“What?”
Peter nodded.
“It was hers all right-matched her dress-made of the same stuff. She had it with her at the Ducks and Drakes-”
“You were at the Ducks and Drakes-last night?”
Peter grinned.
“I was, my child, but not with her. She was with our dear cousin Ross. She had the little silver bag. And I was with the Nelsons and a party.” He groaned. “All enthusiastic, up from the country, and the temperature rising ninety! There is no call for jealousy. But to return to Mavis. She said she’d dropped her bag on the landing after the fracas, but I’m prepared to swear she hadn’t got it when she came tottering out of Ross’s flat, so it looks to me as if she had gone back for it.”
“Would she, if he had frightened her as much as that?”
“That depends on what was in the bag, and how badly she wanted it. She might have reckoned on his being asleep.”
“But she couldn’t have reckoned on finding the door open.”
“She might have gone out on the landing to see if she had dropped it there, and then found that the door wasn’t shut.”
There was a pause. Lee said in a careful voice,
“It couldn’t have been shut. If it had been shut, I couldn’t have got in. But if I was walking in my sleep-” She broke off. “I wonder which of us shut the door, because it was shut this morning, and one of us must have shut it-either Mavis or I.”
Without waiting for him to speak she turned away. “We’d better see how she’s getting on,” she said, and went quickly to the communicating door. But no sooner was it open than she turned a frightened face on him.
“Peter-she’s gone!”
Peter said, “Nonsense!” and, when they had looked in the bathroom and kitchen, “Good riddance.” But he was left with a feeling of profound discomfort. Mavis had fainted when she saw Lee, and it was a real honest-to-goodness faint and no sham. And now she had run away without a word to either of them, and though it was a good riddance, it was also a disquieting circumstance.
He went out on the landing and listened. Rush was down in the hall. He could hear him stumping about, swishing with a broom. He had probably seen Mavis, but it couldn’t be helped. He returned to his own hall.
“I must go back,” said Lee, “before anyone comes. They’ll all be coming up and down now-Rush, and Mrs. Green-no, I don’t suppose she will, because she had one of her turns yesterday-but there’ll be Ross’s man-”
He felt her stiffen against his arm.
“He comes about seven,” he said.
“Yes,” said Lee in a whisper.
Chapter XI
Ross Craddock’s man came in at the front door and gave the porter a civil “Good morning, Mr, Rush.” He was a quiet, melancholy-looking man in his forties, dark-eyed, dark-haired, and sallow-skinned. “Puts me in mind of an undertaker,” Rush used to tell his wife. “And soft on his feet like a cat. Suit Mr. Pyne a treat, he would. Now I say, and I’ll hold to it, that a man that is a man, well, he walks like a man-that’s what I say. He don’t go slipping and sliding as if he didn’t want no one to know what he was up to like that there Peterson does, or a prying old maid like Miss Bingham.”
Mr. Peterson walked softly up two flights of stairs and crossed the landing without making a sound. He had his latchkey ready, and inserted it with the ease of long practice. The hall was dark. The bathroom and kitchen doors faced him, and they were shut. The sitting-room door, which was on his right, was open, but no light came from it, the velvet curtains being drawn and the room in darkness. The bedroom door on the left was shut. The place reeked of spirits.
Peterson put on the hall light, and was immediately startled out of his accustomed routine. Instead of entering the kitchen he remained where he was, his hand just dropped from the switch and his eyes fixed upon the floor. Mr. Craddock had a soul above linoleum. The floor was of a light parquet, with a yellow and blue Chinese rug laid across it. And across the parquet and the yellow and blue of the rug were the marks of a naked foot printed in blood.
You can’t mistake a bloodstain, try how you will. Peterson would have been very glad of anything that would have explained those marks away. If you were own man to a gentleman like Mr. Craddock, there were things you had to put up with, and things that were best not talked about, but you didn’t reckon on bloodstained footprints, no, that you didn’t.
He went quickly over to the bedroom door, tapped lightly, and looked in. The curtains here were of chintz, and the light came through them, a tempered yellowish light, but enough to show that the bed had not been slept in, that it was in fact as he had left it, neatly turned down, with Mr. Craddock’s rather loud pyjamas laid out across the foot. Mr. Craddock’s taste in pyjamas was one of the subjects upon which Peterson exercised a wise discretion.
He turned back, still not greatly alarmed, because he had before now found Mr. Craddock on the sofa, or even-though this had only happened once-upon the floor. He switched on the sitting-room light, and for a moment his only thought was that Mr. Craddock had done it again. And done it properly this time. The little table on which he had set out the drinks had been pushed over, and a chair was overturned. Broken glass too-well, that would account for the blood. There’d been a girl here, and she’d cut her foot. Nasty stuff, broken glass. Lord-what a blind it must have been! And Mr. Craddock dead to the world, sprawling there on the floor with the bits of a smashed decanter all about him.
With a slight reproving click of the tongue, Peterson stepped forward. And then he saw the revolver-Mr. Craddock’s own revolver, the one he kept in the second drawer of his writing-table. And it lay on the hearth-rug a couple of yards away from Mr. Craddock’s outstretched left hand. And Mr. Craddock lay in a pool of blood. Mr. Craddock was dead.
The quiet Mr. Peterson let off a yell and went out of the flat and helter-skelter down the stairs calling for Rush. There was an interval of perhaps two minutes before they returned together, the porter having left the hall and gone down into the basement. By the time they reached the landing the door of Mr. Peter Renshaw’s flat was open and he was coming out of it, pulling on a dressing-gown as he came, while Miss Bingham, without her front, was hanging over the banisters half way down from the floor above and demanding in a high, persistent voice,
“What’s the matter? Oh dear-what’s the matter?”
Behind the door of No. 7 Miss Lee Fenton was wondering how soon she could open that door. Had there been enough noise to wake her, or hadn’t there? But if it was a question of waking, she oughtn’t to be dressed like this. She heard the sound of hurrying feet, and she heard Miss Bingham scream. She couldn’t stand the suspense another moment. She opened the door and came out upon the landing.
The door of Ross Craddock’s flat stood wide open. It had been most terrifyingly shut. Now it was most terrifyingly open. It drew her, and she went towards it, and over the threshold and into the hall.