The Square Emerald · Chapter 15 (2/2)

“I’m not in love with her at all. I suppose I ought to be, right down in the deeps of my heart, but I’m not. And she is not in love with me, either. I knew that seven years ago. She was not over-reticent when she came to discuss our marriage before the separation. Did she tell you anything at all about the boy?”

“Nothing. She really doesn’t know.”

He agreed.

“I was sure she didn’t. Bellini knows⁠—no, I won’t call her Princess or Anita or anything feminine or human! She’s just a devil, a wicked devil! How my father hated her! I’ve an idea he was a bit afraid of her, too. I remember once he asked me, when we were walking together at our place in Hertfordshire, if I liked her, and when I told him that the sight of her made me ill, he put his hand in his pocket and gave me a golden sovereign. And yet he must have been very fond of her once.”

“Fond of her?” Leslie’s eyebrows met. “Do you seriously mean that?”

“I do. They say she was awfully attractive⁠—not very pretty, but very attractive⁠—when she was younger.”

Leslie pushed back her chair.

“This has been a most educational day,” she said. “Produce your evidence, Mr. Dawlish, that your father was ever attracted by that monstrous lady.”

He tried to turn the conversation, but she kept him to it remorselessly.

“I shouldn’t have known, only my mother and the Princess quarrelled. I was curled up in a chair in the library⁠—I must have been about seven⁠—reading one of the kind of books that my father used to buy for me⁠—about pirates and cutthroats and the usual exemplar of youth⁠—when they came into the library together. My mother was furious with Bellini. I didn’t understand all it signified at the time, but later, when I came to think it over, it seemed pretty plain. My mother was furious. ‘You’ve had your innings,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like you any more, and he doesn’t want you in the house. You won’t get him back, anyway.’ There was a lot more said on both sides that I cannot remember. I know that it ended in my mother crying and going out of the room, and in Anita Bellini leaving the house. They must have been on bad terms for two years, probably three. Time has no meaning to a child.”

Leslie was chewing the end of a penholder.

“Then your father, in the argot of these days, was a bad lad?” she said.

“I wouldn’t say that,” he protested. “He was a very simple man, attracted by clever women; and Bellini was brilliant. I remember that her husband was alive in those days; a very tall, thin, melancholy Italian who spoke very bad English. My father and he were not very good friends. I think Bellini had borrowed money and hadn’t repaid it, and dear old Donald Dawlish was rather a stickler for commercial honesty.” And then, with a half-ashamed laugh: “I don’t know why I should be slandering my father or gossiping when I should have no other thought than of my boy. Did she tell you whether she named it?”

“It was neither named nor registered,” was Leslie’s reply. “From that point of view, the child has no existence, and that is why he is going to be so very difficult to trace.”

The pen quivered between her white teeth; she stared out of the window.

“I wonder⁠—” she said softly.

“What do you wonder?”

“If the other two pieces in this jigsaw puzzle are going to be so easy to fit. And I wonder other things, Peter Dawlish. Where is the screw I can turn on Anita Bellini? Give me that letter you had.”

He took it from his pocket and she read it.

“Who sent you this?”

“There was no name attached.”

She looked at the envelope and the postmark.

“This was sent by one who wishes to do either Jane or the Princess a pretty bad turn,” she said. “Now, if I could only trace the sender⁠—”

She lifted the letter to her nose and sniffed daintily.

“Sherlock Holmes would be able to tell in an instant if this perfume was Chanel No. 6 or Chypre. I, being an ignoramus, only know that Greta Gurden’s bedroom reeked with it!”