SV - 05 - Sergeant Verity and the Swell Mob. (26 page)

Verity's
face was suffused by a blush of fury. But Croaker had not done.

'Moreover, sergeant, it seems
that during your absence from duty Cosima Bremer also took the opportunity to
bolt. Not a movement, not a light in the house since then! The board must
consider that as well.'

'Search-warrant,
sir!'

'On what grounds, sergeant? A
young person is entitled to travel if she chooses. There is no crime against
her name, no suspicion to be proved. However, sergeant, the whole sad story of
the Shah Jehan clasp now lies at your own door does it not?'

'Mrs
Verity, sir! Let her be found!'

'You shall have leisure for
that yourself,' said Croaker happily. 'Pending the hearing of dismissal
proceedings by the board, it is my duty to suspend you from employment. The
young person Jolly, being only casually engaged by the police authority, may
now offer her services elsewhere. Remain at your present lodging until
otherwise commanded.'

'Then
there won't be a search for Mrs Verity, sir?' Croaker clicked his tongue.

'Every
wife who leaves her husband mayn't be
searched
for, sergeant! Our force was
not constituted for such interference! Seek her out for yourself if you
choose. For the present, a man suspended without his pay might be glad of one
less mouth to feed.'

Croaker grinned humourlessly
at his plump victim.

'Then I'm suspended without me pay, sir?' Verity
inquired.

'Oh yes,' said Croaker
reassuringly. 'Why, sergeant, a man that sits at home in idleness must not
expect reward for it, must he?'

Verity looked
hopelessly at his commander.

'No, sir.'

'Very well!'
snapped Croaker brightly. 'Dismiss!'

16

To his surprise,
in the days following Bella's disappearance, Verity felt neither the desperate
anguish nor the frantic distraction which victims in stage melodrama displayed.
The torment of her absence filled him instead with a dull, cold sickness of
heart. The Tidy Street lodgings resembled a house of bereavement. Stringfellow
hobbled about, speaking little, apparently in the same state of numbed inertia.
The old cabman and his son-in-law were like battle casualties after some
amputation or mortal wound, the nerves deadened by an atrocious blow and the
pain not yet registering.

Even
the children, in Ruth's care, were silent for the most part. The tearful young
servant nursed and coddled them but they were thoughtful and indifferent.
Verity's pretty nark was housed in one of the attics, from which she now rarely
emerged. There, almost in solitude, Jolly pursued her strange existence.

On the first day, Stringfellow
had gone to London on the train. But the house in the shabby little street at
Paddington Green was still empty. Of Bella there was no sign and no news. Then
the two men searched the streets of Brighton, the missions and lodging houses,
hospital wards and refuges. Verity sought out Constable Meiklejohn to see if
any clue as to Bella's whereabouts might have come the way of the
Private-Clothes Detail. Meiklejohn shook his head, a guilty movement in his
eyes as though he had compromised himself by associating with the disgraced
sergeant in this manner.

Each
morning Stringfellow would assume a courage he did not feel as he fetched the
cab and the old horse Lightning from the hired stable in Station Street. 'C'mon
Verity, me old sojer!' And the two men continued their useless search. For the
first time in his life, Verity felt like a beggar, entreating the charity of
strangers. With the little daguerreotype of Bella, done the day before their
wedding, he accosted the keepers of lodgings and charity houses, even the
strollers on the promenade. They shook their heads, avoiding his gaze as if
embarrassed by his misery. Not one of them, in his view, showed the smallest
human feeling for his plight.

On the third evening he sat
opposite Stringfellow across the rough scrubbed wood of the kitchen table. The
dark ale in his glass was an inch or two lower than it had been half an hour
earlier, but the bread and cheese was untouched.

''s no good, Stringfellow,' he
said at last. 'Someone got 'er. They must 'ave. Mr Croaker was right, too.
We've not had a word from 'em in three days. There ain't no instructions to be
give me. It's done for spite. Some villain I must have crossed done it for
revenge. She ain't never coming back. They don't mean her to.'

Then, for the first time
during his wretchedness, a single manly tear brimmed in his dark eyes and
spread glistening down the flushed pordy cheeks. Stringfellow looked thoroughly
alarmed..

' 'ere!' he said. 'Never say
die! Even if it was true, which it ain't, a man gotta stand to his guns. You
know that, Verity! You been a sojer, same as me! You got the Alma and Inker-man
clasps to prove it! You never turned your back on them Rhoosians at Sebastypul,
did yer? An' our lads rode straight and true against them heathen cannon at
Bhurtpore.'

Verity nodded, unable to
speak, as though conceding the argument.

'Well, then!' said
Stringfellow triumphantly. 'What d'you think your Queen'd say to you if she
could hear you treating for terms now?'

The crisis was
over. Verity heaved himself up presently and made his way to bed up the winding
stairs behind the latch door. Stringfellow gave a sigh, as though catastrophe
had been averted. But now that he was alone he sat in his wooden chair and
stared into the embers of the kitchen fire, his old face ravaged by lines of
despair.

Since
Bella's disappearance, Verity had slept little. When he left Stringfellow, he
was thoroughly exhausted. He snuffed out the candle and pulled open the
curtains to reveal the starlight glistening on Brighton's slates as though the
roofs had been the sea itself. He turned to the straw mattress on the iron
bedframe, an alien and cheerless place now that its emptiness served only to
remind him of Bella's absence. But in his exhaustion he lay down and fell
quickly into a profound sleep.

It
seemed to him that he had slept long and deeply. He came slowly and with an
effort to the surface of consciousness. Even before he could recall the
details of his bereavement, he guessed that Bella had come back to him. It was
still the dead of night, and distant chimes of a church clock carried above sea
and rooftops in the starlit air.

The sharp profile on the
pillow beside him was no illusion. Then he felt the warm smooth pressure of her
naked body, stirring his loins insistently. Verity floated between dream and
reality, fearing that the vision might melt into shadow if he were to speak.
Starlight glistened on smooth gold, the bare skin of her trim shoulders. Her
breasts were smaller and harder than he had remembered. Rediscovering her as
she lay against him, he touched the tip of a vertebra forming a slight eminence
at the slim nape of the neck.

His face touched the sleek bell of hair and he was
puzzled that it should be dark and scented. Later he reproached himself with
knowing already who she was. The faint light from the uncurtained window was
surely enough to identify Miss Jolly's dark questioning eyes, the hair brushed
back clear of her proud forehead. In his wretchedness there was relief merely
in pressing against the body of another creature with no intention of
committing the ultimate offence against his marriage vows.

As she squirmed herself
against him, he allowed his hand to map the oriental delicacy of her shoulders,
the fine bone-pattern of her spine curving inward to the waist, the swell of
her hips. He stroked the silky firmness of her thighs and allowed the softer
twin curves of Miss Jolly's bottom to fill his hands. She arched a leg over
him, her hand pressing his own to delve between her hind cheeks to the opening
of her thighs. Her lips were so close that he saw only part of her face, new to
him and strange. She arched her hips back, opening herself to his hand behind
her, her other fingers seeking his loins. When he put his free hand to her
mouth gently to prevent her kiss, Jolly licked the fingers coaxingly.

Now he
was fully awake. Sitting up suddenly he reached for the matches and lit the
candle. Jolly lay nude and golden-skinned in the flame-light, dark eyes slanting
the first quick anger of rejection.

'No!'
said Verity vigorously. 'Ain't you got the least sense of. . .'

The
anger in her eyes became apprehension, as though he might strike her for what
she had done. Verity looked at her and his sternness melted away. Of all the
men and women who owed him nothing, Jolly was the only one who had offered him
all that she had to give. He touched the side of her face gently with his hand.

' 's all right,' he said
softly. 'I shan't be cross. You're a good girl, 'course you are. Only you must
go back to your room and stay there, just as if Mrs Verity was here.'

Jolly gave him a quick feline glance and her voice was
a soprano wail.

'What's the matter
with me, then?'

'Nothing,'
said Verity hastily. 'Nothing's the matter. You're a good girl and you got
nothing to fear. If you don't understand about me and Mrs Verity, 's not your
fault. You can't be expected to know what you was never told.'

He
guided her to the door with a hand on her arm. The candlelight threw a warm
flickering gold on her nude shape, the slim young figure and the tight little
swagger of her hips. Verity ached with unappeased longing, tempered by a corroding
remorse at the thought of Bella. Just before the door he allowed himself to
administer one or two affectionate little pats. Jolly responded by exaggerating
her swagger. Then she was gone and the door was closed.

Verity lay on the straw
mattress in a fit of self-reproach. He knew that when he recognised his
companion as Jolly rather than Bella he had allowed himself to go on caressing
and fondling her. Such crimes against chastity, he had been taught to believe,
constituted a harm that could never be made up for. In the solitude of the
starlit room his self-disgust mastered him completely. He thought that if Bella
had indeed left him of her own accord, it was the justice he deserved.

The
next day was no more fruitful than its predecessors. From time to time, Verity
thought that Stringfellow looked at him rather oddly and he prayed that the
events of the previous night had not somehow come to the cabman's notice.
Ordinarily, Stringfellow's enthusiastic appreciation of young Ruth would have
left him in no position to complain. But since his daughter's disappearance,
Stringfellow had avoided the young servant girl's company with uncharacteristic
fastidiousness.

It was
two days after Jolly's offer of consolation that Verity received his final
instructions from his tormentors. By the time that a muddy-faced little
happyjack slipped the note through the door at Tidy Street, Verity had given up
all thought that Bella's kidnappers meant to contact him again.

The
final note was in block capitals with no pretence that it had been written by
Bella herself. Indeed, it was neatly printed on a square of card, as though it
had been a formal invitation.

Mrs
Bella
Verity
begs
to
announce
that
she
will take
leave
of
friends
and
former
acquaintances Saturday
the
27th
of
July
at
three
in
the
afternoon
prompt.
She
will
receive
for
this
purpose
at number
33,
Brunswick
Square,
from
which
address she
will
depart
at
half-past
three
exactly.

Despite his fears for Bella, Verity's heart rose with
a new hope and he could almost have loved the man who had sent the message. But
the hope was quickly checked.

'It can't be right,
Stringfellow!' His plump hand slapped the scrubbed wood of the kitchen table.
'Not Brunswick Square! There's still a guard on it! Meiklejohn was outside when
I spoke to him day before yesterday!'

'Well,' said Stringfellow
glumly, 'it ain't nowhere else, 's the only place mentioned. And the time's
four hours from now. Better do something quick. Show this paper to Mr Croaker.'