effort for me to hold my back straight as I went to the front door.
It was a telegram. I handed it to her. She ripped it open and read it aloud. It confirmed that J.B. and Charles would arrive at noon on Sunday for lunch. It had been sent by Charles.
“What is it?” asked Julian, hand to head. Bianca passed the telegram to him, and told him to go out for a walk to clear his head.
“It doesn’t say he’s actually switched the Wills around,” objected Julian.
“How could he put that in a telegram?” asked Bianca, and for once I sympathised with her.
“The phone must still be out of order,” said Julian, testing it. “Oh, hell.”
“A nice job for you,” said his wife. “Just about up to your weight. You can go to the corner phone box and report it out of order.”
“But Charles said he reported it yesterday, and it must be a good mile...”
“...and don’t take the car. The walk will do you good.”
I thought he’d object, but he didn’t. That little exchange convinced me, as nothing else might have done, that Bianca wore the trousers in the Brenner household. Perhaps J.B. had been right in thinking that if he could only work on Julian, the plot against his life would collapse, but I didn’t think he’d have much chance to separate them. Bianca knew on which side her bread was buttered, and Julian seemed obsessed — no, fascinated — by his wife.
He put on his overcoat, and went out. I returned to the kitchen, hoping that Bianca would not follow me. Then the door-bell rang again. I set the kitchen door ajar, to see who it was.
“...it’s really too bad,” Bianca was saying to someone at the front door. “The fault was reported yesterday and you did nothing whatsoever about it...”
A man’s voice mumbled something.
“I daresay!” said Bianca tartly. “But what’s it to me if your van has broken down and half the telephone engineers are off sick? We pay our rental and expect an efficient service.” She raised her voice. “Sue! Come here!”
I took the grin off my face and went through. A middling-sized man in overalls too big for him stood in the doorway, holding a heavy bag of tools in one limp hand and blowing his nose with the other. His eyes were red, gingery hair stuck out in untidy clumps from under a floppy woollen cap, and he was a most unhealthy shade of greenish-white.
My first reaction was that Bianca might have been less hard on a man who ought to be in bed rather than attending to faulty phones. My second was to wonder how I was to explain to him about the damage I’d done to the phone.
“Sue!” said Bianca. “This man has come about the phones. Don’t let him stay here by himself and see he doesn’t take anything away with him when he leaves.”
The engineer looked understandably depressed. He drifted across to the phone, and set down his bag.
“Very well, Mrs. Brenner,” I said, in best parlour maid fashion, I could feel a giggle start at the back of my throat. The telephone engineer ought to have disguised his hands in mittens; they were too clean by half, square-cut and strong-looking. I watched him take the casing off the phone while Bianca checked she had everything she needed for her shopping trip. I had studied Charles’ hands often. This man was smaller and older than Charles, but he’d been bred in the same stable, and the wig and make-up he wore hardly concealed a scar slashing across one eyebrow. How blind Bianca must be not to see how beautifully controlled was his every movement! This was no pit-pony, but a finely-trained racehorse.
He coughed dismally and managed a sniff as Bianca let herself out of the house. He didn’t seem disturbed by the damage I’d done to the telephone. Bianca’s car snorted off down the drive.
“Coffee, David?” I asked.
Five
“Never take an unnecessary risk, Sue,” said David Ashton. “Suppose Bianca had forgotten something and come back to the house for it? Or Julian had wandered in and heard you call me David? Now where’s her papers?”
“Talk of unnecessary risks!” I said indignantly. “What about you? What happens if Julian does walk in and find you burgling Bianca’s desk?”
“In her desk, are they?” He took his bag and went off into Bianca’s sitting-room. I hadn’t had much time to look around between my spells in the kitchen, but it hadn’t taken me