UK title: Spotlight

Miss Silver – #12, 1947

When Dorinda Brown came into the Heather Club at four o’clock on January eighth she hadn’t the slightest idea that she had just made the first step upon a road which was going to take her into some curious places. If anyone had told her so, she would have laughed. She laughed easily, to be sure, with a backward tilt of the head, eyes crinkling at the corners, and a generous display of excellent white teeth. Anyone less good-tempered than Dorinda might have been annoyed with Justin Leigh’s remark that when she was really amused he could count them. Dorinda had only laughed again and said, “Well, they’re all there.”

The Heather Club wasn’t really a club. Penny plain it was a boarding-house, and twopence coloured it was a private hotel. Miss Donaldson who presided over it felt that she was combining patriotism and refinement by calling it a club and displaying a large bowl of Scottish heather in the little dark hall. It was, perhaps, better not to drag in the word private, since privacy was one of the things which the Club was quite unable to offer. It was a big house in a locality which had come down in the world, and its big rooms had been cut up so small that they resembled slices from a once ample joint, each slice just wide enough to take a narrow bed and leave room for the occupant to get in and out. Some of the slices shared a window, others had a narrow slit which let in no air when it was hot and poured an icy draught down the back of your neck when it was cold. Dorinda had a slice with a slit.

As she passed through the hall she encountered Miss Donaldson, tall, bony, and austere of feature. The austerity was all in the shop window. It daunted newcomers, but took nobody in for long. Behind that formidable manner, that tight hair, those rugged eyebrows, there lived a simple, genial creature who asked no more of life than to be able to pay her way.