I said, “No, it wasn’t bad news, and there isn’t any answer.”
Then she went away.
This is the telegram:
Meet me to-night ten-thirty far end crescent. Z.10.
Well, there it was. The crescent would be Olding Crescent.
Z.10’s an odd creature. He has his queer moments of caution, like making me send back envelopes and not putting the name of the place in full-which is one of the things that make me wonder which side of the law he’s on. I’m not going to quod for Mr. Z.10 Smith, so if that’s his dream, he’d better wake up quick.
The telegram had been sent from the G.P.O., so I didn’t get any help out of that. Telegrams aren’t very helpful anyhow. A letter does give you something about a man- you can tell whether he got it straight off the bat, or whether he dawdled about, trying to make up his mind what he was going to say; and you can tell whether he was pretty well bucked with life or in rather a Weary-Willie frame of mind-but a wire doesn’t give you any help.
I wondered what on earth he wanted, and whether he’d really got a job for me, and what sort of a job it was likely to be, and I wished that ten-thirty wasn’t about seven hours away.
It came along at last. I got to the Olding Crescent about ten minutes before the time and walked along to the end of it. By the “far end” I supposed he meant the end that was farthest from Churt Row. I walked in the shadow of the wall where he and I had talked before. It was absolutely pitch-black under the trees. The other side of the road was just visible. There weren’t many lamp-posts, only one every two hundred yards or so-a pretty poor allowance for a suburb.
I had the long brick wall of somebody’s big garden on my left, and the trees on the other side of it hung over and made dense shadows. I felt my way along the wall. After about three hundred yards I came on a door. It was set flush with the wall, and it was locked. The wall went on and on. It seemed to me that there weren’t going to be any houses on this side of the crescent at all. I thought I would cross the road and prospect, so I made for the next lamp-post.
All the lamps were on the other side. I was standing under the lamp looking about me, when a car with a rug over its bonnet went slowly past and came to a stand-still on the wrong side of the road under the trees. As it stopped, the lights went out. I heard the door open, but I didn’t hear any one get out.
I stared into the dark, but I couldn’t see a thing. Then I heard my name.
“ Fairfax -is that you?”
It was Z.10 all right. I knew the sound of him at once. He has one of those dry, breathless and soundless sort of voices. You can do a very good imitation of it if you pitch your voice just above a whisper and see how far you can make it carry without putting any real life into it. It had struck me from the beginning that it wasn’t at all a bad way of disguising one’s voice. He called again, and I stepped out across the road.
The car was a saloon. I couldn’t tell the make. The front door was open, and as soon as I got level with it he spoke again from the driver’s seat.
“Get in-I want to talk to you.”
I put one foot on the running-board and kept a hand on the door.
“Are you going out of town?”
He said “Why?” in rather a surprised sort of way.
“Well, last time-” I began. And then I realized I was making a break, because he took me up most uncommonly sharp.
“Last time? What do you mean by ‘last time’?”
“Oh, nothing,” I said-“nothing.”
Really I wasn’t sorry I’d made a slip of the tongue. I’d never felt sure how much Z.10 knew. He’d given me an appointment at the corner of Olding Crescent and Churt Row, and he’d written afterwards to say that he’d been prevented from keeping it. And some one else had kept it for him. Anna Lang had kept it. And Anna’s account was that she’d overheard a conversation between two men whom she didn’t know. One of them said that he had an appointment to meet me at his place-mentioning me by name- and that he wasn’t going to keep it because he was putting me through some sort of test.
Speaking broadly, I should expect anything that Anna said to be untrue. She doesn’t tell the truth if she can help it-I thinks she finds it dull. But on the other hand, bits of her story do fit in very well. So I couldn’t make out whether Z.10 knew that Anna had met me or not, and I thought I should rather like to find out, because if Anna was in with Z.10, I was through.
“I think you must have meant something,” he said, and from the sound of his voice he was leaning towards me.
“Well,” I said, “last time-”
He interrupted me.
“Last time I met you at the corner. We walked up and down beside the wall and settled your salary.”
“I didn’t mean that time-I mean the time before.”
“There was no time before.”
“Oh yes, there was. You made an appointment to meet me at the corner at ten o’clock.”
“And I did not come-I was prevented.”
“Somebody came,” I said.
I swear he was taken by surprise. He made some sort of a movement and drew his breath in quickly.
“What do you mean?”
“What I say-somebody met me.”
“Somebody met you here?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how. I thought perhaps you did.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said,
“Who met you, Mr. Fairfax?”
“A lady,” I said.
“You don’t know who she was?”
“Oh yes, I know; but if you don’t, I can’t very well tell you.”
“A lady? A lady?”
I thought it was a blow to him. Then he seemed to pull himself together.
“What happened?” he said.
“She took me for a drive.”
“She took you for a drive?” There was the extreme of surprise in his voice.
“For a nice country drive,” I said.
“At ten o’clock at night?”
“From ten to eleven,” I replied.
I could hear him beat on the wheel with an exasperated hand.
“Mr. Fairfax, you’re not serious!”
“Oh, but I am.”
“On your word of honor?”
“I’ll take an affidavit if you like.”
He said, “Well, well-” and made a clicking sound with his tongue against his teeth. Then he asked me point-blank “Who was this woman?”
I didn’t say anything.
He hit the wheel again.
“Where did she take you?”
I thought I’d let fly at a venture. If he didn’t know anything, I shouldn’t be telling him anything; and if he knew already, there wouldn’t be anything to tell.
“She took me to Linwood Edge,” I said-and I’d have given a good deal to be able to see his face.
There was a complete and hollow silence. I could hear two branches rubbing against each other somewhere overhead where the trees crossed one another along the wall, and I could hear the sound of traffic on a main road a long way off. It’s funny how town things and country things sound alike in the distance. That noise of cars and lorries and trams passing each other on a tarred road had just the sound of waves coming in on a pebble beach after a storm. I thought of that whilst I was waiting for him to speak. I had to wait a long time.
When he did speak, I could tell by his voice that he had turned away from me and was looking into the dark ahead of him. He said,
“Get in, Mr. Fairfax, and sit down. We shan’t be driving down to Linwood to-night.”
XXVII
I hesitated for a moment. then I got in.
There was one curious thing about these talks with Z.10 Smith-I would go to ring him up or to meet him, feeling how damned fishy the whole thing was, but the minute I began to talk to him, the oddest interview seemed to be perfectly ordinary and respectable; before I had been talking to him for half a minute I felt as if I was being interviewed by my bank manager or my solicitor. I suppose it’s partly something dry and prosaic about his voice, and partly the little jerky way he has of putting his pince-nez straight-but there it is, and it must be a tremendous asset to him if he’s on the cross.