by Eric Ambler
Andrew didn’t wait for any more. He could not leave Ruth Meriden alone in that isolated house; he must insist that she stay in town till there was no longer any danger. If she objected, he would go to Stock or to someone else at Scotland Yard and insist that she be given protection.
The time was nearly four when he left the cinema. Possibly she would still be entertaining the American dealer and Mr. Hinckleigh at Walden House, but, if luck favoured him, the guests would be gone by the time he reached Cheriton Shawe.
He was in time to catch the four o’clock coach. When he got down at Wyminden Lane it was nearly five. He crossed the road and rang the bell of the first house he came to. He asked if there was any garage close by where he could hire a car. There was. He telephoned from a box at the next corner, and in less than five minutes he was speeding towards Cheriton Shawe.
When they came to the gateway, he asked the driver to wait for him. He stepped over the chain and took the short cut to the house across the lawn of the statues. He rang the bell. There seemed to be nobody at home. He rang again, and, after a further delay, the maid opened the door.
“You been ringing long, sir?” she asked. “I was just making ready to go home.”
“I want to see Miss Meriden,” he announced. “Is she in her studio?”
“No, sir. She’s not here at all, sir.”
“You mean she went back to London with the guests?”
“There’s been no guests, sir. That’s been put off like. Was she expecting to see you?”
“No, not exactly. Have you heard from her?”
“She rung up the Swan, sir, and the landlord sent my brother along with the message to say that nobody was coming and the mistress wouldn’t be home.”
“What does that mean?”
“She’ll be staying in town tonight.”
“At her Chelsea flat?”
“I suppose so, sir. She always stays at her flat.”
“What time did she ring up?”
“Must have been about three, sir.”
Andrew was worried. He had a feeling that something had gone wrong, that she was in trouble. “Listen, Gert,” he said, “I came all the way from town to see her. It’s important. Can you give me the address of the Chelsea flat?”
“Well, I don’t know, sir.”
“You mean you don’t know where it is?”
“Yes. I go in to help Miss Meriden with the cleaning sometimes. I know where it is all right, but she’s a bit particular.”
He deliberated whether he would produce a pound note or not, and decided that it might be fatal. Gert gave an overwhelming impression of incorruptibility.
“It’s very important, Gert,” he urged. “You know I’m a friend. I was out here yesterday, remember?”
“I remember all right.” Gert was dubious on only one point. “Are you sure Miss Meriden would like me to give you the address?”
“I’m sure she won’t blame you. I’ll guarantee it.”
Somehow Andrew got the worried frown off his face and turned on one of his confident smiles. It always worked with patients. It worked with Gert.
“Oh, well,” she said, “you did stay to lunch, so I suppose it’s all right. The flat’s at 18 Palgrave Street, top floor. The way I usually go, I take the tube to Sloane Square.”
“Thanks. I know the street. I must hurry back to town.”
He hurried. The coach from Wyminden Lane sped through gathering dusk, and lights were on along the route. At Oxford Circus he took to the tube and got out at Sloane Square. He found the house in Palgrave Street and rang Ruth Meriden’s bell. No one came down the stairs to admit him. The house door was locked. He rang the bell again and worried whether it worked or not. It was an old house, and the bell buttons looked as if they had been there in the days when Franklin flew kites. The name plate opposite the button had been rubbed almost flat with much polishing so that you had to take an oblique view to read it in the flame of a match.
Once more he tried the bell. Then he went down the steps from the porch and out onto the roadway, and looked up. There were lights behind the blinds or curtains of all the windows except those on the top floor.
He fought down a feeling of panic. It was all right. He had come here merely to check the maid’s story, but there was really no need to doubt its accuracy. She had gone to dinner with that American dealer. Or she was spending the evening with Hinckleigh. Probably she had stayed in town to spend the evening with Hinckleigh, and that was all there was to it. Why anyone should bother about a woman who could bring herself to spend an evening with Hinckleigh…
The door of the house opened as he teetered in indecision. A white-haired old lady, dressed for an Edwardian night out, came down the steps and was turning in the direction of King’s Road when she saw him.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Have you been making all that infernal racket with the top-floor bell? Enough noise to wake the dead. What’s the matter? Are the duns working overtime?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was anxious to get hold of Miss Meriden.”
“High time somebody was.” Her sweet little laugh made him want to strangle her. “That young girl is too serious; much too serious. It’s no use your ringing that bell again. She isn’t home.”
“Do you know if it’s long since she went out, madam?” Andrew’s tone of high courtesy was marred by a slight tremor.
“About six weeks, I should say.” The old lady laughed gleefully.
“Hasn’t she been at the flat this evening?”
“She certainly has not. She wouldn’t dream of arriving without letting me know.”
“Perhaps she’ll be getting in later. I’d better leave a note.”
“That’s right. You leave a note in the box. I’ll look after it when I come home from the ballet.”
She swung off abruptly with the sprightliness of a girl in her teens.
Andrew hesitated. Here his anxiety should end, because the danger, if any, would be at Walden House, not in town. In the morning he could send the girl a telegram asking her to telephone him. Or he might call at an early hour. So long as he warned her about the danger that might threaten her at Cheriton Shawe, his duty would be done.
He turned away in bitterness, thinking of Mr. Hinckleigh. He went to a pub on King’s Road and had a drink. He was a little hungry then, but thought with loathing of a lonely dinner in an unknown cafe. He felt grubby, too, after the long day of running round to no purpose, and discontent accentuated the feeling till he believed he must look like a tramp. Impossible to think of eating before he had been home for a wash and a clean shirt.
A taxi took him across to Holland Park. There were limits beyond which economy became foolish even for a potential hospital registrar, and the limits were reached in his weariness and dejection.
He did feel a little better for the wash and the change, though, as he knotted his tie, it seemed to him that the Maclaren face had lost a lot of its buoyant air. It had a hunted look; and there was a dark puffiness under the eyes that no medical man could accept with equanimity, especially in the absence of compensating dissipation. He shook his head. A little of that dissipation would be good for him. Up to now this so-called holiday in London, this homecoming spree, had been a flop. Time he had a few drinks; time he announced himself to his friends; time he took a nice girl out to a good dinner. Who was Mr. Hinckleigh that he should have all the fun? Dr. Maclaren was not without resources. Indeed, no! Marilyn Webb, for instance. Lovely, witty, cheerful, and he’d get all the inside dope on the hospitals at the same time. But perhaps not tonight.
He went through the list of resources, and finally decided on Sophie Gaines, who was lovely, witty and cheerful, and didn’t know a hospital from a hole in the ground. The best of the lot of them. He had always liked her. If he hadn’t gone off on his Red Cross jaunt, who knows what might not have happened. A radiant girl, Sophie. She glowed.
It was singular, then, that he dialled her number without any responsive
glow. As he swung his finger round the circle from the last cipher, he was more dejected than before. Only when he discovered that he had got on to a wrong number did he feel the slightest relief; but doggedly he began to dial again. As the mechanism whirred unhurriedly, the bell of the flat door rang loudly.
Eight… nine… He dialled the last two digits of Sophie’s number, wondering about the caller at the door. An impertinence, walking up the stairs to the flat without so much as pushing the bell button at the front entrance to give one notice. Jordaens, probably. The police approach.
The automatic ringing-tone was calling Miss Gaines.
He held on. The caller on the door mat might, of course, be somebody for Lang; somebody accustomed to coming informally up the stairs. Or it could be Mr. Botten. After his experiences in M.I. something-or-other, Charley probably considered it undignified to bother about house bells when front doors were open.
Another imperious summons from the flat door cut through the transmitted ringing-tone of the telephone.
Andrew slammed the telephone down on the cradle and bounded from his chair. Then, as he touched the latch, another possibility occurred to him. The enemy had come back. Kretchmann, Haller, Mr. Jolly-Face, the man in the flapping raincoat. One or more of them, and the boss himself for choice. Andrew was in the mood, ready for him, a word of welcome on his lips.
He flung open the door and then jumped as if he had been shot. A flash of light made him close his eyes, but the flash was an inward experience, unseen. He opened his eyes and blinked as if the illumination had been actual. Ruth Meriden was still there on the threshold.
Ten
The first thing he saw was that something had upset her very considerably, but even as he stood aside for her to come in, she burst out exasperatedly.
“Where have you been? I came here looking for you before. I phoned! I phoned and phoned! Where have you been?”
“Looking for you. You told me you were going home. I had to see you, so I went out there.”
“To Cheriton Shawe?”
“Yes, but what on earth’s happened to you?”
She limped past him into the room. There was a long scratch on her face and mud on her coat.
“I fell down,” she said wearily. “And I think I’d like a brandy-”
Something in her tone stilled the questions crowding to his lips. He went to her quickly.
“Here, you’d better sit down. I’ll get you something.”
She sank into a chair exhaustedly. “I ought to have gone back to Palgrave Street,” she said. “But like a fool I didn’t. You see, I got frightened.”
“Oh.” He handed her a glass. “Don’t sip it. Drink it right down.”
She did, then gasped a little. He took the glass away and refilled it.
“What scratched your face?” he asked.
“A bramble.”
‘What about your leg?”
“I’ve bruised my knee. It’s a bit stiff, that’s all.” He gave her the refilled glass. “You’d better sip that one.”
“I shall be drunk.”
“No, you won’t. Do you feel like telling me what happened now?”
She nodded and then, to his relief, she smiled. “It was that wretched boat,” she said. “I tried to find it for you.”
“You did what?”
And then she told him.
Throughout the morning her thoughts had kept going to the boat. For that reason, perhaps, she had failed to take any interest in the American dealer and, in the end, had asked him to postpone his visit to Cheriton Shawe until his return from Paris a fortnight hence. She pleaded that she would then have more work to show him. They had argued about schedules and sailing dates with Mr. Hinckleigh, and finally it was agreed. Then Mr. Alec Foster bought them a good lunch. He was really a very nice person, and she liked him very much.
“But the boat?”
“I’m telling it just as it happened,” she said. “After lunch I went to see the lawyer. He didn’t know anything about the boat, but he remembered the mill.” She paused. “It’s a windmill,” she said.
“A windmill!” With his knowledge of John Quayle Meriden’s peculiarities, the information should not have been startling. He was surprised because he had visualised something else. A windmill did not seem to go with streams and landing stages. It was rather a thing of bleak uplands and windswept plains.
“Is it the mill we’re looking for?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It seems likely, from the position. I was too frightened to make certain.”
“What do you mean?”
She said irritably: “Why did you go down to Cheriton Shawe this afternoon?”
“Never mind that now. Tell me about the mill.”
It seemed that years ago Uncle John had gone duck shooting at Groper’s Wade on the Thames Estuary and had returned in a state of high excitement about this windmill. He had recently read a magazine article on the production of electricity by wind power, and had been inspired by the idea. He would buy the ruined mill, restore it, equip it with a generating plant and demonstrate that the theories of the magazine writer were sound. Then he would buy up windmills all over the country and furnish enough cheap electricity to supply the nation’s needs. The Meriden System would be the salvation of industry, and John Quayle would be honoured wherever a spark was required to turn a wheel or light the darkness.
“You find out who owns that mill,” he had instructed the lawyer. “Get it for me cheap, and keep your mouth shut. Once my plan is known, the price of windmills will go up.”
The lawyer had opened his mouth only to make objections, but Uncle John had remained firm. When he had heard the price, he had been delighted. He had never known anything so cheap, a bargain! The owner threw in the mill cottage, landing stage, all appurtenances, and riparian rights, if any. The agreement had been signed and the price paid. Within a week he had forgotten about it, and nobody had been inclined to remind him.
“That’s what one might have expected,” Ruth Meriden commented. “Do you know where Groper’s Wade is?”
“Not exactly,” Andrew confessed.
“You take the train to Britsea and then you walk across the marsh or fen or whatever you call it.”
“All right. I’ll go down tomorrow and explore.” At the moment it did not seem so important. “What I want to know is how you got yourself into this state?”
“I went down to Britsea.”
“You what?”
“I went down to Britsea,” she repeated calmly. “I telephoned you here from the lawyer’s office. I telephoned three times from different places. Then I decided to go down and check on the mill. I thought you’d like to know definitely if the yawl was there.” “Good God!” he exclaimed. “You shouldn’t have done that alone! Didn’t you realise there was danger? After all I told you about my being shadowed?”
“I didn’t think there’d be any danger to me.”
“Look! I went out to Cheriton Shawe today because I wanted to bring you back to town. I was afraid for you, alone in that crazy house. I thought the gang who killed Kusitch might find the link and go after you. And you walk right into their hands. You’re lucky to have got away from them. They might have killed you. Now that they’ve found the yawl, there’s nothing more we can do. We’d better call up Scotland Yard at once and let the police clear things up.
“Will you stop being melodramatic and listen to me? I didn’t walk into anybody’s hands. And nobody has found the boat. At least, not as far as I know. When I got down to Britsea it was later than I expected,” she said. “Have you any idea what Britsea’s like?”
“Well, what is it like?”
“Hell,” she said simply.
Britsea, it appeared, was a bungalow colony with a few Nissen huts added for architectural variety. It had a station. She had asked the solitary porter if there were a windmill and cottage in the neighbourhood, and he had pointed to the North Sea and said: “That would be Groper’s Wade. First
to the right past the garbage tip.
The lawyer had told her that it was a short walk to the mill, but when she came in sight of it, it seemed to be miles away-a squat stump on the edge of nowhere with dark clouds piling up behind it and the day looking as if it were going to do an early fade-out. It was cold, too. A wind blew in from the sea and across the marsh unhindered. She went on a little farther. Then she became afraid that she could not reach the mill and get back to the station before nightfall, and the idea of darkness on the marsh was not pleasant.
“Even in the daylight it’s bad enough,” she said. “The fact is, I wouldn’t have gone on in any circumstances. I was scared of the loneliness. I can’t stand it when I find myself in the middle of nothing. Then I got the idea I was being followed, and-well, I suppose I fell into a panic.”
Andrew cut in with a question. “What gave you the idea? Did you see anyone?”
“Yes. A man was poking about in the garbage dump. There’s a level, filled-in patch and the trucks tip their loads into the hollow. The man was by the edge of the hollow when I passed, poking about with a stick.”
“He was there before you?”
“Yes, but he could have come on the train, except that I never noticed anyone like him at the station. I think I would have, because he was very tall and thin.”
“Don’t tell me! A tall thin man with a cloth cap and a long grey coat that flaps round his legs when he walks?”
“No. Nothing like it. He didn’t have a hat or coat; just slacks and a rough sort of seaman’s sweater.”
Andrew let out a sigh of relief. “Just an old tramp,” he decided. “You’ll find one on every garbage dump, looking for bits of metal and other things that might bring in a few pence.”
