Coroner's Pidgin by Margery Allingham Page A

mother,” he said. “How did you happen to be here, anyway? I don’t have to have a suspicious nature to notice that, I suppose.”
    â€œI came here to eat,” said Campion with dignity, “and I’m still hoping to do it. I met Mrs. Shering at the Carados’s house and she brought me here because she often eats here, as do others of her circle. That is why I was here, and also why I was not surprised to learn the dead woman came from the place either. Until you told me that I could not imagine how the crowd who seem so determined to make a mystery of her death could ever have met her alive. When you came out with your little piece, I saw how it had happened, and therefore I was not surprised. Now are you satisfied?”
    Yeo sniffed. “You’ve covered yourself,” he said maddingly, “but you don’t help. We got on to her through a laundry mark on her nightdress; our chap who specializes on them traced it to a firm in Notting Hill, and they gave us her address. The char did the rest. She didn’t live with her husband, you see.”
    â€œShe didn’t live with Stavros? Didn’t live here?” Mr. Campion, who was being forced up a narrow flight of stairs, paused in astonishment, and the Superintendent came up with his shoulder.
    â€œThat’s right,” he said. “She didn’t live here. And if you can believe her husband’s story she hasn’t come here very often. She lived alone in a little art and crafty flat in Kensington High Street.”
    â€œWhen did they marry?”
    â€œBeginning of the war. She was a widow then. The man Lewis appears to have been dead for years. According to Stavros he and she never did live together for more than a fortnight, yet he insists he was very fond of her.”
    Yeo was panting a little over the stairs, and had lowered his voice to an angry mumble. “You come and see him,” he said. “He sounds almost on the level, which doesn’t help. I tell you, Campion, I don’t like the people in this case.”
    â€œWhich people? Stavros, or Lady Carados and family?”
    â€œAll of them. They’re all—” the Superintendent hesitated over the word, “they’re all expense-and-talk-over-your-head,” he said at last. “Class, that’s what it is. It’s all right in its proper place, no doubt.”
    â€œWhere’s that?” enquired Mr. Campion side-tracked.
    â€œOn the stage,” said Yeo stoutly. “I like it better than anywhere on the stage. But when I meet it in my business it gets round my feet. You come and hear this chap. He thinks he means something in a high-class foreign way, I don’t doubt, but I can’t say I follow him.”
    Mr. Campion gave up thinking about his meal, and did what he was told.
    They found Stavros standing by a circular table in a small, dark room which was sometimes used for private dinner parties. A constable sat at the table taking notes, while Chief Inspector Holly stood on the hearthrug looking very neat and spare; his black hair receded sleekly from a pallid forehead that shone like china, and his eyes, which were remarkable for their coldness, looked large and blue and hard. On catching sight of Stavros, Mr. Campion’s first impression was that he had changed, and only afterwards it occurred to him that he had become a private person. At the moment he had an entirely new dignity and a different courtesy in which there was nothing ingratiating; he stood easily, but quite still with his hands folded, and his head raised a little. His eyes flickered as Campion came in, but he did not speak.
    Holly stepped across the room to meet Yeo. “He has nothing to add,” he murmured, lowering his voice a tone or two, but making no real attempt to speak in confidence, “hisstory remains. The last time he saw the deceased was on Sunday when she looked in on him for ten minutes or so in the