“Yes, that was her,” De Legett agreed. “I hope you don’t think that’s what Glynne and I were up to?”
He chuckled at what he evidently thought a good joke, and Bobby laughed, too.
“No, I don’t think that had occurred to me,” he said pleasantly.
“As a matter of fact,” De Legett went on, “it was her chauffeur—chap named Reynolds. Got away with it, too. Nothing more ever heard either of him or the loot. I shouldn’t have thought it possible when it was perfectly well known who he was. Mrs. Frayton offered a whacking big reward, too.”
“It’s certainly strange the way he vanished,” Bobby agreed. “Did you and Mr. Glynne leave together?”
“No, I came on to town and he went back to his tennis. Miss Glynne, his sister, you know, she’s a tip topper, was competing. He wanted to be there when she came on in the finals. It was an idea for a new gadget for preventing ice forming on aeroplanes he wanted to see me about. The idea was for me to put him in touch with some of my principals to help get it launched.”
“Did you do that?”
“It hasn’t come to anything as far as I know. I believe he’s working on a new dodge now. Something about retractors. Besides, he seems to have got hold of backers on his own, plenty of capital now to judge from what he’s spending. More than he’ll ever get out of it, if you ask me. My own idea is that what he is really keen on is doing something good that’ll get him back into the R.A.F. They threw him out over some bloomer he made and he wants to wangle a come back.”
Bobby pondered this information. Apparently Leonard Glynne had recently, since at least the death of Andrew White, secured control of at any rate a fairly large sum of money. Also, about the time of that death, Becky Glynne had been somewhere in the neighbourhood. And, if De Legett’s story was correct, it was Leonard who had arranged for that meeting in Wales, so near the scene of the tragedy.
Did those facts, Bobby asked himself very gravely, add up to anything significant?
He felt that he had learnt as much as he was likely to, for the present at least, from De Legett, and that now further information must be sought from Leonard Glynne himself. And that young man was little likely to show himself as friendly and as amiable as had done—so far—Mr. De Legett.
“There is just one thing more,” Bobby said with some slight hesitation. “I understand you are engaged to Lady May Grayson?”
“Good lord, what put that into your head?” De Legett gasped.
“You have her photograph there?” Bobby pointed out.
“Oh, that,” De Legett said. “Well, why not? Easy to look at, isn’t she?” He chuckled as if at some secret joke that he found very amusing. “Yes, that’s her photo all right, but I’ve never met her in my life and if you want to know why that photo’s there, you’ll have to do a bit of guessing. If you guess right I’ll stand you a drink any time you come around again.”
“I’m not a bit of good at guessing,” Bobby said. “In the police, they don’t like guesses either. You are engaged?”
De Legett, who had swung round in his swivel chair to grin at Lady May’s photograph, swung back again to face Bobby.
“Yes, I’m engaged. I expect I shall be married soon,” he said, and as Bobby watched he seemed inwardly to glow, as though the wonder and the glory of that thought had kindled within him a flame of deepest joy.
But Bobby stared at him with a kind of horror, with such a deadly, secret terror as he had seldom known. In a voice he could not keep quite steady, he muttered:—
“Will you tell me who the lady is?”
“Oh, no,” De Legett answered, though without any show of resentment, at a question that might well have seemed outside all discretion. “Oh, no, no one knows that but us.” He paused and from his inner joy there bubbled up a laugh of such utter and complete happiness as it has been the lot of but few to know. “Why do you want to know?” he asked gently.
“Because,” Bobby said, and it was as though the words came from an impulse and a will that were not wholly his, “because I think the answer means your life or else your death.”
But the other seemed quite unmoved.
“That’s right,” he said with the same bubbling laugh of wondering happiness, “it’s life and death to me all right. Life or death,” he repeated, and with those words still sounding in his ears, Bobby took his leave.
CHAPTER XV
CARDIFF
The first thing Bobby did after leaving the office of Messrs. Perceval and Wilde was to make certain arrangements with one of those itinerant photographers often to be seen in London streets, or, in the summer, on the promenades of seaside resorts. After that, he put through a trunk call to Midwych in an attempt to get in touch with Leonard Glynne. The answer, when it came, was from his sister, Becky. She said curtly that Leonard was away, possibly in London, possibly elsewhere. She did not know his London address, no one at home knew it, he had never said what it was, and, anyhow, and very coldly, what was the meaning of such an extraordinary request?
Without waiting for a reply, Becky rang off, and Bobby looked more thoughtful than ever as he, too, hung up. He was aware of a very strong impression that he would get no help from Becky, though in view of the apparent bad feeling between brother and sister, he found himself wondering if it was Leonard or someone else about whom she was troubled. For every tone of her voice had made it plain that she was afraid, afraid of Bobby’s activities. He felt sure she would do all in her power to thwart or hinder them.
“But the thing’s gone too far,” Bobby reflected grimly.
For the next very headachey half hour or so he was busy with Bradshaw, looking up the trains to Cardiff and endeavouring to work out various connections. After that, he just had time to call at the nearest public library where an erudite, astonished, and obliging librarian finally produced for him two books. One was entitled Tales of Old Paris and the other Legends of the Incas.
“You may find what you want there,” said the librarian; and Bobby thanked him, and, by special permission, took the two books away with him to read later.
Next he went on to the little Mayfair hat shop, closed by now, and, taking his fiancée, Olive, to a near-by restaurant, talked over with her his perplexities, his doubts, and his fears.
“It’s an ugly case,” he told her, “and I’m scared where it’s leading, but I’ve got to talk it over with someone or bust. And there’s only you. But for you, I’m all on my own. Colonel Glynne doesn’t seem to want to hear anything about it. I’m to go to the Public Prosecutor’s office or Scotland Yard if I want help—but only if I have to, sort of last extremity. And I’m not quite there yet, though it’s getting to look more and more like it every day.”
So he talked and talked, and put forward theories, and showed they were absurd, and put forward more theories, and disposed of them, too, and Olive listened, and said nothing, but thought the more, till she, too, seemed to glimpse behind his words a horror greater than any she had ever dreamed.
The meal ended in silence and then he took her back home and leaving her there hurried on to his own rooms for a few things he wanted. He had run it rather fine, but by taking a taxi he was in time to catch the night train for Cardiff, finding himself about nine the next morning, after a dispiriting breakfast in a restaurant only half awake, hopelessly lost in a busy Cardiff suburb. A policeman appeared presently and directed him to his destination, a small but prosperous-looking shop with well-stocked, well-arranged windows displaying chocolates, chewing gum, cigarettes and so on. Above was the name ‘Reeves’, and the shop was, he thought, well placed, at a corner where traffic routes intersected and with two large cinemas near by. He stood for a moment, looking at the shop windows, noting their contents, glancing, too, at the windows of the living rooms above, and then as he was about to enter he saw that someone was also looking at him, through the laden shelves of chocolate boxes and boxes of cigarettes that formed the background of the shop window. Who it was he could not tell, for
he had but the merest glimpse of a watchful face instantly withdrawn, but it was with uneasy thoughts in his mind that he pushed open the door and entered.
The shop was empty; and though a bell on the door loudly announced his entry, no one appeared. He waited and then knocked on the counter, but still there was a pause before a woman emerged from the door at the back, stood for a moment looking at him with evident mistrust and fear, and then came on to face him from behind the counter.
“She knows who I am,” he thought, and, a good deal worried, he asked himself how that could be.
Impossible, he thought, for certainly he had never seen her before and yet it was very certain that she knew him. She was about forty, he guessed, with a pleasant, homely face that at the moment bore a very worried and even alarmed expression, and that he now began to think reminded him vaguely of someone else, though of whom he could not be sure. But there was something faintly familiar about the general cast of the features, especially in the small mouth now so tightly closed above the small, pointed chin. Perhaps only a casual resemblance, he thought, or perhaps one that presently he would be able to identify. He bought a packet of cigarettes by way of a propitiatory opening, and then said:—
“You are Mrs. Reeves, I think?” She nodded and he went on:—“I think your sister, Mrs. Reynolds, lives with you. Could I have a few moments’ talk with her?”
“I’ll go and ask her,” Mrs. Reeves answered.
She went back behind the shop and was away some minutes. No other customer appeared. It was a slack hour, too late for people going to work, or for children on their way to school, too early for the morning shoppers. Even the street outside seemed quiet, with little traffic passing except for an occasional car and once for the unnecessarily loud hooting of a motor-cycle that sped by with an arrogant, triumphant ‘honk honk’ as though it shouted satisfaction with itself and scorn of all the rest of the world. Mrs. Reeves came back into the shop.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Jinnie’s not feeling very well.”
Bobby produced his credentials. Mrs. Reeves did not seem either very surprised or very impressed, and thought it very unlikely Mrs. Reynolds would make the effort to see him that Bobby suggested. He asked what doctor was attending her and Mrs. Reeves said her sister wasn’t one to run to a doctor every time she had a bad sick headache, but that didn’t mean she was in a fit state to talk to strangers. Bobby said it was very regrettable, but, in the interests of justice, it was necessary he should see Mrs. Reynolds. He would therefore, he supposed, have to wait till her headache was better. In order to lose no time, he would arrange for a constable to call every hour or even oftener to ask how she was. This suggestion, of course, was no better than blackmail and quite unjustifiable—as he made it, Bobby could almost hear defending counsel thundering a denunciation of police persecution and every national paper in the land taking up the cry. All the same it was quite evident that Mrs. Reeves liked the suggestion of such frequent visits by constables in uniform no better than Bobby had expected. She said angrily:—
“It’s no good your doing that. If you must know, Jinnie’s gone. She’s miles away by now.”
“Is she, though?” said Bobby. “Well, now then. Miles away, you said? Quick work.”
“She’s fed up with your sort and I don’t wonder, either,” Mrs. Reeves went on in the same angry, indignant tones. “Worrying her out of her life, and me, too, and bad for the business as well, with plain clothes police hanging about in every corner waiting for Ted, as if he would be such a fool as to come here.”
“Natural to expect a man to try to get in touch with his wife,” Bobby pointed out.
She made no comment on this, but turned away to put some cigarette boxes straight and then said over her shoulder:—
“What’s the good? why can’t you leave us alone? Ted’s safe enough from you, you’ll never find him.”
“There’s no place in all the world where a man is safe from a police search,” Bobby told her.
“There’s one place where he’s safe,” she answered in a low voice, “one place where you will never find him.”
“You mean he is dead?” Bobby asked, for he believed that he had read that meaning in her eyes. “It’s possible. I thought of that, too. Difficult for a living man to disappear so completely as he has done. What makes you think so?”
She did not answer to that, but went on with her work of unnecessarily arranging and re-arranging her stock.
“I thought of it,” Bobby told her, “because there are so many dead men in this affair.”
“What do you mean?” she said then, pausing in her work to turn and look at him.
“If that’s what Mrs. Reynolds believes,” he went on, “why did she run away the moment she saw me?”
“She’s been driven nearly crazy with questions and questions and questions, and so have I,” Mrs. Reeves retorted. “Sick and tired of it we are, and not as if we knew anything, either of us. How could we? I don’t and Jinnie doesn’t and you lot watching and staring and following, and questions and questions all the time till we were sick and tired. When Jinnie saw you, she came in and told me she couldn’t stand any more, and I don’t blame her. ‘There’s another of them outside,’ she said. ‘It’s the Midwych lot this time,’ she said, and off she went and no wonder.”
“Miles away, now, you said?”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Reeves answered defiantly.
“Quick work,” Bobby said again. “Motor-cycle, I suppose?”
“How do you know?” Mrs. Reynolds asked, looking a little startled this time.
“Well, you said she was miles away by now, and that sounded like a car or a motor bike, and somehow I thought of a motor bike first, because I seem to be always coming across motor bikes in this affair. One hooted rather loudly, too, as it passed a minute or two ago. It almost sounded like a motor bike’s way of pulling a face at you. A woman’s trick, perhaps, when she feels she’s scored for once.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Mrs. Reeves muttered uneasily.
“Well, I don’t either, so that’s no wonder,” Bobby answered. “How did she know where I was from and that I was a policeman?”
“We’ve had plenty like you here,” she retorted, “enough to know when she saw you.”
“But she hadn’t seen me,” Bobby protested mildly. “Oh, yes, she had. Doing the window she was, and saw you staring, and knew at once.”
“I see,” said Bobby. “Well, will you give her a message from me?” He put a card on the table with his London address. “Tell her I would like to see her. Tell her I’m not looking for her husband. It’s not my case. But I think she might be able to help me with another, that of a man named Baird who was found dead recently in Wychwood forest. I daresay you’ve read about it in the papers?”
“What’s it to do with Jinnie?” Mrs. Reeves asked, looking now not only suspicious but puzzled as well.
“I don’t know,” Bobby answered. “I want to find out.”
“Is it a trap?” she asked, more distrustfully than ever.
“No,” he answered. “Besides, I think you are right and that most likely we shall never find Ted Reynolds because I think, like you, that he is dead.”
Mrs. Reeves said nothing. After a pause Bobby added:— “Only, you see, we don’t want any more men dead in the same way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated. After a pause she added:—“I expect it’s just a clever trap.”
“I wish you would get that out of your head,” Bobby said. Then he asked: “Was your sister very fond of him?” The only answer she made was a slight affirmative movement of the head. But it carried much meaning. Bobby took a cigarette from the packet he had just bought and tapped it thoughtfully on the counter.
“That makes it bad,” he said. “I’m sorry. Funny,” he said, “how, when a woman cares for a man it never seems to make much difference what he does.”
“He wasn’t worth it,” Mr
s. Reeves broke out. “Men are like that. You can never trust them. I told her so. Never. It’s not their fault. Led they are. You’ll pay for it, I told her, when I saw how she used to look at him. It’s always like that, if you get that way with a man, you’ll pay for it. It’s the way men are, you can’t trust them, but Jinnie always stuck to it, it was her he put first.”
“First?” Bobby repeated. “Who was second then?” She did not answer, and for a moment or two they looked steadily at each other across the counter. She said slowly:—
“Jinnie never knew.”
Bobby waited. Mrs. Reeves went on:—
“Jinnie knew there was someone, but she was always sure he would come back to her. Because she always knew that she was really first, that the other didn’t count, she was ready to wait. The other wasn’t real, she said, only a mistake, like getting lost in the dark. But she was the light he would come back to, and she waited, and then it happened about the diamond ear-rings and she knew she would never find her man again.”
Again there was a long silence in the little shop, and so softly that Bobby could hardly hear it, she murmured:— “Poor Jinnie.”
“Poor Jinnie,” he repeated after her, and she looked at him in surprise, as though something in his voice astonished her.
He went away then for he felt that he had learned as much as Mrs. Reeves was willing, or perhaps able, to tell him. One highly interesting detail, however, seemed now to be clearly established, though of its significance, or indeed of its importance, he did not feel at all certain. Nor did he feel certain whether Mrs. Reynolds—or Mrs. Reeves for that matter—was more likely to prove helper or opponent, or perhaps, and perhaps more probably, merely indifferent.
He found a good and convenient train and was back in London in time to get to Bond Street before the closing hour. Half way down that proud street of luxury and display stand the discreetly imposing premises of Messrs. Higham, who are not so much the ‘well known’ jewellers as just simply ‘the’ jewellers. They will, of course, sell you a cheap ring or bracelet for ten or twenty pounds, if you happen to want one for any reason, but they are obviously slightly bored by such transactions they merely carry out for the convenience of their more eccentric customers. They prefer to deal in diamond tiaras, pearl necklaces, rubies at least as large as a pigeon’s egg, or indeed, for after all they are tradespeople and have to live, in any form of jewellery of which the value approaches four figures. Transactions over the four figures are, however, those that really interest them, and these, if sufficiently above that kind of dead line, are generally dealt with by the senior partner, old Mr. Higham, a dignitary whom otherwise few customers see.
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