The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [52]
“That would have been, what, Wednesday?”
“I think so.”
“And Damian, you saw him Sunday afternoon?” With a valise-leaving for Sussex?
“That's right.”
“You said Mrs Adler goes to church on Saturday night. Where is that?”
“Well, I don't know that it's church, exactly. It's one of those meeting hall places full of odd people.”
“Is it nearby?”
“I think so—it's my husband who told me about it, let me ask him. Jim? Jim, could you come here for a moment, there's a lady looking for the Adlers in number seven. My husband, Jim,” she said when a rotund man of forty came to the door, pointedly carrying a tea-cup. Distant voices indicated other children, under the supervision of a nanny. And the presence of an undistracted wife at the door at a time when cooking odours filled the house indicated a cook on the premises as well: no Bohemians, these.
“Mary Russell,” I said, holding out my hand first to him, then to her.
“Jim, can you tell Miss Russell where that meeting hall was that you saw Mrs Adler going into, some weeks back?”
Jim was not the brains of the family, and had to hunt through his memories for the event in question. After a while, his round face cleared. “Ahr, yais. Peculiar types. Artistic, don't you know?”
“That sounds like the Adlers,” I agreed merrily. “Do you remember where the hall was?”
He stirred his tea for a moment, then raised the cup to slurp absently: The act stirred memory. “It was coming back from the cinema one night. Harold Lloyd, it was. Wonderful funny man.” I made encouraging noises, hoping I was not to hear the entire plot of whatever picture it was.
Fortunately, his wife intervened. “Which cinema house was it, Jim?”
“Up the Brompton,” he answered promptly.
“Not the Old Brompton?”
“Nar, up near the V and A.”
“Isn't that the Cromwell Road?” I asked.
“Thurloe, for a time,” she corrected me.
“Not Thurloe,” he insisted. “Below that.” This, my mental map told me, did indeed put us onto the bit of the Brompton Road that jogged to join the Fulham Road. I did not know how a stranger ever found his way around this city, where a street could be called by five names in under a mile.
“So was the meeting hall along the Brompton Road?”
“Just this side.” Between them, they narrowed it down for me, and although I knew the area well enough to be certain there was no true meeting hall in that street, there were any number of buildings that could have a large room above ground-floor shops, and his description of “atop the stationers' with the fancy pens in the window,” was good enough to start with. I thanked them and wished them a good evening.
Jim left, but the wife stepped out of the door and lowered her voice. “You said you're a friend of his? Mr Adler's?”
“Originally his, yes,” I said carefully.
“But you know her a little?”
“Not as well as I do him, but a little.” One photograph and a husband's description might better be described as a very little, but the woman wished to tell me something, and I thought she was asking for encouragement.
“Is she … That is to say, is Mrs Adler dependable?”
An interesting word. “Dependable?”
She looked to be regretting the question, but she persisted. “I mean to say, Mr Adler seems a nice enough sort, for an artist, that is. Polite and so very good with the little girl, but the wife … well, she's a bit queer.”
“Hmm,” I said, desperate for a hint as to Yolanda's particular type of oddness. “She does strike one that way, it's true. Perhaps it's just that she's foreign.”
“True. But you'd say that, deep down, she's a good wife and mother?”
Ah. “She loves the child a great deal,” I said, with somewhat more assurance.
“Oh yes, no doubt about