Mrs Pargeter 01; A Nice Class of Corpse

∨ A Nice Class of Corpse ∧

11

Mrs Pargeter rarely spoke of the late Mr Pargeter, except in the most general terms. It was clear from her conversation that he had been a devoted husband, and also a wealthy one, who had left his widow exceptionally well-protected against the financial buffetings of the world. But, as Lady Ridgleigh had found out, enquiries into the sources of the late Mr Pargeter’s wealth were deflected by enigmatic answers.

Mrs Pargeter, however, retained a deep and lasting affection for her late husband. Though his life had been unconventional, though their marriage had been interrupted by his occasional long absences, their love for each other had never faltered.

And Mrs Pargeter had cause to be grateful to him for the many, many useful things that he had taught her.

She thought this once again as, at two-thirty in the morning of the 6^th of March, she slipped the relevant blade of the late Mr Pargeter’s skeleton keys into the lock of the sea-front room that, until the previous day, had been occupied by Mrs Selsby.

She was acting on intuition. Various ideas were connecting in her mind, but she needed more information to convert those connections into a solid chain of logic.

It was Mrs Selsby’s pearls that had put her on the track, and something Miss Naismith had said during the evening that had kept her going in the same direction. In Mrs Selsby’s room she hoped to find out whether she was proceeding on the high road to a solution or up a blind alley.

The lock gave and the door opened with the silent deference that characterised all the fittings of the Devereux. Inside the room the curtains were drawn, perhaps as a mark of respect to the deceased, but Mrs Pargeter did not risk switching on the lights. Instead, she produced a small pencil torch, another invaluable legacy of the late Mr Pargeter’s working life.

She moved straight to the bureau in the bay window. In the front of the hotel she was much more aware of the insistent wash of the sea.

She wore gloves (another of the useful things the late Mr Pargeter had taught her), and the well-oiled drawers of the bureau slid obligingly open at her touch. No need to use the skeleton keys again.

Mrs Pargeter quickly found what she was looking for. Two drawers were full of slim black jewellery boxes. Screwing into her eye the jeweller’s glass that the late Mr Pargeter had also always found so useful, she expertly opened each box and examined its contents in the thin beam of her torch.

As she closed the last box, she smiled with satisfaction. She couldn’t be sure about the settings, but every one of the precious stones confirmed her suspicions.

Mrs Pargeter was silent as she left the sea-front room, and silent as she relocked the door with the skeleton key. She moved silently back up to her second-floor back bedroom, was quickly in bed, and quickly asleep.

Which was why she did not hear the sounds of someone else breaking into Mrs Selsby’s room later that night.