‘I am, ma’am, very.’ Picot was thoughtful. The news was too startling to be entirely credible, but she seemed remarkably certain about it. ‘I think if you’ll excuse me, sir,’ he said, ‘I’ll go after the old woman at once. I’ll take the jacket, if you please – I mustn’t move without that.’
He stepped over to the desk and began to repack the sports coat in the brown paper in which he had brought it. Miss Warburton was openly disappointed.
‘Won’t you ring up your headquarters? There are three telephones in the house, you know.’
Picot forbore to remark that he never used more than one at a time.
‘No, miss,’ he said. ‘If I was wanted I’d be sent for. But of course if a call should come through for me, perhaps you’d explain where I’ve gone. It’s the second cottage, isn’t it? Two doors from here on the left?’
‘You’re quite right, but I shall come and show you,’ she said. ‘Our little houses are built right under the church wall. Mine is the shabby one, but you won’t notice that in the fog.’
She hurried him out so that he could only nod to Avril and grasp his parcel, and she was still talking cheerfully in the hall.
‘We shall expect you to come and tell us all about it – even if you don’t. If curiosity is vulgar, then I’m very vulgar. I make no bones about it. Come along.’
Yet when she returned a few minutes later there was little that was stupid or even affected about her.
‘Mrs Cash has the light on in the attic, Hubert,’ she said. ‘I could see it quite clearly in spite of the fog. She doesn’t want any other visitors while the policeman is there.’
Avril was standing by his own uncurtained window, staring out into the brown mysterious world which was the square.
‘You say these things, Dot,’ he exclaimed. ‘How can you know?’
‘Because I make it my business to,’ she said softly. ‘I’ve got eyes and common sense and I use them. No one ever visits Lucy Cash when that light is on in the attic. It’s a signal to certain people to keep away.’
‘Certain people.’ He mimicked her. ‘What people?’
‘Business people, I suppose,’ said Miss Warburton.
The Canon did not speak for a moment and his face was still hidden. Presently a shudder ran through his broad flat shoulders.
‘I hope you’re right, Dot,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘On this occasion, do you know, I hope you’re right.’
CHAPTER 8
The Spoor Again
—
IT WAS ONE of the most pleasant things about Amanda that she had never lost that rustic outlook which regards the wildest illogicalities of human emotional behaviour as perfectly normal and nothing to make a fuss about. Therefore, when poor Meg in her wretchedness proposed to drag her out at past eleven o’clock at night to inspect the partly furnished bridal house in which even the power was not yet connected, it struck her as the most natural and sensible move in the world.
She was relieved that it was no farther away than the last of the ‘good streets’ on the other side of the square, but she would have gone out to the suburbs quite cheerfully had she been asked.
On inspection, the house proved to be a delightful place. Even when seen in the beam of torches held in very cold hands, it displayed enormous charm. Geoffrey had been determined to satisfy both his own somewhat pathetic dream of solidarity and permanence in his unstable world and his bride’s natural good taste, so that the house had been restored to its original smug Regency comfort, but given a practicalness and a gaiety which it had never before possessed.
They had peeped at the ‘Edwardian’ bedroom with the flower-show paper and Honiton bedspread, and the bathroom off it which was like a comfortable lily-pool, and had come at last to the object of the exercise, Meg’s own studio at the top of the house where the attics once had been.
It appeared to Amanda’s candid eye as if Geoffrey had planned its essential layout so that its conversion to a nursery suite could be accomplished with very little difficulty at the earliest suitable opportunity, but at the moment it was a studio, severly utilitarian and not yet furnished. A quantity of Meg’s personal belongings, still to be unpacked, was stacked round the pale walls where the moving men had left them.
Meg gave up pretending suddenly and dropped to her knees before one small sacking-wrapped bundle. She looked very young indeed, crouching there, her soft fur coat trailing in the dust behind her and her sleek fair head bent intently as she unfolded the hessian.
‘I wanted to find these and burn them,’ she said without looking up. ‘I wanted to do it at once, right away, tonight. They’re only Martin’s letters. That’s why I’ve dragged you out, though. Do you mind?’
‘Not at all.’ Amanda sounded infinitely reasonable. ‘Jolly sensible of you. There always is a moment when one makes up one’s mind about these things, and then it’s much tidier to act at once.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Meg had uncovered a small nest of drawers in a battered Italian leather case and was emptying them hastily on to a sheet of packing paper.
‘I’ve been feeling vaguely guilty about these for months,’ she went on, betraying a charming streak of naiveté which suited her voice much better than her sophisticated make-up and hairdo. ‘I haven’t looked at them for years, but I knew they were here, and when my things came over I let them come too. Then tonight, when I was thinking about Geoff, and – well, needing him, I suppose – it suddenly seemed terribly important that they shouldn’t stay in his – I mean our – house, even for a night. Do you think I’m being hysterical? I am rather, I suppose.’
‘If you are, I don’t see it matters, do you?’ Amanda had seated herself on a box of books and seemed perfectly content to stay there all night, should nothing more than ordinary politeness demand it. ‘Why bother about being anything? This is just the end of Martin come rather suddenly, don’t you think? I mean it’s the end of the painful bit. It was going to happen anyway, but circumstances have hurried it. There was a little storm and the last leaf fell.’
‘Yes. Yes, that is it.’ Meg was eager. Her words came quickly in a rush of relief. ‘I had forgotten him, or at least I thought I had, and then the photographs brought not so much Martin as my husband back and I didn’t know what I did feel. Sometimes I seemed to be being unfaithful to them both, and then tonight the whole thing crystallized and no one but Geoff existed any more for me. I can think of Martin objectively now as an ordinary person. I never could before.’
Amanda said nothing but she nodded complete agreement in the dusk.
Meanwhile, as the neat packages of letters, most of them photostats from the Desert, were piled on the brown paper, something hard and bright fell out from amongst them. Meg held it to the light.
‘Oh,’ she said slowly, ‘yes, I suppose I ought to keep that. It must go down among the other pretties in the show table in the drawing-room. There was something awfully queer about it, a secret, something to do with the war.’
She handed the discovery to the other woman. It was a miniature, a girl’s smiling face in a jewelled frame, a frame worth rather more than the few pounds which the dealer in the Walworth Road had given a soldier for its fellow.
‘How beautiful!’ Amanda shone her torch on the painting. ‘Carolean. I think this must be the original setting, don’t you?’
‘Perhaps it is.’ Meg spoke wonderingly. ‘D’you know, I don’t think I’ve ever considered it before. It just scared me when I first had it and I pushed it away and forgot it. Martin gave it to me a few weeks before he went overseas for the last time. He’d been away for a little while on some trip he couldn’t tell me about. Do you remember those years, Amanda? They seem quite mad at this distance. Dull, and uncomfortable, and full of awful secrets and half-guesses.’
Her voice sounded youthful in the half dark.
‘Martin came in one night, tired and sort of excited, and just pulled it out of his pocket wrapped up in a dirty handkerchief. He said it had had a
companion, but that he’d had to give it away because “there weren’t enough to go round”. I said something about loot and he laughed and I was rather shocked, and then in the next breath he told me he remembered looking at this through the glass of a cabinet when he was a child, and how he always thought it must be Nell Gwynn because she was laughing.’ She paused and added thoughtfully, ‘I often wondered if he could have gone back to Sainte-Odile somehow when the place was occupied. That sort of incredible thing did happen. It was right on the coast, almost in the sea.’
‘Sainte-Odile? His grandmother’s house?’
‘Yes, she had to clear out very quickly at the beginning of the war. She died down in Nice just before he was lost. We didn’t know that, though, until long afterwards.’
Amanda returned the miniature. ‘What happened to the house?’
‘Oh, it’s still there, deserted but almost intact. I had to go over and see it some time ago. Daddy couldn’t come so Dot and I went. She’s the business brain of the family.’ She laughed and sighed. ‘And it was quite dreadful, Martin being only “presumed killed” made no end of complications, and you know what French legal proceedings are. There was some sort of forty-second cousin, too, somewhere in East Africa. Martin had made things even more involved by leaving a will with a firm of solicitors here in Grove Road, which was full of the most specific instructions. For some reason he was terribly anxious that the contents of the house should come to me eventually. He didn’t seem to mind about the building itself, but everything inside bothered him enormously. Smithy, that’s the solicitor, told me he thought there must once have been something of great value there, or something Martin set great store by, although he wouldn’t define it. It was left so that I could claim everything movable – garden tools, flowerpots, everything. But of course the place had been pretty well ransacked by the time we got there. I had what was left. There was a dreary little sale, and the house is just going to pieces waiting for the old gentleman from East Africa.’
‘How sad,’ said Amanda. ‘Was it a pleasant place?’
‘It may have been once.’ The young voice had a shiver in it. ‘But it was beastly when I saw it. Something horrible had happened there in the war. The locals were very discreet and maddeningly vague, but some enemy bigwig – a backroom boy, I fancy – had installed a mistress there, and one night either they killed themselves or were murdered, and there was hell to pay afterwards, trials and tortures and heaven knows what. The place was stripped even of anything interesting, let alone valuable, and there had been a fire in one room. I didn’t like it and I was awfully glad Martin never saw it like that. He loved it when he was a child.’
‘How queer he should worry about the furniture and not the building,’ murmured Amanda. ‘When one’s a child it’s the place, not the thing, one loves. We lived in a mill and it’s a clump of willows I remember best, and the pool under them. Of course our furniture wasn’t very impressive. It had tears in it.’ She laughed. ‘I loved my mill. It’s still in the family, still running at a loss. Perhaps there was something rather important at Sainte-Odile which the Germans took away.’
‘Anyway, there’s nothing there now.’ Meg’s sigh had relief in it. ‘I’m so glad I came and got these letters, Amanda. I’ll take them home and burn them in Mary’s boiler. Martin would approve. I know it now, I know it for sure.’
She was scrambling to her feet with the parcel in her arms when a thin brown hand cut into her shoulder and held her still.
‘Wait,’ whispered Amanda, ‘listen. Someone has just come into the house.’
For a moment they held their breath. Beneath them the dark building lay quiet, shrouded tightly in the damp swaddlings of the fog. There were no faraway sounds from the city. The street outside was deserted, and the mists made an insulating blanket, cutting them off from the world.
It was the draught Amanda had noticed first. It crept up from below, chill from the outside air. The sounds came later, a swift patter of feet, a door opening cautiously, the nervous ring of metal, the squeak of a chair on the parquet.
‘Geoff.’ Meg was still whispering but the word was happy and excited. ‘No one else has a key. He’s got back at last and come to look for us.’
‘Listen.’ Amanda was insistent and her hand was still firm. ‘This person doesn’t know his way.’
They waited. The sounds grew and came closer. Someone was stumbling through the house with a restless, fumbling eagerness, looking for something. They became aware of anxiety, exasperation, and haste. The sense of urgency was violent. It reached up to them through the dark, unmistakable and frightening.
‘Ought we to go down?’ Meg’s whisper sounded breathless in the cold airless room.
‘Where’s the fire-escape?’
‘Just behind us. On this window.’
‘Could you get down to the next house and call the police? You mustn’t make a sound or he’ll hear you. Meg, could you?’
‘I think so. What about you?’
‘Hush. Try. See if you can.’
Downstairs a door slammed with startling noise. It was followed by utter silence. As they listened they were aware of other ears straining below them. The pause seemed interminable, and then at last there were footsteps again in the hall, receding now, ceasing and going on again.
‘Now.’ Amanda gave the shoulder a little push. ‘Shut the window after you and – not a sound.’
Meg did not hesitate. She was rather alarmed but quite capable. She rose silently and tip-toed to the casement. The house was well built and her lightly shod feet made no sound on the boards. The window was a new steel one and opened easily. Amanda saw her dark figure silhouetted against its pallid square of light for an instant. Then she was gone.
The other girl remained where she was, listening. She heard the faint whine of the drawing-room door hinge, and a single step on the wood. Then there was a long silence, followed by a movement in the bedroom immediately below her. The intruder must have come up the stairs without her hearing. She stifled her breath and was aware of the noise of her own heart, and this irritated her. The British burglar is not as a rule the bravest of men, and she knew that should he discover her as his torch beam wheeled across the unfurnished room, the chances were that he would be far more startled than she. But despite all reason she was trembling. There was something peculiar about this particular intruder. His movements were so hurried, and when they were heard at all so oddly violent.
Suddenly she heard him again, very close this time. He ran up the first few steps of the attic stairs outside and paused. A thin pencil of light ran under the closed door of the room in which she sat. It touched her foot and vanished, and there was silence again. Very slowly she rose and stood waiting.
He went back. She heard him distinctly. He had decided that the top floor was unused. After a long interval she heard him down in the hall again.
Amanda considered the fire-escape but changed her mind. The police would respond to Meg’s call immediately, but the fog was very thick and might delay them. It seemed a pity that the burglar should get away without being seen. She decided to go down.
Having made up her mind, she crept to the door. The first flight of stairs seemed to promise the only difficulty, since the boards were bare and newly stained, but she let the balusters take her weight and moved gently, feeling her way.
On the first landing it was very dark. The bedroom doors were closed and the small circular window little more than a blur, but she remembered the design of the house and by following the wall came softly to the top of the graceful winding stairs. Her over-confidence was almost her undoing. She put out her hand for the newel post, missed it, and regained her balance only just in time. Hovering, one foot down, her hand feeling for the rail, she heard him once more.
He was in the little study whose door was immediately to the right at the foot of the stairs. She heard the unmistakable scratch of a match in the inner room, and a flicker of grey appeared in the black of the wa
ll.
A trickle of fear touched her but she ignored it resolutely. Her hand found the rail and she took another step or two down and came under the level of the upper floor. The study door was wide open and through it a light, very faint and unsteady, crept out across the hall to touch the bright casing of a Kandy chest and the pool of a looking-glass hanging above it.
Amanda edged forward. The burglar was very busy. He was still taking care to make no unnecessary noise, but he was hurrying, and at last she recognized the element which had been puzzling her from the beginning. It was an impression of pursuit. Now that she saw it she could feel it distinctly. It was as though the whole house was running away from forces descending upon it rapidly from outside. Yet from beyond the walls there was no sound at all. The fog pressed round the elegant stucco box, drowning it utterly.
One more step brought her flat against the rounded wall just above the open door, and, glancing across the hall, she saw that a patch of the room was reflected in the looking-glass. The first thing she made out was the candle. It was a long green taper which had been set with three others in a gilt sconce on the farther wall. The newcomer had taken it down and it now lolled drunkenly in a vase dripping hot wax recklessly on the polished surface of a Sheraton desk which occupied the centre of the little room.
It took her some seconds to realize that the shadow between her and the rest of the picture was the man himself. He had his back to her and was wrestling with something on the desk. She could not see it, but she guessed it was the spice cabinet which Meg had shown her with such pride, bewailing the fact that the key had been mislaid, so that she could not display its fittings. It was a charming affair made of mahogany and inlaid with ivory, and was to stand on the desk to hold notepaper. The burglar appeared to be wrenching it apart. She heard the scrape and splinter of the wood.
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