A Sword For the Baron (4 page)

 

The plump man, still standing at the open door, seemed to gulp half a dozen times before he spoke again; his glossy brown eyes were huge. At last he muttered: “You're Mannering.” Mannering stood aside. The other squeezed into the hall; he nearly touched the walls on either side, for his elbows seemed to stick out. He was as different as anyone could imagine from David Levinson. He reached the foot of the stairs, looked up, and muttered again:
“Is
she ill?”

“Yes.”

“What—what happened?”

“She collapsed.”

“Did you—did you bring her back?”

“We looked after her.”

“Ill,” echoed the plump man. “I wouldn't have believed—did she have a heart attack?”

“Would you expect her to?”

“I just wondered. She's always been so well, she—I tell you she hasn't had a day's physical illness in her life. Did you—did you do what she wanted?”

“What do you think she wanted me to do?”

“Bring the sword back to Gentian House, of course.”

“What made you think she would want that?”

The man frowned. Take away his fat, which was curiously like puppy fat, and he would be quite good-looking. The frown made him seem older, and his voice became impatient.

“Don't be silly. She told me what she was going to do.”

“Why should she tell you?”

“You obviously don't know anything about the situation,” said the plump man, impatiently. “If you did, you'd know that Sara and I are cousins. I'm just as interested in the family fortune as she is. I knew she wanted that sword back at Gentian House, and would try to persuade you to take it there. I wanted to make sure that she didn't succeed.”

“Why not?”

“Because I thought it a lot of fuss over nothing,” Sara's cousin said.

“A matter of life and death, remember.”

“All right, let me finish, can't you? Lord Gentian's a sick man. This kind of behaviour will make him worse. Now if he'd had a heart attack, no one would be surprised. I laid it on a bit to make you take notice of me. Obviously you did.” He looked up the stairs. “Where is Sara?”

“So you're a cousin of hers,” Mannering said.

“That's right – Claude Orde. You needn't make the usual joke about my parents being poets although they didn't know it. I must say I think there's something damned queer about this – Sara,
ill
.”
He shook his head. “I don't believe it. Not Sara. What—” he broke off, moistened his lips, then touched Mannering's arm. “She hasn't had an accident, has she?”

“Someone tried to murder her.”

He said it in order to break through Claude Orde's composure, and could hardly have succeeded more. Orde started, gripped his arm tightly, moistened his lips again, and stared towards the bedroom door. His jaws seemed to work; his grip was very tight. Suddenly, he looked closely into Mannering's eyes, and said hoarsely: “I knew it. I knew it.”

“Supposing you tell me just what you know, and what this is all about,” Mannering said sharply. “It's time that—”

“Is she all right?”

“She is now.”

“Thank God for that,” said Orde. “Thank God! Well, she can't say I didn't warn her. Mannering – tell her to stop worrying about that sword. Tell her to forget it. Tell her that it will only end up in tragedy.” His eyes closed, his voice was so hoarse that it was difficult for Mannering to hear the words. “Make her stop worrying about it, do you understand? Make her.”

He turned towards the front door.

Mannering put out a restraining hand, but touching Orde's seemed to release a coiled spring of repressed energy. Orde bent his arm and rammed his elbow into Mannering's stomach, knocking him heavily against the wall. Before Mannering could recover, Orde reached the door and wrenched it open. Pain was spreading through Mannering, and there was nothing he could do to prevent the man from leaving. As he saw the door open wide, however, David Levinson came hurtling down the stairs; Mannering had never seen a man move faster. Before Orde could step outside, Levinson had reached him.

“Not yet,” he said. “Mr Mannering wants to talk—”

Mannering saw Orde's round, plump face pale with anger, saw him clench his teeth, and sensed what followed. Levinson gasped as if with pain and came staggering along the hall, tripped over Mannering's foot, and went sprawling on his back at the foot of the stairs. His head thudded on the edge of a tread. Orde went out, slamming the door behind him, making the little house shake.

Mannering straightened up, half stupidly.

“Well, well,” he said under his breath. “Three in a row.” He looked at David, expecting some kind of comment; but David's chin was on his chest, he looked dead to the world.

Mannering felt a sudden surge of alarm as he moved forward. The footsteps on the cobbles faded as he bent over David.

He saw the younger man's eyes flicker.

“Take it easy,” he said, and raised the other's head slightly; his own body was still aching. It would be a long time before he forgot the power of that punch. “You'll be all right. Upsadaisy!” He eased David to a sitting position, then pushed his head down between his knees; after the third time, David's body stiffened in protest.

“That's enough,” he muttered. “All right, now. My
head
.”
Mannering stood away from him as he put his right hand gingerly to the back of his head. “There's a bump like an emu's egg,” he declared. “No, don't touch it!” He sat against the bottom stair, pale, blinking, lips twisted in pain. His left hand began to move about his stomach near the solar plexus; he must be feeling very tender there. “That man packs the biggest punch I've ever come across,” he admitted. “You—are
you
all right?”

“I'll do,” said Mannering.

“What started him off?” Very cautiously, David began to get to his feet.

“I didn't want him to leave,” Mannering answered. “He insisted.”

“Who was he?”

Apparently David hadn't been listening on the stairs all the time.

“Sara Gentian's cousin, who thinks she is ill-advised to cross swords with her uncle.” Mannering grinned. “I was speaking metaphorically, but take that whichever way you like. David, as soon as you feel up to it, I would like you to find out what you can about Claude Orde, too.”

“Who?”

“Claude Orde.”

“His mother or his father must have been a poet,” remarked David. “I—yes, I'm all
right
.” Now he rubbed his stomach very gingerly. “Is it in order for me to talk to your friend Chittering?”

“He's by far the best man to talk to.”

“How much may I tell him?”

“As little as possible, but he can know that we have the sword,” Mannering said. “Don't tell him anything about the family feud, and ask him to keep it all off the record until he's seen me.”

“Think you can trust a newspaperman?”

“You can trust any newspaperman who agrees to keep a story off the record,” Mannering said. “If you couldn't, they wouldn't hold their jobs for five minutes. All right?”

David nodded, slowly. He would feel that pain in the back of the head and in the solar plexus for a long time, but was not prepared to use either as an excuse to rest. He pushed his fingers through his wavy hair. His colour was better, and he made himself stand up to his full height, nodded, went to the door, and said: “Look after her.”

“I will,” promised Mannering.

When the door had closed, he examined it for any sign of the forced entry, then opened it again and studied the escutcheon plate on the outside; there were no scratches, so the forced entry had been done very well indeed. He wondered what the police would think of this remarkable facility in forcing locks.

He knew what they thought of his . . .

There was no way of telling how long he would be on his own, and certainly he would never get a better chance to look round this flat. Whatever had happened here, Sara was in great distress of mind, and he might find a clue to the reason in the flat. He might also find a clue to the identity of her assailant – if there had been one. He remembered the way she had stalked away from Quinns, and thinking that she had been angry – probably furious with him. An angry person did not go home and put his head in a gas oven.

He went quickly upstairs. Sara lay just as he had left her. He pulled the pale blue bedspread off the other bed, and draped it over her; she did not stir, but was breathing evenly. He was sure that she would be conscious before long; now she was only sleeping. He examined her wrists again and made sure that there were no signs of bruising, nothing to suggest that force had been used. He leaned over her, looking at the back of the neck, but saw no telltale marks of violence. Yet if someone had tried to kill her by a fake suicide, violence must have been used.

Violence; or drugs?

Had there really been time for a drug to work?

Mannering doubted it. If someone had been waiting here for her, it might have been possible to overpower her with a silk scarf, for instance; or with a towel thrown over the head and held tightly round the body until, struggling desperately, she had lost consciousness. Towel or scarf could have been taken away and she could have been placed in front of the gas oven, as David had found her.

If it had been done that way, there would be no marks of violence. Mannering remembered a case in which a child had been partly suffocated and then gassed; it had looked like an accident until a distraught, unbalanced mother had confessed.

He glanced about the bedroom. Nothing but the beds had been disturbed. He looked inside the two small dressing tables built into corners of the room so that they received good window light. There was nothing here except the accessories he would expect to find. The dressing table on the right was scrupulously tidy, that on the left was dusted with powder, there were smears of lipstick on paper handkerchiefs thrown carelessly at a little flowered metal basket on the floor. A postcard from Sweden seemed to be from a friend – presumably the friend who shared the flat with Sara. Stockings had been pulled off, crumpled up and thrust into a corner.

Was that how Sara lived?

She was still lying as he had first seen her when he finished up here, so he went down to the kitchen. The first thing he noticed was a big bath towel folded carelessly over the back of a chair. He picked this up; it was exactly the kind which could have been used to overpower the girl. He held it in front of him at arms' length, and saw a smear of bright red lipstick.

If this had been flung over Sara's face, or if she had tried to rub off the lipstick . . .

Why should she, at such a time?

He made himself stand still, recalling her as she had been at Quinns, and on the bed here. Her jumper had three-quarter length sleeves, which had come halfway down her forearms. According to David's demonstration, she had lain in front of the oven with her face on her arms. How
did
one lean forward when one's arms were folded on a table? He dropped onto the chair in front of the gas stove, and tried. The comfortable way was to have one's cheek on one's hands – hands, not arm. Had there been any smear of lipstick on the back of either of Sara's hands? He hadn't noticed any, and did not believe he would have missed it. He went upstairs to check. Both her hands were clean, yet at the shop her lipstick had been very thick and fresh. She could not have failed to smear her hands when resting her cheeks on them.

Either she had cleaned off the lipstick, and that didn't make sense, or it had come off on the bath towel.

He said, softly: “It wasn't suicide.” He went downstairs again, to the one large, pleasantly furnished living room, which overlooked the mews. It was long and narrow. There was a long studio couch in purple mohair, two slender armchairs in the same rich colour, several occasional chairs, a radio and television set combined, a small piano, pushed into a corner, some pouffes, and a tawny coloured carpet which stretched from wall to wall. Against one wall stood a small sideboard in clean-cut pale wood; against another, a writing desk. These were the only two places where anything could be put out of sight. Mannering pulled open each drawer and cupboard of the sideboard; there was whisky, gin, bitter lemon, Dubonnet, soda water – all the usual things. There were some packets of cigarettes, too, as well as knives and forks, table cloth and all that was needed for a dining table.

Mannering went to the writing desk, and tried to open the long drawer – the only drawer it had. It was locked. He thought of David as he took out a bunch of keys, including a skeleton key which would pick more locks than David knew existed; a perfect tool of its kind. He slipped it into the keyhole, twisted and turned for a few seconds, and felt a change of mood surge over him. Years ago,
many
years ago, he had forced the doors of cupboards, rooms and safes, with a skill that few had rivalled. Years ago – a lifetime away.

He had never lost the skill, the dexterity of movement, or the sensitiveness of fingers and ear. He bent over the writing desk, twisting very gently, sure that the lock would be forced back before long.

He felt it go and heard it click; he had taken less than sixty seconds. He stood back, took out a handkerchief, grasped the knob which served as a drawer handle, and opened the drawer very slowly.

As he did so, he heard a noise, on his right – by the door.

He was quite sure of that; it was a noise inside the flat – and he had heard no one come across the cobbled mews. This might be Sara Gentian.

He pretended to notice nothing, and pulled the drawer open still wider.�

 

 

As Mannering bent over the drawer, a flash of coloured light caught his eye, and on the instant he pictured the Mogul Sword of Victory. He stared down, momentarily oblivious of the sound at the door. There in front of him, rolling a little because of the movement of the drawer, was a miniature sword, dazzlingly bejewelled. It was small enough to be used as a brooch or a corsage pin. Even the strange fact that it was unwrapped, there for anyone who opened the drawer to see, did not register on his mind; the sword had a kind of hypnotic effect.

He put out a hand to touch it, then darted a glance at the door. He expected Sara to appear, but there was no sign of her, and no further sound – but the door was moving. It was
closing.
Before he could jump towards it, even before he could call out, it closed with a sharp click. He took a step towards it and heard another click.

She had locked him in.

He called: “Miss Gentian! It's Mannering here.”

She didn't answer. He could picture her standing on the other side of the door, hand touching it, terrified. Any one could
call
himself Mannering.

“Miss Gentian! This is John Mannering. Will you please open the door?”

He reached and touched it; the handle turned but the door did not open. The only sound was of his own making. Exasperating though it was, he couldn't really blame her, especially if her last recollection was of a man suffocating her with a towel over her head. Or had he simply dreamed that up?

“Miss Gentian—” he began again.

He stopped as a different noise sounded in the mews; a car, swinging round a corner. He stepped quickly to the window. Net curtains concealed him, but did not prevent him from seeing outside. A black car was pulling up; as it stopped the doors on either side opened and men stepped out. One man was massive, the other tall and thin; he recognised neither of them, but felt quite sure that this was a police car.

Who had raised the alarm?

He stood back into the room as the two men clattered over the cobbles towards the front door. No one was left in the car, no one appeared to be in the mews. The front doorbell rang.

A few minutes ago, Mannering had felt the mantle of the Baron fall on him; the mantle of a man who had lived and thrived on taking risks, on making instant decisions. He had to make one now. If he were caught here by the police, he could be charged with breaking and entering. He could not be sure that the girl would try to help him. He had refused what she wanted him to do, she might even feel vindictive. In any case, she hadn't invited him here, and didn't know that she owed her life to him. His latest mistake had been to tell her his name.

The doorbell rang again; why hadn't she answered the police?

One man moved towards the window. Mannering stepped to one side, so that he could not be seen. Next moment, the door opened and the man disappeared. Another said: “Did you telephone for us?”

The girl answered, but Mannering wasn't sure what she said, her voice was pitched so low. He pulled the net curtains aside, and opened the casement window. As he did so, the man outside asked in a rising voice: “The man's still
here
?”

Mannering climbed out of the window. The wall of the little porch hid him from the men at the front door, and gave him the moment of respite that he needed. Now that he was outside, at least they couldn't say that they had caught him on enclosed premises. He heard footsteps from inside the house and could imagine the girl turning the key in the lock, and the police thrusting the door open. He had to cross the mews. The police car would soon give him some concealment, but if the men looked round while he was out in the open, they couldn't fail to see him. With luck, they were too busy with Sara. Heart thumping, Mannering reached the shelter of the car, and bent double. If anyone passed the entrance of the mews they would wonder what he was up to; in any case the policemen were bound to realise which way he had come. No one shouted yet. He straightened up and went boldly to the corner. As he reached it, one of the men shouted from the mews, the sound coming clearly through the open window.

Mannering reached the corner.

Three men and two women were in sight, but a taxi started off from a nearby front door, the noise of its engine drowning the sound of the shouting. Mannering simply walked quickly towards the next corner, only fifty feet away. Once round it, he called:
“
Taxi
!” and started to run. People who saw him took no notice; he waved at a taxi with several people in it; a pretty girl stared at him from the back window.
“
Taxi
!” he called again, and heard an engine just behind him. He glanced round, heart thumping; could the police have had another car waiting?

A young taxi driver was leaning out to open a door.

“Looking for me, Guv'?”

“Ah,” said Mannering. “Just right. Victoria Station, and make it fast.”

“Trust me!” the driver enthused.

He swung the taxi round on its remarkable lock, and headed back towards Hillbery Mews. The tall, lean plain-clothes man was standing at the corner, looking up and down but doing nothing to raise an alarm. The other was at the door of the blue painted house, and Mannering fancied that he caught a glimpse of the girl behind him. Mannering sat back in his corner. The taxi driver showed a turn of speed which should have been illegal. Feeling very hot and sticky, Mannering lit a cigarette and drew in the smoke.

He had seldom needed a drink more.

At least there was no sign of pursuit, but the police might think there was no need for one; Sara would have named him. A message might already be on its way to Scotland Yard. He eased his collar. Some of the officers at Scotland Yard were well disposed, but some disliked the owner of Quinns who not only had a flair for detection but also a dash of daring which no Yard man could afford.

The taxi pulled into Victoria Station and the driver grinned round in triumph: “Quick enough, Guv'?”

“Wonderful,” Mannering praised. “Thanks very much.” He put a ten shilling note into the outstretched palm, waved away change, and walked towards the main part of the station as if in a hurry to catch a train. Out of the driver's sight, he stood by the bookstall, looking up and down and reminding himself of the days when he had been hunted by the police, and Victoria Station had been the most likely place for him to shake off pursuers; a kind of haven.

It was an odd fact, that he was behaving as if
he
had cause to fear the police; as if the past was mixing with the present.

“Don't be a damned fool,” he said roughly.

A little woman glanced at him, startled, as she went by. Mannering bought an
Evening News
without glancing at the headlines, and went out into the station approach again; there were more taxis waiting than people. He took one to Green Street, where he had his flat.

For years he and Lorna had been threatened with eviction, for the houses on the left side of the street had mostly been demolished by bombing, and only a few still stood, cheek-by-jowl with blocks of modern flats. Three houses remained, and his was in the middle of them, an anachronism and yet a reminder of the gracious days of the late Georgian period. Across the road, Victorian houses with a stark red brick brashness had all escaped the bombing. He went indoors, and found the small passenger lift on the ground floor. As he stepped inside and pressed the fifth floor button, he heard someone on the stairs; it might be one of the tenants on the lower floors. He let himself into his own flat with his key.

Ethel was singing.

Ethel, their maid, was a great one for pop singing, and had a better off-beat than most. She was comparatively new in the Mannerings' service and was proving very good. Mannering went across to the kitchen. The door was wide open, Ethel was peeling potatoes, swaying from side to side and giving voice with her mouth wide open; she was a plump, pleasant little thing, rather too rosy-cheeked. Mannering backed away, so as not to embarrass her, and called: “Ethel!”

The singing stopped; a moment later the girl appeared at the door.

“Oh, I didn't hear you come in, sir.”

“I didn't think you did,” said Mannering. “Has anyone called this afternoon?”

“No, sir – but a Mr Chittering telephoned, only five minutes ago.” She was dimpled and flushed. “He said he would call again about six o'clock. Would you like a cup of tea, sir?”

“Tea?” echoed Mannering, startled. “I don't think – yes, all right, some tea!” He went into the bathroom, washed briskly, and crossed to the study; whenever he and Lorna were here alone the study was virtually the living room, the big drawing room was seldom used. He stood at the window overlooking the back of more blocks of flats, made of glass and yellow brick. He was troubled, more deeply, than the situation should warrant. He ought to have stopped at Hillbery Mews and brazened it out, of course, but that might have led him to a much more serious situation.

If the police had telephoned the Yard, why hadn't the Yard taken some action?Was he building this affair up in his mind too much? There had been a danger of that from the beginning; reading into the case more than there really was. Yet he knew that he had half-expected to find a man from the Yard or from the local Division waiting for him.

Had Sara Gentian named him?

Ethel came in, with the tea in beautiful china of Worcester fruit pattern. She had patted down her fluffy yellow hair and put on a white apron instead of her kitchen smock, and she bounced up and down like a rubber doll.

As she put the tea on a reproduction Jacobean table, of knee height, the front doorbell rang.

“Oh, there's someone at the door,” she said. “Shall I see who it is, sir?”

“Please,” said Mannering.

There was no reason to be so much on edge, he reminded himself – and yet he was. He did not pour out the tea, and did not move, just stared towards the door, waiting to hear the voice of whoever had called. The door opened; he heard it swinging. The girl said: “Good afternoon, sir.”

“Good afternoon,” a man said in a brisk, clear-cut voice. “Is Mr Mannering in?”

“I'll see, sir,” said Ethel. “What name shall I say?”

“Superintendent Bristow, of New Scotland Yard,” the caller announced.