by Jack Mann
Gees reflected, as she took a tiny sip of the advocaat and put the glass down. “Betty,” he said, “do something for me, will you?”
“Anything you say, darling.” Her eyes were fervent.
Gees smiled. “All I want is for you to stand up for about half a minute, away from the table so I can see down to your feet. You can pretend to look round for somebody.”
“Right-ho, darling.” She rose to her feet and stood clear of the table, and Gees made a swift survey of her, noting every detail of her figure and dress. He said: “That’ll do, thank you,” and she sat down again and took another sip at the advocaat.
“Got a nice figure, haven’t I?” she said, with obvious self-satisfaction. “Sometimes I wish my legs weren’t quite so long, but it’s better that way than the other, isn’t it?”
“A long way better,” Gees agreed, rather abstractedly.
Seeing her casually, he knew, one would take her for something better than her speech proclaimed her. She was built on fine lines, and had quite an attractive face and clear complexion. Pale gold hair, too, and as nearly as he could estimate she was Helen’s height. There was not half an inch of difference between them, at most. High-waisted, like Helen, and obviously long-legged. Put the two of them side by side, and there would be no mistaking one for the other, but, issue a description of Helen, and Betty would fit it, past question. But why Bristol?
“Did he tell you any more than what you’ve told me?” Gees asked.
“No. Only he said we might go a little sea trip, perhaps.”
“Did he, though? Whereabouts, from Bristol?”
“Up the coast. He said it was lovely round the — the Orkneys, it was. But that wasn’t definite. He said we might, that was all.”
“Do you know where I live, Betty?”
She shook her head. “You’re around a lot, and that’s all I know,” she answered.
He took a card from his pocket, and then a ten-shilling note. “If this black-eyed boy of yours turns up either tonight or tomorrow night, I want you to hustle round to that address the minute he leaves you, and let me know what train you’re taking for Bristol and anything else there is to know. Okay?”
“I promise, darling. You save my life with that note.”
“Come around with definite news of him, and you’ll find five more waiting for you. Third floor, and ring when you get there.”
“Oh, Gees!” She gazed at the card. “Confidential, too! Darling, make it two notes now, and four then, in case he doesn’t turn up till tomorrow night. Last week’s rent is heavy on my conscience.”
He watched a second ten-shilling note disappear inside her handbag. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said, “and count on seeing you.”
“Goodnight, angel. Be good till we meet again.”
Half past ten, his watch told him when he reached the pavement outside. For a quarter of an hour he paced slowly back and forth, idly scrutinizing shop windows, keeping the entrance to the beer parlor in sight all the time.
Then, deciding that Betty would keep a vain vigil that evening, he turned toward the Haymarket and Little Oakfield Street, and home.
Some force, he reflected as he undressed and got into bed, was acting for him in this series of escapes that had been his since he set out to return to London from The Rowans. The pit into which he had so nearly driven, the swarm of flies that had blinded both him and the truck driver, and the falling chandelier had all failed as death-traps, and he knew that, reasonably speaking, one of the five incidents ought to have resulted in his being killed.
One or two escapes of the kind would be within reason, but five in succession — no!
If the law of averages had not been suspended, he told himself with absolute certainty, he would have been dead.
Then, of all the thousands of people who passed back and forth between Piccadilly Circus and the Hippodrome, he had met Betty. He refused to regard the meeting as a coincidence. Something had impelled her to accost him, and then to tell her story, just as something had impelled him to rise from his chair at the club and go to look out of the window, just in time to escape the falling chandelier. Why she was to go to Bristol he could not yet see.
MacMorn was in London. Lying awake and puzzling over the problem, linking up MacMorn’s presence with his own series of escapes, Gees questioned whether he was intended to follow Betty to Bristol, under the impression that she was Helen Aylener. It was a farfetched idea, not less fantastic than all the rest of this sequence of events, but . . .
MacMorn, of course, was ignorant of the fact that Gees had declined to take any action for Margaret Aylener. It was just possible that he intended to present Betty in some guise that would induce Gees to believe her Helen, and — but why Bristol?
Was some other trap laid, either on the way to Bristol or in the city itself, into which Gees was to walk? MacMorn’s anxiety to get rid of him was evident enough. Evident, too, was the existence of something working against MacMorn.
The shadows of Brachmornalachan, Margaret Aylener had said, were of her own people, forced to submit to MacMorn’s control, different entirely from willing servants.
Supposing some of them — one of them, even — had so far escaped from control as to be able to impel Betty at the right moment, to impel Gees himself to go and look out through the club window at the right moment?
The theory was fantastic, but was there anything in connection with this business that was not, from a sane, practical standpoint?
Dawn was paling the sky when Gees fell asleep.
He was pulled back to consciousness by a series of coughs, raucous, vulgar explosions not far from his ear, and he opened his eyes to see the lady who came in every morning to cook him a breakfast and clean the flat. On paper, Mrs. Hogg, she insisted on being called Mrs. Hoe. It was no part of her program to enter his bedroom before he vacated it, and he scowled at her.
“Beg pardon, sir, there’s a gentleman wants to see yer.”
“My secretary will be here at ten,” Gees said, observing the clock by his bedside, which pointed to half past eight. “Tell him to come back then. This is the middle of the night.”
“Beg pardon, sir, I told him I dassen’t disturb you, but he said it was most important, an’ I must. I was to tell you ‘is name is Kyrle. ’E spelt it, an’ I was to tell you. K-y-r-l-e. Kyrle.”
Gees sat up. “Tell him to come in here,” he said.
CHAPTER XIV
journey to the mists
As he stood in the bedroom, looking up at Gees, who had got out of bed and stood beside it in his pajamas, Kyrle appeared shrunken, a different man altogether from the one who had bidden goodbye at The Rowans.
“You said I might get in touch with you,” he said without greeting of any sort. There was a flat, hopeless note in his voice. “Helen’s gone. Last night, and this morning. Gone.”
“Begin at the beginning,” Gees said. “Sit down and tell me.”
“I can’t sit down,” Kyrle said. “I’d only — it’s no use. Her aunt was right — I feel sure of it, now. And what’s happening to her — ”
“You’ll do no good, like that,” Gees cut in sharply. “I’m going to have my bath and breakfast. Gone from where? Brachmornalachan?”
“No, here,” Kyrle answered. “She and Miss Aylener went to Edinburgh two days after I drove her to The Rowans — the day after you left. Then they came to London to do some final shopping before the wedding — Helen told me that was what they were after, before they left Edinburgh. I had to come here for the firm, yesterday. Helen and her aunt are staying at Grey’s Hotel — you know it, I expect?”
Gees nodded, and seated himself on the edge of his bed. Grey’s, one of the quietest, best, and most expensive hotels in London, was only three or four doors away from his own club — and he had seen MacMorn pass the club once, while Tony Briggs had seen him twice.
“What day did they arrive in London?” he asked.
“Last Friday. Does it matter? She�
��s gone, I tell you.”
Tony Briggs had first seen MacMorn on that day, Gees remembered, outside the club. He asked: “You saw Helen yesterday?”
“Dined with them,” Kyrle answered. “I didn’t stay long, because Helen said she had a bad headache and wanted to get to bed early. I’m staying at the Mornington.
“About an hour ago the telephone in my room went, and when I took off the receiver it was Miss Aylener. She’d gone into Helen’s room and the bed hadn’t been slept in. So according to that, Helen went out last night. I went round there to see Miss Aylener without even stopping for a bath or a shave.
“And then the man on the door this morning — I went down to ask him — he said he’d seen Helen get into a taxi outside the hotel not more than ten minutes before I got there. He hadn’t seen her go out, and she hadn’t got anything more than a handbag with her. He’d run to the pavement edge to open the taxi door for her, and heard her tell the driver to take her to Paddington.
“So you see — well, that’s why I said last night and this morning. By the time I found that out, she’d been gone over half an hour, and I thought of you and came here instead of chasing her. I don’t know London, you see, and — well, I thought — here I am.”
“Have you had any breakfast yet?” Gees demanded.
“She didn’t sleep in her room last night,” Kyrle said, as if he had not heard the question, “and yet she was outside the hotel this morning to take that taxi to Paddington. Where was she — ”
“Helen did not take that taxi,” Gees interrupted him. “She came out from Grey’s some time last night. Providence, or Fate, or something working against MacMorn, or plain silly coincidence if you like, put me in touch last night with the girl who told that driver to take her to Paddington, and it wasn’t Helen Aylener. Whatever it was, it sent you here to me instead of letting you chase off after that other girl.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?” Kyrle asked.
“We start at ten-five, sharp.”
“Start?” Kyrle echoed. “But — ”
“For Brachmornalachan,” Gees explained. “The Paddington part of it kept me awake quite a while last night, but I see it now. And I rather think hypnosis accounts for Betty not coming round to claim those other four notes — which means nothing to you, of course. Never mind.”
“But — ten o’clock!” Kyrle protested. “That’s an hour wasted!”
“My secretary arrives at ten,” Gees explained calmly, “and I shall take just five minutes to bring her up to date on what has happened, and get her to go and see Miss Aylener at Grey’s to explain that Helen isn’t quite lost yet. And my car will be outside for us — unless, of course, you prefer to stay behind. I’m going, whatever you do.”
“I’ll follow your advice,” Kyrle said. “This — well, it doesn’t exactly fit into structural engineering. I mean, I don’t know anything, and you seem to know everything. But that other girl — are you sure?”
Gees got up off the bed. “Put yourself under my orders, and between us we’ll save Helen.”
He managed to make the prophecy with apparent certainty, but he was far from confident. MacMorn had shown that he had power even here, in the midst of a solid materialism that rendered credence of the shadow magic ridiculous. At Brachmornalachan he would be on his own ground, at the very zenith of his strength.
“All the way by car?” Kyrle asked.
“Unless you’re going from city to city, distances in this country are not enough to justify going by air,” Gees answered. “Besides, we may need the car at the other end. We’ll make it before dark.”
Conducted to a sitting room on the first floor at Grey’s Hotel, Miss Brandon admitted to herself that Gees had been right in describing Margaret Aylener as the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The deep blue, almost violet eyes were wonderful, and the delicate charm of the woman’s face was unimpaired by age, even perfected by it.
“From Mr. Green, I understand?” Her voice, too, was perfect.
“He asked me to come straight to you,” Miss Brandon said. “To explain. He and Mr. Kyrle have gone to Brachmornalachan, and he told me to tell you, he will stop at nothing. And to ask you what you know.”
“He should have come here,” Miss Aylener said sharply, with a note in her voice that marred its music. “Helen has not gone to Brachmornalachan. I followed her to Paddington, and described her there — made inquiries. She was recognized — she has gone to Bristol.”
“That was done to mislead you,” Miss Brandon said. “It is another girl, made up to look like your niece. Mr. Green thinks she will change her makeup on the train, even alter her clothes, and if you wire ahead or do anything to have her stopped when she gets to Bristol, there will be nobody corresponding nearly enough to the description you give for recognition by it. To delay you, keep you from inquiring at Brachmornalachan. But he and Mr. Kyrle, he told me to tell you, will be there almost as soon as she arrives, and perhaps before her.”
“How do you — how does he know about this other girl, if what you say is true?” Miss Aylener asked. “How does he know anything at all?”
“He has been in very great danger, more than once,” Miss Brandon answered, “and attributes it to — to having visited you and heard what you had to tell him — and ask of him. He is telephoning me between one and two, and I am to tell him everything you can tell me.”
“You are — you work with him, then?”
“I am his secretary. He dictated a record of his visit to you and everything connected with it, and we talked it over as well.”
“And now — yes, I understand. Except — he told me he would do nothing. And now you tell me he has gone with Ian?”
“Because there is real danger, now,” Miss Brandon explained. “It was only a vague threat, before — until your niece went like this.”
She waited. Miss Aylener asked: “What do you want me to tell you?”
“About last night. What, exactly, happened then?”
“Last night. Yes. We had been shopping — my niece and I had been shopping all the afternoon, and when we came back here I went to my room to rest. If this suite is available when we come to London, I always book it. This room, with my niece’s bedroom on one side, and mine on the other — and a bathroom, of course.
“I went to my room, as I say, till nearly seven o’clock. When I came in here, my niece told me Mr. Kyrle was in London and had rung up. She had asked him to come to dinner with us, and he did. We all came up here after dinner, and at about ten o’clock my niece said she had one of her bad headaches and wanted to go to bed. Ian — Mr. Kyrle — bade us goodnight and left — ”
“Just one moment, Miss Aylener. One of her bad headaches, you say. She is subject to them at times, you mean?”
“For the last year, since we came back from our Mediterranean trip. I made her see a specialist, in case she had caught some germ on that cruise, but he could find no cause for them.”
“Was it on that cruise you and she went to Eleusis?”
“Yes, but I don’t see why you should attach importance to that. We made the excursion with a party, as ordinary tourists.”
“Yes, of course.” Miss Brandon decided to say nothing about Helen’s meeting with MacMorn on that excursion. “Mr. Green included your visit there in his dictation to me,” she added. “He is always very thorough over the details of his cases in dictating reports on them.”
“Until now, I thought he had declined to regard this as one of his cases,” Miss Aylener said. “I wish he had not — ” She broke off, then.
“You say your niece went to bed at ten o’clock,” Miss Brandon prompted.
“A little after ten — it may have been half-past, even. She bade me goodnight and went to her room, through that doorway.” She pointed at a closed door which she faced as she sat. “My room is through the door opposite, so with this room between us I do not hear what she does in hers, after I have gone to bed. Or before, if she
goes first — these walls are practically soundproof.
“I stayed in here reading the evening paper till about eleven o’clock, and then went to my room. I did not go in to her, knowing as I do that she does not like to be disturbed when she has these headaches. But quite early this morning I went in and found the bed had not been slept in, and at once I rang Mr. Kyrle.”
“Not under the impression that she was with him, surely?” Miss Brandon asked, and instantly regretted the question.
“Because Mr. Kyrle was the only person we know in London,” Miss Aylener said, rather stiffly, “and because my niece might have let fall something in his hearing which would help me to decide where she had gone. But she had not.
“He came round here at once, and learned about her taking a taxi outside the hotel this morning — though you say now it was not my niece who took the taxi. The man on the door said it was, and described how she was dressed when Mr. Kyrle asked him.”
“Could you give me that description?” Miss Brandon asked.
“The more easily since I recognized the clothes as hers. A gray flannel costume with white pin-stripe, gray stockings and gray suede shoes, small gray velour hat, a silver-fox fur, and a salmon-pink neckerchief. All of which she was wearing when we went shopping in the afternoon. I knew her at once by the description.”
“And have you looked over her clothes since?” Miss Brandon persisted. “Are they the things that are missing from her room?”
“They must be! Why, who could — ”
Miss Aylener rose and went toward the door she had indicated, and Miss Brandon followed her. They entered a fairly large, well-furnished bedroom, and Miss Aylener went to the wardrobe on the other side of the bed and opened it. She took out a long, silver-fox stole, and stared at the girl beside her.