The girl from Scotland Yard
“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