Red Shadow (21 page)

“Cut it out, Stark!”

Stark put a damp hand behind him and clutched at the edge of the table. Why had he been such a fool as to come here?.… Mr Jim would have got him sacked if he hadn't..… He'd get him sacked anyhow..… What did he know?.… What had he found out?.…

He fumbled for a handkerchief and dabbed at a forehead that had suddenly grown wet.

“Well?” said Jim.

“I—I don't know what you're talking about.”

“All right, I'll explain. You're trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and it won't do. No—wait a minute! You needn't bother to think up a lie—I tell you I
know
. You sold me a piece of information this morning. This afternoon you supplied Mr Stevens with another piece of information. Mine was a cash transaction, but you probably run an account with him. Does he pay you a fiver a time, or do you give him quantity rates?”

Stark leaned against the table. He wanted something to lean against badly.

“I don't know what you mean,” he quavered.

“It's no good, Stark—I answered the telephone.”

Stark had begun to mop his brow again, but as the last words penetrated the confusion of his mind, his hand dropped. He stood there clutching the clammy handkerchief, his mouth a little open and his breath coming audibly.

“Mr Stevens has gone abroad,” said Jim. “I happened to be in the house when the telephone rang, and I answered it.”

Stark made a superhuman effort.

“There wasn't anything in what I did—not really, Mr Mackenzie. Mr Stevens just asked me to let him know if the guvnor was coming down, and I couldn't see what harm there was.”

“No,” said Jim. Then he looked very directly at Stark and smiled. It was not the sort of smile that was calculated to raise a sinking courage. “Mr Stevens has gone abroad,” he repeated.

Stark said nothing. He was wiping the palms of his hands.

“He has,” said Jim. “And I—
I
, Stark—have not gone abroad. I am here—I am very much here. If you've got to choose between the devil abroad and the devil at home, which is it going to be? I'm afraid you've got to the point when you can't serve two masters any longer—it should perhaps be three, but poor old Rimington doesn't seem to count.”

If Stark's hands were wet, his lips were dry. He ran a shuddering tongue over them.

Jim stood away from the door and began quite slowly to take off his coat. When he had thrown it across a chair, he had another look at Stark.

“Well—which is it to be?”

“
Mr Jim
——”

“Stand up to it, man! You've got your choice.”

Stark backed away from him, one hand on the table. When he came to a chair, he fell on to it all of a heap.

“Mr Jim—don't! Don't hit me! They'll kill me if I tell you. I'd sooner tell you—gospel truth I would—but they'd kill me!”

“Perhaps I shall kill you,” said Jim pleasantly.

“You wouldn't, Mr Jim—I'm no match for you.”

“No, I won't kill you,” said Jim—“I'll only thrash you.”

He came a step nearer, and Stark flung up a hand.

“If I tell you—will you let me off?”

“I'll see about it.”

Stark moistened his lips again.

“They'll kill me!”

“Have it your own way—but I'm here, and they're not.” He paused, and then said, “
Well?
” with a good deal of emphasis.

“All—all right.”

Jim reached behind him for a chair and straddled across it with his arms over the back.

“Fire away,” he said.

“What do you want to know, Mr Jim?”

“Everything. Who
they
are, to start with.”

Stark looked sideways, a glance of pure panic with a sort of question in it.

“Basil Stevens, I suppose.” Jim spoke slowly, watching him. “And Alec Stevens—he's in the cast, isn't he? And—let me see—who else?”

Stark made no denial, but he produced no other name.

“You're not getting along very fast,” said Jim.

Stark threw him a hunted glance.

“I wish I'd never gone into it. I wouldn't if I'd known what they were, but all he wanted at first was just to know silly little things like when Mr Hallingdon rang the guvnor up, and if any appointment was made.”

“With Mr Hallingdon?”

Stark nodded.

“And then he wanted to know about letters, and whether there was anything of Mr Hallingdon's in the safe. And I was short of cash—I'd dropped a packet on Mossy Face.”

“I see. And after the letters and the telephone calls—what next?”

Stark fingered his collar. It seemed as if he found it tight.

“There wasn't much—gospel truth, there wasn't, Mr Jim. Copies of letters, when I could get them—but I got scared.”

“You're not very hard to scare. But what scared you?”

Stark crumpled his handkerchief.

“You don't know where you are with foreigners,” he said.

“Foreigners?”

“They're Russians, Mr Jim—both of them. Name of Stefanoff—only they call themselves Stevens to be taken for English. Why, when they're alone they call each other Vassili and Sasha. That's Russian for Basil and Alec, and——”

“Who told you that?”

“No one.”

“Oh, I think some one. Out with it!”

“A girl,” said Stark. “She's not anyone for you to worry about. She told me, and that got me scared.”

There was more, a lot more, behind all this. It appeared from under Stark's twitching eyelids; it hid behind his stumbling words. Jim's mind followed a line that led from Bertram Hallingdon, through the Sanquhar invention, to Vassili and Sasha Stefanoff, who presented a British front to the world as Basil and Alec Stevens.

The thought of Laura struck him a sharp stabbing blow.

“Get on!” he said harshly.

It took time, but in the end he managed to extract details—such and such a telephone message repeated; such and such a letter copied; such and such a conversation overheard and passed on. Stark appeared to have been a remarkably efficient spy. It seemed certain that Basil Stevens had known all the terms of Bertram Hallingdon's will.

Jim wrote everything down in his neat, careful hand. He came, towards the end, to an item that fixed his attention.

“When was this?” he said sharply.

“Last week, Mr Jim.”

“Basil Stevens was abroad then?”

Stark nodded.

“He had to go to France on business; but he didn't want to be away in case the guvnor went down to see Mrs Stevens—Miss Cameron that was.” Stark was talking quite freely now. “The fact is he'd got it into his head that the guvnor had got some sort of confidential papers of Mr Hallingdon's that he was to hand over to Mrs Stevens, and he wanted to be there when they were handed over, so I was to send him a wire when the guvnor settled to go. You see, he knew by this time that there's never anything done in a hurry, not in our office—so I was to wire him, and he'd come over, by air if necessary.”

“I see. The address, please?” (This was a bit of luck.)

“What address?”

“The one you wired to.”

“I've forgotten it.”

“No, you haven't!”

Stark gulped and produced the address.

“Villa Jaureguy, Sarrance, France.”

When he had written the address, Jim brought a frowning gaze to rest on Stark, who was engaged in smoothing his hair, straightening his tie, and giving other indications of a care-free mind. Relieved—that was what Stark was. He had been genuinely frightened of the Stefanoff pair, and was beginning to have a feeling that he had handed his worries over to Mr Jim.

Jim remembered suddenly Stark breaking a window when their united ages fell several years short of twenty. Stark had whimpered and lied, and Jim had had his pocket-money stopped, and had had to put up with a jawbation of a most tiresome length. He had kicked Stark behind the potting-shed afterwards, and his father had thrashed him for bullying. He frowned portentously as he remembered old Stark glowering through a cobwebby window with a geranium cutting in one hand and a sharp little knife in the other. And little Cissie Stark had stood and watched them, with her dark eyes as round and wet as little black pools, and the knuckles of one brown hand pressed up against her lips in the way she had when anything frightened her. He wondered what had happened to Cissie; he hadn't heard of her for ages.

“Look here, Stark,” he said, “why don't you run straight?”

Stark had revived sufficiently to look offended. Jim put out a hand and brushed away his protest.

“You took scholarships, so I suppose you've got brains of a sort. Why don't you use them? All this rotten sort of game you've been playing—where's it going to put you? I can tell you—anyone can tell you—in jug. You'll get a short sentence, and you'll come out and you won't be able to get a job, and you'll do something crooked and get a longer sentence and start all over again. You're the stuff that habitual criminals are made of. Seems to me if you've got a brain, you might get it to work on whether that's your life ambition. It hardly seems worth while to take scholarships and do four years of London University if you're going to spend most of the rest of your life in jail. Think it over!”

He got up and threw the door open.

“All right, that'll do. Better be getting along.”

As Stark went by him, Jim had a curious impulse.

“Where's your sister Cissie now? Is she married?”

What a nervous little rat the fellow was. He started as if some one had tripped him. Then with a jerk he righted himself and stood there twitching.

“What did you say?”

“I asked about Cissie—your sister Cissie. Nothing's happened to her, has it?”

“Oh no, Mr Jim.”

“Is she married?”

“Oh no, Mr Jim.”

“What's she doing?”

He didn't know why he was asking all these questions about Cissie Stark. He hadn't seen her since she was ten years old—a pretty, cheeky kid, just beginning to make eyes at anything in trousers. Perhaps she had come to grief. That might account for Stark's manner; but he was a little surprised to find him so sensitive on a point of honour. He began to feel sorry he had asked after her. But Stark was answering quite glibly.

“She's on the stage, Mr Jim—in the chorus of
As You Were.
”

Poor old Stark! What would he have said to a daughter in the chorus, a strict, old-fashioned Church-and-State conservative with views on young women “dressing quiet and keeping 'emselves to 'emselves”? Poor old Stark!

Stark was now producing quite a flow of words.

“I don't see much of her, Mr Jim—not once in a twelvemonth.”

Jim cut him short. He really wasn't interested in Cissie Stark. The old people were dead, and she'd gone her own way. He wasn't surprised that she'd cut loose from her brother; he wasn't exactly an asset—probably tried to borrow money from her.

He shut the door on Stark with relief.

Peter Severn rang up ten minutes later. Mr and Mrs Basil Stevens had crossed from Dover to Calais that morning. Their passports were for France.

Jim picked up his notes and looked at the address to which Stark had sent a telegram the week before—Villa Jaureguy, Sarrance.

CHAPTER XXVI

Jim stood on the edge of the road and looked at the iron gates which defended the Villa Jaureguy. Vassili Stefanoff seemed to specialize in houses with good high walls. He had no doubt excellent reasons for this.

The walls of the Villa Jaureguy were, he judged, some six inches higher than those of The Walled House at Putney. The gates, which were locked, had a fine seventeenth century air, and were certainly not climbable. There were, as far as he could observe, no friendly evergreens. The lodge had an unlit, empty look.

The hour was between half-past four and five in the afternoon, and a miserable cold daylight was dying gloomily. The wind—a very considerable wind—blew straight from the north pole. It seemed to intimate that at any moment it might become a blizzard; once or twice already a little burning point of ice had struck Jim on the cheek.

He walked on up the road slowly.

In Sarrance, which was about a mile and a half away, they had told him that the Villa Jaureguy was for sale. It had been the extravagance of a financier who had come to grief. Until it was sold, the executors were letting it furnished. The people of Sarrance evidently considered that only a person deprived of his wits would wish to inhabit a lonely house in the country at this time of year. The present tenant had arrived the day before—a Mr Stevens—English like m'sieu. Oh yes, there was a Madame Stevens—but certainly. They had arrived yesterday. There were servants in the house, a man and wife who acted as caretakers, and their son. No—no one in Sarrance had seen Madame Stevens. It was said that she had been ill—“and for an invalid,
mon dieu
, what a desolate spot!”

Jim walked a hundred yards and saw the wall take a right-angle turn and run back from the road. He walked on, wasting time. It had better be a little darker before he tried to get over that wall. The road, which was hardly more than a lane, began to run up hill. He walked for ten minutes and then came back. The dusk had deepened, and the stinging points of ice were more frequent. He left the road and followed the wall.

The place appeared to be stuck down in the middle of fields. The grounds might have been four or five acres in extent. Sarrance spoke with bated breath of the money that had been spent on them. There was a green marble swimming-bath, an orangery of huge dimensions, a maze, fountains, and so forth and so on. Meanwhile Jim could see no more than the looming blackness of a wall which he could not climb.

He went on following the wall. Since Laura was on the other side of it, he meant somehow to reach that other side; but at the moment he hadn't the slightest idea how he was going to do it. He continued to walk, and after a while came out upon the road again. It was now quite definitely snowing. He wondered what would happen if he were to ring the bell and ask for Laura by name. He stood back from the gates and put his hands in his pockets. He couldn't ring, and he couldn't ask for Laura, because by every possible canon of behaviour he had no business to be here. Instead of coming to the Villa Jaureguy he ought, obviously, to have tracked down Miss Wimborough, escorted her to Sarrance, and then stood aside whilst she paid an orthodox call. Miss Wimborough could have rung that bell as loudly as she pleased. An aunt may visit her niece in the face of the most secretive of husbands. In fact Miss Wimborough should have been standing in his shoes. He knew all this perfectly well. He continued to disregard it.