The Project Gutenberg eBook of The girl from Scotland Yard
Title: The girl from Scotland Yard
Author: Edgar Wallace
Release date: August 12, 2025 [eBook #76677]
Language: English
Original publication: Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc, 1926
Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer
THE
GIRL FROM
SCOTLAND YARD
EDGAR WALLACE
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY—NEW YORK—1928
[COPYRIGHT]
COPYRIGHT, 1926, 1927, BY EDGAR
WALLACE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
CONTENTS
VI. The Effect on Lady Raytham
THE GIRL FROM
SCOTLAND YARD
CHAPTER I.
AT TEA
As Lady Raytham drew aside the long velvet curtains, she looked down into Berkeley Square. It was half-past four o’clock on a cheerless February evening. Rain and sleet were falling and a thin yellow mist added to the gloom of the dying day. An interminable string of cars and taxicabs was turning toward Berkeley Street, their shining black roofs reflecting the glare of the overhead light that had just then hissed and spluttered to life.
She looked blankly toward the desolation of the gardens, a place of bare-limbed trees and shivering shrubs—stared, as though she expected to see some fog wraith take a definite and menacing shape and give tangible form to the shadows that menaced reason and life.
She was a woman of twenty-eight, straight and slim. Hers was the type of classical beauty which would defy the markings of age for the greater part of a lifetime. A fascinating face, calm, austere. Her eyes were a cold English gray. You might imagine her the patrician abbess of some great conventual establishment, or a lady of broad manors defending inexorably the stark castle of her lord against the enemy who came in his absence. Analyse her face, feature by feature, put one with the other, and judge her by the standards which profess to measure such things, and brow and chin said “purpose” with unmistakable emphasis.
She was not in her purposeful mood now; rather was she uncertain and irritable, the nearest emotions to fear that she knew.
She let the curtains fall back until they overlapped, and walked across to the fireplace, glancing at the tiny clock. The salon was half lit; the wall sconces were dark, but the big lamp on the table near the settee glowed brightly. This room bore evidence of money lavishly spent. The greater part of its furnishings would one day reach the museums of millionaire collectors; three pictures that hung upon the apple-green walls were earmarked for the National Gallery.
As she stood looking down into the fire, there was a gentle tap at the door, and the butler came in. He was a tall man, rather portly in his way; a man with double chin and an unlined face. He carried a small salver in his hand, a buff oblong in the centre.
Lady Raytham tore open the envelope. It was dated from Constantinople, and was from Raytham. She had been expecting the telegram all that afternoon. Raytham, of course, had changed his plans. In that sentence was epitomized his life and career. He was going on to Basra and thence to Bushire, to see the interstate oil wells, or the sites of them. He was expensively apologetic for two closely written sheets. If he could not return before April, would she go on to Cannes as she had arranged? He was “awfully sorry,” he must have said that at least four times.
She read it again, folded the pink sheets and laid them on the table.
The butler was waiting, head slightly bent forward as though to catch her slightest whisper. She did not look at him.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, m’lady.”
He was opening the door when she spoke.
“Druze, I am expecting the Princess Bellini and possibly Mrs. Gurden. I will have tea when they come.”
“Very good, m’lady.”
The door closed softly behind him. She raised her sombre eyes and looked at the polished wood of it with a curious, listening lift of her head as though she expected to hear something. But the butler was going slowly down the stairs, a quizzical smile in his eyes; his white, plump hands sliding in and over one another. He stopped on the landing to admire the little marble statue of Circe that his lordship had brought from Sicily. It was a habit of his to admire that Circe with the sly eyes and the beckoning finger. And as he looked, his mouth was puckered as though he were whistling.
A sharp rat-tat on the door made him withdraw from his contemplation. He reached the hall as the second footman opened the door.
Two women entered. Through the open door he had a glimpse of a limousine drawing away.
“Her ladyship is in the drawing room, your highness. Shall I take your highness’s coat?”
“You can’t,” said the first and the bigger woman brusquely. “Help Mrs. Gurden out of hers. Why you wear such horrible contraptions I can’t understand.”
Mrs. Gurden smiled largely.
“Darling, I must wear something. Thank you, Druze.”
Druze took the transparent silk coat and handed it to the second footman. The princess was already stamping up the stairs. She pushed open the door and walked in unannounced. Lady Raytham, standing by the fire, her head pillowed on her arm, looked up, startled.
“I’m so awfully sorry. Push the lights, Anita. The button is by your hand. Well?”
The Princess Anita Bellini struggled unaided out of her tweed coat and threw it over the back of a chair, jerked off her hat with another movement and tossed it after the coat.
People who saw Anita Bellini for the first time gazed at her in awe; there was a certain ruthless strength in every line, every feature. She was something more than fifty and was just under six feet in height.
The masculinity of the powerful face was emphasized by the gray hair, cut close in an Eton crop, and the rimless monocle which never left her eye. Between her white teeth she gripped a long amber holder in which a cigarette was burning.
Her speech was direct, abrupt, almost shocking in its frankness.
“Greta?”
She jerked the end of the cigarette holder toward the door.
“Being fussed over by Druze. That woman would ogle a dustman! She’s that age. It is a horrible thing to have been pretty once and to have produced certain reactions. You can never believe that the spirit has evaporated.”
Jane Raytham smiled.
“They say you were an awfully pretty girl, Nita——” she began.
“They lie,” said Princess Anita calmly. “Russell’s used to retouch my photographs till there was nothing left but the background.”
Greta floated in, hands outstretched, her big red mouth opened ecstatically.
“Darling!” she burst forth, and caught both Jane’s hands in hers. Anita Bellini’s fleshy nose wrinkled in a sneer.
And yet she should have grown accustomed to Mrs. Gurden, for ecstasy was Greta’s normal condition. She had that habit of touching people, holding them by the arms, stooping to look up into their faces with her big black eyes that sometimes squinted a little.
She had been pretty, but now her face was long and a little haggard, the face of a woman who was so afraid of missing something that she could not spare the time to sleep. Her lips were heavily carmined, her eyes carefully made up as though she were still expecting a call to return to the chorus from which Anita had rescued her.
“My lovely Jane! Exquisite as usual. That dress—don’t tell me! Chenel—isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Jane Raytham scarcely looked down. “No, I think it is a dress I bought in New York last year.”
Greta shook her head speechlessly.
Anita Bellini blew out a smoke ring and tapped off the ash in the fireplace.
“Greta lays it on thick when she lays it at all,” she said, and cast a critical eye over her hostess. “You’re peaky, Jane. Missing your husband?”
“Terribly.”
The irony of tone was not lost on Anita.
“Raytham—what is he doing? The man is ill of money and yet won’t take a day off making it. Where the—— Oh, here he is.”
Druze wheeled in the tea wagon.
“Give me a whisky-and-soda, Druze, or I’ll perish!”
She drank the contents of the goblet at a gulp and handed back the glass. She fixed her monocle more firmly and lit another cigarette. The door closed behind the butler.
“Druze wears well, Jane. Where did you get him?”
Lady Raytham looked up quickly.
“Does he? I scarcely notice him. He has always been the same as long as I can remember. He was with Lord Everreed before.”
“That goes back a few years. I remember him when he was a young man.”
The princess had an unhappy habit of smiling with her mouth closed. It was not very pretty.
“It is funny how age comes: thirty to fifty goes like a flash of lightning!”
She changed the subject abruptly and talked about her call of the afternoon.
“I went for bridge and got a string quartet playing every kind of music except one with a tune in it.”
“It was lovely!” exclaimed Greta, her eyes screwed tight in an agony of admiration.
“It was rotten,” retorted the gray-haired Anita. “And more rotten because my sister-in-law was there. The woman’s narrowness depresses me.”
Lady Raytham’s eyes had returned to the fire.
“Oh!” she said.
“I asked her what she was going to do about Peter. Thank heavens she has a little sense there! Peter has been wiped off the slate. Margaret would not even discuss him. The only person who believed in him is Everreed, but Everreed was always a simpleton. He would never have prosecuted, but the bank forced his hand.”
She said this with some satisfaction. She had never liked her nephew, and Peter hated her, hated her gibes at him when he, the son of a wealthy man, had preferred a private secretaryship with that great parliamentarian, Viscount Everreed, to entering his father’s bank. She had sat in court with a contemptuous smile on her lips when the haggard boy had been sentenced for forging his employer’s name to a check for five thousand pounds.
The woman by the fire stirred her tea absently.
“When does——”
“He come out? About now, I think. Let me see. He had seven years, and they tell me that these people get a remission of sentence for good conduct—three months in every year. Why, Heaven knows. We pay enormous sums to catch ’em, and as soon as they are safe under lock and key, we go tinkering with the lock to get them out.”
“Disgraceful!” murmured Greta.
But Jane Raytham did not hear her.
“I wonder what he will do?” she mused. “Life will go pretty badly for a man like Peter——”
“Rubbish!” Anita snapped the word. “For goodness’ sake don’t get melancholy about Peter! He has been five years in prison; and at Dartmoor, or wherever he is, they teach men to use their hands to do something besides forge checks. He will probably make an excellent farm hand.”
Lady Raytham shivered.
“Ugh! How awful!”
The princess smiled.
“Peter Dawlish is just a fool. He belongs to the type of humans that is made for other people’s service. If you start worrying about Peter, you’ll shed tears over the partridge that comes to your table! I wonder what he thinks about Druze?”
Lady Raytham looked up.
“Do you think he still hates him?”
Anita pursed her large lips.
“Druze was Everreed’s butler and cashed the check; the next day Peter disappears on his holiday—in reality on his great adventure. He returns and is arrested, swears he knows nothing about the check, and accuses poor Druze of forgery—which doesn’t save him from imprisonment.”
Lady Raytham said nothing.
“Naturally Peter feels sore—if he was still right in believing Druze the villain of the piece. There may be trouble; we needn’t deceive ourselves.”
Her cigarette had gone out. She opened her bag with an impatient tug and searched.
“Matches? Never mind.”
There was a letter in the bag; she tore a strip from the top and, bending, lit the paper at the fire.
“Who is Leslie Maughan?”
She was glancing at the signature which footed the letter.
“Leslie Maughan! I don’t know him. Why?”
Anita crumpled the paper into a ball.
“Leslie Maughan would like to see me on a personal matter.” Anita invented the stilted and supercilious accent which she supposed the writer of the letter might assume. “And Leslie Maughan will be glad to know what hour will be convenient for me to see him. He is an inventor or a borrower of money, or he has an expedition to the Cocos Islands that he would like me to finance. To the devil with Leslie Maughan!”
CHAPTER II.
THE GIRL DETECTIVE
Druze had come in noiselessly at the door and stood, hand clasping hand. His face was strangely pale; as he spoke, his right cheek twitched spasmodically.
“Yes?”
“Will your ladyship see Miss Leslie Maughan?”
“Miss!” exclaimed Anita, as Jane Raytham rose.
“Miss Leslie Maughan of the Criminal Investigation Department, Scotland Yard?”
Lady Raytham put out her hand and gripped the back of the chair; her face was bloodless; she opened her mouth to speak, but no word came. Greta was staring at the big woman, but Princess Anita Bellini had no eyes but for the pale butler.
“I will see her—in the small drawing room, Druze. Excuse me.”
She swept out of the room and pulled the door behind her until Druze had disappeared round the lower landing. By her right hand was the door of her own room, and she entered swiftly and noiselessly, switching on the lights as she closed the door. She stared into the mirror. Ghastly! That white, drawn face of hers carried confession. Had she been betrayed? Had they fulfilled their threat?
Pulling out a drawer of her dressing table, she fumbled for and found a little pot of rouge and with a quick, deft hand brought an unaccustomed bloom to her cheeks.
Another glance at her face in the glass and she went out and sailed down the stairs, a smile on her lips, and in her heart despair.
All the lights were lit in the little drawing room, and her first emotion was one of surprise and relief. She had not known there were women detectives at Scotland Yard, but she could imagine them as hard-faced, sour creatures in ready-made clothes.
The girl who stood by the table looking down at the illustrated newspaper that Druze had supplied looked to be about twenty-two. She wore a straight nutria coat, a big bunch of violets pinned to one of the revers. She was as tall as Jane Raytham and as straight; trim silken ankles, neatly shod. The face under the upturned brim of a little felt hat was more surprising yet. A pair of dark eyes rose to meet Jane Raytham’s. The lips red as Greta’s, yet owing nothing to artifice, were finely moulded. She had a firm, round chin, and the hint of a white throat somewhere behind the protective fur. In some confusion Lady Raytham catalogued the visible qualities of her unexpected caller.
“You are not Miss Maughan?” she asked.
When Leslie Maughan smiled, she smiled with eyes and lips, and the dimpled hollows that came to her cheeks made her seem absurdly young.
“Yes, that is my name, Lady Raytham. I am awfully sorry to bother you, but my chief is rather a martinet.”
“You are a detective? I didn’t know——”
“That there were women detectives?” asked the girl. “And you’re right! My position is unique. I am an assistant to Chief Inspector Coldwell. The commissioners, who are rather conservative people, do not object to that. But I suppose I really am a detective. I make inquiries.”
She stood by the table, one hand on her hip, one playing with the leaves of the picture paper, her unwavering gaze fixed on Jane Raytham.
“I’m making inquiries now, Lady Raytham,” she said quietly. “I want to know why you drew twenty thousand pounds from your bank last Monday.”
For a second the woman was panic-stricken; so far lost control that she all but stammered the truth. The will that held her silent, apparently unmoved, was the supreme effort of her life. Then her training came to her rescue.
The control of her voice was perfect.
“Since when have the police had authority to supervise the banking accounts of private citizens?” she asked in cold, measured tones. “That is an extraordinary request! Is it then an offence for me to withdraw twenty thousand pounds from my own account? How did you know?”
“One gets to know things, Lady Raytham.” She was cool, unruffled by the indignation, real or simulated. “Lady Raytham, you think we are being very impertinent and abominable. And it is certain that, if you report this matter to Scotland Yard, I shall be reprimanded. But we expect that——”
Jane Raytham had so far recovered toward the normal that she could open her gray eyes in astonishment.
“Then why on earth have you come?” she asked.
She saw Leslie Maughan draw a deep breath; the ghost of a smile trembled at the corner of her mouth and vanished.
“Twenty thousand pounds is a lot of money,” she said softly. There was a note of pleading in her voice, and suddenly, with a cry she could not suppress, the significance of the visit flashed upon the woman. They knew. The police knew the destination or purpose of that money.
Her breath came faster; she could only look into those dark eyes in fear and try as best she could to order her thoughts. Dark eyes—violet, not the burned brown of Greta’s, but a violet that was almost black. A detective—this slip of a girl! She was well dressed, too; the femininity in Jane Raytham took stock of it unconsciously. The gloves were from Renaud’s; only Renaud cut that quaint, half-gauntlet wrist.
“Won’t you tell me? It might save you so much unhappiness. We try to do that at the Yard—save people unhappiness. You’d never dream that, would you? But the police are more like big brothers than ogres. Won’t you?”
Jane Raytham shook her head; it was a mistake, the only one she made, to attempt speech.
“No, I won’t!” she said breathlessly. “There is nothing to tell. Your interference is unwarrantable. I shall write. I shall write.”
She swayed, and instantly Leslie Maughan was by her side; and the strength of her grip was the second surprise that Jane Raytham had.
With an effort, she wrenched her arm free.
“Now you can go, please! And if I do not report you, it is because I think you have acted in ignorance—overzeal.”
She nodded toward the door, and Leslie slowly gathered up her bag and her umbrella.
“If you ever want me, you will find my telephone number on my card.”
Lady Raytham still held the crumpled card in her hand. Now she looked at it and very deliberately walked to the fire and dropped it into the flames.
“Or the telephone book,” said Leslie, as she went out.
Druze was in the hall, dry-washing his hands with nervous rapidity. He hastened to the street door and opened it.
“Good-night, miss,” he said huskily, and she looked at him and shivered. Why Leslie Maughan shivered she did not know, but she had at that moment a vivid and terrifying illusion.
It was as though she were looking into the blank eyes of one who was already dead.
CHAPTER III.
MEETING PETER
Leslie came striding briskly along the Thames Embankment. It was a bitterly cold night, and the nutria coat was not proof against the icy norther that was blowing. The man who walked by her side was head and shoulders taller than she. He had the gait of a soldier, and his umbrella twirled rhythmically to his pace.
“Suicide on the left,” he said pleasantly, as though he were a guide pointing out the sights.
The girl checked her pace and looked back.
“Really? You don’t mean that, Mr. Coldwell?”
Her eyes were fixed upon the dark figure sprawling across the parapet, his arms resting on the granite crown, his chin on his hands. He was a gaunt figure of a man, differing in no respect from the waifs who would gather here from midnight onward, and strive to snatch a little sleep between the policeman’s visits.
“It is any odds,” said Mr. Coldwell carefully, “when you see one of these birds watching the river in that way, he is thinking up a new way of settling old accounts. Are you interested—sentimentally?”
She hesitated.
“Yes, a little. I don’t know whether it’s sentiment or just feminine curiosity.”
She left his side abruptly and walked back to the man, who may have been watching her out of the corner of his eyes, for he straightened himself up quickly.
“Down and out?” she asked, and heard his soft laugh.
“Down but not out,” he replied, and it was the voice of an educated man, with just a trace of that drawl, the pleasant stigmata which the universities give to their children. “Did I arouse your compassion? I’m sorry. If you offer me money I shall be rather embarrassed. You will find plenty of poor beggars on this sidewalk who are more worthy objects of—charity. I use the word in its purest sense.”
She looked at his face. A slight moustache and a ragged fringe of beard did not disguise his youth. Chief Inspector Coldwell, who had come closer, was watching him with professional interest.
“Would you like to know what I was really thinking about?” There was an odd quality of banter in his voice. “I was thinking about murder! There is a gentleman in this town who has made life rather difficult for me, and I had just decided to walk up to him at the earliest opportunity and pop three automatic bullets through his heart when you disturbed the homicidal current of my thoughts.”
Coldwell chuckled.
“I thought I recognized you. You’re Peter Dawlish,” he said, and the shabby figure lifted his hat with mock politeness.
“Such is fame!” he said sardonically. “And you are Coldwell: the recognition is mutual! And now that I have hopelessly committed myself, I presume you will call the nearest city policeman and put me out of the way of all temptation.”
“When did you come out?” asked Coldwell.
The girl listened, staggered. They had been discussing this man not a quarter of an hour before; she had spent the afternoon thinking of him; and now to meet him on that wind-swept pavement, he of all the millions of people in London, was something more than a coincidence. It was fatalistic.
“Mr. Dawlish, I wonder if you will believe me when I say that you’re the one man in London I was anxious to meet. I only knew to-day that you were—out. Could you call and see me to-night?”
The man smiled.
“Invitations follow thick and fast,” he murmured. “Only ten minutes ago I was asked into a Salvation Army shelter! Believe me, madam——”
“Mr. Dawlish”—her voice was very quiet, but very clear—“you are being awfully sorry for yourself, aren’t you?”
She did not see the flush that came to his face.
“I suppose I am,” he said, a little gruffly. “But a man is entitled——”
“A man is never entitled to be sorry for himself in any circumstances,” she said. “Here is my card.”
She had slipped back the cover of her bag, and he took the little pasteboard from her hand, and, bringing it close to his eyes, read, in the dim light that a distant lamp afforded:
Will you come and see me at half-past ten? I shan’t offer you money; I won’t even offer to find a job for you cutting wood or sorting waste paper. It is a very much bigger matter than that.
He read the name and subscription again, and his brows met.
“Oh, yes. Really—yes, if you wish.”
He was, of a sudden, awkward and uncomfortable. The girl was quick to recognize the change in his manner and tone.
“I’m afraid I’m rather a scarecrow, but you won’t mind that?”
“No,” she said, and held out her hand.
He hesitated a second, then took it in his. She felt the hardness of the palm, and winced at the significance of it. In another second she had joined the waiting Coldwell. Peter Dawlish watched them until they were out of sight, and then, with a little grimace, turned and walked slowly toward Blackfriars.
“I knew about the smallness of the world,” said Coldwell, swinging his umbrella, “but I had no idea that applied to London. Peter! It’s years since I saw him last. He was rather a weed five years ago.”
“Do you think he really is a forger?”
“A jury of his fellow countrymen convicted him,” said Mr. Coldwell cautiously, “and juries are generally right. After all, he needed the money: his father was an old skinflint, and you cannot run a hectic establishment, and escort pretty ladies to New York, on two hundred and fifty pounds per annum. He was a fool; if he hadn’t taken that three months’ holiday the forgery would never have been discovered.”
“Who was she?” Leslie asked; she felt that this question was called for.
“I don’t know. The police cher-chezed la femme—forgive my mongrel French—but they never ran her to earth. Peter said it was a chorus girl from the Paris opera house. He wasn’t particularly proud of it.”
The girl sighed.
Near the dark entrance of Scotland Yard Mr. Coldwell stopped.
“Now,” he said, standing squarely before her, “perhaps you will cease being mysterious, and tell me why you are so frantically interested in Peter Dawlish that you have talked Peter Dawlish for the past three days?”
She looked up at him steadily from under the lowered brim of her hat.
“Because I know just why Peter Dawlish wants to kill and whom he wants to kill!” she said.
“Druze! A child would guess that!” scoffed the detective. “And he wants to kill him because he thinks Druze’s evidence sent him to jail.”
She was smiling—a broad smile of conscious triumph.
“Wrong!” she said. “If Druze dies, it will be because he doesn’t love children!”
Mr. Coldwell could only gape at her.
CHAPTER IV.
PETER’S LODGINGS
“Let me get this right,” Coldwell said slowly. “Druze will be killed—if he is killed—because he does not like children?”
Leslie Maughan nodded.
“I know you hate mysteries. Everybody in Scotland Yard does,” she said; “and one day I will tell you just what I mean. Do you remember last August you gave me a month’s vacation?”
Chief Inspector Coldwell remembered that very well.
“I went to Cumberland just to loaf around,” she said. “I was most anxious to pretend that there wasn’t such a place in the world as Scotland Yard. But I’ve got that prowling, inquisitive spirit that would have made me the first woman inspector of the C.I.D. if the commissioners were not such stuffy, old-fashioned gentlemen! One day I was loafing through a little village, when I found something which brought me eventually to this conclusion, that Druze doesn’t like children. And one day, when he discovers the fact, Peter Dawlish will kill him for it!”
“More mysterious than ever!” exclaimed Coldwell. “You’re probably chasing a boojum. It is the fate of all enthusiastic young officers—not that you’re an officer.”
Leslie Maughan had started her police career as a very junior stenographer at Scotland Yard. Her father had been that famous Assistant Commissioner Maughan whose exploits have formed the basis for so many stories of police work, and he had left his daughter with an income which put her above the necessity of working for her living. But police investigation was in her blood, and she had graduated through successive stages, until the authorities, reluctant to admit that any woman had an executive position at police headquarters, admitted her to the designation of “assistant” to the chief of the Big Four.
“She’s brilliant; there’s no other word for her,” he had told the chief commissioner. “And although I don’t think it’s much of a woman’s job, there never was a woman who was better fitted to hold down a high position at the Yard.”
“What are her chief qualifications?” asked the commissioner, slightly amused.
“She thinks quick and she’s lucky,” was the comprehensive reply.
This question of luck exercised the mind of Leslie as she walked home to her flat in the Charing Cross Road. The very fact that that apartment was hers was strong support for the theory of luck. She had taken a long lease of a floor above a moving-picture house at a time when flats were going begging. She might have drawn double the rent from a subtenant; but the place was central, comparatively cheap, and she withstood all temptations to change her abode at a profit.
A side door led to the apartments, and she had hardly closed the door behind her when a voice hailed her from the top of the stairs.
“That you, Miss Maughan?”
“That’s me,” said Leslie.
She hung her coat in the narrow hall and went upstairs to the girl who was waiting on the landing. Lucretia Brown, her one servant, was a very tall, broad-shouldered girl, with a round and not unpleasant face. She stood now with her hands on her hips, surveying her mistress.
“I thought you were——” she began.
“You thought I’d been murdered and thrown into the river,” said Leslie good-humouredly. “As you always think if I am not back on the tick!”
“I don’t trust London,” said Lucretia.
It was her real name, chosen by a misguided farm labourer, who, having heard a lecture on the Borgias, delivered at the parish hall, came away with a vague idea that the historical character who bore that name was a worthy creature.
“I never did trust London and I never will. Have you had dinner, miss?”
“Yes, I’ve had my dinner,” said Leslie, and looked at the clock. “I am expecting a man to call here at half-past ten, so, when you open the door to him, please don’t tell him that I’m out and not expected back for three weeks.”
Lucretia made a little face.
“Half-past ten’s a bit late for a gentleman visitor, miss. A friend of yours?”
Leslie could never train her out of a personal interest in her affairs. In a way Lucretia was privileged. Her first memory was of the broad-faced Lucretia pushing a perambulator in which Leslie took the air.
“Is it anybody we know, miss? Mr. Coldwell?”
Leslie shook her head.
“No,” she said, “he is a man who has just come out of prison.”
Lucretia closed her eyes and swayed.
“Good heavens!” she said in a hushed voice. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when you’d be having a convict up to see you at half-past ten at night! What about asking a policeman to stand by the door, miss?”
“You’re much too partial to policemen,” said Leslie severely, and the big maid grew incoherent in her indignant protests.
Half-past ten was striking from St. Martins-in-the-Fields when the doorbell rang, and Lucretia came in to her, eyes big with excitement.
“That’s him!” she said melodramatically.
“Well, let him in.”
“Whatever happens,” began Lucretia, “I’m not responsible.”
Leslie pointed to the door. He came so lightly up the stairs that she did not hear his steps. The door opened and Lucretia backed in.
“The gentleman,” she said loudly, and cast an apprehensive glance at the stranger as she sidled out of the room and closed the door.
Peter Dawlish stood where Lucretia had left him, his soft hat in his hand, glancing from the girl to the cosy room, a smile on his thin face. She saw now how shabbily dressed he was: his shirt was collarless, his boots gray with mud, the old, ill-fitting suit he wore stained and patched.
“I warned you I was a scarecrow,” he said, as though he read her thoughts. “They gave me a beautiful prison-made suit at Dartmoor, but it didn’t seem the right kind of equipment with which to face a censorious world, so I swapped it for this.”
She pushed a chair up to the fire.
“Sit down, won’t you, Mr. Dawlish?”
“ ‘Mr. Dawlish,’ ” he repeated. “That sounds terribly respectable.”
“You may smoke if you wish,” she said, as he seated himself slowly, and again he smiled.
“I wish, but I have not the wherewithal.” She hastily opened a drawer and took out a tin of cigarettes: “Thank you,” he said.
He took the cigarette in his fingers and frowned.
“That is certainly queer,” he said.
“What is certainly queer?” she asked.
“These gaspers; I used to smoke them in the old days. Had ’em imported from Cairo. You can’t buy them here, at least you couldn’t when I—retired. Heigho! Am I being very sorry for myself again? That stung! I loathe these self-pitiers, and it was a revelation to discover that I had gone over to the majority.”
He lit the cigarette and drew luxuriously.
“This is rather wonderful,” he said.
“Have you had any food?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I dined like a Sybarite, at a small shop in the Blackfriars Road. The dinner cost sixpence; it was rather an extravagance, but I felt I needed bracing for this ordeal.”
“You have no lodging?”
He shook his head.
“No, I have no lodging.”
He was twiddling his long, thin fingers. She noted with satisfaction that his hands were scrupulously clean, and again he seemed to divine her thoughts, for he looked down at them.
“I don’t exactly know what information I can give you, if it is information you require, and if you had been a male-of-the-species policeman I should have declined your invitation rather loftily! But a woman policeman is unique. I’ve seen them, of course—rather fat little bodies with squat little helmets. I suppose they’re useful.”
He noticed that she herself was not smoking, and commented upon it.
“No, I very rarely smoke,” she said. And then, in a changed tone: “Do you mind if I speak very plainly?”
“The plainer the better,” he said, and he leaned back in his chair and sent a cloud of smoke to the ceiling.
“I dare say you’ll be forced to walk London to-night?”
“It has become a habit,” said Peter Dawlish. “And really, it would be rather amusing if one weren’t so horribly tired. They gave me a little money when I left prison—not much. One gets quite a lot of sleep in the daytime, especially the sunny days, in odd corners of the parks. And on rainy nights I know a gardener’s tool house, which is not perhaps to be compared with the bridal suite at an expensive hotel, but is cosy. I slept there last night with an ex-colonel of infantry and a lawyer who lived in the same ward at Dartmoor.”
She eyed him steadily.
“To-night you will sleep decently,” she said, in her quiet, even tone; “and to-morrow you will buy a new suit of clothes and interview your father.”
He raised his eyebrows, amusement in his eyes.
“I didn’t realize that you had scraped down to the family skeleton,” he said. “And why am I to do this, Miss Maughan? The suit of clothes would be a waste of money; my parent would not be impressed by my appearance of affluence. Rather he would imagine that I had found another good-natured gentleman who trusted me with his check book. Furthermore, all this would cost money; and I think you should know, before we go any further, that I am not taking any money from you on any pretext.”
She had the extraordinary knack of making him feel foolish. He always remembered afterward that in the first two meetings with this strange girl he had gone hot and cold either at her words or the inflection of her voice.
“That kind of pride which refuses to take money from a woman is very admirable.” There was a note of cold sarcasm in her voice which made him writhe. “It is the attitude of mind behind man’s subconscious sense of superiority to the female of the species! It is not particularly flattering to a woman, but it must be immensely gratifying to a man! May I ask you another question, Mr. Peter Dawlish? Do you intend sinking down into the dregs? Is your vista of life lined on either side by common lodging houses, with a pauper’s graveyard at the end of it?”
“I don’t exactly see what you’re driving at.”
She had made him angry and was secretly amused.
“I shall do my best, naturally, to find work. I had an idea of going abroad.”
“Exactly.” She nodded. “To one of the colonies. It is the most popular of all delusions that people without grit or ambition can magically acquire these qualities the moment they go ashore at Quebec or Sydney, or wherever their high spirits lead them.”
He was laughing now in spite of himself.
“You’ve certainly got a knack of riling a man.”
“Haven’t I?” she put in. “I’ll tell you what I was driving at, Mr. Dawlish. For you to refuse a loan of money now suggests that you’re perfectly satisfied in your mind that you will never earn enough to repay the loan. The only way you can justify a refusal of money is to believe that you can never pay it back; that you’re going to belong to the bread lines and the park benches and the public charities.”
She saw that her shaft had got home, and went on quickly:
“Of course you will do nothing of the sort! You’ve come out of prison with a grievance against the world, and you’re hardly to be blamed for that. I should imagine you are one of the few innocent men who ever went to Dartmoor.”
He looked at her shrewdly.
“You believe I was innocent?”
She nodded.
“I’m pretty sure,” she said, and then: “Do you carry a gun?”
He laughed aloud.
“The price of a Browning pistol would keep me in luxury for two months,” he said. “No, I carry nothing more dangerous than a toothbrush.”
The drawer from which she had taken the cigarettes was still open; she put in her hand and took out a small black cash box, and jerked back the lid.
“We will do this thing in a businesslike way,” she said. “You will find a paper and pencil on the desk; sign an IOU for twenty pounds. If you believe in your heart of hearts that you’ll be unable to pay me back, that a man of twenty-nine or twenty-eight, or whatever age you are, will never earn a sufficient margin above his cost of living to send back that money in a year or two years, then you need not take a cent. And this little bit of charity, as you call it——”
“I’ve called it nothing of the sort.”
“In your mind you have,” she said calmly. “It is very rude to contradict a lady! Now, Mr. Dawlish, I challenge you! If you think you are permanently down and out, the incident is finished, and I think you’re finished, too.”
She looked at him through her half-closed eyes, nodding slowly.
“You mean I’m not worth salving?” he asked, and got up. “I’ll accept your challenge.”
He took the pencil, scribbled a few words on the writing pad, and, tearing it off, handed it to the girl.
“Produce your twenty pounds.”
He was amused in a sour way, but his anger was mostly directed inward to himself, that he should be angry at all. If anybody had told him, when he had walked into that room, that he would accept a loan of money from the girl who had not been absent from his thoughts since he had met her, he would have laughed at such a suggestion. Yet here he was, counting solemnly the notes as they were handed to him, and pocketing them without one single qualm of conscience.
“I think I’m beginning to know myself,” he said. “I started a weakling, and prison hasn’t improved me. No, no, I do not mean that it is a weakness to accept this money, but it would have been a weakness to refuse. I’m awfully obliged to you.”
She held out her hand.
“Where will you be staying?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But I will keep in touch with you. Please don’t bother about me any more. If I can’t get a job of some kind, I’m really not worth helping. Why are you doing this? It isn’t part of the usual police procedure.”
She shook her head.
“The police help where they can, you ought to know that,” she said quietly. “But I admit that this is a purely personal action on my part. You are part of a big experiment. It isn’t my womanly heart, but my scientific brain that is dictating just now.” And then, going off at a tangent: “I wish you would shave yourself, Mr. Dawlish. You look too much like a musical genius to be thoroughly wholesome.”
He was still chuckling to himself when Lucretia closed the outer door upon him with unnecessary violence.
He knew a small temperance hotel where he could sleep that night, a place in Lambeth, near Waterloo Station. “Temperance hotel” was rather a grand name for an establishment which was only a little superior to a common lodging house, but he guessed it was too late to get a bed at any of the Rowton houses.
He walked briskly down Charing Cross Road and into the Strand, crowded with cars and taxis, for the theatres were closing and the northern sidewalk was almost impassable. And then he thought he saw his mother preceding another lady into a car, and stopped. Yes, it was Margaret Dawlish, and the lady with the dirty-gray hair was Aunt Anita. He could afford to grin now, and the discovery was very pleasurable. He could well imagine that if he had seen that party earlier in the evening, the sight would have evoked a sneer and just that twinge of self-pity against which he was trying hard to guard himself.
He turned back, lest in passing they recognize him, and went down Villiers Street, mounting the stairs to Hungerford Bridge. It was not the twenty notes in his pocket, a compact, cosy little roll, that made his heart and his step lighter; he had caught something of the girl’s spirit, had been imbued with a little of her courage and sanity.
Leslie Maughan puzzled him. She was more than pretty; there was in her face a spirituality which he had not detected in the face of any woman of his acquaintance or knowledge. He realized with a start that he had always disliked clever women. He liked them soft and feminine, and, if the truth be told, a little silly. But he liked this capable and pretty young woman.
Leslie Maughan had just enough of the official quality to keep him at a distance, and yet she was genuinely friendly, as friendly as a sensible elder sister might be, though in truth she must be years younger than he. Sometimes he felt a very old man; Leslie Maughan had made him feel like a child.
He was over the middle of the river now, and there was revealed to him the pageantry of the Embankment, with its lights reflected in the dark waters of the Thames. He felt himself responding to the glow and colour of it. And then, for no reason at all, he had an uncomfortable feeling that he could not trace, but instinctively he looked back. There were several people crossing with him, but immediately behind him, not half a dozen yards away, were three little men who moved shoulder to shoulder. They had the curious high-stepping walk which he had seen in Orientals, a sort of modified prance. They were not speaking to one another, as friends might who were walking home together, and, curiously enough, it was their silence which made him uneasy. Five years in a penal establishment had not been a good nerve cure for a man of Peter Dawlish’s temperament.
He ran down the steps and found himself in a dim and gloomy street. From here was a short cut to the York Road, near where his temperance hotel was situated. His way led him through a deserted street of tiny houses, that was not quite a slum, but was barely respectable. As he turned into the thoroughfare, he glanced back and saw that the three little men were following. They moved noiselessly, as though they were wearing rubber shoes. Peter crossed the road and they followed a little nearer to him.
He was wondering whether it would not be better to turn and face them till they had passed. He had decided upon this action, when something fell over his head. He raised his hand quickly to catch at the thin rope, but it was too late. The slip knot tightened about his throat, two muscular little figures leaped at him, and in another second he was lying on the ground, fighting for life, strangled, his head bursting, his hands clawing at the rope. And then consciousness left him. After an eternity he felt somebody lifting him up and propping him against a wall; a brilliant light shone on his face.
Peter put his hand to his throat; the rope had gone, but he could still feel the deep depression it had made upon his skin.
“What was the game?” said a gruff voice.
He blinked up, could distinguish a helmeted head—a policeman.
“How do you feel? Would you like me to get an ambulance? I can put you into the hospital in a minute.”
Shaking in every limb, Peter struggled to his feet.
“I’m all right,” he said unsteadily. “Who were they?”
The policeman shook his head.
“I don’t know. They passed me at the end of the street, and I thought they looked queer. Little fellows with flat noses; more like monkeys than men. And then I saw them go for you and came after them. I think I just about saved your life, young fellow.”
“I think you did,” said Peter ruefully, as he felt at his scarred throat.
“Run! I never saw anybody run as fast as they did,” said the constable. “Did you have a row with them?”
“No, I never saw them before in my life,” said Peter.
“Humph!” The officer was looking at him dubiously. “Wonder who they were? They talked in some lingo I didn’t understand. I only caught one word, or maybe it’s two—orange pander or bander.”
“Orang blanga?” asked Peter quickly, and whistled.
“Know ’em?”
Peter shook his head.
“No, I don’t know them. I guess their nationality. Javanese.”
The officer was loath to leave him.
“Where are you going now?”
“I’m trying to find a lodging.”
He was still far from recovered, for when he took a step the street and the officer went round in a mad whirl, and but for the policeman’s arm he would have fallen.
“You’ll get yourself pinched for being drunk,” said the policeman humorously. “Lodgings? Now where did I see a lodging?”
He switched on his light, walked slowly down the street, flashing the lamp upon the windows. Presently he stopped.
“Here you are,” he said.
Peter made a slow and cautious way to where the policeman was standing. The lantern was focused upon a little card in the window:
Lodgings for a Respectable Young Man.
“Will this do for you?”
Peter nodded, and the constable rapped gently on the door. He had to wait some time, but presently there was a heavy foot in the passage and a woman’s voice asked hoarsely:
“It’s all right, missis,” said the custodian of the law. “I’m a policeman; there’s a gentleman here who wants lodging.”
The door was unlocked and opened a few inches.
“I’ve got a room, yes, but it’s a bit late, ain’t it?”
The constable uttered an exclamation of surprise.
“Why, bless me, it’s Mrs. Inglethorne!”
“Yes, it’s Mrs. Inglethorne,” repeated the woman bitterly. “And well you ought to know, considering the trouble you police have brought on me! My old man being as innocent as a babe unborn, and our lodger as nice a young man as ever drew the breath of life!”
She peered at Peter in the reflection from the policeman’s light; he saw a bloated red face, a loose mouth, and eyes of singular smallness. She was short and stout and wore a red flannel dressing gown, though apparently she had not disrobed for the night.
“I can’t take you unless you’ve got money,” she said. “I’ve been done before.”
Peter skinned a pound from the roll and showed it to her.
“All right, come in,” she said ungraciously.
Stopping only to thank the policeman for his help, Peter followed her into the narrow, evil-smelling passage, and the door closed behind him.
Fate had played its supreme joke on Peter Dawlish when it had led him to the unsavoury home of Mrs. Inglethorne.
She struck a match, lit a smelly little oil lamp, and preceded him up a steep, short flight of stairs to the floor above.
“Here’s the room,” she said, and he followed her into the front and the best bedroom in the house.
To his surprise, it was fairly well furnished: the bed was a new one, the walls had been lately papered; the two cheap engravings which constituted the pictorial embellishment of the apartment were in good taste.
“This was my lodger’s room. He furnished it himself,” said Mrs. Inglethorne rapidly. “As nice a man as ever drew the breath of life.” She pronounced the last sentence so quickly that it almost seemed to be one word.
“Has he left you?”
She glanced at him suspiciously as though she thought that he was already informed as to the lodger’s fate.
“He’s got five years for busting a house up at Blackheath. My old man got seven, and an honester man there never was!”
A grim jest this, thought Peter Dawlish, that he, newly from that drab and drear establishment on Dartmoor, should be offered the vacant bedroom of one who had taken his place, was probably in the very cell in B Ward he had occupied.
“Pay in advance; eight shillings. I’ll give you the change to-morrow.” Mrs. Inglethorne held out her hand. In the light of the lamp she was even more unprepossessing than Peter had thought.
He gathered from certain evidence that prohibition would find no vigorous supporter in her. She took the money he gave her, and, setting down the lamp, opened a chest and extracted two new sheets. Evidently, thought Peter, as he watched the process of bed making, the burglar lodger was fastidious in the matter of comfort: the sheets were of linen. He discovered later that the pillows were of down, and that the bed itself was a luxurious article purchased at great cost in Tottenham Court Road.
“He liked everything of the best,” said Mrs. Inglethorne, pausing in her labours to extol the absent tenant.
She went out soon after, leaving behind her a faint odour of spirituous liquor. He undressed slowly by the light of the lamp, preparing for the first good night’s sleep he had had in a week.
The bed was soft, too soft. Although he was desperately tired, he tossed from side to side in a vain endeavour to sleep. It must have been two hours before he dozed, and then he woke.
It was a shrill, thin cry that woke him, and he sat up in bed, listening. It came again, from somewhere downstairs. It was a cat, he thought; no human voice was capable of such an attenuation of sound.
Again the cry! He got out of bed, walked to the door, opened it, and bent his head, listening. And then the hair of his head rose. It was a child’s sobs he heard, and then a voice:
“I want my daddy! I want my daddy!”
He heard Mrs. Inglethorne’s growling voice, as if she had been wakened from sleep.
“Shut up, blast you! If I get up to you I’ll break your neck!”
And then the voices ceased, and Peter went back to bed. But it was not until the sound of closing doors in the street told him that the early workers were abroad, that he fell into a troubled sleep, disturbed by dreams of a child who cried and moaned all the time: “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!”
CHAPTER V.
A DEAD MAN
Leslie received a letter on the following afternoon, when she came back from her office.
104 Severall Street, Lambeth.
Dear Miss Maughan: I have lodgings at the above address, and in spite of the neighbourhood they are very comfortable, though my landlady is certainly the most unprepossessing female. There are six children in the house, ranging from a few months to a little girl of eight years. So, whatever are her faults, Mrs. Inglethorne—who drinks gin and has the fiery face of a Betsey Prig—has served her country most prolifically! I am buying some new clothes and hope to report, in a few days, that I am riding upward on a tide of prosperity.
What Mr. Coldwell called “The Dawlish Case,” but which she thought about under quite another title, was completely occupying the girl’s mind. It was her first big case in the sense that never before had the wheels of investigation moved of her own volition.
There had been more spectacular events with which she had been associated. She had helped Coldwell in the Kent Tunnel murder; it was her quick mind which had first grasped the fact that the principal informant of the police knew too much about the tragedy for one who had not participated in the crime. She it was who, searching the contents of a prisoner’s pocket, had found the stain of indelible ink upon a silver coin, and had built upon that slender clue the theory which led to the arrest of the Flack Gang, and the capture of the plant with which they had been flooding Europe with forged one-thousand-franc notes.
She brought to police work the keenest of woman’s wits and a queer instinct for ultimate causes that sometimes amazed and sometimes amused headquarters.
And now she was building up a new fabric, but, as she realized, on the shakiest of foundations—a little book of verse found in a Cumberland cottage.
She took it down from her shelf, a thin volume of Elizabeth Browning’s poems. On the flyleaf was an inscription and eight lines of writing in a neat hand. A stanza of free verse, and not especially good free verse. She read it for the fiftieth time:
Do you recall
One dusky night in June
Over by Harrlow Copse,
Heart of my heart?
Ecstasy lay on your lips,
Nectar of gods was your gift—
All in “the kiss of one girl”
Joy and despair.
The writer was no poet. Even as a writer of vers libre his effort left something to be desired.
She put away the book, returned to her desk, and sat for half an hour, her chin in her hands, her eyes fixed vacantly on the opposite wall. For the moment Peter Dawlish was off her hands, and though he came back again and again to her thoughts, it was not in the rôle of a responsibility.
She took from a drawer the tin of cigarettes she had offered him on the previous night, and examined it absently. She had searched London for this brand of Egyptian cigarettes, and in the end had found them in the last place in the world she expected—Scotland Yard. The chief commissioner, an old Egyptian officer, imported them for his own use.
She closed the lid, found an envelope, and addressing it to “Peter Dawlish, Esq., 104 Severall Street, London,” she inclosed the cigarettes. It was nearly dark when Lucretia brought in her tea.
“You’re not going out again to-night, miss, are you?” When Leslie replied in the affirmative: “What about taking me with you, Miss Leslie?”
Leslie did not laugh.
“Somehow I can’t see you in the setting of a night club, Lucretia,” she said.
“I could stay outside,” insisted Lucretia stoutly. “Anyway, I’d never dream of going into a night club after what the papers say about ’em. I saw a party getting out of a car the other night—ladies! Why, miss, I could have carried all their dresses in a little bag! Disgraceful, I call it!”
Leslie laughed quietly.
“You’ve got to understand, Lucretia,” she said, “that no woman is properly dressed for dinner unless she feels comfortably nude. Don’t faint!”
“Women are not what they was,” said Lucretia severely.
“That’s the devil of it, Lucretia. They are!” said Leslie.
She had only half made up her mind as to the course she should pursue. Mr. Coldwell often twitted her about her luck, but her “luck” was largely a matter of abnormal instinct, and it was in her bones that there was tragedy in the air. Suppose she saw Lady Raytham again, and this time spoke not in parables, but in plain English? It required no particular effort on Leslie’s part, for her moral equipment was free from the faintest tinge of cowardice. She had inquired that morning as to whether Lady Raytham had carried her threat into execution and had written to the chief commissioner, but apparently her ladyship had reconsidered her decision. Had Peter Dawlish told her of the attack which had been made upon him, and which had so surprisingly led him to Mrs. Inglethorne, she would have called at Berkeley Square before then. But Peter had been silent on the subject, and Leslie did not know till the next day of that surprising outrage.
She went to her bedroom and changed her dress; she was dining that night with Mr. Coldwell at the Ambassadors, which is sometimes called a night club by the uninitiated, but is in reality the centre of London’s smart life. Over her flimsy gown, which Lucretia never saw without closing her eyes in mental anguish, she put on her heavy fur coat, slipped a pair of rubbers over her shoes, and sent Lucretia down for a taxi. At a quarter past seven she was pressing the visitors’ bell at No. 377 Berkeley Square. The door was opened almost instantly by a footman.
“Have you an appointment with her ladyship?” he asked, as he closed the door upon her.
“No, she hasn’t an appointment with her ladyship.”
Leslie turned in amazement at the sound of a loud, raucous voice. It was Druze, who had come into the hall from a door beneath the stairs. The white face was red and blotchy; his hair untidy; there was a stain on his white shirt front, and when he walked toward her his step was unsteady. He was, in point of fact, rather drunk, and Mr. Druze drunk was an exceedingly different person from Mr. Druze sober.
The whole character of the man seemed to have changed. From being a shrinking, rather fearful servitor, he had become a blustering, loud-mouthed bully of a man.
“You can get out. Go on! We don’t want you!”
He advanced toward her threateningly, but the girl did not move. The second footman had withdrawn to a respectful distance and was looking with frowning amusement at the antics of his chief.