Outrageous Fortune by Patricia Wentworth Read Free Book Online Page B

seemed crowded with used air. Outside, a light wet wind blew veeringly. There was rain in the wind, but it would not fall yet awhile. It struck damp and cool against his face, and he was glad of it.
    Nesta’s voice came from close behind him.
    â€œWhere did you put the emeralds, Jimmy?”
    He turned blindly, pushed past her, and went blundering through the door and out into the street.

VII
    Caroline drove to Marley, which, as the day sister had told her, was only eight miles from Elston. She found a charming little village with stone walls and thatched roofs. The cottage gardens were full of white and crimson phloxes, and bergamots, and marigolds, and home-painted signs with the word tea printed on them in tall straggly letters. The thatched roofs were doubtless a refuge for earwigs, but though Marley contained some six hundred inhabitants, with the usual allowance of cows, cats, pigs, hens and children, it did not, so far as Caroline could ascertain, conceal Mr and Mrs James Riddell.
    At first this made Caroline angry. A very bright colour bloomed in her cheeks, and she thought of several things which she would have liked to say to Mrs Riddell. Later on, whilst she was having tea in the prettiest of the cottage gardens, she had what she called a brain-wave. There were earwigs in the thatch. She had just fished the third out of her tea, when the brain waved and she wanted to know why Mrs Riddell had said she was coming to Marley when she wasn’t coming to Marley.
    Caroline had, of course, taken the greatest possible dislike to what she described as that snatching woman. But even people whom you dislike very much don’t as a rule tell entirely purposeless lies; so why had the Snatcher said she was coming to Marley?
    Caroline drank some of her tea hastily, because she was very thirsty and she wanted to get in before the next earwig. She had a feeling that there were going to be more earwigs, and sure enough when she put down her cup there was one in the saucer. She never killed anything, so she just said, “Shush!” and tipped it on to rather a moth-eaten marigold. Then she thought very seriously about Mrs James Riddell. And the more she thought, the less she could think of any reason why she should have told that lie— unless —
    The “unless” was so exciting that Caroline felt quite dazzled by it. Why does anyone give a false address? Because they don’t want to give a real one—and they only don’t want to give a real one because they’ve something they’re ashamed of or something they’ve got to hide. Mrs Riddell had come and fetched him away from the Elston cottage hospital. She had said that he was Jim Riddell, and she had said that she was going to Marley. Well, she hadn’t told the truth about going to Marley, so why should she have told the truth about Jim being Jim Riddell? There may be people whose minds do not work like this, but Caroline’s mind worked this way.
    She deflected a spider from the milk-jug, drank the rest of her cup of tea, and was quite, quite sure that Mrs Riddell was not only a Snatcher but a Lying Snatcher, and that for some irrelevant reason of her own she had disappeared into the blue with Jim Randal—“Because if it wasn’t Jim, how did he have a bit of my letter in his pocket? You can’t get away from that—nobody can.” She could see the twirl with which she had written Caroline—quite an extra one because she was so thrilled about Jim. When you’ve got one man in your family, and have made rather a special hero of him, and haven’t seen him for seven years, it just naturally runs to twirls. Why should anyone but Jim Randal have the torn-off end of a letter with Caroline on it? She ought to have asked the day sister whether it was Caroline with a twirl, because that would have settled it—not that it needed settling, because she felt quite, quite sure. On the strength of which she