The Tiger In the Smoke (19 page)

The other girl remained where she was, listening. She heard the faint whine of the drawing-room door hinge, and a single step on the wood. Then there was a long silence, followed by a movement in the bedroom immediately below her. The intruder must have come up the stairs without her hearing. She stifled her breath and was aware of the noise of her own heart, and this irritated her. The British burglar is not as a rule the bravest of men, and she knew that should he discover her as his torch beam wheeled across the unfurnished room, the chances were that he would be far more startled than she. But despite all reason she was trembling. There was something peculiar about this particular intruder. His movements were so hurried, and when they were heard at all so oddly violent.

Suddenly she heard him again, very close this time. He ran up the first few steps of the attic stairs outside and paused. A thin pencil of light ran under the closed door of the room in which she sat. It touched her foot and vanished, and there was silence again. Very slowly she rose and stood waiting.

He went back. She heard him distinctly. He had decided that the top floor was unused. After a long interval she heard him down in the hall again.

Amanda considered the fire-escape but changed her mind. The police would respond to Meg's call immediately, but the fog was very thick and might delay them. It seemed a pity that the burglar should get away without being seen. She decided to go down.

Having made up her mind, she crept to the door. The first flight of stairs seemed to promise the only difficulty, since the boards were bare and newly stained, but she let the balusters take her weight and moved gently, feeling her way.

On the first landing it was very dark. The bedroom doors were closed and the small circular window little more than a blur, but she remembered the design of the house and by following the wall came softly to the top of the graceful winding stairs. Her over-confidence was almost her undoing. She put out her hand for the newel post, missed it, and regained her balance only just in time. Hovering, one foot down, her hand feeling for the rail, she heard him once more.

He was in the little study whose door was immediately to the right at the foot of the stairs. She heard the unmistakable scratch of a match in the inner room, and a flicker of grey appeared in the black of the wall.

A trickle of fear touched her but she ignored it resolutely. Her hand found the rail and she took another step or two down and came under the level of the upper floor. The study door was wide open and through it a light, very faint and unsteady, crept out across the hall to touch the bright casing of a Kandy chest and the pool of a looking-glass hanging above it.

Amanda edged forward. The burglar was very busy. He was still taking care to make no unnecessary noise, but he was hurrying, and at last she recognized the element which had been puzzling her from the beginning. It was an impression of pursuit. Now that she saw it she could feel it distinctly. It was as though the whole house was running away from forces descending upon it rapidly from outside. Yet from beyond the walls there was no sound at all. The fog pressed round the elegant stucco box, drowning it utterly.

One more step brought her flat against the rounded wall just above the open door, and, glancing across the hall, she saw that a patch of the room was reflected in the looking-glass. The first thing she made out was the candle. It was a long green taper which had been set with three others in a gilt sconce on the farther wall. The newcomer had taken it down and it now lolled drunkenly in a vase dripping hot wax recklessly on the polished surface of a Sheraton desk which occupied the centre of the little room.

It took her some seconds to realize that the shadow between her and the rest of the picture was the man himself. He had his back to her and was wrestling with something on the desk. She could not see it, but she guessed it was the spice cabinet which Meg had shown her with such pride, bewailing the fact that the key had been mislaid, so that she could not display its fittings. It was a charming affair made of mahogany and inlaid with ivory, and was to stand on the desk to hold notepaper. The burglar appeared to be wrenching it apart. She heard the scrape and splinter of the wood.

Sudden rage at the wanton destruction of the pretty thing swept over her and she opened her mouth to protest. The words were almost out when a question shot into her mind and stayed there. What was he opening the thing with? She was never certain if she saw the knife, if it caught the light and flashed in the mirror, or if she merely heard the blade biting into the fragile wood, but the words died on her lips and she was suddenly very cold.

With a final squeal of protest the tiny doors of the cabinet split open. In the looking-glass she saw the man's shadow contract and then grow large, and she heard his intake of angry breath. Then the empty ruined toy shot through the door into the hall at her feet, and immediately, as though at a signal, the whole world became alive with noise.

The hammering on the front door was like rolls of thunder. There was an echo of it below in the basement and the shriek of a window flying up somewhere at the back. From all sides came the sound of feet, heavy and hurried on stone, and the unmistakable voices of police demanding admittance.

Close to Amanda, in the heart of the sudden storm, there was brief but utter silence. Then the candle went out, swept vase and all from the desk, and the stranger came forth.

She did not see him, but he passed so close that he brushed against her in the whirlwind dark. She caught something of him in that moment, fear and recklessness and a violence which was new in her experience. He fled past her up the stairs, bolting like some huge animal, fleet and silent, into the house above.

After that it was pandemonium.

Mr Campion found his wife huddled against the wall on the bottom stair, clutching a broken box like a child on a kerbstone while the thunder of police boots and the flash of police torches made traffic above and around her. He jerked her to her feet and drew her roughly into the comparative safety of the study doorway.

‘How damned silly!' he exclaimed irritably. ‘Really, ducky, how damned silly!'

Amanda was too experienced a wife to take the outburst as anything but a compliment, but she was very startled to see him at all. For the first time it occurred to her that this avalanche of official aid could hardly be merely the outcome of Meg's telephone call.

‘Oh,' she said with sudden enlightenment, ‘he was being chased!'

‘He was, my dear, and they've now got him, I should think, unless you've mucked it completely.' Mr Campion was still angry and his arm was so tightly round her shoulders that he hurt her. ‘Upstairs,' he said furiously to a uniformed figure who barged in on them. ‘This room's all right. I'm here.'

Dozens of men appeared to be stampeding through the house. The noise was outrageous and to a relieved onlooker slightly funny. Amanda laughed.

‘What has the poor man got? The Crown Jewels?'

Campion looked down at her. In her torch beam she saw his eyes round and dark behind his spectacles.

‘No, my addle-pated girl,' he said. ‘He's got a knife.' His arm tightened again. ‘Oh, my God, you are an idiot! Why didn't you come out with Meg? It was because you were in here that we had to rush him. Left alone, he would have walked into the arms of the regulars who would simply have sat outside until he moved.'

‘You got Meg's call then?'

‘Good heavens, no!' He was contemptuous. ‘We came up just as she reached the ground. Don't you understand, my dear? It's so simple. The moment Luke talked to the solicitor we all began to see daylight. A man was sent down to watch the rectory and another to keep an eye on this place. Their two reports came in almost simultaneously. Naturally we were half out of our minds. We thought you must walk in on the fellow. As it happened, it was the other way round. While you were pottering through the house like a couple of lunatics, he was forcing a basement window. He must have arrived just after you came in. Our man out here missed you completely.'

His voice ended on the triumphant note of one who has put the thing in a nutshell, and Amanda, who had only understood that he was more badly rattled than she had ever seen him, was too polite to comment.

‘Let's have some light,' she suggested. ‘Have you got some matches? There are some candles on that wall. Be careful how you move. I think he's been terribly untidy.'

Campion produced his lighter but he did not let go of her arm, and when the three tapers were casting an elegant radiance over the wreckage of the pretty room he still stood with his arm across her back.

Amanda considered the damage, her brown eyes pitying.

‘What a shame! And also silly. There were no small valuables here yet, no silver or anything.'

‘He wasn't looking for silver,' said Mr Campion grimly. ‘He was looking for papers. He didn't find them at the solicitor's office, so he came here. Hallo?'

The last word was directed to the doorway, where a drooping figure in a disgraceful old mackintosh stood hesitating.

‘Stanis!' Amanda sounded delighted.

‘My dear girl.' The old man came forward and surprised them all, including himself, by shaking her hand warmly. ‘Dear, oh dear,' he said, ‘I'm getting old. D'you know, I didn't like to come in, afraid of what I was going to find. Well well, young woman, you've frightened us all very badly, you know. Put the fear of hell in us. Good lord, yes. Well, thank God that's over.'

He pulled a chair out and sat down on it, and, pushing his hat on the back of his head, wiped his grey forehead.

Amanda was gratified but surprised. It was nice to know they were all so fond of her, but the relief seemed a little excessive.

‘Have they got him?' she demanded.

‘Eh? I don't know.' He smiled his wintry smile at her. ‘I'm such a big policeman now, you know, that I hardly know anything that goes on at all. I leave the footwork to the youngsters. But even if he slips through their fingers now, it won't be long. At this stage it can hardly be more than a matter of hours. It was you I was worrying about. Why did you want to go and look at a house in the middle of the night? Why don't you shin up Nelson's column one evening?'

‘Oh, forget her,' said Campion testily. ‘Where's Luke?'

‘Skipping about the roofs or half-way down the drain.' Oates was returning to his normal gloom. ‘Yapping like a skeltie, trying to do everybody else's work. That fellow's angry, Campion. He's been touched on the raw. He's what the village I was born in used to call “wholly riled”. I like to see it. I like to know a man has it in him. Yet it always makes me nervous. I don't want him doing anything with his bare hands, so to speak. We have to be very dignified, we senior dicks.'

A remark neither dignified nor even particularly senior, although it possessed a certain colourful sophistication, floated in to them from the hall, and a few moments later the D.D.C.I. appeared. He came stalking in, coat skirts flying, his fingers rattling the change in his pockets and his diamond eyes glowering. At once the little room became grossly overfurnished.

‘Lost him,' he announced, throwing up great hands in a fine impressionist sketch of flight. ‘We shall get him in the next hour or two. We can't help doing that. If we continue to be lame, blind, half-witted, and cloth-eared for the rest of our naturals, we shall pick him up. Alive too, if we don't crush him to death getting out of each other's way. Twenty-five men! Twenty-five men of various branches, counting five drivers and six senior officials, and what happens? The bloke slides out of the bathroom window, the only one in the house which hadn't got a dick sitting under the sill, and leaps into the fog. He has to jump blind, the night is thick as canteen coffee, and does he kill himself dropping on to the spiked railings round the area? Does he hell!'

He had been talking to Oates all the time, but not openly. Ostensibly his remarks had been addressed to Amanda, whom he did not know very well.

At this point he condescended to recognize her for the first time.

‘I'm glad you're all right,' he said with a brief smile, ‘but Campion here has gone down in my estimation socially. He's not the nob I thought he was. He just took on like any other common chap. “Get her out! Get her out!” No old-school-tie stiff-upper-lip stuff there. I couldn't have behaved worse myself.' He laughed abruptly at her amazed expression, which he mistook for embarrassment. ‘Don't worry. It wasn't your fault. We should have lost him anyway. We should have lost him if there had been enough of us to play ring-a-ring-of-roses all round the building, or if we'd been allowed to shoot on sight. We'd have missed him because we under-estimated him. We just weren't thinking in his class.'

Oates cocked an eye at him. ‘He observed your man, knew you'd be on your way, took the risk of carrying his project through before you got here, and marked that one window as the one you didn't guard because you'd estimate the drop as unnegotiable.'

‘Yes,' said Luke. ‘That's right.'

‘Did anyone see him at all?'

‘Two uniformed men saw a shadow and went after it like good 'uns. But he melted. The whole area is alive with us now. It's like looking for a flea in a bust feather bed.'

Oates nodded. ‘He's got nerve and he's got quality. I grant him that.'

‘Likewise spring heels and rubber bones.' Luke spoke grudgingly. ‘I shouldn't like to attempt that drop myself, in daylight. I don't suppose the lady happened to see him?'

‘I?' Amanda shook her head regretfully. ‘No, only as a shadow in the looking-glass. He was in here, you see, and I was out there at the foot of the stairs.'

She noticed that she was causing a sensation and was deeply puzzled by it.

‘I can't describe him either, I'm afraid, because it was so dark. I only saw his back in some sort of rough coat, light buff I think.'