“What did they do about it?” he enquired curiously.
“Sent me an open cheque for two hundred pounds. Hoped it was enough. Assured me that my husband was deeply engaged upon some important contracts for the firm and that I might consider them my bankers if I needed more money. I sent them a batch of dressmakers’ bills. I hope they liked it.”
“He never asks you to help him in his work?” Cheshire observed blandly.
“I do not even know what his work is,” she drawled.
Cheshire sipped his wine thoughtfully.
“Are you not sometimes curious?”
She looked at him with meditation in her large eyes—eyes of an uncertain colour—and a look from Mrs. Florestan was something worth remembering.
“I am afraid of my husband,” she confessed.
“So am I,” Cheshire admitted. “What a joke!”
“What should you do if he came in at this moment?” she asked.
“Run for my life,” he assured her.
Once more the smile trembled at the corners of her full and shapely lips.
“That,” she said, “I do not believe. I am sure that you would fight with him if it was necessary but I am sure that he would win.”
“He seems to have had his own way with me pretty well up till now,” Cheshire sighed.
“He will to the end,” she told him. “Horace Florestan has been a mystery to me ever since we met. Why he married me I do not know. He simply told me that he intended to and he did. Every now and then he is my husband again, then he goes. He becomes a stranger. I am afraid of him. I never know when he is going to change. I never know when he is about to become a human being, but until he does, all that I do is wait, all that I feel is fear.”
“A strange marriage,” he murmured.
“You have said a true thing,” she agreed. “No one knows how strange. Think—what is the greatest resource of a woman left like me? Reading? I cannot read. I will tell you why. There are no books written about men like my husband or women like me. I lose interest in this mob,” she went on, with a wave of her hand. “They are all the same. I know just what they are going to do, how they feel, almost what they are going to eat. They are living the lives of ordinary human beings. Horace Florestan is not, and through him I am not. He is the Bluebeard of to-day. It is I who live in the cupboard. He locks the door. I bore holes and look out. That is how I see life.”
He refilled her glass and his own, pushed his case towards her and held a match for her cigarette.
“Exactly what should you do if he walked in now?” he asked.
“Faint,” she answered. “If our eyes met I should faint, because I should know that he understood what I was feeling.”
“What are you feeling?”
She turned her head and looked at him. He forgot the heavy, clumsy woman he had first seen in that tawdry suburban sitting room. She seemed at that moment something wholly pagan, yet something with a queer quality of enticement. The light shone in her strange eyes, her lips were trembling.
“You are too little of a man, and I am too much of a woman, or you would know,” she told him.
The pause which followed, vibrant yet embarrassing, was curiously broken in upon. The man with the evil mouth, sallow complexion and jet black hair, seemed to appear from nowhere. As a matter of fact, he had left a party of friends who stood waiting for him upon the steps. Cheshire recognised him with amazement.
“Madame!” the newcomer exclaimed, as he made Mrs. Florestan a formal and tremulous bow. “Monsieur,” he added with a glance towards Cheshire.
She looked at him lazily. There was distaste and also anger in her tone.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Ludini?”
“Madame, I am with friends,” he answered. “I had not the thought of seeing you.”
“Where is my husband?”
“No man living could ever answer that question unless he were within sight,” was the fearsome rejoinder.
“Why do you address me?”
“Because you have the courage which only fools have,” he answered. “Also your companion. He has had one escape. Next time he will not have the chance. You two together—it is more than formidable, that—it is disaster, if he should chance to come.”
“I have just heard your name for the first time,” Cheshire, who had made up his mind as to his course of action during the last few seconds, intervened. “I never heard it before and I have no wish to hear it again, but if you want to have supper with your friends to-night run along and join them. I have a fancy that it would not be difficult to place you in a police cell instead.”
“I took my risks when I addressed you,” the man replied, “but it would do you no good to adopt that attitude. I gave you credit for a certain amount of intelligence, which apparently you possess. I am powerless. I am less than a pawn in the game. Find my master, if you are looking for death. Keep away from him, and everything that belongs to him, and everybody who knows him, if you wish to live.”
“Tragic but boring,” Deborah Florestan yawned. “Where is my husband?”
“No one knows. We never know,” he answered. “All that I can tell you is that it is a stroke of great good fortune that he is not here.”
Ludini seemed to disappear as silently and as swiftly as he had come. Cheshire leaned back in his chair and laughed.
“To think,” he exclaimed, “that that is the fellow who tried to stop my getting away from that damnable cellar of yours the other night! To think that I have let him go!”
“You are not a fool,” the woman said indifferently, “not in that way, at least. He could do you no further harm. The man you want is his master.”
“Take me to his master,” Cheshire proposed.
“Why?”
“For your own sake, for your greater comfort. Afterwards, the diamonds you wear so regally might be real ones.”
“I should be wearing them in my grave,” she told him.
He sipped his wine.
“You are becoming morbid.”
She shook her head.
“I am not morbid. I am not a coward. I do not love my husband, but, God in heaven, how I fear him! He has a feeling for me,” she went on. “I think that he would kill me if he thought that I had been unfaithful to him. All the same, I would fall at your feet and pray you—but what is the good? I am afraid. I should always be afraid.”
“I should like to see more of this extraordinary man,” Cheshire remarked cheerfully. “He seems to appear and disappear at will, to behave, in short, as though he had wings underneath his coat, and to put the fear of God into everyone. That man Ludini who has just gone shivered as he spoke of his master. You yourself admit that he terrifies you.”
“He terrifies me,” she admitted, “because he lights fires that he cannot quench, because I have seen all those who have stood in his way go to their death. I would give everything a woman can give in life to be rid of that fear of him. Sometimes I believe that it will hold me in bondage till I die… .”
Joseph made one more effort. He had been called to a neighbouring table and he lingered before Cheshire.
“We are very nearly full up, sir,” he announced. “The table I offered you still remains.”
Cheshire glanced at his companion.
“Why not some supper?” he asked.
“Madame will find the music to-night delightful,” Joseph said, bowing to her. “Presently Suzanne Dreyfus will sing.”
Her eyebrows were gently raised as she looked towards Cheshire. He rose to his feet. She laid her finger upon his arm for a moment as she moved towards the stairs, but it was the shadow of fear rather than the joy of anticipation which walked with her into the supper room.
CHAPTER XXI
Table of Contents
“Scarcely the usual gay crowd, Joseph,” Cheshire remarked as he wrote out his order for supper and handed it to the maître d’hôtel.
The latter acquiesced sadly. He was an Italian, saving mone
y fast, terrified lest any post might bring him his letters of recall.
“It is the fault of the newspapers, sir. The depression is always there. Did you see the placards to-night?”
“Never take any notice of them,” Cheshire said.
“Nevertheless, they kill the spirit of gaiety in the people,” Joseph insisted. “To-night the placards are speaking of a hitch in the conversations in one of the two capitals, another reports a deadlock in the other. At every table in this room at the present moment they talk of one thing only—the fear of war.”
“You bring the caviar along, my friend,” Cheshire directed, “and don’t you worry your head as to whether there’s going to be war or not. Even if there is, it won’t mean the end of all things, you know.”
Deborah Florestan leaned back in her chair with a sigh of content. Her eyes had penetrated into every corner of the room. There was not a soul visible whom she had ever seen before. She began to wonder whether this attractive companion of hers would invite her to dance. He certainly had the figure for it. It would be very pleasant.
“War is a thing I do not understand,” she confided. “My husband, who rarely talks to me, said only a few days ago that he was making a great fortune for his firm out of people’s fear of war, but that if war came they might easily lose it all again.”
“Quite right, too,” her companion assented. “The Government would grab their profits back again.”
She sighed.
“I should like my husband to make a great deal of money out of this fear of war that you speak of,” she confessed, “leave it all to me and disappear.”
“What do you mean by disappear?” he asked.
“Go somewhere where I would never see him again. It would be better if he died,” she added complacently.
“Aren’t you a trifle heartless?”
“I have no heart for my husband,” she admitted. “No more would you if you had lived with him for fifteen years, as I have.”
“How old are you?” he asked.
She seemed to find nothing unusual in his question.
“I am thirty-five,” she told him. “I was studying in London when the first bombers came over. I was not afraid then. I should not be afraid now. What I hate is the look on the faces of all the people. I think I was born to be gay. Horace has set his heel upon that spirit and it is wounded, but there is some of it left.”
“How does your husband make all this money for his firm out of the fear of war?”
“He sells all manner of things to the Government,” she replied. “He travels everywhere where there is steel or aluminium or nickel—anything that is needed in making aeroplanes or battleships. He buys and then he sells. He makes many enemies. People follow him about who mean evil. He himself is visited often by strange men who do strange things for him, and that is all I know, so ask me no more questions, please. He thought when you came to the house in Kensington that you were a spy. Perhaps you are. Perhaps I have done wrong in telling you as much as I have. The first time you asked me I told you that I knew nothing about his work. Somehow, now, I feel that I know you much better and it gives me pleasure to tell you the little I do know.”
Cheshire laid down his cigarette.
“Do you care to dance?” he asked.
A light broke across her face. She seemed suddenly years younger. She rose to her feet at once.
“It will not weary you?”
“Not a bit of it,” he laughed. “I am out of practice, that’s all. That’s not going to matter, I can see.”
As a matter of fact, they were both good dancers, but the woman was superb. Notwithstanding her height and size, she was as light upon the floor as the slimmest of debutantes. She followed his movements as though by instinct. Looking at her unexpectedly, as they slowed up in one of the crowded corners, Cheshire felt almost puzzled. He was dancing with a very beautiful woman of a new type—Titian, Rubens, the painters of the first Spanish Madonnas, a curious medley of women in flowing robes and with superb limbs, passed through his mind. Certainly he had had no thoughts of this gallery of splendour when he had drunk that glass of sherry with Mrs. Florestan and fenced with her mocking questions at the little house in Colville Terrace.
“Dancing gives you pleasure,” he remarked, when at last the music ceased and they returned to their places.
“Music and dancing,” she acknowledged quietly. “I have not danced for years. I began to think I should never dance again. It is like the commencement of a new life.”
“Can’t think how you kept up that beautiful sense of movement,” he went on. “Of course you know that you are a long way the best dancer in the room.”
“Am I?” she asked. “I never watched the others. I was so happy to be dancing myself.”
She paid him no compliments. He realised that she did not think it necessary. All the same, a slight change in her attitude made him almost uneasy. He decided that serious topics of conversation were best.
“Tell me,” he enquired abruptly. “I am not going to ask you any direct questions, but aren’t you ever curious about these Continental visits and secret journeys of your husband?”
She shook her head.
“They do not interest me.”
“I really believe,” he went on, helping himself to a cigarette, “that you are the first woman I have ever met in my life wholly devoid of the bump of curiosity.”
“I am one of the nicest women you ever met in your life, if only you would take the trouble to realise it,” she assured him.
“Even the very nicest are sometimes puzzling,” he persisted. “Tell me this, then—have you ever been curious as to why the police have not returned your car?”
She looked at him with unwilling suspicion in her eyes.
“Did you invite me to supper in order to ask me questions about my husband?” she asked him point-blank.
“I never had the faintest idea of inviting you to supper,” he told her, “until Joseph came and suggested it.”
She indulged in a faint grimace.
“It is humiliating,” she confessed, “that you preserve your character of always speaking the truth.”
“Friends always should,” he said. “Besides, there is more to be gained, as a rule, by speaking the truth than by telling falsehoods.”
“Shall we test that?”
“Well?” he acquiesced doubtfully.
“The first time I saw you you came to Colville Terrace accompanied by a police inspector. You yourself represented a department connected with the police, I think you told us. What are you really?”
“A departmental overseer of unusual happenings.”
“It sounds terrible,” she said, “but it leaves me entirely ignorant.”
“Is it confidence for confidence?”
“It might be if I knew anything.”
“Very well, then,” he proceeded. “I am really a sailor placed for a few months at the head of a department which keeps a watch on people who interest themselves tremendously in armaments at a critical time like this. Hence my interest in your husband.”
“That does not account for my husband looking upon you as an enemy, does it?” she enquired.
“Not unless he was afraid I was trying to find out who had driven his car to St. George’s Hospital last Sunday night.”
“The night Sir Theodore Meldicott was shot,” she murmured.
“The night he was shot—murdered,” Cheshire assented. “Now, don’t you think it is time I asked you a question or two?”
“Well?”
“Do you think your husband is a man who would commit a murder?”
She considered the point.
“I do not think he would hesitate for a moment if it was to his advantage.”
“Well, that’s frank, at any rate,” Cheshire admitted. “Do you believe that he shot Sir Theodore Meldicott?”
“I do not believe or disbelieve,” she answered. “I have not anything to go by. He certainly drove the car awa
y that night. It might easily have been stolen, though, especially if he left it outside that terrible club of his.”
“Did he keep any firearms and ammunition in the house?”
“Not at Colville Terrace.”
“Here, then?”
“Perhaps,” she replied. “Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“You had better go and search his rooms, then—267 to 269. Do not make a mistake, though. Number 269 is my apartment. You would like the keys?”
She drew them from her bag and laid them on the table. He avoided her eyes but he took them up and examined them.
“The larger one,” she explained, “is for the door of the little hall leading into the salon. The two Yale keys are those of my room and his, one on either side.”
He laid down the keys.
“The actual searching of rooms,” he confided, “is not my job. I might send up an inspector.”
“He will not find anything.”
“And supposing I came myself?”
“You might be more fortunate.”
“What I should like to find,” he went on, acutely conscious of the tenseness of the moment but keeping his eyes idly watching the dancers, “is a cartridge with a peculiar casing, a casing of plain steel.”
“I know nothing about firearms,” she assured him calmly.
“You wouldn’t like to look for me, I suppose?”
“Certainly not.”
“Do you believe,” he persisted, “that your husband could be capable of shooting a man with a bullet which is only used by desperate criminals, a bullet that if it lodges in a man’s body anywhere, whether it is a vital spot or not, will inflict a mortal wound?”
“I think,” she replied, “that a bullet of that sort would appeal to Horace immensely. He is terribly cruel, you know. He thinks nothing of life or death in other people. He has no sympathy. He has no kindness.”
“Then why do you hesitate to look and see if you can find a cartridge of this description in his rooms?”
Again he knew that she was looking at him but he refused steadily to turn his head.
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