The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(208)
Her two attendants, one carrying her fan, and the other her reclining cushions, followed.
Mrs. Druce again turned to Loveday.
“Yes, I confess I was taken a little by surprise,” she said, her manner thawing slightly. “I am not accustomed to the presence of detectives in my house; but now tell me what do you propose doing: how do you mean to begin your investigations—by going over the house and looking in all the corners, or by cross-questioning the servants? Forgive my asking, but really I am quite at a loss; I haven’t the remotest idea how such investigations are generally conducted.”
“I do not propose to do much in the way of investigation to-night,” answered Loveday as formally as she had been addressed, “for I have very important business to transact before eight o’clock this evening. I shall ask you to allow me to see Mdlle. Cunier’s room—ten minutes there will be sufficient—after that, I do not think I need further trouble you.”
“Certainly; by all means,” answered Mrs. Druce; “you’ll find the room exactly as Lucie left it, nothing has been disturbed.”
She turned to the butler, who had by this time returned and stood presenting the claret-cup, and, in French, desired him to summon her maid, and tell her to show Miss Brooke to Mdlle. Cunier’s room.
The ten minutes that Loveday had said would suffice for her survey of this room extended themselves to fifteen, but the extra five minutes assuredly were not expended by her in the investigation of drawers and boxes. The maid, a pleasant, well-spoken young woman, jingled her keys, and opened every lock, and seemed not at all disinclined to enter into the light gossip that Loveday contrived to set going.
She answered freely a variety of questions that Loveday put to her respecting Mademoiselle and her general habits, and from Mademoiselle, the talk drifted to other members of Mrs. Druce’s household.
If Loveday had, as she had stated, important business to transact that evening, she certainly set about it in a strange fashion.
After she quitted Mademoiselle’s room, she went straight out of the house, without leaving a message of any sort for either Mrs. or Major Druce. She walked the length of Portland Place in leisurely fashion, and then, having first ascertained that her movements were not being watched, she called a hansom, and desired the man to drive her to Madame Celine’s, a fashionable milliner’s in Old Bond Street.
At Madame Celine’s she spent close upon half-an-hour, giving many and minute directions for the making of a hat, which assuredly, when finished, would compare with nothing in the way of millinery that she had ever before put upon her head.
From Madame Celine’s the hansom conveyed her to an undertaker’s shop, at the corner of South Savile Street, and here she spent a brief ten minutes in conversation with the undertaker himself in his little back parlour.
From the undertaker’s she drove home to her rooms in Gower Street, and then, before she divested herself of hat and coat, she wrote a brief note to Major Druce, requesting him to meet her on the following morning at Eglacé’s, the confectioner’s, in South Savile Street, at nine o’clock punctually.
This note she committed to the charge of the cab-driver, desiring him to deliver it at Portland Place on his way back to his stand.
“They’ve queer ways of doing things—these people!” said the Major, as he opened and read the note. “Suppose I must keep the appointment though, confound it. I can’t see that she can possibly have found out anything by just sitting still in a corner for a couple of hours! And I’m confident she didn’t give that beast Cassimi one quarter the attention she bestowed on other people.”