Dorothy Eden (50 page)

“I believe that’s what happened in the end. She determined to save the baby. So it ended in a melodrama. The baby on the church steps. Funny to think of old Jones having a passionate love affair.”

“Not so funny when you think his wife’s been an invalid for ten years.”

“Yes, the poor devil!”

“Don’t think of it, Flynn. Get some sleep. We’ll be upstairs, if you want us.”

In the end, it was Len Brinker, Harriet’s producer, who identified Jones as Leo Lunn, who, with his wife, Nella, used to do a comedy act, years ago, in variety. Then the wife had fallen ill and Leo hadn’t been able to get a booking on his own. He didn’t know what had happened to them, but he did remember Leo’s gift for mimicry. It would have been no trouble to imitate a voice, especially one with a Cockney flavor like Fred’s.

But all this no one knew until the next day. By that time Harriet was home. They had wanted to keep her longer in the hospital, but she had got up and walked out. She had a lot of things to do at home, she said. The first ones were to buy soap and coffee, or Mrs. Blunt would be leaving an irate note. She didn’t like her messages to be ignored.

“I have to be a better housekeeper,” she said apologetically. “I’ve been careless.”

Of course she had been careless, wrapped up in her memories of Joe, and her desire to succeed as an actress, as if that would be compensation for having no husband. She had allowed Jamie to become willful and difficult, and Arabella had been growing sweetly and almost unnoticed, like a primrose in a shadowy wood.

Her children! And all her life ahead! She must go home at once to get on with it.

Fred was there to open the taxi door and welcome her. He was still handsome in his uniform, but curiously deflated and quiet.

“Glad to see you home, Mrs. Lacey.”

“Thank you, Fred. And you, too.”

He was embarrassed. “Oh, Ma put up my bail. They say I’ll get a sentence, but it won’t be a long one. I don’t know what came over me. When I saw that parcel of money lying on the seat I just couldn’t resist it. Seemed silly, kind of, to leave it there. But that’s all I did, Mrs. Lacey. The other things when Ma covered up for me, I was just out at a place I know, doing a little gambling. I only didn’t tell Ma because she worried about it. And Millie—I didn’t know those earrings were real diamonds, I swear I didn’t.”

“I didn’t even know I had lost them,” Harriet said. “And yet they seem to have been at the bottom of all this trouble. I can’t have Millie back, of course. She’ll have to get another job.”

“Lucky she’s alive to,” Fred growled. “Your kids are waiting for you upstairs, Mrs. Lacey. Jamie’s had that puppy around the garden six times already.”

That was how she was greeted, with Jamie pushing the fat puppy into her arms and shouting, “Look, Mummy! He’s mine and Flynn’s. I have to take him for walks and train him, you know.”

His square, bright face, lit with the excitement of the puppy, showed no trace of his ordeal. Nor, indeed, did Arabella’s as she sat on the floor, gurgling with delight at seeing her mother. She was rosy and healthy and sweet.

“My darlings!” whispered Harriet.

Mrs. Blunt bustled in.

“They look well enough, don’t they, madam? Almost as if they
had
been in the country. But lordy, madam, you look like a ghost yourself. Sit down and I’ll make some coffee. Oh, there isn’t any! Those guzzling policemen drank it all.”

“Just slip out and get some, Mrs. Blunt. And as you’re passing, tell Mr. Palmer to come up, if he’s in.”

“Oh, he’s in, all right. Had me ringing the hospital six times this morning. Are you sure you’re all right, love?”

“Perfectly all right, Mrs. Blunt, thank you. Just a little weak. Gas never was my favorite anaesthetic.”

“Did he
really
tie you to the chair?”

“Well, he didn’t want me to escape out of the window, naturally. Take Jamie with you, Mrs. Blunt. The puppy might like a walk.”

“He’s just been,” Jamie said loudly.

“Never mind. It won’t hurt him to go again.”

So there was only Arabella, contentedly playing on the floor, when Flynn came. He knew his way about in her living room now. As she spoke he walked unhesitatingly towards her.

“Harriet! My darling!”

There were just the two of them as she went into his arms.

“Harriet, I have no eyes.”

“And I have no life without you.”

“Because of yesterday?”

“If you hadn’t come in time, yes. But in every other way, Flynn. Every other way.”

She felt the tautness go out of him. His hand came up to explore her face.

“I’ve wanted to do this for so long.”

“How long?”

“From the first time I met you. But especially from the day you bought a new hat. You walked gaily.”

“I was gay, that day.”

“You will be again, my sweet.”

“We both will.”

“Do you remember my great-grandfather’s letter, ‘You might be any small anonymous woman.’”

“In a way I am anonymous. You can’t see me.”

“I see you the way great-grandfather saw his Mary, only there’s a difference. I have you. Haven’t I?”

“You have me, Flynn darling.”

“No shadows any more?”

“No shadows.”

Mrs. Blunt came bursting in noisily.

“We weren’t long, were we? Now, Jamie, come and help me in the kitchen. Mr. Palmer wants to tell your mother things.”

“About the nasty porridge and the night I was sick?”

“And other things,” said Mrs. Blunt firmly.

“Sit down, Harriet,” said Flynn. “The inspector will be telling you all this later, but I’ll tell you first. Because I think I understand Jones better. He really is crazy about his sick wife, you know. Certainly he had a mistress. He’s no saint, after all, and he is an actor of ability. I believe he made an amusing and dashing lover, another role he could play, of course. Anyway, this woman Eve adored him, and was ready to do his slightest wish. She thought going to live in the house by the river was exciting, and promised much better things for the future.

“But for years Jones had fretted about his inability to give his wife the comfort and care she should have. It was a case of water wearing away stone. This year he cracked. Some way, any way, he determined to get money. I believe he pilfered from me, in small ways, but what he wanted was a lump sum. Just enough to get a better flat and get out of his dreary rut.

“Then you came to live here. A wealthy American, he thought. Two small children. What way did crooks have of making money quickly? Kidnapping, of course.

“He made his plans carefully. He rented the empty house by the river, giving Eve false ideas. He planned, shamelessly, to use her. He also planned to use whatever nursemaid you had for the children. When Millie came he could see that she was vain and stupid, and exactly the type he wanted. He only had to watch until he had some means of blackmailing her. He saw her burying the odd earring in the garden that night, and later dug it up, and realized it was a diamond, and yours. He also found the one Millie had lost. So he had the best kind of threat to make to her.

“But, as you suspected at the beginning, he meant to play fair. If he had been able to collect the money that first evening you would have got your children back in the morning, left on a seat in an underground station during the rush hour, with a telephone message to you as to where to pick them up. But I upset that plan by asking him to drive me to the park that night. He couldn’t collect the money at the right time. When he finally got there it was gone, lifted by Fred, as we now know.

“He became a little desperate then. He thought Arabella’s shorn hair would give you and me warning enough not to call the police. But as you know, we did call them. So there began a frantic day for Jones. He was still determined, if possible, to bring off the thing; he didn’t quite know how. But Millie threatened to confess to the police about the lost earring and the threats she had had, and he had to deal with her. He slipped out of my flat, if you remember, presumably to buy sprouts, but really to ring Millie, impersonating Fred when he did so.

“He didn’t mean to kill her, he said, but just to give her a good fright. But then Eve rang my flat yesterday afternoon to say Jamie had escaped, and he was in a panic. He invented his wife’s collapse, which, as it happened, was real enough, as s
he
had accused her nurse of stealing a gray coat which actually Jones had been wearing in his impersonation of the blonde woman.”

“He was the blonde woman, of course,” Harriet said, rousing herself from her fascinated absorption in the story.

“Yes. A theatrical touch which came to him the day Jamie borrowed one of Mrs. Helps’s wigs and frightened Millie. It really was a touch of genius on Jones’s part to follow that up, lurking conspicuously when he knew there was a chance of Millie seeing him.”

“The beige face?” Harriet queried, shivering a little.

“A nylon stocking drawn over it, flattening his features.”

“It was quite horrifying.”

“I can imagine it was. As you see, Jones was drawn always to the theatrical, as also in the grisly gesture of Arabella’s hair. But here is the nicest part of the story. The woman, Eve, after a nightmare couple of days trying to cope with the children and feeling all the time that she was spied on by the neighbor, Mrs. Briggs (it was Mrs. Briggs who came to our rescue last night), found she was growing very fond of Arabella. She was, by this time, extremely frightened—Jones, in his best Frankenstein manner, had been pretty effective. When Jamie escaped, she was panic-stricken. The only thing in her head was to save the baby. Then you rang, accidentally, and she seized the opportunity to ask you to come. But before you could get there Jones had rung, saying he was on his way, and she was terrified that he would kill the baby. So she ran away and later left Arabella on the church steps, to be picked up by the police. Jones arrived. There was no one there. He was rather at his wit’s end, I think, and would have thrown the whole thing up, and probably no one would have been any the wiser.

“But you walked in. You surprised him upstairs. He couldn’t get out without you seeing him, and anyway you must have had some inside knowledge to have come there. So in that moment, from being an amateur, rather nibbling at crime, he became a desperate criminal. He genuinely tried to kill you. It was, he told himself, you or his wife. And you had had so much, Nell so little. There was no choice.

“He left you there, tied to the chair, slowly inhaling gas, and came back to the flat to see if you had left any clues. You had, of course. Your note saying where you had gone.

“That was easy to get rid of, and almost immediately the news came that Fred was arrested, so Jones got over-confident and made his fatal mistake.”

“What was it?” Harriet asked breathlessly. “How did you know so certainly that he was guilty?”

“Because he insisted that, although Fred denied it, it probably had been Fred who had attacked Millie, and not the blonde woman, as she had said. At that stage no one,
no one,
had told Jones that Millie had said she was attacked by the blonde woman. In that moment I understood everything.”

Harriet put her hand on his. She didn’t speak for a little while. Then she said, “The woman? The one who grew fond of Arabella?”

“They picked her up late last night. Poor little scrap. She’ll get off lightly, probably. She didn’t seem to mind a lot. As long as the baby was safe, she said. I don’t think she had ever handled a baby before.”

“And Jones’s wife?”

“She’ll be cared for until he comes out. Probably do them both good. She had him worn to a frazzle.”

“Oh, Flynn! How sad it all is.”

“Yes, but it’s broken an unhealthy spell for them.”

“It’s so wonderful not to be afraid of the telephone any more. That deadly little bell! It was like listening to danger.”

Then Jamie came in, the puppy bundled fatly in his arms.

“Here’s one of the reasons things went wrong for Jones,” Flynn said. “He never meant to get himself saddled with a five-year-old.”

“The unpredictable,” said Harriet. “The uncertainty of the human element.”

“Flynn, do you suppose now you haven’t got Jones we ought to look after you?” Jamie asked, with the air of producing an original and brilliant idea.

“I’d appreciate it,” said Flynn, and Jamie’s face lit with his wide warm smile.

“Coffee’s ready,” called Mrs. Blunt “I’ll have to go now, Mrs. Lacey. It isn’t really my morning here. I’ve left a note about floor polish. Don’t get that scented kind. It gives me hay fever. Funny how good things are bad for you, and bad things are good.”

Harriet leaned over to touch Flynn’s eyelids lightly with her fingertips. He seized her hand and kissed it.

“Let’s look at it that way,” he said cheerfully.

I
N THAT FORLORN TIME
between late night and early morning Brigit awoke. She could see the illuminated face of her bedside clock with its faint glow-worm light. It said a quarter past three.

Three hours till daylight. Now she would not sleep again. Three hours in which to think. She turned her head restlessly and moonlight caught her in the eyes. The great white staring moon was hanging in the branches of the mulberry tree outside the window.

The tree was dead. Although its trunk had been stiffened with cement to stop its splitting and falling all but one of its branches had withered and died, and now it stood there against the sky, crooked and witchlike, hugging the moon in its bony arms.

Couldn’t they have put her in a room with a view of a living green tree? Brigit wondered in sudden lonely anger. Or if she must have this room because it was large and sunny couldn’t they have thought to cut that lunatic tree down and left her only the uncomplicated sky? She knew that Captain Phillip Templar had planted the tree two hundred and fifty years ago, with the thought of cultivating silkworms as a hobby—he needed a hobby from his buccaneering on the high seas, a nice peaceful hobby that did harm to no one but the mulberry leaves—and that the tree had subsequently become as much an heirloom as the gold plate and the Chinese ivories and the family portraits. Because of this, even dead, the tree would stand there, marring the view, curiously evil in its twisted death, as if it had caught some of the evil of the Templar family.