He read the name and superscription again, and his brows met.
“Oh yes—really—yes, if you wish.”
He was, of a sudden, awkward and uncomfortable. The girl was quick to recognize the change in his manner and tone.
“I’m afraid I’m rather a scarecrow, but you won’t mind that?”
“No,” she said, and held out her hand.
He hesitated a second, then took it in his. She felt the hardness of the palm, and winced at the thought of all that these callosities signified. In another second she had joined the waiting Coldwell. Peter Dawlish watched them until they were out of sight, and then, with a little grimace, turned and walked slowly towards Blackfriars.
“I knew about the smallness of the world,” said Coldwell, swinging his furled umbrella, “but I had no idea that applied to London. Peter! It’s years since I saw him last. He was rather a weed five years ago.”
“Do you think he really is a forger?”
“A jury of his fellow-countrymen convicted him,” said Mr. Coldwell cautiously, “and juries are generally right. After all, he needed the money; his father was an old skinflint, and you cannot run a hectic establishment and escort pretty ladies to New York on two hundred and fifty pounds per annum. He was a fool; if he hadn’t taken that three months’ holiday the forgery would never have been discovered.”
“Who was she?” Leslie asked; she felt that this question was called for.
“I don’t know; the police cherchezed la femme—forgive my mongrel French—but they never ran her to earth. Peter said it was a chorus-girl from the Paris Opera House. He wasn’t particularly proud of it.”
The girl sighed.
“Women are hell,” she said profanely.
“Both places,” suggested Mr. Coldwell, and twirled his grey moustache. “Both places!”
Near the dark entrance of Scotland Yard he stopped.
“Now,” he said, standing squarely before her, “perhaps you will cease being mysterious, and tell me why you are so frantically interested in Peter Dawlish that you have talked Peter Dawlish for the past three days?”
She looked up at him steadily from under the lowered brim of her hat.
“Because I know just why Peter Dawlish is going to kill and whom he is going to kill,” she said.
“Druze—a child would guess that!” scoffed the detective. “And he is going to kill him because he thinks Druze’s evidence sent him to gaol.”
She was smiling—a broad smile of conscious triumph.
“Wrong!” she said. “If Druze dies, it will be because he doesn’t love children!”
Mr. Coldwell could only gape at her.
IV
Mr. Coldwell peered down into the girl’s face.
“Let me get this right,” he said slowly. “Druze will be killed—if he is killed—because he does not like children?”
Leslie Maughan nodded.
“I know you hate mysteries—everybody in Scotland Yard does,” she said; “and one day I will tell you just what I mean. Do you remember last August you gave me a month’s vacation?”
Chief Inspector Coldwell remembered that very well.
“I went to Cumberland just to loaf around,” she said. “I was most anxious to pretend that there wasn’t such a place in the world as Scotland Yard. But I’ve got that prowling, inquisitive spirit that would have made me the first woman inspector of the C.I.D. if the Commissioners were not such stuffy, old-fashioned gentlemen. One day I was loafing through a little village, when I found something which brought me eventually to this conclusion, that Druze doesn’t like children. And one day, when he discovers the fact, Peter Dawlish will kill him for it!”
“Mysteriouser and mysteriouser!” groaned Coldwell. “You’re probably chasing a boojum. It is the fate of all enthusiastic young officers—not that you’re an officer.”
Leslie Maughan had started her police career as a very junior stenographer at Scotland Yard. Her father had been that famous Assistant-Commissioner Maughan whose exploits have formed the basis for so many stories of police work, and he had left his daughter with an income which put her above the necessity of working for her living. But police investigation was in her blood, and she had graduated through successive stages, until the authorities, reluctant to admit that any woman had an executive position at Police Headquarters, admitted her to the designation of “assistant” to the Chief of the Big Four.
“She’s brilliant—there’s no other word for her,” he had told the Chief Commissioner. “And although I don’t think it’s much of a woman’s job, there never was a woman who was better fitted to hold down a high position at the Yard.”
“What are her chief qualifications?” asked the Commissioner, slightly amused.
“She thinks quickly and she’s lucky,” was the comprehensive reply.
This question of luck exercised the mind of Leslie as she walked home to her flat in the Charing Cross Road. The very fact that that apartment was hers was strong support for the theory of luck. She had taken a long lease of a floor above a cinematograph renter’s at a time when flats were going begging. She might have drawn double the rent from a sub-tenant; but the place was central, comparatively cheap, and she withstood all temptations to change her abode at a profit.
A side door led to the apartments, and she had hardly closed the door behind her when a voice hailed her from the top of the stairs.
“That you, Miss Maughan?”
“That’s me,” said Leslie.
She hung her coat in the narrow hall and went upstairs to the girl who was waiting on the landing. Lucretia Brown, her one servant, was a very tall, broad-shouldered girl, with a round and not unpleasant face. She stood now with her hands on her hips, surveying her mistress.
“I thought you were—” she began.
“You thought I’d been murdered and thrown into the river,” said Leslie good-humouredly. “As you always think if I am not back on the tick.”
“I don’t trust London,” said Lucretia.
It was her real name, chosen by a
