by John Creasey
‘My dear,’ he said quietly, taking his left hand from the wheel and touching her arm, ‘it will take a long time for me to thank you for that.’
Marion Dare looked up at him.
‘You’ve thanked me enough already,’ she said. ‘I’ve wanted to break away from Sir Basil for a long time, but—well, it isn’t always easy to get a job, and I just couldn’t pluck up courage to give him my notice. Now...’ she forced herself to smile—‘I can’t very well go back to the Hall.’
‘Not by a long chalk, you can’t,’ Devenish said grimly. ‘So you’ve worked for him during the last three years, have you?’
‘Ever since he retired.’
‘And a very interesting period,’ murmured Devenish, half to himself, ‘but that’s by the way. Tell me—do you know his son at all?’
He looked down at her as he spoke, and before the words were out of his mouth he saw the shadow race back into her eyes. Her body stiffened, her voice grew bitter.
‘You mean Marcus,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know him as well as I know his father. I think Marcus must be the cruellest man I’ve ever known!’
7
Marion Dare Makes an Admission
He should have been prepared, Devenish told himself. Sidelights on the younger Riordon’s latent instincts for crime had been all too revealing during the past twenty-four hours.
As it was, so taken aback was he that he kept his eyes off the road for at least thirty seconds, and failed to notice the car which swung suddenly round the bend towards him. The Aston Martin was well up on the crown of the road, and for a petrifying moment a smash seemed inevitable. Marion Dare’s eyes widened, and she clutched the side of the car tightly.
Devenish gritted his teeth as he swung the wheel round, heading towards the bank. At the crucial moment he slewed it back again. The nearside front wing struck against the bank of the road, the car shuddered under the slight impact, then scraped along the hedge with a cracking of broken twigs.
The margin had been perilously small. As the Aston Martin steadied, the oncoming car roared past it. It was a Bentley S3, a magnificent cream-coloured monster, gleaming beneath the sun, its driver hunched low over the wheel, taking no notice of the car which had so nearly caused a smash.
Devenish had one glance at the driver—and then for the second time that morning, went cold with astonishment.
Why, he demanded of himself a dozen times as he drove Londonwards more carefully, was Lord Aubrey Chester now in the neighbourhood of Wharncliff?
He was still wondering as he pulled up outside his Clarges Street flat and ushered his companion inside. But now he forced it to the back of his mind.
‘This,’ said Hugh Devenish, grinning broadly at his valet, ‘is Miss Marion Dare, Pincher. A very good friend of ours, I can tell you.’
Pincher bowed, slightly and distantly.
He saw that Miss Dare not only wore a coat which was ripped from shoulder to wrist, but that she had an ugly bruise on her forearm and, just above it, a deep scratch.
‘If I may say so, sir,’ said Pincher, ‘it will be wise to treat the—er—wound in Miss Dare’s arm. Shall I bring the first aid box?’
Marion shook her head.
‘No, please!’ she said. ‘I’m all right…’
But Pincher disappeared into the internal regions, and to the ears of the couple in the living-room of Devenish’s flat, there came the faint sounds of activity beyond.
Devenish pulled a chair round for the girl, who sat down gratefully. The wound in her arm was throbbing painfully, and her head ached.
Devenish stood a couple of yards away from her, looking anxiously down at her tousled hair and pale face. Between the lines of her brief self-history he had been able to read the tribulations of her life as the private secretary to Sir Basil Riordon, and he guessed, too, that she would not have been so dubious about leaving her job unless she had been comparatively friendless.
‘Pincher’s coming,’ he said, after a few minutes of silence. ‘We’d better have that coat off, Miss Dare. No, don’t get up ...’
He helped her off with the torn jacket.
Pincher, returning from the bathroom, deposited a first aid box on a small table, handing his master a towel and a sponge, and went out of the room again to fetch a bowl of water.
Within ten minutes of the commencement of operations, Marion Dare’s souvenir of the struggle on the road was concealed by a neatly fastened bandage. Pincher, moreover, revealed both his versatility and his acceptance of Marion by finding a needle and cotton and running a seam along the torn sleeve.
‘It is not,’ he said apologetically, ‘a first class job, madam, but it will enable you to put the coat on.’
Then he turned to Devenish.
‘I was wondering,’ he continued, ‘whether you will want a cold lunch, sir, or whether, in view of madam’s unexpected call, it would be better for me to cook. I can easily grill two steaks, and if you will allow me to presume so far, I would suggest that I...’
‘I’ll give you half an hour,’ said Devenish, ‘and not half a minute more.’
Pincher expressed his triumph by a slight flicker of his heavily-lidded eyes, bowed slightly towards the guest, still more slightly towards his master, then turned out of the room.
Devenish looked at his guest.
‘I suppose,’ he said, quietly, ‘that you don’t know why the gentlemen on the road handled you so roughly and yet not so roughly as they might, do you?’
Marion gave a bitter little laugh.
‘I can guess,’ she said. ‘They thought that Sir Basil, or his son, might hear that they’d—manhandled—me, and they didn’t know how the Riordons would take it.’
Devenish worried the stem of his pipe with his teeth.
‘Living in fear,’ he suggested.
‘I suppose you could call it that,’ agreed Marion. ‘Several times the men have been caught doing something that the Riordons didn’t like, and—well,’ she ended, with a shrug, ‘they’ve just disappeared.’
‘Do you say “disappeared” intentionally, or do you mean that they were fired?’
‘I don’t know. One day they would be about the house and the next they would be missing. No one seemed to know where they’d gone ...’
‘Who do you mean by “no one”?’ prompted Hugh.
‘None of the other servants,’ answered Marion. ‘I knew all of them fairly well, of course, and we used to chat occasionally. But—well, it’s hard to explain.’
Devenish waved his hands in mock surprise.
‘What about all that female chatter we hear so much about?’ he teased.
Marion’s answer made him raise his brows.
‘The only woman permanently at the Hall, besides myself,’ she said, evenly, ‘was Mrs. Ransome, the housekeeper. All the rest were men. Sometimes Marcus brought a woman down with him for a day or two, but there was only one who came down more than once. She—her name is Lydia Crane—came down fairly often, actually—the others came in between.’
Devenish laughed.
‘So Marcus has a real attachment,’ he commented. ‘That might be worth knowing. And now there’s just one more question I want to ask—but I’d like you to know that it’s not just for the sake of curiosity. It’s this. When you saw Sir Basil, you looked frightened. I won’t say you were, but you looked it...’
Marion Dare interrupted him.
‘I was,’ she admitted tensely.
‘And yet,’ Devenish went on, ‘you told me you were anxious to get away from the Hall. And,’ he added, gently, ‘good jobs aren’t all that difficult to get.’
Marion Dare spoke quietly.
‘I’ve been afraid of the Riordons, father and son, almost from the time I worked for them,’ she said. ‘All of us who worked there were the same, I think,’ she added, with a slightly higher tone. ‘We hated them.’
‘Why?’
Marion shrugged her shoulders in a helpless gesture.
‘I jus
t don’t know,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t anything they did or said—at least, not at first. But Sir Basil always seemed to be watching, wherever I went. If I went into the grounds, he nearly always sent someone after me, and even when I moved about the house, he seemed to know where I was going. It was like—like being in prison!’
‘I hope,’ said Devenish, with a mock severity, ‘that you haven’t had any first hand experience of prison walls, my dear Miss Dare ...’
And then he stopped.
For Marion Dare’s expression changed from one of trouble and fear to one of agony, that agony of the mind which is a thousand times harder to bear than agony of the body. She leaned forward in her chair, staring at Devenish with hopeless eyes.
‘But I have!’ she burst out, clenching her fists so that the knuckles gleamed white beneath the stretched skin. ‘I have! That’s why I was frightened of Riordon—why we all hated him. We were all—jailbirds!’
8
More Trouble with Marritabas
It took Devenish ten minutes to quieten Marion Dare’s outburst of dry, body-racking sobbing. At last she squared her shoulders, almost defensively.
‘It was nearly four years ago,’ she said in a low voice, ‘I was working for the Marritaband Development Company—there was a boom in tin shares about that time, if you can remember...’
Devenish widened his eyes.
‘Tin shares, was it?’ he demanded.
Marion hardly noticed his surprise, in her own heavy-heartedness. She went on:
‘Yes—the Marritaband Company in England was really the selling organisation of the South American mines. Well—someone stole nearly two hundred pounds from the safe. Only three of us knew the combination of it, and the other two, besides myself, were the directors. There—there was only one conclusion that they could come to, of course. They prosecuted, and I had a—year’s sentence… ‘ Marion broke off, tears blinding her eyes.
‘I see,’ said Devenish, his voice suddenly gentle. ‘It was a kind of frame-up, and you were the picture.’
Marion Dare looked up at him.
‘I sometimes wonder,’ she said, bitterly, ‘whether I did actually take the money or not. It was found in my room, mostly, and some of the notes were traced in the shops that I had visited. And when I told the—police—that I hadn’t touched the safe, they took no notice. No one believed me. Even when I came out of—prison—no one who heard that I had been—inside—believed that I was innocent.’
Devenish wanted to talk, to tell her he understood, but somehow he couldn’t form the words. He waited for her to speak again.
After a while she went on dully, ‘I gave up trying to get work through the ordinary channels, and registered with an association which looks after people like—myself. I think they called it Discharged Prisoners Welfare Association. Eventually Sir Basil Riordon offered me a job at his country house. He sent Marcus—and Marcus was blunt about it. His father wanted someone to work, not to play, and if I had any scruples about taking the job, would I turn it down without hesitation? Well...’ she broke off, ‘you know the rest pretty well.’
Devenish nodded thoughtfully.
‘Except,’ he said, ‘the reason why you think Marcus is—cruel, didn’t you call it?’
Marion closed her eyes, wearily. Devenish knew that she was very near to breaking point, and he determined that after her answer, the subject would be dropped completely.
‘Well,’ she said slowly. ‘I didn’t like Sir Basil. I hated him. But he was an old man, and his son meant a great deal to him. He used to count the hours when Marcus was coming to see him. But practically every time he came, Marcus had a terrible quarrel with his father—and afterwards, Sir Basil would be ill for a week, or even longer.’
‘Ill?’ queried Devenish.
‘He kept to his bed,’ said Marion, ‘and a doctor—a Frenchman who came to the Hall regularly every week—was with him all the time. I could hear him shouting, even screaming, sometimes.’
‘My God!’ thought Devenish. But there was no need to upset the girl.
‘I see,’ he said quietly. ‘It was a nasty break, Marion. But I think we can forget it now.’
• • • • •
It was two o’clock when lunch was finished, and Devenish lit a cigarette, discovering that Marion preferred not to smoke.
Then, after a consultation with Pincher, he presented the girl with an array of cushions, and told her that she needed a rest.
Marion agreed, gratefully, and Devenish led her to the spare bedroom of the flat.
When he returned, Pincher was standing respectfully by the dining-room table, which was still littered with the remains of the meal. It looked, Devenish said, as though he was expecting something.
‘I was just waiting,’ said Pincher chidingly, ‘for any instructions, sir.’
‘You’re a liar,’ said Devenish, smiting his valet heavily on the back, without causing the minutest change in expression. ‘You were waiting for information, Pincher, inspired by your incurable curiosity.’
‘As you wish,’ bowed Pincher.
Devenish frowned.
‘Pincher,’ he said, without further preamble, ‘there’s a lot of heavy weather in the offing.’
‘I assumed that there was, sir,’ murmured Pincher.
‘And,’ continued Devenish, ‘I’ve got a hell of a lot to do, and it can’t all be done here. At the same time, and with all respect to you, I don’t feel easy about leaving you alone with Miss Dare. It is just possible that others might be curious as to our guest’s present quarters. Now —haven’t you got a sister, Pincher?’
‘I have, sir.’
‘With a tough husband?’
‘Wiggings,’ said Pincher, with a disparaging wave of the hand, ‘was a prize-fighter, as you know, Mr. Devenish.’
‘And they live a life of laziness and luxury in Chelsea, don’t they?’
‘They live in Chelsea,’ concurred Pincher, evenly.
‘I was wondering,’ murmured Devenish, ‘whether you feel you could put up with the tough husband’s company—and your sister’s, of course—for a day or two. If you telephoned them, and asked them to come over right away, do you think they could fix it? Then,’ he explained, ‘I could leave you, confident that any callers who refused to be dismissed by your—er—tact, could be biffed when and as necessary by Wiggings.’
Pincher’s brows went upwards, towards his dome-like forehead.
‘Without wishing to be at all disrespectful,’ he said smoothly, ‘I may say, Mr. Devenish, that I suspected the possibility of events developing in this manner, and took the liberty of communicating by telephone with my sister, who assures me that it will be quite convenient for her and Wiggings to visit here. I have only to call them again, sir, and they will come at once.’
• • • • •
Resplendent in an exquisitely-cut Savile Row suit, Hugh Devenish stepped quietly to the door of the spare room, and after a preliminary, almost inaudible tap, opened the door silently, and poked his head into the room.
Marion Dare was lying full length on the bed. Devenish drew in a deep breath as he saw her, for the first time, peacefully asleep, and with the worry and fear missing from her features.
He stood for a moment, looking down at her, then drew away, and closed the door silently behind him.
Five minutes later, he walked briskly down the steps, leading from 77a into Clarges Street, looked quickly to right and left but without appearing to glance in either direction, and stepped into the driving seat of the Aston Martin. The engine turned quietly into motion, and Devenish slipped in the clutch.
Before touching any speed, he dipped his hand into his waistcoat pocket for his cigarette case—he rarely smoked his pipe out-of-doors—and let the case slip out of his fingers.
For the second time that day, Fate smiled on him.
As he bent down to retrieve the case, something smacked into the windscreen, drilled a small, round hole through the safety
glass, and hummed over his head.
Devenish tightened his lips as he heard the low-pitch easily recognisable hum. His body went tight, and he kept well down, screwing his head round and looking at the hole in the glass. As he saw it, a second bullet smacked through, then a third, and a fourth.
Someone was firing, Devenish knew, from a house on the right hand side of the road, and was firing either from a window, or from the top of the steps leading up to the front door.
For the moment, he did not concern himself with the murderous nature of the attack. Somehow he had to get out of the second ambush that had been made for him that day.
After the fourth shot, the bullets stopped, but Devenish knew that as soon as he poked his head up above the dashboard, they would start again.
Crouching beneath the safety line, his mind worked at lightning speed. He knew that Clarges Street, at that hour of the day, was likely to be deserted for five or even ten minutes on end. There were no tradesmen on their rounds, the afternoon exodus of nursemaids had not started, and only the casual wayfarer was likely to turn into the street.
The seconds passed like minutes. He had one great fear—that the attacker was, in fact, inside one of the houses, and that he would be shooting next from a top floor window. The dashboard would afford him no protection if the shooting started from a higher angle.
He forced himself to be cautious, however, and without lifting his head or shoulders, managed to raise one hand sufficiently to press the self-starter, while with the other he slammed the car into gear. The engine whirred, and as he released the hand brake, the car slid forward.
He was driving blind, his head and shoulders still bent low—praying he could keep the car on the road and that he would run into no child or animal. Only a few yards were needed to get him out of the gunman’s range.
Suddenly, out of the tail of his eye, he saw a dark ball flying over his head, followed by an ominous wisp of smoke. It was, Devenish realised in an instant of near panic, a bomb—and he knew, with a horrible sinking in the pit of his stomach, that if it landed in the back of the car, it was a thousand to one against him escaping with his life.
