Читать книгу The Listening Eye - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 10

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The news was a shock. Miss Silver felt it as such. She recalled the moment when Paulina Paine had terminated their interview and gone out to meet her death. Could she have pressed her more strongly to go to the police? She was unable to believe that it would have made any difference. Could she have insisted on calling for a taxi? She did not know. Would insistence have been of any use? If the knowledge accidentally acquired by Miss Paine was so dangerous as to warrant murder, there were other times and other places where this might have been accomplished. She remained silent for a little before saying,

‘I was most uneasy. I feel that I should not have let her go.’

Lamb said heartily,

‘And that, if you will allow me to say so, is nonsense. You couldn’t possibly have expected the woman to be murdered—if she was murdered, which to my mind is a thing there is no manner of proof about.’

‘She had some idea that she might have been followed on her way to me. There was a man in a taxi at the end of the street. She was sufficiently alarmed to turn back and ask one of her tenants to call a taxi for herself. She was not sure of being followed after that. She says the taxi came after them, but she thinks they lost it in the traffic. It looks as if they had not done so. I urged her to let me call a taxi when she took leave of me, but she refused, saying that she thought she had given way to a nervous impulse and made a mountain out of a molehill. I did not feel easy about it, but I let her go.’

Frank Abbott said, ‘You can’t possibly blame yourself,’ to which she replied soberly, ‘I suppose not. Yet it is difficult not to feel that she came to me for help and that I failed her.’

Lamb said in his most decided voice,

‘If she had taken your advice and come to us she would have been safe.’

‘Are you sure that you would have taken her story so seriously as to give her police protection? If her death was determined on, nothing less would have saved her.’

He frowned.

‘I’m not ready to say that her death wasn’t an accident. She could have been mooning along with her head full of this story, and being deaf she wouldn’t hear a bus coming. We’ve asked for details of the accident, but we haven’t had them yet. What beats me is why should they go to the trouble of murdering her? What, after all, did she hear, or lip-read or whatever you call it? Nothing that’s the least bit of use to us as far as I can see, or the least bit of danger to them.’

Miss Silver looked at him very directly.

‘There was the chance that she might recognize the man who spoke.’

Lamb laughed.

‘My dear Miss Silver—what a chance! Even if she connected what he said with the theft of the Bellingdon necklace, what sort of odds were there against her ever coming across him again?’

She said gravely,

‘I do not know. They may have been less than we imagine. In this connection, one thing she reported him as saying has remained in my mind.’

‘And what was that?’

‘It was when he was speaking of the robbery, and what he said was this. “I won’t take any chances of being recognized, and that’s final.” From which I infer that he was someone whom the secretary might recognize.’

Lamb said with impatience,

‘He’d have taken precautions against that.’

‘So strong a precaution as the murder of the person he feared might recognize him?’

Lamb said impatiently,

‘You say he was planning a murder?’

‘What else, Chief Inspector, when he said that he was not taking any chances of being recognized, and that all he wanted was a clear stretch of road where no one would turn his head at a shot! There may have been a protest from the man whose lips Miss Paine was unable to see, and then the first man said, “I tell you I won’t touch it on any other terms. This way it’s a certainty.”’

Frank Abbott said, ‘Now I wonder if this man really said certainty. If we knew that, it would help to place him, because the ordinary crook would almost certainly have said cert.’

Miss Silver gave a slight reproving cough.

‘I am repeating Miss Paine’s own words.’

Lamb leaned forward.

‘Yes, yes, we know that you can be trusted to be accurate. But Frank has got a point there, you know. Most men, let alone crooks, would have made it cert. Pity we can’t ask Miss Paine whether she prettied it up, but there it is! What would she be likely to say herself? I mean, what was her own way of speaking—schoolmarmish, or plain everyday?’

In the way of business Miss Silver was not apt to take offence. She let the derogatory ‘schoolmarm’ pass.

‘Miss Paine was a plain, downright person, and that was the way she spoke. I think she was repeating to me what she believed herself to have read.’

‘You mean she might have mistaken the word?’

‘It would be possible that she might have completed it.’

Lamb said,

‘Making cert into certainty? Well, there’s no means of knowing one way or the other that I can see, and we’re getting off the track. Seems to me we were talking about what precautions the murderer would have taken against being recognized. You take what Miss Paine got as meaning that he was planning murder as a precaution. At a guess I should have said he’d have used a motorbike for the job. There’s no safer disguise than the goggles and helmet—in fact the whole rig-out.’

Miss Silver’s features expressed a mild firmness. She said,

‘He may have done so. Yet he was still afraid of being recognized and was prepared to shoot the secretary to avoid any risk of it. In my opinion this may be a valuable clue. Such a strong apprehension that he might be recognized does to my mind suggest that the murderer was someone in Mr Bellingdon’s immediate circle. He certainly had inside knowledge of just how and when the necklace would be transferred from the bank.’

‘Well, Ledshire have asked us to come in on the job, and Frank will be going down to Merefields. By the way, Mr Bellingdon will be in town this afternoon. He wants to call and see you. He’ll be coming here first. Would four o’clock suit? He wants to have all that lip-reading business first-hand from yourself. I think he finds it a bit difficult to swallow.’

His tone informed her that the interview was at an end. She rose to her feet.

‘Four o’clock will be quite convenient, Chief Inspector.’