VIII

It was two o’clock when a taxicab stopped in Severall Street, Lambeth, and a very weary girl alighted. The detective whom she had asked by telephone should meet her was waiting at the corner of the street and ran towards her.

“You want Mrs. Inglethorne’s, don’t you, miss? The house is on the opposite side of the road.”

He hurried across the street and knocked at a door. Twice and three times he knocked before a sash went up and the voice of Peter Dawlish asked:

“Who is it?”

He had hardly asked the question before he recognized the girl.

“I’ll be down in a second.”

But before he could descend, the landlady herself made an appearance. She was a little tremulous of voice, more than a little whining, when she recognized the familiar countenance of the detective.

“Whatcher want? There’s nobody here except my young man lodger, and he’s straight⁠—a policeman recommended him⁠—”

“This lady is from Scotland Yard, and she wishes to see him, Mrs. Inglethorne,” said the detective soothingly. “Don’t get worried.”

“Worried! Me workin’ my fingers to the bone and my old man in ‘stir,’ though as innocent as a babe unborn⁠—”

By this time Peter Dawlish had descended.

“Do you wish to see me?”

She nodded.

“Where can I see you? Can you come out and sit in the cab for a few minutes?”

“Certainly.”

“There is another favour I want to ask. Will you be very annoyed if I ask you to allow this police officer to search your room?”

He was struck dumb for a second.

“Certainly. Why, is something lost?”

“Nothing.” She turned to the detective and gave him instructions in a low tone; he pushed past the affrighted landlady and went upstairs.

“Now come into the cab. You won’t catch cold?”

He laughed irritably.

“I’m so hot with righteous indignation that I would melt an iceberg!” he said.

He stepped into the taxi and pulled the door tight.

“Now, Miss Maughan!”

She looked sideways at him; the white face of the lantern illuminating the taximeter formed a reflector that gave some light to the interior of the car.

“What have you been doing all evening?” she asked.

“From what hour?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“I’ve been in the house. A job came to me this morning addressing envelopes, and I’ve been working since seven till within a few minutes of your arrival. About two thousand of them are already addressed; I think that accounts for my time. I only had the envelopes and lists at six-thirty. Why⁠—what has happened?”

“Druze is dead.”

“Dead?”

“Murdered; his body was found on Barnes Common somewhere between 11:45 and midnight.”

He whistled softly.

“That is a bad business. How was he killed?”

“Shot⁠—at close range.”

He was silent for a time.

“Naturally, after my wild and woolly threats, you suspected me. Come up and see the envelopes⁠—my bedroom is the only decent room in the house.”

She hesitated, then, stretching out her hand, pulled back the lock of the door.

Mrs. Inglethorne was past surprising. She stood at the foot of the stairs, an old ulster over her dressing-gown, and watched the two go up without comment.

“There is nothing here, miss,” said the detective before he caught sight of Peter. “Nothing except these.” He indicated with a wave of his hand a deal table covered with small envelopes neatly packed.

Leslie smiled.

“You needn’t have told me you’d been working here, Mr. Dawlish,” she said; “it is like a smoke-room.”

The aroma of cigarettes still hung about in spite of the open windows; the tin she had sent to him was on the table, only half-full.

“I’ve been a little extravagant,” he said apologetically; “but the temptation was great.”

The detective still lingered by the door, evidently in two minds as to whether it would be proper to leave them in this peculiar environment. Leslie saved him the responsibility of a decision by:

“Thank you very much. I will be down in a minute or two,” she said.

She sat at the foot of the bed, her arm over the rail, and looked at Peter. She would not have recognized him; he was clean-shaven, spruce. There was a certain buoyancy in his attitude which was new to her. Good looking, too, and in spite of his nearly thirty years and all that he had suffered, remarkably youthful. It added a piquant interest to her scrutiny that she knew so much about his past⁠—so much more than he guessed.

A husky voice hailed them from the foot of the stairs.

“Would you like a cup of tea, miss?”

Peter Dawlish looked at the girl with a smile.

“She really makes rather good tea,” he said in a low voice.

“I should love one,” she nodded, and he called softly down the stairs and came back.

“I’m scared of waking Elizabeth,” he said, and added: “You look fagged.”

“Which means that I look hideous,” she retorted with a frank smile. “I won’t bandy compliments with you, or I would congratulate you upon the marked improvement which the barber has brought about. Did you know Druze very well?”

“Not very well,” he said.

“Tell me something about him⁠—all that you know.”

He frowned at this, evidently trying to remember matters that had passed, facts that had gone out of his recollection.

“He came to Lord Everreed’s place soon after I took up my post,” he said. “My aunt, the Princess Bellini, recommended him⁠—”

“The Princess recommended him?” she said quickly. “Why, was he in her service?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “He was with Aunt Anita in Java for years. Her husband held some sort of minor post on one of the plantations; he was, I believe, a fairly poor man. After his death she came to England, and Druze came with her; in Java she had afforded the luxury of a butler⁠—living is rather cheap there⁠—but when she came to England she got rid of him. I have a distinct recollection of the letter she wrote to Lord Everreed, which I answered. I call her ‘aunt,’ ” he explained, “although she was only the half-sister of my father, and, in reality, no relation to me at all. How long Druze remained with Lord Everreed, of course I do not know. From the date of my conviction that page of history is closed. But a few years after I had gone to prison I heard in a roundabout fashion⁠—I think it was in a letter which an old servant of ours wrote⁠—that he had gone into the service of Lady Raytham.”

She thought over this for some time.

“When were you arrested?”

“Seven and a half years ago.”

She looked up in surprise.

“Then you served the full sentence?”

He nodded.

“Yes. I am not on ticket-of-leave. The truth is, I was rather a troublesome prisoner⁠—I suppose most prisoners are who have the delusion of innocence. Why do you ask?”

“I have reason to believe that the Princess thought you only served five,” said the girl. “But that really doesn’t matter. I suppose she’s of an age that⁠—I’m being cattish. Now, tell me something more.”

“You look a very sleepy cat,” he smiled, and at that moment there came through the door a strange little figure.

How old she was it was difficult to tell, but Leslie guessed her to be six, though she was tall for that age. She was painfully thin, and her little arms, which carried with solemn attention a cup of tea, were hardly more than of the thickness of the bones that showed through the flesh. Her face, pinched and thin and translucent, had a beauty which made the girl catch her breath. She raised two big eyes to survey the visitor, and then the long lashes fell on her cheeks.

“Your tea,” she said.

Leslie took the cup gently from the child’s hand and set it down.

“What’s your name?” she asked, and as she put her hand on the yellow head, the little creature shrank back, her face puckered with fear.

“That’s Belinda,” said Peter, with a smile.

The child wore a ragged old mackintosh over a nightgown that had once been of red flannelette, but which had washed to the palest of pinks. Her hands, lightly clasped before her, were almost transparent.

“I’m Mrs. Inglethorne’s little girl,” she said in a low voice. “My name is ’Lizabeth⁠—not Belinda.”

She raised her eyes quickly to the man and dropped them again. The gravity of her tone, the low sweetness of her voice, amazed Leslie Maughan. For a second she forgot that she was too tired to be interested even in the bizarre.

“Won’t you come and talk to me?”

The child glanced at the door.

“Mother wants me⁠—”

“Talk to the lady!”

Evidently Mrs. Inglethorne, at the bottom of the stairs, had good ears. The child started, looked apprehensively round, and came sidling towards Leslie.

“What do you do with yourself?” asked Leslie. “Do you go to school?”

Elizabeth nodded.

“I think about daddy most of the time.”

Leslie remembered that daddy was at that moment serving his country in Dartmoor.

“I keep him in a book; he’s very nice⁠—ever so nice⁠—”

The child nodded soberly.

“In a book?” asked Leslie. “What kind of a book?”

A voice outside the door supplied an answer. Mrs. Inglethorne must have crept up the stairs the better to listen.

“Don’t take no notice of her, miss; she’s a bit cracked. Any good-looking feller she sees in a book she says is her father. Why, she used to take the King once, and then Lord What’s-his-name, and when I think of her own poor dear father, that worked his fingers to the bone and got a ‘stretch’ for nothing, as innocent as a babe unborn, it’s very hard.”

Elizabeth was tense now; her big eyes narrowed, her ear turned to the door. It was an attitude of apprehension, and Leslie’s heart ached for the child. She smoothed her hair, and this time the little girl did not shrink.

“I’ll send you some wonderful pictures, and you’ll be able to make up fathers and uncles and all sorts of nice things from them.”

Stooping, she kissed the child, and with her arm about her painfully thin shoulders, led her to the door. On the landing the unhealthy-looking Mrs. Inglethorne smirked and squirmed, a picture of gratitude for the lady’s condescension.

“I’m going to be very interested in Elizabeth,” said Leslie, her steady eyes on the woman. “You won’t mind if I come round sometimes to see how she is getting on?”

Mrs. Inglethorne made a fearful grimace which was intended to express her pleasure.

“How many children have you?”

“Five, miss.”

The woman was looking at her curiously, possibly fascinated by her first meeting with the female of the hated species.

“Five in this little house?” Leslie raised her eyebrows. “Where do you keep them all?”

Again the woman wriggled, this time uncomfortably.

“In the kitchen, miss, except the two girls; they sleep in my room.”

“I’d like to have a look at your kitchen.”

“It’s a bit late, and you’d wake ’em up,” said Mrs. Inglethorne after hesitation.

But Leslie waited, and reluctantly Mrs. Inglethorne went down the stairs, the girl following. The kitchen was at the back of the house, approached by a narrow passage. It was a room barely ten feet square, cold and miserably furnished. In the unsatisfactory light of the oil-lamp the woman carried, she saw not three, but four, little bundles; one, a child which could not have been three years old, slept in a soap box on the floor. Its coverlet was a strip of dusty carpet, which had been roughly cut to fit the shape of the box. Two children were huddled together under the table, wrapped in an old army overcoat. The fourth lay in a corner under a flour sack, so still that she might have been dead; a girl of eleven, sandy-haired, sharp-featured, who shivered and groaned in her sleep as the light of the lamp came upon her face.

“It’s very ’ard on a woman who’s got five mouths to fill,” whined Mrs. Inglethorne; “but I wouldn’t part with ’em for the world. And it’s warm in the kitchen when we’ve had a coke fire going all evening.”

Leslie went out of that sad little room sick at heart. Poverty she had seen and understood. Possibly these unfortunate children were as well off as thousands of others in the great metropolis. The weaklings would die; the fittest survive and presently drag their stunted bodies to a free school, where they would be taught just enough to enable them to write their betting slips and read the football reports intelligently.

Peter was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs.

“I think I’ll go home now. I’m rather tired,” she said. “Most likely you will be interrogated tomorrow either by Mr. Coldwell or an officer from the Yard. I think the best thing you can do is to go up and interview him.”

And then, abruptly:

“Have you seen your mother since you have been free?”

He shook his head.

“My parent has expressed her wishes on the matter in unmistakable terms. We were never en rapport, so to speak, and perhaps it is a little too late now to attempt to arrive at mutual understanding.”

She looked down at the floor, her lips pursed.

“I wonder,” she said, and held out her hand. “Good night, Peter Dawlish.”

He took her hand, held it for a second, and then:

“You’re rather wonderful. I’m getting a new angle on life,” he said.

She had one more call to make. Inspector Coldwell had promised to wait at Scotland Yard until she returned with her report, and she found him sipping coffee in the lobby, and told him briefly the result of her visit.

“I never thought Peter knew much about it. What does he know of Druze?”

He listened intently until she had finished.

“Rum! All the paths in this maze lead back to the Princess Bellini. Yes, I’ll see Peter; I’ll wire him in the morning,” he yawned. “It is time all honest people were in bed. I’m going to take you home.”

Her cab was waiting, and though she had no need of an escort, he pointed out that her way was largely his.

“What we’re going to do about Lady Raytham, I don’t know. I’m taking it for granted that you have discovered a whole lot that you haven’t told me.”

“Not a whole lot, a little,” she admitted.

Mr. Coldwell scratched his head.

“That little is usually crucial. However, I am not going to discourage you. Keep your mystery⁠—a little romance in police work has a wonderful tonic value.”

The cab carried them across deserted Trafalgar Square, and a few seconds later stopped before the door of Leslie’s flat.

“I suppose you know all that is to be known about the case?” he said, with a touch of the sardonic, as he handed her out of the cab. “Whilst I, a poor old muddleheaded copper, am groping round like a blindfolded man in a fog.”

“I think I know a lot,” she admitted, with a tired smile.

Coldwell was amused.

“The complacency of the woman! Here she is, keeping all her clues up her sleeve, ready to spring them out and reduce police headquarters to a bewildered pulp! Know all about Druze, do you?”

“I know a lot about him.”

“Fine!” said Coldwell.

She had the door open now, and he waited until she was in the passage before he dropped his bombshell.

“Promise me you won’t come out and ask questions, but will go straight up to bed, if I tell you something?”

“I promise,” she said.

He put his hand on the knob of the door, ready to shut it.

“Arthur, or Anthony, Druze, as he was variously called, was a woman!”

The door slammed on her; before she recovered from her stupor she heard the rattle of the cab as it moved away.