Hide My Eyes (6 page)

Her laugh was half tolerant, half annoyed.

“He’s left them somewhere and hasn’t had time to go and pick them up. That’s Gerry all over. He takes on much too much.”

Annabelle was curious but still she did not speak. The sun had come out and the open door, with her overnight bag in the dark corner beside it, was suddenly very inviting. She took a step towards it but a hand closed over her arm.

“You’ve not come to see all this dusty old junk.” The kindly voice was full of laughter. “You’ve come to see me, haven’t you, and you thought you’d have a look round before you introduced yourself. That’s Freddy’s family all over. Very wise, my poppet.”

She swung the girl round to face her.

“You’re Jenny Tassie, sent up by your Mamma to see your Aunt Polly,” she announced, her smile radiant, “and you’re just what I want, ducky. Absolutely bang-on, as they say. Come inside.”

Chapter 5

THE MAN WHO WANTED TO KNOW THE TIME

THE AUTUMN MORNING
air was soft and smelled of rain and the London street scene was done in pastel shades under a sky of smoked pearl.

Young Richard Waterfield lingered on the corner a little longer than the ten minutes agreed upon in case Annabelle decided to return. Where the roads met there was a large double pillarbox and he was behind it when the man in the trench coat came hurrying out of the door in the garden wall. Richard was not only surprised to see him but, he noticed with astonishment, considerably irritated. He hung back for a minute or two to observe him.

The newcomer went over to the sports car which was parked on the opposite side of the road and was about to enter it when an idea evidently occurred to him, and he turned back not to the museum but to the house. He walked straight into the porch and emerged a moment later carrying a hat. Since he also slammed the door behind him it was evident to the watching Richard that he carried a key. Then he climbed into the car and shot off down the short road to be halted almost immediately by the traffic coming down Edge Street.

Richard on foot was able to cross and board a ’bus before the car could enter the stream, but as he settled himself on the front seat of the top deck he discovered that in the meantime the driver had edged his way into the flow and was now directly below and in front of him. Both vehicles were hemmed in by a solid procession. The traffic jam was a mid-morning special and progress was practically nil.

The driver of the sports car appeared to be taking the delay philosophically, however, and Richard had every
opportunity
of watching him as he leant idly on the door looking at the foot passengers as they passed by him. He had a narrow head and unusual neck muscles, and Richard noticed particularly the bravura which belonged to the generation three-quarters of a step ahead of his own. His curiosity was deeply piqued. In the letter which Annabelle had shown him there had been nothing to account for this character who seemed so much at home at Number Seven.

The car fitted the man perfectly. It was a Lagonda, elderly but so tuned and titivated that only the gallantry of its basic lines remained to preserve that off-hand elegance which had been its original glory. It was open and Richard, who was looking down directly into the back, could see a coil of fine rope on the worn leather seat, a starting handle with a dirty tie-on label fluttering from its shaft, and an ordinary wooden crate of the kind in which half a dozen wine bottles might well have been packed. This appeared to be nailed down, but there was no wire or cord round it.

On the top of the bus the red-headed young man in the dark suit thrust his chin out unconsciously. There is nothing actively suspicious about a sports car of interesting age, but it does present a certain menace to any self-appointed knight-errant who is compelled to travel by London General Transport.

Richard examined his resources. The contents of his pockets were just about as meagre as he had supposed and presently he unfastened the strap of his wrist-watch. He turned it over with a mixture of satisfaction and regret and put it into his trouser pocket. At once his chin became more aggressive and there was a little upward curl at the corners of his mouth.

There was a branch of Messrs. Rattenborough further down Edge Street and when at last the jam disentangled itself for a minute or two, and the ’bus swept past the huge windows which contained enough plate to fill a galleon, Richard descended and went round to the narrow door above which the three balls were discreetly displayed.

It was not often that he pawned his watch, which was one of his few valuable possessions, but it was his practice to do so
in
times of emergency. Quite apart from the sense of comfort which he derived from having the money in his pocket, the act seemed to underline the importance of the adventure or predicament in his own mind. It set a seal of authority upon it, as it were.

The transaction was accomplished without difficulty and indeed, since the watch was such a nice one, even with a certain amount of social success. He came out feeling confident and walked back to the ’bus stop, intending to get back to the office at once. Annabelle had agreed not to ring the office save in emergency and he had arranged to discover Mrs. Tassie’s telephone number and to call her as soon as he left work. On the whole the position appeared to be in hand.

However, at that point he saw the Lagonda again. It was in a side street, standing before the door of a barber’s shop, an old-fashioned place which still carried a multi-coloured pole beside the lintel.

Richard hardly hesitated. The familiar way in which the driver of the sports car had opened the door of Number Seven had shaken him and he found he wanted very much to know who he was. He walked past the shop, glancing in. The window was only half curtained and he caught a glimpse of a narrow, straw coloured head above a towel in the chair nearest the glass. He pushed open the door and stepped down into the scented steam-filled room which buzzed with conversation. The noise stopped abruptly as he appeared and five pairs of eyes regarded him with that slightly hostile astonishment which appears, in small establishments of the kind, to be the portion of the chance customer.

The man in the white coat who was attending to the driver of the sports car looked at Richard inquisitively, decided rather openly that he was nothing to worry about, and waved him to a seat against the wall, where already there was one customer waiting.

“Just a moment, sir. Percy here is just finishing. I shall be a little time on the Major, and that gentleman beside you is waiting for me. But you’ll find Perce is quite all right. A very fine scissor man Perce is, aren’t you, Perce?”

The second barber, who was at work on the head of a
fat
man who was sitting like a sack with his eyes closed, took no notice at all of the remark. He was elderly, with a fine distinguished face and brooding hooded eyes.

“Perce isn’t deaf,” continued the first barber, who emerged as the proprietor. “He’s just a foreigner. Talks sometimes.” He paused to hone the cut-throat razor with which he was about to shape the tow-coloured waves, and Richard eyed him with covert amusement. He was a dark pale-faced cockney, womanish without being emasculated, who possessed small hands, dull black eyes, and the caressing version of the local accent, which is to say it was thick and slightly unctuous, as if each word was some nice little gift which he felt sure the recipient would appreciate.

“You make up for ’im though, don’t you, Mr. Vick?” The other man waiting, a smartish youngster of the salesman type, spoke without looking up from the sporting sheet he was studying.

Mr. Vick bridled. “I like to be friendly, I hope,” he protested, “and when I see an old customer like the Major, naturally I get on to old times.”

“Don’t apologise,” said the man with the paper. “I like it. It helps me concentrate.”

“Concentrate!” Mr. Vick emitted a drawing-room scream. “You’ll never win nothing that way. The only way to win on ’orses, dogs, pools or anythink else is to take it insouciant. Fly at it, if you take my meaning.”

“And then collect the lolly and come right off the ’andle. Drive round in an ’ired car with a tailor’s dummy and say you’re married. That was your story, wasn’t it?”

The fat man opened his eyes while he spoke and shut them again the instant he had finished. Mr. Vick squealed with delight and appealed to the man whose hair he was cutting.

“That’s a very old anecdote of mine,” he said, grinning at his client through the mirror. “You remember it, don’t you, Major? It was you who was so took with it.”

“Me? Not guilty.” The driver of the sports car spoke idly and his smile was casual enough. But the denial was complete and Richard, who had not heard him speak before, looked at him sharply.

“You’ve forgot.” Mr. Vick seemed gratified. “You laughed like a two-gallon flush. I can ’ear you now.”

The man who sat beside Richard folded his paper.

“Who won what?” he enquired.

“It ’appened in Islington when I was a ’prentice.” Mr. Vick spoke through his teeth, his attention concentrated on some fine work he was doing with the razor. “A young fellow in a draper’s picked up five pounds in the street and put it all on an ’orse called Lucky Gutter, which ’e see was running in the big race that day. It came in at two ’undred to one and the excitement pushed ’im over the edge. ’E turned ’is coat inside out, pinched one of the female dummies out of the window, put a lace curtain over its ’ead, and drove round in front of ’is young lady’s ’ouse with it as if he was getting married. The shock upset ’er and she fell down the area, broke ’er leg and sued ’im. It’s a sad story really.”

“Lucky Gutter,” remarked the salesman, who had a one-track mind. “I never heard of such a name.”

“There was a line of them,” said the fat man, not bothering to open his eyes at all this time, “like the Cottages were later. Lucky Rooftop, Lucky Verandah, and—correct me if I’m wrong—Lucky Clocktower.”

“You remember it now, don’t you, Major? I see you smiling.” Mr. Vick was coy.

“It’s a staggering tale,” said the Major, catching Richard’s eye through the glass and grinning at him, “but I never heard it before.”

Mr. Vick opened his mouth to protest and thought better of it. After a while he sniffed.

“You’ve been coming in ’ere on and off ever since the war,” he began. “Tell me, Major, any more developments in the you-know-what business? You mentioned it last time.”

“What was that?” The Major was friendly but cautious.

“The h-u-s-h h-u-s-h,” spelled Mr. Vick rather unnecessarily, and the man in the chair burst out laughing, the colour flooding his coarse fair skin.

“Oh, that’s in abeyance,” he said with disarming embarrassment, “whatever it was. You haven’t any old Rolls
Royces
about you, I suppose? Any age, any condition, good prices paid.”

“Ah.” Mr. Vick seized on it. “You’re in that line now, are you?”

“No, I’m not.” The fair man spoke lightly. “Not at all.” He closed his narrow lips and sat smiling with his eyes, while the little barber’s curiosity became as noticeable as if he had shouted it.

“You’ve been abroad, I see,” he said suddenly, cutting clean across a pronouncement made by the fat man, who was still talking of the names of race-horses.

“No.”

Mr. Vick was unabashed. He picked up a single wiry lock, pulled it out of curl and let it spring back.

“I made certain this was a bit of foreign cutting,” he said. “Isle of Wight perhaps.”

“Or Wigan, of course,” said the Major and again his shiny brown eyes flickered and his glance met Richard’s own in the looking-glass.

“Lucky Clocktower …” The voice of the sporting salesman was pathetic. “Who could get a tip out of a name like that. What does it mean?”

“Invariably fast.” The eyes in the mirror laughed into Richard’s and dropped as the Major glanced at his watch. “Just like this blessed thing. What
is
the time exactly?”

The question turned out to be amazingly popular with everybody. Mr. Vick turned at once to point to the flyblown disc on the wall behind him.

“That clock is dead right by the Shakespeare Head long bar, slow by Ronnie’s next door, and fast by the B.B.C.,” he announced with incomprehensible pride.

“It is four minutes and twenty-three—don’t stop me, twenty-four, twenty-five seconds fast pre-cisely,” said the sporting salesman, looking at his wristwatch, an impressive performance which he offset somewhat by adjusting the instrument immediately.

“Wait,” commanded the fat man, heaving himself up and accomplishing vasty manœuvres under his shrouding cape. “This is the right time. This is the real time. Railway time,
that
’s what this is.” He brought out a large silver pocket watch, looked at it earnestly for some moments, shook it and put it back. “You’re not far out,” he said to the barber.

Richard shot back his own cuff out of force of habit, remembered in time, and glanced up sharply to find the Major watching him through the glass again. The round eyes turned away at once but the younger man was left with the odd but very definite conviction that for some inexplicable reason he was pleased. He was certainly smiling as he turned to the salesman.

“I make it a quarter to,” he remarked. “If you’re right, this wretched thing of mine has lost a minute and twenty seconds in the past half hour. Exactly thirty minutes ago I was driving over Westminster Bridge and as Big Ben chimed I put it right.”

Richard’s pugnacious young face became blank. The lie uttered so deliberately appeared to be so unnecessary. He eyed the stranger cautiously. He looked perfectly normal and even pleasant, sitting there fiddling with his watch, but suddenly Richard became aware of something very interesting about him. He was engaged in arranging something, some definite, carefully thought out plan. He could not rid himself of the impression. There was a wariness and a sense of suppressed force about the man which was special for the occasion whatever it was.

Richard’s speculations were interrupted by the convulsion in the room caused by the fat man getting up, and by the time he was himself in the vacated seat and had persuaded the foreign assistant not to make too much of a job of the unwanted haircut, Mr. Vick and his favoured client were in full session once more.