The girl from Scotland Yard
Leslie inclined her head slightly. What she had to say could not be
told before this big, steely-eyed woman who stood with her back to the
fire, the inevitable cigarette between her lips, the shining eyeglass
fixed upon the visitor.
“I wanted to see you alone if I could, Lady Raytham.”
Jane Raytham shook her head.
“There is nothing you can tell me that I should not wish Princess
Bellini to hear,” she said.
Without turning her head, Anita flicked her cigarette ash into the
fireplace.
“Perhaps Miss Maughan doesn’t wish to speak before a witness,” she
said, in her hard, deep voice. “If I were Lady Raytham I should have
reported you last night to your superiors and had you kicked out of
Scotland Yard!”
Leslie smiled faintly.
“If you were Lady Raytham, there are so many things you would do,
Princess,” she said, “and there would be so many things that it would
be quite unnecessary for you to do!”
Anita’s eyes did not waver.
“Such as----” she suggested.
If she expected to frighten the younger woman she must have been
disappointed. Leslie’s lips were curved in a fixed smile.
“We have now come to the point,” she said good-humouredly, “where I
should not like to speak before witnesses, either--though some day I
may speak before more witnesses than you can crowd into a room twice
this size; as many, Princess, as can squeeze themselves into Court No.
1 at the Old Bailey.”
She said this without raising her voice, and now for the first time
Anita Bellini gave the slightest hint of her emotion. The eyeglass
dropped and was caught deftly and replaced with too-elaborate care.
The strong mouth drooped a little, but recovered at once.
“That sounds almost like a threat to me,” she said harshly. “Young
lady, I think you’re going to lose a job.”
Quick as a flash came the answer:
“Before I lose my job, Princess, you will lose a very profitable
source of income.”
She did not wait for the answer, but turned to Lady Raytham.
“Will you see me alone, Lady Raytham?”
Jane Raytham’s voice shook a little; she was a very bewildered woman.
“I brought you here to apologize to you for Druze,” she said
breathlessly, “and you have made use of the opportunity to insult my
friend--a lady who----”
Her voice grew husky and she stopped as though she could not
articulate further.
There was nothing more to be gained here, unless she was prepared to
blurt her questions before the very woman who she was anxious should
remain in ignorance of the information which had come to her. Leslie
had unfastened her coat in coming upstairs; behind her brown fur Lady
Raytham saw the silk-clad figure in mauve. Princess Anita Bellini
smiled. She had a flair for Paris models.
“They pay you well in the police, my young friend,” she said bluntly.
“Who is the lucky gentleman who pays for your clothes?”
“My lawyer until I am twenty-five,” said Leslie.
“Fortunate lawyer! Who is he?”
Leslie smiled.
“You ought to know him. He acted for you in your bankruptcy.”
And with that parting shot she went out of the room, knowing she was a
cat, but realizing that a cat was entitled to what pleasure she might
find in getting under the skin of a tigress.
Half an hour later, Mr. Coldwell unfolded his serviette and shook his
head soberly.
“You _are_ a cat, too! But you’re a clever little cat; and when,
Tabitha, did you discover that her highness was a bankrupt? I confess
that is news to me.”
The girl laughed ruefully.
“I read gazettes,” she said. “It is depraved in me, but I find them
more interesting than the best sex novel that any school girl has ever
written! The bankruptcy was arranged ten years ago in the quietest
way. The princess took up her residence in a small country town before
she filed her petition, and it is easy to keep these country
proceedings out of the London papers. On this occasion she described
herself as Mrs. Bellini. There is no law compelling you to use a
foreign title.”
“Pussy cat, pussy cat,” murmured Mr. Coldwell. “And did she annihilate
you?”
“She was slightly withering,” said Leslie carelessly. “But Druze
dropped! I’m awfully worried about that.”
“I don’t see why you should be,” said Coldwell, and beckoned a waiter.
When the man had taken the order:
“Do you know, you’re almost persuading me that there is something big
behind this Dawlish mystery? I don’t mean the discovery, which is very
unlikely to be made, that Druze was the forger after all.”
A tall woman had come into the restaurant and was glaring round
through the thick lenses of her horn-rimmed spectacles. She was very
straight and spare, her head covered with a mop of white hair, which
lent her an almost comical air of ferocity. She nodded curtly to the
inspector and went to meet the gesticulating maître d’hôtel.
“That is mamma,” said Coldwell.
“Mamma? Whose mamma?”
“Your interesting convict’s.”
“Margaret Dawlish?” Leslie opened her eyes in astonishment. “This is
the last place I should have expected to see her.”
“She dines here every night,” said Coldwell. “I have a good idea why.”
Leslie looked at Peter’s mother again; the square jaw, the thin lips,
the deep eyes, all fulfilled the mental picture she had made of her.
“If you weren’t here, do you know what I should do?” she asked at
last.
“Whatever it is, don’t!” said Coldwell apprehensively.
His relationship with Leslie was a curious one. In the old days of
Commissioner Maughan he had been the colonel’s chief assistant; though
he was only a sergeant in those days, he was admitted very largely to
the confidence of that genius of Scotland Yard; spent long week-ends
at Sutton Cawley, and had assumed a sort of guardianship toward
Colonel Maughan’s motherless child. There never was a time within
Leslie’s recollection that Josiah Coldwell had not figured largely in
her life. He was one of her father’s executors, the best trusted of
all his friends, and it was only natural, when she conceived the idea
of adopting police work as a profession, that he should be her
sponsor.
It was not until a very long time after she had put the suggestion to
him that he agreed. At first he had pooh-poohed, then he had grown
solemn, and then mournful; but in the end she had had her way.
“If you don’t put me there, Uncle Josiah, I shall go into training as
a private detective!”
It only needed this threat to force his capitulation, for private
detectives were contemptible figures in the eyes of this regular
policeman. For him it was a matter of pride that she had succeeded.
To-day, if the truth be told, if she had expressed the slightest hint
of weariness and a desire to return to the obscurity of what is termed
“civilian life,” he would have been thrust in the deeps of gloom.
He did not tell her this in the course of the dinner. She had guessed
it easily enough long before, but he did venture to return to a matter
which rather worried him. As the band struck up a dance tune and she
rose invitingly, he groaned and came to his feet.
“I’ll be awfully glad, Leslie, when you find a young man to dance
these infernal jazzes with you. How can you expect the high-class
crooks of London to have any respect for a man who dances in public?”
He was over sixty, yet, in truth, no better dancer took the floor that
night. But it pleased him to talk of his decrepitude.
“I’m not made right,” said Leslie, as he guided her through the
dancers who crowded the floor. “Young men have no appeal for me
whatever.”
Mr. Coldwell peered down at her.
“Are you going to be one of those love-is-not-for-me girls?” he asked
gloomily. “Somehow I can’t imagine you running a garage of toy poms.”
Leslie’s eyes roved around the room, and presently they rested upon
Margaret Dawlish; hard-faced, inflexible, the type of Roman mother who
could never forgive the humiliation that Peter had brought upon her.
How queer was the average man’s conception of the average woman! The
conventional mother, soft, yielding, ready to endure all and forgive
all for the sake of her children, was no figment of imagination, but
the throw-outs were innumerable. Leslie started to count all the
instances she knew, and grew tired of the exercise. She had witnessed,
incredible though it might seem, a mother dancing on this very floor
while her child was dying in a nursing home a few streets away.
She knew mothers who could not speak of their daughters without
growing incoherent with rage. And this was the fourth instance of a
mother who could sweep her only son out of memory, out of existence,
for some offence he had committed, not against her, but against
society. Margaret Dawlish sat alone at a little table, very upright,
very forbidding, and when the maître d’hôtel, in the manner of his
kind, approached her with a smile, she dismissed him with a few words,
and, raising her lorgnette, made an inspection of the dancers.
“That woman is granite,” said Leslie, as the band stopped and they
walked back to their table.
“Which? You mean Mrs. Dawlish? Yes. I rather think she is on the hard
side. That sort of thing meant a lot to her. She hates this company
and this place, but for five years, ever since her son was sent to
prison, she has made a point of dining here.”
Leslie nodded.
“A gesture of defiance! Gosh! These respectable people! They dare not
leave a room for fear somebody talks behind their backs!”
It was toward eleven o’clock, and Coldwell had summoned the waiter to
pay his bill, when a footman came from the vestibule and, bending
over, whispered something to him.
“A phone message; I expect it’s from the Embankment,” he said. “Excuse
me, Leslie.”
He threaded a way through the dancers on the floor, and was gone ten
minutes. When he came back, she saw his white eyebrows were met in a
frown.
“The Kingston police think they’ve got a line to those infernal
motor-car bandits,” he said.
He referred to a gang which was occupying the public attention at that
time--three men who, in hired or stolen motor cars, had been
travelling through Surrey, holding up isolated residences at the point
of a pistol, and getting away with as much portable property as they
could lay their hands upon.
“I’ll see you home,” he said as he paid the bill, “and then I’ll
toddle down to Kingston. I wish to heaven the Kingston police would
make their discoveries at a reasonable hour.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’m not a bit sleepy, and it’s a braw
bricht moonlicht nicht!”
He looked at her dubiously.
“I don’t know that you’re dressed for a motor-car journey, but if you
wish you can come along. I have phoned for the police car; it will be
here in a few minutes.”
She went out into the lobby to put on the woollen spencer she had
brought in preparation for a cold journey home, and over that her
coat. It was true that she never felt less like sleep; in a sense, she
was at a loose end, and the prospect of doing a little work before she
went to bed was a pleasing one, though in all probability she would
play no other part than that of spectator and audience.
The trip promised to be the more interesting, because she had, that
day, been tracing the previous convictions of three men who were
suspected of being the motor bandits--and very commonplace individuals
they were. That had been the most shocking discovery she made when she
came to Scotland Yard--the commonplaceness, indeed the insignificance,
of what it described as the criminal class. Out-of-work plumbers,
labourers, carters, and clerks, with a painter here and there, formed
the bulk of them. The women only had an individuality. There was no
habitual woman criminal quite untouched by romance; their stories were
altogether different, their lives more varied, and, if the truth be
told, their enterprise and inventive qualities more fascinating.