“Oh, any old sort. Bally rot. One night it was a motor-bus chivvying me on the stage. One night May”—May Weston was her companion—“May would keep parrots in the bathroom. Then I hear a noise and wake up and there isn’t any noise.”
“Do you have this every night?”
“Snakes! Not much. Now and again. But I say, doc, it’s not fair. I don’t drink and I don’t drug. But I’ll be seeing pink rats if this goes on.”
“Is there anything worrying you just now?”
Was it possible that Miss Bolton blushed? Reggie could not be sure. “You’re a bright boy, doc. Be good!” She shook hands and gripped like a man. The big emerald she always wore ground into his fingers. “Birdie, the strong girl. Bye-bye,” she laughed.
On the next morning Reggie was just out of his bath when he was told that Miss Bolton’s housekeeper had rung up. Miss Bolton had had an accident and would he go at once. “Tell Sam,” said Reggie, and jumped into his trousers. Samuel Baker, a young taxi-driver whose omniscient impudence had persuaded Reggie to enlist him as chauffeur and factotum, had the car round and some sandwiches inside it by the time Reggie was downstairs. Neither he nor Reggie lost time.
Normanhurst, Miss Bolton’s house, stands by itself in an acre or so of garden, and is in the mid-Victorian or amorphous style. As Reggie jumped out of the car, the housekeeper opened the door. She was a brisk, buxom woman; she looked, and perhaps was, just what a housekeeper ought to be.
“What’s wrong, Mrs. Betts?” Reggie said.
“It’s very serious, sir. This way, please.” She led the way to Birdie Bolton’s boudoir, stopped, took a key from her apron pocket, and unlocked the door.
“Hallo!” Reggie said.