The Case of the Gilded Fly Read Free

was sitting in the corner opposite reading
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
and entirely unaware of the maddening dilatoriness of the train. She tried a few words of conversation with him, but he was not to be drawn, and after a short time returned to his book with a charming but distant smile. Yseut sat back in her corner with unconcealed disgust. ‘Oh, hell!’ she said. ‘I wish this bloody train would get a move on.’
    Helen was Yseut’s half-sister. Their father, an expert on medieval French literature, and a man who showed little interest in anything else, had nevertheless had a sufficient sense of worldly affairs to marry a rich wife, and Yseut had been their first child. The mother had died three months after she was born, leaving half her fortune in trust for the child until she was twenty-one, with the result that Yseut was now considerably richer than was good for her. Before she died, however, there had been a furious quarrel over Yseut’s outlandish name, on which the husband had with unexpected firmness insisted. He had spent the best years of his life in an intensive and entirely fruitless study of the French Tristan romances, and was determined that some symbol of this preoccupation should remain; and eventually he had somewhat to his own surprise had his own way. Two years later he married again, and two years later still Helen had been born, the second baptism causing his more sarcastic friends to suggest that if any further daughters appeared they should be called Nicolette, Heloise, Juliet and Cressida. When Helen was still three, however, both her parents had been killed in a railway accident, and she and Yseut were brought up by a distant and business-like cousin of her mother, who, when Yseut was twenty-one, persuaded her (by what means heaven alone knows, since Yseut disliked Helen intensely) to sign a deed leaving the whole of her money, in the event of death, to her half-sister.
    The dislike was mutual. To begin with, Helen was different from Yseut in almost every way. She was short, blonde, slim, pretty (in a childish way which made her look much younger than she actually was), had big candid blue eyes, and was entirely sincere. Although not particularly intellectual in hertastes, she was able to talk intelligently, and with an intellectual humility which was charming and flattering. She was prepared to flirt, but only when the process did not interfere with her work, which she regarded with justifiable if slightly comic seriousness. In fact, she was for her age an extremely clever actress, and though she had none of the hard intellectual brilliance of the Shaw actress, she was charming in quieter parts, and two years previously had made an astonishing and very well deserved success as Juliet. Yseut was only too well aware of her sister’s superiority in this respect, and the fact did nothing to create any additional cordiality between them.
    Helen had not spoken since the journey began. She was reading
Cymbeline
, with a little frown of concentration, and was not sure that she was enjoying it very much. Occasionally, when the train halted for a particularly long time, she gave a little sigh and gazed out of the window; then returned to her book. ‘A mortal mineral,’ she thought: what on earth does that mean? And who is who’s son, and why?
    Sir Richard Freeman, Chief Constable of Oxford, was returning from a police conference at Scotland Yard. He sat back comfortably in the corner of his first-class compartment, his iron-grey hair carefully brushed back and a light of battle in his eye. He was holding a copy of Fen’s
Minor Satirists of the XVIIIth Century
and was in process of registering emphatic disagreement with the opinions of that expert on the work of Charles Churchill. On hearing this criticism later, Fen was not impressed, since publicly at any rate he manifested nothing but a superb indifference for his subject. And in fact, the relation between the