Читать книгу The Tiger in the Smoke - Margery Allingham - Страница 3

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GHOSTS “It may be only blackmail,” said the man in the taxi hopefully. The fog was like a saffron blanket soaked in ice-water. It had hung over London all day and at last was beginning to descend. The sky was yellow as a duster and the rest was a granular black, overprinted in grey and lightened by occasional slivers of bright fish colour as a policeman turned in his wet cape.

Already the traffic was at an irritable crawl. By dusk it would be stationary. To the west the Park dripped wretchedly and to the north the great railway terminus slammed and banged and exploded hollowly about its affairs. Between lay winding miles of butter-coloured stucco in every conceivable state of repair.

The fog had crept into the taxi where it crouched panting in a traffic jam. It oozed in ungenially, to smear sooty fingers over the two elegant young people who sat inside. They were keeping apart self-consciously, each stealing occasional glances in the same kind of fear at their clasped hands resting between them on the shabby leather seat.

Geoffrey Levett was in his early thirties. He had a strong-featured uncommunicative face and a solid, powerful body. His brown eyes were intelligent and determined but not expressive, and both his light hair and his sober clothes were well and conventionally cut. There was nothing in the look of him to show the courage of the man, or the passion, or the remarkable if untimely gift he had for making money. Now, when he was undergoing the most gruelling emotional experience of his life, he appeared merely gloomy and embarrassed.

Meg Elginbrodde sat beside him. He was much more in love with her than he had ever believed possible and every social column in the country had announced that she was about to marry him.

She was twenty-five years and three weeks old, and for the five years since her twentieth birthday she had believed herself a war widow, but during the last three weeks, ever since her engagement had been announced, she had been receiving through the post a series of photographs taken in the city streets. They were all recent snapshots, as various landmarks proved, and in each of them there had appeared among the crowd a figure who either was her late husband, Major Martin Elginbrodde, or a man so like him that he must be called a double. On the back of the latest picture to arrive there had been a roughly printed message.

“It may be only blackmail,” Geoffrey repeated, his deep voice carefully casual. “That’s what Campion thinks, isn’t it?”

She did not reply at once and he glanced at her sharply, accepting the pain it gave him. She was so lovely. Queen Nefertiti in a Dior ensemble. Her clothes seemed a part of her. Her plum-coloured redingote with its absurd collar arched like a sail emphasised her slenderness. Since it was fashionable to do so, she looked bendable, bone and muscle fluid like a cat’s. A swathe of flax-white hair protruded from a twist of felt and underneath was something not quite true. Exquisite bone hid under delicate faintly painted flesh, each tone subtly emphasising and leading up to the wide eyes, lighter than Scandinavian blue and deeper than Saxon grey. She had a short fine nose and a wide softly painted mouth, quite unreal, one might have thought, until she spoke. She had a husky voice, also fashionable, but her intonation was alive and ingenuous. Even before one heard the words one realised, albeit with surprise, that she was both honest and not very old.

“That’s what the police think. I don’t know about Albert. No one ever knows quite what he thinks. Val certainly doesn’t and she’s his sister. Amanda may, but then she’s married to him.”

“Didn’t Amanda talk of it at all?” He was trying very hard not to be irritable. One of those solid men whose feet seemed to keep by very nature firmly on the ground, he was finding the inexplicable and unconventional unnerving.

Meg moved her head slowly to look at him and he was aware of her new perfume.

“I’m afraid neither of us did,” she said. “It was rather a beastly meal. Daddy kept trying not to say what was in his mind and she and I behaved like nicely brought-up little boys and didn’t notice. It’s all a bit unbearable, darling.”

“I know.” He spoke too quickly. “The Canon genuinely thinks it’s Martin, does he?” and he added, “Your husband,” with a formality which had not existed between them for a year.

She began to speak, hesitated, and laughed uncertainly.

“Oh dear, that was terrible! I nearly said, ‘Daddy always thinks the worst,’ and that isn’t at all what I meant—either about Daddy or about Martin.”

He made no comment and there was a long and unhappy pause during which the cab leapt forward a foot or so, only to pause and pant again, frustrated. Geoffrey glanced at his watch.

“There’s plenty of time, anyway. Now, you’re sure it is three-thirty that you’re meeting Campion and this Inspector?”

“Yes. Albert said we’d meet in that yard place at the top of the station, the one that used to smell of horses. The message just said, ‘Bath train, three forty-five, November eight,’ nothing else.”

“And that was on the back of the photograph?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t in Martin’s handwriting? Just block capitals?”

“I told you.”

“You didn’t show it to me.”

“No, darling.”

“Why?”

She met his glance calmly with her wide stare. “Because I didn’t want to very much. I showed it to Val because I work for her and she called up her brother. Albert brought the police into it and they took the photograph, so I couldn’t show it to anyone.”

Geoffrey’s face was not designed to show exasperation or any other of the more helpless emotions. His eyes were hard as he watched her.

“Couldn’t you tell if it was like him?”

“Oh, it was like him.” She sounded helpless herself. “They’ve all been like him, even that first one which we all saw. They’ve all been like him but they’ve all been bad photographs. Besides——”

“What?”

“I was going to say I’ve never seen Martin out of uniform. That’s not true, of course, but I did only see him for a short time on his two leaves. We were only married five months before he was killed—I mean, if he was killed.”

The man looked away from her out into the fog and the scurrying shadows in it.

“And dear old Canon Avril seriously believes that he’s come back to stop you marrying me five years after the War Box cited him ‘Missing believed killed’?”

“No,” she protested, “Daddy fears it. Daddy always fears that people may turn out unexpectedly to be horrible, or mental, or desperately ill. It’s the only negative thing in his whole make-up. It’s his bad bit. People only tell Daddy when it really is something frightful. I know how he feels now. He’s afraid Martin may be alive and mad.”

Geoffrey swung round slowly and spoke with deliberate cruelty aimed mainly at himself.

“And how about you, pretty? What are you hoping?”

She sighed and leaned back, stretching her long slender legs to dig one very high heel into the jute mat. Her eyes were watching his face and they were entirely candid.

“I knew I’d have to tell you all this, Geoff, so I thought it out.” The drawl was not unsuited to frankness. Each word had its full value. “I love you. I really do. As I am now, with these last five years behind me, I am a person who is quite terribly in love with you and will always be—or so I think now, today, in this taxi. But I did love Martin when I was nineteen, and when I knew—I mean when I thought—he was dead I thought I’d die myself.” She paused. “Somehow I think I did. Your Meg is a new girl.”

Geoffrey Levett discovered with horror that he was in tears. At any rate his eyes were smarting and he felt sick. His hand closed more tightly over the slender gloved one and he banged it gently up and down on the cushion.

“I’m a damned fool,” he said. “I ought not to have asked you that, my dear, dear girl. Look, we’ll get out of this somehow and we’ll go through with the whole programme. We’ll have everything we planned, the kids and the house and the happiness, even the damned great wedding. It’ll be all right, I swear it, Meg, somehow it’ll be all right.”

“No.” She had the gentle obstinacy of her kind of woman. “I want to tell you, Geoffrey, because I’ve thought it all out, and I want you to know so that whatever I do—well, at least you’ll understand. You see, this message may mean just what it looks it means, and in an hour I may find I’m talking to Martin. I’ve been thinking how horrible that’ll be for him. You see, I’ve forgotten him. The only thing I keep remembering and dreading is that I must tell him about the dog.”

“The dog?” he repeated blankly.

“Yes. Old Ainsworth. He died soon after Martin was—was presumed killed. Martin will hate that. He loved Ainsworth. They used to sit and look at each other for hours and hours. It’s horrible, but it really is the clearest thing I remember about either of them. Martin in pyjamas and Ainsworth in his tight brown skin just sitting and looking at each other and being quite happy.”

She made a small gesture with her free hand. Its arc took in a lost world of air raids and hurried meals in crowded restaurants, hotels, railway stations, khaki, sunlight, stolen pools of peace in chaos.

“When he was in the Desert he wrote a poem to Ainsworth—never to me, you know—but he did write one to Ainsworth.” Her husky voice filled the rain-drenched world. “I’ve never forgotten it. He sent it home, probably for Ainsworth. You’d never imagine Martin writing verse. It went:

“I had a dog, a liver-coloured mongrel

With mild brown eyes and an engaging manner.

He had a studious mind and thought

Deeply about himself

And food and sex.

He was also a liar.

He wasn’t proud:

He’d shake hands very gravely

With almost anybody not in uniform ...

I’d like to talk to him again:

Now I’m a soldier we’ve a lot in common.”

She was silent and Levett did not move. It was as though the fog had brought coldly a third person into the cab. At length, since something had to be said, he made the effort.

“A queer chap,” he murmured briefly.

“I don’t think so.” It was evident that she was trying to remember. “He was being a soldier then, you see. He was doing that all the time I knew him.”

“Oh God, yes!” He recognised the haunt at last from his own days in that strange hinterland of war which was receding faster and faster with every day of the fleeting years. “Oh God, yes! Poor little chap. Poor silly little chap.”

Meg bowed her head. She never nodded, he noticed suddenly. All her movements were sweeping and gracious, like an Edwardian woman’s, only less studied.

“I never saw him out of war,” she said in much the same way as she might have said, “I never saw him sober.” “I didn’t know him, I suppose. I mean I don’t really know him at all.”

The last word faded and ceased uncertainly. The taxi started again and, seizing an opportunity, swung sharply into the station approach.

“Are you coming with me, Geoff?”

“No.” The disclaimer was altogether too violent, and he hastened to soften it. “I don’t think so, do you? I’ll telephone you about five. You’ll be all right with Campion and his bloodhound, won’t you? I think you’ll be happier without me. Won’t you?”

The final question was genuine. The flicker of hope appeared in it unbidden. She heard and recognised it but hesitated too long.

“I just don’t know.”

“You go along.” He kissed her lightly and had the door open just before the taxi stopped. As he helped her out she clung to his sleeve. The crowd on the pavement was large and hurried as usual and they were crushed together by it. Once again he saw her as he had been seeing her at intervals all the afternoon, afresh, as if for the first time. Her voice, reaching him through the bustle, sounded nervous and uncertain. The thing she had to tell him was altogether too difficult.

“I haven’t really told you, Geoff. I’m so muddled. I’m so sorry, darling.”

“Shut up,” he said softly, and thrust her gently away.

The crush snatched her and bore her away from him into the dark archway of the entrance, which was festooned like a very old theatre proscenium with swathes of fog. She turned to raise a small gloved hand to him, but a porter with a barrow and a woman with a child frustrated her and she was swept on out of his sight as he stood watching, still with the cab door open.

Meanwhile Mr. Albert Campion and Divisional Detective Chief Inspector Charles Luke, who was Father Superior of the second most tough police division in metropolitan London and proud of it, stood in the covered yard of the southern end of the terminus and waited. Apart from bleaching him, the years had treated Mr. Campion kindly. He was still the slight, elegantly unobtrusive figure exactly six feet tall, misleadingly vacant of face and gentle of manner, which he had been in the nineteen-twenties. The easiest of men to overlook or underestimate, he stood quietly at his point of vantage behind the rows of buffers and surveyed the crowd with casual good temper.

His companion was a very different kettle of fish. Charlie Luke in his spiv civilians looked at best like a heavyweight champion in training. His dark face with its narrow diamond-shaped eyes and strong sophisticated nose shone in the murky light with a radiance of its own. His soft black hat was pushed on to the back of his close-cropped curls and his long hands were deep in his trouser pockets, so that the skirts of his overcoat bunched out behind him in a fantail.

Members of that section of the district who had most cause to be interested in him were apt to say that, “give him his due, at least you couldn’t miss him.” He stuck out like a lighthouse. He was some inches taller than his companion but his thickset build made him seem shorter. As usual he conveyed intense but suppressed excitement and rigidly controlled physical strength, and his bright glance travelled everywhere.

“It may be just some silly game, a woman playing the goat,” he remarked, idly sketching in a pair of horns with his toe on the pavement. “But I don’t think so. It smells like the old ‘blacking’ to me. All the same, an open mind, that’s what we want. You never know. Weddings and so on are funny times.”

“There’s a man involved, at any rate,” objected Mr. Campion mildly. “How many photographs have you got of him in all—five?”

“Two taken in Oxford Street, one at Marble Arch, one in the Strand—that’s the one which shows the movie advertisement which dates it as last week—and then the one with the message on the back. That’s right, five.” He buttoned his coat and stamped his feet. “It’s cold,” he said. “I hope she’s not late. I hope she’s beautiful too. She’s got to have something if she can’t even recognise her old man for sure.”

Campion looked dubious. “Could you guarantee to recognise a man you hadn’t seen for five years from one of those snapshots?”

“Perhaps not.” Luke put his head under an imaginary backcloth, at least he ducked slightly, and sketched in a piece of drapery with waving hands. “Those old photographers—mugfakers we call ’em—in the street don’t use very new cameras or very good film. I’m allowing for that. But I should have thought a woman would know her own husband if she saw the sole of his boot through a grating or the top of his hat from a bus.”

Mr. Campion regarded him with interest. It was the first trace of sentimentality he had ever observed in the D.D.C.I, and he might have said so, but Luke was still talking.

“If it’s blackmail, and it probably is, it’s a very rum lark,” he was saying. “I don’t see how or when the bloke expects to collect anything out of it, do you?” His eyes were snapping in the smoking mist. “The ordinary procedure is ‘give me fifty quid or you’ll be up for bigamy.’ Well, she’s not married again yet, is she? Crooks can be peculiarly wanting on the top storey, but I’ve never heard of one who’d make a blob like that. If it had been her wedding which had been announced and not her engagement it might have made sense. Even so, what’s the point of sending her one picture after another and giving us all this time to get on the job?”

Mr. Campion nodded. “How are you getting on with the street photographers?”

The other man shrugged his shoulders. “I’d rather ask those sparrows,” he said seriously, nodding towards a cluster of the little mice-like birds twittering over some garbage in the gutter. “Same result and less halitosis. They all take several hundred snaps a day. They all remember photographing someone exactly like him, only it wasn’t quite he. They all lost money on the deal. My boys are still working on it, but it’s a waste of time and public money. The pics themselves are covered with fingerprints. All five show the same bleary, smeary figure in the street. Nothing to help at all. This last one with the train time on the back is the craziest of all, to my mind,” he added earnestly. “Either he wants to get the police on the job or else he expects the young woman to be a darned sight more windy than she appears to be. You say she’s not lying. I haven’t seen her; I wouldn’t know. I’m just taking your word for it. That’s why I’m here getting so perishing cold.”

His pile-driver personality forced home the suggestion, but he spoke without offence. If one of the great West Country locomotives which lay panting and steaming on the rails ahead of them had advanced the same argument, it could hardly have been more powerful or impersonal.

“No, she’s not lying,” said Campion. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that Elginbrodde may be alive?”

“The War Office says ‘No, go away.’ ”

“I know. But they’ve been wrong before.”

“If it’s Elginbrodde himself, he’s ‘psychological.’ ” The D.D.C.I. let his eyes cross horribly and for an instant his tongue appeared, loose and lolling. “I hate psychiatry.” His glance darted off again, scanning the hurrying travellers. Almost at once a soft but unmistakable whistle escaped him. “This is it.” His tone ran up in triumph. “This is our young lady, I’ll bet a pound. See that where-are-you-I-hope-or-don’t-I look? Am I right? What a smasher!”

Campion glanced up and started forward. “Clever of you. That is Mrs. Elginbrodde.”

Meg saw them bearing down upon her. In her hypersensitive mood they appeared monstrous.

There was Campion, the amateur, a man who never used his real name and title. In appearance a middle-aged Englishman typical of his background and period. She saw him as kindly, unemotional, intelligent, and resourceful, all inbred virtues ensuring that his reactions would be as hidebound as a good gun dog’s. She knew his kind so well that she was prepared to find almost any hidden peculiarity in him. It was typical of his variety that he should perhaps be very brave, or very erudite, or possibly merely able to judge Chinese prints or grow gardenias.

On the other hand, the man behind him was something new to her and at first glance she found him frankly shocking. Hitherto she had thought very little about policemen, classing them vaguely as necessities which were on the whole beneficial, like banks or the parliamentary systems. But here, as she could see, was a very male person of considerable if not particularly pleasant interest.

Luke came bounding forward with the unaffected acquisitiveness of a child espying a beautiful cuddly pet. His eyes were flickering and his live shrewd face expressed boundless tolerance.

The interview was so clearly just about to get off on the wrong foot that they all recognised the fact just in time. Campion performed the introduction with iron under his velvet words, and Charlie Luke shut off his magnetism regretfully, like a man switching off a light. He watched the girl cautiously, noting her beauty but discounting it, and when he replaced his hat he put it on straight. Yet there had been no chill in her greeting; she was simply obviously worried, a woman so torn by her loves and loyalties that her genuineness was unquestionable.

“I was so sorry I couldn’t find you any snapshots for comparison,” she said earnestly. “My husband didn’t live in England before the war, so none of his things were here. We didn’t have very long together and somehow we didn’t seem to run to snapshots.”

Luke nodded. He recognised her mood. That preoccupation with the problem so acute that it excluded even the ordinary social preliminaries was familiar to him. He had seen worried people before.

“I understand that, Miss—I mean Mrs. Elginbrodde. He was in France, wasn’t he, brought up by a grandmother? And he wasn’t very old when he died, twenty-five, I think?”

“Yes. He’d be thirty now.” She looked round as she spoke, nervously and yet not entirely unhopefully. The movement was quite subconscious and it struck both men as pathetic. It was as though the war years had peeped out at them suddenly and the coloured clothes all round them in the fog had been washed over briefly with khaki. To add to the illusion, the dreary thumping of a street band away out in Crumb Street behind them reached them faintly through the station noises. It was only the ghost of a tune, not recognisable yet evocative and faintly alarming, like a half-remembered threat. Luke hunched his wide shoulders.

“The studio portrait and the passport didn’t really tell us much, you know,” he said, sketching in a very large square followed by a very small one with his restless long-boned hands. “I think I ought to tell you that as far as our experts can tell from measurement of the features, as far as they can tell, it’s not the same man.” He was watching her, trying to appraise her reaction. The face she turned to him was both disappointed and relieved. Hope died in it but also hope appeared. She was saddened and yet made happy. There was shame there and bewilderment. She might have been going to cry. He began to be very sorry for her.

“I did find this last night,” she said, turning to Campion. “I’m afraid the whole thing is very dark, but it’s a snap a child took of a dog we had, and that’s Martin in the background. I don’t know if it’s any use at all, yet I think anyone who knew him would recognise it.”

She brought a little faded square from the depths of her big handbag and handed it to him. The D.D.C.I. looked over his shoulder. It was the yellowing print of an overexposed snap of a plump, negroid-looking dog wallowing on a London lawn, and far in the background, laughing, with hands in pockets and head thrust forward, was a boy wearing a braggadocio moustache. There was nothing definitely characteristic there except perhaps his spirit, and yet the picture shook them both and they stood looking at it for a long time. At length Luke tapped his coat pocket.

“I’ve got one of the street pictures here, but this isn’t the time to get it out,” he murmured, and once again his glance roved round the vast station. He was puzzled and making no secret of it. “Yes, I see why you got the wind up.”

His shrewdness and friendliness took any offence out of the observation. “There is a look there. I see what you mean. Yes. Tell me, Mrs. Elginbrodde, did your husband have any young brothers or cousins?”

“No, none I ever heard of.” The suggestion was a new idea to her and in the circumstances hardly attractive.

“Now look here”—Luke became a conspirator and his overpadded shoulders seemed to spread even wider to screen her—“the only thing you’ve got to do is to keep your head. It all depends on you. It’s a million to one that this will turn out to be the usual blackmail by a customer with a record as long as a train. He’s behaving altogether too cautiously so far and that may mean that he’s not sure of his ground. He may just want to look at you, or he may risk talking to you. All you’ve got to do is to let him. Leave the rest to me, see?”

“Time is getting on,” put in Mr. Campion behind him. “Fifteen minutes to go.”

“I’d better go to the platform.” Meg moved as she spoke and Campion drew her back.

“Not yet. That’s where he’ll look for you. Don’t move from here until we spot him.”

She was surprised and her narrow brows rose high on the smooth forehead, which was rounded like a little girl’s and had been fascinating Luke for some time.

“But I thought the message meant that he was coming off the Bath train?”

“That’s what he wants you to think.” The D.D.C.I. was in danger of becoming fatherly. “He wants you to watch the train so that he can pick you out at leisure. The postmark was London, wasn’t it? He doesn’t have to go to Bath to take a platform ticket.”

“Oh. Oh, of course.” She sighed on the word and stepped back beside him, her hands folded. In spite of their escort she looked lonely, peering out anxiously, waiting.

The fog was thickening and the glass-and-iron roof was lost in its greasy drapery. The yellow lights achieved but a shabby brilliance and only the occasional plumes of steam from the locomotives were clean in the gloom. That tremendous air of suppressed excitement which is peculiar to all great railway stations was intensified by the mist and all the noises were muffled by it and made more hollow-sounding even than usual. From where they stood they could see all the main-line gates and over on the left the great entrance with its four twenty-foot doors and the bright bookstall just beside it.

The afternoon rush was beginning and wave after wave of hurrying travellers jostled out of the booking hall and fanned on to the wide ledge of one of the longest platforms in the world. Away to their right was the other carriageway climbing bleakly into Crumb Street, and behind them was the tunnel to the Underground and the double row of telephone boxes.

Luke was watching the main entrance with misleading idleness, while Campion kept a discreet eye on the Underground, and neither was prepared for the sudden cry beside them.

“Oh! Look! Over there. There he is. Martin!”

Meg had forgotten everything else in the world. She stood transfixed, pointing like a child and calling at the top of her voice.

Fifty yards away on a strip of sooty pavement, which was otherwise deserted, a neat soldierly figure had appeared. He wore a distinctive but well-cut sports jacket and the inevitable green pork-pie hat, and had just turned in smartly out of the drive from Crumb Street. He had a brisk purposeful step and was not looking about him. Even at that distance the shadow of a large moustache was discernible, and from behind him, as though designed to increase the somewhat theatrical militariness of his appearance, the rowdy street band thumping out the violent marching song sounded clearly from the distance.

“Martin!” Meg broke away before they could stop her. There was something in the cry which reached the man above the noises of the station. It was not the sound itself but something emotional which ran through the other loiterers, as if between them they had made a telephone wire. Campion saw a line of turning heads and at the end of it the stranger starting violently, stopping, pausing frozen for a moment. Then he ran.

He fled like a deer down the first avenue of escape. A mass formation of porters’ trucks, each piled high with luggage, lay directly ahead of him, and his pursuers were sweeping down on him from his left, so he turned right through the open gateway of the suburban-line platform where the slow down train stood waiting. He ran as though his life depended on it, blindly, knocking strangers headlong, leaping over suitcases, darting round lamp standards only just in time to avoid disaster. Luke shot after him, clutching his coat skirts round him and gaining because of his superior stride. He sped past Meg, who would have followed him had not Campion’s hand closed firmly on her wrist.

“This way,” he said urgently, and swept her on towards the other platform immediately behind and parallel to the stationary train.

Meanwhile the crowd hampered everybody. Luke charged through it like a bull, shouting the familiar “Mind your backs, please!” of the station staff. Porters paused in the fairway, staring. Ticket collectors hesitated and got in the road. Children appeared from nowhere and scampered up and down, screaming, and the great solid mass of apathetic gazers who spring out of the very stones of a city the moment there is anything to look at shuffled after the fugitive, making any return journey impossible.

On the other platform, however, when at last they reached it, Mr. Campion and the girl found themselves practically alone. The suburban train, still unlit and lying like a black caterpillar on the second row of rails, was separated from them by a gulf of blackness striped with dull silver. Since all the excitement was taking place on the other side of it, there were no faces at the windows and no sign of movement from within. Meg was very white and her hands were shaking.

“He ran away,” she began huskily. “Martin——”

The word died abruptly. Campion was not looking at her. He was watching the dark side of the train, his coat buttoned tightly and his hands ready. The overhead lamp shining on the fog made it look as though the scene were taking place under muddy water. Distances were deceptive and colours untrue. For Meg it was a moment of unreality. She did not believe in it, and her eyes, as they followed Campion’s gaze, were incredulous.

At last the moment he waited for occurred. A door halfway down the train swung back abruptly and a dark figure dropped out on to the line. He tripped over a sleeper but recovered himself and stumbled across to the platform, only to find the stone rim level with his shoulders. He sprang at it and clung there, his head turned from them, as he peered anxiously down the line. Any incoming engine must crush him, but at the moment there was no sign of one, only the fog and the coloured lights.

He slipped back and made another effort, just as Campion’s lean arm shot out and caught him by the collar. At the same moment Luke appeared behind him and the train became alive with spectators. Windows rattled down, heads were thrust out, and the shrill clatter of voices broke over them in a wave. Luke dropped on to the line with unexpected lightness. He was in perfect condition, lithe and powerful. He caught the stranger by the waist, heaved him into Campion’s arms, and vaulted up beside him, his hat still in place.

A white face with narrow black frightened eyes looked up at them. All the soldierliness had vanished. The swagger had melted and the body shrunk into the clothes. The moustache looked enormous and ridiculous. He made no sound at all, but stood shaking and twitching, ready to run again the moment the grip on his arm should relax.

“Oh ... oh, I’m so sorry. How crazy of me. Now I see him close he’s not even like him.”

They had not noticed Meg come up and her wondering voice took them by surprise. She was staring at the captive in bewilderment, the colour pouring into her face, relief fighting with disappointment in her eyes.

“It was at that distance—I could have sworn, I don’t know why. The build, the clothes, the——” She put out her hand to touch the tweed coat sleeve and the prisoner leapt away from her as if she had been a live rail. There was a momentary struggle and as they over-powered him again Luke jerked the man towards him so that their faces all but met.

“You’re losing something, mate,” he remarked with ferocious good humour. “Look at this. It came off in my hand.” The movement was too swift to be resisted. The stranger swore in a husky whisper and was silent again. The moustache had been lightly gummed and now the skin on the long upper lip was pale where it had been. Luke tucked the piece of hair into his waistcoat pocket. “Nice one,” he said shamelessly. “Must have cost a packet and come from a swell costumier’s. I’ll take care of it for you.”

Without his moustache, it was difficult to believe that the stranger had ever resembled any other man closely. He had a distinctive mouth, marred by the scar of a sewn harelip, a broken tooth in the centre front, and an indefinable air of slyness which at this moment was overshadowed by a terror quite out of proportion to his crime, at least so far as it was suspected.

Meg put her hand up to her cheek. She was incoherent with embarrassment and bewilderment. It was evident that two more different men than the captive and Martin Elginbrodde were impossible to imagine, and yet she had been so sure.

Luke grinned at her. “He didn’t risk coming too close, did he?” he said. “But he quite took you in at a distance. Quite a performance.”

She turned away abruptly and Luke lifted his chin to peer down the platform. Two heavy men in raincoats were running towards them, followed by a small section of the crowd who had just discovered what had happened.

“Your men?” Campion sounded relieved.

Luke nodded. “I put them on the entrance doors in case. They spotted the rumpus and used their heads.” He raised his hand to the newcomers as he spoke and returned to his prisoner. “Well, Chatty,” he said cheerfully, “don’t go getting any funny ideas about this being an arrest.” He shook the arm he held by way of emphasis. “This is just a friendly invitation to a quiet talk in a nice warm room. You may even get a cup of tea, for all I know. Understand?”

The man said nothing. He might not even have heard. His face was wooden. Only his eyes shifted uneasily. He was quiet now, but there was still a tenseness in his body. He was still ready to make a dash for freedom the moment he got a chance.

Luke surveyed him, his head on one side, his bright eyes inquisitive.

“Why are you worrying?” he said softly. “There’s not more on your mind than there is on mine, by any chance?”

In spite of the hint, which was broad enough, there was no relaxing, no letup. The weak mouth remained tightly closed, the muscles were still flexed under the tweed sleeve.

Luke handed him over to the newcomers, who arrived breathless and unsmiling.

“No charge. Held for questioning.” He might have been delivering a parcel. “He wants taking care of. Don’t hurry him, but see he gets there. He seems bent on taking exercise. I’ll be right behind you.”

Meg and Campion walked down the shadowy stone way together and Luke walked beside them. The solid knot of men in front moved quickly. The crowd stared at them but parted for them, and they turned out of the gate at the top and round the bend, out of sight.

The girl was quite silent for some time, but the emotional conflict in her mind was as apparent as if she had explained it. Campion watched her out of the corner of his eye.

“You’ll have to put this clean out of your mind, if you can, you know,” he said at last. “If I may I’ll put you in a taxi outside the station, and then after Luke has had a chat with this fellow I’ll get him to come back with me. I don’t see the purpose of this performance at all, but I think you’ll have to face the fact that it is only a performance.”

She paused in her walk and faced him. “You mean you’re quite certain it wasn’t Martin in the photographs?”

“Oh no, it was this fellow every time. That’s practically sure.”

“Practically?” Her wide mouth twisted and her eyes looked darker. “Practically sure Martin is dead again. I’ve been remembering him. He was a very—very sweet person, you know.”

A wave of old-fashioned black anger swept over Luke’s dark face. In common with everything about him, it was vivid and more than life-size.

“That’s the thing which makes me wild,” he announced with a bitterness which startled them both. “A chap gives his life and as soon as the grass has grown a bit and there’s the chance of a spot of happiness for the woman who is the only thing left of him, a ruddy great pack of ghouls come scrapping round looking for a hap’orth of gold out of his eyeteeth. Forgive me, Mrs. Elginbrodde, but it makes me spiteful.”

“A pack?” she said dully. “Are there more of them?”

“Oh yes. I’ve seen that quivering little mug before somewhere. He’s nothing. He’s the tailor’s dummy. If he’d been on his own he’d have done a bit of talking. I’m not the one that lad is so frightened of. That’s the only thing he did tell us.”

“Then Martin might——”

“No.” He spoke with a tenderness unexpected in him. “No, lady, no. Put that clean out of your mind. That dear chap and his dog have gone, gone where the dear chaps do go, gone with a few I knew. You’ve got your own life and you go and live it and make a do of it, as no doubt he’d like you to. Now you go home. Will Mr. Levett be there?”

“No. Do you want him? He brought me here and went on to his office. He’s going to ring me at five. He has some sort of business appointment this evening.”

She saw his expression and smiled to reassure him. “Oh, I shall be all right. My father is there. In fact, there are quite a lot of people in the house. We’d be very glad to see you if you could manage it.”

“Fine.” It was obvious that Luke thought of clapping her on the shoulder and quite as obviously changed his mind. “Splendid. Wait for us. Now we’ll put you in a cab just over here....”

He was still fierce when they closed the taxi door on her some minutes later and caught a last glimpse of her face as it changed after her parting valiant smile. As they pushed up the drive into Crumb Street, Campion was struck once more both by his power and the unexpected emotional depths he had revealed. Luke was as moved as if Elginbrodde had been his brother and was identifying him in his mind with some soldier he had loved. It made him an alarming enemy for someone.

Meanwhile Crumb Street, never a place of beauty, that afternoon was at its worst. The fog slopped over its low houses like a bucketful of cold soup over a row of dirty stoves. The shops had been mean when they had been built and were designed for small and occasional trade, but since the days of victory, when a million demobilised men had passed through the terminus, each one armed with a parcel of government-presented garments of varying usefulness, half the establishments had been taken over by opportunists specialising in the purchase and sale of secondhand clothes. Every other window was darkened with festoons of semi-respectable rags based by bundles of grey household linen, soiled suitcases, and an occasional collection of surplus war stores, green, khaki, and air force blue. The fine new police station on the corner was the chief ornament to the district, and the D.D.C.I. advanced upon it with the tread of a proprietor. The impatient traffic was moving a little and they were held up for a moment or so on a street island. As they waited, Mr. Campion reflected that the evil smell of fog is a smell of ashes grown cold under hoses, and he heard afresh the distinctive noise of the irritable, half-blinded city, the scream of brakes, the abuse of drivers, the fierce hiss of tyres on the wet road.

Just above it, like an appropriate theme song, sounded the thumping of the street band. There was nothing of the dispirited drone there. It triumphed in the thick air, an almighty affront of a noise, importunate and vigorous.

The knot of men who were playing were half in the gutter and half on the pavement. They were moving along steadily, as the law insists, and the rattle of their collecting boxes was as noisy as their tune. They were some little way away and it was not possible to distinguish individuals, but there was a ruthless urgency in their movements and the stream of foot passengers narrowed as it flowed past the bunch. Luke jerked his chin towards them.

“See that? Demanding with menaces. What else is it? Gimme, gimme!” He thrust a long curved hand under Campion’s nose and achieved an expression of rapacity which was startling. “We can’t touch ’em. Keep moving, that’s all we can say. If a cat made a row like that we’d kill it.”

Campion laughed. He liked Luke.

“I remember after the first World War those bands were pretty shocking,” he remarked, “but I thought the Welfare State had rather seen to that sort of thing. They are ex-Service, I suppose?”

“Who isn’t?” Luke was irritable. “I bet you every man under sixty in this street is ex-Service, and half the women too. That little band of brothers is only ex-Service among other things. Haven’t you seen them about? They tramp all over the town, West End mostly. Nothing’s known against any of ’em, as we say, but they’re not exactly pretty to look at.”

He drew a balloon shape in the air with his hands and screwed his eyes up to beady pin points.

“They all wear tickets round their necks. One says ‘No Pension.’ Nor have I, of course. Then there’s ‘Invalid’ and ‘One Arm.’ Poor bloke—but he can get a new one from the old National Health free. Where is it? ‘No Head’ would make you look quicker. Not one says ‘Unemployed,’ I notice. That would be asking for it. They’re only beggars. Every big city produces ’em. They’ve got a fine old ex-Service song there, anyway. Remember it?”

“I’ve been trying to. Was it called ‘Waiting’?”

Luke stood listening, an odd expression on his face. The band was moving very slowly.

“I’ll be WAI-tin’ for you!” he bellowed suddenly just under his breath. “AT the old oak tree-ah! I’ll be WAI-tin’ for you. Just you wait for me-ah! Turn up your lips, waggle your hips, and we’ll all be set for chapel. So softly we’ll glide, where water-weeds hide, and willows make little waves dapple. Most poetic, I don’t think, but those aren’t the words those beauties are remembering.”

“No.” Mr. Campion’s neat memory had turned up the reference card at last. “Button your purse, shout for Nurse, I’ve brought my brace and tackle.”

The D.D.C.I. laughed. It was a queer little grunt, not entirely of amusement. “That’s a respectable one of its class. But those boys down there aren’t thinking along those lines. You can tell it by the way they’re playing.” He thrust his vivid face close to Campion’s own. “I’ll be WAI-tin’ for you, AT Oflag Seventy-three-ah! I’ll be WAI-tin’ for you, don’t look out for me-ah! Lift up your froat, you’ll bleed like a goat, WHOOPS your adam’s apple!”

Mr. Campion’s eyebrows rose a fraction and he did not smile. If Luke had hoped to shock he had succeeded. The words had not been inspired, but from behind them there had flashed out for an instant the reality of the thing which had been chasing them all the afternoon. He was aware of it in the street now, stark under the blanket of the gloom. For the first time that day he recognised it and it sent a thin trickle down his spine.

“Violence,” he said aloud.

“That’s it, chum.” Luke had seen their chance and they were edging swiftly through the traffic. “That’s it,” he repeated as they reached the pavement. “It’s always there in London under the good temper. D’you remember in the Blitz, ‘I wouldn’t be dead for a pound’? That wasn’t half a joke then. It tickled us, just touched the spot. Poor old George, blood streaming down his face! Laugh! I thought we’d bust our braces.”

He paused to assist a woman to disentangle his long legs from her steel go-cart, flashed a joyous smile at her, and pressed on happily.

“I laughed myself,” he said.

Mr. Campion listened to him gravely. He had his own brand of humour, but this was not it. The band and its bellow had become hateful to him and the fog bone-chilling and menacing.

“Oh lord, yes, there’s violence about.” Luke’s wide shoulders were winnowing a path for himself through the crowd. “You can’t miss it. I shouldn’t be surprised if we don’t get quite a whiff of it the moment we get inside. That shady little mouse we just caught was frightened of somebody, wasn’t he? Hullo, what’s up?”

Campion had paused and was looking over his shoulder. He was holding up the stream and half a dozen people jostled him.

“It was nothing,” he said at last as he moved on again, “at least I don’t think so. I thought I caught a glimpse of Geoffrey Levett just then. I must have been mistaken.”

Luke turned into a narrow archway set deep in the blank side of a new building.

“Everyone looks alike in the fog,” he said cheerfully. “You can follow your own Ma home in it, certain that she’s the girl next door. If Mr. Levett is about here at all he’s probably inside, asking a few important questions while we’re still getting over the road. Now, Mr. Campion, we’ll have to treat this lad very gently. We’ll just turn him quietly inside out. After all, we haven’t a thing on him, have we—yet?”