Third girl - Agatha Christie [27]
This part of London seemed to have suffered or profited from a large amount of building in the recent years. Enormous skyscrapers, most of which Mrs Oliver thought very hideous, mounted to the sky with a square matchbox-like air.
Claudia turned into a building. ‘Now I shall find out exactly,’ thought Mrs Oliver and turned into it after her. Four lifts appeared to be all going up and down with frantic haste. This, Mrs Oliver thought, was going to be more difficult. However, they were of a very large size and by getting into Claudia’s one at the last minute Mrs Oliver was able to interpose large masses of tall men between herself and the figure she was following. Claudia’s destination turned out to be the fourth floor. She went along a corridor and Mrs Oliver, lingering behind two of her tall men, noted the door where she went in. Three doors from the end of the corridor. Mrs Oliver arrived at the same door in due course and was able to read the legend on it. ‘Joshua Restarick Ltd.’ was the legend it bore.
Having got as far as that Mrs Oliver felt as though she did not quite know what to do next. She had found Norma’s father’s place of business and the place where Claudia worked, but now, slightly disabused, she felt that this was not as much of a discovery as it might have been. Frankly, did it help? Probably it didn’t.
She waited around a few moments, walking from one end to the other of the corridor looking to see if anybody else interesting went in at the door of Restarick Enterprises. Two or three girls did but they did not look particularly interesting. Mrs Oliver went down again in the lift and walked rather disconsolately out of the building. She couldn’t quite think what to do next. She took a walk round the adjacent streets, she meditated a visit to St Paul’s.
‘I might go up in the Whispering Gallery and whisper,’ thought Mrs Oliver. ‘I wonder now how the Whispering Gallery would do for the scene of a murder?
‘No,’ she decided, ‘too profane, I’m afraid. No, I don’t think that would be quite nice.’ She walked thoughtfully towards the Mermaid Theatre. That, she thought, had far more possibilities.
She walked back in the direction of the various new buildings. Then, feeling the lack of a more substantial breakfast than she had had, she turned into a local café. It was moderately well filled with people having extra late breakfast or else early ‘elevenses’. Mrs Oliver, looking round vaguely for a suitable table, gave a gasp. At a table near the wall the girl Norma was sitting, and opposite her was sitting a young man with lavish chesnut hair curled on his shoulders, wearing a red velvet waistcoat and a very fancy jacket.
‘David,’ said Mrs Oliver under her breath. ‘It must be David.’ He and the girl Norma were talking excitedly together.
Mrs Oliver considered a plan of campaign, made up her mind, and nodding her head in satisfaction, crossed the floor of the café to a discreet door marked ‘Ladies’.
Mrs Oliver was not quite sure whether Norma was likely to recognise her or not. It was not always the vaguest looking people who proved the vaguest in fact. At the moment Norma did not look as though she was likely to look at anybody but David, but who knows?
‘I expect I can do something to myself anyway,’ thought Mrs Oliver. She looked at herself in a small fly-blown mirror provided by the café’s management, studying particularly what she considered to be the focal point of a woman’s appearance, her hair. Noone knew this better than Mrs Oliver, owing to the innumerable times that she had changed her mode of hairdressing, and had failed to be recognised by her friends in consequence. Giving her head an appraising eye she started work. Out came the pins, she took off several coils of hair, wrapped them up in her handkerchief and stuffed them into her handbag, parted her hair in the middle, combed it sternly back from her face and rolled it up into a modest bun at the back of her neck. She also took out a pair of spectacles and put them on her nose. There was a really earnest look about her