The Camelot Caper (5 page)

Jess growled under her breath.

“It's a nice little problem,” Randall said, squinting at the excessively bright lights of an approaching car. “I mean, how do we get the villains back on your trail without making you sound a complete idiot? That's one of the difficulties of this form of fiction; the heroine has to be an idiot or she wouldn't get into such idiotic predicaments. A sensible female would go straight to the police.”

“Who would, of course, believe me without question.”

“Yes, I know, that's the conventional excuse. Wait a sec—no, that won't work. Even if they tracked you to the Blue Boar, Alf couldn't tell
them where you'd gone. Not that he wouldn't tell them if he knew. He adores causing trouble. But he couldn't. Hmmmm.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence except for Randall's muttering, and Jess amused herself by studying his profile in the lightning flashes from oncoming headlights. Vindictively concentrating at first on the size of his outstanding facial adornment, she found herself growing to admire it. It was a well-shaped nose, for all its size, and only slightly curved: Roman in its narrowness and beaky arrogance. She tried to picture him in a helmet, with a row of bristles on top like a shoebrush, barking out orders in Latin to a troop of legionnaires. She failed. The rest of his face didn't fit. His chin was firm, but hardly belligerent, and his mouth was shaped with a precision that verged on delicacy. If it had not been overshadowed by The Nose, it would have been a sensitive mouth.

Then the fatigue that had been accumulating all day hit her like a hammer, and she did not awaken until the recurrent flash of street lights vexed her eyes.

“Almost there,” said her companion equably, as she hastily withdrew her head from his shoulder.

If they had passed any of the famous land
marks of London, she had slept through them; when they turned into a quiet, almost empty street she had no idea where she was. Randall pulled over to the curb. Without waiting for her, he mounted a flight of stone steps and rang a doorbell.

To Jess, blinking groggily out of the car window, the place did not look like a hotel. It was one of a long row of similar houses, tall and thin, separated from one another only by narrow passageways, and fronting directly on the sidewalk. This house was distinguished from its neighbors by a black-painted door and a big brass knocker, but it had the same air of smug, Dickensian respectability and in fact dated, as she was to learn, from that very era.

Before long the door was opened by a stooped, elderly man who greeted David with a cordial handshake. They exchanged a few sentences, and then the other man came out to the car and reached for Jessica's suitcase.

“Good evening, Miss Tregarth. We've only one single left, and it's on the fourth floor. No lift, I'm afraid…”

“That will be fine.”

He went on into the house with her bag, and David opened the car door. Jess was sodden with fatigue; as she clumsily maneuvered her
self out of the car, she dropped her purse. Half the contents slid out onto the sidewalk—wallet, pen, lipstick, and the pocket thriller she had been trying to read.

Randall bent to pick them up. When he straightened he was smiling, but not pleasantly.

“Jolly good joke, Miss Tregarth. For a while I almost…We'll have a laugh over it next time we meet.”

He didn't even wait for her to answer, but roared off with an indignant swish of his exhaust. Jess was left staring bemusedly at the purse and the book which he had thrust into her hands.

 

The knock on her door sounded like thunder. Jess sat up in bed, brushing tangled curls out of her eyes. She was startled, but not alarmed; at first she couldn't even remember where she was, let alone what had happened the day before.

“Your tea, Miss Tregarth,” called a voice from outside the door. “May I come in?”

The knob turned before she had a chance to say anything, and she dived under the sheet. The elderly man who had met her the previous night entered, carrying a tray. He gave her a pleasant smile, and Jess smiled back, a little uncertainly; she felt like a hick from the back-
woods. She hadn't ordered tea. Was this a normal service of English hotels? A gracious gesture, certainly, but it struck her as somewhat arbitrary that the manager of the hotel should decide when his guests ought to get up.

“I do hope you slept well,” said the manager, bellboy, and waiter calmly. “You looked frightfully tired last night.”

“I did, and I was,” said Jessica over the top of the sheet. “And I'd forgotten that what you call the fourth floor is what we call the fifth.”

“That's so, isn't it?” The man put the tray on a chair and drew it up to the side of the bed. “Ordinarily, of course, I wouldn't have dreamed of disturbing you. But Mr. Randall rang up, and said to make sure you were awake before I put him through to you. He has such a sense of humor.”

“Doesn't he, though,” Jess said coldly. “Thank you for the tea.”

“Mr. Randall said to give you five minutes, then he'll ring back.”

When he had withdrawn, Jess contemplated her pot of tea with mixed emotions. Amusement finally won out. Whatever David Randall was up to now—and she suspected it would not be to her taste—she owed him something for finding this gem of a hotel. Her funny little room, up
under the roof, must have been part of the servants' quarters of the original house. It was the oddest blend of old and new; there was a telephone, but no bedside table, a washbasin in the corner and a ceiling that sloped so abruptly over her bed that she had nearly brained herself when she sat up. And the manager—was he the manager? Or Lord High Every-thing Else? Had he made the tea, besides carrying it up five flights of steps? It was excellent tea; by the time the telephone rang she was ready to face even David Randall.

“Awake?” said the familiar voice.

“I'm awake, but I don't know why.”

“You've been sleeping for hours. It's almost midday.”

The dulcet tones sounded different. Jess peered suspiciously into the mouthpiece.

“Are you drunk?”

“No, but I soon shall be. Meet me. I might even give you lunch.”

“You can just keep your lunches. I don't think I want to meet you.”

“I think you'd better.”

“That sounds like a threat,” Jessica said slowly. All at once she was struck by a bombardment of doubts. His fortuitous appearance—his odd behavior—and he knew where she was.
The flaw in the plot, he had called it. But it was no flaw, if he was one of the enemy.

“It is a threat. But not from me. They came, I saw, they conquered.”

“They—oh, no! You don't mean—”

“Yes, I do mean,” said the peculiar, blurred voice, with a theatrical gasp. “We must have a chat. Have them call you a taxi; I presume you don't know London well enough to get around. Tell the driver you want number thirteen, Lincoln's Inn Fields. Got it? The house is a museum—Sir John Soane's Museum.”

“But I'm not even—”

“Then get dressed. In something less conspicuous than that glaring yellow costume you wore yesterday. Drab brown, that's the thing. Ask the guard to direct you to the Monk's Parlour. If I'm not there, wait for me.”

It was half past twelve when Jess paid off the taxi and climbed the steps to the entrance of Sir John's museum. It was not precisely the most popular tourist haunt in London; there were more guards than visitors. When she asked for the Monk's Parlour, the guard directed her downstairs. She had been too preoccupied to do more than glance at the other rooms of the house, which was a handsome building in its own right, but the Monk's Parlour brought her
up short. It would have attracted the attention of a dope addict in the grip of the drug.

The room was gloomy and low-ceilinged. It looked smaller than it was because it was crammed with the most grotesque collection of miscellany Jess had ever seen. The walls were covered with fragments—bits of sculpture, and isolated gargoyles, and staring antique faces, looking like blind decapitated heads in the thick dusk. Though the house stood on a London street, the window of the room looked out on a vista of ruins—columns and arches and melancholy fallen stones.

Jess staggered back against the stair rail. The place reminded her of something, and as the first shock wore off, she began to remember. Something in a college course, about a Gothic craze that had swept England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In literature it had produced such gems as Walpole's
Castle of Otranto
, and Mrs. Radcliffe's
Mysteries of Udolpho
. The genre had been delicately and devastatingly spoofed by the rapier-witted Miss Austen in her book
Northanger Abbey
.

The craze had extended to architecture as well, with Walpole's beloved Strawberry Hill as the classic example. Towers and battlements and crenellations sprang up; the grounds were
adorned with fake ruins hung with fake moss, and riddled with grottoes filled with fake antique statues. Patently Sir John had been a convert.

The atmosphere of the Parlour was not soothing to shaken nerves; she couldn't imagine a more likely spot in which to be strangled, after having her virtue threatened, as Mrs. Radcliffe might have expressed it. Whatever David Randall's motives, he must be crazy to suggest meeting in this Gothic nightmare.

It was not long before she heard footsteps and saw on the stairs a pair of legs which, from their length, could only be David's. Then the rest of him came into view; and she knew why the aristocratic voice had sounded blurred.

Jessica was rendered speechless, which was not a common state with her; she had never thought of this possibility, although she realized that she should have done so after hearing what David had told her on the telephone. David cleared his throat nervously. He appeared to be embarrassed, though she couldn't imagine why; she would have expected, and understood, rage, indignation, or reproach. Before either of them could gather enough wits to open a conversation, more footsteps were pounding down the stairs. David moved aside to allow a young cou
ple, very mod and long-haired, to enter the room. They giggled, jointly, and did not stay long; but David said, “This place is too popular. Let's go into the sarcophagus room.”

“Sarcophagus! Not even Sir John would—”

“Oh, yes, he would. Haven't you seen enough of his taste to know that he adored sarcophagi?” David took her arm and steered her through the appropriate doorway. The object was unquestionably a sarcophagus, even to an eye unaccustomed to such decorative items: an extremely large, grubby, white stone sarcophagus, an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, covered with neat rows of hieroglyphic signs which had once been filled in with blue paste. Most of the paste had gone, and the little that remained had turned a dirty gray. The horribleness of the object was completed by the smeary, dusty glass case which covered it.

The two stood side by side in the narrow aisle along the far side of the huge stone coffin.

“Look like an enthusiastic student,” David advised. “Friends assure me that this specimen is a perfectly stunning sarcophagus, as sarcophagi go.”

“It needs a good scrubbing. David—I'm so sorry—”

“Here, none of that! Unreasonable as I am, I can't think of any reason why you should be sorry. You told me the literal truth, and I sneered at you. But I shan't apologize, because I don't want to welter in bathos with you.”

“Bathos, indeed. I am reminded, I must admit, of one of your minor poets.”

“Which one?”

“Blake.”

She thought that would baffle him; she was impressed and obscurely pleased when, after a moment of frowning thought, he burst into a peal of laughter. The sound rang hollowly in the high, glass-roofed chamber, and bounced back off the sarcophagus. David winced, cursed, and dabbed at his lower lip with a handkerchief which was already bloodstained.

“Damn, the cut keeps opening up again. I've got to learn not to guffaw. But that's not bad—as you Americans—”

“Oh, stop it.”

“Fearful symmetry, eh? What a way to describe my classic features.”

“They look pretty fearful now,” Jess said grimly. “Couldn't you put something over those bruises? It makes me uncomfortable just to look at them.”

“Not half so uncomfortable as it makes me to feel them. I thought seriously of starting a beard.”

“It's not funny.”

“Not very, no.”

“What happened?”

“Let's discuss it over lunch. I don't think I can stand the sight of this sarcophagus much longer. It seems safe to assume that I wasn't followed; the gentlemen would have made an appearance by now, in this nice quiet cul-de-sac, if I hadn't lost them.”

“Is that why you suggested meeting here? Good heavens, you are crazy. Let's get out of this horrid place.”

Jess was given a demonstration of solid British phlegm when the waiter in David's favorite restaurant greeted him and his altered face without so much as a raised eyebrow. When the preliminaries of ordering were over, David finally gave in to her repeated demands for an explanation.

“They found the Blue Boar,” he began. “How, I don't know, but I can think of several ways in which it might have been done. Alfie had gone to bed by the time they arrived, and his natural ferocity was not soothed by being rousted out in
the middle of the night. He talked. He knows me by name, you see; my rich old maiden aunt lives in the neighborhood, and I generally stop at the Boar for a quick one before I head homewards, Auntie being a bit of a teetotaler. I could kick myself. An obvious clue like that one, and I overlooked it! That sort of thing is supposed to be my specialty.”

“What do you mean, your specialty? What do you do for a living?”

“Haven't you guessed?” He gave her an off-center grin. “Where's the book that fell out of your bag last night?”