Blindfold by Patricia Wentworth Page B

of tools on the back seat. To all intents and purposes they were alone. That was a lovely feeling too. They could talk secrets if they wanted to. And then Kay laughed, because of course they hadn’t any secrets. She thought it would be rather nice to have a secret with Miles. She looked at him with the laugh in her eyes and began to tell him about No. 16 Varley Street.
    â€œIt isn’t Nurse Long’s house, you know. She’s looking after an old invalid lady who hardly ever comes out of her room. She’s a Miss Rowland, and I’ve only seen her twice. There’s a lot to do, because there’s only the cook and me, and Mrs Green never comes upstairs at all. She ought to do the dining-room and the hall of course, but she says she’s too fat to get up the stairs, and I really think she is. She’s very good-natured, and she’s been there for years and years.”
    â€œIs there anyone else in the house?” said Miles.
    â€œNo—just Miss Rowland, and Nurse Long, and Mrs Green, and me. And they don’t seem to have any visitors, It’s a good thing, or I’d never get through. Nurse Long does the old lady’s room, but I’ve got everything else, and all the trays to take up and fetch. It’s a basement house, and that always makes work.”
    Miles asked a funny question. Afterwards she thought it was a very funny question indeed. He said,
    â€œWhat’s the drawing-room like?” and she laughed and said,
    â€œOh, my dear, it’s exactly like the pictures in the old Punches your mother had—bunches of flowers on the carpet, and a table with photograph albums, and a gold clock with cherubs, and things like that.”
    â€œWhat sort of shape is it?”
    â€œWide across the front of the house and narrow at the back, like an L. Two doors—one in the wide part and the other behind.”
    â€œIs there a mirror in the narrow part?” said Miles.
    Kay nodded.
    â€œA great big one with a wide gilt border. How did you know?”
    Miles laughed.
    â€œThat sort of room ought to have a mirror in it,” he said.
    But he hadn’t laughed because he felt like laughing. He was thinking that Flossie Palmer hadn’t invented the mirror. And Flossie Palmer said that she had seen a gaping hole within the wide gilt frame—a gaping hole with a frame round it—and something else so frightening that she had then and there run out of the house into the fog.… The thought of Kay in the house from which Flossie had fled filled him with disquiet. It also filled him with an unreasonable resentment against the very pleasant and agreeable Captain Grey who had married his sister Kitty and taken her out to India. If Kitty had been available, he could have insisted on Kay leaving 16 Varley Street immediately. Kitty being some thousands of miles away and no longer of the least use, he racked his brains in vain for a substitute. He had two aunts and a sprinkling of cousins, but as far as Kay was concerned they were a wash-out. The aunts were his father’s sisters, and they had always deplored what they called “dear Eleanor’s vagaries”. He blenched at the thought of explaining Kay to them. The cousins he remembered as pretty, conventional girls entirely taken up with their own affairs. His thought glanced at Lila Gilmore, only to provoke him to rueful laughter at his own expense. Besides, Kay and Flossie under the same roof—He thought not.
    He found Kay looking at him as if she would like to know what he was thinking about. He would have liked to tell her too, but he restrained himself. Instead he asked her,
    â€œWho was the fellow you wouldn’t go out with?”
    Kay flushed.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œBut he called you Kay.”
    â€œI know he did—but I don’t know him all the same.”
    â€œDo you mean you’ve never seen him before, or just that you don’t want to know