They went by bus to the southern end of Westminster Bridge and walked along York Rtogether. Just before they reached Severall Street they saw a small motor truck turn into the main r and mechanically, Leslie, who had a weakness for such mental registrations, turned her head to note the number. It was a favourite trick of hers to carry fifty or sixty motor-car numbers in her head and jot them down at the close of the day—a practice into which Mr. Coldwell had initiated her. As she looked round she heard:
"Lady!"
A shrill voice called her.
"Who was that?" she asked, but Peter had not heard.
They reached the house and he opened the door and called Mrs. Inglethorne, but it was one of the children who answered.
"Mother's gone out. Her and Elizabeth."
Sometimes the woman took the child with her when she went shopping, Peter explained.
"I'm afraid I've brought you on a long job," he said. "She may be out for hours."
Leaving her for a moment in the passage, he ran upstairs to his room, intending to show her one of his small treasures, the photograph of his dead father. He reached the head of the stairs and then stopped aghast. The door of the mysterious locked room which adjoined his own was wide open, and when he strode in he saw it was empty. Mrs. Inglethorne was a quick worker, and, in the space of time between his departure and his return, had removed all evidence of her guilt.
He went into his own room, pulled open the drawer of the table where he kept his few treasures, and had taken out the small leather-covered portfolio when he saw some writing on the pad—a few scribbled words in a childish hand: "She has taken me away. Elizabeth."
He tore off the corner of the blotting paper and went back to the girl.
"I was afraid of this," she said in a low voice. "Do you remember the cry 'lady' as we passed the motor van? Where is the nearest telephone booth?"
At the corner of the street was a little general shop, which had a telephone sign, and Leslie almost ran to the shop. There was some delay before the instrument was disengaged, but in a few minutes she was connected with Scotland Yard and was talking to Coldwell.
"The number of the car is X.Y. 63369," she said. "There is no doubt whatever that it contains stolen property, but it is the little girl I want."
"I'll send out a call," was Coldwell's reply. "We may not pick it up before to-night; on the other hand, we may be lucky."
"Where are you going now?" asked Peter when they were outside the shop.
"Back to the house," said Leslie. "I want to look at that room."
"They cleared everything."
She nodded.
"Thieves in a hurry are very careless people, and perhaps Mrs. Inglethorne isn't so clever as she imagines."
The room was apparently bare; the only article of furniture it contained was a long table, and by the dust marks on this Leslie was able to judge the extent of the property that had been stored. On either side of the rusty fireplace was a cupboard. One of these she opened and found empty, except for a little heap of rubbish at the bottom. The second, however, was locked. With a table knife borrowed from the kitchen she forced back the catch and pulled open the door. There was nothing very much there, but enough. There were three bolts of silk, one still bearing the label of the wholesaler from whom it had been stolen.
"Thieves in a hurry are very careless," she said, with the light of battle in her eyes, "and it really doesn't matter whether Mrs. Inglethorne is hanged for a sheep or a lamb, so long as she's well and truly hanged!"
She sent Peter to the police station, and went down to interview the children. A grubby lot of little people they were, very pale, very starved looking, except one who apparently was in charge in Mrs. Inglethorne's absence. She was the little girl, Leslie learned later, who had slept in the woman's bed, and, unlike the others, she bore a striking facial resemblance to her mother.
"You didn't find nothing, did you?" She was frankly hostile. "You've got to be up very early to catch my old woman, missis!"
And then, turning to the silent semi-circle of children who constituted the remainder of Mrs. Inglethorne's family, she ordered them peremptorily away.
"Go and play in the back yard."
Poor little starvelings! Leslie's heart ached to see them. She sought, by delicate inquiry, to discover where Elizabeth had been taken, but the preternatural cunning of the child she questioned baffled her.
Peter came back in a very short time, accompanied by a uniformed inspector and a plain-clothes officer. They made an inspection of the silk and carried it off with them to the station.
"This may affect you a little, Peter Dawlish," said Leslie when they were alone. "The children will be removed to the workhouse this afternoon, and Mrs. Inglethorne will be arrested immediately on her return, so that you will have the house to yourself."
He laughed.
"I'm not depressed," he said.
He walked with her as far as Westminster Bridge R and at parting she asked him a curious question.
"What would you do if you had half a million pounds?"
He looked at her in astonishment and laughed.
"That isn't my favourite dream," he said. "But I think the first thing I should do would be to send to America to discover whether I have been, as you would say, 'well and truly' divorced."
"Indeed?" Her tone was a trifle cold. "Is that necessary when Jane Raytham is within a penny bus ride?"
And with a nod she was gone.
Peter returned to the house and found it very difficult to resume his work or concentrate his mind upon lists. He had hardly started before the police officials came with an omnibus to take away the children, and they departed with no visible reluctance, except in the case of the girl whom Leslie had interviewed.
At four o'clock in the afternoon Mrs. Inglethorne came into the house in triumph, and without going into the kitchen mounted the stairs and stood, arms akimbo, her red face made hideous by a self-satisfied smirk, confronting her lodger.
"Well, did you bring in the police?" she demanded. "And what are you going to do with Elizabeth?" And, when he did not answer, she shook her fist at him. "Out you go, out of my house, you police informer. I'll learn you to go prying around and threatening me! You leave this room at once or I'll send for a policeman."
"I think I'll stay," he said good-humouredly.
"Oh, will you?"
She went to the door and called:
"Emma."
There was no answer.
"I can save you a lot of trouble, Mrs. Inglethorne," said Peter, putting down his pen. "Your children have been taken away to the workhouse."
She staggered back against the wall, her big mouth open wide.
"W-why?" she stammered.
"It is usual to take children to the workhouse when their parents are arrested and there are no other relatives to look after them," he said.
"Arrested?" she screamed.
He nodded to the window, and she staggered past him and, pulling up the sash, looked out. Two men were standing on the opposite sidewalk, and one nodded as to an old friend. She recognized the detective sergeant who had arrested her husband.
"They can't touch me!" she screamed. "They can't touch me! It's my word against yours——"
"Unfortunately you left a few bolts of silk behind in the cupboard," answered Peter.
Mrs. Inglethorne was in a state of collapse when the detectives came in to arrest her.
The motor truck had been traced; the driver and a man who accompanied the car had been driven to the nearest police station, where the plunder was checked and exhibited in preparation for the charge which would follow. They either could not or would not, however, give any information concerning the child, and when Leslie went to Lambeth to interview Mrs. Inglethorne in her cell, she was no more successful.
"Find her!" rapped the woman. "She's in good hands, that's where she is. I'm not saying anything. If you want her, find her! That's my last word to you!"
Leslie did not notify Peter that she was coming to Lambeth. Passing up Severall Street on her way home, she saw the light in the upstairs window and guessed that he was still working hard. A postman rapped at the door, and she waited a while until it was opened, as she guessed, by Peter, and almost turned back just to say a word to him. And if she overcame this deplorable weakness, it was not lightly done.
"Leslie Maughan," she said to herself, mounting the steps of Hungerford Bridge, "do you know what you are doing? Shall I tell you in the vulgarest terms? You're chasing a married man! Leslie, that isn't done! Not in the best society."
She was uncommonly weary when she dragged herself into her own sitting room, deciding to forgo the duty she had planned. This was a second call upon Greta Gurden. That afternoon there had been a consultation at Scotland Yard, but matters had not developed sufficiently to justify the issue even of a search warrant.
After a light dinner she took out the letter she had received two nights before, spread the foolscap on her desk and examined it carefully. It was a queer story she read, even in the stilted terminology of an elderly country parson, who employed such words as "primogeniture," and felt it necessary to sprinkle his pages with quotations from Horace, mostly in Latin. The writer was the vicar of a small Devonshire parish near Budleigh Salterton, and he had, as he said in a preliminary flourish, "reached the fourscore of the prophet." He wasted a page in explaining how he came to reach these years, and employed "mens sana in corpore sano" at least twice in the first folio.
He knew the Druze family very well; they lived in his village and had done so for hundreds of years. He himself had baptized Alice Mary Druze and Annie Emily Druze, and several other members of the Druze family which he thought it was necessary to enumerate by their full names; it had necessitated long researches in ancient registers. The Druze family had for generations farmed some forty acres of poor land on the edge of Dartmoor. They were "a wild family with a bad history," and here the reverend gentleman, who was also something of a scientist, branched away from the main track to a discourse upon heredity which would have done credit to a Lombroso.
Old father Druze was a lunatic and had died mad; his grandfather had committed suicide; there was a record in the parish registry and a note that he had been buried at the crossr, in the proper manner for such as take their lives; Druze's grandmother had also a history of sorts. The clergyman remembered her as a "respectable woman," though inclined to gayety, and he even felt it necessary to retail a hundred-year-old piece of scandal, something that had happened at Widdicombe Fair.
Alice was illiterate; he had extracted a note of this fact from the register of the church school. Annie, on the other hand, was a diligent scholar "and showed surprising proficiency in the study of the so-called dead languages," so that she "speedily secured a respectable situation with a haberdasher in Exeter, a Mr. Watson. She was a God-fearing young woman, a communicant, and eventually married a well-to-do farmer in the neighbourhood of Torquay." The farmer's name Leslie jotted down on her pad.
The third of the daughters, Martha, was of an "exemplary character, though of no great educational attainments." About her the clergyman was very explicit, for it was he who had obtained her a post first as stillroom maid at a Plymouth hospital, and afterward, on his recommendation, as a probationary nurse. It was believed that she went to South Africa and "married a prosperous carpenter."
When Leslie had traced Druze to that little Devonshire village, and wrote, with no great hope, to the vicar, she hardly expected so voluminous and conscientious a record of the family history; for he even sent photographs of tombstones which marked the departed Druzes of the Eighteenth Century!
If she had only read this before, she thought, she could not have been shocked by the discovery that "Arthur Druze" was a woman; for apparently there was no male member in that family, except the semi-lunatic father and a remote uncle who for some reason wasn't called Druze at all. She read through carefully, took down an atlas and a gazetteer from her helf, and finally locked letter and data in the drawer. Her work was by no means finished for the night, though she was dropping with weariness. She had a number of letters to write. Before she had left the office, Mr. Coldwell had given her the names and addresses of a dozen people who would be helpful to her in the search she was making.
At eleven o'clock they phoned from Scotland Yard to tell her that there was no news of Elizabeth. Mrs. Inglethorne, confronted as she was with a long term of imprisonment, possibly of penal servitude, refused any information about the child, except that she had gone to "her aunt's."
Lucretia brought her coffee. The girl had an irritating trick of expressing her disapproval by audible tut-tuts, and twice did she tut-tut into the room and out again. At last she extinguished all the lights in the room save the table lamp.
"You've got to go to bed, miss," she said firmly. "I'll have you on my hands if I'm not careful. And what about this young girl?"
Leslie rose stiffly from her desk, gathered the letters together and stamped them.
"She is not coming to-night," she said. "Post these, Lucretia. I'll wait for you to return and then you can go to bed."
She heard the door open and guessed, by the cold draft that swept up the stairs, that Lucretia had followed her usual practice of leaving the door ajar while she went to the nearest pillar-box, which was some distance from the flat.
It was part of the night's routine that Lucretia should take the letters; almost a ritual that Leslie should stand in the open doorway of her sitting room until she heard the girl return.
The maid could not have been gone half a minute before the street door below closed softly. She heard the gentle thud of it.
"Is that you, Lucretia?" she called down into the dark hall.
There was no reply.
Her flesh crept, for no reason that she could understand; a cold shiver went down her spine. Leslie Maughan was not a nervous girl. Her duty and association with Coldwell had taken her into many uncomfortable situations, and unless it was because she was very tired, there was no particular reason for nervousness. But her sensation was something more than the uneasiness which comes to the strongest nerves when they are left alone in a house. It was a premonition, a warning, indeed a certain knowledge that there was somebody in the hall below who should not be there.
She went back into the room, closed the door quietly and slipped in a bolt she had had fitted. She switched on the lights that Lucretia had extinguished, and, going to the window, pulled the curtains apart and lifted the sash. Charing Cross Rwas fairly well crowded with people. It was a clear night and a few paces away she saw two policemen patrolling, and presently she discerned Lucretia making her way hurriedly across the r The maid came beneath the window simultaneously with a policeman; Leslie called her and she looked up.
"Tell the policemen I want them to come in," she said. "Here is the key—catch!"
One of the officers caught the key deftly.
"Anything wrong, miss?" he asked, knowing her.
"I think somebody has come into the house while my maid went out to post a letter. You left the door open, did you, Lucretia?"
"Yes, miss, I did," confessed the agitated Lucretia. "I forgot to take the key."
"Well, hurry——" she began.
At that moment all the lights in the room went out.
She sat on the sill and swung out her legs, her eyes fixed on the door, which was visible in the light of a street lamp. A faint creaking sound came to her ears and she saw the door move slightly—the bolt was straining under some enormous pressure. Then a voice from the pavement below hailed her.
"The street door won't open, miss," said the policeman's voice.
She looked back at the door. The slot of the bolt was giving under the strain.
"Can you catch me?" she asked.
The two men ran to the pavement beneath her.
"Jump!"
Again she looked back. At that moment, with a crash, the door opened. She had a dim vision of two stunted figures, then, bracing her hands on the sill, she jumped.
It was not a dignified landing, but for the moment Leslie Maughan was less interested in her dignity than her safety. A crowd had already gathered, attracted by the unusual happening, and there appeared from nowhere an inspector of police, a resourceful man who, having heard the story, immediately stopped an omnibus and ordered the driver to bring his big machine onto the sidewalk immediately beneath the window. Standing on the rail of the bus, one of the policemen reached the window sill and climbed inside, and was followed by the inspector. There was no sound of the struggle which the morbid crowd expected. A few minutes later the door below was unbolted and Leslie and the trembling Lucretia went into the passage.
They found the hall window on the first landing wide open. A police whistle buzzed in the street; in a very short time the block would be surrounded.
"No, they haven't cut the wire, as far as I can see," said the inspector, examining the wall of the passage with his lamp. "Where do you keep your fuse box?"
"I think it is near the door," said the girl.
It proved to be within easy reach. The flat had been darkened by the simple expedient of removing the fuses. They found them intact on the floor and replaced them, and an inspection was possible. Except for the broken door, no damage had been done to the flat. Whoever the intruders were, their time had been too short to conduct a search of the room. The drawers of the desk were untouched.
"They hadn't much time, had they?" said the puzzled inspector. "I can't understand this job. If they were ordinary burglars they would have cleared just as soon as they knew you had spotted them."
Half an hour later, and before the police had departed, Mr. Coldwell came on the scene. By this time every roof and yard in the vicinity had been searched; night watchmen had been aroused from their surreptitious sleep, and a small army of police detectives had examined every window that might afford a possible means of escape. But no sign of the intruders was discovered.
"I don't like this," said Leslie.
Mr. Coldwell shook his head.
"You'll have to find other lodgings for a while. To-morrow you had better transfer your belongings and Lucretia to my house at Hampstead."
For five minutes he discussed in a low voice the theories he had formed, the plans he had made.
"I don't think it is necessary to leave a policeman in the house," he said at last, and a little yellow man curled up on the top of the high bureau in Leslie's room, screened from observation by the old-fashioned frieze of the wardrobe, was relieved.
He heard the policemen go clattering down the stairs, and after a while:
"Just phone me if you're at all nervous, Leslie. Good-night."
Coldwell's voice sounded from the hall; there was the slam of a door. The little yellow man, who spoke and understood English very well, did not smile to himself, because he was of a race that seldom smile.
Leslie went into her bedroom with a yawn, gathered her sleeping things and disappeared into the bathroom. The listener heard the sound of running water, heard her bid a reassuring good-night to the tremulous servant, and then the door of the bedroom opened and closed. The light was extinguished; there was the creak of a bed, and after a while the sound of deep, regular breathing.
For an hour the yellow man lay, not moving a muscle, and then, reaching up, he caught hold of the wooden moulding, tested its strength, and was satisfied. He felt the long, queer-shaped knife that was in his belt, and, with the agility of a cat, and supported only by his sinewy fingers, he drew himself clear of the wardrobe, and dropped noiselessly on to the carpet.
The wardrobe hardly creaked as he moved; save for the soft pad of his bare feet and the breathing of the sleeper there was no sound. Holding the knife lightly in his right hand, he groped along the pillow with his left, ready to pounce upon and strangle the scream before it rose.
There was no head on the first pillow, none on the right—the bed was empty. He straightened himself up quickly, half turned as he heard a sound from behind him, but it was too late. An arm of steel flung round his throat, the knife hand was gripped at the wrist and twisted so sharply that the weapon fell to the floor.
"I want you!" It was Coldwell's voice.
He lifted the little figure without difficulty, and reached out his hand to turn on the light. At that moment the prisoner recovered himself, and with amazing strength twisted round to face the detective. Coldwell realized that he had on his hands something with the ferocity and suppleness of a wild cat, something that growled and clawed and kicked so that not a limb of him was still. The unexpectedness of that furious onslaught threw him for a second off his balance. He drove out with his right, but as though he could see in the dark, the assassin dodged, and in another second he was free and had flown through the open door. Coldwell followed, but too late. With one leap the little man crashed through sash and pane and dropped unharmed to the street below. A policeman made a dive at him, but he ducked, flew across the r and disappeared down a court by the side of a theatre toward St. Martin's Lane.
"Didn't even see him," said Coldwell bitterly, when he called the girl in from Lucretia's room. The detective's face was scratched, his collar torn. "It was rather like tackling a young tiger."
Leslie had turned on the lights and they saw the extent of the damage. He must have dived for the lower sash, head-first, for the upper window was untouched. There was not a scrap of glass remaining, and the cross supports of wood were smashed to splinters.
"I've heard of such things being done," said Coldwell, "and I've seen them done—on the stage! But never in real life and through three-quarter inch moulding!"
Leslie was still dressed. She had been waiting in the maid's room, a pistol on her lap, till the sound of the struggle brought her out, just too late. Mr. Coldwell disappeared into the bedroom and returned with the ugly and curious-shaped knife which the man had dropped.
"Eastern," he said, as he felt the edge gingerly. "Malayan, I guess."
He also had been sitting on a chair immediately to the right of the wardrobe, but until he had made an examination later he had not known from what place his assailant had come.
"I thought he'd come back through the window," he mused. "That's one of the curiosities of human nature, Leslie; jot it down in your note We always look under things for hidden criminals; we never look over; and yet the cleverest fellow that ever got away from the police was a steeplejack who hid for a fortnight at the top of a smokestack! Ever wear garters, Leslie?"
She laughed softly.
"That almost sounds indelicate to me," she said. "No, I won't go very deeply into the question, but I don't wear garters!"
He was quite serious.
"Wish you would, just to oblige me. One garter, anyhow. I meant to give it to you to-day."
He drew something out of his pocket and she gasped.
"You really wish me to wear this?"
He nodded.
"A little heavy, but I wish you would," he said.
He insisted upon staying the night, and to make doubly sure had a policeman put on duty in the hall below. Early as the hour was when she went out to her bath, she found him up and dressed, studying the morning newspaper.
"Wonderful how you miss things when you're away from the Yard for a few hours," he drawled.
She turned back from the open door of the bathroom. When Mr. Coldwell drawled, there was something sensational to come.
"What have we missed?" she asked. It was not entirely curiosity which made her ask.
He looked at the newspaper again and took off his glasses.
"Peter Dawlish was arrested last night."
She gazed at him in horror and amazement.
"Arrested? On what charge?"
"Threatening to murder Princess Anita Bellini," was the staggering reply.
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