“Mamma? Whose mamma?”
“Your interesting convict’s.”
“Margaret Dawlish?” Leslie opened her eyes in astonishment. “This is the last place I should have expected to see her.”
“She dines here every night,” said Coldwell. “I have a good idea why.”
Leslie looked at Peter’s mother again; the square jaw, the thin lips, the deep eyes, all fulfilled the mental picture she had made of her.
“If you weren’t here, do you know what I should do?” she asked at last.
“Whatever it is, don’t!” said Coldwell apprehensively.
His relationship with Leslie was a curious one. In the old days of Commissioner Maughan he had been the Colonel’s chief assistant; though he was only a sergeant in those days, he was admitted very largely to the confidence of that genius of Scotland Yard, spent long weekends at Sutton Cawley, and had assumed a sort of guardianship towards Colonel Maughan’s motherless child. There never was a time within Leslie’s recollection that Josiah Coldwell had not figured largely in her life. He was one of her father’s executors, the best trusted of all his friends, and it was only natural, when she conceived the idea of adopting police work as a profession, that he should be her sponsor.
It was not until a very long time after she had put the suggestion to him that he agreed. At first he had pooh-poohed, then he had grown solemn, and then mournful; but in the end she had her way.
“If you don’t put me there, Uncle Josiah, I shall go into training as a private detective!”
It only needed this threat to force his capitulation, for private detectives were contemptible figures in the eyes of this regular policeman. For him it was a matter for pride that she had succeeded. Today, if the truth be told, if she had expressed the slightest hint of weariness and a desire to return to the obscurity of what is termed “civilian life,” he would have been thrust in the deeps of gloom.
He did not tell her this in the course of the dinner (she had guessed it easily enough long before), but he did venture to return to a matter which rather worried him. As the band struck up a dance tune and she rose invitingly, he groaned and came to his feet.
“I’ll be awfully glad, Leslie, when you find a young man to dance these infernal jazzes with you. How can you expect the high-class crooks of London to have any respect for a man who dances in public?”
He was over sixty, yet, in truth, no better dancer took the floor that night. But it pleased him to talk of his decrepitude.
“I’m not made right,” said Leslie, as he guided her through the dancers who crowded the floor. “Young men have no appeal for me whatever.”
Mr. Coldwell peered down at her.
“Are you going to be one of those love-is-not-for-me girls?” he asked gloomily. “Somehow I can’t imagine you running a garage of toy poms.”
Leslie’s eyes roved around the room, and presently they rested upon Margaret Dawlish; hard-faced, inflexible, the type of Roman mother who could never forgive the humiliation that Peter had brought upon her. How queer was the average man’s conception of the average woman! The conventional mother, soft, yielding, ready to endure all and forgive all for the sake of her children, was no figment of imagination, but the throw-outs were innumerable. Leslie started to count all the instances she knew, and grew tired of the exercise. She had witnessed, incredible though it might seem, a mother dancing on this very floor whilst her child was dying in a nursing home a few streets away. She knew mothers who could not speak of their daughters without growing incoherent with rage. And this was the fourth instance of a mother who could sweep her only son out of memory, out of existence, for some offence he had committed—not against her, but against society. Margaret Dawlish sat alone at a little table, very upright, very forbidding, and when the maître d’hotel, in the manner of his kind, approached her with a smile, she dismissed him with a few words, and, raising her lorgnette, made an inspection of the dancers.
“That woman is granite,” said Leslie, as the band stopped and they walked back to their table.
“Which? You mean Mrs. Dawlish? Yes, I rather think she is on the hard side. That sort of thing meant a lot to her. She hates this company and this place, but for five years, ever since her son was sent to prison, she has made a point of dining here.”
Leslie nodded.
“A gesture of defiance. Gosh! these respectable people! They dare not leave a room for fear somebody talks behind their backs.”
It was towards eleven o’clock, and Coldwell had summoned the waiter to pay his bill, when a footman came from the vestibule and, bending over, whispered something to him.
“A phone message. I expect it’s from the Embankment,” he said. “Excuse me, Leslie.”
He threaded a way through the dancers on the floor, and was gone ten minutes. When he came back she saw his white eyebrows were met in a frown.
“The Kingston police think they’ve got a line to those infernal motorcar bandits,” he said.
He referred to a gang which was occupying the public attention at that time. Three men who, in hired or stolen motorcars, had been travelling through Surrey, holding up isolated residences at the point of a pistol, and getting away with as much portable property as they could lay their hands upon.
“I’ll see you home,” he said as he paid the bill, “and then I’ll toddle down to Kingston. I wish to Heaven the Kingston police would make their discoveries at a reasonable hour.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’m not a bit sleepy, and it’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht!”
He looked at her dubiously.
“I don’t know that you’re dressed for a motorcar I have phoned for the police car; it will be here in a few minutes.”
She went out into the lobby to put on the woollen
