'Young people,' said Locke, 'are utterly callous. You agree?'
'Come, now!'
'And sometimes utterly ruthless. This is not out of any brutality. It is because they cannot see the effect of their actions on any person except themselves.'
Briefly Locke held up another mask before his face without putting it on. The features of a young girl, exquisitely tinted, as real as a living face, serene and innocent even to the long eyelashes, appeared in the glass.
'They are blind,' the eyes in the mirror closed, 'to any consideration except self-interest They want something. They must have it. Point out to them that this is wrong; they will agree with you, perhaps sincerely, and in the next moment forget it Youth is a cruel time.'
The mask dropped.
'Now I will tell you, a stranger, what I would not tell my own wife.'
'Monsieur,' said the woman, 'you frighten me.'
'I beg your pardon. Most humbly. I will stop talking.'
'No, no, no! I wish to hear! And yet .. .'
'Yesterday evening,' said Locke, 'when a group of us were being questioned by the doctor of philosophy in question, there occurred to me suddenly a new and unpleasant idea. I could not credit it I cannot credit it even now.'
'It occurred to me because of a question asked by this Dr. Fell. He suddenly asked, for no apparent reason, whether the lady who died—a handsome lady, in the full strength of her beauty—had visited my house on the afternoon of the twenty-third of December.
'I answered, truthfully, that she had. I did not add something else. I dared not add it I will not add it But shortly after she left my house I saw her, through my study window, walking in the frost-covered fields. There was someone with her.'
Again Locke held up a mask to his eyes; and the face that sprang out of the glass was the face of a devil.
'I will deny this if I am asked. I can laugh at it But the person in question handed to her something which I now half-believe to have been a small brown bottle. A bottle that...'
'One moment, monsieur,' the woman said. 'I believe the outer door of our shop is now open.'
There was a jarring and blurring of the mirror. The devil mask slipped and dropped. Several things occurred with blinding swiftness.
Before Mademoiselle Frey could reach the front room of Sedgwick & Co., Holden was out in the passage. But he had no intention of flight, even if unobserved flight had been possible in that bare passage with its stairways up and down. In a split second he had made and discarded two plans, finding a third which was better for what he wished to discover.
As Mademoiselle Frey opened the door wide, he was standing in front of it with his hand upraised as though to knock.
Mademoiselle Frey was a slim, sturdy woman in her middle thirties. Though she was not pretty, with black hair and black eyes against an intense pallor and a vividness of lipstick, yet her vitality and sympathy made her seem so.
At the moment her eyes looked dazed, deeply immersed, in Danvers Locke's story; fascinated by Locke as so many people were fascinated by him. And, as Holden had hoped for, her complete absorption in a French-told narrative made her speak, abruptly and automatically, in French.
'Et alors, monsieur? Vous desirez?'
'I ask your pardon, mademoiselle!' Holden said loudly, in the same language.
He wanted Locke to overhear him, if Locke did not recognize his voice. And the best way to disguise your voice is merely to speak in another language, since the listener's ear is deaf to the accents it expects.
'I ask your pardon, mademoiselle! But I am looking for Madame Vanya.'
'Madame Vanya?' The dark eyes looked blank.
'She is'—he made the accent deliberately clumsy—'she is a reader of the future.'
'Ah! Madame Vanya!' cried the other. 'Madame Vanya is not here. She is upstairs.'
'I am desolated to have troubled you, mademoiselle!'
'There is nothing at all, monsieur.'
The door closed.
Holden went quickly up the stairs to the top floor. It was very hot here under the roof. A dim little bulb burned in one corner. Leaning over the railing of the landing, keeping as far back as possible, yet staring very hard at the door of Sedgwick & Co. downstairs, he waited with tense expectancy for what he believed would happen.
CHAPTER XVII
What the devil was Locke doing here?
It might be mere coincidence. He had said, at Widestairs last night, that he intended to come to town today. To find him buying masks in New Bond Street was not at all surprising. Yet in this particular building? In this particular building?
One thing seemed certain. If Locke knew that here upstairs was Margof 8 place of rendezvous with her unidentified lover, as Doris knew it, then no human restraint of curiosity could keep him inactive. Locke had just heard a man, speaking French with a strong English accent, inquire for Madame Vanya more than six months after Margot’s death. And this at a time when the police were investigating.
Locke would come up here, on some pretext or other! He must come up!
So Holden waited.
And the seconds ticked by, and nothing happened. Meantime, his eye measured the top floor for a possible way in. The same bare stretch of wall with its oak door and
Yale lock. Opposite, the same landing window open to a dingy air space between this and the next house. He went over and tried the knob of the door.
Locked, of course. No good at all without proper tools. But...
Low ceiling on this landing. No trap door to the roof, as there must be by law. Therefore the trap door to the roof is inside Madame Vanya's flat. Therefore the easiest means of entry is by way of the roof itself.
And still, from the floor below, nobody stirred.
You're off the track! he told himself violently. Danvers Locke doesn't know anything about this. Forget those notions that went through your head in the shock of seeing him! Forget it!
Pushing down both dusty leaves of the landing window, Holden stepped on the sill and put his head outside. The walls of the two buildings, black and scabrous brick, were not more than a couple of feet apart. Most windows in the house next door seemed either blind or boarded up. A mildewy smell drifted up from the ground some forty feet below.
He climbed to the outer sill of the window, his back to the house next door. With first one foot and then another on the joined sashes, he drew himself up still higher with one hand inside the window.
His right hand crept up to find the low stone coping round the roof above. Even at full stretch his fingers were still eighteen inches below the roof. Got to do a balancing act on these window sashes, and jump for it.
E-easy, now!
A bus rumbled in the street From the comer of his eye, through the vertical opening between these two buildings as between high canyon walls, he could see far away the glitter of motorcars. Holding himself by a fingertip balance with his left hand now outside the window, he let go and jumped.
He was off balance, but his right hand caught and gripped. His left hand caught and gripped. With both knees drawn up, with the edge of one shoe wedged into the inch-wide projection of the window top, he swung himself up to the roof and landed on his feet like a cat.
The sun dazzle smote his eyes. It was a second or two before he realized that his own apparition, shooting up out of nowhere, had caught the attention of two startled workmen on the adjoining roof behind him.
The workmen were carrying between them a very long and heavy wooden signboard inscribed with the black-and-gold inscription, Bobbington of Bath. Their heads stared over it like heads over a fence. The mouth of one was open, and that mouth was about to say. 'Oi!'
