‘Not back yet.’
‘Well, he ought to be. Personally, I’d like a round table conference. I’m not squeamish, God knows, but that chap upstairs is getting on my mind!’
‘I believe you are losing your nerve,’ commented Wharton, studying her. ‘What’s he been doing to get on your mind? You’re not falling for him, are you?’
‘Don’t be a damned idiot!’ she retorted. ‘I don’t fall for anybody! Just the same, I wish he hadn’t turned up.’
‘No good wishing, at this stage of the game,’ frowned Wharton. ‘He has turned up, and—according to the old man—he’s likely to upset everything if he’s not dealt with. He seems that sort.’
‘Dealt with?’
‘Yes—dealt with. If Clitheroe chooses drastic methods, we’ll have to back him up.’
‘Suppose we don’t back him up?’
‘I’ve thought of that too. But it’s too late, my dear, to go back. Mahdi’s using pressure, and if there’s the slightest slip we’ll all be in the gravy. Why waste time talking about it? Tell me something more about our patient. What did you do when he came to?’
‘I did the obvious,’ she answered. ‘Pretended to be sympathetic, and all that. While he pretended to believe me.’
‘I see. Vamp stuff. But how do you know he’s only pretending?’
‘He watched me while I poured him out a glass of water, and the moment I was out of the room he was off the bed like lightning, listening at the door,’
‘That’s not proof positive,’ said ‘Wharton.
‘Add a woman’s instinct,’ she retorted, ‘and the proof’s quite positive. I’m supposed to be doing spy work on his behalf at the moment. Pathetic, isn’t it? And if I don’t return soon, with some plausible story, he’ll have the door down, or start bellowing out of the window. Listen!’ She started violently. ‘What’s that?’
A door had closed somewhere. Wharton growled at her.
‘That’s downstairs, not upstairs!’ he exclaimed nervily. ‘For old Harry’s sake, don’t lose your wool! I expect it’s only Clitheroe returning.’
They waited in silence. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. In a few moments Clitheroe poked in his head.
He was carrying a parcel, and he looked warm and annoyed. As he stared at the two inmates of the room, his annoyance increased.
‘Why are you both here?’ he demanded raspingly. ‘Flitt’s downstairs, and one of you ought to be upstairs!’
‘We’re discussing the situation,’ answered Wharton. ‘The patient’s come to, and we’re deciding what to do with him.’
‘Come to?’ cried the old man, his eyes blazing. ‘Come to? And nobody with him—’
‘Oh, don’t get excited,’ interrupted Jessica, no less warmly. ‘The door’s locked. He’s safe for the moment.’
‘You fools!’ snapped Mr Clitheroe. ‘That kind of fellow is never safe for any moment! I’ll go up to him, and if he makes trouble I’ll try him with a dose of this!’
He opened the parcel, and stared at it, gasping. His companions stared also. Revealed was a substantial piece of cheese.
‘What on earth—!’ murmured Wharton. ‘I say—is this some new gadget?’
The old man did not reply. He continued to stare at the cheese. Then he swung round with an exclamation, and made for the door. As he did so, a figure came loping up the stairs.
‘’E’s gone in, sir!’ panted the figure. ‘I seen ’im!’
‘What—to twenty-nine?’ cried Mr Clitheroe.
‘Yes, sir! I watched, as you told me, and back ’e comes, like a flash—’
Mr Clitheroe interrupted with another angry exclamation, and turned to Wharton.
‘That tramp fellow,’ he said shortly.
‘What!’ exclaimed Wharton, in astonishment. Then added defensively: ‘He wasn’t there when I searched the place, that I’ll swear to!’
But the accusation he anticipated was not made.
‘I know he wasn’t there,’ said Mr Clitheroe. ‘The fellow barged into me just now in the street—and tried to put me off with a silly lie. But we guessed the lie, didn’t we, Ted? We guessed he’d go back to No. 29, and we watched for him, and we’ve caught him—eh, Ted? Well, now we’ll give him the fright of his life, and make him wish he’d never been born!’ On the point of departure he paused. ‘Still, I’ll leave nothing to chance this time. Jessica, ring up Dakers. Tell him to stand by in the next street with his taxi. We may want it, if our friend is slippery. We may want Dakers to drive him home and stow him in his attic. Yes, let Dakers come along, Jessica—it’s time he earned a little of his pay.’
Then Mr Clitheroe went out into the passage.
‘Meanwhile, what about our other darling upstairs?’ Jessica called after him.
But Clitheroe did not hear. Wharton laughed.
‘I’ll go up and deal with the Australian,’ he said. ‘You go and do your telephoning.’
‘Be careful the Australian doesn’t turn the tables and deal with you!’ retorted Jessica.
‘Don’t worry,’ smiled Wharton. ‘This isn’t a test match!’
He went upstairs. Jack Hobart heard him coming, and waited by the door with clenched fists. He recognised the footsteps as masculine, and guessed that his recent companion had either been overruled or sought aid. The latter he divined. A moment later Wharton’s voice, calling through the door, broke the tension.
‘I understand you’re awake,’ called Wharton.
Hobart did not reply.
‘If I’d been with you, you’d have gone to sleep again pretty quick,’ continued Wharton. ‘Your last jailer was a bit too sympathetic.’
Hobart wondered.
‘Like me to come in and tuck you up?’ asked Wharton.
‘Love it,’ answered Hobart. ‘I’m just longing for some real comfort.’
‘Well, you can go on longing,’ grinned Wharton. ‘Because I’m not coming in. I’m going to stay outside. All night. With a revolver. Got that?’
‘It sounds most convincing,’ responded Hobart.
‘Good!’ said Wharton. ‘It’ll be just as convincing as it sounds unless you return to your little bed and stay there till morning. At the slightest noise, I shall come in.’
Hobart heard a chair being placed outside the door. He visualised his new jailor squatting down on it. Quietly he returned to the little bed, and sat down.
As the seconds slipped by, his problem classified into a single question. How was he to get out of the room?
Every room is built with a minimum of two openings, A door and a window. The door being useless as a means of egress, Hobart fixed his eyes on the window, speculating on its possibilities.
He could run to the window, thrust it wide and shout. He ruminated over the probable results. The door behind him would fly open and a bullet would speed across the room…Would it?…Yes, it would. ‘For, obviously,’ argued Hobart, ‘I have walked into a madhouse!’ The simple rules of logic did not appear to apply to events in No. 26 Jowle Street.
But the window might offer other aids to escape. Suddenly rising from the little bed, he tiptoed very softly across the room. There was a ledge outside the window. If one got on to the ledge, and upright, one could grasp a protuberance from which one might swing on to the roof. And, once on the roof…
He stood by the window for several minutes, studying it and the lie of the land. Suddenly he drew aside. The door of No. 29 was opening, and a man was coming out.
‘By Jove, it’s that damned old skunk!’ he muttered. ‘What’s he been doing over there?’
The old man crossed the road. He disappeared from the watcher’s sight as he drew up to the front door of No. 26, the window ledge protruding and blotting him out. A few moments later, a new matter claimed Hobart’s attention. A face had appeared momentarily at a window opposite. At the window of the second floor front.
‘Holy smoke!’ thought Hobart. ‘It’s that queer old tramp! Now, what’s he up to?’
He con
tinued to watch. Odd fragments of some queer nocturnal drama were moving before him—fragments it was impossible for him to piece together. Did they have any concern with his own predicament?
‘I wonder!’ he reflected. ‘P’r’aps I’ve walked into something bigger than I imagined! P’r’aps more than just the safety of Mr Jack Hobart is involved.’
This theory gained colour when the next fragment came before his eyes. A woman emerged from somewhere below the window ledge. It was his original jailor. The woman who had drugged him. He caught a glimpse of her green dress beneath her furs as she emerged from the spot where the old man had disappeared. Obviously, from the front door. She looked along the road, ran quickly to the nearest corner, and, beckoned. A taxi-cab appeared. Then she turned and came back, reaching the door of No. 29 at the same moment that the taxi-cab reached it. She inserted a latch-key and went into No. 29. The taxi-cab waited. So did the watcher.
‘Gone to sleep?’ asked a voice from the door.
Hobart tiptoed back to the bed.
‘Or just sulky?’ went on the voice.
‘Thought I wasn’t to talk,’ answered Hobart, from the bed.
‘Oh—you’re being obedient,’ said Wharton, outside. ‘Well, keep it up.’
Hobart waited a while. Then he tiptoed to the window again. The taxi-cab was moving away.
Ten minutes went by. Nothing happened. Hobart decided on his policy.
‘I’ll give that fellow an hour to fall asleep,’ he thought. ‘Then I’ll open the window and get out of it, if it’s my last act on earth!’
Back on the little bed once more, he lay down to count the minutes. But it was Hobart himself who fell asleep first. The drug was still hanging about him. When he awoke, he sat up with a guilty start. A church clock in the distance was chiming midnight.
‘What a fool!’ he thought. ‘Have I been off as long as all that?’
The chimes echoed away into the surrounding silence, and died in it. Hobart turned towards the door. He heard soft, regular breathing. Quickly he ran to the door, and turned the handle, taking a full minute to do so. The door was still locked.
‘Damn!’ he muttered, while the quiet, regular breathing continued tantalisingly on the other side of the wood. ‘If only I could get to him now, just as he is, and make him see stars! Well, the window it will have to be!’
He stole to the window, and quietly opened it.
CHAPTER XXIV
ACROSS THE ROOF
IT has already been implied that Jack Hobart did not like running away. It was equally distasteful to him to call in outside aid when he had once begun to get his teeth into a job. He possessed the colonial’s spirit of independence, an independence born of independent forefathers who had snapped their fingers at security, and crossed great seas to enlarge their cramped souls in adventure; and the idea of shouting for help, after he had gained the ledge outside the window, only came into his mind to be dismissed.
He had been cheated and drugged and outwitted. These things had happened in his own house! Well, before he left the house he was going to get his own back, and he was going to find out what the big idea was. The discovery would lose its savour if he permitted it to be made by any outside person.
Jack Hobart wasn’t especially interested in seeing Mr Clitheroe in handcuffs. He wanted to punch his nose.
But there were other reasons why Hobart did not call down into the street. Item, there was nobody in the street to call to. Item, by calling down he would immediately draw attention to himself and render his personal safety more precarious than ever. Item, even if he were successful in attracting the attention of a policeman or a passer-by, the story he had to tell would seem less plausible than the story Mr Clitheroe would assuredly tell in return. Hobart had no friends he could appeal to; he could supply no address to establish his respectability. Thus, Mr Clitheroe would have little difficulty in convincing the law that Jack Hobart was a burglar and in getting him locked up for the night. That would be a very poor conclusion to the adventure.
He seized the projection above him, leapt lightly from the ledge, and hoisted himself up. He found himself on a dark slope. The ceiling of the room he had just left had sloped, and he was now on the outer side of the ceiling. He groped around with his hands for something solid to grasp.
The comparative smoothness of the roof was interrupted by a small excrescence of brick. ‘Good!’ he thought, and gripped it. It came away as he did so. Letting it go, he swung his arm in a frantic effort to find some other anchorage, for he had trusted too much of his weight to the small projection and was now falling backwards. A chimney pot saved him from a sudden descent to the street below. His arm wound round and encircled it, while a loose brick and a couple of tiles slipped down the slope and over the edge. It made Hobart feel a little sick to realise how narrowly he had missed being in their company.
He heard the impact of the falling debris on the pavement. He waited for a few seconds, partly to learn whether the disturbance had been heard by others, and partly to regain his composure. Then, satisfied that the accident was not going to militate against his chances of success, he continued to climb along the slope, groping for projections that were firm and solid while he sought his objective.
His objective was a skylight.
There was no skylight in the immediate vicinity. This meant that he must climb up to the ridge of the sloping roof, and search on the opposite side. He continued his way up the watershed. Now he was only a few inches from the ridge, and in a moment his eyes would peep over. But suddenly he stopped dead. Two other eyes, appearing from the opposite side, had peeped over first, and were staring into his.
It was a very nasty moment. The eyes that stared at Hobert’s were luminously green. Then, as the darkness beyond separated itself from the darkness of the owner of the eyes, forming a little outline, two black ears materialised on either side of a smooth black head.
‘By Jove, I owe you something for that!’ muttered Hobart.
His momentary indignation was quickly followed by a happier emotion.
‘Yes, but where have you come from?’ he asked the luminous green eyes. ‘Through an open window, eh? That’s what I’m looking for!’
It wasn’t certain that the cat had come through an open window. Exactly how cats get on roofs has never been discovered by man. They probably have their own methods, and if they really want a roof they will undoubtedly find one. Still, just as a human being will follow an easy path to a mild diversion, so a cat may pass through an open window to its natural flooring. In any case, this particular cat no longer loomed as a sinister circumstance. It increased the possibility of the skylight by fifty per cent.
Perhaps the cat objected to the abrupt beneficence with which it now became invested. It gave Hobart one more unpleasant moment by emitting a sudden yowl. ‘Say, stop that!’ whispered Hobart. ‘Want to wake everybody?’ The cat turned in response, showed a poker tail, and disappeared down the opposite slope again.
Hobart lost no time in following. He reached the ridge, and passed over the Himalayas into the mysteries of Thibet. A little patch of yellow winked up at him from half-way down the descending slope. Now the black form of the cat blotted it out. Now the black form passed beyond, and the yellow patch glowed again.
‘Skylight!’ thought Hobart, rejoicing.
But the cat had not paused, and when Hobart reached the skylight he gathered the reason. The skylight was closed. All he could do was to put his face close to it and peer through.
He peered through into a little passage. It was the passage, he divined correctly, outside the room, in which he had been a captive. And on an old wooden chair outside the door of the room—a door which Hobart had only seen previously from the insider—sat a man.
Hobart studied the man. It was his male jailer obviously. Measuring him for future reference, he deduced that the fellow was similar in height and build to himself. There was also a certain facial resemblance, although Hobart was not very pr
oud to own this fact. The fellow was asleep. A candle, at last gasp, flickered on a cheap, high chest. Electric light in No. 26 Jowle Street evidently ended at the second floor.
‘By God, if I could get through this skylight, you’d sleep on for a bit longer!’ thought Hobart.
Wood had divided them before. Now it was glass. Life was terribly tantalising.
The yellow patch became suddenly black. The tantalising vision vanished like a bad dream. The candle had flickered out.
Well, that was that. Now where was the cat? Hobart continued his cautious descent of the roof, and discovered that the slope was much longer at the back of the house than it had been at the front. It seemed to descend to the second floor. Reaching the end of it at last, he peered over the edge to see whether there was any possible continuation of his route. When his eyes grew accustomed to the new vista they were trying to penetrate, a vague railing grew out of the darkness beneath him. At first it looked like the mere shadow of a railing but as it materialised slowly it became the solid railing of a balcony. As it only protruded a very little way out from the wall, it appeared to belong one of those useless structures just too small for a chair and just too large for a window-box.
Something brushed against him.
‘I wish you’d give me a bit of warning when you’re coming!’ he grumbled to the cat.
But again the cat proved his friend rather than his enemy. It jumped down on to the railing, turned housewards, and vanished.
‘Eureka! There’s the open window!’ thought Hobart.
He turned over on his stomach, and gingerly lowered his legs downwards and outwards into the inky abyss. They met nothing. He endured an unpleasant moment when he had to decide whether to draw back to the roof or risk leaving it without the choice of returning should he want to; but he took the risk, and when his fingers were beginning to slip from the ledge they gripped and his straightened arms could stretch no straighter, the tip of a toe touched iron and told him that he had won a further stage of his hazardous journey.
The House Opposite Page 16