Page 8 of Marble Hall Murders

He had a brain tumour. Nothing could be done about it and in just a few months it would kill him. This visit to the doctor was little more than a formality. Dr Benson would examine him, ask questions about his physical well-being, his sleep, his appetite, his state of mind – and then send him home with a smile and a few words of comfort. The two ofthem had developed a strange rapport, something more than doctor and patient. They were partners in a process that was universal, beyond their comprehension, and one that neither of them could change.

Dr Benson’s clinic was on the ground floor of a tall, narrow building, identical to its neighbours on either side. Fifteen years ago, there would have been railings separating it from the street, but these had been removed along with all the other metal in London, repurposed for the war effort. It reminded Pünd of the times he had lived through, the world tearing itself apart, so many millions of deaths while he had languished behind the barbed wire of a Nazi concentration camp that he should not have survived. Even when Dr Benson had told him the bad news, Pünd had thought of himself as fortunate. He had never expected to live this long.

He reached the front door and rang the bell. Almost immediately, it was opened by a young woman whose face he recognised but whose name he had never learned. She was the clinic’s receptionist. She knew every patient who came to the building and remembered those who didn’t return.

‘Mr Pünd,’ she said, with a smile that suggested they were both delighted he was there. ‘What a beastly summer we’re having! Do come in.’

She showed him into the waiting room with its flock wallpaper, antique floor lamps and mahogany table on which rested the usual pile of magazines:Country Life,PunchandReader’s Digest, none of them up to date. Four doctors shared the building and all of them had patients arriving at the same time. Pünd recognised a foreign-looking man sitting in the corner. From his appearance and his posture, he had to beex-military. Sure enough, a nurse in a white coat came in a moment later.

‘Major Alcazar …’

The man stood up stiffly and followed her out.

Pünd took his place on a sofa and reached out for one of the magazines, not because he intended to read it, but because it prevented the two other people in the room from questioning him. He flicked it open and glanced at a picture of a country estate in Wiltshire. It reminded him of the case he had just solved in the village of Saxby-on-Avon. His last case, probably.

Outside, in the corridor, he heard a woman speaking, high-pitched and a little querulous, someone who was used to being obeyed.

‘I think I left it in the waiting room. It must have dropped out of my bag.’

Pünd had already recognised the voice before Lady Margaret Chalfont appeared in the doorway. There could be no mistaking it. Lady Chalfont spoke in the same way she lived her life: imperiously and with every intention of being noticed. The figure who now stood before him was a tiny bird of a woman who seemed to be shrinking even as she stood there, but who was fighting it with every inch of her being. She was in her mid-sixties, but illness had added ten years to that. Her hair, which had been dyed silver and mauve, was carefully coiffured to disguise how thin it had become, and she had dressed purposefully in bright colours with a green jacket, ballooning maroon trousers and an exotic headband missing only the feather, but none of this could disguise the truth of her condition. She was holding a Gucci clutch bag in one hand, a single glove in the other.

As she came into the room, she was already searching for its companion. Her eyes darted over to the sofa where Pünd had chosen to sit and he saw the expression on her face change as she noticed him.

‘My dear Mr Pünd! What a surprise. You are the last person I’d expect to see in this awful place. Are you ill?’

It was just like her to be so direct. Pünd rose to his feet. ‘I am waiting to see the doctor,’ he replied non-committally.

‘They don’t know anything!’ Lady Chalfont sighed. ‘They look you in the eye and tell you, take this pill and that pill and you’ll be fine, but you’re not. You never are. When the Grim Reaper comes calling, the doctors can only sit there, hiding behind their charts and their X-rays. Charlatans, the lot of them!’

‘You seem unchanged, Lady Chalfont.’

‘An illusion, Mr Pünd. Anyway, “Nichts ist höher zu schätzen als der Wert des Tages,”fn1 as Goethe so rightly said. And nothing has brightened up this one more than bumping into you.’

Pünd smiled. He had met Margaret Chalfont in Salisbury nine years ago, when she had been one of the main suspects in the murder of George Colindale, who had been poisoned at a New Year’s party to which they had both been invited. At that time, she had been single. Her husband – Henry Chalfont, the 6th Earl Chalfont – had been killed by a V-2 rocket in the last months of the war. Pünd recalled that there had been a son and a daughter, both married, and later he had spotted the arrival of a grandson, announced inThe Times. He had liked Lady Chalfont immediately. She might be loud andoutspoken, but she was also cultured, well meaning and, as it turned out, the one who had made the single observation that led Pünd to solve the case.

It seemed remarkable that they should have met now and in this place, and he was wondering what he should say next when his eye fell on something he had noticed the moment he had entered the room but which he had until now ignored. He leaned down and retrieved a single calf-leather glove from underneath the sofa where he had been sitting. Only the fingertips had been visible.

‘I believe this is what you are looking for, Lady Chalfont,’ he said.

She took it, beaming, and pressed it against its partner. ‘You really are a marvel, Mr Pünd. You don’t miss anything, do you!’

She was about to go on when there was a movement at the door and a much younger woman presented herself; not a nurse and quite possibly not a patient either. She looked uncomfortable, in a hurry to be out of there. She was very much stouter than Lady Chalfont, with the face of a woman who took herself seriously. She wore heavy glasses and her almost colourless hair was tied back in a bun. Her clothes, like her manner, were businesslike. There was something of the prison warden about her as she stood there, upright, in her ungainly leather shoes.

‘Have you found it, Mother?’ she asked impatiently, then stopped, seeing that she had company. Pünd bowed to her. So they were related! It was said that Lady Chalfont had been a great beauty in her youth, but her daughter looked nothing like her.

‘This gentleman found it for me, Judith. In fact, we’re old friends. This is Atticus Pünd. I’m sure you’ve heard me talking about him. He is quite probably the best detective in the world.’ She turned to Pünd and continued without taking a breath. ‘My daughter. Judith Lyttleton as she is now. She drove me here.’

‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Mrs Lyttleton,’ Pünd said.

‘Actually, it’s Dr Lyttleton,’ Judith replied with impatience rather than rancour, as if this was something she was used to explaining – which indeed it was. ‘I have a postgraduate degree in ethnology from University College, London. I’ve written several papers about Peru. You may have read them.’

‘I’m afraid I have not.’

Judith nodded, disappointed but unsurprised. ‘We really ought to be on our way, Mother. We must pick up the cases and get to the airport.’

‘We’re heading back to the South of France,’ Lady Chalfont explained. ‘My late husband, Henry, bought a house in the Côte d’Azur and I spend the whole summer there. I remarried, by the way. Did you know that?’

‘I did not,’ Pünd said.

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