The China Governess (32 page)

‘When?'

‘Do me a favour! Now, of course. Have you gone soft or something? Push me out, that's what you'd better do. Push me out. You might lose your job if they found us together. I might say anything and you couldn't deny it. I've got a say same as you have. I'm legal. I've got papers, you can't take those away. Can you?'

‘Something is happening upstairs.' Julia's voice came in to them from the passage. ‘Tim! Somebody is screaming upstairs.'

‘No, I don't think I want to.' Tim was answering the boy in the corner. He turned and spoke to Julia.

‘The house is aroused, is it? I think we'd better take him with us. He's our pidgin.'

‘VERY NICE,' SAID
Luke, settling back in Mr. Campion's most comfortable chair. A glass was in his hand, the telephone was on his knee to save him having to get up when it should ring again, and his feet were on the fender. ‘This is how I like waiting. We'll give them another half-hour. O.K.?'

His host glanced up from the message he was reading. He had found it on his desk when they had come in to the Bottle Street flat some little time before, and his anxiety to see if it had arrived had been one of the reasons why he had asked Luke in for a night-cap instead of being persuaded to go elsewhere after they had left the dining-room of the Eagle Tavern. It was a long dispatch, written in Mr. Lugg's schoolboyish hand, and had been taken down from the telephone which in England is now so often used for the relaying of telegrams. Mr. Campion had read it without astonishment and now there was a curiously regretful smile on his pale face as he put it into his pocket.

Luke cocked an eye at him. ‘Secrets?' he suggested. ‘You don't tell us more than you have to, do you, you old sinner? I don't blame you, we've got no finer feelings. Lugg has gone to bed on principle, I suppose? What does he do, a forty-hour week?'

‘He says it's nearer a hundred and forty and that if he had a union he'd complain to it, ruin me, and be deprived of the little bit of comfort he
has
got. I could hardly help overhearing you on the telephone just now. They've got Mrs. Leach, then?'

Luke's grin appeared widely, as it only did when he was truly amused. His eyes shone with tears of laughter and his mouth looked like a cat's. ‘I don't know why these gormless habituals tickle me so,' he said. ‘It's not a nice trait. They do, though. Do you know where she was all the time? In custody at the Harold Dene nick.'

‘The cemetery Harold Dene?'

He nodded. ‘On a charge of pinching flowers and trying to sell them to the little shop opposite the main gates. The startled proprietor had only just handed an expensive and distinctive sheaf of Arum lilies to a regular customer, who hadn't left the shop above fifteen minutes so he could hardly ignore it, when she brought them in. He asked Agnes to wait while he got some money and nipped out of the back door to find a policeman. While he was away she helped herself to a telephone call and was just hanging up as he returned with a copper. We find 'em, don't we!' He was silent for a moment and sat sipping his drink and looking into the gas fire as if he saw castles there.

‘That boy Timothy was lucky,' he observed at last. ‘That was his Mum's last throw turned that number up. Some guardian angel looked after him all right.'

He appeared to be very serious, the long waving lines deep on his forehead. ‘Remember that tale we heard tonight about the head-scarf? I thought at the time it had the true outlandish ring about it. Little white lambs dancing on a blue field and “Happy and Gay” –
Happy and Gay
! – written all over it in flowers. I ask you, Campion! Think of that poor girl, dying in a hospital which everyone confidently expected to be bombed in a couple of hours. She was married to a nervy, over-conscientious nut who didn't even know he was a father and was away on active service anyhow. Her only relative was helpless and there was no one to mother the baby. So what did she do? She caused the kid to be wrapped in a shawl marked “Happy and Gay” and then dropped off uncomplaining into Eternity. What happened? What you'd think? Not on your nellie! A bird turned up out of the air, a wayward nit, who scooped up the kid as a pink ticket to safety and flapped off with it, to drop it neatly into the empty cradle of the one kind of woman who wouldn't see anything extraordinary about its arrival and who found the message perfectly comprehensible. There you are, a straight answer to a straight prayer.'

Mr. Campion regarded his friend dubiously.

‘It's one way of looking at it,' he said. ‘There are others.'

‘Not if you take her viewpoint.' Luke was unrepentant. ‘Locate
the true protagonist of each story and straight away you're living in an age of miracles. That's my serious and considered opinion. I see no other reasonable explanation for the stuff I come across.' He laughed and dismissed the whole stupendous subject. ‘Munday is wild, I understand,' he remarked. ‘There'll be some ruffled plumage to be smoothed down there, I shouldn't wonder.'

‘Hadn't he realized that Barry Leach was anything to do with Cornish?'

‘He didn't know Barry Leach or Barry Cornish existed. Why should he?' Luke was mildly ferocious. ‘One Charles Luke, Superintendent, might have pulled a finger out and recollected something about a small-time problem brat in a totally different manor when the flat-wrecking case first came up, but did he? No, of course he didn't. He'd never heard of the silly twit until this afternoon when he put a query through to records. It's my fault. Cornish is somebody in Munday's area. It might have helped him had he known about this skeleton in his cupboard before. Munday has a grievance.'

‘Will he show it?'

‘I don't know. It'll be interesting to see, won't it?' As if in answer to his question the telephone upon his knee began to ring and he lifted the receiver.

‘Luke,' he said, and brightened visibly. ‘Ah. Hello. Your name was on my lips, Chief. How goes it? What? Here? Why not? Mr. Campion won't mind, he may even give you a drink. Right away then. O.K.'

He hung up and made one of his comic faces.

‘He'd like to have a direct word with me,
if
I don't mind. Very proper and correct. That'll teach me!'

He was still mildly apprehensive when Munday appeared ten minutes later; and when Mr. Campion, who had not met him before, let him in the thin man was surprised by the newcomer's attitude, which was not at all what he had been led to expect. The correct pink-faced official was neither reproachful towards Luke nor packed with secret satisfaction at the new advantage he had suddenly acquired over the Councillor. Instead he came in with the unmistakable air of a man determined to put a delicate piece of
tactics across. His light eyes were cautious and his prim mouth smiling.

‘I must apologize for intruding on your hospitality at this time of night, Mr. Campion', he said, with an effusiveness which was obviously foreign to him. ‘I've always hoped to meet you but this is an imposition.'

Luke, who listened to him with astonishment, relaxed openly.

‘He won't mind,' he said cheerfully. ‘Even if he won't tell me what's in his telegram. Now then Chief, what's happening? Have you got the boy?'

‘Not yet, Superintendent. But he was noticed by a uniformed man in Scribbenfields this afternoon before the call went out, so he's about there as you supposed. He hasn't been seen since it got dark but the building is being watched and I've had a word myself with the woman Leach.' He shook his fair head. ‘A poor type,' he said. ‘Not imbecilic you understand, but a distressingly poor type. She admits telephoning the cobbler's shop and leaving a message for Barry Leach with Miss Tray. Just the name and address of the person she thinks was responsible for hiring the Stalkeys, that's all.'

‘Did she say how she got it?'

‘She got the surname and the address from a label on a wreath, and the first name she learned from something said by a woman she saw by the grave, and whom she thought she recognized as someone she'd met years ago in the country, she doesn't know where.'

‘Ah,' said Luke. ‘So Mrs. B. did speak. I thought that story of uncharacteristic silence was too good to be true.'

‘Probably she spoke to herself, don't you think?' ventured Mr. Campion, who had appreciated Mrs. Broome in his own way. ‘Having picked up the habit from
Alice in Wonderland
, no doubt.'

‘Alice? That's just about what she is!' Luke was hearty. ‘Classic and intended for children. What about this watch on the Well House, Bob? We don't want any more tricks with firelighters; that place is full of antique curiosities.'

‘So I understand. Some of them human.' Munday could have been joking but his expression of complete seriousness was unchanged. ‘I don't think there's any fear of that. I have two good
men on it and the uniformed branch is co-operating. We haven't alarmed the occupants yet.' He hesitated and they realized that he was coming to the purpose of his visit. ‘I've taken an unusual step which I hope you will approve, Superintendent.'

‘Oh yes, what is it?' Luke was highly intrigued by the entire approach. ‘What's the matter with you, Munday?'

‘Nothing, sir, but I don't know if you quite appreciate the peculiar position of a fellow like Councillor Cornish in a place like Ebbfield.' He took the bull by the horns. ‘I've taken the liberty of informing him and he'll be present when we make the arrest. I'd like it. I'd be happier.'

‘Do what you like, old boy. It's your baby.'

Luke was sitting up like a cat, his eyes bright as jet bugles. ‘I didn't know the local governments had such powers. He can make you a lot of trouble if not buttered, can he?'

For the first time Munday smiled, his thin lips parted in a frosty smirk.

‘It's not that,' he said. ‘But he has a position to keep up, you understand, and he's at a great disadvantage in being a man of remarkable conscience. Such people are more common in Scotland than they are here.'

‘I don't get this at all,” said Luke frankly, ‘but it fascinates me. What are you frightened of?'

Munday sighed. ‘Well,' he said, ‘let me put it to you this way. Suppose he comes to his son's rescue as he has before, I understand, and he sees him in custody with one or two abrasions on him, perhaps.'

Luke ducked his chin. ‘I like “abrasions”,' he murmured. ‘Then what?'

‘Then the father has a great fight with his terrible conscience,' said Munday with granite seriousness. ‘Should he make a row with the police, who may have done their duty a little over-conscientiously, thereby calling attention to himself? Or should he say nothing about it and condone brutality for fear of appearing in the newspapers?' He paused. ‘I know him. In the ordinary way I have dealings with him once or twice a week. He's an awful nuisance but a good man. Every devil in Hell would drive him to sacrifice
himself and we'd all be smeared over the London Press, let alone the local journal, when we could save ourselves a scandal in a nice suburb with a splendid building estate.'

Charles Luke thrust a long hand through his hair.

‘I haven't fully appreciated you all these years, Chief,' he said. ‘I didn't know you had it in you. So he's coming to see the arrest? That's very sensible. That'll do it, will it?'

‘Very possibly.' Munday was wooden-faced. ‘But to make perfectly certain of the desired effect I have suggested to him that he brings the probation officer with whom he's had dealings once or twice before, and I myself have taken the precaution of borrowing a C.I.D. sergeant from over on the Essex side. He's a man who knows Barry Leach well and has, in fact, arrested him on two previous occasions.'

‘Without abrasions?'

‘Without abrasions.'

Luke leant back, his dark face alight with amusement.

‘Carry on. It's all in your safe hands, Chief. We'll stay here and leave it to you. It's been a long day!' The telephone bell interrupted him once more and he took up the receiver. ‘Luke here.'

He sat listening while the voice at the other end chattered like a starling just out of earshot. Gradually his face grew more grave and there was an unnatural stiffness about his wide shoulders.

‘Right,' he said at last. ‘The Chief Inspector's here. I'll tell him and we'll come along. Good-bye.'

He hung up, pushed the instrument across the table and rose to his feet.

‘Come along, chaps,' he said. ‘The balloon has gone up at the Well House. There's no fire but they seem to have had a murder. I'm afraid, Chief, you're going to get publicity after all.'

WHEN TIMOTHY AND
Julia hurried up the staircase to the bedroom floor, where a considerable commotion was taking place, Tim took Barry Leach with him. He had him gripped firmly by the arm, since he felt that it was not safe to let him loose, and he had no immediate idea what to do with him. The captive made no resistance and came not only quietly but in a series of eager little rushes like a timid dog on a choke chain.

The only lights left on in the house were two of the lamps in the candelabra which hung in the stairwell, so that all round them the building seemed ghostly and enormous, a great creaking barn, as they stumbled up the shallow steps among its shadows. Besides the noise from above there was a terrific draught and the night air of the city swept down upon them in a tide.

‘It's Nanny Broome,' Julia said breathlessly. ‘Shouting out of a window I think. What on earth is happening?'

Eustace asked the same question as he appeared suddenly at his door, the first in the passage down the right wing. He was wrapped in a splendid silk robe and had paused to brush his hair, so that he loomed up neat and pink in the gloom.