The Square Emerald · Chapter 5 (2/2)

“Are you going to be one of those love-is-not-for-me girls?” he asked gloomily. “Somehow I can’t imagine you running a garage of toy poms.”

Leslie’s eyes roved around the room, and presently they rested upon Margaret Dawlish; hard-faced, inflexible, the type of Roman mother who could never forgive the humiliation that Peter had brought upon her. How queer was the average man’s conception of the average woman! The conventional mother, soft, yielding, ready to endure all and forgive all for the sake of her children, was no figment of imagination, but the throw-outs were innumerable. Leslie started to count all the instances she knew, and grew tired of the exercise. She had witnessed, incredible though it might seem, a mother dancing on this very floor whilst her child was dying in a nursing home a few streets away. She knew mothers who could not speak of their daughters without growing incoherent with rage. And this was the fourth instance of a mother who could sweep her only son out of memory, out of existence, for some offence he had committed⁠—not against her, but against society. Margaret Dawlish sat alone at a little table, very upright, very forbidding, and when the maître d’hotel, in the manner of his kind, approached her with a smile, she dismissed him with a few words, and, raising her lorgnette, made an inspection of the dancers.

“That woman is granite,” said Leslie, as the band stopped and they walked back to their table.

“Which? You mean Mrs. Dawlish? Yes, I rather think she is on the hard side. That sort of thing meant a lot to her. She hates this company and this place, but for five years, ever since her son was sent to prison, she has made a point of dining here.”

Leslie nodded.

“A gesture of defiance. Gosh! these respectable people! They dare not leave a room for fear somebody talks behind their backs.”

It was towards eleven o’clock, and Coldwell had summoned the waiter to pay his bill, when a footman came from the vestibule and, bending over, whispered something to him.

“A phone message. I expect it’s from the Embankment,” he said. “Excuse me, Leslie.”

He threaded a way through the dancers on the floor, and was gone ten minutes. When he came back she saw his white eyebrows were met in a frown.

“The Kingston police think they’ve got a line to those infernal motorcar bandits,” he said.

He referred to a gang which was occupying the public attention at that time. Three men who, in hired or stolen motorcars, had been travelling through Surrey, holding up isolated residences at the point of a pistol, and getting away with as much portable property as they could lay their hands upon.

“I’ll see you home,” he said as he paid the bill, “and then I’ll toddle down to Kingston. I wish to Heaven the Kingston police would make their discoveries at a reasonable hour.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’m not a bit sleepy, and it’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht!”

He looked at her dubiously.

“I don’t know that you’re dressed for a motorcar I have phoned for the police car; it will be here in a few minutes.”

She went out into the lobby to put on the woollen spencer she had brought in preparation for a cold journey home, and over that her coat. It was true that she never felt less like sleep; in a sense, she was at a loose end, and the prospect of doing a little work before she went to bed was a pleasing one, though in all probability she would play no other part than that of spectator and audience.

The trip promised to be the more interesting because she had, that day, been tracing the previous convictions of three men who were suspected of being the motor bandits⁠—and very commonplace individuals they were. That had been the most shocking discovery she made when she came to Scotland Yard⁠—the commonplaceness, indeed the insignificance, of what is described as the criminal class. Out-of-work plumbers, labourers, carters, and clerks, with a painter here and there, formed the bulk of them. The women only had an individuality. There was no habitual woman criminal quite untouched by romance; their stories were altogether different, their lives more varied, and, if the truth be told, their enterprise and inventive qualities more fascinating.

She passed through the swing doors into the street. The night was bitterly cold and the sky overhead was clear. The bright moon which she had recklessly inferred was not in evidence, but there were all the other attractive conditions for a midnight ride.

The car was an open tourer, with a plenitude of rugs, and Mr. Coldwell fixing the rear screen to shield her face from the cutting air, the journey promised no discomforts. The car passed swiftly through Kensington and across Hammersmith Bridge, and in an incredibly short space of time was running down Kingston Vale. The driver pulled up at the police station behind a big touring car, which was unattended, and they got down.

In the charge-room they found the inspector talking to a middle-aged man, who was apparently the owner of the car.

“Sorry to bring you down, Mr. Coldwell,” said the inspector, “but this sounds almost like one of the motor crowd’s little jokes.”

The car owner apparently was the proprietor of a small garage. That afternoon he had been approached by a seemingly decent man who asked him if he would come to London with the idea of negotiating for an important journey. The garage keeper, as it happened, had some business in town, and had met the hirer at a little restaurant in the Brompton Road.

“He seemed all right to me,” the garage keeper continued his narrative. “It was only after I got home that I began to smell a rat. He wanted me to pick him up at the end of Barnes Common, near the Wimbledon Road, at a quarter-past ten tonight, and drive him to Southampton. He asked for a closed car, but I told him I hadn’t got one that could do the journey, and I didn’t like the idea anyway. But as he offered me double the fare I should have asked, and paid half of it down, I agreed.”

“Did you ask him why he wanted to go to Southampton at a quarter-past ten?”

“That was the first question I asked,” said the man. “He told me he was dining with some friends, and that that would mean he would lose the boat-train⁠—the Berengaria pulls out at five o’clock tomorrow morning, and all passengers must be on the ship overnight. I’ve had that job before, so it wasn’t unusual; the only queer thing about it was that, instead of asking me to pick him up at a house, he fixed this place on Barnes Common. But he told me he didn’t want his friends to know that he was leaving the next day. At any rate, I fell for him, but as time went on I began to get suspicious and communicated with the police.”

“What sort of looking man was he?” asked Leslie.

“A middle-aged man, miss,” said the chauffeur-owner, a little surprised at a question from this quarter. “It struck me that he’d been booz⁠—drinking a little, but that’s neither here nor there. He was well dressed, and that’s all I can tell you about him except that he was clean-shaven, had rather a big face, and wore a soft felt hat.”

Coldwell turned to the girl.

“Does that describe any of the people we have been looking over?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“No,” she said quietly; “but it rather accurately describes Druze.”

“Druze?” he said incredulously. “You’re not suggesting that Druze is one of the gang?”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” she said, biting her lip thoughtfully. “Did you notice his hands, Mr.⁠—?”

“Porter,” said the chauffeur. “Yes, miss, I did notice his hands when he took off his gloves to pay me. They were very white.”

She looked at Coldwell.

“That is an even more accurate description,” she said.

“You didn’t go to the Common, did you?” asked Coldwell.

“No, sir. The inspector went up in my car with a couple of policemen.”

“He must have smelt a rat,” said the local inspector. “There was no sign of anybody at a quarter-past ten, and apparently he was very particular about his being there absolutely on time. He told Mr. Porter: ‘If I’m not there by twenty-five minutes past, don’t wait for me.’ That sounds rather like the gang, Mr. Coldwell,” he added. “It is an old trick of theirs to hire a car and arrange to be picked up in some quiet spot⁠—”

The telephone bell tinkled in another room, and he went to the instrument. He was gone five minutes. When he came back:

“The gang busted a house the other side of Guildford at nine o’clock,” he said. “The car smashed into a ditch and two of them have been caught by the Surrey police.”

Coldwell pursed his lips.

“That disposes of your theory,” he said.

Driving back up Kingston Vale, Coldwell expatiated upon his favourite theme, which might be headed: “No effort is wasted when you’re dealing with lawbreakers.”

“A lot of men would grouse about being brought out in the middle of the night on a fool’s errand, but it isn’t possible to investigate the reason why a condensed milk tin has been found in an ashpit without learning something valuable. And if that hirer was friend Druze⁠—”

“As it was,” said Leslie promptly.

“⁠—well, we’ve learnt something,” continued Coldwell. “It brings him into a new list, so to speak. He’s in the people-who-do-strange-things class, and that makes him stand out from the mass of law-abiding citizens.”

They passed swiftly down Roehampton Lane, climbed the little slope that carried them over the railway bridge, and had reached the middle of the common when Chief Inspector Coldwell began to enlarge and illustrate his theory. Just ahead of them Leslie saw the rear lights of a car moving out from the side of the road.

“Never despise little cases,” he began, “because⁠—”

There was a grinding of brakes; the car stopped so violently that Leslie’s nose touched the glass screen painfully.

“What’s wrong?” asked Coldwell sharply. He, too, had seen the car ahead, and his first thought was that his driver was avoiding a collision.

The police chauffeur was looking round.

“I’m sorry, sir; I was rather startled. Did you see a man lying on the sidewalk?”

“No⁠—where?” asked the interested Coldwell.

The driver reversed and the car moved slowly backward. They saw a black something in the darkness, and then, as the machine moved back a few more feet, the headlamps showed the figure of a man.

Coldwell got down from the car slowly.

“It looks like a drunk,” he grumbled. “You’d better stay where you are, Leslie.”

But his foot had hardly touched the ground before she had followed.

Well enough Inspector Coldwell knew that this was no drunk. The attitude, the outstretched arms, the legs slightly doubled, told him, before he saw the little pool of blood on the sidewalk, that there was no life here.

For a second the two stood gazing down at the pitiable figure.

“Druze,” said the girl quietly. “Somehow I expected it.”

It was Druze, and he was dead. The heavy overcoat was buttoned across his breast, there was no sign of a hat, and his hands, ungloved, were tightly clenched. As she looked, Leslie saw a queer green glitter in the light of the motor-lamps.

“He has something in his left hand,” she said in a hushed voice, and, kneeling down, Inspector Coldwell prised loose the fingers, and the thing that the dead man held fell with a tinkle to the gravelled path.

Coldwell picked it up and examined it curiously. It was a large, square emerald in a platinum setting, one edge of which was broken, as though it had been torn forcibly from a larger ornament.

“That is queer,” he said.

She took the emerald from his hand and carried it nearer to the lamp. Now she knew that she had made no mistake. It was the pendant on the chain she had seen that evening glittering on Lady Raytham’s neck!