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Blindfold
Patricia Wentworth
CHAPTER I
“Half past ten,” said Mrs Green—“and time you took ’er Benger’s up. Half past ten to a tick she ’as it, so you’d better look sharp.”
Flossie Palmer stifled a yawn.
“And what about my beauty sleep? How am I to keep my complexion if I got to sit up till half past ten?” She finished on a giggle, and then added, “Pertickler, is she?”
Mrs Green turned round from the gas stove with the saucepan of Benger in her hand.
“Everything to the tick,” she said. “If you’re late, you get the sack, so I keeps me clock a bit on the fast side to be safe. ’Ere, give me that cup! And now up you go! And you knock on ’er door, but you don’t go in, not for nothing. You waits on the mat till Nurse opens the door and takes the tray, and then you come along down. Same way with the tea in the morning—half past eight, and you knocks, but you don’t go in. And mind you clear the corner with your tray—the stair’s that awkward.”
Flossie Palmer took the tray and went out of the kitchen. The stair which led from the basement was steep and narrow. She wouldn’t have taken the job if she had known that there was a basement. “Carrying trays up these stairs all day and half the night, I don’t think!” Well, she’d obliged Ivy, and Ivy’d obliged her, but she needn’t stay more than her month. That’d give her time to look round. Aunt’s tongue had got to be beyond a joke so, basement or no basement, she’d have to stay her month. She giggled a little as she pushed open the door at the top of the stair. It was Ivy’s month really, come to think of it. “And you just remember your name’s Ivy Hodge this journey, Flossie my girl,” she said as she went up the stair from the hall to the first landing.
The drawing-room took up the whole of this floor. To reach Miss Rowland’s room she had to go up one flight more. Funny kind of start to have a mistress you didn’t see. It must be awful to be an invalid and lie in bed all day. Seemed she did come down to the drawing-room on her good days, so perhaps she’d see her to-morrow.
She knocked on the bedroom door and waited with her tray. It was the nurse who opened it—starched cap, starched apron, starched cuffs, starched belt. “Coo! I wouldn’t like to have her looking after me!” She proffered the tray, and it was taken.
“You’re the new maid?”
“Yes, Nurse.”
“Ivy Hodge?”
“Yes, Nurse,” said Flossie Palmer.
“You’re nearly a minute late, Ivy. Don’t let it happen again. Miss Rowland expects punctuality.”
The door was shut. Flossie tossed her head as she went down to the next landing—“Thinks she’s a duchess, I suppose!” She stopped to recapture the nurse’s chilly tone: “‘Miss Rowland expects punctuality’! And if I was half a minute late, it was as much as it could have been!” She tossed her head again. Her hair was fair and fluffy under the neat cap. Nurses who gave themselves the airs of duchesses were worse than the back-breakingest basement stair that ever was. She paused on the top step of the next flight and looked back over her shoulder. And then next moment she didn’t know why she had done it. Come to think of it, there was something funny about that.
She stood there, little and trim, in her black dress with its white turn-down collar and thin pleated apron, her fair hair bound with a black velvet ribbon to which was attached a little white frill like a coronet. Her blue eyes searched the landing. There were two doors, both leading into the L-shaped drawing-room. The one nearest the stairs was shut, but the other stood a handsbreadth ajar. She tiptoed up to this door, pushed it half way open, and looked in. The light from the landing showed an old-fashioned carpet with bunches of flowers on a ground of faded drab.
Flossie put up her hand to the switch and hesitated. She hadn’t seen the drawing-room yet. “S’pose I’ll see plenty of it before I’m through.” And as the words came into her mind, her fingers moved on the switch and with a little click the light went on in two bracket-lamps on the other side of the room. They were one on either side of the mantelpiece, just where the gas-brackets of an earlier day had been. They preserved the illusion of that day. The whole room preserved it.
Flossie stepped inside and looked about her. There was the big couch where, she supposed, Miss Rowland would lie when she came down. It was upholstered in dark green tapestry, and so were the chairs. The curtains were of dark maroon velvet with deep fringed pelmets. In the middle of the white marble mantelpiece was a gilt clock supported by massive golden cherubs. It startled Flossie with a silvery chime of three strokes. “Quarter to eleven. Coo! I must hurry!” And then, “The blinking thing must be fast.” Just one look round into the L. She came a few steps further. There was a piano round the corner—the upright sort, with flutings of faded green silk, and tarnished brass candle-holders. It stood flat against the wall just beyond the second door and was reflected in the very large gilt-framed mirror which hung on the opposite wall. She wondered how you cleaned all that gilt stuff. She’d never had it to do. There was a bit of work in this room; she could see that.
She looked down the L to the window at the end of it. Another pair of those velvet curtains. Handsome stuff, but a bit too heavy for her taste. Someone had drawn them crooked—“That there nurse, I shouldn’t wonder.” Funny how it worried you to see things crooked like that.
She went down to the end of the L and pulled at the soft, rich folds. There was a noise that frightened her. She had never heard a curtain make a noise like that before. Suppose someone came. “Well, I’m not doing nothing wrong, am I?” She turned round with that little toss of her head and stood, her eyes widening to a horrified stare. The noise hadn’t come from the curtain at all. It had come from the wall of the L. She was looking at the wall. She was looking at the place where the six-foot mirror had hung in its broad gilt frame. It had reflected the piano, but it didn’t reflect it any more. It didn’t reflect anything, because the glass was gone. Instead there was a blackness, a dark hole full of shadows.
Flossie’s mouth opened in a stiff O. She screamed in her mind, but it made no sound in the room. There was a sound there, but it was another sort of sound altogether. It came from the black hole with its wide gilt frame. There was a shuffling and a sighing, and a deep and dreadful groan. And then something moved and, moving, came into view.
It was a man’s head. It seemed to rise out of the darkness at the bottom of the frame. At first she only saw the head. It had dusty hair and glazed, straining eyes. There was blood running down over the forehead. It rose a little, waveringly, and she saw the shoulders and arms. The man was crawling with a slow, painful motion. One of the hands rose like a dirty claw. It came groping over the edge of the gilded frame. Flossie stared at it in a terror beyond anything she could have imagined. It was worse than the worst nightmare she had ever had. She wanted to scream, and she couldn’t scream. She wanted to fly, and she couldn’t move.
And then all at once another hand came out over the frame, high up, and someone was looking at her. A long, pale face—with eyes—It was the eyes which shocked her alive again. They were pale too—pale, cruel eyes—and at the sight of them Flossie screamed and ran. She didn’t remember opening the door in the L, but she must have got it open, because the next thing she knew she was, tumbling through the doorway and down the stairs into the hall three steps at a time and four at the last, and then helter-skelter through the baize door and down the basement stair. They’d come after her those eyes would. “Oh, Gawd—don’t let them!” breathed Flossie.
The kitchen door stood open and the kitchen was dark. Mrs Green had gone to bed
in one of the two dingy basement bedrooms. The other waited for Flossie Palmer. And it might wait.
Her coat hung on a peg in the passage. She snatched it and, without waiting to put it on, stooped to the heavy bolt which fastened the area door. It came creaking back, and the key creaked too as she turned it. Mrs Green’s voice came to her on the threshold—Mrs Green’s voice, and—was someone opening the door at the top of the stairs? She didn’t wait to see, but slammed the door and ran up the area steps and down the foggy street. Thick fog, so that no one could see her. Thick, blinding fog, so that she couldn’t see where she was going. Thick, deadening fog—
She ran on wildly, clutching her coat, not daring to stop and put it on, or to listen for the footsteps that might be following her.
CHAPTER II
Miles Clayton had not felt the hand in his pocket. It had come and gone, and he had felt nothing at all. His own hand, following it after some lapse of time which he could not measure, found only emptiness, a most disconcerting emptiness. There should have been a bulging pocket-book, but it wasn’t there. His hand came away, and then went back again. There are things you simply can’t believe. This was one of them. The pocket-book was there, because he had put it there. It bulged with the Treasury notes into which he had, only an hour or two ago, changed his French money at Dover. It contained, besides, his passport, his letter of credit, and his luggage check. It was impossible that it should be gone.
His fingers explored the neatly fitting lining of his right-hand inside pocket. There was nothing in it except the lining. He withdrew his hand, rummaged his other pockets, and, having drawn a blank, made such remarks as seemed suitable to the occasion. There were twenty pounds in the pocket-book, but the letter of credit was the worst of it. The passport didn’t matter so much. He wouldn’t be going back yet awhile. Personally he considered the whole thing a wild goose chase, but if old Macintyre didn’t mind footing the bill, that didn’t matter to him.
He left that. The immediate question was, what next? He supposed the police, and groaned in spirit. He foresaw an endless vista of the most devastatingly bromidic interviews in which he supplied earnest and well-meaning officials with his entire history from the cradle to what interviews call present day, while in return they assured him that they would do their best to trace his money—and his letter of credit—his passport—his luggage check.
He found himself presently in the middle of such an interview.
“My name is Miles Clayton. I am a British subject. I have just landed at Dover and come up by the boat train.”
The man whom he was addressing said, “Wait a minute, sir,” and melted away. He was a fat man with rather a sympathetic face.
After about five minutes he was replaced by a little ginger-headed man with a swivel eye. Miles began all over again.
“My name is Miles Clayton. I am a British subject. I have just landed at Dover and come up by the boat train.”
The little man stabbed an official pen into an official ink-pot, cast a large blob of ink upon the table at which he had seated himself, and called back over his shoulder.
“George, did you fill up those forms?”
There was a thick fog outside, and a good deal of it hung about the corners of this office. From one of its dingier recesses the voice of George made answer. It said,
“No.”
“Then get on with it!” said the ginger-headed man. He turned back to Miles, stabbed with his pen again, and said,
“Now, sir, what about it?”
Miles said his piece all over again. He thought this was the sixth time, if you counted the two porters and the ticket-inspector.
“My name is Miles Clayton …”
This time he got it all off his chest, and was edified by the sight of the official pen taking official notes.
“You see, it’s damned awkward about my luggage,” said Miles.
The official pen travelled squeakily over the official paper.
After a short interval Miles repeated his remark.
The pen continued to squeak.
Miles went on talking.
“You see, it really is damned awkward, because I’ve got no hand-luggage. My suit-case gave up the ghost in Paris, so I chucked it away and booked everything through. Hotels don’t smile on you if you arrive without any luggage.”
The ginger-headed man dipped his pen fiercely in the ink and went on writing.
Miles continued to talk. He had a friendly disposition, and he had been looking forward with immense pleasure to being in England again. He had had three very pleasant years in New York, but London was London, and old Macintyre’s wild goose chase was a bit of all right as far as he was concerned. Just at the moment joyous reunion with his native land was not going quite as well as he had hoped. On the other hand if, as seemed probable, the ginger-headed man had a human heart somewhere under that official uniform, it might possibly be softened to the extent of permitting him to remove at least one of his trunks to an hotel.
It was a hope which perished in the cradle. The ginger-headed man broke suddenly into his conversation with a request for a signature.
“Name and address, sir, if you please.”
“But I haven’t got an address. You know, you haven’t really been listening—I thought you hadn’t. Now look here—I arrived in Paris from New York a week ago. And I arrived in Dover from Paris this evening. You don’t want my New York address. You don’t want my Paris hotel. And if you’ll tell me how I’m to scrape up an address in London when I haven’t got any money and I haven’t got any luggage, I’ll be most uncommonly obliged to you.”
It wasn’t any good, not as far as to-night was concerned anyhow. He could come back in the morning and they would see what could be done.
Miles went along to a telephone-box and rang up Archie Welling—that is to say he rang up the Wellings’ house—only to be informed after considerable delay by an agitated and breathless female voice that Mr Archie was out of town.
Miles considered. He had never met Mr and Mrs Welling, but they must know he was coming over. He asked if he could speak to Mr Welling. The female voice, very flustered, said that Mr Welling was away, and saved him the trouble of asking for Mrs Welling by adding, “They’re all away, sir.” Whereupon a second female voice said in a hissing whisper, “’Ush! You shouldn’t ha’ said that,” and the line went dead.
He stood in the box and tried to think of anyone else whom he could ring.… Mrs Brian?… Her name wasn’t in the directory.… The Maberlys were in Egypt, and Tubby was in Scotland.… Gilmore—there wasn’t an earthly chance of connecting with Gilmore till he reached office to-morrow.… He couldn’t think of anyone else.
He ran through his pockets and discovered that a single penny represented his cash in hand. You can’t get a bed for a penny. What an ass he had been to run himself out of change. If he hadn’t—well, what was the good of saying that now? He had, and there was an end of it.
He looked at his wrist-watch. Just on eleven, and a beast of a foggy night. If it hadn’t been for the fog, they’d have been in hours ago.
Eleven.… By ten o’clock next morning he could start looking up Gilmore at his office and all would be well. Meanwhile he had eleven hours to put in, and a penny in hand.
He walked out of the station into the fog.
CHAPTER III
A church clock some-where in the fog struck three. The strokes sounded dead and far away. Miles Clayton wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to have kept on moving. If it hadn’t been for the fog, he would rather have enjoyed seeing what London looked like at night. But where were you to go when you couldn’t see a yard before your face? He had found himself on the Embankment, felt his way to a bench, and stayed there until a policeman came and moved the whole benchful on. He was now in some sort of niche or embrasure behind a group of statuary. He knew this because he had barked his shin on the stone plinth and, groping, had encountered a horrid mass of monumental drapery. He was cold an
d stiff, and most unutterably bored.
A small whispering voice said in the dark beside him,
“They might leave you be!”
The voice didn’t seem to be addressing anyone; it just complained out loud because it had been moved on, and the night was long, and the fog was cold, and the stone of the seat was so hard. It was rather a pretty little voice, a girl’s voice. It sounded young. Miles found himself speaking to it.
“It’s not so long to morning now.”
“They keep moving you on so!” said the voice. “A shame, I call it!”
“Well, it stretches one’s legs.”
Someone on the other side of him, a man, gave a ghastly hollow groan.
The girl’s voice said, “Ooh!” and came a little nearer. Miles could feel its owner pressing up against him with a shiver. After a moment she said, “D’you know why they move them on? Bound to do it they are, every two hours regular. I’ve got a friend that’s got a cousin in the p’lice, and he says it’s in case anyone goes and dies afore morning—that’s what he says. He says he’d get into awful trouble if anyone was found dead on his beat and they’d been dead more than two hours, so they just keep moving them along. But I call it a shame all the same.” She gave another shiver. “I’ve never been out all night before. Have you?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Flossie Palmer hesitated. His voice sounded nice—quite like a gentleman’s voice. Oh well, there were all sorts out of work nowadays. Aunt ’ud have a fit—but then Aunt would have a fit anyway if she knew that her own sister’s daughter was spending the night on the Embankment along with a lot of tramps. She gave her head its little characteristic toss and said with a sort of whispering eagerness,
“My name’s Flossie. What’s yours?”
“Miles.”
“That’s funny. D’you mean that’s your Christian name?”
“Yes. It means a soldier.”
“Are you a soldier?” Aunt had always warned her specially about soldiers.
Blindfold Page 1
