Dorothy Eden (34 page)

“That’s just what I said, ma’am. You can’t take risks with those people. They kill quick as think. I mean, what’s a bit of a kid to them, if it’s to save their own skins.”

“I can’t believe it!” Harriet looked around frantically. It was a diabolical prank of Jamie’s. He had hidden himself and Arabella. In a moment he would come bouncing forth, laughing hilariously.

When would she see his gleeful, mischievous, so like Joe’s face again…

“Millie!” she said sharply. “For heaven’s sake, stop crying and tell me exactly what happened. Come now. Control yourself.”

“Oh, it wasn’t my fault, ma’am!” Millie wailed. “I’d just slipped into Woolworth’s to buy myself a home perm, just two minutes, no more. And then there was the empty pram and the note sort of pushed under the pillow.”

Harriet looked at Fred. “Ask your mother to come up, will you, Fred. You say no one else knows of this?”

“No one, ma’am. I told Millie not to say a word. You can’t fool about with this. I know these—I mean, I’ve read enough in newspapers and so on, to—”

“Fred! Just bring your mother.”

But the old lady, when she came, was no more help than Millie. She had been curling a raven-dark wig and she absentmindedly still had it in her hands, like a grisly trophy from the guillotine. Her own hair was wild and unkempt.

“Fred and me didn’t see anything!” she said in her distressed voice. “Not even Jamie, though Millie said she told him to come down. But he didn’t come. It might be because he was afraid I’d be scolding him for what he did with the ash blonde yesterday, but the shampoo brought that right, so I wouldn’t have scolded the lad. Only he just didn’t turn up.”

Harriet, in a desperate desire to get some calm sensible picture of the afternoon’s events, turned to Millie.

“Millie, why did you tell Jamie to go down to Mrs. Helps instead of taking him with you and Arabella?”

“Because I didn’t want to be long, Mrs. Lacey. My feet was tired after dancing last night, and I wanted to put them up.”

Harriet thought tiredly that she might have known when she engaged Millie that a girl with that sort of amiable, vacuous face would not be trustworthy. She would be lazy and untruthful. At the time, however—was it only a week ago?—her good qualities had seemed to exceed her possible bad ones.

“So you told Jamie to go down to Mrs. Helps for half an hour and you went out with Arabella alone?”

Millie nodded. “But he must have followed me, the ba—I mean, that’s what Fred said must have happened.”

“You didn’t actually see him at all, Fred?”

Fred shook his head vigorously.

“No, ma’am. It was my two hours off. I was having forty winks. Wasn’t I, Ma?”

The old lady nodded. “Yes, Fred was on his bed until four o’clock.” Her voice was unusually firm and vehement.

Abruptly Millie plunged into a fresh bout of sobbing.

“Oh, Mrs. Lacey, that empty pram! I ran all the way home with it, really I did.”

Harriet tried not to see the picture of the distraught girl pushing home the pram, the mattress still warm from Arabella’s soft, plump little body. One must not let the awful worry overwhelm one. One had to think clearly and logically.

“Didn’t you scream or anything when you came out of Woolworth’s and saw that Arabella had gone?”

Millie gulped and shook her head. “At first I was sort of thunderstruck. I thought some old lady must have picked Arabella up. You know the way old women hang over babies in prams. I was just going to look around when I saw the note, half stuck under the pillow, and I read that, and then I just came home as fast as I could. I thought Jamie would be here, at least, but when he wasn’t—oh, it was awful!”

“I still can’t think,” said Harriet slowly, “why you didn’t scream and call a policeman.” That, she would have thought, would have been the inevitable reaction of a girl like Millie.

“I did look, but there wasn’t one about,” said Millie. “All I wanted to do was to get home. To Fred,” she added, and a rather dreadful travesty of coyness came into her blotched and swollen face.

“And I told her to keep clear of the police, in view of what the note said, and do nothing until you got home,” Fred said importantly.

“You going to call the police and risk your baby being murdered?” The abrupt question in Mrs. Helps’s high, thin voice was somehow the ultimate in horror.

Harriet lost her desperate logical grip of the situation and sat down, burying her face in her hands. Jamie and Arabella had gone. They had been snatched away as ruthlessly as young spring leaves off a tree in a sudden storm. They would come back. Of course they would come back. Didn’t that dreadful note say so? “This is honest,” it had ended, ironically. But in the meantime there was the long night, all the next day, and another long night to be lived through. All the time wondering where they were, whether they were cold and frightened, hungry, bewildered, sick perhaps, or cruelly treated. Thirty-six hours… In one’s whole lifetime one would not expect to have to endure more than a few hours of such agony.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” came Fred’s voice. “I took the liberty to pour this for you.”

He held out a glass of brandy. His handsome ruddy face was kind, but all the time there was a lurking glow of excitement in his eyes, as if this were the kind of situation that stimulated and pleased him.

Mechanically Harriet took the glass and drank. Thirty-six hours… They had to be endured somehow.

“You weren’t planning to get the police, were you, ma’am.”

“Fred, how can I, how can I?”

“That’s what I say. What’s five hundred pounds compared with the kids’ lives?”

Harriet swallowed the rest of the brandy and shuddered uncontrollably. Arabella and Jamie. Jamie and Arabella. Jamie who had adored, and been adored by his father. Arabella whom Joe had known nothing about. The little anonymous Arabella, with her round laughing face, her beautiful red-gold curls… Her babies, of whom she was not allowed to think when she was at the theater, whom Zoe said she neglected. Zoe! With her pretty face turned thin and malicious, her wild threats. Was this some ghastly trick of hers?

But it couldn’t be. Even Zoe would be capable of no more than jealous words…

She forced herself to behave politely.

“Thank you, Mrs. Helps, and Fred. Will you go now? I want to think. And please say nothing to anyone.”

Fred nodded solemnly. Mrs. Helps, looking suddenly small and shriveled, with the black wig incongruously in her hand, also nodded. There was a look of defeat on her face. She seemed beyond words. Her tall son had to take her arm and lead her away.

When they had gone the flat seemed so empty that it was frightening. Harriet shivered, lifting her haggard eyes to Millie.

Millie sniffed, her reddening eyes threatening once more to overflow.

“You don’t blame me, Mrs. Lacey, do you? I couldn’t help it. I mean everyone leaves babies outside shops.”

“I don’t know yet whom I blame, Millie. I have to think. It might even be myself.” She forced herself to look impersonally at the wretched girl, a travesty of the pert, confident creature who had gone out dancing with Fred last night. “You’d better go to bed, Millie. You look worn out. I’ll bring some hot milk.”

This kindness was too much for Millie who promptly burst out into fresh sobs.

“Oh, ma’am. I know who done this, although I didn’t see. It was that woman with the witchy blonde hair. I know it was. She’s been haunting me!”

A
T EIGHT O’CLOCK THE
telephone rang. The sound was unbearably violent in the quiet flat. It made Millie, in her bedroom, give a muffled scream. She said something that sounded like, “It’s her again!” but when Harriet called out “Who?” she said “Nothing,” and lay trembling while Harriet answered the telephone.

The caller was only Flynn.

“Is that you, Harriet? I thought you were coming down tonight.”

“So I was but—”

“Is anything wrong?”

She couldn’t tell Flynn. She knew instinctively that he would insist on ringing the police immediately. She had already spent two agonized hours wondering if she were wrong not to ring them, but knowing all the time that she would not. Wasn’t there that case in the States where by too eager and unimaginative police action, the kidnapper panicked and strangled the baby not a mile from its home? She couldn’t risk anything going wrong. Five hundred pounds was a cheap price to pay to get her babies back safely.

Fred, with his distrust of the police and anything to do with the law, she could trust, but Flynn would not be like Fred. She had to keep this catastrophe from
him
somehow, in case he put his well-meaning foot in it, and by morning Jamie and Arabella would be found dead in Epping Forest, or some lonely place like that.

“I said, is anything wrong?”

“No. I’m just rather tired.”

“Are you telling me the truth, Harriet?”

“Why should you think I’m not?”

“Nothing. I just wondered if Zoe had been getting at you. She was in a foul mood today. A woman scorned. What the devil is it to do with her if I employ you in a perfectly respectable way?”

Zoe had said something might happen to the children. But it was fantastic to think she would do such a desperate thing, purely from spite.

The blonde woman Millie had said was haunting her… Zoe was blonde. She could have deliberately ruffled her hair and looked strange. But Millie would surely have recognized her. Unless it were too dark…

That vague person had seemed to be watching the flat the other night—it could have been either a woman or a man … The telephone call, when no one spoke…

“Harriet, are you there?”

The sharp impatience in Flynn’s voice dispersed her exaggerated fancies.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“And asleep, apparently. Do pull yourself together and come down for an hour.”

Again her impulse was to refuse. But the night stretched long and bleak and sleepless ahead of her. If she could assume some kind of concentration it would at least pass a little of it.

“All right,” she agreed. “Though I warn you I’ll be very stupid.”

Millie huddled in her bed, not wanting to be left.

“Supposing the phone rings,” she whimpered.

“If anyone wants me you will come down at once and get me. Don’t be such a scared rabbit. No one can eat you over the telephone.”

Which was true, but to both of them the innocent white instrument in the hall had become sinister, a sleeping snake that could on an instant vibrate with noise and menace. Harriet washed her face and straightened her hair. Everything in her bedroom was the same as it had been that morning—the neatly made bed, the toilet articles on the dressing table, the photograph of Joe, serenely smiling, the bowl of winter roses, still as fresh as they had been when she arranged them that morning. Only her face looking back from the mirror was different. It was white and strained, her eyes enormous, a vertical line etched into her forehead. Tonight, she reflected wryly, even Zoe would not have been jealous. Tonight she was almost grateful that Flynn was blind and could not see her hideous anxiety. But how could she conceal it in her manner?

Flynn was seated before the fire in his luxurious living room.

He had rather touchingly placed a reading lamp on the small table where she was to work. He was obviously pleased with his arrangements, for he called cheerily, “Come in and we’ll start at once. Am I a slave driver? But you did promise, you know.”

“What shall I do first?”

It was useless to try not to think of the empty beds upstairs, and Millie a sodden heap of misery and funk. Harriet endeavored to put some life in her voice.

“Sit down and have a drink. I told Jones to leave everything ready. He was in a hurry, as usual, to rush home to his pampered wife.”

“I won’t have a drink, thank you.”

“Nonsense. It’s just what you need if you’re tired. What’s wrong? Jamie been getting the best of the new girl? At least she’s keeping him occupied. I haven’t seen him all day.”

“No, it wasn’t Jamie. Rehearsals went badly. I was threatened with losing my job.”

“Oh, too bad. What was your mind on?”

Lounging back in his chair, his face in shadow, he might have been watching her intently. His face, at that moment, was relaxed and placid, but that could be deceptive. At any moment his quick temper might come flaming forth. He looked so large and strong, it seemed almost absurd that he was tied virtually to these four walls. Even in his blindness he was tremendously vital, and a little uncomfortably full of intelligence. Harriet had the sensation that her mind was being accurately read and analyzed.

“Oh, the children,” she said vaguely, answering his question.

“They’re not sick, are they?”

Len Brinker had asked the same question. She prayed that they were not sick, that they had been fed and put in a warm bed, and soothed to sleep. Even a kidnapper, if he promised to return one’s children safe and well, must make some plans for their temporary welfare. Perhaps he would have an innocent and gullible old mother or aunt. That was if he were a man. He could, of course, be a woman who knew how to care for children. One hoped this was so. A woman would not kill…

“Harriet, you shivered!”

“Did I? I told you I was tired.”

“And full of nerves about something.”

“You’re too observant. Were you like this before you lost your eyesight?”

“Never noticed a thing,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s begin on the letters following that one you read the other night. I think they’re all there on my desk. I dared Jones, on pain of banishment to Clapham, not to touch them.”

“Yes,” said Harriet, touching the yellowed paper covered with its thin faded writing, the long-ago inscription of someone else’s hopes and agonies. “This one begins, ‘My dear Mary.’ He calls her Mary now. She’s no longer anonymous. Who was she?”

“Mary Weston. She was nineteen and lived in Chester, but sometimes visited an aunt in London. That’s all I know about her.”

“Didn’t your great-grandfather marry her?”

“No. He went abroad. When he came back her family had forced her into some sort of marriage of convenience. It’s all in the letters. Harriet, are you listening?”