Rolling Stone (13 page)

“And these?”

“Ninepence, madam. As you see, they are not quite fresh.”

Miss Hollinger beamed.

“I will take them. I am sure they are very nice—very nice indeed—just what I wanted—such a sweet shade.”

It was not raining when she came out of the shop. She might have left her umbrella at home. She had a way of walking as if she might trip over her bunchy skirt. She tittuped back past her own door and ascended the steps of the next house, where she rang the bell. The elderly maid who answered the door stood aside for her to enter, but she shook her head.

“I am afraid not, Miller—not this morning. I have to go and see a friend. Perhaps this afternoon—but better not tell her in case I am prevented. My friend is coming to town on purpose to see me, and I do not yet know her plans. But how is dear Miss Talbot today? I could not go out without enquiring and bringing these few flowers. With my love please, Miller, and if I can come in later I will. And how did you say she was?”

Miller's large, pleasant face was unresponsive. “She don't give you time to say nothing, and that's the truth.” She took the flowers, sized them up as left-overs, and said,

“Miss Talbot is about the same.”

Miss Hollinger coughed sympathetically.

“Ah, yes—a heavy blow. We must do all we can. And you will give her my love, and—oh, yes, I shall make a point of looking in later on if I can possibly manage it.”

CHAPTER XIX

Whilst Miss Hollinger was buying flowers and enquiring after his aunt, Peter Talbot was engaged in the unsatifactory occupation of kicking his heels. At ten o'clock he did not feel like kicking them in the hotel any longer, so he walked round to the garage and kicked them there. There are always things that you can do to a car. He did some of them, and felt better, until the fact that he was practically within touching distance of a stolen Turner which the whole of Scotland Yard was looking for began to bore its way painfully into his consciousness. By about a quarter to eleven he was beginning to get hot behind the ears every time anyone looked his side of the garage. He decided to knock off before he got to the point of falling upon the nearest mechanic's neck and proclaiming his guilt.

He walked back to the hotel, and wondered when he would get any more instructions, and what they were likely to be. If he could have guessed, then it is on die cards that he would have gone round to Colonel Garrett and thrown in his hand. But he didn't know, and he didn't guess, so he walked up the steps and into the hall of the hotel in a bored but not particularly apprehensive frame of mind.

The hall was the sort of hall which is made by throwing a small front sitting-room into the original passage entrance of a London house. The office was in the back sitting-room, with a sliding glass shutter behind which sat a bored sallow girl who used a magenta lipstick.

Peter stood just inside the door, and beheld his Aunt Fanny's bosom friend Miss Hollinger in converse with the bored sallow girl. He was petrified with horror. What in the name of all that was improbable could Blanche Hollinger be doing at the Edenbridge Hotel? She lived next door to Aunt Fanny, so she couldn't possibly be wanting to book a room, and if she wasn't booking a room, what was she doing? Yes, that was it—
what was she doing?
Was it a case of “Fly—all is discovered,” or was it not? His immediate impulse was to fly. But if he flew or, alternatively, fled, how was he to find out whether flight was a necessity or merely a chucking up of the sponge?

Besides,
was
he absolutely sure that it was the Hollinger? They had only met once, and then in semi-darkness. If he had encountered her face to face in the street he would probably have passed her by, but this back view was just what he had seen on more than one occasion when he had lurked behind Aunt Fanny's drawing-room curtains and beheld Miss Hollinger trip down the next-door steps. He couldn't, of course, have sworn to her features, but he could have sworn to that battered hat, and that ghastly bunch of clover, and the scarf with its drabbled shades of cyclamen and fuchsia. The voice too. No one who had ever heard that voice would forget it—rather high, with a faintly tinny sound and just the suspicion of a lisp. And the flow of words. Oh, it was certainly the Hollinger, and as certainly he meant to find out what had brought her to his hotel.

The thoughts passed in a flash. Her back was towards him. He reached a chair on the right of the door, snatched up somebody's discarded newspaper, and spread it widely between him and danger.

The bored damsel said in an extinguished voice,

“I couldn't say, I'm sure.”

Miss Hollinger was brightly insistent.

“But my friend intended to come here—I am quite sure of it. I think you had a Mr. Vincent staying here some time ago. It may have been a year or two ago—I am not quite sure on that point.”

“I couldn't say, I'm sure,” said the damsel at the desk.

“Not that it matters,” pursued Miss Hollinger. “But he was a friend of the nephew of a great friend of mine—not the friend I am enquiring about—oh, no, quite a different person—a Miss Talbot.”

Peter groaned behind his paper. He had come to the Edenbridge because he remembered that Vincent had stayed there. It appeared that the Hollinger was here for the same reason.

She went on explaining herself.

“So I wrote to my friend—not Miss Talbot, but the friend I was expecting to find here—and told her she could not do better than book a room at the Edenbridge Hotel—because I am sure any recommendation of my dear friend Miss Talbot's.… And so then she wrote and said she would—”

The damsel gazed at her magenta finger-nails.

“We have no one of that name.”

Miss Hollinger became a trifle flustered.

“I can't understand it at all. The name is Clephane—rather unusual—Scotch, I believe. Perhaps if I might just look at the register—”

A perfectly awful stab of apprehension went right through Peter. He knew his Aunt Fanny's fatal habit of handing round letters. How many of his letters had she handed on to her dear friend Blanche Hollinger, and would dearest Blanche be sufficiently familiar with his writing to recognize it when she saw it in the Edenbridge register? There wouldn't be much to go on. James Reilly—British; and, for his last address, Brussels. It was the Brussels that might give him away—he had written to Fanny Talbot from Brussels. His conscience made a coward of him. Of all the ignominious ways of being caught out! And then he was blessing the sallow girl in his heart because she wasn't making any move to hand over the register.

“There's no name like that in the book, and no correspondence from anyone of that name.”

“I can't understand it at all,” said Miss Hollinger in a distressed voice. “I certainly understood—in fact I made quite sure. I really should be obliged if you would let me look for myself.”

The girl threw her an exasperated glance.

“I'm sorry, but there's no one of that name in the hotel.”

Miss Hollinger drooped and turned away. As she passed him, Peter could hear her making small distressed sounds and murmuring, “Oh dear, I can't understand it at all.”

He went thankfully up to his room and waited to see what would happen next. Something was certainly due to happen. You don't just steal a Turner and leave it at that. You have to dispose of the corpse. Perhaps someone would come and remove it from the car without dragging him any farther in. Perhaps they wouldn't.…

Peter sat in one of those rigidly uncomfortable chairs of which hotels appear to have the monopoly and read the two newspapers he had brought in with him and the one he had picked up downstairs. They all had large headlines about the theft of the Turner. Two of them said the police were following up a clue, and the third believed an arrest was expected at any moment. That, of course, made pleasant reading. All three linked the theft of the Turner with the attempted theft of Mr. Oppenstein's Gainsborough and the murder of his butler, Francis Bird. One headline said, “Two crimes in a week,” and proceeded further to enquire what the police were doing.

The most enterprising of the three papers had photographs of the Cresswells and their guests. Peter studied them with considerable interest. James Cresswell—a frowning snapshot, curiously balanced by Emily in a tiara which had slipped a little to one side. Joseph Applegarth—unjustly rendered rather smug in a top hat and a morning coat, assumed possibly for a funeral, as he had a dark waistcoat and wore no buttonhole. Miss Norah Margesson in tweeds. The lovely Mrs. Yorke in evening dress. Fabian Roxley in flannels with a tennis-racket. Mr. Basil Ridgefield, slim and monocled, coming out of his own front door with his ward Miss Terry Clive behind him. Well, one of these people had cut the Turner from its frame and handed it to him out of the drawing-room window, having first smashed a pane so as to make it look like an outside job. The question was, which of them?

Speaking offhand, the ones he didn't cotton to were James Cresswell and Norah Margesson. And Norah Margesson had certainly taken the pearls. He looked at Terry Clive, and thought she might be counted out. The snapshot had caught her with rather a jolly smile. She looked cheerful, honest, and—rather as an afterthought—pretty. He found it comic to remember how she had scolded him in the moonlight, with a coat flapping open over her nightgown and a bare foot stamping on the bare, damp stone. A nice kid and a plucky one. He thought he would like to see her again, and thought he'd be lucky if they didn't meet when he was in the dock and she in the witness-box.

Well, it was all very amusing—or at least it would be amusing if his criminal associates would get a move on. He was beginning to be bored by his own society.

He thought it was about time something happened.

CHAPTER XX

There was a knock on the door. Alfred, the page, put his head round it without waiting for an answer. A sharp-faced boy who looked ten and was actually nearly seventeen.

“Please, sir, Miss Louisa Spedding to see you—your sister, sir—leastways your half-sister, she says.”

Peter had never received such a facer in all his life before. Anyone to see him would have been bad enough—any Miss Spedding worse. But a Miss Spedding who was obviously the Louie of the letter and Spike Reilly's half-sister was purely horrific. He had at the most a few seconds in which to make up his mind what to do. He might bribe Alfred to say that he was out—one doesn't always want to see one's female relations. It was worth trying. He produced half a crown, pressed it into a willing palm, and said,

“I'm out. You've just seen me go, and what's more, you don't know when I'm going to be back.”

“Yes, sir—thank you very much, sir.” He pocketed the half-crown and glanced over his shoulder. “It's not go, sir—she's a'coming along the passage now.” He ducked beneath an arm in a bottle-green sleeve trimmed with fur, backed, and disappeared.

Peter had just time to, reach the window and was looking out of it before the owner of the arm completed her entrance and shut the door behind her. A bright, firm voice said,

“Well, Jimmy, aren't you going to say how-do-you-do? I hope you're glad to see me.”

There was no help for it. Pewter turned round. He only hope she wouldn't scream.

Miss Spedding, in appearance, was not the screaming sort. She was a plump woman with firm red cheeks, rather prominent brown eyes, and a solid chin. She had on a bottle-green hat as well as a bottle-green coat. The coat fitted her as if she had been moulded into it. She wore black kid gloves stitched with white, and black laced shoes, and she carried a new black bag with a chromium-plated clasp. She stood just where she was, a yard inside the door, and said,

“Who are you? Where's Jimmy?”

“Well, I think perhaps you've made a mistake—” He got as far as that, and she interrupted him.

“Oh, no, I haven't. That's Jimmy's suit-case all right. Do you suppose I don't know it? And I want to know who you are, and I want to know where Jimmy is.”

The game was up. If only the suit-case had been under the bed instead of right under her nose on the nearest chair—

He came forward and said in a lowered voice,

“Miss Spedding—I'm very sorry indeed—but I'm afraid I've got bad news for you.”

She didn't move, but her eyes were on his face.

“What is it?”

He said, “Won't you sit down?”

“No. What is your news?”

He said, “I'm very sorry about it. Your brother—he was your brother, wasn't he?”

“My step-brother. Why do you say he
was
?”

“Because he was very ill when I came across him. I sent for a doctor, but he didn't get there in time.”

She looked him straight in the face and said,

“Jimmy's dead?”

“I'm afraid so,” said Peter.

Miss Spedding walked over to the bed and sat down. She opened her bag. and took out a clean folded pocket-handkerchief, but having thus prepared for grief, she did not weep. She said “Oh dear!” once or twice, and then,

“I always said it would come to that, but he wouldn't listen—nobody ever does. Oh dear me—he was ever such a nice little boy, but he got into bad company.”

She sat there, her firm rosy face distressed, her black gloved hands clasping the folded handkerchief.

Peter told her about coming to the Brussels hotel and finding Spike Reilly there.

“I did what I could for him—I really did.”

Miss Spedding kept her eyes on his face. When he had finished she said,

“I've often thought he'd come to a bad end—prison, or something like that, you know. I daresay it's all for the best. Once you get into bad company it's not so easy to get out again.”

Peter said, “No, it isn't.” And then, “There was a letter from you among his things.”