Hide My Eyes (12 page)

Luke’s quick eyes met her own inquisitively. He liked her, she was his sort, he reflected.

“Such as what?” he murmured. “The tidy dose of chloral in a rowdy’s half-pint?”

Polly’s brows rose into croquet hoops.

“Shush. That’s not a thing to mention even in fun.” She spoilt the effect immediately by adding in a lower tone, “It’s a very useful thing to know, though, if a woman does happen to be left alone in charge of licensed premises at any time. They sleep very peacefully and nobody is any the wiser.”

Luke controlled a shout of laughter. She was restoring his temper.

“Did you ever have to use it, Ma’am?”

“Certainly not, Superintendent,” said she and they both laughed, and, turning away from the empty showcase, made a move to join the other two.

Annabelle was talking, her country colour glowing, her face animated. Charlie Luke leaned towards his new friend.

“You’ve got a knock-out there, Ma’am, if I may say so. Your niece, or your husband’s?”

He expected her to be delighted and she was.

“Oh, Freddy’s,” she whispered back. “Such a nice child, too. Not in the least conceited. I’ve only known her for a day, but I love her already.”

“A day?” He paused to stare at her. She was not looking at him but continued placidly.

“I invited the elder sister but she couldn’t be spared, so they sent this one. Only this morning. But she’s very like Freddy. The same temperament and the same common-sense. He and I got on like a house on fire from the moment
we
met. Some people make friends like that. They do or they don’t in the first ten minutes.”

Luke grinned. He found her soothing. She restored his self-confidence.

“And you’re one of the ones,” he suggested.

She beamed at him. “And so are you,” she declared, startling him, “and it’s a very funny thing to find in a policeman. It must be very awkward at times. Still, you’re tough and I suppose you can take it. Now is it too early for a drink, or can I offer you some tea?”

They had just reached the others and Luke shook his head. Annabelle was full of news.

“Mr. Campion’s wife is Amanda Fitton, Aunt Polly,” she announced. “We know her sister at home. She lives in almost the next village. And you,” she added joyfully, turning to Luke, “you must be the man who married Prunella last year. Will you give her my regards, please? She’ll remember me, Annabelle Tassie.”

“Only last year?” Polly pounced on the information and regarded the Superintendent with a new and to him terrifying enlightment. She closed her lips at once but as she let her visitors out of the garden door she shook his hand and wished him good luck very earnestly, so that he had no doubt at all to what she referred. She made him laugh even while she embarrassed him, a human old party if ever he saw one.

Mr. Campion did not follow Luke immediately but lingered for a moment or two chatting to Annabelle. He was dithering slightly in the way which those who had cause to know him best might have found a little sinister. His pale face was as vacuous as in his youth and his eyes were lazy behind their spectacles.

“It’s such a jolly neighbourhood, don’t you think?” he was saying earnestly as he waved an idle hand which took in the hideous studio behind them and the so-far unrestored tenement house opposite.

“Jolly?” Annabelle, who was literal minded, sounded dubious, and Polly, her smile still happy from her encounter with Luke, sailed in to the rescue.

“It’s been good in its time,” she agreed, “and people are
re-discovering
it and painting it up, which is always exciting.”

“Of course it is. And so convenient. So near the shops.”

It was Polly’s turn to be astonished. To her mind, the hardware shops at the Barrow Road corner of Edge Street were hardly the kind to attract him.

“Well, I find them useful,” she said, “naturally. But they’re not very posh. One would hardly buy clothes here, or …”

“Oh I say, wouldn’t you? Not some things? I mean to say …” The stranger appeared to be wrestling with the conversational subject as if it was a wet sheet which had fallen on him. “I understand there’s a magnificent store somewhere down here called Cuppage’s, famous for its sales and for men’s gloves. Is that true? Have you ever bought men’s gloves in a sale at Cuppage’s, Mrs. Tassie? As a present, I mean, not—not to wear of course. S—silly of me.”

The involved stuttering speech was sufficiently long to permit the words to register and Polly stood stiffly, her head slightly on one side and her indulgent smile fading. From behind his spectacles Mr. Campion observed her with interest and saw first astonishment and then incredulity, followed by a flicker of instantly suppressed alarm, appear and vanish on her kindly face. When she bade him goodbye she was on guard.

Luke had waited a yard or two down the street for him and now they walked toward the corner together to pick up the police car which had been parked discreetly just around it. Luke seemed disposed to apologise, if strictly in his own way.

“I’m Charlie Muggins in person,” he remarked. “I know it and I don’t want to hear any more about it. Wherever the Goff’s Place Beauty is, he’s not in that chamber of horrors. That’s one item we can enter in the book and sign for.”

“You think so?”

“Don’t you?” Something in the light voice had made Luke turn to stare, his arched brows rising high. “That old girl was on the up and up, and the dummies she described
were
clearly wearing the clothes which our witness had in mind.”

“Oh yes, I agree.” Mr. Campion conveyed that those were not quite the lines on which he was thinking. “A pleasant woman,” he continued cautiously, “but with one peculiarity which might be significant in the circumstances, or so I thought, didn’t you?”

“No,” said Charlie Luke, who was irritated with himself. “Since you ask me, chum, no. I’m satisfied that I’ve been led up Garden Green as far as Goff’s Place is concerned. I admit it and when I get back I may possibly go in and tell old Yeo so, just to see his happy smile. You can take it from me that there isn’t anything that isn’t dead ordinary about that woman. The world is packed with old ducks just like her. There’s millions of ’em, all born on a Friday, loving and giving. What’s peculiar about Aunt Polly, for God’s sake?”

Mr. Campion hesitated. “I was thinking of her museum,” he said. “To keep up a nuisance of a place like that, which she doesn’t think is funny, as a memorial to a man who was delighted with it, argues that she loved him in a particular way. She identified herself with him.”

“Okay.” Luke was splendidly unimpressed. “There’s no need to get a trick-cyclist approach to that one. That’s how uncomplicated people do love. They gang up. I’m you, you’re me, that’s the big idea, so what?”

“
So where is the rest of the family?
” said Mr. Campion simply.

It was a convincing point. Luke pushed his hat on to the back of his head and walked along considering.

“She’s bound to have someone to be fond of, I grant you that,” he said at last, “or she wouldn’t be standing up. The girl has only been there a day so it can’t be her. The old lady must have friends, obviously. You think she’s mothering something, do you?”

“I don’t know at all.” The thin man shrugged his shoulders. “No one’s living in the house. She may have many interests. I got the impression that there were several people in and out didn’t you?”

Luke frowned. “A coke hod in the kitchen was standing on an old copy of
Sports Motor
and there was a cigar
butt
among the London Pride edging the little path to the front door. There was an overall too big for her hanging in the scullery, and someone had left a bunch of watercress on the kitchen window-ledge,” he recited casually. “Yes, of course there are people about her or she wouldn’t be as she is, but no, Campion, our chap can’t be amongst them. The witness who saw the old folk in the ’bus happened to confuse them with the waxworks in her museum. That’s sufficient. If the murderer was known to her as well, the coincidence would be amazing.”

Mr. Campion drew a long breath. “There is one possible explanation of that point,” he was beginning when they turned the corner and Luke’s wireless operator sprang out of the car and came towards them, a written message in his outstretched hand. The Superintendent glanced at it and turned to his friend with sudden energy.

“This is more like it,” he exclaimed joyfully. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. They’re fairly certain they’ve got the ’bus. It’s been hidden for eight months behind a bargeload of empty oildrums. Hop in old boy. We’ll drop in to the office for the full gen and then we’ll slip down and inspect it. It’s in a square mile of scrap called Rolf’s Dump. Ever heard of it?”

Chapter 10

THE OBJECT OF THE EXERCISE

“SO TEA IS
served to residents only? My dear man, we
are
residents. Our baggage is coming up from the airport. That is why we are sitting here waiting. Run along, do. We’re tired. We’ve come a very very long way. We want crumpets, and for God’s sake see the butter is fresh. Cake, Richard? No? Very well then, tea and crumpets.”

The man in the trench coat stretched himself in the deep brocade-covered chair and waved an impatient hand at the ancient waiter, who plodded away mumbling.

“This old place has got the kiss of death written all over it, but it’s useful,” he continued, looking round the dim lounge of the Tenniel Hotel and keeping his voice down as people do in a huge public room in which they find themselves virtually alone. “The lease is just running out and it’s going to be pulled down to make way for Government offices. But meanwhile it’s quiet and reasonably civilised.”

Richard, who was sitting on a couch beside him, followed his gaze with open disapproval. To his mind the place was a tomb and, worse, an anachronism. He fancied he could smell the dust in the pile carpet patterned with fleur-de-lys, and one corner of the high ceiling, the cornice of which was as elaborate as a wedding cake, was badly discoloured where some mishap to the plumbing had done its worst.

Gerry’s elaborate lie to get the unwanted tea had annoyed him and he was also puzzled. His guide had insisted that they should sit just here in the centre of the longest wall, although there was apparently no other visitor in the place. Richard could see no purpose in the decision unless it was part of a manœuvre, in which case, as seemed more and more probable at every moment, he felt he was liable to find himself involved in something very dubious very soon. The only real advantage in the position appeared to be that they
had
a direct view across some forty feet of lounge, through an archway, down a white-painted corridor, and into the side vestibule of the hotel through which they had entered. From where he sat Richard could make out the row of telephone booths there, at this distance no larger then so many dolls’ houses.

“Are we waiting for somebody?” he enquired suddenly.

The flat expressionless eyes of the man beside him opened very wide.

“Good heavens no. Why?”

“I wondered. I thought you told Edna you had a date at half past.”

Gerry ducked his chin. “That? Oh I had to be definite or we’d never have got away. You fell for her, did you? She’s got something, God knows quite what, but a certain something.”

Richard coloured and his jaw became more aggressive even than usual, but he stuck to his shy, slightly off-hand manner.

“She seemed to know you pretty well.”

“But not well enough, dear boy.” Gerry produced the archaic form of address with a flourish. “I saw quite a bit of her at one time and she played hard enough for me, but it never took, as they say of inoculation. I was damned careful it shouldn’t. That’s the secret of my success.”

“What is?”

“I never let anything tear the skin. I’ve never been faintly fond of anything or of anybody in my life.” He spoke lightly but with satisfaction. “I’m deadly serious about this. I spotted the plain mechanical truth of it as a child. You could almost call it the Chad-Horder discovery. Any kind of affection is a solvent. It melts and adulterates the subject and by indulging it he loses his identity and hence his efficiency. By keeping myself to myself in the face of every conceivable attack I have remained successful, bright and indestructible. It’s a simple recipe for a hundred per cent success. I hand it to you gratis, Richard. Consider it a token of my esteem. Ah, here are the crumpets.”

They arrived cold and slightly burnt and soggy, in an
Edwardian
white-metal contraption which should have contained hot water and did not. Gerry did not appear to notice any fault worth commenting upon. He poured tea from a plated pot, sent the mutinous waiter, a black-browed toad in the seventies, labouring back for lemon, and appeared to enjoy himself hugely.

He was revealing a personality with a faint but positive streak of conventionality, which was unexpected, but now more than ever Richard was aware of the strong element of deliberation in him which he had first noticed in the barber’s shop. He was going about some business, conducting some carefully considered undertaking which, Richard felt uncomfortably, was going according to plan. How he himself was supposed to figure in the performance Richard had no idea, and it occurred to him that it might be as well to find out, but before he could make any move in that direction he was forestalled by Gerry, who might have been thought-reading.

“I tell you what I have in mind for this evening and I don’t want any refusal,” he began suddenly, with an engaging air of frankness. “I’ve been hanging on to you like a leech all this afternoon and you’re not going to escape me now. This is the position. I live in a rather decent little residential hotel, Lydaw Court, Kensington, and they’ve got a party on tonight. There is, as usual, a preponderance of women and I’ve promised I’ll bring a young man to partner some of the girls. Don’t worry, my dear chap, we shan’t be expected to change, but I can offer you a decent meal and very nice company, and you’d be doing a most charitable act. How about it?”

Richard blinked. The offer possessed a curious quality of conviction. Suddenly he was quite certain that the man did live in just such a place as he described and that he himself had been picked out as a likely candidate for the invitation, even as far back as their encounter in the barber’s shop.