The girl from Scotland Yard
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.”