Hole and Corner (9 page)

She came into Mrs Huddleston's bedroom and went straight to the built-in cupboard by the fireplace. It hadn't taken her long to find out from Possett that Mrs Huddleston didn't believe in safes or locking things up. She hid her jewellery, and put it in a different place every week. This week the emeralds were rolled up with her stockings. Possett had let that out when they were making the bed yesterday morning. She couldn't keep anything to herself, Possett couldn't. Bessie despised her a good deal.

There were drawers inside the cupboard door. There was a whole drawerful of stockings. Bessie ran her fingers over them, and found the emeralds easily enough. They were beautiful and valuable stones, and they were beautifully set. She looked at them with professional admiration. There was a headband of green leaves set so that they would lie flat against the hair, and there were long earrings, and two brooches, one smaller than the other. It seemed a most awful waste to plant them all on Miss Dale. The headband would be enough to make it look as if she had planned the theft, not just been tempted by the brooch lying, as you might say, to her hand on the drawing-room mantelpiece. She'd got to be in the thing up to her neck, had Miss Dale, but the headband would be enough for that.

Bessie slipped all the things into her apron pocket under her handkerchief and ran down the stairs again. Would Al Phillips find out if she kept some of the emeralds? She didn't see why he should. She could keep the earrings and one of the brooches, and no one would be any the wiser. If they weren't found in the hem of the grey coat, it would only look as if Shirley Dale had hidden them somewhere else—that's all it would look like. Bessie would be safe enough, and Ted's old fence would give her a price for the brooch and earrings. She made up her mind to keep them.

Then she hid the headband and the larger brooch as she had hidden the diamonds, pushing them down through the slit in the lining of Shirley's coat. The headband lay flat along the hem, and she worked the brooch round to the back on the opposite side to the diamonds, taking care to keep the two brooches sis inches apart so that they couldn't possibly knock against each other and give the show away.

Bessie stepped back from the coat-stand with triumph in her heart. There was rather a mouldy-looking fern in a pot on the hall table. Her eye lighted upon it approvingly. The earthenware pot was concealed by a majolica jar. She took it out, dropped the remaining emeralds into the jar, and when the fern had been replaced there was nothing of an incriminating nature anywhere except a dirty mark on Bessie's thumb. One minute later she was washing it off under the scullery tap with Primrose soap, and half a minute after that she was sitting close up to the kitchen window to catch the light, with her eyes bent on page 101 of a novelette entitled
The Perils of Pansy
, whilst her ears noted gratefully the fact that Cook was still snoring. Not much to choose between her and the old grampus upstairs, but Cook perhaps a bit louder and rather more on the bass side.

She became engrossed with Pansy, who was being subjected to the perfidious advances of an unscrupulous duke who had nothing except his wealth and his title to recommend him, while her heart remained perseveringly true to a virtuous commercial traveller who had been unjustly dismissed by his firm. Bessie more than suspected the duke of having a hand in this dismissal, and she had also begun to have a dawning suspicion that the persecuted Everard was going to turn out to be the real duke. She would have time for at least two chapters before she had to think about getting tea.

CHAPTER TEN

Shirley caught the six o'clock bus. She had to run for it, because at the last minute Mrs Huddleston called her back to look up a number in the telephone directory. As she ran, the hem of her coat flapped against her legs. She was in too much of a hurry to bother about it. Something hard kept hitting her on the calf. She thought vaguely that there must be leaden weights in the hem to keep it down—tailors often put them there. But she had had this coat two years, and it was funny that it should suddenly have started banging into her when it had never done it before.

She caught the bus by the skin of her teeth, and was flung into the only vacant place by the violent lurch with which it started off again. She came down with a bump between a pale young man with an evening paper and a red-faced woman in a fur cap and a disintegrating plush coat trimmed with rabbit, and had great difficulty in reducing a scream to a gasp, because something very sharp indeed ran about half an inch into the calf of her left leg. She hoped no one noticed the gasp. It really had only just missed being a shriek, because the jab was so sudden. The young man continued to read his paper. The red-faced woman said darkly, “Don't care 'oo they knock down, do they? Talk about accidents on the road—seems to me, you don't
'ave
to go out on the road to 'ave them.”

Shirley bent down and felt her calf. It was still hurting abominably, but since it wasn't streaming with gore she supposed that the pin which had run into her hadn't really gone in as much as half an inch. It had felt like being stabbed to the bone. (“Draw it mild, my good Shirley—it's about two inches to the bone if you start that side”). She controlled a giggle and sat back. Well anyhow, whether it was half an inch or two inches, the main point was that her leg wasn't streaming with blood. It didn't in fact seem to be bleeding at all, which she thought showed great self-control considering the provocation it had had. And then she began to think about the provocation. What could possibly have pricked her like that? If her coat had been new, it would have been quite easy. You pin up a hem, and then you forget to take the pin away. But why should a pin lurk peacefully and secretly for years and then turn and rend you? She wondered if her stocking had laddered. That really would be a curse.

And while she was thinking about that, in a funny underground way she began to connect the pin which had jabbed her with the odd hard something that had kept on banging against her leg as she ran to catch the bus. She had taken it to be a weight, but it had puzzled her—and weights don't have sharp pins attached to them. Something clouded in Shirley's mind, faintly at first, and then with a gathering darkness. If you pour ink into water, it goes in black, and then spreads out and thins away until the black is all gone and there is only the water, with a tinge in it that wasn't there before. What happened in Shirley's mind was the opposite to this. It was as if all her thoughts were suddenly, lightly, tinged with fear and then the fear began to draw itself away and gather itself together until it wasn't part of her own thoughts any more, but just a dense blackness which had been dropped into her mind. On a terrified impulse she bent down again and felt the hem of her coat.

The young man was reading his paper. The red-faced woman had shut her eyes. The two people immediately opposite were getting to their feet. There was nobody to notice Shirley's sudden pallor. Her heart gave a frightful jump. The bus stopped at the corner of Emsworth Road, and she rose blindly and followed the people who were getting out there. A lot of people always got out at Emsworth Road. It wasn't her stop, but nobody was to know that.

She began to walk back along the way that the bus had come.

It wasn't true.…

It was true.…

It couldn't be true.…

What's the good of saying ‘couldn't' when a thing has happened? This thing was true because it had happened. The pin that had run into her was the pin of Mrs Huddleston's diamond brooch. The catch had come undone, and she had told Mrs Huddleston that it was undone, and Mrs Huddleston had told her to put the brooch on the mantelpiece, and she had put it there leaning up against the Dresden china shepherdess.

Well, it wasn't there now. It ought to be there, but it wasn't. It was in the hem of Shirley Dale's coat. She had felt the shape of it quite clearly through the stuff of the hem—the shape, and the big diamond which stuck up like a boss in the middle. She was cold, and hollow, and her legs shook. “The prisoner when arrested had the stolen goods in her possession.” That's the sort of thing you see in the papers. It doesn't happen to real people. It can't happen to me—oh, it can't! Oh please, please,
please
!

With a sort of mental jerk Shirley pulled herself together. Something had made her get off the bus. She didn't quite know what, but it was good sound commonsense. What she'd got to do was to go straight back to Revelston Crescent, tell Mrs Huddleston what had happened, and insist, absolutely
insist
, on an inquiry. Because somebody must have put that brooch into the hem of her coat, and for her own sake as well as Shirley Dale's Mrs Huddleston was bound to find out who that someone was.

The minute she decided to do something she began to feel better. She must get back to Revelston Crescent as quickly as possible. It wasn't worth waiting about for a bus. She could do it in ten minutes if she hurried.

She began to hurry, taking three or four running steps and then a couple of walking ones. She must get there before Possett got back from seeing her mother at Ealing, but it was no good arriving out of breath. She was going to need it all to cope calmly with Mrs Huddleston. You could do this running and walking stunt indefinitely without getting out of breath.

Possett wasn't due back till half-past six, so there ought to be plenty of time, “
Loads
of time,” Shirley said to herself as she ran. Sometimes Possett came in early. “Don't think of that'—don't, don't,
don't
! Why should she be early to-day? She
won't
be early.” And until she came in at half-past six nobody would know that the brooch was gone. Mrs Huddleston wouldn't dream of telling anyone except Possett to put her jewellery away. No, she would wait for Possett to come in, and then she would tell her all about the catch being damaged, and how tiresome it was, and a lot of stuff like that. And when she'd said everything you
could
possibly say about a brooch that wanted mending, and said it twice over at least, then she would tell Possett to take the brooch off the mantelpiece—“carefully, because it is so valuable.” With even the least little bit of luck she would get in long before it came to that.

Shirley didn't have any luck at all. Possett came home at five minutes past six. Her sister Mrs Hodgson had also been out to Ealing, and she had to get back not one minute later than six because Aggie, her eldest, was bringing a young man in to tea sharp at the half hour and she'd got scones to make and everything to see to. So the sisters took the same bus, Mrs Hodgson getting off back at the High Street, and Possett, who was Mabel in the family circle, reaching Revelston Crescent at exactly five minutes past six. She took off her outdoor things and went down to the drawing-room as she always did the minute she got in, and the next thing was Mrs Huddleston in hysterics, and Bessie being rung for, and Possett and Bessie applying restoratives. And the next thing after that was Possett at the telephone, trembling in every limb and ringing up the police station.

The loss of the emeralds was discovered a little later, after Possett had rung up the station, but before the policeman arrived.

Shirley Dale saw him arrive. She had turned into Revelston Crescent and had slackened her pace so as to appear with all the calmness and poise which the situation demanded, and there, advancing from the other end of the Crescent with majestic tread and all the calm and poise in the world, was a large and towering policeman. The same something which had snatched Shirley from the bus once more impelled her. She turned, ran up the steps of No 12, and stood there screened by the portico as if she were waiting for someone to come and let her in. She hadn't the slightest doubt that the policeman was on his way to No 15. She had never seen a policeman in Revelston Crescent before. The fact that one was there now most undoubtedly meant that Mrs Huddleston had discovered her loss and sent for the police.

Revelston Crescent was not at all well lighted. Shirley stood in the dark under the portico of No 12 and looked sideways between the pillars. The lamp which had enabled her to see the policeman was opposite No 20. She watched the massive form approach, at first silhouetted against the lamp-light, then growing larger and dimmer. The heavy tread sounded on the quiet pavement. It ascended the steps of No 15. And then, before there was time for the bell to be rung, the door was jerked open and for a moment the agitated twitterings of Possett actually reached Shirley's ears. The policeman went in and the door was shut. Shirley heard that too. And then without stopping to think or plan she ran down the steps of No 12 and went on running.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Shirley sat in a third-class carriage, and was appalled at her cowardice. Behind being appalled there was a faint fresh tang of triumph. It felt rather like having a scolding from old Aunt Emily Dale in a stuffy room with a hot fire and all the windows shut, and hearing the wind blow in off the sea all cold, and salt, and gusty.

Her hands and feet were cold and her cheeks burned. She sat up stiff and straight with the damp air buffeting her as the train gathered speed, and called herself a puling, puking, pusillanimous pip-squeak, but away at the back of her mind something danced and shouted, “I've done it—I've got away!”

Shirley turned savagely on the shouting, dancing rebel. “Yes, you've got away—and shall I tell you where you've got to? Out of the frying-pan into the fire. You just panicked and ran, and in about half no time the police will be running after you. What you ought to have done was to run after that policeman and burst into the house with him, arm-in-arm so to speak, and tell him all about it.” She stopped short. You can't scold anyone, not even yourself, when a sort of cramp of terror has taken hold of you. She waited for it to let go again. Presently it went. She was glad the window was open and the wind blowing in on her face. She was very glad indeed that she was alone in the carriage. She didn't bother about any more scolding, because what was the good? She
hadn't
followed the policeman into the house, and that was that. The milk was spilt, and she couldn't conjure it unspilt again however hard she scolded. When you haven't done a thing, it's just sheer waste of time saying “Why didn't I do it?”