Closed Casket. Sophie Hannah

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СКАЧАТЬ when he consulted his pocket watch and noticed that by hesitating, and with all the taking out of the watch and putting it back in the waistcoat pocket, and pulling it out once more to check, he had made himself late. It was already a minute after four o’clock. He knocked.

      Only one minute late. She would notice—was there anything she did not notice?—but with any luck she would not remark upon it.

      ‘Do come in, Michael!’ Lady Athelinda Playford sounded as ebullient as ever. She was seventy years old, with a voice as strong and clear as a polished bell. Gathercole had never encountered her in sober spirits. There was always, with her, a cause for excitement—often such morsels as would alarm a conventional person. Lady Playford had a talent for extracting as much amusement from the inconsequential as from the controversial.

      Gathercole had admired her stories of happy children solving mysteries that confounded the local police since he had first discovered them as a lonely ten-year-old in a London orphanage. Six years ago, he had met their creator for the first time and found her as disarming and unpredictable as her books. He had never expected to go far in his chosen profession, but here he was, thanks to Athelinda Playford: still a relatively young man at thirty-six, and a partner in a successful firm of solicitors, Gathercole and Rolfe. The notion that any profitable enterprise bore his name was still perplexing to Gathercole, even after a number of years.

      His loyalty to Lady Playford surpassed all other attachments he had formed in his life, but personal acquaintance with his favourite author had forced him to admit to himself that he preferred shocks and startling about-turns to occur in the safely distant world of fiction, not in reality. Lady Playford, needless to say, did not share his preference.

      He started to open the door.

      ‘Are you going to … Ah! There you are! Don’t hover. Sit, sit. We’ll get nowhere if we don’t start.’

      Gathercole sat.

      ‘Hello, Michael.’ She smiled at him, and he had the strange sense he always had—as if her eyes had picked him up, turned him around and put him down again. ‘And now you must say, “Hello, Athie.” Go on, say it! After all this time, it ought to be a breeze. Not “Good afternoon, your ladyship”. Not “Good day, Lady Playford”. A plain, friendly “Hello, Athie”. Is that too much to manage? Ha!’ She clapped her hands together. ‘You look quite the hunted fox cub! You can’t understand why you’ve been invited to stay for a week, can you? Or why Mr Rolfe was invited too.’

      Would the arrangements that Gathercole had put in place be sufficient to cover the absence of himself and Orville Rolfe? It was unheard of for them both to be away from the office for five consecutive days, but Lady Playford was the firm’s most illustrious client; no request from her could be refused.

      ‘I dare say you are wondering if there will be other guests, Michael. We shall come to all of that, but I’m still waiting for you to say hello.’

      He had no choice. The greeting she demanded from him each time would never fall naturally from his lips. He was a man who liked to follow rules, and if there wasn’t a rule forbidding a person of his background from addressing a dowager viscountess, widow of the fifth Viscount Playford of Clonakilty, as ‘Athie’, then Gathercole fervently believed there ought to be.

      It was unfortunate, therefore—he said so to himself often—that Lady Playford, for whom he would do anything, poured scorn on the rules at every turn and derided those who obeyed them as ‘dreary dry sticks’.

      ‘Hello, Athie.’

      ‘There we are!’ She spread out her arms in the manner of a woman inviting a man to leap into them, though Gathercole knew that was not her intention. ‘Ordeal survived. You may relax. Not too much! We have important matters to attend to—after we’ve discussed the bundle of the moment.’

      It was Lady Playford’s habit to describe the book she was in the middle of writing as ‘the bundle’. Her latest sat on the corner of the desk and she threw a resentful glance in its direction. It looked to Gathercole less like a novel in progress and more like a whirlwind represented in paper: creased pages with curled edges, corners pointing every which way. There was nothing in the least rectangular about it.

      Lady Playford hauled herself out of her armchair by the window. She never looked out, Gathercole had noticed. If there was a human being to inspect, Lady Playford did not waste time on nature. Her study offered the most magnificent views: the rose garden and, behind it, a perfectly square lawn, at the centre of which was the angel statue that her husband Guy, the late Viscount Playford, had commissioned as a wedding anniversary gift, to celebrate thirty years of marriage.

      Gathercole always looked at the statue and the lawn and the rose bushes when he visited, as well as at the grandfather clock in the hall and the bronze table lamp in the library with the leaded glass snail-shell shade; he made a point of doing so. He approved of the stability they seemed to offer. Things—by which Gathercole meant lifeless objects and not any more general state of affairs—rarely changed at Lillieoak. Lady Playford’s constant meticulous scrutiny of every person that crossed her path meant that she paid little attention to anything that could not speak.

      In her study, the room she and Gathercole were in now, there were two books upside down in the large bookcase that stood against one wall: Shrimp Seddon and the Pearl Necklace and Shrimp Seddon and the Christmas Stocking. They had been upside down since Gathercole’s first visit. Six years later, to see them righted would be disconcerting. No other author’s books were permitted to reside upon those shelves, only Athelinda Playford’s. Their spines brought some much-needed brightness into the wood-panelled room—strips of red, blue, green, purple, orange; colours designed to appeal to children—though even they were no match for Lady Playford’s lustrous cloud of silver hair.

      She positioned herself directly in front of Gathercole. ‘I want to talk to you about my will, Michael, and to ask a favour of you. But first: how much do you imagine a child—an ordinary child—might know about surgical procedures to reshape a nose?’

      ‘A … a nose?’ Gathercole wished he could hear about the will first and the favour second. Both sounded important, and were perhaps related. Lady Playford’s testamentary arrangements had been in place for some time. All was as it should be. Could it be that she wanted to change something?

      ‘Don’t be exasperating, Michael. It’s a perfectly simple question. After a bad motorcar accident, or to correct a deformity. Surgery to change the shape of the nose. Would a child know about such a thing? Would he know its name?’

      ‘I don’t know, I’m afraid.’

      ‘Do you know its name?’

      ‘Surgery, I should call it, whether it’s for the nose or any other part of the body.’

      ‘I suppose you might know the name without knowing you know it. That happens sometimes.’ Lady Playford frowned. ‘Hmph. Let me ask you another question: you arrive at the offices of a firm that employs ten men and two women. You overhear a few of the men talking about one of the women. They refer to her as “Rhino”.’

      ‘Hardly gallant of them.’

      ‘Their manners are not your concern. A few moments later, the two ladies return from lunch. One of them is fine-boned, slender and mild in her temperament, but she has a rather peculiar face. No one knows what’s wrong with it, but it somehow doesn’t look quite right. The other is a mountain of a woman—twice my size at least.’ Lady Playford was of average height, and plump, with downward slopes for shoulders that gave СКАЧАТЬ