Fog of Doubt by Christianna Brand Page A

mantelpiece in this room, beside the telephone. Where is it now?—I tore it up; I copied the address into my little book in the usual way, and chucked the paper into the fire. Wasn’t that rather a silly thing to do?—Well, yes, perhaps it was, in case I got the address copied down wrong, but there it was, I just did it. And, why is that rather a pity?—Because, my dear Inspector, I now can’t show the scrap of paper to prove that it ever existed. And nobody in the house ever saw it . Nobody took the message, nobody wrote it down. Matilda didn’t, Rosie didn’t, Granny didn’t, and now Melissa tells us that she didn’t; and there’s nobody else.’
    â€˜M’m,’ said Cockie. ‘It doesn’t sound too good.’
    â€˜It sounds pretty good to Inspector Charlesworth,’ said Thomas. ‘It sounds just the job to him . I waved a blank paper under Matilda’s nose, told her it was a case and I’d have to go out, skipped off without seeing the victim, presumably so that I wouldn’t have as an excuse for killing him that I didn’t like his face, hung about in the fog till I saw by the lights in the house that Matilda had gone upstairs and left him alone, whizzed into the hall, got my little hatchet out of the drawer, whistled him to come out of the drawing-room and be killed, and blipped him on the head. Then, not being a good enough doctor to know whether or not a man’s dead, I went off into the fog again, leaving him to hop up and ring round telling everybody all about it before he passed away.’ He looked Cockrill in the eye. ‘And the hell of it is, that it hangs together you know; it sounds damn silly, and yet it’s watertight. Charlesworth’s not quite such a bloody fool as he looks.’
    â€˜ ‘Ere, ’ere, ’ere, ’ere, wot’s all this?’ said Detective Inspector Charlesworth, coming in at the door.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    R OSIE privately thought Mr. Charlesworth was simply heaven! Fancy a detective being so young , and then so frantically good-looking with his hair brushed up into divine little sort of moustaches over his ears; and lovely long legs and nice grey eyes and a gent! Even if he was rather beastly and suspicious about poor Thomas. I expect I could get round him, though, she thought; not to fuss any more but just say it was a burglar and be done with it. Getting round Mr. Charlesworth would in itself be quite fun.
    Mr. Charlesworth was perfectly (and genuinely) enchanted to see Inspector Cockrill; no suspicion of unfriendly feeling, no slightest intention of giving offence lurked, or ever had lurked, in his guileless heart. He wrung the old man’s hand, asked after Grime in Kent, rather as though it were the routine of general misdemeanour in a minor preparatory school, and referred with great jocularity to that Jezebel case, when they had worked together—apparently blissfully forgetful of where the ultimate credit for its solution had lain. Cockie, who had so recently adjured the Evans family to be of good behaviour with the police, set them but a poor example of frankness and honesty. He just happened to be in London.… And just happening to drop in on his friends, the Evans’s.… ‘I find them in rather an unfortunate situation; and I thought that perhaps …’
    â€˜We thought that perhaps Cockie could just explain to you how idiotic it was to think that Thomas could possibly have wanted to kill Raoul,’ said Rosie, ‘and then he could help you to find out who it really was.’
    Cockie passionately disclaimed. Charlesworth declared that he would be only too happy to talk things over with the Inspector; but it was apparent that Rosie’s words had brought him back to earth with a nasty bump. They strolled into the garden together. ‘To be honest, Inspector, I don’t like this case one bit.’
    â€˜Nor do I,’ said