She straightened up and began to walk round to the front door. Her legs were shaking. It would be easier to go in that way. But as she came to the steps she met the postman coming down, and wished she had scrambled in at the study window, because of course he would talk about Miss Murdle, and she didn’t feel as if she could bear it. Everyone she met all day long would talk about Miss Murdle, and she felt as if she would end by believing she had murdered her.
The postman began at once. “Shocking thing, this about Miss Murdle—isn’t it, miss?”
There was a stone balustrade on either side of the steps. Delia leaned against the left-hand bottom pillar and said in rather a breathless voice, “What happened?”
This was almost too good to be true. Mr. Cobbett’s bright, alert face became extremely animated. He was too humane to feel pleasure in a murderous attack, but he certainly enjoyed talking about it.
“Struck down without an eye to see, and there she might have laid all night, poor lady, if it wasn’t for Mrs. Fletcher coming by to the farm. Almost trod on her, and got such a turn she isn’t over it yet. And whether Miss Murdle gets over it or not, well, there’s no saying.”
Delia gave a gasp. “Isn’t she dead?”
Mr. Cobbett shook his head.
“Not yet she isn’t, but there’s no saying.”
Delia felt as if a cold and heavy weight had been lifted from her heart. Miss Murdle might have been her dearest friend.
“Oh, Mr. Cobbett—are you sure she’s not dead?”
Mr. Cobbett was quite sure. He had it from Barnett, Dr. Kyrle’s chauffeur-gardener, who in his capacity as a St. John’s Ambulance man had assisted in conveying Miss Murdle to the cottage hospital.
“Looked like a corpse and never so much as groaned when they shifted her, but the doctor, he says very decided, ‘Oh, no, she’s not dead,’ he says, and that’s as far as anyone knows.”
Delia went into the house. Breakfast seemed more possible since she had seen Mr. Cobbett.
Half an hour later she came downstairs wearing a warm tweed coat and carrying Antony’s parcel. She went round to the garage, took out her own little car, and drove into Wayshot with the parcel on the seat beside her. If anyone was watching her or the house, well, let them watch and see what they made of it.
Soon after she had turned out of the drive she heard the chug-chug of a motor-bicycle coming up behind her. Once odd things begin to happen, everything seems odd. She felt a passionate dislike for that motor-bicycle, and a cold drop went trickling down her spine. She was wishing she had brought Parker with her, when, large, solid and noisy the Benting bus came up behind, going a great deal faster than its legal thirty miles an hour. She let it pass her, stepped on the gas, and followed it into Wayshot.
An angel bus, a bus of deliverance—only what was there to be delivered from? She looked about for the motor-bicycle, and couldn’t see it any more. The bus had stopped in front of the Blue Lion, and she had stopped in front of the bank, so there was no reason at all why the motor-bicycle should not have stopped too. It might be parked in Parson’s Alley, or round the corner of the lych gate, or behind the grocer’s van, or it might be lurking on the far side of the bus.
She got out of the car with Antony’s parcel well in evidence and disappeared into the bank. Presently she came out without it and drove back to Fourways.
Chapter Seven
Antony, in the character of an aimless loafer, was drifting down a street towards the waterside. Presently a man whom he wanted to see would come along and pass him a word. That would be the first step towards getting home again. It was a pleasant morning with a soft air off the sea, and the sun coming and going between blue sky and a fleece of cloud. A girl in a blue coat and skirt and a little blue hat came out of one of the small houses on the opposite side of the street. She looked at Antony, and, most unfortunately, at that exact moment Antony thought about Delia and smiled. If it hadn’t been for the smile, the girl might have let him go, but the minute he smiled she was sure of him. She ran across the street and planted herself squarely in his path.
“Why—Antony!” she said in a light, surprised voice.
Antony could have murdered her with all the pleasure in life. Her name was Mina van Eyden, and she was a very pretty girl. He had met her and her sister at a dance when he was over in April. Cornelius had introduced him. They had danced, they had sat out, and he had an idea that at some point in the proceedings he had kissed Mina. The sister wasn’t so pretty, but he had liked her. They had all seen quite a lot of each other for a week. A week in April—it was a long time ago.
Really a bit of the most outrageous luck to run across her here. And what was she doing in a street like this anyway?
He made his face as blank as he could and muttered something in Dutch. Mina van Eyden tossed her head.
“What a silly man you are! Did you really think I shouldn’t know you again? I’ve been visiting my old nurse—and this is the reward of virtue!” She was speaking in English as good as his own.
He shook his head, shuffled with his feet, and muttered a clumsy excuse.
“I do not understand—I speak only Dutch.”
A shade of uncertainty crossed her pretty face. She opened her mouth and shut it again.
Antony pushed past her and left her standing. He hoped that she would have enough sense to hold her tongue.
Mina had no sense at all. She was as silly as she was pretty. She went out to a lunch party and told all her friends she was quite sure that she had met the goodlooking Englishman who was the foster brother of Cornelis Roos.
“Antony Rossiter—that was his name. Cornelis introduced him to me at a dance in April—I forget whose dance it was, but that does not matter. He danced divinely. I have never danced with anyone whose step suited mine so well. It was like a lovely dream.”
Barend Roos, who was a cousin of Cornelius, looked at her gravely. He was a big, heavy man with some resemblance to his cousin. He said, “You are talking nonsense, Mina. How could this Englishman be here now?”
She laughed her high, light laugh. Perhaps some day she would marry Barend, meanwhile it amused her to torment him. She had no intention of being taken for granted.
“Perhaps he flew,” she said, and laughed again.
Her sister Letta kicked her under the table and began immediately to tell a really funny story. Letta was little, and dark, and lively. She was not pretty, but she had brains. When they were walking home, she said,
“Sometimes I think you really are half-witted, Mina, and sometimes I think you do it on purpose.”
Mina smiled sweetly.
“And which did you think it was today, darling?”
“I don’t know. Did you really see Antony Rossiter?”
“I really did—Letta, I really did. He had on such shabby clothes too—just like those loafers you see about the docks. And he wouldn’t speak to me, or anything.” She giggled. “Letta, it was quite terribly funny—he pretended he only knew Dutch!”
Letta beat her hands together sharply.
“You shouldn’t have spoken of it—you shouldn’t have told anyone! Do you want to bring him to his death?”
Mina lost a little of her bright colour.
“Of course I don’t! I wouldn’t have said it anywhere else—we were all friends.”
Letta said low and sharply, “And Barend is a friend of the Nazis—don’t you know that? You said it in front of him.”
Mina slipped a hand inside her sister’s arm.
“Oh, Letta, don’t be angry! I didn’t think—”
“You never do!”
“I didn’t mean any harm.” Her colour began to come again. “Don’t be so gloomy about it!”
“Did Barend ask you any more questions? I saw he got you away into a corner after lunch.”
“Do you suppose he wanted to talk about another man?”
“Did he ask you where you had seen Antony?”
“Yes, he did. But it doesn’t mean a
nything, Letta.”
“It doesn’t mean anything to you,” said Letta van Eyden.…
Antony was in Anna Brandt’s kitchen when the men came to arrest him. Fortunately for him the door stood ajar to the front room, and the first thing he noticed was that everything had stopped dead. It was a busy time of day and there had been a rattle of cups and saucers, a jingle of knives and forks, and a great hubbub of talk. And then not a sound. Nobody moved, nobody whispered. For all he could have said to the contrary, nobody breathed. To a man on his sort of job anything out of the way spelt danger. He slipped noiselessly into Anna’s sitting-room, and heard behind him a man speaking in the front room. The voice was the voice of authority, and the accent was German. He didn’t wait to hear what it said. He got out of the window and down the yard.
There was a door which gave upon an alleyway. He was halfway to the street beyond, when he heard a shout behind him, after which he picked up his feet and ran. He had no qualms about Anna, because the faster he ran the better it would be for her. If they didn’t catch him, he didn’t see how they were going to be sure that he wasn’t her nephew Piet. Anna could be trusted to do the best for herself and him. But if they got their hands on him, the Piet story would be bound to break down, and then there would be a firing-squad for Antony Rossiter, and at the very least a concentration camp for Anna Brandt.
The devil of it was that the minute you run you give yourself away. The only thing in his favour was that the dusk was falling. He turned a corner, slowed to a walk, and looked for somewhere to take shelter. He was in the street where he had encountered Mina van Eyden. If ever in his life he wished a girl unkissed, it was Mina. If he hadn’t kissed her, she mightn’t have recognized him. He hadn’t the slightest doubt that she had given him away, not out of spite, or because she didn’t like him or the English, but in some moment of pure prattling folly. Well, he had kissed, and she had told, and that was the end of it, and perhaps of Antony Rossiter too. There was no cover in this street, and there was no turning out of it. It wasn’t very light, but it was a long way from being dark enough to hide a life-sized man in an empty street.
These things flashed on the screen of his mind without taking up any time at all. They were all there at once, and nothing to do about it except to keep on moving as fast as possible without breaking into a run.
But in the end he had to run, for the hunt came round the corner and in the forefront of it what he had most dreaded, a man on a motor-bicycle. He ran for all he was worth, heard the loud, angry voice of authority calling on him to stop, and felt a bullet go whistling past his ear. It struck with a plop against the wall of a house. There were more plops, more bullets. The man was a very bad shot. Not altogether happy on his motor-bicycle either—or perhaps that was wishful thinking. He was level with Antony now, but there was a turning at last, a narrow cut between two houses running down to the waterside, walls to the right and left high overhead, cobblestones under foot. A horrid place to be shot in, like a rat in a runway. He felt a stinging pain in his left arm, but he was through.
He came blinding out of the end of the cut, across a dozen feet of cobbled walk and over the edge of it to the deck of a barge. The place was an inlet from the harbour. It was stiff with barges. If he could get across to the other side he would be all right. A motor-bicycle has its limitations.
He scrambled across the first barge and faced a six-foot jump and, with a sickening check, the realization that the second barge was full of Germans. The language of Goethe and Wagner struck like a nightmare upon his ear. Who said German was a beautiful language? Antony Rossiter—before the men who speak it went mad.
He looked over his shoulder and saw the motor-bicycle standing on the cobblestones. The man who had ridden it was standing too—standing and taking careful aim. This time he would not miss. Well, that was that.
The automatic went off with a loud report. Antony yelled, spun round, and went down like a stone between the barges.
“And you say that this man was your nephew?”
Anna Brandt squared her shoulders. That her life hung on what she said, and on whether the men to whom she said it would believe that she was telling the truth, she knew very well. In that knowledge she lifted her head and looked at them frankly. “Oh, yes, he is my nephew Piet Maartens, my sister’s son. Anyone can tell you that. He has been here before—always comes back when he’s sick or broke, and then off again and not a word out of him till next time.”
The man in uniform looked down at his notes. It was true that there was a nephew who came and went, a ne’er-do-well. He said sharply, “If he was your nephew, why did he run away when the police entered your place?”
Anna’s glance never wavered. She said with a slight shrug of the shoulders, “Because he is a good-for-nothing and he is afraid of the police. Only that morning I caught him with his fingers in my till. I told him then that I should send for the police. You know how it is, Mijnheer, one says that kind of thing, but one does not mean it—not when it is one’s own flesh and blood. I meant to give him a fright, that is all. But when your police came in he thought I had sent for them, and he took to his heels.”
Her manner was calm and assured. He looked at her, and she met the look without a tremor.
He said harshly, “Well, you can come along and identify the body,” and watched to see how she would take it.
She took it calmly. If he was her nephew, and a rogue, that is how a decent woman would receive the news of his death.
“Is he dead, Mijnheer?” And, when he nodded, “Well, it is a good thing my poor sister did not live to see the day. I did what I could, but some people are bad from the beginning. He took after his father. Our family, thank God, have always been respected.”
He turned to the door.
“You will accompany me to the mortuary.”
Later on in the day Barend Roos walked in upon Mina van Eyden and her sister. They were orphans, living with an invalid aunt. Heiresses too—he would not do so badly for himself if he married Mina. Besides he was in love with her. Enough to make him dislike the errand upon which he was come and to put as good a face on it as possible. He could have wished that Letta was not there. She did not like him, and he had a feeling that he could manage Mina better alone. When they were married, his sister-in-law would not be very often in his house—he meant to see to that.
He came into the room and stood for a moment without speaking. Then he said in a tone of concern,
“I am afraid something very unpleasant has happened. Do you remember, Mina, at lunch the other day you said that you thought you had seen Antony Rossiter?”
Mina turned pale. She threw a frightened look at her sister and took a step towards her. As she did so she said in a nervous voice, stumbling and hurrying over the words,
“I don’t know—I can’t be sure—I didn’t really know him at all well—it might have been somebody else.”
“But that’s not what you said the other day.”
“Mina is always seeing likenesses,” said Letta.
Barend frowned. “What has happened is this—someone else must have recognized him, because the Gestapo were informed. They went to arrest him at an eating-house kept by a woman who used to be in the Rossiters’ service, but he got away. They made after him, and there was, I believe, some shooting down by the waterside. He tried to cross on the barges and was shot down. The body wasn’t recovered at once, and now there is a question of identification.” He paused, and added in a concerned voice, “I am afraid, Mina, it is going to be necessary for you to identify him.”
Mina gazed at him in a bewildered manner.
“Oh, Barend, I couldn’t—I couldn’t possibly! You don’t mean that I’ve got to go and look at him!”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to. You see, there isn’t anyone else.”
She took another step away from him, her eyes wide with horror. “There’s Cornelius.”
“Cornelius can’t be found.”
“
How do you mean, he can’t be found? Look for him.”
“The Gestapo are looking for him,” said Barend grimly. “If they find him, I shall lose a cousin. I’m afraid we can’t count on Cornelius. Come, my dear—I will go with you, and it will all be over very quickly.”
All this time they had taken no notice of Letta. She might not have been there. In herself, in her mind and spirit, she was alone. In that April week which seemed so long ago she had given Antony Rossiter a quick, passionate love. It had never occurred to her that he would love her. It had never occurred to her that she would love anyone else. She was not jealous of Mina, or of any girl whom he might love. She only wanted to love him. And now he was dead—
She came back from the thought to the sound of Mina’s hysterical tears. “Barend, I can’t! It would kill me! I have never seen a dead person! Indeed I can’t!”
A high pride rose in Letta. At least she would see him again. She stepped forward and said, speaking slowly and clearly, “There is no need for Mina to go—she would only faint. I knew Antony just as well as she did. If someone is wanted to identify him, I will go with you, Barend.”
On the way to the mortuary she was wondering what she would say. If it was going to get anyone else into trouble, perhaps she ought to say she wasn’t sure. No, that wouldn’t do, because then they would drag Mina into it. She never thought it strange that Mina, who didn’t love Antony and had betrayed him, should be shielded at her expense.
She sat in the car beside Barend and felt a hatred for him that was like a burning fire. That it was he who had given Antony away to the Gestapo, she was as sure as she was of her own hatred. Never while she lived should he marry Mina—she made herself that promise. And some day she would tell him why, and tell him that the van Eydens didn’t marry traitors.
When they came to the mortuary she went calmly in and looked at a dead, drowned face. She looked at it for a long time. There was a disfiguring wound on the temple. It was rather a horrible sight, but she looked steadily and long. She might have been meeting a lover loved and lost. She might have been taking a last farewell. Her small, dark features were icily composed. Her eyelids were cast down. Only the dead man could have seen her eyes. If there was a dangerous spark in them, only he could have told. She said at last in a clear, controlled voice, “Yes, it is Antony Rossiter.”
Pursuit of a Parcel: An Ernest Lamb Mystery Page 8