2
“Did I wake you?” said the telephone.
“Yes,” said Spencer Hastings bitterly. “Get to hell! What d’you want?”
“Dyson,” said the telephone. “And Flood.”
“They’re busy,” said Hastings, now not so much himself as editor and half owner of The Owl.1
“What on?” said the telephone.
The editor said: “Eh—oh—I——”
The telephone said: “Come out of the manger. I need ’em.”
“Right!” Hastings was fully awake now. “What’s on?”
“You should know,” said the telephone.
“Good Lord!” Hastings was astonished. “You don’t mean——”
The telephone interrupted. “So if you’d have ’em sent down as soon as they get to the office I’d be glad. G’bye.”
3
Garrett stood before the writing table in Anthony’s library. Upon the blotter there was now spread an inch-scale sectional map whose centre was the green of Shepherd’s Bush. Anthony tapped with a forefinger upon a spot somewhat to the left of this. He said:
“I chose a point roughly halfway between the bus stop here and Goldhawk Market, which is here. I then took a compass and used this spot as the centre and drew a half-inch or half-mile circle.” He looked at the studiously blank face of his guest and a little smile twitched momentarily at the corner of his mouth.
Garrett said with a stolidity of tone which did him credit: “I’m afraid I don’t see we’ve got much further—except, purely presumptively, to narrow our search to a mile-wide circle of what seems to be a very densely populated part of this city. And as we still don’t know—and how could we if you come to think of it?—what the woman looks like or what she’s called . . .”
He let his voice trail off into silence and Anthony’s smile became a laugh.
“I’m afraid I don’t see the joke,” said Garrett stiffly.
“There isn’t one,” said Anthony. “I apologize. But I’m pleased with myself. I’ve got something we can get any number of teeth into. And it’s not only a new fact, it’s also corroborative of this district”—he tapped the map with a forefinger, right on the inch-wide circle—“being the right one.” Garrett said: “Go on! Go on!”
Without speaking Anthony opened the centre drawer of the table. His right hand went into it and came away bearing a six-inch square of white cardboard. Garrett, looking with puzzled eye, saw that in the centre of this was neatly pasted the yellow, irregularly edged slip of paper which bore the shopping list.
“You said your exhibits would tell us nothing,” said Anthony and pointed to the list. “But that, my lad, shouts information !”
“Eh!” said Garrett and frowned and picked up the cardboard gingerly. He stared at the paper pasted to it. He said:
“But it’s just a shopping list. We all——”
Anthony interrupted. “Read it out. And construe.” Garrett held the cardboard nearer to his eyes. He said hesitantly: “Tea.’ That’s easy. Then ‘one sit. bttr.’ I didn’t know what that meant until you told me, salt butter. ‘P.ons.’ I remember you or Hastings said that was pickled onions. The next means a quart of shrimps. Then one half pound of sausages; then matches; then a leg of lamb and one pound of—of—I can’t remember what you said, something——”
“Suet,” said Anthony and grinned.
“That’s it!” Garrett looked from the cardboard to Anthony’s face and then back. He studied the list again, his lips moving as he repeated each item to himself. He said at last: “Sorry, I don’t see.”
Anthony said: “I don’t blame you. In your enlightened country any sort of foodstuff can be bought on Sunday. Here the only shops which are open on Sunday are sweetstuff shops, occasional chemists, what you’d call delicatessens and tobacconists. There are some others, of course, but they don’t matter here. . . . Now look!”
Garrett obeyed; only to glance up again after a moment. He shook his head and lifted his shoulders. He said:
“It’s no use! I see what you mean but I don’t see what the effect is. You mean that there are some things on the list—I suppose butter and meat and suet—that she couldn’t have bought that day. But I still . .
Anthony said: “You’re getting close. But the real point isn’t so much the impossibility of buying certain things on Sunday; it’s this—that whoever wrote this list knew that impossibility. A shopping list written on a scrap of paper torn from a magazine and thrust into a glove isn’t a shopping list for the morrow; it is, almost inevitably, a shopping list for the same day and the same trip for which the glove is put on—because no woman, under normal circumstances, carries anything in a glove which isn’t for immediate use. In other words we can assume that the woman of the glove was going to translate the list into commodities before returning home. We know that she put the list into her glove on Sunday and that therefore this was Sunday shopping—a fact borne out by all the list except the last two entries, for only those are impossible of Sunday purchase. She can’t have been ignorant of the fact that it was Sunday, because such ignorance, in this still Sabbatical town, is impossible even to a half-witted child. Therefore this is, on all heads, a Sunday list. Therefore lamb and suet—particularly the first, are intruders and unbelievable intruders. Follow?”
Garrett nodded but between the eyes which were fixed upon Anthony was still a frown compounded of bewilderment and disbelief. He said:
“It sounds all right. But lamb and suet are there!”
“That,” said Anthony, “is where you’re wrong. They are not there!” He opened the middle drawer of the table again and from it took a reading glass. He said: “Take that and have another look.”
“Listen!” Garrett said. “If you think I lived with that thing for days and didn’t look at it under a glass you must be——” He checked himself. “You must think I’m dumber than I am! If what you’re trying to tell me is that the last two items on the list weren’t written at the same time as the others, or were written with a different pencil, you can save yourself the trouble.” His tone showed him almost beyond pretence of civility. “I didn’t happen to mention it when I gave it to you because I thought anyone could see it with half an eye.”
Anthony looked at him. “I see. How d’you account for it then?”
Garrett said: “I thought it was simple. I thought it meant that at some period the owner of the list suddenly remembered the meat and the suet and added them on.”
“And that roughness in those entries,” said Anthony. “You can see what I mean with the naked eye, but better under the glass.”
Garrett stared at him. “Written on a rough surface. Against a wall, maybe. Or on anything which wasn’t smooth.”
“Say a handbag?”
Garrett laughed; a harsh little sound. “No. I’ve thought about this business, you know! Not a handbag. Because if she’d had a handbag she’d have put the list into that and not into her glove.”
“Possibly,” said Anthony softly, “someone else’s handbag. And, also possibly, in a moving vehicle. If you look carefully you’ll see that the letters—especially the m in ‘lamb’ and the h just before ‘St’—are shakily made.”
Now Garrett did look, bending over the card on the table and using the glass. He said grudgingly:
“It’s possible.” He straightened and turned once more to face his host. “But it doesn’t alter anything. It merely means that she may have written this in a train or a bus or a car.”
“And on a Sunday?” Anthony’s tone was meek.
“I don’t . . .” began Garrett and then checked himself. His right hand rubbed reflectively at the back of his head. He said in a sudden little burst of words:
“Look here, will you tell me what you’re driving at?”
Anthony smiled. “Sorry. I love to be mysterious and reveal all in the last chapter. . . . Let’s recapitulate. First, the day the woman put this in her glove was Sunday. Second, the last two items on the list a
re the only ones not purchasable on Sunday. Third, she has no foreign accent and therefore knows the Sunday shopping laws. Fourth, she added the last two items to this Sunday shopping list in a moving vehicle and so had to press the paper upon a rough surface which, as there is nothing in a tube train or bus which will fill the bill, was most probably the outside of a woman’s handbag. Fifth, she carried no handbag herself or she would not have put the list in her glove. . . . Add those five points together and I think you’ll agree that the last two entries do not refer to a leg of lamb and a pound of suet. As a corollary to all that I’ll add this—that once it had dawned on me that the last two lines were not what they seemed it also dawned upon me that, if they had been, they’d have been most curious. Because legs of lamb don’t fit at all with the sort of larder that goes in for half pounds of salt butter and small quantities of pickled onions. Further, it’s unlikely that this sort of larder would buy, at one and the same time, sausages and lamb.”
Garrett had picked up the card again and was looking at it. When he spoke his excitement was audible. He said:
“But what are these last two things?”
Anthony said: “Think. Our woman who (a) has no bag with her, (b) is unlikely to be buying legs of lamb and (c) wouldn’t try to buy a leg of lamb on a Sunday, takes a bus to Notting Hill and while in the bus writes something at the bottom of her shopping list, using someone else’s bag to write upon. But, since it cannot be shopping which she is adding to her shopping list, why should she write at all in the bus? Because it is something which she has suddenly thought of, and wants to remember, which has been brought to her attention while on the bus. Now, bearing all that farrago in mind, consider the actual words that she wrote. ‘L. Lamb’ and ‘1 Lb. St.’ We thought, because we saw it in conjunction with a shopping list, that these last meant leg of lamb and one pound of suet. I maintain that what they really mean is: Miss, or Mrs, Lucy, or Letitia or Lettice or Lulu or Lola or what the L you like, Lamb, who lives at Number I ‘Lb.’ Street.”
“Great God!” said Garrett.
“You see,” Anthony said, “it all fits. The bus, the bag and the Lamb. . . . If you write something, on the only bit of paper you have, when you’re on a bus, and you put the paper on a bag that you’ve had to borrow, I think it’s a reasonable seventy-five-out-of-a-hundred chance that you’re writing down the address of someone you’ve met in that bus. Now what sort of someone? It might be an acquaintance made during the bus ride but you’re only having a twopenny ride and that doesn’t seem long enough to get to the addresswriting stage: it’s more probable, therefore, that the address is that of a friend of other days and the same sex whom you’ve just met again.”
“God!” said Garrett again. “It’s grand. It doesn’t matter a damn, Gethryn, whether it was a sudden woman acquaintance, a man she picked up or an old friend of either sex! It doesn’t matter if it was a hermaphrodite! Whoever it was is going to be able to tell us something. If we——”
Anthony grinned. “Hold your horses! What sort of a street d’you think ‘Lb.’ stands for?”
Garrett stared at him. “I wouldn’t know that. You have damn funny street names anyway.” Anxiety took the place of irritation in his tone. “Do you mean you can’t . . .”
“I mean,” said Anthony, “that I can’t see Lb. as an abbreviation for any word likely to be the name of any London street. And if those two letters are Lb. we’ve got the devil of a job in front of us because it’d mean that we’re dealing with an abbreviation which is unreasonable. I haven’t yet looked through the London Directory but I’ll bet you a pound to a dollar there aren’t more than two streets beginning with l and ending b. And no street which begins with Lb. . . ”
“Hell,” said Garrett, and two words more.
“Quite,” said Anthony. “But look again through the glass at those two letters before the St. of ‘street.’ When our minds were on shopping we naturally saw Lb. But now I want to think that b is really another l.”
Garrett snatched up the glass and bent again over the card. He said almost at once:
“It might be! It might quite easily be. . . . Damn it, it’s got to be. . . .”
“Zeal, all zeal, Mr Easy!” Anthony crossed to the table and sat upon its edge. “But let’s take it as a double l for a minute. And let’s take something else. This isn’t unassailable logic but I think it’s fair presumption. If Miss X meets Miss Lamb on a bus near Miss X’s home or place of constant visiting and writes Miss Lamb’s address down in such extremely abbreviated form, it argues, both by reason of this extreme abbreviation and by reason of the coincidence of meeting on the bus, that Miss Lamb is living in the same neighbourhood as Miss X. If Miss Lamb were living in quite another district it would not only make the coincidence of their meeting on this bus far greater, but it would also tend, I think, to make Miss X write down the address more fully. I say, therefore, that our first step is to enlarge the circle which I’ve drawn on that map and then look inside it for all streets beginning with a double l.”
“But look here,” said Garrett and then was cut short by sounds from outside the door—the closing of another door; men’s feet upon parquet flooring; a rap upon the door of the room in which they were.
Anthony smiled. “Reinforcements,” he said and then, raising his voice: “Come in!”
“Don’t worry, we’ll go right in.”
The door opened to admit two men. The first was tall and thin and stooping and was clad in a stained and dirty raincoat from beneath which there came down two shapeless cylinders of ancient, maculate grey flannel. He carried a tortured bundle of greenish-grey felt which might have been a hat and around his neck was a woollen muffler of the colour of whole-meal bread. From the folds of this protruded a head like that of an eagle with a sense of humour and lank black hair. A pair of the largest horn-rimmed glasses which Garrett had ever seen bestrode the fierce beak, enlarging dark eyes which were at once heavy lidded and alert.
The second visitor was as different from the first as well could be; a youngish-looking man, clad with beautiful ease in brown, rich tweed, with a round and smooth and freshly coloured face, very sleek blond hair, rather prominent light blue eyes and a trim solidity of body which made him seem shorter than his real height—in short, what would have been a picture of healthy, pleasant, rather fatuous young English manhood save for the lines about the mouth and the gleam of tired and doubting humour in the light blue eyes.
“I want you two,” said Anthony, “to meet Mr Sheldon Garrett. Garrett, Mr Dyson; Mr Flood.”
In that order the first man nodded his eagle’s head; the second came forward and held out his hand and clasped Garrett’s and shook it firmly.
“Dyson and Flood,” said Anthony, “are going to help us.” He looked at the two. “At least I think they are. Anything interesting on?”
Dyson shook his head, drawing down the corners of his wide, thin-lipped mouth. Flood said:
“There isn’t anything interesting. Not any more.”
“Sit down,” said Anthony. “And I’ll change your minds.” They sat, Dyson collapsed into a corner of the big leathern sofa chair with one hand hiding his spectacles, Flood neatly upright in a high-backed chair. Anthony addressed them. He was brief and lucid and extremely careful of details—but he came at last to the end. He surveyed his visitors and said: “Now is there anything interesting? Have a drink?”
“Yes,” said Dyson without taking his hand away from his face. “And yes.”
Flood said: “So the first step is Ll Street? . . . Thanks, I believe I will.”
4
Dyson took a glass from his lips. “Need a street directory,” he said.
Flood nodded.
“All done,” said Anthony. “We’ve got five alternatives on the LI line. Lloyd Street. Llewellyn Street and Llowndes Street—though what a name like that’s doing down there is puzzling—and Lowell Street and Laval Street.”
Dyson’s collapsed length seemed suddenly to have
received, from source unknown, a revivification; at one moment he had been lying back collapsed, at the next he was on his feet.
Flood rose too. He took out a linen handkerchief and neatly wiped his mouth and put the handkerchief away again. Dyson looked at him. Without a word they went towards the door, opened it and were gone. It shut behind them.
Garrett looked at his host with raised brows.
Anthony said: “We’ll hear. . . . Come and meet my son.”
CHAPTER VIII
A SMALL NEAT MOTORCAR with bright blue paint and gleaming fittings turned into the Hammersmith end of Lloyd Street. It hesitated at the corner, slid along the left-hand curb and then, after a moment, shot directly across the road and repeated the performance. Seeming to regain sanity, it crossed to its proper side and purred easily down the street. At the farthermost end it stopped and there emerged from it a young man in admirable clothes of brown tweed. He looked this way and that along the street and then up at the door of the first house; a door which once had been green but which now was of an indeterminate putty colour flecked by streaks of grey where time and weather had entirely removed its paint.
The young man ran up the steps, He looked upon each side of the door for a bell and, finding none, put his hand to a knocker of wrought iron which hung by only one screw. A hollow sound came and he waited. After a minute he knocked again; then again waited. He inclined his head towards the door and seemed to be listening. He straightened himself and knocked with considerable force, this time using the side of a gloved fist.
No sound had come from behind it but the door was suddenly opened with a violence which sent its inner handle crashing against the wall of the passage. Flood blinked and saw that there stood framed in the doorway a short square man clad in blue trousers too large for him and grey shirt too small. The trousers were held neither by belt nor braces, and their nether ends hung down in a series of elephantine folds. The shirt, buttonless, gaped across a rufus-thatched chest and its sleeves were rolled up over a pair of abnormally muscled forearms. In the left hand was an open book whose large print afforded to Flood’s quick eye a surprising glimpse of Latin verse. From the massive shoulders rose a short thick neck almost wholly hidden by the ragged edge of a bright red beard, and from beneath bushy brows of the same improbable colour two fierce little eyes shot fire.
Warrant for X Page 7
