Gibbous House 77

Miss Pardoner's reaction was disconcerting at first:

'Mr Moffatt, you cannot surely imagine that I have not read it?'

The woman arched an eyebrow. I raised both of my own, before charging myself with being doubly dull. In the first, and less serious, indictment: for not grasping that someone had left Miss Arabella Coble's neophyte scribblings for me to find – and in the second; for not taking pains to read it. My ward's statement meant that there was something in the diary revealing of Arabella. How revealing remained to be seen; but since Alasdair Moffat could not have figured in its pages, something ripe must have lain in them to belie the fairy tale I myself had just spun about Miss Arabella Coble.

'Ah, I see... Perhaps a grieving husband should be allowed a little gilding of mourning's lily?' I ventured.

Miss Pardoner's reply fell somewhere between the bray of an amused donkey and the snort of a particularly disdainful thoroughbred. Any subsequent badinage was prevented by the querulous voice of the reporter, who enquired:

'Who.. ahem... is Miss Arabella Coble?'

Blinking like a bat before a raised candle, he looked from Miss Pardoner to myself, and back again. Not for the first time, my own reactions were anticipated by the unlady-like sardonicism of Miss Pardoner.

'No knowledge of Cobles, Mr Allan? Really, I would have thought a newspaperman employed by Northumbria's finest sheet would have a vast supply of information on such influential personages.'

Mr Allan's crest had quite fallen, and I suspected that he knew himself that the Alnwick Mercury's most utilitarian moments came when wrapped around the fresh produce of the town's market on Saturdays. Nevertheless, one would have thought that a reporter would have known something of the Cobles, therefore I asked him,

'How long have you been reporting for the Mercury, Mr Allan?'

He made an unattractive and petulant-looking moue and said:

'8 days.'

This time I joined my ward in the unattractive snickering.

She recovered herself somewhat more quickly than I. There was a glint of mischief or even devilment in her eye as she said:

'Miss Arabella Coble was a renegade, a strumpet, a wilful woman and a faithless wife. For all that I know she may have been a thief and a murderess.' She paused and moistened her lips as though suddenly dry-mouthed: 'I wish that I had met her, before she died.'

The last of Allan's pen's scratchings died away, wherupon the three of us sat in silence, and but one of us was quite comfortable in it.