Dorothy Eden (39 page)

Harriet felt Flynn’s fingers tighten on her arm. She also noticed the woman’s quickened interest as she looked at Flynn’s dark glasses.

“Oh, dear, poor soul! Tch, tch, tch! Then you’d better come in. After all, if you’re old friends of Miss Mansell’s I expect it’s all right. There’s a step down into the hall. Mind that, sir. And some stairs to climb.”

“Mis Mansell does live here alone, doesn’t she?” Harriet asked causally.

“Oh, yes, madam.”

Her thin figure had flitted away up the stairs ahead of them. In the clean, dingy hall, with its polished brown linoleum and brown and cream banisters, Harriet was overcome with disappointment and despair. It was no use. Her children were not here. One could see that.

“It’s all a mistake,” she whispered to Flynn. “I apologize to Zoe.”

“Harriet, I’m sorry.”

Tears filled her eyes. She was grateful, suddenly, that Flynn could not see them.

“It’s all my fault. It was a foolish thing to think. Let’s go home.”

“No, let’s go up and see the room now we are here,” Flynn insisted. “One might as well know where the crazy kid lives.”

His voice held concern and affection. It irritated Harriet who now could think of nothing but that they had followed a hopeless trail. Unreasonably, she expected him to be thinking of nothing but her children, also.

“But why bother? You can’t see it when you do get there.”

He didn’t seem to mind her cruelly factual words. He said lightly, “On the contrary, your eyes are mine. What does this hall look like?”

“The rolling stock of the Great Western Railway.”

“This way, sir,” called the woman, out of sight along a passage at the top of the stairs. “There’s a nasty turn halfway up.”

“That’s all right. My wife is used to helping me.”

Harriet stiffened. He whispered, “You started this particular game.”

“It seemed easier with a woman like her. More respectable.”

“Oh, indeed. Respectability is the thing.”

“Can’t you manage the stairs, sir?” Harriet might not have been there any longer. All the woman’s morbid attention was fixed on Flynn.

Flynn, curbing his sudden explosive anger, proceeded up the stairs as quickly as possible. A door was opened halfway down a narrow passage. The woman stood aside as Harriet, followed by Flynn, went into the simple shabby room. There was a window that looked over the river. Beneath it was a divan with a shabby cover. There were chairs, a threadbare carpet, Zoe’s clothes hanging half-concealed behind a cretonne curtain that comprised the closet, and a clutter of cosmetics on the tiny dressing table.

But it was the center of the room that took Harriet’s attention. On a circular table stood a hand sewing machine, and spread out beside it, covering the rest of the table, was a gleaming piece of cream-colored satin, cut out and pinned into the shape of a dress. A wedding dress.

The woman, with unexpected tact, had gone away. Flynn stood within the door, his head up in its arrogant manner, all his senses concentrated on forming an impression.

Why? Did he care so much where Zoe lived? Was his casual and sometimes impertinent attitude towards her a disguise covering his real feelings, which because of the intolerable fact of his blindness he would not show?

“Well?” he said impatiently, “what’s it like? Has the girl a bed to sleep in?”

Of course it was a wedding dress. Zoe was making it herself. Probably she made all her clothes. If she were a clever enough dressmaker, as she seemed to be, that would explain why she could look so smart, and yet have so little money.

But the wedding dress was for her wedding to Flynn. She must have counted on achieving that very soon indeed. Since Flynn had not so far made the anticipated proposal she was furiously blaming Harriet. That could well explain her attack yesterday. For if the girl were almost penniless she had to bring off this gamble successfully as soon as possible.

“Harriet, is it that bad?”

“Bad?”

“The room.”

“Oh, no. There’s a perfectly adequate bed, and comfortable chairs. No, it isn’t that bad. Not Manchester Court, I grant you.” She looked again at the gleaming satin of the half-finished dress. No, that must remain Zoe’s secret, for the next few weeks, or forever, as fate decided. It was no business of Harriet’s. Although, in that moment when, in her best actress manner, she had told the woman that Flynn was her husband, and his fingers had pressed her arm, her heart had given a strange leap, as if it had just awakened after a long sleep.

“Flynn, do let’s go.”

“The house smells,” said Flynn, sniffing fastidiously. “Floor polish, mold, dusty carpet. Intriguing, but not to live with. Why didn’t Zoe tell me she lives like this?”

“You’d better ask her. At the moment I’m afraid I’m more interested in finding my children.”

“Oh, poor Harriet, of course.”

“Poor Zoe, poor Harriet! You must be getting a little tired of your forlorn female friends.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“It was absurd of me to think Zoe might have taken the children… You’ll have to thank the woman for letting us in. But please hurry. I must get home to Millie. And I haven’t rung Len telling him I won’t be at rehearsals. He’ll be livid.”

“And we have to explain, of course, to Zoe what we have been doing here. That poor blind man and his wife.”

“Oh, God,” said Harriet. “Shall we leave a note, after all?”

Flynn put out his hand, feeling for her arm.

“One thing at a time, my love. No, we won’t leave a note. I’ll explain to Zoe when I see her.”

Jones was waiting around the corner. He had been walking up and down, his coat flapping open from his tall spare figure. Seeing them alone, he forebore to make obvious remarks, but with his usual discretion opened the door of the car and said soothingly, “Nasty bleak place this. I wouldn’t care to live so close to the river.”

“Well, we drew a blank, Jones.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”

“It was a long chance. But one has to explore every avenue.”

“Indeed, sir. Human nature being what it is.”

He means the unexpected things, Harriet thought, the little quirks that come in and make plans go awry, make one revise one’s opinions. The unanticipated moment of joy when Flynn’s fingers had pressed her arm. The wedding dress that was to culminate Zoe’s carefully laid and unscrupulous but somehow pathetic plans.

The kidnapper had correctly anticipated hers and Millie’s reactions and behavior. But he was a human being, too. Could he be so sure that somewhere along his dangerous way some little thing, some unexpected behavior on someone’s part, would not let him down…

H
ARRIET WENT INTO THE
flat wearily. It was the same as it had been when she had left it, filled with the scent of lilac, deadly quiet.

Millie said nothing had happened. There had been no callers and no telephone messages.

“Not even a word from Fred,” she said, and her lip quivered. “It’s all so awful, I could die.”

Harriet looked at the time and realized she could just catch Len on the telephone before rehearsals started. She explained that she had flu, and then had to endure five minutes of indignation and threats of dismissal before he calmed down and told her to take four aspirins ever four hours, and if incipient flu was the reason for her bad performance yesterday he would forgive her.

She went into the bathroom and found Mrs. Blunt’s note. “You need more bath soap. If you get that new French kind, don’t waste it on the children.”

Mrs. Blunt, she said to herself, when my children come home they may use my expensive soap or anything they please. Just, please God, let them come home.

It seemed years ago since she had gaily bought a new hat and enjoyed wearing it.

The time was two o’clock. Another six hours to wait. The gloom of the gray day had deepened. The wind had strengthened and whined, like a muffled puppy, in the chimney. It looked as if it were going to snow.

Flynn had asked if she minded him talking to Fred and his mother, and also to Millie. She had assented wearily, knowing that this would achieve nothing. Which was exactly what happened. They all reiterated what they had already told Harriet, and Millie once more became a sodden heap of misery. There was only one thing Harriet could do, and that was to live through the six hours until eight o’clock. To live without thinking, if possible, of what the children were doing, whether they had eaten, whether Arabella was having her afternoon nap, whether Jamie was escaping trouble…

Or thinking of Zoe’s half-made wedding dress, all her hopes spread on a table in a shabby, depressing, anonymous room.

Of what Grandmother Lacey in Boston would think of her care of Joe’s children… Or of what Joe himself would think.

Or of what one would do if Jamie and Arabella had disappeared as completely and finally as Joe had…

The telephone did not ring again. Flynn came up once to ask her to have tea with him, because he insisted that food was vitally important in a crisis. But Millie, at the prospect of being left alone again, threw her such a stricken look that Harriet suggested Flynn having tea with them. This he agreed to do, and sat opposite her, his face turned to her as if he were watching. He had dropped his earlier efforts to make idle conversation in order to distract her and was almost completely silent. But it was comforting, somehow, having him there. The flat did not seem quite so empty.

When he left it was six o’clock. Unbelievably as it seemed, time was passing. Those hours would never have to be lived again. They were gone forever.

“You do look tired, Mrs. Lacey,” Millie said timidly.

“I’m all right. Are there plenty of eggs and milk? We may have to get a meal for the children later.”

Millie gasped. “Oh, ma’am, do you think they’ll come back tonight?”

Harriet turned on her, angry at the girl’s disbelief.

“Of course they will. I refuse to think anything else.”

Millie was at the window, looking out into the darkness.

“It’s awful cold and dark for a baby,” she muttered.

Harriet repressed a shiver.

“Where do you suppose they’ll be left, Mrs. Lacey?” Millie asked.

That was a question Flynn had kept flinging at her, too. In his argument that the police should be called immediately, he had kept demanding how the kidnapper could safely return two live children to any given spot without being detected himself—or herself.

But that, Harriet had insisted, could be done as unobtrusively as the kidnapping had been done. What was wrong with them being left in a doorway, or at a quiet bus stop? The kidnapper could then keep his promise to telephone her and instruct her as to where the children waited.

The only flaw in this argument was that it would be night time.

It may well be that she would not get any information until morning, that there would be another long night to live through.

But she clung to her perhaps naïve belief that whoever had watched the flats so closely as to be accurate about her and Millie’s movements would also know at exactly what times Fred went off duty. What was to stop the children being slipped inside the front doors at an unguarded moment?

This hope she now told Millie, but Millie’s reaction was disappointing.

“Coo! Wouldn’t she know Fred would be watching, after all this?”

“She has no reason to know that Fred is in this horrible secret. Millie, why do you keep saying ‘she’?”

Millie pressed her nose against the window, staring down into the dark square. Nothing moved among the bushes and tree trunks. There was no lurking woman with a white face and tattered blonde locks. But how did one know there wasn’t?

She shuddered uncontrollably.

“Because of that awful woman who watched me.”

“But you only saw her once. There could be nothing significant about that.”

“No, twice. Jones saw her running away from the door that day, the same as I did.”

“Millie, that was Jamie. He told me so. And Mrs. Helps found the wig he had used, the little scamp.”

“It wasn’t Jamie that night,” Millie said hysterically. “Not after midnight. Besides she was
tall!”

“Just a passer-by. You can’t be so scared about someone who seemed to stare at you only once.”

“It was the same scraggly hair,” Millie insisted. “And then the phone ringing and no one speaking. That was to scare us more.”

Harriet looked with distaste at the girl with her tear-blotched face and stupid, staring eyes. How could she once have thought that Millie was pleasant and kind and pliable?

“Come now,” she said sternly, “Mr. Palmer doesn’t place any more importance on those things than I do. We think you’ve imagined half of it and the other half is pure coincidence. Now what about seeing if you can make a nice omelette for supper, because shortly I have to go.”

Millie opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. But a strange knowing look, which was vaguely disturbing, had flickered in her eyes.

“What were you going to say, Millie?”

“Nothing, ma’am. Only that I’m not very good at omelettes.”

“Never mind. It will give you something to do, and we really ought to eat. As you say, it’s cold and dark outside.”

In the basement flat Mrs. Helps was watching her son Fred. He had finished his supper and changed into a tweed jacket and slacks. Now he was peering into the mirror over the mantelpiece, slicking down his hair and carefully studying his appearance.

She had to be careful how she asked questions. If she made them too obvious she got no answer.

“It’s an awful cold wet night,” she said, feeling her way to the final question—as to whether he was going out.

“It’s going to snow,” he answered briefly.

“That Millie rang up again.”

“What’s wrong with her now?”

“She said she was lonely.”

“Serves her right, letting those kids get stolen.”

He sounded so indignant that the old lady’s heart lifted with relief. He couldn’t be indignant like that if he were guilty, could he? He wasn’t as good an actor as that.

“Fred, you’re not going out in this cold without a scarf?”

“Now, Ma, don’t fuss. You know I can’t stand fussing.”