Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman by Ellis Peters

him?”
    “No, never,” she said firmly, with a snap which said plainly that that was the way she had wanted it.
    “Nor your husband, either?”
    “He hasn’t seen him. He did write to him once, only once, about a couple of months ago.”
    “Trying to effect a reconciliation?”
    “Asking for help,” said Jean, and bit off the consonant viciously and clenched her teeth on silence.
    “With your consent?”
    “
No
!”
    She wasn’t going to much trouble to hide her feelings, but she hadn’t intended to spit that negative at him so bitterly. She turned her head away for a moment, biting her lip, but she wouldn’t take it back or try to soften it now it was out.
    “With what result?”
    “With no result. He sent a contemptuous answer and refused to do anything for us.” She had been grateful for that, it had salved the fierce pride Leslie had involuntarily injured by making the appeal.
    “And there’s been no further approach?”
    “None as far as I know. But I’m sure none.”
    After some inward debate George told her the terms of Armiger’s will; it seemed a justifiable line of inquiry. “Does that come as a surprise to you, Mrs. Armiger?”
    “No,” she said steadily. “Why should it? He had to leave his money to someone, and he had no relatives left that he hadn’t quarrelled with.”
    “You didn’t know of this plan of his to make Miss Norris his heiress?”
    “All we knew was that Leslie was written off for good, so it no longer concerned us. His father had made that very plain.”
    She was turning the narrow wedding ring upon her finger, and George saw that it was loose. The cheek on which the dark hair curled so lustrously was thinner than it should have been, too, perhaps with too much fatigue and worry, carrying the child, running this oppressive, cramped apology for a home and working part-time to eke out the budget; or perhaps with some other strain that gnawed at her from within. Something terrifying and destroying had happened to her when Leslie caved in and wrote to his father, something he might never be able to undo. Thanks to that unrelenting old demon of a father of his, he had another chance to come up to her expectations, if he had it in him; but after that one slip he had to prove it, up to then probably she’d been serenely sure of him. And yet George could see Leslie’s point of view, too. He must love his wife very much, or he wouldn’t have burned his boats for her sake; and to see her fretting here, to think of his son spending the first months of his life here, was surely enough to bring him to heel, however reluctantly. You could even argue that his attitude was more responsible than hers. What was certain was that by that one well-meant gesture he’d come dangerously near to shaking his marriage to pieces.
    “I won’t trouble you any longer, Mrs. Armiger. Thank you for your help.”
    He rose, and she went with him to the door, silent, disdaining to add anything or ask anything. Or hide anything? No, she would do that, if she had to. Maybe he’d soon know whether she was already hiding something.
    The stairs were dark and narrow, the house smelled of oilcloth, stale air and furniture polish. Mrs. Harkness’s frigid gentility would never stand many visits from the police, even in plain clothes. George had already observed that no telephone wires approached the house, and that there was a telephone box only fifty yards away at the corner of the road. He drove away in the opposite direction, but turning left at the next by-road came round the block and parked under the trees within sight of the bright red cage, and sat watching it for a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, twenty-five; but Jean Armiger didn’t come.
    That pleased him; he had liked her, and he wanted her on the level, and though he had suffered some reverses in the past he had never yet learned to be sufficiently wary of the optimism with which he viewed the motives and actions of those people who made