Pursuit of a Parcel (28 page)

She moved to the fourth step, and then got to her feet. The stair turned half way, and as soon as she got round the curve she could see into the hall. It was of a good size, square, with the front door facing her and two other doors opening off to right and left of it. An octagonal lantern hung from the ceiling. Its glass panels had been covered with green paper, but it gave enough light to see by.

Delia came down the rest of the way. Just before she reached the bottom she saw that the dining-room door was ajar. She could see a bright crack running all the way down from the top to the bottom of the jamb. No, not a crack. It was wider than that—two inches—a hands-breadth—

The door wasn't ajar, it was opening. She jumped the last step and ran to the back of the house. It wasn't any good—she knew that. But you have to try. If the consulting-room door had been open—But it wasn't. They had shut it. Even as she wrenched at it, Barend's hand came down on her shoulder. It held her, turned her round, kept her there pressed back against the door to face him. Then, before either of them could speak, the sharp sound of an electric bell came rasping through the house.

XX

The sound was repeated. Barend Roos brought his hand down hard over Delia's mouth. He must have turned the knob of the door, for she felt it give way behind her. Next moment they were inside the room in the dark with the door ajar, and she was being held so tightly that she could neither move nor make a sound.

In the dining-room Ina Long had got to her feet, but Jimmy Nash was before her at the door. He had drunk a lot of whisky, but it would have taken a good deal more to have drugged his sense of danger. He caught Ina by the arm, his face pale and his eyes blinking.

“What's at the bottom of the garden?”

She stared at him stupidly. The bell rang again.

“What's at the bottom of the garden, out there at the back?”

She said, “A kind of lane. It's a right of way.”

He gave her a push towards the hall.

“Call out and say you're coming! I'm off. Make a bit of time for me!”

He ran past her and was gone. She heard him on the stair going down to the basement. Then she called out,

“I'm coming. Just a minute.”

Her hands fumbled with the chain, and the bolt at the bottom of the door. It was stiff. Even if Jimmy had not told her to make time, she could not have been very quick over it. It was stiff, and it hurt her fingers. She got it back and stood up with a little exclamation of pain. Someone was using the knocker now. She said, “It's all right. The bolt's stiff.” And then she was turning the key and the door swung in. The porch was full of men. Before any of them spoke she knew that they were the police, and that meant it was all over. Clara, Ernest, Delia, herself—nothing that she could do would either help them or hurt them now. It was out of her hands. For the moment she was past feeling anything but relief. She stood there looking at them with her tear-reddened eyes, and Inspector Lamb walked into the hall and said,

“Mrs. Long?”

“Yes.”

The other men had come in too—Seargeant Abbott, Antony Rossiter, and a constable.

“I have some enquiries to make.”

In the consulting-room Delia was holding on to herself. If she couldn't see or make a sound, she could hear. She heard Jimmy's steps go down into the basement, she heard a door pulled open and left to swing on its hinges, she heard him go down the garden. She heard Ina Long at the front door, and Inspector Lamb speaking with the measured voice of authority. The man who was holding her heard it too. She could feel him stiffen. She did the only thing she could think of. She drew in her breath in a long sigh, her head fell back, and she went limp and heavy in his grasp. And insensibly that grasp became less strenuous. His arms still held her, but for a moment the pressure on her mouth was relaxed. In that moment she bit, and bit hard. The hand flinched away, and Delia screamed.

It was a good scream. She had filled her hungs so as to be ready for it, and it was a superlatively good scream.

She was flung violently to the ground. If she hadn't let herself go limp, it would have hurt more. She bumped her shoulder and her head. There was a moment of confusion, a hurry of men going past her. Someone called out. There was a smash of breaking glass, and a voice that cursed furiously in a foreign tongue. As she struggled up, Detective Inspector Lamb came over the threshold and switched on the light. Three men heaved and strained over by the window. They reminded Delia vaguely of the Laocoön. Her head was feeling like that. It took in surface impressions like pictures.

Inspector Lamb didn't think anything about the struggling group at all. He plunged in and became part of it. After a few vigorous and noisy moments a handcuffed figure emerged, Lamb's hand upon its shoulder. Lamb's voice, stolid and unhurried, rehearsed the ritual of arrest. Sergeant Abbott smoothed back his unruffled hair and straightened a tie which might have been a quarter of an inch out of line.

Antony came over to Delia and caught her in his arms, and Delia disgraced herself by bursting into tears.

He pulled her into the passage and kissed her as vehemently as if there hadn't been a policeman in the house. He managed to talk all the time as well, but so incoherently that he never dared to remember what he had said. The only comfort was that Delia was in no case to remember it either, and everyone else's attention was urgently taken up with other things—or at least he devoutly hoped so.

“Are you hurt?”

“No—no, I'm not.”

“Then why are you crying?”

Delia gave an irrepressible sob.

“Because I want to.”

“And you're not hurt? You swear they didn't hurt you?”

She said with a sudden steadying of her voice,

“I think he was going to murder me—I really do. He knew I'd opened the parcel, but he wouldn't believe there wasn't any cylinder inside it.”

Antony gave a rather shaky laugh.

“There never was a cylinder—I'm sure of it. Con was spoofing them.”

She pulled away to look into his face.

“Cornelius—but he said—he talked—as if the cylinder had really been there.”

“Who did?”

She made a motion towards the consulting-room.

“Cornelius.”

Antony said, “Cornelius is dead.”

“Oh!”

“They got him. And when they thought they'd got the parcel with the cylinder they shot him. And when they found out that the cylinder wasn't there they thought you'd taken it out.”

Delia shook her head.

“I didn't.” She put her lips close up against Antony's ear and whispered, “I only took out the papers.”

“What!”

“Ssh!” She went on whispering. “You know—the ones I told you about—maps—with funny marks on them. You see, after Miss Murdle, I didn't think that parcel was a bit safe, so I opened it, and when I saw there were maps I thought they might be frightfully important, and I thought I'd better take them out. And I thought if I put the parcel in the bank everyone would think they were still inside it, so I did it in rather a public sort of way, and they burgled the bank. So, you see, it took them in. But I can't understand about Cornelius.
He
said he was Cornelius. Isn't he?”

Antony said again, “Con's dead. I told you. That's a cousin—Barend Roos, one of their Fifth Column. But he'll be for it now.”

Inspector Lamb came out of the room.

“I'd like to have your statement, Miss Merridew. We can go into one of the front rooms.”

As they came through the hall they saw Ina Long. Through all the noise and disturbance she had not moved. She stood against the wall by the front door with her arms hanging and the tears running down her face. The constable stood beside her. Delia ran to her—put an arm round her—made her sit down.

Shepherded into the drawing-room, she rushed to her defence.

“You mustn't do anything to her! You won't—will you? They were frightening her sick. You don't know how dreadful they were. And she's got a perfectly good husband in hospital, and she doesn't think he'll ever forgive her, and it's smashing her up. And there's his practice, you know—she's afraid he'll be ruined if it gets into the papers.”

The Inspector was very nice to Delia. He liked a girl to have what he called a feeling heart. A lot of girls didn't seem to have any feelings at all. He was sympathetic, but he got her to the point and kept her there till she had made her statement and signed it. Then he went and telephoned a description of Jimmy Nash, after which he and Sergeant Abbott went off in a police car with Barend Roos and Ina Long.

Delia and Antony drove away in the Hillman, but when they had gone about a quarter of a mile Antony stopped the car. The street was quiet as far as in it lay—houses all decorously blacked out, and the minimum of traffic. Guns were booming away to the east. Sometimes a shell rose like a star and burst above the black irregular line of the housetops. Neither Antony nor Delia had the slightest idea whether there was, officially speaking, a raid in progress or not. They were not thinking about raids—they were thinking about each other.

Presently Antony said,

“What am I going to do with you, my sweet?”

She rubbed her cheek against his.

“Perhaps we ought to tell Simmy I'm not dead. I expect she's been in an awful flap.”

“I expect she has, and I expect I really ought to drive you down there. It'll be the third time today. Fortunately Frank Garrett seems to be able to get petrol, and if you've really got those maps, he won't mind how much I use to get them. Only, darling, why didn't you give them to me before? When I was down there and you told me you'd opened the parcel—why on earth didn't you give them to me then?”

“I didn't want you to be murdered.”

“Murdered?”

She nodded.

“There was a very murdering feeling about them. I could feel it oozing out at me.”

Antony said “Idiot!” in an affectionate voice.

Delia snuggled up to him.

“No—I think it was clever, because look what's happened. And if anyone
was
going to get murdered, I couldn't bear it to be you when you'd just come back after being dead and—” She burrowed into his shoulder and choked there. “Why do you make me say it? I'd finished crying, and now you've made me start all over again. Look at me!”

“It's too dark.” He kissed her instead.

After a minute or two he shook her a little and demanded briskly,

“What did you do with those papers, and where are they?”

“I hid them,” said Delia. Then she gave a small, unsteady laugh. “I hid them very, very cleverly.”

Antony's blood ran cold. Suppose they had got a man into the house at night—last night—and found those maps. Impossible that Delia should have hit on any hiding-place which would defy a really expert search. These people didn't leave anything to chance. He thought they were bound to have been through the house. He said sharp and quick,

“Where did you put them?”

Delia pulled away.

“I won't tell you—no, wait—I won't tell you unless there are going to be policemen and people. I simply won't have you going off all by yourself with those maps and getting murdered. And if you're going to bully me like the man I thought was Cornelius—what did you say his name was?”

“Roos—Barend Roos.”

“Well then, I shall faint like I did with him.”

“Delia, don't be a fool!”

She came back and flung her arms round his neck.

“Darling, I'm not really—I've been clever. But I don't want you to be murdered.”

Antony began to laugh.

“All right, we'll have old Hopkins, and Sam Gaunt, and Parker. Will that do?”

Delia said “'M” against his cheek.

“And now—where did you put them? I only hope they're still there.”

“Nobody could find them, not if they looked for a year. Do you know what I did?”

“I want to know.”

“I put them into one of Mrs. Parker's glass preserving jars—you know, they have screw-on tops. And I put one of the kitchen weights in with them—the two-pound one. And I dropped the jar into the cold water cistern. And nobody, nobody,
nobody
would ever think of that—would they?”

“I don't think they would, but I think we'd better go and see.”

“Don't you think it was clever of me? I do!”

Antony was starting up the car. He said in a firm, practical voice,

“I hope you screwed the top on tight.”

“Of course I did! Aren't you going to say I was clever?”

The car began to move. Antony said.

“You've got wind in the head, my sweet—that's what's the matter with you.”

About the Author

Patricia Wentworth (1878–1961) was one of the masters of classic English mystery writing. Born in India as Dora Amy Elles, she began writing after the death of her first husband, publishing her first novel in 1910. In the 1920s, she introduced the character who would make her famous: Miss Maud Silver, the former governess whose stout figure, fondness for Tennyson, and passion for knitting served to disguise a keen intellect. Along with Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, Miss Silver is the definitive embodiment of the English style of cozy mysteries.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.