Weekend with Death Read online

  Wilson came back to the point from which he had started.

  “He was, I believe, at quite a well known public school. His father, I think, was in the army. A natural reaction from militarism, which I would be the last to condemn, may have been the beginning of his downfall. I myself, as you are doubtless aware, have been a lifelong pacifist—I was a conscientious objector during the last war.…” He continued to talk.

  It was about half an hour later that the car showed the first signs of trouble. After a mile or two of lumpy running, Wickham pulled up by the side of the road and opened the bonnet. Presently he came round to the window and announced that he would like to get the car to a garage.

  “There’ll be one at Hedgeley.”

  “Dear me—how very unfortunate! And how far is it to Hedgeley?”

  “A couple of miles.”

  “Is there an hotel there?”

  “Of sorts,” said Wickham laconically.

  “I said we ought to have come by train,” said Joanna. “And it is going to snow—I feel quite sure that it is going to snow.”

  They were detained at Hedgeley long enough to reduce I Miss Cattermole to a state of nervous depression, and her brother to the limit of his self-control. The hotel was of the cheap commercial kind. The food was definitely bad. The fire in the coffee-room smoked and kept on going out. There was nothing to read. When Sarah suggested going out to get a paper, there seemed to be a number of reasons why she should not do so. The nearest paper shop was half a mile down the street. The car might be ready at any moment. The morning papers would be sold out and the evening papers not yet in. And finally, “I must really ask you not to leave my sister—she is in a sadly nervous state.”

  Sarah, whose inclination had been of the slightest, gave way, and was rewarded by a mild half promise that Wilson would look out for a paper-boy.

  If he looked, it was in vain. No paper was forthcoming. Sarah, who was divided between boredom, curiosity, and a quite strong reluctance to read any more about Emily Case, began to wonder why there had been no papers at breakfast. As a rule there were three, but this morning none except yesterday’s Times. She wondered whether Morgan had taken them. She wondered whether they contained too faithful a description of Sarah Marlowe.

  The day grew steadily colder. At intervals of half an hour Wilson crossed the street to the garage and came back with discouraging reports.

  “They can’t find out what is wrong”… “Wick-ham says it may be the coil” … “No, my dear, they cannot say how long they will be. We must just possess our souls in patience.” …

  It was not until five o’clock that Wickham came across to say that the car was in running order. It was quite dark as they took the road, running on through the town and out upon a tree-bordered highway.

  Presently they turned right-handed, and then turned again. Two right-hand turns take you back in the direction from which you have come, and a third brings you to the road you have just left. Prolonged boredom makes you either very dull or very observant. It had the latter effect upon Sarah. She said in a tone of surprise,

  “Why, we are back on the Hedgeley road!”

  “We might be on any road in this dreadful darkness,” said Joanna in her most complaining voice. “I am sure I cannot think how Wickham manages to drive with those wretched black-out lights.”

  “Wickham is an extremely good driver,” said Wilson complacently. “You need not be in the least nervous, my dear.”

  “But why are we going back?” said Sarah.

  “What makes you think we are going back, Miss Sarah?”

  She turned a puzzled face upon him.

  “We are coming into Hedgeley again.”

  In the darkness she wondered whether Wilson was smiling. His voice sounded as if he were.

  “One place looks exactly like another in the blackout, and I am sure you can trust Wickham not to lose his way.”

  Sarah said no more. She leaned back and stared out into the darkness. They were driving back, right through Hedgeley, between the garage and the hotel, past the church with the pointed spire. She could not see these things, but she knew that they were there. She knew that they drove right through the town and out at the other side.

  Presently they took a turning which brought them by an uphill road to open ground. There were no trees or hedgerows any more, only a black moor in the darkness under a freezing sky.

  CHAPTER XIII

  About a quarter of an hour after Mr. Cattermole’s Vauxhall had driven away from his front door Henry Templar walked up the steps and rang the bell. It was an unconventional hour, and Henry had been bred to a regard for the social conventions. If Sarah had been in her own home, it would still have been a little marked, but since she was Mr. Cattermole’s employee, to walk in at half past nine in the morning and demand an interview was an uncomfortably conspicuous act, and one to which only a sense of extreme urgency could have compelled him.

  His conversation with Sarah on the telephone the previous evening had exasperated and alarmed him. He had not known her for seven years without being aware of the lengths to which her warm heart, her generosity, and her obstinacy were capable of taking her. If she thought getting involved with the police was going to throw her out of a job and interfere with her supporting Miss Tinkler, then she was liable to compromise herself to almost any extent in a pig-headed attempt to dodge the law. When you came down to brass tacks, the thing that made women so difficult to deal with was that fundamentally they had no respect for the law. He supposed it was because they had only recently had any voice in the law-making business, and before that for generations of women the man-made and man-wielded law was a thing to be borne, suffered under, dodged, flouted, or broken.

  During the watches of the night Henry considered very seriously the consequences which Sarah would be inviting if she persisted in withholding vital information from the police. He composed speeches and marshalled arguments, but he had extremely little hope that they would cause Sarah to see the error of her ways. In the whole time that he had known her he could not remember an occasion on which he had induced her to change her mind. Not when it had really mattered. And her answer when pressed had always amounted to this—“What’s the good of arguing, when that’s how I feel?”

  There it was—if you were a woman you didn’t reason; you felt. The irrational nature of the female sex really came home to him for the first time. Along with his serious consideration of the consequences which Sarah might be bringing upon herself, he began to be almost as deeply concerned about those in which he might himself be involved if he were to allow his feelings to precipitate him into matrimony. Because there was no disguising the fact that Sarah was a dangerously impulsive person. It was part of her charm. But—

  During those sleepless hours Sarah’s charm presented itself to Henry under the time-honoured guise of flowers decking the edge of a precipice. And Henry had no natural bent towards precipices.

  At 7.0 a.m. he dialled Mr. Cattermole’s number, and received no reply. At 7.15, at 7.30, and 7.45 he repeated the performance, with the same result. At eight o’clock he was informed that the line was out of order. He then rose, shaved, dressed, and breakfasted. By this time it was nine o’clock. He decided that by walking to Bank Street he would get some fresh air and exercise and catch Sarah before she started her morning’s work. He could allow himself a quarter of an hour.

  Thompson answered the bell, and the minute she opened the door Henry had a premonition. Something was going to go wrong with his neat timetable. Something had in fact already gone wrong. Thompson, prim and tidy in lilac print and an apron which crackled with starch, shook her head reprovingly. She too prized the conventions, and to come asking for a young lady when it wasn’t hardly breakfast-time wasn’t at all the thing—not in the class of house she was accustomed to.

  “Oh, no, sir—they’ve just left.”

  “Left?” said Henry in a stupefied tone.

  “Gone away for the week-
end,” said Thompson, as one explaining things to a dull-witted child.

  “And there he stood,” she told Mrs. Perkins afterwards in the kitchen. “Looked as if he couldn’t hardly believe it, and frowned something shocking. And then he said, ‘Are you sure?’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ And he said, ‘Where have they gone? I suppose you can give me the address?’ and I said, ‘Indeed I can’t!’”

  Mrs. Perkins heaved a sigh.

  “Sounds as if he’d got it bad,” she said—“doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know about that.” Thompson’s voice was sharp.

  Mrs. Perkins shook her head.

  “Ah, no—you wouldn’t. You mark my words, Lizzie, they’ve had a tiff—that’s what it is. You mark my words!”

  “That was him on the ’phone last night. I heard her say ‘Henry’ as I come past with my tray—‘Henry, I can’t’, she said. And I thought to myself, ‘You just go on saying that and it’ll be a bit of all right.’ And what it was he was wanting her to do, well, it isn’t for me to say, but from what I’ve come across, they’re all alike, men are, and all any of them want is to have things their own way, so I just hope she goes on saying can’t to him.”

  Mrs. Perkins made a vaguely sympathetic sound.

  “Ah well, dear, you’re bitter—and no wonder, the way you were treated. But there’s all sorts. You depend upon it, they’ve had a quarrel, and he come here on the way to his office in the hopes of making it up. A bit of a facer for him, poor fellow, to find them all gone off and no address, which I can’t say I hold with myself. Suppose we was to be murdered in our beds, or the house burnt down—it stands to reason we ought to know where we could get word to Mr. Cattermole. We did ought to know where he is, and that’s a fact.”

  “He doesn’t want to be bothered,” said Thompson—“and I don’t blame him.”

  Henry Templar proceeded to his office, and in due course went out to lunch at his club, where he was joined by a friend of the name of Blenkinsop.

  Mr. Blenkinsop, who was a year or two older than Henry, was the secretary of an Under-Secretary. It being Saturday, there was time for conversation as well as food. Mr. Blenkinsop was discreet, but not so discreet with Henry as he would have been with most other people.

  Henry was never quite sure how the murder of Emily Case came up, but all in a minute there it was, and Blenkinsop was saying,

  “The inquest’s on Monday, I see, but they’ll ask for an adjournment. There’s something behind it, you know.”

  Henry said, “Is there?” and hoped that he said it in his usual tone.

  Blenkinsop nodded.

  “Oh, obviously. I wonder who the girl was.”

  “What girl?”

  “The girl who was with her in the waiting-room of course. There’s something there. Why doesn’t she come forward?”

  “People don’t like getting mixed up in a murder case.”

  “Silly of her,” said Blenkinsop briskly. “That morbid shrinking from publicity only results in attracting it. Nobody would have noticed her if she had come forward at once. Now everyone wants to know who she is.”

  It was perfectly true. Henry’s annoyance with Sarah deepened. If she had taken his advice—Women never did take advice. They asked for it, but when they got it they chucked it away and did what they had all along made up their minds to do. He nodded and said gloomily,

  “Girls don’t reason. I expect she panicked.”

  Blenkinsop went on talking about Emily Case. It wasn’t any use trying to deflect him, because when he wanted to talk about anything he talked about it. All you could do was to abstract your mind and wonder whether the club Stilton had definitely deteriorated, or whether it was merely your own palate.

  Presently Blenkinsop appeared to have talked himself out. Putting sugar into his coffee, he produced a name like a rabbit from a hat.

  “Blechmann—did you ever hear of anyone called Blechmann?”

  Henry said, “No,” and then wasn’t sure. “Ought I to have heard of him?”

  “I don’t know—I just wanted to see if there was any reaction.”

  Henry said, “I don’t think so—” There was just a trace of doubt in his voice. “What’s it all about anyhow?”

  Blenkinsop put his elbows on the table and leaned across it.

  “Look here,” he said, “do you remember when we were at Interlaken in July?”

  “How do you mean, do I remember? Of course I remember.”

  “Well, what I really mean is, do you remember old Bloch?”

  “Of course I remember him.”

  Blenkinsop edged nearer.

  “Well, that gets us started. What do you remember about him?”

  “Look here,” said Henry, “I want to know what all this is about.”

  Blenkinsop gave an impatient sigh.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute, but I want you to say your piece first. Suppose it was a matter of life and death, and you had to make a statement—suppose you had to describe old Bloch—just what exactly would you say?”

  “In a statement to the police?”

  “If you like to put it that way.”

  “Is this a statement for the police?”

  Blenkinsop’s shoulder jerked.

  “It might be. Go on—what would you say?”

  Henry looked at him and considered. Something was certainly up. Blenkinsop had the air of a terrier at a rat hole—stubbly reddish hair bristling, small grey eyes alert and bright. He said,

  “Well, he passed as a Dutchman—but as you’re taking so much interest in him, he may have hailed from over the Rhine.”

  “I don’t want speculation—only what you yourself observed.”

  Henry nodded.

  “All right. As far as I came across him—and that wasn’t any more than you did—he was just what he purported to be, an amiable middle-aged professor of entomology who had spent a good deal of his time in the Dutch East Indies. I suppose you don’t want me to describe him?”

  “Yes, I do. Go on.”

  “Sounds silly to me. You saw just as much of him as I did. Well, I should put him down at fifty-one or fifty-two—about five-foot-eleven—thickset and heavy—large, pale, flattish face—good teeth—deep voice—strong, very ugly hands.… I think that’s about all.”

  “Hair? Eyes? Colouring?” Blenkinsop jerked the words at him one at a time.

  “Well, I said he was pale—what more do you want? Eyes nondescript—hazel to grey—nothing you’d notice much anyway. Hair grey and rather long—but it was a wig, you know.”

  Blenkinsop took him up with energy.

  “I know? How should I know? I didn’t anyway. But what’s more to the point is, how did you know?”

  Henry laughed, partly at all this much ado about nothing, and partly at the recollection of old Bloch’s head emerging egg-like from the bushes. He said,

  “I know because I saw him without it. He tripped up and went head first down a bit of a slope into some bushes and came up bald as the back of your hand.”

  “You never told me.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact he asked me not to give him away. He was horribly put out and begged me not to mention it—said he’d lost his hair in Java, and that it was impossible for a man of science to keep his end up, especially with students, who he assured me were a race of devils, if they had any excuse for regarding him as an object of ridicule.”

  Blenkinsop said abruptly,

  “Had he any eyelashes?”

  “No—I don’t think so. He wouldn’t have if he’d lost all his hair like that.”

  “Blechmann was bald—no hair at all—no eyebrows, no eyelashes.”

  “So are dozens of other people,” said Henry. “Anyhow, who’s Blechmann? Your turn now—I’m through.”

  Blenkinsop drank his coffee at a gulp and pushed the cup away.

  “Well, here you are. A man in the Foreign Office asked me if I wasn’t at Interlaken in July, and when I said I was, he wanted everything I c
ould tell him about Bloch. It seems they think he was Blechmann.”

  “I’d take more interest if I knew who Blechmann was.”

  “Well, that’s just what they would like to know. Ostensibly he’s a Belgian from the Eupen district, and actually he’s a German agent, and a very clever one at that. He can pass as Belgian, Dutch, Swiss, or English. At the moment—look here, Henry, this is very hush-hush—they think he’s over here, and they’d very much like to get their hands on him. The idea is that he’s come over on Fifth Column business, to organize what you might call an extensive news-agency for transmitting weather reports and other information useful to the enemy.”

  “Why do they think he’s Bloch?”

  “I don’t know, but they do. Your story about the wig rather bears it out. And here’s something I didn’t tell you. When I was in Paris in October I saw a man ahead of me in the street whom I took for Bloch. The light was bad, and I only had the back view to go by—a kind of silhouette, if you know what I mean. But I thought it was Bloch—something about the set of the head and the heavy shoulders—and when I caught him up it was a Frenchman with a little pointed beard and a flourishing moustache. But he hadn’t any eyelashes. Now what my man wanted to know was this. Was there anything about Bloch which he couldn’t disguise—besides the lack of eyelashes? And when I said I couldn’t think of anything, he asked me who I had with me at Interlaken, and said I’d better find out whether you’d noticed anything I hadn’t.”

  Henry was frowning. He said,

  “His hands—I’d know them anywhere—beastly, ugly hands—thick through—fingers like a bunch of bananas. I’d know them anywhere. But look here, I should have thought he’d stick out a mile over here, because though his English was perfectly fluent, he’d any amount of accent.”