“I should try a bit of mincing, all the same,” Mr. Tuke said dryly. “It would be wiser, as your husband said.” He took out his watch with an air of closing the subject. “Dear me, I shall make you late. Where is your meeting?”
The commonplace question brought her back to earth.
“The meeting? . . . At our headquarters, in the High Street.”
“Let me drive you there. It is the least I can do, after imperilling your reputation for punctuality.”
Her cheeks still flushed, she was breathing a little fast. Harvey opened the front door, and her glance went past him to the sleek black Delage drawn up at the gate. It was easy to read her thoughts, and she gave the car’s owner a smile which he afterwards described to his wife as approaching the arch. Mrs. Tuke retorted that if the poor woman had known him better she would have been rightly suspicious of his unusual politeness. In happy ignorance, Mrs. Shearsby began to apply a touch of powder in front of a mirror in the hall. As they left the house she glanced quickly at the neighbouring windows. Even in wartime, trained observers in Burnside Avenue were no doubt watching the piistress of ‘ Aylwynstowe 5 depart in style.
CHAPTER XVI
THE attention of Mr. Tuke, as in his unaccustomed role of the squire of dames he ceremoniously opened the garden gate, was momentarily elsewhere. A little way down Burnside Avenue another car was drawn up at the kerb. It had not been there when he arrived. It had a familiar look: it was uncommonly like the rather battered Morris last seen outside The Bushel and Strike in Stocking some three hours ago. It was blue, and he remembered the registration letters. Through the windscreen he could see two figures in the front seat.
As the Delage began to move, so did this other car. On the way to the High Street, while Mrs. Shearsby spent much of her time scanning the pavements, once or twice waving to acquaintances, Harvey was watching, in the driving mirror, the blue Morris following behind. He had no doubt now as to its identity. It had not followed him to the Vicarage, nor when he took the road to Stocking Corner and so to Bedford. It must have come direct, probably some time later. It had been driven to Burnside Avenue, and these subsequent proceedings implied that the tall man in the check jacket and his tough-looking companion were interested in the tenants of ‘Aylwynstowe.’ It was natural to wonder whether their presence in Stocking, of all places, did not fall into some pattern. But what pattern? Harvey, to his annoyance, could make nothing of it.
The Delage, the Morris still in its wake, crossed the graceful bridge over the Ouse, and Lilian Shearsby indicated the W.V.S. headquarters in the High Street. The arrival could not have been more happily timed, for three women in uniform, unloading bundles from a small van, paused to stare in the most gratifying way. The passenger prolonged the sensation by voluble thanks, until Mr. Tuke, watching in the mirror the Morris in its turn drawing up a hundred yards in rear, felt that the need for good manners was past, and reached across her to open the car door. As Mrs. Shearsby got out she hailed her colleagues, still standing staring among their bundles.
“Hullo, Muriel! Sorry if I’m a little late, Mrs. Blake.”
“Here are the men’s clothes at last,” said the woman called Muriel, looking at Mr. Tuke with frank curiosity. “Though they seem to be mostly youths’ again. Help us hump these in, and we’ll get the rest out.”
“And they must be carefully counted this time,” Mrs. Blake said, with the air of asserting herself.
Raising his cap about an inch to Lilian Shearsby’s final wave and smile, Harvey let in his clutch and drove slowly down the street. The blue Morris was still at the kerb when he turned round the first corner and again pulled up. He slid out from the driving seat and walked back to the corner. The High Street was crowded and busy, and there were a surprising number of cars, hooting their way up and down or parked in accordance with municipal ordinances. Unaware of the stringency and peculiarity of these, Harvey had fortunately drawn up the Delage on the correct side of the road for that day of the week. Glancing back down the High Street, under cover of a group of women walking past his turning, he found the scene in which he was interested unchanged. Mrs. Mortimer Shearsby and her companions were carrying bundles from the van across the pavement in a mannish and energetic manner, and the Morris car, its occupants still visible in the front seat, remained stationary a hundred yards beyond.
Harvey took further stock of the situation. On the far side of the High Street, in the opposite direction and only twenty yards away, stood a telephone cabinet. As another party of shoppers straggled past his turning he dodged across through the traffic and shut himself in the glass box. As he asked for Whitehall 1212, he could still see the distant Morris through the window.
Goins rattled, the connection was made, Button “A” was pushed, and after a brief passage with intermediaries the high voice of Mr. Hubert St. John Wray came thinly over the line. It sounded rather peevish.
“Well?”
“Tuke here,” said Harvey, grinning fiendishly at the instrument.
“So they tell me. Where is ‘here’?”
“Bedford.”
“So you have gone there? Well, what is it?”
“I want you to do something, Wray. Highest priority, please. Ring up the police here and ask them to send an intelligent and inconspicuous plainclothes officer, at once, with an inconspicuous car or motor-bike, to the telephone box on the east side of the High Street, a hundred yards north of the W.V.S. headquarters. Got that? The number is 06632. Hurry,
