The Man in the Queue (9 page)

The Levantine in London, the dead man's friend in London presumably, the Levantine recognizable, the friend about to be traced by his bank-notes—things, as Marcel had remarked, were marching. At the bottom of St. Martin's Lane Grant remembered that this was the last night of
Didn't You Know?
He would drop in there for a little and then go back to the Yard. His thoughts worked much better without goading, and the quiet of the room at the Yard was a silent goad that maddened him. His thoughts would never work to order. There was more likelihood of a revelation being vouchsafed him in the middle of the teeming streets, in the seething mob that somewhere held the Levantine, than in the imposing isolation of his room.

The play had been in progress for about twenty minutes when Grant, after a chat with the manager, found six square inches of standing-room at the back of the dress circle. It was a magnificent sight, looked at from the darkness of so remote a vantage. The theatre, never a very accommodating one, was packed from floor to ceiling, its rosy dimness filled with the electric quality that is only found when every man of an audience is an enthusiast. And they were all enthusiasts, that last-night crowd, devotees saying farewell to the object of their adoration. Adulation, camaraderie, and regret filled the house and made the gathering completely un-British in its abandon to the emotion of the moment. Now and then, when Gollan left out an old gag, some one would call a correction. "Give us all of it, Golly!" they cried. "Give us all of it!" And Golly gave them all he had. Ray Marcable trailed her loveliness over a nearly empty stage with that half-reluctant lightness of a leaf in the wind. She was always, when she danced, a mere fraction of a beat behind the music, so that it seemed as if, instead of being an accompaniment, the music was the motive power, as if it was the music that lifted and spun and whirled her, floated her sideways, and relinquished her gently as it died. Again and again at their vociferous demands the music lifted her into motion, held her laughing and sparkling and quivering, like a crystal ball held poised on a jet of water, and dropped her in a quick descending run to a fast-breathing stillness broken by the crash of the applause. They would not let her go, and when at last some one held her forcibly in the wings, and an effort was made to get on with the story, there was unconcealed impatience. No one wanted a plot tonight. No one had ever wanted one. Quite a large number of the most enthusiastic habitués were unaware that there was such a thing, and few, if any, would have been able to give a lucid account of it. And tonight to insist on wasting time with such irrelevance was folly.

The entrance of the most perfect chorus in Britain soothed them slightly. The fourteen Woffington girls were famous in two continents, and their studies in synchronized motion gave one the same feeling of complete satisfaction—the satisfaction that never becomes satiety—that one has on beholding the Guards in motion. Not a head turned too much, not a toe was out of alignment. No kick was higher than its neighbour, no flop was quicker than another. When the last of the fourteen flicked her black-and-orange columbine skirt in a little defiant motion as she disappeared behind the flats the audience had almost forgotten Ray. Almost, but not quite. Ray and Gollan possessed the house—it was their night, theirs and their public's. And presently the impatience with anything that was not Ray or Gollan became too marked to be ignored. The evening was one long crescendo of excitement that was rapidly reaching hysteria point. Grant watched half pityingly the wry smile with which the leading man acknowledged the conventional plaudits accorded to his sentimental solo. That solo was sung by languishing tenors all over Britain, whistled by every errand boy, played, with lowered lights, by every dance orchestra. He had obviously expected it to be encored at least three times, but beyond humming the last chorus with him they had shown no marked appreciation of it. Something had gone wrong. They couldn't even see him. With as good a grace as he could muster he took his place as background to Ray Marcable, danced with her, sang with her, acted with her—and Grant suddenly caught himself wondering if his eclipse were merely the accident of Ray Marcable's vivid personality, or if she had used that personality deliberately to keep the limelight where she happened to be. Grant had no illusions about the theatre or about the professional generosity of leading ladies. Theatrical stars were easily moved to tears and a lavish expenditure over a hard-luck story, but their good nature withered at the fount when confronted with a successful rival. Ray Marcable had a reputation for all-round generosity and sweet reasonableness. But then, her press agent was wily beyond the average of that wily race. Grant himself had read "pars" about her which he had not recognized as an agent's work until his eyes had gone on to the next item of interest. He had that supreme quality, her press agent, of making the advertised one's presence in the story entirely and convincingly incidental to the main theme.

And then there was the suspicious fact that she had had three leading men in the two years, whereas the rest of the cast had stayed the same. Could her friendly air, her modesty, her—there was no other word for it—her ladylikeness be camouflage? Was London's fragile darling hard as nails underneath? He visualized her as he had met her "off," unassuming, intelligent, eminently reasonable. No parade of temperament or idiosyncrasy. A charming girl with her head screwed on the right way. It was hardly credible. He had known among crooks many women of the fluffy type who had no softer feelings whatever in their makeup. But Ray Marcable's was a sweetness that had no fluff about it, a sweetness that he could have sworn was genuine. He watched her closely now trying to disprove for his own satisfaction—he had liked her enormously—that suggestion which his mind had thrown up involuntarily. But to his dismay he found his suspicions, now that they were acknowledged and made the subject of investigation, being slowly confirmed. She
was
keeping the man out of it. When he looked for the indications they were all there, but they were done with a subtlety such as Grant had never witnessed before. There was nothing so crude as trying to share or divert his applause, or even cutting his applause short by an intrusion of her own. All these would have been recognizable for what they were, and therefore, from her point of view, not permissible. It occurred to him that she was not only too subtle to use such a method but too potent to need to. She had only to use her glowing personality with unscrupulousness, and rivals faded out as stars before the sun. Only with Gollan she was powerless—he was a sun as potent as herself, if not more so—and so she suffered him. But with her leading man—good-looking, amiable, and a very fine singer—she had no difficulty. They had said, he remembered now, that it was impossible to find a leading man good enough for her. That was why. He did not doubt it now. There was something uncanny about the clearness with which he suddenly read her mind, untouched by the glamour that surrounded him. Only he and she in all that intoxicated crowd were aloof, were poised above emotion and looking on. He watched her play with that unhappy wretch as coldly and deliberately as he would have played a trout in the Test. Smiling and sweet, she took what would have been a triumph from his hands, and tacked it on to her own dazzling outfit. And no one noticed that the triumph had gone astray. If they thought at all; they thought that the leading man was not up to the mark tonight—but, of course, it was difficult to get one good enough for her. And after having absorbed his worth she would at the end of a turn with a Machiavellian acuteness drag him forward by the hand to share the applause, so that every one in the building thought, Well,
he
didn't deserve much of it! and his inferiority was accentuated and remembered. Oh, yes, it was subtle. This play within a play became for Grant the absorbing entertainment of the evening. He was seeing the real Ray Marcable, and the sight was incredibly strange. So rapt was he that the final curtain found him still at the back of the circle, deafened by the cheers and feeling strangely cold. Again and again, and yet again, the curtain rose on the glittering stage, and the stream of presents and flowers began to flow over the footlights. Then the speeches came; first Gollan, clutching a large square bottle of whisky and trying to be funny, but not succeeding because his voice would not stay steady. Grant guessed that in his mind was a picture of the heartbreaking years of squalid rooms in squalid towns, twice-nightly performances, and the awful ever-present fear of the bird. Gollan had sung long for his supper; it was no wonder that the feast choked him. Then the producer. Then Ray Marcable.

"Ladies and gentlemen," she said in her clear, slow voice, "two years ago, when none of you knew me, you were kind to me. You overwhelmed me then. Tonight you have overwhelmed me again. I can only say thank you."

Very neat, thought Grant, as they cheered her to the echo. Quite in the part. And he turned away. He knew what was coming—speeches by every one down to the callboy, and he had heard enough. He went down through the crimson and buff vestibule and out into the night with a queer constriction in his chest. If he had not in his thirty-five years cast overboard all such impedimenta as illusion, one would have said that he was disillusioned. He had quite liked Ray Marcable.

"It's not a Christian life at all," said Mrs. Field as she put the inevitable bacon and eggs in front of him. Mrs. Field had tried to cure Grant of the bacon-and-eggs habit by providing wonderful breakfasts with recipes culled from her daily paper, and kidneys and other "favours" wrested from Mr. Tomkins at the threat of withdrawing her custom, but Grant had defeated her—as he defeated most people in time. He still had bacon and eggs, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. It was now eight o'clock on Sunday morning, which was the fact that had called forth Mrs. Field's remark. "Unchristian" in Mrs. Field's vocabulary meant not any lack of conformity but an absence of comfort and respectability. The fact that he was having breakfast before eight on a Sunday morning shocked her infinitely more than the fact that his day was to be spent in the most mundane of work. She grieved over him.

"It's a wonder to me that the King doesn't give you inspectors decorations oftener than he does. What other man in London is having breakfast at this hour when he needn't!"

"In that case I think inspectors' landladies should be included in the decoration. Mrs. Field, O.B.E.—for being an inspector's landlady."

"Oh, the honour's enough for me without the decoration," she said.

"I'd like to think of a good rejoinder to that, but I never could say graceful things at breakfast. It takes a woman to be witty at eight in the morning."

"You'd be surprised really at the standing it gives me, you being an inspector at Scotland Yard."

I "Does it really?"

"It does; but don't you be afraid. I keep my mouth shut. Nothing ever comes out through me. There's lots would like to know what the inspector thought, or who came to see the inspector, but I just sit and let them hint. You don't have to see a hint unless you like."

"It is very noble of you, Mrs. Field, to achieve a reputation for obtuseness for my sake."

Mrs. Field blinked and recovered herself. "It's my duty, if it wasn't my pleasure," she said, and made a graceful exit.

As he was going away after breakfast she surveyed the untouched toast sorrowfully. "Well, see that you have a good meal in the middle of the day. You can't think to any advantage on an empty stomach."

"But you can't run to any advantage on a full one!"

"You'll never have to run very far after any one in London. There's always some one to head them off."

Grant was smiling to himself as he went down the sunny road to the bus-stop at this simplification of the work of the C.I.D. But there was no heading off the people who claimed to have seen the wanted man. Nearly half London appeared to have set eyes on him—his back as often as not. And the number of cut hands that required investigation would have been incredible to any one who has not witnessed a manhunt from the inside. Patiently Grant sifted the reports through the long, bright morning, sitting at his desk and sending his lieutenants out here and there as a general arranges his forces on a battle-field. The provincial clues he ignored, with the exception of two, which were too good to be passed over—there was always the odd chance that the man in the Strand had
not
been the Levantine. Two men were sent to investigate these—one to Cornwall and one to York. All day long the telephone at his elbow buzzed, and all day long messages of failure came over it. Some of the men they had been sent out to observe had not, in the detective's opinion, the remotest resemblance to the wanted man. This valuable information was obtained often enough at the cost of a long afternoon's vigil behind the Nottingham lace curtains of a suburban villa waiting for "the man three houses down" to pass within examining distance. One suspect proved to be a nobleman well known to the public as a polo player. The officer who tracked him down saw that he had aroused the earl's curiosity—the noble lord had been run to earth in a garage where he was collecting his car preparatory to having a little flip of three or four hundred miles as a slight Sunday diversion—and confessed what his business was.

"I
thought
you were tailing me," said the peer of the realm, "and as my conscience is particularly good at the moment I wondered what you were up to. I have been accused of many things in my short time, but never of looking like a murderer before. Good luck to you, by all means."

"Thank you, sir, same to you. I hope your conscience will be as clear when you come back." And the earl, who had more convictions for exceeding the speed limit than any one else in England, had grinned appreciatively.

Truly it was the men who went out that found work light that Sunday, and it was Grant, sitting pulling strings with mechanical competence, that found it tedious. Barker came in in the afternoon, but had no suggestion to make which might expedite matters. They could afford to ignore nothing; the least helpful of the clues had to be investigated in the relentless process of elimination. It was spadework, and most unchristian, in the Field sense. Grant looked enviously from his window, through the bright mist that hung over the river, at the Surrey side, lit now by the westering sun. How good it would be to be in Hampshire today! He could see the woods on Danebuny in their first green. And a little later in the evening, when the sun went, the Test would be just right for fly.