P. M. Penhow

“May I see the envelope?” Rory asked.

Mr. Gladwyn passed it to him without comment. It was addressed to him at the Vicarage; it had a franked American stamp and a New York postmark.

“You see? All above board.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rory sat back in the chair and ran his fingers through his hair. “May I compare the letter with a sample of handwriting I have here?”

“By all means. Though the police have already done that. They brought in one of their experts. They seemed perfectly satisfied.”

Rory unfolded the sheet of paper that he had found in his chest of drawers. He laid it side by side with the New York letter on the desk and methodically compared individual characters. There was a strong family resemblance between them, though there were small differences in their formation, and the handwriting of the letter from New York was smaller, squeezed to fit one sheet of paper. But there were also minor but equally obvious variations between Miss Penhow’s hurried draft letter to Mr. Orburn and her more carefully written commentary on the parable of the Prodigal Son.

“Well?” said Mr. Gladwyn. “What do you think?”

“That they could easily have been written by the same person.”

“Precisely.” Mr Gladwyn stood up, perhaps hoping to encourage his visitor to do likewise. “You’ve met Mr. Serridge, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen something of him in the last few years. And what I’ve seen inclines me to give him the benefit of the doubt in a case like this. It is true that Miss Penhow left rather suddenly. But their relationship was unorthodox from the start, I’m afraid. We have a perfectly reasonable explanation of why she left.”

“Isn’t it strange that she’s not been in touch with Miss Kensley or any of her friends?”

“I don’t think so. You forget-this is a woman previously of good character who has been tempted into doing something of which she now feels greatly ashamed. She is trying to build a new life. The last thing she wants is reminders of the old.” The Vicar looked at his watch again, and this time he made no attempt to conceal what he was doing. “I’m not naive, Mr. Wentwood-I fancy I can see as far into human nature as the next man. But remember your Bible, eh? Cast not the first stone.”

Rory stood up. “Mr. Serridge still lives at Morthams Farm?”

“Yes, indeed. Though he spends a good deal of his time in town. These haven’t been easy years for farmers, as I’m sure you know, but he’s made quite a success of Morthams since he bought it from Captain Ingleby-Lewis.” There was a tap on the door and the maid appeared with a coal scuttle. “Rebecca, would you show Mr. Wentwood out?”

During Lydia’s first morning at Shires and Trimble, she learned how to place files in alphabetical order in drawers and how to moisten stamps and put them on envelopes. Her instructor, the junior clerk Mr. Smethwick, had pale, flaky skin and was very particular about how things should be done in the office. Stamps, for example, should be placed so their borders were as nearly aligned as possible with the edges of the envelope. Ideally the gap between the edge of the stamp and the border of the envelope should be about a sixth of an inch above and to the right of the stamp.

“These little details matter, Mrs. Langstone,” he said. “It tells the client we are a firm that knows how to keep things straight, a firm he can trust with his business.”

“But how can you be certain of that?” Lydia asked. “The client might not notice at all, or they might even think we were being rather too fussy.”

“Nonsense. If you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. Langstone, you can tell that you’ve never worked in an office before.”

The typist chipped in, “I bet there’s not a lot you don’t know about the secret workings of the mind, Mr. Smethwick.”

Mr. Smethwick hesitated, visibly uncertain whether or not this should be taken as a compliment, and then smirked as his riposte came to him: “Then all I can say is you’d better watch what you’re thinking.”

Miss Tuffley gave a shriek of laughter, which won her a disapproving stare from Mr. Reynolds, the senior clerk.

Mr. Shires himself did not come into the office. Mr. Trimble did not appear to exist. Mr. Reynolds ruled supreme in Mr. Shires’ absence. He was too wrapped up in his own work to talk to anyone unless it was absolutely necessary. But Miss Tuffley more than made up for his silence by chattering non-stop whenever her red nails were not dancing noisily on the typewriter keys, and sometimes even then. It soon became clear that she knew more about the cinema-the films, the actors, the gossip-than anyone else Lydia had ever met.

The office boy, who was usually entrusted with the envelopes and stamps, was ill. The work was tedious and oddly tiring. Lydia tried to avoid looking at the clock on the wall above Mr. Reynolds’ high desk. She would not have believed it possible that time could move so slowly. At a little after eleven o’clock there was a variation in the monotony in the form of a stout woman in a pinafore who brought round a tray of tea, after which Mr. Smethwick taught Lydia how to answer the telephone. It was important to master the correct salutation: “Shires and Trimble. Good morning,” with the emphasis firmly on the adjective, to create a mood of optimism and hope. According to Mr. Smethwick, one’s intonation should create the impression that one was mentally in a state of high alert and also smiling in a welcoming way.

At one o’clock Lydia went to the cloakroom to fetch her hat and coat. There was a pause in the rattle of the typewriter keys in the general office. She heard Miss Tuffley’s voice raised in argument with Mr. Smethwick: “…herself as Lady Muck. If you ask me she’s…” Typing drowned the rest of the sentence and reduced Mr. Smethwick’s reply to a low rumble. Lydia settled her hat on her head and went back to the general office. Mr. Smethwick asked her to post the letters she had so carefully stamped. “Think you can manage that, Mrs. Langstone?”

She went downstairs and opened the street door. She was so tired and angry she wanted to cry. Outside lay freedom, albeit for only an hour. She paused in the doorway to savor the gray pavement, a taxi, the east wall of the chapel and a gray sky. So that’s what paradise looked like. An absence of Shires and Trimble.

As she stepped onto the pavement, the taxi’s rear window slid down. A thin and very elegant woman stared at Lydia, who came to an abrupt halt.

“Hello, Lydia,” said the woman, and the dream of freedom died a premature death.

“Hello, Mother,” said Lydia.

Rawling’s solitary pub was called the Alforde Arms. Rory ate bread and cheese by the fire in the saloon bar, and washed down his lunch with half a pint of bitter. In India, he would often daydream about this sort of day-a simple lunch in a village pub, logs smoldering on a hearth, a muddy walk under a gray, wintry sky swirling with rooks.

While he ate, he summarized to himself what he would report to Sergeant Narton when they met this evening. It wasn’t a great deal: the Vicar had received a letter from New York which purported to be from Philippa Penhow; she could indeed have written it; and if it was genuine it offered a plausible explanation for her disappearance and her silence, particularly if one allowed for the shame she must have felt in allowing Serridge to seduce her in the first place. There was also the fact that Mr. Gladwyn seemed to like Mr. Serridge. Finally-and this was the only really disturbing piece of information he had acquired-Captain Ingleby-Lewis had sold Morthams Farm to Serridge. Lydia Langstone’s father was somehow involved in this. He had a disturbing sense that the boundaries of the whole affair had shifted, and that even his own role in it might not be what he had assumed it was.