The door in the boundary wall gave upon a little lane. The Vicar’s stables opened into it. The door stood open, and they were both in the car before Grace was half-way down the stairs. Ethan had put in an hour in the garage that morning, and as he had run the engine, it was warm enough to start up easily. They came out into the lane, where they had to back to take the turn. They slid down the narrow alley which ran between the Vicarage and the high church wall. Ethan turned to the right, left the church and a half-dozen scattered cottages behind, and filled his lungs with a huge breath of relief.
“We’re off!”
He began to sing loudly, untunefully, and in a variety of keys:
“From the desert I come to thee on my Arab shod with fire,
And the winds are left behind in the umty tumty tum——”
“I say that’s a ripping song—isn’t it? Sort of thing you can really let out on!”
He let out:
“At thy window I sta-a-and, and the something hears my cry.
I love thee, I love but thee, with a love that shall not die
Till the sun is co-o-old——”
“I say, that’s beastly appropriate—isn’t it? I don’t know that I ever struck a day when the sun was colder.”
Mally went off into a fit of helpless, gurgling laughter.
“We’re mad,” she said. “We’re both quite mad. We must be, or this sort of thing wouldn’t happen to us.”
Ethan slipped his left arm round her waist and gave her a hug.
“It’s rather jolly being mad together. I say, that was a good get-away—wasn’t it?”
He hugged her again. Mally caught sight of herself in the glass screen, formless in Ethan’s bulging coat, with the peak of a tweed cap hanging over one eye. She fell weakly against Ethan’s shoulder, and Ethan kissed the corner of her mouth where the deepest dimple came and went. They very nearly went into the ditch, because the kiss was a long one; and it ended because Mally gave a sudden choking sob and hid her face against the sleeve of the aged Burberry. Fortunately the road was empty.
Ethan continued to drive at thirty miles an hour with his arm round Mally’s waist.
“You’re not angry—Mally—darling?”
Mally burrowed her nose into the Burberry and sniffed.
“I couldn’t help it. I shall never be able to help it when you look at me like that. Were you frightfully angry when I did it last night? Were you?”
Mally sniffed again.
They left the highroad and swung to the right. The tweed cap fell off. Mally sat suddenly bolt upright and crammed it on again. Her mouth was trembling and she was very pale.
“Where are we going?”
“To London, I think. You ought to see a solicitor. This warrant business is all nonsense. I’m not going to have you arrested. I’m going to take you to my cousin, Mansell Messenger. He’s a good old sort. He’s the senior partner in a fearfully respectable firm of solicitors with no end of a comic name—Worple, Worple, Worple and Wigginson. The last Worple died in the eighteenth century, and I don’t believe there ever was a Wigginson. Mansell runs the show. He’s a clever old bird, and well in with Scotland Yard. His wife is a sister of Sir Julian Le Mesurier, the chief of the C.I.D., so he’d be quite a useful man to get on to.”
“Suppose he w-won’t,” said Mally.
“He will, like a shot. Besides, I shall tell him we’re engaged. We are, aren’t we?”
“N-no, we’re n-not. You m-mustn’t.”
Mally looked straight ahead of her and felt a tear run hot and salt into the corner of her mouth.
“You little darling idiot!”
“I’m n-not.”
Ethan burst into a great roar of laughter.
“Mally, you’re so funny! You really are! I shall drive slap into a hedge if you make me laugh like this.”
“You oughtn’t to laugh,” said Mally in a small, obstinate voice. “It’s very serious. I shall be sent to prison for years and years and years. And you can’t possibly be engaged to a girl in a p-p-prison—you know you can’t.”
Ethan jammed on his brakes. The car skidded and stopped. Mally said, “Oh!” and felt Ethan’s hands come down very hard on her shoulders. He pulled her round to face him and gave her a little shake.
“You’re not to talk like that! Do you hear? I won’t have it. I don’t like it. You’re not to do it. No, I’m quite serious. We are engaged, and we’re going to stay engaged until we’re married—and we’re going to get married as soon as possible.”
Mally cocked her left eyebrow at him.
“’M,” she said.
“No!” said Ethan loudly. “No! Mally, you’re an imp of darkness. But for the Lord’s sake be good—at any rate until we’ve finished running away. I can’t really drive the car with one hand and shake you with the other—and we’ve got to push along. I can’t risk going through Weyford or Guildford, so we’ve got to go round and strike London road beyond Ripley. I think we’ve got a sporting chance; but we certainly haven’t got any time to waste.”
He started the engine, and they began to do a rather perilous thirty-five miles an hour along very narrow winding lanes, where the snow had turned to ice. They came out on the London road half an hour later, and mended their pace.
Mally sat hunched up in the big coat. She had not spoken for a long time, when she suddenly giggled and said:
“If there’s a police trap on this road, you’ll be the one to be arrested. And then, perhaps, I won’t marry you.”
“There isn’t a trap,” said Ethan sternly.
Next moment, as a small car passed them, she clutched his arm.
“Ethan! That’s Candida Long! It is! Oh, it is! Oh, I want to speak to her—she was such a brick to me! Catch them up! Catch them up quickly! I must speak to her!”
Ethan caught them up. Mally stuck her cap out of the flap of the side screen and waved it. Ethan hooted. Miss Long’s companion shouted something unintelligible. Miss Long herself glared, exclaimed, and applied her brakes. Both cars came to a standstill, and in a moment Mally had whisked out into the road.
“It’s me!” she said. She hitched up Ethan’s coat and climbed on the step. “I got away—I wanted to tell you. You were a brick. Oh! It’s Mr. Medhurst!”
Ambrose Medhurst opened the door on the other side and got out. He was a sensitive young man, and it seemed to him that he was de trop.
“Oh!” said Mally. “Has he? Are you?”
Candida leaned over the side. She said, “S’sh! Not exactly.” Then she put her lips close to Mally’s ear and whispered, “You were quite right. He does—but he won’t.”
They could hear Ethan and Ambrose talking.
“Why won’t he?” said Mally, bobbing on the step.
“My beastly money. But I believe I’ve lost a lot of it. And if I have, he will.”
“Ouf! How good of him!”
Mally’s eyes danced. So did Candida’s.
“Yes—isn’t it? What are you doing? Are you all right? Paul was wild. I say, are you sure you’re all right? Because I should simply hate them to get you now. What are you doing?”
“I’m still escaping. I’m escaping with Ethan. Do you know Ethan? He says we’re engaged. And I’m much too frightened of him to say we’re not.”
Candida began to laugh; and as she did so, Ethan and Ambrose came round the car. Candida turned, with her hands out.
“Ambrose, I’ve had a brain-wave! Let’s change cars.”
Mr. Medhurst’s fine dark eyes took on a bewildered look. He said, “Change cars?” And Candida said, “Change cars.” And then Ethan pushed forward, very large and frowning.
“Miss Long—I say—do you really mean that?”
Candida jumped out.
“Of course I mean it. Are they after you? Are you being chased? Would it really be a help? Do you think they’ll chase us instead? Oh, what a lark!”
Ethan seemed in doubt as to how many of Miss Long’s questions really required a
n answer.
“I’m sure we’re being chased,” said Mally from the step of the car. Ethan’s coat trailed from her shoulders to the ground; she clutched his cap in her bare hand.
“As a matter of fact,” said Ethan, “we had to bolt by one door whilst the local policeman was being let in by the other. And as everybody in Weyford knows the number of my car, I don’t think we’ve a frightfully good chance of getting to London. I want to get to my cousin, Mansell Messenger. He’s a solicitor and can advise us.”
“Then take my car, and we’ll have yours. Come along, Ambrose, you shall drive. And we’ll get off the main road and see how long we can keep going before we’re taken up. I’ve never been arrested! It’s the chance of a life-time. What a jest! Bless you, my children!”
She kissed her fingers to Mally and ran laughing to Ethan’s car, dragging Ambrose with her.
“She is a brick!” said Mally. “Come along, slow-coach!” She jumped in, trailing the coat behind her. “I know where her garage is, so that’s all right.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she told me—and because I’m so frightfully clever.”
“Now then,” said Ethan warningly.
Mally dimpled at him. With a sudden movement she rubbed her head against his shoulder and said, “Didums?” Then she began to laugh softly. “We’re really, really, really going to get away. I didn’t think we could—but we’re going to!”
CHAPTER XXXIV
Mr. Mansell Messenger was a brisk little grig of a man with rosy cheeks, gray hair that rumpled easily, and very lively hazel eyes. He allowed the eyes to dart some searching glances at Miss Mally Lee as she sat in one of his big leather armchairs and told her story.
She told it all through from the beginning, and it did not escape him that a good deal of it was news to his cousin Ethan. He held a pencil in his hand and drummed against his lips with it. Every now and then he made a note of something. And then the eyes were scanning Mally again, from the short, rumpled dark hair to the shabby house shoes in which she had walked so many weary miles. The big muffling coat lay over the arm of the chair.
Mally, in her short skirt and jumper, was extraordinarily small and young. She sat up straight, and she told her story well, but not too well. Mr. Mansell Messenger had a well-founded distrust of the too glib tale. Mally was not glib; she was natural. He liked her voice, and the set of her head, and the way she looked at him. He liked the way in which she spoke of the Peterson household; there was no rancor, no sharp-voiced resentment. She was puzzled, and she had been frightened; and she was plucky—not the sort to be frightened for nothing.
When she had done, he asked her questions:
“Had any one in the house any grudge against you?”
Mally lifted her head a little.
“I didn’t like Mr. Craddock.”
“Had you quarrelled?”
“Oh, no. We weren’t friends. He knew I didn’t like him.”
“May I ask how he knew?”
Mally stuck her chin in the air.
“I s-slapped his face.”
“Just so,” said Mr. Messenger—“just so. I’m sure he deserved it. But perhaps you’ll just tell us why you found it necessary to slap him?”
“It was my own fault,” said Mally. “I ought to have known he was a slug and that you can’t trust slugs. I came home late and he offered me sandwiches, and I said ‘Yes’ because I was hungry—dancing always makes me hungry. And then he tried to kiss me, and I slapped him frightfully hard and ran away.”
Ethan, standing propped against the mantelpiece, was understood to mutter something of an imprecatory nature.
“Just so,” said Mr. Mansell. “And when did all this happen?”
“The night before.”
“The brooch was already lost then?”
“Yes, we’d been looking for it all the afternoon.”
“And it was next day after lunch that they searched you and found it?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Just so. And when did you first hear about the lost paper?”
“After they searched me, I think.”
“You’re not sure?”
“Not quite sure. It was all so horrid—I didn’t seem to be able to think. They sent the maid away, and then they went on, and on, and on about the paper. They said they knew I’d got it; and they said if I’d give it up, they wouldn’t say any more about the diamond and they wouldn’t send me to prison.”
Mr. Mansell bit the end of his pencil.
“And you say you had no knowledge of any paper?”
“I hadn’t then.”
“But you had subsequently?”
“Barbara gave me her drawings. She loved them frightfully, and she said her father and Paul Craddock would burn them. She gave them to me after I climbed out of the window—I told you—and I put them in my pocket and forgot all about them until I was sitting under a holly bush in the wood at Peddling Corner waiting for something to turn up.”
“And then?” said Mr. Mansell Messenger.
“I looked at the drawings to pass the time, and I found a paper with a cross-word puzzle on it. But I wasn’t feeling like cross-word puzzles, so I put it back in my pocket and didn’t worry about it. Only when I was in that empty house I told you about, I looked at the paper again, and I thought it was odd——”
“You thought it was odd. In what way did you think it was odd?”
Mally met his eyes very engagingly.
“Just odd,” she said with a little wave of her hand. “I didn’t worry about it much—I was too cold and hungry. But this morning I showed it to Ethan. And first we both thought it wasn’t a cross-word puzzle at all; and then we wondered what it was. And then——” She turned towards the hearth. “Ethan, you’ve got it. Show him.”
Ethan came forward with the paper in his hand. He leaned across his cousin and laid it on the writing-table.
“It’s a cipher,” he said. “I tumbled to that at once. But when I started to work it out I found that it was practically all decoded on the other side of the paper. Have a look at it yourself and you’ll see.”
Mansell Messenger swung his chair about and positively pounced on the paper.
“Heliogabalus—Constantinople,” he read aloud, and stabbed the blotting-paper with the point of his pencil.
“The key words,” prompted Ethan; and Mansell said, “Just so,” and ran his finger along the next line, where the alphabet stood letter for letter beneath the two key-words.
Ethan went on explaining.
“They’ve taken the initial letters of the clues to make the cipher. Here it is, decoded.” He pointed lower down. “These two words—‘In England’—I worked out with the key. The rest was already decoded, including the signature. It’s Paul Craddock’s writing, Mally says.”
“That so?” said Mansell, looking sharply round at Mally. “Don’t say you’re sure if you’re not. Don’t say anything unless you’re sure.”
“But I am sure—I’m quite sure.”
“Very well.”
He proceeded to read the decoded message over in an undertone. “Shipments made as arranged. Authorities alert. Suspect Pedro Ruiz. Advise no more shipments at present. Do not communicate with me in England. Varney.” He read it over twice, and stabbed at his blotting-paper all the time. Then there was a silence.
It seemed a long time before he made a quick movement and jerked a question at Mally:
“Any idea what this means?”
“N-no,” said Mally.
“No idea what shipments are referred to?”
She shook her head.
“Ever heard of Pedro Ruiz or Varney?”
“N-no.”
“But you’re sure this is Mr. Paul Craddock’s handwriting?”
“Yes, I’m quite sure.”
Mansell Messenger went on looking at her for about half a minute. Then he pushed back his chair and got up.
“I’m going to ask you both to
go into the next room. Wait a moment whilst I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to telephone to Sir Julian Le Mesurier and ask him if he will see you. I think it possible that he may be interested in this cipher, and I should advise you to tell him everything you know quite unreservedly. If you are not willing to do so, I don’t think I can help you very much. But if you will be guided by me——”
“Oh!” said Mally, a little overpowered. “But we will. That’s why we came here—didn’t we, Ethan? We want to be guided by you, so please don’t say you won’t help us.” She looked at him very appealingly indeed.
“I don’t say anything of the sort.” Mr. Messenger took her by the arm, patted it, and propelled her gently towards the outer room. “Run along and talk to Ethan.”
The outer room was empty. As soon as Mansell had gone back into his office, Ethan picked Mally up and hugged her.
“You’re not to be frightened,” he whispered in her ear.
“I’m n-not.”
“You are. And I won’t have it. Do you hear? I simply won’t have it. You’re all shaking and cold like a little frozen bird. You’re not to do it.”
“S’sh!” said Mally. “S’sh! He’s left the door ajar. I want to listen.”
They stood quite still, and heard Mansell’s voice a little raised.
“That you, Piggy? Yes, Mansell speaking. Hallo! Are you there? Yes, that’s better now. Can you hear me all right? It’s rather important. Look here, you remember our conversation last night after dinner.… Yes, the very confidential part of it.… She’s here now.… Yes, that’s what I said—Here—H for horse, E for Edward, R for ructions and E for emergency … A warrant? Yes, I know—so she says. I’d like you to see her. And I’ve a document that I think will interest you—Hallo, the door’s open! Wait a minute while I shut it.”
The door shut with a click this time, and Mally fairly flung herself into Ethan’s arms.
“Ethan—don’t let them take me to prison! I c-couldn’t bear it! I am frightened—I’m dreadfully, dreadfully frightened. Oh, I am!”
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