Killing a Unicorn by Marjorie Eccles Page B

diverted.
    â€˜Only they know why! I couldn’t tell them anything more. They asked what exactly I’d been doing up here last evening, why I hadn’t gone home. It wasn’t any of their business, but it should have been fairly obvious that I was staying to have supper with you — and to see Jonathan, when he arrived.’ She shot Jonathan a bright, meaningful
glance. Jonathan cowered. No doubt her obsessive interest in his performances was kindly meant, but it did him no favours. She herself was no mean performer on the viola, and demanded a note-by-note discussion of every piece he played. Thread to the needle, that was Jane Arrow, practically every semi-quaver to be worked over. It was even worse if his concert had been recorded on Radio 3 and she’d been listening. ‘They want to see all of you again, too,’ she informed everyone.
    â€˜I think we’re talking at cross-purposes,’ Jonathan said. ‘If these police are the same people who were here last night, they weren’t the ones Chip’s been speaking to in Felsborough.’ Explanations followed.
    Jane stood like a pillar of salt in the middle of the room, a miniature Olive, Lady Baden-Powell in her Girl Guide hat, shocked but doughty and unassailable, saying absolutely nothing, and thereby effectively silencing everyone else. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t speak, however, as her utter stillness, though Jane was rarely silent and never still. She was quick as a bird, forever pecking out staccato conversation in sharp, starling-like little bursts, in the spiked, admonitory way they were all so accustomed to that they scarcely noticed. ‘Jasie?’ she said at last. ‘Jasie?’ and then began demanding the how and why. Always quick on the uptake, she had no difficulty in absorbing the necessary facts, and thereafter wasted no more time in expressions of shock, or horror. Whatever she felt was hidden, though for a moment back there, it had seemed as though her tough old heart might have been breached. A course of action was already forming in her mind, everyone could see. She was an organizer by nature (possibly an inheritance from her father, the Commander) and was in her element in any sort of crisis, stemming from her time as a nurse during the war.
    There was no denying that everyone in the house had been glad of this at some time or other, but now there was a concerted, hasty movement, everyone suddenly busy: Chip looked at his watch, murmuring something about
going outside to wait for the police. Jonathan said abruptly, ‘I’ve already seen the police once, if they want me again, they’ll find me with Fran. I managed to persuade her to take the sleeping pill the doctor left with her and she was still out to the world when I came back up here this morning. No sign of her being up and about when Chip and I went down to The Watersplash looking for Jasie, either.’
    â€˜Oh yes, do go and bring her back here!’ implored Alyssa. ‘She’ll surely come when she knows what’s happened!’ The thought of Fran was like the strong shot of brandy Alyssa would have preferred in the circumstances, even at this time in the morning, to the tea Jilly had made for her, welcome though that had been. The person Alyssa really wanted, however, was Humphrey. He’d said he wouldn’t be back until eleven at the earliest, he didn’t like to push the old girl — meaning his ancient and beloved bull-nosed Morris Minor, into which he folded his long stork’s legs like an Anglepoise lamp, and drove sitting bolt upright with his Sherlock Holmes hat on. Alyssa always felt she ought to be wearing a motoring veil whenever she sat next to him. ‘Tell Fran I desperately want to see her, Jonathan — and when she speaks to Mark, ask her to tell him to come home immediately. I’m sure whatever it is he’s doing in Antwerp can wait. At times like this,