Warrant for X

by Philip MacDonald

  Hastings said: “Anthony, you can’t do it! What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see——”

  Garrett said: “You don’t have to discourage him, do you?” His voice was harsh.

  Hastings looked at him quickly; then smiled. He said:

  “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to be a wet blanket. But, anyhow, you can’t stop Carlton Howe [2] when his nose is to the trail.”

  Garrett said: “It’s I who ought to apologize. I’m——”

  Anthony said: “For God’s sake, shut up! Both of you.” His elbows were on the table now and his chin was propped on his hands. Immediately in front of him, now tidily arranged, were the little scrap of paper which was the shopping list, then the bus ticket and then, half full of air and thus rather horribly caricaturing life, the black glove of cheap kid.

  There was silence in the room for a long moment while six eyes gazed at the little miscellany upon the table edge; and then Anthony pushed back his chair and stood. He said, looking at Garrett:

  “That ticket machine. Did you notice the value? . . . I mean, was it a twopenny machine? Or a fourpenny? Or——”

  Garrett said: “Couldn’t say. You see, I was——”

  Anthony said: “But if we go there now you can point it out to me?”

  “Yes,” said Garrett. . . .

  4

  “But how long will they be?” said Lucia Gethryn.

  Spencer Hastings smiled. “Anthony’s driving. They’ve been gone five minutes. They’ll be back before I want another drink.”

  Three minutes after this Garrett opened eyes whose lids for the last mile of his journey had been screwed tight shut. He sighed a small sigh of relief and turned down his collar and got out and stood on the pavement and found himself facing the arched entrance to Leinster Terrace underground station. Anthony joined him and they walked through the archway and into the booking hall. It was almost deserted. Garrett pointed. “That one,” he said.

  They walked towards the machines and now Garrett saw that at the top of his choice was a large plaque bearing the sign “3d.” and underneath this a printed list of stations. This list, he saw with disappointment, was a long one. He said:

  “Seem to get everywhere in the world from here.” Anthony did not answer. He took out a pen and a small red notebook and began to write rapidly. He finished writing and put pen and book away. “Come on!” he said and started with long strides for the street.

  But once on the pavement he did not make for the car. He halted and looked about him. He said:

  “Just a minute. There should be one somewhere here.” Garrett wondered what the “one” might be and then saw, as Anthony moved towards it, a flat-capped, blue-uniformed figure standing with broad back to a tobacconist’s window. As they drew close he read, up on the badge above the cap peak, the words “London General Omnibus Company.”

  CHAPTER VI

  ANTHONY GETHRYN and his wife were alone. Through the library windows came faintly to their ears the sound of the starter of Hastings’ car mingled with a grinding of gears from the taxi in which were Garrett and Avis Bellingham.

  Lucia sat upon a corner of the big writing table and looked across the room at her husband.

  “And now,” she said, “perhaps you’ll tell me what it’s all about.”

  Anthony crossed the room and stood to face her. He said:

  “Young American, solitary, hears two women, unaware of his presence, talking in a teashop. For him the conversation, being largely allusive, is vague in detail and indefinite in statement; but is sinister in purport, tone and atmosphere. It conveys definite impression that there is a scheme afoot which will make money through a child and may also bring injury to a male adult. The only name mentioned is that of an ally and is the disconcertingly ubiquitous one of Evans. Young American decides to make himself able to identify the women and unobtrusively follows them when they leave the shop. They get to Leinster Terrace tube station and he loses ’em, never having managed to see their faces. He goes back to the teashop and has his first piece of luck, getting one of the women’s gloves, inside which are a bus ticket and a scrap of paper bearing a pencilled shopping list. These leave him no wiser. After much thought and abortive search for advice he goes to Scotland Yard, which, not unnaturally, is civil but unimpressed. The thing gets on his mind but there seems nothing he can do about it until he finds a charming friend who knows us. Finish.”

  A small and worried frown creased Lucia’s white forehead. “But . . .” she began.

  “And here,” said her husband, interrupting, “we have exhibits A, B and C.” He went to the front of the table and opened its centre drawer and took out the glove, the bus ticket and the scrap of buff-coloured paper. He said, half to himself:

  “Here are some things and some very pretty things. Now who is the owner of these very pretty things?”

  Lucia got to her feet and came round the edge of the table and stood beside him and put her hand upon his shoulder. She said:

  “Listen, darling! I’m—I’m worried.”

  Anthony raised his head sharply to look at her but he did not speak. She said after a pause:

  “That’s a very nice man and this thing seems to have eaten right into his mind. To you it’s just a new sort of puzzle—new because instead of being asked to find out who did something you’re being asked to find out who’s going to do something. And—and . . .”

  “Well?” said Anthony. He looked at her with the beginnings of a smile pulling down one corner of his mouth. She said:

  “It’s—it’s . . . Oh, damn! It’s just that I can’t help thinking you’ve given the boy too much encouragement. Didn’t you see how different he looked when he left—after you’d told him to come to lunch tomorrow and hinted that you might be further ahead? You must have seen. And I just thought it wasn’t. . .”

  Anthony said: “All right, Officer, I’ll talk!” All vestige of the smile had left his face. “I liked Garrett. And you know what I think about Avis. In any case I’d help any friend of hers. But in this business I’m not being actuated by friendship. . . . If you go up our stairs, madam, to the third floor and open the second door on your right, what do you find?” Lucia stared at him.

  “The night nursery, of course.”

  “And in a corner there’s a natty small bed, isn’t there? And what’s in the natty small bed?”

  “What are you talking about, Anthony?”

  “What’s in the natty small bed? Answer me!”

  Lucia said: “Alan, you fool!”

  Anthony said: “Yes. And, thanks to God and despite the treasury, I’m a moderately rich man. Suppose, then, that when we left this room, in about an hour, we walked together up to the third floor and opened the second door on the right, very quietly so as not to wake the occupant of the natty small bed. And suppose we found the french windows on to the balcony there wide open and the natty small bed entirely empty. And suppose that, earlier in the evening, downstairs here, we’d heard some sound from above but hadn’t thought anything of it. And suppose——”

  “Stop! Will you stop!” Lucia was white faced and her breath came quick.

  “Suppose . . .” began Anthony again and then put his hands upon his wife’s shoulders. Beneath his touch he could feel her body shaking. He kissed her and smiled and said: “Sorry. But I wanted to make you understand. I believe, not only what Garrett heard, but what he felt and feels. And if this is a long business I want you to understand it because you’ve got to feel like that too. You see, my dear, you didn’t hear him tell his story after dinner. He told it damn badly but it was the more convincing for that.”

  Lucia stood on tiptoe and returned the caress of a moment ago. And then, turning, she was gone from under his hands and crossing the room. Her gait showed desire for haste cloaked by simulation of leisure.

  Anthony stood where he was, looking at an open door. There came to his ears a series of soft, swift, ascending sounds.

  2

  Lucia ca
me softly down the stairs. She was smiling but behind her upon the third floor the nursery door stood wide. She reached the foot of the stairs and crossed the hallway and went into the library.

  Anthony, seated before the writing table, did not turn as she came in. She crossed the room and stood beside him. Now the glove and the bus ticket and the scrap of paper were at one side of the table, their place taken by two maps, one overlapping the other—a folded map of the Central London Underground Railway System and a bus chart headed, “Route 19H.”

  “Anthony!” said his wife and he turned his head to look up at her.

  “I’ve been thinking!” she said. “Those things don’t happen in England.”

  “Everything happens in England,” said her husband.

  The dark head was shaken. “No. Not kidnapping.”

  “It has,” Anthony said. “And it will again.”

  “It’s American!” said his wife. “It’s American!”

  “And England,” said Anthony, “in common with the rest of the world, is becoming more Americanized every day. In the main not a bad thing. Very clean Tn some specific instances like this . . .” He shrugged.

  “These women,” Lucia said. “Were they American?

  “Don’t think so. Why should they be?”

  “But, Anthony, are you seriously trying to tell me that you believe that this might be—well, a sort of beginning to a kidnapping whatd’youcallit?”

  “Racket, d’you mean?”

  “Yes. . . . But, after all, why should it be kidnapping at all? Did these women say anything about stealing a child?

  “How can you make money—big money—through a child unless you kidnap it? I could think of other things but I’d rather not . . . and anyhow, they wouldn’t fit.”

  Lucia pondered. “What I don’t see is why this worries Sheldon Garrett so much. After all, it’s not even his own country. And even, according to him, the women didn’t say anything definite. Why doesn’t he just forget it? Or are ail playwrights public spirited?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Anthony said. “I got it out of hi/n on the way back from Leinster Terrace. He has a sister with a child.

  And she married Barry Hendricksen——”

  Lucia interrupted. “Hendricksen! Not . . . ?”

  “Yes,” said Anthony.

  “But they got the boy back, didn’t they? Not that it wasn’t terrible, but I mean, it wasn’t like that awful Lindbergh thing.”

  Anthony smiled at her. “If you’d wait a minute, woman!” His smile went. “It was only given out to the world that the child was sent back after the third ransom payment. What was omitted from the news was the fact that when it came back it left half its mind behind it.”

  Lucia stared at him, the colour ebbing from her face. Her lips opened as if to speak but no sound came from them. Her husband turned his chair and once more stared down at the maps. He said almost briskly:

  “Now watch ye and wait, for ye know not at what hour the Answer cometh. . . . Two feminine voices; two feminine backs; one feminine glove; one feminine shopping list; one neuter bus ticket; the knowledge that both women booked from the threepenny machine at Leinster Terrace . . . Problem: find the owner of the glove.”

  Lucia perched herself upon the arm of the chair and, one hand upon his right shoulder, looked down over his left at the maps. She said:

  “It’s impossible! You can’t do it! . . . Oh! And you forgot that one of the voices knew a man called Evans.”

  Anthony said: “There’s no such word as ‘can’t’, missie, in the English language. Listen! We discard the voices as being useless. Likewise we discard Evans and the glove. Contrariwise we hang on, first of all, to the bus ticket plus the knowledge of that threepenny machine.” He opened a drawer and took from it a pencil and with the pencil made a ring round one of the black dots upon the railway map. He said:

  “That’s Goldhawk Market. And it’s the last station but one of the longest possible threepenny rides from Leinster Terrace, going west. Why do I choose it when I could choose any of sixteen other stations reachable for threepence from Leinster Terrace? The answer to this minor problem is to be found in exhibit B.” He pointed to the bus ticket. “See what I mean?”

  Lucia said: “I don’t and you know I don’t. I’ve——”

  “ ‘Ush, ‘ush! I will have ‘ush. Why do I choose Goldhawk Market, I say? I choose it because the owner of the glove took a threepenny ticket from Leinster Terrace station and in the glove was found this ticket from an L.G.O.C. bus on the 19H route.”

  “But . . .” Lucia began.

  “ ‘Ush again! This bus ticket, although it hasn’t got any names on it, has numbers. And it is a twopenny ticket punched at Number 5. Now the western end of the 19H route is Gunnersbury. Station 1, which by no means strangely coincides with the beginning, is the Bald-Faced Stag in Iron Lane, Gunnersbury. Station 2 is the junction of Goldhawk Road and Jennifer Street. Station 3 . . . but why bother you with all this professional detail. Let it suffice to say that, being twopenn’orth and having been punched at Station 5, the ticket must have been bought by someone boarding the bus between the Goldhawk Road-Jennifer Street junction and the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and intending to get off at the Notting Hill point. We thus have a good presumptive knowledge of the district where the owner of the glove lives. . . .”

  “Why?” said Lucia quickly and drawing a deep breath. “She might live in Hampstead and ’ve been driven out to Richmond by a cousin to see an aunt and then driven back as far as Shepherd’s Bush and then have got on a bus to Notting Hill to meet the other woman and then have been going out to supper with a friend anywhere on the three-pennyworth from Leinster Terrace. . .

  Anthony looked at her. “The Eighth Wonder,” he said. “Reba the Reasoning Woman . . . We are going, madam—we’ve got to go—by probabilities; and I say, taking the threepenny train ticket in conjunction with the bus ticket, that it is eminently probable that the owner of the glove lives—or has constant association with someone who does live—within a radius of half a mile from a point midway between the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and the joining point of Jennifer Street and the Goldhawk Road. . . .” His voice tailed off and he muttered as if to himself: “And he said these didn’t help.”

  Lucia said: “Well, they don’t much, do they? It’s really just as impossible in that radius of yours as it is in the whole of London. I mean, to find a woman you’ve never even seen properly. Needles get lost in haystacks; I shouldn’t think the size of a haystack would——”

  “If you lost a thimble in a forty-acre field,” said Anthony, “and God came down on a cloud and told you it was in the middle acre, you’d be nearer finding that thimble than you were at first? . . . And hold your jaw, woman!”

  He pushed away the maps and picked up the glove and the dirty little scrap of paper and set them before him on the blotting pad. He said:

  “Three little articles belonging to Who. One gave a message and now there are Two.”

  “Whimsical, aren’t you?” said his wife.

  Anthony did not answer. He had turned away from her again. He propped his elbows on the edge of the writing table and dropped his head into cupped hands. . . .

  3

  The hands of the clock upon the table stood at a few moments after one. Lucia had long since gone to bed but her husband still sat and stared down at a piece of buff paper and a black right-hand glove. The smoke from his pipe hung above him in a blue cloud. Neither his head nor his body moved but the green eyes were alive. . . .

  “Hell!” said Anthony suddenly and thrust back his chair and stood and stretched his long body. He began to walk up and down the big room; from balcony windows to door and back again. His pipe went out and he did not relight it. He went on walking—and his brain went on behaving like a squirrel on a treadmill.

  He halted. He found himself opposite the writing table again and once more staring down at the paper and the glove. He took himself to task and opened a drawer and d
ropped into it the glove and the scrap of paper and the bus ticket. He locked the drawer and walked across the room and switched out the lights and began to make his way upstairs.

  4

  He was in his dressing room. As she had not called to him, he knew that upon the far side of the inner door Lucia slept. He pulled on pyjamas and stood for a moment motionless while his unruly mind insisted upon giving him, yet again, an orderly resume of L’affaire Garrett.

  Odd thing to happen to an American on a Sunday afternoon in Notting Hill. Odd thing for this kind of an American to be in Notting Hill at all, Sunday or no Sunday. . . .

  “My God!” said Anthony Gethryn aloud. He tore open the wardrobe door and reached a long arm into its dark interior and snatched at a dressing gown. Pulling it on as he went, he left the room and ran downstairs. He opened the library door and switched on the lights and made for the writing table with long strides. He unlocked the drawer and opened it and took out the little scrap of buff paper.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE TELEPHONE RANG, and went on ringing.

  It waked Thomas Sheldon Garrett from the first real sleep he had achieved since the night of Saturday, the seventeenth. He raised himself on an elbow and muttered thick curses and reached out a groping hand. He opened his eyes and his gaze fell, even as his fingers closed over the telephone, upon the travelling clock beside it. The time was ten minutes to eight. He lifted the receiver and held it to his ear and growled. The telephone said: “Garrett? Gethryn here.”

  “Oh!” said Garrett, anger leaving him.

  The telephone said: “Sorry to wake you. Can you change that lunch appointment to breakfast?”