Frank Abbott, standing on the hearth, presented as great a contrast as was possible-tall, slim, elegant, with a long bony nose, fair hair mirror-smooth, and the light blue eyes which were capable of so icy a stare. Miss Silver was one of the people for whom they could soften. They did so now.
She had taken the chair which had been set for her on the far side of the writing-table. She wore the black cloth coat which had seen so many years of service and, the wind being exceptionally cold, an antique tippet of faded yellowish fur. Her hat, no more than two years old, was of black felt renovated last autumn, the trimming being now of black ribbon arranged in loops, with a bunch of violets added recently to mark the approach of spring. She wore black kid gloves and carried a well-worn handbag.
Lamb sat back in his chair and said in a voice that kept its country sound,
“Well, Miss Silver, I suppose you can guess why I wanted to see you.”
She inclined her head.
“I have read the account in the paper.”
He lifted a big square hand and let it fall again upon his knee.
“And I suppose you’ve been saying to yourself, ‘Well, I told them, and they wouldn’t take any notice.’ That’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it?”
She said with a touch of primness, “I hope I should not be so unjust.”
His eyes, irreverently compared by Frank Abbott to the larger and more bulging type of peppermint bullseye, were turned upon her for a moment.
“Well, I ask you! Ledlington! Who’d have thought of that? You bring me a mare’s nest that might have been anywhere in the kingdom! I believe I mentioned a good few places on the telephone when we were talking-and not a clue to which of them would be the least unlikely, or what any of it was about anyhow! And then it turns out to be Ledlington and the Bellingdon necklace! Of course if we’d known what was going to be stolen-” He broke off with a short laugh. “Pity your Miss Paine didn’t get hold of something useful whilst she was about it!”
Miss Silver looked at him in a manner which reminded Frank Abbott of a bird with its eye upon a worm. There was nothing contemptuous about it, it was just bright and enquiring.
“I do not remember that I mentioned my caller’s name.”
“No, you didn’t. Careful not to, weren’t you? But you did give me the address of the gallery, and you did tell me there was a portrait of her hanging there, that the artist rented her top floor, and that his name was Moray. And no need for anyone to be Sherlock Holmes for Frank here to get his address and go round and see him. And when you hear a couple of the things he walked into, I’m expecting you to have a bit of a shock. There-it’s your pigeon, Frank. You’d better get along with it and tell her.”
Miss Silver transferred her attention to Inspector Abbott.
“Well,” he said, “the gallery identified the picture for me as soon as I said it was a portrait of a deaf woman by an artist called Moray. And a very good portrait I thought it was-streets ahead of most of the other stuff they’d got there, so I wasn’t surprised to see that it was marked ‘Sold’. What did surprise me, and what’s going to surprise you, is the name of the man who bought it. There was an old chap called Pegler taking the entrance money, very friendly and chatty and tumbling over himself to link the picture up with this morning’s smash-hit headlines. Because it seems that the man who bought Miss Paine’s portrait is no other than Lucius Bellingdon, ‘And you’ll have heard all about his having his diamond necklace stolen and his secretary shot in the papers this morning,’ as Mr. Pegler put it.”
Miss Silver said, “Dear me!”
“He had quite a lot to say about Miss Paine one way and another. Told me how she’d been in to see her picture, and how she ‘did that lip-reading a treat’, and had advised him about his grand-daughter who was going deaf. He said she was a very nice lady and a lot of people were ever so interested when he told them how good she was at the lip-reading. ‘They wouldn’t hardly credit it,’ he said. So then he told me about the gentleman that was in there the same time as she was, and how he wouldn’t believe she could tell what anyone was saying-not the length of the gallery-‘but I told him she could, because I’d heard Mr. Moray use those very words, and the gentleman went away and he didn’t look any too pleased’. I asked him if he would know the man again, and he said he would, but when it came to a description it was the sort where there’s nothing to take hold of. He wouldn’t go so far as to say the gentleman was tall, nor yet short-he wasn’t to say fair-complexioned, nor you wouldn’t say he was dark, but he had a black felt hat and a drab raincoat.” Here Inspector Abbott broke off and addressed his Chief. “I don’t suppose we have any statistics as to how many men in Greater London would have been wearing black hats and drab raincoats on that particular day-”
Lamb said curtly, “Get on with your story!”
Frank obliged.
“I got Moray’s address, which is 13 Porlock Square, and I went down there. The woman who came to the door said she lodged in the basement3 and when I asked for Miss Paine she got out her handkerchief and said Miss Paine had been run over by a bus coming home the day before yesterday evening, and they took her off to the hospital but she never came round.”
Chapter 8
THE news was a shock. Miss Silver felt it as such. She recalled the moment when Paulina Paine had terminated their interview and gone out to meet her death. Could she have pressed her more strongly to go to the police? She was unable to believe that it would have made any difference. Could she have insisted on calling for a taxi? She did not know. Would insistence have been of any use? If the knowledge accidentally acquired by Miss Paine was so dangerous as to warrant murder, there were other times and other places where this might have been accomplished. She remained silent for a little before saying,
“I was most uneasy. I feel that I should not have let her go.”
Lamb said heartily,
“And that, if you will allow me to say so, is nonsense. You couldn’t possibly have expected the woman to be murdered-if she was murdered, which to my mind is a thing there is no manner of proof about.”
“She had some idea that she might have been followed on her way to me. There was a man in a taxi at the end of the street. She was sufficiently alarmed to turn back and ask one of her tenants to call a taxi for herself. She was not sure of being followed after that. She says the taxi came after them, but she thinks they lost it in the traffic. It looks as if they had not done so. I urged her to let me call a taxi when she took leave of me, but she refused, saying that she thought she had given way to a nervous impulse and made a mountain out of a molehill. I did not feel easy about it, but I let her go.”
Frank Abbott said, “You can’t possibly blame yourself,” to which she replied soberly, “I suppose not. Yet it is difficult not to feel that she came to me for help and that I failed her.”
Lamb said in his most decided voice,
“If she had taken your advice and come to us she would have been safe.”
“Are you sure that you would have taken her story so seriously as to give her police protection? If her death was determined on, nothing less would have saved her.”
He frowned.
“I’m not ready to say that her death wasn’t an accident. She could have been mooning along with her head full of this story, and being deaf she wouldn’t hear a bus coming. We’ve asked for details of the accident, but we haven’t had them yet. What beats me is why should they go to the trouble of murdering her? What, after all, did she hear, or lip-read or whatever you call it? Nothing that’s the least bit of use to us as far as I can see, or the least bit of danger to them.”