Look to the Lady (13 page)

‘But if this is true,' said Beth indignantly, ‘why are we going on? How do you know we shan't be held up before we get to Coggeshall?'

‘Deduction, dear lady,' explained Mr Campion obligingly. ‘There are two roads from Sanctuary to Coggeshall. You might have taken either. After Coggeshall you must go straight to Kelvedon, and thence by main road. I fancy they'll be patrolling the main road looking for us.'

In spite of herself Penny was impressed. ‘Well, you're thorough, anyway,' she said grudgingly.

‘And clean,' said Mr Campion. ‘In my last place the lady said no home was complete without one of these hygienic, colourful, and only ten cents down. Get Campion-conscious today. Of course,' he went on, ‘I suppose we could attempt to make a detour, but considering all things I think that the telephone wires are probably busy, and at the same time I'm rather anxious to catch a glimpse of our friends in action. I think the quicker we push on the better.'

Penny nodded. ‘All right,' she said without resentment. ‘We leave it to you.'

The Case is Altered was a small and unpretentious red brick building standing back from the road and fronted by a square gravel yard. Mr Campion descended, and cautiously taking the suitcase from the dickey, preceded the ladies into the bar parlour, an unlovely apartment principally ornamented by large oleographs of ‘
The Empty Chair
', ‘
The Death of Nelson
', and ‘
The Monarch of the Glen
', and furnished with vast quantities of floral china, bamboo furniture, and a pot of paper roses. The atmosphere was flavoured with new oilcloth and stale beer, and the motif was sedate preservation.

Val was standing on the hearthrug when they entered, a slightly amused expression on his face. Penny reddened when she saw him, and walking towards him raised her face defiantly to his.

‘Well?' she said.

He kissed her.

‘Honesty is the best policy, my girl,' he said. ‘Have some ginger beer?'

Penny caught her brother's arm. ‘Val, do you realize,' she said, ‘here we are, miles from home, with the – the
Thing
actually in a portmanteau. I feel as if we might be struck by a thunderbolt for impudence.'

Val put his arm round her shoulders. ‘Leave it to Albert,' he said. ‘He spotted your little game. He seems to have one of his own.'

They turned to Campion inquiringly and he grinned. ‘Well, look here,' he said, ‘if you don't want to play darts or try the local beer or otherwise disport yourselves, I think the sooner we get on the better. What I suggest is that we split up. Penny, you and I will take the precious suitcase in the two-seater. Val and Miss Cairey will follow close behind to come to our assistance if necessary. Have you got enough petrol?' Penny looked at him in surprise. ‘I think so,' she said, but as he hesitated she added, laughing, ‘I'll go and see if you like.'

Mr Campion looked more foolish than before. ‘Twice armed is he who speeds with an excuse, but thrice is he whose car is full of juice,' he remarked absently.

Penny went out, leaving the door open, and was just about to return after satisfying herself that all was well, when the young man came out of the doorway bearing the suitcase.

‘We'll get on, if you don't mind,' he said. ‘Val's just squaring up with the good lady of the establishment. They'll follow immediately.'

Penny glanced about her. ‘Where is the other car?' she demanded.

There was a Ford trade van standing beside the bar entrance, but no sign of a private car.

‘Round at the back,' said Campion glibly. ‘There's a petrol pump there.'

He dropped the suitcase carefully into the back of the car and sprang in beside the girl. ‘Now let's drive like fun,' he said happily. ‘How about letting me have the wheel? I've got testimonials from every magistrate in the county.'

Somewhat reluctantly the girl gave up her place, but Mr Campion's driving soon resigned her to the change. He drove with the apparent omnipotence of the born motorist, and all the time he chattered happily in an inconsequential fashion that gave her no time to consider anyone or anything but himself.

‘I love cars,' he said ecstatically. ‘I knew a man once – he was a relation of mine as a matter of fact – who had one of the earliest of the breed. I believe it was a roller-skate to start with, but he kept on improving it and it got on wonderfully. About 1904 it was going really strong. It had gadgets all over it then: finally I believe he overdid the thing, but when I knew it you could light a cigarette from almost any pipe under the bonnet, and my relation made tea in the radiator as well as installing a sort of mechanical picnic-basket between the two back wheels. Then one day it died in Trafalgar Square and so –' he finished oracularly – ‘the first coffee-stall was born. Phoenix-fashion, you know. But perhaps you're not liking this?' he ventured, regarding her anxiously. ‘After all, I have been a bit trying this morning, haven't I?'

Penny smiled faintly at him.

‘I don't really dislike you,' she said. ‘No, go on. Some people drive better when they're talking, I think, don't you?'

‘That's not how a young lady should talk,' said Mr Campion reprovingly. ‘It's the manners of the modern girl I deplore most. When I was a young man – years before I went to India, don't you know, to see about the Mutiny – women were women. Egad, yes. How they blushed when I passed.'

Penny shot a sidelong glance in his direction. He was pale and foolish-looking as ever, and seemed to be in deadly earnest.

‘Are you trying to amuse me or are you just getting it out of your system?' she said.

‘Emancipated, that's what you are,' said Mr Campion, suddenly dropping the Anglo-Indian drawl he had adopted for the last part of his homily. ‘Emancipated and proud of yourself. Stap my crinoline, Amelia, if you don't think you're a better man than I am!'

Penny laughed. ‘You're all right, really,' she said. ‘When does the fun begin?'

‘Any time from now on,' said Mr Campion gaily, as he swung the little car into the main road. Penny glanced nervously over her shoulder.

‘There's no sign of the others yet,' she said.

Her companion looked faintly perturbed.

‘Can't help that,' he said.

It was now about half-past eleven o'clock, and although a Friday morning, the road was not as crowded as it would become later in the day. Mr Campion drove fiercely, overtaking everything that presented itself. On the long straight strip outside Witham he once more broke into his peculiar brand of one-sided conversation.

‘Then there's poetry,' he said. ‘Here is today's beautiful thought:

There was an ex-mayor in a garden

A-playing upon a bombardon,

His tunes were flat, crude,

Broad, uncivic, rude,

And –

‘I don't like the look of that car which has just passed us. It's an old Staff Benz, isn't it? Sit still, and whatever you do don't try and hit anybody. If you lose your head it doesn't matter, but don't try to hit out.'

On the last word he jammed on the brakes and brought the car to a standstill only just in time, as the old German staff car, heavy as a lorry and fast as a racer, swerved violently across the road in front of them and came to a full stop diagonally across their path so that they were hemmed in by the angle. The whole thing was so neatly timed that there was no escape. It was only by brilliant driving that Mr Campion had succeeded in pulling up at all.

What took place immediately afterwards happened with the speed and precision of a well-planned smash-and-grab raid. Hardly were the two cars stationary before five men had slipped out of the Benz, the driver alone remaining in his seat, and the sports car was surrounded. The raiding party swarmed over the little car. There was no outward show of violence, and it was only when Penny glanced up into the face of the man who had stationed himself on the running-board at her side that she fully realized that the newcomers were definitely hostile.

She shot a sidelong terrified glance at Mr Campion, and saw that the man upon his side had laid a hand in an apparently friendly fashion on the back of his neck, the only untoward feature of the gesture being that in the hand was a revolver.

A third man leaned negligently against the bonnet, his hand in the pocket of his coat, while a fourth, with remarkable coolness, stood by the back of the Benz to signal that all was well to any passing motorist who might stop, suspecting a smash.

They were all heavy, flashily dressed specimens of the type only too well known to the racecourse bookmaker.

Penny opened her mouth. She was vaguely conscious of other cars on the road. The man at her side gripped her arm.

‘Hold your tongue, miss,' he said softly. ‘No yelping. Now then, where is it?'

Penny glanced at Albert. He was sitting very still, his expression a complete blank.

‘No – no,' he said, in a slightly high-pitched voice, ‘I do not wish to subscribe. I am not a music lover. Go and play outside the next house.'

The stranger's hand still rested caressingly on the back of his neck.

‘Now then, no acting “crackers”,' he said. ‘Where is it?'

‘You should take glycerine for your voice and peppermints for your breath, my friend,' continued Mr Campion querulously. ‘Don't bellow at me. I'm not deaf.'

His interlocutor summoned the man who leant so negligently against the bonnet. ‘There's nothing in the front of the car,' he said. ‘Have a squint into the dickey.'

‘No!' Penny could not repress a little cry of horror.

The man with the gun, who seemed to be in charge of the proceedings, grinned. ‘Thank you kindly, miss,' he said sarcastically. ‘A girl and a loony. It's like stealing a bottle from a baby.'

‘There's only my lunch in there,' said Mr Campion, but Penny noticed that his voice betrayed nothing but nervousness.

‘Is that so?' The third man lifted out the suitcase. ‘This is it,' he said. ‘It weighs a ton. The rest of the car is empty, anyhow.'

Too terror-stricken to speak, Penny glanced wildly up the road only to see a Rolls-Royce and a van being waved on by their persecutors.

‘'Ere, these locks 'ave been bunged up,' said a voice behind her. ‘Give us yer knife.'

The man with the gun glanced down the road, apprehensively it seemed to Penny. ‘Stick it in the bus,' he said. ‘There's nothing else here, anyhow. Now then, boys, scarpa!'

His four satellites were back in the Benz with the precious suitcase within ten seconds. The driver swung the car back with a roar, and the man with the gun gave up his position and leapt for it as it passed. They had chosen a moment when the coast was clear, and the whole astounding episode was over in a space of time a little under five minutes.

Mr Campion freed his brakes and started the engine, but instead of turning and following the retreating raiders as Penny had half hoped, half feared he would, he sent the car careering down the road towards London, and the speedometer finger crept round the dial like a stop watch.

It was not until they reached Witham and crawled through the narrow street that Mr Campion permitted himself a glance at his companion. Before then the car had occupied his whole attention. To his horror she was in tears. For the first time that day his nerve failed him.

—

‘A
ND
he never stopped once to beg pardon
,' said Mr Campion, as he swung the sports car neatly into the big yard at the back of the Huguenots' Arms at Witham and brought it to a stop within a yard of the pump.

Penny hastily dabbed away her tears. ‘What on earth are you talking about?'

‘Poetry,' said Mr Campion. ‘The highest within me. Soul juice, in fact. It's the last line of the Neo-Georgian sonnet I was declaiming to you when the rude gentleman with the acquisitive instinct stopped us. Don't you remember – about the civic person in the garden? I'd better recite the whole thing to you.'

Penny put out her hand appealingly. ‘Don't,' she said. ‘It's awfully good of you to try to cheer me up, but you can't realize, as a stranger, what this means. That suitcase contained the one thing that matters most in the world. I'm afraid I've lost my nerve completely. We must get to the police.'

Mr Campion sat perfectly still, regarding her with owlish solemnity.

‘You're the first person I've met to feel so sensibly about a couple of bottles of bitter,' he said. ‘I had no idea you'd get het-up like this.'

Penny stared at him, the truth slowly dawning upon her.

‘Albert,' she said, ‘you –'

He laid a hand upon her arm. ‘Don't spoil the fun,' he said. ‘Look.'

Even as he spoke there came the roar of an engine from outside and a trade van jolted slowly into the yard. The cab was facing them, and a gasp of mingled amusement and relief escaped Penny.

Val sat at the steering wheel, a peaked cap pulled well down over his eyes and a cheap yellow mackintosh buttoned tightly up to his throat. He had a strap buckled across one shoulder which suggested admirably the presence of a leather cash satchel. A pencil behind his ear finished the ensemble. The metamorphosis was perfect. Anyone would have been deceived.

The
chef-d'oeuvre
of the outfit, however, was Beth. She had pushed her smart beret on to the back of her head, reddened her lips until they looked sticky, plastered a kiss-curl in the middle of her forehead, and had removed the jacket of her three-piece suit so that she was in a blouse and skirt. She was smiling complacently, her big dark eyes dancing with amusement. And in her arms, clasped tightly against her breast, was a precious bundle swaddled in white shawls with a lace veil over the upper part.

‘There,' said Mr Campion. ‘All done with a few common chalks. Our young Harry taking his missus and the kid for a trip during business hours. “Domesticity versus Efficiency”, or “All His Own Work”.'