“No! Look here!”
Winking to keep back tears, her face flushed and her ash-blonde head bent forward, Barbara fumbled inside the handbag. She held out four folded sheets of notepaper closely written.
“This,” she said, “is the last letter Harry Brooke ever wrote to Jim. He was writing it on the afternoon of the murder. First it goes on—gloating!--over the success of his scheme to blacken Fay and get what he wanted. Then it breaks off suddenly. Look at the end bit!”
“Euston!”
Miles dropped the key[-ring in his pocket and took the letter. The end, done in a violent agitated scrawl for an after-thought, was headed, “6:45 p.m.” Its words danced in front of Mile's eyes as the train quivered and roared.
Jim, something terrible had just happened. Somebody's killed Dad. Rigaud and I left him on the tower, and somebody went up and stabbed him. Must get this in the post quickly to ask you for God's sake, old man, don't ever tell anybody what I've been writing to you. If Fay went scatty and killed the old boy because he tried to buy her off, I won't want anybody to know I've been putting out reports about her. It wouldn't look right and besides I didn't want anything like this to happen. Please, old man. Yours in haste, H. B.
So much raw, unpleasant human nature cried out of that letter, Miles thought, that it was as though he could se the man writing it.
Miles stared straight ahead, lost now to everything.
Rage against Harry Brooke clouded his mind; it maddened him and weakened him. To think he never suspected anything in the character of Harry Brooke . . . and yet, obscurely, hadn't he? Professor Rigaud had been wrong in estimating this pleasant young man's motives. Yet Rigaud had drawn, sharply drawn, a picture of nerves and instability. Miles himself had once used the word neurotic to describe him.
Harry Brooke had coolly and deliberately, to get his own way, invented the whole damned . . .
But, if Miles had ever doubted whether he himself was in love with Fay Seton, he doubted no longer.
The thought of Fay, completely innocent, sick with bewilderment and fright, was one that neither the heart nor the imagination could resist. He cursed himself for ever having doubts of any kind about her. He had been seeing everything through distorted spectacles; he had been wondering, almost with a sense of repulsion mixed with the attraction he felt for her, what power of evil might lie behind the blue eyes. And yet all the time . . .
“She isn't guilty,” Miles said. “She isn't guilty of anything.”
“That's right.”
“I'll tell you what Fay feels about herself. And don't think I'm making exaggerated or melodramatic statements when I say so. She feels that she's damned.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I don't think it. Know it.” Intense conviction seized him. “That's what was in her whole behaviour last night. Rightly or wrongly, she feels that she can't get away from something, and that she's damned. I don't pretend to explain what's been going on, but I know that much.
“What's more, she's in danger. Something would happen, Dr. Fell said, if she tried to carry out her plans. That's why he said I must catch her at any cost and not lose touch with her for a moment. He said it was a matter of life and death. And, so help me, that's what I'm going to do! We owe her that much, after all she's been through. The very split-second we get out of this train . . .”
Miles stopped.
Some inner ear, some faint consciousness still alert, had just rung a warning. It warned him that, for the first time since he entered this Underground train, the train had come to a stop before he remembered hearing it stop.
Then, with the bright image of the car leaping out at him, he heard a sound which galvanized him. It was the soft, rolling rumble of the doors as they started to close.
“Miles!” cried Barbara—and woke up at exactly the same moment.
The doors closed with a soft bump. The guard's bell-push tinkled. Miles, springing up to stare out of the window as the train glided on again, saw the words of the station-sign glaring out at him with white letters on a blue ground, and the words were “Camden Town.”
He was afterwards told that he shouted something to the guard, but he did not realize this at the time. He only remembered plunging frantically at the doors, wrenching to get his fingers into the joining and tear them open. Someone said, “Take it easy, mate!” The Australian soldier woke up. The policeman, interested, go to his feet.
It was no good.
As the train whipped past the platform, gathering speed, Miles stood with his face against the glass of the doors.
Half a dozen persons straggle towards the way-out. Dingy overhead lights swung with the wind which billowed through this stale-smelling cavern. He clearly saw Fay—in an open tweed coat and black beret, with the same blank, miserable, tortured look on her face—walking towards the way-out as the train bore him past into the tunnel.
Chapter XVI
Under a very dark sky, drizzling, the rain splashed into Bolsover place, Camden Town.
Of the broad stretch of Camden High Street at no great distance from the Underground station, even off the narrow dinginess of Bolsover Street, this was a dul-de-sac seen under a brick arch.
Its surface was of uneven paving-stones now black with rain. Straight ahead ere two blitzed houses, looking like ordinary houses until you noticed the state of the windows. On the right was a smallish factory or warehouse bearing the legend, “J. Mings & Co., Ltd., Artificial Dentures.” On the left lay first a small one-story front, boarded up, whose sign said that it had once served suppers. Next to this were two houses, brick-built of that indeterminate colour between grey and brown, with some glass in their windows and an air not entirely of decay.
Nothing stirred there, not even a stray cat. Miles, heedless of the fact that the rain was soaking him through, gripped Barbara's arm.
“It's all right,” Barbara muttered, moving her shoulders under the mackintosh, and holding her umbrella crookedly. “We haven't lost ten minutes.”
“No. But we have lost that time.”
Miles knew that she was frightened now. On the way back, where at least they had been able to step instantly into a train going in the other direction at Chalk Farm, he had been pouring out the story of last night's events. It was plain that Barbara no more knew what to make of it than he did; but she was afraid.
“Number Five,” said Miles. “Number Five.”
It was the last house down on the left, at right angles with the two blitzed houses. Miles noticed something else as he led Barbara over the uneven paving-stone. In a large grimy display-window on the premises of J. Mings & Co. Ltd., was a very large set of artificial teeth.
As an advertising display they might have been considered gruesome or comic, but had they been in a better state of repair they could not have failed to attract attention. Made of metal painted in naturalistic colours as to teeth and gums, they loomed there close-shut and disembodied, a giant's teeth in the faint grey light. Miles didn't like them. He felt their presence behind him as he went to the blistered door of Number Five, on which there was a knocker.
But his hand never reached the knocker.
Instantly a woman's head appeared at the open ground-floor window of the house next door, moving aside what once might have been a lace curtain. She was a middle-aged woman who looked at the newcomers avidly; not at all in suspicion, but with pervading curiosity.
“Miss Fay Seton?” said Miles
The woman turned around towards he room behind her, evidently to kick at something, before she replied. Then she nodded towards Number Five.
“First floor-up-left-front.”