“Are you going to the Baby Party?” he asked, indicating the gardens with a nod. “They’re all dressed like toddlers in there. Behaving like them as well. Biggest bunch of nincompoops in London.”
The mummy spoke, slightly muffled on account of the bandages.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that. Oh—am I Vivian Quinn? Yes, yes, indeed, the one and only.” He preened a little, he loved being recognized. “Do I know you?” he asked. “Are you the—？”
The question remained unfinished. Quinn looked down at the large knife sticking out of his stomach in disbelief. A coup de grace. It was not the bull who had been gored, it was the matador.
Adieu, Adieu, Adieu
It was almost dark by the time they were back at the car.
By the light of a torch, Gwendolen read out instructions from the handbook while Frobisher wielded the starting handle, and then, of course, there was a whole new palaver over getting the headlights to work. By the time the road was moving beneath their wheels once again it was the deep dark that you only found in the countryside and they were totally reliant upon the weak beams. Gwendolen suspected her dreams would be haunted by the new vocabulary of “strangler wire” and “throttle” and “double declutch,” but it was exciting just now to be driving in the night-time, and they had been comfortably silent for a while when suddenly those same weak headlights were illuminating a road full of—
“Rabbits! Oh, Lord, rabbits everywhere, Inspector!” It was as if an entire warren had been tipped out onto the tarmacadam. Frobisher braked hard, jerking them both forward. Gwendolen wasn’t sure if any had gone beneath their wheels, she imagined the crunch of tiny bones, but the rabbits seemed unconcerned about the juggernaut that had borne down on them. The dog, asleep again, had woken up with an excited start at the word “rabbits.” Not such a city dog, perhaps.
The rabbits didn’t move. Gwendolen supposed that they hadn’t yet adjusted their lives to the terror of the modern combustion engine. Perhaps they never would. There were babies, too—adorable little things, frolicking innocently—although Frobisher seemed unmoved by their charms. He was a countryman, she reminded herself, he had grown up looking on rabbits as sport or food or both.
The rabbits remained unconcerned, claiming the road as their own, and eventually Gwendolen had to get out of the car and shoo them away, while Frobisher kept the engine running—God forbid they would have to start it up again. Eventually, the shooing being ineffective, she decided the best thing was to walk ahead of the car as someone would have had to do in the early days of motoring to warn horses and pedestrians, rather than rabbits, of the oncoming monster. There was a fairy tale she had once read about herding rabbits—or was it hares? Hares, more likely. It was considered one of those impossible tasks that the protagonist had to perform in order to be released from a spell.
She was laughing when she climbed back in the passenger seat and said, “Well, that was silly.” She felt, suddenly, rather ridiculously fond of Frobisher, and if he hadn’t been gripping the steering wheel she might have reached over and touched his hand, or even his cheek. She would let him kiss her when they were back in London. Of course, he might not want to.
They proceeded cautiously, but there were no more rabbits. “I shall expect to have you home by midnight,” he said.
“Before the car turns into a pumpkin?”
“Quite.”
She was prompted to ask, “And where do you live, Inspector?”
“Ealing,” he replied, after a little beat. She had never met anyone so unwilling to divulge information about themselves.
“Ealing? In a house?” She had imagined him in a bachelor flat in Marylebone or Kentish Town.
“Yes, a house. Do you find that odd?”
She was thoughtful for a moment. “With someone?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Do you share the house with someone, another person?”
There was a long silence. Perhaps he was hoping for more rabbits to appear or indeed any diversion to delay replying, but there was no wildlife to provide him with respite and eventually he said, “Just my wife.”
“Your wife?” The spell was broken.
* * *
—
“Miss Kelling…Gwendolen…”
“Yes, Inspector?” she said coolly. They had exchanged barely a word since the revelation of the wife. What was there to say? She had been under the misapprehension that she was being courted （she who had had no wish to be courted!）， that he was, indeed, in a position to court her, but this had turned out not to be the case at all. He had a wife! He was no better than a common Casanova.