“Well, you’ve done it,” she said coolly. “Nothing can alter that. What you’ve got to consider now is how to get away. And as quickly as you can.”
“Yes, you said that before—but how, and where to?”
“Have some food and I’ll tell you. Have you had a proper meal today?”
“Yes, I had breakfast,” he said. But he did not appear to be hungry, and his angry, feverish eyes watched her unwaveringly.
“What you want,” she said, “is to get out of this district, where every one’s talking about the thing, to a place where no one’s ever heard of it.”
“If you mean abroad, it isn’t the slightest good trying. I tried to get taken on a boat as a hand four days ago, and they asked if I was Union or something, and wouldn’t look at me. And as for the Channel boats, I might as well give myself up.”
“I’m not talking about abroad at all. You’re not as famous as you think. I’m talking about the Highlands. Do you think the people in my home on the west coast have ever heard of you or what happened last Tuesday night? Take my word for it, they haven’t. They never read anything but a local paper, and local papers report London affairs in one line. The place is thirty-six miles from a railway station, and the policeman lives in the next village, four miles away, and has never seen anything more criminal than a salmon poacher. That’s where you are going. I have written a letter, saying that you are coming because you are in bad health. Your name is George Lowe, and you are a journalist. There is a train for Edinburgh from King’s Cross at ten-fifteen and you are catching that tonight. There isn’t much time, so hurry.”
“And what the police are catching is me at the platform barrier.”
“There isn’t a barrier at King’s Cross. I haven’t gone up and down to Scotland for nearly thirty years without knowing that. The Scotch platform is open to any one who wants to walk on. And even if there are detectives there, the train is about half a mile long. You’ve got to risk something if you’re going to get away. You can’t just stay here and let them get you! I should have thought that a gamble would have been quite in your line.”
“Think I’m afraid, do you?” he said. “Well, I am. Scared stiff. To go out into the street tonight would be like walking into no-man’s-land with Fritz machine-gunning.”
“You’ve either got to pull yourself together or go and give yourself up. You can’t sit still and let them come and take you.”
“Bert was right when he christened you Lady Macbeth,” he said.
“Don’t!” she said sharply.
“All right,” he muttered. “I’m sort of crazy.” There was a thick silence. “All right, let’s try this as a last stunt.”
“There’s very little time,” she reminded him. “Put something into a suitcase quickly—a suitcase that you can carry yourself—you don’t want porters.”
He moved at her bidding into the bedroom that led off the sitting-room, and began to fling things into a suitcase, while she put neat parcels of food into the pockets of the coat that hung behind the door.
“What’s the good?” he said suddenly. “It’s no use. How do you think I can take a main-line train out of London without being stopped and questioned?”
“You couldn’t if you were alone,” she said, “but with me it’s a different matter. Look at me. Do I look the sort who would be helping you to get away?”
The man stood in the doorway contemplating her for a moment, and a sardonic smile twisted his mouth as he took her in in all her upright orthodoxy. “I believe you’re right,” he said. He gave a short, mirthless laugh and thereafter put no difficulties in the way of her plans. In ten minutes they were ready for departure.
“Have you any money?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said; “plenty.”
She seemed about to ask a question.
“No, not that,” he said. “My own.”
She carried a rug and an extra coat: “You mustn’t suggest hurry in any way; you must look as though you were going a long journey and didn’t care who knew it.” And he carried the suitcase and a golf-bag. There was to be no hole-and-corner business. This was bluff, and the bigger the bluff, the more chance there was of carrying it off. As they stepped into the foggy road, she said, “We’ll go to Brixton High Street and get a bus or a taxi.”
As it happened, it was a taxi that offered itself first. It swelled out of the dark before they had reached a main thoroughfare, and as the man heaved what they were carrying aboard the woman gave the address of their destination.
“Cost you something, lady,” said the driver.
“Well, well,” she said, “isn’t every day my son has a holiday.”
The driver grunted good-naturedly. “That’s the stuff! Feast and famine. Nothing like it.” And she climbed in, and the taxi ceased its agitated throbbing and slid into action.
After a silence the man said, “Well, you couldn’t do more for me if I were.”
“I’m glad you’re not!” she said. There was another long silence.
“What is your name?” she asked suddenly.
He thought for a moment. “George Lowe,” he said.
“Yes,” she said; “but don’t think next time. There is a train north to Inverness that leaves Waverly at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. You’ll have to spend tomorrow night in Inverness. I have written down on a paper what you do after that.”
“You seem to be perfectly sure that nothing’s going to happen at King’s Cross.”
“No, I’m not,” she said. “The police are not fools—that Scotland Yard man didn’t believe half I said—but they’re just human. All the same, I’m not going to give you that bit paper until the train’s going.”
“I wish I had that revolver now!” he said.
“I’m glad you haven’t. You’ve made a big enough fool of yourself already.”
“I wouldn’t use it. It would just give me courage.”
“For goodness’ sake, be sensible, Jerry. Don’t do anything silly and spoil things.”
They fell to silence again, the woman sitting upright and alert, the man shrunk in the corner, almost invisible. Into the west of London they went like that, through the dark squares north of Oxford Street, out into the Euston Road and with a sharp left-handed turn into King’s Cross. The moment had come.
“You pay the taxi and I’ll get the ticket,” she said.
As Lamont paid the taxi-man the shadow of his turned-down hat hid his face, so that his retreating back was all that the incurious gaze of the driver noted. A porter came and took his things from him, and he surrendered them willingly. Now that the time had come, his “nerves” had gone. It was neck or nothing, and he could afford to play the part well. When the woman joined him from the booking-office, the change in him was evident in the approbation on her cold face. Together they went on to the platform and followed the porter down it, looking for a corner seat. They made a sufficiently convincing picture—the man with the rug and the golf-bag and the wraps, and the woman in attendance with the man’s extra coat.
The porter dived into a corridor and came out again saying, “Got you a corner, sir. Probably have the side to yourself all the way. It’s quiet tonight.”
Lamont tipped him and inspected his quarters. The occupant of the other side had staked his claims, but was not present other than in spirit. He went back to the doorway with the woman and talked to her. Footsteps came down the corridor at his back, and he said to her, “Have they any fishing, do you think?”
“Only sea-fishing in the loch,” she said, and continued the subject until the steps had moved on. But before they faded out of earshot they stopped. Lamont cast as casual a glance as he could achieve down the corridor, and found that the owner of the steps had halted at the open door of his compartment and was examining the luggage on the rack. And then he remembered, too late, that the porter had put his suitcase up with the initials outside. The G. L. was plain for all the world to read. He saw the man stir preparatory to coming back. �
��Talk!” he said quickly to the woman.
“There’s a burn, of course,” she said, “where you can catch what they call beelans. They are about three inches long.”
“Well, I’ll send you a beelan,” he said, and managed a low laugh that earned the woman’s admiration just as the man stopped behind him.
“Excuse me, sir, is your name Lorrimer?”
“No,” said Lamont, turning round and facing the man squarely. “My name is Lowe.”
“Oh, sorry!” the man said. “Is that your luggage in the compartment, then?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, thank you. I am looking for a man Lorrimer, and I was hoping that it might be his. It’s a cold night to be hanging round for people who aren’t here.”
“Yes,” said the woman; “my son’s grumbling already at the thought of his first night journey. But he’ll grumble a lot more before he’s in Edinburgh, won’t he?”
The man smiled. “Can’t say I’ve ever travelled all night, myself,” he said. “Sorry to have bothered you,” he added, and moved on.
“You should have let me take that other rug, George,” she said as he moved out of earshot.
“Oh, rug be blowed!” said George, as to the manner born. “It will probably be like an oven before we’ve been going an hour.”
A long, shrill whistle sounded. The last door was banged.
“This is for expenses,” she said, and put a packet into his hand, “and this is what I promised you. The man’s on the platform. It’s all right.”
“We’ve left out one thing,” he said. He took off his hat and bent and kissed her.
The long train pulled slowly out into the darkness.
9 GRANT GETS MORE INfORMATiON THAN HE EXPECTEd
GRANT WAS STUDYING the morning papers with his habitual half-careless thoroughness. That is not a paradox; Grant apparently skimmed the paper, but if you asked him about any particular happening afterwards, you would find that he had acquired a very efficient working knowledge of it. He was feeling pleased with himself. It was only a matter of hours before he got his man. It was a week today that the murder had been committed, and to locate the murderer from among a mass of conflicting clues in such a short time was good work. He had been favoured by luck, of course; he acknowledged that freely. If it weren’t for luck on some one’s part, half the criminals in the world would go unpunished. A burglar, for instance, was hardly ever convicted except through an outrageous piece of luck on the part of the police. But the queue affair had not been a picnic by any means. There had been spadework galore; and Grant felt as nearly complaisant as it was in him to feel as he thought of the crowd of men working the south of London at this minute, as eager as hounds in cover. He had had his suspicions of Mrs. Everett, but on the whole he had decided that she was telling the truth. The man put on to watch her had reported that no one had come or gone from the house from eight o’clock last night, when he went on duty, until this morning. Moreover, she had produced photographs of the men when there had been no necessity to, and it was quite possible that she did not know her late boarder’s address. Grant knew very well the queer indifference that London breeds in people who have lived long in it. The other side of the river to a Fulham Londoner was as foreign a place as Canada, and Mrs. Everett would probably be no more interested in an address at Richmond than she would have been in a 12345 Something Avenue, Somewhere, Ontario. It would convey as little to her. The man Lamont was the one who had been least time with her, and her interest in him was probably less than that which she had for the dead man. He had probably promised in the friendly if insincere warmth of parting to write to her, and she had been content with that. On the whole, he thought that Mrs. Everett was genuine. Her fingerprints were not those on the revolver and the envelope. Grant had noticed where her left thumb and forefinger had held the photographs tightly by the corner, and the marks when developed proved to be quite new in the case. So Grant was happy this morning. Apart from the kudos arising from the apprehension of a badly wanted man, it would afford Grant immense satisfaction to lay his hands on a man who had struck another in the back. His gorge rose at the contemplation of a mind capable of conceiving the crime.
In the week since the queue murder its sensational value to the Press had been slightly minimized by other important happenings, and though Grant’s chief interest seemed to be devoted to apparently unimportant and irrelevant scraps of information like the theft of bicycles, he was amusedly and rather thankfully aware that the most important things in Britain today, judging by the size of the heading that announced them and the amount of space allotted them, were preparations for the Boat Race, the action of a society beauty doctor against a lady who had been “lifted,” and the departure of Ray Marcable to the United States. As Grant turned over the page of the illustrated paper and came face to face with her, he was conscious again of that queer, uneasy, unpolicelike movement in his chest. His heart did not jump—that would be doing him an injustice; C.I.D. hearts are guaranteed not to jump, tremble, or otherwise misbehave even when the owner is looking down the uncompromising opening of a gun-barrel—but it certainly was guilty of unauthorized movement. It may have been resentment at his own weakness in being taken aback by a photograph, but Grant’s eyes were very hard as he looked at the smiling face—that famous, indeterminate smile. And though his mouth may have curved, he was not smiling as he read the many captions: “Miss Ray Marcable, a studio photograph”; “Miss Marcable as Dodo in Didn’t You Know?”; “Miss Marcable in the Row”; and lastly, occupying half the centre page, “Miss Marcable departs from Waterloo en route for Southampton”; and there was Ray, one dainty foot on the step of the Pullman, and her arms full of flowers. Arranged buttresswise on either side of her were people well enough known to come under the heading “left to right.” In either bottom corner of the photograph were the eager heads of the few of the countless multitudes seeing her off who had been lucky enough to get within hailing distance. These last, mostly turned to look into the camera, were out of focus and featureless, like a collection of obscene and half-human growths. At the end of the column describing the enthusiastic scenes which had attended her departure, was the sentence: “Also sailing by the Queen Guinevere were Lady Foulis Robinson, the Hon. Margaret Bedivere, Mr. Chatters-Frank, M.P., and Lord Lacing.”
The inspector’s lips curved just a little more. Lacing was evidently going to be managed by that clear, cold will for the rest of his life. Well, he would live and die probably without being aware of it; there was some comfort in that. Nothing but a moment of unnaturally clear sight had presented the knowledge of it to himself, and if he went into any London crowd, Rotherhithe or Mayfair, and announced that Ray Marcable, under her charm and her generosity, was hard as flint, he would be likely to be either lynched or excommunicated. He flung the paper away, and was about to take up another when a thought occurred to him, prompted by the announcement of the sailing of the Guinevere. He had decided to accept Mrs. Everett’s statement as being correct, but he had not investigated her statement that Sorrell was going to America. He had taken it for granted that the America story had been a blind by Sorrell to mask his intended suicide, and the Levantine—Lamont—whether he believe the tale or not, had not sought to alter the supposition of Sorrell’s departure. Had he been wise in not investigating it further? It was, at least, unbusinesslike. He sent for a subordinate. “Find out what liners sailed from Southampton last Wednesday,” he said; and remained in thought until the man came back with the news that the Canadian Pacific liner Metalinear had sailed for Montreal, and the Rotterdam-Manhattan liner Queen of Arabia, for New York. It seemed that Sorrell had at least taken the trouble to verify the sailings. Grant thought that he would go down to the Rotterdam-Manhattan offices and have a chat, on the off chance of something useful coming to light.
As he stepped from the still drizzling day into the cathedral-like offices of the Rotterdam-Manhattan a small boy in blue leaped genielike from the tessellated pavement of
the entrance-hall and demanded his business. Grant said that he wanted to see some one who could tell him about the sailings for New York last week, and the urchin, with every appearance of making him free of mysteries and of knowing it, led him to an apartment and a clerk, to whom Grant again explained his business and was handed on. At the third handing-on Grant found a clerk who knew all that was to be known of the Queen of Arabia—her internal economy, staff, passengers, capacity, peculiarities, tonnage, timetable, and sailing.
“Can you tell me if any one booked a passage on the Queen of Arabia this trip and did not go?”
Yes, the clerk said, two people had failed to occupy their berths. One was a Mr. Sorrell and the other was a Mrs. James Ratcliffe.
Grant was speechless for a moment; then he asked the date of the bookings. They had been booked on the same day—seven days before the murder. Mrs. Ratcliffe had cancelled hers at the last minute, but they had had no further word from Mr. Sorrell.
Could he see the plan of the cabins?
Certainly, the clerk said, and brought them out. Here was Mr. Sorrell’s, and here, three along in the same row, was Mrs. Ratcliffe’s.
Were they booked separately?
Yes, because he remembered the two transactions quite well. He thought the lady Mrs. Ratcliffe, and he was sure from his conversation with him that the man was Sorrell himself. Yes, he thought he would recognize Mr. Sorrell again.
Grant produced the Levantine’s photograph and showed it to him. “Is that the man?” he asked.
The clerk shook his head. “Never saw him before to my knowledge,” he said.
“That, then?” asked Grant, handing over Sorrell’s photograph, and the clerk immediately recognized it.
“Did he inquire about his neighbors in the row?” Grant asked. But the clerk could recall no details like that. It had been a very busy day that Monday. Grant thanked him, and went out into the drizzle, quite unaware that it was raining. Things were no longer reasonable and understandable; cause and effect, motive and action decently allied. They were acquiring a nightmare inconsequence that dismayed his daytime brain. Sorrell had intended to go to America, after all. He had booked a second-class passage and personally chosen a cabin. The amazing and incontrovertible fact did not fit in anywhere. It was a very large wrench thrown into the machinery that had begun to run so smoothly. If Sorrell had been as penniless as he seemed, he would not have contemplated a second-class journey to New York, and in view of the booking of the passage, contemplated suicide seemed a poor explanation for the presence of the revolver and absence of belongings. It shouted much more loudly of his first theory—that the lack of personal clues had been arranged in case of a brush with the police. But Sorrell had, to all accounts, been a law-abiding person. And then, to crown things, there was Mrs. Ratcliffe’s reappearance in the affair. She had been the only one of the people surrounding Sorrell to show marked distress at the time of the murder or afterwards. It was she and her husband who had avowedly been next behind Sorrell in the queue. Her husband! A picture of James Ratcliffe, that prop of British citizenship, swam into his mind. He would go and have another, and totally unheralded, interview with Mr. Ratcliffe.
Man in the Queue Page 11
