Читать книгу Danger Calling - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 10

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Monday got up in a fog. Lindsay looked at the blurred outline of the houses opposite and wondered if Peel Anderson would start, but when he reached Croydon it was clearer and the Channel report gave visibility as fair.

Poole had insisted on coming to see him off. He looked more wooden than usual. He held on to Lindsay’s suit-case till the last moment. Lindsay could very well have done without his presence. He had to make a fuss about being strapped in, lose his temper, and make a fool of himself. Poole made him self-conscious. In the end Lindsay of course gave way.

They pushed off, and he carried with him an uncomfortable feeling that Poole must have thought he was making an ass of himself. It was about eight years since he had flown. To be candid, he had always disliked it extremely, and could have wished that a flying accident were not so much the simplest and most convincing way of killing him off.

Mr Smith’s plan was simple in the extreme. Peel Anderson would discard him at an agreed spot. Subsequently—for publication—while passing over the Channel he would look round and find his passenger gone. It would be conjectured that he had unstrapped himself and come to grief. Lindsay hoped that it would pass as an accident; he did not want to be a suicide if it could be avoided. But that was one of the things that had to be chanced.

They came out of fog into mist, and out of mist into haze. Presently there was just a white coverlet lying close down over the countryside with trees and church spires sticking up out of it. Peel Anderson was steering for a place where he had made a forced landing a few months before. The sun was out, and the sky blue overhead as they came down in a wide meadow where the last of the mist lay on the grass like rime.

Lindsay stood and watched the plane rise and take the air again. A high, thin sunlight caught the wings, the roaring beat in his ears and droned away. He watched till what had been an aeroplane was a distant bird, a speck of flying dust, and then just nothing at all.

He turned and walked across three fields, and came to the road. The whole thing had gone very well. He had left his leather coat behind, and presently Peel Anderson would drop it into the sea. Instead, he had over his arm the Burberry provided for him to change into. He put it on, drew a muffler up round his chin, climbed through a hedge, and walked down the road at a brisk pace. He was glad enough to walk, for there is nothing quite so cold as fog. He walked for four miles and hardly saw a soul. A car or two went by, and he passed a man ploughing; he looked as small as a doll in the middle of the immense brown empty field.

Lindsay soon got warm, and just as he could see by a straggle of cottages and a church spire that he was coming to a village, a car ran out of it going dead slow. It passed Lindsay by about half a dozen yards and then stopped. He turned round and went back.

“I wonder if you can tell me the time,” he said.

The driver was a youngish man with a bright, hard eye and a tight mouth. He said,

“You’ve made quite good time;” and then, “Would you care about a lift?”

This was according to plan, and Lindsay had his answer ready.

“To Notting Hill?”

“Righto!” said the driver; after which Lindsay got in at the back and slammed the door.

The car was a saloon. He leaned back in the corner. So that was that. He had stopped being Lindsay Trevor, but he had not yet begun to be Trevor Fothering. It felt queer to be nobody. A couple of lines of Matthew Arnold’s floated through his head:

“Two worlds—one dead, the other powerless to be born.”

He felt rather like that.

The man who drove the car had not got that tight mouth for nothing. He did not utter a single word during the whole run. After passing Notting Hill station he turned off to the left and presently stopped at a neat, inconspicuous house in an inconspicuous street. He did not speak then, but as soon as Lindsay was out of the car he turned and drove away.

Lindsay rang the bell. He was to ask for Miss Agnes, and when the door opened he guessed at once that it was she who had opened it. She had grey hair and grey eyes, and a tall buxom figure in a rather old-fashioned grey dress. She looked like somebody’s nicest aunt, and when Lindsay said, “I was to ask for Miss Agnes,” she smiled one of the pleasantest smiles that he had ever seen. He found her a very pleasant person.

After producing bacon and hot coffee, she showed him to a comfortable room with a fire, and said she was afraid it would be rather dull, but she thought he had better stay there.

About an hour later she fetched him upstairs to the bathroom and dyed his hair in the most efficient manner. She used a double henna shampoo, left it on for half an hour, and then rinsed it in soda to set the colour. It came out a flaring ginger, which she compared with a clipping of Trevor Fothering’s hair, to her satisfaction and Lindsay’s disgust. She did his eyebrows too, and altered their shape very slightly. By tweezing out some of the hairs she gave them an upward twist.

Lindsay looked at himself in the glass and felt that she had been almost too successful. He would not have believed that anything could have so robbed him of his own identity. He certainly wasn’t himself any more, and he was quite willing to take her word for it that this was what Froth looked like now.

Miss Agnes appeared to be very much pleased with her handiwork.

“But you must remember to let your lower lip hang down a little on the left. And you mustn’t look too cheerful—not at first at all events. When everyone is quite used to you, you won’t need to be so particular, but at first you will have to remember all the time. You mustn’t look too intelligent, you know. Mr Fothering is not a very intelligent person. He can be sharp, but he is not intelligent.”

Lindsay laughed.

“You must keep your voice high,” said Miss Agnes, turning on the cold tap to rinse out the bath. “And remember your cousin only knows the amount of French that a boy brings away from his public school. He doesn’t know any German, or any other language at all.”

Lindsay spent the rest of the day in this odd niche between his two worlds getting used to a codfish mouth and carroty hair. At half past seven he and Miss Agnes sallied out together on foot. He wore the Burberry, a soft hat rammed well down, and a scarf pulled well up. The evening was damp and misty. It was warmer. By and by the mist would probably turn to rain.

Lindsay bought a paper, and stood for a moment under a street lamp to find the headlines he was looking for. They stared him in the face:

SHOCKING AIR FATALITY. DEATH OF PROMISING

YOUNG AUTHOR. BRIDEGROOM WHO WAS TO

HAVE BEEN MARRIED ON SATURDAY.

He ran his eye down the column. Peel Anderson seemed to have played up all right. His statement was according to plan. He had looked back in mid Channel and had been horrified to find his passenger gone. Mr Trevor had objected to being strapped in, and had only given way under protest. He was afraid etc. etc. He had seen Mr Trevor after passing the coast-line. He had not noticed whether he was strapped in then—and so forth and so on.

“I don’t think you’d better stand under the light,” said Miss Agnes.

They proceeded on their way and presently arrived at the nursing home which had been sheltering Trevor Fothering for the last ten days. They were expected, for Mr Fothering’s nurse opened the door at the first touch of the knocker. She had bright hair, a blue dress that matched her eyes, and an air of clean efficiency. She put them in a little room on the right, took Lindsay’s Burberry, scarf and hat, and went out again, shutting the door. She had not spoken a word.

They heard her run upstairs, and in two or three minutes footsteps came down again—the steps of more than one person. When she heard them, Miss Agnes got up, took Lindsay’s hand in a nice strong clasp, said “Good luck!” and went out. Through the open door he caught a glimpse of his late Burberry—just that and nothing more. His intelligence supplied him with the information that Froth was inside it. No, not Froth—William Jones—William Jones who was going to Madeira. From now on he himself was Froth. His new world had been born, and it lay around him to explore.

He heard the front door shut on Miss Agnes and William Jones. Then his door opened and the nurse beckoned him. She did not wait for him, but ran lightly up the stairs and into a room on the left of the landing.

Lindsay followed her into what was quite evidently Trevor Fothering’s empty room. Afterwards he thought that was the oddest moment in the whole change over. There were all Froth’s things lying about—a suit-case half packed on the chair at the foot of the bed; an open drawer, with letters and cigarettes; some loose coins on the dressing-table; his brushes—sponge—pyjamas. Lindsay had, as it were, to assimilate all this, to be able to think of these things as his own. And Lord—how it went against the grain!

He had forgotten to shut the door, and the nurse came over and pushed it to. Then she took a good look at him from not more than a yard away. Lindsay returned the compliment. She was undeniably pretty, and was undeniably capable; but somehow he did not think he would have wanted to be nursed by her if he were really ill.

“Well,” she said, “she’s made a pretty good job of you.”

“Do you think I’ll do?”

“Yes, you’ll do all right. If I hadn’t just seen him go out of the door, I might have been taken in myself. You needn’t be afraid—you’ll put it across all right. Of course, to anyone who knew him well, there’d be the sort of difference that you can’t put into words. What I mean is, I should think you weren’t really alike in your characters.”

“And what makes you think that?”

She laughed.

“Well, I can’t imagine anyone picking him out for the sort of job you’ve got in hand—he hasn’t the nerve.”

“Nerve or not, it was his job,” said Lindsay—“so I suppose someone did pick him for it.”

She laughed again.

“He picked himself. Didn’t they tell you? He told me all about it. When the last man threw up the job, he was in Paris, and he’d scraped some acquaintance with Restow. Well, he wrote on his own to the department, told them something he’d picked up, and offered to supply them with information. He’d done an odd job or two before, but nothing big. He knew the man who had just thrown the case over, and he fished for it—at least that’s what he told me.”

Lindsay was thinking that he ought to have met Trevor Fothering and picked his brains. He had said so to Miss Agnes, but she would not hear of it. He said so now to the nurse.

“Much too great a risk,” she said.

“I don’t see why.”

“He doesn’t know about you. He doesn’t know, and he isn’t to know.”

Lindsay was a little startled.

“What does he know?”

“Only that he’s being got out of the country. He’s in such a blue funk that’s all that interests him.”

“Do you know why he is in a blue funk?” he asked quickly.

“No, I don’t. He’d talk quite freely up to a point, and then he’d shut up like a clam.”

“He didn’t say anything?”

“He liked talking about himself, and he liked talking about Restow up to a point, but he wouldn’t go beyond it. We shouldn’t know there was anything to know if he hadn’t talked in his sleep.” She hesitated for a second and then added, “I made notes. I suppose you’ve seen them?”

He had the notes in his pocket. Presently, when he was alone, he sat on the edge of the bed and read them over again.

“Midnight. F—— muttering. Words here and there: ‘Restow—francs.’ Muttering: ‘I can’t!’ Muttering: ‘No—no—no!’ Screamed and woke. Held my wrist and kept on saying ‘I thought they’d got me!’ I said, ‘Who?’ He said, ‘Is that you, nurse? Give me something to drink.’ Dozed. Woke again screaming. Said the same thing: ‘I thought they’d got me!’ I asked, ‘Why should they want to get you?’ He said, ‘I know too much. They don’t trust me. I wish——’ Stopped. Presently dozed. Later, muttering again: ‘If she knows—she doesn’t know—she doesn’t know anything—I swear she doesn’t—no!’ Louder: ‘No!’ Screaming: ‘No!’ Muttering again: ‘If you touch her—I haven’t—I tell you I haven’t—I’ll do anything.’ Muttering.”

It wasn’t very illuminating. He felt that he wanted to know who “She” was, and he thought that on the whole the disjointed sentences pointed to Froth having been got at. It looked as if “she,” whoever she might be, had been used to put the screw on him.

Lindsay learnt the notes by heart and destroyed them. He could not very well take them with him to Restow’s house.

He was not, after all, to go down to Rillbourne. One of the letters in the drawer was from Restow, telling his secretary to meet him at his town house. It wasn’t quite clear when Restow himself expected to arrive. The letter was typed, and signed with some thick black markings rather like cuneiform which did duty for “Algerius Restow”. Lindsay wondered what they had been written with—perhaps the butt end of the pen.

He slept in Froth’s bed, and did not dream at all. In the morning he put on Froth’s clothes—his own would go back to Miss Agnes—and in the evening he got into a taxi with Froth’s luggage and drove to No 1 Blenheim Square. He could have wished that he had been going to Rillbourne—he could not have said why. It was farther off; but that wasn’t exactly a reason.

He sat in the taxi, and would have given anything in the world to be out of the adventure. The whole thing was the purest madness. Within twenty-four hours he would be exposed as an impostor and, his identity once out, the laughing-stock of London. Like a jigging squib the thought racketed through his mind—“Oh, printer’s ink! What an advertisement for my book!”

The squib went out in a stench of sulphur. He would certainly never be able to show his face again. A desert island in the Caribbean and anonymity for life loomed towards him from the darkling future. He had colder feet than he had ever had before in his life.

When the taxi stopped he got out, beheld magnificent steps flanked by crouching lions, and, ascending, pressed a bell in the centre of a marble flower. Before he had time to draw his hand back the door opened and a couple of footmen appeared.

Lindsay remembered suddenly that he was not Lindsay at all but Froth—Froth! He had carroty hair and a codfish mouth.

He must keep his voice high.

He was Restow’s secretary.

He was Froth.

All these thoughts appeared simultaneously and with perfect distinctness.

He pitched his voice high and said,

“I am Mr Restow’s secretary, Mr Fothering. Has Mr Restow arrived?”

As soon as he had spoken, the worst moment was over. What to him was a plunge into adventure was to Restow’s household a mere unnoticed addition to its numbers. He heard that Restow had not arrived yet. His luggage was lifted out and brought in. He passed through a vestibule into Restow’s surprising hall.