“She was going to drop her disguise when she got to the United States,” Leslie concluded, and with this view Mr. Coldwell agreed.
At last the second box was emptied, but again there was nothing that could afford the slightest clue.
“There’s a suitcase; we only discovered it this morning. It was in the parcels office at Waterloo,” said Coldwell.
He opened a cupboard and took out a crocodile-skin travelling grip and put it on the table. It was locked, but suitcase locks respond to almost any key, and at the second attempt it was opened. Here the girl found such articles as she would expect an ocean traveller to carry: sponge-bag, soap, a small jewel-case containing a gold watch and guard, a diamond-encircled wristwatch, and a small diamond bar brooch. A silk dressing-gown, a pair of slippers, and a few odds and ends completed the contents.
“Nothing here,” said Leslie.
She ran her hand round the silken lining of the case, and suddenly her fingers stopped. She felt a thin oblong package under the silk. Reaching out she took Coldwell’s scissors from his desk and cut through the silk. Inserting her fingers, she drew forth an envelope. It was closed and bore no inscription. She tore off the end and drew out an oblong document. It was a marriage certificate, performed apparently by the Rev. H. Hermitz, of Elfield, Connecticut.
“Good Lord!” said the startled Coldwell, reading over her shoulder.
For a moment the words swam before the eyes of the girl, and then out of the blur they appeared with staggering clearness. It was a document certifying that Peter James Dawlish had been joined in holy matrimony with Jane Winifred Hood—and Hood was Lady Raytham’s maiden name!
She read it again, then put the document into the inspector’s hands.
“Then they were married,” she said evenly. “That was the thing I wasn’t sure about.”
XII
Peter Dawlish found it very difficult to concentrate his mind upon his work, and although his task was purely mechanical he stopped from time to time and allowed his thoughts to wander; and inevitably they wandered towards that grey building on the Thames Embankment, and a room somewhere in its dark interior where a girl was sitting. He could see her face very clearly. He sighed and took up his pen again, and cursed himself for the folly of dreams.
Far better for him, he thought, that, if he could not concentrate upon his work, he let his mind go roving westwards to the bleak moor and those ugly prison buildings that are set in a fold of it; to the carved sneer on the stone arch under which he had walked, heavy-footed, towards the golden-bearded warder who stood by the iron gates and counted the prisoners in and out; to the long, smelly “ward,” and the vault-like cells with their gaily coloured blankets; to the stretch of bog-land from which the convict workers returned soaked to the skin to their lukewarm dinners; to the barnlike laundry, the silent punishment cells, and the cracked asphalt where the prisoners walked in a ring on Sunday mornings. An ugly memory, but at least one of accomplishment, and substantially past. Much better than letting your fancies go straying towards the straight figure of a girl with violet eyes and red lips that curved everlastingly in laughter.
He had reached the S’s in the list, the Simpsons and Sims and Sinclairs. It was ill-paid work, his employer being a bookmaker of dubious probity; but, so far as he was concerned, he had been paid something in advance, and he had been promised another job to follow.
Very resolutely he had dismissed from his mind all thought of his mother. Even in Dartmoor he had excluded her from his thoughts. If he remembered at all, it was by the letter that had come to him on the day of his conviction. His father had died that week; he had been sinking for months, and had never been conscious of his son’s shame. That had been Peter’s one comfort, until he received his mother’s letter, telling him that in a lucid hour of consciousness old Donald Dawlish had struck his name from his will. So Peter went down from the dock with the bitterness of death in his heart—beside that knowledge of his father’s last act, the seven years’ sentence was as nothing.
At six o’clock, Elizabeth brought him his tea. She was unusually solemn and silent, and when he attempted to start a little conversation with her, she was so embarrassed that he did not attempt to pursue this course.
He went out for an hour, strolling through the Lambeth Cut amidst a medley of hawkers’ stalls with their glaring acetylene lights. He had some comfort from this contact with his fellows. As he returned, he was opening the door of the house with a key which the woman had given him that day, when he remembered that he had not seen Mrs. Inglethorne since the visitation of the police.
He went upstairs, lit the oil-lamp, and, putting a paper bag full of biscuits which he had bought on the table before him, he settled down to his task. Eight o’clock was striking when he heard the squeaking of motorcar brakes as it stopped before the door, and, going to the window, he pulled aside the shade and looked down. It was too dark to distinguish the visitor, but his heart leapt at the thought that it might be Leslie Maughan, and he opened the door and waited. This time he heard Mrs. Inglethorne’s voice, and after a while she called up to him sourly.
“A lady to see you, Mr. Dawlish.”
“Will you ask her to come up, please?”
He went back into the room and waited. The step on the stairs was slower and heavier than Leslie’s. And then there came through the open doorway the last woman in the world he expected to see—his mother.
Her cold eyes went from him to the littered table.
“Fine
