Red Shadow (23 page)

“Well, I do—when it suits me.” He continued to look at her. “You're not by any chance married to Basil Stevens?”

She blew out a puff of smoke and turned her left hand for him to see that it wore a wedding ring.

“Looks nice there, Mr Jim—doesn't it?”

“
Very.
Are you married to Stevens?”

“What d'you think?”

How many more times was she going to say that?

“I don't want to think—I want to know. Are you married to Basil Stevens?”

She sat up a little at that. The hot ash fell on her knee, and she brushed it off with an extraordinary violence.

“What makes you go on asking me that? Isn't he married to your Miss Laura Cameron? Well then, how can he be married to me?”

“I asked you a question, and you haven't answered it.”

She flung her cigarette away and jumped up.

“I suppose you think you're funny, coming here and insulting anyone like that!”

“You haven't answered me.”

She looked remarkably handsome; but he wondered whether she was going to scratch his face. And then on the top of that, like a sharp prick, came the thought, “
Is
she really angry?”

“Oh, I haven't, haven't I? All right then, Mr Funny Jim, you can have it straight from the shoulder! You men are good enough to play about with, and I've no objection to your paying the bills! But
marry
one of you—well, I don't think! A wedding ring will give me all the respectability I want! Marry? No thanks! What am I going to get out of marrying? Why, you've no sooner got back from signing your name in a registry office than the man begins to treat you like something he's bought and paid for! Regular parcel—done up in brown paper and handed over the counter!” She laughed angrily. “No
thanks!
I know when I'm better off than that!”

“You talk as if you'd tried it,” said Jim.

She gave him a dark look.

“Perhaps I have,” she said, her voice sullen. She pulled her soft pale draperies about her. “Anyone can be had for a mug once. But I'm damned if anyone's going to have me on a second time.”

There was something real there. He felt compunction—he'd been rough with her.

He said quickly,

“I'm sorry, Cissie,” and all at once she was laughing again.

“You needn't be.”

She kissed her fingers to him, and as she did so, a door banged and Basil Stevens called from the room beyond,

“Cis!”

CHAPTER XXVIII

If the banged door had been a pistol shot, it could hardly have brought Cissie's laughter to a more sudden end. Her hands dropped, her mouth formed a soundless “Oh,” and as Basil Stevens called her name, she went running to the door. As she ran, she looked over her shoulder and made a gesture towards the orangery.

Jim was already behind the screen. The glass door was ajar. He slipped noiselessly into the heavy scented dusk, and behind him, in the room he had just left, he heard Basil Stevens say in a loud accusing voice,

“The gate was open!”

“Was it?”

Jim could admire her cool indifference. He stayed a moment with the door ajar and the screen shielding it.

“I tell you it was open!”

“Well, what about it?”

“I had my key, and when I went to put it in the lock the gate was open.”

“You keep on saying that.”

“Yes, I keep on saying it, because I mean to know why it happened!”

Jim thought that possibly Miss Cecile St Arc here shrugged her shoulders. She spoke in the voice of a young person who is bored to tears.

“Better ask old Guy Fawkes Clement, or Mrs Guy, or the boy! I don't look as if I'd been out opening gates, do I?”

Jim knew very well that he ought to be gone; yet he did not go.

“Do I?” said Cissie in a soft, warm voice.

Basil Stevens answered her impatiently.

“I don't know. Some one opened it.”

“Bit of a bear with a sore head, aren't you?”

The man's voice changed to a ferocious rasp. He flung out a Russian oath and followed it with a,

“Take care, or I shall think you know something! And if I think that—if I think that——”

“Why, what is there to know?” said Cissie Stark.

Jim guessed at a wide, half sulky stare. She had twice her brother's pluck.

Inside the room Basil Stevens caught the girl by the shoulder.

“Have you been meddling with my pocket-book?”

She threw back her head and looked angrily at him.

“I tell you I never touched your blooming old key! Why should I?”

“It is not the key!” His voice had a raw, savage note. “It is not the key. The key is nothing by itself, and the gate is nothing. But some one has been tampering with my pocket-book—and if it is you, Cecile—if it is you——”

She wrenched herself free with a movement that showed how strong she was.

“Well, it wasn't me—and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it! Do you think I'm a dirty thief? And who do you think you are anyway? Bluebeard? Or Ali Baba or something?”

She picked up her pale draperies, did a dance step or two, and landed a high kick just short of his ear.

“Blooming pantomime king—that's what you are! And look here, my lad—when I do play in panto, I want an audience!”

She had one behind the glass door. Jim wondered whether she knew it.

“Be quiet!” said Basil Stevens not at all loudly.

Cissie shivered.

“Oh, come off it, can't you!” she said. “You give me the pip when you talk like that! What have you gone and lost out of your old pocket-book then?”

“Not lost,” he said. “Not lost. It has been taken. And I am sorry if anyone has taken it—for them. And they will be sorry for themselves—very sorry.”

“Drop it!” said Cissie. “I've not been near your pocket-book. What's gone? Money?”

“No.”

“All right, don't tell me if you don't want to, only don't say afterwards I wouldn't help you—that's all.”

“It is a piece of torn paper,” he said.

Jim knew now why he had waited.

“A piece of torn paper—a piece of a bank-note if you like—but it is of no value without the other pieces.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. It sounds tripe to me. What does anyone want with a bit of a bank-note—unless they'd got the rest of it?”

“
Ah!
” said Basil Stevens. It was not an English sound at all; there was a half obliterated guttural in it—the Tartar showing where the Russian surface was scratched.

Cissie had her hand at her mouth, her teeth pressed against the pink knuckles. With a sudden exclamation she threw out her hand.

“I'll tell you who had your pocket-book!”

“You'll tell me?”

“Yes, my lad—I—Cissie the sleuth! You aren't half impatient—are you? All right, if you want to know, it was your cousin Alec.”

Jim's hands tingled on the door.

“Sasha?”

Cissie laughed.

“Of all the silly ways of saying Alec! Sasha—
Sasha!
” She mimicked him. “Oh, Lord! What a name!”

He took her by the wrist.

“Cissie, you ask for trouble! What is this about Sasha and my pocket-book?”

“Let me go then! All right—well, I saw him with it.”

“You saw Sasha with my pocket-book?”

“Yes, ducky.”

“When?”

“Just before we started. He came into the room with it in his hand, and when he saw me he went back into the bedroom.”

“You are sure?”

“Of course I'm sure! No bats in my belfry, old dear!”

“I was changing.” His voice dropped to a running mutter. “Changing—he talked—I wondered why he talked—he went on talking—I was stooping—down on my knees to pack—my coat was off—he could have got it then—” All at once his voice came out full strength again. He swept an arm round Cissie and held her close. “You're sure? You're
sure
?”

“Cross my heart!”

“With a knife—” said Basil Stevens.

Her laugh had a shudder in it.

“Let me go! Basil—
Basil
—let me go!”

Quite suddenly he let her go.

“What's that door open for?” he said, and stared at the hand's-breadth that showed above the screen.

Cissie backed away from him.

“What door?” she said, and eyed him.

He went across the room at a run, pushed the glass with the flat of one hand, and with the other jabbed at the switch. An orange light sprang into brilliance. It flooded the glass house from end to end.

There was nobody there.

CHAPTER XXIX

Something had warned Jim Mackenzie. As Cissie laughed and called out to Basil Stevens to let her go, Jim had begun a noiseless retreat. He was at the outer door when he heard the rush of feet. He had time to open and close it behind him, but no time to get away. As the switch clicked down, he fell on his hands and knees hard up against the wall and at once began to crawl towards the house.

The yellow light made the orangery look as if it was on fire. The glass shone with a hot glow. The palms and the orange trees in their green tubs looked black against it, as if they had been burned. A little of the light came through the glass and made the path look as if it were paved with gold for a yard or two; then it lost colour and was swallowed up by the dark.

Jim had got beyond its radius, when the orangery door swung open. He had risen to his feet and stood pressed against the wall of the house beyond the windows of the little salon. He saw Basil Stevens stand looking out and heard him call over his shoulder,

“Another door unlocked!”

Cissie must have suggested Pierre as the offender, because Basil Stevens said, “Then his father had better take a stick to him!” and with that, shivered, cursed the cold, and went in. A moment later the orange light went out and left the baffling darkness unbroken.

Jim pushed on to the gate. The snow was not lying or it would have been lighter. Perhaps it would lie later on when the earth had lost the warmth drawn from a few mild days. The cold was in the wind. It froze the rain and flung it freezing against the earth, the trees, the grass. Jim thought that it was cold enough for Russia—very appropriate weather in fact.

He ran the last twenty yards, came to the gate, and found it locked. A nasty blow; but of course he should have expected it. Basil Stevens wouldn't ramp into the house and raise Cain about the gate being open and just leave it at that. Of course he had locked it with his own key. And the lodge was empty, and Master Pierre off the map. The gate was no more climbable from this side than it had been from the other. He would just have to wait for Pierre. He had a pious hope that the young rip wasn't going to make a night of it. There was a little patch of turf beside the lodge. He paced up and down upon it, glad to be able to stamp his feet without making a noise; he had had to walk like a cat on the gravel.

Well, he had come where he had no business to come, and the event had justified him. He had acquired two valuable pieces of information. Laura wasn't here; he didn't believe she had ever left England, and she certainly was not with Basil Stevens. That was the first thing. And the second was the news that Alec Stevens had robbed his cousin. That meant that Alec Stevens now held two of the three pieces of Bertram Hallingdon's five-pound note. If he could lay hands on the third piece, there would be very little between him and the Sanquhar invention. Perhaps he had the third piece already. Laura had had it. Jim felt sure that Laura had had one of the pieces; she had been so urgent, so insistent that he should hide his piece. He hadn't hidden it, and Sasha had got away with it. He wondered now whether Sasha had got away with all three pieces.

For a moment a hard laughter shook him. Bertram Hallingdon and his torn five-pound note! He wondered how much more trouble they were all going to buy with it before they were through. And then his mood darkened. Laura had bought her trouble and his already, full measure, pressed down and running over. Why had she done it? And again why—and again.
Laura
—to break everything—and for a swab like Stevens who couldn't be faithful to her for a month! He thought of Cissie Stark, and then again of Laura. Why in God's name had she done it, and plunged them both into this immeasurable misery?

He jerked his thoughts away from the contemplation of what Laura had done. It was done, and if he went on thinking about it he would go mad. What he had got to think about now was some way of getting out of this place. He supposed he would have to make a circuit of the grounds and see if there was anything climbable on this side of the wall. Only if there wasn't and Pierre slipped in whilst he was away, he would be absolutely dished. Hang the boy—why couldn't he come home?

He stepped up to the gates and looked through them. The wind blew and the snow fell. If it hadn't been for the snow, he would hardly have been able to see his hand before his face. As it was, he could just distinguish a faint movement in the darkness, as if it was a black curtain shaken by the wind. And then all of a sudden he saw a far-off flash of light and heard the faint sound of an approaching car. The flash came as the headlights swung round the sharp bend where the lane left the high road from Sarrance. As the sound of the engine grew louder, Jim wondered very much whether the Villa Jaureguy was to have another visitor, and who that visitor might be. He stood on one side as the full blaze of powerful headlights cut a lane through the night. Then the engine slowed, the car stopped, a door was flung open, and some one sprang out a few yards short of the gate and hurried towards him. As she came into the light, Jim saw that it was a woman in a dark fur coat. She came right up to the gates and pushed at them. When they did not move, she called out in a voice of assured authority,