Rosalind smiled. Mimosa looked odder than ever. After eighteen months she really looked quite over-poweringly odd. She had gone platinum, and what had once been rather mouse-coloured hair was now an unearthly shade between flaxen and grey. It hung about the little shrivelled neck in lank half curled ringlets. Her dress was silver gauze. It disclosed the greater part of her emaciated body. Jeremy found himself unwillingly able to count her vertebrae. He reflected, not for the first time, that the female spine was an over-rated spectacle. Mimosa’s seemed to have as many bones as a herring.
“Quite too marvellous!” she was saying. “And I have such lots to tell you! I shall ring you up! I’ve found the most marvellous woman! Oh, my dear, she really is! Quite unbelievable, if you didn’t see it with your own eyes! We’ll go together!”
She turned and tapped Jeremy on the arm with a bone-white finger, her huge pale eyes staring from the narrow, pinched face which was all white except for a crooked carmine mouth.
“Jeremy, you shall come too!”
“Where?” said Jeremy. Then, with haste, “I work for my living, you know, Mrs Vane.”
“I thought you went everywhere that Rosalind did. The faithful cavalier!” She tapped him again, laughed her light, high laugh, gushed an effusive farewell, and fluttered back to her table.
Rosalind and Jeremy walked on.
“Lord—what a woman!” said Jeremy.
“She’s a sort of a cousin of Gilbert’s and I’ve known her most of my life,” said Rosalind. She laughed a little. “Why should one person remind you of another when they’re not in the least bit alike? Frank would be so angry if I told him that Mimosa had made me think of him. By the way, do you know my cousin, Frank Garrett, at all? I don’t believe you ever met.”
He repeated the name.
“Garrett?”
Rosalind laughed again.
“He’s in the Foreign Office Intelligence. You can’t have met him—he’s quite impossible to forget—nubbly, you know, and bristly, and all the wrong clothes. Gilbert liked him. He’s coming to see me to-morrow.”
Jeremy walked beside her for a couple of yards. Then he said,
“Why did you tell me that, Mrs Denny?”
Rosalind looked at him seriously.
“Because he seems very interested in you, Jeremy,” she said.
CHAPTER V
WHEN JEREMY HAD SAID said good-night to Rosalind Denny at the door of her flat, he ran downstairs without waiting for the lift and walked back to his room.
Bernard Mannister’s house was in Marsh Street. It stood at the corner where Tilt Street runs in. If you follow Tilt Street for a hundred yards or so, you come to a narrow turning on the left called Nym’s Row, which is given over to what once were stables but have now developed into garages.
Jeremy had a room over the third garage. It suited his purse, his convenience, and his inclination. There were three rooms in all. The other two were occupied by Mr and Mrs Joseph Walker. Mr Walker drove a taxi-cab, and Mrs Walker, whose Christian name was Lizzie, had once been housemaid to Jeremy’s mother. She remembered Jeremy in long clothes, treated him as if he had not very long outgrown them, and made him a good deal more comfortable than he might have been in rooms which were three or four times as expensive. She allowed him a key under protest and with the gloomiest anticipations, since it was her simple creed that a lost key was certain to be picked up by some bloodthirsty ruffian who would immediately repair to Nym’s Row and murder her and Joseph in their beds. How he was to know what lock out of London’s million locks the key would fit, or what motive even the most desperate criminal could possibly have for the massacre of Mr and Mrs Joseph Walker, she did not pretend to know. Jeremy had his key, and Lizzie Walker swore that she never slept a single blessed wink the nights he was out late. This being so, it was difficult to account for those blended snores which he could always hear as soon as the door swung in.
He came in now, passed the Walkers’ door, and entered his own room. It was not a very large room, but it was large enough. It held a bed, and a wash-stand, and a chest of drawers, and a typewriter, and a horribly battered but very comfortable easy chair, and an almost equally battered trunk, and a strip of carpet, and Jeremy.
Jeremy took off his evening clothes, folded them quickly and neatly, and put them away in a drawer. He then got out and put on a suit which had been a trusty companion on country tramps for many years, and which was now reaching the stage of being unable to face the light of day. The elbows were almost through, and there was something which was not exactly a hole in the right knee. As he put it on, he sang in a sort of growling whisper,
“Day after day I’m on my way With my rags, bottles and bones”
He wondered what it would be like to run an old clothes business. All right if the old clothes were your own. Beastly if they were anyone else’s. He wondered what it would feel like to be a tramp. Three months ago he wasn’t so far off finding out. Once your clothes go, and your boots, especially your boots, jobs no longer exist and you begin to slide on an hourly steepening slope to those ultimate depths in which men struggle just to get a crust of bread, or a pint of beer, or enough warmth to keep the life in them—
“Bring out your rags, bottles and bones”
He put out the lights pulled up the blind, and opened the window. It was dark enough—thick, and a little rain in the air. The window looked into a small square yard, separated from the long strip behind Mannister’s house by a brick wall, and from the yards on either side by lower walls.
Jeremy got out of the window and let himself down by the rainpipe. It was very dark indeed in the yard. The wall of the house and the other three walls gloomed over it and made it quite impossible to see anything at all. Jeremy had to negotiate a derelict wheelbarrow, half a dozen cracked flower-pots, a large tin bath with a hole in it, and a rickety pair of wooden steps. In theory, he knew the position of each of these things to a hair; in practice he barked his shins on the bath, narrowly escaped crashing over the flower-pots, and blundered into the steps, which when clutched shut up, catching his thumb in the hinge.
It was rather a breathless moment.
Then he fetched up against the wall and gave his mind to inducing the steps to stay put. He found consolation in murmuring,
“Put on your black gloves and play the fiddle, And smile, dam you, smile!”
There was bottle-glass on the top of the wall. He took off his coat and used it as a pad. The drop on the other side was no great matter.
He had now to get into Mannister’s house, and this was no great matter either. The catch of the scullery window was not the first that he had slipped back. He was, in fact, something of an expert, having acquired the art at the age of fifteen when putting in an interminable period of quarantine with an old cousin of his father’s who insisted on treating him as if he were an invalid—“A light supper, and bed at half-past eight. Early to bed and early to rise, my dear Jeremy.” She practised what she preached. Her doors were locked at nine, and by ten o’clock the whole household was supposed to be asleep. It was then that Jeremy began to practise upon scullery windows. At first he merely opened the catch, slipped out, went for a tramp in the dark, and came back much exhilarated by having defied authority. Then one night there was the window latched against him. He was doubly exhilarated when he found that he could deal with the catch. He soon discovered that one of the maids was also in the habit of slipping out. It became a point of honour to take risks without being spotted. He acquired considerable proficiency, and went out of his way to attempt the more difficult windows. He had many hair breadth escapes, but was never caught. Old Cousin Emily never guessed.
As he slipped the catch of Mr Mannister’s scullery window, it came to Jeremy cold and sharp that here was he, ages older than his fifteen-year-old self, and his father and mother gone, and that old Cousin Emily was still living up in Middleham in th
e same house. She had been living in it for an odd eighty years or so, and she probably still locked up at nine and believed that everyone in the house was asleep by ten. She was the only relation he had in the world. He wondered who got out of her scullery window nowadays, and with that he swung himself over the sink and shut the window behind him.
Mr Mannister’s scullery was not so immaculate as Cousin Emily’s had been. It smelt of grease and stale food.
The servants lived out, with the exception of old James the butler who slept at the top of the house. Jeremy’s burglary was not, therefore, a very risky one. He had only to go up the kitchen stairs, cross the hall into the library, and collect his notes. He wondered whether he should take off his shoes, and then, quite fantastically, discovered that his pride jibbed. Whatever happened, or didn’t happen, he wasn’t going to be found walking about Mannister’s house in his stocking feet. There wasn’t an ounce of logic in it, but there it was.
He need not have troubled. The house was good sound eighteenth-century work, one of those solid Georgian houses which put modern building to shame. Its stair treads did not creak, and its doors opened and closed again as silently now as on the day they had first been hung.
Jeremy reached the library without event, ran through his notes, and turned to the book-shelves to verify those quotations with which Mr Mannister proposed to decorate his speech. There was one from Timon of Athens about giving to dogs what was denied to men. He turned the pages of a highly ornamental Shakespeare, one of an imposing row of prizes. Here it was: “Hate all, curse all: show charity to none … give to dogs what thou deniest to men.” Then, for a contrast, a jingle of Tommy Moore’s: “Let Sympathy pledge us. …” Hang Mannister! He never forgot a line outright, and he never could finish one. Well, here was Moore:
“Let Sympathy pledge us, through pleasure, through pain, That, fast as a feeling but touches one link, Her magic shall send it direct through the chain!”
Mannister had worked up to a peroration on International Contacts, depicting them as so close that a drop of the virus of hate in the veins of one nation must surge in fever through the veins of all the rest, and impulses of fear and anger or of generosity and affection, were irresistibly communicated, devastating or ennobling millions who knew nothing of the causes which shattered or exalted them.
Jeremy pushed Moore back into his place, turned round, and was struck motionless. The door was opening. He was at the far end of the long room with a light just over his head. The switch was by the door. The door was opening. It made no noise and it opened very slowly. There was no light at that end of the room.
The door swung slowly in until it made a straight line with the jamb. On the dim threshold there stood a girl in her night dress. She had a lot of dark hair tumbling in curls about her shoulders. Her left hand hung down holding something. Her right hand was dropping slowly from the door. It was like a slow-motion picture. Her arm came back to her side. She stood there with her eyes wide open, staring at the light and at Jeremy.
Jeremy recovered himself. He had not the remotest notion who she might be, or what she could possibly want. He said,
“I’m Mr Mannister’s secretary. I hope I didn’t startle you.”
He began to walk towards her, but as soon as he moved, her hands went up in a groping manner and she turned and went back into the darkness of the hall. There was a sound of something falling—something small. It was the only sound that she had made.
Jeremy stopped for a moment, and then went on to the door. There was a little dusky space just beyond it, and after that a quite impenetrable blackness. He could not see anything, and he could not hear anything. The house was as dead still as if no one had moved in it for hours.
He looked down and saw something small lying to his right and a little in front of him. It lay just on the carpet’s edge. He picked it up, switched on a nearer light, and looked at it. It was a baby owl modelled in clay of a peculiar bluish green colour. The workmanship was extraordinarily good. The eyes blinked, the feathers had a look of downy softness. It was quite small, not more than two inches in height, but it was so life-like that he found himself half afraid to close his hand lest he should crush the feathers. The girl must have dropped it when he startled her.
All this passed through his mind in a flash. Then he put the owl in his pocket, switched off the light he had just put on, and crossed the hall.
He had the stairs in front of him now and, passing them on the right, the passage leading to the basement. Standing there, he thought he heard the baize door touch the jamb and come to a stop. When he opened it, there was the black passage beyond and the stairs going down. There were ten steps down, and then more passage, with the kitchen, pantry and store-room opening upon it.
Once past the baize door, he could make use of a pocket torch. Kitchen, pantry, scullery, and larder were all empty under the dark. He began to wonder strangely what he had seen. Then as he came back into the passage from the kitchen and flashed his light to and fro, he saw a door opposite him but a little to the left, and it stood a hand’s breadth open.
Jeremy whistled between his teeth. He could swear that the door had been shut when he came in this way, for he had flashed his light across it and wondered what door it was, It was shut then, and it was open now. He pushed it wide, and saw a black stair go steeply down.
He turned the beam of his torch on the dark and went down. There were fifteen steps, and the last six turned at a sharp angle. They were of old worn stone, and they brought him into a stone chamber like a hall, very black and dark. He sent the beam of his torch travelling.
The place seemed very old, a very great deal older than the house. Doors opened from it here and there. Old cellars, as he guessed, here long and long before the Georgian house was built. He tried some of the doors and found them locked. The air was still and rather warm. The air was very still. His feet rang on the flagstones. The stone roof was groined and vaulted overhead. The least sound came echoing back. At the far end the passage went off at right angles.
He turned the corner and flashed his light ahead. It showed him four doors, three on the right, the other blocking the passage—four doors, three closed and the other closing. The doors on the right were shut, as all the other doors had been shut, but the door that spanned the passage moved in the beam of the torch.
As he swung the torch, the light caught the top corner of the moving door and, sweeping down, flashed over three fingers of a moving hand. The door moved. The hand moved. The light flashed past. When he focused it again, the door was closed and the hand was gone.
He was at a distance of perhaps five yards. For a moment he did not move, only kept the beam on the door. The hand had been there, and it was gone. It had been drawing the door to, and it was gone.
He walked down the passage and pulled at the door. It opened quite easily. The torch showed an empty cellar some eight feet square with a beautifully vaulted roof. There was no cover at all; there was only a most stark, bare emptiness. Jeremy stood in the midst of the emptiness and thought. He had seen a hand, or to be exact, three fingers of a hand—small, smooth fingers with oval nails. He thought they belonged to the girl who had stood between the dark hall and the half lit library looking at him. When the torch flashed across those three fingers, she must have been standing where he was standing now, just across the threshold, drawing the door towards her. What had happened after that? Perhaps half a minute had gone by. And she was gone, leaving this bare emptiness.
What had he seen?
The hand with the torch fell to his side. He stood there frowning, and felt a faint cold go pringling down his spine. He made an impatient movement and looked down at the bright ring of light cast by the hanging torch. There was a little dust in the beam, and there was thick dust on the stone slabs which formed the floor. And right in the middle of the ring of light there was the mark of a small naked foot.
CH
APTER VI
“COLONEL GARRETT—” ANNOUNCED MRS Denny’s maid.
Rosalind put down her book and came to meet him.
“How nice of you, Frank!” she said.
Garrett grunted.
“Hope you’ll say as much when I’ve got through!”
She laughed.
“That sounds—are you trying to frighten me? I thought this was going to be a nice cousinly visit.”
“I haven’t time for cousinly visits,” said Garrett. He jerked a crooked tie crookeder and frowned horribly at the pleasant room.
Rosalind Denny had been fortunate. Furnished flats and furnished houses are usually crowded, and seldom take kindly to one’s own belongings. This was an exception. It had plain walls and a plain neutral-coloured carpet. There were comfortable chairs. There was a walnut tallboy, and an old knee-hole writing-table. There had been very little else. Rosalind’s Rockingham candlesticks and her apple-green Bristol glass fitted in very happily. One of the Bristol bowls held anemones—violet, white, rose, and dusky crimson. Their stamens were all sooty like little chimney-sweeps’ brushes. Rosalind wore a soft grey jumper and skirt, and a row of violet and crystal beads.
Garrett frowned impartially at her and at the room.
“Frank dear—how alarming! You’re very mysterious. Don’t you think we might sit?”
She took a sofa corner herself, the one nearest the brightly burning fire, and pointed him to the other.
“And now—” she said.
He threw himself back against the green and silver cushions, an incongruous figure in a baggy suit of violent check. His maltreated tie was of a horrid shade of brick. He wore green socks and new yellow shoes.
“The fact is, I don’t like my job.”
“Always—or just to-day?”
Garrett grinned suddenly.
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