Rolling Stone (15 page)

His employers knew it. And there was the answer to his first question.

Garrett would have no motive for sending Spike Reilly's sister to see him, but his employers might have a very strong motive indeed, if they had the least, faintest shade of suspicion that he was not Spike Reilly.

He thought he had just been had up for an identification parade, and he hoped with a good deal of fervour that Louisa could be trusted to identify him in no uncertain manner.

He turned about and went back to her.

“I think this means they wanted you to take a look at me.”

“I've been thinking that.”

“Well, what are you going to say to them, Miss Spedding?”

She said irrelevantly, “There isn't any voice Mrs. Simpson couldn't do. Man, woman, or child, she could take anyone off.”

“You think it was Maud Millicent Simpson who rang you up?”

“If it was, she didn't mean me to know.” She got up from the bed. “I'd best be going.”

“And when you've got home I expect there'll be another telephone call, and the girlish voice will want to know how you found your brother, and whether you had a nice time with him.”

“I wouldn't wonder,” said Louisa Spedding. She moved towards the door.

Peter moved with her.

“Well, what are you going to say?”

She took hold of the door to open it, and then stood with her hand on the knob.

“If I say you're not Jimmy, they'll do you in. And if I say you are, and they find out you're not, then they'll do me in as likely as not.”

“Look here,” said Peter, “go to the police—go straight from here and tell them all about Mrs. Simpson. Ask the police to protect you, and they'll see you're safe.”

“No,” she said—“I won't do that. Things would come out about Jimmy—I can't do that. But I won't give you away.”

She pulled the door open quickly and went. And shut it behind her.

CHAPTER XXII

Louisa Spedding came out upon the foggy street. She was vexed with herself, because she was beginning to wish that she had held her tongue. She couldn't think what had come over her up in that room with the young man who wasn't Jimmy because Jimmy was dead. A way with him, that's what he had, and it would have been better if she hadn't given in. She could remember how Cornelius Reilly had got round her mother, and it ought to have been a warning to her. Why, if anyone had told her that she would blab out all that about Jimmy and that Grey, and about Mrs. Simpson too,—well, she just wouldn't have believed it. She was downright vexed with herself, and more than a little bit scared.

Ever since it had first come to her what sort of things and what sort of people Jimmy had got himself mixed up with she had made up her mind that the safe way was for her to know nothing. Anything that Jimmy said or anything he hinted had better go in at one ear and out of the other, as the saying was. Once you began to talk, there was no knowing where it was going to stop, and before you knew where you were you might find yourself in a police-court or worse. And the police were all very well in their way, but you didn't want them mixed up in your own affairs, or in your family's affairs. So she wished she had held her tongue.

She turned the corner of the street and walked in the direction of the main road, where she would get her bus. A woman came out of the first side turning, brushed against her, and said, “I beg your pardon.”

Louisa Spedding turned her head and began to say “Granted.” But the word broke off, because the woman was Mrs. Simpson. She was dressed different from when they had met in the bus, and she was speaking different too—that sort of a lisp was gone. But whatever she did or didn't do to herself, there was a thing Louisa would always know her by—a thing that very likely she never noticed she'd got herself, because your own eyelids aren't things you notice or see. But there, on the right one, at the inside corner, was a little round brown mole. She might look in the glass a hundred times a day and not see it, because you didn't see it till the lid came down a bit. But Louisa had always noticed it, right from the very first day. She noticed it now behind the tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles which were one of the things that made Mrs. Simpson look different. She had had on tinted pince-nez before. Come to think of it, she had on the same dress and hat, but the dress was mostly covered by an old raincoat, and she'd got a thick black chiffon scarf tied on over the hat. A regular figure of fun it made her look, and a real old maid into the bargain. No one would ever believe she'd been right down dressy sixteen years ago. But smart or dressy, old maid or widow, nothing was going to stop Louisa Spedding from recognizing Maud Millicent Simpson.

She had all this in her mind as she stood on the damp pavement and took a good look at the woman who had brushed against her. Then she said,

“Well, to be sure, Mrs. Simpson! Fancy meeting you!”

“And fancy you knowing me, Louie,” said Mrs. Simpson. Her voice was the voice of sixteen years ago, a pretty, cultured voice.

Louisa Spedding's tongue got the better of her discretion.

“And why shouldn't I know you now? If I knew you on the bus the other day after not seeing you for a matter of sixteen years, if isn't just covering up your clothes and putting on a different pair of glasses that will stop me knowing you today. I should always know you.”

Mrs. Simpson nodded.

“Very clever of you. I'm sure I don't know how you recognized me in the bus. Sixteen years is a long time, and I am afraid I have changed a great deal.”

Louisa said, “Oh, well—” And then, in a hurry, “I'm sure I'm very glad to have seen you, but I ought to be catching my bus, for goodness knows what the kitchen-maid will be making of the
hollandaise
sauce, and Sir John—well, he's particular.”

Mrs. Simpson consulted a wrist-watch.

“Well, Louise, you're too late for your sauce and too late for your lunch, for it's past one o'clock now. You'd better come along and have something with me, and we'll have a talk about old times. And if Sir John gives you notice, you can always come back to me. Come—wouldn't you like to do that? It's not such a big house, but I'd give you whatever he does. Now what do you say to that?”

The way she said it and the way she looked when she said it took Louisa Spedding a long way back. In the old days you never could tell whether Mrs. Simpson meant what she said or not. Louisa didn't know now, but she thought she'd be on the safe side. She said quickly,

“I'm not thinking of making a change—and I couldn't go without a kitchen-maid either.”

“And what makes you think you wouldn't have a kitchen-maid, Louie?”

Louisa Spedding stared.

“Why, you wouldn't have room for one, would you?” she said.

They had turned into the side street and were walking along it—a little dark, narrow street without shops, and every window curtained with net, or muslin, or Nottingham lace. Mrs. Simpson gave her a swift sideways glance.

“The house is bigger than it looks.”

“It doesn't look big,” said Louisa. And then she could have bitten her tongue out, because Mrs. Simpson turned round and smiled, and said in her sweetest voice,

“How do you know how big it is, Louie?”

Well there—she had put her foot in it. And it wouldn't matter how she tried now, Mrs. Simpson would have it out of her. She might have changed in her looks, but she hadn't changed about things like that. Louisa coloured up and tried to pass it off with a laugh.

“Of course I don't know where you live.”

“Don't you? I think you do.” Mrs. Simpson was still smiling. “It isn't a crime, Louie. But I'd dearly like to know how you found out. Did you engage a detective?” Her tone was light and amused, with an undercurrent of irony. Louisa remembered that too, and how she had hated it sixteen years ago. She was on the defensive as she said,

“Why, it was easy enough, Mrs. Simpson, and no reason against it that I can see. I take that bus every week going down to see a friend of mine, and next time I went I got talking to the conductor. He's been on that route all this year, and if the bus is empty we have a bit of a talk. Well then, he'd noticed when I spoke to you, so I got telling him I'd known you sixteen years ago, and he said, ‘That's funny.' and he told me you were a regular passenger. So I asked him if he knew where you lived, and he said you always got down at the corner of Sunderland Place, and he said he'd seen you go in at the third or fourth house in Sunderland Terrace. It all came out quite natural, just in the way of talk.”

“I see—” said Mrs. Simpson gently. “But, Louisa, how did you speak of me? Because, you know, I married again, and if you called me Mrs. Simpson—”

Louisa shook her head with decision.

“There weren't any names mentioned, neither by him nor by me. I just said it was a lady I'd lived with a long time back. And we talked about how you came across people years after you'd stopped thinking about them.”

“So we do,” said Mrs. Simpson. “You're quite sure you didn't mention my name?”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Simpson, I'm sure I didn't.”

Mrs. Simpson manner changed. Her voice became brisker.

“That's all right, Louisa. And now—how stupid I am—I haven't asked you how you found your brother. Did you have a nice time with him?”

Louisa Spedding felt a sort of shock. She had said to Peter that it wouldn't surprise her if it had been Mrs. Simpson who had telephoned and told her to go round and see Jimmy at the Edenbridge Hotel. She had said that, and she had meant it, but when it came to finding out that she was right she got a shock. Somehow, meeting Mrs. Simpson and talking to her had taken her right back into the safe comfortable days before Jimmy went wrong, when she didn't have to suspect anyone or think before she spoke. But now, with this sense of shock upon her, it came to her that she ought to have been thinking what she said, and not letting her tongue run on. She said,

“Oh, yes, I saw him. We had a good talk.” And then she fetched a heavy sigh and said, “I wish we could all go back and be the way we used to be.”

Mrs. Simpson took no notice of this. She looked sharply at Louisa Spedding.

“You did see your brother?”

“Oh, yes, I saw him.”

“Then what's the matter—isn't he well?”

“So far as I know. He didn't say. Oh dear me—why couldn't he settle down respectably?”

Mrs. Simpson made no answer to that. She was smiling again.

“And now we will have our lunch. There's a nice little place just round this corner, but I must telephone to my house first to let them know that I shall not be back.”

They were nearing the end of the narrow street. A telephone-box was visible at the corner. The broad and noisy thoroughfare lay beyond. Mrs. Simpson opened the door of the box and beckoned Louisa inside.

“There's just one other call I ought to make, and I wonder if you would look up the number for me. I'm afraid I can't see well enough with these glasses, and you always had such good sight. The name is Hirstman—H-I-R-S-T. I can be getting my coppers ready.”

It was a close fit for the two of them inside the box. Mrs. Simpson stood behind Louisa and pulled the door to. The noise of the traffic receded miraculously. Louisa bent over the directory and drew a gloved forefinger slowly down the HIRs.

Mrs. Simpson opened her bag. She looked up the street and down the street. There was a lot of heavy traffic in the road. There were not many pedestrians, because it was lunch-time. And old man went by with a dog on a lead—a man and a girl—three girls talking nineteen to the dozen—and then for thirty yards or so nobody at all. Mrs. Simpson's hand came up from her bag with something muffled in a woolen scarf. She pressed this something against Louisa's neck just under the right ear and pulled a trigger.

Louisa Spedding did not cry out at all. She did not know what had happened. Her body slumped down upon the floor of the box. Mrs. Simpson helped it down. Then she put the pistol away in her bag and walked out of the kiosk.

She went back by the way they had come. There was no one in the narrow street. The fog had thickened and the air was dark. She stepped into an opening about half way down and removed the large black veil which poor Louisa had thought so old-fashioned. It rolled up tight and went into her bag. She changed the tortoise-shell rimmed spectacles for a pair of tinted pince-nez, and she took off her raincoat and hung it over her arm.

When she stepped back into the street she was quite a different woman from the one who had accompanied Louisa Spedding—different in appearance, in dress, and in her walk. There was bright colour in her hat and in the scarf about her throat. Her coat and dress were black. The drab raincoat was tucked out of sight over her arm. The tinted pince-nez made an extraordinary difference in her appearance. She walked mincingly, but at a considerable speed, to the end of the street and turned the corner.

CHAPTER XXIII

Terry Clive was having lunch with Fabian Roxley. And she was beginning to wish that she hadn't come, because it wasn't being at all a comfortable sort of meal. When a young man sits beside you wrapped in gloom and takes no interest in his food, it generally means that you are in for a scene. And Terry was hungry. She wanted her lunch, and she wanted it to an accompaniment of pleasant friendly talk. It was just like a man to propose to you before you had finished your soup. And what happened then—if you refused him? How could you decently take any interest in a mushroom omelette or a brown-bread ice? And what did you talk about—or didn't you talk at all?

Terry had never yet been proposed to at lunch, so she did not know, but she had a horrid suspicion that she was going to find out. She thought she would make sure of the soup anyhow, because it was mulligatawny, for which she had a passion. She looked at Fabian's gloomy face and said,