CHAPTER XIII.
PETER TELLS
It was twelve o’clock when he put down his pen and rubbed his cramped hands. Throwing up the window to let out the smoke, he munched a biscuit and meditated; and then his face brightened, and his thoughts went unresistingly toward Leslie Maughan. Then through the open window he heard unsteady steps coming along the paved sidewalk. They paused before the door of the house; there was a rattle of the key. When Mrs. Inglethorne went out at night, she usually returned with that same unsteady footstep. Presently the door slammed, and her muttering came up to him from the passage.
Usually she did not go out nights, but stayed at home to receive the curious callers who came at odd moments. They always knocked once with the knocker and once with the flat of their hands, and generally they carried a parcel or package, big or small. There was a whispered colloquy in the passage, the chink of money, or, more rarely, the rustle of treasury notes, and they went out again—without their parcels. This, Peter had seen and had not seen. Prison had taught him the wisdom of blindness, and he had not spoken to Mrs. Inglethorne of the furtive men and women who came slinking down Severall Street at those hours when the police patrol was well out of the way.
Leslie Maughan! He smiled a little at the thought of her, more at his own madness. What barriers separated them—barriers more real, more invincible, than the difference between Scotland Yard and Dartmoor Prison! It was worse than madness to think about her!
The scream that brought him to his feet was shrill and charged with fear and mortal agony. In two strides he was at the door and had pulled it wide open.
Now he heard it plainly—the whistle and fall of a whip, the terrified, frantic cries for mercy. He ran down the stairs in the dark and tapped at Mrs. Inglethorne’s door. From inside the room came a deep, heartbreaking sound of sobbing.
“Who’s that?” asked Mrs. Inglethorne defiantly. “Go away and mind your own business!”
“Open the door, or I’ll break it open!” cried Peter in a cold fury.
“I’ll send for the police if you interfere with me!” yelled the woman.
His answer was to throw his weight against the flimsy door. The catch broke with a snap, and he was in the foul bedroom. Elizabeth lay cowering on a filthy camp bed, clad only in a coarse nightdress. Her head was pillowed in the crook of her arm, and convulsive sobs shook the thin shoulders. Her face aflame, Mrs. Inglethorne stood at the foot of a big brass bedstead, one hand holding herself steady, the other grasping an old dog whip.
“I’ll learn her to go talking about me!” she said thickly. “After all I’ve done for her!”
There was another child there, a girl who was apparently the same age as Elizabeth. She, however, enjoyed the luxury of Mrs. Inglethorne’s ample bed and was so used to this exhibition of the woman’s wrath that she was asleep.
“Where is your coat, Elizabeth?” asked Peter gently.
The child looked up, her eyes swollen, her face red, and cast one fearful glance at her mother.
“Watcher goin’ to do?” asked Mrs. Inglethorne unsteadily.
“She will sleep in my room for the night,” replied Peter. “To-morrow I will make other arrangements for her, and if you give any trouble I shall send for the police.”
Mrs. Inglethorne was amused in her way.
“Send for the police!” she scoffed. “I like that! An old lag sending for the police! And they’ll come, won’t they?”
“I think so,” said Peter quietly. “They will come, if only to discover why you never use the back room upstairs as a bedroom, why it is always kept locked, except after your visitors’ calls.”
The smile died from the woman’s face.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Peter went on, “you can ‘fence’ till the cows come home! But I’m not going to have you beating this child while I’m in the house. And when I’m out of it, and out of it for good, I’ll see that she is well looked after!”
The woman’s face was mottled with fear.
“Fence!” she spluttered. “I don’t know what you mean by that low word! If you mean I receive stolen property, then you’re a liar!”
“Let me call the police and settle the matter,” said Peter.
The threat sobered her.
“I don’t want any police in my house. The kid annoyed me, and it’s a hard thing if a mother can’t cane her own children without being interfered with. If she wants to sleep upstairs, she can, but she’d be better off down here, Mr. Dawlish. You haven’t got any accommodation for a little gel.”
This was true.
“All right, get into bed, Elizabeth.” He covered her up with the pitifully thin bedclothes, and without apology took Mrs. Inglethorne’s heavy coat that lay over the bed rail and put it on top. “Sleep well,” he said, and patted her cheek.
She was safe for the night. What happened in the morning depended entirely on the view which Leslie Maughan took of a scheme that was beginning to take definite shape.
Mrs. Inglethorne was a fence, a buyer of stolen property. He had lived too long in association with the worst criminals of England to have any doubt upon the point, and, squinting through the keyhole one day in his curiosity, he had seen enough to remove the last remnants of doubt that remained.
He went to bed, determined to interview Leslie at the earliest opportunity, and it was not only on Elizabeth’s account that the thought pleased him.
When he arrived at the flat in Charing Cross Road next morning, Lucretia did not recognize him, and scowled fearfully at the suggestion that he should be admitted. She looked at his shabby attire and shook her head.
“It’s no good your trying to see Miss Maughan. You’d better call on her at Scotland Yard. She’s very busy now.”
“Who is it, Lucretia?”
Leslie was leaning over the rails of the landing; she could not see the visitor, but she could hear the uncompromising note in Lucretia’s voice.
“A young man wants to see you, miss. What’s your name again? Dawlish.”
“Oh, is that you, Peter Dawlish? Come up, will you?”
Peter ran up the stairs, followed by the muttered protests of the maid.
“You’re in time for breakfast. How are the envelopes going?”
“They’re melting!” he said.
He was conscious of a certain indefinable change in her tone. It was not that she was more serious, but there seemed some listlessness about her, as though she were tired. It was almost an effort to talk. She looked weary, he saw, when they passed from the dark landing, and he commented on this.
“I’ve been up half the night,” she said, “wandering about in a very cold garden, watching an elderly lady searching the ground with an electric lamp. That sounds mysterious, doesn’t it?”
She pointed to a chair and Peter sat down.
“It sounds almost romantic. Where was this?”
“At Wimbledon.” She waved the matter out of discussion. “Well,” she asked, “what brings you to West Central London at this unholy hour?”
Her grave eyes were fixed on his; there was something of reproach in them, something of hurt. He was puzzled; he felt that he had fallen short in her estimation, that she was disappointed with him for some reason. So strong was this impression that he grew uncomfortable under her gaze, and as though she were aware of this, she dropped her eyes to the table and began slowly to stir her coffee.
“I’ve come on a fool errand, with a wild and impossible suggestion.”
And then he told her of what had happened overnight, of the merciless flogging which Mrs. Inglethorne had administered.
“The woman is a fence,” he said, “not in a very big way. I think she specializes in furs and silk lengths.”
She knew something of the genus fence, but he told her what he had learned in Dartmoor, of fences who visited the scene of prospective robberies and priced the loot, practically paying for it, before it was stolen; of skillful men and women who would stand outside a small jeweller’s shop and with one comprehensive glance assess the thieving value of the whole. He told her of “dead” stores—stores which were locked up at night, where nobody lived on the premises, and of “live” stores, where there was either a watchman or a proprietor and his family sleeping on the floors above.
“I am not reporting this officially—I mean the fence part of it—but the child is ill-used. The other little kids get a whacking now and again, but I should think she gets hers all the time.”
“What do you wish me to do?” she asked, looking up at him.
“I don’t know.” He had a sense of awkwardness. “I had a wild idea that possibly you might be able to find—to do something with her.”
“You mean take charge of her?”
She was smiling at him.
“Yes, I suppose I did mean that,” he said after a second’s thought. “It sounds fantastic and impossible now, but Elizabeth has got a grip on me. Probably it is my own rather unhappy childhood which is responding to her wretchedness.”
She laughed.
“I’ll make your mind easy, at any rate,” she said. “I had already considered the possibility. In fact, I discussed the matter with Lucretia last night before I went out to dinner, and Lucretia was wildly enthusiastic. I have a spare room here; she could go to the Catholic school in Leicester Square. The only point is that we get Mrs. Inglethorne’s consent.”
“She had better,” he said grimly, and her lips twitched.
“Really, you’re almost ferocious when you’re taking up the causes of other people,” she said. “I wish you’d be a little energetic in your own.”
“Aren’t I?”
She shook her head.
“Not very,” she answered, in her quiet way. “Why don’t you see your mother?”
He grinned.
“She saved me the trouble and came last night.”
“To Severall Street?” she asked in astonishment, and when he nodded: “Was it—a pleasant—encounter?”
“A normally strained interview,” he answered cheerfully. “She endeavoured to instill in me a passion for agriculture, and Canadian agriculture at that. I love Canada. You can’t even take a week-end trip into Canada without loving it. But the prospect of milking cows in Saskatchewan didn’t appeal.”
“She wanted you to go abroad? Why?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“I suppose she rather feels there isn’t room enough for both of us in London.”
She thought the matter over for a minute.
“Didn’t your father leave you any money?”
“He cut me off without the proverbial shilling.”
The lightness of his tone, she suspected, was assumed. Coldwell had told her how much Peter had loved his father.
“He altered his will at the eleventh hour—the day before I was sentenced—and left me nothing. Poor old dear! I haven’t the slightest grudge. How could I? He was the best father that ever lived.”
She had said she rarely smoked; she took a cigarette from her bag now and lit it without looking at him. Indeed, for the next four minutes, as he talked about his envelope addressing and his future, it seemed that she was more interested in the blue vapour that floated from the end of her cigarette than in his narrative.
“You’re unfortunate.”
She put down the cigarette, carefully took out a spoonful of coffee from the cup and dropped it on the glowing end as it lay in the saucer.
“You’re unfortunate, Peter Dawlish, both as a son—and as a husband!”
He did not speak.
“Terribly unfortunate,” she went on moodily. “I think you must have been born under a very unlucky star. I’m not asking you for confidences; you’d hate me if I did.”
Presently:
“How did you know?”
She fetched a long sigh.
“How did I know? Oh, I only knew yesterday for sure. I’d guessed for a long time—ever since I went on my holidays into Cumberland and found a little volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s with an inscription in doggerel blank verse on the fly leaf. It was when I saw that the first letter of every line reading from below, upward, made the words “Jane Hood” that I first guessed. But I wasn’t certain—about the marriage. There was no record at Somerset House.”
“We were married in America.”
She nodded.
“I know that now; but why?”
He stared past her out of the window. Here, she thought, was a man who really regarded life as a terribly serious business. She was mighty glad of that.
“Jane was very unhappy at home; her people were rotten. Her father kept a gambling house, and her mother——” He shrugged. “I fell in love with her. If I hadn’t been a fool I would have gone to my father and told him the truth and then, in all probability, there would have been no cause for unhappiness. But I was aware that he knew Jane’s people and knew that they were rotten. We went away to America together and were married in a little town in Connecticut. I suppose you know that? Her father was American born. From the first day the marriage was a ghastly mistake. Jane thought I had unlimited money. I had to pawn her jewels to get home, and there was a fearful scene when we landed at Liverpool. We were both a little crazy, and agreed then and there to separate. I went back to Lord Everreed’s house to find detectives awaiting me at the railway station. I haven’t seen or spoken with Jane since.”
“Has she divorced you?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know. Things like that are possible in America, but I’ve had no notification.”
Leslie bit her lip.
“If she hasn’t, she’s committed bigamy. You realize that?”
“I realize that,” he said shortly. “Which means that I cannot free myself without betraying her; I can’t do that. I couldn’t expose her to imprisonment.”
There was a tense and painful silence.
“Is that all?” she asked. “All you have to tell me?”
“You did not need telling, I think,” he said, a little bitterly.
“No.” She lit another cigarette; the flame of the match quivered unsteadily. “You’re very unfortunate, Peter Dawlish.”
She blew out the match with deliberation and put it carefully in her saucer by the side of the sodden cigarette.
“You knew nothing about Druze, of course, or you would have told me. When did you say your father disinherited you?”
“The day before I went to prison.”
She considered this.
“Tell me, Peter! You don’t mind my calling you Peter? I feel rather sisterly toward you just now. What was the relationship between your father and mother? Cordial?”
He shook his head.
“No, they were never cordial; they were polite.”
She bit her lip, looking at him absently.
“Did you ever see the Princess Bellini at your father’s house?”
“Only once,” he replied. “Father disliked her——”
“She was a sort of aunt, wasn’t she?” Leslie interrupted.
“I’ve never exactly fathomed the relationship. I’ve always understood that the Princess Bellini’s brother married my mother’s sister.”
She rose from the table abruptly, for no apparent reason.
“Peter Dawlish,” she said, and her voice shook a little in spite of her assumption of banter, “if you were cursed with my intense curiosity you might be a very much happier man.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you—some day. And now let us get back to our muttons; and our muttons for the moment is poor Elizabeth. The only difficulty in the way is Mrs. Inglethorne. As a loving mother, she may very well object to her child being taken from her. Obviously I cannot use the same argument as you have used. If she is a fence and a lawbreaker, it is my duty to inform Mr. Coldwell and have her arrested. If she isn’t a lawbreaker, we shall have to get after her from another angle. That sounds terribly businesslike. I think I’ll go back with you to Severall Street and see Mrs. Inglethorne myself. She may be amenable to reason.”
CHAPTER XIV.
AN ARREST
They went by bus to the southern end of Westminster Bridge and walked along York Road together. Just before they reached Severall Street they saw a small motor truck turn into the main road, and mechanically, Leslie, who had a weakness for such mental registrations, turned her head to note the number. It was a favourite trick of hers to carry fifty or sixty motor-car numbers in her head and jot them down at the close of the day—a practice into which Mr. Coldwell had initiated her. As she looked round she heard:
“Lady!”
A shrill voice called her.
“Who was that?” she asked, but Peter had not heard.
They reached the house and he opened the door and called Mrs. Inglethorne, but it was one of the children who answered.
“Mother’s gone out. Her and Elizabeth.”
Sometimes the woman took the child with her when she went shopping, Peter explained.
“I’m afraid I’ve brought you on a long job,” he said. “She may be out for hours.”
Leaving her for a moment in the passage, he ran upstairs to his room, intending to show her one of his small treasures, the photograph of his dead father. He reached the head of the stairs and then stopped aghast. The door of the mysterious locked room which adjoined his own was wide open, and when he strode in he saw it was empty. Mrs. Inglethorne was a quick worker, and, in the space of time between his departure and his return, had removed all evidence of her guilt.
He went into his own room, pulled open the drawer of the table where he kept his few treasures, and had taken out the small leather-covered portfolio when he saw some writing on the pad—a few scribbled words in a childish hand: “She has taken me away. Elizabeth.”
He tore off the corner of the blotting paper and went back to the girl.
“I was afraid of this,” she said in a low voice. “Do you remember the cry ‘lady’ as we passed the motor van? Where is the nearest telephone booth?”
At the corner of the street was a little general shop, which had a telephone sign, and Leslie almost ran to the shop. There was some delay before the instrument was disengaged, but in a few minutes she was connected with Scotland Yard and was talking to Coldwell.
“The number of the car is X.Y. 63369,” she said. “There is no doubt whatever that it contains stolen property, but it is the little girl I want.”
“I’ll send out a call,” was Coldwell’s reply. “We may not pick it up before to-night; on the other hand, we may be lucky.”
“Where are you going now?” asked Peter when they were outside the shop.
“Back to the house,” said Leslie. “I want to look at that room.”
“They cleared everything.”
She nodded.
“Thieves in a hurry are very careless people, and perhaps Mrs. Inglethorne isn’t so clever as she imagines.”
The room was apparently bare; the only article of furniture it contained was a long table, and by the dust marks on this Leslie was able to judge the extent of the property that had been stored. On either side of the rusty fireplace was a cupboard. One of these she opened and found empty, except for a little heap of rubbish at the bottom. The second, however, was locked. With a table knife borrowed from the kitchen she forced back the catch and pulled open the door. There was nothing very much there, but enough. There were three bolts of silk, one still bearing the label of the wholesaler from whom it had been stolen.
“Thieves in a hurry are very careless,” she said, with the light of battle in her eyes, “and it really doesn’t matter whether Mrs. Inglethorne is hanged for a sheep or a lamb, so long as she’s well and truly hanged!”
She sent Peter to the police station, and went down to interview the children. A grubby lot of little people they were, very pale, very starved looking, except one who apparently was in charge in Mrs. Inglethorne’s absence. She was the little girl, Leslie learned later, who had slept in the woman’s bed, and, unlike the others, she bore a striking facial resemblance to her mother.
“You didn’t find nothing, did you?” She was frankly hostile. “You’ve got to be up very early to catch my old woman, missis!”
And then, turning to the silent semi-circle of children who constituted the remainder of Mrs. Inglethorne’s family, she ordered them peremptorily away.
“Go and play in the back yard.”
Poor little starvelings! Leslie’s heart ached to see them. She sought, by delicate inquiry, to discover where Elizabeth had been taken, but the preternatural cunning of the child she questioned baffled her.
Peter came back in a very short time, accompanied by a uniformed inspector and a plain-clothes officer. They made an inspection of the silk and carried it off with them to the station.
“This may affect you a little, Peter Dawlish,” said Leslie when they were alone. “The children will be removed to the workhouse this afternoon, and Mrs. Inglethorne will be arrested immediately on her return, so that you will have the house to yourself.”
He laughed.
“I’m not depressed,” he said.
He walked with her as far as Westminster Bridge Road, and at parting she asked him a curious question.
“What would you do if you had half a million pounds?”
He looked at her in astonishment and laughed.
“That isn’t my favourite dream,” he said. “But I think the first thing I should do would be to send to America to discover whether I have been, as you would say, ‘well and truly’ divorced.”
“Indeed?” Her tone was a trifle cold. “Is that necessary when Jane Raytham is within a penny bus ride?”
And with a nod she was gone.
Peter returned to the house and found it very difficult to resume his work or concentrate his mind upon lists. He had hardly started before the police officials came with an omnibus to take away the children, and they departed with no visible reluctance, except in the case of the girl whom Leslie had interviewed.
At four o’clock in the afternoon Mrs. Inglethorne came into the house in triumph, and without going into the kitchen mounted the stairs and stood, arms akimbo, her red face made hideous by a self-satisfied smirk, confronting her lodger.
“Well, did you bring in the police?” she demanded. “And what are you going to do with Elizabeth?” And, when he did not answer, she shook her fist at him. “Out you go, out of my house, you police informer. I’ll learn you to go prying around and threatening me! You leave this room at once or I’ll send for a policeman.”
“I think I’ll stay,” he said good-humouredly.
“Oh, will you?”
She went to the door and called:
“Emma.”
There was no answer.
“I can save you a lot of trouble, Mrs. Inglethorne,” said Peter, putting down his pen. “Your children have been taken away to the workhouse.”
She staggered back against the wall, her big mouth open wide.
“W-why?” she stammered.
“It is usual to take children to the workhouse when their parents are arrested and there are no other relatives to look after them,” he said.
“Arrested?” she screamed.
He nodded to the window, and she staggered past him and, pulling up the sash, looked out. Two men were standing on the opposite sidewalk, and one nodded as to an old friend. She recognized the detective sergeant who had arrested her husband.
“They can’t touch me!” she screamed. “They can’t touch me! It’s my word against yours——”
“Unfortunately you left a few bolts of silk behind in the cupboard,” answered Peter.
Mrs. Inglethorne was in a state of collapse when the detectives came in to arrest her.
The motor truck had been traced; the driver and a man who accompanied the car had been driven to the nearest police station, where the plunder was checked and exhibited in preparation for the charge which would follow. They either could not or would not, however, give any information concerning the child, and when Leslie went to Lambeth to interview Mrs. Inglethorne in her cell, she was no more successful.
“Find her!” rapped the woman. “She’s in good hands, that’s where she is. I’m not saying anything. If you want her, find her! That’s my last word to you!”
Leslie did not notify Peter that she was coming to Lambeth. Passing up Severall Street on her way home, she saw the light in the upstairs window and guessed that he was still working hard. A postman rapped at the door, and she waited a while until it was opened, as she guessed, by Peter, and almost turned back just to say a word to him. And if she overcame this deplorable weakness, it was not lightly done.
“Leslie Maughan,” she said to herself, mounting the steps of Hungerford Bridge, “do you know what you are doing? Shall I tell you in the vulgarest terms? You’re chasing a married man! Leslie, that isn’t done! Not in the best society.”
She was uncommonly weary when she dragged herself into her own sitting room, deciding to forgo the duty she had planned. This was a second call upon Greta Gurden. That afternoon there had been a consultation at Scotland Yard, but matters had not developed sufficiently to justify the issue even of a search warrant.
After a light dinner she took out the letter she had received two nights before, spread the foolscap on her desk and examined it carefully. It was a queer story she read, even in the stilted terminology of an elderly country parson, who employed such words as “primogeniture,” and felt it necessary to sprinkle his pages with quotations from Horace, mostly in Latin. The writer was the vicar of a small Devonshire parish near Budleigh Salterton, and he had, as he said in a preliminary flourish, “reached the fourscore of the prophet.” He wasted a page in explaining how he came to reach these years, and employed “mens sana in corpore sano” at least twice in the first folio.
He knew the Druze family very well; they lived in his village and had done so for hundreds of years. He himself had baptized Alice Mary Druze and Annie Emily Druze, and several other members of the Druze family which he thought it was necessary to enumerate by their full names; it had necessitated long researches in ancient registers. The Druze family had for generations farmed some forty acres of poor land on the edge of Dartmoor. They were “a wild family with a bad history,” and here the reverend gentleman, who was also something of a scientist, branched away from the main track to a discourse upon heredity which would have done credit to a Lombroso.
Old father Druze was a lunatic and had died mad; his grandfather had committed suicide; there was a record in the parish registry and a note that he had been buried at the crossroads, in the proper manner for such as take their lives; Druze’s grandmother had also a history of sorts. The clergyman remembered her as a “respectable woman,” though inclined to gayety, and he even felt it necessary to retail a hundred-year-old piece of scandal, something that had happened at Widdicombe Fair.
Alice was illiterate; he had extracted a note of this fact from the register of the church school. Annie, on the other hand, was a diligent scholar “and showed surprising proficiency in the study of the so-called dead languages,” so that she “speedily secured a respectable situation with a haberdasher in Exeter, a Mr. Watson. She was a God-fearing young woman, a communicant, and eventually married a well-to-do farmer in the neighbourhood of Torquay.” The farmer’s name Leslie jotted down on her pad.
The third of the daughters, Martha, was of an “exemplary character, though of no great educational attainments.” About her the clergyman was very explicit, for it was he who had obtained her a post first as stillroom maid at a Plymouth hospital, and afterward, on his recommendation, as a probationary nurse. It was believed that she went to South Africa and “married a prosperous carpenter.”
When Leslie had traced Druze to that little Devonshire village, and wrote, with no great hope, to the vicar, she hardly expected so voluminous and conscientious a record of the family history; for he even sent photographs of tombstones which marked the departed Druzes of the Eighteenth Century!
If she had only read this before, she thought, she could not have been shocked by the discovery that “Arthur Druze” was a woman; for apparently there was no male member in that family, except the semi-lunatic father and a remote uncle who for some reason wasn’t called Druze at all. She read through carefully, took down an atlas and a gazetteer from her bookshelf, and finally locked letter and data in the drawer. Her work was by no means finished for the night, though she was dropping with weariness. She had a number of letters to write. Before she had left the office, Mr. Coldwell had given her the names and addresses of a dozen people who would be helpful to her in the search she was making.
At eleven o’clock they phoned from Scotland Yard to tell her that there was no news of Elizabeth. Mrs. Inglethorne, confronted as she was with a long term of imprisonment, possibly of penal servitude, refused any information about the child, except that she had gone to “her aunt’s.”
Lucretia brought her coffee. The girl had an irritating trick of expressing her disapproval by audible tut-tuts, and twice did she tut-tut into the room and out again. At last she extinguished all the lights in the room save the table lamp.
“You’ve got to go to bed, miss,” she said firmly. “I’ll have you on my hands if I’m not careful. And what about this young girl?”
Leslie rose stiffly from her desk, gathered the letters together and stamped them.
“She is not coming to-night,” she said. “Post these, Lucretia. I’ll wait for you to return and then you can go to bed.”
She heard the door open and guessed, by the cold draft that swept up the stairs, that Lucretia had followed her usual practice of leaving the door ajar while she went to the nearest pillar-box, which was some distance from the flat.
It was part of the night’s routine that Lucretia should take the letters; almost a ritual that Leslie should stand in the open doorway of her sitting room until she heard the girl return.
The maid could not have been gone half a minute before the street door below closed softly. She heard the gentle thud of it.
“Is that you, Lucretia?” she called down into the dark hall.
There was no reply.
Her flesh crept, for no reason that she could understand; a cold shiver went down her spine. Leslie Maughan was not a nervous girl. Her duty and association with Coldwell had taken her into many uncomfortable situations, and unless it was because she was very tired, there was no particular reason for nervousness. But her sensation was something more than the uneasiness which comes to the strongest nerves when they are left alone in a house. It was a premonition, a warning, indeed a certain knowledge that there was somebody in the hall below who should not be there.
She went back into the room, closed the door quietly and slipped in a bolt she had had fitted. She switched on the lights that Lucretia had extinguished, and, going to the window, pulled the curtains apart and lifted the sash. Charing Cross Road was fairly well crowded with people. It was a clear night and a few paces away she saw two policemen patrolling, and presently she discerned Lucretia making her way hurriedly across the road. The maid came beneath the window simultaneously with a policeman; Leslie called her and she looked up.
“Tell the policemen I want them to come in,” she said. “Here is the key—catch!”
One of the officers caught the key deftly.
“Anything wrong, miss?” he asked, knowing her.
“I think somebody has come into the house while my maid went out to post a letter. You left the door open, did you, Lucretia?”
“Yes, miss, I did,” confessed the agitated Lucretia. “I forgot to take the key.”
“Well, hurry——” she began.
At that moment all the lights in the room went out.
She sat on the sill and swung out her legs, her eyes fixed on the door, which was visible in the light of a street lamp. A faint creaking sound came to her ears and she saw the door move slightly—the bolt was straining under some enormous pressure. Then a voice from the pavement below hailed her.
“The street door won’t open, miss,” said the policeman’s voice.
She looked back at the door. The slot of the bolt was giving under the strain.
“Can you catch me?” she asked.
The two men ran to the pavement beneath her.
“Jump!”
Again she looked back. At that moment, with a crash, the door opened. She had a dim vision of two stunted figures, then, bracing her hands on the sill, she jumped.
It was not a dignified landing, but for the moment Leslie Maughan was less interested in her dignity than her safety. A crowd had already gathered, attracted by the unusual happening, and there appeared from nowhere an inspector of police, a resourceful man who, having heard the story, immediately stopped an omnibus and ordered the driver to bring his big machine onto the sidewalk immediately beneath the window. Standing on the rail of the bus, one of the policemen reached the window sill and climbed inside, and was followed by the inspector. There was no sound of the struggle which the morbid crowd expected. A few minutes later the door below was unbolted and Leslie and the trembling Lucretia went into the passage.
They found the hall window on the first landing wide open. A police whistle buzzed in the street; in a very short time the block would be surrounded.
“No, they haven’t cut the wire, as far as I can see,” said the inspector, examining the wall of the passage with his lamp. “Where do you keep your fuse box?”
“I think it is near the door,” said the girl.
It proved to be within easy reach. The flat had been darkened by the simple expedient of removing the fuses. They found them intact on the floor and replaced them, and an inspection was possible. Except for the broken door, no damage had been done to the flat. Whoever the intruders were, their time had been too short to conduct a search of the room. The drawers of the desk were untouched.
“They hadn’t much time, had they?” said the puzzled inspector. “I can’t understand this job. If they were ordinary burglars they would have cleared just as soon as they knew you had spotted them.”
Half an hour later, and before the police had departed, Mr. Coldwell came on the scene. By this time every roof and yard in the vicinity had been searched; night watchmen had been aroused from their surreptitious sleep, and a small army of police detectives had examined every window that might afford a possible means of escape. But no sign of the intruders was discovered.
“I don’t like this,” said Leslie.
Mr. Coldwell shook his head.
“You’ll have to find other lodgings for a while. To-morrow you had better transfer your belongings and Lucretia to my house at Hampstead.”
For five minutes he discussed in a low voice the theories he had formed, the plans he had made.
“I don’t think it is necessary to leave a policeman in the house,” he said at last, and a little yellow man curled up on the top of the high bureau in Leslie’s room, screened from observation by the old-fashioned frieze of the wardrobe, was relieved.
He heard the policemen go clattering down the stairs, and after a while:
“Just phone me if you’re at all nervous, Leslie. Good-night.”
Coldwell’s voice sounded from the hall; there was the slam of a door. The little yellow man, who spoke and understood English very well, did not smile to himself, because he was of a race that seldom smile.
Leslie went into her bedroom with a yawn, gathered her sleeping things and disappeared into the bathroom. The listener heard the sound of running water, heard her bid a reassuring good-night to the tremulous servant, and then the door of the bedroom opened and closed. The light was extinguished; there was the creak of a bed, and after a while the sound of deep, regular breathing.
For an hour the yellow man lay, not moving a muscle, and then, reaching up, he caught hold of the wooden moulding, tested its strength, and was satisfied. He felt the long, queer-shaped knife that was in his belt, and, with the agility of a cat, and supported only by his sinewy fingers, he drew himself clear of the wardrobe, and dropped noiselessly on to the carpet.
The wardrobe hardly creaked as he moved; save for the soft pad of his bare feet and the breathing of the sleeper there was no sound. Holding the knife lightly in his right hand, he groped along the pillow with his left, ready to pounce upon and strangle the scream before it rose.
There was no head on the first pillow, none on the right—the bed was empty. He straightened himself up quickly, half turned as he heard a sound from behind him, but it was too late. An arm of steel flung round his throat, the knife hand was gripped at the wrist and twisted so sharply that the weapon fell to the floor.
“I want you!” It was Coldwell’s voice.
He lifted the little figure without difficulty, and reached out his hand to turn on the light. At that moment the prisoner recovered himself, and with amazing strength twisted round to face the detective. Coldwell realized that he had on his hands something with the ferocity and suppleness of a wild cat, something that growled and clawed and kicked so that not a limb of him was still. The unexpectedness of that furious onslaught threw him for a second off his balance. He drove out with his right, but as though he could see in the dark, the assassin dodged, and in another second he was free and had flown through the open door. Coldwell followed, but too late. With one leap the little man crashed through sash and pane and dropped unharmed to the street below. A policeman made a dive at him, but he ducked, flew across the road, and disappeared down a court by the side of a theatre toward St. Martin’s Lane.
“Didn’t even see him,” said Coldwell bitterly, when he called the girl in from Lucretia’s room. The detective’s face was scratched, his collar torn. “It was rather like tackling a young tiger.”
Leslie had turned on the lights and they saw the extent of the damage. He must have dived for the lower sash, head-first, for the upper window was untouched. There was not a scrap of glass remaining, and the cross supports of wood were smashed to splinters.
“I’ve heard of such things being done,” said Coldwell, “and I’ve seen them done—on the stage! But never in real life and through three-quarter inch moulding!”
Leslie was still dressed. She had been waiting in the maid’s room, a pistol on her lap, till the sound of the struggle brought her out, just too late. Mr. Coldwell disappeared into the bedroom and returned with the ugly and curious-shaped knife which the man had dropped.
“Eastern,” he said, as he felt the edge gingerly. “Malayan, I guess.”
He also had been sitting on a chair immediately to the right of the wardrobe, but until he had made an examination later he had not known from what place his assailant had come.
“I thought he’d come back through the window,” he mused. “That’s one of the curiosities of human nature, Leslie; jot it down in your notebook. We always look under things for hidden criminals; we never look over; and yet the cleverest fellow that ever got away from the police was a steeplejack who hid for a fortnight at the top of a smokestack! Ever wear garters, Leslie?”
She laughed softly.
“That almost sounds indelicate to me,” she said. “No, I won’t go very deeply into the question, but I don’t wear garters!”
He was quite serious.
“Wish you would, just to oblige me. One garter, anyhow. I meant to give it to you to-day.”
He drew something out of his pocket and she gasped.
“You really wish me to wear this?”
He nodded.
“A little heavy, but I wish you would,” he said.
He insisted upon staying the night, and to make doubly sure had a policeman put on duty in the hall below. Early as the hour was when she went out to her bath, she found him up and dressed, studying the morning newspaper.
“Wonderful how you miss things when you’re away from the Yard for a few hours,” he drawled.
She turned back from the open door of the bathroom. When Mr. Coldwell drawled, there was something sensational to come.
“What have we missed?” she asked. It was not entirely curiosity which made her ask.
He looked at the newspaper again and took off his glasses.
“Peter Dawlish was arrested last night.”
She gazed at him in horror and amazement.
“Arrested? On what charge?”
“Threatening to murder Princess Anita Bellini,” was the staggering reply.
CHAPTER XV.
TRAPPED
Rarely did Mrs. Greta Gurden permit herself the luxury of brooding upon her injuries. She was no philosopher, and it was sheer necessity which made her disregard the irritations, petty and great, of life, and concentrate her mind upon pleasant things. But she found herself helpless with a leg that throbbed and throbbed, and the memory of Anita Bellini’s insolence rankled as sorely. She was propped up in bed with a heap of papers on her lap. Though there was no immediate need for the work she had taken in hand, and, in truth, sought it only as a relief from boredom, she permitted herself the illusion that she was the victim of a task mistress who was not satisfied with her normal and heavy exactions, but must needs add to her offence this torment of a sick woman.
Old letters, old bills, a receipt or two, a few ancient telegrams about nothing in particular, dozens of letters dealing earnestly with forgotten accounts, an interminable correspondence between Anita and a house agent—she turned the pages one by one, sorting the sheep from the goats.
Presently she came to an old letter typewritten on plain paper—Anita, like her dependent, had used a small portable typewriter for years. The letter was unfinished; halfway through the princess had changed her mind, or probably substituted another for this and had tossed the rejected scrap aside to be gathered to the heap which had accumulated and which was now being sorted.
She read the letter through as far as it went; she was sourly amused. Anita must have been in a careless mood when she threw this away. The old instinct of service told her that it ought to be destroyed at once. She gripped the paper to tear it, thought better of her impulse, and began to consider certain possibilities. To say that she felt bitterly against Anita Bellini at that moment would be to grade her emotion charitably. She was getting old, was she? She had lost her looks and was unlikely to get a job in the chorus. Anita had taken it for granted that she would be forever satisfied with the humiliating position of companion. Capri was to be a kind of bonus.
The princess was a woman of temperament, sometimes feverishly elated, sometimes savagely depressed. Yet in all her permutations of mood, she had been consistently contemptuous of her hireling. Greta grew red and hot and cold at the memory of the insults which this woman had heaped upon her, and the hand that held the letter shook. And then an idea began to take shape in her mind; it was half formed when she called Mrs. Hobbs.
“Get my address book.”
She was a systematic woman, and entered without fail the location even of chance acquaintances who might be of no value to her. She ran her thumb down the index till it stopped at “D”; the last entry on the crowded page was “Peter Dawlish.”
“Give me an envelope, please, and my fountain pen; and take this letter to the post—no, bring my little typewriter.”
The obedient Mrs. Hobbs carried the tiny machine, which was a replica of Anita’s, and laid it on the invalid’s lap. Greta inserted the envelope, typed the address, and while the instrument was being removed, inserted the torn sheet of paper and licked down the flap of the envelope.
“Go to the general post office—you’d better take a bus each way—and post this. If anybody asks you whether you’ve posted a letter for me, you’re to say no.”
It was not the first time Mrs. Hobbs had received similar instructions.
The houses in Severall Street are not equipped with letter boxes, and postmen have learned by experience that inserting letters under doors which are backed by coarse fibre mats is a difficult and sometimes an impossible proposition.
Peter heard the heavy rat-tat of the postman and, going downstairs, opened the door.
“Dawlish?” asked the postman.
“That is my name,” said Peter, in surprise. He took the letter and closed the door. Had he followed the practice of Severall Street and its people, which is never to go to the door without making a scrutiny up and down the street, he could not have failed to see Leslie on her way home.
His first thought was that it was a letter from her, but when he brought it to the light of his room, he saw that it was typewritten and had been posted in the city.
He opened the envelope and took out a sheet of typewriting paper. It was discoloured, and one corner had been torn off. He looked at the date and had a mild shock.
“July 7, 1916.”
And yet—as he saw—it had been posted that afternoon. There were just three or four lines, the last of which stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence. Only dimly did he comprehend the significance of the fragment.
Dear Jane: Druze has found a very good home for your son in a middle-class family. There are no other children. He will be well cared for. And——
Scribbled below in pencil, and almost indecipherable, were the words: “Martha’s servant.”
He must have read the letter a dozen times before he understood.
“Jane’s son—Jane’s little son!” He came to his feet slowly, his limbs trembling, the paper swimming before his eyes.
Jane’s son—his son! The consciousness of fatherhood momentarily overwhelmed him. Jane had had a child. He had never dreamed—somewhere in the world was a little boy, fatherless—his little boy! He grew hot at the thought. And then, in a frenzy of impatience, he took up his coat, struggled into it, and, not stopping to extinguish the lamp, ran down the stairs and out of the house.
The bus that carried him to Piccadilly seemed to crawl. He got down at a traffic block at Bond Street, half walked, half ran into Berkeley Street, and came at last to the dark portals of Lady Raytham’s house. It was past ten. She might be out. But he would wait for her—all night if necessary. He hated her at that moment and there was jealousy behind the hate. He hated her for not telling him, for excluding him from the knowledge and inspiration of their gift. Perhaps he was being brought up as Raytham’s child, to call him “father.” Peter grew insanely furious at the thought.
To the new butler who opened the door all callers were as yet strange. Peter seemed no stranger than others and he was met civilly.
“What name shall I tell her ladyship?” he asked.
“Mr. Peter,” said Peter, after thought.
He was shown into the small drawing room, and paced up and down like a caged animal until he heard the door open and, turning, met face to face, for the first time in eight years, the woman of “the adventure.”
She was pale but very calm and sure of herself as she closed the door behind her. For a while they stood, looking at each other. She had matured, grown more beautiful; the old, graceful carriage was unchanged; the enticing lines of her had come to a greater perfection. He had grown older, she thought, was much more of a man than when she had known him before. His face had formed; he had resolution and strength and a balance that had been missing; in his eyes she read something that chilled her.
“You wish to see me, Peter?” she asked.
He nodded.
He was trembling; feared to speak lest his voice betray him.
“What is it you wish to see me about?”
“I want my child.” His voice was low; the words seemed to choke him, so that he ended on a cough.
“You want—your child?”
She shook her head so slightly that if he had not been watching her closely the gesture would have escaped him.
“Will you tell me what you mean?”
She was fencing. She wanted time to take all this in. He had shocked her very badly.
“Why pretend, Jane? You know what I want, and what I mean. Where is our child?”
She passed her hand wearily across her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said. She made no attempt to evade the question, accepted his knowledge, startling as it was, “I don’t know. Is it worth while knowing? He is very happy. I did what was best, Peter. I told nobody. When I went to Reno——”
“You have divorced me?”
She did not answer. A lie trembled on her lips and was instantly rejected—impatiently.
“No, I have not divorced you,” she said. “They would not grant me a divorce because you had not been served with the papers—or something of the sort. I don’t understand the law very well. I was a fool, of course.”
Another intense silence.
“That puts me in your hands, doesn’t it?” she went on. “Though I don’t imagine you will——”
He stopped her with an impatient gesture.
“I’m not thinking of you and I’m not thinking of myself,” he said. “I am thinking of the boy. You don’t know? Jane, you horrify me! You don’t know where your own child—— Good heavens! I thought he might not be here, but that you should tell me so quietly and calmly that you’ve lost track of him—as if he were a——”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know. Honestly, Peter, I don’t know. I was terrified when I knew he was coming. I just dimly remember seeing the little thing, and then they took him away—we had arranged it beforehand.”
“Who are ‘we?’ ”
She hesitated.
“Anita was very good to me, and so was Druze. It was only then I discovered that Druze was a woman. I had to pay for it afterward—Druze’s knowledge, I mean. I don’t really remember the child—only just that vague, queer impression like the elusive memory of a dream. Peter, be a little pitiful. I was in a terrible condition; my father was writing, asking me to make up my mind about Raytham. You knew he wanted to marry me? Raytham had lent Father a lot of money, and I was afraid, terribly afraid, of what would happen if Father came to learn—about the marriage and everything.
“He knew I’d been to America, of course; I was supposed to have taken an engagement to sing—you remember that, don’t you, Peter? But he didn’t know I’d returned, or what had become of me. I had to send all my letters to a friend in New York to be posted back to him.”
She stopped.
“Where is the child? That is all I want to know.”
She shook her head.
“Druze knew. She told me something just before she went out; she had been drinking, Peter. She told me a ghastly thing.” Her voice broke. “Terrible, terrible!” She covered her eyes again, and he waited, his heart a heavy stone.
“This ghastly thing; what was it?” he asked at last.
“She said”—this needed courage to think, it was a torture to say—“that even she didn’t know where the child was; that she had handed the boy to the first person who, for a consideration, offered to adopt it; and all the time I had been comforting myself with the thought that—that he at least was being brought up happily, however much a blackguard his foster father was.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
“I’ve been paying money, big sums of money,” she said at last, “as I supposed to the man who had adopted him, and who, learning of my marriage to Raytham, had for years blackmailed me. Too late I discovered that this blackmailer was mythical, that it was Druze who was robbing me all the time.”
Peter drew a deep breath.
“How awful! How perfectly awful!” he whispered. “Just disappeared into the mass—and you allowed him to go. I can’t understand that. I thought that women——”
She stopped him with a weary gesture.
“I don’t understand women, either. I wish I’d kept him and had faced all the trouble that would have followed. You know about it for the first time, Peter, and you have the support of your righteousness. It has been a bad dream to me—an eight-year long discomfort. And now it is a nightmare.” She pressed her throbbing temples. “I can’t sleep for thinking of him. That little mite of a boy—my boy and yours—perhaps being starved, or dead perhaps, or suffering——”
She screwed her eyes tight as though to shut out a horrible vision.
“Does Bellini know?” He was like ice now.
“Anita?” She looked at him in surprise. “No; why should she? You hate Anita, of course. I’m not really—fond of her. She’s difficult. But she was very helpful to me, Peter.”
He looked at her steadily.
“Who was Martha?”
He saw by her frown that she did not understand him.
“Do you know a woman called Martha?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t remember anybody of that name. Why?”
“Martha’s servant had the child. Bellini knows. And what Bellini knows, I will know.”
He made as though to leave the room, but she barred the way.
“Peter, will you forgive me? I’ve been a fool—a wicked fool, Peter. I’d gladly change places with my own kitchen maid to undo all the past. You loathe me, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t loathe you,” he said quietly. “I’m awfully sorry for you in a way; but I’m disappointed in you, too, Jane. You’ve been a weakling.”
“Have I? I suppose I have.” She saw him, a blurred figure, through a mist of tears. “I suppose I have. And one pays dearer for weakness than for wickedness, I think. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to find the child.”
She threw out her arms in a gesture of despair.
“Find the child! If you only could! Peter, if you could bring him to me and——”
“You!” He laughed harshly. “The child belongs to me! To me! Do you hear? You had him and lost him. If I find him I will keep him.”
He brushed past her, threw open the door, and stalked through the hall into the night.
He had still the greater part of the twenty pounds left that Leslie had given to him, and at this moment of crisis he must spend; he could not afford to economize. A taxi driver accepted with some reluctance his order to drive to Wimbledon Common. It was a long journey, and he had time to put in order the confusion of his mind.
Anita Bellini knew; he was confident of that. And if she knew, he should know. Her residence was a mansion, standing in two acres of ground on the fashionable side of Wimbledon Common; a big, somewhat old-fashioned house, garnished with the square towers and big Gothic turrets which were the joy of the Victorian architects. It had something of a mediæval appearance, seemed to be a veritable castle of despair when he ordered the cab to wait. The cautious man demanded something on account, and wisely, as it proved.
He strode up the gravelled drive. No light showed in any window; even the transom above the massive front door was lifeless. He pulled the bell and the faint clang of it came back to him. After a long time he heard the rattle of chains, the shooting back of a bolt, and a faint light was reflected behind the fanlight. The door was opened a few inches by a very old man with dirty white hair and wearing the slovenly uniform of a footman. Peter saw that the longer chain was still fastened to the door and that the aperture was not big enough to squeeze through.
“You’re Simms, aren’t you?” He remembered the ancient. “I want to see the princess.”
The old man made the grimace that Peter remembered.
“You can’t see the princess; she’s not at home,” he said in a loud cracked voice.
“Tell her Peter Dawlish wishes to see her, and if she will not let me in she can come to the door,” he said.
He was not prepared to have the door slammed in his face, yet that was what happened. He waited for five minutes, and then he heard the lock turn. This time he saw Anita. She wore a long green dress, smothered as usual with beading which glittered in the dim hall light.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want to speak to you privately.”
“This is as private an interview as you’ll get,” she said coolly.
The reflection of the hall light on her monocle produced an eerie illusion. It was as though she were glaring at him with one malignant golden eye.
“What do you want?” she repeated. “If it’s money, you can’t have it. This is not a charitable institution or a home for convicts.”
In the pause that followed he made a mental calculation as to the strength of the chain that held him from admission. He might at a pinch break it and force an entrance. He was prepared to go to any mad lengths to get the information he sought.
“Where is my child?” he asked.
Not a muscle of the big face moved.
“I didn’t know you’d been raising a family. Surely I’m the last person in the world to be acquainted with your vicarious progeny.”
“Where is Jane’s child? Perhaps you’ll understand that.”
She had been taken aback by the first question, he was sure. The length of time that elapsed before she answered betrayed her.
“So you know that, do you? The child? I’m afraid I can’t tell you. I have something better to do than to keep track of the indiscretions of my friends, and certainly I do not concern myself with the illegitimate children of convicted forgers——”
“You lie,” said Peter quietly. “You know I was married to Jane.”
Anita Bellini chuckled.
“The marriage was illegal; didn’t you know that? You didn’t comply with certain formalities——”
“I have seen Jane to-night. She has no doubt about its legality. Where is my son?”
“Where you will never find him.” All the pent-up malignity of the woman suddenly took expression. Her face, never attractive, was contorted by rage to an appearance that was almost ludicrous. “Where you will never find him! In the slime and the mud where his father belongs; dead, I hope!”
A sudden insane fury possessed him. He was scarcely human; saw the hateful face of this woman through a redness, and flung himself against the door. It jerked back with a crash and suddenly flew open. The chain had broken.
To him she was no longer a woman, but some devil that had taken human shape. He wanted to kill her, to grip that big throat and choke the life out of her. As the chain broke, she stepped back, and he found himself looking into the black muzzle of a pistol.
“Don’t move,” she said gratingly. “Don’t move, Peter Dawlish. I am justified in shooting you in the defense of my life.”
She did not see his hand move. The pistol was struck down from her grip and fell with a clatter on the floor; and, in his mad anger, with murder in his heart, his hand was outflung. Then somebody called him.
“Peter!”
At the sound of the voice his arm dropped, paralyzed with amazement. A woman was in the hall; she had come out of a room at the foot of the broad stairway; a woman in black silk, white-haired, hard-faced; it was his mother!
“Come in here.”
She pointed to the open door of the room and he walked past her without another glance at Anita Bellini. She was shrinking back against the wall, frightened for the first time in her life.
It was a small study furnished in the Oriental fashion; there was a great silken divan, and a shaded lantern hung from the ceiling. Something more modern he saw—a telephone on the tiny octagonal table. The receiver was off—he had interrupted her in the act of telephoning.
“What is the meaning of this?”
Mrs. Dawlish had assumed the old air that he knew so well and detested so much.
He was still shaking, but he was calmer.
“I presume you don’t need to be told; you must have heard. I came to your friend——”
“To the Princess Bellini,” interrupted the woman. “Yes?”
“To discover where was my child.”
“Really?” The gray eyebrows rose. “I was not aware that I was a grandmother.”
The old devil rose again in him.
“Then your hearing is affected,” he said harshly. “You know—of course you know! The whole gang of you know! You know about Jane, you know about my marriage, you know about the child. Perhaps you know where he is.”
And then, to add to the fire of his fury, he saw her smile.
“You have always been a fool, Peter. I suppose you will be a fool to the end of your days,” she said. “You had better go back to your envelope addressing and forget there are such things in the world as children. I have been trying very hard to do the same for the past seven years.”
She was a surprising woman, for without warning she came back to the offer she had made to him.
“You would be well advised to go to Canada or Australia, or any other place that takes your fancy,” she said, and went on in a conversational tone to discuss the advantages which might accrue.
He was puzzled. Then it occurred to him that she was talking to gain time—for what? His back had been to the door and now he edged round until it was under his view. But if Anita Bellini contemplated any treachery, there was no visible or audible evidence.
He heard the front-door bell ring, and an exchange of voices in the hall, and then the door opened and two men entered. It was not necessary that he should be very experienced in such matters to realize that they were detectives. His mother’s narrative stopped automatically. Her white, skinny finger pointed to him.
“This man is Peter Dawlish—an ex-convict!” she said. “I charge him with threatening to murder my friend Princess Anita Bellini.”
A quarter of an hour after, the taxicab which Peter had employed to bring him to Wimbledon deposited him at the police station, and he was sitting, dazed and wrathful, behind the locked door of a police cell.