He knocked at the front door of the second pink cottage in Cliffside Row just as the church clock was chiming half past seven; and on the instant he recoiled a step or two nervously, almost wishing he had let well alone, for the consequences of the knock manifested themselves before the door was opened. Something—it sounded like a glass—shattered on a quarried floor. A girl’s voice uttered a small, frightened cry, and a young man’s, suddenly sharp with fury and helplessness, shouted: “For God’s sake, girl, what’s up with you to-day? Anybody’d think a gun had gone off. It’s only the door. If there’s something wrong with you, I wish you’d have the sense to tell me. Oh, come out! I’ll go.”
The door, suddenly flung wide, vanished with startling effect, as if Jim Pollard’s large young fist had plucked it off. Levelled brown eyes under a thick frowning ridge of brow stared dauntingly at Paddy.
“Well, what’s up?” The eyes, once they focused upon him, knew him well enough. “Oh, it’s you, young Rossall. What do you want?” Less unfriendly, but as anxious as ever to get rid of him and get back to whatever scene they had been playing between them there in the doll’s-house living-room. The knock on the door had been only a punctuation mark. Paddy felt small, unsupported, and less certain of the sacred harmony of marriage than he had been two minutes ago. But he’d started it, and now there was no backing out.
“I’d like to talk to you and Rose, please. It’s very important.”
“Mrs. Pollard to you, my lad,” said Jim smartly. “All right, come in.”
“I’m sorry! She used to let me call her Rose, but I won’t do it if you don’t like it. It was only habit.”
He stepped over the brightly-Cardinalled doorstep into the pretty toy room, and Jim closed the door behind him. Rose, clattering dust-pan and brush agitatedly in the minute kitchen beyond, was sweeping up the fragments of the glass she had dropped. The door between was open, and Paddy saw her slide a furtive glance at him, and take heart. All the same, her eyes were evasive and her hands unsteady when she came in.
“Hallo, Paddy, what’s the matter?”
“Nothing with me,” he said, making straight for the essential issue, head-down and ready for anything. “It’s
His impetuous rush had carried him thus far through a silence of stupefaction on one side and desperation on the other, but now, in a subdued way which didn’t carry beyond the walls, hell broke loose. Rose burst into tears and flung herself face-down into a chair. Jim gaped open-mouthed from one to the other of them, and with a muted bellow of rage clouted Paddy on the ear with an open right hand as hard as a spade. The blow slammed him back against the wall, from which one of Rose’s pretty little calendar pictures, a golden-haired tot with a bunch of forget-me-nots, promptly fell and smashed.
“You nasty little brat!” growled Jim through his teeth. “You come here slandering my wife, and see what you’ll get! Who d’you think you’re threatening with the police, you—”
Nobody had ever hit Paddy like that before. Instead of taming him it infuriated him. Clasping his smarting cheek, he shouted back into the menacing face that leaned over him: “I wasn’t threatening her, I wasn’t slandering her, I said—”
“I heard what you said. Accusing her of taking money and jewellery—”
“Don’t be so bloody stupid!” yelled Paddy, blazing with rage. “I never said she took them, I said she
It was not language of which either his parents or his teachers would have approved, but it stopped Jim, in the act of loosing a damaging left at him, as though the breath had been kicked out of him. His hands dropped. Shades of doubt and consternation and suspicion pursued one another over his candid face. Rose, through her desperate sobs, implored indistinctly: “Don’t hurt him, Jim! He doesn’t mean any harm.”
Her husband turned and looked at her, quaking in the frilly chair. “Now, look! There’s one bloke around here who doesn’t seem to be in any of the secrets, and that’s me. And I’m going to know, and pretty sharpish, so you can both make up your minds to that. Maybe what this kid’s saying has got something in it, after all. The way you’ve been acting the last couple o’ days, there could well be something queer going on, and you mixed up in it. If there is, I want to know. Now!”
His voice had worked its way down from the peak of anger to an intimidating quietness. He plucked Paddy away from the wall by the shoulders, and plumped him down hard in a chair.
“If I went off at half-cock, and you’re being straight with me, I’m sorry, kid. But first I’ve got to know. Come on, let’s have it. The lot. I’ve been trying to get some sense out of her for days, and she’s been putting me off and swearing there was nothing, and going round like a dying duck in a thunder-storm. I’m about sick of it. If you know anything, let’s have it, and know where we are.”
Paddy took a deep breath, and told him everything he knew and everything he guessed. Rose, subsiding into exhausted silence, still hid her face.
“I came to tell you,” said Paddy, with dignified indignation, “that I know very well you can’t have done anything wrong, and it’s dead silly to carry on as if you have. I don’t know what’s behind all this, but I do know you’ll only get yourself into trouble if you go on hiding things. What you ought to do is go straight to the police, and tell them all you know. That’s the only way to help yourself.”
Jim took his hands from the boy, and looked down at Rose’s heaving shoulders. There was hardly any need to ask, but he asked, all the same, his voice baffled and exasperated, and painfully gentle.
“Is that right, Rose, what he says?
A fresh spurt of tears, but she scrubbed them away with the stoical determination of despair. “I had to get them out of the house. I didn’t want you to know. It wasn’t my fault, but it was even less yours, and I wanted you kept out of it.”
“Go and wash your face and pretty yourself up,” said Jim. “We’re going to the police. Now.” He turned to fix a stern but no longer unfriendly eye on Paddy. “All three of us,” he said with emphasis.
“Yes,” said Rose, bolt upright and pale of face on one of Hewitt’s hard chairs, “it’s true, there is a way in. I’ll show you. If somebody’d leaned against the right edge of the right stone, there in the vault, he’d have found it, only it’s placed so nobody’s likely to, not by accident. It’s one of the facing slabs in the corner. It swivels on an iron bar that runs through it from top to bottom. I reckon they put it all in when the vault was made. It’ll only swivel one
