Dead or Alive (20 page)

She rolled her eyes at him in a puzzled way.

“It was some place or other, Mr Coverdale.”

And all at once there was a most frightful thought in his mind. “Some place or other, or some Place or other?” Which did she mean, and how was he to find out without asking a leading question? He got a piece of the hotel paper and gave it to her with a pencil out of his own pocket.

“Now, Miss Thompson, will you write that message down as nearly as possible as you saw it? Write down everything you remember seeing, even if it's only part of a word. Give me as much as you can.”

She rested the paper on the wedding photograph and wrote the first few words quickly, then stopped, lifted the pencil and wrote again, leaving a gap. Then, frowning, she bent over the paper, pencil poised, and all at once with a quick movement she scribbled in the empty space.

“There!” she said and pushed the paper at him. “That's the best I can do. I can't swear to the name but it was something like that.”

Bill read in a neat characterless hand, “I am going down to—” and then a gap, and then a scribble that looked like “stow.” Then, most decidedly and unmistakeably, “Place,” with a capital p. All his pulses jumped. “I am going down to—stow Place.”

He had to put his leading question then. He couldn't keep it back.

He said, “Was it Ledstow Place?” and she blinked at him and said,

“Oh
yes
, Mr Coverdale, it was.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded and laughed.

“Oh yes. So soon as you said it I could see it just like he'd written it down.”

Ledstow Place! It seemed incredible. Four days after he had disappeared Robin O'Hara had been in Oleander Mansions at Della Delorne's flat, and he had tried to send a note to say that he was going down to Ledstow Place … who was the note for? He asked the question with a rising excitement.

“And who was it adressed to?”

“Well, that's what I didn't see, and I was going to tell you about it. If I'd had the name and address, I'd have taken the message in the morning, as much as I could remember of it, but it was only the inside I'd looked at, and there was nothing to go by. Well, after the note got torn and Mabel had put it on the fire, which she'd no business to do, and so I told her, I began to think what I could do, because I'd got his ten-shilling note. Then it come to me p'raps I could go across to Miss Delorne's flat and just let him know I'd had an accident with his note. I told Mabel what I was going to do, and she promised to leave the door open and be just inside, but when I got half way across the landing I didn't go any further.” A funny little shiver passed over her and she stopped.

“Why didn't you?” said Bill quickly.

“Well, it sounds silly, Mr Coverdale, but his shoes were gone.”

“His shoes?”

She shivered again.

“I told you he was in his stocking feet with his shoes in his hand, putting them out for the porter. And then five minutes after they weren't there. It sounds awful silly, but I got a kind of a creep down my back when I saw they weren't there, and I couldn't have gone on and knocked on the door, not for anything in the world I couldn't.”

Bill sat in a frowning silence. Was Robin being so watched that he had to have an excuse for opening the door of Della Delorne's flat? He had come out with the shoes in his hand, and put them down, and gone back into the flat after writing his note and giving it to Beatrice Thompson. And then, five minutes afterwards, the shoes were gone again.

That looked as if the shoes were an excuse. He was doing something he didn't want known, and if he was heard opening the door, the shoes would be a very good excuse. But he couldn't have counted on Beatrice Thompson. What was he planning to do when he came out with those shoes in his hand, very quietly and in his stocking feet? He had a slip of paper ready. And a pencil. And a ten-shilling note. All very handy. Bill thought he must have planned to put his message and the ten-shilling note through the letter-box of the opposite flat and chance Mabel's getting it to its destination—any decent girl would. If he had to write the note out there on the landing, someone must have been watching him pretty closely in the flat. The someone would be Della Delorne. That brought her into the affair of his murder with a vengeance. If she wasn't in it, if he wasn't suspecting her, he could have written his note under her eyes and walked round to the post with it. There would have been no reason why he shouldn't.

No, he had been on the track of some very dangerous people—this on Garratt's authority—and the track had led him to his death.

And this—this was the last living sight of Robin O'Hara—a figure emerging stealthily from Della Delorne's flat, sending, or trying to send, an eleventh-hour message, and then vanishing into the flat again, or so off the map and out of everybody's ken.

And that eleventh-hour message—“I am going down to Ledstow Place.”

The track ended at Ledstow Place.

The violence of his mental reaction brought his head up with a jerk. It was nonsense. It was the most completely damnable nonsense. And then, sitting there in the hotel lounge with Beatrice Thompson gazing at him between interest and alarm, two things happened in his mind. They happened simultaneously but separately. It was like being aware of two quite different scenes on the same brightly lighted stage.

On the one hand he saw a window break suddenly, and on the other he saw Beatrice Thompson look at Meg's wedding group and point with a scarlet fingernail. The window was a top-storey window of the house on the island at Ledstow Place. He looked back over his shoulder in the dusk, caught a fleeting gleam of daylight on the glass, and saw it break—suddenly, inexplicably. The scarlet nail pointed at the Professor. Miss Thompson's voice said eagerly, “I've seen that old gentleman;” and then, “Coming out of Miss Delorne's flat—nine o'clock in the morning;” and then, “Disgusting, I call it.”

And the track which Robin O'Hara was following had led to Ledstow Place.

It wasn't possible
.

He clenched his hands and forced his voice.

“Miss Thompson—why did you say that you recognized someone else in that group you've got there?”

She rolled her eyes.

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Then you've a very short memory.” He leaned across and picked up the wedding group. “When I first showed you this, you said you recognized someone. Not Mr O'Hara—you didn't say anything about him to start with. I want to know why.”

The eyes ceased to roll. They became shrewd and businesslike.

“Well, we hadn't fixed anything up then—had we? Of course I recognized
him
right away.” She pointed at Robin in his bridegroom's array. “I recognized
him
all right, but I wasn't going to say so till we'd got the business part settled. Well, you know how it is—a girl's got to look out for herself or she'll get left.”

A tremendous feeling of relief came over Bill.

“Then you didn't really see the Professor—the old gentleman—at all?”

Miss Thompson tossed her head.

“I don't tell lies, Mr Coverdale! Of course I'd seen him—like I told you. Coming out of Miss Delorne's flat he was, at nine o'clock in the morning, and looking as pleased with himself as a cat that's been at the cream, the horrid old man.”

The dead weight of apprehension settled slowly down again. The Professor? Incredible. But this girl wasn't lying. She had really seen him coming out of Della Delorne's flat.… She couldn't have seen him. It was impossible.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

“He hasn't got a beard in the photograph, of course,” she said.

“Then you can't be sure.”

“The one I saw had a beard. And he walked sort of lame. Does this one walk lame? Because if he does, it would kind of prove it was him, wouldn't it?”

Bill took the photograph away from her and laid it down. There wasn't anything more to say. That leonine head with its shock of white hair would be easily recognized, beard or no beard. But the limp made the recognition certain. It was the Professor whom she had seen. There was only one more question to ask.

“When did you see him?”

Miss Thompson considered.

“Well, the fourth was my birthday, October the fourth, the night the other one, Mr O'Hara, gave me the note, only by the time it came to that it was well over midnight and we'd got into October the fifth, and it wasn't that day I saw the old gentleman, but it was the next, and that would make it October the sixth. And it was nine o'clock in the morning, like I told you, and he came on out and down the stairs, and that was the last I saw of him.” She got up and began to button her coat. “If that's all, Mr Coverdale, I'll be getting along. It's not the Palais-de-Danse tonight, but we did think about going to the pictures, so if there isn't anything more—”

There wasn't anything more.

He paid her, shook hands, saw her out, and came back again to the place where they had talked. There wasn't anything more. The phrase summed up the feeling which was pressing in upon him and which he was resisting with an ever-weakening conviction. There wasn't anything more. He had followed the track which Robin O'Hara had followed. It led to the Professor, and to Ledstow Place, and it broke off short there. He felt as if he were standing on the edge of a cliff where the path had broken off and where one step more might take him over the edge. Robin O'Hara had gone down to Ledstow Place. Had that been the step which had taken
him
over the edge?

Meg was at Ledstow Place now.

A horrible cold fear swept over him, quite instinctive, quite unreasoning.

And then and there he remembered Meg talking to him on the telephone yesterday—“A tram—a beastly juggernaut of a tram” … “I nearly came to a sticky end.…” “I suppose I slipped.…” Was that to have been the step over the edge for Meg?

All at once, out of the horror and confusion which filled his mind, there emerged a clear and definite conclusion. Meg must be got away from Ledstow Place—now—at once—before anything else could happen. He hadn't the slightest idea what excuse he was going to make or how he was going to get her away. He only knew that he was going to do it.

From the telephone-box he rang up Jim Ogilvie and told him that he was called out of town. Perhaps it was a memory of Robin O'Hara that made him add, “I have to go down to Ledstow—a family emergency.”

He tried for Garratt next, to be told that he was out. He didn't know whether to be glad or sorry. Garratt would have to know what the Thompson girl had said, but he had no time to waste on letting him know tonight, and no patience or temper to listen to Garratt telling him he had found another mare's nest. Yet he gave the same message to Garratt's man that he had given to Jim Ogilvie.

“Tell him I've gone down to Ledstow. Tell him I'll call him up. The address is Ledstow Place.”

And with that he rang off and went out to get his car and to drive furiously through the dark upon the Ledlington road.

XXI

Meg had lunch with Miss Cannock in the room that would have been the study if Uncle Henry hadn't had his study over on the island. This room, in which the Professor sat immersed and wrote the great work which was to bring down the high look and proud stomach of Hoppenglocker and all Hoppenglockerites, was by common consent the Study. As a result no one quite knew what to call the other room. It had, therefore, no official title, and was variously alluded to by members of the household.

Meg found herself thinking of it as the Blue Room because of her blue curtains and the delphiniums in the chintz which she had chosen for it—no, not for it, but for its furniture—in the days when she and the furniture had a home at Way's End. The chintz was getting very shabby now. Miller called it the hall room and Miss Cannock the morning room.

It was not a very comfortable place for meals. A folding table had to be brought in from the hall and cleared away again afterwards. There was nowhere to put a joint if one had to be carved, and there was nowhere to stand any extra plates or dishes except the writing-table, so that at every meal there was the feeling that the house was being turned out, and that at any moment removers might appear to pack up the furniture and take it away. As for the joint difficulty, Mrs Miller met this by the simple expedient of not cooking one, her idea of lunch for two ladies being three cutlets and a rice pudding one day, and three cutlets and a blancmange the next.

The third cutlet set up a delicate situation. Miss Cannock in her role of hostess—and how odd to see someone else being hostess in Uncle Henry's house—was bound to offer it to Meg. Meg, hungry but polite, as became a guest, was bound to refuse. Whereupon Miss Cannock with an archly irritating laugh would daily remark, “Perhaps I had better save its life, or Mrs Miller's feelings may be hurt.” The cutlets were very small, and Meg's exasperation grew. After all, Miss Cannock was indubitably the housekeeper, and could order four cutlets or even six if so disposed.

Today when offered the last cutlet, Meg thought with a sudden spurt of suspicion, “I wonder if she's starving Uncle Henry,” and, nerved by this, she said, “Yes, thank you,” whereupon Miss Cannock helped her, and then sat gazing mournfully at her own empty plate. Meg was hungry, but it was all she could do to finish the cutlet. Miss Cannock looked ridiculously forlorn sitting there opposite her, fidgeting with that silly long scarf which she always wore and which was continually catching in something or falling off. She got out her handkerchief and rubbed the tip of her nose with it. She patted that old-fashioned fringe of hers, she straightened her scarf, she sighed. Meg swallowed the last bit of cutlet in a hurry and said,

“I do hope it's not going to rain.”