I wrinkled my brows. "What lady is that?"
"I forgot to tell you, sir. She's waiting to see you when you get back. That gentleman what's been staying with you—his wife."
"Mrs. Lenden?"
"That's right, sir. They arrived together in your car not a minute or two after we found Mr. Sanders, and long before
[Pg 144]
the doctor came. And the lady knew just what to do, and she and Mrs. Richards bound him up a treat with bandages and all. And then the doctor came, and the police, and Sanders told them what had happened, but I wasn't there then, only Mrs. Richards and the gentleman and his wife. And then we got Sanders up to bed, and a little while after that the gentleman went away in your Morris, sir."
"D'you know where he went to?"
"Yes, sir. He was going to Dover, and he was in a great hurry. I filled up the Morris with four gallons, sir, and lent him a couple o' maps." He paused, and then he said: "The lady's at your house now, sir. Waiting to see you."
I stood for a moment on the platform. The train had steamed away down the hill to Portsmouth, and I was the last passenger to leave. Over the downs the sun was going down; from where I stood I could trace the hogged line of the hills from Butser to South Harting. Beyond that lay my own country and . . . I didn't know what.
I turned to the Siddeley. "We'd better get along back there then," I said. "And pretty quick."
He made that car move faster than she'd ever gone before along the road to Under, and he got there long before I had time to make my plans. The car swung round the gatepost on two wheels and came to rest in the yard. "I'll see Sanders first," I said to Kitter. "If he's awake."
I went into the house by the back. A maid that I met in the passage told me that Mrs. Richards, the housekeeper, was sitting with Mr. Sanders in his room. She had heard that Mr. Sanders was getting on nicely, and had had a little sleep during the afternoon. It was a terrible thing, she said, and she hoped I wouldn't find anything taken, papers or that, and not as if he was a young man, neither.
I went on upstairs. He had a little sitting-room of his own in the servants' wing, with a bedroom opening out of it. Both were furnished very profusely in the Victorian manner, with furniture that I think had once graced the house and had been turned out to make room for older stuff, or newer. An ornately
[Pg 145]
framed photograph of a forbidding old woman who had been his mother hung above his bed; in the sitting-room there was a brightly-coloured oleograph of King Edward and Queen Alexandra at their coronation.
Mrs. Richards was sitting by his bed, and reading the leading article in the
Morning Post
to him aloud, with long pauses of non-comprehension between the sentences. I heard them at it as I came upstairs. He had his own copy of the
Morning Post
every day—a perquisite that I had not dared to curtail when I took over the reins after the war. I don't think he has ever read anything else, except possibly the Bible. Country-bred—gardener's boy, footman, valet, and finally to butler. It makes a difference.
Mrs. Richards got up as I entered, and began to talk. I let her run on for a little, and then moved up to his bedside. I don't know how old he was, but old enough to be very badly shaken by a thing like that. His flannel nightgown had had one sleeve cut off, and the arm was bandaged closely to his body.
I said the usual things that one does say at a time like that. He was as comfortable as they could make him in the circumstances, but he was in for a bad night of it. They had sent for a nurse from Portsmouth, and were expecting her very soon, they said. Sanders himself was pretty cheerful; I was relieved by the way he greeted me. He wasn't very badly hurt. And then I asked him how it happened, and he looked about him for a little without speaking, and finally he said something inconsequent. I divined what he wanted, and sent Mrs. Richards on a vain errand.
He said that he had gone over to my rooms with a bottle of whisky in his hand to fill up my decanter.
"The window was open wide, sir. And there was two men there, one of them just outside the window and one right inside the room. Right inside. They must have come in through the kitchen garden from the lane, and then through the little green gate. The only way they could have come, sir."
I nodded. "Did you recognise either of them?"
[Pg 146]
"That brother of Nitter's was one, sir—the one outside. Not the one that had the pistol, but the other one. I didn't tell that to the police, sir, seeing that it touches the town and thinking that I should rightly tell you before saying anything. But that's one of them."
He had barely given a glance to him. The other man, he said, had rather a fat, white face, and was taller and broader than Nitter. He had a brown soft hat on. He was standing by the safe, and as he entered Sanders saw him pick up something black.
"One of your books from the safe, or something of that, sir," he said. "A black one, and rather fat. Would that be anything important?"
I shook my head slowly. "It sounds like the cash-book. I don't think that'd do them much good."
Sanders had made some exclamation as he entered. The man who was inside the room whipped round at that and made for the window, taking the black packet with him. Nitter was already outside. And then old Sanders, who had lived all his life in Under and found London a confusing place and terribly expensive, acted promptly and with decision. The man with the fat, white face was at the window when Sanders lifted the whisky bottle that he was carrying and flung it straight across the room with all the force of his old arm. It hit the chap on the shoulder, cannoned heavily off his head, and burst against the wall. Sanders ran forward to grapple.
He never saw the man draw his gun. He only knew that two shots were fired, and he was sure it wasn't Nitter. Something went singing past his ear in an explosion, and another crashed through the soft part of his shoulder. "And then," he said naïvely, "I seemed to get one foot in front of the other, sir, and I fell down." He stayed down till Kitter and Watson came bursting in, a minute or two later, and found him on the floor.
"I gave Mrs. Richards the key to the silver cupboard, sir," he continued. "And there's eight dessert-spoons and four table-spoons in the left-hand drawer in the pantry, and a tea-spoon in Miss Sheila's room what she has for her medicine. And I
[Pg 147]
told Arthur that when he lays the table this evening he's to go to Mrs. Richards and she'll give him the silver out of the cupboard, and he's to take it straight back to her when it's washed, and no nonsense. And then there's the tea-pot what was used for breakfast. That will be in the pantry on the shelf, unless Mrs. Richards thought to lock it up with the rest."
"I'll see her about that when I go down," I promised him.
I stayed up there with him for a quarter of an hour longer, listening to his instructions about the silver and the wine. He insisted on giving me the key of the cellars. I could have left him much earlier but—well, I suppose it comes to this, that I was shirking. Waiting in my house was the girl that I had met in Winchester, and I was afraid to go and meet her.
I realised that at last, and went downstairs.
There was nobody about in the mansion. I don't know what happened to Lady Arner that day; I suppose she was keeping to her room. Arner himself was up in Town, and Sheila had gone off early in the morning to visit friends in Hornsea, and was still away. I went out of the mansion into the yard, and crossed over to my own house.
And there was Mrs. Lenden in the sitting-room by the window. She had turned on the reading-lamp by the piano and she was sitting on the window-seat, in the gloom outside the circle of light. I do not think that she can have been doing anything at all, but wait for me.
I crossed the room to her. "Good evening," I said. "I'd have come over before, but I went up to see Sanders. They told me that you were here."
She inclined her head gravely. "They've told you all about it?"
"I think I've probably heard most of it," I replied. "All but one thing, that I don't quite follow. Where's Lenden gone off to?"
She didn't answer at once. "He left a letter for you," she said. "He wanted to do that, because he was a bit worried about taking your car away again without asking. There it is, on the table."
[Pg 148]
I took it up. It came in an envelope, and gummed down. I stood there fingering it for a minute, but I didn't open it at once. And while I was hesitating there, the girl got up from the window-seat and came over to me by the table.
"Do you know what it was that they stole?" she asked.
I moistened my lips. "The plates, I suppose."
She nodded. "That was it. Maurice told me about it last night. The whole thing—everything that he told you. And he told me all about what's happened since he's been here. You've been most frightfully good to us, Mr. Moran. To us both."
I cleared my throat. "That doesn't matter," I said at last, and I was startled for the moment by the strangeness of my own voice.
She shook her head. "But it does matter. You don't see it, but it matters—frightfully. It was because you were so decent to him that Maurice stayed here after the first day when he was ill. If it hadn't been for that, he'd have gone straight back to Russia directly he was well enough to travel. And the plates would have been there by now. And developed and everything. . . ."
I couldn't have found anything to say to her then in any case. But I didn't want to say anything. The less I said the better, until I had heard the whole of what she had to tell me. And so I stood there looking at her dumbly, and she thought that I was embarrassed at her praise, and she smiled a little to make me feel less awkward. Even at such a time she could do that.
"It's because you were so frightfully decent to him about it all that we've got just the one chance to put it right," she said.
I nodded slowly. "I see," I muttered, and stood there fingering the letter.
She went wandering in her narrative, and I didn't dare to recall her to the point. "One reads about spies in books and things," she said absently, "and it all seems—unreal. Not the sort of thing that could possibly happen in one's life. And then—well, it does."
She raised her eyes to mine. "Maurice didn't think about being a spy," she said. "Honestly—I know he didn't. All he
[Pg 149]
ever thought about was the job—the flying, and whether he'd be able to keep his course all right, and how he'd be able to find out what the wind was doing, and what height he'd have to be when he let off the firework. And whether a thousand pounds was the right fee for all that night flying, and what he'd have got for a series of long night flights like that if it had been in England. You see, it's his profession, and it's all he thinks about. It's—it's the only thing he lives for, really."
She paused for a minute, and then she began again: "I know him so well. I've helped him so often with his plans for long flights like that. I used to sit and write down things for him in the evenings when he was plotting his route on maps and things, and I used to make little lists of things that he mustn't forget to tell the mechanics in the morning. We used to do everything like that together. And so you see, I do know. Honestly. He gets so keen upon a job, and he does his job so well for its own sake, that he forgets about the rest of it."
I said something then. I don't know what. At all events, she didn't heed it.
"Do you know what we came over here for this morning?" she inquired. "To get those plates back again. And then he was going to expose them." I think she may have thought from the expression on my face that I didn't understand her. "You know, it's an awfully quick plate, because it was for using at night. It's quite easy to spoil a plate like that, and ruin the picture on it. You've only got to take it out of the case and expose it to the light for ever so short a time, and it's done for. I know, because I used to have a Kodak once, and I spoilt some. And Maurice says it's just the same with plates as it is with films."
I crossed over and kicked the fire up into a blaze. "You were going to do that this morning?" I inquired. It was the shortest, the most non-committal thing that I could find to say.
She nodded. "We talked it all over last night, at Winchester. You see"—she glanced up at me wistfully—"we couldn't possibly let those plates go back to Russia. It's not the thing to do.
[Pg 150]
Maurice saw that for himself, just as much as I did. It only wanted someone to put it to him."
There was a little pause at that. "It wanted you to put it to him," I said. "I can't say that I had much success."
I really think that was a new idea to her. "I suppose that's true," she said. And then she went on to tell me how they had driven over from Winchester after an early breakfast, and had arrived not five minutes after the burglary had taken place.
"It was rotten luck, that," she said quietly. "If we'd only been just a minute or two earlier—this wouldn't have happened. You see, we were going to expose the plates at once—directly we got here. Maurice thought it'd be a good place if we were to lay them out on the window-sill for a minute or two." She turned vaguely towards the curtained alcove. "This window-sill."
"Bad luck," I said.
There was a long silence after that. I broke it at last with the inquiry that I knew the answer to.
"Where's Lenden, then? Did he go off after them?"
She nodded dumbly. "He wanted to," she said, a little pitifully. "He said he couldn't possibly let it go like that, and he said he knew which way they'd be going." She pulled herself up, and stared at me gravely. "I think it was the right thing to do," she said.
"It's a damn risky thing to do," I said practically. "Where's he gone to?"
She had quite recovered her control. "He's told you in his letter, I think. It's somewhere between France and Italy. It's the same way as he went to Russia, when he went out there first of all."
I glanced furtively at my wrist-watch. There was still lashings of time to catch the Havre boat, but by this time he would be in Paris. He had an eight hours' start.