Although she had told Frobisher that she was on leave from the Library, she had already made her farewells before embarking on her trip to London. She wanted him to think her anchored, she intuited he would respect that more than her current circumstances.
“We shall miss you so much, Miss Kelling,” Miss Shaw said. Gwendolen was kissed affectionately on the cheek by them all, except Mr. Pollock, of course, who gave her a lifeless handshake and said he wished her well.
* * *
—
She had been picked up from the Warrender at an unearthly hour this morning by Detective Chief Inspector Frobisher in a car driven by a police constable—a fact that did not go unnoticed by Mrs. Bodley.
Detective Chief Inspector Frobisher—what an unwieldy moniker. Gwendolen decided she would call him Frobisher in future, although perhaps not to his face. He had a very solemn face. He was the taciturn sort—she had known a few—and seemed pained by her attempts at conversation.
It was still barely eight o’clock when he returned her to the Warrender and Gwendolen said, “So shall you go home now?”
“Home?” he repeated with a perplexed frown, as if he wasn’t sure what the word meant. （Surely he had a home?） “No,” he replied after a pause. “Duty calls, I’m afraid. I shall go to work, to Bow Street.”
“And that’s where I shall come to give you my ‘report’？” She laughed at the word, at the enterprise ahead of her. （She was feeling a little giddy.） When he frowned at her again—and he did frown rather a lot—she said, “Don’t worry. I will be sensible, I promise. I am known for it, unfortunately.”
“You must not attract attention to yourself.”
“I am a librarian,” she had reassured him. “We are accustomed to moving through the world unnoticed.”
The constable who was driving them opened the car door for her and Gwendolen ran up the steps of the Warrender, turning at the top to salute Frobisher. How full of vigour she was. It felt as if a great weight had been removed from her, which it had, of course, because her mother was dead. Alleluia!
Mrs. Bodley—rarely absent from reception, Gwendolen had discovered—glanced inquisitively at her outdoor clothes. “Out early, Miss Kelling?” she enquired, when what she meant, Gwendolen presumed, was “Back late, Miss Kelling?”
“I barely saw my bed last night, Mrs. Bodley,” Gwendolen said breezily. She was rewarded with a pruny look. “I do hope I haven’t missed breakfast.”
Breakfast, like all the meals in the Warrender, was a hefty affair. A large silver pot of coffee circulated round the dining room continually, a thin young waitress called Violet staggering beneath its weight. Poor Violet was cowed by both coffee pot and Mrs. Bodley.
Porridge, fatback bacon, fried egg and black pudding, followed by toast and marmalade. You could say what you liked about Mrs. Bodley but the Distressed were never knowingly underfed by her. Gwendolen ate it all with relish. How full of rude health she was. She was not yet thirty-two, she reminded herself. She had lived beneath the shadow of the war for long enough. She could be free of it now. The Relief of Gwendolen, like the lifting of a siege. She signalled for more coffee and exchanged smiles with Violet. They were almost like conspirators, Mrs. Bodley their joint foe.
Could she do what Frobisher had asked? She had no idea, but she would give it a go. It would be an adventure. With any luck it would not be sensible.
Frobisher Deskbound
It was only by chance that Gwendolen Kelling had caught him yesterday, brooding at his desk in Bow Street. Frobisher spent as little time as possible in an office, preferring to be out and about. A man in an office saw nothing, a man on the street saw much, especially a suspicious man. The happiest time in Frobisher’s career had been when he was a young constable in uniform, patrolling the streets, wearing out the leather of his big boots. He had been on crowd duty for the old Queen’s funeral and for the new King’s coronation, and for the one that followed, too.
He had seen the best of London, but since the war the capital had gone into decline. O tempora! O mores! he thought. Everyone had gone quite mad in the peace, he sometimes wondered if they were not approaching the death of Western civilization. But then he supposed people had been talking about the end of civilization since Babylonian days, or, indeed, Tutankhamun. Those inclined to superstition talked a great deal about the curse that had come with the opening of the Pharoah’s tomb. It was deemed to be manifesting itself across the capital. Frobisher was dismissive of such irrationality, although of course he had been as thrilled as everyone else by the discovery of the tomb. （Wonderful things!） He had taken out a subscription to National Geographic just so that—