The inspector’s news was disturbing, however, and Robin pressed for details.
Whybrow laughed. “There was a doctor in the house, and I had an impression it was something to do with the girl. But there’s been no accident, and I may very well be completely wrong. After all, the fellow may have been attending Sir Henry. If ever a man needed a nerve specialist, I’ve been talking to him this afternoon. Well, I’m disturbing you. I’ll go up to my own office. Look in on me before you go.”
He bustled off, leaving Robin fighting with the desire to phone the Regent’s Park mansion for news of Jennifer in spite of the rebuff which he had received only a few hours before.
Prudence told him to wait, however, and urged him to concentrate on the clue which Caithby Fisher had put into his hands.
He set to work again feverishly, and half an hour later sat back in his chair, regarding three pencilled names on a slip of memorandum paper.
“Knowles & Kirby, Lincoln’s Inn. Faber & Washington, Cursitor Street. Rolls & Knighton, Quality Passage.”
They were all solicitors with whom Morton Blount had at some time had private dealings. Yes, it must be one of the three.
He was eyeing the notes, debating on his next move, when the telephone on the desk in front of him began to ring and he lifted off the receiver mechanically.
“Is that you, Mr. Grey?”
He recognized the voice of the man on the switchboard downstairs.
“I’ve had some difficulty in tracing you. I wasn’t sure whether you were in the building at all. It’s a private call for you. Shall I put it through?”
“What name?” A ridiculous hope shot through his mind that it might be the girl herself.
“A Mr. Rex Bourbon, sir. He said you probably wouldn’t remember the name, but it seems most urgent.”
Robin did remember the name, however. He remembered the face too, remembered the sallow complexion, the twitching nervous hands of the man who had been present at Sir Ferdinand Shawle’s dinner party.
“Yes. I’ll speak to him.”
Immediately came another voice.
“Is that Mr. Grey?”
The tone was nervous, the words almost inarticulate.
“I don’t suppose you remember me. My name’s Rex Bourbon. We met at Sir Ferdinand Shawle’s. I’ve rung you because you’re the only man I’ve met at the Yard, and it’s most imperative that something be done at once. I implore you to come at once—come yourself.”
Robin pulled a scribbling pad towards him. He had had some experience of dealing with hysterical people who wanted immediate attention, but there was something in this broken voice, with its nervous, high-pitched timbre, which told him that he was dealing with someone in genuine trouble.
“Wait a minute,” he said soothingly. “Of course I remember you very well. Is there anything I can do?”
“Yes. Come at once. I’ve told you. Listen, can you hear me? I must speak softly. Do you understand? I’m not sure I’m here alone. The office is closed, but the street door downstairs is ajar. You must come at once. I have something of vital importance to tell you. If you don’t come instantly it may be too late.”
The last sentence ended in a gasp, and Robin made up his mind.
“I’ll come,” he said. “Wait a moment, though. You haven’t told me where you are. What’s the address?”
“Thirteen, Wych Street. Ash, Henderson & Fern, Limited. You know—Sir Henry Fern’s office—Jennifer Fern’s father. Come at once.”
There was a click and all was silent.
Robin moved the telephone hook up and down eagerly, but there was no response. Thoughtfully he hung up the receiver, and then, slipping the memoranda of the legal firms into his pocket, he reached for his hat and hurried downstairs into the street.
At that hour the streets of the city were all but deserted, and when Robin reached the outside of the imposing building in Wych Street which housed Sir Henry’s firm, its dark façade did not look at all inviting. The steady yellow glow of the street lamps showed the windows to be dark, and there seemed to be not even a watchman on the premises.
Robin was perfectly aware that he might be walking into a trap, but, since the office was Sir Henry’s and Rex Bourbon’s message had struck him as a genuine cry for help, he did not hesitate.
The great door under the ornate porch opened to his touch, and he stepped into a darkened hall, from which a flight of steps rose into the gloom above.
As soon as he entered he was aware of an atmosphere of horror. It descended upon him unexpectedly, and he reproached himself for what he felt was an unnecessary alarm.
Nevertheless he pulled out his torch and hurried up the staircase, the feeling of apprehension growing upon him at every step.
On the first landing all the doors were locked, and he went on to the next floor, the uncanny premonition growing.
The second floor was devoted to the directors’ own offices. Here there were heavy carpets laid, and the doors were ornate affairs of polished mahogany and brass.
The centre door, the one which instinct told him belonged to Sir Henry Fern’s own office, stood open, and he advanced cautiously.
The silence of the great building was deathlike. There was no noise from the traffic below, no creaking, no movement; only silence, thick, oppressive, and somehow terrible.
The room he entered was in darkness save for the faint light from the street lamps below shining in at the uncurtained windows, and Robin paused on the threshold, every nerve strained, every sense alert.
Still there was no sound. He allowed the beam of his torch to sweep round the room.
The next moment a smothered exclamation escaped him, and he stood looking down at the thing which lay face uppermost on the floor.
Now he knew what had caused that strange sense of something wrong which had swept down to him from this silent room the moment he had entered the building.
Rex Bourbon lay sprawled upon the thick Turkey carpet. A glance told Robin that the man was dead. He could see the thick neck, the sallow skin, the ponderous body of the broker, and recognized it instantly.
One hand was doubled beneath the man, and the other lay flung out at an unnatural angle, the fingers clenched.
Robin glanced swiftly round the room. The place seemed to be undisturbed. There was no sign of a struggle.
The boy bent over the body. He was too well trained to disturb it, but he satisfied himself that it was indeed the man who had been speaking to him over the phone less than twenty minutes before, and discovered the small round bullet hole in the dark cloth above the heart and noted the tiny burns which surrounded it.
The shot had been fired at close quarters, then. There was the revolver lying beneath the body. Robin did not touch it. There was work for fingerprint experts, members of the complicated machinery for the detection of crime.
At first sight it was almost certainly a suicide, but Robin had an uncomfortable feeling that in this case first impressions were not going to be reliable.
He turned to the telephone, but before he touched the instrument something caught his attention. The outstretched hand of the corpse lay almost at his feet, and, acting on impulse, he bent down and opened the fast stiffening fingers.
He was rewarded. A small piece of yellowed paper fell out onto the carpet. He picked it up, and a puzzled expression spread over his face.
The scrap of paper was the torn-off top of what appeared to be an old-fashioned playbill of the colonial type. Across the coarse paper were the words “Prescottville Theatre: Lessee and Manager, Eric Waterhouse,” and underneath, “Monday, Dec. 3rd, 1896.”
Robin stood looking at the crumpled scrap in natural astonishment. Then he glanced round the room, half expecting to see the remainder of the bill lying on the floor. But, although he searched, there was no sign of anything of the kind in the neat, well-ordered office.
The more he looked at the scrap of paper the more remarkable and incomprehensible it became. Prescottvill
e he remembered vaguely as a little frontier town on the Canadian-American border, but how a thirty-seven-year-old playbill could come to be lying in the dead hand of a well-known City broker in Sir Henry Fern’s own office was more than he could hope to guess.
But here he stood with a corpse at his feet, and Robin, always a Yard man, became his cool practical self in the emergency and picked up the telephone receiver to summon the police.
He got on to Inspector Whybrow immediately and told his story briefly and concisely.
“Suicide? Where?” He heard the older man’s voice rise in astonishment. “Sir Henry Fern’s own office? Get away! You stay there. We’ll be right down. This is serious. Don’t touch anything till I’ve come.”
Robin replaced the receiver and stood for some moments looking down at the thing which lay so pitifully on the carpet.
Then he pulled himself together and wandered over towards the door. He knew Inspector Whybrow’s methods and did not wish to poach on his preserves.
The atmosphere of the great building got on his nerves, and, suddenly remembering that he had closed the main door behind him when he entered, he went down to open it, deciding to wait for the police in the hall.
As he opened the door, however, and the cool air from the street greeted him, acting on impulse he stepped out and stood looking up and down the deserted road, revelling in the sense of relief which had passed over him on leaving the sinister building.
He walked to the edge of the curb and back, and finally took up his position in the porch to await the police car.
The more he thought of the man upstairs the less inclined he was to believe that it was a case of suicide.
He was so engrossed in his thoughts, so enmeshed in his efforts to solve the fantastic mystery which seemed to weave Sir Henry Fern and his daughter into a closer and more complicated pattern, that he did not notice the slight rustling sound behind him as the door of the building before which he stood, and which so far as he knew contained nothing but the corpse of Rex Bourbon, moved slowly open.
It was not until footsteps sounded on the stone behind him that he swung round just too late to save himself. A blow crashed down upon his skull. He fought to regain consciousness, but it was impossible. The blood surged up behind his eyes, the dull, sickening sensation spread through his brain, and he slumped forward to the ground, senseless.
When he came to himself he was lying on the uppermost bunk of an ambulance. His head was throbbing, and the light in the top of the car beat into his eyes unbearably.
Gradually recollection came back to him. His first thought was that his enemy had left him where he lay and that the police, arriving, had discovered him and called the ambulance.
But that sixth sense, that intuition which had preserved his life on more than one occasion, came to his rescue now.
He began to be aware of danger, imminent and inescapable. Without daring to move, he turned his eyes slightly and took in as much as he could of his surroundings.
He recognized at once that the ambulance was not of the official pattern, but belonged rather to some private nursing home. He could just see the nurse’s head with its enormous white veil as she stood with her back to him looking through the little window into the driver’s cab.
As he watched, she bent forward and he saw her shoulders. Something strange about them attracted his attention, and the next moment she turned her head.
Robin closed his eyes at once, but that single glance had been sufficient.
The figure in nurse’s clothes was a man, powerful and barely disguised save for his unusual costume. In that brief moment Robin had seen something else also. The man’s arms had been crossed upon his chest, and in the right hand something small and gleaming had flickered for an instant.
Robin did not doubt that it was the barrel of a revolver.
So he was being kidnapped. The realization came home to him slowly.
There was a window on his right, and by moving very stealthily he was able to peer out.
He was still in London; he saw that instantly. Moreover, they were in the Strand. He could not trust himself to risk breaking a window and fighting his way free. The fact that the “nurse” held a revolver alone showed that his enemies, whoever they were, meant business.
Moreover, he knew from experience how difficult it is to attract the attention of a London crowd when one is in some ordinary everyday vehicle which people are used to meeting in the streets.
Halfway down the Strand a traffic block threatened to hold them up, and the ambulance swung down into the Adelphi. It was a strange experience to lie there and see the familiar street passing rapidly by, framed like a cinematograph film by the window.
As he approached Mrs. Phipps’s house he edged still further round and peered up at the windows in the wild hope that someone would see and recognize him.
As his eyes swept the windows, to his complete astonishment he caught a glimpse of a white face looking down from between the curtains of his own sitting room.
His first impression was that he was dreaming or that some malignant fate had swept him completely out of his mind. But as he stared, the features burnt themselves into his brain, and he knew that, whatever else in the world might be illusion, this one thing was true.
The face that peered out at him from the window of his own sitting room, high up above the ambulance which bore him, powerless, he knew not where, was the face of the one girl he loved: the face of Jennifer Fern, and across its loveliness, stamped so vividly that the recollection of it remained with him to his dying day, terror, naked and uncomforted.
CHAPTER 11
A Woman Afraid
“WELL, my dear, I don’t know what to say, I really don’t.”
Little Mrs. Phipps, her beaky face a picture of concern, stood looking at the girl who crouched on the window seat in Robin’s study.
The Jennifer Fern who, white and trembling, shrank back among the bright cushions on the leather couch, made a very different picture from the smiling, poised young woman of the morning.
Mrs. Phipps was bewildered. After Robin’s experience of the night before, she had been inclined to refuse the girl admittance when she had come pounding upon the door nearly an hour earlier in the evening, but there was something about Jennifer which had touched her heart, something which told her that here at least was someone whom Robin had no cause to fear.
The girl moistened her dry lips with a feverish tongue.
“But he must come soon!” she said. “Surely he must come soon!”
Mrs. Phipps glanced at the clock.
“He ought to have been in some time ago,” she said. “And he’s not at Scotland Yard, because Inspector Whybrow’s been ringing up every two or three minutes for the past I don’t know how long.”
Mrs. Phipps had salved her conscience by staying at Jennifer’s side throughout her entire visit. “After all,” she reflected, “nothing can happen to Mr. Robin’s flat if I’m in it.”
The girl’s pitiable state worried her motherly heart, however, and she stood looking down now, her bright birdlike eyes unexpectedly tender.
“I expect you must think me very presumptuous, my dear,” she said at last, “but I’ve known Mr. Robin a long time, and I’ve cared for him, as you might say, quite as much as if he was my own son. Just lately I’ve noticed that a change has come over ’im. He’s not at all a one for ladies—not at all. But I have said to my husband, I have said, ‘That boy’s in love,’ and now when I see you, my dear, I can understand it. Isn’t there something I can do? You’re worrying me out of me life sitting there looking so unhappy, so little and frightened. I’ve seen you watch the window, and I’ve seen you start and look up at the least sound on the stairs. What’s the matter? Have you had a quarrel with him? And are you waiting to make it up?”
“Oh, no, no. Nothing like that. I don’t even know if Robin does love me. I wasn’t sure till this morning that I loved him myself.”
The girl’s voic
e was very low, and her eyes looked like dark pits of tragedy in her pale face.
“It’s—it’s much worse than I can tell you. You’re so kind.”
She stretched out her hand.
“You’re such a dear that I want to confide in you. But I don’t know how to begin. I came to find Robin, Mrs. Phipps, because I was in danger, because I was virtually a prisoner in my own home. It’s all happened so swiftly. At first I thought I was dreaming, but gradually the terrible reality began to force itself upon me. I saw there was nothing to be done but to run away. And so I did.”
A shudder shook her slender form, and she turned and peered once more down into the street.
“If only he would come!”
The words were uttered so softly that Mrs. Phipps scarcely heard them. She saw the graceful shoulders tremble, saw the hunted look creep again into the white face.
Outside, the narrow street was deserted, but as the girl watched, the shrill clangour of an ambulance bell rang out above the dull roar of the Strand traffic and a familiar white vehicle rushed past and disappeared down the steep hill.
For some reason which the girl could not fathom, the sight of it sent yet another thrill of apprehension through her heart. She looked back into the room.
Mrs. Phipps made up her mind. “I’m going to make you a cup of tea,” she said. “Mr. Robin told me only this morning that I wasn’t to leave anyone alone in his suite while he was out, but thank goodness I’m not such a fool that I don’t know when to use my own judgment.
“Now look here, my dear, you lie down. You’re safe here and quiet. You have a little sleep. I’ll bring you up a cup of strong tea, and then when Mr. Robin comes you’ll be all right and ready to talk to him.”
She moved over impulsively and dropped a little peck of a kiss upon the girl’s cheek.
“You’re nervous,” she said. “I’ve seen nerves before. You must take care of yourself. You young girls don’t eat enough, anyway. And take my advice”—she wagged a bony forefinger in front of the girl—“don’t get ideas in your head. All this talk about being kept a prisoner! It’s exaggeration. Who’s going to keep you a prisoner? You’re probably not very well, and your folks want you to rest.”
The Man of Dangerous Secrets Page 10
