He lifted the little figure without difficulty, and reached out his hand to turn on the light. At that moment the prisoner recovered himself, and with amazing strength twisted round to face the detective. Coldwell realized that he had in his hands something with the ferocity and suppleness of a wild cat, something that growled and clawed and kicked so that not a limb of him was still. The unexpectedness of that furious onslaught threw him for a second off his balance. He drove out with his right, but as though he could see in the dark, the assassin dodged, and in another second he was free and had flown through the open door. Coldwell followed, but too late. With one leap the little man crashed through sash and pane and dropped unharmed to the street below. A policeman made a dive at him, but he ducked, flew across the road, and disappeared down a court by the side of a theatre towards St. Martin’s Lane.
“Didn’t even see him,” said Coldwell bitterly, when he called the girl in from Lucretia’s room. The detective’s face was scratched, his collar torn. “It was rather like tackling a young tiger.”
Leslie had turned on the lights and they saw the extent of the damage. He must have dived for the lower sash head first, for the upper window was untouched. There was not a scrap of glass remaining, and the cross supports of wood were smashed to splinters.
“I’ve heard of such things being done,” said Coldwell, “and I’ve seen them done—on the stage. But never in real life and through three-quarter inch moulding.”
Leslie was still dressed. She had been waiting in the maid’s room, a pistol on her lap, till the sound of the struggle brought her out, just too late. Mr. Coldwell disappeared into the bedroom and returned with the ugly and curious-shaped knife which the man had dropped.
“Eastern,” he said, as he felt the edge gingerly. “Malayan, I guess.”
He also had been sitting on a chair immediately to the right of the wardrobe, but until he made an examination later he had not known from what place his assailant had come.
“I thought he’d come back through the window,” he mused. “That’s one of the curiosities of human nature, Leslie; jot it down in your notebook. We always look under things for hidden criminals—we never look over; and yet the cleverest fellow that ever got away from the police was a steeplejack who hid for a fortnight at the top of a smoke stack. Ever wear garters, Leslie?”
She laughed softly.
“That sounds almost indelicate to me,” she said. “No, I won’t go very deeply into the question, but I don’t wear garters.”
He was quite serious.
“Wish you would—just to oblige me. One garter, anyhow. I meant to give it to you today.”
He drew something out of his pocket, and she gasped.
“You really wish me to wear this?”
He nodded.
“A little heavy, but I wish you would,” he said.
He insisted upon staying the night, and to make doubly sure, had a policeman put on duty in the hall below. Early as the hour was when she went out to her bath, she found him up and dressed, studying the morning newspaper.
“Wonderful how you miss things when you’re away from the Yard for a few hours,” he drawled.
She turned back from the open door of the bathroom; when Mr. Coldwell drawled there was something sensational to come.
“What have we missed?” she asked. It was not entirely curiosity which made her ask.
He looked at the newspaper again and took off his glasses.
“Peter Dawlish was arrested last night.”
She gazed at him in horror and amazement.
“Arrested? On what charge?”
“Threatening to murder Princess Anita Bellini,” was the staggering reply.
XIII
Mrs. Greta Gurden seldom permitted herself the luxury of brooding upon her injuries. She was no philosopher, and it was sheer necessity which made her disregard the irritations, petty and great, of life, and concentrate her mind upon pleasant things. But she found herself helpless with a leg that throbbed and throbbed, and the memory of Anita Bellini’s insolence rankled as sorely. She was propped up in bed with a heap of papers on her lap, and though there was no immediate need for the work she had taken in hand, and, in truth, sought it only as a relief from boredom, she permitted herself the illusion that she was the victim of a taskmistress who was not satisfied with her normal and heavy exactions, but must needs add to her offence this tormentation of a sick woman.
Old letters, old bills, a receipt or two, a few ancient telegrams about nothing in particular, dozens of letters dealing earnestly with forgotten accounts, an interminable correspondence between Anita and a house agent—she turned the pages one by one, sorting the sheep from the goats.
Presently she came to an old letter typewritten on plain paper—Anita, like her dependent, used a small portable typewriter for years. The letter was unfinished; halfway through the Princess had changed her mind, or probably substituted this for another, and had tossed the rejected scrap aside, to be gathered to the heap which had accumulated and which was now being sorted.
She read the letter through as far as it went; she was sourly amused. Anita must have been in a careless mood when she threw this away. The old instinct of service told her that it ought to be destroyed at once; she gripped the paper to tear it, thought better of her impulse, and began to consider certain possibilities. To say that she felt bitterly against Anita Bellini at that moment would be to grade her emotion charitably. She was “getting old,” was she? She had lost her looks and was unlikely to get a job in the chorus. Anita had taken it for granted that she would be forever satisfied with the humiliating position of companion. Capri was to be a kind of bonus.
The Princess was a woman of temperament, sometimes feverishly elated,
