The girl from Scotland Yard
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.
“Do you hear what I say? Clear out! We don’t want any spying police
girls round here.”
It looked as though he would use physical force to eject her, but his
hand had hardly been raised when she said something in a low
voice--one word. The big white hand went down; the blotchy red went
out of his face, and he blinked at her like a man who was trying to
swallow something that would not be swallowed. And then, looking up,
she saw a resplendent figure at the head of the stairs. It was Lady
Raytham.
“Come up, please.”
The voice was hard and metallic. There was neither cordiality nor
welcome in it, nor did Leslie expect any such demonstration. She
mounted the stairs, but before she could reach the landing Lady
Raytham had turned and preceded her into the drawing room. As she went
in, she saw that her unwilling hostess was not alone. Before the fire
stood a figure which was not wholly unfamiliar--a square, tall,
Eton-cropped figure with a monocle, which fixed her with a keen and
penetrating glance.
The contrast between the two women was startling. Lady Raytham had
never looked more lovely, more fragile, Leslie thought, than she did
at that moment. She also was going out to dinner, and she wore a dress
of old gold, and about her neck a magnificent chain of emeralds that
terminated in a square emerald pendant which must have been worth a
fortune. Anita Bellini was in scarlet, a hard, shrieking scarlet that
no other woman could have worn. And yet, for some remarkable reason,
it suited her. The _godet_ was of silver lace, decorated by big green
and red stones and the thick jade bracelets and ruby necklet gave her
an air of barbaric splendour.
“I am sorry you came, Miss Maughan; it is doubly unfortunate. If Druze
had been normal, I should have sent you away without seeing you. As it
is, I feel that at least an apology is due to you for the disgraceful
condition of my servant.”