So Many Doors, page 24
CHAPTER XXXI
“THEY WENT OFF TOGETHER”
By this time the routine work was nearly over, or at any rate had reached the stage at which supervision was no longer necessary. To Bobby, the superintendent said now, and with great decision:
“Next thing, that girl’s got to be found, and the sooner the quicker.”
“If it’s not sooner, it may be never,” Bobby told him.
“Eh? what’s that?” asked the superintendent, struck by something in Bobby’s tone. “Suicide? That what you’re thinking?”
“No,” Bobby answered. “She’s not the suicide type. She’s fighting too desperately to save herself to have any thought of suicide. But I’m inclined to think there’s a factor she doesn’t know or hasn’t taken into account.”
“Oh, yes,” the superintendent agreed. “I remember. You said you thought you knew where she had got herself tucked away. Something Miss Martin told you just now, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Bobby answered. “But after what’s happened, it’s hard to say what may be her next move. I’ve been trying to think. Is there a ’phone box near?”
“Round the corner,” the superintendent answered. “Why?”
“I want to ring up my Redruth hotel,” Bobby explained.
“Don’t think she’s been staying there, do you?” asked the superintendent, smiling.
“You never know,” Bobby answered, giving smile for smile. “Come along.”
He hurried away, the superintendent by his side. Bobby borrowed coppers from him and put a call through. Connection made, he said:
“Mr Owen speaking. I want the manager. The manager himself. It’s important. Oh, that you? Tell me, have you a Miss Mary Martin on your kitchen staff? You have? Good! Been with you long? Only a day or two? Is she there now? Oh, had the day off but due on duty this evening. Not there yet? Good! Thank you. On no account let any one—any one at all, you understand?—no one—neither Miss Martin herself nor any one, know I’ve been asking. Not a soul. I shall raise merry hell if she gets to know. Oppose the renewal of your licence very likely. Yes, yes. I know it’ll be all right. I only want to rub it in how important it is. I want to talk to the young woman very specially indeed, and she has a gift for disappearing. The pea under the thimble has nothing on her. Good! All right.”
Bobby turned to the superintendent then, but before he could speak the other broke out:
“But, hang it all, Mary Martin, she’s here . . . I mean to say . . . at the hotel here . . . she can’t be in two hotels at once.”
“Why, no,” Bobby agreed. “But a name’s easily taken. Never mind that now. Will you get through to your people at Redruth, and tell them to put a man on to watch, back and front, to see if she arrives, and to make sure she doesn’t leave again? Not to interfere with her unless she tries to leave. Only to make sure she doesn’t go off again. I should rub that in.”
The slightly dazed superintendent did as requested. Bobby bustled him off to their car, and in a very few minutes they were speeding Redruth way on a road Bobby was beginning to know well. He drove furiously, as opportunity permitted, and the superintendent, slightly recovered now, protested again:
“But Mary Martin . . . are there two of ’em?”
“Bella Winlock had to have a new name,” Bobby explained. “If she was going to try to get a job, she would want a new identity card. And I remembered the first report said two of the girls hadn’t their identity cards and the third had had it but had mislaid it. Or had she or had our Bella annexed it? A job gives the background, which is what matters if you’re in hiding. She had it at first as being one of a party of girls on a hiking holiday. But that didn’t last, and didn’t look promising, either, when questions began to be asked. No questions likely about a girl working in an hotel kitchen. Nothing to make any one talk there.”
“But why this one hotel in especial?” the superintendent asked. “Out of all the dozens and dozens we have down here.”
“Well,” Bobby answered. “I knew Monk had stayed at this Redruth hotel, and I thought it likely he told Bella it was a quiet sort of place where no one was likely to take any notice of you. Commercial travellers mostly, all coming and going, and all busy with their own affairs. Not tourists with nothing to do but gossip about each other. So, as she knew of its name and where it was, and knew it was a quiet sort of place, clearly possible she might choose it. Besides, there had been one or two little incidents. Nothing much. Quite insignificant. A certain tendency to hover near when I was ’phoning that might have been entirely accidental or even some one waiting their turn. Trifles light as air, but I remembered them.”
“But why an hotel? Why not a shop or lodgings or anything?”
“That,” Bobby explained, “was the hint Miss Martin gave me—the real Miss Martin. She told me Bella had asked her a lot of questions about work in an hotel, and she had told her she could get a job helping in the kitchen anywhere, any time, even if she had never seen an hotel before. It seemed a hint of what was running in Bella’s mind and, as it turned out, a sound one.”
“I suppose,” said the superintendent, rather crossly, because it all sounded so simple now and he felt he ought to have known it all all along, only he hadn’t—“I suppose you call that deduction, too?”
“Well, shall we say putting two and two together and making four?” Bobby asked.
The superintendent approved. He didn’t say anything, but he was confirmed in his opinion that it had all been quite simple. No sensational pulling rabbits out of hats. You just put two and two together, and there was your answer. As simple as that. Yet here at his side was a man who did no more, and yet who, starting as a constable on a beat, was now a big noise at Scotland Yard. It didn’t seem quite fair; but there—some people had all the luck.
Occupied in these sage but somewhat melancholy reflections, the superintendent subsided into silence, and did not feel too sympathetic towards a certain haste, even a tendency to take risks at corners, or, still more reprehensible, an appearance once or twice of an attempt to rush traffic lights on the point of changing—one of the worst faults a motorist can commit. He was moved to remonstrate.
“I say,” he said, “wasn’t that running it a bit fine? No hurry, is there? I mean, whether you get there five minutes sooner or later.”
“I don’t know,” Bobby answered, and muttered angrily when a lumbering, horse-drawn wagon forced him to slow down for a moment.
“Speaking for myself,” said the superintendent, “it’s not a job I’m looking forward to. I know it’s got to be done. You can’t let a young woman like her run about loose. No telling what she wouldn’t be up to next. But, all the same, a young girl and all of us hunting her down to put a rope round that pretty neck of hers. I can’t help wishing . . .” He paused, and then added apologetically: “I’ve got a girl of my own, and I wish to God some one else had this bit of work.”
Bobby gave him a friendly glance.
“I know,” he said, “but it has to be. And if we are hunting her down, perhaps others are, too, and it may be one half of our duty is to help her, to save her.”
“What do you mean by that?” the superintendent asked, startled.
But Bobby did not attempt to answer. He rounded a corner, then another, and halted the car before his hotel. He jumped out, followed by the superintendent. A plain-clothes man came forward.
“Nothing doing, sir,” he reported. “No one answering the description been here. Only one woman all the time, and she only stayed a minute.”
“What was she like?” Bobby asked.
“Oh, quite different,” the man answered confidently. “Tall and thin. Had a bad cough. Seemed to shake her all to bits and set her long earrings swinging so you thought they would swing themselves clean off.”
Bobby went into the hotel. He said to the receptionist:
“A lady has been here. Did she ask to see one of your staff, Miss Martin?”
“That’s right,” the receptionist agreed. “Her mother’s been knocked down by a car. The lady said it was bad, and Miss Martin was to go to the hospital at once. They went off together.”
Bobby went back to the superintendent.
“Vea’s got in first,” he said. “She’s warned Bella. They went away together.”
“Warned her?” repeated the superintendent. “Warned her we wanted her?” He turned wrathfully on the plain-clothes man. “Perkins,” he demanded, “didn’t you see them go?”
“Easy to see how it happened,” Bobby interposed. “First, Vea. Perkins wasn’t interested. That was all right. Why should he be? Then Vea appears again. Probably she stood for a moment in the door, looking round—for a taxi or something. Perkins still not interested. Not the woman he was told to look out for. He’s been told to be careful to avoid being noticed. So he turns his back and walks away. Vea’s on the watch. She may have played the same trick before, she knows them all from the word ‘go’. She makes Bella a sign, and Bella slips out, taking care to keep on the far side, and they walk away together. Perkins will be on the look out for that dodge another time.”
Perkins gave Bobby a look of deep gratitude. He might still get a wigging, but the full force of it had been broken, and indeed Bobby was never severe, except in cases of wilful neglect or indolence. He knew so well that the best slip up at times. Luckily for Perkins, too, the superintendent was too puzzled by this new development to have much time or thought to spare for rebuking subordinates. He said:
“Well, if they’ve gone away together, where to?”
“Yes, I know,” Bobby said. “There’s that next.”
“Seems,” said the superintendent, with a note of rebuke in his voice—“seems to show they’ve been working together all the tune. That’s a new angle. Cuts out your notion that Vea might have it in for Bella now she knows it was her did in Mark Monk.”
“Does it?” Bobby asked. “Or does it mean Vea wants to keep Bella for herself?”
CHAPTER XXXII
“WHY SHOULD OTHERS LIVE?”
Now at last, now that Bella Winlock was ‘wanted’ on a clear and definite charge, it was possible to take more forthright and decided measures to discover her whereabouts. Desirable, too—more than desirable, in fact—to find Vea as well, though in her case it was difficult to think of any excuse for detaining her, highly advisable as that course of action seemed to be. The liberty of the subject is above all things sacrosanct in every free community, but it has its disadvantages when the question is not so much the detection as the prevention of crime.
Not that there was very much that could be done for the moment, now that night was drawing in, beyond making preparations for the morrow. Plans were laid. Instructions were sent out. It was agreed that every possible means of publicity should be employed, including such things as the publication of photographs in the Press. All this completed, and nothing more to be done till morning, Bobby began to think of dinner—a subject which had been a kind of yearning background to his thoughts for some time. It was afterwards, he was in the lounge, smoking a good-night cigarette over a cup of coffee, complacently contemplating bed, that Vea Burden came quietly into the room. She stood in the doorway, looking at him, a faint smile on her thin, ravaged face where the scarlet of her painted lips showed in startling contrast to the deathly pallor of her other features. Bobby rose to his feet.
“Oh, good evening,” he said. “Awfully good of you. I’ve been hoping for a chance of a chat. Waiter, another cup of coffee. A liqueur?”
“Thank you so much,” she said, and there was a touch of mockery in her voice as she added: “Awfully good of you.” To the waiter she said: “Make it double—the liqueur, not the coffee.” To Bobby she said: “I’ve got a room here for to-night. Do you mind?”
She sat down, and they looked at each other across the small lounge table, nor did either speak. Vea’s thoughts were her own, her eyes, beneath swollen, half-closed lids, were inflamed and dark. Bobby was wondering uneasily what lay behind this unexpected visit. Vea began to cough. There were still a few of the other visitors to the hotel scattered about the lounge, chatting or reading, or playing cards. All of them looked, for it was a harsh and dreadful cough, and shook her so it was a wonder that thin and emaciated form could endure it. She had her handkerchief to her mouth. When she took it away there was blood on it. She showed the stain to Bobby:
“That’s why,” she said. “My lip-stick, I mean. Why it’s the brightest crimson I could find. Then it doesn’t show. The blood, I mean.”
“I see you’ve taken off your earrings,” Bobby remarked.
“I miss them, feel undressed somehow,” she told him. “I got used to them. A sort of signature tune. Only now I thought they might be getting to be too much of one. That plainclothes cop outside here, I was afraid he had noticed. Not too bright, was he?”
“Or shall we say,” Bobby suggested, “not so experienced, not so well up in the tricks of the trade—of the crook?”
She began to cough again. This time the spasm was less severe, less prolonged. She said:
“I got soaked to the skin that wet day. So did you. Hasn’t hurt you, though.”
“I had a hot bath as soon as I could,” Bobby explained.
“And I,” she said, “I had no change so I lay in my wet things all night. There was a fever in my blood that I thought would dry them. It doesn’t matter much. Did you see those fools all staring just now? Have they never heard any one cough before?”
“Not like that I think,” Bobby answered. “You should be in hospital.”
“Hospital?” she repeated. “Cemetery you mean. You think I’m going to die, don’t you? Break a blood-vessel or something. So did they.” With a sudden blazing fire of passion that seemed to eat her up into one fierce incarnation of angry will she said: “Why should they live—why should any one—if I’ve to die?”
“Would you like another cup of coffee?” Bobby asked.
She stared and laughed—no pleasant laugh, low and harsh.
“Damn you!” she said at last. “I think I hate you more than all the rest.”
“Well, that doesn’t do either of us much good, does it?” Bobby asked. “And it doesn’t do your cough much good either to get wet through and lie in damp things all night. Tell me, what have you been trying to do all this time?”
“If you weren’t a fool,” she told him angrily, “you could see for yourself I had to know.”
“To know?”
“To know,” she repeated, “—to know what had happened, to know—to know, if it was like that, which had killed the other.” She laid a hot and stinging hand on his. Her eyes were fire, her voice hardly more than a whisper as she repeated: “It was the not knowing was more than I could bear.”
“Mark Monk or Bella?” Bobby said. “Victim or murderer? Which was which? or something else altogether? Well, that’s what we were trying to find out.”
“If it was Bella had had it, I had to help Mark,” Vea went on. “That’s at first how I thought it was. He was my man. I wanted him back. I think I might have got him back—I think I might have gone on living. I think I might, if it had been that way and I had helped. He might have wanted me again, have needed me. That’s what I wanted. For him to need me.”
“He might have for a time, needed you as long as he needed your help. Afterwards?”
“I know what you mean,” she said defiantly. “You mean he killed his first wife. They couldn’t prove it. She should have left him if she couldn’t keep him. It was up to her. A woman ought to know her man. Well, suppose he did?” She was staring at Bobby, intently, fiercely. She drew a long, deep breath. “What about it?” she asked. “Life wouldn’t be dull, anyhow. Have love from him—or death. To know every time he kissed you, what might be next.”
“A fascination of horror,” Bobby said with a mixture of repugnance, fear, and pity.
She nodded and was silent. Then she spoke again.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I suppose you can’t. Could you love a woman you knew was giving you poison in your food every day? I wonder. We could, we others. It wasn’t only me. Others, too. I’ve seen the whisper go round the room that there was a man had stood his trial for murdering his wife, and some would shiver, turn pale, shiver away, and some, and more, would turn pale and shiver—but not away. Ever looked over a steep cliff and felt it draw?”
“The pull of the abyss,” Bobby said.
“Well, then,” she said.
“Does all that explain why you came here this evening to warn Bella?”
“I only wanted to know if she were here,” Vea answered. “Been here all the time, hasn’t she? safe and snug, in the same place as you, helping cook your dinner, while all the time you were searching for her high and low.”
“One up to her,” Bobby agreed. “Definitely one up to her. A young woman of imagination and resource. Still, but for you, I think we should have found her this evening. Where is she now?”
“How should I know?”
“You came to warn her, didn’t you? I should have to lower my opinion of your intelligence if you tried to deny that. She went away with you, I think?”
“She didn’t. She may have slipped out after me. I don’t know and I don’t care. Nothing to do with me.”
But now she was not looking at him. Her eyes were turned away. She put one hand up to shade her face as if she feared that he might understand what he saw if he saw too clearly. Her small, feverish, restless movements that had been noticeable before, though she herself had been unconscious of them, now ceased entirely. She sat rigid and motionless.
“You told me,” Bobby said, “how you felt you had to know what took place at Bexley House. You thought it must be either that Mark Monk had killed Bella or that it had been the other way. Well, we thought that, too, though we had to take into account the possibility of some one else having intervened, and of Bella having been rushed away to prevent her telling. Or even of her having gone off voluntarily with the idea of helping Mark’s escape, if he had done anything. Many possibilities. But I think you only considered the first—that one of the two had killed the other. If it had been that Mark Monk were the killer, you meant to help him. But supposing the killer turned out to be Bella, what had you in your mind then?”
