She Came Back

by Patricia Wentworth

  Anne said nothing. Miss Silver went on.

  “I believe that the police are not interested in your movements. I have reason to believe this. It follows that someone else is interested. It is for this reason that I am ringing you up. You will know better than I who this someone may be, and to what extent you are in danger. I felt bound to warn you. If you would care to consult me, I am at your disposal. It would not, I think, be safe for you to come to me, but I would come to you.”

  Anne’s head came up with a jerk. What was she doing, allowing herself to be talked to like this? She must have gone crazy. Quite crazy, because something in her wanted to say,

  “Yes, come, come, come!” She controlled it, as she had controlled her voice, and murmured,

  “I am sure you mean to be very, very kind, but I still don’t know what you are talking about. Goodbye.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Anne hung up the receiver. She had a sense of relief, a sense of having escaped. She had almost said “Come.” It seemed incredible now, but she had wanted to say it. She thought it was the strangest conversation she had ever had-strange in what had been said, and strange in the way in which it had affected her. This woman, this Miss Silver-she spoke as if she knew. Nellie had talked to her in the train. What had Nellie said to her? How much of what Nellie said to her had been repeated to the police? Even through her sense of relief at having got away from the telephone she could feel the urge to see Miss Silver and find out. Then all at once it was what Miss Silver had said that possessed her mind-the hard, unshaded fact that Felix had put someone on to shadow her. She hadn’t the slightest doubt that it was Felix, and that meant… She knew very well what it meant. She hadn’t really won her battle, she had only made him suspect her. He had ceased to press his orders, not because she had convinced him that they were inexpedient, but because he no longer trusted her to carry them out. And when he knew that she had been to Leaham Street, and had stood there looking at Montague Mansions with the name stuck up over the door, he wasn’t going to be exactly reassured. She hadn’t gone in that time, but she might the next.

  Well, she would have to make up her mind. She could throw in her hand, call Miss Silver up now at this moment, and give Felix away… Could she?… She didn’t know who he was. What had she to give away? He knew how to cover his tracks, and every word she said would accuse herself. The plan began to look shaky and shoddy when you got it out in the light of common sense. If Miss Silver hadn’t recognized her, she could have rung up from a call-box and told what she knew about Felix and his appointments behind the hairdresser’s shop which called itself Félise. But what was the good of saying “If”? Nellie Collins used to say, “If if’s and ans were pots and pans, what would the tinkers do?” Miss Silver had recognized her. It was too late-she couldn’t get out that way. She must play for safety-she must get Felix the impression of the key. That would placate him. If by some marvellous piece of luck she could get the code too, she would be in the clear. He couldn’t go on suspecting her after that.

  Of the two dangers she was in, that from Philip had suddenly become negligible. It was Felix who must be placated and reassured at any cost. She knew very well what happened to the useless or untrustworthy tool-it went on the scrap-heap with as little compunction as if it had really been a question of rusty iron or broken steel. The confidence of her mood did not vanish; it took a change of direction. She felt astonishingly easy and certain of herself. She even planned the words in which she would tell Felix that she had walked round by Leaham Street to have a look at Montague Mansions, and if he said “Why?” she would laugh and say, “Oh, I don’t know-it amused me-like looking through the bars at something that would bite if it got the chance.”

  When Philip came home he found her with just that touch of gaiety lighting her up. There was still some time before supper, and he sat down and talked. When she went to prepare the meal he followed her into the kitchen, propped his long figure against the dresser, and went on talking. Without quite noticing how, she found that they were talking about France, and that he was asking her questions, not in any suspicious way but as if the subject interested him, as if it were a meeting-ground. While she flaked fish for a pie and prepared a cheese sauce she realized that for the first time they were conversing, and that Philip, interested and laying himself out to please, could be very attractive indeed.

  Over the meal he began to talk about his work. What was said was nothing, but the fact that he could talk about it at all lifted her up. She was very careful, showing only a friendly interest, asking no questions, except that when he mentioned that he would have to finish some writing after supper she said,

  “Will it take you long?”

  “Not very. I ought to have waited to finish it in office-I don’t really like bringing the code-book away. However- No, I shan’t be long.”

  As the meal went on, her confidence grew. She was on the crest of her wave. When she went to fetch the coffee she put two of the tablets which Felix had given her into Philip’s cup. The tray stood on the dresser. Lifting her head, she saw her own reflection in a small cheap mirror propped on the dresser shelf. For a moment it startled her. Natural colour glowed in her cheeks, her eyes shone, her lips had a new curve. She thought, “I look as if I was in love with him.” And then, “Well, why not? I could be if he wanted me to. Why not?”

  She picked up the tray and went through with it to the living-room. Philip had got out of his chair. He was standing by the hearth looking down into the fire. As she set down the tray, he said,

  “I’ll take my coffee through and finish what I brought home. It won’t take long. If I sit down now I shan’t want to get up again. I’ll come back for a bit when I’ve finished, and then go early to bed. I could sleep the clock round.”

  She had the feeling that everything was playing into her hands. In any other mood she might have wondered why. Tonight it never crossed her mind that things might be going too easily.

  An hour later, when he came back, she was sitting under the lamp sewing delicately at a piece of fine underwear. The light fell softly on peach-coloured satin and écru lace, on the bright steel needle, along a skein of embroidery silk laid out on the arm of the chair. She looked up as he came in, and saw him put up a hand to hide a yawn. From his other hand there swung a length of chain with a key-ring at the end of it. She lifted her eyebrows and said, “Tired, Philip?” and he gathered up the chain into his palm and said, “Dead. It’s no good trying to sit up any longer. I’ll go off.” As he turned he looked back to say good-night. Then he went out and shut the door behind him.

  Anne went back to whipping the lace on to her peach satin petticoat. There was a little clock on the mantelpiece, a bright modern trifle all chromium and crystal. It struck ten with a tinkling chime. It struck eleven. Anne went on sewing for another half hour. Then she got up, folding her work, and went to put it away in her bedroom, not hurrying herself. To anyone watching her she would have been any pretty woman going about the business of tidying up before she went to bed.

  When she had put her sewing away she came back to the sitting-room to straighten the chairs and plump up the cushions, going to and fro without haste and without noise. Then she went back to her room and took off her shoes. In her stocking feet she went along to Philip’s door and tried the handle. It turned easily, as she had known that it would. She stood there with the door a hands-breadth open, listening to Philip’s breathing and thinking that she hadn’t left anything to chance. She had tested the door very carefully and could be sure that it wouldn’t give her away. Not that the creak of a hinge or the click of a lock would wake him now. She thought he would have been safe enough even without the tablets, and with them it would take an air raid to shift him. Yet as she stood there, a very faint compunction stirred at the edge of her mood. It had no strength either to change or to deflect it. It was just there, a quite vague feeling about the defencelessness of sleep. In a moment it was gone, caught up with that sense of everything
going right for her. Tonight, if ever in her life, she had power in her hand. Other people were there to be used-Philip, Felix, Lyndall, Miss Silver-

  She pushed the door wide open and went in. At the dressing-table she switched on a pocket-torch, screening it from the bed. The key-ring lay flung down on the right with a note-case, a handful of coins, a folded handkerchief. It was all quite easy. She picked it up without making a sound and went out of the room, drawing the door to behind her.

  In the study she put on the overhead light and sat down to the table. The locked despatch-case was on her left. She pulled it down across the blotting-pad, fitted the smallest of the keys, and threw back the lid. Right on the top was her piece of unbelievable luck-the code-book. She took a long breath, savouring her triumph, full of that sense of power.

  CHAPTER 28

  Philip Jocelyn did not go directly to his own room at the War Office next morning. With the case he had taken home the night before, he made his way along a number of corridors. In the room he entered, Garth Albany sat writing. He looked up, and received a slight shock. Philip never had much colour, but this morning he looked ghastly-skin bloodless, face drawn, every line deepened and emphasised.

  He said, “Well?” and was rather horrified when Philip laughed.

  “Is it? Perhaps it is. We’ll see-unless she’s been too clever for us. I was doped last night.”

  “What!”

  Philip gave a casual nod.

  “Undoubtedly. Slept like the dead. I’m not really out of it yet, in spite of cold water and the very excellent breakfast coffee which was provided. It’s a pity Miss Annie Joyce is an enemy agent, because she’s a very good cook. Anyhow she drugged me last night, and what she did after that I am not in a position to say. You’d better get your fingerprint people on to the contents of my case and my keys. I’ve taken care not to touch them, or anything inside or outside the case except the handle. Of course she may have worn gloves, in which case she’s done us down, but I hardly think she’d do that-not in the domestic circle.” He set the case down and dropped a knotted handkerchief on Garth’s blotting-pad. The shape of the keys showed through the linen, the key-chain clinked. With a brief “See you later,” he turned and went out of the room.

  Garth Albany felt relief. A beastly business, and Philip was taking it hard.

  At a little after one o’clock Lyndall Armitage was in the. drawing-room of Lilla Jocelyn’s flat. It was a charming room, L-shaped, with windows looking east and west so that it caught both the morning and the evening sun. The two west windows faced you as you came in at the door, but the one east window was out of sight round the corner of the L. Lilla’s piano stood there, and at the moment in which the bell rang Pelham Trent had just lifted his hands from the keyboard and swung round upon the piano stool.

  Lilla said, “That was lovely.”

  If Lyndall had been going to speak, the sound of footsteps in the hall put it out of her head. Her heart beat a little faster, and without meaning to do so she found herself on her feet, moving towards the part of the room which faced the door. Because it was Philip’s step in the hall. She knew it too well not to recognize it now. Not even to herself would she admit how everything in her quickened at the sound. She ought to have stayed with the others-she oughtn’t to have come to meet him-there wasn’t any reason why she shouldn’t come to meet him. These thoughts were all in her mind at the same time, not very clearly defined, and not taking up any time at all. She was shaking a little, she didn’t quite know why, and her thoughts were shaken too. She passed out of sight of the two by the piano, and then the door was opening and Philip was coming into the room. Something came in with him- she didn’t know what it was. It was like cold air coming into a heated room. But the cold was not physical; she felt it in her mind, and she saw it in Philip’s face.

  He shut the door behind him, stood back against it, and said,

  “Anne’s dead.”

  Lyndall drew in her breath, but she made no sound. It was Lilla who said, “Oh!”

  And with that, and with the sudden movement and stir in the part of the room that was out of his sight, it came to Philip Jocelyn that they were not alone. He stood stiffly where he was for a moment. Then he stepped away from the door, opened it, and went out, shutting it behind him. Before Lyndall could follow him he was gone. The clap of the outer door came back to her across the hall.

  CHAPTER 29

  It was just a little earlier than this that Chief Detective Inspector Lamb and Sergeant Abbott emerged from the lift and rang the bell of No. 3 Tenterden Court Mansions, a high-sounding name for the block of flats put up at the corner of Tenterden Gardens just before the war. Of the gardens which gave the curving crescent its name there remained no more than a strip of shrubbery, trodden flat since the removal of the railings for salvage, and a few old leafless trees, one of which had been damaged by a bomb splinter. Two of the houses in the middle of the row were empty shells, but the flats were intact.

  When Sergeant Abbott had had his finger on the bell for something like a minute he shrugged his shoulders and looked round at his Chief Inspector. They could hear the bell ringing in an empty space, but from inside the flat no other sound struck on the ear.

  “No one there, sir.”

  Lamb frowned.

  “She may have cut and run, or she may have slipped out for a bit of shopping. Go along down and ask the porter whether he’s seen her go out.”

  “And if he hasn’t?”

  Lamb considered this. He had his search-warrant, but he didn’t want to make more talk than he could help. He didn’t want to bring the porter into it. No harm in asking whether he’d seen Lady Jocelyn go out. If he had-well, he’d have to think about that.

  When Abbott came back to say that the porter hadn’t seen Lady Jocelyn all the morning the Chief Inspector frowned again, dipped into his pocket, and produced the latchkey with which he had been furnished.

  “Fact is,” he said, “I’d have liked it a deal better if Sir Philip had come along and let us in himself-it would have been more regular to my mind. I suppose he’s got his feelings when you come to this kind of a job. Well, there you are- in we go!”

  Frank Abbott put the key in the lock and opened the door. They came into a small empty hall with a door to the right, and another facing them. Both doors were half open, as if someone had been going in and out between them, easily. But the flat felt dead empty.

  They went directly into the drawing-room. A little pale sunshine slanted through the windows. Everything was neat, everything was in order. The chairs were undinted, the cushions plumped up. But the grate had not been done. The charred shell of one of last night’s logs lay upon a bed of tumbled ash. Frank Abbott cocked an eyebrow at it.

  Lamb grunted, swung round, and went out across the hall to the other open door. It stood a little wider. No need to touch it. No need to cross the threshold in order to find Lady Jocelyn. The room was Philip Jocelyn’s study. She lay in a heap beside the writing-table, and both men knew at once that she was dead.

  After a brief pause Lamb stepped inside and crossed the room. The woman he had come to arrest would never stand her trial. Whoever she had been, or whatever she had done, she was no longer here. The body lay upon its face with the table telephone dragged down from the desk and lying beside it. There was blood on the bright hair, and on the plain drab carpet.

  Lamb bent over her without touching anything.

  “Shot from behind at close quarters,” he said. “Looks as if she’d been trying to reach the telephone. Well, we’ll have to ring up the Yard. We can’t use this.” He indicated the fallen instrument. “See if there’s an extension in a bedroom.”

  There was-a smart pale blue affair, looking oddly incongruous beside Philip Jocelyn’s unmade bed, with his shoes standing about, his brushes on the dressing-table, the general air of a man’s room in disorder.

  Frank Abbott came back and reported.

  “The extension is in his room. The bed has
n’t been made.”

  “Bed?”

  “Single. She was along here, next to the drawing-room. Her room has been done-bed made, everything tidy.”

  Lamb gave the grunt which meant that he was thinking.

  “Looks as if it had happened first thing. He goes about half-past eight, I take it. Looks as if she’d done her room but hadn’t had time to do his-he said they had no help. I wonder what about breakfast.”

  They went together into the small, brightly painted kitchen.

  On a clean checked table-cloth stood the remains of a meal- cups which had held coffee, coffee-pot and milk-jug, rolls and butter untouched and uncut.

  “Looks as if nobody had had much appetite for breakfast. Coffee-what’s the good of that to start the day on? Give me a rasher and a good strong cup of tea!”

  “Who’s going to give you a rasher, sir?”

  “I know, I know-there’s a war on. But I take my bacon ration out at breakfast and try to forget about it. Well, the boys will be here soon. Something queer about it to my mind-breakfasting on a cup of coffee.”

  “Well, he’d been drugged, and she-well, whoever she was, she’d been living in France, and a cup of coffee and perhaps a roll would be what she was used to.”

  Chief Inspector Lamb looked heavily disapproving.

  “Then you don’t want to look much farther for why France came out of the war. Coffee! How do you expect men to fight on coffee?” Then, as the telephone bell rang sharply, “Who’s that, I wonder. Go on and see!”