He knew the Druze family very well; they lived in his village and had done so for hundreds of years. He himself had baptized Alice Mary Druze and Annie Emily Druze, and several other members of the Druze family which he thought it was necessary to enumerate by their full names (it had necessitated long researches in ancient registers). The Druze family had for generations farmed some 40 acres of poor land on the edge of Dartmoor. They were “a wild family with a bad history,” and here the reverend gentleman, who was also something of a scientist, branched away from the main track to a discourse upon heredity which would have done credit to a Lombroso.
Old father Druze was a lunatic and had died mad; his grandfather had committed suicide (there was a record in the parish registry and a note that he had been buried at the crossroads, in the proper manner for such as take their lives). Druze’s grandmother had also a history of sorts. The clergyman remembered her as a “respectable woman,” though inclined to gaiety, and he even felt it necessary to retail a hundred-year-old piece of scandal, something that had happened at Widdicombe Fair.
Alice was illiterate; he had extracted a note of this fact from the register of the church school. Annie, on the other hand, was a diligent scholar and “showed surprising proficiency in the study of the so-called dead languages,” so that she “speedily secured a respectable situation with a haberdasher in Exeter, a Mr. Watson. She was a Godfearing young woman, a communicant, and eventually married a well-to-do farmer in the neighbourhood of Torquay.” The farmer’s name Leslie jotted down on her pad.
The third of the daughters, Martha, was of an “exemplary character, though of no great educational attainments.” About her the clergyman was very explicit, for it was he who had obtained her a post, first as stillroom maid at a Plymouth hospital, and afterwards, on his recommendation, as a probationary nurse. It was believed that she went to South Africa and “married a prosperous carpenter.”
When Leslie had traced Druze to that little Devonshire village, and wrote, with no great hope, to the vicar, she hardly expected so voluminous and conscientious a record of the family history; for he even sent photographs of tombstones which marked the departed Druzes of the eighteenth century!
If she had only read this before, she thought, she could not have been shocked by the discovery that “Arthur Druze” was a woman; for apparently there was no male member in that family, except the semi-lunatic father and a remote uncle who for some reason wasn’t called Druze at all. She read through carefully, took down an atlas and a gazetteer from her bookshelf, and finally locked letter and data in the drawer. Her work was by no means finished for the night, though she was dropping with weariness. She had a number of letters to write. Before she had left the office, Mr. Coldwell had given her the names and addresses of a dozen people who would be helpful to her in the search she was making.
At eleven o’clock they phoned from Scotland Yard to tell her that there was no news of Elizabeth. Mrs. Inglethorne, confronted as she was with a long term of imprisonment, possibly of penal servitude, refused any information about the child, except that she had gone to “her aunt’s.”
Lucretia brought her coffee. The girl had an irritating trick of expressing her disapproval by audible tut-tuts, and twice did she tut-tut into the room and out again. At last she extinguished all the lights in the room save the table lamp.
“You’ve got to go to bed, miss,” she said firmly. “I’ll have you on my hands if I’m not careful. And what about this young girl?”
Leslie rose stiffly from her desk, gathered the letters together and stamped them.
“She is not coming tonight,” she said. “Post these, Lucretia. I’ll wait for you to return and then you can go to bed.”
She heard the door open and guessed, by the cold draught that swept up the stairs, that Lucretia had followed her usual practice of leaving the door ajar whilst she went to the nearest pillar-box, which was some distance from the flat.
It was part of the night’s routine that Lucretia should take the letters; almost a ritual that Leslie should stand in the open doorway of her sitting-room until she heard the girl return.
The maid could not have been gone half a minute before the street door below closed softly. She heard the gentle thud of it.
“Is that you, Lucretia?” she called down into the dark hall.
There was no reply.
Her flesh crept, for no reason that she could understand; a cold shiver went down her spine. Leslie Maughan was not a nervous girl. Her duty and association with Coldwell had taken her into many uncomfortable situations, and unless it was because she was very tired, there was no particular reason for nervousness. But her sensation was something more than the unease which comes to the strongest nerves when they are left alone in a house. It was a premonition, a warning, indeed a certain knowledge that there was somebody in the hall below who should not be there.
She went back into the room, closed the door quietly and slipped in a bolt she had had fitted. She switched on the lights that Lucretia had extinguished, and, going to the window, pulled the curtains apart and lifted the sash. Charing Cross Road was fairly well crowded with people. It was a clear night and a
