There was such a long pause that he thought they had been cut off, but when he said “Hullo!” she said,
“All right—I’m here—I was just thinking. You’re sure it’s important?”
“Yes.”
“Very well—just this once. We oughtn’t to meet, you know. Or you don’t know, but—we oughtn’t to.”
James took no notice of this.
“Where shall we meet?” he said.
“I’m supposed to be going to a dance. If I start early and arrive late, no one will be any the wiser—at least I hope not.”
“Well?”
“I’d better come to you. You’re in Gertrude Lushington’s flat, aren’t you? I’ll take a taxi to the corner, and you can meet me there at a quarter to ten.”
“I’ll be there,” said James.
XIII
Corbyn Mews opens on to Little Corbyn Street, and Little Corbyn Street runs into Hinton Road. The houses in Hinton Road, old-fashioned, inconvenient, and five storeys high, back on to the Mews. They have sunless basements and horrible long back yards, by courtesy gardens, which are the fighting-ground of every cat in the neighbourhood.
James walked from the corner fifty paces down Hinton Road and back to the corner and fifty paces down Little Corbyn Street. It was a bitter night with a cold wind blowing. Coming or going, the wind appeared to meet him full. The air smelt of frost. It was too early for the full chorus of the cats—too early, and perhaps too cold.
James hoped that Sally wasn’t going to be late. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch and found that it was just a quarter to ten. Before he had time to pull down his cuff a taxi drew up in front of the corner house. James was a dozen paces away. He stood still where he was in the shadow. He watched Sally get out and pay the driver. He watched the taxi move off and disappear up the road. Then he came up quickly and said,
“I was just wondering if you were going to be late.”
“Brr!” said Sally. “Isn’t it bitter? I was here first, James Elliot.”
“No—I’ve been here ten minutes. Come along. I thought the taxi man had better not see me—just in case, you know.”
Sally laughed under her breath.
“How discreet! Go right up to the top of the class! Where’s this place of Gertrude’s?”
“In here. It’s only a step.”
Sally said, “Brr!” again.
James felt an extraordinary sense of pride as he opened the door and ushered her up a ladder-like stair into his cousin Gertrude’s studio. It was at any rate warm—an anthracite stove saw to that—and altogether it wasn’t too bad if you didn’t look too hard at the pictures. There was a Persian carpet on the floor, and some odd stripy curtains from Georgia, or Caucasia, or some other off-the-map sort of place where Gertrude had just missed coming to a sticky end. The stair came up through a hole in the floor, because the studio had once been a hayloft. James reflected that he and Sally seemed destined to meet in haylofts. He shut down the trap-door to keep out the draught, folded the rug back over it, and offered Sally a shapeless old red leather chair which he knew to be comfortable.
“Lovely and warm,” she said. “My goodness—what’s that?”
James said gloomily, “It’s called Eve.”
Sally gazed fixedly at the gaunt, grey female with the apple. Then she looked at the lobster in the left-hand corner and said,
“What’s that?”
“A lobster.”
“Why?”
“Ask Gertrude.”
“Do you think she’s going to eat it? It’s already cooked.”
“It’s symbolic. The blue tadpole thing in the other corner is symbolic too. Gertrude told me so.”
“I don’t wonder Gertrude can’t stay at home.” She pulled her chair round so that she didn’t have to look at Eve.
James took the other chair, the one you had to sit in carefully because the off front leg was loose.
“I oughtn’t to be here,” said Sally in rather an irresolute voice. “We ought never to see each other, or telephone, or anything. It’s frightfully dangerous.”
“For you?” said James.
“For both of us,” said Sally.
She sat up straight in the leather chair and threw back her cloak. It was very long, and it was made of black velvet with a lining of white fur. Under it she had on a soft white filmy dress. There was a string of pearls round her neck. James told himself that there was no earthly reason why he should not admit that she was easy to look at—very easy—very, very easy.
“You’re not listening,” said Sally.
James blushed under the unshaded electric light. To his own horror, he heard himself say, “I was looking at you.”
“Staring,” said Sally.
James pulled himself together with a jerk.
“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind repeating what you’ve said.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“But you said—”
“No I didn’t. What was the good of saying anything when you weren’t listening?”
James gave it up. Girls were like that. He said in a forbearing voice,
“All right, I’m sorry. Let’s begin again. You said it was dangerous for us to meet. Why?”
Sally opened her green eyes wide.
“Can’t you see that they mayn’t be sure about you and they mayn’t be sure about me, but if they see us together, they’ll be sure about both of us.”
“Why couldn’t we have met at Daphne’s? As a matter of fact we did. If you know Daphne, why should it be so compromising for you to know me?”
“I’ve known Daphne for more than a year. We met in the Tyrol. But that’s not the point. Don’t you see that if they saw your car the other day, and if they took the number, they could find out what firm it belonged to? Say they were rather suspicious of me, but not sure enough to do anything about it—well then, don’t you think that if I’m friendly with someone employed by that firm, they’ll be much, much more suspicious about both of us. They mayn’t know you drove the car, but they’re bound to keep an eye on anyone who might have driven it.”
“I’ve got to tell her about Jackson,” said James to himself.
He got up and went over to the stove and rattled at the thing that let the ashes through and came back again.
“Look here,” he said, “you keep on saying they, and I don’t know who they are, but they don’t think it was I who drove the car—they think it was Jackson.”
“Jackson?” said Sally in a small startled voice.
“He was at Atwell’s with me. He did most of the demonstrating.”
“Did?” said Sally.
“He’s dead,” said James.
“Oh!” said Sally. It was more of a startled breath than a word—the sort of sound that she might have made if she had hurt herself. Only when they were running away together and she had cut her foot she hadn’t made any sound at all. James remembered that.
He saw her black lashes dip for a moment and rise again. Her eyes were steady. So was her voice, though she only managed one word,
“How?”
“Someone rang up—after I’d gone, a couple of nights ago. He said he was Mr. Hazeby. Hazeby, Meredith & Hazeby are a very respectable firm of solicitors. I’ve made enquiries about them. I’m quite sure they hadn’t anything to do with the business. I’m certain someone was just using their name.”
Sally took a breath.
“Go on. What happened?”
“Jackson took the call, but the clerk, a girl called Daisy Callender, told me about it. She swears she could hear both ends of the conversation. I believe she did, because she told me what Lucas’s said to me when I was talking to them this afternoon. She’s got ears like a cat.”
“What did she hear?” said Sally breathlessly.
“She heard this person who called himself Hazeby make an appointment with Jackson. He began by asking about our trade plate and the Rolls, and Jackson said was there any complaint, an
d he said quite the reverse, and that the driver had been of service to a girl who was a client of his and she would like to thank him.”
“What?”
“Yes. And as she’d only met him in the fog and couldn’t be sure she would know him again, would he wear a buttonhole and meet her on the steps of the B.B.C.”
“You’re making it up.”
“I’m not. Daisy Callender swears to it. And that ass Jackson fell for it, poor chap, and said he was the driver and buzzed off to meet the girl. He was like that, you know—a bit of a chaser.”
“Yes,” said Sally. “And?”
“He was picked up dead in a Surrey lane early next morning—run over.”
Sally put a hand on either arm of her chair. Her fingers closed so tightly upon the worn red leather that the knuckles stood out white. She did not say anything at all. Her lashes went down, and the colour went out of her face. James hoped very much that she wasn’t going to faint. She took a moment. Then she said quick and low,
“It might have been you.”
“It may have been an accident,” said James. He spoke quickly too, because quite suddenly he was most frightfully glad to be alive and it wouldn’t have been decent to say so—not when they were talking about Jackson.
Sally shook her head.
“No, it wasn’t an accident.”
And with that James burst into speech.
“Look here, Sally, we can’t go on like this. You can’t just say it wasn’t an accident and expect me to leave it at that, because, you see, if it wasn’t an accident, it was murder, and if Jackson was murdered, he was murdered instead of me. He was a silly ass, and I’ve often thought he was an offensive ass, and he blobbed right into the middle of this thing because he was a silly ass, but the fact remains that he got murdered instead of me. I’m safe as long as they think they’ve wiped out the person who drove that car. I’m safe because Jackson was murdered. Don’t you see, that puts it up to me to get back on them? I can’t just stay safe and let them get away with it. You must see that.”
Sally looked up, opened her lips to speak, shut them again, and looked down at the white stuff of her dress.
“Yes, I see,” she said.
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
She took her hands from the arms of the chair and folded them in her lap.
“If I tell you things, it’s not going to be—safe—for you.”
“I don’t want to be safe while other people are being murdered, thank you.”
Sally nodded.
“One has that feeling,” she admitted.
“What about you?” said James.
She gave the faint laugh he had heard in the hayloft.
“Oh, me?” she said. “I shouldn’t think it would make any difference. They mayn’t bother about me, or they may. They haven’t up till now.”
“Sally, who are they?”
She looked down at her hands—pretty, bare hands with no rings.
Then she wasn’t engaged. And what did it matter whether she was or no?
She said, “James—I’m going to tell you things. It isn’t easy. It’s not easy, because I’ve got to be fair, and it’s very difficult to be fair about a thing like this. I’ll tell you somethings that happened, and you must draw your own conclusions. I don’t want to tell you what I think about the things I’m going to tell you. I would like to know what you think about them. I’d like you to sit down.”
James sat down in the uncertain chair.
“All right, Sally,” he said, “go ahead.”
She looked up then, but not at him. Her eyes went past him. She said,
“I told you I met Daphne in the Tyrol. Not last summer, the year before. It was at a place called Holbrunn. Jocko and I were both there—we were with a party. We got to know the Stricklands awfully well, and we did quite a lot of climbing.” She stopped and looked at him. “It’s awfully difficult. I don’t think I’ve begun right. I think I ought to have begun with Aunt Clementa.”
“All right, begin again.”
She took a deep breath.
“I’m doing it very badly. You know what I told you in the hayloft about Aunt Clementa and her diamond necklace?”
“I know there was something about a diamond necklace.”
“I told you she’d hidden it and I’d gone to the house to look for it.”
“Yes,” said James drily—“it was something like that. I thought it was a yarn.”
Sally looked away.
“Well, it was and it wasn’t. She did hide something, but it wasn’t the diamond necklace. At least she told me she’d hidden something. She was bedridden, you know. That’s to say everyone thought she was bedridden, and she was awfully old and ill, so I didn’t take much notice at the time. The nurse was in the bedroom with the door open between. She had two nurses and they took turns. One of them was always there. And when I really began to think about things I thought about that, because nurses generally go away tactfully when you come to see your bedridden relations. But these two didn’t. Never. One of them was always hovering. And I didn’t like either of them. One was smarmy, and the other all tight and starched—you know the kind. Well, that day it was the starched one. Aunt Clementa was supposed to be more or less unconscious—it was only a few days before she died—but all of a sudden I saw her looking at me. She was lying on her side with her back to the nurse, and she hooked a finger out of the bed-clothes and beckoned to me, so I bent down and said ‘What is it?’ and she began to whisper right in my ear. She said, ‘I’ve got a letter for Annie. I want you to address it to her and post it yourself.’ Well, I thought she was wandering, but she put her hand under the pillow and pulled out a crumpled envelope and pushed it into my hand. She said, ‘Don’t let her see. Quick—put it down the front of your dress!’ So I did. And the nurse came out of the bathroom and asked if she wanted anything. I really did think Aunt Clementa was wandering, but I hated the nurse, so I said, ‘I think she wants her handkerchief.’ And Aunt Clementa groaned and rolled up her eyes. After a bit the nurse went back, and Aunt Clementa looked at me and winked.”
“Who was Annie?” said James.
“The old maid she used to have. She’d been there twenty years, but she couldn’t get on with the nurses, so she left. I thought she might have stuck it out myself, because the poor old pet missed her frightfully. All the old servants left round about then. They were supposed to be extravagant and I don’t know what, but she liked them and they looked after her, and I thought it was a shame. Well, I wanted awfully to get rid of the nurse for a moment, but I didn’t know how. Then I thought of a message, and she came over to the bed and took a good look at Aunt Clementa and primmed up her mouth, and I wondered if she was going to refuse, but she went. And the minute she was out of the room Aunt Clementa began to whisper again. She clutched at my hand, and she told me she had hidden the diamond necklace.”
“I thought you said it wasn’t a diamond necklace.”
Sally threw him a fleeting glance.
“No, it wasn’t a necklace, but I think we’d better go on calling it one.”
“I thought you said she was bedridden.”
“Well, she said she wasn’t. That was one of the things she told me. She said she got up in the night and walked about, but no one knew, not even Annie. And I suppose she might have done it, because she hadn’t had a night nurse very long, but of course she may just have imagined the whole thing. She hadn’t time to finish telling me, and I couldn’t ask any questions, because the smarmy nurse came in all hot and bothered. The other one must have sent her up whilst she went on my message, and that made me think a bit too. I didn’t like any of it at all.”
XIV
“What did you do?” said James in his practical way.
“I posted the letter to Annie. I didn’t tell anyone, and I posted it. And next day we went off to the Tyrol—Jocko and I and the party I told you about.”
“You didn’t tell me who was in the
party.”
The colour ran up into Sally’s cheeks.
“No—I didn’t. I don’t want to just now. I want to tell you what happened first. I didn’t feel happy about leaving Aunt Clementa, but it had all been arranged, and by that time I was feeling quite sure that she had just been rambling. I wrote to two cousins and an aunt and told them to keep an eye on her and make sure the nurses were doing their job, and then I went off. Well, she died whilst I was on my way over. Jocko and I didn’t go back for the funeral. We—we weren’t encouraged to. Then when Jocko found she’d left him the house and a lot of money he felt rather bad about it. We both did. I suppose we ought to have gone, but—I told you we weren’t encouraged, so we stayed at Holbrunn. My guardian went over, and when he came back he told Jocko about the will.”
“You haven’t told me anything about your guardian.”
“No,” said Sally. “But I will presently.” Then she went on quickly, “This is a very difficult bit to tell. It’s all difficult, but this is the worst bit.”
“All right, go on.”
“It’s dreadfully difficult. We were all at breakfast one morning, and the post came in. There was a letter for Jocko, and when he opened it he said, ‘Good Lord! What’s old Annie writing to me for?’ And I tried to kick him under the table, because I knew it must be something to do with the letter I’d posted for Aunt Clementa, but I expect I kicked the wrong person, because he began to read Annie’s letter out loud, and it just said Aunt Clementa had asked her to send him the enclosed, and she hoped he was very well, and kind regards from Annie. Well, ‘the enclosed’ was the crumpled envelope Aunt Clementa had given me. Everyone just sat, and Jocko opened it and took out the most awful scrawl and began to read that too. It began, ‘Dear Jocko,’ and then it went on, ‘I’m going to die, and I’ve left you this house. I want you to find what I’ve hidden here. I’ve had to hide it because of them.’ And when he’d got as far as that I couldn’t bear it any longer, and I said, ‘Jocko, you oughtn’t to read that out. She didn’t know what she was writing. It’s not fair.’ And my guardian said, ‘Quite right, Sally,’ and Jocko stopped. He just looked down the page, and he said, ‘She must have been mad, poor old thing,’ and he put it in his pocket. Well, after breakfast we all went out. We weren’t doing a real climb, only scrambling about. Jocko had a very bad fall. He went over a place which ought to have killed him. There was a good wide ledge and lots of room. I was in front, so I didn’t see what happened. Someone screamed, and when I turned round Jocko wasn’t there. It was the most frightful time I’ve ever had, because it took us more than half an hour to get to a place where we could climb down, and then we had to work back to where he’d gone over, and when we did get there I thought he was dead. He wasn’t, but I thought he was. I made a fool of myself. I just sat down and put my head in my hands, so I don’t know what happened, but presently they said he wasn’t dead—I think it was Daphne who said so—and between us we got him back to the hotel. By the time we got there I was all right again. I kept with him, and before they started to undress him I looked for Aunt Clementa’s letter, but it wasn’t there. I knew which pocket he’d put it in, but it wasn’t there. I looked in all his pockets, and it wasn’t in any of them.”
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