Ladies’ Bane

CHAPTER 31

Inspector Howland was a slight middle-aged man with a retiring manner. There were, in fact, times when it became so hesitant that the person to whom he was talking might feel a kindly impulse to help him out. He saw Geoffrey Trent, and asked him a number of questions relating to his business in the Near East. Geoffrey, at first annoyed, passed to a state of rather contemptuous tolerance. If a check-up on these things was required for Customs purposes, he could not imagine why a more competent and businesslike person had not been sent down. In any case, as he told the embarrassed Howland, there were a number of the questions which he could not possibly answer without access to the books of the Company in which he held an interest.

“That would be as trustee for your late ward, Miss Margot Trent?”

The question was put in so small and shy a voice that no offence could be taken.

“Certainly.”

“These interests have now passed to you?”

“Yes, I am sorry to say they have.”

“Sorry, Mr. Trent?” Howland peered through the thick lenses behind which his shortsighted eyes blinked at the world.

“I was very fond of my ward.”

“Ah, it was a sad accident. But to return to this Company. You hold a majority of the shares?”

“About fifty-five per cent-beside some which I hold in my own name. May I enquire why I am being asked all these questions? So far as I am aware everything is in order. If there is an idea that there has been some breach of the Customs regulations-”

“I have no connection with His Majesty’s Customs, Mr. Trent. If you jumped to that conclusion, it was not my fault.”

Geoffrey frowned.

The questions went on, still in that diffident tone, but becoming more and more difficult to answer.

“Do you know a man called Muller?”

“Well, yes.”

“He was the assistant manager of your general trading company?”

Geoffrey raised his eyebrows.

“Was?”

Howland blinked.

“I am afraid he has been arrested.”

“What for?”

“Trafficking in illicit drugs.”

Geoffrey Trent clapped a hand to his head and exclaimed,

“Oh, my God!”

Another person interviewed by Inspector Howland was Florrie Bowyer.

“You work by the day at the Ladies’ House?”

Florrie felt pleased and important.

“Oh, yes, sir-I’m housemaid.”

“Like working there?”

“Oh, yes-Mr. Trent is ever so kind.”

“And what about Mrs. Trent?”

She wouldn’t have answered just anyone who asked her that, but this poor little man did seem so shy you kind of felt you’d got to help him out. She dropped her voice and said,

“She’s been ill-sometimes she’s ever so strange. You won’t say I said so.”

“What makes her strange?”

They were in her mother’s front room, but she looked over her shoulder as if someone were listening for what she was going to say.

“It’s the medicine she takes-white stuff in a powder. Mr. Trent he asked me had I ever seen any such, doing her room and putting her things away. And when I said yes, he said to show him, and he took the whole lot and put it on the fire-said it was making her ill and she mustn’t have any more of it.”

“And did she seem to get better after that?”

“Oh, yes, she did. Dr. Whichcote came up to see her once a week. He thought she was better too, because I was in the hall once when Mr. Trent was letting him out, and he said something like ‘definite progress,’ and, ‘we’ll just go on with the diminishing doses.’ ” She looked up suddenly with a flush on her face. “I wouldn’t say nothing about it, not to anyone, only you can’t be in a place without knowing when there’s talk, and if it’s anything against Mr. Trent, well, I thought I’d better tell what I seen with my own eyes and heard too, because there never was a gentleman that took more thought for his wife. Never an unkind word, and she used to be ever so queer sometimes-enough to put any gentleman out. But Mr. Trent never!”

Howland looked through his thick lenses at the little pleading face. Earnest child with every appearance of being truthful. He said,

“You were quite right to tell me what you know.”

Florrie felt a good deal uplifted.

There was another interview, and a longer one, with Jacqueline Delauny. She made an effective entry in her black dress, and avoided the chair which he had set for her facing the light.

“Thank you, I should prefer to stand, and as I am feeling cold I should like to warm myself a little.”

She took up a graceful bending position with a hand on the mantelpiece and a foot raised upon the kerb of the hearth. She was thus only half facing him and could look away, or down into the fire as she wished. He began to think that she was clever, and then to wonder whether it would not have been cleverer not to take so obvious a precaution. But then she probably put him down as a fool-people very often did.

She stood there waiting for him to begin, her dark eyebrows a little raised. When he let her wait, she bit her lip and said,

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. May I ask why you wanted to see me?”

“Certainly. I am an officer from Scotland Yard. A question has arisen out of the affairs of the late Mr. Edgar Trent. I believe you were his secretary.”

She really did look genuinely surprised.

“That seems like a very old story. And I am afraid I must correct you. I wasn’t really Mr. Edgar Trent’s secretary. I did some translation work for him, and he would occasionally ask me to help him with a foreign letter.”

“Our information is that you lived in his house and acted as his confidential secretary.”

She shook her head.

“Oh, no-nothing like that. I went to live in his house because he asked me to take charge of his daughter. He was a widower, and the child, who was then about eight or nine, had been left to run quite wild.”

“That was the girl Margot Trent who met with a fatal accident here?”

The tears rushed to her eyes.

“Yes, it was Margot. She had been terribly neglected, and she was not quite normal. I can assure you that looking after her left me with very little spare time on my hands.”

“But you were in Edgar Trent’s confidence?”

“With regard to his daughter, I may say that I was. I could not have stayed with so difficult a child if I had not had the full support and confidence of my employer.”

“Miss Delauny, I was not talking about your employer’s daughter, I was talking about his business. Were you not equally in his confidence about that?”

“But of course not! I knew nothing about his business except what everybody knew. He was a rich man who had done very well at it, but just what he did-” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m afraid business has always seemed very dull to me. I really wasn’t interested in it.”

Howland looked at her hard.

“Are you going to say you didn’t know he was running dope?”

Her hand dropped from the shelf, her foot from the kerb. She stood up straight and angry.

“That is a most insulting question!”

“I am afraid it is one that you will have to answer.”

“Naturally. I should insist upon answering it. Of course I have no knowledge of the sort you imply.”

“You knew that your employer committed suicide?”

“I was no longer in Alexandria by then. Naturally I heard of his death. He had sent Margot home in ’39 just before the war broke out, and I accompanied her.”

“You remained in charge of her?”

“Not entirely. Margot was for a time with her old nurse, a very suitable person. I used to visit her constantly and report to her father. After his death Mr. Geoffrey Trent invited me to take charge again. Nurse was getting old and felt that she could not go on. When Mr. Trent married two years ago we joined him here.”

A perfectly natural, simple, straightforward story, and no evidence to break it down. There is a long sliding scale between the nursery governess who looks after your difficult child and occasionally writes a foreign letter for you and the confidential secretary with every detail of your business at her fingers’ ends. Their advices had not mentioned the child. If she was really there, and Jacqueline Delauny in charge of her, it was going to be very difficult to get her where they wanted her, at the incriminating end of that scale. He went away with a feeling that he hadn’t got very far.