Red Shadow (19 page)

“Six o'clock this morning,” said Amelia rapidly. “Six o'clock this blessed morning, sir, and in this horful icy cold. And h'anyone may say what they likes about flying, but flying in the face of Providence is what I call it.”

There was a pause.

“When will she be back?” said Jim Mackenzie.

“I don't know, sir,”—very lugubriously.

“Oh,
damn!
” said Jim, and jammed the receiver back upon the hook.

What did Agatha Wimborough want to go trapesing off to France for? He had never expected to be desolated by her absence, and yet undoubtedly at this moment a lost and helpless feeling descended upon him. He would have to tackle Rimington himself now. What was it going to look like, his coming and demanding Laura's address? Rimington would have every justification for refusing it.

Mr Rimington refused it so politely and so definitely as to convey the very decided impression that the request was one which should never have been made.

Jim got up and put his hands in his pockets. He wasn't finding this interview easy, and the harder he found it, the grimmer he looked and the more his chin stuck out.

“And that's that!” he said. “I've asked for Mrs Stevens's address, and you've refused to give it to me. You've also informed me that I had no business to ask for it. I'm now going to tell you something.”

Mr Rimington was leaning back in his office chair, a very comfortable circular chair with discreet green leather upholstery. He wore an expression of bland and courteous attention. He did not speak; he merely waited. He would let the young man say what he had got to say, and then he would be unable to spare him any more time. Another appointment—yes, another appointment.

Jim clenched his hands and drove on.

“Mrs Stevens—” the name was gall and wormwood—“Mrs Stevens rang up yesterday.”

“She rang you up?”

“On a matter of business—a matter connected with Mr Hallingdon's affairs.”

“She didn't give you her address?” There was just a pleasant note of inquiry in Mr Rimington's voice.

Jim jerked up his head.

“She didn't give it to me, because she couldn't give it to me. And that's why I'm asking you to give it to me now. She didn't give it to me, because she didn't know it.”

“Mr Mackenzie!”

“She didn't know it. You've got to listen! I'm telling you what she said to me. I asked her where she was, and she said she
didn't know
. She said
they hadn't told her.
”

Mr Rimington was looking with interest at his own well blacked shoes. He had one knee crossed comfortably over the other so that he could admire a high state of polish without any undue strain. He had no wish to look up or to meet the furiously earnest gaze of this pertinacious young man; but whether he looked up or down, he could not escape from the feeling that this gaze was both intense and embarrassing.

“Mrs Stevens has been—er—ill,” he observed.

“What's that got to do with it?”

“She may not be—er—perfectly recovered.”

“What d'you mean by that?”

Mr Rimington had not the slightest intention of explaining what he meant by that. He put the tips of his fingers together and looked at them for a change. Then he said,

“There is no harm in my telling you that I saw Mrs Stevens last week.”

“Was she ill then?”

“She was in bed,” said Mr Rimington—“but sitting up. I understood that she was convalescent. Perhaps it will relieve your mind if I tell you that I saw her alone. If she had wished to ask me any questions, she could have done so. She asked me nothing. I may add that there was a capable-looking nurse in charge, and that I received the impression that she was well cared for and perfectly satisfied with her surroundings.”

“And you saw her alone?”

“I saw her alone. And as I was discharging a somewhat confidential mission, I satisfied myself that there was no one outside the door. If Mrs Stevens had been under any kind of duress, she could have appealed to me. She did nothing of the sort.”

Jim stood silent for a moment. He must try and get the address from Stark. But suppose Stark didn't know it? He squared his shoulders and renewed the attack.

“Mr Rimington—will you go and see her again? You've given me to understand that this isn't my affair—but it
is
yours. Is there anything to prevent your going down to see Mrs Stevens this afternoon? You could at least give her her own address.”

“I have, at present, no business with Mrs Stevens,” said Mr Rimington. “They are, I believe, going abroad very shortly. But—yes—I could go and see her.”

“Could you go to-day?”

“No—I think not to-day.”

“To-morrow?”

“I am not sure. I am not prepared to give any undertaking on the subject.” He glanced at his watch. “And now I am afraid, Mr Mackenzie, that I cannot give you any more time.”

Jim came out to a wet street and a drizzle of rain.

Damn the weather! He would have to hang about and catch Stark when he went to lunch. That might mean a couple of hours. Oh, damn everything!

It did not mean a couple of hours. He had walked four times to the end of Dickson Road and back, when Mr Stark, junior clerk in Rimington, Rimington and Greenlees, emerged from the office, turned the corner into Rangeley Street, and began to foot it briskly in the direction of Southam Road.

Jim came up with him fifty yards from the corner and touched him on the shoulder.

“Where are you off to in such a hurry?” he said.

Mr Stark had started nervously. He was carrying an attaché case. He shifted it from his left hand to his right.

“I was just going round to Mallesons' about a lease we're drawing up.”

Jim walked along beside him. Rather a slimy business handling Stark. He had several reasons for hating it. Funny that he could never see Stark without simultaneously having a mental picture of old Stark in the potting-shed at home. Why should old Stark, a decent dour old thing if ever there was one, have produced Stark, with his shifty eyes, reedy physique, and general look of having emerged from some underground burrow? He could never help wondering what Stark would have been like if he had stuck to gardening instead of graduating into the black-coated class and embezzling a little money—a very little money—and coming to “Mr Jim”, shaking with terror, to be saved from prison for old Stark's sake. Rather disgusting the whole thing. Still he had got to have Laura's address.

All at once the realization of what Stark would think if he asked for it..… Rotten. That's what the whole thing was—
rotten
!

And then Stark speaking, with the shy deprecating note in his voice which was so unlike old Stark's surly gruffness.

“I heard you in the office with the boss just now, Mr Mackenzie.”

It had been “Mr Jim” when he wanted some money to save him from prison. The “Mr Mackenzie” was a bid for equality.

“Oh, you did? How much did you hear?”

“We're not supposed to give addresses—you know that, Mr Mackenzie.”

“How much did you hear?”

Stark looked sideways under pale lashes and reddened lids. He wasn't like old Stark at all; he was like his mother—like, and unlike. Jim remembered Mrs Stark as a silent, white-faced wisp of a woman who was said to be a dragon in the house and to insist on old Stark taking off his boots before he came indoors. Yes, Stark was like his mother; it was Cissie who took after old Stark.

“For the Lord's sake, Stark, don't squint at me like that! What did you hear?”

“I should get the sack if he was to find out, Mr Mackenzie.”

A nasty mess Stark—distinctly a nasty mess.

“What do you want?” said Jim bluntly.

“Would it be worth a fiver to you, Mr Mackenzie?”

Jim stood still.

“Yes, it would.” He produced a pocket-book. “Hand it over, and look sharp!”

“The Walled House,” said Stark. “Leeming Lane, Putney.”

“
Putney?
” said Jim.

“That's right.”

Jim counted out five pound-notes and handed them over. Stark put them away with alacrity. He didn't see why Mr Jim—Mr Mackenzie—should look at him like that. Something for something was the way of the world, and where was the harm?

Jim Mackenzie's voice cut hard across his thoughts.

“Make a good bit on the side one way or another, don't you, Stark?”

Now if that wasn't a dirty, unfair thing to say! Why, he might have stolen the fiver by the way Mr Jim—Mr Mackenzie—was looking at him.

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Perhaps you don't—perhaps you do. I'd be sorry to see you in jug, for old Stark's sake. Better watch your step a bit. Well, that's all for to-day.”

CHAPTER XXIV

Jim went down to Putney in the early afternoon. He restrained himself till then, because, even to his impatience, it did not seem a good plan to arrive at The Walled House in the middle of lunch. It probably wasn't a good plan to arrive there at all. What he ought to do was to let old Rimington go down. Quite doggedly he admitted this and went.

Leeming Lane was one of those derelict bits of country round London which are being slowly pressed to death. One end of it was already raw and scarred from the erection of a dozen or so little pill-boxes with names like Mon Abri and Locarno. At the other, dark shrubberies and high walls looked down upon the old footpath of the lane.

The Walled House stood alone. Its walls were high and reinforced by evergreens. It had a neglected and forbidding look. Tall stone pillars held between them an oak door with a bell at one side of it.

Jim looked at the bell rather hard. It must have been years since its brass had winked in the sun, so dark and stained and discoloured was it. He rang, and thought that he could hear a faint tinkling that died in the distance. Presently he rang again. No one came; no one answered. The whole place might have been dead and buried for years.

He went back to the other side of the road and took stock of the house. Only the upper windows were visible above the bank of evergreen. Two unkempt laurels made an arch above the gateway. The house stood surprisingly near to the road. Not a large house. The upper windows, which were all that he could see, showed a glimpse of curtain at either side and a few inches of blind at the top. It came to him that he might at any moment see Laura looking out from between the curtains. And then he knew that he would not see her. She had been there last night; she was not there now. The house was a mere empty shell in which the ringing of a bell died with no one to hear it. All the same he meant to get in.

He stopped thinking about Laura and gave his attention to the question of how he was going to get in.

He walked on along the lane. On his left there was a very high wall with bottle-glass on the top of it; on his right, when he had passed The Walled House, a rather battered wooden fence with a hedge inside it. Three or four yards from where the fence began there was a narrow gate that had once been painted green. It bore the remains of lettering which had probably advertised a tradesmen's entrance.

He lifted the latch, walked in, and found himself on a narrow path with a crowding shrubbery on either side of it. The place smelt of damp weeds and sour neglected soil. He pushed his way through the shrubs on his right and came up against the side wall of The Walled House. When he had put a safe distance between himself and the lane, he got over the wall with the help of a convenient cypress. He dropped amongst shrubs. Everyone in the lane seemed keen on the gloomiest type of evergreen. This side of the wall smelt, if possible, worse than the other.

He emerged from the shrubbery, made his way round to the back of the house, and knocked at the kitchen entrance. He was so sure that there was no one in the house that he would have been desperately taken aback if his knocking had produced anything except an echo. The whole place felt deserted. All the same he was going to get in. He wasn't quite sure what happened if you were found breaking into a house in broad daylight. It wasn't burglary before eight o'clock at night—or was it nine?—which seemed a very convenient arrangement. He thought he would have a try at the scullery window. There seemed to be something about a scullery which produced extreme debility of the latch. He had always been able to get in through the scullery window at home, and he had come across several other cases. This scullery window was no exception to the rule. The rickety latch slid back at the merest touch from his pocket-knife. He climbed in over a very dirty sink—tea-leaves, cabbage-leaves, banana skins. Faugh! How beastly!

He came through the untidy kitchen into a passage that ran beside the stairs and opened into the hall. The first door on the left, a study, with curtains drawn; the second, opening from the hall, a dining-room; on the other side of the hall door the drawing-room—all empty and about as cold as the north pole.

He went up the stairs, round the bend, and came to a landing with four doors opening upon it. He tried them all in turn, and every room was empty. In the two rooms which faced each other across the landing, one at the head of the stair up which he had come, and the other at the foot of that which led to an upper floor, the beds were neatly made. In both these rooms a lingering smell of boots conveyed the impression that they had been occupied by men. The other two rooms were in considerable disorder. The bed-clothes had in each case been flung back from an unmade bed. In the right-hand room there was a litter of torn and half burned paper in the grate.

Jim gathered up the paper carefully and spread it out on the dressing-table. There was some part of a bill with the heading burnt through. He read: “Ribbon—three and elevenpence halfpenny”, and tossed the charred fragment back into the grate. The other pieces were bits of a letter torn small. After a lot of trouble he fitted some of them together and got what seemed to be a signature—“Your devoted Sasha”. He tipped all the bits into his handkerchief, knotted it, and pushed it down into his pocket.