A taxi was waiting outside No. 34. As the old clown approached, his faded blue eyes were rejoiced by the sight of a beautiful dark girl, in a flame-colored evening dress, emerge from the house, followed by a pin-headed, slick-haired man. When she saw the dismal object wheeling the pram, she took a shilling from her bag. Averting those faded blue eyes, the clown held out a filthy claw, and in a husk of a voice said, “Thank you, lady. Gawd bless you.”
Ah well, thought Nigel as the taxi moved off, if Clare could not recognize me, Alec Gray certainly did not. He wheeled his deplorable pram to the end of the street, collecting a few coppers thrown from windows en route; then, going down a deserted cul-de-sac on the far side of Campden Hill Road, he disposed of pram and gramophone among the debris of a bombed site, put on a long cloak and sombrero hat which had been concealed in the pram, and returned to Radley Gardens with a large, rolling gait, the image of a genuine, if disreputable, painter. He entered No. 34, went upstairs, let himself into Gray’s flat, closed the door and put it on the chain, drew the curtains, and switched on the light.
His next step was to find an escape route, if there was such a thing. If Clare played her part correctly, and telephoned the number he had given her, he would not need it; but one couldn’t be too careful. A little prospecting discovered the ladder which led up to the roof garden; and warily investigating this, Nigel found a fire escape leading down the back wall of the house. He returned to the sitting room. With his usual blatant disregard for his neighbors, Gray had left the radio playing at full blast. This was most convenient. It would cover any noise Nigel might make. Throwing off cloak and hat, putting on a pair of gloves, he looked round the room.
It was furnished and decorated with a good deal more taste than Nigel had expected. The radio and cocktail cabinet were vulgar enough; but over the mantelpiece, which was littered with invitation cards, there hung a tolerable Utrillo, and on the wall facing it a really fine Vuillard interior. A grand piano stood in one corner, a saxophone and a guitar leaned against another. There were two enormous armchairs, an expensive-looking divan, and a walnut escritoire. Nigel moved over to the latter. He had a jemmy in his pocket, and no scruples about breaking drawers open, for he intended the job to look like a straight burglary. In the present instance, however, no violence was needed. The drawers of the escritoire were not locked, and Nigel began methodically to go through the papers they contained….
Clare Massinger was finding the evening less distasteful than she had anticipated. She had the pleasure of being the most attractive girl at the restaurant, and of being told so by her escort—not in a wolfish way, but boyishly, shyly almost. Alec Gray was doing his best to efface the impression of his first visit to her studio, she thought. He had undeniable charm, when he chose to exercise it. He possessed, too, the flair which every specialist in women cultivates—for intuitively choosing the right approach to the woman of the moment. With Clare it was gaiety, frankness, a faintly avuncular manner of teasing her, which altered from time to time into schoolboyishness. Gray seemed to be in the highest spirits: there was a sort of latent recklessness about his manner and conversation—Clare could imagine how stimulating, challenging it would be to a woman like Hesione. The cruder sexual weapons he was keeping in abeyance, though occasionally she was aware of his bold, confident gaze fixed upon her. He was solicitous about her dinner, suggested dishes not on the menu, kept the waiters on their toes, drank sparingly.
They talked a little about her work—Gray was no Philistine. He inquired after Nigel, hoped he would soon be out of hospital, apologized for the scene he had made in her studio.
“Afraid I was in a foul temper. That boy was an absolute pest. Damned cheek of his—running into your place.”
Clare, who had been finding it more and more difficult to associate her companion with burglaries and kidnapings, or whatever Nigel suspected him of, saw the danger signal just in time.
“Oh, but I’d asked him to come and sit for me.”
“Yes, of course, I remember. You told me. Have you finished the head?”
“He never came back again. You must have frightened him off.”
“I’m sorry. He’d probably have pinched your jewelry, though. What charming topazes those are: just right for your coloring. Strangeways give them to you?”
It was the first flick of his impertinence. Clare ignored it.
“No. They’re an heirloom.”
“Does he make a living out of doing this detective stuff?”
“I’ve no idea. I didn’t even know he did that sort of work, till a few days ago.”
“There seem to be more hard knocks than halfpence in it this time,” he said offhandedly.
Gray fell silent for a little. Clare reflected on her position. Why had he Snapped the bait so readily when she angled for this invitation? She had assumed he would pump her hard about Nigel, but he seemed to take only the most perfunctory interest in that subject. On the other hand, if his womanizing urge was so strong as to have overcome the blows to his vanity which she had given him at their first meeting, it was odd that he should not now be following it up.
“D’you know Hess Durbar well?” he presently asked.
“Fairly. Better since she started sitting for me.”
“Unfair advantage you have, studying people when they’re trying to look interesting. I’d be terrified of you.”
“I suppose people do find it alarming. But we’re only interested in the surface, and the bone of course—not the nasty things crawling under their skin.”
Alec Gray’s eyes popped at her a little. He flicked cigar ash on the table. “I hear Hess has been visiting your—visiting Strangeways in hospital.”
“Who told you?”
“Is it meant to be a secret?”
Clare laughed. “Good gracious, no!”
“Someone or other. I’m always hearing gossip. Comes of being an eligible young waster. I suppose Hess has told you I’m a bad hat?”
“Well, actually she’s hardly mentioned you.”
A slight frown appeared on his face, giving it a heavy look. Heavy and petulant. “I wonder why she chucked me,” he said after a moment. “Frightened off, I suppose. You know, the police have got it into their heads that I’m a sort of master criminal.”
He threw it off in his careless way—so carelessly that Clare was taken by surprise. He talked as if it was something they both knew about. There was a moment’s pause before she expressed the proper astonishment and incredulity.
“You were a bit slow on that one, my dear,” Gray said, grinning at her. “So Hess has been talking to you. Or was it Strangeways?”
Irritated with herself, Clare said at random, “Oh, I hear so much gossip. It was Sir Rudolf, I think.”
“Now that is extremely unlikely.” Gray’s expression was amused.
“Why? He’s got much more reason to dislike you than—”
“You’re fighting out of your weight, my dear girl. During the war I did a spell of interrogating enemy prisoners. We weren’t supposed to beat them up, so I got rather good at detecting lies by subtler methods.”
His complacence had the effect of allaying Clare’s exasperation. “You’re just like a small boy boasting to his mother,” she said smiling; then, seeing his expression, added hurriedly, “But I’m sure you were very good at it.”
“Ah, ah! Pussy! Now let’s stop bickering. Time to be moving on to the wild excesses of The High Dive, if you’re ready. The proprietor, name of Samuel Borch, has just been taken up by the police. Sorry you won’t be able to meet him. Fascinating type. He’s one of my accomplices in crime, so they tell me….”
Nigel had finished his investigation of the writing desk. The drawers had rewarded him with a few receipts, a head of unpaid bills, bundles of letters from women which would have made a fortune for certain Sunday newspapers, a social diary aggressively innocent in its entries, a stack of sheet music, eight packs of expensive playing cards, and among the letters several photogr
aph albums. Nigel inspected these with considerable care. The first was absorbing as a pictorial social register, but for no other reason. The second, devoted to Gray’s hobby of sailing, contained some excellent snapshots. In the third, a series of group photographs appeared—school teams, OCTU and regimental groups. Nigel studied each of them in turn. On the last page but one, there was a picture of a Commando unit: sitting center was Alec Gray; and in the back row another face appeared which Nigel could recognize—the face of one of the two men whom Bert Hale had pointed out to him in Kensington Gardens: the one, Bert had said, with a knuckle duster.
Nigel removed the snapshot, put it in his pocket, and substituted for it a loose photograph which he found at the back of the album. Then he flung all the objects from the escritoire over the floor, kicking them about to suggest the debris left by an impatient burglar, and went into the bedroom. Here again he drew the curtain before turning on the light. To reinforce the impression of a burglary, he fetched the cloak and filled its pockets with a few articles from the dressing table—silver-backed brushes, gold cuff links, a signet ring, and so on. Then he started to go methodically through the chest-of-drawers and the numerous suits which hung in the wardrobe. As he set to work, the telephone rang.
It was not yet quite ten o’clock. Surely Gray could not be on his way back already? Nigel lifted the receiver. “Yes?” he said. A woman’s voice replied.
“Alec, darling, I’m furious. I’ve been waiting hours for you—”
Nigel replaced the receiver. It was a damned nuisance. If the indignant female should upbraid Gray later, it would come out that someone had answered the telephone from his flat; and bona-fide burglars are not in the habit of answering telephone calls while professionally occupied….
As they entered The High Dive, the manager hurried obsequiously forward, emitting a positive oil-slick of welcome.
“Hello, Antrobus,” said Gray, in his most officer-class manner. “This is my guest, Miss Massinger. I’ll sign the book.”
Making up in the ladies’ room, Clare heard a few snatches of conversation from outside.
“So they’ve not arrested you yet?” Gray’s hearty, clipped voice was answered by a smooth murmur which Clare could only just catch.
“… police all over the place today, sir … said we could stay open for a while … all most unfortunate.”
“If I know them, they spent half the time sampling the cellar, eh?”
A deferential laugh from the manager. “I don’t think they found our Château d’Yquem, sir, anyway. Shall I bring you up a bottle?”
“Why not? We ought to celebrate.”
The club was rather better than most of its kind, thought Clare, as they sat at their table. The usual Society riffraff were present, of course—angular girls with hideous, high-pitched voices and their escorts whose smooth, immature faces looked as if they had been fashioned, all from the same mold, out of the best butter. But the ventilation was good, the band clever, and the wine excellent. Indeed, Clare was feeling the first premonitions of tiddliness.
“I hope you like this stuff,” said Gray, who had been nodding coolly to acquaintances in the room. “It’s rather special.”
“I do, thanks. And it’s always nice not to have to drink champagne. Speaking for myself, it brings on the glooms. How unreal these places are. I hate harmless vice, don’t you?”
“Good lord! Did you want to be taken to a thieves’ kitchen?”
“Oh no, I’m quite happy here, really. Why ‘kitchen,’ I wonder?”
“Search me.”
Clare pulled herself together. “We’d better dance. I’m starting to talk fatuous.”
Gray was a superb dancer, and Clare began to enjoy herself thoroughly: she knew that many eyes were turned their way; and to be playing with fire was always exhilarating. But, as the night wore on, Clare became more and more puzzled. She had sensed some inner excitement at work in Alec Gray all the time, and assumed that she was the cause of it. Her relief, as time went by and he made no pass at her, was not unmixed with pique. Woman-like, she contrived somehow to blame Nigel for this: how dare he throw me into this man’s arms? It would serve Nigel right if I did let myself go.
Clare pressed closer to Gray, feeling the man’s strength and recklessness, and that strange, controlled excitement which communicated itself to her like the tingling of an electric current. An echo from far away, her voice came back, talking to Nigel in the studio—“That armor-plated type of cad does fascinate us girls…. We want to find the weak joint in his armor, or unbuckle it and see what’s underneath.” Suddenly Clare felt disgusted with herself.
“What bitches women are!”
She did not realize she had uttered her thought aloud, till he said, drawing one fingernail down the ridge of her back, “That’s the way I like them.”
His hot, hard voice completed her cure. She drew away from him, and when the dance ended, said she would sit down for a while. Gray did not pursue it. They talked, amicably enough, about her upbringing and art training, and his war experiences. It was really, she thought, the oddest evening….
In the bedroom of Gray’s flat, Nigel drew a deep breath. After going through every suit, every drawer, every conceivable hiding-place, he had drawn blank. Apart from the photograph in his pocket, there was nothing incriminating to be found. It was naïve, perhaps, to have expected it. Wastepaper baskets had been examined; blotters investigated; walls sounded. No doubt a police search would have ripped open the mattress and torn up the floor boards. But Nigel was too exhausted to do more: his head throbbed again, and his heart was sick. He set aside Gray’s address book, for further perusal, and stepped wearily into the bathroom.
An old coat was hanging up there, with a bathrobe. Mechanically his fingers went through the coat pockets. Deep down in the breast pocket, where his fingers only just touched it, he felt something. A scrap of paper, crumpled up and thrust there absentmindedly, no doubt, and forgotten. Nigel unfolded it. A slip of paper, three inches by two, with a few words typewritten on it.
No. 3 Berth all 12 sailing Harwich 13th
Nigel swayed, slumped down on a chair. Oh God, he thought, thank God, we’ve done it! Here was the secret of Dai Williams’ message. Bert Hale had not made it up to mystify his young friends. Somehow Dai Williams had come into possession of this knowledge. Knowing his own extreme danger that afternoon, he scribbled it on the margin of his newspaper; then, dying, he had torn off that bit of paper and given it to Bert. But he had torn off too little. His dying eyes could not see that the scrap of paper he gave the boy did not contain the whole message, only Berth all 12. Dai was an uneducated man, in the extremity of fear. It was easy to see how the rapidly scribbled words had become disjointed and turned into Bert Hale 12.
Hurrying back into the bedroom, Nigel rang the Yard. Blount was still there, catching up on his routine work. He would stay, he promised, till Nigel arrived. All right, if it was so urgent, he would have a police car waiting at the corner of Radley Gardens and Church Street in fifteen minutes. Nigel felt cool and capable again. He artistically increased the disorder he had made in Gray’s bedroom; then, going out onto the roof garden, ran down the fire escape noisily and climbed up it again as silently as he could, for the subsequent police investigation into the “burglary” must be allowed to find footprints. Next, using his jemmy on the trapdoor, he did his best to leave the impression that the burglar had broken in from the roof garden. Finally, he rang up the friend who was to have relayed Clare’s telephone message to him, when Gray left the club, and told him not to do so. He had thought of everything, surely.
Putting on the cloak and black sombrero, Nigel let himself out of the flat, and padded briskly toward Church Street. He had forgotten only one thing. In the heat of excitement, he had become quite oblivious of his disguise. As he went up to the waiting police car, the driver called out,
“Hey, grandfather, this ain’t your Rolls Royce!”
Nigel put up his hand to his
false beard, realized what he looked like, and laughed. “It’s all right. I’m Strangeways behind all this hair. Superintendent Blount sent you for me.”
In a moment, they were tearing east. When Nigel was shown into Blount’s room at New Scotland Yard, the Superintendent quailed from the spectacle.
“My guid Lorrd! I naiver thocht ye’d come doun to this, Strangeways,” he exclaimed, his native Doric returning under the stress of emotion. “Ye’re looking poasitively verrminous.”
A few words from Nigel sobered him. He reached for the green telephone.
“This is something for the Top Brass, I doubt.”
Ten minutes later, after a breakneck drive in the police car, they entered the study of a Very Important Personage. Nigel was conscious of a soldierly figure in pajamas and dressing gown, a pair of very keen gray eyes beneath bushy eyebrows, and a gentle, almost lisping voice, as their host greeted them.
“This is Mr. Strangeways, Sir Edward. I thought he’d better tell you his story himself.”
“Ah yes. Quite right, Blount. Very nice of you to come, Strangeways. I knew your uncle, when he was Assistant Commissioner.” The stern eyes twinkled. “He was fond of dressing up, too! I expect we could all do with a whisky—if Blount will let us drink, just for once, while on duty.”
Nigel told his story. Once or twice Sir Edward lisped a searching question, and his eyes never left Nigel’s face. When Nigel came to the “burgling” of Gray’s flat, he heard a subdued clucking from Blount, who always affected a horror for unorthodox procedure; but Sir Edward’s expression never changed—he might have been listening to an account of some mild undergraduate escapade.