Hide My Eyes Page 10

  Mr. Campion drew a long breath. “There is one possible explanation of that point,” he was beginning when they turned the corner and Luke’s wireless operator sprang out of the car and came towards them, a written message in his outstretched hand. The Superintendent glanced at it and turned to his friend with sudden energy.

  “This is more like it,” he exclaimed joyfully. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. They’re fairly certain they’ve got the ’bus. It’s been hidden for eight months behind a bargeload of empty oildrums. Hop in old boy. We’ll drop in to the office for the full gen and then we’ll slip down and inspect it. It’s in a square mile of scrap called Rolf’s Dump. Ever heard of it?”

  Chapter 10

  THE OBJECT OF THE EXERCISE

  “SO TEA IS served to residents only? My dear man, we are residents. Our baggage is coming up from the airport. That is why we are sitting here waiting. Run along, do. We’re tired. We’ve come a very very long way. We want crumpets, and for God’s sake see the butter is fresh. Cake, Richard? No? Very well then, tea and crumpets.”

  The man in the trench coat stretched himself in the deep brocade-covered chair and waved an impatient hand at the ancient waiter, who plodded away mumbling.

  “This old place has got the kiss of death written all over it, but it’s useful,” he continued, looking round the dim lounge of the Tenniel Hotel and keeping his voice down as people do in a huge public room in which they find themselves virtually alone. “The lease is just running out and it’s going to be pulled down to make way for Government offices. But meanwhile it’s quiet and reasonably civilised.”

  Richard, who was sitting on a couch beside him, followed his gaze with open disapproval. To his mind the place was a tomb and, worse, an anachronism. He fancied he could smell the dust in the pile carpet patterned with fleur-de-lys, and one corner of the high ceiling, the cornice of which was as elaborate as a wedding cake, was badly discoloured where some mishap to the plumbing had done its worst.

  Gerry’s elaborate lie to get the unwanted tea had annoyed him and he was also puzzled. His guide had insisted that they should sit just here in the centre of the longest wall, although there was apparently no other visitor in the place. Richard could see no purpose in the decision unless it was part of a manœuvre, in which case, as seemed more and more probable at every moment, he felt he was liable to find himself involved in something very dubious very soon. The only real advantage in the position appeared to be that they had a direct view across some forty feet of lounge, through an archway, down a white-painted corridor, and into the side vestibule of the hotel through which they had entered. From where he sat Richard could make out the row of telephone booths there, at this distance no larger then so many dolls’ houses.

  “Are we waiting for somebody?” he enquired suddenly.

  The flat expressionless eyes of the man beside him opened very wide.

  “Good heavens no. Why?”

  “I wondered. I thought you told Edna you had a date at half past.”

  Gerry ducked his chin. “That? Oh I had to be definite or we’d never have got away. You fell for her, did you? She’s got something, God knows quite what, but a certain something.”

  Richard coloured and his jaw became more aggressive even than usual, but he stuck to his shy, slightly off-hand manner.

  “She seemed to know you pretty well.”

  “But not well enough, dear boy.” Gerry produced the archaic form of address with a flourish. “I saw quite a bit of her at one time and she played hard enough for me, but it never took, as they say of inoculation. I was damned careful it shouldn’t. That’s the secret of my success.”

  “What is?”

  “I never let anything tear the skin. I’ve never been faintly fond of anything or of anybody in my life.” He spoke lightly but with satisfaction. “I’m deadly serious about this. I spotted the plain mechanical truth of it as a child. You could almost call it the Chad-Horder discovery. Any kind of affection is a solvent. It melts and adulterates the subject and by indulging it he loses his identity and hence his efficiency. By keeping myself to myself in the face of every conceivable attack I have remained successful, bright and indestructible. It’s a simple recipe for a hundred per cent success. I hand it to you gratis, Richard. Consider it a token of my esteem. Ah, here are the crumpets.”

  They arrived cold and slightly burnt and soggy, in an Edwardian white-metal contraption which should have contained hot water and did not. Gerry did not appear to notice any fault worth commenting upon. He poured tea from a plated pot, sent the mutinous waiter, a black-browed toad in the seventies, labouring back for lemon, and appeared to enjoy himself hugely.

  He was revealing a personality with a faint but positive streak of conventionality, which was unexpected, but now more than ever Richard was aware of the strong element of deliberation in him which he had first noticed in the barber’s shop. He was going about some business, conducting some carefully considered undertaking which, Richard felt uncomfortably, was going according to plan. How he himself was supposed to figure in the performance Richard had no idea, and it occurred to him that it might be as well to find out, but before he could make any move in that direction he was forestalled by Gerry, who might have been thought-reading.

  “I tell you what I have in mind for this evening and I don’t want any refusal,” he began suddenly, with an engaging air of frankness. “I’ve been hanging on to you like a leech all this afternoon and you’re not going to escape me now. This is the position. I live in a rather decent little residential hotel, Lydaw Court, Kensington, and they’ve got a party on tonight. There is, as usual, a preponderance of women and I’ve promised I’ll bring a young man to partner some of the girls. Don’t worry, my dear chap, we shan’t be expected to change, but I can offer you a decent meal and very nice company, and you’d be doing a most charitable act. How about it?”

  Richard blinked. The offer possessed a curious quality of conviction. Suddenly he was quite certain that the man did live in just such a place as he described and that he himself had been picked out as a likely candidate for the invitation, even as far back as their encounter in the barber’s shop.

  Meanwhile Gerry had produced a visiting card.

  “We may as well be formal,” he remarked deprecatingly. “Never mind if you haven’t one on you. Where do you live, by the way?”

  Richard gave the number of his Chelsea lodgings and watched the other man write it down in a small notebook neat as a stage prop, which he replaced very carefully in his inside breast pocket. Something slightly extraordinary about the movement caught Richard’s attention. Gerry had held the side of his trench coat and the edge of his jacket together when he reached for the pocket, so that no glimpse of the inner garment appeared. There was nothing wrong about the performance; it was merely odd, and Richard was reminded of how he had removed the two coats together and put them on again in the same way in Mr. Vick’s shop. The card was engraved and read:

  Mr. Jeremy Chad-Horder

  Lydaw Court Hotel

  Kensington, W.8.

  He looked at it for a moment and glanced up.

  “I thought you said you’d left this place,” he observed bluntly.

  “That’s right. I told Edna so.” Once again the shamefaced laughing apology flickered over the lantern face. “Something had to be done. Frankly that was why I drifted in there today. Our receptionist at Lydaw Court is an extremely decent woman and very useful to me. She’s been getting fed to the teeth. Edna has been pestering her, ringing up at all hours of the day. The poor woman told her I was out sixty-three times in a week. She made a note of it. It was getting absurd.”

  Richard sat looking at him, his young face inscrutable.

  “So Edna’s letters weren’t hanging about in the vestibule?”

  “Good God, of course they weren’t. That would have been dangerous. I said that to discourage her.” He began to laugh. “How romantic you are,” he said. “I rather like it.
It’s old world. Let me see, Edna is about eleven years older than you. That’s as it should be. You’re the age to have chivalrous instincts and she’s the age to work hard to evoke them. Oh well, if you insist we’ll wander back to the Midget after I’ve made a ’phone call.”

  The offer constituted such an extraordinary volte-face that the young man gaped at him and at once a hint of caution appeared in the flat eyes and the suggestion was withdrawn at once.

  “On second thoughts, please not,” he said. “I couldn’t bear it. Besides, the food at the old Lydaw is really exceptional when they make the effort, and oh boy will they be trying tonight! That’s settled then, is it? Waiter!”

  The old waiter, who was resting his weight surreptitiously on a gilt and marble console on the further wall, detached himself reluctantly, ploughed forward, and stood lowering. Gerry smiled at him.

  “Some more of your excellent crumpets. Hot, this time and not quite so black round the edges.”

  The ancient face remained expressionless.

  “For two, sir?”

  “Certainly for two. I see no more of us, do you? For two only.”

  “None for me,” said Richard hastily.

  “Oh but you’ve got to. I’m going to telephone a girl I know and I may be hours. You must have something to amuse you while I’m down there in the box.”

  “I’ll go on drinking tea.”

  “Will you? Oh, very well. Bring some more tea, waiter, and no crumpets. No crumpets to sound for us on the other side. Off you go.”

  He leant back in his chair and glanced at his watch.

  “I must go and call up my poppet in the wilds.” He took a handful of change and a ten-shilling note from his trouser pocket and looked at it. “The only thing against this lovely gal is that she lives deep in the shires, and the charge for a three-minute call down there is three shillings and seven-pence,” he remarked as he began to sort the coins in his hand. “She will certainly expect six minutes chit-chat from me, and because she is really quite something I may feel like continuing even after that. The ’phone boxes here are normal and work on the principle of the coin in the slot, therefore I shall require nine separate shillings, three sixpences and three pence. From you, Richard, I require two separate shillings and a tanner for half a crown. Can you do it?”

  It took them a minute or two to make the little adjustment and by the time the fresh tea arrived the three small columns of coins were arranged on the table. Gerry took up the teapot and chattered briskly as the waiter’s gloomy presence moved away once more.

  “What an evil-eyed old drear,” he observed. “He’ll remember me, won’t he? He loves me not. Don’t get me wrong about this girl, by the way. I’ve not been captured. It’s just that she’s delectable, lusciously young, and she’s fallen for me and so …” he peered at his watch again, “and so I humour her. Well now, it is a quarter to six.”

  “Is it?” Richard was astonished. He felt his own naked wrist and glanced round for a clock. Gerry displayed his forearm with a good Swiss watch upon it.

  “There you are,” he said. “On the dot. She’ll have just come in. My God, Richard, you should see her. She’s extraordinary. Lovely. Very smooth golden-brown hair, cut so that it just brushes her tweed collar. Enormous grey eyes and a perfect skin. She can’t be out of her teens and she looks edible. Wait here for me, old boy. As you know, I just haven’t got the money to be more than ten minutes. There are the ’phone boxes, see? Down there in the hall at the end of the corridor. You can keep me under your eye all the time.”

  He sprang up, gathered the change from the table, and strode across the vast room, getting smaller and smaller as he passed down the long passage to the vestibule. Just before he reached it he turned and waved his hand and saw Richard raise his own and settle back in his seat.

  After that point in distance it was not really possible for any normally sighted person to pick out much detail from either direction, although the two figures were still visible to each other, or would have been had either been watching. As it was Richard saw the man he knew as Jeremy Chad-Horder bearing down upon the telephone booths, glanced away for a moment and lost sight of him. Not unnaturally he assumed he had entered one of them.

  In fact the man in the trench coat had approached the line of booths and had walked along swiftly beside it as if he were seeking one which was unoccupied. When he came to the last of the line, which was out of sight of the mouth of the corridor, he turned smartly round behind it and stepped out of the small doorway normally used by hotel servants bringing in luggage, and which flanked the canopied side entrance.

  Outside it was neither dark nor light, but at that brief twilit stage when London’s sky, streets and buildings appear all to be draped in different shades of blue, and the newly-lit lamps and the sidelights of the traffic are yellow and inadequate against the fast vanishing daylight. It was also the rush hour and the man in the trench coat melted into the wave of home-going workers like a drop into the sea.

  Gerry moved quickly and with that complete lack of hesitation which he had displayed as he had prepared Richard’s mind for his telephone call. Never once did he falter or make an unnecessary step, but carried out the entire operation with the smooth efficiency of a dance routine on the stage.

  All central London is covered by a network of small rights of way which can make moving about in it remarkably simple to anyone who has taken the trouble to work out his route. By making use of a mews, a furniture shop with a back entrance, and a passage kept open by ancient custom to give access to a no longer useful pump, Gerry reached the Lagonda parked where he and Richard had left it in something under two minutes.

  As he had expected, the long car was now almost alone in the cobbled lane and lay deep in the shadow cast by the steep sides of the dark houses which lined it. He walked over to it and unlocked the boot, to take out the box, the rope, and a worn ex-Army beret which was lying under them. This last he put on at once, and, taking off his trench coat, locked it away. Finally, after tightening his muffler, he turned up the collar of his jacket and buttoned that double-breasted garment up to his chin.

  His next move was extraordinary but it was made so casually that even had there been a watcher it must have passed unnoticed in the uncertain light. Leaning over the back of the car where he had rested the box, he ran first one hand and then the other along the running board, and as he straightened himself he rubbed his face with his dirty hands. At last he took up the rope and shook it out, revealing it as a loop carefully knotted. This he placed round his neck where it hung halfway to his knees, lifted the box into the sling it made, and set off down the lane in the direction opposite to the Midget Club.

  He came out into Minton Terrace in a matter of seconds and the overhead lights of the traffic way showed the remarkable change in his appearance.

  The heavy duty van delivery man is a familiar figure in modern London and is one of the very few workers whose trade still dictates a distinctive dress. While his shoes and trousers are as respectable as his pay packet, his jacket, which receives most of the wear, is liable to be torn out in a matter of days. He is apt, therefore, to wear old secondhand garments which can easily degenerate into picturesque rags by the end of the week.

  No one who glanced at Gerry as he shouldered his way across the pavement could have thought there was anything strange about him, yet his navy chalk-striped jacket had been made for a bigger man and was oilstained and ragged, the elbows out and padding protruding from the shoulder where the sleeve was coming away.

  The beret, which completely covered his distinctive hair, was dusty, and his face was dirty enough to be virtually unrecognisable. The rope sling gave him a professional air and the rough wooden box was typical of millions. Above all, his manner was convincing. Every movement he made, every line in his taut body, and the impatient half-whistle from between his teeth, were calculated to convey to one and all that he was late, that shops and offices were closing, and that somewhere in
the gloom his van was waiting, its driver swearing in its cab.

  His performance was particularly convincing as he came bounding up the stone steps of Number 24, Minton Terrace. This was a very fine block of offices built in the florid style of the early years of this century. The carved walnut door stood open and the moderate sized entrance hall, with its white marble floor, Turkey carpet and elderly commissionaire dozing in his hooded hall-porter’s chair, was bright and busy as the little gilt lift travelled up and down serving the home-going staffs from the upper floors.

  The offices of Messrs. Southern, Wood and Phillipson occupied the whole of the basement floor, but they closed at five and the staircase which ran down behind the lift was deserted.

  As Gerry strode across the hall towards this well, no one appeared in his path. At the top of the stairs he paused to drag a small ragged receipt book from his left side pocket and dropped the wooden box on to the marble for a moment while he looked for it. The box hit the stone with the vicious double crash of a pistol shot, a savage noise which seemed to epitomise the roughness of the rôle he was playing. At any rate, the old commissionaire, although he frowned helplessly at the clatter, made no attempt to admonish him.

  Having found, apparently, the necessary receipt form, Gerry lifted the box again and rattled down the stone staircase with it, still whistling between his teeth.

  The small passage below was not very well lit and contained only two mahogany doors both of which bore the name of Mr. Matthew Phillipson’s firm. The newcomer lowered his box very gently on to the ground beside the first of them, replaced the receipt book in his left pocket and thrust a hand deep into the right one. When it came out again it was holding a gun.

  There was a bell on the door and he pressed it with his elbow and flipped the knocker with the nose of the weapon, so that it fell noisily. The breathy whistle through his teeth did not cease.

  The right time, but not by the watch he had shown Richard, was half past five exactly. From somewhere behind the heavy door there was a thin tinkle of chimes and the man with the gun at the ready waited. Apparently he was without any emotion.