“Here, Phippy, Phippy! Hold on a moment.” Robin caught the old woman by the shoulder and shook her gently, so that she stopped talking and looked at him in mild surprise. “Who’s been here?” he inquired.
“A woman,” said Mrs. Phipps, adding reluctantly, “I suppose she’s a lady, really.”
“Who was she? What did she want? When did she go?”
“She hasn’t gone,” said Mrs. Phipps, her indignation boiling over again. “She’s in your sitting room now, and nothing I could say would move her, the—the—the person!”
Robin swept the old lady aside good-naturedly and hurried into his study in some trepidation.
A tall figure in a soft flowing fur coat rose up from his deep easy chair. He stared at her in complete astonishment, for as the light fell upon her face he found himself looking into the dark, curiously appealing eyes of Madame Julie.
Robin stared at the woman who had appeared so astonishingly before him, and she came forward, her hand outstretched.
“I had to see you. I hope you don’t mind.”
Her voice was low and soft, but there was intensity in its tone, and he realized that she was labouring beneath some suppressed excitement.
“Not at all,” he said wonderingly. “Not at all. Won’t you sit down?”
She seemed not to have heard the conventional phrase, for she stretched out her hand and laid it on his arm.
“Mr. Grey,” she said, “I want you to be frank with me. I want you to forget that I am comparatively a stranger, that I am a woman, and that I have come to see you at what I am afraid is a very unconventional hour. I have come for your sake as much as my own. Tell me, are you in love with Jennifer Fern? Do you really love her?”
Robin looked at her helplessly. Her nervous manner and her extraordinary interest in what, after all, must be his own private affair naturally suggested an advanced case of chronic hysteria.
She seemed to read the thought in his face.
“This must seem very odd to you,” she went on in an attempt at calmness. “But I tell you you must forgive me. You must be patient. Tell me, do you really love this girl?”
Something in her voice and in the passionate sincerity in the dark eyes convinced Robin that she was in earnest, that she was sane, and that she had some deep reason for her apparently extraordinary behaviour.
“Yes,” he said truthfully. “Yes, I love Jennifer.”
It was the first time that he had uttered the words aloud, and in spite of the tenseness of the moment their truth came home to him with a little shock of something very like dismay.
The woman seemed relieved.
“I believe you,” she said. “I saw it in your eyes when you were talking to her this evening. Now you must trust me a little further. You two young people are in serious danger.”
She swept aside his incredulous exclamation with an impatient gesture.
“I have come here at great risk,” she said simply. “It is not likely that I should do this unless I had some very good reason. I am not a fool. Nor am I,” she went on, the ghost of a smile flickering across her pale, still beautiful face, “the hysteric you seem to think, young man. Now, I have a way out for you both.”
She opened her jewelled vanity case and produced two official-looking green-backed booklets, which she laid upon the table between them.
“These,” she went on, tapping them with a slender finger, “are two reservations on the Orient liner Orestes which leaves Tilbury for Sydney on the morning tide. You have just time. If that girl loves you as you love her, and as I believe she does, you will have no difficulty in persuading her to come away with you.”
For once in his life Robin was bewildered. Here was a person who every instinct told him was a shrewd, capable being in full possession of her senses deliberately persuading him to take a ridiculous and incomprehensible course.
But the woman was still talking, the words breaking from her lips in a stream of passionate pleading.
“Many people have eloped before. It may even appeal to her; there is a spice of romance in it. As soon as you are out of port, the captain can marry you on the high seas. Not a soul will know until it is done. Not a soul will be able to stop you. You will have the long voyage to Sydney and back again if you wish. By that time the danger will be past. It is your last chance. Will you take it?”
Robin picked up the documents from the table. A glance told him that they were indeed reservations for the Orestes and represented a very considerable amount of money spent.
Meanwhile the woman was watching him with big, terror-stricken eyes.
Robin sat down, motioning his visitor to a chair opposite.
“Don’t you think you’d better explain a little more fully, Madame?” he said.
She still ignored his offer of a chair, and instead bent forward across the table, her pale face suffused with eagerness.
“Take this warning seriously, please,” she said pleadingly. “I can’t tell you any more. I can only repeat that you are in danger. I can only implore you to take this way out while there is still time.”
Robin’s ingenuous boyish face became troubled.
“My dear lady,” he said, “how can I? The whole thing’s preposterous.”
“Not if you love her,” she insisted, “and she loves you. What does it matter when you get married—tomorrow or in a year’s time? Or where?—in a society church or on an ocean-going liner?”
Robin lowered his eyes before the woman’s penetrating stare. The question she raised brought home to him the hopelessness of his situation with regard to Jennifer.
He pulled himself together and rose stiffly, his embarrassment lending his manner more coldness than it might otherwise have possessed.
“You’ve come to me with an impossible story, Madame,” he said, “and an equally impossible request. While I do not insult you by suggesting that you are forcing yourself into an affair which is hardly any concern of yours, I must point out that my marriage is my own business, and at the moment I do not want to discuss it.”
He heard her catch her breath, and, turning, saw to his astonishment that her eyes were full of tears. She winked them back instantly, however, and drew herself up, a curiously imperious gesture which lent her height an impressiveness.
“You want proof?”
The words were uttered very softly, but there was something in the inflection of her voice which sent a little thrill down his spine.
“Very well. I tell you you are in danger—you particularly. Her turn has not come yet. Since you don’t believe me, I should examine your rooms very carefully before you go to sleep tonight. Something tells me, Mr. Grey, that if you neglect this warning, nothing very much will matter to you by this time tomorrow.”
She was still speaking softly, almost lightly, but he could feel the underlying sincerity, the underlying menace almost, in every word.
He looked at her inscrutable face for a moment and then glanced sharply round the room. His quick, well-trained eye and orderly memory told him that nothing was out of place. Mrs. Phipps had conservative ideas both in regard to furniture and tidiness, and he could tell at a glance, after some years of her ministrations, if anyone other than she had been tampering with his things.
Madame Julie stood watching him, her lips smiling, her eyes wide, and with that hint of fear and pleading in their depths.
He turned into his bedroom, which led out of the other room.
Here everything was as usual. The bed had been turned down, he recognized, by Mrs. Phipps’s careful hand.
He went on to the bathroom, a tiny white-tiled affair of a pattern which his good landlady had caused to be installed in every suite.
Robin’s detective-trained mind went to work methodically. In all cases where a trap has been laid for a victim it is usually found that the intelligent criminal anticipates the normal actions of his prey so that death may come swiftly and completely unexpectedly. Robin considered his own habits upon going to bed.
<
br /> He would take off his things by the big wardrobe, hang up his suit, change into pyjamas, come into the bathroom to wash.
He examined the basin carefully. His soap and sponge were where Mrs. Phipps always left them. His shaving brush he was certain had not been touched, since he had cleaned it himself that morning.
He picked up his toothbrush, peered at it under the electric light, and finally sniffed it dubiously.
He turned back and replaced it in its stand. As he did so he caught sight of his tube of toothpaste lying on the glass shelf beneath the shaving mirror.
Instantly his heart leapt uncomfortably and he stood staring at it. It lay on the wrong end of the shelf. Mrs. Phipps had set out his belongings in exactly the same order night after night for years, and she invariably put the toothpaste next to the shaving cream on the right. He had often remarked that he could have dressed himself quite well in the dark, so exact were these tiny arrangements.
He picked up the tube and turned it over. It was the brand he usually used, but he had an impression in the back of his mind that this was considerably fuller than the tube of the morning.
Holding the thing well away from him, he unscrewed the cap and squeezed out a little of its contents into a soap dish. The familiar ribbon of pink cream greeted his eyes, and he was inclined to laugh at himself for over-caution, when something inconsistent about the compound caught his attention.
He picked up the tube and sniffed it. The next moment the colour drained out of his face and he dropped the thing into the washbasin involuntarily.
Even the strong peppermint flavour of the paste had been unable to disguise the pungent, sinister scent of bitter almonds which even in that brief moment had set his nostrils tingling and dried the back of his throat.
Cyanide.
Cyanide, that most swift, most horrible of all the poisons, a touch of which on the tongue means almost instantaneous death.
“Of course it is traceable.” The thought ran through Robin’s mind immediately. Whoever had placed this death trap for him was taking a big risk.
The diabolical ingenuity of the scheme shocked him. The infrequency with which cyanide is used as a poison, save with suicides, is due principally to its well-known symptoms which make it most obvious to trace, and secondarily to this characteristic and powerful odour which warns any intended victim if it is placed in food.
There are few things that the average person puts straight into his mouth without hesitation. One of these is toothpaste. The metal cap on the tube prevented the smell of bitter almonds suffusing the room, yet Robin shuddered when he realized how easily he might have squeezed some of the infamous mixture onto his brush and used it unthinkingly.
He picked up the tube gingerly, replaced the cap, and, setting it down upon the soap dish, carried them carefully into his bedroom and locked them in the little wall safe above his bed.
He returned to the bathroom and washed his hands before he hurried back to the sitting room to interview his strange guest, who had turned out so astonishingly to be a deliverer. There were many thoughts in his mind, many questions on his lips.
As he turned into the room, however, a sense of frustration seized him. It was empty, and the door to the staircase stood ajar.
He went out into the hall. The whole house was dark and silent. The other lodgers had early habits, and Mrs. Phipps herself had retired.
He went downstairs cautiously, but although he searched the house no trace remained of his mysterious visitor save the soft fragrance of the perfume she used.
He came slowly back to his room, his forehead knotted, his eyes dark and troubled.
Lying on the table were the two reservations. He turned them over idly.
A strange woman, with a strange, all-impelling motive, he reflected.
He could not understand her behaviour. Her talk of an elopement, marriage on the high seas—it was all strange and incomprehensible. And then her dramatic warning, which had proved to be only too justified ...
He passed his hand through his fair hair.
Then he sighed, and a faint, rueful smile passed over his face as he threw the reservations down upon the table again. There was something about the romantic picture which Madame Julie had painted which had been very tantalizing.
“If she loves you ...” she had said. Robin shook his head sadly. That was not to be hoped for, he decided.
CHAPTER 7
Sinister Coincidence
“OH, MR. ROBIN, how you startled me—sitting up in bed like that! You don’t look as though you’ve slept a wink.”
Mrs. Phipps set the cup of tea she carried on the little table at the side of Robin’s bed and bustled round the room, pulling back the curtains and throwing the windows wide.
Robin sat hunched up in bed, his knees drawn up to his chin and his arms clasping his ankles. He looked tired, certainly, and there were lines of anxiety round his eyes. He had spent a wakeful night pondering over the peculiarities of the astonishing situation in which he found himself.
As a rule he was able to keep one side of his mind for his cases; never before had anything touched him quite so nearly. The personal element kept intruding itself into his thoughts, and he found it very difficult to think of Jennifer in any detached or disinterested manner.
Mrs. Phipps planted herself at the end of the bed and surveyed him with shrewd, motherly eyes.
As he caught sight of her inquisitive little face peering at him like some quizzical sparrow, he jerked his mind out of its train of thought, which largely concerned the most beautiful girl in the world, and returned to the business in hand.
“Phippy,” he said, “did anyone else come up here last night—before I came in?”
Mrs. Phipps looked surprised. “Anyone else besides that—that——”
“Lady,” suggested Robin.
“Lady,” agreed Mrs. Phipps grudgingly. “That lady who was waiting here when you came back? Anyone besides her? Well, what a funny thing you should ask that! As I was dressing this morning I said to myself, ‘There! I never told him about that poor old body.’ I was so taken aback by that—that lady’s impudence in coming so late, that everything else went clean out of my head. It wasn’t even as if she was a relation, yet she came up here as bold as brass. That’s what we used to call ‘fast’ when I was a girl.”
Robin knew Mrs. Phipps too well to attempt to stop her before she was forced to take breath. At the first opportunity, however, he cut in.
“Who are you talking about?” he inquired.
“Why, the lady,” said Mrs. Phipps. “The second lady.”
Robin started.
“Oh. So there were two ladies who came up here last night?”
“Well, yes, I’m telling you.” Mrs. Phipps looked pink and irritated. “The first one, poor dear old body, said she’d come up all the way from Somerset to see her son who’s in hospital, and she called in on you because she hadn’t seen you since you were a little boy. She waited until she’d have missed her last train if she hadn’t gone. She looked so tired, but I made her a cup of tea and let her sit up here and drink it. I’d have told you first thing, but that other person coming put it clean out of my mind. Oh, that—that other one did annoy me!”
Robin restrained an impulse to get out of bed and shake a little coherence into the garrulous housekeeper.
“Now, Phippy,” he said slowly, his voice having just that quality of sternness which made her realize that he was very much in earnest, “how much can you remember about this first visitor of mine? Did she give her name?”
“Of course she did! Would I have let her in if she hadn’t? She said you’d recognize her name at once. Why, Mr. Robin, it was your old nurse, Mrs. Hester Branch, from Somerset.”
She was looking at him with interest to catch the gleam of recognition which she felt sure would come into his face.
Robin’s eyes remained grave, however.
“Oh, yes,” he said noncommittally. He knew that it would hardl
y add to the speed of Mrs. Phipps’s revelations if he volunteered the information that he had never had a nurse in his life. “How old was she?”
“Oh, getting along,” said Mrs. Phipps complacently. “Between sixty-five and seventy. But wonderfully upright and strong-looking. She said her ears were still good, but she suffers with bronchial trouble which makes her very hoarse. She looked so tired, poor thing, and so grateful for the cup of tea.”
Robin laughed, a short bitter explosion which made the old lady look at him in amazement.
“Phippy, you really are a darling,” he said.
Mrs. Phipps positively blushed.
“Oh, Mr. Robin, go along with you!”
“I suppose you left her in my sitting room while you made the tea?”
“Yes, I did. There was a nice fire there, and I thought if she couldn’t see you she’d be happy resting in your place.”
Robin leant forward.
“Phippy,” he said, “you’re perfectly sure it was a woman?”
“Well, Mr. Robin!” Mrs. Phipps’s mouth fell open as for the first time a faint inkling of the truth presented itself to her mind. She turned pale and clutched the bedrail with nervous, bony fingers. “Oh, Mr. Robin!” she repeated. “You don’t mean to say that you don’t know anybody of that name? Oh dear, oh dear, and I left her alone amongst all your things! I never imagined anyone could be so deceitful! Tell me,” she went on anxiously, “nothing’s been taken, has it?”
Robin shook his head. “No,” he said slowly. “No, Phippy, nothing’s been taken.”
“Thank Heaven for that,” said Mrs. Phipps piously.
Robin regarded her with affectionate dismay.
“In future,” he said, “never show anyone in here unless you know them. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Mrs. Phipps was conscience-stricken. “Oh, the wicked old thing!” she went on with sudden indignation. “The wicked old thing! Sitting there sipping my tea. I expect that’s what she came for—just to get warm. It’s very sad in a way, but very wrong.”
The Man of Dangerous Secrets Page 6
