‘O’Shea won’t let us get away with it,’ he said, with a worried frown. ‘You know him, Soapy.’
‘We shall see,’ said Mr Marks, with a confident smile.
He poured out a whisky and soda.
‘Drink up and we’ll go.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve got plenty of time—thank God there’s a war on, and the active and intelligent constabulary are looking for spies, the streets are nicely darkened, and all is favourable to our little arrangement. By the way, I’ve had a red cross painted on the tilt of our van—it looks almost official!’
That there was a war on, they discovered soon after they turned into the Embankment. Warning maroons were banging from a dozen stations; the darkened tram which carried them to the south had hardly reached Kennington Oval before the anti-aircraft guns were blazing at the unseen marauders of the skies. A bomb dropped all too close for the comfort of the nervous Connor. The car had stopped.
‘We had better get out here,’ whispered Marks. ‘They won’t move till the raid is over.’
The two men descended to the deserted street and walked southward. The beams of giant searchlights swept the skies; from somewhere up above came the rattle of a machine-gun.
‘This should keep the police thoroughly occupied,’ said Marks, as they turned into a narrow street in a poor neighbourhood. ‘I don’t think we need miss our date, and our little ambulance should pass unchallenged.’
‘I wish to God you’d speak English!’ growled Connor irritably.
Marks had stopped before the gates of a stable yard, pushing them. One yielded to his touch and they walked down the uneven drive to the small building where the car was housed. Soapy put his key into the gate of the lock-up and turned it.
‘Here we are,’ he said, as he stepped inside.
And then a hand gripped him, and he reached for his gun.
‘Don’t make any fuss,’ said the hated voice of Inspector Hallick. ‘I want you, Soapy. Perhaps you’ll tell me what’s happened to this ambulance of yours?’
Soapy Marks stared towards the man he could not see, and for a moment was thrown off his guard.
‘The lorry?’ he gasped. ‘Isn’t it here?’
‘Been gone an hour,’ said a second voice. ‘Come across, Soapy; what have you done with it?’
Soapy said nothing; he heard the steel handcuffs click on the wrist of Joe Connor, heard that man’s babble of incoherent rage and blasphemy as he was hustled towards the car which had drawn up silently at the gate, and knew that Mr O’Shea was indeed very sane on that particular day.
TO Mary Redmayne life had been a series of inequalities. She could remember the alternate prosperity and depression of her father; had lived in beautiful hotel suites and cheap lodgings, one following the other with extraordinary rapidity; and had grown so accustomed to the violent changes of his fortune that she would never have been surprised to have been taken from the pretentious school where she was educated, and planted amongst county school scholars at any moment.
People who knew him called him Colonel, but he himself preferred his civilian title, and volunteered no information to her as to his military career. It was after he had taken Monkshall that he permitted ‘Colonel’ to appear on his cards. It was a grand-sounding name, but even as a child Mary Redmayne had accepted such appellations with the greatest caution. She had once been brought back from her preparatory school to a ‘Mortimer Lodge’, to discover it was a tiny semi-detached villa in a Wimbledon by-street.
But Monkshall had fulfilled all her dreams of magnificence; a veritable relic of Tudor times, and possibly of an earlier period, it stood in forty acres of timbered ground, a dignified and venerable pile, which had such association with antiquity that, until Colonel Redmayne forbade the practice, charabancs full of American visitors used to come up the broad drive and gaze upon the ruins of what had been a veritable abbey.
Fortune had come to Colonel Redmayne when she was about eleven. It came unexpectedly, almost violently. Whence it came, she could not even guess; she only knew that one week he was poor, harassed by debt-collectors, moving through side streets in order to avoid his creditors; the next week—or was it month?—he was master of Monkshall, ordering furniture worth thousands of pounds.
When she went to live at Monkshall she had reached that gracious period of interregnum between child and woman. A slim girl above middle height, straight of back, free of limb, she held the eye of men to whom more mature charms would have had no appeal.
Ferdie Fane, the young man who came to the Red Lion so often, summer and winter, and who drank so much more than was good for him, watched her passing along the road with her father. She was hatless; the golden-brown hair had a glory of its own; the faultless face, the proud little lift of her chin.
‘Spring is here, Adolphus,’ he addressed the landlord gravely. ‘I have seen it pass.’
He was a man of thirty-five, long-faced, rather good-looking in spite of his huge horn-rimmed spectacles. He had a large tankard of beer in his hand now, which was unusual, for he did most of his drinking secretly in his room. He used to come down to the Red Lion at all sorts of odd and sometimes inconvenient moments. He was, in a way, rather a bore, and the apparition of Mary Redmayne and her grim-looking father offered the landlord an opportunity for which he had been seeking.
‘I wonder you don’t go and stay at Monkshall, Mr Fane,’ he suggested.
Mr Fane stared at him reproachfully.
‘Are you tired of me, mine host?’ he asked gently. ‘That you should shuffle me into other hands?’ He shook his head. ‘I am no paying guest—besides which, I am not respectable. Why does Redmayne take paying guests at all?’
The landlord could offer no satisfactory solution to this mystery.
‘I’m blessed if I know. The colonel’s got plenty of money. I think it is because he’s lonely, but he’s had paying guests at Monkshall this past ten years. Of course, it’s very select.’
‘Exactly,’ said Ferdie Fane with great gravity. ‘And that is why I should not be selected! No, I fear you will have to endure my erratic visits.’
‘I don’t mind your being here, sir,’ said the landlord, anxious to assure him. ‘You never give me any trouble, only—’
‘Only you’d like somebody more regular in his habits—good luck!’
He lifted the foaming pewter to his lips, took a long drink, and then he began to laugh softly, as though at some joke. In another minute he was serious again, frowning down into the tankard.
‘Pretty girl, that. Mary Redmayne, eh?’
‘She’s only been back from school a month—or college, rather,’ said the landlord. ‘She’s the nicest young lady that ever drew the breath of life.’
‘They all are,’ said the other vaguely. He went away the next day with his fishing rod that he hadn’t used, and his golf bag which had remained unstrapped throughout his stay.
Life at Monkshall promised so well that Mary Redmayne was prepared to love the place. She liked Mr Goodman, the grey-haired, slow-spoken gentleman who was the first of her father’s boarders; she loved the grounds, the quaint old house; could even contemplate, without any great uneasiness, the growing taciturnity of her father. He was older, much older than he had been; his face had a new pallor; he seldom smiled. He was a nervous man, too; she had found him walking about in the middle of the night, and once had surprised him in his room, suspiciously thick of speech, with an empty whisky bottle a silent witness to his peculiar weakness.