The Smiler With the Knife Page 12

  “A charade? Oh, but really, Mrs. Ryle——”

  “Now, don’t start making a thing about it,” she said firmly. “Nobody could reach your position in Whitehall without being a born actor. Besides, you’ll be all right, you don’t have to say anything. It’s a dumb charade. Just the thing for the Silent Service.”

  Quelled by this flow of rather sinister compliments, Sir Thomas Park allowed himself to be led out with the rest of Mrs. Ryle’s team.

  “Now then,” she said remorselessly when they were outside. “The word will be Abel. We’ll finish with a Cain and Abel scene. What about A? Agag? Artemis? Absalom? All a bit threadbare.”

  “St. Athanasius,” suggested Chilton Canteloe.

  “My dear man, what do you know about St. Athanasius?”

  “Nothing. But I can easily imagine it. Park could appear as Athanasius, dictating his creed, while three of us——”

  “No. I don’t think that would be at all historical. Besides, the bishop might object.”

  “Alcibiades, then. A scene from his private life. That would knock them.”

  “It sounds rather risqué to me. Platonic love is one thing, and Socratic love another. Still, art should have no frontiers. We’ll settle on that. Abel. B. What about the B?”

  “Browning,” piped up Sir Thomas unexpectedly. “A rattling good play that was. What the devil was it called? The Brownings of Wimpole Street, that’s it.”

  “Barretts, dear, Barretts. Yes, that’ll do. I,” Mrs. Ryle added masterfully, “will play the part of Mr. Barrett.”

  After the usual flippant wrangling, the rest of the word was disposed of. The first scene having been played out with considerable réclame, Mrs. Ryle’s side retired to make ready for the second. Their leader threw open the cupboard of theatrical properties. “Elizabeth Barrett must have some sort of wig,” she said. “This’ll do, perhaps.” She took out a heavy, ringleted affair and tried it on Sir Thomas Park. “No, my dear. Nothing could make you look like an invalid poetess.” She tried it on two of the women: then on Chilton Canteloe. “Ah, that’s better. You’re Elizabeth B. Now go and swathe yourself up in this lace. Run along. And don’t forget to put some powder on. The canary of Wimpole Street was not sun-tanned. Sir Thomas, you will sustain the rôle of Robert Browning: you must be suave, but passionate: success is your middle name, remember.”

  “I always think Browning was a bit of a bounder,” replied Sir Thomas.

  “I’ll leave you to bring out the nuances of the character. Now for the rest of you . . .”

  The Barrett-Browning scene was always remembered, by those who had been present, as Mrs. Ryle’s greatest triumph. Ably seconded by a corpse-pale but winsome Elizabeth, and Sir Thomas’ wonderfully caddish Browning, she gave Mr. Barrett full value. She sneered, rampaged, snubbed, exuded the very essence of patriarchal tyranny. Even a maid, who had peeped in at the drawing-room door with a message for her mistress, was held spellbound and evidently so affected by the scene that she entirely forgot to deliver the message.

  Not merely forgot the message, but after watching for a few moments through the slightly-opened door, slipped away, took off cap and apron, and emerged from the house as Georgia Strangeways. Much as she had admired Mrs. Ryle’s rendering, it was not Mrs. Ryle she had come to look at. She had come to look at Chilton Canteloe, wearing a wig of black hair parted in the middle, with ringlets falling to the shoulders. And she had seen his face amazingly transformed thus into the face of the woman whose picture was in the locket claimed by Major Keston. There could be no mistaking it. The link was made at last. It was just conceivable that some unknown X might be the real owner of the locket, might have picked up that daguerreotype by chance and used it to conceal the E.B. disk: but, in view of what Georgia knew about Chilton, this must be considered too much of a coincidence.

  In the taxi, Georgia was exultant, yet a little worried. The question was—had Pamela Ryle and Thomas Park carried it off without raising Chilton’s suspicion? Had there been any difficulty in getting him to wear that wig? Alison would tell her to-morrow. It was Alison who had suggested to her friend, Mrs. Ryle, the plan by which Chilton and the locket should be connected. Pamela Ryle was staunch as oak, Alison knew, beneath her odd whims and escapades, and she had been willing to fall in with Alison’s suggestion without inquiring too deeply into the reasons for it. Sir Thomas Park was the repository for so many secrets that he could be trusted not to give away even the most apparently insignificant. Mrs. Ryle had asked him privately to suggest Elizabeth Barrett as one of the scenes for the Nebuchadnezzar, for Alison thought the whole thing would thus appear more spontaneous and be less likely to put Chilton Canteloe on his guard.

  Indeed, but for the ill-timed enthusiasm of Lady Rissington, who was also at the Ryles’ party, everything would have gone off without a hitch. Pamela Ryle had seen to it that the men of her side changed their clothes in her husband’s study, where there were no mirrors. There was nothing here to show Chilton his resemblance to his grandmother—the woman in the locket. He was entirely absorbed in his rôle as Elizabeth Barrett, till, when the scene had ended, Lady Rissington rushed up to him out of the audience, took his arm, screaming, “Oh, Chillie, you look positively divine! Do come and look at yourself. It’s a knock-out,” and led him up to a mirror on the wall.

  Chilton Canteloe regarded for a moment the tilted, coquettish head with its drooping ringlets, the face that gazed at him out of the mirror, so strange yet so familiar. “Yes, the effect is rather stunning, isn’t it?” He turned away, smiling speculatively over Lady Rissington’s head at the guests sitting there. He walked out of the room with that lumbering, bear-like gait of his, and found Mrs. Ryle.

  “Do you mind if I use your telephone?” he asked. “There’s something I forgot to tell my secretary before I came out.”

  “Of course. You know where it is. You’re not on in the next scene, are you?”

  Still in wig and Victorian lace, the millionaire went out into the hall. He dialled a number. He spoke quietly:

  “Is that you, David? . . . Canteloe speaking. Will you find out where Mrs. Nigel Strangeways was between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty to-night. Also her husband . . . Yes, I know that. Please don’t interrupt. Put B 20 and B 23 on to it. Yes, I want them to start at once. Good-bye.”

  Chilton returned to the study, took off the wig, stared at it for a few seconds; then, with an expression which few people had ever seen on his face, he twined his fingers almost lovingly in the silky, black hair and, breath hissing through his distended nostrils, began to pull. He did not jerk out the handful of hair. He pulled at it steadily, as if he wished to prolong the torture of some woman whose dark head he was holding down. He went on, steadily pulling, till at last that lock of hair was dragged up by its roots. Then his mouth straightened again, and he took a comb, and began carefully combing the hair over the little bald patch he had made on the wig.

  “Those two were the only ones who saw it,” he muttered. “Unless Keston was lying. Foolish of me . . . still, one can’t be too careful. Damn all this caution! It makes me sick. Not for much longer, though.”

  He went into the next room, smiling with gay, confident charm at Mrs. Ryle and the rest of her side, who were just returning from the third scene of the charade.

  CHAPTER X

  THE EPISODE OF THE MOST POPULAR MAN

  UP TILL NOW, Georgia had not been able to grasp the full implications of the E.B. There had been moments—the affair of Rosa Alvarez, the sinister episode in Professor Hargreaves Steele’s laboratory—when she had felt its breath chill on her neck. Yet even these, by their sheer melodrama, put an aura of unreality around the whole business; while the amateurishness, the cheapjack reactionary sentiments, the pathetically idealistic or merely disgruntled attitude of the E.B. rank-and-file with whom she herself had been working, prevented her from taking the situation with consistent seriousness. Like many highly intelligent people, Georgia was inclined to under-estimate the enorm
ous potential strength of stupidity. Like herself, millions of men and women in England, though the last ten years had given them so many object lessons in the way a few really determined, unscrupulous men can exploit this stupidity and apathy, were still saying “That sort of thing cannot happen here.” Even Georgia, who was seeing it begin to happen, could not quite believe her eyes—so difficult was it for English people of her class to shake from their eyes the scales which long security had grown there. “One has heard of engineers being hoist by their own petards,” she said to Nigel when the whole affair was over: “I’d never realised how a nation might be betrayed by the sheer perfection of its defence-mechanisms.”

  Georgia, however, was brought wide awake at last by two events that occurred shortly after Pamela Ryle’s party. The first of these was so trivial that she herself hardly noticed its significance at the time. The second made perhaps the biggest journalistic sensation since the Great War.

  The night of the Ryles’ party, Georgia got out of her taxi a few hundred yards from her flat, slipped quietly in and went to bed. She had sent her maid out for the evening. She had not been in bed half an hour before there was a ring at the outer door. Slipping on her dressing-gown, she went to answer it. A policeman stood outside, a large, fresh-faced, polite young man, his helmet tucked under his arm.

  “Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” he said. “Saw a chap hurrying down the street just now—he seemed to have come out of this block, so I thought I’d better make sure he hadn’t been breaking in anywhere. You heard anything suspicious?”

  Minor public school and Hendon Police College stuck out all over the young man’s bearing. Georgia screwed up her eyes against the light, passed the back of her hand over her forehead.

  “No. I’ve heard nothing. I’ve been in bed—a headache, but I’d have heard him if he was in any of the rooms, I think.”

  The policeman inquired politely whether she had been at home all the evening.

  “Yes,” she said. “But why should you think this chap was a criminal? And can’t you arrest people for loitering with intent?”

  “He wasn’t loitering, ma’am. Far from it. Came haring past me like a streak. I thought I recognised him, though. And, if he’s the chap I believe he is, we can pick him up any time. One of our regulars.” The policeman grinned at her. “Suppose your maid didn’t hear anything?”

  “She’s out for the evening.”

  “Don’t mind if I have a look round, do you? Just to make sure.”

  He went solemnly round the flat, even poking a nose into her bedroom. Finally he took himself off, saying how fearfully sorry he was to have been a nuisance and expressing the hope that her headache would soon be gone. Georgia wrote down the number she had noticed on his uniform. No doubt it was just a coincidence that somebody should be inquiring about her movements on this very evening when it was essential that the E.B. should not know she had been out of the house at all. But, if the young policeman and the suspicious character were fakes, she’d be able to find it out very quickly.

  Next morning, when Doris brought in her tea, the girl was evidently excited—and faintly disappointed not to have found her mistress murdered in her bed. The copper had been round to every flat in the building last night, to see if anything was stolen. Loudly Doris lamented that she always missed the fun.

  “And was anything stolen?”

  “Well, not as you might say stolen. But he nearly caught the burglars, a couple of them, running away. Must have surprised them before they’d got to work properly.”

  Just another scare, thought Georgia. If my polite young copper had really been an E.B. agent in disguise, he’d never have bothered to go into all the other flats: too dangerous for him, besides: somebody might have recognised he wasn’t the regular policeman on this beat, and started talking. Wait a minute, though. Wouldn’t he have taken the risk? In order to find out if any of the other occupants of the flats had seen me go out or come in last night? He’d not be apt to take my own word for it that I had not gone out.

  “Do you know this policeman, Doris?”

  “Oh yes, m’m. A nice boy, he is. Real superior, too. That Millie, in Number Two—fancies herself, she does, it’d make you laugh—when he went in there last night she tried to get a date out of him—been trying for months now, the artful cat—but nothing doing with our Mr. Robert.”

  So Millie could vouch for the young policeman. That was that. An over-zealous officer he might be, but not a bogus one. Georgia dismissed him from her mind.

  It might never have recurred to her, had not Mrs. Tinsley, the occupant of Number One flat, whom she met by chance in the hall later that morning, begun talking about last night’s visitation. The constable, it seemed, had been remarkably pertinacious in his inquiries. Had Mrs. Tinsley heard any movements in the flat above? (The flat above hers was Georgia’s.) Had she seen or heard any one going in or out since nine o’clock?

  “Of course I hadn’t,” said Mrs. Tinsley with some heat. “I kept on telling him nobody could have been up in your place—except yourself: you’d come to borrow some aspirin off me and then gone to bed. These young policemen are becoming a menace. They’ll do anything for promotion.”

  Thank heaven our flats don’t boast a night-porter, and I made my exits and entrances as quietly as I did, thought Georgia.

  At six o’clock that evening Georgia rang up Sir John Strangeways from a friend’s house. She was still a little impatient of the precautions that had to be taken in communicating with him, but she followed his instructions meticulously. When they had spoken the code-sentences by which they recognised each other, she said:

  “The experiment was successful.”

  “Good. Well done. You must stick to him now—a lot will depend on you. Find out what his arrangements are. You know.”

  “I wish you’d keep your policemen out of my hair.” Georgia gave him a brief account of the visit yesterday night, and told him the constable’s number.

  “I’ll have inquiries made. Don’t trust any one you’re not sure of. Well, good luck.”

  That was all. But it was more than enough. Though Georgia had lived often enough in lawless places, she found it difficult to adapt her mind to the idea that here, in England, a blue uniform might cover an enemy. The servant, Millie, had recognised the policeman as the regular one on the beat: yet there seemed little doubt now that he had invented the story of the man running away in order to find out whether Georgia had left the house that evening. It was quick work on the part of the E.B. What unnerved Georgia, though, was that it had been done with the full panoply of the law. She had a vision of the E.B. stretching out its tentacles into all the places she used to believe most secure. Sir John had warned her at the start that the movement had a certain foothold in the police, the army, the Civil Service: but it had needed that polite young constable to bring it right home to her. From now on, she would not know who was friend, who was enemy.

  Well, she had her job. She must stick to Chilton and “find out what his arrangements are.” In Sir John’s crisp, business-like tones, it had sounded like nothing more important than the plans, say, for a summer cruise. Yet on those plans history was now balanced. And what chance had she, supposing her alibi of yesterday night did not convince the E.B.? About as much chance as a bug under a steam-hammer. Only Georgia’s remarkable buoyancy of temperament, the self-confidence that had carried her through so many difficult places, prevented her falling into despair during the next few days.

  It was on the Saturday morning that the great news-story broke, overwhelming her own worries and activities as a beaver-dam might be overwhelmed by the tidal wave of an earthquake. The trap she had set to catch Chilton Canteloe, to identify him with the woman in the locket, seemed a niggling, irrelevant thing in the face of this enormous counter-stroke—no stronger than the wisps of flax that Samson burst with one heave of his muscles. Georgia opened her papers that morning, and their headlines smacked her across the eyes. The Press had certai
nly let itself go.

  “MILLIONAIRE PLANS MILLENNIUM,” one paper shrieked.

  “CANTELOE’S CURE,” howled another antiphonally.

  “CHILTON’S CHALLENGE,” chimed a third.

  Pouring herself another cup of coffee, Georgia lit a cigarette and read quickly through the various stories. They boiled down to this. Last night the millionaire had given a dinner to a number of prominent industrialists, bankers and scientists. The speech he made had evidently been issued to the Press beforehand, for the papers carried it verbatim. It put forward a plan for the abolition of unemployment in Great Britain.

  In brief, a network of co-operative enterprises was to be set up all over Britain, amongst which the unemployed were to be distributed. Each man should follow the trade to which he had been accustomed, while those who had not yet learnt a trade would for the present provide the unskilled labour. As far as possible, each co-operative should be self-sufficient: but the necessary goods which any one of them could not manufacture would be exchanged by a system of barter with commodities produced by some other co-operative. The scheme was on a heroic scale. Whole communities might be transplanted to places where they could work under the best conditions. On the other hand, it did not necessarily involve a depopulation of the derelict areas. “The desert,” Chilton had quoted in his moving peroration, “shall blossom like a rose.” There was coal and iron in the earth, there were fish in the sea. It was pernicious nonsense, Chilton declared, to say that the unemployed did not want work. All that you needed was a scheme by which the fish might get to the miners, the coal to the fishermen.

  This co-operative scheme would not injure the normal trade of the country, he pointed out, for by it the unemployed would be transformed into one vast, self-contained unit, living by the exchange of its own commodities until such time as world economic conditions allowed them to be reabsorbed into the normal productive life of Great Britain. The scheme would apply not only to manual labour, but to unemployed architects, engineers, doctors, teachers, clerks—all of whom could find a place in the co-operative communities.