Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories (26 page)

He pushed this open cautiously, and entered into a small, cupboard-like apartment, where the air was surprisingly fresh. The reason for this became obvious when one glanced up to find that this was the inspection pit of Mr. Knapp’s garage, which had been built by the previous tenant by the simple expedient of cutting off the head of the cellar stairs.

Box pulled himself out lightly, and leaned back to help Levine hoist up their prisoner. It was not quite daylight, and it was still dark in the garage. The doors had been opened, however, and against the grey patch of light which they framed, the cars loomed out, dark and graceful.

The crooks moved swiftly. As soon as Box’s head appeared above the inspection pit the uniformed figures in the drivers’ seats started their engines, and Mr. Knapp, who had been the last man up, spoke in a muffled whisper to his leader.

“Hurry, boss. I hear the trucks moving. I expect they’re using them. It’s going to be a near thing.”

Box chuckled.

“It’s going to make them very sick,” he said. “We shall wriggle out straight under their noses, net the money and get away with it.”

He sprang lightly into the back of the car, where Casson had already seated himself with Thurtle beside him. Mr. Knapp seated himself on the floor at their feet.

“Let her go, Tim.”

The car leapt forward, and Box leaned back among the cushions, a smile of complete satisfaction spreading over his face. His eyes fell idly upon the shoulders of the man who had just brought the car swinging out of the garage. As he stared he noticed something which sent a chill down his spine.

Between the back of the chauffeur’s collar and his cap was a tiny end of surgical bandage. The man who drove the car in which he and his prisoner rode so complacendy had a wounded shoulder.

With a muttered exclamation, Box leaned forward and felt for his gun, but at that instant the car came to an abrupt stop. Box was thrown off balance and in that moment his chance of escape vanished.

Doors were pulled open and armed men appeared. From his position of vantage in the driver’s seat Bob Fisher turned round. He smiled as he removed his cap.

The Jensen had been pulled up at the same time a little farther down the street, and the grinning detective who had taken Jack Simmons’ place climbed out into the road.

The round-up was complete, neat and precise in every detail. The hidden police had swept down upon the can immediately their drivers had brought them to a standstill.

Joseph Thurtle, alone unperturbed among the wrestling throng, permitted himself to be led quietly into a police car and driven this time without adventure to Scotland Yard. The other men put up a fight, but they were completely unprepared for the attack and proved no match for their assailants.

It was some time later when George Box was being driven to headquarters, with Fisher seated on one side and Davidson on the other, that the slightly puzzled expression returned to his blue eyes.

“I don’t bear any grudge against you, Fisher,” he said affably. “This is first blood to you. You laid a trap and I fell into it. I thought you underestimated my intelligence. It happens; I misjudged yours. But what I want to know is this: How did you spot me? When did you realise I wasn’t quite the innocent friend who had rung you up to show you a peculiar flat?”

“You’re under arrest. You take my advice and keep quiet,” said Inspector Davidson.

Box shook his head.

“Not at all,” he said. “I’m naturally curious. After all, I think you owe it to me.”

Fisher turned, and for a moment, his shrewd grey eyes met those of the crook.

“Two little incidents,” he said, “and one rather striking corroboration of the suspicion planted in my mind. When I looked over your entertaining flat, you told me you had only been in the place five or six hours. And yet every ash tray was filled with cigarette stubs. My naturally inquiring mind compelled me to have a look at them. They were all of your own particular brand, with the tips discoloured. You’re a very wet smoker, Box. Perhaps that’s why you only smoke them half-way through?

“Of course, that was a very small point, but it did occur to me that no human being could have smoked so much in a mere afternoon. That put me on my guard.”

He paused. “Then, when the young woman made her sudden and startling appearance, I caught a glimpse of your face. I expected you to be surprised, astounded, bewildered—anything. Yet I saw none of these. You were angry. At the time I didn’t understand.”

Box laughed unpleasantly.

“You’re a brighter little detective than what I thought,” he said. “Anything else? I’m afraid it doesn’t strike me as being very conclusive so far.”

Fisher grinned.

“It was your generosity which undid you in the end,” he said. “I think I told you that in the fracas in the mews one of my assailants slipped his jacket. That coat had a tailor’s label with his client’s name neatly written inside. Do you give all your old clothes away to your gang?”

Box swore.

Gina Baring was going to leave her husband. They had discussed the move very carefully and with all the mutual consideration which had characterised every step of their eventful twelve years of married life.

Hitherto they had faced each obstacle in their joint path and bad avoided it or surmounted it together, but now the time had come when it seemed to both that the wisest course lay in the dissolution of their partnership.

Gina Baring sat in her white and gold drawing-room and trembled. She was not aware that she was afraid, but that subconscious, almost physical intelligence which governs the senseless reactions of the body was in a state of panic.

The front part of her brain was busy thinking of Fergus Cappet, the man to whom her husband was so lightheartedly relinquishing her; or rather it was thinking of the uncomfortable armchairs in his dark book-lined living-room and wondering if he would permit her to change them for something less reproving to the flesh.

Over the Florentine mantelpiece her own portrait, painted before Jan Baring had become the fashionable A.R.A. he now was, smiled down at her with wide, confident eyes. Mrs. Baring met the painted gaze and shivered without knowing why.

She and Jan were parting on the morrow. Their simple arrangements had already been made with due attention to the comfort and convenience of all concerned.

Tomorrow, Fergus, who was bohemian in the fine old-fashioned sense of that extraordinarily demoded word, would receive Gina Baring with that lack of formality which his two disastrous past experiences had taught him to prefer.

On her departure from home her husband had arranged to phone his solicitor and instruct the law to take its heavy-footed course. Then, on the day in which the Court should pronounce Jan a free man, he would marry Lynne Agnew.

The Barings had worked out every move together, as they had worked out the other serious steps in their lives, such steps as their rise from the studio in Soho to the flat in St. John’s Wood and afterwards their departure to Kensington, and from Kensington to their present home on the Kentish Downs.

It was a dignified programme, comfortable and eminently practical. Gina Baring knew that it would work admirably.

At the moment she was in a state of enforced calm. She was not considering the future or permitting herself to peer too closely at the immediate past.

When Fergus Cappet had taken her into his arms and his narrow, ugly mouth had trembled as he told her of his insufferable need for her, his appeal had come at a time when Lynne Agnew had already taken a definite place on Jan’s horizon, so that Fergus had been a godsend to Gina Baring, providing as he did a blessed avenue of dignified escape.

Mrs. Baring stirred on the couch. Lynne Agnew was coming to dinner. She had phoned to invite herself that morning and Jan had brought the intimation to his wife apologetically.

“I told her the Perneys were coming,” he had said rather helplessly: “I explained that they were old friends we hadn’t seen for seven or eight years; but she’s made up her mind. It won’t matter, will it?”

Gina Baring had looked into her husband’s dark face and had smiled and reassured him. Privately she considered Lynne’s gesture vulgar, precipitate, and unfortunately typical, but she did not say so. The Barings had always preserved a code of politeness which, while it made their daily relationship particularly comfortable, tended to keep them strangely unaware of each other’s more intimate reactions.

Now, as Gina sat waiting for the Perneys to arrive on the evening train, she considered Lynne Agnew’s attraction once again, and once again gave it up as incomprehensible. The entire cul-de-sac in which her own and Jan’s life had suddenly come to a full stop was incomprehensible to her.

It had begun with the house. The house was the house of their dreams. In the days when they had worked together in the dusty little studio littered with the paraphernalia of Jan Baring’s trade, the miscellaneous belongings of their myriad friends, and their own few possessions, they had conceived just such a dwelling and had furnished it in imagination with just such treasures as it now contained.

That was over ten years ago. Since then they had worked as only the obstinately successful artist knows how to work, and at last, through sweat and the bloodshed of reverses, had realised their sweet ambition.

Gina Baring’s glance rested on the porcelain bowl they had brought from Marseilles, the candelabra they had picked up in Rome, the table that had come from the castle in Wales, and the puzzled expression in her round, grey eyes grew stronger.

Lynne Agnew had arrived on the scene with the house. She was a member of the country social set whose card of membership was the possession of reasonably-sized property in the district, and the blonde widow had annexed Jan in a fashion so blatant and forthright that Mrs. Baring had sat spellbound, scarcely believing her senses.

It had happened so suddenly. Jan had slipped into a vacant niche as the affluent celebrity of the neighbourhood and Gina had found herself without a place.

The little dinners at which one met the same people, heard the same gossip and exchanged the same half-digested views bored and bewildered her. She became aloof and unfriendly, while Jan, on the other hand, took to the life with unexpected enthusiasm.

He played bridge, he danced, he bought an expensive car and drove Mrs. Agnew about in it and listened with apparent satisfaction to her secondhand sophistries.

At the moment when Gina Baring’s astonishment had turned to bitterness and her discomfort become identified with shame, Fergus Cappet had appeared with his romantic and tragic appeal.

Tonight the Perneys were coming down from town for a snatched week-end, and tomorrow, when they had gone again, the Barings’ marriage was ending as quietly and unobtrusively as it was possible to ensure.

Gina rose. It was nearly fifteen minutes past seven. In a moment now Jan would swing the car in at the drive gates and the Perneys would climb out to greet her.

She was not very clear in her mind about the Perneys. Victor had been a friend of Jan’s in the early days. He had come to the gatherings, and towards the end of the time had often brought with him the little thing who was now his wife.

Gina Baring feared they might be a dull couple. She remembered those first years as a period of drudgery, only made possible by a youthful exuberance now as inexplicable as it was irrecoverable.

It was nearly eight years since she or Jan had seen either of them, and Victor’s letter announcing his marriage and his intention of descending upon them had seemed very much of an irritating voice from the remote past.

Neither of the Barings had ever any desire to be rude, however, and since it was easier to put up with their old friends for a night than to go through the laborious business of an explanation, they had fixed an early date and fitted in their own arrangements accordingly.

Gina Baring saw the forthcoming evening as a last dull prelude to her new adventure, and did not look forward to it particularly. She heard the car drive up and, after glancing at herself in the round mirror, went out to greet her guests in Jan’s house for the last time.

Her first glimpse of them interested her. The man was much as she remembered him. He was thicker, perhaps, and less untidy, but he had the same feckless, typically artistic face and the same youthful expression.

The girl had grown up. She was more assured but still vulnerable, and Gina felt vaguely maternal towards them both.

She noticed that Jan was nervous. He hustled in with the suitcases and was inclined to talk loudly about trivialities. For the first time it occurred to her that the evening might have its embarrassing moments.

It was at this instant that Victor Perney caught sight of Gina, and her formal smile of welcome vanished before his whoop of delight.

“God!” he said. “Darling! Oh, my lovely woman, what a
corker
of a house!”

She was in his arms and hugged and kissed like a long-lost mother before she could draw breath.

“Gina!” cried the girl behind him. “Oh, Gina, you’ve grown lovely. I knew you would. We always said you would and you have. Oh, darlings, isn’t this marvellous?”

Gina Baring was kissed again, and with a boisterous guest on either arm and followed by Jan, she was swept, startled and breathless, into the breakfast-room, out into the garden and back through the french windows again.

Sally Perney paused on the threshold and stood hesitating, looking like some plump and delighted robin in her fashionable suit and bright sweater. Her quick turn of the head towards her husband was birdlike, too.

“Vic,” she said joyfully. “Oh, Vic, they’ve done it. Look!”

Following her ecstatic gaze, Gina Baring had the odd experience of seeing her own room for the first time. The discovery that it really was lovely, as lovely as she and Jan could conceive a room, came to her with a sudden sense of comfort which was rudely dispelled immediately afterwards by her next thought, which was of the morrow.

Jan tried to take the situation in hand. His intelligent face was blank as he busied himself with drinks. He talked incessantly, asking questions without waiting for answers to them, and firing off little scraps of random information whenever there seemed to be the least fear of a lull in the conversation.