The week which followed was a very busy one for Alan Wembury. He had only a slight acquaintance with Deptford and its notables. The grey-haired Scots surgeon he saw for a minute or two, a shrewd old man with laughing eyes and a fund of dry Scottish humour, but both men were too busy in their new jobs to discuss The Ringer.
Mary did not write, as he had expected she would, and he was not aware that she was in his district until one day, walking down the Lewisham High Road, somebody waved to him from an open taxicab and turning, he saw it was the girl. He asked one of his subordinates to find out where she and Johnny were staying and with no difficulty located them at a modern block of flats near Malpas Road, a building occupied by the superior artisan class. What a tragic contrast to the spacious glories of Lenley Court! Only his innate sense of delicacy prevented his calling upon her, and for this abstention at least one person was glad.
Chapter 7
“I saw your copper this morning,” said Johnny flippantly. He had gone back to lunch and was in a more amiable mood than Mary remembered having seen him recently.
She looked at him open-eyed.
“My ‘copper’?” she repeated.
“Wembury,” translated Johnny. “We call these fellows ‘busies’ and I’ve never seen a busier man,” he chuckled. “I see you’re going to ask what’ busy’ means. It is a thieves’ word for detective.”
He saw a change come to her face.
“‘We’ call them?” she repeated. “You mean ‘they’ call them, Johnny.”
He was amused as he sat down at the table.
“What a little purist you’re becoming, Mary,” he said. “We, or they, does it matter? We’re all thieves at heart, the merchant in his Rolls and the workman on the tram, thieves every one of them!”
Very wisely she did not contest the extravagant generalisation.
“Where did you see Alan?”
“Why the devil do you call him by his Christian name?” snapped Johnny. “The man is a policeman, you go on as though he were a social equal.”
Mary smiled at this as she cut a round of bread into four parts and put them on the bread plate.
“The man who lives on the other side of the landing is a plumber, and the people above us live on the earnings of a railway guard. Six of them, Johnny — four of them girls.”
He twisted irritably in his chair. “That’s begging the question. We’re only here as a temporary expedient. You don’t suppose I’m going to be content to live in this poky hole all my life? One of these days I’ll buy back Lenley Court.”
“On what, Johnny?” she asked quietly.
“On the money I make,” he said and went back to his bete noire. “Anyway, Wembury isn’t the sort of fellow I want you to know,” he said. “I was talking to Maurice about him this morning, and Maurice agrees that it is an acquaintance we ought to drop.”
“Really?” Mary’s voice was cold. “And Maurice thinks so too — how funny!”
He glanced at her suspiciously.
“I don’t see anything amusing about it,” he grumbled. “Obviously, we can’t know—”
She was standing facing him on the other side of the table, her hands resting on its polished surface.
“I have decided to go on knowing Alan Wembury,” she said steadily. “I’m sorry if Maurice doesn’t approve, or if you think I’m being very common. But I like Alan—”
“I used to like my valet, but I got rid of him,” broke in Johnny irritably.
She shook her head.
“Alan Wembury isn’t your valet. You may think my taste is degraded, but Alan is my idea of a gentleman,” she said quietly, “and one cannot know too many gentlemen.”
He was about to say something sharp, but checked himself, and the matter had dropped for the moment.
The next day Mary Lenley was to start her new life. The thought left her a little breathless. When Maurice had first made the suggestion that she should act as his secretary the idea had thrilled her, but as the time approached she had grown more and more apprehensive. The project was one filled with vague unpleasant possibilities and she could not understand why this once pleasing prospect should now have such an effect upon her.
Johnny was not up when she was ready to depart in the morning, and only came yawning out of his bedroom when she called him.
“So you’re going to be one of the working classes,” he said almost jovially. “It will be rather amusing. I wouldn’t let you go at all, only—”
“Only?” she waited.
Johnny’s willingness that she should accept employment in Maurice’s office had been a source of wonder to her, knowing his curious nature.
“I shall be about, keeping an eye on you,” he said good-humouredly.
A few minutes later she was hurrying down crooked Tanners Hill toward a neighbourhood the squalor of which appalled her. Flanders Lane has few exact parallels in point of grime and ugliness, but Mr. Meister’s house was most unexpectedly different from all the rest.
It stood back from the street, surrounded by a high wall which was pierced with one black door which gave access to a small courtyard, behind which was the miniature Georgian mansion where the lawyer not only lived but had his office.
An old woman led her up the worn stairs, opened a heavy ornamental door and ushered her into an apartment which she was to know very well indeed. A big panelled room with Adam decorations, it had been once the drawingroom of a prosperous City merchant in those days when great gentlemen lived in the houses where now the poor and the criminal herded like rats.
There was an air of shabbiness about the place and yet it was cheerful enough. The walls were hung about with pictures which she had no difficulty in recognising as the work of great masters. But the article of furniture which interested her most was a big grand piano which stood in an alcove. She looked in wonder at this and then turned to the old woman.
“Does Mr. Meister play this?”
“Him?” said the old lady with a cackle of laughter. “I should say he does!”
From this chamber led a little doorless anteroom which evidently was used as an office, for there were deed boxes piled up against one wall and a small desk on which stood a covered typewriter.
She had hardly taken her survey when the door opened and Maurice Meister came quickly in, alert and smiling. He strode toward her and took both her hands in his.
“My dear Mary,” he said, “this is delightful!”
His enthusiasm amused her.
“This isn’t a social call, Maurice,” she said. “I have come to work!”
She drew her hands free of his. Had they always been on these affectionate terms, she wondered. She was puzzled and uneasy. She tried to reconstruct from her memory the exact relationship that Maurice Meister had stood to the family. He had known her since she was a child. It was stupid of her to resent this subtle tenderness of his.
“My dear Mary, there’s work enough to do — title deeds, evidence,” he looked vaguely round as though seeking some stimulant to his imagination.
And all the time he looked he was wondering what on earth he could