by FRANCES
He heard a key grate in a lock, and a door open and the movement of feet. All gone in? In which case he might chance listening at—
He crept down and looked around the corner. The tall man, Bennie, was still outside the door. He had a revolver in his hand and seemed to be patting it. As Bennie would himself have said, “Blimey.”
Why the sudden readiness of armament? The leaving of sentry on post?
Obvious, my dear Watson. Don, the square man—who’d be Hunter?—has arrived with news. The quarry is on the loose; the quarry packs a right; the quarry may, just possibly, have followed and be lurking about. Reg concentrated on listening. He thought he heard voices, probably from the room they’d locked the girl in. He could hear no words.
Doing no good here. And no point in going down. Reg went, cautiously, up the stairs.
The floor above had lower ceilings. He came out into a transverse corridor like the one below. See where it takes me. Get into the room above the room they’re in. There was just a chance he might hear something from there. If somebody shouted.
There was also a chance that Bennie could hear somebody walking above him. No way of avoiding that, except by caution. Reg walked on tiptoe, slowly, carefully, close to the wall on the theory—had he read that somewhere?—that if weight was placed there the floor would creak less. The floor creaked anyway; it was a creaky house. Perhaps Bennie would ignore a few more creaks among so many.
The floor plan here was evidently the same as it was a flight down. There was a door at the end of the central corridor and it opened on a room like the one below, except that here the ceiling was much lower and the window was a dormer. Reg went in, and closed the door gently behind him and listened, and for a moment heard nothing. Then he heard the girl say, “There’s nobody to pay you. Nobody I know’s got any money.”
It was almost as if he were in the same room with them. Her voice was startlingly clear. The floor must be—
No. The voice came from behind a grating, set low in the wall. He went closer to the grating and, together with sound, warm air came from behind it. Of course—the outlet of a hot-air duct, part of the central heating. An extension, evidently, of the duct which served the room below. As good as a speaking tube, in any event.
“Tell it to the boss, lady.”
That was the answer. The voice was the square man’s voice. “Could be he’ll just say ‘sorry,’ and go right along. Could be he won’t.”
“If it isn’t money,” she said, “what is it? Why are you doing this to me?”
The square man had not said it wasn’t money they were after—not in words. His face must have told her. Half of conversation is what the face tells.
“It’s because of my sister, then?”
“You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”
“He points a gun at me,” she said. “Brings me here. You lock me up. Why shouldn’t I ask questions? It’s got something to do with my sister. With who killed her.”
“Man named Grant killed her,” the square man said. “Don’t you read the papers? The man who was at your place. You helped him get away. You were a fool, miss. Done to you what he did to your sister, if I hadn’t come along.”
The girl didn’t say anything. What was her face saying? Of course, she knew—
“After I fell,” the man said. “Slipped and banged my head and—”
“He knocked you out.”—
“Any way you want it, if it makes you feel better. You lit out Don’t deny that, do you?”
“I was—” she began, and then her voice seemed to falter.
Now what in blazes?
“Why would he want to hurt me? Do anything to me?”
“You’re not as bright as you look,” the man said. “You can testify he was dating your sister, can’t you? Now you’ve seen him again?”
She didn’t say anything. Now what the—
“So,” the square man said, “he wouldn’t want you so you could talk any more, would he? Like in court.”
There was rather a long pause. Then she said, “Just because he was dating her—” There was uncertainty in her voice.
Whose side is the filly on?
“He said—he said he came to tell me—he didn’t kill her. I—just because he was dating her—”
The uncertainty was even more evident in the clear, soft voice. The voice faltered. The face—the damned pretty face, whatever else—probably showed the same uncertainty. What is she up—
“He admitted he had been?”
“Oh,” she said, “there wasn’t time for that. He’d just got there before you came. Said he’d come to tell me he didn’t—wasn’t the one who—”
The voice trembled. Breaking down at the thought of her murdered sister, the girl was. Only, she wasn’t. Then—leading them up the garden path? Or, was I the one led?
Abruptly, rudely, the man said what that was a lot of. Ought to watch his language, the square man ought. Remember to tell him that when they met next.
“Best thing that ever happened to you,” he said, “was that we picked you up before he got started. You could identify him as the man your sister was going around with? Like you told the newspapers you could?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes, of course. Only—” She paused. It was as if the obvious were not worth finishing; her tone had underlined the obviousness of her agreement. “Why did you—the other men—I don’t under—”
“To keep you from getting hurt. But the boss’ll straighten it all out for you. When he gets here. So—eat your lunch, miss.”
“I—”
“Just eat your lunch.”
And then Reg heard the sounds of the two men’s leaving, and heard the door close. Faintly, he could hear the key turn in the lock. He waited, gave them time. Then, into the rising warmth of the speaking tube, he said, “Miss Larkin?” She did not answer, but he heard her move. He repeated her name. She still did not answer. Was it, for some reason he wouldn’t know about, a oneway speaking tube? He spoke a little louder.
“Where are you?” she said and then, “There’s a man outside, I think.”
There was that, of course. He probably would hear her voice. He would certainly know there was nobody in the room with her.
“What are they after? What do they want of me? I’ve told them all I know about this man Grant. All you know, Peggy. What do they want out of me now? What do they want out of you, Peggy? Why won’t they let me go?”
Her voice grew a little louder. She had spotted the source of his voice, moved toward it. And—she was making a not bad pretence of a young woman talking, bewilderedly, to herself.
He kept his own voice very low. “Good,” he said. “Because they know you can’t identify me—know you’ve seen me—and must be pretty sure you told me you can’t. And they know damn well you can’t because they know I didn’t kill her. Do you hear me?”
“I heard his voice on the telephone. I’m sure it was his voice. So what more do they—” She stopped. In a much lower voice, one he could hardly hear, she said, “He’s coming.” At the same time, he heard the key turn in the lock below, heard the door open.
“Having a nice little chat, miss?” the man, Bennie the cockney, said. It was as if he were speaking into the speaking tube. It was almost as if Reg were himself in the room; as if, looking around the room, Bennie would surely see him. He had, momentarily, a conviction that Bennie was seeing him. “With who, lydy?”
“Chat?” she said, and he could have patted her on the shoulder for the surprise in her voice. “What do you mean?”
“Heard you. Jawing away.”
“I couldn’t have been unless—” She paused. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have been talking to myself. I do, sometimes. It’s a—”
“Right,” Bennie said. “You go right ahead, lydy, if it makes you feel better.”
Reg could hear him go out and close the door, and hear, again, the key turn in the door’s lock.
“I believed him wh
en he said he didn’t kill her,” the girl said. “And I didn’t really see him and—”
Not so much reason for that now, Reg thought. Still—
“The reason they know that I didn’t kill her,” Reg said, “is because one of them did. I think the square man.”
“Square?”
“The one in the apartment. The one I hit. I don’t know why, but it’s clear enough they’re trying to lay it on me. But that’s not the point, now. You can hear me?”
“Yes.”
“The point is, they know you’re lying when you say you can identify me. Because now they know you know you can’t. You see?”
“I think so. Yes. I was trying to stall. Make them think—”
“All right. Listen. The men who were just there. Not Bennie—the others. Did they have guns too?”
“The young one—he looks like a grown-up Boy Scout. He carried one in his hand. The one you call the square one—I don’t know whether he had or not. You’re not going to try—”
“Not if I can help it. I think perhaps I can get out of here. There’s a back stairway. Get help. I think they’re waiting for someone—for the one they call the boss. So maybe—”
He stopped.
“I don’t like—” he said, and stopped again.
“You can’t go up against guns,” she said. “They’re—they’re bad men, Mr. Grant. They’d just as soon—”
She did not finish that. She said, “Don’t let them shoot you.”
“I’ll have a try at it,” he said. He tried to think of something else to say.
“God bless,” Reginald Grant said. It was a familiar phrase to him, and a worn one. It was a parting tossed gaily to friends. It didn’t feel that way in his mind.
“I hope so,” Peggy Larkin said. “I really do.”
I keep going from place to place and doing nobody any good in any of them, Reg thought. He went from the place he was in through the corridor, again trying to creak as little as he could manage, and, even more cautiously, down the stairs—down the first flight and then, edging his way, down the second.
XII
The staircase ended in another narrow passageway, which extended to right and to left. It was dim; almost everything in this house—this labyrinthine house—was dim. A little light edged through a small window at the right end of the passageway. Reg stopped just at the foot of the stairs and listened and heard nothing. The kitchen, and escape through the kitchen door, must lie to his left.
He went left in the passageway, still cautiously. He reached a swinging door. Right—the door in the kitchen’s left wall. He started to push it open and stopped.
“O.K.,” the young American—no, think of him as the grownup Boy Scout—said from behind the door. “You know the Slasher. He’s stopped for a couple. Why not?”
There was the sound of a glass being put down on something hard, presumably a table top.
“Or,” the square man—Hunter, that was the square man—said, “he’s taken a powder.”
“You’re jumpy,” the other man said. “He goes to buy groceries. He stops for a couple first. You know Slash. Always time for a couple first. Why’d he take a powder?” Another glass was put down. The Boy Scout’s? “Unless he’s been paid off? On account of, I haven’t been paid off, Don.”
“You will be. I suppose you’re right about Slash.”
“Sure I am. How’s for another beer? While we wait for his royal highness?”
This was, apparently, answered in the affirmative by a nod of a head. Reg heard one of the men cross the kitchen, heard a refrigerator door open and close; heard the faint rasp of a beer can being opened, and heard the sound repeated.
“What’s he going to want done?” the Boy Scout said, after a moment. “What I figure? Seems like sort of a waste. So was the other one, in a way, but not as much.”
“He’ll tell us.”
The “boss.” The “leader.” Now “his royal highness.” Come on, my friends. Put a name to him.
“Ours not to reason why,” the Boy Scout said. “Only not the rest of it. The other way round for the rest of it. Seems like a screwy way to go about it. If he wants Grant”—there was a momentary hiatus. Reg Grant could imagine a gesture taking the place of a word. A forefinger drawn across a throat? Pleasant thought.
“He’s paying,” the square man said.
“He and who else?”
“I wouldn’t know. What difference does it make?”
Apparently it didn’t make any. A shrug probably had answered.
“Time to catch the news,” the square man said.
This is all very well, Reg Grant thought. Only mildly illuminating, but bits and pieces thankfully received. Time out for a breather, the boys in the back room were getting. No reason for me to take one. But not, evidently, out through the kitchen.
He went back along the passageway. At the other end, another swinging door, at right angles to the window. Reg listened, heard nothing, and chanced the door. He went through into what was obviously the dining room—a heavy, long table in the center; heavy chairs along either wall; a general feel of long disuse. No banquets recently, Reg thought, and went around the table, the length of the room, to double doors. He listened again, opened the doors—they opened silently, and simultaneously. He looked into a longer room. Drawing room, although probably not called that. He resisted the impulse to pause in the doorways and announce, to an empty room, chairs and sofas under dust covers, that dinner was served.
The feel here, too, of long disuse. And here, too, the prevailing dimness of the big house—the all-but-abandoned house. “All but”—those were the operative words.
The drawing room floor was carpeted. He went, cautiously, the length of the room—past a fireplace in which no fire burned; a mirror above it reflecting nothing, not even, in the dimness, his own passing. A bit on the dreary side, all of it. No place to linger in.
At the end of the room there was an archway to the entrance hall. And there, invitingly, an exit door.
Reg was at the door, his hand on the knob, when lights swept him through glass as a car circled in the brief drive. The car stopped in the porte-cochere.
Reg jumped back and, in the instant of jumping away from light, heard a man’s footsteps on the main staircase. Bennie—that would be Bennie, on his way down.
To go back into the drawing room, Reg would have to pass within view of the man coming down the stairs. The other way—down the passage beside the stairs; the one that led to the kitchen area. And to the men drinking beer at the kitchen table. Damn and blast—
The little nook—the storage closet for fireplace wood—under the stairs. Perhaps just time—
There was just time. The man coming down the stairs was almost down them; the men who had been in the kitchen were coming along the corridor toward him, but were still beyond the door, when Reg wrenched the low door open and folded himself into the little space, and clawed the door closed behind him.
Two pairs of dark-trousered legs went past the crack between door and jamb. Heavy feet went down on the stairs above him. Gathering of the clan. And—arrival of their “leader”? Of his nibs? He heard the door open. He heard what sounded like two men come in. He heard Bennie say, “Evening, guvner.” What was wrong with giving the bloke a name? “Wet out, ain’t it, guvner?” The second man, if there was a second man, got no greeting.
“Very,” the “guvner” said. He had the voice of a thick man, Reg thought. “Very unpleasant afternoon. The girl’s here?”
Talks the King’s English for a change, Reg thought, before he fully realized what he thought. Talks the King’s English. Why—a man from home. For a moment, Reg thought the voice familiar. But then he decided that only the accent was familiar. Not cockney, this time. This time—
“She’s here.”
“Right. Run into any trouble?”
There was a momentary silence. Reg suspected that it was spent by Bennie and the Boy Scout in looking at Hunter, conceiva
bly with some enjoyment.
“None worth mentioning,” Hunter said.
Reg waited for contradiction; for possible hoots. None came. It occurred to him that Hunter, under “his royal highness,” was the boss here. A boss, come to think of it, with a knife.
“The young lady hasn’t been hurt?”
Wait a mo. Accent like mine. Voice not, but a girl to whom both voices would have a similar strangeness—the strangeness of intonation and accent—to a girl hearing a voice on a telephone—
“She’s all right. What now?” That was Hunter, the square man.
There was no immediate answer from the newcomer, from “his royal highness.” The men were, apparently, clustered in the entrance hall.
“Grant’s still not caught,” the man from Oxford (perhaps Cambridge?) said, as a statement.
“Not unless the cops are clamming up,” Hunter said. “We just got news on the radio. ‘Police report no progress in their search for Reginald Grant’ and the rest of it. So?”
“Not too efficient, are they?” “his royal highness” said. “Disappointing, isn’t it? That rather bad show at Stamford.” There was an implied “tut-tut.”
“We can’t do it all,” Hunter said. “He came out of it sooner than—” He did not finish.
“Seems the bloke’s a fly boy,” Bennie said. “Handy with his fists too. Tougher than we figured, guvner.”
It was a jibe at Hunter. It got no audible response.
It was a nuisance—put it mildly—not to be able to see the men he listened to. The inclination to stick his head out and have a look was almost irresistible. Stick his head out and have it blown off. Or, as was more probable, bashed. If they’d wanted to kill him, he’d be dead by now. Do him in, but let the police do it—that seemed to be the notion. All most baffling.
“Nice cuppa, guvner?” Bennie said. “About time for it.”
“For God’s sake,” the square man said.
“Not a bad idea, Wells,” the guvner said. “Not a bad idea at all.”