Four Strange Women (25 page)

“Why not?” persisted Bobby. “What exactly is going on?”

“Petting party, explained Evers simply. “Mind you, I ain't supposed to know. Told very special I was to keep my eyes in the boat. Told if I was caught peeping, it would be all the worse for me. Got a way of saying it, too, that sort of sends a chill up your back like going into the ring against a bloke a stone or two heavier than you and a better record. But there, Mr. Owen, sir, you know what human nature is, I don't deny as I've had a peep or two— Lumme, talk about your lady Godivas. Ain't in it, she ain't.”

“Do you mean?” began Bobby.

“I do, said Evers. “I remember the boys took me along to a strip tease act in New York after I won my first fight there and had been matched up for a second I would have won, too, only for a bit of bad luck in not noticing a left hand swing coming along. Only the strip tease act—well, Sunday school it was along of—” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder towards the closed doors behind. “Pay's good and nothing against the law in being like the lilies of the field, if so be your tastes is such. Mind you, down in Hoxton where I live they wouldn't stand for it, but of course West End gentry's different.”

Bobby asked one or two more questions. The details he received he found sufficiently surprising, though no man can serve for long in the police forces of London without learning much of human depravity. But it did appear that Evers was very likely right in claiming that there was no actual breach of the law. The whole thing appeared to be no more than the breaking through the ordinary restraints of decency and civilization by those ancient animal instincts that lie deep hidden in man, inherited from his brute ancestry. A sink of corruption certainly, and there might be legal means of dealing with it and clearing it up, but for that greater authority than he possessed would be needed and greater knowledge, too. Perhaps the Home Office would know what to do, but he certainly did not.

“It's the young 'uns she wants,” Evers said suddenly. “She likes to get the young 'uns here.”

“Who is she?”

“There's times,” Evers answered slowly, “I think she's the devil himself turned woman, and a way of speaking so sometimes you feel there isn't nothing you wouldn't do if she asked you in that voice of hers that curls all round your innards like, and then there's times you feel you would rather have truck with a whole bag full of vipers than her. It's she as does it all—and it's the young 'uns she wants, it's the young 'uns she likes to get here.”

“Who is she?” Bobby asked again. “What is she like?”

“I've never seen her, only heard her talk,” Evers answered. “I get my orders by post—typewritten, they are —and if she is here when I get here to open up, then she talks to me through the door curtains.”

“But you see everyone when they get here, you admit them all,” Bobby said.

“That's right,” Evers agreed, “but I've got no way of telling which of 'em is her.”

“Can't you tell by her voice?”

Evers shook his head.

“Some of 'em speak in a disguised sort of way when they give their fake names and their numbers,” he explained, “and then some of them come together and only one speaks. No, I've no idea which is her though sometimes I've thought that if I did, it would be a sort of day's good deed to wring her neck for her. But the pay's good and you can't quarrel with your bread and butter, not in these days.”

“Then you can't give me any idea how to identify her?”

“No, sir, honest I can't,” Evers declared earnestly. “I don't even know for sure it is a woman, only by going by her voice.”

“What about her letters? aren't they signed?”

“Oh, yes, but only in typing same as any one could do. Jinnie Reynolds the name is, and an address in Cardiff, only they don't come from there, being always posted in London.”

Plainly the former heavy-weight boxer knew no more and plainly, too, a fear had been put upon him that smothered in him any desire to investigate further. Then, too, when Bobby hinted that he would like a chance to see for himself what was going on behind the closed door leading into the main hall, a door screened further by heavy curtains in black, entangling velvet, Evers protested that he had been paid to carry out a duty he must perform to the best of his ability.

“My job is to stop any one as isn't their own lot,” he said. “You wouldn't ask me to go against my job, Mr. Owen, sir, now would you? I've never double-crossed any one yet, once I've took their money, not even when I was in the boxing game, I never did. You wouldn't want me to start now, sir, would you?”

It was quite a pathetic appeal and as a matter of fact Bobby did know that Evers even if his ethical ideas were slightly confused on some points, had always shown himself loyal to his employers. 

“Oh, well, that's all right,” he said, "if that's how you feel about it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Owen, sir,” Evers said gratefully. “I know you run straight, and I knew you wouldn't want another bloke to go crooked. Besides,” he added, as an afterthought, “you wouldn't see nothing except a mixed bathing show without the bathing—or nothing.”

“Especially nothing, apparently,” said Bobby, and after ascertaining from Evers that he had never thought of keeping any of the typed notes he received and extracting from him a promise that for the future he would preserve them for inspection, Bobby retired.

Outside, by the open gates admitting to the forecourt, he found Inspector Marsh looking very worried indeed.

“You were right enough,” he said, “though I didn't believe you at first, but dynamite this job is sure enough. Dynamite. You can handle it on your own from now on as far as I'm concerned.”

“Why? what's happened? what do you mean?” Bobby asked.

Marsh leaned nearer. In a hoarse and cautious whisper, as though he feared even the night might overhear and tell, he said:—

“Hannay.”

“Hannay,” repeated Bobby, puzzled.

“I saw him plain,” Marsh insisted in the same hoarse and careful whisper. “He stopped to light a cigarette and I saw him plain, plain as I see you. If I hadn't dodged quick as I knew how, he would have spotted me, like as not.”

“What did you dodge for?” Bobby asked. “Why didn't you ask him what he was up to?”

“Me?” gasped Marsh, quite overwhelmed at the idea of a mere inspector asking General Sir Harold Hannay, with half the alphabet after his name, chairman, too, of the Wychshire Watch Committee, ‘what he was up to?'

It was, however, less Sir Harold of whom Bobby was thinking than of his daughter, Hazel, tall, dark and haughty, with those searching, passionate eyes that told of her southern ancestry. Was it to seek his daughter, was it because he knew or suspected something concerning her, that Sir Harold was here? could it be that Hazel was the unknown ‘she' whose identity Bobby desired above all things to discover, of whom Evers had spoken with such strange terror in his voice? Abruptly Bobby asked:—

“Did Sir Harold go inside the hall?”

“He came along immediately after you had gone in,” Marsh explained. “He stood looking at the front door and then he went round to the back along that narrow passage between the hall and the fence, and I lost him. I couldn't follow too closely or he would have spotted me. When I got round the corner into the back yard, there wasn't a sign of him. He might have gone through into the street or he might have gone in by the back door. I tried it but it was locked. Of course, he might have had a key. I don't know. No one came when I knocked. What's it all about, anyhow? what did you find out?”

“Nothing much,” Bobby answered. “Unluckily ‘Batter' Evers was on guard. You know—the old heavy-weight boxer. He spotted me at once and that did for my chance of getting inside. He sticks to it there's nothing going on but a specially hot ‘petting party', as he calls it. According to him it's nothing but a lot of young Mayfair decadents amusing themselves in their own fashion.”

“Not a police job at all?”

“Seems not,” agreed Bobby gloomily.

But Marsh was looking very relieved.

“That explains Sir Harold,” he said. “Got wind that Miss Hannay's mixed up with it and wants to yank her out.”

“Yes, I thought just possibly it was Miss Hannay,” Bobby agreed again.

“Well, then,” said Marsh, more and more relieved, “not our business and we can drop it. Eh?”

Bobby shook his head.

“The petting party may be only a blind,” he said; “only the meet of the hounds, and the kill yet to come.”

“I don't know what you mean, what kill?” Marsh said uneasily. “Anyway, we know what Sir Harold was here for, he's not the only papa wondering what the girls and boys are after. You can wash him out.”

“I suppose so,” Bobby said, but remembered how Sir Harold had looked, what discomfort, amounting indeed to terror, had shown in his eyes when he had been about to enter a room at Colonel Glynne's where were his daughter and her friends.

In Bobby's memory that had not been the look of a father angry or suspicious of a daughter's conduct, something stranger far must have caused that terror to show so plainly in eyes that on so many battlefields had watched with calm the angel of death pass to and fro.

“I'll have to tackle him,” Bobby decided, “but if he thinks his daughter may be mixed up in it, he won't say a word. He is the type who might give her a revolver and tell her to use it, but he would never say a word in public.”

He reflected, too, that he had no actual proof to offer that Sir Harold had actually been there that night. He himself was certain Marsh had told the truth, but suppose Sir Harold chose simply to deny it. Doubtful, more than doubtful whether Marsh could be trusted to stick to his story, if it were seriously challenged. Bobby was not much inclined to think the good inspector was quite the type to stand up to a man in Sir Harold's position. After all, the bare possibility of a mistake did exist. Marsh might have been deceived by some chance resemblance. Not that Bobby himself believed that for one moment, but the existence of that possibility would certainly destroy the validity of Marsh's evidence.

Bad luck all along the line to-night, Bobby told himself bitterly. Why had it to be Evers guarding admission to the hall, Evers, who knew him so well, when it could so much more probably have been someone who had never seen him? Why had Sir Harold chosen to make his appearance at the very moment when Bobby was inside the hall? A few minutes earlier or later, Bobby reflected, and he would have been able to stop and question him. No doubt Marsh who knew so much less of the affair and its strange implications, was hardly to be blamed for his hesitation, but for Bobby it might have been a chance, now lost, to obtain valuable information.

“No good hanging about here any longer, is it?” suggested Marsh, evidently longing to be off bedwards.

“You cut off if you like, I think I'll stay around a bit,” Bobby answered, and poor Marsh was torn between his reluctance to leave a colleague and his very keen desire for his bed.

Before he could decide, they saw someone coming towards them across the forecourt where the shadows lay so heavily. They stood watching the approaching figure. It was coming slowly and with apparent hesitation. A woman, they thought.

“Show's over, beginning to go home,” Marsh suggested, his tone hinting the example was one to be followed.

But that was not what Bobby thought. He was aware of a tightening at his heart, of a dryness in his mouth, as he watched how silently, as it were a shadow among others, the approaching figure came towards them, at times almost hidden from sight in some patch of darkness thicker than elsewhere, then again appearing, always a little nearer, furtive and unreal in some queer way, and always silent as the night itself. At a little distance she stood still.

“Mr. Policeman,” she called—the voice was certainly a woman's but pitched unnaturally high, for disguise, Bobby thought, “Mr. Policeman.”

“Yes,” Bobby said, and began to move forward.

“No, no,” she called. “Keep away. Not too near, if you please, or I'll be off where you can't follow. I'm only a messenger.”

“From whom?” Bobby asked.

“From—her,” came the answer. “She wants to know what you are doing here? She can't imagine any reason why police should be bothering us. She would like to know by what right police come here asking their impudent questions?”

“Now, that's a lot she wants to know,” Bobby said. “But who is—she?”

“Just—she,” the other answered, and laughed a little and then abruptly shut her laughter off.

“I mean her name, what is her name?” Bobby asked, though a little disconcerted by the sound of that harsh and brief laughter.

Behind him, he was aware of Marsh's heavy and uncertain breathing that seemed to be coming in short, tiny gasps. There came into Bobby's mind a memory of Evers's sudden exclamation:—‘There's times I think she's the devil himself turned woman.' To his surprise he discovered he was wondering if this could be true.

“Does her name matter?” the woman was saying. “What's in a name?” she quoted mockingly. “Ask her that yourself if you like and she'll tell you—perhaps. This way.”

“Is that necessary? are you sure you are not her yourself?” Bobby asked, and moved towards her.

At that she turned and ran. Swift, swift beyond description, swift and light, she turned and fled on swift and noiseless feet, light as a fawn on grass, and after her raced Bobby at his utmost speed, his footsteps crashing down the silent night like strokes of a hammer, and behind him followed Marsh, though less ready and less swift. Not often had Bobby ran as he ran now, for instinctively he knew that this illusive figure before him might at any moment vanish somehow or somewhere into the unknown. Yet there was also exultation in his heart, for he was very sure that never yet had lived woman born of mortal sire who with so short a start could outstrip his pursuit in such a chase. He was gaining on her already. Already he could distinguish more plainly the form and outline of the shadow that was her among those other shadows that flickered and wavered in that so dimly-lighted forecourt. Already he was preparing to stretch out his hand and seize her. He saw her plainly as she fled past the corner of the main building into that narrow passage that ran by its side, between it and the boundary fence. He increased his pace as a runner increases it with the winning post in sight. He flung out his hand to reach her he judged to be now within arm's length, for indeed he ran more swiftly than ever any woman could, he caught his feet in a coil of wire she dropped at that instant behind her, headlong he went, prostrate and sprawling, he heard her laugh in the darkness and behind him Marsh, unable to stop in time, fell over him as he tried to get to his feet so that they became a confused and struggling heap in that narrow space between wall and fence. The impact, for Marsh was a heavy man, knocked Bobby flat again, and took away all power of speech. He heard Marsh gasp out an oath. He heard again the woman laugh. He felt a sudden blow on his throat, a sharp and heavy blow. He heard the sound of another blow and a muffled exclamation from Marsh. Something fell tinkling to the ground near by. A door opened and shut. He managed to get to his feet. Marsh, muttering and swearing to himself, was still upon his knees. Bobby pulled open the door in the fence and ran into the street. He was just in time to see by the light of the nearest street lamp a figure on a bicycle riding furiously away. He almost thought he heard again a faint laugh floating back to him, but he was not sure. Anyhow, she—whoever ‘she' might be—had made good her escape. No hope of overtaking her now.