He crossed a stile, and came in sight of the lights of Hinton station. As he did so, the church clock of Hinton St Margaret chimed out the hour of twelve. If the train had not been altered, he had a quarter of an hour in hand, and a couple of hundred yards between him and the main road.
The field path ended in a gap with posts across it. Jim emerged, crossed the road, and began to walk down the incline which led to the station. It is a long incline. He had only just begun the descent, when it was borne in upon him that the time-table had certainly been altered. The clock had only just struck twelve, but the train was coming in. It might now be anything from the eleven-fifty-five to the twelve-five, but it couldn’t any longer be the twelve-fifteen.
He started to run, and as he did so, something black began to bob up and down ahead of him. It was another man, also running, and presumably with the same object. Jim put on all the pace he could, gained a little, and then saw the black figure draw away. They would hold him at the wicket. If they held him, he’d be likely to miss the train. Would they hold him? No, he was through, with a hand thrust out as if he were showing a ticket. That was it—he’d come down by train, and he’d got his return ticket. He was across the platform and into one of the rear carriages as the train began to move. Jim flung himself against the wicket, and saw the red tail-light slide off into the dark. He had shot his bolt. That was the last train, and even if he felt like walking into Ledlington, which he didn’t, it wouldn’t be of the least use. The fellow would have had several hours in which to get off the map. He turned round and walked back up the incline.
Well, he had lost the train. Had he gained anything? He had seen the man’s back for a moment as he ran across the platform. The light was poor, and he certainly hadn’t seen anything that he could be sure of recognizing—medium height—medium build—some sort of cap on the head—a suit, not an overcoat. That was all, except just for one thing, and that he couldn’t have sworn to. He thought there was something odd about the man’s right shoulder as he ran—his shoulder, or his sleeve. There was something that might be a shadow, or a stain, or a tear; and he remembered his own left-hand grip, that last wrench when the man bit him and pulled free, and the sound of tearing cloth.
He passed between the posts and took the path across the fields again. He was angry and fagged, he had a bump on his head, and a bitten wrist. He had had the emeralds in his grasp and had lost them. But gradually, as he walked, it came to him that the alteration in the local time-table which had turned the twelve-fifteen into the twelve-three or something of that sort had saved him from plunging into the devil of a mess. If he had come up with his burglar, what was he going to have done about it? Chasing him was all right, but what happened if you caught him? That was where the fun began. He sketched out some snappy dialogue as he walked:
“I charge this man with breaking into my house at Hazelbury West and committing an assault by biting me on the wrist.”
“What is the name of your house?”
“Hale Place.”
“What is your name?”
“James Randal.”
“Do you charge the prisoner with theft?”
“Yes—I charge him with the theft of the Van Berg emeralds.”
“And may we inquire what the Van Berg emeralds were doing in your possession, Mr Randal?”
After that the dialogue broke up in disorder, to the accompaniment of a heavy hand on his shoulder and a stolid voice informing him that he was under arrest for the murder of Elmer Van Berg, and that anything he said would be liable to be used in evidence against him. He began to feel a good deal of gratitude to the person responsible for the altered time-table.
That lasted for a bit, and then something else loomed up. Suppose the thief didn’t know what he’d got. Suppose he just went blundering off with the emeralds to his usual fence. It was a hundred to one he’d be nabbed. And if he was nabbed, it was about ten thousand to one that he’d give the whole show away—he would be bound to if he didn’t want to be charged with the murder, or the attempted murder, of Elmer Van Berg. He would save his neck by owning up to having burgled Hale Place.
The dialogue began again.
“And who does Hale Place belong to?”
“It belongs to me.”
“Now, Mr Randal—can you offer any explanation as to how these emeralds, the property of Mr Van Berg—or would it be the late Mr Van Berg—can you offer any explanation as to how these emeralds came to be concealed in your house?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Evidence has been given that they were in a hiding-place the secret of which was known only to yourself. Do you deny this?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I put it to you that you stole the emeralds and placed them in this receptacle.”
It was a nightmare—the deadliest, beastliest kind of nightmare; because it was all perfectly logical, possible, and probable. His mind began to sort out the facts and array its conclusions.
He couldn’t go to the police, because, quite definitely, he couldn’t afford to charge his burglar.
On the other hand—
He must do everything in his power to trace the man and get the emeralds away from him. If he didn’t succeed in doing this, he would probably find himself in the dock for the theft of the emeralds and the murder of Elmer Van Berg.
He had no idea how he was going to trace the man. He had no clue to his identity except that of a torn coat sleeve. A torn coat may be changed or mended. Exit the torn coat.
The man had got into a train which went to Ledlington and didn’t go any farther. Going to Ledlington doesn’t necessarily mean staying in Ledlington. Still, it was some sort of a clue to the man’s whereabouts.
A torn coat and a Ledlington train were all he had to go upon. They did not provide him with very much encouragement.
He came back to Hale Place dog-tired, missing Caroline by a bare five minutes. He had left the door wide open, and he found it closed. So Caroline had come. He thought she might be there still. He called her name. When there was no reply, he went forward into the kitchen and groped for and lit another of the candles she had brought him. He wanted to wash the blood from his face, and to bathe his bitten wrist.
At the scullery sink he let the tap run and put his head under it. Then he took a look at his wrist. It was a good deal bruised, but the skin was only broken in one place. As he held it under the tap and the smear of blood ran off, he gave a start and caught up the candle in his other hand. The mark of the bite showed plain on both sides of the wrist. On the under side were six indentations, all close together. But on the top of the wrist there were only four—two on one side and two on the the other, and a widish gap between.
Here at last was a real clue. The man who had bitten him had lost the two front teeth in the middle of his upper jaw.
XXVII
If you cannot go back or go forward, you must just make the best of it and go whatever way you can.
Jim walked back across the fields in the early hours of the morning and took the milk train into Ledlington. It used to leave Hinton at six-thirty. He discovered that it now left at six-thirty-one. It reached Ledlington at ten minutes to seven, which is a cold, uncomfortable hour to arrive anywhere, but especially when you have no fixed destination and very little money.
He had a cup of tea and a sandwich, and put in time in the waiting-room until he could buy a paper. He chose one of the more dramatic dailies, and was immediately confronted by a large picture of Packham Hall and a photograph, described as unique, of Susie Van Berg with the emeralds all across the front of her dress. It wasn’t a very good photograph of Susie, but it was a speaking likeness of the emeralds. Jim wondered whether the burglar would see it, and what he would do if he did see it. If he had a grain of sense, he’d chuck the chain away into the nearest ditch and make himself scarce. That was assuming that he didn’t already know what he had got. But didn’t he? Didn’t he? What had brought him to Hale Place twice? Would he ha
ve come back a second time, and come back to a room which appeared to contain nothing stealable if he hadn’t got wind of the emeralds? It was taking a risk to come back. There must have been a strong motive. The emeralds would provide the motive. A room containing nothing but panelling, two china candlesticks, and an immovable four-post bed frankly would not. It became most urgently necessary to find the burglar.
Jim had a pleasant picture of himself asking the forty thousand odd adult inhabitants of Ledlington to show him their front teeth. There didn’t seem to be any other way of identifying the burglar.
He read all that his paper had to say about the Van Berg case. There was a lot of it, but it didn’t amount to anything at all. He gathered that Elmer was about the same, that Susie was refusing to be interviewed—the journalistic euphemism for this is, “absolutely prostrated”—and that the police were sitting tight. He thought that he would go and have another look at the back numbers as soon as the free library opened. There were several points on which he felt he could do with a little more information.
He left the station at half past eight and walked in the direction of the library. It would not be open until nine o’clock, so he walked down the High Street, through Poulter’s Row, and round the Market Square.
The library is upon the east side of the square. It was presented to Ledlington by the late Sir Albert Dawnish in recognition of the fact that it was in Ledlington that the first of Dawnish’s Quick Cash Stores had had its birth. Sir Albert himself, three times life size, stands in the middle of the square attired in the strange garments peculiar to statuary. There are the trousers that would break any man’s leg, the negligent tie, the flapping collar, and the cloak. It was a very expensive statue. Ledlington regards it with pride.
Jim was passing the statue a second time, when a girl who had just come down Market Street with a basket on her arm stopped short not a yard away and said “Oh!” in a tone of so much surprise that his attention was arrested. A moment before, he had not known that there was a girl there, but when she said “Oh!” he saw Min Williams staring at him and recognized her at once. She had on a blue serge coat and skirt and a very neat little dark blue hat which threw up the gold of her hair and the blue of her eyes.
She said “Oh!” again, and her cheeks turned bright pink. It was an embarrassing encounter. There was nothing for it but to make it as ordinary as possible.
He said good morning, asked her why she was out so early, and was about to pass on, when she stopped him.
“Are you in a hurry?” It was said timidly, hesitatingly. Her colour came and went. Only a very hard-hearted person could have admitted to being in a hurry.
Jim said, “Not at all.”
“Then if we could just walk round the square—”
They began to walk. He wondered what she wanted to say to him. Apparently nothing, for she remained perfectly silent. When they reached the colonnade which embellishes the west side of the square, however, she turned to him with a look of embarrassed appeal.
“Aren’t you coming back?” She was brightly flushed. The effort to speak had brought tears into her eyes.
Jim was rather touched.
“I don’t think so, Min.”
The colonnade was quite empty. She stood still and looked at him earnestly.
“I’m not one to interfere—but she’s very unhappy.”
“Nesta?”
She nodded.
“I don’t think it’s on my account.”
She nodded again, blinking away a tear.
“What makes you think so?” he said.
Min’s eyes reproached him.
“You’ve not been married a month.”
He looked hard at her.
“I’m not admitting I’m married at all.”
She backed away from him.
“You haven’t remembered?”
“I haven’t remembered marrying Nesta.”
“Don’t you want to remember?”
He gave a short laugh.
“Not that!”
“It’s dreadful for her,” she said in a soft, distressed way. “It seems as if that would be a thing you couldn’t help remembering—it seems as if it would be too dreadful if anyone could forget that they were married. I’m so sorry for Nesta I don’t know what to do.”
“What makes you think she minds, Min?”
“She’s so cross,” said Min ingenuously. “There isn’t nothing right from morning till night.”
He got a kind of hard amusement out of that. He wanted Min to go on talking, so he said,
“You think she really minds?”
“If it was Tom—” said Min, and turned quite pale.
“Tom’s a very lucky young man, and I expect he knows it.”
He wanted her to talk, because an idea was shaping itself in his mind. When he had waked up in her house, it was Min who told him he was Jim Riddell. How did she know? What was she going on when she said that? He thought he could size up a liar, and he didn’t believe that Min was a liar; he thought she was just what she seemed to be—a nice, simple girl, rather pathetically fond of Tom, who didn’t strike him as being nearly good enough for her. Now if Min had known him—really known him—as Jim Riddell, and as Nesta’s husband before the wreck of the Alice Arden, he wouldn’t have to believe her, but he would certainly have to take her evidence very seriously into account.
Min blushed.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said.
Someone had turned into the colonnade from Poulter’s Row. The last thing that Jim wanted was to attract attention. He said, “We’d better walk.” And then, as they moved, “Min—I don’t know about anything. For instance, I haven’t any idea of where I first met you.”
Min said “Oh!” in a startled way.
“If I’m Nesta’s husband, I’m your brother-in-law.”
“That’s right.”
“Then I suppose we’re old acquaintances—you’ve known me for a long time.”
If she wasn’t truthful, she’d say yes to that and land with both feet in his trap. The gap in his memory only covered the last six weeks. On the farther side of it were the seven years he had spent overseas. He felt an odd relief when she shook her head and said,
“Oh no.”
“We’re not old friends?”
“Oh no,” said Min again.
“Min—when did you meet me first?”
He got a round blue stare.
“Oh, you know.”
“I’m afraid I don’t. Shall we turn and walk back again? I don’t suppose anyone knows us, but you never can tell. And now—when did you meet me first?”
“Oh, but you do know that—you can’t have forgotten so soon!”
“So soon?”
“It’s not a week,” said Min. “You can’t have forgotten!”
Jim felt a rising excitement. He was aware that he changed colour; he hoped not too noticeably.
“Not a week? Do you mean you never saw me before Nesta fetched me from that hospital at Elston?”
“No, never.” She looked up at him with an air of childlike candour.
“Then it was Nesta who told you I was Jim Riddell?”
“Oh yes.”
“So when I said I didn’t know who I was, and you said I was Jim Riddell, you were only saying what Nesta told you to say?”
Min coloured up to the roots of her fair hair. There was distress and bewilderment in her voice as she protested,
“But she couldn’t have made a mistake. She must have known—her own husband—”
Jim thought he would let it go at that. But he wanted to know about Tom. Where did Tom stand? He felt a little chary of accepting Tom as a guileless innocent. He asked abruptly,
“Hadn’t Tom met me either?”
“Oh no.”
So that was that. Jim felt as if a heavy paving-stone had been lifted off his back. He still carried one or two more, but this particular one was gone. If it was only Nesta who identified him
as Jim Riddell, he was prepared to lay very long odds that he wasn’t Jim Riddell, and never had been Jim Riddell. At the same time his opinion of Nesta as an adversary went up. It had been nothing short of a stroke of genius to put up Min to answer his bewildered questions. Simple good faith is more effective than the cleverest of lies.
They reached the end of the colonnade once more.
“I mustn’t keep you,” he said.
Min blushed again.
“Oh, won’t you please come back with me and just see her? You don’t know what mayn’t come of it if you go on staying away. Won’t you please come back?” She spoke with what was obviously a great effort. Her hands, in their neat thread gloves, were twisting the straps of the shopping basket.
That very delicate extra sense which sometimes warns, and sometimes discerns things of which we have no evidence, became suddenly active in Jim. He had owed his life to it before now. It prompted him to go on talking to Min. Instead of saying good-bye he turned and began to walk slowly back along the colonnade.
Min, flushed and encouraged, moved beside him with small quick steps, two or three to his one. It would be so lovely if she could bring them together again. Married people oughtn’t to live separate; it always led to trouble.
Mother always said..… She found she was saying this out loud:
“Mother always says—”
And then Jim discomposed her by turning a most attentive look upon her.
“Yes—what does your mother say?”
“If you won’t think I’m saying anything I shouldn’t—”
“I promise you I won’t, Min.”
She didn’t feel quite so flustered after that. He had a real kind look in his eyes when he spoke her name. His voice was kind too, and if he didn’t take it amiss, there was no saying what good she mightn’t do if she could only get the courage to speak out.
“Well?” said Jim. That odd unclassified sense was alert and waiting, but he felt free to be amused and a little charmed by Min’s hesitancies.
“I don’t hardly like to.”
“Oh come—you were going to tell me what your mother says. I’m sure you can manage that.”
Outrageous Fortune Page 18
