by Molly Thynne
She nodded.
“Eric and I lodged there together till I went to the country. And, anyway, she’s the sort that would give them up to any one if she saw the colour of their money. I wonder she hasn’t sold them before.”
“Do you know how much is due to her?”
“Ten pounds would cover it. I don’t know to a shilling.”
Mellish opened a drawer and took out a packet of notes. He counted fifteen.
“Here you are,” he said. “This will give you a margin. Now I want you to go there as soon as you can, and if you can find the photograph, bring it to me here. You can leave it with my man if I’m out. Have you spoken of this to any one?”
“Not about the photograph. I’d have told the police, if they’d have listened to me, but they didn’t give me a chance. Unless Eric spoke to any one of it, no one knows about it.”
She stuffed the notes into her bag and prepared to go.
“You’ll feel better about the whole thing now that you are doing something definite,” he said kindly. “If we do bring this home to de Silva it will only be with your assistance, and you won’t help us by brooding over it unnecessarily. Try to get a good night’s rest and, if you can, keep your mind off it till to-morrow.”
She took his outstretched hand mechanically.
“I can sleep all right,” she murmured. “It’s the dreams I mind.”
Mellish, his keen eyes on hers, caught her wandering glance and held it.
“That stuff you take isn’t doing the dreams any good,” he said. “Take my advice and cut it out. We’re going to need your brains, if there’s anything in this. Keep them clear for Conyers’s sake.”
For a moment she was nonplussed, then, with a short laugh, she stretched out her hand and stared at the twitching fingers.
“No wonder you spotted it,” she said. “Any fool can see I’m all to pieces. It’s only this last week. I gave it up six years ago, but when they told me about Eric I had to have something. I’ll try to drop it, so long as I can be of use, but I won’t promise more than that. And you can trust me to get the photo.”
It was close on midnight when she left Mellish’s rooms, and he had imagined that she would go straight home and set about her search for the photograph in the morning. Astute though he was, he had not reckoned with the fact that he was dealing with a woman whose state of mind was not normal at the best, and who was still under the influence of the stuff with which she had been drugging herself ever since Conyers’s death. She left him with her thoughts intent on the task he had given her, and she proceeded, blindly and instinctively, to carry it out.
Her mind was centred on her loss and the urgent need to avenge Conyers’s death. Until that need was satisfied she would know no rest. But there was another influence at work in her clouded brain, an influence of which she had given Mellish no inkling, and that was fear. She had spoken only the truth when she said she would be glad to die; but she was afraid, for all that. There was a moment, during her interview with de Silva, when she knew she had gone too far, and in that second the expression on his face had terrified her. She had not been exaggerating when she said that she knew he would have killed her if he could, and ever since, hardly realizing it, she had been on her guard.
She was no sooner in the street than she cast an instinctive, furtive glance round her. She felt, rather than saw, a dark figure detach itself from the shadows on the other side of the road and slip silently across behind her. Twice she stopped, pretending to tie her shoe, and each time the shadow slowed down until she moved on again. Never did it pass her. With fear clutching at her heart she hurried on until she reached the reassuring glare of Piccadilly Circus. There, not daring to glance behind her, she boarded an omnibus. She was barely seated before a man jumped on and ran so quickly up the steps on to the top that she had no opportunity to see his face.
At South Kensington she got down and, going into the Tube, took a ticket for Earl’s Court. Two or three belated theatre-goers followed her to the ticket office, and she was conscious of a man among them, but again she failed to catch a glimpse of his face. By sheer luck the lift doors were just shutting and she slipped in a second before they closed, and was borne down secure in the knowledge that her pursuer, if he existed, had not had time to follow her. When she stepped out at the bottom she could hear the other lift descending, and knew that in another moment she would be trapped. Instead of following the little crowd to the platform she turned and ran for the stairs, and was well on her way up them before the second lift had disgorged its passengers.
She emerged, panting, into the street, and literally hurled herself into a taxi that had just set down a fare at the station entrance. As she opened the door she told the driver to go to Victoria, the first name that occurred to her, and he swung round and down Onslow Place before she was properly in her seat. She peered through the little window at the back, but could see no sign of any pursuit. A group of people were entering the station, but she could see no one coming out, and she felt satisfied that, if any one had been following her, she had succeeded in putting him off the scent.
She put her head out of the window and gave the driver the address of Conyers’s old lodgings. He had some difficulty in finding the right number in a dingy street off Tottenham Court Road, and there was a further delay while he fumbled for change for one of Mellish’s pound notes, but the street was reassuringly empty, and while she stood waiting, her finger on the bell, for the door to open, not a soul passed down it.
The landlady, whose lodgers had a habit of forgetting their keys and returning in the small hours, opened the door herself and poked her head suspiciously round it.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said sourly. “And about time, too! I ain’t got no bed for you, so you needn’t think it, not till you’ve settled up what you owe me. If you haven’t got it, you can just take yourself off, that’s all!”
Mrs. Verrall pushed her way into the dingy passage.
“I haven’t come to stay,” she answered curtly.
It did not take long to settle with the woman, once she had actually set eyes on the money.
“The trunk’s in the back parlour,” she said, in answer to Mrs. Verrall’s question. “I couldn’t have it cluttering up the bedroom. You’re surely not going to take it away at this time of night?”
“Where’s the suitcase?”
“With the trunk, of course. What d’you think I’d done with it? Popped it? You’ll want a cab if you’re going to take the lot.”
“I’ll send for them to-morrow. There’s something I want out of the suitcase. The rest can wait.”
The woman led the way into a stuffy little room off the hall and lit a flickering gas jet.
“You must have wanted it pretty badly to come at this time,” she remarked, eyeing her visitor’s movements inquisitively.
Mrs. Verrall did not answer. She was on her knees by the suitcase, feverishly unstrapping it. At that moment the sound of a bell came pealing from the lower regions, and, with a muttered curse on lodgers in general, the landlady went to open the front door, reluctantly leaving her visitor to her own devices.
It did not take Mrs. Verrall long to find the shabby writing-case she was looking for. She sat back on her heels and turned the contents on her lap.
Among a litter of old letters were half a dozen photographs. She knew most of them by sight, and discarded them by the simple process of pitching them on the floor. Then she came on the one she was seeking.
It was a group of three men. Two of them she recognized as old acquaintances of Conyers whom she had met in his company; the third, a slight, fair man, with well-cut, rather effeminate features, she had never seen before.
She sat studying it preparatory to putting it in her bag. So absorbed was she that she did not notice the landlady’s heavy tread as she descended to the basement, or the faint creak, immediately afterwards, of a loose board in the passage. She was taken completely unawares when a hand closed over her throat
from behind and she was jerked violently backwards with her head against the knees of her assailant.
She struggled in vain to free herself, tearing at the iron fingers which sank inexorably, deeper and deeper, into her throat.
Then suffocation overcame her; there was a sound like the beating of a thousand drums in her ears; strange lights, that seemed to penetrate agonizingly to her very brain, danced in front of her eyes. Then the torture ended mercifully in a great wave of utter darkness.
CHAPTER XV
Jervis had closed the door on Mrs. Verrall with a distinct sensation of relief. She was not the sort of person he was accustomed to see in his master’s company, and the more he thought about her the less he liked her. He had formed his own opinion of the type of lodging house to which he had delivered Mellish’s note, and Mrs. Verrall was exactly the kind of lady he had expected to find there. Incidentally, her deshabille had been a good deal more pronounced when she had issued from her room in answer to her landlady’s raucous summons than he cared to contemplate, and her reception of Mellish’s letter had been hysterical, to say the least of it.
His manner was portentous as he shot the bolts home on the front door after her departure. Then, having ascertained that his master was supplied with all that he required, he made his way to bed, acutely conscious of the fact that, owing to the intrusion of this undesirable woman, he had lost nearly an hour of well-earned rest.
He was awakened out of his first sleep by the insistent ringing of the telephone bell.
His first action was to look at his watch. The hands pointed to five-minutes to two. He shrugged into a dressing-gown and made his way down the passage to the hall. To his surprise his master was before him, and had already taken the receiver off the hook.
“Hullo! That you, Carol?” he heard him say.
There was a pause during which Jervis hovered, uncertain whether to wait or go back to his room. Then he discovered that Mellish had forgotten his slippers, and was standing in his bare feet on the cold parquet of the hall. He decided to wait.
“Mrs. Verrall? Yes. You haven’t got it?” There was relief rather than disappointment in his voice. He had felt sure that it was Carol on the telephone, and the thought had brought him out of bed at a run.
“You were what? Mercy on us! I had no idea you’d go to-night or I should have suggested your waiting till to-morrow. Where are you? Very well, I’ll come now.”
He hung up the receiver and, turning, caught sight of Jervis’s appalled countenance in the background.
“I’m going out, and I don’t know quite what time I shall be back. Get to bed, Jervis; I shan’t need you.”
Jervis was engaged in facing this abrupt re-entry of Mrs. Verrall into his well-ordered life.
“Can I get you a cab, sir?” he said feebly.
“I’ll pick one up as I go. Don’t sit up for me.”
“You’ll put on your slippers, sir,” he begged, obsessed by the sight of his master’s unprotected toes.
“Since when have I been in the habit of going out in my night clothes? Pull yourself together, Jervis!”
It was half-past two before Mellish reached Mrs. Verrall’s lodgings. She had evidently been watching for him from the window, for she opened the door to him herself. She was dressed as he had seen her last, but she had removed her hat, and her hair was rough and disordered. She looked utterly exhausted.
“Come in here,” she said, speaking in a curious, hoarse voice. “They’re all in bed. We shall have to be quiet.”
He followed her into a depressing dining-room in the middle of which stood a table covered with a stained cloth and still littered with the remains of supper. As he closed the door behind him she seized his arm and clung to it convulsively. She was trembling violently.
Mellish put his arm round her shoulders and led her to a chair. Then he sat down opposite to her and took both her hands in his.
“There, there,” he said reassuringly. “It’s all over now and you’re quite safe. You can trust me to see that you’re properly looked after in future.”
“I’ve lost the photo,” she exclaimed piteously, almost as though she expected him to scold her. “He took it. … I did my best!”
She put her hand to her throat and, for the first time, Mellish noticed the purple marks which were already beginning to darken into bruises.
“Good God!” he exclaimed, shocked out of his usual imperturbability. “The brute must have half-strangled you!”
She nodded.
“It hurts,” she told him childishly. “And I’m afraid I don’t know where to go!”
“Don’t let that worry you,” he said. “I’ll see that you are protected. Try to tell me all about it.”
She was shaken and confused, but the whole thing was still so vividly impressed on her mind that, by degrees, he got a connected account out of her.
It appeared that the landlady had found her lying on the floor, and had done her best to bring her round. It was some time before she realized her surroundings, and, when she did, her throat was so sore that she could hardly speak. Meanwhile the landlady was vociferous in her associations that she had seen no one, and that she was sure that only the lodgers were in the house when she went down to the basement after letting in the latecomer who had rung the bell while Mrs. Verrall was opening the suitcase. This she declared to be a woman who lodged in the third floor.
“Went straight upstairs to her room, she did,” she insisted. “I see her with me own eyes before I went downstairs. Besides, she wouldn’t do a thing like that. Whoever done it must ’ave got in after I left the ’all.”
Mrs. Verrall was convinced that the woman was lying, and that she had let in a man, not a woman, as she declared. He had no doubt bribed her to go downstairs and stay there until she heard him leave the house.
“She’d do anything for money,” she assured Mellish. “Besides, she’d never have left me like that, once her curiosity was aroused. She’s far too inquisitive, and she was mad keen to see what I was after before the door bell rang. She was terrified for fear I should go to the police, and tried to make me promise not to. She knew her story was too thin to be believed. How he tracked me, I don’t know. I could have sworn I’d thrown him off.”
“Don’t distress yourself about the loss of the photograph,” said Mellish kindly. “You’ve seen it, which is half the battle. Can you describe the third man in the group?”
Her connection with Scotland Yard had taught her to be accurate, and she was able to give Mellish a very clear idea of what the man in the photograph was like. It tallied admirably with that of Shand’s suspect, Strelinski.
“You’ve helped us more than you realize,” Mellish assured her. “Now, about yourself. Will you feel safe here for another few hours? Is your landlady trustworthy?”
“She’s all right. She and her husband are very decent people. They won’t let any one in if I tell them not to.”
“Very well, then. Will you go to your room now and try to get some rest? Which floor are you on?”
“I’m on the top, and the door’s a good one with a stout lock. I shall be all right to-night, but I must get away to-morrow. I’m frightened.”
“I’ll see to that. I promise you’ll be out of this and in a safe place by lunch time. If it’s any comfort to you, I don’t think the man meant to kill you. I fancy he’s got enough on his conscience, and isn’t inclined to take any further risk. He’s got what he was after, and I fancy he’ll let you alone in future.”
Mellish watched her go up the staircase, and waited in the hall till he heard her door close, then he let himself softly out of the house. A prowling taxi passed him when he was half-way down the street, but he ignored it and waited until he came to a rank before getting into a cab. He was taking no risks after the story he had just heard.
At seven o’clock he rang up Dalberry, and by eight the two men were breakfasting together. While they were eating, Mellish gave Dalberry a short account of the events o
f the night before.
“Can you undertake to find a temporary home for Mrs. Verrall until this blows over?” he finished. “She ought to be got out of London, and if you’ve got a nice, motherly farmer’s wife up your sleeve who’d take her in for a bit, produce her. Then we’ll settle how to get her there.”
“I can do that for you. Not a farmer’s wife, as it happens, but one of the lodge-keepers. She asked me the other day if I’d mind if she let her room to an artist in the summer, and I know there’s no one there at present. She’s a thorough good sort, and can be trusted to fuss over your Mrs. Verrall and make her comfortable.”
“Has she got a man on the premises, in case of any possible trouble?”
“Her son. One of the gamekeepers, an enormous chap who’d be equal to tackling any one. Give them a hint that she’s to be looked after and they’ll be as good as a body-guard.”
Mellish’s next move was to go with Dalberry to Scotland Yard. There they interviewed Shand, who showed considerable interest in this new development.
“Funny how our fair friend goes on cropping up,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ve no doubt what Mrs. Verrall’s description would have been if she’d managed to catch a glimpse of her assailant. I can understand his attack on Mrs. Verrall, but I’m blessed if I can see what he wanted to put Smith out of the way for. I wish I could get on to the link between this Conyers business and the affair on the Enriqueta.”
“Conyers was removed because he knew too much,” suggested Mellish. “It looks very much as if something of the kind may have happened in the case of Smith.”
Shand nodded.
“I’ve been of the opinion all along that Smith did not know that his assailant was on board the boat,” he said. “I shall always believe that he stumbled on him just before he was murdered. As you say, he probably signed his own death warrant when he did so. Everybody who knew him agreed that he was too loose-tongued to keep the fact to himself if he had a friend on board, and he seems to have stated several times that he knew no one. What beats me is the length to which Strelinski seems to have been prepared to go rather than risk the discovery of his identity. The man must have a good deal on his conscience!”
