It was explained that, if she had any other name, no one knew it, not even, apparently, Meg herself. It was further explained that Meg, having retired through age from the exercise of her profession, still took a kindly interest in its practitioners, acted frequently as a go-between, and had developed into one of the most expert, cunning, and audacious sneak-thieves in London.
“She plays the feeble, flustered, bewildered old woman,” explained the junior who had spoken before, “though really she’s as spry and active as anyone a quarter her age, and when Good Samaritans have put the poor flustered old thing in the right bus, or helped her across the street, or picked up her parcels she’s managed to let fall, and presently they miss their purse or wallet, the dear old lady they’ve helped is the very last person they suspect. We’ll get her some day,” declared the speaker, with more hope than confidence in his voice, “but if this Alice Yates is in with her – well, there’s something up. There’s more ways than one of being blind,” he added, with a sideway look at Bobby.
Apprehension grew acute again with this hint that fresh developments might be expected, and Bobby, by a respectful question he managed to slip in, learned that Dr. Beale was in complete ignorance of the careful watch and guard being kept upon his movements that it was hoped would help some day or another, in some way or another, towards discovering the truth by throwing light upon the activities of those suspected. It was convenient from the point of view of the watchers that Dr. Beale’s car had recently been sent for repairs and had not yet been returned, so that if he did journey up to London he would probably use the railway, though as an additional precaution the garages in the neighbourhood had been asked to give warning of any order for the hire of a car received from him. He was understood, however, to be exceptionally busy both with the book he was writing – Analysis of the Unconditioned was known to be the title – and with some articles for a learned periodical in New York. Till midnight his light could be seen burning, his shadow on the blind was often visible as he paced up and down between lamp and window, now and again he himself in person at the window as, opening it, he would lean out, deep in thought, his glasses removed to rest his eyes, smoking the huge pipe he affected at these times, apparently enjoying the cool night air, till suddenly, with that odd, abrupt speed of movement characteristic of him, he would draw back, slam the window, and be again at his desk, writing rapidly the thoughts that presumably had come to him during that interval of repose.
“His life is in our hands,” said the A.C. uncomfortably. “If we let anything happen to a man like that when we could have prevented it, we shall deserve all we get.”
“He’s just the sort birds like Percy Lawrence and Alice Yates are out to get hold of,” observed one of those present. “Learned professors and philosophers and so on – don’t know the first thing about real life, and you can’t make them understand, either. No experience; innocent as lambs.” This verdict was unanimous, and, it having been delivered, the conference broke up, so Bobby, who found he had for once a little free time on his hands, went off to a secondhand bookshop he had noticed in the street in which his cousin, Chris, had his establishment. It had occurred to him that it might be a good idea if he refreshed what fragmentary knowledge of philosophy he had picked up at school and college. It was not much more extensive, in fact, than that of the gentleman who, during the world war, and under the impression that Hegel was a contemporary German general, had furiously denounced the late Lord Haldane for an expression of devotion to that philosopher. But the books upon the shelves of the shop he visited all looked so formidable that in the end he contented himself with a volume of the Home University Library, and with it in his pocket went across to Chris’s shop to ask the young man in charge when his employer was likely to return.
The young man had no idea. Mr. Owen hadn’t said anything about it, nor had he written. It was Lord Westland’s collection Mr. Owen was cataloguing. But would Sergeant Owen please remember that that information was strictly confidential? There were reasons, apparently, why neither Lord Westland nor Mr. Chris Owen wanted it known; something to do, probably, with a contemplated winnowing at the collection.
Bobby promised absolute and complete silence, adding with a laugh that that promise must of course be taken as subject to his duty as a police officer, and the young man laughed, too, and said he didn’t much suppose that cataloguing Lord Westland’s collection was likely to be a matter for the police, even though there were plenty of catalogues it would be sheer flattery to describe as criminal – a word far too weak for many.
So Bobby said he would be glad to know when his cousin returned, and the young man promised to inform him, and Bobby went on to a restaurant near, where he was known, and, getting permission to use their phone, put through a long-distance call to Westland Castle, for a paragraph he had chanced to notice in the paper that morning was running in his mind.
In due course connection was made, and, in reply to his inquiry, he was informed rather testily that since, as had been stated in the papers only that morning, the castle was in the hands of the builders and decorators for extensive alterations intended to bring it more into line with modern requirements, Lord Westland was not in residence – he was, in fact, travelling on the Continent – and nothing was known of Mr. Christopher Owen. As for the famous Westland collection, that had been packed and removed to safe-deposit vaults for safety, so there was certainly no question of any fresh valuation or cataloguing for the present.
Bobby was profuse in expressing thanks for this information, thanks that were not too graciously received, and, in no happy mood, left the restaurant to return homewards.
Outside, he ran across a constable, a man named Markham, with whom he had been friendly during his own uniform days. He stopped to exchange a word with him and to ask if it were true he was now due for retirement. Markham, an elderly man, said it was, and spoke with relish of the cottage in the country, with a garden attached, where he and his wife meant to spend their remaining days, far from cars and phones and road accidents and all the rest of London’s bustle; and as they chatted they were nearly the witnesses of a new tragedy. A flustered old lady, who must have been nearly eighty, though she seemed active enough, lost her head crossing the road near them and as nearly as possible got herself run over. As it was she dropped umbrella, handbag, glasses, and emitted a frightened little squawk. A well-dressed young man near by burst out laughing at her predicament; the constable and Bobby dived to her rescue. Between them they retrieved her and her possessions with no harm done, and set her on her way. She went off quite briskly, and a sudden, uncomfortable idea occurred to Bobby. Hurriedly he made sure his pocketbook was safe, and was a little relieved to find it still in his pocket. He said to his companion:
“Bit of a narrow squeak. Don’t know her at all, do you?”
“Why, yes, didn’t you?” answered Markham. “It was Lady –” And he named the mother of a well-known Cabinet Minister at the moment much in the news. “Lives in the square just round the corner,” he added.
“Oh, is that she? No, I didn’t know her,” Bobby answered, thankful he had not betrayed his passing suspicion that so influential and important a lady was Magotty Meg.
“Did you see that fellow laughing?” Markham added indignantly. “I nearly said something. A fellow who thinks it funny when a woman old enough to be his mother is nearly run over – well, he’s got the mind of a murderer.”
“So he has,” agreed Bobby, and went on his way.
CHAPTER 22
MISS HEWITT’S STORY
It was odd how tenaciously every detail of this narrow escape an old lady had had from being run over clung in Bobby’s mind, thankful as he was that he had not betrayed his momentary impulse to identify the respected mother of a Cabinet Minister with Magotty Meg.
He was worried, too, by the report that Alice Yates had spent an evening with that disreputable and almost legendary character. He himself had never come in contact with her, but
he knew that the oddest tales were told about the old woman, most of them highly discreditable and improper, and often showing an odd twist of mischief or of malice. One of her favourite hunting grounds, for instance, was charity bazaars, or those meetings at fashionable houses where fashionable women assemble, sometimes for moral and intellectual uplift, sometimes to consult how, with dance and song, to do good to the poor at the rate of two guineas a ticket, including a champagne supper. Who could suspect the earnest, attentive old lady in quaint, old-fashioned clothes of the best quality, grown a little feeble evidently and continually fumbling with her glasses so that her hands were never still, of being in any way responsible for purses missing from handbags their owners were certain they had never left hold of for a moment? Or if – for Magotty Meg was no despiser of small things – a shortsighted old lady mistook a thirty-shilling silk umbrella with a gold-mounted handle for her own, and was stopped just as she was toddling away with it, no one could be so churlish and suspicious as to refuse to accept her flustered apologies and protestations that it was exactly like her own someone else must have gone off with by mistake, since it was nowhere to be found. But the necessity for offering such excuses were rare indeed, for Magotty Meg could nip into a taxi or round a corner with astonishing speed. There was this to be said for her, too: that, though her avowed object was to accumulate savings large enough to permit her, as she put it, “to retire to a little country cottage,” every girl in her former line of business knew that, when times were hard and luck was out, Magotty Meg could always be relied on for a friendly loan.
And it is a fact that only under the stress of such hard necessity as prison, sickness, or death – the last contingency not infrequent in the profession with the highest death rate – was default in repayment any but the rarest of occurrences.
None the less, it was sufficiently disturbing to the picture beginning to frame itself in his mind, though with outlines as yet both blurred and dim. No very good interpretation could be put upon a visit to Magotty Meg, old and experienced in evil, a notorious go-between, though one who always made sure that both parties knew and understood what they were doing and all probable consequences – it was another odd trait in her character that, being possessed of a certain amount of medical knowledge, said to be due to her having been a nurse in her young days, she was – her one vanity – extremely fond of showing it off in frankest detail. This story, therefore, of a visit paid the old woman by Alice troubled Bobby curiously. It was difficult to understand; it was only too likely to mean that the girl’s resolution had broken under the strain of the enormous toil she had been inflicting on herself, and that she was now drifting back into her old ways.
A pity, he thought; and he wondered uneasily if his reminder to her that she was losing her sight had anything to do with her relapse. What he had said might, he supposed, have made her realize with sudden force the inevitable consequences she was facing, and so might have made her decide, in abrupt panic, that she could not go on.
Bobby told himself wryly that those hasty words that had, as it were, got themselves uttered by his tongue before his mind had had time to weigh them, had involved, apparently, a heavy responsibility, one little to his taste. And he was aware, too, that this suggested interpretation, if it proved fact, proved entirely false the picture of events that had been vaguely and dimly forming itself in his mind.
By an effort he put such thoughts aside and went back to the Yard, chiefly with the idea of seeing if anything fresh had come in, and there presently a colleague found him sitting with his Home University Library book open before him, but obviously not reading it.
“Don’t wonder,” said the colleague, looking askance at the title. “What on earth are you going in for now?”
“I thought I would like to know something about the theory of monads and about Hegel’s – realism,” Bobby answered slowly. “It’s all very instructive – and jolly puzzling. If I can get time, I want to run down to Oxford and find some professor of philosophy to put a few questions to.”
“Better put in for a day’s leave and tell ’em why,” observed the colleague with deep irony. He added accusingly: “All the same, you weren’t reading, unless you read upside down.”
"Upside down? So it is,” agreed Bobby, surprised. “No, I wasn’t reading – I was thinking about an old lady I saw nearly run over.”
“What about it?” demanded the other. “See that every day in every street, nearly, don’t you?”
“It’s no laughing matter, anyhow,” Bobby observed.
“Who said it was?” came the sharp and somewhat indignant response; and then, as Bobby did not answer, the continuation: “I came along to tell you there’s a girl turned up wants to spill something she thinks she knows about those City bucketshops we’ve been chasing round after. It’s your case, so you’re to see if there’s anything in her yarn. Is it true they’re going to pinch the Norris bird?”
“Not that I know of,” said Bobby, startled. “Is there anything fresh against him?”
“The fellow he was talking to on the Embankment was brought in this morning. Didn’t you know? Always the way, us chaps don’t get told a thing, but we’re supposed to know it all, all the same.”
For a moment or two the speaker expanded on this perennial grievance of the junior ranks; and Bobby expressed heartfelt acquiescence, and wondered what information the man from the Embankment had been able to give, and his colleague said he had no idea but he understood the papers in the case had now been put before Treasury counsel. It was believed the A.C. thought there was enough to risk an arrest on; and a good chance that the search of Norris’s flat an arrest would make possible would reveal further information to justify it.
“The fact is,” said the colleague confidentially, “the old man’s got the wind up for fear someone else gets bumped off, and he’ll get it in the neck for not having had the gumption to save him when there was previous warning.”
“It’s worrying me, too,” observed Bobby; and his colleague said it wasn’t worrying him. He added thoughtfully that a few resignations high up always made things livelier down below, and Bobby said he must get along and interview the young lady who thought she had something to tell them.
“Don’t let her keep you too long,” said his colleague cheerfully. “I’m signing off – done my eight hours, thank the Lord, and it’s me for my little home in the west.”
With that he departed to catch a train for Acton, and Bobby made his way to a room where a very nervous young woman who gave her name as Harriet Hewitt was waiting for him, and protested eagerly that she had never had anything to do with the police before and wouldn’t have come now, only her boss said she must, and was sure to ask about it in the morning, and quite likely to give her the sack if she said she hadn’t been.
“He’s so down on outside brokers,” she explained, “we all think he must have been bitten by one some time. So you see I had to come, hadn’t I?”
Bobby agreed upon the necessity and hinted gently that he would be glad to know what it was Miss Hewitt knew. So Miss Hewitt opened her eyes to the widest and said: “Oh. but I don’t know anything, not really.”
Bobby waited, knowing that this was a quite hopeful beginning, since often those know the most who are the least aware of it.
“It was so funny, and such impudence as well,” Miss Hewitt continued, “not but that I was glad to go in a way, especially with a month’s salary when 1 couldn’t have asked for more than a week’s, being all you’re entitled to when paid by the week. Of course,” she added, looking thoughtfully at Bobby, “I saw at once what it meant.”
“Yes,” said Bobby, “it meant – ?”
“Meant she was in love with him,” explained Miss Hewitt, searching in her handbag for a handkerchief so that she might wipe her eyes, into which tears had come at the very thought of that tender passion. “She wanted him,” said Miss Hewitt, applying the handkerchief to each eye in turn, “and she jolly well meant to have him
, and that’s partly why I gave in so soft-like, only you don’t want to be a spoil-sport, do you?”
Bobby agreed that you didn’t, and dropped another gentle hint that he would like to know who the “he” and the “her” were.
“Why, it’s them I’m telling you about,” Miss Hewitt pointed out patiently. “You could see it all over her, just like the films when the big business man comes in and sees the new secretary and it’s ever so exciting because you know just exactly what’s going to happen. Only what I say is, every one has their own choice, and if there’s some who go soft for what’s more like a walking corpse straight out of the coffin than anything else – well, it’s nothing to do with anyone else.”
“Certainly not,” agreed Bobby. “You mean Mr. Percy Lawrence?”
“Well, it’s him I’m talking about, isn’t it?” demanded Miss Hewitt, less patiently this time. “Gave me the shivers, he did, first time I saw him, but always the perfect gentleman, that I will say. Me being hard up and out of a job through Brown, Jones & Son’s crashing. I was five years with them before – well, I was glad enough to take it on, though all the time meaning to get something better as soon as I could. There’s some in the City,” she added, growing thoughtful again, “such smart Alecks it would be all the better if they were living corpses, too, or dead ones either, wouldn’t it?”
Once more Bobby expressed agreement, and, by dint of discreet questioning, discovered that Miss Hewitt, out of work for some time and finding it difficult to secure fresh employment, had been glad to take the post offered her by Mr. Percy Lawrence on behalf of the Berry, Quick Syndicate.
The Bath Mysteries Page 17