House in Charlton Crescent (20 page)

“Now, Mrs. Grey, is that daughter of yours at home to-day?”

The woman shrank back and, realizing the uselessness of resistance let the door slip from her grasp. “Oh dear! Oh dear!”

“Is she at home, I ask?” pursued John Daventry, pushing his foot forward until he could insert his knee and push the door and Mrs. Gray back together.

Mrs. Gray threw her apron over her face and began to weep noisily. The inspector followed Daventry into the narrow entry, called by courtesy a hall, as Mrs. Gray fell back against the wall.

“Leave this to me, Mr. Daventry,” he said authoritatively. “Mrs. Gray, your daughter has nothing to fear from us if she will just answer a few questions quietly.”

“She don't know nothing of what Miss Maureen done,” wailed Mrs. Gray inconsequently.

“Well, she has only to tell us so,” the inspector said politely. “Ah, there you are!” as through a half-open door on the right he caught sight of a tall white-faced girl supporting herself by her hand against the table. “Now, now, don't alarm yourself”—as the girl began to shake visibly and to look on the verge of collapse—”we just want to know what you did at Brighton the other day.”

“Nothing—I didn't do anything!” the girl muttered sullenly. But though she answered Furnival it was at Daventry she was glancing with frightened eyes. What importance had any policeman in the world to her compared with Mr. Daventry?

John Daventry answered the glance.

“Tell us where Maureen is,” he said thickly. “We know that you took her to Brighton with you. You have both been traced there; where is she now?”

The girl threw out her hands. “I don't know, I wish to Heaven did!”

She flung herself down on a wooden chair beside her and burst into loud suffocating sobs. The anger in John Daventry's usually good-tempered face deepened.

“What have you done with her?” he demanded. “Where is she now? When did you leave her? Speak the truth now or by the Lord in Heaven I will wring your blasted neck for you!”

He seemed to have forgotten Furnival's presence, and that functionary elected to remain an inactive spectator, though to those who knew the Ferret it would have been obvious that eyes and ears were alike vigilantly on the alert.

“I don't—know,” she said, the words coming out between bursts of sobbing. “I couldn't tell you any more, sir, not if you was to murder me, and—and I shouldn't mind if you did!”

John Daventry glared at her. Assuredly, had she been a man, he would have been as good as his word. He would have taken her by the throat and shaken the truth out of her.

As it was, standing over her, he looked so big and strong, so thoroughly capable of carrying out his threat, that he literally frightened her into speech.

“Where did you last see her?” he thundered.

Alice lifted her tear-stained face. “On the front at Brighton, sir. I only took my eyes off her one minute, and the next she was gone. I searched for her everywhere for hours, but not a trace of her could I find. That is God's truth, Mr. Daventry, sir. And I couldn't tell you any more—not if you were to hang me for it.”

John Daventry stared at her. “Do you mean to say—”

Inspector Furnival put him quietly aside. “No one is likely to hang you, my good girl, or to try to punish you in any way. We only want to find the child for her sister's sake. She said ‘Alice will tell you all she knows if you say how anxious I am! I always liked Alice—she was a good girl—and I think she liked me,'” finished the inspector, improvising as he went on. 

“Which I always did,” Alice sobbed. “We all did. And I would never have taken Miss Maureen to Brighton, if I had thought of such a thing happening. But Miss Maureen, she had set her heart on going and she gave me no peace.”

“I see.” The inspector's voice grew gentle. “We quite realize that you are not to blame. But, now, will you tell me just what happened? Begin at the very beginning.”

John Daventry opened his mouth as though he were going to intervene at this juncture, but a warning gesture from the inspector checked him and he remained with his mouth slightly open, staring at them.

“I—I met Miss Maureen at the junction,” said Alice, beginning to speak a little more clearly. “And—and we went back to town and then changed to Victoria and came to Brighton. My cousin had some rooms to let and we meant to stay there for a time. But we put our luggage in the cloak-room and went for a walk along the front first. Miss Maureen was that pleased to get away from—from the house in Charlton Crescent that she was dancing about all excited like. But I was tired, we had had to do a lot before we left, but speak to Miss Maureen as I might she wouldn't be quiet. There were some children dancing about to an organ that an old woman was playing and Miss Maureen went and danced with them. I asked her not to go, but it was no good.”

John Daventry nodded his head. He knew Maureen only too well in this mood and quite realized that Alice could have had no easy task.

“I think—I think I must have dozed a minute,” the girl went on. “I had been up early in the morning and was tired, but it was only a minute. Miss Maureen was then jumping about like anything when I closed my eyes. When I opened them again not a bit of her could I see. They told me afterwards that I rushed about like a wild woman. The old woman was still there with her organ, and the children were dancing about. There didn't seem to be any difference except that Miss Maureen was not there.”

“What happened next?” the inspector questioned in that new tonelessly gentle voice of his. “What did you do?”

“Do!” Alice Gray echoed. “I ran up and down Brighton streets looking here, there and everywhere I thought the child might have got to. I just ran till I was ready to drop, and then went to my cousin's. There didn't seem anything else to be done.”

“It did not strike you that the proper thing to do was to go to the police station and report the child's disappearance?” the inspector said quietly. 

Alice stared at him. “No! No! I couldn't do that,” she wailed. “I couldn't do anything. I just came home and waited.”

“If you had gone to the police they would have probably found her in half an hour,” said the inspector quietly. “Now, however, it is no use crying over spilt milk.”

“Do you mean that there is no more to be done?” John Daventry demanded.

The inspector shrugged his shoulders.

“Not at present, I'm afraid.”

Daventry made no rejoinder, but his frown was ominous. Alice looked relieved. The inspector's eyes did not miss one shade of her expression.

“There is nothing to be done but to set all the resources of Scotland Yard to work to find the child.” He turned to John Daventry and said a few words in an undertone. Then he looked back at Alice.

“Why did you take the child to Brighton?” he asked sharply. “Why did you want to hide yourselves?”

Alice's hands dropped on her lap. Every vestige of colour faded from her face. In the silence that followed you could fancy you could hear her heart beating.

“Hide ourselves!” she breathed at last. “We—we didn't want to hide ourselves. Miss—Miss Maureen wanted to see Brighton.”

“Stop!” The inspector's tones had altered to sternness. “We know that you were frightened, that you were both frightened, that there was something in connexion with Lady Anne's—death! Ah!”

He sprang forward as he spoke and caught the girl just as she reeled off the chair in a dead faint.

The inspector laid her on the rough couch at the end of the window. Then glancing round the room he caught up a glass of water and dashed it into the girl's face. It had the instant effect of bringing back her senses. She sat up and brushed back the wet hair from her face.

“You said that if I told you about Miss Maureen that was all—all!” she murmured.

“If you told me the whole truth,” the inspector said significantly. “Think again, my girl. The whole truth if you please.”

But Alice was lying back in her chair ready to faint again. “The truth! the truth!” she murmured. “I have told you the truth.”

“The whole truth,” the inspector corrected.

Alice scarcely seemed to hear him. She was murmuring: “The truth! the truth!” to herself.

The inspector shrugged his shoulders as he glanced across at John Daventry. “We shall do no more good here to-day, Mr. Daventry. It is sheer waste of time.”

John Daventry muttered a sulky assent, and the two men turned away. At the front door which Mrs. Gray was still holding open in a dreary, senseless fashion, the inspector waited to allow John Daventry to precede him. Then with a muttered word of apology he returned swiftly to the kitchen.

Alice sat up with a startled cry as he stepped quickly to her side.

“When you are thinking over what you will say to me, the next time—don't forget the connexion with the Cat Burglar,” he said suggestively.

Then he turned away from her as quickly as he had come in. As he did so he cannoned into John Daventry who had followed him. But the inspector did not stop. With another apology he hurried out of the house.

With his quick stride John Daventry caught him up on the narrow pavement outside. “I heard you!” he said hoarsely. “I heard you just now.”

In one swift glance the inspector saw that the ruddy colour had faded from the young man's face—that beneath its tan it had turned grey and cold.

“Heard me just now?” he questioned blandly.

“Yes! Heard you!” John Daventry repeated. “What did you mean? You asked about the Cat Burglar.”

The inspector turned and looked him full in the face, an odd expression gleaming for a moment in the sharp little eyes.

“What does she know about the Cat Burglar?” he repeated. “Well, I am inclined to think that she knows more about the Cat Burglar than anyone, Mr. Daventry.”

“But—but—” John Daventry's utterance became choked. The big veins in his forehead stood out like whipcord. His face swelled, but he did not turn red, instead its sickly grey tint became more pronounced against the tan of his skin. He put up one big hand and wrenched at his collar as though he were stifling.

“But—but—” he gasped incoherently. “If—if you know that she knows all about the Cat Burglar—then you must know about him too.”

The inspector raised his eyebrows. “Not necessarily! But—supposing that I do know something. Have you never had any suspicion, Mr. Daventry?”

“Never, so help me Heaven!” John Daventry asseverated thickly.

“No news?”

Bruce Cardyn shook his head. “Not so far. The inspector may be back any moment.”

“He would have phoned through if he had had any good news,” Dorothy Fyvert said miserably. “And if he cannot make Alice speak no one can.”

“Mr. John Daventry may possibly,” Cardyn suggested.

“He won't,” Dorothy said in a mildly contemptuous voice. “John will bluster and rage, but he will never get the truth out of Alice.”

“Suppose the truth has already been told?” Bruce Cardyn suggested. He was looking grave and tired. His eyes were red-rimmed and had an extinguished look—the sort of look that comes to a man who has been sitting up several nights in succession. Lady Anne Daventry's death was taking heavy toll of those who were engaged in trying to probe the secret of it.

Dorothy herself was looking wretchedly ill. This terrible anxiety about Maureen coming on the top of the horror of her aunt's death had turned the bright healthy girl who came home with the Barminsters to the house in Charlton Crescent into a mere nervous wreck. She had not been to bed, she had not taken off her clothes since she heard that her sister was missing, and she spent her whole time walking, backwards and forwards, up and down the streets. She firmly believed that Maureen would come or be brought to her in those same streets. Sometimes Margaret Balmaine was with her—sometimes Susan. More often she was alone.

It went to the heart of the man who loved her to see her as she was now. Her bright fair hair looked disordered and dull under a hat thrust on anyhow. Her brown eyes were bloodshot from much weeping and had great dark half-circles beneath them. The clear tones of her complexion were blurred and her face itself looked sodden and swollen. Her usually soft red lips were cracked and discoloured and every now and then they twitched uncontrollably. But Dorothy cared nothing about her appearance. She could think of nothing but Maureen—Maureen whom her imagination pictured in more and more terrible straits as the hours went on.

She had just paused in her endless pacing of the streets to call at the house in Charlton Crescent to see whether there was any news of Maureen. 

It was the day of the inspector and John Daventry's visit to Todmorden Lane, and Bruce Cardyn was at Lady Anne's house to meet the inspector.

“How do you mean—that Alice has told the truth?” Dorothy questioned feverishly.

“Well, I am inclined to think that, when she says she does not know where the child is, she is speaking the truth,” he said slowly.

“But if she does not, where on earth can Maureen be?”

“I don't know,” Bruce said in a strangely abstracted tone. “But we are bound to know soon,” he added.

He was still holding the door open. Dorothy had come into the hall and was standing with her back to it. He watched the outgoings and the incomings in the Crescent with the same abstracted look. A motor came whizzing up to the next door. For a moment Bruce thought that one of the two men in it was the inspector, then he saw that both were strangers. An organ-grinder was playing a melancholy ditty outside the Crescent; a little beggar boy came round from the other side and sat down on the first doorstep, leaning his head against the doorpost.

“I don't know that we are bound to know soon,” Dorothy contradicted. “I heard the other day—somebody told me in a shop where I was making inquiries—that a mother sent her child to school as usual one day in a little country town. She stood on the doorstep to watch her as far as she could. It was only a little way to the school, such a very little way that there was only one field with a footpath running right through it that was really out of the mother's sight until the child came out in the village street. The child turned to wave her hand to her mother before she went through the handgate, and from that day to this neither word nor sign has come from her. She disappeared as completely and utterly as though the earth had swallowed her up. The villagers went out in bands to search for her. Scotland Yard sent down detectives and of course the local police were very busy from the first, but not the smallest trace of her could any of them discover—or has ever been discovered. Mr. Cardyn, do you wonder that the poor mother went mad—that to this day she is confined in a lunatic asylum and that she spends all her days in trying to find something? She does not know what, fortunately. The memory of her little child has a good deal faded, only she knows that it is a very precious thing that she looks for constantly. Mr. Cardyn, suppose we never find Maureen—we never know what has become of her?” And Dorothy shook from head to foot as she spoke.