The Man in the Queue (13 page)

Grant smiled benevolently as he watched the graceful figure making its way back to the spoons and the silver-cleaning rags. Typically French he was, he thought, in his shrewd recognition of the commercial worth of his beauty, in his humour, in his opportunism. It was sad to think that
embonpoint
would ever mar his slenderness and his good looks. Grant hoped that in the midst of his adipose tissue he would keep his humour. When he himself got back to the Yard it was to obtain a warrant for the arrest of Gerald Lamont for the murder of Albert Sorrell, outside the Woffington Theatre, on the evening of the 13th of March.

When she closed the door behind the inspector, the woman in Brightling Crescent remained for a long time motionless, her eyes on the brown-patterned linoleum that covered the floor of the lobby. Her tongue came out and ran along her thin lips in a contemplative way. She did not appear agitated, but her whole being seemed concentrated in an effort of thought; she vibrated with thought as a dynamo vibrates. For perhaps two minutes she stood there quite motionless, still as a piece of furniture, in the clock-ticking silence. Then she turned and went back to the sitting-room. She plumped up the cushions which had been depressed by the inspector's weight—she herself had taken the wholly instinctive precaution of seating herself on a hard chair—as if that were the most immediately important thing in life. She took a white tablecloth from a drawer in the sideboard and began to set a meal, coming and going between the sitting-room and the kitchen in an unhurrying deliberation, laying knives and forks exactly parallel in a painstaking fashion that was evidently habit. Before she had finished a key rattled in the lock, and a drab woman of twenty-eight or so let herself in, her grey-drab coat, fawn-drab scarf, timidly fashionable green-drab hat, and unexpectant air proclaiming her profession. She removed her galoshes in the hall and came into the sitting-room, with an artificially cheerful remark about the wet day. Mrs. Everett agreed and said, "I was thinking, as it's cold supper, you mightn't mind if I left it set and went out. I'd like to run over and see a friend, if it makes no difference to you." Her boarder assured her that it made no difference whatever, and Mrs. Everett thanked her and retired to the kitchen. There she took from the larder a roast of beef, from which she cut thick slices, and proceeded to make sandwiches. She wrapped them neatly in white paper and put them into a basket. Into the basket with them she put some cooked sausage, some meat lozenges, and a packet of chocolate. She stoked the fire, filled the kettle, and set it on the side of the hearth so that it would be hot when she came back, and proceeded upstairs. In her bedroom she made a deliberate toilet for the street, tucking stray strands of hair carefully under her uncompromising hat. She took a key from one drawer and opened another, withdrew a roll of notes and counted them, and put them into her purse. She opened a blotter worked in canvas and silks and wrote a short note, which she sealed in an envelope and put into her pocket. She came downstairs again, pulling on her gloves, and, taking the small basket from the kitchen table, let herself out at the back door, locking it behind her. She went down the street, looking neither right nor left, her flat back, lifted chin, and resolute walk proclaiming the citizen with a good conscience. In the Fulham Road she waited at a bus stop and took such casual interest in her fellow-attendants as does a woman who knows what is what and keeps herself to herself. So entirely orthodox was she that when she left the bus only the bus conductor, whose power of observation was entirely instinctive, could have said that she had been a passenger. And in the bus that took her to Brixton she was equally inconspicuous; her fellow-travellers noticed her no more than if she had been a sparrow or a lamp-post. Sometime before Brixton became Streatham Hill she got off the bus and disappeared into the foggy evening, and no one remembered that she had been there; no one had been disturbed by the terrific pent urgency that her passive exterior hid.

Up a long street where the street-lamps hung like misty moons she went, and down another its exact replica—flat fronts, foggy lamplight, deserted roadway; along another and yet another. Halfway along this last she turned abruptly and walked back to the nearest lamp-post. A girl hurried past her, late for some appointment, and a small boy came jingling two pennies in his joined palms. But no one else. She made a pretence of looking at her watch in the light and went on again in the original direction. To her left was a terrace of the high, imposing-looking houses which the social descent of Brixton has left high and dry, the plaster peeling in large flakes from the walls, and the variegated window-curtaining proclaiming the arrival of the flat-dweller. Nothing could be seen at this hour of the detail of the mass; only a chink of light here and there and the recurrent fanlights of the doors told of human habitation. Into one of these she disappeared, the door closing softly behind her. Up two flights of stairs, dimly lighted and shabby, she went, and came to the third flight, where there was no light. She glanced up into the dark above and listened. But only the stealthy creaking of the old wood sounded in all the house. Slowly, feeling her way step by step, she climbed, negotiated the turn without a stumble, and came to rest at the top of the house on an unlighted landing, breathless. With the assurance of one who knows her way, she put out her hand to locate the invisible door, and having found it, knocked gently. There was no answer, and no streak of light below the door betrayed a presence beyond. But she knocked again and said softly, with her lips to the crack where the door met the upright, "Jerry! It's me." Almost immediately something was kicked away from inside the door, and it opened to show a lamp-lit room, with a man's figure silhouetted crucifix-wise against the light.

"Come in," said the man, and drew her quickly in and shut the door and locked it. She set her basket on the table by the curtained window and turned to face him as he came from the door.

"You shouldn't have come!" he said. "Why did you?"

"I came because there was no time to write to you, and I had to see you. They've found out who he was. A man from Scotland Yard came this evening and wanted to know all about you both. I did everything I could for him. Told him everything he wanted to know, except where you were. I even gave him snaps of you and him. But he knows you are in London, and it's only a matter of time if you stay here. You've got to go."

"What did you give him the photographs for?"

"Well, I thought about it when I went away to pretend to look for them, and I knew I couldn't go back and say I couldn't fired them and make him believe me. I mean, I was afraid I wouldn't do it well enough. And then I thought, since they had got so far—finding out all about you two—a photograph wouldn't make much difference one way or another."

"Wouldn't it?" said the man. "Tomorrow every policeman in London will know exactly what I look like. A description's one thing and that's bad enough, God knows—but a photograph is the very devil. That's torn it!"

"Yes, it might have if you were going to stay in London. But if you stayed in London you'd be caught in any case. It would only be a matter of time. You've got to get out of London tonight."

"There's nothing I'd like better," he said bitterly, "but how, and where to? If I leave this house, it's fifty to one I walk straight into the police, and with a mug like mine it wouldn't be very easy to convince them that I wasn't myself. This last week's been ten thousand hells. God, what a fool I was!—and for so little reason. To put a rope round my neck for next to nothing!"

"Well, you've done it," she said coolly. "Nothing can alter that. What you've got to consider now is how to get away. And as quickly as you can."

"Yes, you said that before—but how, and where to?"

"Have some food and I'll tell you. Have you had a proper meal today?"

"Yes, I had breakfast," he said. But he did not appear to be hungry, and his angry, feverish eyes watched her unwaveringly.

"What you want," she said, "is to get out of this district, where every one's talking about the thing, to a place where no one's ever heard of it."

"If you mean abroad, it isn't the slightest good trying. I tried to get taken on a boat as a hand four days ago, and they asked if I was Union or something, and wouldn't look at me. And as for the Channel boats, I might as well give myself up."

"I'm not talking about abroad at all. You're not as famous as you think. I'm talking about the Highlands. Do you think the people in my home on the west coast ever heard of you or what happened last Tuesday night. Take my word for it, they haven't. They never read anything but a local paper, and local papers report London affairs in one line. The place is thirty-six miles from a railway station, and the policeman lives in the next village, four miles miles away, and has never seen anything more criminal than a salmon poacher. That's where you are going. I have written a letter, saying that you are coming because you are in bad health. Your name is George Lowe, and you are a journalist. There is a train for Edinburgh from King's Cross at ten-fifteen and you are catching that tonight. There isn't much time, so hurry"

"And what the police are catching is me at the platform barrier."

"There isn't a barrier at King's Cross haven't gone up and down to Scotland for nearly thirty years without knowing that. The Scotch platform is open to any one who wants to walk on. And even if there are detectives there, the train is about half a mile long. You've got to risk
something
if you're going to get away. You can't just stay here and let them get you! I should have thought that gamble would have been quite in your line.

"Think I'm afraid, do you?" he said. "Well, I am. Scared stiff. To go out into the street tonight would be like walking into no-man's-land with Fritz machine-gunning."

"You've either got to pull yourself together or go and give yourself up. You can't sit still and let them come and take you."

"Bert was right when he christened you Lady Macbeth," he said.

"Don't!" she said sharply.

"All right," he muttered. "I'm sort of crazy." There was a thick silence. "All right, let's try this as a last stunt."

"There's very little time," she reminded him. "Put something into a suitcase quickly—a suitcase that you can carry yourself—you don't want porters."

He moved at her bidding into the bedroom that led off the sitting-room, and began to fling things into a suitcase, while she put neat parcels of food into the pockets of the coat that hung behind the door.

"What's the good?" he said suddenly. "It's no use. How do you think I can take a main-line train out of London without being stopped and questioned?"

"You couldn't if you were alone," she said, "but with me it's a different matter. Look at me. Do I look the sort who would be helping you to get away?"

The man stood in the doorway contemplating her for a moment, and a sardonic smile twisted his mouth as he took her in all her upright orthodoxy. "I believe you're right," he said. He gave a short, mirthless laugh and thereafter put no difficulties in the way of her plans. In ten minutes they were ready for departure.

"Have you any money?" she asked.

"Yes," he said; "plenty."

She seemed about to ask a question.

"No, not that," he said. "My own."

She carried a rug and an extra coat: "You mustn't suggest hurry in any way; you must look as though you were going a long journey and didn't care who knew it." And he carried the suitcase and a golf-bag. There was to be no hole-and-corner business. This was bluff, and the bigger the bluff, the more chance there was of carrying it off. As they stepped into the foggy road, she said, "We'll go to Brixton High Street and get a bus or a taxi."

As it happened, it was a taxi that offered itself first. It swelled out of the dark before they had reached a main thoroughfare, and as the man heaved what they were carrying aboard the woman gave the address of their destination.

"Cost you something, lady," said the driver.

"Well, well," she said, "isn't every day my son has a holiday."

The driver grunted good-naturedly. "That's the stuff! Feast and famine. Nothing like it." And she climbed in, and the taxi ceased its agitated throbbing and slid into action.

After a silence the man said, "Well, you couldn't do more for me if I were."

"I'm glad you're nod" she said. There was another long silence.

"What is your name?" she asked suddenly.

He thought for a moment. "George Lowe," he said.

"Yes," she said; "but don't think next time. There is a train north to Inverness that leaves Waverly at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. You'll have to spend tomorrow night in Inverness. I have written down on a paper what you do after that."

"You seem to be perfectly sure that nothing's going to happen at King's Cross."

"No, I'm not," she said. "The police are not fools—that Scotland Yard man didn't believe half I said—but they're just human. All the same, I'm not going to give you that bit paper until the train's going."

"I wish I had that revolver now!" he said.

"I'm glad you haven't. You've made a big enough fool of yourself already.

"I wouldn't use it. It would just give me courage."

"For goodness' sake, be sensible, Jerry. Don't do anything silly and spoil things."

They fell to silence again, the woman sitting upright and alert, the man shrunk in the corner, almost invisible. Into the west of London they went like that, through the dark squares north of Oxford Street, out into the Euston Road and with a sharp left-handed turn into King's Cross. The moment had come.

"You pay the taxi and I'll get the ticket," she said.

As Lamont paid the taxi-man the shadow of his turned-down hat hid his face, so that his retreating back was all that the incurious gaze of the driver noted. A porter came and took his things from him, and he surrendered them willingly. Now that the time had come, his "nerves" had gone. It was neck or nothing, and he could afford to play the part well. When the woman joined him from the booking-office, the change in him was evident in the approbation on her cold face. Together they went on to the platform and followed the porter down it, looking for a corner seat. They made a sufficiently convincing picture—the man with the rug and the golf-bag and the wraps, and the woman in attendance with the man's extra coat.