by Cyril Hare
Derek murmured agreement, although from the context he was left in some doubt whether the last words referred to the state of affairs with regard to Finland, the unsatisfactory nature of the coffee, or the adventures of the night before. He was trying to find some comment which would be equally appropriate to all three subjects when a diversion was effected by the door opening to admit Hilda.
“My dear!” cried the Judge, starting to his feet. “What does this mean?”
“I’m sorry if I startled you,” said Hilda, calmly. “I know I look a hideous spectacle, but I thought you would be prepared for it. Now Mr. Marshall takes it all quite coolly.”
She turned towards Derek a face disfigured by an enormous black eye. Beneath her make-up she was pale, and round her neck she wore a chiffon scarf which could not wholly conceal some ugly bruises on either side of her throat.
“But, Hilda, you ought to be in bed! The doctor said positively——”
“The doctor doesn’t know what the beds in these Lodgings are like,” said Hilda, helping herself to toast and butter. “I lay there as long as I could bear it and then I decided to get up. It was all I could do to get outside my door, though. There was a great fat policeman blocking it. On the stable-door principle, I suppose.”
“The Chief Constable will be here shortly,” said the Judge. “He sent a message just now to ask if you would feel equal to making a statement. I told him——”
“I’m quite ready to make any statement to anybody, so long as I can get away from Wimblingham this morning and never see the place again,” said Hilda firmly.
“But tell me, what actually happened?”
“My dear William, what happened was exactly what I had warned you might happen. Somebody made an attack on you last night and I got in his way, that’s all. No details, please! If I’ve got to tell the whole story to the policeman I don’t want to go all through it twice. It was quite unpleasant enough without that.”
“An attack on me?”
“Certainly. You don’t imagine anybody’s going to take the trouble to break in here just for the fun of blacking my eye, do you? Besides—you’ll hear all about it directly. May I have a look at The Times, if you’ve done with it?”
Barber meekly surrendered the paper.
“When I think”, he observed, “of the fuss that the average woman makes about the smallest misadventure and how gladly she will seize the opportunity to tell her story twenty times over if possible, I—I am really impressed by you, Hilda.”
Hilda, rustling the pages of The Times, looked up with what would have been, but for her disfigurement, a charming smile.
“That”, she observed, “is as it should be.”
Ten o’clock brought the city Chief Constable, an amiable but badly worried man. With him came a detective inspector and a doctor. The latter was professionally shocked at finding his patient out of bed, but on examining her could do no more than congratulate her on her splendid constitution. He wrote out a prescription which Hilda light-heartedly made into a spill for her cigarette as soon as his back was turned and left her to the two policemen.
Lady Barber’s statement was quite short and to the point.
“I woke up in the night,” she said. “No, it’s no use asking me what the time was. I didn’t look at my watch, and in any case it’s hopelessly unreliable. I thought I heard someone moving in the passage outside, so I went along to my husband’s room to investigate. It was quite dark and I was feeling my way along the wall. Just as I got to his door I bumped into someone. I said, ‘Who are you?’ or something like that. The next thing I knew was a torch being flashed in my face. The man, whoever he was, caught me by the throat—here”—she indicated the bruises beneath the scarf—“and then I felt a terrific blow in the eye. I think he must actually have hit me with the torch, because everything went dark. He let go of me as he struck and I fell down. Then I suppose I screamed. And that is really all I can remember.”
There was a pause, and then the inspector said softly, “Why did you go to your husband’s room, Lady Barber?”
“Because I suspected that there was somebody about, and I thought he might make an attempt on my husband’s life—and I was right,” she added triumphantly.
“Had you any reason to fear for his lordship’s safety, then?”
“Certainly I had. Otherwise I shouldn’t have come to Wimblingham—odious place.”
The city Chief Constable blenched at this slur on his own town, of which he was oddly proud.
“Perhaps it would help us if you would tell us your reasons,” he said.
Hilda nodded towards the Judge.
“You tell,” she said.
Somewhat haltingly, Barber related the story of the anonymous letters at Markhampton and the incident of the poisoned chocolates.
“I freely admit”, he added, “that I did not take any of these incidents particularly seriously. But it seems that I was wrong.”
The Chief Constable looked wise and said nothing. Rather diffidently, the inspector took it upon himself to speak.
“It seems a strange business,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to hang together, if I may say so. I mean, the person who sent the threatening letters might follow it up by sending poisoned chocolates—though it was a crude kind of poison, admittedly—or he might attempt a crime of violence, but hardly both. I mean, sir,” he addressed his superior, “we don’t generally find one man attempting two different classes of crimes, do we? Criminals generally tend to keep to a groove.”
“That is so,” said the Chief Constable. “Of course, we have no proof that the assailant in this case came here with the intention of committing an act of violence. He might have been merely a thief. Had you any articles of particular value in your room, my lord?”
The Judge shook his head.
“I had not,” he said. “And frankly, what the man intended to do here is a question that does not interest me very much at the moment. What I want to know is, how was it that he got into these Lodgings and how did he get out again without being apprehended? It is a somewhat extraordinary state of affairs if the lodgings of His Majesty’s Judge of Assize can be visited by a marauder with apparently complete impunity, and one which, I must say, appears to me to reflect very little credit on the police force of this city.”
The Chief Constable’s face bore the expression of a man who had long foreseen a blow which he could not avoid. In his distress the mask of officialdom dropped off and he became quite human.
“I can only say, my lord,” he said, “that if I had had any warning at all that particular precautions were necessary—any hint of the story you have just told me, for instance—I should have stationed a constable outside your lordship’s room all night. Short of that, honestly there is nothing I can do to make this place safe—nothing! I have spoken to the Clerk of the Peace about it time and again, but nothing has been done. It is hopeless!”
He went on, with an eloquence born of deep feeling, to enlarge upon the peculiarities and disadvantages of the building in which they were. It had twenty different recognized entrances and exits. Apart from these, two of its irregular sides fronted on to narrow alleys, from which it would be the simplest matter to break into one of the ill-protected ground-floor windows, and in the blacked-out streets it would be mere chance if a patrolling constable happened to catch him in the act. Once inside, there was nothing to prevent the intruder from rambling all over the building.
“There are night watchmen, of course,” the Chief Constable added, “but there never were enough of them, and a good half have been taken for war service of one kind or another. Doors are locked, but there’s not one in the place I wouldn’t undertake to force with a hairpin.”
“It would be pretty difficult for anyone to find his way about the place, though,” Derek pointed out. “Unless he knew it fairly well to start with. I know I lost my way completely between here and my bedroom on the day we arrived. Don’t you think that points to a man with local
knowledge?”
“It ought to, but it does not,” said the Chief Constable more despondently than ever. “For sixpence you can get at any bookshop in the city a local handbook with a complete plan of the building, showing all the principal rooms, including, of course, the Judge’s lodgings. That’s because this is an Ancient Monument. All I can say is, Ancient Monuments are all very well in their proper places, which is museums, but they have no call to put Judges in them and expect the police to guard them. If you’ll excuse my saying so, my lord.”
“And”, the inspector put in by way of rubbing it in, “I ought to point out that it would be quite unnecessary to break into the building at all. All that anybody need do would be to come in during the day on one of a dozen pretexts—to make an inquiry about his rates, or A.R.P., or what not—and conceal himself somewhere in the place till nightfall. It’s as easy as pie.”
Derek had an inspiration.
“The public gallery of the Court opens out of this corridor,” he said.
“Exactly. And a very likely place to choose. I’m obliged to you for the suggestion, sir.”
“Well,” said Barber, “this certainly reveals a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. I am not at all sure that it is not my duty to make some official representations upon the matter. But I can quite see that in view of what you tell me, my strictures upon the police force which you command, Mr. Chief Constable, may have been somewhat—ah!—more severe than was appropriate to the circumstances. Meanwhile——”
“Meanwhile,” said the Chief Constable, looking a good deal more cheerful than he had been at any time since the interview began, “meanwhile, we shall of course do all we can to bring this man to justice. If he is a local man, there won’t be much difficulty. By midday to-day every man in the city with a record of violence against him will have been pulled in and we shan’t let any of them go until they have fully accounted for every minute of last night. I have spoken to the Chief Constable of the County and he is doing the same for his jurisdiction. If he’s not a local, then it’s a different matter altogether. But we’ll do our utmost. You would wish the Yard to be notified, my lord?”
The Judge hesitated for a moment and then nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “I think that that will be necessary.”
The Chief Constable rose and was about to leave the room when his subordinate murmured something in his ear which caused him to turn back.
“There is one further possibility, my lord,” he said, “which you may think very far-fetched, but I feel bound to mention it. Do you consider that this assault could have been committed by someone inside the lodgings, a member of the household, I mean, and not an intruder at all?”
There was a moment’s stupefaction and then the Judge laughed.
“Apart from ourselves, there are only four persons who were sleeping here last night,” he said, “and one of them is a woman. I think I can safely say that from what I know of them you can discard that theory.”
“Thank you, my lord. That is as I expected but I thought I ought to mention it.”
*
Later that morning the party left for London. Hilda had contrived a rakish veil which fell over one side of her hat and completely concealed her black eye while looking exceedingly becoming. She need hardly have bothered, however, so far as any spectators at Wimblingham station were concerned, for an impressive body of police kept nearly half the platform free until they were safely in their carriage. Evidently the Chief Constable was taking no chance. Looking out of the window, Derek could see his broad chest heave with a sigh of relief as the train steamed out.
“Shut the window, Marshal,” said Barber.
As he tugged at the strap, Derek was conscious of a sharp pain in his side. He realized that he was still sore from his encounter with Beamish of the night before. How hard he had kicked him! You wouldn’t have thought bedroom slippers could hurt so much. He put his hand to his ribs and winced. Could they have been bedroom slippers? And if they were not, why not? He tried to recollect Beamish’s appearance. There had been a big ulster which had hidden everything else. He had been too busy to look at his feet…. A fantastic notion, born of the Chief Constable’s last words, floated into his mind, and refused to be dislodged.
“Mr. Marshall, you look quite distraught,” said Hilda kindly. “Have one of the Judge’s caramels. They’re quite safe. I bought them myself.”
Chapter 10
TEA AND THEORY
“Will you come to tea with me to-morrow?” Hilda said abruptly to Derek, just before they parted at the station.
It was more than an invitation, Derek felt. A command? Not exactly. An appeal then? Something between the two, perhaps. In any case, without knowing exactly why, he accepted, simply because he felt that he had no option in the matter. It was not in the least what he wanted to do. He was going home to his mother in Hampshire that evening and he did not at all enjoy the prospect of breaking into his short holiday. But when a hostess of Lady Barber’s calibre looks a young man firmly in the eyes—even though she may happen to have only one eye of her own available at the moment—it takes a very determined young man to refuse her preferred hospitality.
As it turned out, he found himself next day only too glad to have the excuse to return to London. Since he had been away, he had to some extent forgotten the maddening feeling of uselessness which had oppressed him ever since a medical officer had told him brutally that he was hopelessly unfit for active service. At home once more, it returned to him in full measure. All his friends in the village had disappeared into some form of war work or another. His mother was spending all her days at an A.R.P. centre, waiting patiently at the telephone for warnings of air raids which never seemed to come, and had no time for him. Moreover, the two spare rooms of the small house were now occupied by a couple of London mothers and their small children, with whom with the best will in the world he could not get upon speaking, let alone upon friendly terms. He had been accustomed to leading the rather spoiled life of the only son of a widowed mother and the contrast was somewhat painful.
Derek spent his evening composing yet another letter to somebody who he hoped might be able to find him a job in the ranks of the temporary Civil Service and in filling up yet another form supplied by that disheartening institution, the Central Registry of the Ministry of Labour. Next day he took an unnecessarily early train to London.
Hilda had appointed the meeting at her club. Derek went there vaguely expecting something in the nature of a party. He found his hostess by herself, in a small room which she appeared to have secured for her exclusive use, to judge by the fact that while they were together only two other members intruded and straightway tiptoed out again with muffled apologies. She greeted him in her usual friendly fashion and rang for tea. While this was being brought she chattered away amusingly enough but to little purpose. Derek began to wonder whether her seclusion was merely due to her disfigurement, as to which she made various more or less facetious allusions. But as soon as tea had been brought in and the waitress had withdrawn, her manner changed to one of seriousness, almost of solemnity.
“I asked you to come here,” she said, “because I wanted to talk to you without being disturbed.”
She did not say by whom she was afraid of being disturbed, but it was obvious to whom she was referring. Indeed, her next words showed in what direction her thoughts were running.
“Derek,” she went on earnestly, “this is serious. William does not appear to me in the least to realize how serious it is.”
Derek was so impressed by being addressed by his Christian name that for the moment he paid little attention to what she was saying, and during that moment looked, for him, uncommonly stupid. Hilda instantly noted his lack of attention and apparently guessed the meaning of it, for she coloured slightly and then continued, frowning in the effort to concentrate upon her subject.
“He doesn’t—he never has—pay any regard to his personal safety,” she said. “For that m
atter, in his own affairs he has always been quite childishly careless. You’ve had some experience of that already. And it puts a very heavy responsibility on you.”
Derek shifted rather uncomfortably in his chair under her purposeful gaze. Nobody had hitherto indicated to him that the position of Judge’s Marshal entailed any particular responsibility, apart from wearing a top hat and pouring out tea, and he had some difficulty in adjusting his mind to the idea.
Hilda, as usual, seemed to divine what was going on in his thoughts. “Do you know what the Marshal originally was?” she said. “A bodyguard for the Judge. In the old days it was part of his duty to sleep across the door of the Judge’s room to protect him from any intruders.”
Derek was moved to say that he could hardly have slept worse at Wimblingham if he had followed the old custom, but his levity was not well received.
“A bodyguard,” Lady Barber repeated. “That is what the Judge needs, and that is what you and I together have got to supply during the rest of this circuit.”
“Then you really think there is still danger of some attack on him?” Derek asked.
“I have not the smallest doubt of it. Has anybody? It isn’t only that from the very beginning of the circuit things have been happening, it is that they have been getting more and more serious each time. Just consider. First we have an anonymous letter. Then comes the motor accident——”
“But that surely can’t have had anything to do with it,” Derek objected.
