‘That thing in the middle of the table that looks like the end man in a minstrel show. It’s something you got since … er … since I was here last, isn’t it?’
Tactless of me, I suppose, to remind him of that previous visit of mine, and I oughtn’t to have brought it up, but these things slip out.
‘Yes,’ he said, having paused for a moment to shudder. ‘It is the latest addition to my collection.’
‘Daddy bought it from a man named Plank who lives not far from here at Hockley-cum-Meston,’ said Madeline.
‘Attractive little bijou,’ I said. It hurt me to look at it, but I felt that nothing was to be lost by giving him the old oil. ‘Just the sort of thing Uncle Tom would like to have. By Jove,’ I said, remembering, ‘Aunt Dahlia was speaking to me about it on the phone yesterday, and she told me Uncle Tom would give his eyeteeth to have it in his collection. I’m not surprised. It looks valuable.’
‘It’s worth a thousand pounds,’ said Stiffy, coming out of her coma and speaking for the first time.
‘As much as that? Golly!’ Amazing, I was thinking, that magistrates could get to be able to afford expenditure on that scale just by persevering through the years fining people and sticking to the money. ‘What is it? Soapstone?’
I had said the wrong thing.
‘Amber,’ Pop Bassett snapped, giving me the sort of look he had given me in heaping measure on the occasion when I had stood in the dock before him at Bosher Street police court. ‘Black amber.’
‘Of course, yes. That’s what Aunt Dahlia said, I recall. She spoke very highly of it, let me tell you, extremely highly.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Oh, absolutely.’
I had been hoping that this splash of dialogue would have broken the ice, so to speak, and started us off kidding back and forth like the guys and dolls in one of those old-world salons you read about. But no. Silence fell again, and eventually, at long last, the meal came to an end, and two minutes later I was on my way to my room, where I proposed to pass the rest of the evening with an Erie Stanley Gardner I’d brought with me. No sense, as I saw it, in going and mixing with the mob in the drawing-room and having Spode glare at me and Pop Bassett sniff at me and Madeline Bassett as likely as not sing old English folk songs at me till bedtime. I was aware that in executing this quiet sneak I was being guilty of a social gaffe which would have drawn raised eyebrows from the author of a book of etiquette, but the great lesson we learn from life is to know when and when not to be in the centre of things.
7
I haven’t mentioned it till now, having been all tied up with other matters, but during dinner, as you may well imagine, something had been puzzling me not a little – the mystery, to wit, of what on earth had become of Emerald Stoker.
At that lunch of ours she had told me in no uncertain terms that she was off to Totleigh on the four o’clock train that afternoon, and however leisurely its progress it must have got there by this time, because Gussie had travelled on it and he had fetched up at the joint all right. But I could detect no sign of her on the premises. It seemed to me, sifting the evidence, that only one conclusion could be arrived at, that she had been pulling the Wooster leg.
But why? With what motive? That was what I was asking myself as I sneaked up the stairs to where Erle Stanley Gardner awaited me. If you had cared to describe me as perplexed and bewildered, you would have been perfectly correct.
Jeeves was in my room when I got there, going about his gentleman’s gentlemanly duties, and I put my problem up to him. ‘Did you ever see a film called The Vanishing Lady, Jeeves?’
‘No, sir. I rarely attend cinematographic performances.’
‘Well, it was about a lady who vanished, if you follow what I mean, and the reason I bring it up is that a female friend of mine has apparently disappeared into thin air, leaving not a wrack behind, as I once heard you put it.’