Pursuit of a Parcel: An Ernest Lamb Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  Antony crossed to the window and opened it, holding back the curtain. He said, “Come in, Con,” and Cornelius came in over the sill. The latch clicked to, the curtain dropped, and the light came on again. There was Anna’s room, with every bit of furniture shinning with polish, and there was Cornelius, looking as impassive as if he had come in by the front door and he and Antony had been meeting every day. He walked to the chair which had been Josef’s and sat down.

  “Well?” he said. “Anna said you wanted to see me. What is it all about? I notice she hasn’t provided any refreshment.”

  Antony laughed. “She’s a thrifty soul. I fancy she would say you had come here to see me, not to drink at her expense.

  Cornelius nodded. “Yes—Anna is like that. But she can be trusted, and that’s more than you can say about everyone.”

  Antony wondered whether it was more than could be said for Cornelius himself. He began to talk about the business that had brought him over—this and that information in the reports Cornelius had furnished—how he got them, where had he got them, and did anyone know that he had got them, and so forth.

  Cornelius took out a cigar and lit it. He let Antony talk and said nothing. When Antony had finished, he let go a mouthful of smoke and enquired, “Am I to understand that I am not giving satisfaction?”

  “I don’t know why you should say that. If your stuff’s correct it’s valuable—you must know that. What I’m here for is to check it over with you. There is a little vagueness about your sources of information, and they’d like it cleared up.”

  Cornelius produced a slow smile.

  “I saw the big little man in Berlin the other day, and allowing for the difference in phraseology, that is what he said too. I seem to be an object of suspicion to both sides.”

  Antony cocked an eyebrow. “If they really suspect you in Berlin, Con, why aren’t you dead?”

  “I may have been able to disarm his suspicions.” He paused, and added, “Why does Garrett suspect me?”

  “I didn’t say he suspected you. I said he wanted this stuff checked up. It’s too important to take any chances over. Come along, Con, tell me how you got it!”

  Cornelius said placidly, “I think I’d better tell him myself. The fact is I’m clearing out, and the sooner I clear the better for me. I suppose you didn’t get a parcel from me before you left?”

  “No, I didn’t. What kind of a parcel?”

  Cornelius still watched his cigar.

  “Oh, a very important parcel indeed—a parcel which is practically my life, in a nice strong box done up in brown paper and addressed to ‘Antony Rossiter, Esq. By Hand.’”

  Antony leaned forward. “Con—what are you talking about?”

  “My parcel,” said Cornelius. “I would like you to go back to England again as quickly as you can, because as long as you stay over here on this stupid inquisitive business which Colonel Garrett has sent you to pry into you are risking my life in a very dangerous way. You see, the little man knows what is inside the parcel, and he would guess that I should not be so stupid as to keep it in any place where he can get his hands on it. He does not kill me or put me in a concentration camp, because I have told him that if he does so, my parcel will begin to make things very unpleasant for him, and though he has a very unbelieving nature, I was able to convince him that this would be the case.”

  Antony looked at him quizzically. “I suppose you know what you’re talking about, Con. I don’t.”

  “It is not necessary,” said Cornelius in his grandest manner. He was once more the lordly elder brother giving his orders to the little boy who had adored him. “You will get back to England as quickly as you can. Some arrangement has been made, I suppose, for getting you back. Mr. Merridew will have the parcel, and it is marked to be given to you by hand, but I am very uneasy as long as you are over here. As I said before, I am being followed wherever I go. I think I got rid of him tonight. But it is no great matter—they will think I have an assignation with Anna—she is quite a handsome creature still. I hope I got rid of him the night I handed my parcel over in a waterside tavern. I took every precaution, but one can never be quite sure. If he has found out that it has gone to England—and I am afraid I cannot regard that as impossible—then he will stick at nothing to get it back.”

  “What’s inside?” Antony’s tone displayed a lively curiosity.

  Cornelius drew at his cigar and let out the smoke.

  “High explosive,” he said without any expression at all in his voice—“the sort that can blow a reputation to bits, and blow a man out of his job and land him in one of his own concentration camps. As long as that’s loose in the world, he can’t touch me without touching it off. You get home—and make sure you’re not followed when you fetch my parcel away.”

  “Good lord, Con—what do you want me to fetch it away for? Much better leave it in the guardian’s safe.”

  Cornelius shook his head. “At this time—when bombs fall every night in London? I don’t think so. If you could be quite sure that you were not followed, I should say take it out of London and find a safe place for it.”

  “I could put it in a country branch of my bank.”

  Cornelius shook his head again. “No building is safe from a bomb. I do not agree to any bank—it is these big important buildings that are hit everywhere. You must hide it, and you must be very careful. He has his agents still. You must not trust anyone at all, and if—” He dropped his voice to the lowest murmur. “Listen, Antony—”

  Chapter Four

  Doris Holt came in some time after her parents had finished their tea. She had a cashier’s job in a big drapery shop within half a mile of Adelaide Terrace. Like most other shops in the neighbourhood, they closed early enough to have allowed Doris to be in an hour ago.

  Mrs. Holt looked up and said nothing, but Emanuel frowned and said in a mild, troubled voice, “You’re late, Dor.”

  Doris tossed her head. She was very small, and light, and slim. Her ash-blonde hair fell curling on her neck in a page’s bob. A ridiculous little black felt hat clung precariously to one side of her head. She slipped out of her coat and stood up in the neat black frock which she wore in the shop. She had Emanuel’s small features as well as his fair colouring, but in her nineteenth year these things bloomed together in the fragile, evanescent prettiness which is to be seen in so many London girls. When she spoke, her voice was the voice of the London shop-girl, pretty and a little affected.

  “Oh, I just met someone, Dad.”

  Mrs. Holt had a slow smile for her.

  “And he saw you home. Better just hang your coat in the hall, ducks, and come along to your tea. There’s no saying when the sirens will go, and I like to get washed up first, especially when it’s fish.”

  Doris ate an excellent tea, and chattered all the time. The name of Mr. Miller kept bobbing up in her conversation, as a cork bobs up in a light rippling sea.

  “Mr. Miller says we’ll all be living underground by Christmas, any of us that’s left. He says these shelters we’ve got aren’t reelly any use at all. I told him about Dad and Mr. Smithers making one out at the back between the two houses, and he said it wouldn’t be the least bit of good—not when the bombs reelly started coming. Mr. Miller says we don’t know what it’s going to be like yet. He says they haven’t hardly begun, and he says if he was us he’d go to the big public shelter round the corner and not trust to a home-made thing like ours. And when I told him as often as not we just stayed here in the kitchen, well, he was reelly shocked.” She giggled a little and rolled her pale blue eyes. A very bright pale blue they were, like the blue of some rather fragile flower. “And what do you think he said, Mum?—he’s very goodlooking, you know—well, he just sort of fixed me with his eyes—it’s a pity he’s got to wear glasses—and he said real earnest, ‘Miss Doris’—I’m sure nobody could be more respectful than he is, reelly he’s quite a gentleman—‘Miss Doris,’ he said, ‘do let me ask you as a personal favour not t
o lose a moment after the sirens go. What would be my feelings,’ he said, ‘if anything was to happen?’ So I said, ‘I’m sure I don’t know, Mr. Miller,’ and he said, ‘There’s only one Doris Holt. Take care of her.’ Made me feel all gooey—it did reelly. So then he walked home with me.”

  “Who is Mr. Miller?” said Emanuel Holt in a vexed voice.

  Doris giggled. “Reelly, Dad—how you said that! Anyone would think—”

  “Well, we haven’t heard of him before, ducks—have we?” said Mrs. Holt.

  Doris giggled again. “Well, you couldn’t have, because I hadn’t heard of him myself, and the best girl ever can’t tell her Mum and Dad what she doesn’t know, can she?”

  “You didn’t let him pick you up, Doris!”

  “Reelly, Mum! As if I would! And if you want to know, it was Florrie Hicks came up to me just as we were coming out, and she said, ‘There’s a friend of mine wants to meet you.’ And there he was—ever so polite, and quite the gentleman.”

  Mrs. Holt looked at her with a comfortable smile. “And what’s Tom Hale going to say to so much Mr. Miller, ducks?”

  Doris coloured right up to the roots of her very fair hair. She was brilliantly pretty for a moment and her eyes shone.

  “What’s it got to do with Tom Hale whom I go with? I don’t care if I never see him again! I’m sick and tired of the very sound of his name!”

  Mrs. Holt continued to smile. “All right, ducks. Now what about another cup of tea?”

  The raiders were a little later than usual. Mrs. Holt had finished her washing up with ten minutes to spare before the sirens went wailing overhead. The family then adjourned to the shelter which they shared with the Smithers next door. It was a close fit, but Mr. Smithers, an elderly widower “living retired” as he himself put it, had an ingenious mind and a turn for carpentry. From first to last the shelter had been his peculiar care. Emanuel had merely paid his share of the bill and lent an inefficient hand with the digging. It was Mr. Smithers who had insisted on the extra inches of depth and a corresponding increase in the defensive layer of earth piled overhead. He had also with his own hands constructed bunks, so that each person was enabled to lie down. This had necessitated some careful dovetailing.

  Mr. Smithers, like all artists, was not fully satisfied with the result. He had provided five persons with the means of assuming a recumbent position, but it had not been possible to allow each of them a space of more than five-foot-six by eighteen inches in which to recline. He used to lie in his bunk and meditate upon the possibility of improving upon this arrangement.

  As soon as it was quiet enough to sleep, he slept. When roused by more bombs, he would plunge again in thought. His elderly sister, after plugging her ears with pink cotton wool and tying up her head first in a woollen scarf and then in a waterproof hood, slumbered peacefully irrespective of what might be happening outside. This made them ideal shelter-companions. The only thing was, as Mrs. Holt said, that it was really quite easy to forget that they were there.

  The shelter boasted a small electric bulb. It was Emanuel’s habit to pass the earlier part of the evening in improving his mind. Having perused with interest some statistics as to the limited number of words contained in the ordinary person’s vocabulary, he was now busily engaged in adding to his own. Opening a dictionary at random, he pursued the unfamiliar word with zest and interest, whilst Rosie knitted and Doris flicked over the pages of a magazine.

  “Now, Rosie, here’s one you won’t know, for I didn’t myself. Astonishing where they come across the words. Grave, Rosie—a transitive verb, but not, as you might imagine, the one which means to carve, puncture, or engrave, from the Old English grafan, cognate with groove, but another which has nothing to do with grafan at all. It comes from the Old French grève, a shore, and it means to clean the ship’s bottom by burning off accretions while aground or in a graving dock.”

  “Fancy that!” said Mrs. Holt.

  Doris giggled. “A lot of use a word like that’s going to be to you, Dad!”

  A deafening crash seemed to rock the shelter. When the noise had died away, Emanuel continued.

  “Very clever at describing things, they have to be, the people who write these dictionaries. Now how would you describe green, Rosie, if you were put to it?”

  Mrs. Holt looked up from the Air Force sock which she was knitting for her sister Emily’s second boy. “Green, Em?”

  “Green,” said Emanuel with the air of one who has put a poser and knows the answer.

  “Well, it’s just green, ducks.”

  “Ah, but if you were writing a dictionary you’d have to describe it, Rosie.”

  “Well, I don’t see what you’re going to say except that it’s green. And as to writing, I’m no great hand with a letter, let alone a dictionary, so I shouldn’t trouble my head.”

  “Well, this is what they say—and I must say I should never have thought of it myself—that’s why a dictionary is so improving. Here we are, ‘Green—adjective and noun. Of the colour between blue and yellow in the spectrum; coloured like grass, sea water, emerald, olive, etc.’ There! What do you think of that? Clever, I call it.”

  “If you know what a spectrum is.” Rosie’s tone disclaimed any desire for such knowledge.

  As Emanuel was about to turn to “Greffier—a registrar or notary,” there were half a dozen crashes in rapid succession, the first terrifyingly near, the last definitely and reassuringly farther away. Mrs. Holt laid down her knitting, and a comparative silence fell.

  “Em—did I turn off the gas at the meter?”

  “I don’t know, Rosie.”

  “You didn’t see me? Doris—did I turn off the gas?”

  “I don’t know, Mum.”

  “Well, I’ll just go and see.”

  Emanuel dropped the dictionary and slid out of his bunk.

  “You stay where you are, Rosie! It won’t take me a minute—I’ll go quicker than you.”

  The searchlights were all up as he emerged from the shelter. The back door was no more than a dozen feet away. He ran across and slipped in, putting up a hand to switch on the light.

  Nothing happened. He let the switch go up, and pulled it down again. Still no light. It went through his head in quite a matter-of-fact way that the power station must have been hit. He got out the little torch which always went with him to the shelter and discovered that the gas was off. Well, it wouldn’t have been like Rosie to leave it on.

  He was just going to open the back door again—had in fact stretched out his hand to do so—when, faint but unmistakable, he heard a footstep overhead.

  All at once he was afraid. His heart had not quickened when the bombs came crashing down. It struck now against his side with a thudding which made it difficult to breathe. It was a cold night—the lean-to scullery was cold, with its three outside walls and no room over it—but there was sweat on his temples and palms. He stood where he was and listened as well as he could for the drumming in his ears.

  The step was not directly overhead. It was very faint. There was nothing over the scullery. Bathroom and lavatory came next, over the kitchen. He thought the sound came more from the front of the house, from his and Rosie’s bedroom. But that meant a thief—

  He began to feel very angry indeed. Mean—that was the only word for it. It was a word which heartened him a good deal. You are angry with mean people, and you despise them. They don’t frighten you.

  He still had the torch in his left hand. But he wouldn’t turn it on—not yet. He didn’t need a torch to find his way across his own kitchen, but he kept a finger ready on the catch.

  The door into the kitchen was open. He skirted the table and opened the door into the passage, all without making a sound. Standing there, he listened, and heard what he had heard before, a footstep going to and fro upstairs, moving, and stopping, and going on again. Words and a picture came into Emanuel’s mind—“Looking for something”—and the picture of a man’s hand holding a torch and flicki
ng the beam of it here and there and everywhere. In his mind he could see the bright circle of light slide from Rosie’s crimson eiderdown to the pillows of the double bed, and from there to the washstand china—poppies and cornflowers on a cream ground—Rosie liked a bit or colour. It would pick up Rosie’s Bible on the table, her side of the bed, and her bedroom candlestick—you couldn’t put all your trust in electric light these days. And then what else was there for it to go flicking over and prying at? The old bow-front chest of drawers which Rosie had brought from the farm when she married—the built-in cupboard where she hung her clothes—two old chairs which had come with the chest—a looking-glass, and that was all. And you wouldn’t have to look long to know that it was all either. The lull held. He heard a drawer slide out and presently slide home again.

  His anger had gone cold on him whilst he stood there listening. He began to wish that he had clattered through the kitchen shouting. Of course he could do it still—but not so easy to clatter and shout in cold blood. And then, while he was wondering if he could screw himself up to it, the lull outside was violently broken by what sounded like three cracking claps of thunder right overhead. The ground jarred under his feet, and the house shook and rattled about him. Something in him—some force, some vehemence—was released. He flung the door he was holding back against the wall and ran towards the stairs calling out at the top of his voice, “Who’s there? Come down!”

  Like the apprentice who raised the devil, Emanuel’s command produced more than he had bargained for. A bright dancing light whirled out of the upper darkness, and an extremely solid body came charging down the stairs. The impact took Emanuel off his feet. His hand was wrenched from the newel. He lost his torch and fell flat on the hall linoleum. The front door opened and banged. Amidst the roar of the London barrage, now in full swing again, he picked himself up, tripped over his torch, and having recovered it, felt his way back into the scullery. Groping, his hand touched somebody’s face.