Anthony leaned forward and took the hand which lay upon her knee. It felt cold and stiff as he covered it with his own.
“Shirley—one minute—has anything of this sort ever happened to you before?”
“No, it hasn’t.” She paused, and added with a little catch in her voice, “It hasn’t—really.”
“Those people at the next table—have you ever seen either of them before?”
“No, never.”
“You’re sure neither of them was in the bus the other day?”
“Quite sure.”
The hand in his was warmer, and it had begun to shake a little. She closed her eyes for a moment, and then looked at him again, but without the same fixity.
“No, they weren’t in the bus, either of them—I’m quite sure. But everybody didn’t get on.” She shut her eyes again, screwing them up tight. “There were people left behind—quite a lot. They might have been there—either of them. I don’t know—I wasn’t noticing. I was thinking about the bag and how it could possibly have got on to my arm, and trying not to catch the eye of the vinegary woman it belonged to—and of course every time I looked up I did.” She gave him the faintest of fleeting smiles. “You know how it is. And she had the horridest sort of eye to catch—like a half-cooked gooseberry—” She pulled her hand away suddenly and sat back. “Anthony, I’m not a kleptomaniac!”
“I didn’t think you were,” said Anthony.
“I don’t know why you didn’t—I very nearly did myself. I suppose it was the shock or something, but I had the most horrible giddy feeling that I might have done it. And then when you were holding my hand I sort of knew you didn’t think so, and then the giddy feeling went away and I didn’t think so either. For one thing, if I was going to steal, I’d take something that was worth having, and not a nasty little jingly bag with the best part of five shillings in it.”
Anthony was sitting there frowning. She had said there were three possible explanations, and they had just disposed of two of them. There remained the third and most improbable of the three. But why should anyone plant alien bags upon Shirley Dale? There didn’t seem to be any answer to that.
“It’s difficult—isn’t it?” said Shirley.
CHAPTER SIX
Alfred Phillips caught a waiter’s eye and ordered coffee. He had resumed his chair, and sat with his shoulder turned to the length of the room down which Anthony Leigh and Shirley Dale had taken their way, but Ettie Miller watched them out of sight with a furious gleam in those fine dark eyes of hers. Seen like that, she had a heavy brooding face, and a mouth that fell easily into angry lines. When Alfred Phillips spoke her name with impatience she turned the anger on him.
“Well, you’re a nice one, letting her go like that!”
“Come, come,” he said—“it all went off very well. And you mustn’t look that way—you’ll be having people noticing you.”
“And why shouldn’t people notice me? Haven’t I just had my bag stolen, or as near as makes no difference? I should have thought the more people noticed me, the better. And they wouldn’t expect me to be looking as pleased as Punch either—would they? I should have thought the more fuss there was, the better it would have suited your book. I tell you, Al, I don’t understand you—I don’t know what you’re getting at. Why didn’t you go on and run her in? You’ll never get a better chance. There she was, red-handed as you may say, and instead of calling in the police all you’ve got to say is, ‘That’s enough, Ettie.’ And there’s me taking my bag back, and meek as a mouse—and I’m sure I don’t know why I did it—and Miss Shirley Dale going off without so much as a cross word from anyone, let alone a policeman’s had on her shoulder, which is what I thought you meant or I wouldn’t have taken the risks I did and get no thanks for them either!”
There was an empty table on either side of them now. The hum of the room and the sound of the gypsy music which the orchestra was playing enclosed them. They could talk as intimately and privately as if there had been walls about them and a locked door to shut them in.
Alfred Phillips let her talk. Ettie always had a lot to say, and it was no good trying to stop her. When she had got to the end of it she would listen to him, and not before. She grumbled until the coffee came. Then, as she helped herself to sugar, she rolled her eyes at him and said,
“Lost your tongue, Al?”
“Using my eyes instead. That dress suits you, Ettie.”
“Think so?”
He put a little warmth into his cold look.
“Red’s your colour.”
“Oh well, I don’t know. I got it a bargain.”
He looked at her approvingly.
“You’re clever. But you got that all wrong just now, you know. You listen a minute and I’ll put you wise. That little bit of a game with Shirley Dale—there wasn’t anything serious about that.”
She stared at him, angry and surprised.
“There wasn’t?”
“Of course there wasn’t, any more than there was yesterday when she got on a bus with another lady’s bag on her arm.”
“What did you let me do it for then?” said Ettie Miller. A heavy flush came into her face. “If I thought you were making a fool of me, Al Phillips—”
Mr Phillips moved impatiently.
“Fool nothing! This is business. Now you listen to me, Ettie! There isn’t any sort of business in the world that doesn’t need publicity. I’m not ready for the real job yet. Advertisement—that’s what comes first—advertisement, publicity. Then when everything’s set, put your business across and it’ll go big.”
Ettie looked stubborn.
“That’s just a way of talking. But what I say is, you’ll never get a better chance than you’ve had to-night, and if you go throwing chances away, you’ve only got yourself to thank if you don’t get them again.”
Al Phillips smiled.
“I can make all the chances I want. Now you freeze right on to this—to-night was only publicity. You’ve got brains all right, if you’ll use them. Well then, how was it going to look if you ran her in—when the whole story came out—well, I ask you, what was it going to look like? Conspiracy, my dear—and then it would be you that would be in the dock on a criminal charge, and not her.”
“Dry up!” said Ettie Miller angrily. “What do you think you’re saying? What was the good of doing the thing at all if it was all going to fizzle out?”
Mr Phillips went on smiling.
“When the real job comes off, Anthony Leigh’s going to remember where that bag of yours was found,” he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Shirley came back to her lunch next day to find Mrs Camber hovering. The door was no sooner shut than she made an agitated descent from the half-landing.
“If I might have a word with you, Miss Dale—”
Shirley looked at her in surprise. She didn’t in the least want to have words with Mrs Camber. She wanted her lunch. She had been promised a good hot helping of beefsteak pudding and a baked apple, and she had been thinking lovingly about them all the way home, and Mrs Camber ought at this moment to be taking the pudding out of its cloth and helping it in portions instead of lurking on the stairs and fussing down on her like a stout agitated hen.
“If you’d come into the dining-room, miss, if you please,” said Mrs Camber, very flushed, very short of breath, and still shiny from the kitchen fire.
The dining-room belonged to Miss Pym, but since she was in Paris, it was at their disposal.
“What is it, Mrs Camber?” said Shirley when the door was shut. Whatever it was, she hoped it wasn’t going to take long. The room was stuffy and quite horribly cold. Miss Pym ran to silver photograph frames, and they were all lying down flat, as if a wind had passed over them.
Mrs Camber stood just inside the door and fidgetted with her kitchen apron. She had a round, flushed face and deeply sunk eyes. Her dark hair was brushed back as tight as it would go and pinned into a heavy coil at the back of her head. She said
in a choked, gulping way,
“I’m bound to bring it to your notice, miss. And what you’ve got to say about it you can say it to me down here, for when all’s said and done it’s my house, and no getting from it, and so I told her.”
The cold stuffiness of the room seemed to thicken about Shirley. It was rather a horrid feeling. She had an involuntary picture of being plunged in cold dirty water that had begun to freeze. What a stupid thing to think about. She said,
“Mrs Camber, what do you mean?”
Mrs Camber’s flush deepened.
“And I told her straight, unpleasantness is what I’ve never had in my house before—no more than it might be a gentleman that had had a glass too much and come home a bit noisy, and if so be that it happened more than what you might call once in a way, I’d give him his notice same as I did Mr Peters that had the room Mr Wrenn’s got now—and a nicer gentleman never stepped, only when it come to his falling downstairs three nights running and getting on for four in the morning and a-setting on the landing singing Rule Britannia, only he couldn’t get along with it for the hiccups, well, I took and told him, ‘Mr Peters,’ I said, ‘this is my house,’ I said, ‘and it’s a respectable house, and those as don’t behave as such, they must take and go elsewhere,’ I said.” She paused for breath, drawing it in with a sound between a gasp and a snort.
Shirley spoke quickly. Once Mrs Camber got going again, she wouldn’t have a chance, and she simply must find out what all the fuss was about.
“Mrs Camber dear—what’s the matter? I didn’t come home drunk last night, did I?”
Mrs Camber looked scandalized.
“I never said no such thing, miss—and a drunk woman’s a disgrace neither more nor less, and nothing to make a joke about if that’s your meaning!”
A spurt of anger flared in Shirley. It made her feel better. She stamped her foot hard on Miss Pym’s Brussels square. A little dust came up, because when a lodger was away neither Mrs Camber nor Mabel wasted time on an empty room.
“What do you mean? I want my lunch, and you keep hinting and hinting, and don’t tell me a thing. What’s the matter?”
Mrs Camber’s manner changed. She stopped fidgetting with her apron, crossed her arms at the place where her waist would have been some twenty-five years ago, and said darkly,
“Don’t you know, miss?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then it’s Miss Maltby,” said Mrs Camber.
“Miss Maltby?”
“Miss Maltby,” said Mrs Camber in a tone of heavy I gloom.
Shirley felt as if the dirty water of her imagining had changed to dirty glue. She was entangled and bewildered, and she hadn’t the slightest idea what Mrs Camber was driving at, except that it was something unpleasant. The water might have changed to glue, but the dirt was constant.
“What about Miss Maltby?” she said impatiently.
Mrs Camber burst into speech.
“Seeing you won’t let on that you know, I’m bound to tell you, and if there’s anything you’ve got to say you can say it to me like I told you first go off. And I told Miss Maltby the same. ‘There’ll be no police sent for in my house,’ I said, ‘not till I’ve seen her myself and put it to her straight and heard what she’s got to say.’ And, ‘Oh, Mrs Camber,’ she says, ‘I don’t want no police brought into it.’ ‘And if you did,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t get them, Miss Maltby—not in my house,’ I said.”
Shirley’s hand came out and caught her by the arm. Shirley’s voice rang in the cold, stuffy room.
“What are you talking about?”
Mrs Camber gulped and went on.
“Down into my kitchen she come, and me with my hands in the flour, and ‘Oh, Mrs Camber, can I speak to you?’ she says. And I says, ‘Not if you was Queen Alexandra you can’t, not till I’ve finished with my crust, which if I leave it to Mabel it’s spoilt.’ I’ve not got nothing against the Salvation Army, and so I told the Curate when he came. ‘Mabel’s religion’s all right so far as I can see,’ I said. ‘She don’t tell lies and she don’t carry on with the boys, and hymn-singing don’t worry me, not so long as it’s cheerful, which most of the Army hymns are, to do them justice. No, her religion’s all right, Mr Smithers,’ I said, ‘but she’s got a shocking heavy hand for pastry and there’s no getting from it.’”
Shirley shook the arm she was holding, but that was as far as she could get. To shake Mrs Camber herself was an impossibility.
“What did Miss Maltby want?”
Mrs Camber gulped again.
“I told her straight I’d got to get my pudding on, and what did she do but hang around and watch me till I could ha’ screamed? ‘But why do you do it that way?’ she says. And, ‘Wouldn’t it be better someways else?’ she says. And, ‘Oh dear, what a long time it takes to make a pudding,’ she says. And, ‘Isn’t it funny to call it a pudding when it’s got meat inside it?’ she says. And Mabel singing in the scullery fit to burst your ears: ‘Is there anyone there at the beautiful gate a-watching and waiting for me?’ And I took and told her, ‘You go along upstairs, Miss Maltby, and set down, or I won’t be answerable for the pudding nor yet for my temper,’ I said, and she took and went.”
Shirley let go of the hard, hot arm and stood back. Hopeless to try and hurry Mrs Camber. She had to tell you everything that happened or she couldn’t tell you anything at all. She didn’t do it on purpose; it was just the way her mind worked. If you burst in, she just went back to the beginning and started all over again.
“Well, you finished the pudding, and then you saw Miss Maltby. What did she want?”
Mrs Camber tossed her head.
“Unpleasantness of some kind it was bound to be—I knew that right along. But when she up and told me what it was you could have knocked me down with a turkey feather. ‘And I want you to come upstairs with me and search her room,’ she says, ‘and if I’ve made a mistake I’ll be ready and willing to apologize for troubling you,’ she says, ‘but it’s a thing that ought to be cleared up, if it’s only for the sake of your house,’ she says. And I said ‘Right you are,’ and up we went.”
Shirley went back one step, two steps, until she touched the table. It was an oval table with a rosewood top and a single massive leg. It was very solid and strong. Shirley leaned against it. She said,
“You went up? Where?”
“Into your room, Miss Dale.”
Shirley felt herself turning white with anger. Her face felt white, and her lips felt stiff. She said in a very slow, cold voice,
“You went into my room with Miss Maltby? Why?”
“Because this is my house, and I’ve always kept it respectable—that’s why,” said Mrs Camber.
Shirley put her hands behind her and gripped on to the edge of the table—hard. It was like the worst sort of dream she had ever dreamt. It couldn’t be true—it really couldn’t be true. Perhaps she would wake up in a minute. Perhaps she wouldn’t. She said more slowly than before,
“I don’t know what you mean. Will you please tell me?”
“There’s things you can tell at once, and there’s things you can’t,” said Mrs Camber with an air of aloof gloom, “which when she come and told me, ‘Miss Maltby,’ I said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ And she says, ‘Believe it or not, it’s true.’”
An awful patience had descended upon Shirley.
“What did Miss Maltby say?”
She thought Mrs Camber’s little sunk eyes had a pitying look. That was all nonsense, because why on earth should she be pitying Shirley? And why on earth didn’t she come to the point?
“Some people says a sight of things they’d better by half keep to themselves.”
“Mrs Camber, you really must tell me what Miss Maltby said.”
“Which it’s nothing anyone would be in a hurry to hear—not if they knew what it was. And I said to her, ‘Well, by all accounts and at the very least of it you’ve been a-prying and a-poking.’”
Shirley’s
patience broke suddenly. She stamped again, and very much harder than before. There was a pair of old-fashioned lustres on the mantelpiece. The voice in which she said “Mrs Camber!” made them ring.
“And all very well to shout at me, miss, but shouting’s no answer.”
“You haven’t asked me anything,” said Shirley.
“Well, then I’m going to,” said Mrs Camber—“and if you don’t like it, it’s not my fault! Was you in Miss Maltby’s room day before yesterday round about half-past one when she was over in the bathroom and says she saw you go in and saw you come out through the crack of the bathroom door?”
A bright high colour flamed in Shirley’s cheeks. Her skin burned and tingled with it. The lustres rang again as she said,
“What an absolute lie!”
“That’s what she says—and couldn’t come out along of having nothing on but a towel. And what she wants to go having a bath at such a ridiculous hour is what I can’t understand and never shall. But that’s her way, and as she says, there’s no one in the house that don’t know it. ‘And what’s easier,’ she says, ‘than to come down one pair of stairs and slip in and slip out again? And no one wasn’t to know,’ she says, ‘that I count all my money regular every time I come in or go out,’ she says.”
“Is Miss Maltby mad?” said Shirley.
There was a faint sympathetic gleam in Mrs Camber’s eye. She repressed it as in duty bound.
“Not that you’d take notice of,” she said.
“She must be if she says I was in her room.”
“That’s what you say, miss. And what she says is she saw you there—leastways she saw you go in, and she kept her eye to the crack till you come out again, not above a minute or two it wasn’t, she says, and when she’d got some clothes on her, and come back into her room and went over her money, there was two sixpences short.”
“She must be absolutely raving,” said Shirley.
A fleeting look that resembled pity appeared again on Mrs Camber’s face. It was gone in an instant. She said in a flat, heavy voice,
“So upstairs we went and into your room, miss, and she says to me, ‘I won’t put a finger on nothing, Mrs Camber,’ she says, ‘but those two sixpences have got my mark on them same as all my money has and if you won’t look and see if Miss Shirley Dale hasn’t got them hidden away somewhere, well then I’ll have in the police,’ she says. And the first thing I see when I took up the toilet-cover off of your chest-of-drawers, there was two sixpences pushed in under, just where the looking-glass would be standing over them.”
Hole and Corner Page 5
