Flowers For the Judge by Margery Allingham Read Free Book Online

Mike, are you listening to me? Do you understand?’
    ‘I only know that this ghastly thing has happened to you, of all people,’ he said. ‘Look here, Gina, don’t get alarmed. We’ll fix it somehow so that you don’t have to go to the damned inquest.’
    The girl passed her hand over her forehead.
    ‘Oh – oh, dear God!’ she whispered, and crumpled at his feet.
    Mike carried her into her bedroom.
    It was over three-quarters of an hour later when Mr Rigget came creeping up the stairs. John held up his hand warningly as Mrs Austin showed the excited young man into the room. It was one of John’s peculiarities that he regarded himself as the undisputed owner of any room in the two buildings, and the fact that he was now using his bereaved cousin-in-law’s studio as an office did not strike him as being in any way unfitting or extraordinary.
    ‘… suddenly at his place of business, Miss Curley,’ he was saying. ‘Funeral arrangements later. That’s for
The Times, Morning Post
and
Telegraph
. The other paragraph Mr Pelham can send out to the places he best thinks fit. Mr Rigget, what do you want?’
    The final phrase was uttered in such a complete change of tone that Miss Curley started violently. But Peter Rigget was not quelled. For one of the few times in his life he was the bearer of important news.
    ‘Mr Widdowson,’ he burst out, ‘there are two men at the office asking for you. I slipped out through the garden and came up the back way to warn you.’
    ‘To warn me?’ John eyed the young man with a nice admixture of distaste and astonishment. ‘What are you talking about? What two men?’
    ‘Well, sir,’ said Mr Rigget flatly, cheated of his drama, ‘one of them’s a Coroner’s Officer and the other is a plain-clothes man. They only send the plain-clothes man, sir, when it’s – serious.’

CHAPTER III
Design for an Accident
    MR CAMPION SAT IN the waiting-room at the Sign of the Golden Quiver and reflected philosophically that it is often the fate of experts to be called in and left in a corner. The young woman who had admitted him had been very firm: he was to wait.
    As he sat in the shadow of the mahogany mantelpiece and sniffed the leather and tobacco scented air he regarded the room with interest. There are publishers whose waiting-rooms are like those on draughty provincial railway stations; others that resemble corners of better class bookshops, with the wares tastefully displayed; and still others that stun by their sombre magnificence and give the odd impression that somebody very old and very rich is dying upstairs: but the waiting-room at Twenty-three expressed the personality of Barnabas Limited and was solid and comfortable and rather nice, like the dining-room of a well-fed mid-Victorian household.
    Mr Campion caught himself glancing at the polished side tables and supposing that the silver had gone to be cleaned . Apart from a few early editions in a locked glass and wire-fronted cupboard there was not a book in the place.
    A portrait of Jacoby Barnabas, the uncle of the present directors, hung over the mantelpiece in a grand baroque frame. Head and shoulders were life-size, and it was evident from a certain overpainting in the work that the artist had striven with some difficulty for a likeness.
    It showed a strong, heavily-boned man of sixty-odd with the beard and curling white hair of a Victorian philanthropist, but the light eyes set deeply in the fine square head were imperious and very cold, and the small mouth was pursed and narrow amid the beautiful fleecy whiteness of the beard. A grim old boy, thought Mr Campion, and turned his attention to the other visitor, who stood stiffly on the other side of a centre table which ought to have had a silver epergne upon it.
    He was a fat young man with a red face, who looked less as though he had a secret sorrow than a grievance which was not going to be a secret very long. He regarded Mr Campion with what appeared to be suppressed