Four Strange Women (20 page)

It was about the only object in the room that was not strictly business-like. The phone, the filing cabinet, the shelf of reference books, the basket trays for letters answered and unanswered, all alike were such as can be seen in almost every city office. The interest Bobby showed in the photograph and that he did not attempt to hide, apparently did not attract De Legett's attention. Possibly he was used to seeing his visitors' eyes drawn to that presentation of feminine beauty, a little out of place in this efficient looking office. Evidently he had hoped that Bobby's call had some connection with a business proposition and he appeared both very surprised and a little bit disappointed when Bobby began to explain his errand.

“I saw something about it in the papers,” he agreed. “A man named Baird, wasn't it? Poor chap. Hard luck.” He paused and Bobby had the impression that he was contrasting Baird's luck with his own, and that this contrast made him more sympathetic to the other's tragic fate. “Some chaps do seem to get it in the neck, don't they? I suppose we can't all be—” He paused then and did not finish the sentence, and Bobby felt convinced he had been about to say ‘—like me', and then had felt that seemed too much like gloating over the contrast he was drawing inwardly between what had happened to Baird and his own good fortune.

“I thought perhaps there were one or two points you might be able to help us in,” Bobby said.

“Me?” exclaimed De Legett looking now very bewildered. “Good lord, how?”

“I think you knew Mr. Andrew White?”

“I don't think so, not that I can remember,” De Legett answered, looking more and more puzzled. “Who is he? In what connection? Client, do you mean?”

“He was the head of a big firm in the food products line,” Bobby explained. “He was found dead in a cottage in Wales—”

“Oh, of course,” De Legett interrupted. “I remember that all right. Made quite a fuss at the time. No one could make it out. But we had nothing to do with his firm— quite out of our line of country. I never met him personally either. He was in a much bigger way, you know.”

“There were certain features in the case that are curiously like some of those in the Baird case,” Bobby continued.

“Yes. Well?” De Legett said, with the same air of untroubled but friendly interest. He added, as Bobby did not reply at once:— “I haven't seen much about Baird's death. I just skimmed it through. Poor blighter. The paper was trying to hint at murder, but it sounded to me more as if he had done it himself. I remember about Andy White though. If you had said Andy White instead of Mr. Andrew White I should have known at once who you meant. He was always called Andy White. I happened to be in the neighbourhood just about the same time, and I remember being asked if I had seen anything of him. I shouldn't have known him if I had, and anyway I had no idea he was hanging about there.” Bobby found himself wondering whether the frank and ready admission was a proof of innocence or whether it had been made because of a guess that the fact was already known and could not therefore be denied.

“Was there any connection, private, business, in any way whatever, between your presence in the locality and Mr. White's?”

“Good lord, no. I've told you I didn't know the chap from Adam. Look here, what's all this about?”

He still appeared to be quite unperturbed, though a good deal puzzled. His manner was perfectly friendly, too; that of a man confidently expecting a reasonable and satisfactory explanation to questions which he did not at the moment understand.

“It's merely this,” Bobby explained. “I am trying to clear away the non-essentials so as to get at what really counts, if I can. I would like to say, please, with all the emphasis I can, that I've a reason for my questions, even though you think I'm being impertinent. Impertinent in the sense that they may prove not—pertinent, is likely enough. But not impertinent in the sense of being mere cheek. So I hope you will answer them as fully and freely as you can. If you will give me that help, it may be a very great help indeed.”

“Well, fire ahead,” De Legett answered, “though I haven't the foggiest what you're getting at.”

“Mr. Leonard Glynne was with you at that time?”

“That's right, but what on earth?”

Bobby lifted a hand to check him.

“What was the reason for your meeting?”

“Business,” answered De Legett briefly. He was keeping his temper admirably, but a faint note of impatience sounded now in his voice, to remind Bobby that friendly and amiable as so far he had been, his temper was beginning to wear. “Why ask me? Why not ask Glynne?”

“For one thing, you are in London and Mr. Glynne lives in Midwych.”

“He has a place up by the Edgware Road somewhere,” De Legett answered. “He's often there.”

Bobby received this information with no sign of interest, even though it startled him, for the Edgware Road vicinity was beginning to acquire for him a sinister significance. “Can you give me the address?” he asked.

“Well, I think you had better ask Glynne himself,” De Legett answered. “I'm not even sure now where it is exactly—though I daresay I've got a note of it somewhere. Still, I think you had better ask him.”

“Who was your business with?”

“Well, what do you suppose? I've just told you that's why Glynne and I met.”

“You mean it was business between your two selves? But why meet at an hotel in Wales instead of here in your office, especially if Mr. Glynne has a London address, too?”

“It was more convenient, that's all. I run up north fairly often to see my principals and nose around for any chance there may be of a new agency. Glynne knew I was in Liverpool for a day or two and knew it wouldn't be much out of my way for me to stop off where he said. He was helping a Mrs. Frayton run a tennis tournament on the Welsh coast at the time, so it was handy for him, too.”

“Mrs. Frayton? Did you say Mrs. Frayton?” Bobby asked.

“Yes. What about it. Why?”

“I remembered the name, that's all,” Bobby answered slowly, while to himself he wondered what the meaning might be of the strange way in which this case seemed ever to go round and round in circles. “There was a big jewellery robbery, wasn't there?” he asked.

“Yes, that was her,” De Legett agreed. “I hope you don't think that's what Glynne and I were up to?”

He chuckled at what he evidently thought a good joke, and Bobby laughed, too.

“No, I don't think that had occurred to me,” he said pleasantly.

“As a matter of fact,” De Legett went on, “it was her chauffeur—chap named Reynolds. Got away with it, too. Nothing more ever heard either of him or the loot. I shouldn't have thought it possible when it was perfectly well known who he was. Mrs. Frayton offered a whacking big reward, too.”

“It's certainly strange the way he vanished,” Bobby agreed. “Did you and Mr. Glynne leave together?”

“No, I came on to town and he went back to his tennis. Miss Glynne, his sister, you know, she's a tip topper, was competing. He wanted to be there when she came on in the finals. It was an idea for a new gadget for preventing ice forming on aeroplanes he wanted to see me about. The idea was for me to put him in touch with some of my principals to help get it launched.”

“Did you do that?”

“It hasn't come to anything as far as I know. I believe he's working on a new dodge now. Something about retractors. Besides, he seems to have got hold of backers on his own, plenty of capital now to judge from what he's spending. More than he'll ever get out of it, if you ask me. My own idea is that what he is really keen on is doing something good that'll get him back into the R.A.F. They threw him out over some bloomer he made and he wants to wangle a come back.”

Bobby pondered this information. Apparently Leonard Glynne had recently, since at least the death of Andrew White, secured control of at any rate a fairly large sum of money. Also, about the time of that death, Becky Glynne had been somewhere in the neighbourhood. And, if De Legett's story was correct, it was Leonard who had arranged for that meeting in Wales, so near the scene of the tragedy.

Did those facts, Bobby asked himself very gravely, add up to anything significant?

He felt that he had learnt as much as he was likely to, for the present at least, from De Legett, and that now further information must be sought from Leonard Glynne himself. And that young man was little likely to show himself as friendly and as amiable as had done—so far—Mr. De Legett.

“There is just one thing more,” Bobby said with some slight hesitation. “I understand you are engaged to Lady May Grayson?”

“Good lord, what put that into your head?” De Legett gasped.

“You have her photograph there?” Bobby pointed out.

“Oh, that,” De Legett said. “Well, why not? Easy to look at, isn't she?” He chuckled as if at some secret joke that he found very amusing. “Yes, that's her photo all right, but I've never met her in my life and if you want to know why that photo's there, you'll have to do a bit of guessing. If you guess right I'll stand you a drink any time you come around again.”

“I'm not a bit of good at guessing,” Bobby said. “In the police, they don't like guesses either. You are engaged?”

De Legett, who had swung round in his swivel chair to grin at Lady May's photograph, swung back again to face Bobby.

“Yes, I'm engaged. I expect I shall be married soon,” he said, and as Bobby watched he seemed inwardly to glow, as though the wonder and the glory of that thought had kindled within him a flame of deepest joy.

But Bobby stared at him with a kind of horror, with such a deadly, secret terror as he had seldom known. In a voice he could not keep quite steady, he muttered:—

“Will you tell me who the lady is?”

“Oh, no,” De Legett answered, though without any show of resentment, at a question that might well have seemed outside all discretion. “Oh, no, no one knows that but us.” He paused and from his inner joy there bubbled up a laugh of such utter and complete happiness as it has been the lot of but few to know. “Why do you want to know?” he asked gently.

“Because,” Bobby said, and it was as though the words came from an impulse and a will that were not wholly his, “because I think the answer means your life or else your death.”

But the other seemed quite unmoved.

“That's right,” he said with the same bubbling laugh of wondering happiness, “it's life and death to me all right. Life or death,” he repeated, and with those words still sounding in his ears, Bobby took his leave.

The first thing Bobby did after leaving the office of Messrs. Perceval and Wilde was to make certain arrangements with one of those itinerant photographers often to be seen in London streets, or, in the summer, on the promenades of seaside resorts. After that, he put through a trunk call to Midwych in an attempt to get in touch with Leonard Glynne. The answer, when it came, was from his sister, Becky. She said curtly that Leonard was away, possibly in London, possibly elsewhere. She did not know his London address, no one at home knew it, he had never said what it was, and, anyhow, and very coldly, what was the meaning of such an extraordinary request?

Without waiting for a reply, Becky rang off, and Bobby looked more thoughtful than ever as he, too, hung up. He was aware of a very strong impression that he would get no help from Becky, though in view of the apparent bad feeling between brother and sister, he found himself wondering if it was Leonard or someone else about whom she was troubled. For every tone of her voice had made it plain that she was afraid, afraid of Bobby's activities. He felt sure she would do all in her power to thwart or hinder them.

“But the thing's gone too far,” Bobby reflected grimly.

For the next very headachey half hour or so he was busy with Bradshaw, looking up the trains to Cardiff and endeavouring to work out various connections. After that, he just had time to call at the nearest public library where an erudite, astonished, and obliging librarian finally produced for him two books. One was entitled
Tales of Old Paris
and the other
Legends of the Incas
.

“You may find what you want there,” said the librarian; and Bobby thanked him, and, by special permission, took the two books away with him to read later.

Next he went on to the little Mayfair hat shop, closed by now, and, taking his fiancée, Olive, to a near-by restaurant, talked over with her his perplexities, his doubts, and his fears.

“It's an ugly case,” he told her, “and I'm scared where it's leading, but I've got to talk it over with someone or bust. And there's only you. But for you, I'm all on my own. Colonel Glynne doesn't seem to want to hear anything about it. I'm to go to the Public Prosecutor's office or Scotland Yard if I want help—but only if I have to, sort of last extremity. And I'm not quite there yet, though it's getting to look more and more like it every day.”

So he talked and talked, and put forward theories, and showed they were absurd, and put forward more theories, and disposed of them, too, and Olive listened, and said nothing, but thought the more, till she, too, seemed to glimpse behind his words a horror greater than any she had ever dreamed.

The meal ended in silence and then he took her back home and leaving her there hurried on to his own rooms for a few things he wanted. He had run it rather fine, but by taking a taxi he was in time to catch the night train for Cardiff, finding himself about nine the next morning, after a dispiriting breakfast in a restaurant only half awake, hopelessly lost in a busy Cardiff suburb. A policeman appeared presently and directed him to his destination, a small but prosperous-looking shop with well-stocked, well-arranged windows displaying chocolates, chewing gum, cigarettes and so on. Above was the name ‘Reeves', and the shop was, he thought, well placed, at a corner where traffic routes intersected and with two large cinemas near by. He stood for a moment, looking at the shop windows, noting their contents, glancing, too, at the windows of the living rooms above, and then as he was about to enter he saw that someone was also looking at him, through the laden shelves of chocolate boxes and boxes of cigarettes that formed the background of the shop window. Who it was he could not tell, for he had but the merest glimpse of a watchful face instantly withdrawn, but it was with uneasy thoughts in his mind that he pushed open the door and entered.