There were three photographs inside. Peter put in his hand and took one of them out. It was rather like taking a lucky dip, but there was nothing lucky about the draw, which was a hard, highly glazed photograph of a plump young woman in tights, with an enormous feathered hat upon her head. There was a fuzz of hair under the hat, a pair of rolling eyes very much made up, and a smile which displayed a great many not very even teeth. His heart sank like lead. The monstrous idea which he had entertained flew out of the window as he handed the picture to Lee with a casual,
“Well, I don’t think much of Ross’s taste.”
“She was supposed to be a very clever actress,” said Lucy Craddock in a doubtful voice-“very versatile. She was in a repertory company somewhere up in the north, I believe, but when she came to London she couldn’t get any work there. I haven’t seen the photographs for years, but I think there’s one of her as an old woman. The one Lee has got was when she was principal boy in Puss and Boots.”
Peter fished again, and got a severe-looking person with every hair strained back from her face and a heavy pair of spectacles on her nose. The figure had an angular look. The tight lips were primmed.
Miss Lucy nodded at the picture.
“You would never think it was the same person, would you? But it is. It was some play in which she took the part of a schoolmistress. She really was very versatile. See how different she can make herself look.”
Peter took out the third photograph. As he put his hand into the envelope, Lee turned her eyes upon his face. An agonizing suspense took hold of her. It seemed to slow everything down-the beating of her heart, the movement of Peter’s hand, her power to think.
She saw Peter’s hand come out of the envelope with the third photograph. She saw him look at it. She saw his face stiffen and then suddenly, violently change. She found voice enough for his name, but he drowned it.
“It’s true!” he said. “After all-after all-it is true!”
Lee said, “What?”
He got to his feet, came round behind Lucy Craddock’s chair, and leaning over her held the photograph where all three of them could see it. It showed a scraggy-looking female in a battered hat, a down-at-heels dress, and a torn apron. There was a straggle of grey hair beneath the hat. A draggled crochet shawl was clutched about the neck with one hand, the other held a dustpan and brush.
Lucy Craddock said in rather a dazed voice,
“She took the part of a charwoman in some play whose name I have forgotten.” Then she gave a little gasp and said, “Oh, my dear boy!”
Lee kneeled up straight. Her feet and ankles had gone to sleep. She couldn’t feel them at all, but she couldn’t feel the rest of her body either. Only her hand shook and shook as she put it up to find Peter. Her voice was quite steady and clear as she said,
“It’s Mrs. Green.”
Chapter XXXV
There was a dead silence. They all looked at the picture. Peter was the first to speak. He said, “Well, it lets Bobby out,” and with that he went through to the hall and took the telephone down from its hook.
Lee got painfully to her feet. They were quite numb. Her mind felt like that too. If Mrs. Green was Ross’s wife, Aggie Crouch, then what was she doing here pretending to be Mrs. Green? And where was she now?
She heard Peter at the telephone, and then she heard the click as he put the receiver back. He came in and picked up the photograph. It had fallen into Lucy Craddock’s lap, where it lay in that proximity to the Craddock relations which the refinement of Miss Mary Craddock’s taste had proscribed. A portion of Aunt Sabina’s crinoline obscured the dustpan and brush. The head with its battered hat had come to rest on the proud shoulder of Uncle Henry Albert. He said,
“Lamb is coming round. Well, I suppose this lets us all out. Amazing-isn’t it?”
Lee said, “It doesn’t prove she did it.”
“It will make the police sit up and think a bit. And she’s rather given herself away by disappearing. Just a little bit too clever, that business of ringing up Scotland Yard saying she’d got some hush-hush evidence, and then working off the piece about being frightened of me, and of poor old Rush. The damnable thing is that it might have come off. Lee, do you realize how very easily it might have come off? By gum, she’s a clever woman! What was it Lucinda said-very versatile? I’ll say she is. She probably came down here in the first instance to spy out the land. Ross wouldn’t give her any more money, and she may have wanted a line on him for blackmail, or even for a divorce. I wonder if she bribed old Mother What’s-her-name to retire and let her in here as charwoman. Ross hadn’t seen her for twenty years by all accounts. Mrs. Green was an ironclad disguise, and she put on the port-wine mark just to make quite sure. I don’t suppose Ross ever really got a look at her. She had nothing to do with his flat, and it would be easy enough to keep out of his way. Even if he passed her on the stairs, she’d only got to go down on her knees and start dusting between the banisters or something like that. I shouldn’t think he ever saw her face, but he might have seen it a dozen times without recognizing her. He probably remembered her like this.” He reached over for the first photograph and gave a short laugh. “Tights, curves, eyes, teeth, hair-not much there that you would connect with Mrs. Green, is there? Well, there she was. And all the time someone was moving around from one lot of cheap lodgings to another, calling herself Rosalie La Fay, forwarding Aggie’s letters to old Prothero, and getting his answers back. I wonder who it was. Didn’t you say there was a sister?”
“Yes,” said Lucy Craddock in a flustered voice-“oh, yes, a sister-but I don’t remember her name.”
Peter nodded.
“Probably the sister then. Anyhow somebody she could trust to hold her tongue and do what she was told. Then Aggie gets her opportunity. She finds Ross’s key sticking in the door of his flat. She pinches it, and when Ross and Peterson are both out of the way for the day she goes in and has a good worry around. It was easy enough to dodge old Rush, because he’s got his settled times for everything, and she’d know what they were by then. Well, we know that Ross left his own bunch of keys lying about that day. That’s what he had the row with Rush about. He saw his papers had been meddled with and he accused Rush-‘Clean forgot himself Mr. Ross did,’ as the old boy put it to me. But it was Aggie. It must have been Aggie. And the first thing she saw when she opened that despatch-case was old Prothero’s letter urging Ross to make a will, and saying that the unsettled property amounted to a very considerable fortune and he ought to provide against any possibility of an intestacy. Mrs. Green mightn’t have made much of that letter, but you can bet your life that Aggie sucked it dry. If she was in any doubt she had only got to get the sister in Birmingham to go and ask the nearest solicitor. She could have copied the letter without names, or with different names, and have asked what the position of a widow would be if the husband died leaving a lot of unsettled property and no will. And I expect it was right there that she began to think of being Ross’s widow in desperate earnest. I don’t know how she brought it off all the same. She went home, and she went to bed drunk at half past nine. But I suppose she probably wasn’t really drunk at all, and allowing for that-”
Lee caught him suddenly by the arm.
“The Connells’ flat!” she said in a breathless voice.
All this time Lucy Craddock’s eyes had been round and fixed. They did not leave Peter’s face, but they did not really appear to be seeing him or anything else. She blinked rapidly now, and said in a small, obstinate voice,
“Oh, no, my dear, the Connells were away. And in any case-”
“Not the Connells,” said Lee-“their flat. Mrs. Green-she had their key. She said so when she was going off on the Tuesday night. She said she had just finished cleaning up after them, and Rush was furious because she didn’t give him the key before she went. You know she had one of her bad turns, but I suppose it was just acting really. I am sure she just went home and pretended to be drunk so that the other people in the house would leave her alone, but I think she slipped back here-Rush doesn’t lock up till eleven-and hid in the Connells’ flat. It-it’s just underneath Ross’s, and she would be able to listen and make sure that everything was quiet before she came out.”