“What are you talking about?”
“Maudie. I love her passionately. She used to be a governess, but now she is a private detective. She can’t really be a contemporary of Lord Tennyson’s, but she manages to produce that effect. I’ve told Roger to go and see her, so she may be coming down, and if she does, I shall feel a lot happier. Only you don’t know anything, remember. She may be just an ordinary visitor taking a holiday in the village or anything, so not a word to a soul. But if she’s there, you’ll have someone to hold on to.”
Judy swished water into the washing-up bowl and stuck her chin in the air.
chapter 3
Miss Silver was inclined to see the hand of Providence in trifles. Her first contact with the Pilgrim case occurred when she had just finished working out a new and elaborate stitch for the jumper which she intended for her niece Ethel’s birthday. This she regarded as providential, for though she could, and did, knit her way serenely through all the complications which murder produces, she found it difficult to concentrate upon a really elaborate new pattern at the same time. Ethel Burkett’s annual jumper provided sufficient mental exercise without being brought into competition with a criminal case.
She was considering her good fortune in having obtained this excellent pre-war wool. So soft-such a lovely shade of blue-and no coupons, since it had been produced from a box in the Vicarage attics by Miss Sophy Fell, who had pressed, positively pressed, it on her. And it had been very carefully put away with camphor, so it was as good as on the somewhat distant day when it had been spun.
She had all her stitches on the needles, and the pattern well fixed in her mind, when her front door bell rang and Emma Meadows announced Major Pilgrim. She saw a slight, dark young man with a sallow complexion and a worried frown.