The Daffodil Affair Read Online Free PDF

piece of chorus work for some time.
    ‘Fair childish,’ said Mrs Fiddock, speaking as if offering the next logical step in a well-ordered theme. ‘Creepy, it was at times. Shy and innocent and ignorant like.’
    Hudspith tried something else. ‘Your daughter went out to dances – that sort of thing?’
    ‘That she did,’ said Mrs Rideout. ‘And that flighty she’d get that there was no holding her.’
    The lips of Mrs Toomer, Mrs Thorr and Mrs Fiddock parted in affirmative incantation. Hudspith plunged again. ‘What other interests had she?’
    ‘Plays,’ said Mrs Rideout.
    ‘Ah – she went to the theatre?’
    Mrs Rideout shook her head violently, apparently intimating that there were degrees of eccentricity of which even her Lucy must be acquitted. ‘She made ’em.’
    ‘Made them?’
    ‘In bed at night. Since we came here it’s fair driven me crazy. Whisper, whisper, whisper.’
    ‘What sort of plays?’
    Mrs Rideout considered. ‘Diatribes,’ she said. ‘Diatribes and sometimes another as well.’
    ‘You mean plays sometimes with two people and sometimes with three? What sort of people.’
    ‘They got very queer names.’ Mrs Rideout shifted uneasily on her chair, as if obliged to contemplate something she had long felt it more comfortable to ignore. ‘Poppet is one.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘And Real Lucy and Sick Lucy is the others. Sick Lucy doesn’t seem to know much. They’re always telling her what happened before.’
    Superintendent Hudspith was not a learned man. But he had read the appropriate textbooks in a number of odd fields. And now – almost as if dazzled by the great light that had come upon him – he gazed at Mrs Rideout and her friends with an unseeing eye. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll be damned!’
    ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Toomer.
     
    Hudspith’s inquiries were prolonged and it was dusk as he turned east along Victoria Street. Anyone glancing at him as he passed the Army and Navy Stores would have suspected first drink and then somnambulism – for he walked as in a trance. This beat the band; it was the very mark and acme of the evil with which he had to cope. He believed himself well-read in all the quaintness and curiosity of vice; his files were a veritable museum of recherché sins; he was the familiar of devils more grotesquely caparisoned than any that ever appeared to St Anthony. But the ingenuity of this – of this vest-pocket promiscuity or compendious polygamy – he had not met the like of before… So he walked down Victoria Street growling, ready positively to bark – and conceivably up the wrong tree.
    Sesame and Lilies and the Swiss Family Robinson and the books on the bottom shelf. After London (what would that be? – wondered Hudspith, staring fixedly and vacantly at Westminster Abbey) and Cowper’s Letters and Mopsie in the Fifth … And suddenly the sheer technical difficulty of what the adversary had achieved revealed itself and forced from him a sort of reluctant admiration. Did you ever hear of the isle of Capri? It was clear now that this could not have been the whole story by a long way. But then perhaps it had been a matter of simple force in the end; despite the note in the cocoa jug, perhaps the girl had been kidnapped after all.
    Hudspith looked up at Big Ben and took no comfort from still being able to read the time on it. London slid past him: high up, the last glitter of day; round him, newsboys and sandbags, cavities and crowds; far below, the purposive hurrying of the underground and the odd pleasing smell that hangs round the stations as you pass. People glanced up at the sky; Hudspith stared through it, scanning some ultimate battleground of good and evil to which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
    Fetishists. Men who insist on knock-kneed women, on bowlegged women, on one-eyed women…and now this. Hudspith climbed flight upon flight of stairs rapidly, in a sudden cold sweat. He marched along a corridor – was hailed through an