The Tiger in the Well (44 page)

A maidservant came out of the kitchen, apprehensive, and stopped with her hand to her mouth. Sarah-Jane saw her from above, saw her glance back, saw a man's head appear there in the shadow behind her, look past her, and then retreat silently.

She wondered if she should tell Jim. Parrish was going downstairs now, slowly, backward. When he reached the hall floor he went to join his men at the door of the dining room,

II

and all of them watched as Jim and Mendel and the others came down after them.

She saw Jim standing easily at the foot of the stairs, holding his stick, waiting; she saw Mendel standing next to him, arms folded, with the air of a gentleman inspecting a painting at the Royal Academy; she saw his men ranged behind him, brutal and frightening and intense; she saw someone behind Parrish slip an object into his hand. . . .

And then he was holding a pistol. In a moment, all the power had swung the other way.

"Put up your hands," he said. "All of you. Back against the wall, go on."

Jim took a step forward. Parrish fired into the floor at his feet, and Jim stopped.

Sarah-Jane felt as if she were dreaming. She could see little things very clearly, like the bullet hole in the carpet, like a piece of sticking plaster on top of Parrish's head. . . . She was looking right down from above, and her mind whirled, and she looked around hastily. Yes. There was something on the floor outside the nearest bedroom door. She picked it up, tiptoed back, leaned over, took aim, dropped it . . .

The white china burst into fragments, and Parrish went down at once. The gun fell from his hand. Jim was on him in a moment, and Mendel seized the gun, but one of Parrish's men charged him and sent him flying into the umbrella stand. Then the fight began, and in a moment the hall was a melee. Sarah-Jane shrank back; the ferocity of it. . . One man was kicking another in the head . . . Someone had a razor . . . The sounds they were making, the grunting, the sickening crunching noises, and without a word spoken, going about this violence as if it were a difficult trade they had to concentrate on, like hewing rock or stoking a boiler. . . .

She turned away, shivering, and looked out the window. i A man was running along the drive toward the gate; it was the servant whose head she'd seen looking out of the kitchen. Should she shout and stop him.? Tell Jim.? What.?

By the time she'd seen him, the fight was over. Someone

386 TAe Tiger in the Well

downstairs let out his breath in a long whistling sigh, and then there was the sound of hands brushing together. And the front door opening, and stumbling feet.

She looked over the banister again. The last of Parrish's men was crawling out on his hands and knees. Mendel was bending over one of his men, another was sitting on the stairs mopping his cheek with a dirty handkerchief, another was combing his hair in the hall mirror.

Jim was standing over Parrish, who was stretched senseless on the floor.

Sarah-Jane, trembling in every limb, crept down the stairs. She'd killed him. She'd be hanged. It was almost the worst thing she'd ever known.

Jim looked up. '*What'd you drop on him.**"

"A chamber pot," she whispered. "Is he dead.'^"

Jim chortled. "Dead.? He's snoring like a baby. I bet he's never been laid out by one of them before. ..."

Mendel handed him a vase of flowers which had escaped the destruction, and Jim tipped the lot over Parrish's head. As Parrish spluttered awake, Jim bent down and pulled him up by his lapels.

"Where is she.?" he said. "Where's the child.?"

Parrish said nothing. Even dazed and soaked and beaten, he had a formidable coldness in his eyes, and he merely glared up at Jim with hatred and said nothing.

"Not going to talk, eh," said Jim, and dropped him.

"It's nine o'clock, Mr. Taylor," said Mendel. "The telephone exchange will be open. I'm going to send a man down to the hotel to make a call. I think you said something about breakfast."

"So I did," said Jim. "Have his servants made a run for | it.? Yes.? Well, we can fry some eggs and bacon, make a bit , of toast. Oh—not bacon in your case, I beg your pardon. Let's tie up this bugger, and then we can go and see what ' there is."

He spoke lightly, but Sarah-Jane could see that he was worried about Harriet. He and Mendel tied Parrish to the

newel post by his thumbs and then went through with the rest of the men to the kitchen. Sarah-Jane ioolted back at Parrish, and then away hurriedly, for the hatred in his eyes chilled her.

"Tell me about this man Lee," said Jim a few minutes later in the kitchen. "The whatchacallem—the Tzaddik. What's that mean, by the way.?"

"It's a Yiddish word," said Mendel. "It means a righteous man, a holy man, a saint, something like that. Unless it means precisely the opposite, which it does here. He's Parrish's principal; he set him up in business. He's involved in a complicated fraud on Jewish immigrants, which Mr. Goldberg has been investigating. But he comes into this because it seems to be him rather than the little man out there who wants Miss Lockhart's child. He's her real enemy; Parrish is only an agent. I imagine he was allowed to have this place as a kind of payment. Might I trouble you for the marmalade. Miss Russell.'*"

Sarah-Jane was becoming impressed by this elegant, worldly man; he seemed to breathe an air of power and wealth and authority, and to have more time and space around him than other people, so that he could move through it like a prince. And yet he was a Soho criminal! And here he was in the kitchen at Orchard House listening respectfully to Jim, treating him like an equal. . . . She didn't know whether to admire, or deplore, or join in.

She heard a noise from the hall: a voice—and suddenly remembered what she'd seen from the upstairs window.

"Oh, Jim!" she said. "I'm sorry, I forgot! While you were fighting there was a man running out the gate—one of the servants—"

She looked toward the hall door. Jim heard the voice too and got up at once.

Sarah-Jane was behind him. Parrish was standing next to the stairs, rubbing his thumbs. Beside him was a policeman. Sarah-Jane could see two more policemen through the open front door, looking at the scattered furniture.

The Tiger in the Well

"This is the girl I dismissed, Constable," said Parrish. "She must have let them in."

Jim stepped forward. "Morning, Constable Andrews," he said. "Glad to see you."

The policeman looked uncomfortable.

"Look, Mr. Taylor," he said, "I know you've just got back—^you won't have heard, I expect. But we can't have this kind of thing going on. I'm sorry, Mr. Taylor, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to take you down to the station."

"Me.? What for.?"

"Breaking and entering. Affray. That'll do for a start. I daresay Mr. Parrish will want to sue you for trespassing, but that's up to him. Now, let's not have any trouble—"

"You're joking!" said Jim. '*You know I live here, you dozy clod! You've had a glass of beer in the kitchen dozens of times. It's that man you ought to arrest."

The policeman shifted his feet, looked at Parrish, looked at the floor.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Taylor. The law's on his side, not yours. If you won't come quietly, I'll have to arrest—"

"You don't suppose this little louse would have been able to get away with it if Mr. Garland and I'd been here, do you.? He hasn't got a leg to stand on, and you know it!"

"I have to deal with the situation as I find it, Mr. Taylor."

"Boss!" a man came running in at the front door and stopped on seeing the confrontation. It was the man who'd gone to telephone.

"Yes, Al.?" said Mendel from the kitchen doorway.

"That's Mendel!" said Parrish at once. "The Soho gang leader! There's bound to be a reward—"

The policeman was bewildered. Mendel came forward, and Parrish fell silent.

"Well.?" he said to the man in the doorway. "What's the news.?"

"One of Moishe Lipman's blokes telephoned in just a few minutes ago. He says the house in Foumier Square—^you

know, the one they was watching—it's collapsed. Just fallen in!"

"That the one where Miss Lockhart was?" said Jim to Mendel. "In Spitalfields.?"

Mendel nodded. The policeman was looking from one to the other, uncertain what to do; so he was unable to stop Jim, who slipped past him out the front door and away.

"Stop him!" the constable yelled to the other policemen outside, but Jim evaded them easily. Sarah-Jane knew he'd go straight to Spitalfields—^and she knew, too, that the responsibility for coping with this was suddenly hers, because Mendel was a guest and had no authority in the house.

So in the little silence that followed, she cleared her throat and said, "Well, Constable. I suggest we go and sit down and try to get to the bottom of this. There's obviously some confusion in Mr. Parrish's mind; you can see he's been hit on the head. Shall I make us all a cup of tea.^"

There'd never been such a crowd in Foumier Square. The rain had lifted, and the two hundred or so onlookers jostling for position in the road gazed through the misty air at the ruined house, gaping in wonder.

The fire brigade had pulled half a dozen men and women out of the rubble so far, but it was a big house, and the rumors going around the crowd spoke of a large household— mysterious owner—crippled—strange machinery—^secret rooms—screams in the middle of the night. . . .

It got better and better.

By midmoming, the occupants of the houses on either side, who'd been evacuated, were allowed to go back in and get dressed while the firemen inspected the structure. Reporters from the major papers had interviewed the chief officer, the neighbors, the passers-by; artists stood there sketching assiduously for the engravers who'd turn their drawings into plates to be printed in the illustrated weeklies; sellers of meat pies set up their barrows; a mobile coffee stall pulled by an arthritic horse was soon open and doing a flourishing trade.

And all the morning the rescue continued. One after another the staff from the house were helped, or dragged, or carried out. Three of them were dead, another six injured, and from what the survivors said, another five were niissing: a valet, a footman, a maidservant, the butler, and the master himself, a Mr. Lee.

The secretary, Herr Winterhalter, had broken a collarbone, but otherwise he was unhurt, and he stood beside a police officer identifying the servants who were being brought out and describing the layout of the house so that the rescuers knew where to look.

At the edge of the crowd, Margaret Haddow was standing. Next to her were Rebecca Meyer, her arm in a sling, and James Wentworth, the lawyer. Each time a shout went up from the firemen clambering over the mbble they took a step closer, tried to peer over the heads of the crowd, held their breath; and then sighed. They didn't say much.

Margaret felt a tap on her shoulder.

She turned, and saw Jim—sunburned, disheveled, travel-stained, grim-faced. She gasped with surprise and seized his hand. They'd been on first-name terms for as long as she and Sally had; she felt like embracing him.

"Do you know what's happening.^" she said after they'd shaken hands. "Oh, sorry, this is Miss Meyer, who looked after Harriet. And Mr. Wentworth, the firm's solicitor. But when did you get back.'"'

He explained what had happened at Orchard House.

"Parrish was still there when I left," he said. "Sarah-Jane's coping with it. Mr. Wentworth, I'm going to need a lawyer myself: that little weasel had the police at his beck and call. How the hell—excuse me—did all this happen^'

Rebecca said something in German. Mr. Wentworth translated: "There was no sign of the child at Twickenham, Mr. Taylor? Miss Meyer is very concerned. She blames herself for letting it happen."

"Well, tell her she's not to. According to Kid Mendel, this Mr. Goldberg sent off" three parties to find Harriet, One came

here to watch this place, Mr. Mendel went to Twickenham, and Mr. Goldberg himself went to Clapham. If she's not here and she wasn't at Orchard House, then she must be—"

Rebecca was speaking again, urgently. Jim heard the name Goldberg and watched the lawyer, intrigued by this shabby-looking man with his shrewd, ugly face and his flaming red hair.

*'Apparently," said Mr. Wentworth, "Mr. Goldberg single-handedly stopped a riot this morning. There was a mob about to attack a bakery in Whitechapel—so Miss Meyer has heard—and Goldberg roused the local people, called for a chair, stood up and began to tell a story, of all things—^and they stopped to listen! It's gone all 'round the East End— he's a figure of some fame in this community, Mr. Taylor. But then he was arrested, so Miss Meyer says."

"Arrested.'' Him as well.'' But hang on: if he was in Whitechapel, he can't have been in Clapham. So maybe—"

Margaret gave a cry and seized the lawyer's arm, pointing up at the house.

One of the firemen was waving. He bent to lift some bricks out of the way, and then there was a head, a shoulder, an arm—

"That's not Sally," said Jim, disappointed.

But Rebecca was nodding, her face animated, and she spoke rapidly.

"It is!" said Mr. Wentworth. "Miss Meyer says she dyed her hair and cut it short—"

Jim didn't wait. Dodging through the crowd, he snatched a blanket and scrambled up over the rubble, shoving the firemen aside—^and then she was clear, lying exhausted and bruised and torn on the broken bricks, and then she saw him, and they were only a few feet apart.

He stopped, looking down at her.

"What do you think you look like.?" he said softly. "You ought to be ashamed, clambering about in your underwear. Sling this 'round you, go on. ..."

Then she was trembhng against him, huddled up in the

blanket, and he began to help her down toward the pavement.

"Where's Harriet?" she muttered.

"We're still looking."

Helping her clamber over the bricks and stones, her torn stockings, her bloodied feet—and hands coming up to help, Margaret close by, and the little Russian girl, and a policeman.

And a man with his arm in a sling, and a German voice: "Yes, this is the one."