Verity got up, his lungs aching with the exertion, and reached for the scrap of paper. Its message was printed in bold capitals.
The last act of Miss Bella's tragedy will be performed on the sands before the old battery this evening, at seven o'clock promptly.
There was no further doubt. The one thing he had feared most and expected least had happened. Whoever had set him up had abducted Bella as well. In his dismay, he tugged out his watch to check the time. It was a battered timepiece, so thinly plated with silver that constant handling had already worn it to the brass in several places. But he kept it right, and its hands now pointed to ten minutes past seven.
'They never told me soon enough!' he howled. Then it occurred to him that they would hardly have delivered the message if it were too late. Lunging forward he ran down the length of Brunswick Square towards the evening sea, turned east, and began pounding along the promenade to the astonishment of its sedate strollers. Men and women turned to stare at the gasping, floundering figure as he struggled onward. His tall hat came off, rolling away, but he never paused to pick it up. A wag shouted, 'Stop thief!' Several of the urchin happyjacks began running along beside him and then gave up the sport after a little way. Before him Verity saw the web of the Chain Pier stretching out to the dark blob of its landing-stage. Closer than that was the little crescent, Artillery Place, where the battery of guns had once stood. A grassy slope with a little pathway led down from the promenade to the beach at that point. He stumbled down it, saw the shingle and, beyond it the wet patch of sand which would presently be covered by the evening tide. Then he looked about him.
The beach was deserted, not another figure anywhere between the stretch marked off by the wooden groins before the Old Battery. On the promenade, the strollers had ceased to interest themselves in him and had resumed their walks. In his anguish, he roared above the gentle thunder of the incoming waves.
'Bella! Mrs Verity! Where yer gone? Bella!'
Mingled with his fear for her there was now a fury at the taunting cruelty which his persecutors displayed.
'Sons of whores!' he bellowed. 'Where is she?'
There was no answer beyond the light breeze and the ripple of the tide at his back. He turned to the flat, shining sand which separated him from the water. And then he saw.
The first salty tide-mark had almost reached the letters which were cut into the sand. They were several inches tall, appearing from the promenade only as the ruffling of the sand by a child's stick. At close quarters their message was clear to read, though meaningless to a casual reader.
The health of Mrs Bella V. continues excellent. It may remain so while her husband is attentive to instructions. The issue to be at his deciding.
Verity looked round the empty beach with a wail of despair. He turned to the promenade above, but not a single face was watching him. He had no doubt that Bella's kidnappers had satisfied themselves that he had read the message, but even while he was doing so the watcher would have turned away. Taken with the other two messages, the writing in the sand left no doubt as to what had happened. The words traced by the stick showed the motive precisely. Mr Croaker must see them! But the first wave had already swept smoothly over the message, leaving the words perceptibly fainter as it drained back into the sea.
Racing up the beach, Verity burst upon the promenaders, clutching men by the arms, dancing into the path of oncoming couples.
' 'elp me! Quick! I gotta have a witness! There's writing on the sand! Young person's life depends upon it! Someone gotta read it too before the tide wipes it away!'
They walked in a careful circle about him, the women drawing their skirts in a little, the men glaring at the plump, hatless drunk who struggled to molest them.
'Lissen!' Verity howled. 'Lissen! All of you!'
But he was like a bull in an arena, formed by the moving procession of men and women on either side. Suddenly, his despair was pierced by the realisation of his own powers. Of course! His eye sought out a slightly-built man, inoffensive in appearance, who was walking on his own.
'You!' shouted Verity, plunging through the crowd and seizing the man's arm. 'Yer under arrest!'
In the melee, a woman screamed and there was a mutter of anger. But the men regarded the ferocity of the drunken bully and kept clear of him. Verity twisted the little man's arm and propelled him, squealing in terror, down the path to the beach.
''s all right!' he gasped reassuringly as they ran. 'You only got to read some words!'
They came to the patch of sand below the shingle. From a distance Verity could see that the marks were still there. But his acquaintance with tides was slight enough. By the time that they stood over the inscription the wash of the rippling waves had reduced it to a pattern that was as obscure as hieroglyphics. Verity let the man's arm go and swung around with a sob to the spectators on the promenade. In a gap between the figures he saw that a black cab had pulled up. From its window stared the haggard face of Inspector Croaker.
Old Mole smiled. He was not a greatly pleasing sight, but then it was not the girl's role to be pleased. Cosima smiled back, eyes taking in the expensive suiting and the silk hat. Mole removed the hat and executed an odd genuflection. He handed her a neat parcel tied by a bow. Cosima pulled the bow and emitted pleasantly shocked laughter, lightly stifled by one hand, as she saw the photographic cards of herself within.
'Allow me,' said Mole in a voice which was almost a sneer. He put one foot over the threshold of the double door. At that moment the surly figure in tall hat who stood waiting at the foot of the steps turned about. He strode rapidly up to the door, bundled Mole and Cosima inside, and followed them. Then the double doors closed and there was the click of a key being turned.
Within the hooded shade of his olive-green Pilentum, Sealskin Kite watched the closed door on the far side of Brunswick Square. Then he craned round to catch a view of the distant promenade, where old Mrs Kite would open her blue parasol at once upon the return of the private-clothes jack. But a long time passed and the parasol remained shut. Sealskin Kite whinnied with merriment at the neatness of the whole thing.
Inspector Croaker had himself well under control. He had chosen to give the impression of a man struggling to be fair. His words might almost have been those of an officer acting as prisoner's friend in a court-martial.
'Assault, false arrest, desertion of duty,' he said pleasantly. 'Enough to be going on with. Eh, sergeant?'
'Yessir,' said Verity glumly. Though at attention before the inspector's desk, he moved sufficiently to ease his fleshy neck away from the cutting torment of a tight collar-edge. Mr Croaker did not even reprimand him for the movement.
'Try to see, sergeant, how it will look to the board of inquiry.' Croaker's voice had the distant quality of a man who has attained the perfect equilibrium of bliss. 'Assault upon a member of the public, admitted. False arrest, admitted. Absence from duty, admitted. Causing an affray upon the promenade, admitted.'
'Mitigation, sir!' said Verity firmly. Croaker looked at him dreamily.
'Ah yes, sergeant. I was forgetting the mitigation. Three messages about Mrs Verity's departure. One written upon the sand and read only by yourself. One written in block capitals on paper. You see, sergeant, do you not, that the board will be inclined to regard both such writings as your own work? Which leaves us with one note, written by Mrs Verity perhaps. It announces her intention of leaving you.'
'She never, sir!'
'No, sergeant? Lastly there is the servant's evidence. Mrs Verity going off with another man, having commended her children to the girl's care.'
'No, sir!'
'No?' said Croaker. 'Evidence to the contrary, sergeant?' 'Mrs Verity, sir. Her character and her dooty!’ Croaker sighed.
'Neither I nor the gentleman of the board, sergeant, have the advantage of the lady's acquaintance. She is not evidence.'
'She ain't run off, sir! It's villains as means to sweeten me by taking her! She gotta be found!'
'And have you received such instructions?' 'No, sir!'
Croaker shook his head.
'How very unfortunate, sergeant. In the absence of such demands, I fear the board must simply decide that Mrs Verity has — how shall we say it? — bolted.'
Verity's face was suffused by a blush of fury. But Croaker had not done.
'Moreover, sergeant, it seems that during your absence from duty Cosima Bremer also took the opportunity to bolt. Not a movement, not a light in the house since then! The board must consider that as well.'
'Search-warrant, sir!'
'On what grounds, sergeant? A young person is entitled to travel if she chooses. There is no crime against her name, no suspicion to be proved. However, sergeant, the whole sad story of the Shah Jehan clasp now lies at your own door does it not?'
'Mrs Verity, sir! Let her be found!'
'You shall have leisure for that yourself,' said Croaker happily. 'Pending the hearing of dismissal proceedings by the board, it is my duty to suspend you from employment. The young person Jolly, being only casually engaged by the police authority, may now offer her services elsewhere. Remain at your present lodging until otherwise commanded.'
'Then there won't be a search for Mrs Verity, sir?' Croaker clicked his tongue.
'Every wife who leaves her husband mayn't be searched for, sergeant! Our force was not constituted for such interference! Seek her out for yourself if you choose. For the present, a man suspended without his pay might be glad of one less mouth to feed.'
Croaker grinned humourlessly at his plump victim.
'Then I'm suspended without me pay, sir?' Verity inquired.
'Oh yes,' said Croaker reassuringly. 'Why, sergeant, a man that sits at home in idleness must not expect reward for it, must he?'
Verity looked hopelessly at his commander.
'No, sir.'
'Very well!' snapped Croaker brightly. 'Dismiss!'
16
To his surprise, in the days following Bella's disappearance, Verity felt neither the desperate anguish nor the frantic distraction which victims in stage melodrama displayed. The torment of her absence filled him instead with a dull, cold sickness of heart. The Tidy Street lodgings resembled a house of bereavement. Stringfellow hobbled about, speaking little, apparently in the same state of numbed inertia. The old cabman and his son-in-law were like battle casualties after some amputation or mortal wound, the nerves deadened by an atrocious blow and the pain not yet registering.
Even the children, in Ruth's care, were silent for the most part. The tearful young servant nursed and coddled them but they were thoughtful and indifferent. Verity's pretty nark was housed in one of the attics, from which she now rarely emerged. There, almost in solitude, Jolly pursued her strange existence.
On the first day, Stringfellow had gone to London on the train. But the house in the shabby little street at Paddington Green was still empty. Of Bella there was no sign and no news. Then the two men searched the streets of Brighton, the missions and lodging houses, hospital wards and refuges. Verity sought out Constable Meiklejohn to see if any clue as to Bella's whereabouts might have come the way of the Private-Clothes Detail. Meiklejohn shook his head, a guilty movement in his eyes as though he had compromised himself by associating with the disgraced sergeant in this manner.
Each morning Stringfellow would assume a courage he did not feel as he fetched the cab and the old horse Lightning from the hired stable in Station Street. 'C'mon Verity, me old sojer!' And the two men continued their useless search. For the first time in his life, Verity felt like a beggar, entreating the charity of strangers. With the little daguerreotype of Bella, done the day before their wedding, he accosted the keepers of lodgings and charity houses, even the strollers on the promenade. They shook their heads, avoiding his gaze as if embarrassed by his misery. Not one of them, in his view, showed the smallest human feeling for his plight.
On the third evening he sat opposite Stringfellow across the rough scrubbed wood of the kitchen table. The dark ale in his glass was an inch or two lower than it had been half an hour earlier, but the bread and cheese was untouched.
''s no good, Stringfellow,' he said at last. 'Someone got 'er. They must 'ave. Mr Croaker was right, too. We've not had a word from 'em in three days. There ain't no instructions to be give me. It's done for spite. Some villain I must have crossed done it for revenge. She ain't never coming back. They don't mean her to.'
Then, for the first time during his wretchedness, a single manly tear brimmed in his dark eyes and spread glistening down the flushed pordy cheeks. Stringfellow looked thoroughly alarmed..
' 'ere!' he said. 'Never say die! Even if it was true, which it ain't, a man gotta stand to his guns. You know that, Verity! You been a sojer, same as me! You got the Alma and Inker-man clasps to prove it! You never turned your back on them Rhoosians at Sebastypul, did yer? An' our lads rode straight and true against them heathen cannon at Bhurtpore.'
Verity nodded, unable to speak, as though conceding the argument.
'Well, then!' said Stringfellow triumphantly. 'What d'you think your Queen'd say to you if she could hear you treating for terms now?'
The crisis was over. Verity heaved himself up presently and made his way to bed up the winding stairs behind the latch door. Stringfellow gave a sigh, as though catastrophe had been averted. But now that he was alone he sat in his wooden chair and stared into the embers of the kitchen fire, his old face ravaged by lines of despair.
Since Bella's disappearance, Verity had slept little. When he left Stringfellow, he was thoroughly exhausted. He snuffed out the candle and pulled open the curtains to reveal the starlight glistening on Brighton's slates as though the roofs had been the sea itself. He turned to the straw mattress on the iron bedframe, an alien and cheerless place now that its emptiness served only to remind him of Bella's absence. But in his exhaustion he lay down and fell quickly into a profound sleep.
It seemed to him that he had slept long and deeply. He came slowly and with an effort to the surface of consciousness. Even before he could recall the details of his bereavement, he guessed that Bella had come back to him. It was still the dead of night, and distant chimes of a church clock carried above sea and rooftops in the starlit air.
The sharp profile on the pillow beside him was no illusion. Then he felt the warm smooth pressure of her naked body, stirring his loins insistently. Verity floated between dream and reality, fearing that the vision might melt into shadow if he were to speak. Starlight glistened on smooth gold, the bare skin of her trim shoulders. Her breasts were smaller and harder than he had remembered. Rediscovering her as she lay against him, he touched the tip of a vertebra forming a slight eminence at the slim nape of the neck.
His face touched the sleek bell of hair and he was puzzled that it should be dark and scented. Later he reproached himself with knowing already who she was. The faint light from the uncurtained window was surely enough to identify Miss Jolly's dark questioning eyes, the hair brushed back clear of her proud forehead. In his wretchedness there was relief merely in pressing against the body of another creature with no intention of committing the ultimate offence against his marriage vows.
As she squirmed herself against him, he allowed his hand to map the oriental delicacy of her shoulders, the fine bone-pattern of her spine curving inward to the waist, the swell of her hips. He stroked the silky firmness of her thighs and allowed the softer twin curves of Miss Jolly's bottom to fill his hands. She arched a leg over him, her hand pressing his own to delve between her hind cheeks to the opening of her thighs. Her lips were so close that he saw only part of her face, new to him and strange. She arched her hips back, opening herself to his hand behind her, her other fingers seeking his loins. When he put his free hand to her mouth gently to prevent her kiss, Jolly licked the fingers
coaxingly.
Now he was fully awake. Sitting up suddenly he reached for the matches and lit the candle. Jolly lay nude and golden-skinned in the flame-light, dark eyes slanting the first quick anger of rejection.
'No!' said Verity vigorously. 'Ain't you got the least sense of. . .'
The anger in her eyes became apprehension, as though he might strike her for what she had done. Verity looked at her and his sternness melted away. Of all the men and women who owed him nothing, Jolly was the only one who had offered him all that she had to give. He touched the side of her face gently with his hand.
' 's all right,' he said softly. 'I shan't be cross. You're a good girl, 'course you are. Only you must go back to your room and stay there, just as if Mrs Verity was here.'
Jolly gave him a quick feline glance and her voice was a soprano wail.
'What's the matter with me, then?'
'Nothing,' said Verity hastily. 'Nothing's the matter. You're a good girl and you got nothing to fear. If you don't understand about me and Mrs Verity, 's not your fault. You can't be expected to know what you was never told.'
He guided her to the door with a hand on her arm. The candlelight threw a warm flickering gold on her nude shape, the slim young figure and the tight little swagger of her hips. Verity ached with unappeased longing, tempered by a corroding remorse at the thought of Bella. Just before the door he allowed himself to administer one or two affectionate little pats. Jolly responded by exaggerating her swagger. Then she was gone and the door was closed.
SV - 05 - Sergeant Verity and the Swell Mob. Page 17
