The Daffodil Affair Read Online Free PDF Page A

character and habits of the missing girl.’
    The crisis was over. Even Mrs Toomer ceased knocking her breast. Instead, she took the lid from the teapot and peered hopefully inside.
     
    Lucy Rideout was nineteen; so much could be gathered from her mother – who appeared to feel, however, that this represented her fair share of such information as the assembled party might provide. On her daughter’s interests and accomplishments she was vague; of her friends she knew little; among a number of photographs in a drawer she found one which, after some consultation with her friends, she was persuaded to assert was Lucy. Often, thought Hudspith, our claim upon the awareness of even close relations is surprisingly marginal and precarious. Nevertheless there was something almost pathological in this woman’s attitude to her daughter; it was almost as if the child had been an intellectual problem which Mrs Rideout had long since found it simplest to give up. He scrutinized the photograph with a professional eye. Lucy Rideout was not pretty. Nor, as far as he could discern, did she possess any of the specific types of plainness which have here and there a peculiar appeal. Why, then, Lucy? Presumably because she was half-witted and so particularly easy to spirit away. Only Hudspith thought that if this indifferent photograph revealed anything at all it was the appearance of considerable intelligence. And this by no means accorded with his brief. He turned to Mrs Rideout. “I understand,’ he said cautiously, ‘that your daughter was never very bright at her books?’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout readily.
    ‘In fact, the truth is that she isn’t quite–’
    ‘Her books?’ interrupted Mrs Toomer. ‘Why, she was always at her books, poor dear.’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout. ‘So she was.’
    Mrs Toomer nodded towards the bookshelf. ‘See for yourself, mister. She must have bought all them since the Rideouts was blitzed. Always reading, is Lucy. But bad at her books, as you sez.’
    Hudspith frowned. ‘But if she was always reading–’
    ‘That’s why she was bad at her books,’ Mrs Toomer looked curiously at Hudspith, as if doubting the perspicacity of one to whom this elementary point could be obscure. ‘Always reading, she was. It fairly drove her teachers wild.’
    ‘That was it,’ said Mrs Rideout. She nodded, vague but decided. Suddenly she became much more emphatic. ‘That and her forgetfulness. No one but me can ever know how forgetful that girl is.’
    ‘Was , more likely,’ said Mrs Fiddock gloomily.
    ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout. ‘Sometimes she wouldn’t as much as know if she’d put her dinner inside her. Something chronic, Lucy’s memory.’
    ‘It comes of reading,’ suggested Mrs Thorr. ‘Just common reading, let alone the sort of reading your Lucy did,’ She turned to Hudspith. ‘Lord Bacon and Giboon,’ she enumerated, awed. ‘And Shakespeare and the German Gouty.’
    ‘That’s right,’ chimed in Mrs Toomer. ‘And fairy stories, too, and animals what talk. Half a week’s wages, Lucy would give, if she saw a nice big book with coloured pictures in a window.’
    And the odd thing, thought Hudspith, is that the bookshelves bear out this fantastic confusion of testimonies. He addressed himself resolutely to Lucy’s mother, ‘My information is that your daughter is weak in the head. Not what they call mentally deficient, exactly – but getting on that way. Is that right?’
    ‘Quite right,’ said Mrs Toomer before Mrs Rideout could reply. ‘Not mental–’
    ‘Mentals,’ interrupted Mrs Thorr, ‘goes to school in a car. Lucy never did that, though her father tried for it when he was alive, poor man.’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout.
    ‘Not mental,’ resumed Mrs Toomer. ‘Just a bit cracked like. What you might call terrible serious-minded.’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Rideout and Mrs Fiddock and Mrs Thorr. It was their first