The Bath Mysteries (20 page)

After supper it was not the maid, but the landlady herself, who appeared – an unusual honour – to clear away. But Bobby soon realized there was something she wanted to talk about, and as she folded up the tablecloth she began.

“It's wonderful comforting to be all rented,” she said, “but I don't know that I'm easy in my mind about Miss Yates, though she does seem to be such a nice young lady.”

“Why? How's that?” Bobby asked, sitting up quickly, with more interest than he always showed in his good landlady's gossip.

“She's going blind,” said the landlady.

Bobby stared.

“What?” he exclaimed. “Blind... going blind... but...”

He subsided into silence, completely bewildered by this unexpected and startling announcement.

“A young lady like her,” said the landlady, “and seems she knows it, too, but goes on just the same in spite of all.”

“Knows she is going blind?” repeated Bobby, still more bewildered.

“They told her plain at the hospital when she went,” the landlady assured him, “what she had to do and to come again, but she won't go near there now, and acts just the same, plain as they put it to her. ‘Your eyes will be gone in two or three months or less,' they said, and might as well have never said a word for all the heed she takes.”

“But surely... ” began Bobby, his tone quite incredulous, for the story seemed to him beyond belief.

“I spoke to her myself,” the landlady said, “not being able to believe it, either. All she said was, never even looking up: ‘What must be, must be,' and what I say is, it ought to be stopped. Goodness knows, there ought to be some way of stopping her, so there ought.”

“I don't understand,” Bobby protested. “What's she doing... or not doing...?”

The landlady was quite willing to explain as long as Bobby, by exception, was willing to listen. It appeared that from the start she had been a trifle worried about the new lodger. Bobby guessed, though this was not plainly stated, that the good lady could not quite understand why so eminently eligible a lodger, quiet, pleasant, anxious to avoid “giving trouble,” out all day (quality No. 1 in a lodger), in good work, should be willing to rent a room so generally inconvenient and undesirable as the landlady knew in her heart this one to be. Moreover, it had been taken promptly, at the first figure mentioned, with no attempt to bargain; with, indeed, every appearance of satisfaction and even eagerness. To the landlady it had seemed too good to be true, and as her experience of fife had led her to mistrust all – and more especially lodgers – that seemed too good to be true, she had gone to visit Miss Yates's former landlady in order to find out more about her.

The information she obtained regarding Miss Yates's own personality had been eminently satisfactory – quiet and amiable, never out late, paying regularly, giving no trouble.

“You don't often find young ladies like her nowadays,” was the final verdict, delivered with heartfelt conviction.

But she displayed a feverish intensity of industry that had worried both present and former landladies with its suggestion of an inevitable breakdown certain to involve the girl herself, and therefore themselves as well, in difficulties.

“She sits up to all hours,” Bobby's landlady told him, “and up again first thing in the morning, as I've noticed myself – it's one or later when she goes to bed, and up again at five or thereabouts when you hear her alarm going off. Ten hours' office work and coming and going, and then ten hours' steady work in her own room, except week-ends, when it's all afternoon Saturdays, and Sundays all day. It isn't natural or right, and I don't like it, any more than the other lady did where she's come from. I never heard of anything like it.”

Nor had Bobby, nor did he know what to make of such a story.

“It's why she left where she was,” the landlady said. “The other lady told her straight out, and quite right, too, that she didn't ought, and she said she couldn't stand being annoyed, and off she went, and sorry the other lady said she was to lose her but glad not to feel responsible any more, not knowing what might happen next.”

“What work does she do?” asked Bobby.

“Sewing for the big West-End shops. Mr. Owen, what do you think she gets for it?”

Bobby had no idea.

“Threepence an hour,” said the landlady. “The other lady went and asked, and that's what she found out – ten hours' work five days a week, and more on Saturday, and twice as much on Sundays, and, when all's said and done, not so much more than a pound a week.”

Bobby was silent, contemplating with amazement and unbelief this picture of toil almost superhuman for a pittance so small. And by a girl believed to have followed the undisciplined and lawless life of the streets. The thing was incredible, impossible, beyond belief.

Nothing, Bobby told himself, could bring about a change so miraculous, transcending all knowledge or experience.

In the streets they live at the mercy of every chance, drifting helplessly here and there as whim and accident may send, incapable of foresight or of energy, lacking willpower to carry out one course of action for one consecutive half hour. But this tale was of a discipline so strong, so persistent, so unvarying and bitter, medieval monk or hermit might well have shrunk from its endurance.

The inconsistency was too great, Bobby thought. How relate that strength, that virtue, to the frailty of the light- minded woman of the street, careless of all restraint and order?

He told himself there must be a mistake somewhere, and then he recognized there could not be. Impossible to doubt the truth of the landlady's story, and the identity of Alice Yates with Slimmy Alice of the Soho streets had been fully established.

“That's why she's going blind,” the landlady said, “and good reason too.”

“She knows?” Bobby asked.

“She's been told plain enough. Anyone can see how red and swollen her eyes are, and the way she blinks and puts up her hand to clear her sight – spiders' webs she says she sees and has to brush away.”

“Couldn't she wear glasses?”

“She won't. She says she sees better without, and glasses would make no difference, they told her at the hospital, so long as she goes on the way she does.”

Bobby sat still and silent. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if to realize what blindness meant, and then quickly opened them again, ridiculously afraid that if he did not he might never be able to. There were two pictures before his mind: that of a woman lightly profaning the deep mystery of sex by offering it for sale in the market place, that of a woman leading a life of such dull, fantastic toil with so rigid a determination as she knew must involve the loss of what is to many more than life itself.

He did not understand how it was possible to reconcile them.

Bobby was generally a sound sleeper. But tonight he found himself restless, his mind a tumult of many thoughts. The routine of his daily work had made him familiar enough with the discovery of the vice that masked itself as virtue, of the crime that sheltered behind the appearance of the most strict respectability. But how interpret this disclosure of what appeared so dull and drab and secret a heroism in one about whom such dark suspicions clustered, whose past was known to be of a kind to exclude her from decent society? What meaning could be given to a tale of toil so hidden, to all appearance so purposeless, and yet witnessing to a resolve and strength of will approaching the superhuman?

His sitting room was on the ground floor, and next morning, while eating his breakfast, he kept his door half open and listened intently till presently he heard upon the stairs a step so light he nearly missed it, and was only just in time to see Alice passing through the hall on her way to her office.

“Oh, good morning,” he said, holding out his hand in greeting, and as instinctively she took it, he turned hers a little round to the light and saw there three tiny scars upon the wrist.

“It was you, then,” he said.

“What was?” she asked, making that gesture he had noticed previously of moving her hand before her eyes, as if to clear away something floating there before them.

“I heard a story the other night,” he answered, “a story of a girl whose wrist was burned by a lighted cigarette on the Embankment near a coffee stall.”

She made no answer, but she fixed those red and swollen eyes of hers upon him as though all her life were burning there, burning itself away. For a longer or a shorter time they stood so, and he was aware of an impulse to put up his hands, as if to defend himself against an actual blow, so much did the fierceness in her eyes resemble one. She took her glance from him, and he was relieved, and without speaking a word she moved on towards the door. He said:

‘‘Won't you tell me? I believe I might help you if you would tell me.”

She seemed to hesitate. She paused. Without looking back, she said over her shoulder in that low, husky voice of hers:

“Tell you what?”

“Why you don't care that you are going blind,” he answered.

He had an impression that she trembled a little. It passed, and she walked on. The door closed softly behind her, and Bobby was alone in the hall. He went back to his unfinished breakfast and found that he had no more appetite.

“That was pretty brutal of me,” he thought, and he tried to excuse himself with the usual metaphor of the surgeon's knife, and found it sufficiently unconvincing.

But when later on he arrived at Scotland Yard and reported his landlady's story, he found little interest taken in it.

“A bit of sewing's always a way women can earn a bit extra, and lots of them seem to like the job, too,” observed Ferris cheerfully. “Nothing more to it.”

“But it looks, sir,” Bobby protested, “as if she were deliberately sacrificing her sight.”

Ferris remained quite unconvinced.

“Not her,” he said confidently. “No one would do that – not likely, not much. She'll stop her sewing long before there's any real danger of that happening. Mustn't pay too much attention to landladies' gossip.” He added thoughtfully: “Very likely she's been told to keep busy so as to keep her off the streets and giving the show away.”

“But wasn't there a report,” Bobby objected, “that she had been seen hanging about Leicester Square or somewhere up that way?”

“So there was,” admitted Ferris, “once or twice – mixing up again with her old pals apparently.”

“Well, then,” Bobby muttered, faced again with this absolute contradiction between the wanton and lawless life of the street and the bitter, unrelenting toil of the needle.

“Or maybe, if you ask me,” Ferris added, “it's just a plan to give her an excuse for keeping an eye on you. Being careful to remember to keep the door locked when you're having a bath?”

Bobby said he always did that, and, besides, everyone knew a detective-sergeant was far too small game to be worth powder and shot.

“An inspector now,” he said abstractedly, “an inspector might be worth going gunning for”; and Ferris changed the subject with some haste.

It seemed he had to tell of an important discovery just made, one so interesting, significant, and important, indeed, that before it this incomprehensible yarn of a girl sacrificing her sight by working all hours of the day and night lost all meaning.

“You remember,” Ferris said, “the A.C. had the Embankment lousy with occasionals on the lookout for your shadow Mr. Smith. A washout, of course; bound to be. I could have told him that at once. If the shadow man was even half as smart as your story made out, he would fall to it at once what was on and just fade away till the A.C. took his occasionals off again – putting salt on a bird's tail idea, if you ask me. I suppose the A.C. saw that at last and had another idea – a real brainstorm this time,” admitted Ferris reluctantly, for a thing like that one does not care to say about an Assistant Commissioner, whose rank should alone be a safe protection against such doubtful things as brainstorms – as it generally is, if their subordinates can be believed. “What he did,” said Ferris with reluctant approval, “was to have 'em all trailed.”

“All?” repeated Bobby, a little uncomfortably.

“The whole blessed lot,” Ferris told him, “whose names have been mentioned – every one of 'em. Mr. Chris Owen, who bought bits of china where one death happened, and what was he doing there? Mrs. Ronnie Owen, widow, who found hubby had been carrying on with another woman while making up to her again, and known to have owned a leopard-skin coat same as worn by woman at the inquest. Also your Alice Yates and Dr. Beale and Percy Lawrence and the whole lot, in fact. Chris Owen is in the country at the moment, valuing some big nob's collection. Mrs. Ronnie Owen doesn't seem to go out much except to friends or a bridge club she belongs to. Percy Lawrence is still doing his fifteen miles every evening heel and toe, in and out and in again. Dr. Beale hasn't budged from where he lives. Your pal Alice never goes anywhere except to and from her office, and her stunt every night of watching Percy pass without any sign to show they even see each other.”

“Well, then,” said Bobby, relieved.

“Haven't noticed,” asked Ferris, “that I didn't mention Mr. Richard Norris? Well, it looks like he's the goods all right enough.”

“Norris?” repeated Bobby incredulously. “You mean that?”

“Looks like it,” Ferris said. “Mr. Richard Norris, living in style in a swell flat off Park Lane out of his earnings as a writer about golf.”

“He does a lot on the Stock Exchange, too,” Bobby said quickly. “I believe he gets inside information, and has done well with it.”

“Met that yarn before,” remarked Ferris unbelievingly; “the way they all account for money there's no accounting for. Besides, there's information that the firm of stockbrokers he used to deal with have done nothing much for him for months. He may have taken his business to another firm, but they think they would have known it if he had. They gave him special terms, too, apparently. And he's been seen visiting the L.B. & S.C.S. office near Green Dragon Square.”