When I first worked with him I was squeamish about all sorts of things, but a year or so in his company made me a skilled and remorseless liar in the cause of truth. It follows naturally that if George believed in humbug, hypocrisy and concealment, I, as a respectful pupil, developed brands of my own. In fact, I have to-day no qualms about keeping back from George just what I think the time isn’t ripe for him to know, nor do I always keep strictly to the truth in describing how I have arrived at this and that. I often wonder if he sees through my little tricks as well as I see through his own. But it’s all very amusing, as I hinted before, and the curious and gratifying fact remains that we generally wind up a job not only satisfactorily but in some sort of double harness.
And about this latest assignment, I was proposing to work in my own way. I hadn’t told George, for instance, that I had ways and means of getting inside information about Kenray, and from a vantage-point far removed from the shop. That’s why, as soon as I reached my flat, I tried to get hold of Luddly. He’s at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and something to do with ancient and medieval jewellery. I forget his official title but it’s something out of the Arabian Nights like Keeper of the Jewel House.
“Who’s speaking?” a voice said.
“Travers. Ludovic Travers.”
“Hang on, will you, sir,” the voice told me, and for best part of five minutes I duly hung on. Then I heard Luddly’s voice. There were various gossipings and mutual inquiries and then I asked most guardedly about Kenray.
“I know him very well,” he said. “The best man in London, and a most excellent fellow generally.”
“Implicitly reliable?”
“Absolutely. He’s got more murky secrets under his hat than any man I know. Do you know him, by the way?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, you’ll find him very quiet and unpretentious. Like that shop of his. That’s just off Lower Regent Street, if you should want it. His sister runs it, by the way.”
“Name of Kenray?”
“No, no. Allbeck, her name is. Grace Allbeck. I’ve known her for years. The most charming woman. Perfectly delightful. My missus is very fond of her.”
“Good, I must drop in some time.”
“Poor soul, she’s had a pretty thin time,” Luddly went on. “Lost her husband in the last war and her only son—only child in fact—in this. Topping fellow he was too.”
“Well, thanks very much, Luddly,” I said. “I’ll keep all that under my hat.”
A few more words about fixing up a lunch rendezvous some time and we rang off. What he had told me didn’t seem to make things any easier. That Kenray was a man of standing and integrity seemed certain, and there seemed, too, no earthly reason why I should now go to his shop. Except, of course, that Wharton had made that much a definite assignment.
I had a hunt through my wife’s jewellery and found the piece I wanted. Then I walked through to Leicester Square and so to Lower Regent Street. The shop, which was just into Rodney Place, was certainly an unpretentious one, but it had more than a touch of class. The door of the side entrance was painted green and in addition to the bell-push had quite a charming knocker. In the first of the two smallish windows were two fine bow figures against a background of coloured velvet and flanked by two famille verte bowls in which were tiny sprays of yellow jasmine. A delightful effect, I thought, and showing definitely a feminine hand. As for the other window, the centre part of which had a steel grille, that held no more than a dozen pieces of jade and antique jewellery, but each piece, though that sort of thing is out of my special orbit, looked the perfection of its kind.
I walked on a few yards to get myself into a suitable frame of mind before making an entry and to view the shop from a distance. Above it was the single word
KENRAY
the reticence of which seemed to be the shop’s sole flamboyance. And just then the door opened and a man came out. That is, he didn’t come full out. He emerged and then turned, and he seemed to me to be shaking his fist at someone in the shop! Then I had a good view of him as he backed away and turned, his head still shaking angrily. Then what should he do, and though it was a perfectly fine morning, but open an umbrella, stoop forward against it as though leaning into the wind, and move on with a perfect disregard of what might be in his way. At Lower Regent Street he turned left and I lost sight of him. But I knew him well enough. He was Bertram Dane.
Dane isn’t his real name. What happened to him later you will subsequently know, and so I’m running no risk of a libel action by his heirs and assigns, if any. All the same, what little I say about him is implicitly true.
Dane was the last of the eccentrics, the queer characters who flourished as late as Edwardian times and who adorned, or otherwise, the halls of the Savage and other clubs. Not that Dane was gregarious, far from it. He had a miser’s reputation even if he was the owner of the finest collection of antique and medieval rings in Europe. He was immensely wealthy, for his father had been a mid-Victorian cotton king. Dane himself, by the way, was, as I reckoned, just in the seventies.
As for his eccentricities, he wore clothes that must have come down to him from his father and been worn by himself continually since. Do you know what is supposed to be the most tragic and mournful line of verse ever written? It is this, and a translation from the Chinese:
Drearily drips the rain from the hat which I stole from a scarecrow.
I don’t believe that comes from the Chinese at all. I think Dane wrote it.
One other eccentricity should be mentioned. He had a house built for his collection just before the last war, and in St. John’s Wood. But the lower story of the house he had no intention of using, except for a special back entry. He lived in the other two stories and offered the lower one to the police as a kind of club and canteen, and he must have had prior knowledge that the offer would be accepted. The last I heard about it was that it was a police and wardens’ post combined. But you see the point? Never a penny to pay for special police protection! Surrounded at night with his priceless collection of jewellery and sleeping sound in his bed.
But what I was wondering was what had been happening inside Kenray’s shop that morning and what had made the old man so obviously infuriated. In fact, the wish to know and my backward turn were one, and I was entering the shop almost before I was aware of it. The first thing I saw was a woman, standing with her back to me across the rather small room and facing a narrow passage that probably led to a showroom. There was no bell on the door and the strip of matting deadened my steps, and so engrossed did she appear to be that she had evidently heard no sound. Somehow I knew she must be Kenray’s sister. She was tallish—about five-foot nine—and lithely built, and I remember I was faintly puzzled for I had anticipated someone rather elderly, and there was a woman still in the prime of her life. Her brown hair had only the faintest fleck of white and it curled round the white neck and above the collar of the sage-green jumper. I knew there was a smartness about her simple dress which it was beyond me to analyse.
Suddenly she stooped, her arms about a largish wooden box. It must have been heavy, for she had to rest it for a moment against the side of the low counter before she raised it to the top. I was moving forward, and at the sound of my feet she turned. At once I knew she was Kenray’s sister. There was a definite likeness, even if I now judged her age to be the mid-forties.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid you didn’t hear me come in. May I help you with that box?”
I didn’t know why but her eyes seemed to be searching me closely. Then she smiled.
“It was foolish of me,” she said. “I oughtn’t to have tried to move it. I’m not so strong—really.”
I smiled too, and I didn’t know why. Perhaps because the voice had such charm. Perhaps at the thought that one so lithely strong and so attractive in herself should think it necessary to proclaim her essential femininity.
But a man suddenly appeared in the passage. He was wearing a green
baize apron and his cap was on as if he had just entered from the street. He was shortish, red-faced and looked a robust seventy, and he had a straggly moustache not much smaller than Wharton’s.
He caught sight of me, and flicked a forefinger to his cap. “Mornin’, sir.”
Before I could give him a good morning he was going straight on.
“Now what about them boxes, Miss Grace?”
“I thought you were out, Tom,” she said.
“So I was but I’m back now.” He caught my eye and almost gave me a wink as he said that.
“Take them to the office and remove the lids,” she told him. “Then you’d better go to dinner.”
In that bare half-minute I had a good chance to study her. Knowing Luddly, I knew it must have been some paragon of a woman who had called forth those eulogies of his, and I was not disappointed. I told you that her voice had a peculiar charm, and the quality of breeding, but there was far more to it than that. Into her face I probably read far too much, and there were things that Luddly had mentioned that doubtless coloured my thoughts, and yet all that was far from explaining just how I felt, nor have I power of words to make my feelings clear.
I do know that when she first faced me her face was flushed from lifting that box, and the warm colouring and that startled stare of surprise somehow set the years back so that I knew that once she must have had what I can only lamely call a bewildering loveliness. Now as I saw her more closely it seemed that I could read on her face the experience of a lifetime, and much of tragedy, though of tragedy serenely borne. Everything about her had character and sureness of poise. Even that startled moment had been no more than a moment, and her stare was not perhaps the hardness I’d at first thought it, but a directness that was disconcerting.
Tom moved off with the box, arms well round it and feet well apart, and it seemed as much as he could manage. Grace Allbeck turned back and on her face was a faint inquiring smile.
“Your man’s a countryman?” I remarked politely.
Her smile went and once more she seemed to be making a quick mental search of me.
“He’s a Londoner,” she said. “He’s been with us a very long time now. But why should you think him a countryman?”
“I really can’t say,” I told her. “Perhaps it was that flick of the forelock he gave me. I’m a countryman myself.”
There was a moment or two of awkward silence. As I fumbled in my breast pocket I was damn’ sure nevertheless that Tom was a countryman. True he had a faint London accent, but I was a Dutchman if it wasn’t set against a background of East Anglia.
“This piece of jewellery,” I said. “I happened to be passing this shop and wondered if you’d be interested. My wife is thinking of selling it so as to contribute to war bonds and things.”
She had beautiful hands and long, sensitive fingers and at once she was smiling again as she took it and held it against the light. Then she inspected it with a strong glass.
“Interesting, is it?” I said.
“Yes, quite,” she told me. “Could you tell me how it came into your possession?”
“It was given to my wife by some Indian potentate or other in return for some favour when she was out there. You may remember her, Bernice Haire, the actress.”
“But of course,” she said. “But it was a good many years ago when I last saw her. Is she acting now?”
“Only in a hospital,” I said. “But her idea was that it was native Indian work.”
“It’s Persian,” she said. “Sixteenth century.”
“Really? And the gold is twenty-four carat?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “But that doesn’t affect its value. You see this greenish tinge when I hold it like this? That shows it’s an alloy of gold and silver.”
“How very interesting!” I said, and it was. “Must have taken someone years to cut all that delicate tracery out of the metal.”
“But it wasn’t made like that,” she said. “It was made in a wax mould. The melted alloy was simply poured in.” And, as she handed it back to me, “I should be delighted to buy it if your wife decided to sell.”
“What’s it worth,” I said, and tried to be casual.
“I can give you fifty guineas for it,” she said, and as calmly as if it had been five shillings.
“Then I think my wife will certainly sell,” I said. “Will you keep it here till I hear from her?” That might give me an excellent excuse to return, if necessary, to the shop.
“I’d rather you kept it,” she told me.
“Yes, but I might go hawking it round. You know, trying to get a better price.”
She smiled. “That’s very quixotic of you. But you wouldn’t get a better price. I will take your name and address if you care to leave it.”
“I’m only a stone’s throw away,” I said. “Travers— L. Travers—St. Martin’s Chambers.”
She wrote it down and it conveyed nothing to her whatever. Then, as there seemed little further to say or do, I smiled and turned. She was following me to the door, and then I turned again.
“By the way, just as I was coming here I saw an old acquaintance of mine coming out. At least I think it was. Bertram Dane.”
Her lips parted and I could see I had startled her in some curious way. But I hadn’t. It was only that she had suddenly remembered something. With an, “Excuse me just a moment,” she was making for the passage.
“Tom,” she called.
“Yes, Miss Grace,” came the muffled voice.
“Go easy with that lid! And don’t forget there’s another box here.”
“All right, Miss Grace.”
“We have to be so careful,” she told me when she came back. “But what was it you were asking me?”
“Nothing important,” I said. “I only thought I saw old Bertram Dane going out of here.”
She laughed gently. “I’m afraid you mustn’t tempt me into stories about patrons. We often see Mr. Dane in here.”
“Did you ever see his collection?”
“Once,” she said. “Quite a long time ago.”
“He’s a queer fish,” I said. “I hadn’t seen him for years till this morning. That’s what made me so—well, so impertinently curious.”
“Isn’t it natural to be curious?”
“A dangerous hobby sometimes,” I said. “But thank you again for telling me all those interesting things. My wife will be thrilled.”
The door closed gently behind me and I had that queer feeling of stepping into a vacuum that one gets paradoxically when stepping from a confined space and comparative gloom into sun and free air. Also I suddenly felt hungry. And I remembered a little restaurant on the far side of Rodney Square.
When I’d taken the trouble to walk all that way round, I found that restaurant gone. Then I thought I’d go to my club and lunch there, and ring up Wharton. But as I came in sight of Kenray’s shop again I saw a man emerge from the side door. His apron was off and he was wearing his overcoat and bowler.
“Then you can go to your dinner,” was what Grace Allbeck had told him. ‘Tom’ she had called him, and he had called her ‘Miss Grace’ and if he wasn’t some sort of family retainer, then I was woefully out.
That was why I told myself I might do worse than try to lunch with Tom.
Chapter III
NOTHING AT ALL
Tom crossed over to the Haymarket and down Mortimer Street. Fifty yards along where Charters Street crosses it, he turned into a pub, the Eagle. I was close on his heels and before I’d taken a couple of steps inside was having to clean my glasses so thick was that saloon bar with the dampness of human breath and tobacco smoke. When I put the glasses on again Tom was being hailed by a small group of men in the far corner.
I ordered a pint of bitter and managed to elbow my way towards him. I needn’t have worried. So loud were his group talking that I could have heard each word from yards beyond where I took my stand, and that was with a good view of his back.
“Y
ou have a look at ’em,” one man said, and Tom held out his hand to another man who gave him a small paper bag. What Tom pulled out was a shallot.
“Not a bad sample,” was his verdict. “I’ve seen worse than them. Put them in about the end of February and see they have somethin’ to eat and you ought to get a rare good crop.”
“They’ll be in long before February,” their owner said. “The first time it’s fine, end o’ this month, in they ruddy well go.”
“All that’s out o’ date,” Tom told him contemptuously, and waved a hand round. “Look at last year now. Mine didn’t go in till the first week in March. And I’ll tell you for why. Ground were, too sodden, that’s why. My brother-in-law, he say, ‘You’re too late with them shallots’, he say. ‘Wait you and see!’ I say, and what happened. The best crop I ever had. And I had ’em all inside afore July was half out.”
There was a babble of argument at that but Tom didn’t stay for it. He was edging his way towards a door on his left and I went through it close behind him. That lunch room was packed and I couldn’t see a sign of a vacant table. But Tom was still going forward and making for a single table in the far corner with a turned-up chair. He had taken his seat before I let him catch sight of me, and pretty forlorn I looked, standing there holding my half-consumed pint and looking round for a pew.
He gave me a second look before he spoke.
“Didn’t I see you in the shop, sir?”
With apparent difficulty I remembered.
“You’ll be lucky if you find a seat here now,” he told me. Then: “Tell you what. I can make room for you here, sir.”
He was signalling to a young waitress who came straight over and then found a spare chair. For over twenty years he’d had his midday meal at that pub, so he told me. I asked him to have a drink with me. He thanked me and said he was having his usual, which turned out to be a half-pint, brought with his meal. The meal itself wasn’t the worst I’ve ever eaten, if a pretty long way from the best. The beer wasn’t bad for a war-time brew and it was that that we talked about first. Then I asked him what part of Norfolk, or Suffolk he came from. You never saw a man so surprised. Then he chuckled.
The Case of the Corporal's Leave: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 3