The Blue Diamond (33 page)

“Not exactly.” The girl laughed, though her eyes did not meet his. “But now that you have come home Aunt Laura will not mind and I shall be quite free.”

“Are you perfectly certain that my mother's consent was all that was wanting?” Sir Arthur asked as his attention was claimed by his small nephew.

Lady Laura was easily persuaded to stay for dinner; her pride in her newly-recovered son was very evident.

Mavis and Garth too vied with one another in showing their joy at having this dearly-loved brother with them again. Only Dorothy felt somewhat left out in the cold as the evening progressed. After his first greeting Arthur never spoke to her save when courtesy made it imperative. It even seemed to Dorothy that during dinner he avoided looking in her direction, and she rose from the table with the feeling that the old pleasant, cousinly relationship was broken for ever, and that there was nothing to replace it.

“Now to-night you are to come up very soon—you are not to sit smoking for ever so long,” Mavis paused at the door to say to her husband. “We cannot spare Arthur—mother and I.”

In the drawing-room Lady Laura and Mavis settled themselves in one of the big settees for a comfortable talk about Arthur, and his wanderings; Dorothy joined them for a few minutes, but presently, feeling out of everything and unsettled, she wandered absently through the open French window and walked slowly along into the scented twilight beyond.

She strolled away up the grassy paths to the quaint little old-fashioned garden which Mavis called her own, and sat down beside the fountain. Somehow Arthur's return had made her realize far more vividly than his absence had done how entirely outside his life she stood, and, despite her courage, tears gathered in her eyes as she felt a strange unaccustomed sense of loneliness.

She hardly knew how long she had been there when she caught the sound of footsteps and saw a tiny speck of light advancing towards her. She sat still; surely whoever it was would not notice her, and would pass by, but her white gown made a patch of light across the dull grass, and the steps came straight towards her.

“Dorothy!” Arthur's voice said softly as he threw away his cigar. “Here you are! I was looking for you.”

He stood gazing at her in admiration.

“For me!” the girl echoed as she sprang to her feet. “Does Aunt Laura want me? I will go at once.” She moved forward.

Arthur laid his hand on her arm.

“My mother is quite happy talking to Mavis. I am not her messenger. No. I want you for myself, Dorothy. Can't you stay and talk to me a little while?” as the girl seemed disposed to hurry away. “Aren't you going to tell me that you are glad to see me back again?”

“I am glad you have come back,” the girl murmured, twisting her hands together nervously. “But I must not stay out, Arthur. I have letters to write, and—”

“Can't they wait a few minutes?” Arthur inquired reproachfully. “You were sitting quietly enough just now when I came up, Dorothy; and I must tell you why I came home.”

“Aunt Laura wanted you—we felt sure you would know that,” Dorothy said confusedly.

Arthur still retained his hold on her arm, and almost before she had realized that they were turning away from the house he had guided her into a side path.

“I don't think my mother's wishes had much to do with my return,” he went on. “I am ashamed to say that I had in no way realized how my continued absence was wounding her. My resolution was formed when I received a letter from her with certain news.” He paused and looked earnestly at her.

Dorothy turned away her head.

“You don't ask me what the letter contained,” Arthur went on after a moment. “It told me that you were proposing to take up work in a home in East London. When I heard that it struck me that it was time to come back if a hope daily growing stronger in my heart was ever to become a reality. So I am here, Dorothy, to say that I cannot spare you—to ask you to come to the Manor and take care of my mother and me. We want you, Dorothy, more than the crèche does. Will you come? That is the question I have journeyed six thousand miles to put to you. Will you at least give me one word of hope?”

Dorothy drew her arm from his—her trembling was so excessive that he could not but notice it.

“Oh, Arthur, you do not realize—you have not thought—”

“Haven't I?” he interrupted, a touch of passion in his voice. “What else do you imagine has been in my mind through the long days and nights that I have been away from you? I could not come before to you. I made a terrible mistake, Dorothy. Tell me that it is not too late to rectify it!”

“You have forgotten,” Dorothy began slowly, almost beneath her breath.

“May I tell you how I feel, Dorothy—that for a time I was deluded: I followed a chimera, but all the while I must have felt that the reality was here. Do not tell me that the awakening has come too late, child. Give me one word of hope that some day you may let me teach you also to forget the past, to give the present to me.”

“You are sure?” Dorothy's voice quivered with emotion. “Arthur, I—”

Arthur ventured to catch her trembling hands in his.

“Sure—certain, Dorothy! Will you—”

His arm went round her, his fair head was bent over her beautiful brown hair.

“I—I—think I am sure too,” the girl whispered.

THE END

Annie Haynes was born in 1865, the daughter of an ironmonger.

By the first decade of the twentieth century she lived in London and moved in literary and early feminist circles. Her first crime novel,
The Bungalow Mystery
, appeared in 1923, and another nine mysteries were published before her untimely death in 1929.

Who Killed Charmian Karslake?
appeared posthumously, and a further partially-finished work,
The Crystal Beads Murder
, was completed with the assistance of an unknown fellow writer, and published in 1930.

The Bungalow Mystery

The Abbey Court Murder

The Secret of Greylands

The Witness on the Roof

The House in Charlton Crescent

The Crow's Inn Tragedy

The Master of the Priory

The Man with the Dark Beard

The Crime at Tattenham Corner

Who Killed Charmian Karslake?

The Crystal Beads Murder

Glancing at her more closely, he noticed dark stains on her white gown. Horror-struck, he bent over her for a moment, and realised that it was unmistakably a corpse.

Little Polly Spencer liked to visit her hiding place up on the London rooftops, to escape a scolding or worse from her stepmother. Peeping through a studio window, she sees what looks like a burglary. But signs of robbery are merely a cover for murder – and the young figure on the roof seemingly the only witness to the crime.

Polly is sent to live with her well-born mother's family, her secret kept from the police. More than a decade later, she has become Lady Warchester, the wife of a wealthy titled man—yet, in a world utterly removed from her childhood, she will finally face the pale-faced killer she glimpsed through the window all those years ago. And the danger of having seen too much is about to become acute…

The Witness on the Roof
(1925) is a classic of early golden crime fiction. This new edition, the first in over eighty years, features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

“Miss Haynes has a sense of character; her people are vivid and not the usual puppets of detective fiction.”
New Statesman

“N
OW
, P
OLLY
, there you go again! Didn't I promise you the worst thrashing you ever had in your life if you let little Tim out of your arms again? And there he is, crawling in the gutter, and his clean pinny all dirty, and you with one of them nasty, trashy fairy-tale books! I declare you forget everything. I'll give you something to remember!”

The speaker seized the frightened-looking child, who was cowering away from her against the wall and administered a series of shakes, punctuating them with rough blows aimed haphazard on the thin shoulders. Tim, the cause of the commotion, paused in the midst of his happy investigation of the contents of the gutter and set up a loud howl.

A man's shadow darkened the threshold.

“Let be, missis, let be!” a gruff voice said. “What has the child been doing now? Haven't I told you I won't have her thrashed?”

“Doing? Little need to ask that question, John Spencer—look at Tim out there! You are fair silly over the girl—”

But the hand had relaxed its grip; little Polly waited for no more. Experience had taught her that, though her father might take her part at the time, her stepmother was sure to have her own way in the end. She ran out at the back of the house, past the stables, in which she could hear her father's charges, the great Sir Robert Brunton's carriage horses, stirring impatiently. With a passing feeling of wonder that Jim Gregory, her father's underling, should be away from his post, she climbed up a ladder into the loft where the provender for the horses was kept.

High above, almost hidden by the rough straw, there was a small round window. To get to it, holding by the bundles of straw, was an easy matter to Polly. She caught an echo of her stepmother's voice in the yard as she popped through and, clambering by a water-pipe, made a perilous ascent to the roof of the nearest house. There, concealed by a high stack of chimneys, she presently sat down to review the situation.

Mrs. Spencer was the only mother the child had ever known. John Spencer's first wife had died in 1887, leaving him with two daughters—Evie, then just fifteen, and the week-old baby.

It had been a sorry time for the man. Evie adored the baby, but her ideas of managing it, and the house, had been vague, and there had been no one to blame John Spencer when, a couple of years after his wife's death, he had married the buxom cook in the establishment in which he was coachman—no one, that is to say, but Evie, who had resented her father's second marriage passionately. There had been constant skirmishes between her and her stepmother until, when Polly was five years old, Evie had found the situation intolerable and had suddenly disappeared from home.

Polly—whose memory of her sister was now merely a vague recollection of being cradled in tender arms, of loving kisses being pressed upon her cheeks—sometimes had letters and beautiful presents from Evie. The rest of the family had nothing. Her stepmother, loudly opining that the girl had gone to the bad, confiscated the presents; the letters, written very plainly so that the child might read them, Polly kept and conned over and over again until she knew them by heart. It was nice to feel that some one cared for her, even this dimly-remembered elder sister.

She was thinking of that now as she sat hunched up behind the chimneys. She had had a letter from her sister the day before; perhaps that had helped to make her stepmother so cross, she reflected. Young as she was, she realized perfectly that the fact that Evie had so completely emancipated herself from her thraldom was exceedingly galling to Mrs. Spencer—almost as galling perhaps as that other fact which she had heard her father state in one of his rare fits of anger.

“Leave the child alone!” he had growled. “You don't understand her—how should you? Her mother was a lady born.”

Polly thought of that now as she looked round with the air of a conqueror exploring some unknown world.

Grove Street Mews ran at the back of Hinton Square, where the town house of her father's employer was situated. At the opposite side, nearer where Polly had emerged, was Grove Street, a precinct which had undoubtedly known better days; fallen as it was, it still retained some remnants of past greatness in the shape of lofty rooms and large windows. It had, however, become the prey of the tenement owner, and each house harboured six or eight different tenants.

It was on the roof of one of these Grove Street houses that Polly now found herself. Above her there arose another story and yet another. Polly ran great danger of being seen as she picked her way carefully along. It was very dirty; soot and grime seemed to have found a final resting-place on the ledges. Looking down at her begrimed frock and pinafore, Polly shrugged her thin shoulders with unchild-like resignation. What did it matter? Her stepmother was sure to be angry anyhow.

At first there was fascination enough in the roof itself—in climbing over the various little projections, skirting the chimneys, or watching the sparrows that sat looking at her with their unwinking black eyes, as if marvelling at this sudden invasion of their territory.

But presently Polly grew more enterprising; she looked up at the long rows of windows. What were the people doing behind the blinds and curtains?

Some of the sills were on a level with her head; raising herself on tiptoe she could just manage to see in. The first was a sitting-room; so much she had contrived to make out when there was a sound of an opening door, and with a little gasp of alarm she drew back.

No sound came from the room, however; evidently she had passed unnoticed; and presently, regaining confidence, she crept along.

At length she was stopped by the wall of the next story. Polly looked up at the overhanging eaves wistfully; it was impossible to think of getting up there, and she was about to turn back hopelessly when a window close at hand caught her attention—it was sufficiently low to be easy of access. Polly found herself unable to resist the temptation. Tiptoeing, she gazed through the lower pane. At first, by contrast with the sunshine outside, everything looked dark, but, becoming used to the dimness, the child saw that the room was a great bare-looking apartment. She was too ignorant to know that the big easel in the middle of the room, the stacks of unfinished canvases against the walls, the untidy litter of paints and tubes and rags on the centre table proclaimed it to be a studio, but something in its aspect attracted her.