Читать книгу Blindfold - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 6

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Mr. Gilmore might be addicted to late hours, but he did not permit them to impair his efficiency. He was something in the Foreign Office—a very efficient and confidential something. Miles Clayton, entering upon him in an extremely hungry, cold, dirty, and disgruntled condition at somewhere about ten-fifteen, was immediately sucked into a vortex of energy which resulted in the almost instantaneous recovery of his luggage and the production of his lost note-case, minus the notes it had contained, but with his passport and letter of credit intact.

“Ordinary station thief. Little man—not up to handling a letter of credit. Note-case chucked away—too dangerous to keep. What about the numbers of the notes? Have you got them?”

Miles shook his head.

Mr. Gilmore frowned.

“Always take the numbers of notes,” he said. “I do. Train yourself to memorize them ... Not in the least—perfectly easy. Let your brain behave like a blancmange, and it will. Now better go and have a wash and a shave, and some sleep. Dine with me at the Luxe at eight.”

Miles was very glad to agree. He found a more modest hotel than the Luxe to stay at, wallowed in hot water, ate largely, and plunged into a deep and dreamful sleep. He didn’t dream very much as a rule—only when he was excited or tired out. He didn’t know when he had dreamed like this. Looking back afterwards, he couldn’t remember where one dream stopped and another began. He couldn’t really remember much about them, and the bits he remembered gave him the feeling that there was a great deal more that was hiding in the corners of his mind. In one of the dreams he was crawling through a long dark passage after a head which kept on rolling away. Not a nice dream. And then, after some indeterminate lapse of time, there were eyes glaring at him from the darkness and he was trying to catch them in a butterfly net. Why? What an ass one was in a dream.... And then someone said “Miss Macintyre” in a loud booming voice that went rolling about like lumps of thunder. And in the middle of it all there was a baby in his arms, and it looked up at him with incredibly solemn eyes and said, “You don’t know my name.” And after that he was running the gauntlet between two rows of girls who stretched from the Marble Arch to Waterloo Bridge. One of them was Miss Macintyre, but he didn’t know which. They shouted their names at him as he ran: “Joan—Alice—Una—Marion—Flossie.” Flossie. She said in a shuddering whisper, “There was a great black hole in the wall,” and he fell over the edge of the world into another dream.

It is a long way down over the edge of the world, but it is very quiet when you get there. There was a sound of water, and a sound of trees—soft running water, and slow waving trees.... Little Kay was there. It was years since he had thought about Kay.... He stayed in this dream for a long time very pleasantly.

Then he woke up and dressed, and went to dine with Mr. Gilmore at the Luxe.

It was a very good dinner, and he was still hungry. Somewhere between the fish and the entrée he found himself telling Gilmore about his wild goose chase.

“How many girls do you suppose there are in England at this minute between the ages of nineteen and twenty, Gil?”

“Ask the editor of Tit Bits,” said Gilmore. “His line, not mine. How many halfpennies does it take to reach the moon? If you stood all the policemen in the world one on top of the other, what would be the colour of the top one’s hair? Why is a mouse when it spins?”

“Do you suppose there are a million?”

“I hope not.”

“Well, half a million?”

“Why this morbid preoccupation with flappers?”

Miles shook his head.

“They’ve stopped flapping at nineteen and a half.”

“Anyhow, why?”

“Miss Macintyre,” said Miles. “I’ve been telling you all about her and you haven’t been listening. Mother vanished into the blue twenty years ago—had a baby in Hampstead and died.”

“I heard all that. Your boss wants to find the girl and leave her his money. How do you propose setting about it? Where are the clues?”

“Well there are three letters from Mrs. Macintyre, all written the same month, two before the baby was born and one afterwards. Knox Macintyre hadn’t opened any of them. The boss read them and handed them on to me. They were rather—heart-rending. I don’t know what they quarrelled about, but she wanted to make it up. That was the first letter, and she asked him to cable an answer. The next was a fortnight later. She was awfully worried because he hadn’t cabled. She was ill, and she was running out of money. She didn’t want to sell the jewels he had given her. She begged him to cable and come to her. The last was ten days later, just a scrawl in pencil. ‘Very ill. Do please come. Baby is a girl. So pretty.’ Well, that was all, except a letter which he had opened, from the landlady: ‘Dear sir, your wife died this morning. Please send money for funeral expenses and my account enclosed and oblige yours truly, Agnes Smith.’ Pretty grim, isn’t it? Knox must have been a hard nut.”

Gilmore nodded.

“Any address on the letters?”

“Oh yes—72 Laburnum Vale, Hampstead. But when I wrote to Mrs. Agnes Smith, the letter came back with Not known scrawled across it in blue pencil. So then the boss told me to come over and worry round.”

“Jewels——” said Gilmore meditatively. “She didn’t want to have to sell her jewels.... Any idea what they were? Likely to be noticeable if and when sold?”

“Very much so, I should think. I hunted up a couple of her women friends. Their eyes fairly popped when they were describing them. Item—a rope of black pearls. Item—a wreath of diamond laurel leaves, said to have belonged to the Empress Maria Theresa. Item—a pair of pink pearl earrings set with brilliants. Etcetera, etcetera.”

“The complete jewellers’ catalogue!” said Gilmore sardonically. “Well, you hike to Hampstead, you pursue pawnbrokers, you look for Mrs. Smith, who is probably dead. Net result a cable to New York: ‘Nothing doing.’ ”

“You’re a damping blighter, Gil.”

Gilmore shrugged his shoulders. His dark, lean face expressed an amused contempt.

“Twenty years—what optimism!”

Miles laughed a little. He was the same age as Gilmore, but there might easily have been seven or eight years between them—the important years between the late twenties and the middle thirties. When Gilmore smiled, the apparent gap increased. The smile brought out the lines which marked his face. Miles Clayton’s laugh made an undergraduate of him again. He had a boy’s fair hair and fresh complexion. It came as a surprise when his jaw set and his grey eyes looked out from under frowning brows. The boy was gone then, and his twenty-eight years could be credited. Just now he laughed.

“Optimism? Well, you’d say so if you knew when those letters were written.”

Gilmore’s eyebrows went up.

“July, 1914,” said Miles. “There was just going to be a tidy-sized war, Gil, in case you’ve forgotten. That mixes it a bit—doesn’t it?”

They had arrived at the sweet.

As Miles helped himself, Flossie Palmer was looking into the cracked mirror on her chest of drawers. The crack was high up in one corner, so it didn’t really matter. She had on a very bright pink dress which killed her delicate porcelain tints, but she considered it a complete success. She had painted her lips a brilliant cerise and darkened her eyebrows with a burnt match. She and Ernie were going to the palais de danse, and the immediate problem was to get out of the house without being seen by Aunt. Aunt would make her wash her face, to a cert she would. She already thought the dress too bright to be quite respectable. Aunt was so pertickler.

Flossie tilted the glass for a last good look. She wanted something round her neck, and she’d got nothing but her old beads. She took them out of the drawer and hung them round her neck—three times round and something to spare. A bit dull in colour. Old-fashioned too, going three times round like that. The grey looked rather nice hanging down over the bright pink of the dress. She put on her coat, listened at the top of the stairs, and ran down them quick and light to join Ernie in the street.

And at the same moment in the kitchen at 16 Varley Street Mrs. Green looked up at the kitchen clock.

“Getting on for nine o’clock. I thought it’d ha’ been later.”

She was addressing the new house-parlourmaid, who was still in her out-door clothes. They were very neat out-door clothes, but not very warm for the time of year—a dark blue coat and skirt, a grey scarf, and a little round grey cap. The hair under the cap was dark, very dark indeed. It waved away from an extremely pretty forehead. Mrs. Green, looking at her, thought the girl a deal too pretty for service—“Why, with her hair as black as that, her skin did ought to be dark. And look at it—white as privet! Show me a girl as pretty as that, and I’ll show you one that’ll get her head turned before you can say Jack Robinson.”

At the moment there did not seem to be any sign of head-turning or of what Mrs. Green called “ideas.” The dark blue eyes looked at her in an anxious, friendly manner.

“Do I have to do anything to-night?”

The girl’s voice increased Mrs. Green’s apprehension. Niminy-piminy she called it—for all the world like the young ladies in her last place, and all very well for young ladies. Actually, the voice was a pretty one.

“What did you say?” said Mrs. Green. “And I’ve forgot your name, what with that girl running out of the house like a mad thing last night, and only come in a matter of two hours before. And two others this month, and I don’t know what girls are coming to, I’m sure. And what did you say your name was?”

“Kay,” said the girl.

“Rubbidge!” said Mrs. Green. “There’s no such name!”

The very little beginning of a laugh changed the charming line of the lips into something more charming still. A dimple showed and was gone. She said sedately,

“It’s all I’ve got. Please, do I have to do anything to-night?”

“Half past ten,” said Mrs. Green, “you takes ’er Benger’s up. Half past ten to a tick she ’as it. And you don’t go in, not for nothing. You waits on the mat till Nurse opens the door and takes the tray.”

“I’ll just go and take off my things,” said Kay.