Читать книгу Dead or Alive - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 10

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“It sounds to me like a pack of nonsense!” said Garratt. He glared resentfully at Bill Coverdale and went on cramming tobacco into his pipe.

Bill leaned against the mantelpiece and waited. It wasn’t the slightest use arguing with Garratt, but when he had told you what a damned fool you were he would as a rule give you a fair innings. He waited therefore quite amiably until the pipe was alight.

Garratt tossed the match in the direction of the fireplace and missed it.

“A pack of twaddle-bosh!” he said rudely. “First you say you wouldn’t recognize the woman you saw with O’Hara, and then you come here and tell me you’ve recognized her.” Bill nodded.

“I recognized her all right.”

“Then why did you tell me you wouldn’t be able to?”

“I never said I wouldn’t know her. And when I saw this Delorne girl at the Luxe last night I recognized her at once—that is to say I recognized her lipstick.”

“You recognized her what?”

“Lipstick,” said Bill. “You know—the stuff girls put on their mouths.”

He got a baleful glance.

“How do you mean you recognized it? Every woman in London plasters herself with the stuff!”

“Oh—you’ve noticed that? Then perhaps you’ve noticed that the stuff isn’t all the same colour. This particular brand wasn’t. It was pink, a sort of flannelette pink, and the minute I saw it I knew that I’d seen it before. And I knew when—and where.”

“Well?”

“The night before I sailed last year—that’s when. And just beyond Robin O’Hara in a taxi—that’s where.”

Garratt pulled at his pipe.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You can’t be!”

Bill picked up the spent match and dropped it amongst the wood and coal of the unlighted fire.

“Well, there’s some corroborative evidence—”

“Why didn’t you say so?” snapped Garratt.

Bill laughed a little.

“Just waiting for you to say your piece,” he said.

“Well, what is it? I suppose you know I’ve got a job to get on with. What’s your evidence? Trot it out!”

“Well, Meg O’Hara obviously recognized the girl—saw her, and didn’t want to see her—dropped her handkerchief and turned away to pick it up just as we were passing Miss Delorne. Then when I pressed her she said she knew who she was. She gave me her name—Della Delorne—and when I went on pressing her she told me she’d seen her with Robin O’Hara.” He hesitated, and then went on with some change of voice. “It’s no good trying to keep things back in an affair of this kind, so you’d better know that she was going to sue for a divorce. O’Hara was a rotten husband. He was a cruel devil, you know, and she’d have been well quit of him. I gathered that Della Delorne would have been the co-respondent.”

Garratt blew out another cloud of smoke. He looked through it sharply at Bill Coverdale and said,

“How much did you know of this when you—recognized her?”

“I didn’t know any of it.”

“Sure of that?”

“Oh, quite sure.”

“And after you recognized this girl’s lipstick Mrs O’Hara gave you to understand that she was going to have cited her as co-respondent—if O’Hara hadn’t disappeared?”

“That’s what it amounted to.”

“All right,” said Garratt, “we’ll get on to her. You’ve probably made a mistake, and we shan’t get anything out of it, but we’ll try a cast or two. Good-bye—I’m going out.”

Bill laughed again.

“I’d hate to keep you, but it might interest you to know that I was shot at last night.”

On his way to the door Garratt stopped and came about with a jerk.

“You were what?”

“Oh, just shot at—on my way home—in a nice convenient backwater where the local inhabitant is warranted to sleep through anything from an air raid to the day of judgment.”

Garratt came back with a scowl on his face.

“Are you fooling?”

Bill looked mildly innocent.

“Certainly not.”

“Then tell me in plain English what happened.”

Bill told him. Before he got very far Garratt produced a map, and he had to start again and trace the way he had taken step by step.

“Minnett’s Row—” Garratt jabbed with his thumbnail at the thin black line which represented the lane of crowding houses where Bill had stood to see who would come out of the darkness of the alley-way. “Morton’s Alley, and Minnett’s Row.” Garratt jabbed again.

“It hadn’t anything to do with the street,” said Bill. “I cut up the alley because I thought I was being followed, and I wanted to know who was after me. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I’d been followed all the way from the flat.”

Garratt snapped out a single word—“Why?”

“Well, I was about here”—it was Bill’s turn to put a finger on the map—“when I began to think someone was trailing me, and the minute I began to think about it I felt pretty sure I’d been hearing him behind me all the time.”

“And the footstep came after you through the alley into the row, and then fired a pistol at you point blank and missed you clean? You weren’t drunk, I suppose?” Garratt’s tone was in the last degree offensive.

“I was not—I hadn’t even taken a drink. And you’ve got it all wrong. He didn’t miss me clean—he took the skin of the top of my ear, and I walked home bleeding like a pig.”

Garratt cast an unsympathetic eye upon the wound.

“The fellow must be a damn bad shot. Sure you didn’t cut yourself shaving?”

Bill Coverdale straightened up and went back to the hearth.

“Have it your own way,” he said. “I thought I’d just tell you—that’s all.”

Garratt glared at the map for a moment, and then gave it a shove which sent it off on to the floor.

“Any idea who it could have been?” he said.

“None.”

“No one with a grudge against you?”

Bill shook his head.

“Not that sort of grudge.”

“You didn’t get into a mess in Chile?”

Bill laughed.

“No good trying to drag Chile in.”

Garratt walked round the table, picked up the map, folded it with a ruthless disregard for the way in which it was meant to be folded, and banged it down upon his blotting-pad. Then he came over to Bill and prodded him in the chest with a nubbly forefinger which felt exactly like a piece of an iron gas-pipe.

“Who was it? Who do you think it was? You were thinking of someone when you were telling me. Who was it?”

Bill made a slight movement of the shoulders which could not have been called a shrug.

“I thought about O’Hara, but it couldn’t have been O’Hara.”

“O’Hara?” said Garratt explosively. “Damned nonsense!” He went over to where he had left the map, took it across to a book-case at the far side of the room, and jammed it in between a Who’s Who and a Burke’s Peerage. Then he looked over his shoulder with a scowl and said sharply, “Damned nonsense! O’Hara’s dead!”