Chapter XXXVI

What Inspector Lamb thought was that it wasn’t going to be at all an easy job and he’d better get busy with a timetable.

“The bother is, we don’t know where she may be making for. Just get on to Mr. Prothero at his private house, Mr. Renshaw, and ask whether he hasn’t had any word about a change of address from the woman in Birmingham. Mrs. Green won’t go to the place where her confederate has been staying, so I’ll lay they’ve got a move planned, and when it’s over it’ll be Mrs. Green who has taken on being Miss La Fay, and the other will have gone back to her own name or else gone off the map altogether.”

He immersed himself in the timetable. Presently Peter came back, and he looked up alertly.

“Well, what did you get, Mr. Renshaw?”

“He’s on his dignity. Doesn’t keep clients’ addresses at his private house. Doesn’t expect to be rung up on a Saturday evening. But I did drag one thing out of him. All this chopping and changing of addresses falls into the last three months, and before that Mrs. Ross Craddock was living at Doncaster under the name of Miss La Fay. You see, I thought she might go back to wherever she was living before she started being Mrs. Green.”

“Did he give you the Doncaster address?”

“No, he didn’t. I haven’t rung off. Would you like to deal with him?”

The Inspector heaved himself out of his chair. He could be heard coping with Mr. Prothero in a highly official voice, after which he returned and addressed himself to the timetable again.

“He’ll get the address and let the Doncaster police have it. Now about these trains? Let’s see what she could catch-” He flicked pages, made notes, used the telephone, and turned a considering eye upon Peter. “The trouble is she isn’t going to look like Mrs. Green by the time she gets anywhere at all. If she goes to this Doncaster address she goes there as Miss La Fay, and of course we can question her. But it’s not going to be so easy to prove that she ever was Mrs. Green unless she’s got the clothes with her. She mayn’t have been able to get rid of them, or she mayn’t have thought it necessary. If it hadn’t been for the photographs, no one would ever have connected her with Mrs. Green. She could have gone ahead and claimed all that money, and no one would ever have dreamed of suspecting her. Mind you, we’re very far from having a case against her as things stand. The best hope is that she’ll give herself away. Now, Mr. Renshaw, I’m going to Doncaster, and if you like you can come along too. I’m sending Abbott to Birmingham. I make it this way. I don’t suppose for a moment that the woman was really ringing up from Charing Cross -much more likely King’s Cross. And she’d get the first train she could. Well, the first train’s a slow one, and she had twenty minutes to catch it. She may have got out of Mrs. Green’s clothes and taken the mark off her face before she rang me up, or she may have still had it to do. I should think she would have done it already, because she wouldn’t want to attract attention by being seen at King’s Cross looking like Mrs. Green, and twenty minutes wouldn’t give her too much time for what she would have to do. She wouldn’t want to hang about the station waiting for a fast train either-she’d want to get clear away out of London, because she knew she’d started a hue and cry. Now this is where we come in. There’s an express thirty-five minutes from now, and it reaches Doncaster ten minutes before that slow train. If she didn’t take that, she’ll be taking this. So either we get to Doncaster ten minutes before she does, or we all get there together, and I’ll be very glad of your assistance to identify the lady.” He paused, turned a hard, solemn gaze upon Peter, and added, “Always supposing she’s going to Doncaster, which I don’t feel at all sure about myself.”

“I’m with you,” said Peter. “Lucinda, lend me a pound. One needs a margin on a wild goose chase. Better make it two, or even three. She may have gone to Jericho. What happens then, Inspector? Do we charter an aeroplane? What-a whole fiver? Lucinda-how prodigal! By the way, you’d better make Lee go to bed-she’s all in.” He kissed them both and ran to catch up the Inspector, who had already begun to descend the stairs.

The last of the summer daylight was gone long before their train reached Doncaster. The Inspector displayed a most unexpected agility. As the train slowed down, he had the carriage door open and was out upon the platform before it came to rest. He and Peter stood unobtrusively on either side of the exit. A local constable came up, spoke low, and went through into the booking-hall.

Some twenty passengers had alighted. The first one or two approached the ticket-collector. A stout man in a bowler hat, with a stout wife in artificial silk and two stout little boys with apple cheeks, one flapping a banana skin and the other eating peppermints out of a paper bag. Here at least there could be no suspicion.

There followed a jaunty, shabby young man with bow legs and a loud cloth cap. He hooked a ticket out of his waistcoat pocket, thrust it at the collector with a cheerful “Evening, George,” and swaggered off, whistling as he went.

After him a woman with a shopping-bag full of brown paper parcels. She had a bent, discouraged look. Her hat had drifted to one side of her head. Her hair was in wisps. Her washed-out cotton dress sagged unevenly at the hem. She might have been Mrs. Green some dozen or so years ago. Peter looked at her with a sort of horror in his mind, because if this was the woman they were hunting, she seemed a most wretched and helpless prey. She sighed with utter weariness as she set down her bag and began a slow, ineffectual search for the ticket which she appeared to have mislaid. She had two pockets, a shabby handbag, and a purse. The ticket was in the purse, which was the last place in which she thought of looking for it. By the time she had given it up there was a little crowd of people waiting behind her, and Peter was quite sure that she was not Mrs. Green. Her eyes were the wrong colour. The light shone right down upon her as she looked up at the collector. It showed them hazel with faint brownish flecks. He remembered that Mrs. Green’s eyes were of a washed-out bluey grey. You can’t change the colour of your eyes. He looked across at the Inspector with a slight shake of the head, and, sighing heavily, the weary creature passed between them and went her way.

There was no one else who could possibly have been Mrs. Green.

The slow train came in ten minutes later, and they took up their places again, standing one on either side of the ticket-collector, but beyond him so that they were not seen by the passengers as they approached.

Only some half dozen people got out when the train stopped, and four of these were men. Of the two women one was both tall and bulky, with great cushioned shoulders, enormous hips, and a heavy rolling walk. Her large red face shone with perspiration. Her strong black hair curled vigorously under a flat fly-away hat profusely trimmed with poppies, cornflowers, and white marguerite daisies. Her expression was one of complete satisfaction with herself and with the world in general.

Last of the six came a woman in a neat dark coat and skirt and a close black hat. Copper curls rolling up from under the brim, an eye-veil standing out stiffly like an inverted halo, tinted cheeks, and a bright scarlet mouth-those things held Peter’s eye. A picture of Mrs. Green, wispy, bedraggled and down at heel, rose to the surface of his mind. The woman who was coming towards them along the platform wore thin silk stockings, and shoes with flashy buckles and heels like stilts. He saw Mrs. Green’s foot in a bulging shoe with a burst seam. He looked at the woman in black, and still saw Mrs. Green. It was like an effect in a film-one picture superimposed upon another, both pictures there together, flickering, combining, separating again. He felt horror, and the keenest excitement he had ever known. For no reason that he could have named he was quite sure that this was, not Mrs. Green who had served her turn and was no more, but Aggie Crouch-Rosalie La Fay -Ross Craddock’s wife. No, Ross Craddock’s widow-she had most efficiently seen to that.