He nodded. ‘There’s something I want you to do for me, if you will.”
“I’ll help all I can. You know that.”
“Yes, of course I do, darling.” He squeezed her arm, looked fondly down at the girl’s almost tawny skin, the skin which made the blood pump faster in his body. . . he looked away. He was here on business, and time was short. He knew he could rely on Debbie absolutely, could even sometimes take her pretty fully into his confidence. Her Foreign Office work—which had been responsible for throwing them together in the first place—was guarantee enough not only in Shaw’s eyes but in Latymer’s too. But all he said now was:
“I want to get in touch with a girl.”
Her eyes sparkled, suddenly mischievous. “Really, Esmonde!”
He went on, “She’s a girl who works in a shop. It’s a small place—a dress-shop in the King’s Road, Chelsea. Helene’s. D’you know it?”
“I don’t.” Sitting on the arm of a chair, she smoothed her frock over long, slim thighs, blonde head bent to hide a hint of quite irrational jealousy. She knew it was irrational and it didn’t last long. She looked up, her lips curved in laughter now. “But it sounds as though you’ve reconnoitred the ground pretty well yourself, doesn’t it, Esmonde dear?”
He grinned tightly. “Ass! Look, Deb, this is serious. I’ve got to find something out from this girl. And I don’t even know her name. All I know is that she’s a tall brunette—a ‘real classy bit and a good-looker’—to quote a description I was given last night.”
“Poor darling, you are going to have a search, aren’t you?”
“No,” he said, “you are.”
“Heavens, why me?” She looked bewildered.
He said, “Because if I went along it’d raise one hell of a lot of speculation—"
"You flatter yourself, my pet—"
"—and I'm playing this as carefully as I know how. We're handling something pretty prickly and we're liable to step on other people's toes—"
“Policemen’s toes?”
“Yes. Scotland Yard. Latymer doesn’t want it known we’re working on this—not yet, anyway; till we know rather more than we do at present. Now listen, Deb.” He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I want you to go along to Helene’s and buy yourself a dress—or something—and get talking to the girl who serves you. Try to find out if any of the girls has been upset over a boy friend the last couple of days.” He hesitated. “I think I’ll have to tell you a bit of the story after all. I’m looking for the white girl friend of that coloured Tube guard of the night before last, the one who disappeared—”
“Isn’t this rather delicate ground, Esmonde? I mean ... the colour question and all that?”
“Yes, it is, and that’s another reason why I’d like you to handle it. She might resent a man. Just feel your way around it—you understand all right. All I want is a name and address for now. I’ll leave it to you to find the best way of breaking the ice on the spot in the circumstances as you find them. Can you do that?”
She said quietly, “I’ll have a shot. It shouldn’t be all that difficult—those little places don’t often have more than two or three girl assistants at the most, and they all love a bit of a gossip. Who doesn’t, anyway? But I don’t promise a thing, mind.” She looked at him with a peculiar, rather wistful expression. “Sounds as though she’s made rather a fool of herself, doesn’t it? I mean, a coloured boy friend who’s got himself into nasty trouble—and who may have let her in for another kind of trouble for all we know—h’m?”
“We don’t know anything about that. All I’m concerned with is finding out where MacNamara is, anyway. Whatever she may have done, it’s her own worry, Deb.”
“Yep, sure!” She swung her slim body off the arm of the chair and went over to a mirror. “It always is the girl’s worry, isn’t it? Makes you think, though.” She turned towards him. “All right, Esmonde dear, leave it to me. Kiss me.”
He took her face in his big hands, kissed her on the mouth, gently. He said, “Thanks, Debbie. Get along as soon as you can. In the meantime, I’ve got some homework to do. I’ll be back in the flat at lunch-time, maybe before. Go straight round there and give yourself a drink if I’m not in.” He grinned down at her, took her chin in his hands, loving the light dusting of golden freckles on the tawny cheekbones. “That’s if you haven’t lost the latch-key....”
She grinned back. “Darling, it’s my dearest possession, I wear it next to my heart. . . look, who was it who said just now to get along to Chelsea as soon as I can?”
They left Albany Street together and split up at Great Portland Street station.
Shaw made his way to the reference library in Kensington High Street. Here he was handy for Gliddon Road and could nip home quickly to stand by for Debbie. He spent the morning studying large volumes dealing with the peoples of Africa—and Nogolia in particular. And as he read, absorbedly, the quiet room seemed to grow quieter, dark with the secrets of the hidden, forbidding continent; the atmosphere thickened with the blood that had been spilt in ten thousand years of voodoo, a doctrine and a way of life as old as time itself, stretching back into pre-history. Africa, land of the Dark and Angry Gods, the men of hate and fury, the spine-chilling spirits whose gross appetites could be appeased only by human sacrifice and terror... those old gods still stalked the land and filled men’s minds to-day, made the lush green jungle creep with fear, and, except on the surface, twentieth-century progress came to a dead stop. Behind the factories of so-called Modem Africa, behind the copper- and diamond-and tin-mines, the gold-mines and the progressive industrial front, there still lurked the ancient paganism walking hand-in-hand with the ju-ju man who had a vested interest in its survival. . . Sango the Thunder God, the Snake God, Erinle, Otin, Esamba, all these gods and others were the stock-in-trade of ju-ju . . . cruelty and barbarism and revolting practices, blood and lust disguised as propitiation ceremonies for the spirits who came to plague and purge the jungle-heart of Africa. Latymer had been right.
These people, steeped from birth and pre-birth in the implicit beliefs and understandings of their ancestors, could not easily or quickly be weaned from a way of life which held life itself as cheap as dirt, could not have their thought-stream dammed and diverted in the short span of one or two generations. Behind the police façades of the Negro colonies here in London even, behind the faces of the bus-conductors and the street-sweepers and the lawyers and the businessmen, behind the too-smart suits and the decorative shoes and the colourful shirts, there lurked still those deep impulses, impulses which, in blind and sheerly instinctive obedience to the powerful, compelling voice of Africa as personified by the man who called himself Edo, could break right through as soon as the moment of action came. Even the hard-headed Jiddle had been half inclined to believe in these things; and Shaw realized, as he read on, that you didn’t even need to believe in order to see the stark fact that most of Africa’s millions had no possible doubt in their minds that voodoo and the ju-ju man and the Dark Gods were there yet, and always would be, that they were immortal and timeless, while the white man’s meaner substitutes of mission and hospital were only drearily temporary and could be swept away. Indeed, Shaw’s newspapers lately had told him that in some ways Africa was ‘advancing’ backward, that in many areas, as the white men withdrew, the old practices were coming back.
And yet Patrick MacNamara had intended being a doctor.
Surely the doctors, at least, among the Africans had given up the old nonsenses? A man who intended to study the white man’s medicine must surely have gone halfway towards rejection—or could he be rediverted? Probably he could.
It was still a puzzle, and Shaw couldn’t fit the pieces together until he’d found MacNamara.
He got back to the flat shortly after twelve-thirty and found it empty. Because he’d expected to find Debonnair there when he arrived, he waited in a fever of impatience until he heard the doorbell.
When he answere
d it a light rain was falling, and Debonnair was looking seductive in a flame-coloured lightweight mackintosh which set off her hair and her tall, slim figure beautifully. The clear hazel eyes smiled at him, and she gave him a thumbs-up sign as she came into the hall.
He said, “Good girl!”
“Not so fast. Look.”
She’d kept her other hand behind her back, and now Shaw realized why. Smiling triumphantly, she brought out the long, wrapped cardboard box. She said, “That’s why I was rather a long time. It’s the sweetest little frock, darling—bought on your orders, remember?”
He tried to look severe, but he couldn’t help responding to the happiness in her eyes. “How much?”
“Fifty guineas.”
He whistled. “You’ve got a hope!”
“I repeat—on your orders, Commander Shaw! Right?” She put her face up and he kissed it. He said indulgently, “Right! I’ll fix that somehow, even if you get me shot . . . which is quite likely. Latymer looks at all the expense accounts himself.” Putting his hands on her shoulders, he slewed her round and took her mackintosh and hung it up. “How about a drink?”
“Just what I need. Give me one, and I’ll tell you all about it.” She walked ahead of him into the sitting-room, and he studied her back view appreciatively. Going across to the cupboard he brought out the glasses. He poured the girl a gin, a whisky for himself. As she sipped, curled up in a big leather armchair, she told him.
She said, “I can’t tell you in detail how it happened, but these things do, between women. Just a little interest shown, and passing the time of day—you know? I found out that a young lady by the name of Gillian Ross had been upset yesterday over something she’d read in the papers, and she’d asked Mrs du Pont—that’s the madame—if she could go home. Which she did. And she hasn’t been in to-day. When madame rang Mrs Tait, who’s the young lady’s landlady, she was told the girl was ‘poorly’ and wouldn’t be in for a day or two. Does that help?”
“Yes, I think it fits, Deb. Sounds like the right girl. . . I take it there weren’t any others who’d been upset?”
She shook her head. “Only her.”
“Good. I suppose you didn’t get her address, did you?”
“No. Short of asking right out, there didn’t seem to be a way, and I knew you wouldn’t want me to show too much curiosity. But it shouldn’t take long to find out, should it?” She smiled up at him over the rim of the glass, provocatively. “Use that brain of yours, darling!”
He grinned. “All right, wonder-girl! I’ve ticked over. Mrs Tait’s on the phone, we know that, so she’ll be in the book. I don’t know what I’d do without you!”
He went into his bedroom, came back with the telephone directory, and thumbed through it. He murmured, “There’s quite an assortment of Mrs Taits. I suppose we’ll have to try them all.”
Debonnair said, “I’ll do it. May as well finish what I’ve begun.”
“Right, thanks.” He added warningly, “Be careful, though. Talk around the point when you get the right Mrs Tait. I don’t want the girl to know anyone’s on to her, just in case she decides to run.”
“Okay.” Debonnair went out of the room. She wasn’t away very long, and when she came back she said, “I followed a hunch and tried Chelsea first. . . just a wrong guess or two and then I got her. She lives in Oakley Street Mrs T. sounds rather an old dear, incidentally, but I didn’t get any fresh information except that Gillian’s not actually in bed.”
“I didn’t think you would, and I’m glad she’s not in bed, because we’re going round there.”
“Are we indeed? D’you really mean ‘we’?”
Shaw nodded. “Moral support—for me! She’s bound to be upset.”
“True enough. Well—when do we start?”
“Right now.” Shaw looked at his watch. “We’ll eat afterwards, somewhere in Chelsea.”
They rang one of the bells at the top of the steps in the Oakley Street house, the bell with a small white card alongside it with the name: Miss G. Ross. After a second ring, they heard footsteps, and the door was opened by *a tall, dark-haired girl of little more than twenty, dressed in a tightly moulded sweater and tartan trews whose folds left very little to the imagination. She was undoubtedly, as Jiddle had said, a ‘good-looker’; but she was showing the strain of recent events and she was pale and nervy-looking, with large dark rings under her eyes. Shaw introduced himself.
She was suspicious and wary at first, but when Shaw mentioned Patrick MacNamara and the fact that he had been on that train with him, she seemed to soften a little—she would, Shaw knew, have read all the papers. Glancing at Debonnair, she said, “Oh, all right then, come along up. The room’s a bit untidy.”
She turned away. An attractive perfume wafted back as they followed her in and up the stairs which rose steeply from the end of the hall. The long, trousered legs went up quickly, past the first landing and up to the next, beyond that again to the very top of the building, to where the stairs were even steeper and narrower and covered with lino instead of carpeting. She led them into a tiny, jazzily furnished apartment with a sloping, garret-like ceiling and an unmade divan bed in one corner. A door led off into a poky kitchen, like a cupboard. Gillian Ross jerked the door of the kitchen shut with her foot and then jabbed at some cushions in the chairs, pushing them straight.
She said abruptly, “Sit down, won’t you. I think I need a drink. What about you?”
Debonnair shook her head and Shaw said, “Not just now, thanks, but don’t let us stop you.”
“All right.” She picked up a bottle and splashed gin into a glass. Shaw watched her curiously. She was young to be starting this sort of carry-on, he thought, and she looked as though she had a decent background somewhere. She had an almost patrician air, with her straight brows and firm, determined chin, and this didn’t quite fit with the jazzy room, and the gin, with the whole untidy, slack bachelor-girl existence which, by first appearance anyhow, seemed to be her life.
When she’d poured the gin she lit a tipped cigarette, took a deep lungful of smoke, and said, “Well? You’d better explain, hadn’t you? How did you know my address—and how did you know about Pat and me, anyway?”
Shaw dodged those two direct questions, but apart from that he explained as fully as he could. He said, “I happen to be a—Government agent, Miss Ross, though nothing whatever to do with the police. We have reason to believe that MacNamara may be able to help us quite a lot in certain inquiries which we’re making. In turn, I’m quite sure we can help him. You see, I was a witness to some of what happened in the train.”
“D’you think he did it—that murder?” The girl’s voice was higher, brittle, and Shaw noted the way her fingers tightened round her glass.
He said, “For what my opinion’s worth—no, I don’t. That’s one of the reasons I want to help, to find out more than I know already. Only MacNamara can tell me anything.”
She nodded, seeming to consider what he had said. Then she asked, “Is Pat in danger? I mean, will some one try to get at him?”
Shaw studied her set, drawn face obliquely. “Not necessarily. It could be that he’s simply being hidden by some one. On the other hand—yes, he might be in danger. Can you tell me where I can find him?”
“No,” she said. “No, I can’t. I swear that. I just don’t know. . . I’ve not heard a word from him since—since that happened. You . . . don’t think something could have happened to him already?”
“That’s something I can’t possibly answer,” he said gravely. “Miss Ross—why do you think some one may try to get at him, anyway?”
She didn’t answer at first; then, hesitantly, she said, “I don’t really know. Only he’d got into a bad set, and there were things. . . .” Her voice trailed away and she began to tremble a little. “I don’t know anything really, honestly I don’t.”
Shaw’s eyes narrowed and he shook his head slowly. He said seriously, “If you do, I hope you’ll trust me enough to
tell me. I promise I’ll do all I can to help, but we don’t want to be too late.” Her head jerked a little at that and he went on, “I can tell you this—we believe that something very big is behind the killing the other night, and there are people who’ll go to any lengths to see that their plans aren’t messed up. It seems clear that MacNamara must have been pretty deeply involved himself, but it could be that he’s only an innocent dupe, just some one they’re making use of. I want to find him and talk to him—and I want to get to him before anyone else does ... anyone who might think it advisable to prevent him giving away information if he’s arrested. Do you see?”
“Yes,” she said, “I see that. I!ve been half expecting the police to come along and say something like that, but they haven’t been, I don’t know why, unless they just don’t know about me. We never met each other’s friends, so there wouldn’t be anybody to know really. That’s why I was so surprised you knew.” She stopped then, and seemed to break down completely. Her face went down into her hands and her shoulders heaved. Debonnair flashed a glance at Shaw, frowned warningly, went across and sat by the girl. For several minutes she talked to her in a low, comforting voice, and the racking sobs began to subside. After a while Gillian Ross looked up, her face tear-stained and blotchy. She said, “I’m awfully sorry. Things have got me down a bit.”
“Of course they have,” Shaw agreed sympathetically. “It’s time you had someone to talk to and take some of the load.” He paused, looking at the girl closely. “I’m going to take a chance and put you in the picture, Miss Ross, and remember, if ever you’ve kept a secret in your life, and I’m sure you have, this is the one time above all others that you’ve got to give me your word you’ll never reveal what I’m going to tell you, not to anyone. I dare say you’ve heard of the Official Secrets Act. Well now, that applies to all I’m going to say, and I’m warning you—officially, and in the name of Her Majesty’s Government. Do you really understand?”
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