by Molly Thynne
She looked up with a smile.
“I thought I heard you come in just now. Did you go out again?”
Carol nodded.
“I found I’d got no stamps, so I ran out to the post office to get some.”
“My dear, how troublesome for you! Why did not you let the porter fetch them? It is what he is here for.”
“It wasn’t any trouble, really,” Carol assured her. “I hadn’t taken off my hat when I discovered there were none in my drawer.”
Lady Dalberry laughed.
“This seems to be our unlucky day,” she said. “The same thing happened to me, only I was not dressed to go out. I was going to send the porter, but, if you have just bought some, perhaps you would have pity on me. I only need one.”
There was a glint of humour in Carol’s eyes as she opened her bag. Lady Dalberry could hardly be expected to know that, among other fittings, it contained a special leather case for the little stamp-books issued by the Post Office. The case had had a book in it when the bag was given to her some months before, and it had remained untouched ever since. If, as she suspected, Lady Dalberry was trying to test the accuracy of her statement that she had been to the post office to buy stamps, she was ready with her proof.
She produced the case, opening it in such a way that her aunt could see that the book was an unused one.
“Is one enough?” she asked. “I’ve got a whole book here.”
“Plenty,” said Lady Dalberry, as she took it. “I will fetch my letter.”
She rose and left the room. Carol waited until she heard the door of her bedroom close behind her, then she went swiftly to the writing-table and looked into the little inlaid box in which she knew Lady Dalberry kept her stamps. She had been right in her suspicions. The box was well stocked. Evidently it was not going to be so easy as she had imagined to attend to the posting of her own letters.
She made her way slowly to her room, deep in thought. In the passage she met Lady Dalberry, carrying a letter in her hand.
“Thank you, my dear,” she said gratefully. “Have you anything more for the post? I am going to ring for the boy.”
“I’m afraid not. My letters aren’t written yet. I wish they were!”
She had almost reached her room when Lady Dalberry called her back.
“By the way,” she said. “Have any of your letters gone astray lately? Juan de Silva was complaining of the carelessness of the people here and asking whether we had had any trouble. I told him that, as far as I knew, we had missed nothing. He says that they leave the letters lying about in the porter’s room downstairs.”
For the moment the audacity of the attack took Carol’s breath away, then she was conscious of a cold touch of fear at her heart. Until now she had been unable to bring herself to believe that Lady Dalberry was really actively concerned in the plot against Dalberry. But this last move, coming on the top of the illuminating little episode of the stamp-box, brought the truth forcibly home to her, and she realized that the situation was not only awkward, but alarming. She answered naturally enough, however.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I certainly haven’t missed anything. The whole place seems to me extraordinarily well run. I should be sorry if either of the porters got into a mess. They’re so nice, both of them.”
Safe inside her room, she pulled herself together and faced the situation. She realized now that she was frightened, and made a determined effort to steady her nerves. It was absurd, she told herself, to yield to panic now. After all, when she had decided to stay on at the flat, she had been aware that Lady Dalberry was, to put it mildly, under the influence of de Silva, but she knew now how half-hearted her own suspicions had been. Such things, she had felt, simply did not happen to people like herself. It was disconcerting in the extreme to discover that they did, and still more disquieting was the realization that there was no one in the flat to whom she could turn in a moment of emergency. It was one thing to assure Mellish that she would face the music, sitting in the comfortable security of his room at the Albany, and quite another to contemplate her own complete isolation in this flat, without even a servant within call, for the staff of the Escatorial was housed far away in the basement. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of her own loneliness and inadequacy, and was actually on the point of packing a bag and going to the nearest hotel for the night, rather than spend another hour under the same roof as Lady Dalberry, when in a flash her imagination, which had so nearly been her undoing, saved her.
She pictured herself on the morrow going to see Mellish and confessing to him that her nerve had failed her after all. That he would be sympathetic, she knew. Indeed, he could be relied upon to treat her with the greatest kindness and consideration, and, unbearable thought to one of her generation and temperament, he would not be surprised. It would be only what he would naturally expect from a sex he had been brought up to look upon as both timid and inconsistent. Ever since her uncle’s death she had been asserting her independence, and had scoffed at Mellish’s endeavours to hedge her round with the conventional restrictions he considered necessary for her safety; and, now that he had given her a chance to show that she was of different mettle to the Victorian women he professed to admire, she could hardly bring herself to go to him and confess herself beaten.
With a characteristic little jerk of her shoulders she turned and switched on the lights over her dressing-table. With the swiftness of reaction she had made up her mind to stay and see the thing through. She was dining with friends, and did not expect to be back till late, a fact for which she was thankful, for, in spite of her determination, she did not feel equal to facing a long evening in Lady Dalberry’s company. She was too fundamentally honest to take kindly to deception of any sort, and she felt that, for one day, she had done more than her share of lying. The words had come easily enough to her lips, but, looking back on her last interview with Lady Dalberry, she realized that she was a mere beginner at a game the other woman played to perfection, and that the fewer encounters she risked the better.
She had just finished dressing for dinner when the telephone bell rang in the hall. She opened her door and listened, but there was no sign of life, either from Lady Dalberry’s bedroom or the sitting-room. She concluded that her aunt had already gone down to the restaurant for dinner.
She crossed the hall and took down the receiver.
“Is Miss Summers at home?” asked a voice. For a moment she was puzzled, then she realized that Jervis was speaking.
“Who is it?” she asked. “I am Miss Summers.”
“Will you hold the line a minute, miss? Mr. Mellish would like to speak to you.”
She glanced round her apprehensively, the receiver at her ear, but there was no movement from either of the two rooms across the hall. All the same, she wished she had ascertained definitely that the flat was empty before answering the telephone. Then she heard Mellish’s voice, with its slow drawl.
“I took a chance of catching you alone,” he said, “because I wasn’t sure of finding you later. Are you alone in the flat?”
“I think so,” she answered, speaking as low as she dared. “Is it anything important?”
“Only this. I’ve been thinking things over, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it will be wiser for you to clear out. I don’t imagine, for a moment, that you are in any danger, but that fellow may make himself unpleasant, and I don’t feel that, after what has happened, your aunt is sufficient protection for you. I ought never to have given in to your suggestion in the first instance.”
There was a moment’s pause, then:
“I think I’d better stick to our first plan,” she said undecidedly.
“Nonsense!” came sharply from the other end of the wire. “If there’s no one you care to go to, I’ll take a room at a hotel for you for a night or two, and then we can settle whether you’d like to leave London for a time or make other arrangements. Get your things packed and be ready to leave to-morrow morning.”
His voice was peremptory. In his anxiety he had adopted a tone he generally knew better than to use when dealing with Carol, and the girl was quick to resent it. A moment earlier she had been more than inclined to accede to his suggestion; indeed her hesitation had been only to save her face. Mellish’s assumption that she would fall meekly in with any arrangements he might think fit to make roused her to immediate opposition.
“I’m sorry,” she said, keeping her voice low and selecting her words carefully. “I’m afraid it’s no good. I’ve decided to stick to our first arrangement. I’ll explain why when we meet.”
“Has anything fresh happened? If not, let me beg of you—”
She cut him short.
“I can’t argue about it now, but please let things remain as they are for the present.”
A sudden suspicion seized Mellish.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Is anybody listening?”
“Possibly. I don’t know.”
“Very well, then. I’ll ask you a few questions that can be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Has anything important happened since I saw you?”
“No.”
“Has anything at all happened? Anything you would like to tell me?”
“Yes.”
“You have quite made up your mind to stay on for the present?”
“Yes.”
“Can you meet me on the bridge by the Powder Magazine in Kensington Gardens to-morrow morning at eleven?”
“Yes. That will suit me perfectly.”
“Excellent. We will thresh the matter out then. Meanwhile, you’re all right?”
“Quite.”
He rang off, and Carol, after fetching her cloak and bag from her room, telephoned to the porter for a taxi and left the flat.
She slammed the front door behind her, and then, following a sudden impulse, slipped her latch-key into the lock and turned it carefully. Very gently she pushed the heavy door ajar and looked through the chink.
Lady Dalberry’s bedroom door was open and she stood on the threshold. She was staring at the telephone, and on her face was a look of mingled curiosity and annoyance that confirmed Carol’s suspicion that she had been listening to her one-sided conversation with Mellish and had gathered nothing from it.
The girl felt deeply grateful for the instinct that had warned her to be careful in her answers.
With infinite precautions she closed the door. Then she ran swiftly down the stairs and into the waiting taxi.
CHAPTER XII
An amusing dinner-party and an evening spent in the society of people she had known for years, and on whose friendship and integrity she knew she could rely, went a long way towards dispelling Carol’s fears. She returned to the Escatorial a very different person to the nerve-racked girl who had left it only a few hours before. Though she was still conscious of a sense of insecurity that made her lock her bedroom door carefully before settling down for the night, her self-reliance had returned to her and she slept like a log and woke feeling refreshed and confident in the morning.
Lady Dalberry breakfasted in her room and Carol did not see her before leaving the flat to keep her appointment with Mellish. She found him, a peaceful and reassuring figure, meditatively observing the boats on the Serpentine, and the first thing he did was to hand her a note from Dalberry, written in answer to her letter.
“He rang up this morning, and when he heard that I was meeting you, he entrusted me with this. We decided that it was wiser not to send it by post.”
He turned his back and displayed a fatherly interest in the ducks while she read it and scribbled a pencilled answer, accepting Dalberry’s invitation to dine that night, on the back of the envelope. Mellish undertook to see it delivered, and slipped it into his pocket. Then he began to tackle her in earnest on the score of her obstinacy in insisting on staying on at the Escatorial.
But he was unfortunate in the moment he had chosen. The fine, bracing weather, her own sense of physical fitness, and the added stimulus of Dalberry’s letter, had effectually banished her fears of the night before, and she was filled now with a high spirit of adventure. Mellish soon realized that nothing he could say would alter her decision, and abandoning what was obviously becoming a futile discussion, he asked what had happened after her return to the flat the day before.
She told him all that had passed between her and Lady Dalberry, and his mouth hardened as he listened.
“This only confirms me in my decision that you ought to leave that place at once,” he said emphatically.
“If you take that line, I shan’t report to you any more,” she countered. “I must stay on for a bit, but I promise that, if anything really unpleasant happens, I will clear out at once. Meanwhile, I shall keep my eyes open and try to find out what hold this wretched man has over Aunt Irma. I can’t help feeling sorry for her, and I’m sure she has been dragged into this in spite of herself.”
She and Lady Dalberry lunched together, and Carol found it easier than she had expected to keep up at least a semblance of their old friendliness. Dalberry’s letter and the knowledge that she was to meet him that evening prevented her from dwelling unnecessarily on what had passed, and at the moment she felt more than prepared to meet whatever might lie in the future.
She told Lady Dalberry that she was dining out and would probably not be home till the small hours. Fortunately for her, her aunt took it for granted that she was spending the evening with some friends who had recently arrived in London from abroad, and beyond saying that she would be at her club until fairly late, and would not sit up for her, did not pursue the subject further. Thus it was that, secure in the knowledge that her aunt was still unaware that she was in communication once more with Mellish and Dalberry, Carol, in her most becoming frock, set out with a light heart to keep the appointment she had been looking forward to all day, little dreaming that, during her absence, the Escatorial was to achieve an unenviable, if brief, notoriety as the scene of a tragedy as grim as it was mysterious.
Just over an hour before her return—to be exact, a few minutes after eleven-thirty—the night porter of the Escatorial strolled out on to the steps to “cast an eye on the weather,” as he expressed it. As he did so, a taxi, coming from the direction of Park Lane, drew up opposite the door. According to his custom he ran down the steps and opened the cab door.
The occupant made no move to get out, and, after waiting for a moment, he peered into the interior of the cab, expecting to find that one of the tenants of the building had dined, not wisely but too well. The light was bad, but it was good enough for him to see that the passenger, who was huddled in the corner of the cab as though asleep, was a stranger to him.
The taxi-driver twisted himself round so that he could see into the interior of the cab.
“Anything wrong, mate?” he asked. “I was told the Escatorial.”
The porter turned to him.
“’E’s not one of our lot,” he said. “Drunk, isn’t ’e?”
“’E ain’t no drunk.”
The driver climbed out of his seat and came round to the door of the cab.
“’E was sober all right when I see ’im last,” he stated. “’E and the other gentleman was walkin’ along Regent Street when they stopped me. They was both steady enough then.”
He climbed into the cab and shook the occupant gently by the arm.
“’Ere, sir,” he said. “You wanted the Escatorial, didn’t you?”
There was no response, and he bent lower and peered into the man’s face, with the result that he backed out of the cab in a hurry on to the porter’s toes.
“Somethin’ wrong in there,” he said briefly. “Take a look at ’is face!”
The porter went round to the other door and opened it. Then he shut it again hurriedly. He was an old soldier and quite capable of keeping his head in an emergency. He had his duty to the flats to consider, as he expressed it afterwards, and he saw no reason why the fair name of the Escatorial shoul
d be sullied by a sordid affair of this kind.
“If you take my advice, you’ll drive ’im round to the police station round the corner,” he said decisively. “’E don’t belong ’ere.”
The driver hesitated and, by so doing, effectually ruined the porter’s neat scheme.
“This was the address I was given,” he insisted obstinately.
“I can’t help that. ’E don’t belong ’ere. You cut off with ’im to the station.”
But it was too late. A policeman had just turned the corner, and at the sight of him the cabman’s face cleared. He gave a shrill whistle and signalled to him to come over. The policeman did not hurry himself as he strolled across the road towards them, but after a brief glance into the interior of the cab, his manner changed considerably.
With the help of the taxi-driver he got the man out of the cab, and together they carried him into the Escatorial and laid him down on the floor of the porter’s room.
The policeman knelt down by his side.
“He’s gone,” he announced, after a brief examination. “Anybody know who he is?”
“’E doesn’t belong ’ere,” asseverated the porter earnestly. “And, what’s more, ’e’s never been ’ere to my knowledge. The day-porter may know ’im by sight; I don’t.”
The constable went to the telephone and called up the police station. In less than ten minutes the station inspector arrived, bringing with him a constable and the divisional surgeon, whom he had picked up on the way.
Now it so happened that the inspector was an old associate of Chief Detective-Inspector Shand. It also happened that Shand had dropped into the local police station for a chat only a few days before. His visit had not been entirely without an object.
“Know anything of a chap called de Silva?” he had asked casually.
The inspector shook his head.
“That’s a new one on me,” he said. “Who is he?”
“He’s in your manor, anyway. Got a flat at the Escatorial. I’m interested in him, that’s all.”
