The Square Emerald · Chapter 13 (2/2)

“Where is Jane’s child? Perhaps you’ll understand that.”

She had been taken aback by the first question, he was sure. The length of time that elapsed before she answered betrayed her.

“So you know that, do you? The child? I’m afraid I can’t tell you. I have something better to do than to keep track of the indiscretions of my friends, and certainly I do not concern myself with the bastards of convicted forgers.”

“You lie,” said Peter quietly. “You know I was married to Jane.”

Anita Bellini chuckled.

“The marriage was illegal⁠—didn’t you know that? You didn’t comply with certain formalities⁠—”

“I have seen Jane tonight. She has no doubt about its legality. Where is my son?”

“Where you will never find him.” All the pent-up malignity of the woman suddenly took expression. Her face, never attractive, was contorted by rage to an appearance that was almost ludicrous. “Where you will never find him! In the slime and the mud where his father belongs⁠—dead, I hope!”

A sudden insane fury possessed him. He was scarcely human, saw the hateful face of this woman through a redness, and flung himself against the door. It jerked back with a crash and suddenly flew open. The chain was broken.

To him she was no longer a woman, but some obscene devil that had taken human shape. He wanted to kill her, to grip that big throat and choke the life out of her. As the chain broke, she stepped back, and he found himself looking into the black muzzle of a pistol.

“Don’t move,” she said gratingly. “Don’t move, Peter Dawlish. I am justified in shooting you in defence of my life.”

She did not see his hand move. The pistol was struck down from her grip and fell with a clatter on the floor, and, in his mad anger, with murder in his heart, his hand was outflung. Then somebody called him.

“Peter!”

At the sound of the voice his arm dropped, paralyzed with amazement. A woman was in the hall; she had come out of a room at the foot of the broad stairway; a woman in black silk, white-haired, hard-faced⁠—it was his mother!

“Come in here.”

She pointed to the open door of the room, and he walked past her without another glance at Anita Bellini⁠—shrinking back against the wall, frightened for the first time in her life.

It was a small study furnished in the Oriental fashion; there was a great silken divan, and a shaded lantern hung from the ceiling. Something more modern he saw; a telephone on the tiny octagonal table. The receiver was off; he had interrupted her in the act of telephoning.

“What is the meaning of this?”

Mrs. Dawlish had assumed the old pontifical air that he knew so well and detested so much.

He was still shaking, but he was calmer.

“I presume you don’t need to be told⁠—you must have heard. I came to your friend⁠—”

“To the Princess Bellini,” interrupted the woman. “Yes?”

“⁠—to discover where was my child.”

“Really?” The grey eyebrows rose, “I was not aware that I was a grandmother.”

The old devil rose again in him.

“Then your hearing is affected,” he said harshly. “You know⁠—of course you know! The whole damned gang of you know! You know about Jane, you know about my marriage, you know about the child. Perhaps you know where he is.”

And then, to add to the fire of his fury, he saw her smile.

“You have always been a fool, Peter. I suppose you will be a fool to the end of your days,” she said. “You had better go back to your envelope addressing and forget there are such things in the world as children. I have been trying very hard to do the same for the past seven years.”

She was a surprising woman, for without warning, she came back to the offer she had made to him.

“You would be well advised to go to Canada or Australia, or any other place that takes your fancy,” she said, and went on in a conversational tone to discuss the advantages which might accrue.

He was puzzled. Then it occurred to him that she was talking to gain time⁠—for what? His back had been to the door, and now he edged round until it was under his view. But if Anita Bellini contemplated any treachery, there was no visible or audible evidence.

He heard the front door bell ring, and an exchange of voices in the hall, and then the door opened, and two men entered, and it was not necessary that he should be very experienced in such matters to realize that they were detectives. His mother’s narrative stopped automatically. Her white, skinny finger pointed to him.

“This man is Peter Dawlish⁠—an ex-convict!” she said. “I charge him with threatening to murder my friend, Princess Anita Bellini.”

A quarter of an hour after, the taxicab which Peter had employed to bring him to Wimbledon deposited him at the police station, and he was sitting, dazed and wrathful, behind the locked door of a police cell.