“Do you know the Groats?” he asked quickly.
“I don’t know them,” she said slowly, “at least, not very well, only—” she hesitated, “I’m going to be Mrs. Groat’s secretary.”
He stared at her.
“You never told me this,” he said, and as she dropped her eyes to her plate, he realized that he had made a faux pas. “Of course,” he said hurriedly, “there’s no reason why you should tell me, but—”
“It only happened to-day,” she said. “Mr. Groat has had some photographs taken—his mother came with him to the studio. She’s been several times, and I scarcely noticed them until to-day, when Mr. Curley called me into the office and said that Mrs. Groat was in need of a secretary and that it was a very good position; Ł5 a week, which is practically all profit, because I should live in the house.”
“When did Mrs. Groat decide that she wanted a secretary?” asked Jim, and it was her turn to stare.
“I don’t know. Why do you ask that?”
“She was at our office a month ago,” said Jim, “and Mr. Salter suggested that she should have a secretary to keep her accounts in order. She said then she hated the idea of having anybody in the house who was neither a servant nor a friend of the family.”
“Well, she’s changed her views now,” smiled the girl.
“This means that we shan’t meet at tea any more. When are you going?”
“Tomorrow,” was the discouraging reply.
He went back to his office more than a little dispirited. Something deep and vital seemed to have gone out of his life.
“You’re in love, you fool,” he growled to himself.
He opened the big diary which it was his business to keep and slammed down the covers savagely.
Mr. Salter had gone home. He always went home early, and Jim lit his pipe and began to enter up the day’s transactions from the scribbled notes which his chief had left on his desk.
He had made the last entry and was making a final search of the desk for some scrap which he might have overlooked.
Mr. Salter’s desk was usually tidy, but he had a habit of concealing important memoranda, and Jim turned over the law books on the table in a search for any scribbled memo he might have missed. He found between two volumes a thin gilt-edged notebook, which he did not remember having seen before. He opened it to discover that it was a diary for the year 1901. Mr. Salter was in the habit of making notes for his own private reading, using a queer legal shorthand which no clerk had ever been able to decipher. The entries in the diary were in these characters.
Jim turned the leaves curiously, wondering how so methodical a man as the lawyer had left a private diary visible. He knew that in the big green safe in the lawyer’s office were stacks of these books, and possibly the old man had taken one out to refresh his memory. The writing was Greek to Jim, so that he felt no compunction in turning the pages, filled as they were with indecipherable and meaningless scrawls, punctuated now and again with a word in longhand.
He stopped suddenly, for under the heading “June 4th” was quite a long entry. It seemed to have been written in subsequently to the original shorthand entry, for it was in green ink. This almost dated the inscription. Eighteen months before, an oculist had suggested to Mr. Salter, who suffered from an unusual form of astigmatism, that green ink would be easier for him to read, and ever since then he had used no other.
Jim took in the paragraph before he realized that he was committing an unpardonable act in reading his employers’ private notes.
“One month imprisonment with hard labour. Holloway Prison. Released July 2nd. Madge Benson (this word was underlined), 14, Palmer’s Terrace, Paddington. 74, Highcliffe Gardens, Margate. Long enquiries with boatman who owned Saucy Belle. No further trace—”
“What on earth does that mean?” muttered Jim. “I must make a note of that.”
He realized now that he was doing something which might be regarded as dishonourable, but he was so absorbed in the new clues that he overcame his repugnance.
Obviously, this entry referred to the missing Lady Mary. Who the woman Madge Benson was, what the reference to Holloway Gaol meant, he would discover.
He made a copy of the entry in the diary at the back of a card, went back to his room, locked the door of his desk and went home, to think out some plan of campaign.
He occupied a small flat in a building overlooking Regent’s Park. It is true that his particular flat overlooked nothing but the backs of other houses, and a deep cutting through which were laid the lines of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway—he could have dropped a penny on the carriages as they passed, so near was the line. But the rent of the flat was only one-half of that charged for those in a more favourable position. And his flat was smaller than any. He had a tiny private income, amounting to two or three pounds a week, and that, with his salary, enabled him to maintain himself in something like comfort. The three rooms he occupied were filled with priceless old furniture that he had saved from the wreckage of his father’s home, when that easy-going man had died, leaving just enough to settle his debts, which were many.
Jim had got out of the lift on the fourth floor and had put the key in the lock when he heard the door on the opposite side of the landing open, and turned round.
The elderly woman who came out wore the uniform of a nurse, and she nodded pleasantly.
“How is your patient, nurse?” asked Jim.
“She’s very well, sir, or rather as well as you could expect a bedridden lady to be,” said the woman with a smile. “She’s greatly obliged to you for the books you sent in to her.”
“Poor soul,” said Jim sympathetically. “It must be terrible not to be able to go out.”
The nurse shook her head.
“I suppose it is,” she said, “but Mrs. Fane doesn’t seem to mind. You get used to it after seven years.”
A “rat-tat” above made her lift her eyes.
“There’s the post,” she said. “I thought it had gone. I’d better wait till he comes down.”
The postman at Featherdale Mansions was carried by the lift to the sixth floor and worked his way to the ground floor. Presently they heard his heavy feet coming down and he loomed in sight.
“Nothing for you, sir,” he said to Jim, glancing at the bundle of letters in his hand.
“Miss Madge Benson—that’s you, nurse, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” said the woman briskly, and took the letter from his hand, then with a little nod to Jim she went downstairs.
Madge Benson! The name that had appeared in Salter’s diary!
CHAPTER FOUR
“I’m sick to death of hearing your views on the subject, mother,” said Mr. Digby Groat, as he helped himself to a glass of port. “It is sufficient for you that I want the girl to act as your secretary. Whether you give her any work to do or not is a matter of indifference to me. Whatever you do, you must not leave her with the impression that she is brought here for any other purpose than to write your letters and deal with your correspondence.”
The woman who sat at the other side of the table looked older than she was. Jane Groat was over sixty, but there were people who thought she was twenty years more than that. Her yellow face was puckered and lined, her blue-veined hands, folded now on her lap, were gnarled and ugly. Only the dark brown eyes held their brightness undimmed. Her figure was bent and there was about her a curious, cringing, frightened look which was almost pitiable. She did not look at her son—she seldom looked at anybody.
“She’ll spy, she’ll pry,” she moaned.
“Shut up about the girl!” he snarled, “and now we’ve got a minute to ourselves, I’d like to tell you something, mother.”
Her uneasy eyes went left and right, but avoided him. There was a menace in his tone with which she was all too familiar.