Never Walk Alone

by Rufus King

  Mr. Stedman and Kent flanked her as they went inside and entered a small reception room which in addition to a white-coated attendant and an unimportant-looking little man seated at a desk held Mr. Smith, his handsome young nephew Fergus Wade, and Miss Ashley.

  Miss Ashley.

  Mrs. Giles swiftly absorbed Miss Ashley’s daytime armor: admirably cut dark slacks, a turtle-neck sweater, and a jacket of the same material as the slacks. Mrs. Giles had been unable to absorb the perfection of this outfit during her glimpse at the station. All she had then been able to see had been Miss Ashley’s equally perfect (for its purposes) head.

  “Well,” Mr. Stedman was saying, “I see we’re all here. Lieutenant, I don’t believe you’ve met Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade. And this is Miss Ashley.”

  Mrs. Giles grew sick at heart as she eyed this fictitious meeting. Miss Ashley positively swiveled up to Kent and held out her hand.

  “Hello there, Lieutenant.”

  “Hello, Miss Ashley. Glad that you’re with us out at the house.”

  “Well, it’s beginning to have its compensations.”

  Mr. Smith came over and forthrightly told Mrs. Giles how sorry he was that she would have to face this ordeal. She considered how solid, how substantial his work clothes made him look and how equally effective were those of his young nephew. Both men reminded her of the splendid posters depicting Labor at the forefront of the fight.

  Then her eye was diverted by a look which passed between Mr. Stedman and the unimportant-looking man at the desk. Oddly it struck her as being one of secret significance. It made her suspicious of some possible official trickery and put her instantly on guard.

  As they all followed Mr. Stedman and the white-coated attendant from the room she made certain that her hand was firmly fixed in the crook of Kent’s arm.

  “A shame your having to do this,” Kent said.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Anyhow, this will be the end of it.”

  “Of course.”

  But it wouldn’t be. Mrs. Giles knew and felt that Kent must know so too. She held herself beside him when they stopped in a vault-like room filled with the pungent odor of disinfectant. They were grouped near a drawer-like slab on which rested the outline of a body beneath a sheet.

  She saw the white-coated attendant step to the sheet and take hold of its upper end. She was aware that Mr. Stedman had moved to a position from where he could study the reactions that might come to their several faces. This is where we get it, she thought grimly.

  They did, all right.

  The attendant lifted the sheet. Mrs. Giles felt the muscles of Kent’s arm contract against her fingers as her own heart skipped a beat. The exposed face was not that of the man who had lain dead beneath the azaleas. Mr. Stedman’s trick at once became apparent to her in its full cleverness. If guilt lay among the observers shock might force it involuntarily to cry out: “That is not the man.”

  Silence held for a terrifying moment, and then Mr. Stedman said casually to the attendant: “You’ve pulled out the wrong slab, Jim.” He turned to the rest of them. “I’m sorry to prolong this. That isn’t the body. Jim missed the slab.”

  So she was right. Tricks had been planned. Mrs. Giles’s belief was now solidly clinched that mugging as a motive might set all right with the police but not with Mr. Stedman. Mr. Stedman definitely linked the murder with River Rest, and beneath his air of agreeable sociability he was out to get them.

  The slab slid in and the slab beside it slid out, and again a sheet end was raised.

  Yes, Mrs. Giles thought, it’s he. The face was sharper, clearer than it had been in the moonlight, making more prominent the diplomat, the foreign-court look. There was complete dignity on the face and utter peace.

  A strangled cry shocked her severely.

  “I got to get out of here,” Mr. Smith’s handsome young nephew said. His face was drenched with sweat and had turned the color of oyster shell. “I’m going to be sick.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Mr. Stedman drove Kent and herself back and left them at River Rest. It seemed to Mrs. Giles that a century had passed before she found herself at long last in her sitting room and taking off her jacket and hat. Kent had said that he was going into his room for a rest. She knew only too well how greatly he needed one.

  The most disturbing remembrance about their departure from the mortuary was the moment when Miss Ashley had said to Kent: “I’ll be looking forward to seeing you out at the house this evening, Lieutenant.”

  Mrs. Giles still shuddered at the sultry, the provocative brazenness which had timbred Miss Ashley’s voice. But she shuddered even more so at what had been Kent’s reply: “I’ll look forward to it too. Possibly, if you’re not too tired from your work, we could chase up a dance or something in town.”

  Feeling a little faint, she sat down. She was too sodden with sheer worry, too filled with despair at the intricacies of this mess she was plunged in even to cry. And brokenhearted with fears for Kent. The ordeal at the mortuary had unnerved her more than she had imagined.

  She frankly admitted that she didn’t know what to do. Talk openly to Kent, she supposed. Nothing else, no other sensible course seemed left her. But not in this condition. First that panacea of all panaceas: a warm and nerve-relaxing bath. Mrs. Giles stood on weary feet and started for the bedroom door.

  She opened it and stepped in and saw Leila. The girl stood facing the dresser. She whipped around on hearing the latch click, then swiftly concealed a hand while her eyes and features settled into a bland composition of sweet innocence. Mrs. Giles sighed.

  “Give it to me, Leila. Whatever it is.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I’m sure I don’t. I’ve just been finishing with straightening up your room.”

  “Whatever you’ve taken, dear.”

  “I don’t take things. You might just as well accuse me of being a thief. Sometimes I just borrow something just to admire it. There’s a big difference. A special one.”

  “Leila, I am a little nervous. Give it to me at once, please.”

  “I told you this morning you looked terrible. And now you look worse. You ought to see a doctor.”

  “I am not ill. I am fatigued. The demonstration at the station tired me.”

  “It was before you went to the station that I told you how poorly you looked. Mr. Stedman was just as worried about you as I was.”

  Mrs. Giles stiffened perceptibly. She could not vision the county prosecutor losing his imperturbability over a migraine.

  “Mr. Stedman, Leila?”

  “Yes. We had quite a talk before you and Mr. Kent got here.”

  “You discussed—me?”

  “We discussed everybody. He seemed to want to. I told him you were so weak when you went out for a breath of air before breakfast that at times you had to steady yourself by putting a hand on the bushes.”

  “Did Mr. Stedman comment, dear?”

  “Well, he was ever so interested and wondered whether you always took a stroll before breakfast. You don’t, of course. As I told him. Honestly, you’re just being stubborn if you don’t see a doctor. Your face is perfectly white again.” Mrs. Giles spoke with unaccustomed asperity.

  “We will discuss it no further, Leila.”

  “Oh, very well. Here. Take it if you want it.”

  Leila, emulating the speed and intangibility of light, dropped a silver thimble into Mrs. Giles’s hand and was no longer in the room. Even the door had been silent in its swift closing.

  Mrs. Giles placed the thimble back on the dresser. It was the one she had used while basting the blue silk wrapper beneath the dinner dress. She never knew what would strike Leila’s fancy. Sometimes the objects would be new and at other times they might have been lying around the house since the day when Joel had brought her.

  She pressed finger tips upon the woodwork to steady herself. Mr. Stedman was anything but a dolt, and Leila’s account to him of the pre-breakfast stroll with the pres
sing among the bushes surely would have registered in italics. The net which he was settling so gently about their shoulders would surely, soon, begin to be drawn in. It was utter madness not to talk with Kent at once.

  She went out into the cool, dim hallway and rapped lightly on Kent’s door. She waited for a moment before rapping again, then as there was still no answer she opened the door and went inside.

  Kent was lying fully dressed on the bed, lost in deep sleep. A slant of sunlight curved his check, and Mrs. Giles’s eyes were helpless with sudden tears at the youthful look of childlike innocence which sleep had brought him: all care wiped away. She walked to the windows and drew down masking shades, tempering the room into twilight, and then stood for a while by the bed.

  She pictured in this sleep of deep exhaustion the endless quality which must have been his desperate night: awake through all of it after that grim rendezvous with Miss Ashley, waiting in dim stations for trains, beset with cares so deep and private that he would not share them even with her.

  In danger surely.

  In danger both last night and now. If Miss Ashley’s had been the hand which had stabbed the stranger how increasing might become her reluctance to permit this witness to her deed to live. It was the commonest of gambits: these later murders grasped at as safeguards against knowledge of a deed already done.

  And if the murderous hand belonged to someone else entirely?

  Then surely the threat still obtained. The threat from the stranger who would have witnessed the victim fall as the result of his knife thrust, who would have witnessed the rendezvous between Miss Ashley and Kent, and who would dread that either of them might in turn have caught sight of him.

  Not for an instant did it strike Mrs. Giles that she herself would also fit within that classification: that this hidden unknown might as easily have observed her own performance in the moonlight as he had Miss Ashley’s and Kent’s.

  Kent stirred and she cursed her folly at having ever conceived this rooming refuge for war workers in the first place, no matter how essential and patriotic the idea might be.

  How miserable it was that Kent’s eagerly awaited homecoming should have turned out like this. Not only his military career but his life was in jeopardy of being warped by it. If the blaze of Miss Ashley’s allure had blinded him into a truly desperate infatuation.

  There would be no warping. Mrs. Giles vowed it. Not if she could help it.

  “Sleep,” she said quietly. “Sleep.”

  The telephone was ringing when she returned to her living room.

  A man’s voice said when she answered it: “This is Russell Stedman, the county prosecutor. May I talk with Mrs. Giles, please?”

  Her hand pressed swiftly against her heart.

  “I am Mrs. Giles, Mr. Stedman.”

  “I hope I haven’t disturbed you. Will it inconvenience you if I borrow your coachman for half an hour or so?”

  “Hopkins?”

  “Yes. Stupidly we’ve just realized that he hasn’t taken a look at the body. I’ll run out and drive him down to the morgue if I may.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Stedman. I will see that he is ready.”

  “Thank you very much. I’ll be out in ten or fifteen minutes. Say about three o’clock.”

  “Mr. Stedman—”

  “Yes, Mrs. Giles?”

  “I—naturally I am interested—but were there no papers or anything in his pockets? It seems so odd, especially nowadays when people bulge with classification numbers and ration books.”

  “No, no wallet, nothing. That is more or less to be expected in a mugging. Picked clean. We’ll have a report on his fingerprints from the central bureau in Washington pretty soon. If they’re listed that will settle it. If not—well, it won’t be the first time we’ve been left holding an unidentified body. How is that grandson of yours enjoying himself?”

  “Kent is sound asleep.”

  Stedman laughed pleasantly.

  “That’s what most of the boys seem to want when they get home on leave. Sleep, beefsteak, and, believe it or not, chocolate-ice-cream sodas. Well, thank you, Mrs. Giles. I’ll pick up Hopkins in a quarter of an hour.”

  Mrs. Giles replaced the receiver. She pressed the button on the house telephone marked “Stable.” She told Hopkins, when he answered it, that Mr. Stedman would call for him at three and what for. She asked him, when he returned, to let her know.

  This stream which despite its gentleness kept moving so inexorably on! Now adding Hopkins. There was nothing which Hopkins could know.

  She turned the water on in the tub.

  CHAPTER 17

  Stedman drove slowly.

  He took in Hopkins obliquely. What, he wondered, were the chances of getting even one drop of value from this well so obviously dried into aridity by the years?

  “Do you sleep in the house or over the stables?” he asked.

  “In the house, Mr. Stedman. Ella, my wife, has a room with Leila. I have one of my own. All are on the top floor. Mrs. Giles thought it better for Leila to have a companion.” A guard, Stedman thought, would be a happier word.

  “Is the house noisy?”

  Hopkins was somewhat affronted.

  “Noisy?”

  “I mean in the way that old houses usually are. Creaks and things. Rattling shutters.”

  “Not River Rest, Mr. Stedman. It was soundly built, and time hasn’t affected it. Why, at nights you could hear a pin drop.”

  Oh, could you now? Stedman filed that away. He was bemused at the professional manner in which an undoubtedly sterling character such as Mrs. Giles could lie once she put her mind to it. He found himself feeling increasingly sorry for her. And very sorry for her grandson. Well, there was no rush. He decided to stretch to its ultimate limit the charitable kindness of delay.

  “Did you hear anything unusual last night?” he asked.

  “No, but then I wouldn’t. I’m a sound sleeper.”

  They drove for a while in silence.

  “What is your own opinion of this?” Stedman said.

  “Ella and I both have no doubt about what is at the bottom of it.”

  “Really? Tell me.”

  “It follows the general law of things.”

  “I don’t think I understand that.”

  “I am speaking of an established environment and an established class. It is similar to chemistry, Mr. Stedman. A proper blend is harmless. But you introduce an improper outside force into the mixture and get an explosion. That is what has happened to River Rest.”

  “The new roomers?”

  “Certainly, sir. Not only Mrs. Giles herself but her every surrounding have established a certain balance; you might call it an atmosphere of life. By doing what she did she not only opened River Rest to roomers; she opened it to attack.”

  Stedman wondered whether the old fellow might not have something there. It was a thought completely foreign to his own presumptions, but certainly it was worth some future consideration. Not much, though. Too lavish an accumulation of the coincidental became absurd: four roomers from a local war plant, a grandson from the South Seas via Washington, all coming to a common focus last night on a corpse from God knows where. Nonsense.

  He drew up at the curb.

  The same unimportant-looking little man still sat at the desk in the morgue’s reception room, and the same white-coated attendant stood near the door. Stedman introduced Hopkins and said they’d take a look now.

  Stedman had no expectations, but he wasn’t overlooking any trick. He had been voted into the job of county prosecutor by never having done so. When they reached the room with the rolling slabs the same business of the wrong body was gone through with, but it got him no farther with Hopkins than it had with the other bunch.

  He hoped Hopkins wouldn’t keel over the way that handsome hulk Wade had. Funny about that. Something funny, anyhow. If the simple sight of a cadaver was going to throw him into a faint why hadn’t the first one? Why wait for the second? Well, som
e people needed the old one-two. But was there any connection in it with Hopkins’ theory?

  The right body was rolled out, and Hopkins stepped closer to the slab to get a better view.

  “Yes, Mr. Stedman. The face is familiar. There is that foreign look about it which struck me. Yes, sometime recently.” Stedman stopped rocking back on his heels.

  “Who is it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know that, but he is a man I’ve seen.”

  “Where?”

  “On the street, I suppose.”

  Blast, Stedman thought, all twittering zanies.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t about the grounds at River Rest?”

  “No, I’d remember if it were. We have so few people who come there. I’m certain it was on the street. I enjoy observing faces while I’m sitting on the box waiting for Mrs. Giles. She doesn’t go out much, but whenever she does go to a store or to the hairdresser’s I like to watch the people walking by.”

  “I wish you could be more definite about this.”

  “I wish I could. It was quite recently. I know that. I suppose it was either yesterday afternoon while I waited outside the exhibition hall during the bond sale, or else this morning at the station. You’ll probably put me down for a muddleheaded old fool when I say that I’ve also a feeling that neither of those places was the one. It was somewhere else.”

  Stedman did put him down for a muddleheaded old fool, and no probably about it.

  He said with repressed resignation, “Possibly it will come to you.”

  “Oh yes. Things often do. After I’ve slept on them.” Stedman decided to be philosophical about it. He considered the advisability of putting a guard on Hopkins. If the old relic had seen the victim there was always the chance that the murderer had observed the old relic observing the victim. That was pretty farfetched.

  “We will go back now,” he said.

  CHAPTER 18

  Stedman wondered as they drove back toward River Rest if any good would come from trying to jog Hopkins’ memory with an association of ideas. He also wondered whether the old fellow might not be one of those thorough nuisances who occur in droves during so many investigations, who imagine or deliberately concoct fictitious knowledge just to shove themselves into the limelight. He could check on that with Mrs. Giles right now.