Читать книгу The Tiger in the Smoke - Margery Allingham - Страница 4

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AT HOME The fog was thicker than ever over in St. Petersgate Square, but there its brown folds hid no violence. Rather it was cosy, hardly cold, gentle, almost protective. The little close was well hidden even on the brightest of days. Ten years before even the enemy had not found it and so, almost alone in the district, the quiet houses remained much as they had always been. By yet another oversight the railings round the tiny square in the centre had been spared by the scrap merchants and the magnolia, two or three graceful laburnums and a tulip tree had overgrown unmolested. It was one of the smallest squares of its kind in the city. There were seven houses on each of two opposite sides, a wall on the third which shut out the steep drop into Portminster Row and the shops, and, on the fourth, the sharp-spired church of St. Peter of the Gate, its rectory and two minute glebe cottages adjoining. The square was a cul-de-sac. The only road led in by the wall, so that all wheeled traffic had to return by the way it had come. But for foot passengers only there was a flight of steps at the other end. The church stood very high, and between its narrow stone yard and the rectory’s Regency block the stone stairs wound up steeply to a wide residential avenue behind. The stairs were worn and highly dangerous despite the bracket street lamp on the churchyard wall, but they were much used in daytime by shoppers, who treated the square as a short cut to civilisation from the stucco wastes of fading grandeur which had once looked down on “trade.” Yet tonight when visibility was down to nil, the rectory might have been alone upon a moor.

It was a pleasant cube of a house possessing two main storeys, a half-basement, and a fine range of attics just above the cornice. There were lights in every window and the two which flanked the squat porch showed red and warm-looking in the mist.

Old Canon Avril had lived so long in the square that changing times had altered his domestic arrangements without haste or upheaval. He lived on the ground floor very comfortably while his old verger, William Talisman, made his home in the basement and Mrs. Talisman looked after them both. In the fine rooms above Meg had her self-contained apartment, and the attics had been converted into a pleasant cottagey dwelling for tenants of whom everybody was fond. It had all come about quietly and easily, and he knew very well how lucky he was.

In his early days the living had been a fashionable one and he had been glad of the glebe cottages to house the overflow of his servants, but he had not enjoyed it and the newer arrangements seemed to him infinitely more luxurious. At the moment he was standing where he always had stood, on the rug before the living-room fire. It was the room he had brought his bride to thirty years before, and since then, if only for reasons more financial than sentimental, nothing in it had ever been changed. It had become a little worn in the interim, but the good things in it, the walnut bookcase with the ivory chessmen displayed, the bureau with thirteen panes in each glass door, the Queen Anne chair with the seven-foot back, the Persian rug which had been a wedding present from his younger sister, Mr. Campion’s mother, had all mellowed just as he had with care and use and quiet living.

At the moment he was brokenhearted. Meg had returned with her story and he had found it so bewildering that his incredulity had made her cry. She had gone upstairs and he was left sorrowing but still very puzzled. His books were in the other room in comfortable chaos waiting for him to return to their sanity and peace, but he was resisting them valiantly.

Normally he was the happiest of men. He asked so little of life that its frugal bounty amazed and delighted him. The older he grew and the poorer he became, the calmer and more contented appeared his fine gentle face. He was an impossible person in many ways, with an approach to life which was clear-sighted yet slightly off centre, and therefore disconcerting to most of his colleagues. No one feared him, simple people loved and protected him as if he were daft, and he had exasperated more great churchmen than any other parson alive.

The great Dr. Potter, who was for a brief time Bishop of London, had been at Cambridge with him in the nineties and had once heard him deliver a scintillating sermon on an abstruse heresy which but twelve men in England could possibly have appreciated to a congregation of four small shopkeepers and their families, five small boys, and a deaf old lady. When he had remonstrated that no one could possibly have followed him, Avril had clasped his arm and chuckled contentedly. “Of course not, my dear fellow. But how wonderful for him if by chance one of them did!”

He believed in miracles and frequently observed them, and nothing astonished him. His imagination was as wild as a small boy’s and his faith ultimate. In ordinary life he was, quite frankly, hardly safe out.

He was a big man with a great frame, untidy white hair, and the ease of manner of one to whom every stranger is probably due to become an old friend. His distress just now was all the more poignant.

“She saw him,” he repeated, his voice urgent. “She saw and recognised him and ran to him across the station. You heard her say that, Amanda.”

The only other person in the room, the Lady Amanda, sister to the Earl of Pontisbright, wife to Albert Campion, director of the key firm of Alandel Aircraft Limited and white hope among Britain’s back-room boys, sat in the high chair. She was embroidering the word “Sheriff” in very large letters on a small green shirt. The red hair of the Pontisbrights, which in medieval legend is said to swallow the fire of rubies, was cut neatly round her small head, and under it her brown eyes were thoughtful in her heart-shaped face.

She had explained the business very carefully to him twice already, but the cream of her forehead remained unruffled and her clear voice preserved that quality of adventurous common sense which was her chief characteristic.

“But when they caught up with him he wasn’t Martin at all. I’ve done that, haven’t you, Uncle Hubert? Especially on railway stations. It’s the noise. You can’t hear at all, so you don’t see too well either.”

The old man shook his head uneasily. “But when she first saw him she was sure,” he insisted. “She says so. I’m so frightened of this, Amanda, that I’m clinging to it like a drowning man to handfuls of sea.”

Amanda’s thin brown fingers turned the wool deftly.

“I don’t think the man they caught changed clothes with Martin in a train full of people in a few seconds, do you?” she remarked.

He laughed. It was an abrupt crow directed at himself.

“Check,” he said. “No. No, perhaps not. Although, you know, Amanda, people do do the most extraordinary things. But you’re right. That’s wild. That really is absurd. Unless by chance there were two men.”

“No, Uncle.” She led him away from that loophole with an experienced hand. “No. There was only one man and he was not Martin, but he looked like Martin from a distance and he wore clothes like Martin and he must have moved and walked exactly like Martin or Meg would not have been deceived. Therefore he is someone who knew Martin, and——”

“Good heavens!” He was looking at her in horror, pain and dismay on his fine face. “You don’t mean that poor boy is in the background somewhere, in some institution perhaps? Perhaps unrecognisable himself, but teaching someone else, instructing someone?”

“No, my dear.” Amanda’s tenacity could match his own. “Martin is dead. He was killed in the war. This man who is impersonating him must have known him before. Do you remember how you showed me how Henry Irving walked? You could do that now, but you can’t have seen him for forty or fifty years. When Albert comes in I think we’ll find that this man knew Martin long ago, perhaps in France before the war.”

The old man sighed. His own imaginings had shaken him and he was only half comforted.

“Perhaps so. Yes, perhaps so. And what about this photograph in here? This is the same man in the same masquerade, is it?”

His eye had caught the new copy of the Tatler lying open on the couch before him and he bent down to retrieve it. For the first time Amanda frowned.

“That really is bad luck,” she said. “When Mrs. Featherstone telephoned this afternoon and told me, and I looked it up, I was awfully sick about it. It was jolly clever of him, whoever he is, and very, very naughty.”

“It’s so like the boy as I remember him. All that hairy martial rubbish on his face, dear silly fellow.” The Canon was holding the page very close to his eyes, trying to find on its shiny surface lines which had never been there. “There’s the name too, you see, the name underneath.”

“Yes, well, that’s all part of the act.” She was genuinely worried and her sewing lay quiet in her lap. “I was going to tell you just when Meg came in. I telephoned the paper and Sean was in conference but I got hold of Pip, who was fascinated, of course. When he had finished explaining that one can’t libel a dead man he put me on to the photographer and I talked to him.”

“Oh, he was standing there, was he?” The Canon was enormously interested.

“No, he was in his own office. You see, the paper buys these news snapshots from a photograph agency. The photographer simply saw Bertie and May Oldsworth on the course and went over to snap them. There were one or two other people standing near who were also in the picture, and as he did not recognise them he asked them their names, as he always does. He remembered Elginbrodde because he asked to have it spelt.”

“The man gave his name as Martin Elginbrodde?” The old man continued to peer at the small figure on the extreme edge of a group of racegoers tucked down in one corner of a very full page. “ ‘The Hon. Bertie Oldsworth,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘who hunts with the Westmeath, in the paddock with his wife, who is a daughter of Lady Larradine. Also in the picture are Mr. and Mrs. Peter Hill and Major Martin Elginbrodde.’ Upon my soul, Amanda, I can’t believe this man would have given Martin’s name to the press.”

“But of course he would if he was impersonating him, Uncle. He must have been following the photographer around, waiting for a chance to slip into a picture.”

“Why should he be so cruel? What did he hope to gain?”

Amanda had no solution to offer and did not attempt to invent one. In her experience, no one could beat Uncle Hubert on his own ground when it came to conjecture. Instead she stuck to practical matters. The ability of the soberest folk to believe all they read in print was well known to her, and her worry was a real one.

“People we know have been ringing up ever since, asking if Meg has seen it,” she said slowly. “There’ll be a lot more this evening. People always read the Tatler at tea on Wednesdays. And of course they’re going to go on telephoning from now till next year as the late ones spot it in the dentist’s waiting room or the hairdresser’s. Meg’s going to hate that. Just now she’s expecting a call from Geoff. I hope I did the right thing. I put Sam on to it.”

“Sam?” The Canon’s face brightened. “Just the man. He knows all about newspapers.” A smile of affection had passed over his face as it always did when he spoke of Samuel Drummock, who was his tenant on the top floor. That elderly and distinguished sporting journalist and his wife had lived there many years, and the relationship between the two men was something of a miracle in itself. It was a cordiality based, apparently, on complete non-comprehension cemented by a deep mutual respect for the utterly unknown. No two men saw less eye to eye and the result was unexpected harmony, as if a clog and a fish had mysteriously become friends and were proud each of the other’s remarkable dissimilarity to himself.

Amanda sighed. “So that’s all right. He’s sitting on the top stairs with the phone and a mug of beer. Meg has left her door open and the moment it really is Geoff he’s going to call her. He’s furious about all this. I’ve never seen Sam ‘right angry,’ as he calls it, before.”

“Well, you know, it’s an evil thing, this attempt to reverse the process of mourning.” The Canon stepped back on to his own territory and became a different being. “Mourning is not forgetting,” he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. “It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous. This attempt to reverse it when the thing is practically achieved, that is wicked, an attempt to kill the spirit. The poor fellow, whoever he is, has no idea what he’s doing, that’s obvious. Sam forgets that. Hallo, that’s the front door. Is that Albert?”

Amanda listened a moment and then bundled the shirt she was holding behind her under the cushion like any other mother six weeks before Christmas.

“No, Uncle, that’s the children.”

“Oh dear!” He was alarmed. “I’d forgotten them. They must be kept right away from this, Amanda. They’re not ready for anything of this sort. This is most shocking to the young. Frightening.”

“I know, dear. Lugg’s with them. We’ll see to that. Hullo, how did you get on?”

The door shuddering open had admitted three excited people. Two of them, both male, were almost beside themselves with the joyous adventure of getting home through London in a real pea-souper. One of these was six and the other was sixty. The third of the party, who was pale and a little breathless from the responsibility of controlling the others, was a girl. She was eight.

Mr. Campion’s heir, Rupert, came in blinking in the bright light. He was a slender six-year-old, red-haired like his mother, and wiry. He had the innate gentleness of his father’s family, but unlike either of his parents, he was shy. He went over to his mother now and, leaning across her chair, burst out with his private worry in a husky whisper.

“The shoe trees for Aunt Val cost two-and-six.”

“Oh well, that’s all right,” said Amanda reassuringly. “That only makes you ninepence down to date. That’s not bad, you know, considering the rise in the cost of living.”

“You’re sure?”

“Certain. We’ll go into the whole situation at the end of the week. Was it fun?”

“Tremenjous.” Mr. Magersfontein Lugg, breathing heavily in the doorway, was glowing with a good temper foreign to his somewhat lugubrious personality. He was a large globular person, with a vast white face, small beady black eyes, and a drooping moustache. For so many years he had been Mr. Campion’s friend and knave, as well as his personal servant, that certain eccentricities which he possessed had long been accepted and forgiven by all who knew them. He wore the formal black clothes and hard hat of an upper servant of the last century, but there the likeness ceased abruptly.

“I don’t mind minding kids,” he announced. “The little gel saved me from being run over twice.”

The third member of the trio smiled faintly. She was not very tall and not very plump, and her thick straight hair hung down behind her almost to her knees. She was very plainly dressed and as formal as only a child can be, but the blue eyes in her short-nosed solemn face were secretly merry under their heavy lids.

This was Emily, daughter of Mrs. Talisman’s second son who had got on in the world and achieved an engineering degree, only to be killed with his wife and a second daughter in Portsmouth in the Blitz. Then Emily, who had been a baby at the time, had come to live with her grandmother in the half-basement.

Old Canon Avril often forgot she was not his own granddaughter, and Mrs. Talisman brought her up to be worthy of such a distinction, with the result that she might have been a little repressed had it not been for Sam and Mrs. Drummock, who prevented all that.

She looked round cautiously. “There were fires in the street,” she said.

“Tha’s right. They’ve got the old beacons out at Marble Arch.” Lugg spoke with tremendous relish. “I ain’t seen ’em since I was a nipper meself. Flames shootin’ up into the sky like Guy Fawkes night.”

Rupert regarded him seriously. “We got you away, though,” he observed, “and you still have your parcel. Are you going to show it to Mother, or is it a surprise?”

“Now then, now then, come orf it.” Mr. Lugg’s sallow skin had achieved a dusky redness and his eyes glowered. “Be a sport. Remember all I’ve learned you. Don’t nark it.”

Rupert said nothing, but his eyes laughed and he and Emily exchanged a silent joke.

“It is a surprise,” deduced Amanda, “and I’m glad to know because Mr. Lugg’s surprises are better if they’re not sudden.”

“All right, all right, I’ll tell yer if yer must know. It’s only a bloomin’ Father Christmas mask. I was trying it on to amuse these ’ere kids and the blessed girl be’ind the counter made me buy it.” Lugg was fighting with a string on his limp package and would have produced his purchase there and then had not a key sounded in the lock behind him in the hall.

“Oh.” Amanda got up. “Look, Lugg, that’s the boss with Inspector Luke.”

The fat man met her eyes. “Inspector Luke, eh?” he said in quick comprehension. “Yes, well, you young’uns better get along, get your wet shoes orf or something. We don’t want you dyin’ on us, causin’ trouble. Come on, come on, get a move on, can’t yer? Where shall we go? Up top?”

“No, I don’t think so. Mr. Drummock’s busy for us on the phone.”

“Ho.” The black eyebrows rose. “General mobilisation, is it? Very well, we’ll go down to yer Grannie’s, Emily. See what she’s got in her pantry. Perhaps she’ll ’ave another go at teachin’ me to speak proper, pore soul.”

Rupert slid his hand into the vast one. “You can if you like,” he said with the conscious wickedness of one betraying a confidence. “You said you could.”

“Yus, but I don’t like, see? And that was between us. You’re goin’ to get a thick ear. You’re above yourself, that’s what you are. You get more like your Pa every day. Come on, Emily, where are yer?”

“I’m here.” Her voice sounded from the basement stairs. “I’ve put the light on for you. You fell last time.”

They vanished below, leaving the room blank, like a stage after a harlequinade, and the old man laughed.

“How happy they are,” he said, “all of an age. Ah, Albert my boy, come in, come in. Good evening, Chief Inspector. I’m afraid we’re giving you a lot of trouble.”

The greeting stopped Charlie Luke, who had come swinging in behind Campion, filling the room to bursting point by the mere size of his personality, short in his tracks. Suspicion leapt in his bright eyes. He always suspected people wanting to save him trouble. One good stare at the old man appeared to reassure him, and without being in any way discourteous he soon managed to convey that he had seen faces like Uncle Hubert’s “befuddled old kisser” before. He smiled, with a secret quirk of sheer street-boy naughtiness in his twisted lips, only to receive a considerable shock as he found it not only remarked and recognised but also forgiven by the old priest. It was the most complete introduction taking place in a few seconds which Mr. Campion had ever witnessed.

The two men shook hands and after he had greeted Amanda as an old colleague Luke glanced about him.

“Where’s Mrs. Elginbrodde? Did she get home in good shape?”

“Yes. She’s upstairs in her own room. I’m afraid I upset her.” The Canon wagged his head regretfully. “This has appeared too.” He took up the social journal as he spoke and the D.D.C.I. nodded.

“We saw it at the station. The old charge sergeant sits there reading it, thinking he’s a lord. That’s going to cause a bit of trouble, I’m afraid. Well, it’s an upsetting time, sir. I think I ought to see the young lady, though.”

Amanda rose. “We’ll go up. Did you get anything?”

“A little. Nothing conclusive,” murmured her husband, who seemed unhappy. “Come on, Charles. This way.”

Meg Elginbrodde’s sitting room, immediately above the one they had just left, was as different from it as could well be imagined. Van Rinn had done the décor for her in the latest lush or Beaton manner, and between the damasked grey walls and the deep gold carpet there ranged every permissible tint and texture from bronze velvet to scarlet linen, pin-pointed and enlivened with daring touches of Bristol blue. After a dubious sidelong glance Luke suddenly decided to like it very much indeed, and he favoured it with a good stare round which made him look like a black curly retriever arriving unexpectedly in fairyland.

On an elegant side table between the windows there were evidences of Meg’s own art, sketches of dresses, swathes of material, samples of braids and beads, and the blue spidery designs from which jewellers work. Since Campion’s famous sister Val had acquired the controlling interest in the fashion house of Papendeik, she had sponsored several young couturiers, and Meg Elginbrodde was one of her most successful discoveries.

The girl herself had been sitting in a small gilt armchair by the fire when they arrived and she rose to greet them. She had changed into a long grey dress which suited her slenderness and flattered the white-gold sleekness of her hair, but she looked an older woman than she had appeared in the station. The emotional experience which she was undergoing had marked her and her muscles were taut and her eyes sombre with new information about herself.

“Who was he? Did you find out?” She spoke directly to Luke as if to a friend, and was met by something new in his attitude. He had become wary and inquisitive, and Campion, who seemed nervous of him, hastened to answer.

“His name is Walter Morrison.”

“Commonly called ‘Duds.’ ” Luke indicated exaggerated outline of his own clothes by way of defining the nickname. “Does that convey anything to you?”

“No,” she said slowly, her eyes growing puzzled as they watched him. “No. Ought it to?”

“Not particularly. He’s been out of jail, Chelmsford”—he sketched in the blank face of a squat building with the flat of his hand, presumably to save himself time—“just six weeks. He was concerned in a holdup.” He hunched his shoulders and embarked on one of those pieces of description which were peculiarly his own. It was an astonishing performance in many ways. The man talked like a pump, in gusts, using little or no syntax and forcing home his meaning by what would appear to be physical strength alone. “It was thug stuff, but they planned it, Duds and another man. One knife between them and half a broken bottle. It was on the corner of Greek Street and Soho Square. Night. V-2 time.” His diamond-shaped eyes demanded her co-operation. “Remember V-2’s? The whole city waiting. Silent. People on edge. More waiting. Waiting for hours. Nothing. Nothing to show. Then, strike a light! Suddenly, no warning, no whistle, wallop! End of the ruddy world! Just a damned great hole and afterwards half the street coming down very slowly, like a woman fainting. Well. It was in that time. These two lay in wait. Dark streets. Quiet. Foreign troops passing. These lads were waiting for a drunk. Two came by at last alone.”

His voice dropped a tone or two. “Quietly. Quietly. Up behind ... Got yer!” He finished with a soft but bloodcurdling little gulp and the scene was as vivid and as unspeakably brutal as if it had happened before them. “It wasn’t so easy though,” he rattled on, unaware of a tenth part of the impression he was creating on that gentle civilised company. “Bad luck really. Or good. Depends which side you were on. A patrol car ran slap into the fight. Money and valuables had passed, so the law was happy. The two were inside and up before the Beak before they knew what had happened to them. Neither was in uniform and there was no traceable sign that either of them was entitled to wear one. They weren’t talking, of course, but their fingerprints were on the files so they didn’t miss anything that was coming to them. The other man got the full ten years for robbery with violence. But the charge against Duds was reduced to ‘Assault with intent to rob’ and he got the limit of five. He can’t have been a good boy inside in spite of his pretty voice. There was no remission.”

Meg smoothed the silk over her knee and the diamond on her hand winked and trembled. She looked a trifle dazed. It was an effect which Luke’s descriptive methods were liable to produce on the uninitiated.

“That just makes it utterly incomprehensible,” she said softly. “Is that all you know about him?”

“Oh no.” His intelligence was sharp and he prodded her bewilderment like a carpenter prodding a beam for rot. “From 1932 to 1940 he was in and out of prison for various offences, larceny, demanding with menaces, assault. After that he vanished, might have died, for nearly five years, which suggests that he was being taken care of by the Army. He might have done well in it. That did happen.”

“Did he serve with Martin Elginbrodde at any point?” demanded Amanda, her cool voice deliberately conversational in the tension.

“We haven’t established it.” Luke met her eyes and flashed a question at her which she either could not or would not recognise. “He says he never heard of him, naturally. His story is that he’s an actor by profession. That probably means he once went on the stage for a spell. He gave the name of a provincial management and we’re checking on that now. It won’t get us far or”—he peered at Meg again—“will it?”

“He certainly had a most professional moustache,” murmured Mr. Campion with uneasy lightness.

Meg raised her head. “How did he explain the moustache?”

“Oh, said he used to wear one but lost it in stir, and didn’t like to turn up among his pals without one.” The D.D.C.I. spoke in a new light voice, with a careful clipped accent. He also twisted his body slightly, and immediately the absent Duds was recalled to the mind’s eye. “He gave his present address, which is a well-known lodginghouse just over the river, and we were able to check on that at once. After we let him go ...”

“You let him go!” Meg looked at him in amazement and he stiffened.

“We couldn’t hold him, ma’am.” He sounded scandalised. “We can’t hold a man because a lady thinks she recognises him as her husband.”

“But he ran away.”

Luke opened his mouth but checked the retort just in time. He glanced hopefully at Mr. Campion, who did his best to explain.

“If the police arrest a man they’re bound to bring him before a magistrate as soon as possible,” he said gently. “That’s the law the wars are fought for nowadays. Habeas corpus and all that. This man Morrison hasn’t even been proved to have got himself photographed in a false moustache to plague you with copies of it, but even if he had I doubt if the act would constitute nuisance. That was why we hoped he’d speak to you. Once he had asked for money, or uttered threats, some point in his performance would have appeared.”

She shook her head wonderingly and Luke exploded.

“We were only within our rights in marching him off for questioning because the chump ran away,” he announced inelegantly. “If he’d raised his hat and wandered off we could hardly have stopped him. The courts can be very mind-my-wig when they begin on the subject of police persecution of the marked man.” He threw in a brief but vivid impression of some legal dignitary who possessed a commanding manner, a throat infection, and a small but obtrusive corporation. “However, we’re on to the blighter now. He knows we are and——”

The trill of the telephone bell on the landing outside cut him short. Meg had sprung up at its first hesitant note. Her movement was unconscious, as was also her glance at the French clock on the mantelshelf. The golden hands showed the time as a few minutes before seven and in the silence everyone remembered that Geoffrey Levett had promised to telephone her at five. Meanwhile a firm flat Midland voice was speaking in the passage outside.

“Hullo, hullo.... Aye, it is.... But no, no, you can’t speak to her. I’m sorry.” The tone was patient but utterly uncompromising. “Oh yes, I’ve got your name. I’ll remember.... Yes, she has seen it.... Aye, it was indeed a great shock. Someone playing the go-at. Not in good taste.... No, I quite agree.... Good-bye.”

The phone rang off and the tiny sound was followed by a bellow which would have carried across a playing field.

“Meg lass!”

“Yes, Uncle Sam?”

“The Dowager Lady Totham, Park Street. Seventeen going up.”

“Thank you, darling.” She sighed and reseated herself. “That’s been happening all the time. Sam’s keeping a list. I do hope Geoff doesn’t keep finding this number engaged. I’m sorry, Chief Inspector, what were you saying?”

Luke stood looking at her. His hands were in his pockets, his jacket hitched back into a flounce behind his narrow hips. His shoulders were flat and wide and his dark face glowed with the half-ferocious, half-condoning knowingness which was the essence of the man. He had clearly made up his mind to come clean.

“Mrs. Elginbrodde,” he demanded bluntly, “just how well did you know that husband of yours when you married him?”

Mr. Campion’s face became misleadingly blank and Amanda looked up, her brown eyes surprised and wary. They were hostile to Luke and he was aware of it and used to hostility.

“Well, you see how it is,” he went on, taking the room into his confidence. “Now I’ve had a talk with Duds I see he’s a smooth piece. Nice voice. Plausible. May have come from a good home, as they say. May easily have had a very good war record.”

Canon Avril, who had been sitting very quietly in the darkest corner of the room, leant forward.

“If you’re asking if he had ever had any serious illness or nervous trouble, we don’t know,” he remarked. “I hadn’t known him from boyhood and when his grandmother wrote me from France she did not mention anything of the kind. He was introduced here by a young nephew of mine soon after the war had started. Then, when he returned from the Middle East, we saw a lot of him. I thought he and Meg were young to marry, but then life was shorter in those days. Youth is relative, after all.”

The D.D.C.I. hesitated, but his sophisticated eyes smiled at the old man.

“As long as you satisfied yourself about the chap, sir,” he said, “as long as you did check up on him——”

“Check up?”

Luke sighed. “Neither Mr. Campion nor I ever met Mr. Elginbrodde. Today we questioned a man called Duds Morrison. There are five years in Morrison’s life which from our point of view are unaccounted for, and it was during those same five years that Elginbrodde met and married your daughter. I’m just making quite sure they’re not the same man.”

Meg gaped at him. In her amazement she let the murmur of the telephone outside pass unnoticed.

“But I saw him too.”

Luke regarded her stolidly. “I know you did,” he said, and added with an irritable gesture which destroyed his official manner, “You’re human, aren’t you?”

“But of course.” To everyone’s astonishment the Canon got up and, coming down the room, took his daughter’s hand. “Of course,” he repeated. “This young man must make sure of that, Meg. Good gracious me. No good purpose is ever served by discounting the possibility of sin.” He made the word sound familiar if not downright homely.

Luke’s smile grew slowly broad and absent-mindedly he turned his thumbs up. “That’s all right then. You must take a squint at him yourself, sir——”

“Is there a Chief Inspector of Po-lice in there, Meg? Name of Luke?” The bellow from the landing cut him short and sent him hurrying to the door. “Divisional Headquarters, urgent.”

Everyone listened to the ensuing conversation, but it was not revealing.

“Where?” Luke demanded after a long silence, and then, “I see. Right. I’ll come there now. No good sending a car in this fog.”

He came striding back into the room, unusual touches of colour on his cheekbones.

“I’m afraid it’ll have to be tonight, sir,” he said to Avril, “and I’ll have to ask you to come out again too, Mr. Campion, if you will. I haven’t been very bright. They’ve just picked up Duds in an alley off Crumb Street. He’s what you might call thoroughly dead by all I can hear.”

Mr. Campion sat up slowly and then rose to his feet.

“So soon?” he murmured. “That’s a black mark against us, Charles. I wondered if he had it coming to him, but I didn’t envisage anything quite so—prompt.”

“Are you saying he’s been murdered?” Meg was very pale.

Luke smiled at her from the midst of his preoccupation. “He didn’t die of neglect.”

The Canon got up. “We must go at once,” he said.

As the front door closed behind the three men and its distinctive slam echoed in the apartment upstairs, Meg walked down the room and back again.

“I love Geoffrey,” she said.

“Yes.” Amanda did not move. Her eyes looked warm and honey-coloured in the firelight. “That’s obvious, if you’ll forgive my saying so. Did you quarrel this afternoon?”

“No, I tried to explain, though, which was silly. I thought I knew Geoff but I don’t, Amanda. I love him unbearably but I don’t know him at all.” She looked so young of a sudden that the other woman glanced away.

“I don’t expect he’s very knowable at the moment,” she observed. “Getting married is always rather complicating, don’t you think? I know it’s useless to say don’t worry, but I feel you must wait. Waiting is one of the great arts.”

“That awful little man in the station wasn’t Martin.”

“No, of course he wasn’t.”

“The Chief Inspector didn’t believe me.”

“Luke was mystified. When he talked to Morrison he must have decided it wasn’t blackmail. Now of course he’s furious with himself.”

“Because he didn’t guess the man was going to get killed?”

“Well,” said Amanda, who was giving the matter her deepest consideration, “he hasn’t looked after him very well, has he?”

Meg made an effort to think about Morrison and gave it up.

“Suppose Geoff doesn’t ring.”

“Eeh, he’ll telephone, lass.” The door had been kicked open a little wider by a soft-soled shoe and Sam Drummock came cautiously into the room. He was carrying two large tulip glasses which he had overfilled, and he walked very steadily, like a three-year-old carrying a pitcher. He was a round man with a round bald head, and possessed the great strength which is inherent in the Midland breed. He had small shrewd eyes and a red face and was at the moment clad in his working garment. This was a sort of high-collared pyjama jacket in heavy shantung, most beautifully laundered and worn over tidy little grey flannel trousers. His small round feet were set in neat and shiny red slippers, and his entire appearance managed to suggest the highly conventional costume of some unknown land.

“Gin sling,” he explained, handing each of them a glass. “I mixed it myself so I know it’s all right. It’s a pick-me-up. You need it. Wait till I get my can. It’s on the stairs.”

He moved very quickly and lightly, like the boxers he admired so much, and was soon back again, a shining pewter tankard in his hand.

“Well, I listened,” he announced cheerfully. “It’s a killing, eh? Well, that’s bad. Still, cheer up. Thank God it’s not uz.” A little chuckling laugh escaped him and he roamed over to a bureau on whose lid a design for a wonderful wedding dress was displayed. “I’m going to see the old Queen in this,” he said to Amanda with enormous satisfaction. “I’m going to sit in the front pew and hold my little top hat on my knee. If the old Bishop (and he hasn’t been looking too good lately, mind you) only foozles it, and Hubert has to do the marrying, I’m going to give her away.”

He peered at the drawing again and made an explosive noise.

“I don’t like the bit underneath. That spoils it for me, that does. ‘Darling, if I could only wear this myself I’d be in heaven.’ Signed Nicky. I’d Nicky the little so-and-so.”

Meg smiled in spite of her preoccupation. “Nicolas de Richeberg is the most brilliant dress designer in the world, Uncle Sam.”

“So he ought to be.” Sam raised his tankard. “Only the best is good enough for uz. But she’d look lovely in calico, my old Queen would. Meg——”

“Yes?”

“It’s on my conscience so I’ll have to tell you. That girl in Geoff’s office rang again. He’s forgotten a personal call that was booked to him by his Paris foreman or broker or whatever they call them. She wants him to phone the moment he comes here.” Sam was worried. The anxiety peeped out of his kind little eyes and was gone again. “But it doesn’t signify.” A hopeful idea occurred to him. “Maybe he’s gone and had a drink or two, eh?”

“That wouldn’t be like him.”

“No.” He put his head into his mug and reappeared, refreshed. “Mind you,” he said, “if it was Martin that was on the tiles I wouldn’t give it another thought. I’d know.”

Amanda hesitated. “I never knew Martin, of course. Was he a wild person?”

“Martin?” Sam put his head back and crowed aloud. “Oh, a dasher. A lively, dashing, smashing sort of a lad. But we don’t want to talk about him, poor fellow, do we?” There were sudden tears in the twinkling eyes. “Oh lord, no. That’s done. That’s over. My old Queen’s going to be happy with a grand chap. She’s going to have a good steady sensible manly sort of a huzband.” He fixed the visitor with a solemn stare. “A grand chap,” he declared. “One of the best. And when I’m talking I know what I mean. A straight clean fighter.”

This last was clearly the highest praise he could bestow. He hesitated, glanced at the door and back again, and his very head shone with exasperation.

“But if he’s not flat on his back under a bar table, why the hell doesn’t he ring oop?” he said.