Warrant for X

by Philip MacDonald

Sheldon Garrett had slept, and well. There was some colour in his face and last night’s look of gauntness had lessened. He had eaten a large breakfast with pleasure and said so. His cigarette tasted of tobacco. He began upon expression of gratitude and was cut short.

  “The Van Renselers,” said Anthony, “are all right. I went to the Alsace myself. As a telephone man. Nice child; apparently pleasing parents. Excellent atmosphere. Nothing ominous.”

  “Nurse?” said Garrett.

  “All right,” said Anthony. “Nothing like your description. Kid’s on very good terms with her.”

  Garrett crushed the cigarette in his saucer. “It must be the others, then—what’s the name?—Lester.”

  Anthony nodded. “Definitely. But unfortunately, they aren’t staying put. They’re on a motor tour.”

  Garrett sat upright. “Odd time of year,” he said. “Exactly,” said Anthony—and there was a silence broken by a knocking upon the door and a parlourmaid who said: “Mr Pike to see you, sir. He’s in the library.”

  “I’ll come down,” said Anthony; then looked at Garrett. “No. Ask him to come up.”

  They waited, and Pike came, smiling. He said, after greetings:

  “Well . . . we’re on to the Lesters!” He looked at Garrett while he spoke. “They stopped for breakfast at an inn in Cloughton. Inspector Bull of the Yorkshire police interviewed the man and the nursemaid.”

  Garrett sat forward. “What’s the setup?” he said.

  Pike stared. “Beg pardon, sir. . . . Oh, I see . . . well, it seems they must be our people. I spoke to Bull on the phone and got the story direct from him. He’s a good man; very sound. What he says, in brief, is that there’s something odd, as you might say, about the whole—er . . .” He hesitated, groping for a word.

  “Setup,” said Garrett.

  Anthony laughed. “Say it, Pike. Don’t be insular!”

  Pike grinned; then grew immediately serious. “It’s this way, sir: Bull didn’t know what he was looking for because my instructions carefully omitted anything definite; he simply knew, like the other officers all over who got the orders, that under some pretext he must interview the Lesters, if they stopped their journey in his district, and then communicate with me after he’d got all the information he could about where they were going and cetera—a general picture, as you might say, of the family and servants.”

  “And,” said Anthony, “Bull no likee setup. Why?”

  Pike, aware that he was being kept up into his bridle, repressed a fleeting smile. He said:

  “Just coming to that, sir. Bull—and don’t forget he knows nothing—didn’t like the nursemaid!”

  Garrett threw back the bedclothes and swung his legs to the floor.

  “Passport?” said Anthony.

  Pike looked at him. “Seemingly all correct in the name of Jane Matthews, sir. Bull got all the particulars and I’ve started a check.”

  “The little more,” said Anthony, “and how Murch it is!” Pike smiled dutifully. “But, as you can see, sir, the check’s going to take time. Quite a time.”

  Garrett said: “You say this inspector didn’t like the girl.” Pike nodded. “After he’d finished with Lester, Bull made opportunity to talk to the girl and—well, he didn’t cotton to her. Nothing definite, you know, but her manner wasn’t right. He said she seemed a bit too quick to resent police inquiries.”

  “What were the inquiries?” said Garrett.

  “Very tactful, you may be sure, sir.” Pike looked slightly pained.

  Garrett was putting on a dressing gown. “Why’s tact necessary?”

  “Well, really, sir!” Pike’s tone was mildly astonished. “We’ve got to be careful. As it is, Bull had to trump up some question about Alien Registration even to have the right to speak to them. You see, there’s nothing against these people: not yet.”

  Anthony said: “Pike: shake your sleeve!”

  Pike laughed like a small boy, proud of an uncle’s shrewdness. “Well, sir, there’s a funny thing—Bull didn’t like Lester any more than he did the nurse. Not so much, in fact. ‘Superintendent,’ he said to me, ‘if there’s anything rum about that lot, there’s two of ’em in it—Lester himself and the nursegirl.’ ”

  Garrett was lighting a cigarette from a box on the dressing table. He turned and walked across to Pike and stood facing him.

  “And so what?” he said harshly.

  Pike stared. “I don’t quite follow you, I’m afraid, sir.”

  “Mr Garrett,” said Anthony, “is wondering what action the police are taking. What he’d like is to have these people detained.”

  “Yes,” said Garrett. “Hold ’em—and give ’em the works!” He dropped into a chair.

  Pike drew in his breath with a reproving little hiss. “We can’t do anything like that here, sir.” He shook his head slowly, in a movement of absolute negation.

  Garrett stood up suddenly. A half-muffled groan of exasperation escaped him, but no words came.

  “What we have done,” said Pike, “is to issue general orders that the Lester car’s to be watched for and reported on everywhere it goes. When the party stops for any reason, we shall know at once and a watch—though unobtrusive, as you might say—will be kept to see that nothing goes wrong.

  When they stop for the night——” He broke off and glanced towards Anthony, who now stood at the window. “Well, even if there’s no official action, I’ll wager that Colonel Gethryn and yourself will probably be at the place before morning.”

  “Very nice!” said Garrett savagely. “All very nice—unless something happens at some place along some road where there aren’t any policemen! Which doesn’t seem a bit unlikely !”

  An angry light came into Pike’s eyes and in his long face the mouth became a narrow line. He said stiffly:

  “Mr Garrett, this isn’t the United States! Rightly or wrongly we’ve got what you might call a cast-iron legal system. . .

  Garrett said harshly: “I know all about that! But don’t you realize that if somebody doesn’t do something——”

  “Shut up!” said Anthony suddenly. He came from the window and stood looking from one angry face to the other. “Pike, Mr Garrett’s got some cause to be worried, and what’s biting you is that you know it and can’t do anything about it. Garrett, it’s no good snapping at Pike; he’s done everything that can be done—and a bit more! I’ll do plenty of unofficial stuff—but we mustn’t go chasing blindly all over the north of England when our people may be doubling back for all we know. So there’s nothing for it but to wait until they’re set for the night. And there are worse things to put your trust in than Scotland Yard. . . . Now, be good little men and make up!”

  Garrett smiled, the angry light fading from his eyes. “Sorry!” he said.

  Pike’s mouth appeared again. “And me, sir.”

  “Bless you!” said Anthony and surveyed them benignantly. “Dear kiddies!”

  7

  The morning crept on and became noon—and still the sun, as if determined to make fools of the Air Ministry and those unsung necromancers, Zambra and Negretti, went on shining from a sky of impossible blue.

  It shone, with what to Avis Bellingham seemed delightful partiality, through the french windows of Lucia Gethryn’s drawing room and made of that charming chamber a place in which, thought Avis, a man could not be otherwise than happy—not even a man who, like the man with her now, was suffering from an idee fixe and a broken head.

  She did not think this, she found; she knew it, although for ten minutes no word had passed between them and she could not, as she sat at Lucia’s piano, even see her companion.

  From her fingers—long slender fingers whose looks were so much at variance with the controlled strength of their touch upon a keyboard—flowed the last, rippling, sweet yet discordant notes of Ravel’s “Fountain.” She sat motionless for a moment—and then caught her breath as a man’s hands fell upon her shoulders.

  “Tom!” she said—and twisted fr
om under the hands and turned and was caught up by arms whose strength appalled and delighted her.

  She found herself upon her feet, but the arms were still around her. A voice said her name and lips fastened upon her own lips and the world went away.

  Then the lips went away and the world came back and was focused in Garrett’s eyes. She put her hands upon his shoulders and heard herself laugh—a little, shaky sound. She said, in a voice which sounded to her own ears far away:

  “Mr Garrett! This is sudden!” And was immediately horrified at the banality of the attempted jest.

  He smiled down at her, the old smile which she had known when they first met; the smile which made his eyes almost disappear; the smile with which she had fallen in love—how many years ago was it?—and which she had been forced, until she had found its owner so improbably asleep in her London flat, to put out of her mind as completely as she might. He said:

  “It’s time I talked to you. Sit down!”

  He put his hands upon her arms and she found herself again seated upon the piano stool. He said:

  “I haven’t been myself. I’ve been—well, you know how I’ve been. I ought to apologize—and I do! I——”

  Avis interrupted him. “Of course I understand!” she said and smiled up at him and set a hand upon his arm.

  “How could I help but understand!” she said—and got to her feet, closing the fingers of the hand.

  “You see,” she said, “I’ve something to tell you; something I ought to have told you weeks ago!”

  She moved the hand from his arm to his shoulder. She stood very close to him. She said:

  “You mustn’t be angry with me. I——”

  She broke off, abruptly. Her eyes clouded, losing their blueness behind a veil of steely grey. They had seen the thought of her and the bright gleaming of happiness go from the man’s eyes. She said:

  “You’re not listening! You’re not even thinking about—about us! You’re——”

  There was misery in Garrett’s face, and a puzzled wonder. He strove with evil-shaped, misty thought and wrenched his mind back to this room and this woman whom he loved. He said:

  “Darling, forgive me! I was . . . I suddenly had . . .” He struggled painfully for words. “Look here, I know there’s something wrong with this business! There’s a mistake! I—I feel it! It’s something wrong and twisted. There’s something, somewhere, going on now, that we ought to be stopping! I——”

  He cut himself short. He was looking at a back which receded.

  “Avis!” he said—and took a step in pursuit and found himself alone, the sound of the closing door ringing in his ears. . . .

  The grandfather clock in the corner by the french windows came to life. It whirred and struck. Its hands showed the time as fifteen minutes past noon.

  8

  At thirty minutes past noon, a woman entered a sitting room on the seventh floor of the Alsace Hotel. She was laughing at something said to her in the bedroom which she had just left. She was neither short nor tall but most pleasingly in drawing; and of an age which might have been anything between twenty-eight and thirty-one. She walked to the high windows and stood looking out, over the green of gardens and the grey of the Embankment, at the sunlight playing upon the river. Stray rays of this light picked out gleams of gold in her neat dark head and bathed with hard radiance a face which had no reason to fear it.

  A man came into the room and stood with an arm about her shoulder. He was tall and heavy and moved with the sure, easy smoothness which tells of conditioned muscles. His clothes looked like an Englishman’s, but in his cleanshaven face was something pleasantly and essentially transatlantic. He held the woman close and they stood in silence, studying the river and the roofs beyond it.

  “This isn’t London!” said the woman at last. “Oughtn’t it to be foggy? Or at least raining? This is a sort of New York day.”

  The man’s arm tightened its grip about her shoulders. He said: “What time’s Brat coming in?”—and would doubtless have been answered had not the bell of a telephone begun to ring.

  The woman crossed the room and picked up the instrument. She said into the mouthpiece:

  “Hello? Who is this?”

  A man’s voice came along the wire, but it did not answer her question. It was a flat, toneless voice with no accent in particular. It said:

  “Mrs Van Renseler?”

  “Yes,” said the woman. “Speaking.”

  “Mrs Theodore Van Renseler?” The flat voice was insistent, an unpleasing sharpness somewhere concealed within it.

  “Yes,” said the woman. “Who is this talking?”

  “Are you in the sitting room of the suite?” said the voice. “Or the bedroom?”

  Helen Van Renseler looked up at her husband, who now stood close. Her face was screwed up in a deliberately comic—and extremely attractive—expression of histrionic bewilderment. Into the telephone she said icily:

  “If you won’t say who you are I shall hang up!” She winked at her husband.

  “You’d better not,” said the flat voice. “For your own sake!” It went on at some length, while Van Renseler studied his wife’s changing expression at first with amusement, then with curiosity and finally with anger.

  “Give me that!” he said at last and held out his hand for the telephone.

  But the owner of the flat voice had rung off, and Van Renseler spoke into a dead instrument. His wife was frowning. She said:

  “What an extraordinary . . .” and let her voice tail off into silence.

  “What’s it all about?” said Van Renseler angrily; then laughed at himself.

  “Must’ve been crazy!” said his wife; but the frown was still etched into her forehead.

  Van Renseler took her by the shoulders. “Shake the life out of you!” he said. “What—is—it—all—about?”

  He was smiling; but the woman was not. She said:

  “It was a man’s voice. It was sort of—well, beastly! And he said there was a letter in the Railway Guide.” She pointed to a small corner bookshelf. “What do they call the things?

  . . . Bradshaw.”

  She twisted away from her husband’s hands and crossed the room.

  “Some publicity stunt,” said Van Renseler, and followed and stood beside her as she stooped and pulled the heavy Bradshaw, in its stiff leather case, from a shelf. She said, speaking as if to herself: “Page two-o-two-three . . .” and began, with fingers that seemed a little uncertain, to flip over the leaves.

  Van Renseler said: “I tell jou it’s some advertising trick!”

  Helen Van Renseler turned a page—and a piece of note paper, covered with typescript, fluttered to the floor.

  She was upon it before her husband could move. She began to read as she was straightening her body—and as she read the colour drained from her face.

  “My God!” said Van Renseler, watching her. He put an arm about her and felt her body sag against the support. Over her shoulder he read:

  To MR AND MRS THEODORE VAN RENSELER:

  At 12:i5 P.M. today we took charge of your daughter Patricia. If you wish to have her returned to you unharmed, you are to carry out the following instructions to the letter:

  1. Make no communication whatsoever to the police—or to anyone—concerning the situation. (You may be sure that if you fail to observe this instruction you will not see your daughter again.)

  2. Obtain fifteen thousand pounds (£15,000) in one-pound currency notes.

  3. Place this money (which must not be marked) and Mrs Van Renseler’s emerald necklace, earrings and pendant in a plain suitcase.

  4. Mr Van Renseler will bring the suitcase to Cromwell Road station at nine-thirty o’clock this evening.

  5. He will then purchase a ticket and go down to the westbound platform by the stairs.

  6. Someone will approach him within a few minutes of his arrival. This person will say, “Have you a safety match?” which is a signal for Mr Van Renseler to hand
over the suitcase.

  7. The person taking the suitcase will then leave the platform. Mr Van Renseler will stay where he is for five minutes.

  If these instructions are fully and personally carried out, and the contents of the suitcase are found to be in order, Patricia Van Renseler will be returned to you before tomorrow evening.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  WITHIN a stone’s throw of Victoria underground station there is an underground cocktail bar. It is, perhaps, the most pleasant of its kind in London and known only to a sufficient clientele. It is open during the usual hours; it is never empty and desolate, nor full and discomfortable. It is always quiet, unfailingly cheerful and invariably soothing. The liquor it stocks is of the best and its staff are expert craftsmen.

  Here, at seven o’clock in the evening, were some eight or nine regular customers who sat about at tables—and Sheldon Garrett, who stood at the bar.

  He was doing what, out of respect to his battered skull, he should not have done—drinking his third martini. It was a good martini, but to Garrett it tasted like water tainted by the dissolution of a slate pencil.

  The barman watched him with anxious eye. “How’s that one, sir?”

  Garrett sipped and essayed a smile of appreciation. He said the right things in a poor imitation of the right voice—and let his glance flicker towards the archway at the end of the bar.

  Here, in the nearer of two telephone cubicles, Anthony Gethryn spoke urgently into a mouthpiece set immovably three inches too low for comfort. He said:

  “Well, that’s that. But they’ll have to stop somewhere soon!”

  “Yes sir,” said Pike’s voice. “And where shall I call you when they do?”

  Anthony said: “If I’m not here—Victoria-84328—call the Buckingham Theatre. I might take Garrett there. Anything. to get his mind off this hunch of his.”

  Pike’s voice said: “You sound worried, sir.”

  “I am. Garrett’s no fool, and hunches aren’t always to be despised. He says there’s something wrong—and I’m beginning to feel it. . . .” Anthony’s voice tailed off into silence.