Spider's Web - Agatha Christie [10]
As Clarissa replaced the receiver, Miss Peake suddenly darted to the console table and set it back against the wall. ‘Excuse me,’ she boomed, ‘but Mr Sellon always liked this table flat against the wall.’
Clarissa surreptitiously pulled a face at Sir Rowland, but hastened nevertheless to assist Miss Peake with the table. ‘Thank you,’ said the gardener. ‘And,’ she added, ‘you will be careful about marks made with glasses on the furniture, won’t you, Mrs Brown-Hailsham.’ Clarissa looked anxiously at the table as the gardener corrected herself. ‘I’m sorry–I mean Mrs Hailsham-Brown.’ She laughed in a hearty fashion. ‘Oh well, Brown-Hailsham, Hailsham-Brown,’ she continued. ‘It’s really all the same thing, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s not, Miss Peake,’ Sir Rowland declared, with very distinct enunciation. ‘After all, a horse chestnut is hardly the same thing as a chestnut horse.’
While Miss Peake was laughing jovially at this, Hugo came into the room. ‘Hello, there,’ she greeted him. ‘I’m getting a regular ticking off. Quite sarcastic, they’re being.’ Going across to Hugo, she thumped him on the back, and then turned to the others. ‘Well, good night, all,’ she shouted. ‘I must be toddling back. Give me the broccoli.’
Sir Rowland handed it over. ‘Horse chestnut–chestnut horse,’ she boomed at him. ‘Jolly good–I must remember that.’ With another boisterous laugh she disappeared through the French windows.
Hugo watched her leave, and then turned to Clarissa and Sir Rowland. ‘How on earth does Henry bear that woman?’ he wondered aloud.
‘He does actually find her very hard to take,’ Clarissa replied. She picked up Pippa’s book from the easy chair, put it on the table and collapsed into the chair as Hugo responded, ‘I should think so. She’s so damned arch! All that hearty schoolgirl manner.’
‘A case of arrested development, I’m afraid,’ Sir Rowland added, shaking his head.
Clarissa smiled. ‘I agree she’s maddening,’ she said, ‘but she’s a very good gardener and, as I keep telling everyone, she goes with the house, and since the house is so wonderfully cheap–’
‘Cheap? Is it?’ Hugo interrupted her. ‘You surprise me.’
‘Marvellously cheap,’ Clarissa told him. ‘It was advertised. We came down and saw it a couple of months ago, and took it then and there for six months, furnished.’
‘Whom does it belong to?’ Sir Rowland asked.
‘It used to belong to a Mr Sellon,’ Clarissa replied. ‘But he died. He was an antique dealer in Maidstone.’
‘Ah, yes!’ Hugo exclaimed. ‘That’s right. Sellon and Brown. I once bought a very nice Chippendale mirror from their shop in Maidstone. Sellon lived out here in the country, and used to go into Maidstone every day, but I believe he sometimes brought customers out here to see things that he kept in the house.’
‘Mind you,’ Clarissa told them both, ‘there are one or two disadvantages about this house. Only yesterday, a man in a violent check suit drove up in a sports car and wanted to buy that desk.’ She pointed to the desk. ‘I told him that it wasn’t ours and therefore we couldn’t sell it, but he simply wouldn’t believe me and kept on raising the price. He went up to five hundred pounds in the end.’
‘Five hundred pounds!’ exclaimed Sir Rowland, sounding really startled. He went across to the desk. ‘Good Lord!’ he continued. ‘Why, even at the Antique Dealers’ Fair I wouldn’t have thought it would fetch anything near to that. It’s a pleasant enough object, but surely not especially valuable.’
Hugo joined him at the desk, as Pippa came back into the room. ‘I’m still hungry,’ she complained.
‘You can’t be,’ Clarissa told her firmly.
‘I am,’ Pippa insisted. ‘Milk and chocolate biscuits and a banana aren’t really filling.’ She made for the armchair and flung herself into it.
Sir Rowland and Hugo were still contemplating the desk. ‘It’s certainly a nice desk,’ Sir Rowland observed. ‘Quite genuine, I imagine, but not what I’d call a collector’s piece. Don’t you agree, Hugo?’
‘Yes, but perhaps it