Ellis Peters - George Felse 05 - The Piper On The Mountain Read Free Page A

left the presence very demurely. In the long, soundless corridors of Building One he danced a little when there was no one else in sight, but it was a sarabande rather than a jig, and his face remained bland, intent and fierce with thoughtfulness. He knew exactly what he would do with the Security Office; he had had his own ideas ever since he had worked with Terrell on a certain dossier, and found the differences between their minds sharpening at every contact. It was that dossier, he remembered, that had put Terrell in charge of security at the Marrion in the first place.
    He moved his own personal things into the office which had been Terrell’s. Temporary the appointment might be, and pending confirmation, but Blagrove spent a coolly happy hour rearranging things to his liking, taking down Terrell’s few mountain photographs from the walls, installing his own yachting colour pictures in their place. The beautiful Chloe Bliss—he’d kept her picture in its place even when she left him—went into a desk drawer with the rest. Of Miss Theodosia Barber, Tossa to her friends and contemporaries, there were no pictures, or he might have been tempted to secrete one for his own private pleasure when he had his predecessor’s effects packed up for delivery to the widow.
    By noon he had made a clean sweep. As far as the Marrion Research Institute was concerned, Herbert Terrell was not merely dead, but buried, too.
     
    Chloe spent the whole of Monday shopping for glamorous mourning, and quite forgot about telephoning her daughter until late in the evening. While she waited for the operator to get the number of Tossa’s Oxford digs she practised looking appropriately widowed and murmuring: “Poor Herbert!” There was a mirror suitably placed opposite the telephone for this exercise, so it wasn’t time wasted. Shopping had acted as a tonic; she was looking blooming. Pathetically blooming, of course, but blooming. A pity about the name, though. What could you possibly do with “Herbert?” And yet how like him, how decorous and dull. Even death, even a sudden death like this, couldn’t get such a name off the ground.
    The telephone sputtered in her ear, and Tossa came on the line, sounding defensively grim, as usual. Unexpected calls at this hour of the evening could only be from home.
    “Tossa Barber here. Mother?”
    Where did the child get that gruff voice, like a self-conscious choirboy just stricken by puberty? She might make a hit on television some day, if she could learn to use her natural oddities, but she’d never make it on the stage. You couldn’t fill a theatre with that bashful, suppressed baritone stammer.
    “Darling, yes, of course it’s me. Did I interrupt something for you?”
    “No, nothing much, we were just planning this foreign route. And arguing a lot, of course. The boys want to drive and drive, they don’t see any point in stopping at all, really. But it doesn’t matter, once we’re across to Le Touquet we can go wherever we like, and change the plans as much as we like. We’ve got the car, that’s the main thing. It’s a VW van, third-hand, but it’s been looked after. And you won’t have to worry about us at all, because we’ve got two first-class mechanics.”
    Trot out at speed all the mitigating circumstances, and pray that she isn’t feeling maternal, or you’ve had it. Tossa and her fellow-students had been planning this holiday abroad all the term, and shelled out the money already for the air passage across the Channel, but one unpredictable impulse of mother-love on Chloe’s part could still wreck it. Well, even if she quashed their plans, Tossa was determined she wouldn’t go with her to Menton, to play chaperone for her and her next-man-in, before she’d even shucked off the present incumbent. She couldn’t help it, and Tossa knew she couldn’t, and didn’t hold it against her. But, my God, how it complicated things!
    “Tossa, love, there’s something I’ve got to