Peter knew. He said,
“Did you know her well? How well did you know her?”
She stared at him.
“I was cook in the house—they kept three. And I was there two years. There isn’t much you don’t know about someone you’ve lived with for two years. I won’t say she wasn’t always very pleasant.”
“And you recognized her again at once?”
“Oh, I’d know her again anywhere.”
“I don’t know how you could be sure after so long.”
“Well then, I could,” said Miss Spedding. “There’s something I’d always know her by.”
“And that is?”
She shook her head with decision.
“Least said, soonest mended. I’ve kept out of a lot of trouble in my time by not talking, and I’m not going to do different now. And if you’ll take my advice you’ll go back to your right name and your right place, and not stir up a lot of trouble for yourself when there’s no need.” She turned towards the door.
“Miss Spedding,” said Peter, “you say there’s no need to stir up trouble. It’s these people who are stirring it up, you know—theft, blackmail, murder. There was that poor chap of a butler at Mr. Oppenstein’s—you must have seen about it in the papers—what harm had he done? Seen someone he might have recognized, and so they killed him. And so perhaps they’ll kill someone else if they’re allowed to go on. Do you think you’ve got a right to hold your tongue?”
She said, “Mrs. Simpson hasn’t got anything to do with that.” But she looked away and didn’t meet his eye.
“Your brother thought she had.”
Louisa Spedding turned again, and spoke sharply.
“What right have you got to say that?”
“I’ve got a right to say it because it’s true. I told you he talked when he was dying.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he could find out who it was he was working for. He wasn’t talking to me, you must understand, but to this employer of his. He said, ‘Maud Millicent Simpson—what do you say to that? If I can find out about her, I can find out about you,’ and a lot more of that sort of thing. And he’d been asking you about her. I read your letter, you know. You can’t really look me in the face and say you don’t believe Maud Millicent Simpson is mixed up with this business.”
Miss Spedding stood where she was. She made no attempt to look him in the face. After a minute she said in an unwilling voice,
“You’re a gentleman—you haven’t any call to meddle with all this. There are the police, aren’t there? It’s their work, and they’re paid for it. What has it got to do with you?”
Peter put his hands in his pockets, jingled a coin or two, and smiled affably.
“My dear Miss Spedding, I don’t like blackmail, and I hate murder.”
She frowned suddenly and distressfully.
“Jimmy hadn’t anything to do with murder,” she said in a shaken tone.
“No, I don’t think he had. But I think they meant to try and fix it on him.”
“If I thought that—” said Louisa slowly. She came a step nearer. “What makes you say a thing like that?”
“Well, your brother was over here that week-end. Do you know why?”
“He was sent for.”
“Do you know why he was sent for?”
She looked away.
“He didn’t know himself. They made him come over, and they sent him back again. He didn’t know why.”
Peter jingled the money in his pocket.
“That’s why. If the Oppenstein affair had gone right, they’d have sent him back—with the picture perhaps. If it went wrong, they could put the blame on him.”
Miss Spedding’s colour rose high.
“It’s a good thing he’s dead and out of it—and it would be a good thing if you were out of it too.”
“I’m going to get them out of it first,” said Peter in a cheerful and determined voice.
CHAPTER XXI
Louisa Spedding stood there flushed and irresolute. She was afraid, but she was angry. She had not shed a tear for Jimmy Reilly, but there was a heavy weight on her heart. If it wasn’t for them, he’d be alive and respectable—they might be keeping a little shop together the way she’d often planned it. And then murder—that wasn’t right. They ought to be stopped. Perhaps this young man was the one to stop them. She said,
“What do you want to know?”
Peter laughed.
“More than you can tell me. But I expect you can tell me some of it. Look here, how did your brother come in contact with these people? Can you tell me that?”
“I’ll tell you what I can. He met a man called Grey when he was in America. It wasn’t his name of course. Jimmy never knew his real name.” She stopped, looked at him very straight, and said, “If I tell you what I know, you’ve got to leave me out of it. I don’t want any trouble. And it’s no use the police coming round—they won’t get a word out of me.”
Peter nodded.
“They shan’t worry you. I shan’t say who told me.”
He felt a strong excitement. Why didn’t she get on with it—why didn’t she speak?
She said, “All right, I’ll tell you.”
She went back to the bed and sat down. Her knees were shaking. There was a lot of wickedness in the world. Jimmy was dead. She had always tried to do her duty and live respectable. People who did murder had got to be stopped. Perhaps this young man would stop them—a real gentleman, and nice teeth when he smiled.
She got out her handkerchief again and wiped her forehead.
“This is gospel truth I’m telling you. Jimmy picked up with this man Grey. He wanted to get away from America because of something he’d done—”
“Do you know what it was?” said Peter.
An old-fashioned and unbecoming blush suffused Miss Spedding’s face.
“It was one of those kidnapping cases. I don’t know what I felt like when I heard about it. But there—it was the company he’d got into, and this Grey told him there was easy money to be earned over here if he’d do as he was told and not ask questions, so Jimmy took it on. He was to go on the Continent and travel about, and he’d be told what he had to do, a bit at a time, in a cipher they had. Mostly it was posting letters. He didn’t tell me what they were, but it was something to do with insurance companies.”
“Blackmail about the pictures—yes, that would be it. Go on,” said Peter.
“There were other things too, but they kept him pretty much in the dark. Sometimes he saw this Grey, but he didn’t see anyone else.”
“Did anyone else see him?” said Peter. “That’s what I want to know.”
“I don’t think so,” said Louisa Spedding. “This Grey, he was the go-between. The ones who were behind it all, they kept themselves to themselves. They wouldn’t want for anyone to be in the way of seeing them—only this Grey that they had to trust. And from what Jimmy said, they’d got such a hold over him that they could trust him.”
“Then it was only Grey who knew Spike—your brother—by sight?”
“That’s right,” said Louisa Spedding. “And I’ll tell you how I know about that in a minute. Well, this Grey got into a motor accident over in Austria, and he was so badly hurt that he died, and when he was sure he wasn’t going to live he told Jimmy some things.”
“What did he tell him?”
Louisa Spedding had her last moment of hesitation. Afterwards, when she had come out of the room and was walking down the stairs, she couldn’t think what had come over her. She supposed it was Jimmy being dead that made her feel as if it didn’t matter what she said, but she wished that she had held her tongue. Now, with Peter watching her, she let it run.
“He told Jimmy it was a woman who was running the whole thing, and there was a man in it too. He said the woman used to work for a very big crook called the Vulture, but he was dead now. He said he had worked for him too, and when this picture business began this woman sen
t for him to work under her. They didn’t want more people in it than they could help, and Grey had to find them what they wanted.”
“They?” said Peter sharply.
Louisa Spedding nodded.
“This woman, and the man who was working with her—”
Peter broke in.
“Who is he?”
“Jimmy didn’t know. That was the great secret, because he was somebody high up that nobody would suspect. Grey told Jimmy that, and he said to watch out for him, because he’d tear anyone up as if they were a bit of old paper if he thought they were getting dangerous. But he said the woman was worse. He said she could get away with anything, and no one ever crossed her and came out of it alive. That’s what he said.”
Peter leaned forward. He could hardly hold his impatience.
“And he told your brother her name, Miss Spedding—he told him her name?”
“He said she’d got a dozen names, and she could look like a dozen people. And he said her own real given name was Maud Millicent, and he said that away back when he first knew her, her name was Simpson. And that’s why Jimmy told me about her, because he remembered when I was in service with Mrs. Simpson, and he’d an idea he’d heard the whole of that name before—Maud Millicent Simpson. And I don’t mind saying it gave me what you might call a fright, meeting her again on the top of all that. And if I’m to tell you what I think, it’s this—you’ve got to be careful, because she’s watching you. Why do you suppose I’m here this morning?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Peter.
“Or how did I know where to find you?”
He laughed.
“Still no idea.”
“Then I’ll tell you. I was rung up on the telephone. I’m housekeeper at Sir John Morleigh’s, and there’s a telephone in the pantry. The butler said it was for me. And there was someone saying ‘Miss Spedding’ in a voice I could have sworn I’d never heard before—a kind of a silly giggling voice like a girl’s. And it said, ‘Your brother Jimmy’s over again. I expect you’d like to see him.’ So I said yes, I would, and she said, ‘Hurry along and go this morning then, or you’ll miss your chance, because he’s going away again.’ She gave me this address and rang off. So I left the kitchen-maid to do the lunch and came along.”
Peter was leaning over the end of the bed. He straightened up now with a jerk and walked over to the window. The morning was turning to fog, but the misty street and the yellow-grey sky were somewhere away outside his consciousness—he looked at them, and he did not see them. His thoughts raced.
Someone had sent Louisa Spedding to see him. Why?
Someone had given her this address. Who knew it?
The last question answered itself first. Garrett knew it. But he didn’t know where to find Louisa Spedding. At least he hadn’t known between twelve and one o’clock last night.
His employers knew it. And there was the answer to his first question.
Garrett would have no motive for sending Spike Reilly’s sister to see him, but his employers might have a very strong motive indeed, if they had the least, faintest shade of suspicion that he was not Spike Reilly.
He thought he had just been had up for an identification parade, and he hoped with a good deal of fervour that Louisa could be trusted to identify him in no uncertain manner.
He turned about and went back to her.
“I think this means they wanted you to take a look at me.”
“I’ve been thinking that.”
“Well, what are you going to say to them, Miss Spedding?”
She said irrelevantly, “There isn’t any voice Mrs. Simpson couldn’t do. Man, woman, or child, she could take anyone off.”
“You think it was Maud Millicent Simpson who rang you up?”
“If it was, she didn’t mean me to know.” She got up from the bed. “I’d best be going.”
“And when you’ve got home I expect there’ll be another telephone call, and the girlish voice will want to know how you found your brother, and whether you had a nice time with him.”
“I wouldn’t wonder,” said Louisa Spedding. She moved towards the door.
Peter moved with her.
“Well, what are you going to say?”
She took hold of the door to open it, and then stood with her hand on the knob.
“If I say you’re not Jimmy, they’ll do you in. And if I say you are, and they find out you’re not, then they’ll do me in as likely as not.”
“Look here,” said Peter, “go to the police—go straight from here and tell them all about Mrs. Simpson. Ask the police to protect you, and they’ll see you’re safe.”
“No,” she said—“I won’t do that. Things would come out about Jimmy—I can’t do that. But I won’t give you away.”
She pulled the door open quickly and went. And shut it behind her.
CHAPTER XXII
Louisa Spedding came out upon the foggy street. She was vexed with herself, because she was beginning to wish that she had held her tongue. She couldn’t think what had come over her up in that room with the young man who wasn’t Jimmy because Jimmy was dead. A way with him, that’s what he had, and it would have been better if she hadn’t given in. She could remember how Cornelius Reilly had got round her mother, and it ought to have been a warning to her. Why, if anyone had told her that she would blab out all that about Jimmy and that Grey, and about Mrs. Simpson too,—well, she just wouldn’t have believed it. She was downright vexed with herself, and more than a little bit scared.
Ever since it had first come to her what sort of things and what sort of people Jimmy had got himself mixed up with she had made up her mind that the safe way was for her to know nothing. Anything that Jimmy said or anything he hinted had better go in at one ear and out of the other, as the saying was. Once you began to talk, there was no knowing where it was going to stop, and before you knew where you were you might find yourself in a police-court or worse. And the police were all very well in their way, but you didn’t want them mixed up in your own affairs, or in your family’s affairs. So she wished she had held her tongue.
She turned the corner of the street and walked in the direction of the main road, where she would get her bus. A woman came out of the first side turning, brushed against her, and said, “I beg your pardon.”
Louisa Spedding turned her head and began to say “Granted.” But the word broke off, because the woman was Mrs. Simpson. She was dressed different from when they had met in the bus, and she was speaking different too—that sort of a lisp was gone. But whatever she did or didn’t do to herself, there was a thing Louisa would always know her by—a thing that very likely she never noticed she’d got herself, because your own eyelids aren’t things you notice or see. But there, on the right one, at the inside corner, was a little round brown mole. She might look in the glass a hundred times a day and not see it, because you didn’t see it till the lid came down a bit. But Louisa had always noticed it, right from the very first day. She noticed it now behind the tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles which were one of the things that made Mrs. Simpson look different. She had had on tinted pince-nez before. Come to think of it, she had on the same dress and hat, but the dress was mostly covered by an old raincoat, and she’d got a thick black chiffon scarf tied on over the hat. A regular figure of fun it made her look, and a real old maid into the bargain. No one would ever believe she’d been right down dressy sixteen years ago. But smart or dressy, old maid or widow, nothing was going to stop Louisa Spedding from recognizing Maud Millicent Simpson.
She had all this in her mind as she stood on the damp pavement and took a good look at the woman who had brushed against her. Then she said,
“Well, to be sure, Mrs. Simpson! Fancy meeting you!”
“And fancy you knowing me, Louie,” said Mrs. Simpson. Her voice was the voice of sixteen years ago, a pretty, cultured voice.
Louisa Spedding’s tongue got the better of her discretion.
“And why shouldn’t I know
you now? If I knew you on the bus the other day after not seeing you for a matter of sixteen years, if isn’t just covering up your clothes and putting on a different pair of glasses that will stop me knowing you today. I should always know you.”
Mrs. Simpson nodded.
“Very clever of you. I’m sure I don’t know how you recognized me in the bus. Sixteen years is a long time, and I am afraid I have changed a great deal.”
Louisa said, “Oh, well—” And then, in a hurry, “I’m sure I’m very glad to have seen you, but I ought to be catching my bus, for goodness knows what the kitchen-maid will be making of the hollandaise sauce, and Sir John—well, he’s particular.”
Mrs. Simpson consulted a wrist-watch.
“Well, Louise, you’re too late for your sauce and too late for your lunch, for it’s past one o’clock now. You’d better come along and have something with me, and we’ll have a talk about old times. And if Sir John gives you notice, you can always come back to me. Come—wouldn’t you like to do that? It’s not such a big house, but I’d give you whatever he does. Now what do you say to that?”
The way she said it and the way she looked when she said it took Louisa Spedding a long way back. In the old days you never could tell whether Mrs. Simpson meant what she said or not. Louisa didn’t know now, but she thought she’d be on the safe side. She said quickly,
“I’m not thinking of making a change—and I couldn’t go without a kitchen-maid either.”
“And what makes you think you wouldn’t have a kitchen-maid, Louie?”
Louisa Spedding stared.
“Why, you wouldn’t have room for one, would you?” she said.
They had turned into the side street and were walking along it—a little dark, narrow street without shops, and every window curtained with net, or muslin, or Nottingham lace. Mrs. Simpson gave her a swift sideways glance.
“The house is bigger than it looks.”
“It doesn’t look big,” said Louisa. And then she could have bitten her tongue out, because Mrs. Simpson turned round and smiled, and said in her sweetest voice,
“How do you know how big it is, Louie?”
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