by Lynn Brock
‘Very well, Thomson,’ he said, observing that the man was watching this proceeding with interest, ‘if an opportunity occurs I shall be delighted to do anything I can to help you. However, I fancy that if you tell Dr Melhuish what you have just told me, he will probably require no further recommendation. Especially if he is in a hurry for a man.’ He nodded pleasantly. ‘Good-afternoon.’
‘Good-afternoon, sir.’
At the door, however, the visitor paused.
‘I don’t know if I ought to mention it, Colonel—but there’s a Mr Frensham who has been making inquiries about you. Perhaps you know him. He was a friend of poor Mr Barrington’s.’
‘I have met Mr Frensham,’ Gore replied curtly. ‘Making inquiries about me? Making them of whom? You?’
‘Yes, sir. He came round to the garage on Saturday morning, while I was doing some vulcanising there. What he said was that he was thinking of making Mrs Barrington an offer for her two-seater, and that he wanted to find out something about it, as I had been keeping it in order for Mr Barrington. But, as a matter of fact, sir, I think he really came to try and pump me for information about you.’
‘Very kind of him, I’m sure,’ smiled Gore. ‘I hope you gave him all you had, Thomson.’
Thomson smiled too, sardonically.
‘I had none to give him, sir. So I concluded there was no harm in letting him have it. However, I thought I’d better mention it to you, sir, as I was here.’
‘Quite. Er … inquiries? What did he want to know?’
‘He asked a lot of questions, sir, until I choked him off and told him I was busier than I looked. He seemed especially anxious to find out whether you were an intimate friend of Mr Arndale’s—and also whether you were an intimate friend of Mrs Barrington’s. I said simply that I knew nothing whatever about you, except that you had just come back from Central Africa.’
‘I see. Right you are, Thomson. I’m afraid I must cut away and change now. I won’t forget about Dr Melhuish.’
‘Thank you, sir. Good-afternoon.’
The second gong went before Gore had succeeded in restoring his chin to something approaching seemliness, and he was still struggling with an unduly starched collar when the page irrupted into his bedroom gleefully to inform him that a gentleman desired to see him.
‘Who is it?’ Gore demanded, and then swore briefly but heartily. The wing of the refractory collar had escaped from the strain of his fingers as he turned towards the boy, and, slipping upwards, had grazed the cut on his chin and set it bleeding again. He rent the defiled collar from about his neck and cast it from him bitterly, as Arndale’s tall figure lurched into view and swept the page from its path.
‘It’s me, Gore,’ he said sullenly and thickly. ‘I want to have a word with you about something. Go on. Go on. I can talk while you’re dressing.’ He dismissed the page with a push and shut the door, and turned to Gore again a face of surly anger. ‘Look here, Gore. There’s just one piece of advice I want to give you, old chap, and that is—mind your own business. That’s what I’ve come here to say to you. Mind your own business. Just that. You understand?’
Gore was not easily shocked; but his visitor’s appearance did shock him severely. It was bad enough that he should be, if not drunk, next door to it—and at that hour. But there was a worse degradation in his face than the mere stupidity of drunkenness; a haggard, weary fear which the blustering truculence of his manner at the moment attempted vainly to conceal. His skin had lost its plump ruddiness and sagged now in muddy unhealthiness with a curious effect of deflation. His bloodshot, shadowed eyes refused to meet Gore’s, and slid away to the knob of the bedstead which, to emphasise his remarks, he prodded with his stick as he spoke.
‘What’s the trouble?’ Gore asked, when he had taken swift stock of his visitor’s pose.
‘The trouble is this. I hear you’ve been making yourself busy about my affairs. Butting in where you’re not wanted. Understand? I hear you’ve been trying to kick up some silly fuss or other about a cheque of mine—threatening people—making an infernal ass of yourself generally. Well … just chuck it, my dear old chap. Understand? I’m quite capable of looking after my own affairs. Understand?’
Gore inspected his chin solicitously in his mirror.
‘Cecil, my lad,’ he said gently, ‘you’re half-screwed, so I won’t throw you out into the corridor, though I should very much like to. If you’ve got anything sensible to say to me, say it, by all manner of means. If not … bung off. I’m just a teeny-tiny bit snappish this evening.’
‘I’ve said all I’ve got to say,’ said Arndale doggedly. ‘Don’t threaten me, Gore. I tell you, I won’t allow anyone to threaten me.’
‘Right, my dear old fellow,’ Gore smiled sweetly. ‘You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble if you don’t, I fancy.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘The most friendly of advice, Cecil.’
‘Well, you can keep your infernal advice to yourself. And your infernal threats, too. Understand?’
Gore’s good-humour was not, as a rule, easily disturbed. But the events of the afternoon had ruffled his normal serenity of mood a good deal; his chin refused persistently to stop bleeding; and Arndale’s manner was deliberately provocative. He realised at that point that the very briefest prolongation of the conversation in the strain in which it had so far proceeded would almost certainly terminate regrettably, and resolved to terminate it there and then. He reached the door in a stride.
‘I hate saying so, Arndale, but I’ve had enough of this. If Frensham can scare you—and you wouldn’t come here to talk to me this way unless he had scared you—he’s not going to scare me. You can tell him so, with my compliments. I’ve no doubt he’s waiting anxiously to know what kind of a reception I’ve given his ambassador. Just tell him again, will you, that if I don’t hear from him before ten o’clock tonight the police will receive full particulars of that interesting little affair that took place this afternoon. I’m sorry for you, Arndale. I believe you’re in a tight place. I’ve no idea why or how. But I can guess anyhow that it’s a tight place. That, however, is your look-out. And now you know.’
He opened the door. Arndale eyed him for a little while heavily.
‘Shut that door,’ he said at length.
‘Not unless you’re going to talk reasonably.’
‘All right, I’ll talk reasonably, as you call it.’
Gore shut the door, but retained his hold of its handle.
‘Well?’ he demanded curtly. ‘Buck up. I’ve got to get some dinner, you know.’
But Arndale appeared unable to find words for the thing he had come to say, simple as Gore knew it to be. He had abandoned now summarily his attempt to work himself into a rage, and stood staring with clouded gaze at the knob of the bedstead.
‘I’m not going to give you any reasons, Gore,’ he said at length, without raising his eyes, ‘but I ask you not to make a fuss about what happened this afternoon—not to go to the police about it. Frensham told me you lost some money—five or six pounds—’
‘I lost a good deal more than that, Cecil. However, don’t worry about what I lost. I shall get it back before I’ve done with Mr Frensham and his pals. I’m sorry to discover that you’re one of them, though.’
‘Oh, don’t be a fool,’ said Arndale wearily. ‘Cut it out, Gore. Leave Frensham alone. You’ll make nothing out of him.’ He made a gesture of weak exasperation. ‘Damn it all. What are you trying to make out of him? That’s what I want to know. Why are you making all this fuss about that cheque of mine? What’s it got to do with you?’
‘Nothing whatever,’ Gore assured him—‘now. But the other things which Frensham took away from Mrs Barrington’s house without her permission must be given back … with my own money … to me … here … before ten o’clock. You can tell Frensham so. Otherwise—’
‘What other things were taken?’ Arndale asked curiously.
‘Barrington’s bank-
books, and some other papers and things.’
‘Barrington’s bank-books?’ Arndale repeated. He mused over that for a little while stupidly, then dismissed his speculations with another exasperated little gesture. ‘Don’t bother about them, old chap. There’s no use in threatening Frensham. Leave it alone. You know I shouldn’t ask you to—if I hadn’t a reason. Anyhow, I understand Mrs Barrington asked Frensham to—’
But Gore’s patience was now exhausted.
‘Rot,’ he said curtly. ‘Leave Mr Frensham to do his own dirty work, Arndale.’
He opened the door again and his visitor passed out into the corridor.
‘We’re old friends, Gore,’ he pleaded. ‘I ask you once more not to drag the police into this.’
‘Sorry,’ said Gore inexorably. ‘If you didn’t attach such importance to your new friends, your old ones might be some help to you. Hope you’ll put your head under a pump before you let Mrs Arndale see you. Cheerio.’
But even as he saw Arndale’s broad-shouldered back lurch out of sight round the angle of the corridor, he realised that he had handled him quite wrongly. Instead of taking advantage of an opportunity to discover something definite about Arndale’s relations with Barrington and about the hold which it was clear Frensham possessed over his fears, he had allowed the irritability of a moment to induce him to throw it away. With a little management Arndale could probably have been persuaded to talk—perhaps even enticed into clearing up the whole mystery of Barrington’s death—
There, almost within his grasp, had been that interesting and useful fact to be acquired—the fact which Arndale was afraid of. But it had been allowed to escape … because one didn’t try to inveigle people into giving information they didn’t want to give.
Gore shrugged his shoulders and went to dinner. The head-waiter’s eye met his solicitously as he entered the dining-room twenty minutes later; and presently the man approached his chair.
‘Sorry to hear you’ve had an accident, Colonel. Not serious, I hope?’
‘Nothing,’ Colonel Gore replied chillingly, ‘is serious except brunette hairs in blonde soup.’
The head-waiter inspected the colonel’s soup-plate with horrified eyes, flushed a rosy pink, and bore the plate hastily away with his own hands. It was the first time the colonel had found the slightest of fault with the Riverside’s cuisine; a circumstance which the chef, upon receiving the head-waiter’s report, attributed to the fact that it was the thirteenth of the month.
CHAPTER XVI
IN reply to Colonel Gore’s inquiry over the phone next morning—which was the morning of Tuesday, November 14th, Major Whateley, the official who presided over the local branch of the Ministry of Pensions, sent along to the Riverside an ex-sergeant of the Westshires named Stevens—a sturdy, stolid, steady-eyed man of thirty-five or thereabouts, who appeared everything that could reasonably be hoped for for five bob a day.
When Gore had listened to the inevitable story of jobs that could not be got, he explained the nature of the job he had to offer. Stevens listened attentively to his directions, undertook to find out anything that was to be found out about Mr Frensham’s movements, habits, company, and personal character with the utmost discretion, and to report in two days’ time—that is to say, on the afternoon of the following Thursday—such information as he had succeeded in acquiring.
‘You will want some money,’ Gore said. ‘I don’t want you to blue this two quid exactly. But you’ll probably find it useful to pay for other people’s drinks occasionally, and so on. If you should want to talk to me in a hurry about anything, telephone to me here to the Riverside. But don’t use the telephone at the Excelsior. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut. I fancy you’ll find Mr Frensham is in with a pretty hot lot.’
Stevens departed on his mission with two pounds and many expressions of gratitude. Thursday came and went without any sign from him. On Friday morning Gore received the following communication, written in block capitals on a postcard:
‘Your friend, Bert Stevens, has hopped it to London for his health. Any spare quids you have may be posted to him c/o Sherlock Holmes, Esq., New Scotland Yard, as he is still thirsty and hopeful. Trusting you’re in the pink as this leaves us at present.—From ALL OF US.’
Discomfiting as this communication was, it was in some measure a relief; for the failure of his ally to report on the preceding day had caused Gore some misgivings as to his personal safety. The allaying of that anxiety was, however, no remedy for the fact that Frensham was now thoroughly warned and on his guard. This second humiliating failure to illuminate the dark places wherein that gentleman moved so warily was even more unfortunate than the first. Frensham must have guessed now that the threat to call in the assistance of the law had been mere bluff and that he was quite safe in defying it. If the police had been put on his track, a bungling amateur like Stevens would never have been employed to supplement their professional operations. Frensham would realise that at once. He’d say to himself and to his pals: ‘That’s all right. They’re afraid. Now we know where we are we can carry on with the good work comfortably and happily.’
But happy and comfortable were the last things that Mr Frensham and his friends should be, Gore was now determined, at all events while they remained in Westmouth. And the immediate effect of that derisive postcard was to induce him to set at once about the carrying out of a project which he had been meditating since Stevens’s failure to appear on the preceding day.
He set off shortly after breakfast for Hatfield Place, armed with the latchkey which Mrs Barrington had enclosed in her last letter against some unexplained contingency, and let himself into Number 27 in the confident expectation that the house contained no one to witness the harmless burglary which he had come to commit. His surprise and embarrassment were therefore no less than those of the two people who, at the sound of his entry, emerged from the sitting-room at the end of the hall.
Mrs Barrington—whom he had supposed in Paris at that moment—had been the first to appear, and, upon perceiving him, had half-turned as if to shut the door of the sitting-room behind her. The movement, however, had been too late. Challoner already stood in the aperture, looking extremely sheepish, and, as he recognised the intruder, extremely annoyed.
Mrs Barrington was the first of the three to recover her self-possession. She had been crying, Gore saw, and looked wretchedly ill and worn; but as she came towards him along the hall she mustered up a wan, appealing smile to accompany her calm ‘Good-morning, Wick. How on earth did you know I had come back?’
‘I didn’t,’ he said frankly. ‘You’ve caught me red-handed. Just my luck. I really came here to pinch something out of that tin box of your husband’s. Do you mind very much?’
‘Not in the least. But it’s fortunate that you came along this morning—and so early. I took all the things out of the box before I went away and locked them up in a cupboard upstairs. If you had postponed your visit for another quarter of an hour or so I’m afraid you’d have had some difficulty in finding what you wanted. What do you want, by the way?’
‘Lead me to that cupboard,’ he said solemnly. ‘There you shall see.’
‘How mysterious,’ she laughed. ‘Well, come along. I haven’t much time. I must catch the 11.15 back to London.’
As they went up the stairs she explained that the original programme of her journey to Vence with her mother had been revised, and that they had decided to remain in London until the following Monday. The discovery that in the flurry of her departure she had forgotten a fur-lined travelling coat which had appeared upon consideration indispensable, had induced her to return to Linwood for a night. Gore agreed that a fur-lined travelling coat was absolutely necessary at that time of year, and changed the subject considerately. He had seen Arndale, he told her, about that cheque. Arndale appeared perfectly satisfied about it. There was nothing whatever to worry about so far as it was concerned. The other things he hoped to recover from Frensham in the co
urse of the next few days.
Mrs Barrington smiled vague approval and disappeared to prosecute in a bedroom an apparently complicated and impatient search for the keys of the cupboard before which she had left him standing on the landing. She reappeared at length and opened the door of the cupboard.
‘His things are all together, on the bottom shelf,’ she said carelessly.
The cardboard box of which he was in search lay against the back of the cupboard, and to reach it he was obliged to stoop and thrust an arm sideways into the narrow space between the lowest shelf and that immediately above it. For a moment it eluded his grasp, and, as he groped for it he was aware that, behind him, Mrs Barrington had taken something from the shelf quickly and had stepped back a little from the cupboard—he assumed to examine it. As his fingers closed on a corner of the cardboard box he glanced over his shoulder towards her with a smile.
‘Got it,’ he announced, and then perceived to his horror that the object which she had taken from the shelf was Barrington’s revolver and that she was holding it, with a curious, awkward, lamentable determination, pointed towards her own haggard, tear-stained face. There was no time to do anything save make a sweeping blow at the weapon with his left arm. He heard the heavy explosion as the momentum of his violent movement deprived him of his balance and sent him asprawl on knees and hands to the floor. But he was on his feet again in an instant and snatched the revolver from the hand that had dropped limply to her side.
‘What the hell—?’ he demanded angrily.
She was shivering with fright now, and her teeth chattered as she answered him.
