Читать книгу The Attic Murder - S. Fowler Wright - Страница 5

CHAPTER THREE

Francis Hammerton, if we are to think of him by his true name, had not considered the probability that Mrs. Benson might not be the sole occupant of the house, his mind having been concentrated upon aspects of his position which threatened more definite hazards.

Actually, the woman whose voice he heard was a next-door neighbour, Miss Janet Brown, who had looked in with no further purpose than to return a borrowed flat-iron. But it happened that she was already informed of the exciting incident of the afternoon, and when Mrs. Benson detained her for a cup of the tea which could be cheaply obtained by adding fresh water to the leaves in the lodger’s teapot, and naturally mentioned the good fortune which had walked in less than two hours before, Janet was quick to see the connection between the events.

“Edwards?” she asked scornfully. “You call him Mr. Vaughan next time you go up, and see how he’ll jump, or else answer his name without noticing how he’s giving himself away, which would be just as good proof.”

“I don’t think I shall try that,” Mrs. Benson answered doubtfully. She was sensibly trembling between the disappointment at the prospective loss of a most promising lodger, and vaguer fear of what so cunning and unscrupulous a character might be doing among the dowdy dining-room furniture. “I suppose,” she concluded, “I’d better let the police know.”

Miss Brown, a fair-haired angular woman, who showed her half-Scottish ancestry only in her bony figure, and the practical shrewdness with which she faced a difficult world, considered this proposition, and pronounced against it.

“There’ll be a reward offered, if you wait, more like than not. It might be a hundred pounds! You’ll be a fool if you let them know before that. Keep him close, I say, till you see how the cat jumps.”

Mrs. Benson wavered miserably between the prospect of such wealth, and the shadow of a great fear. She was a woman who prided herself upon her respectability, which meant, among other things, that she came of a family who had no dealings with the police.

Even for a criminal to be arrested beneath her roof would tend to taint her with the stigma of an undesired and undesirable notoriety. It was not at all the kind of thing which her deceased parents would have approved. It might not be quite so disgraceful as being behind with the rent (which had actually happened three years ago, though, by the combined mercies of Heaven and Mr. Clay, it was known to none but herself and the landlord’s agent), but it was not the kind of thing that should occur in the house of a woman whose uncle was a builder’s merchant, and whose brother-in-law had once sat on a Rural District Council.

But, far worse than that, suppose that, by not giving information at once, she should “get in trouble” with the police.

“I don’t know,” she said, “what I ought to do. Not rightly. He might clear off before then.”

The last sentence was spoken in a tone between hope and fear. Had she heard the front door bang at that moment, her first sensation might have been relief, rather than regret for a lodger lost, or the romantic shadow of reward faded away.

But Miss Brown put the suggestion aside. “Not he,” she said. “If you don’t let him see you suspect. He’ll be lying too snug for that.... You’ll find he won’t stir out of the door, more likely than not.... You can just wait till the reward comes out, and walk round the corner to pick it up.”

“Suppose they say I ought to have told them before?”

“Told them what? Your lodger’s a different name, isn’t he? How can you tell that as you don’t know? Even then, you won’t do more than a guess.

“You don’t read the papers much. You’re too busy for that, with all our lodgers to feed, and to wash and mend, and the house cleaning from attic down.... But you see the bills. £100 REWARD! Anyone’d stop to read them—and you go straight round on the chance.”

Francis Hammerton, having heard the most part of this conversation, or at least Janet’s part in it, for Mrs. Benson had a voice of less penetrating quality, did not wait to hear more.

He had heard sufficient to conclude that he would not be immediately denounced, and to see that he would increase his peril by confessing an identity already guessed. Janet’s last statement led him to conclude that there were most probably other lodgers in the house, and he saw that this must increase the risk of discovery while he remained listening at Mrs. Benson’s door.

Even in a less compromising position, he would have had no inclination to make himself known to the other occupants of the house, or to give occasion for his presence to be narrated to them. He went back while he safely could.