Four Strange Women (11 page)

He was still using the official motor cycle, and as he happened to meet Biddle half way up the drive, he gave it to him and asked him to park it, he himself going on to the house on foot. As he was in the act of knocking the door opened and Becky Glynne appeared. She looked startled at seeing him, and then said with her usual air of bitterness and only half concealed hostility:—

“Oh, it's you. You want to see father, I suppose.” She turned and went back into the house and Bobby followed her. In the lounge hall Hazel Hannay and Lady May Grayson were standing, and Bobby thought that the glances they gave him were nearly as hostile and doubtful as that with which Becky had greeted him. She now said to Lady May:—“It's stopped raining.”

“I'll run across then,” Lady May remarked. “Are you waiting, Hazel?”

Miss Hannay did not answer. She had apparently not heard. She was staring at Bobby with that strangely intense, absorbing glance of hers, as if she meant to beat down whomsoever it rested on by the sheer force of her dark and strange personality. Becky said to Bobby:—

“I expect you had better wait. Some of the Baird clan are there.”

Lady May said, but in a not very interested tone:—

“They are worried about my photo. It's business with me, people buying my photo. It's what I have them taken for. I never set eyes on the man.”

“I have,” Becky said. “I met him at the ‘Cut and Come Again'. Then he turned up here. They know that, too. I mean the Baird clan. And I haven't the Southpool tennis badge now. I got rid of it long ago.” She continued to watch Bobby with the same challenging and angry air. “I sold it,” she said.

Bobby said nothing. This was quite deliberate on his part. He had a strong impression that silence was the most likely way to get anything from this hostile and bitter girl. She flashed out:—

“I expect most of the others did, too, but I don't know. That's why the badges are made gold, so that we can sell them and get full value. It preserves our amateur status,” she said with deep contempt. “I wish I had the guts to turn pro. and be honest, I would if I were good enough.” The door of the colonel's study opened and he came out with two strangers, a man and a woman; well dressed, typical representatives of the English upper middle class. A little pompously the man said:—

“I need not assure you I am fully content to leave the matter with you. Mrs. Hands and I are both convinced everything possible will be done.”

The woman, who was apparently Mrs. Hands, said:— “Billy never committed suicide. He wasn't like that.” The colonel took them to the door. Biddle had been warned and had brought their car round. They drove off and the colonel came back and nodded to Bobby to follow him. In the study, he said:—

“That was Baird's sister and her husband. They don't seem to have had much to do with him, but they both had the idea that he was in love with some girl. Mrs. Hands said she had heard from mutual friends that Baird's bachelor days looked like coming to an end, only nobody knew who the girl was. Mrs. Hands came up to town to tackle him—she lives somewhere deep in the country—and he didn't deny it. He wouldn't say who it was though, all he said was she would know in good time. But the funny thing she said was that when he told her this he—well, ‘glowed' was the word she used. Odd expression, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” said Bobby; and remembered how once before he had heard that same word used. 

“You heard what Hands said?” the colonel went on, sitting down at his desk. “That he was fully content to leave it to us. That means he is thinking of going to Scotland Yard.”

“Well, sir, they'll only refer him to you,” Bobby pointed out.

“I am not going to call in the Yard,” the colonel said. “I see no reason to, for one thing. If I did, I should have to explain why.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bobby and went on:—“I gather Miss Glynne is inclined to think her name and Lady May Grayson's may be mentioned, that there may be gossip.”

“If I called in the Yard, I should have to admit that,” the colonel said. “It would look as if I believed there might be some foundation for it. I don't and I won't.”

“No, sir,” said Bobby.

“I have spoken to Hannay,” the colonel continued. “I shall leave the whole thing entirely in your hands. You will report progress daily. If at any time you feel you want the Yard's assistance, you shall have it. In that case, I shall resign.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bobby impassively, though inwardly a little startled at finding such responsibility thrust upon him.

The colonel settled himself comfortably in his chair. There was a small fire burning; the room, well lighted, had a bright and cheerful appearance. From its windows, the curtains not yet drawn, a flood of light poured out into the darkness of a night unillumined by stars or moon.

“Now let's hear what you've been doing all day,” said the colonel.

Bobby took out his report. He pencilled a note on the first page and handed it across to his chief.

“Here is my report, sir,” he said.

Colonel Glynne, looking a little surprised, took it and read the note. It ran:—

“I think someone is listening at the window. May I see to it?”

Colonel Glynne read Bobby's note without allowing to appear any sign of interest or surprise. In indifferent tones, he said:—

“Carry on. You had better look first in the spare room at the head of the stairs, on the third shelf.”

“The third shelf? Very good, sir,” Bobby answered, guessing this was said to allow him to leave the room without alarming any possible eavesdropper.

He got up and hurried along the passage and into the lounge hall where Becky Glynne and the two other girls— for Lady May had not yet carried out her expressed intention of returning to Crossfields—were sitting round the fire, talking to each other in low voices. They looked up in some surprise as he went quickly by, out through the front door, and round by the side of the house to where from the study window light streamed into the darkness.

There, crouching against the wall, in shadows made deeper by contrast with the rays the study lamp sent out, he could see the eavesdropper, whose faint movements and light breathing his quick ear had caught. He flashed his electric torch and said:—

“What are you doing there?”

He had come up so quickly and so quietly that evidently his approach had gone unnoticed. With a little gasp of dismay the crouching figure straightened itself and stood up. To Bobby's extreme surprise he saw that it was a woman, and, to his even greater surprise, that it was the woman he had seen singing outside a public-house in Midwych the night before; the same woman who, according to the complaint mentioned by Inspector Morris, had been the cause of some dispute between a constable of the city force and a passing civilian.

“What on earth?” began Bobby, quite taken aback.

The window of the study opened and the colonel looked out.

“Anyone there?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. A woman, sir,” Bobby answered.

“What's she want?” the colonel inquired unemotionally —he seemed a man hard to surprise, Bobby thought. “Better bring her in,” he added, closing the window.

“Very good, sir,” said Bobby, addressing, however, only a closed window. “This way,” he said to the woman.

She made no attempt to protest or resist—to Bobby's great relief, for if there was one thing he dreaded more than another it was having to handle a woman throwing a fit of hysterics. He could still remember from his uniform days the feel of ten very sharp nails scoring ten distinct and extremely painful channels down his cheeks. He could still remember, on the same occasion, the look on a youthful colleague's face as a most ungentle hand twined itself in his curling locks and pulled and pulled and pulled. True, Bobby also remembered the callous advice given by an old and experienced sergeant on the same occasion that still was mentioned with a certain awe in the district where it had happened.

“Dip the end of a towel in cold water,” the sergeant had said, “and apply it to the face hard and frequent.” Good advice, no doubt, but then towels and cold water are not always so immediately available as are finger nails and hairpulls, so that Bobby's relief remained intense as his captive continued to walk sedately by his side. He even had the impression that in some way she was pleased, that this was what she had wished to happen, and he found himself wondering if those faint noises he had heard had been less unintentional than they had seemed. He had left the front door open and they passed through, the woman still walking meekly by his side, and on into the lounge. The three by the fire looked up in a surprised way at his return with this unexpected companion. Bobby was walking straight on, but abruptly the woman turned from his side, made a step or two towards the little fireside group, and then stood still in a curiously intent and eager, even challenging attitude, her deep-set, hollow, burning eyes concentrated in turn on each of the three others with a kind of fierce and passionate energy.

It was the first time Bobby had seen her clearly, for, at the door of the public-house the night before, only her white, thin face had shown in the light issuing from the building. He could see now that she was about thirty or thirty-five, tall for a woman, thin and emaciated, with white, pinched features drawn and fine, her cheeks hollow, the skin stretched tight over the bones of the face, the eyes deep sunk with dark lines beneath, the small mouth tightly closed by thin, bloodless lips. She was dressed almost in rags, in an old coat and skirt that once perhaps had been of good material but now was stained and torn. She wore, too, an ancient raincoat, her shoes were worn out, down at heel, altogether deplorable, her stockings sagged about her ankles and were badly and carelessly darned. She had no hat and her hair showed untidy and uncared for, and a woman has indeed gone far into the depths when she neglects her hair. A deplorable figure; and yet, it seemed to Bobby, puzzled and uneasy, showing nothing of that sad acquiescence in defeat which is stamped upon so many of those for whom society has no place. Rather, he thought, there burned within her a fierce and secret flame of purpose, and he wondered, once more puzzled and uneasy, what that purpose could be.

It was indeed as though this homeless outcast dominated and controlled the scene, as though all these surroundings, these comfortable surroundings of middle-class life, had no importance save as a background for her personality.

Bobby did not attempt to interfere. He was conscious of an impression growing stronger every moment that this scene had a significance that he did not in the least understand, but that, if he could grasp its meaning, would explain many things.

For a brief moment the woman stood there in the same attitude while in startled silence the three by the fire looked up at her. Slowly—or so it seemed, though probably it was but the fraction of a second—the passionate intensity of her gaze concentrated itself upon Lady May; and it was as though Lady May's beauty shrivelled and passed beneath those burning eyes as a thing of no account or consequence. Lady May shrank back in her chair and lifted a hand as if to protect herself, that slim white hand on which still glistened the stone that was not, she said, the real Blue John.

The woman's glance passed on and rested next on Becky, and to Bobby it seemed that just as Lady May's beauty had shrunk beneath it to unimportance, so Becky's air of anger and sullen hostility diminished to the status of a little girl's bad temper. Bobby was aware of an impression that Becky herself felt this, and that she was astonished, knowing that in some strange way she had met in this outcast of the streets a stronger than herself. She made a movement as if to rise and then changed her mind and turned to the other a sulky and reluctant shoulder. Bobby was reminded of a child bewildered by a rebuke it did not understand, and he was sure Becky drew a breath of relief when the stranger looked away from her and at Hazel Hannay.

But Hazel, unlike her two companions, met the other's gaze with one as deep, as questioning, as passionately intent as her own, and it was as equal antagonists that their eyes met, in equal search and equal challenge. Hazel spoke, very quietly. She said:—

“Who are you? What do you want?”

But now Bobby thought it was time to interfere. “Colonel Glynne is waiting,” he said, and touched the woman on the arm.

Instantly there left her all the strange intensity she had seemed to show, all the fierce restrained passion her manner and her bearing had so strangely expressed. She drooped, she veiled her eyes, she made herself seem small and humble and of no importance, and in doing so she intensified tenfold the menace of her presence, the dark and hidden threat that somehow she had managed to convey. In silence she turned to follow Bobby and they went on and along the passage to the colonel's room; she in meek obedience, Bobby profoundly uncomfortable as he tried to attach some meaning to the odd scene he had just witnessed, that had hidden in it, he was convinced, a warning of ill things to come.

Of one thing only his close observation of what had passed had convinced him—that none of the other three had ever before, to their knowledge, seen this wanderer of the streets and yet that she herself knew something of each one of them. Though how indeed could ever their orbits have crossed, the orbit on the one hand of a vagabond singer at the doors of public-houses, on the other those of three prosperous, carefully brought-up young ladies with all that young ladyhood still implies? How could they ever have come into closer contact than that provided by the stray coppers wherewith the well-to-do express their knowledge that they, too, are indeed their brothers' keepers?

Bobby opened the door of the study. The woman went in. Bobby followed her. The colonel was sitting at his desk. She stood silently before him, her hands folded, her attitude humble and pleading. Bobby, staring at her, could hardly believe it was the same woman whose fierce gaze had but the moment before seemed to challenge the place and life and safety of those other three.