by James Hilton
He licked the perspiration as it streamed down over his lips. What could he do, trapped between an enfilading terror on the right and an ascending one from below? There was no inch of room to escape; he was sheerly cornered, and whatever movement he made could only decrease the distance between himself and one or other of his pursuers. For he was convinced, by now, that they WERE his pursuers; and like a horrible nightmare there came the sudden vision of a possibility that had never before occurred to him, though it was simple enough, by all standards—the possibility that the Oakington murders had been the work, not of one person only, but of TWO! And the two now were after HIM!
If only he could have flashed a light in either direction he would not have cared so much, though the darkness, he knew, hid him from them as effectively as it hid them from him. But the terror lay in not knowing who, or even in some sense WHAT, was coming; better even to be a target for revolver-practice than to wait in total darkness for something unknown and terrible to lay hands on him.
The footsteps on the stairs were climbing towards him. He was certain of it, though he felt rather than heard their approach. They were soft, stealthy footsteps, creeping up towards him through the blackness. He was sure that in another moment he would either turn sick or scream at the top of his voice or else hurl himself desperately downwards against whatever horror might be ascending. All he did, however, was to close his eyes, as if to shut out the very perception of darkness. The footsteps were quite near to him now; whatever belonged to them could not be more than a few yards away. Yet still no light! He felt that he MUST break down, MUST ultimately secure the blessed relief of unconsciousness, MUST—and yet somehow could not. Then, to his utmost horror, he felt a hand reaching out of the darkness, and cautiously roving over his hand, his arm, his shoulder, his neck. He opened his mouth to scream, but the hand suddenly closed over it, while a hoarse voice whispered in his ear: “Follow me down, you fool, and for God’s sake be quiet!”
He never knew exactly what happened just after that. The next he clearly remembered was being in his own room, in his own easy-chair, with Guthrie offering him brandy out of a flask. Yes, GUTHRIE.
“Feeling better, eh?” the detective said, in a kindly voice.
Memory came back to him with a rush. “Yes—oh yes, I’m all right —but up there—in the sick-rooms—there’s someone hiding —”
“Don’t get excited—I know all about it. I turned the key in the lock at the bottom of the stairs as we came down.”
Turned the key in the lock! Why on earth hadn’t he himself thought of something so absurdly simple? He stammered: “But—but—aren’t you going to—to arrest him?”
“All in good time—no need for you to worry. A little bit of a wait will do our friend up there no harm. First of all, as soon as you feel ready for it, I’d like to know just a few details of this latest development.”
Revell was still dazed; he stared at Guthrie in vague astonishment. “I don’t understand,” he gasped. “I don’t understand why you are here—I don’t—I don’t think—I understand—anything.”
“No?” Guthrie’s voice was quietly sympathetic. “All right, then, it doesn’t matter. You’ve had a pretty fair shock—I’m not surprised it’s taken a bit of the wind out of you. But you were chasing somebody, weren’t you?”
Revell jerked out: “Somebody tried to shoot me—through that window —I ran after him—and he went up to the sick-rooms.”
“You SAW him try to shoot you?”
“I saw the revolver, and I knew who he was.” After which, in slow, staccato phrases, he recounted the whole incident.
For the next few moments Guthrie behaved like an altogether different man. Usually calm and imperturbable in manner, he became suddenly agile and excited; he sprang to the window, opened it wide, and gave the sill and framework a most minute examination. When he turned round again his lips were tight with anger. “A pretty trick, Revell,” he said bitterly. “Well worthy of the others. Come and look here.” And as Revell staggered to his feet and approached the window, the detective took his arm with a sudden friendliness that was again unusual. “I’m damned glad you’re still alive, anyhow. It’s only by amazing luck that you are. The difficulty, you see, was to shoot without being seen—to take aim, that is, without the criminal having to put a head round the corner. You were typing, you say, just before you noticed the revolver pointing at you?”
“Yes.”
“Sitting here at this desk?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve often been in the same position before, I suppose?”
“Yes, fairly often.”
“I see.” He led Revell close to the window. “Notice these two nails on the inside of the window embrasure. They’re new—that was rather careless, for it would have been just as easy to find rusty ones. But it was a devilish neat idea, all the same. For if you place the barrel of a revolver plumb against the brickwork and at the same time lying across these two nails, it will aim directly at the head of anyone sitting as you were at the desk here. The assassin had only to lean out of the end dormitory window next door, hold the revolver in position, and shoot as soon as the sound of your typewriter began. Simple, but rather desperate when you come to ponder over it. Our friend must have rather badly wanted you out of the way.”
“It was jealousy,” Revell answered. “His wife told me he was like that. And he saw her here with me a little while ago.”
“Oh?” Guthrie raised his eyebrows slightly. Then he wandered about the room with apparent casualness, picking up first one thing and then another. At last the writing-desk and its contents attracted his attention. “Hullo, what’s this—a letter for me? I suppose I may open it.” Revell watched him half-dreamily, still too bewildered to attempt any interference. He saw the detective read the letter, slip it into its envelope, and put it into his pocket without remark.
“I still don’t quite understand why you are here,” Revell said at length.
“No? Ah well, never mind—all in good time, as I said before. You can thank your lucky star I WAS here, anyhow. Have a smoke—it’ll calm your nerves.” He lit his own pipe and puffed vigorously. “The Oakington murderer is, of course, upstairs. I daresay you guessed as much. There’s no chance of escape—the windows are too far from the ground and barred as well. And here, by the way, is the revolver that nearly did for you. I found it on the stairs on the way up. The murderer must have been in a deuce of a hurry to drop it.” He produced from his hip-pocket a villainous-looking long-barrelled weapon. “This is what is called a Colt Point 22 Police Positive. Not a nice thing to be plugged with, by any means. Yes, my lad, you’ve been damned lucky.” He turned to the bookshelves at his elbow, abstracted an A.B.C. guide, and began languorously to search the pages. “Ah, there’s a train to town in half an hour from now—the night mail from Easthampton. I should catch it, if I were you.”
Revell faced this new suggestion with fresh bewilderment. “But—but WHY?”
“Oh well, you’ve had enough for one night, surely. Leave me the job of putting the bracelets on our friend. You’ll be able to read all about it in the papers to-morrow.”
Revell suddenly realised the drift of the other’s remarks. “Mr. Guthrie,” he answered, with flushing cheeks, “you needn’t think you can take me in as easily as that! I can see what you’re after. You’ve bungled this case pretty badly up to now, yet you want to come in for all the credit just as if you hadn’t. _I_ tracked down the Oakington murderer, not you, and though I don’t mind you coming in with me on it, I’m damn well going to see that you don’t shove me out! After sweating over the business long after you’d given it up as a bad job, don’t you think I deserve to be in at the finish?”
Guthrie nodded quite equably. “All right, if that’s how you look at it.” He shrugged his broad shoulders; Revell was rather surprised that he should give in so easily. “Well, if we are going to do the job together, we’d better get it done, that’s all. Do you feel equal to an
y possible unpleasantness?”
“Of course,” answered Revell, valiantly. “We shall be armed, anyhow.”
“Oh, I wasn’t so much thinking of that. Still, you can carry this affair with you, if you like. It isn’t loaded now, so you can wave it about if you feel inclined. Anyhow, let’s go.”
He led the way out into the corridor, and a moment later, after unlocking the door at the foot, they were climbing the stairs to the floor above, but this time with Guthrie’s powerful electric torch illuminating the way. Revell’s heart was beginning to beat fast again, but Guthrie appeared quite calm. “This was where we first met, wasn’t it?” he whispered, as they reached the top. “Romantic spot, eh?” He turned to the right, with Revell following him.
There were five rooms in a row, each with the door closed. Guthrie opened the first, flashed his torch round, and closed the door again. “Nothing there,” he said.
The next three rooms were similarly searched; since they were completely bare of furniture it did not take more than a rapid flash of the torch into all the corners. They knew then, of course, as they had perhaps expected from the beginning, that their quest would end at the fifth room. As Guthrie opened the door of it a strange sound came from within—a sound as of a dry, coughing sob. And a second later the rays of the torch lit up, in the furthest corner, the small huddled figure of Mrs. Ellington.
* * *
CHAPTER 13. — LUNCH FOR TWO IN SOHO
Two days later, at the hour of ten in the morning, Colin Revell sat up in bed at his Islington lodgings and gloomily surveyed the sunlight streaming in at the sides of the window-blind. He had slept badly—had had troubled, nightmarish dreams that had awakened him from time to time in a sickly glow of perspiration. Now, as his full consciousness returned, the nightmare horrors vanished, but memories took their place—and memories that were hardly to be preferred.
With a yawn of misery he jolted himself out of bed and wound up the paper blind. Islington greeted him with its familiar frowsiness; it was a Friday, and innumerable vendors were pushing their hand-carts towards the Cattle Market. The sun shone mistily out of a sky that was like a curtain of soiled muslin stretched just above the housetops. Why DID one live in such a place? Why, in fact, did one live at all? For in his mind’s eye he was seeing the cool green lawns of Oakington. Fate had decreed that he should at last sigh wistfully for his Alma Mater.
Mrs. Hewston’s tap on the door-panel reminded him of more earthly things. “Are you gettin’ up, sir?” she called out, in that tone of sing-song commiseration which Revell found hardest of all to endure.
“Yes,” he answered, curtly.
“I do ‘ope you’re feelin’ better, sir.”
“Oh yes, Mrs. Hewston, thanks—there’s really nothing at all the matter with me.”
“That’s what you SAY, sir, but it don’t seem true, reelly. Any’ow, I’ll put the breakfast out for you, sir.”
“All right.”
She went down again and busied herself with the preparation of the inevitable ham-and-eggs. She was indeed a good deal mystified by her lodger’s condition. As she informed her neighbour across the garden fence: “‘E don’t ‘ardly seem the same person since ‘e come back from that school. ‘E don’t eat, and ‘e don’t sleep (‘cos me bein’ a light sleeper and ‘is room bein’ over mine, I can ‘ear ‘im movin’ about at all hours of the night), and ‘e don’t read ‘is paper—in fact, ‘e don’t seem to take no interest in anything. Sort of listless, like. It’s my belief them murders ‘as thoroughly got on ‘is nerves. But you’d think ‘e’d be more satisfied now, wouldn’t you, seein’ they’ve found out as ‘ow the woman done them after all?”
“After all” was typical of Mrs. Hewston. It conveyed, without exactly saying so, the impression that all along in her own mind she had suspected the truth. Which was certainly not the case.
Meanwhile, after a wash, but without his customary bath and shave, Revell descended to his ground-floor sitting-room. The thought of ham-and-eggs, by now a little chilled under their cover, was hardly cheering. He turned to the sideboard and brought out a gin-bottle. Before opening it he went to his desk for a ruler and measured the height of the liquid—‘five and a half inches, and when he had gone to bed it had been six. Mrs. Hewston again, he reflected, without malice, without even irritation. She always did, and she always would, and what the hell did it matter, anyway?
What did anything matter, in fact? He mixed himself a stiff gin-and-tonic and drank it off at a gulp. Then he sat heavily in his chair beside the empty fire-grate and closed his eyes. His typewriter, still locked, faced him from the corner where he had dumped it down two days before, and the manuscript of his unfinished epic lay mixed up with a heap of unopened letters on his writing-desk.
But behind his closed eyes there was no relief. Indeed, thoughts and images only crowded more impetuously; he lived again through those frightful moments at the top of the sick-room staircase, felt again that fearful brain-splitting shock when Guthrie had shone his torch through the doorway of the fifth room. What had happened after that was still, as it had been at the time, a vague nightmare in his mind. The woman’s wild shriek of defiance, her tigerish attack, Guthrie’s ruthless but calm retaliation, and that horrible procession of the three of them up to the moment of his collapse. He still saw her blazing, hunted eyes, and still heard her hoarse screaming. Guthrie, no doubt, had grown used to such scenes, but for him, Revell, they were a memory that would always horrify.
God—how awful it was. And to think that she, whom he had believed the most charming and innocent creature that ever breathed… Oh, damn it all, there was nothing for it but another drink. He rose, and in doing so, noticed the streamer headline on the front page of his morning newspaper. “Mrs. Ellington in Court—Sensational Evidence”—it shouted. The ghouls! He threw the paper across the room where he could not see it. But of course that was really quite useless—the whole business was altogether impossible to escape. Every placard would contain one or other of those fateful words—“Ellington” and “Oakington”… Oh yes, there was decidedly nothing for it but another drink.
But while mixing it he heard footsteps and voices outside his room, and in a few moments Mrs. Hewston opened the door with the information, given in the same tone of graveyard sympathy, that a gentleman had called to see him. And before he could give any reply, the nondescript and average figure of Detective Guthrie came into view and, after a friendly nod of dismissal to Mrs. Hewston, stepped past her into the room.
“Well, my lad,” he began, with a robust cheerfulness that jarred exquisitely on every one of Revell’s nerves, “I thought I’d pay you a morning call. Your landlady’s been giving me an awful account of you, but of course I know what landladies are. Nothing much wrong really, I suppose, eh?”
“Oh no.” Revell managed a dismal smile. “Have a drink?”
“No thanks. I don’t drink in the morning, and neither should you, by the way. Now I come to look at you, though, you do seem a bit dickey. Only natural, of course, after the shock of Wednesday’s little affair.”
Revell abandoned the mixing of his drink and re-established himself in the arm-chair, motioning Guthrie to take the one opposite. The detective did so.
“As a matter of fact,” he went on, “I came chiefly to tell you that, for the present, at any rate, I don’t think we shall need your evidence. I quite appreciate your scruples in the matter, and it’s just possible we may be able to do without you altogether, even at the Assizes. I’ll do my best for you, anyhow. We shan’t, of course, take up the matter of that attempted attack on you. Too many counts on the indictment never help the prosecution. So you needn’t fear you’re going to have a lot of limelight turned on you.”
Revell nodded. “Thanks. That’s good of you.”
“Oh, don’t thank me—it was all decided at the Yard, but I was very glad, of course, for your sake.” His gaze roved round the room. “Look here, don’t let me interrupt your breakfast.”
“You’re not doing—I didn’t intend to have any.”
“Oh, nonsense, man—you must EAT.”
“Je n’en vois pas la nécessité.”
“Oh, don’t be funny.” Guthrie lifted the cover and peered at the neglected ham-and-eggs. “I must admit it doesn’t look very tempting. But Revell, you know, you mustn’t let this Oakington business upset you too much. It IS upsetting, I know—even to a hardened old sleuth like me. I’ve only arrested three women for murder in twenty years, and I can’t say I’ve grown used to the experience.”
“Oh, I shall be all right soon.”
“Of course you will. Cheer up, anyhow, and don’t take gin for breakfast if you want to live to a decent old age.” He stared at the other doubtfully for a moment and then, as if seized with a sudden idea, continued: “Look here, come to lunch with me in town—we’ll go to some quiet little place where we can chat, if you like. There’s a French restaurant I know near Leicester Square—you’ll have an appetite for the food there when you see it, I’m certain. Go up and dress, and I’ll wait for you down here.”
Revell opened his mouth to decline, but the other anticipated him. “Go along now—I won’t listen to any refusal. Got a newspaper, by the way, that I can look at while you’re getting ready?”
Revell pointed to the newspaper on the floor. “Thanks,” replied the detective genially, as he picked it up. “I say, what a splash these papers are making of the affair! By Jove, it reads well! Run along and take your time—I shall be quite happy here.”
