Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  It was a good long walk, and the blackness was so intense that Harben, who was gradually regaining his senses, also began to wonder whether they would not be just as likely to tumble into the river as to gain the house which they sought. But it was too late to think of that. However, they were fortunate enough to fall in with a man who had a torch, and, linking arms across the narrow street which led to the river, they followed the gleam until their guide entered a house and left them in the pitch-black night.

  “This way,” said Harben. With difficulty they negotiated the narrow turning and passed between the three white posts which marked the junction of the road with the concrete path along which they would have to go to get to the house.

  Harben was afraid that they might walk past it in the blackness. There was nothing to show which house it was, unless he could find the pillared portico. He tried to remember, as they felt their way along—he and El Piojo in the lead, the captain and Don Juan close behind them, and Estéban and Jorge bringing up the rear—exactly where the house was situated.

  The Spaniards walked steadily, said nothing, and appeared to be able to see, like cats, in the dark, for they made no complaints and never trod on the heels of those in front. Even El Piojo was quiet, and seemed to be in full possession of his faculties.

  The blackness, as is its wont, grew appreciably less black as they proceeded, and Harben could fancy at last that he could see a dull gleam from the river. He found the house by coming up suddenly in front of one of the pillars. He stopped short, and the Spaniards following him cannoned into him.

  They were gravely and sincerely apologetic.

  “Here we are,” he said, in English; and then, in Spanish, “Take care. There are nine steps.”

  They all counted them as they stumbled and groped their way upwards. When he had gained the top of the flight, Harben pushed open the letter-box and peered in. A gleam of light came from under one of the doors. He could see the thin streak across the hall.

  He took up the knocker and banged loudly.

  “I don’t know whether it’s my wife or the burglars,” he remarked. Suddenly it became evident that he and the Spaniards were not the only persons on the steps. An English official voice demanded sturdily:

  “Now what’s all this, gentlemen? You don’t live in this house.” The next moment, just before Pirberry’s bloodhounds joined them, a policeman’s lamp was being flashed in their faces.

  “That’s all right, officer,” said Harben. Before he could say any more, the shadows who had tracked him and his party from pub to pub in Soho and now by train from Piccadilly and on to the house, began to manifest themselves to the constable.

  “And the gentlemen can go into the house if they care to. Those are our orders,” said the shadows.

  “Very good,” said the local constable. “Then good night, all.” He switched off his lamp and felt his way down the steps. They could hear him walking away along the concrete path.

  “And now, sir,” said the leader of the shadows, “we must come in with you if you’re going into this house.”

  “The more the merrier,” said Harben. There had been no reply to his knocking. He knocked again. This time there was the sound of footsteps coming towards the front door. It was opened. A torch picked out the buttons on his coat, and then travelled up to his face.

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Bradley. “I expected you. Pray come in.”

  It had been, on the whole, a strange evening. To Harben at this point it became fantastic. All his visits to this house had had a dream-quality unlike anything else he had experienced, and this visit seemed as extraordinary as any of the others. He could not have explained why, but Mrs. Bradley was quite the last person by whom he had expected to be confronted.

  A fire was burning in the grate. The heavy, thick curtains were drawn closely across the windows, and Harben and the sinister old lady sat opposite one another across the hearth. Of the Spaniards, the captain, Don Juan, and Estéban occupied in close contact with one another, an old-fashioned, high-backed couch, whilst El Piojo, lying on the floor at their feet, soon succumbed to slumber, and pillowed his head on Estéban’s square-toed boots. Jorge took a chair near the door.

  Conversation was carried on chiefly by Mrs. Bradley. She would not speak Spanish, and the captain’s laboured, oddly inflected English could neither grapple with her questions nor enable him to frame any very satisfactory replies.

  At last Mrs. Bradley rose. The Spaniards, except for El Piojo, rose politely. He, awakened by the sudden movement of Estéban’s boots beneath his head, snorted, sat up, gazed round, sighed deeply, like a dog, and then lay down again.

  “Good night, gentlemen,” said Mrs. Bradley. “There are beds for all when you wish for them. Mr. Harben will conduct you to your rooms.”

  Harben said to the others, in Spanish:

  “At your service, gentlemen. This makes a complication. Please follow me. I must see what beds we have.”

  The captain and Don Juan took the room in which the old man’s body had lain; Jorge had the attic bedroom above in which the old man died. Estéban, who seemed to think that someone should have charge of El Piojo, accepted the attic next to that occupied by Jorge, because it contained two beds. He woke the half-breed and shepherded him upstairs.

  Harben went back to the room in which all had sat, for he felt sure that Mrs. Bradley would want to communicate with him. He waited for half an hour, but she made no sign. Then he turned sharply, for he heard the creak of the door. It was not Mrs. Bradley, but Leda. She came in, put her fingers against the back of his head, stroked the short harsh hairs on his nape, bent her head until her mouth was against his neck, kissed the top of his ear, and sat on the arm of his chair.

  “Aren’t you coming to bed?” she asked.

  Without question he rose and went with her, but, as he stood up, he took out a sailor’s knife and carried it in his hand as they went upstairs.

  “We must be quiet,” she said.

  There seemed nothing to fear, however. She led the way to a room on the garden side of the house. The bed was deep and wide. It was so comfortable, and now that Harben was in it he felt so tired that his only remaining fear was lest he should fall asleep. He had a thousand questions to ask, but they did not exchange another word. They lay close in one another’s arms, learning one another again, and bridging the months that had gone with the moment which now seemed their own.

  They did not sleep, for at three in the morning the siren, wailing its lost, unearthly, melancholy warning over the ancient houses and older river, brought Leda sitting up in bed, her fingers biting hard into David’s arm.

  “The cellar!” she said. “I know it’s going to be bad.”

  “Are you afraid?” he murmured.

  “Not for myself, but I don’t want to lose you now.”

  She groped her clothes and put them on; found shoes; turned impatiently to him.

  “David, be quick! Be quick!”

  Harben pulled on his shirt and trousers and a jacket, found socks and shoes, put his hand on the door, and struck a match.

  “Blow it out!” she said. “I know the way, and I don’t want to meet the others.”

  “But if there’s a shelter …?”

  “Your old lady will show them. She knows where it is.”

  They went down the stairs in the dark, and into the garden. There was now a gap in the fence. She pulled him through it. They went down the next-door garden, and, by a ramp, into a shelter.

  The shelter was dry and warm. A man was already in it. Harben recognized him as the next-door neighbour who had spoken about the weeds. They greeted one another.

  “Yes, it’s my shelter,” he said, “but I don’t mind who uses it, of course. The young lady is my guest every night that we have a raid. She often gets here before I do.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid of the raids,” said Leda. Harben did not believe she was afraid. He had discovered, he thought, her hiding-place. He was no longer surprised that sh
e had remained undetected. He had fancied she looked very pale. This underground life explained it. He wondered how she had managed to get enough food.

  They could hear very little of the raid. Their neighbour went up to the surface to find out how matters were going, and came back to report that the barrage was heavy but that the house and those near it seemed not to be damaged. Whilst he made his third reconnaissance the All Clear signal was given, and they went aloft to a clear and beautiful morning.

  “Let’s swim,” said Leda.

  “Let’s go to bed,” said Harben. She was tired, and soon fell asleep. They had drawn back the curtains. The morning light grew stronger. Harben did not sleep. He was wondering how he could keep her now that he had her again. He lolled on his elbow to look at her. Pale, defenceless, vulnerable, and childlike she seemed, different from the young girl who had tapped with urgent fingers that night nearly twelve months earlier, yet reminiscent of her in the same way that a face seen dimly in green glass is reminiscent of itself.

  Then she had still been her own, and now she was his. Then she had walked with fear, but now the fear was in his own heart, lest he should lose her again.

  He woke her at last by taking her into his arms. She woke with a smile, and said at once:

  “I’ve been dreaming about your old lady.”

  “Nice or nasty?” said he.

  “I don’t know. Let’s trust her, David. Let’s tell her the truth, and—”

  “No. Let’s swim,” said Harben.

  There seemed to be nobody about. The tide was half-way out, and a long spit of ooze and gravel lay between the bottom of the river-bank steps and the stream.

  This time they had no tub from which to bathe, so they walked downstream to the cut and took off their clothes behind a hopper which was lying heeled-over on the mud. They tossed their towels into a dinghy drawn up out of reach of high tide on the concrete bottom of the slipway, and waded into the water hand in hand.

  Leda was swimming first. She walked in up to her knees, reached forward, threw herself flat, and paddled out with her hands until the water was deep enough for swimming.

  Harben, who knew he could not catch her if once she decided to swim fast, swam to amuse himself only. They neither kept together nor made any signal until, as soon as he was tired, he swam up beside a willow bush on the island, sure that she would come up, and so she did.

  She did not get out of the water, but lay on her breast by the bank and swayed herself gently forward and backward on her hands.

  “Will you stay this time?” asked Harben.

  She smiled, looking down at the water, her greenish lashes damp on her wet, cold cheeks. Harben had a sudden recollection of the wonderful, long, black lashes of Sister Mary Dominic, and, startled, blinked it away.

  “Shall we tell your old lady?” asked Leda.

  “I’m cold,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

  They went back to an empty house. Mrs. Bradley and the Spaniards were gone. Leda had brought no key. She led him back by way of the shelter belonging to the next-door neighbour. It was built, Harben now discovered, almost at the bottom of this garden. A long passage led to his cellar, which was damp and already contained, with the rising tide, six inches of water. They splashed through this, and gained the cellar of Leda’s own house through a large gap which had been picked in the cellar wall. It was new since Harben and Mrs. Bradley had found the cellar opening in the pantry.

  Up the steps they went; into the kitchen. No one was there. The upstairs rooms, equally, were empty.

  “Gone off without having breakfast,” said Harben. “Queer. I suppose they concluded I’d gone back to town without them. You’d think they’d have seen us in the water.”

  Mrs. Bradley had gone by the earliest morning train to her duties in Soho, and had left the house whilst the raid was still on, at just after five o’clock. The Spaniards, who had an aristocratic scorn of bombs and shrapnel, had remained in bed until seven, and then had left, sober and hungry, to get their breakfast in town. Mistrusting the concrete path, they had taken the first little alley, come on to a road, and the captain’s English had been found sufficient to permit him to ask the way to the nearest station.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Merman

  Pirberry sent for the Spanish captain that afternoon, and asked him again about his wound.

  “I know nothing. I say nothing. I dislike the police,” said the captain scornfully.

  “But it’s a question of murder. And you yourself were pretty badly injured by the fellow, whoever he is,” said Pirberry, through the interpreter.

  “With dead men I have no conversation,” said the captain grandly. “And with the man who attacked me with a knife I have still an account to settle. I shall settle it without the aid of the police.”

  “Not in England you won’t, my bucko,” said Pirberry in English. The interpreter translated this as: “In England we are all law-abiding citizens.”

  The captain smiled politely, and Pirberry, unable to get any more out of him, had to let him go.

  “I don’t know whether you could get any more out of him, ma’am,” he said dejectedly.

  “I could tell him the truth, which at present I think he only guesses,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “Then there is proof, ma’am, of—?”

  “There’s proof strangers came to The Island. Why should they have come there? They knew where David was, and they knew he was not with me. They meant to make certain that I was not left alive to tell tales. They knew David and I were friends, and they must have believed he had some special knowledge which could be used against them, and which he might have communicated to me. If he has such knowledge, he is still unaware of the fact. It’s interesting. I wonder what it is they thought he knew?”

  “Something about the poison, ma’am. It must be.”

  “I wonder?” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “But if they were so determined on getting rid of him, why didn’t they kill him when they had the chance? You mentioned that evening outing, ma’am. What did you mean?”

  “That David is only afraid of one of them now, not both. He has discovered something since he came back to England—not necessarily about the poison.”

  “I suppose they thought they had seen the last of him when they threw him into the open boat and cast him adrift on the sea. It must have given them a terrible shock to run into him again in England,” Pirberry observed. “How did that happen, do you think, ma’am?”

  “I really think Fate stepped in. Their ship was torpedoed or gunned, and they were brought into port here, just as they told us. Their Consulate vouches for them, and would have found out the facts.”

  “And the old man wasn’t a Spaniard, but the girl is,” Pirberry observed. “It was her Bible and her poetry book you found, ma’am, so you said. But it wasn’t her Christian name on the fly-leaf.”

  “We don’t know that. Leda may be David’s name for her. Men do give love-names to women, and women to men.”

  “Well, I’ve still to trace the arsenic, ma’am,” said Pirberry, “before all can turn out for the best. It sounds a long job, after all this time, you know.”

  “I can tell you where to find it,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  “You can.”

  “Try the hems of the new silk pennon which Leda put on David’s tub, Inspector.”

  “But wouldn’t that implicate him, ma’am? Or, at any rate, the girl?”

  “I don’t think so. If you find it, I should say that is proof presumptive that neither of them knows it is there. After all, why should they keep the poison? A pinch or two of arsenic thrown in the river is nobody’s business at all. To continue to keep a pennon which is the repository of several lethal doses is to act like a madman, and David and Leda are not mad, whatever else they may be.”

  “Then the girl didn’t write that note?”

  “Oh, yes, she did. But the pennon, you remember, was a new one, and I expect, as soon as he got back to t
he tub he put it straight into the flag locker. I might believe, even then, that David was guilty, but then, if he had been guilty, he would not have mentioned so casually that the dead man had been sick before he died.”

  “None of it’s proof, ma’am. And his finger-prints were certainly on that cistern.”

  “But you’d hardly get a summing-up against him, or the girl, on the evidence which you could bring forward at this date.”

  Pirberry looked worried and doubtful.

  “I’ll have to bounce something more out of him,” he said. But before he had the chance to see Harben, there was another extraordinary occurrence, which, in his phrase, “brought the Spaniards right back into the picture”. This was nothing less than what seemed to be a wholesale kidnapping of the captain, Estéban, Don Juan, and Jorge by the crew of a tug called the Polly. El Piojo alone escaped to tell the tale.

  The Spaniards, having breakfasted in the Strand, had gone to their Consulate for news of a ship which would repatriate them. Then the captain had been sent for by Pirberry, and after that they had decided to return to the house by the river to see Harben.

  He and Leda were preparing to leave, and the first they knew of the developments which followed the return of the Spaniards was supplied by a Quixotic figure, long-limbed, thin, and gesticulating, which came running towards them.

  It was, as they saw when he approached them, El Piojo.

  “Gracias a Dios, señor!” was all that he could find breath to say, as he came up.

  “Why, what is the matter, my friend? And where are the others?” asked Harben.

  El Piojo put a hand to his heaving chest.

  “Taken! Taken!” he cried. “It is all that villain Don Juan! He has led my noble companions into a trap. Guard yourself, friend. They know you, and are resolved to have your life!”

  “Is the captain there?” asked Harben.

  “Alas, no! He plunged into the river and is drowned.”

  “You saw him jump in?” demanded Leda.

  “Yes, certainly, madam. From the bridge of the tug. God’s beard! It was terrible! Even Don Juan the traitor has crossed himself when the captain did it.”