by Jack Mann
“You’re a strange girl,” Gees said, more because he felt this dwelling on her terrible experience as morbid than for any other reason.
“But then”—she looked up at him and smiled—“I have had a strange experience. I must be the only one in modern times who has come back unharmed from that terrible prison of mine. And I’m so tremendously happy to be back, don’t you see? Is that strange?”
He shook his head and smiled at her, but gave no other answer.
“Now I’ve seen it again as I wished, with you, too,” she said.
“Mr. Gees, isn’t there anything at all I can do for you?”
“Not that I know of,” he answered reflectively. “Except—be normal. Don’t let this experience colour your life.”
She laughed. “Don’t fear for me,” she said. “I am quite normal. I’m going to live quite an ordinary life, fall in love and marry, probably, a little later on, and till then get into mischief, flirt, and do all the things an ordinary girl does. Help my mother in the new farm—there’s nothing to do till we go there—and eat and drink and sleep and get as much fun out of life as I can. Is that normal enough?”
“It sounds reasonable,” he admitted. “And forget—what happened?”
She shook her head. “That would mean forgetting you,” she pointed out with a little frown. “No, I should hate to do that. But I’ll promise you to put it behind me, the horror of it that was till you came to give me back my freedom. And will you promise me something?”
“I’d better know what it is, first,” he said.
“Something very big. Something you can do, though. At least, if you can’t, with the insight you’ve shown over me, nobody can.”
“Well, what is this wonderful thing for the wonderful man to do?”
“Destroy that”—she pointed momentarily at the farmhouse—“that which makes a home there, whatever it is. Don’t go away to London, but stay here till you have destroyed it, ended the nightmare.”
“I’m coming back here for that purpose and nothing else,” he said. “But I want only your father and you to know that I’m coming back.”
“You are—that is a promise?” she insisted, gazing at him intently.
“To make the attempt,” he said. “I’m not sure if it can be destroyed, but it may be possible to free that house and this way leading to it of what seized on you. What will happen after, I don’t know. The immaterial, surely, is indestructible. Or is it?”
“Somehow, its power is there,” she said, and nodded to indicate the house again. “Drive it from there, take away its power”
“And then?” he asked in the pause. Her certainty, rather than belief, over this problem that he had determined to solve impressed him. He regarded her, now, as equal with himself in knowledge, if not as one of greater, clearer sight. But she smiled at him and shook her head.
“I’m just May Norris, Mr. Gees, not a seeress,” she told him. Then she laid her hand on his arm and impelled him toward the roadway. “We will go back, now,” she said, “and I’m quite content, because I’ve seen Nightmare for the last time with you, and you’re coming back here and the nightmare will end. Nobody can be harmed by living here, then.”
“If I succeed,” he cautioned her.
“Oh, you’ll succeed!” she prophesied confidently.
Somewhere near them sounded the chuttering, clucking noise that he had heard when he first came along this roadway—very nearly such a sound as that thing had made when it fled down the aisle of Denlandham church, but fainter and more confused. Both he and the girl were deep in the shadows of the roadway, now, and she stopped and grasped his arm again, momentarily, while she looked back.
“There!” she exclaimed. “Did you hear it? The sound I used to hear in my room last autumn, and I tried to tell myself it was the bats.”
He did not answer, but took her arm and led her quickly on to the outer end of the roadway. There, beyond the gate, he stopped to face her, and took a card from his pocket to hand to her.
“For your father,” he said. “I asked him to wire me, and forgot to give him the address. Hand it on to him for me, will you?”
“Why, of course I will. But—isn’t this rather—well, flamboyant, Mr. Gees? Not quite like you, I mean?”
“I dunno,” he said. “It’s effective, anyhow.” She read aloud—
GEES
Confidential Agents
Consult GEES for everything
From Mumps to Murder!
37, Little Oakfield Street, Initial Consultation:
Haymarket, S.W. Two Guineas.
“Well, it gives the facts,” he said. “And now—” He held out his hand.
She took it in both her own. “They laughed at you, there in the roadway,” she said, “just as they used to laugh at me. But I know this is not the end—you will come back.”
“Yes,” he said, “though to what result I am not sure.”
“And so, Mr. Gees, for a little while, good-bye.”
As he drove on, he could see in the driving mirror that she turned and waved her hand, and at that he lifted his own hand in response. Then a bend of the road hid her, and he gazed ahead, seeing more clearly, since the walk and talk with her along the roadway to Nightmare Farm, the way that he must go.
CHAPTER XII
MADAME STEPHANIE
RISING LATE ON MONDAY MORNING, Gees went out to Piccadilly Circus and got himself a breakfast at the Corner House which he ate with a rather yearning memory of Nicholas Churchill’s idea of breakfast. He returned to Little Oakfield Street to find that Eve Madeleine had not even yet arrived, and that the woman who “did out” his living rooms and the two offices and usually cooked breakfast for him had finished her chores and gone—knowing nothing of his return the night before, she had not come in early enough to get breakfast for him as she usually did.
He settled himself in Eve Madeleine’s office with the library book she had left there, and tried to get interested in it until about half-past eleven, when the rightful occupant of the room entered the flat and appeared in the doorway, to stand staring at him as he put the book down on her desk and rose to his feet.
“Fraid I’ve dropped cigarette ash about, Miss Brandon,” he greeted her, “but you’re late. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“I went to get those particulars from the Saint Alphege marriage register before coming on here,” she answered. “But—is the case finished?”
“Barely begun,” he said. “Let me see that copy, please.”
She handed it to him, and then removed her hat and coat to seat herself at her desk. Scrutinising the copy, Gees saw that “Isabella Edwina Carter” recorded her birthplace as “Lymington, Hampshire,” and gave her age as thirty-two. He pocketed the paper.
“And both parents deceased,” he remarked. “Well, we shall see. I’m grateful to you for that report of yours as well as for this, Miss Brandon. Now take your little notebook and pencil, and we’ll have a precis of the case to date, as nearly as I can remember everything.”
He seated himself beside the desk and for over an hour dictated steadily. Then he lighted a cigarette for himself and one for her.
“I think that’s all,” he remarked. “How soon can you type it out?”
“By four or five o’clock,” she answered. “There’s a good deal.”
“And in taking it down, you haven’t taken it all in,” he remarked.
“Get it typed, and then study it yourself. We’ll go over it together—I’m going out on an inquiry—and you can ask questions and talk it out with me, make yourself a wall, and I’ll heave ideas at it and watch them bounce. It’s a good way of clarifying my own views. Count on seeing me back some time this afternoon, and I may want you to talk overtime. Most of that, you’ll find, concerns the girl May Norris, and she amounts to no more than a side-issue. The main case is to come.”
“And you believe in these—these twirling gurglers?” she asked.
“Miss Brandon, get hold of a book called Aylwin, by Watts-Dunton, and read it,” he counselled. “You’ll find there a saying—I forget the exact words, but something like this. ‘Quoth Ja’afar, bowing his head—“Bold is the donkey-driver, O Ka’dee, and bold is the ka’dee, who dare say what he will believe, what disbelieve, not knowing in any wise the mind of Allah—not knowing in any wise his own heart and what it shall some day suffer.” ’ That may not be exactly what the author said, but it’s the sense of it. As far as my belief goes, I’ve seen one gurgling twirler, and heard some more—or the same one, maybe. We will continue the discussion when I get back.”
He went out, and took a taxi to Baker Street Station. A short walk back along Baker Street brought him to Canuto’s, where he lunched and sat long over his coffee. In the end he went out and, heading for Upper Gloucester Place, discovered the dingy brass plate announcing that “Madame Stephanie, Clairvoyante,” resided there. He rang the bell.
Madame herself, recognisable by Miss Brandon’s report, opened the door and surveyed him with disfavour that grew as she took in the type of man confronting her. She shook her tousled head at him.
“I theenk you make ze meestake, m’sieu,” she said. “Ze wrong door.”
“Oh, no, madame,” he dissented easily. “You are Madame
Stephanie, and I was careful not to come without a recommendation for a sitting.”
“Zen p’raps you will come een, m’sieu,” and she drew back to admit him, going on to the room described in Miss Brandon’s report, untidy and even dirty, to turn there and face him, still with suspicion.
“You ’ave ze recommendation, you say, m’sieu?” she asked.
“It may be stretching a point to call it that,” he answered coolly. He had got inside the place, which was his main object for a beginning. “The name I bring as introduction is Isabella Edwina Carter.”
He saw her start of alarm. “Carter?” she asked. “Ze first two names, m’sieur—oui. But not—not Carter. Let me see!” She held out her hand, in expectation of a card or something.
“Nothing to see,” he answered coolly. “Just—your daughter, madame.” For the facial resemblance was enough for the assumption.
“But—but ze name eet is not Carter,” she protested. “No. Eet ees now d’Arcy, since she marry. I do not geev you reading of ze ’and, m’sieu.”
“Probably not,” he said. “If you did, I wouldn’t believe any of it. D’Arcy, eh? Well, I think that’s about all I want.”
“What do you mean?” Angered and flustered, she dropped her pretence of an accent. “If you are police, you can prove nothing—nothing! They have tried before to catch me, to prosecute me, but I do nothing illegal. You—you swine of police! Get out of my house!”
“D’Arcy,” he repeated, and did not move. “But Carter first.”
“It was not!” she almost screamed. “My daughter’s name was Curtis, not Carter, till she married Mr. d’Arcy last year!”
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Curtis,” Gees said. “And your husband—don’t get excited, for I’m nothing whatever to do with the police—is your husband still in the navy, or retired now?”
“My husband is dead, long ago. He was never in the navy. What do you want? Who are you? Why do you come here questioning about me and my daughter, if you are not police? I try to make an honest living, and a poor one it is, but you have no business to come here like this! What do you mean by it? Why don’t you go when I tell you?”
“Never in the navy. And you’re sure your daughter married d’Arcy?” he asked, and made no move toward going.
“Sure of it? How dare you say such a thing? Of course she married him! A wealthy landowner in the west country—though it makes very little difference to me. They’ve stayed here with me since she married him—are you making insinuations against my daughter?”
“Calm down, Mrs. Curtis,” he urged. “I’m asking, not insinuating anything against anyone. They came here on the fourteenth of February and stayed six days—yes. If you think I’m wasting your time, I’ll pay you for it, and do get out of your head that I intend you any harm, for I don’t. See—here’s a guinea.” He put down a note and a shilling on a small, rickety table beside him. “And they were married last September, I believe, but where? Were you at the wedding?”
She looked uncertainly from him to the note and shilling, took them up from the table, and held them tightly in her bony hand.
“I—if you mean no harm—no, I wasn’t there,” she said more calmly. “She—I thought she was coming back, when she went away, and the next thing I knew was that they’d married. She’s known him a long time. There’s no harm in telling you, since you know they’re married. At Bournemouth, it was. She went there. I thought she was coming back.”
“And they did stay a week with you, last February? “ he asked.
“Yes, and before that, too. After the honeymoon. Why shouldn’t they?” She peered up at him, shortsightedly, perplexedly.
“Ah, why shouldn’t they?” he repeated. “The answer, I fancy, is by echo. D’Arcy. And his first name will be Angus, I take it?”
“Since you know so much, why ask me?” she retorted.
“I won’t, then,” he promised. “In fact, Mrs. Curtis—not
Carter—I won’t ask you anything more whatever, but obey you and go.”
“Yes, but why do you keep on saying Carter?” she demanded.
“She—she only called herself that once, when—when she didn’t want her real name known over something that’s all finished and forgotten. Why do you keep on saying the name like that?”
“Oh, I expect it’s a lapse of memory or something of the sort,” he answered. “Never mind, Mrs. Curtis—I won’t trouble you any more, for the present. Probably not at all, from now on. Good afternoon.”
He went out and, since Eve Madeleine would not yet have finished her transcription, headed for Madame Tussaud’s and got himself a seat in the cinema. The vacuity of the film then in process of presentation served as aid to reflection, rather than as a deterrent, and he sat on, fitting together the pieces of the puzzle—its main features presented no difficulties, and only the motives of the people concerned were obscure—until five o’clock, when he emerged and took another taxi for Little Oakfield Street. The transcription would be finished, now, and Eve Madeleine would have had time to study it.
“Just a wee spot more to take down before we begin our talk, Miss Brandon. Interview with Madame Stephanie, alias Curtis. No, the other way about. Her real name is Curtis. Now go ahead.”
He dictated the interview as nearly as he could from memory, and as he finished the girl looked up with pencil poised, ready for more.
“That’s all,” he said. “Transcribe it later. Put it aside for now. Have you gone over all I dictated this morning—the sense of it?”
She nodded. “If it would make sense,” she answered.
