As they went upstairs, she whispered, “Are they there?”
“I—er—think so,” stammered Basil. He looked at her suspiciously. “How do you know?”
“When I went behind your curtain yesterday to put on my hat, I had to tip the mirror to get at the light. Oh, Basil, what had we better do? I’ll help you if I can. Why didn’t you trust me?”
“Sorry, Beryl. Tell you the truth, I didn’t want to bother you. It’s all right, really. I can explain it all—later.”
“But what do we do now?” Beryl whispered urgently. “Quick!”
They were in the room which had been assigned to Mrs. Pongleton.
“Don’t rush me so,” Basil grumbled. “We’d better not find them now—Father would be so mad. And besides, you heard what Gerry said, about the police having searched the basket. You see, the pearls weren’t—I mean, they may have been put in after that, and if we find them there it may look fishy. No, I’ve a better idea. Can you get them out for me, Beryl, like lightning?”
“Come along to my room—it’s not very safe here.” Beryl, snatching the little blue cushion, hurried along the corridor to her own room, where she seized a pair of scissors and unripped Betty’s stitches rapidly.
“Are you sure you’ve got a safe plan, Basil?”
“Yes, safe as houses; you see——”
“Don’t tell me. It may be better for me not to know; but if you want me to help, give me the word.”
“You’re a brick. Is it undone?—are they there?”
Beryl’s fingers searched the kapok. Suddenly Basil laid a hand on her arm. “Fingerprints! Put on gloves!”
Beryl gazed at him aghast. This really gave her the feeling of being involved in some criminal undertaking.
“But no one will look for fingerprints on them if—if—you arrange it properly!”
“You never know what they’ll look for,” said Basil gloomily. “Best to make sure.”
Beryl searched for gloves, and, having put them on, again probed the cushion.
“Yes—here!” Carefully she drew them out.
“Paper, quick!” said Basil anxiously.
Beryl found tissue paper in which she wrapped the pearls, and Basil put the little packet into his breast pocket.
“Please be careful, Basil. I shall be awfully worried till I hear it’s all right.”
Her blue eyes looked at him appealingly. He almost wished he had confided in her to begin with—some of it, at any rate. It had seemed such a shame to bother her, and now he was bothering her after all. She looked frail and pathetic, he thought, in the black frock which accentuated her delicate fairness and her slender figure and the smooth, pale gold of her hair.
Basil roused himself. “All right, Beryl. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. Don’t worry. We must go downstairs. I say, what about the damn cushion?”
“I’ll sew it up and put it back later. Aunt Susan won’t notice that it’s not in the basket.”
They returned to the sitting-room. Basil was now racking his brains for an excuse for getting away from the family circle, and before long the excuse shrilled through the house with the voice of the telephone bell.
“Mrs. Bodylove to speak to Mr. Basil Pongleton,” the maid informed them.
“Mrs. Body...?” Basil’s mother could not quite bring herself to pronounce this exotic name.
“It’ll be Waddletoes—my landlady, y’know,” Basil reassured her, as he hurried rather too joyfully towards the door.
Mrs. Waddilove’s fruity voice, thinned and metallicized by the apparatus, jangled in Basil’s ear: “There’s a young person called to see you, Mr. Pongleton, and won’t give her name, and I was all for telling her to call again, but she was that persistent I really didn’t know how to get rid of her, so there she is up in your room; settled herself quite at-home-like, and said she didn’t mind waiting, so I thought best to let you know, sir.”
“Quite right, Mrs. Waddy; thanks very much. Will you tell her that I’ll be home soon? Yes, business. Er—what name did you say?”
“I’ve told you, sir, she won’t give ’er name; and if it’s business it’s a funny sort of business, if you ask me.”
“Quite so. I’ll be along soon. You did quite right, Mrs. Waddy.”
Basil re-entered the sitting-room, dragging on his overcoat with an air of urgency.
“Awf’ly sorry—someone waiting at my rooms to see me on business. Must fly. I’ll be here to-morrow morning early to fetch you—about nine-thirty. Good-bye, Mother. ’Bye, Father.”
Beryl came to the door with him.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “There really is someone waiting to see me. Yes—business, I think. But I’ll dash up to the Frampton first and see about—you know—putting things right. Good-bye, Beryl. You’re a brick!”
Beryl reflected that Basil was not usually so beset with pressing business affairs, especially on Sunday evening.
There was actually a taxi cruising up Haverstock Hill, and Basil, anxiously feeling the loose coins in his pocket with one hand, hailed it with the other. It set him down a few minutes later at the corner of Church Lane—he didn’t want all the frumps peering out of the windows to see who was driving up to the boarding-house in a taxi!
Yes, Betty was in. What a blessing! He said he would wait in the lounge hall, and she came to him there after a few moments. He had the little tissue-paper packet in his hand ready; he drew her towards the corner by the front door, and pressed it into her hand.
“Betty, dear—you must do it again! Look here, put ’em in her chair—the armchair in the drawing-room; stuff them down the side—get the idea? Can’t explain now, but please do just this one thing more for me. Yes, the other was splendid; it wasn’t your fault that it got messed up. Can’t explain, but I’ll tell you all about it later. Thanks most awf’ly; you’re a gem; don’t know what I should do without you. Someone’s waiting to see me at my rooms—business. Must fly!”
Betty kept her head, and only protested gently, “I do wish you weren’t always in such a tearing hurry—there are heaps of things I want to ask you. But I’ll see to it; to-night will do, I suppose?”
“Yes; good-bye. Family goes home Tuesday morning, and I may have more time then, if I’m still at large. Good-bye! I’ll have to go in that beastly underground.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MAMIE TURNS UP
MRS. WADDILOVE was evidently on the look-out for Basil, for she heaved herself up out of the basement just as he let himself into the hall of her house in Tavistock Square.
“Well, Mr. Pongleton, I’m sure I’m glad you’re back, for I don’t like the idea of that young person left alone in your rooms, and that’s a fact. And really, the trouble I’ve had these last few days, what with callers and newspaper men and those nasty perlice nosing around.... Up and down the stairs all the time! It’s more than I can stand, and it’s not what I’m used to. A friend to lunch or to tea now and again, that’s within reason, I’ve always said; but these last few days I’ve had no peace at all.”
Basil sighed. He knew that it was something more than the mere trouble of answering the door that had chilled Mrs. Waddilove’s usual geniality and brought a note of bitter suspicion into her voice.
“I’m most awf’ly sorry, Mrs. Waddy, but I don’t want them to call. Confounded bad management, I should say, to keep bothering us again and again like this instead of remembering what they want to know the first time. But have the police been again?”
“That they have, Mr. Pongleton; asking me this and asking me that till really I don’t know what I’ve told them!”
“I hope you’ve told them the truth, Mrs. Waddy,” said Basil, assuming a confidence he did not feel.
“The truth is what I’ve tried to tell them, as I always tell anyone. And there’s no reason that I know of why I should tell them anything else.” She looked up at him meaningly out of her little peering eyes, deep-set in her plump, flushed face. “What time did you go out o
n Friday morning, they want to know. I told them before and I’ve told them again that you went out at ten minutes short of the half hour by my kitchen clock, which isn’t more than a few minutes fast, just to be on the safe side. And if you ask me, it’s a great pity you didn’t stay in bed a bit longer that morning, which wouldn’t have been anything out of the ordinary. And did you have a hat on and what sort of a hat? Well, I told them, you’re not one to go rushing round a respectable square—and respectable it always has been—without your hat; and if you came back without it—well, what can you expect when anyone’s had a nasty shock like you had?”
“Quite so, Mrs. Waddy,” Basil agreed. “It was a proper knockout blow. I think I left that bowler at Mrs. Kutuzov’s at Golder’s Green. D’you say the police asked if I came back without it?”
“Happen it were one o’ them journalists asked that. Nosey, they are! And did you pay your rent reg’lar, they asked—that was the perlice. Well, I couldn’t say reg’lar, meaning no offence, but you know well, Mr. Pongleton, that many’s the time you’ve owed for a week or more, but I’ve made no fuss, knowing that your allowance came like clockwork——”
“Good heavens, Mrs. Waddy, do I owe you now? Saturday— of course. My aunt’s death seems to have upset everything, you know, and I’d forgotten all about the date.” He plunged his hand into his pocket, as the gesture appropriate to the occasion rather than with any hope of finding stray notes there.
“It’s not that I’m bothering about, Mr. Pongleton,” Mrs. Waddilove assured him—“though it’s more than one week that’s owing, as you may remember. It’s all this prying and poking that I don’t like, and never have done—not that I’ve ever been mixed up in things of this kind before. And strange men who look as if they’re up to no good everlastingly hanging on the railings opposite. But that’s not all. About that letter, they wanted to know....”
Basil made an effort to check the quick look of alarm that he realized he had shot at the garrulous old woman. “What letter, Mrs. Waddy?”
“That letter that came on Friday morning, and got you out of bed in such a hurry. I’m not one of the prying sort, and my gentlemen’s letters are no concern of mine, but I couldn’t help knowing that I brought a letter up to you that morning with the Hampstead postmark and a hand I’ve seen often enough before, and how you tore it open before I was out of the room, and shouted down the stairs after me to get your breakfast at once, which I did—and that accounts for you going off so early.”
“But, look here, that letter—d’you mean a letter from my aunt?” Ideas whirled through Basil’s head like a snowstorm. Was Waddletoes sure that the letter was from Miss Pongleton? Could he put her off the scent, muddle her somehow? What had old Slowgo advised him to say?
“It’s not my business to know who your letters are from, and I never was one to be inquisitive,” Mrs. Waddilove insisted. “It’s not my way to go looking for trouble. But often’s the time I’ve brought you a letter in that hand and you’ve mentioned, casual-like, that it was from your aunt—poor lady! And I little thinking what was in store for her! But what was in that letter, of course, I know no more than the man in the moon, and so I told those perlice.”
“But, Mrs. Waddilove, this is the first I’ve heard about a letter from my aunt on Friday morning. I did hear from her not long before her death—let’s see ... I had tea with her on Wednesday, didn’t I? She wrote asking me to go, of course, and I think she wrote again after that. Why, I may have the letter upstairs. But surely it came on Thursday? I didn’t go to Hampstead on Friday, you know—I went to Golder’s Green to see a man about a portrait of my cousin.”
“So you told me, Mr. Pongleton; and where you go or don’t go is no business of mine. But when the perlice ask questions they have to be answered, and that letter came on Friday, as I know well enough, though what was in it I can’t tell.”
“I should think it would be better if the police asked me about my own letters,” Basil suggested. He feared they would do so only too soon. “But what about my visitor? I’d better go up and see her. Did you say a young lady?”
“Not so young, perhaps, as she’d like us to believe, and listening with the door open as like as not to what we’ve had to say, though I shut it myself, and made sure of it.”
Mrs. Waddilove retreated towards her basement whilst Basil leapt up the two flights of stairs, cursing silently.
In his “rooms” he found, as he had expected, Mamie Hadden, lolling at ease in the biggest armchair with a cigarette between her lips—one of his own, he noticed, from the open box beside her—and her rather too fat legs, cased in shiny pink artificial silk, stretched out to the fire. He did not know why he had expected to find Mamie, except that she seemed to represent the only point in his complicated and besetting affairs that had not jabbed him within the last forty-eight hours, so he felt that she was due to turn up soon.
She turned her head towards him, and nodded without taking the cigarette out of her mouth.
“Good evening, Mr. Pongleton-Brown! Thought I’d better see how you were getting along and make sure you weren’t forgetting me. Your old lady here was in a fair to-do about letting me in, but I wasn’t putting up with any of her airs, so I just said to her: ‘I’m an old friend of his and I’m here to see him on important business, and you’ll hear about it if you don’t let me in!’ So here I am!” Mamie’s pinched and prim enunciation reminded Basil of his first meeting with her, when he had “picked her up” in a cinema for the sake of having someone to talk to. She had relapsed into broader, more natural accents when they became more friendly.
“I wish you hadn’t come!” Basil informed her frankly. It was a relief to tell the truth, if only for a moment. As he noticed Mamie stiffening herself in indignation and even putting her hand up to her mouth to remove the cigarette, he added hastily, “For your own sake chiefly. I didn’t want to bring you into this.”
“If you didn’t want to bring me into it, you should have thought of that sooner, Mr. Clever, and not come asking me to help you pawn those pearls, and then come beggin’ me to help you get ’em out agin! When am I likely to get my fifteen poun’s back, I’d like to know? I’m a poor girl, an’ I can’t afford to go throwing my savings down the drain. I might’ve done the dirty on you over that deal. Those pearls were worth a lot more’n fifteen poun’s; we might’ve got ’em copied so’s you’d never’ve known. Didn’t think of that, did you, Mr. Pongleton-Brown?”
“Good Lord!” exclaimed Basil aghast. “D’you mean to say I haven’t got the real ones? Oh, Mamie, you wouldn’t——”
“Don’t you worry yerself,” Mamie advised him—“I’m not that sort; but you’re that innercent. Not fit to go gettin’ yerself mixed up in a dirty business like this.”
“But, Mamie——” Basil protested.
“No need to go Mamie-ing me like that. Now just you listen an’ I’ll explain a few things. You’re wondering, p’rhaps, how I foun’ my way here and foun’ out your right name. Oh, you thought you were sharp, didn’t you, Mr. Brown?—but you didn’t think your picture’d be in all the papers, an’ your name in full—nephew of the victim of the underground murder! No mistaking you, either, with your comic hat an’ all.”
Basil had chucked the “comic hat”—a black felt, of “Chelsea” character, with wide brim—across the room, and thrown his overcoat over a chair. He stood on the hearthrug looking down at Mamie and wondering how best to deal with her. Mamie, who had always been kind and consoling, had now, like Mrs. Waddilove, “turned nasty”. Of course they both suspected him of being concerned in the murder of his aunt, and, instead of trying to shelter him, they could only think of their own petty difficulties.
“Look here, Mamie—I told you I was in a hole when I saw you on Friday night, and you turned up trumps then and helped me. I hadn’t forgotten you—after all, that’s only the day before yesterday. I haven’t had time to get the money yet. Besides, as I told you, I didn’t want to bring you into the mess.
The police are keeping an eye on me; you see, they haven’t caught the murderer yet, whoever he is, and they have to keep their eyes open and watch everyone who might be mixed up in the affair, in the hope of getting a clue. That’s why I didn’t want to go and see you or you to come here. There’s a man on the watch outside this house, and he’ll probably follow you when you go away and ask you awkward questions.”
Mamie tossed her head. “And you don’t want me to tell them all I know about you, Mr. Pongleton-Brown! Of course not!”
Basil seized a humpty, drew it up beside Mamie’s chair, and sat there. Her small, plump hand, with stubby fingers and red lacquered nails, lay on the arm of the chair, and he put his own hand over it.
“You’ve been so kind to me, Mamie, and I’ve trusted you—surely you won’t let me down now?”
“Trusted me!” snorted Mamie. “Couldn’t even tell me your right name!”
“What did my name matter, anyway? I went to you when I was in a hole on Friday night, and you helped me, as I knew you would.”
Mamie turned her long-lashed, greenish eyes upon him coldly.
“But you knew when you came to me on Friday that the old lady had been murdered, and yet the news wasn’t in the papers then!”
“What makes you think I knew?”
“Weren’t you in a nice state of mind? I knew something’d upset you, but I didn’t know what till later. Then I began to put two an’ two together, after I read the news an’ saw your picture. The paper said you lived in Tavistock Square. Well, I’ve got frien’s here, an’ it didn’t take me long to find out from them where you lived. With that hat, y’see, anyone’d notice you. Nice hat for a murderer, I mus’ say!”
“Mamie, you don’t really think I could do that horrible thing? Besides, I didn’t wear——” He stopped himself abruptly. “Mamie, I swear to you that I had nothing to do with it. If I had, why should I want to get the pearls back? If Aunt Phemia had been alive I should have been able to pay you back before now. Her death hasn’t done me any good.”
Murder Underground (British Library Crime Classics) Page 14