Scandal at High Chimneys (11 page)

“Well, old boy,” Victor asked with somewhat sardonic inflection, “did you see the play?”

“A kind of one. I saw your stepmother.—Keep your head turned away from the theatre, and don’t look in the direction of St. Giles’s.”

“Well, carry me out!” said Victor. “You saw Georgette? In daylight? What was she doing there?”

“Meeting an old friend. What else she was doing remains to be seen. She’s going to Laurier’s now, and I mean to follow her.”

“What about this detective?”

“It won’t take fifteen minutes, unless something unforeseen turns up. You go across to Whicher’s; it’s there, above the sign that says
EASY SHAVING
; and I’ll join you.”

“Look here Clive: if a woman goes to Laurier’s, that don’t mean she’s no lady. It only means she’s a bit fast.”

“Fast! I’m concerned with something more serious. Off you go, now.”

Victor dodged out amid the traffic. Clive, affecting to be fascinated by a stationer’s shop-window, watched from the corner of his eye as Georgette Damon came out of the theatre. Still she did not observe him, or seem to observe him. After looking round vainly for a cab, the pretty lady made a pouting mouth and set off to walk eastwards.

Clive walked twenty feet behind her.

“‘In polite society,’” he remembered reading in a book published during that same year, “‘a
FAST
young lady is one who affects mannish habits or makes herself conspicuous by some unfeminine accomplishment—talks slang, drives about in London, smokes cigarettes, is knowing in dogs, horses, etc.’”

At Laurier’s, which had some status between a restaurant and a very luxurious public-house, you found little talk of dogs and horses. The book did not define feminine correctness in the matter of drink. Such correctness went without saying. Provided she sipped genteelly, a lady or her mother or stepmother might put away enough Burgundy or Marsala to float a ship of the line.

But a parcel of men’s clothes? The costume which could only be that of a prowler and a murderer?

“Where did you find these clothes?”

“Where I knew I should find them. Hidden among a certain young woman’s belongings in her bedroom at High Chimneys.”

Kate’s, for instance?

Along the north pavement of Oxford Street, amid foot-traffic moving sedately past dun-coloured buildings and long solemn lines of street-lamps, Georgette’s words came back to him with a ring of outrage and sincerity. She really hadn’t seemed to know her husband was dead.

On the other hand, if Celia Damon had been right and, every move of the murderer were directed towards putting the blame on Kate, the clothes would have been found among Kate’s possessions because Georgette (or somebody!) had put them there to be found. It was a logical step, an inevitable one.

Granted a certain set of circumstances, Georgette could just possibly have been the murderer.

Matthew Damon had not been killed when he was alone, shut up in his study behind barred doors and windows. On the contrary! Only the house was locked up on the inside. Suppose she had some accomplice inside High Chimneys itself?

Georgette makes a spectacular exit, flaunting bag and baggage, at about half-past five. Burbage bars the front door after her. Shortly before the time of the murder, then, this accomplice opens a door or a full-length window, admits Georgette for her masquerade, and locks up again after she has gone.

‘Nonsense!’ said his common sense. ‘What accomplice? Can you really credit this?’

‘No, I cannot,’ replied the same. ‘But all things are possible in the nightmare. And it
is
just feasible.’

Clive, raging, wished to all gods he could make up his mind about her.

There she walked, in blue gown and short fur jacket, with the smoky wind whooping round her. At times she was coy and shrinking, at other times angry and imperious, at still others fearful and racked by conscience, precisely like all the other women he had ever known. Was Georgette, unlike most women, unduly preoccupied with thoughts and dreams of sensuality? Well, so was his own Kate. And Clive, who was damned if he would be a hypocrite, refused to condemn in Georgette what he found so agreeable in Kate.

Steady!

Georgette walked a little faster. So did Clive.

Berners Street, full of expensive shops and kept women, went by on their left. So did Newman Street, ditto. They were approaching Rathbone Place, with Laurier’s round the corner. Straight ahead, beyond the other side of Tottenham Court Road, lay the odorous slums and thieves’ kitchens which were not supposed to exist.

Georgette had crossed Rathbone Place. A four-wheeler, whisking out of the Place just after she crossed, momentarily obscured Clive’s view of discreet windows in arabesques of frosted glass below the curly gilded letters
Laurier.

On the far pavement she did not turn left in the direction of Laurier’s. Instead she pressed on towards the intersection of Tottenham Court Road with Crown Street and St. Giles’s High Street.

Then, unexpectedly, as Clive quickened his step, trouble was upon him.

“I
DON’T KNOW YOU,
sir,” said Georgette, suddenly stopping and turning round. “Why are you following me?”

“And yet, Mrs. Damon, I had the honour of making your acquaintance yesterday. It was for the second time, you said.”

“My name is certainly Mrs. Damon. But you are either mistaken or mad. Why are you following me, sir? Do you mean to molest me?”

Her actress’s voice again rose up clearly.

This was the one weapon, Clive thought with an inner curse, that you could never meet.

Wind blew the sparks from a pieman’s fire. A pavement artist, hunched against the wall in the last stretch of Oxford Street, looked up in blear-eyed glee from a coloured-chalk drawing of Napoleon Bonaparte and a couple of herrings.

“Mrs. Damon, let me assure you—!”

“And
I
assure
you,
sir, that if you have made a mistake I shall be glad to excuse you. If you continue to molest me, I shall be obliged to call a policeman.”

The word policeman rang out with peculiar effect above all other noises.

Hitherto there had been any number of well-dressed and stately passers-by. Now the pavement, for yards round Georgette and Clive, was cleared of them as though by magic. They did not hurry; they kept their eyes fixed ahead; they simply vanished. But the word acted with equal magic to whistle up others.

That was where Georgette’s expression changed.

Head raised, innocent blue eyes fixed on Clive, beaded reticule clasped against her breast, she had been poised in an air of martyrdom. Now she looked past him.

“No!” Georgette cried. “No!”

“Oh, yes,” said a heavy, pleased voice Clive recognized only too well. “
I
don’t excuse him.”

A self-confident figure, as tall as Clive but more burly, came padding round the corner of Rathbone Place with a wickedly pleased smile and the step of a tame tiger. Tress’s glossy hat was stuck on the back of his head; his chest swelled under a plum-blue greatcoat with an astrakhan collar.

In his right hand, grey-gloved, Tress gripped a thick walking-stick with a silver head. He looked Clive up and down.

“Well, well,” Tress said agreeably, as though just recognizing him. “So it’s Strickland, is it?”

“Now look here, Tress—!”

“Up to your old tricks, eh?”

“No!” cried Georgette, clasping both hands on the reticule. Something honest, something deeply human and likeable, flashed in her blue eyes.

“Got anything to say for yourself, Strickland?”

“Yes. Keep off. I warn you.”

“Oh, you warn me? Why?”

“Do you want a public scene? Here in the street?”

“
You
don’t, I’ll be bound.”

“Now look here—”

Tress’s wide-spaced teeth, framed in yellowish Dundreary whiskers with beard-like hair under the chin, appeared in a smile.

“
You
don’t want a public thrashing, Strickland. But that’s what you deserve. And that’s what you’re going to get.”

With a lightning-like motion Tress shifted his grip on the walking-stick, lifted it, and slashed it down at the other’s face. Clive’s temper blew to pieces. He slipped aside, swinging his weight to drive his left fist into the middle of Tress’s stomach, at the same moment that powerful hands locked his arms at both sides and flung his weight back again.

A roar of delight from spectators almost drowned two other voices.

“Now, then!” said a bearded police-constable at Clive’s left side. “None of that, you!”

“Now, then!” said a bearded police-constable at Clive’s right side. “What’s all this?”

“
Was
you molesting the lady, sir?”

“No,” said Clive.

“Oh, yes,” said Tress, unruffled and grinning.

“Ask the lady,” shouted Clive.

The lady was not there.

“
Was
you molesting the lady, sir?”

“Heard her say so, didn’t you?” inquired Tress.

“That’s right,” agreed Police-Constable Number One. “Quiet, you!” he added to Clive. “Station-house, Tom.”

“Make way, there!” interrupted a new voice. “Make way, there!”

Both constables stiffened to salute-position without relaxing their hold on Clive. Into the nightmarish group of spectators, who had begun to whistle and caper, pushed a shortish thick-set man, his face somewhat pock-marked, with an unmistakable air of authority despite his shabby plain clothes.

“Indecently molesting a lady, sir,” Police-Constable Number One announced importantly. “Lady’s fainted, most likely. Anyways, she ain’t here.”

“I heard it, I heard it!” The pock-marked newcomer, after studying Clive for an instant with a bland, shrewd eye, turned to Tress. “Do you give this man in charge, sir?”

“I do,” said Tress, unbuttoning his greatcoat. “Here’s my card.”

“Ah. That’ll do, sir. All right, my lads: St. Giles’s Station-House. Take him along.” There are times when it is just as well not to speak, because the extent of your rage would make you sound foolish. Two noises most affected Clive Strickland then. One was the first note of the clock at St. Giles’s Church, banging out the hour of noon when he should have been elsewhere. The other was Tress’s deep, almost noiseless laugh.

Clive’s shoulders opened and heaved with a sudden wrench that threw Police Constable Number Two off his feet before both officers fastened on him again.

“You’d better be quiet, Strickland,” Tress said maliciously. “
You’ve
got nothing to say.”

“I’ve got something to do, Tressider, the next time you and I meet.”

Tress, not impressed, turned away.

“Quiet!” snapped the pock-marked man, and swung to the crowd round the prisoner. “That’s all,” he said. “Stall your mugs, the lot of you! Hook it!”

Most of these obediently hooked it and faded away. But some few, the more nightmarish from the slums, trailed after the fighting group as Clive was borne across towards St. Giles’s High Street.

“All right, my lad,” the pock-marked man told him loudly. “If you’ve got anything to say, get it off your chest now.”

“As a matter of fact,” panted Clive, making the others stop when he stopped, “I have quite a few things to say. The fact that I did follow Mrs. Damon may make it partly my own fault. But that’s as far as it goes. At this minute I ought to be talking to a man named Whicher about a murder that was committed in Berkshire last night. Why the hell don’t you go the whole hog and arrest me for that too?”

The pock-marked man got in front of him.

Shortish and thick-set, in one of the new-style bowler hats and new-style suits with the short coat, yet shabby and greatcoatless, he had a manner which was not quite that of the gentleman yet far from being that of the lout.

“Let drive all you please, sir,” he urged in an apologetic whisper, “but for God’s sake stop fighting until we get you to the police-station so they won’t know it’s not a real arrest. I
am
Whicher.”

A dray loaded with beer-barrels went over ruts with a rumble and crash. Clive, still panting, looked down at the other man.

Then the little group, with Clive offering only a token resistance, staggered through an offensively foul street to the station-house in the shadow of the church. Inside the charge-room the policemen dropped their hands; both beards were split with grins.

“Sorry, sir,” said Police-Constable Number Two, setting out a chair by the fire.

“Sorry, sir,” said Police-Constable Number One. “Ex-Inspector Whicher is an old pal of ours. He thought the gent with the Dundreary whiskers was out to make trouble for you, and we’d best handle it like this. Good thing the sergeant’s not here, though.”

“Well, I’ll be so-and-so’d,” observed Clive, and sat down in the chair.

“Ah!” breathed Mr. Whicher, in a more cheerful tone. “That’s all right, then.”

But Jonathan Whicher was far from being cheerful at the back of it.

Always with a reserved and thoughtful air, as though turning over some deep arithmetical calculation in his mind, he regarded Clive with his head on one side.

“I ask your pardon, sir,” he apologized, “for putting you to this inconvenience. You must think I am foolish, like; ay, and more than foolish. But I heard this gentleman,”—and he held up Tress’s card—“shouting your name. My little game might have had a different ending if I could have talked to the lady. I never thought Mrs. Damon would hook it too.”

Clive jumped up from his chair.

“Inspector …” he began.

“Stop!” said Mr. Whicher, holding up his hand. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’d rather you didn’t call me Inspector. Charley Field got into trouble for calling himself that; and
he
retired from the Force in good order. He wasn’t forced to resign like me.”

“Then what do I call you?”

“Well, sir, that’s as you like. Mr. Dickens, when he wrote some pieces about us in
Household Words
fifteen years ago, called me Witchem. The swell mob spelled Witchem with a B. I’ll answer to any name that allows I’ve got wits in my head.”

“Anyway!” said Clive, sweeping this aside. “Are you acquainted with Mrs. Matthew Damon?”