XX
It seemed to Peter Dawlish that he had been unconscious for an eternity when he turned over on his back with a groan and felt carefully towards his damaged head. His face was wet and sticky, and when he essayed to rise to his feet, it seemed that the whole of the building was oscillating violently. Presently, however, he was up, keeping to the wall for support, and, grasping the handle of the door, he jerked it open and was instantly gripped with hands of steel.
“Hullo, who are you?” asked a stern voice.
“I don’t know—Dawlish—something happened. I saw a light and came over—and then the door opened and I don’t remember much more.”
The detective recognized him.
“The door opened?” he said anxiously. “Was somebody in the flat?”
Peter nodded and winced.
“Give me a drink,” he said, and the detective guided him by the arm and led him upstairs to Leslie’s room.
A glass of ice-cold water revived him and he was able to tell a coherent story of his experience.
“It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes ago,” said the detective. “I went round to see my opposite number and I’ll swear I wasn’t gone for more than that time.”
Suddenly he stooped to the floor and took up something. It was a loose native slipper that had slipped from the foot of Leslie’s captor in the hurry of departure. The light he had shown when he searched for this was the light that Peter saw.
“Just wait; I’ll call Mr. Coldwell.”
Inspector Coldwell was at dinner when the message came.
“Hang on, I’ll come down,” he said. “I’ve had a wire from Miss Maughan that she’s going to Plymouth, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
He was in the flat twenty minutes later. By this time Peter’s wound had been roughly dressed, and he had washed the blood from his face. Save for the throb of the wound, he was little the worse for his experience.
“They coshed you with a rubber club; it is rather a good method,” said Coldwell callously.
He looked round the room with pursed lips and a frown.
“It doesn’t follow that because those birds were here, she was here,” he said, and glanced at his watch. “Too early for Miss Maughan to have arrived at Plymouth. Just wait; I want to make sure.”
He drove to the telegraph office from which the message had been sent, and was fortunate to find the postmaster just leaving his office.
“I want to see the telegram that was sent from here about five o’clock tonight addressed to me.”
“You want to see the original telegram, I suppose? That won’t be difficult.”
It was more difficult than he supposed, and half an hour’s precious time was wasted before the pencilled form was produced. Coldwell had only to glance at the writing to know that it was not in Leslie’s hand. Yet a woman had written it; that was obvious from the characteristic writing.
He returned to the flat and sent the detective in a cab to Scotland Yard and Peter employed this interval to tell him of what he had found in Mrs. Inglethorne’s box.
“I pretty well guessed that,” said Coldwell. “So did Leslie—Miss Maughan. ‘The son’ meant nothing. This unfortunate lady had intended keeping the child with her if it were a girl, and that was not the wish of the gang who were bleeding her. They told her she had a son. But I’m going to make sure about that before we go any farther. Somehow I’m not so scared about Leslie Maughan as I ought to be perhaps. She’s got a sort of gun.”
A quarter of an hour after, his cab drew up before the gloomy doors of Holloway Prison, and after a strict scrutiny of his credentials he was admitted, and conducted to one of the main halls of the gaol, where the remand prisoners were housed. The chief wardress opened the door and went in. Presently she came out and beckoned him into the cell.
Mrs. Inglethorne was sitting, a scowl on her face, her big raw hands clasped before her. She knew Coldwell, and lifted her lip in a grin of rage.
“Don’t you come in here!” she said shrilly. “I’m not going to talk to you. If you want to find that kid, you go and find her! And that’ll take you some time, I’ll bet!”
“Listen!” Coldwell had a very direct way with criminals. “Whether you’ll get a nine2 or a lagging depends on the answer you give me, Mrs. Inglethorne. There’s just a chance that you may get something worse than a lagging.”
She scowled up at him.
“What do you mean?”
Very deliberately he sketched a portion of her life; told her where she had lived, and how long she had stayed in her various places of abode. She made no comment or correction, looking down at her hands, and only when he paused did she meet his eyes.
“Is that all?” she asked insolently.
“Not quite all. You have been engaged in baby farming for the past twenty years. In 1916, in the month of July, you received from one called Arthur Druze a baby boy of a few days old. Where is that child?”
“You’d better find out,” she said.
“It is for you to find out,” he said, in that hard, metallic voice which he adopted on occasions. “You have to prove to me that that child is alive, or there’s another charge against you.”
“Eh?” She was startled. The big mouth trembled. “You can’t charge me—”
“I’ll charge you with murder, and I’ll dig up the garden of every house you’ve occupied in the past six years to find evidence.”
Mrs. Inglethorne’s many-chinned jaw dropped; her eyes stared wildly, and in their depths Coldwell read the very terror of death.
“I’ve done nothing—like that!” she almost screamed.
“You were Martha’s servant, weren’t you?”
She nodded dumbly, and then, throwing herself on the couch, she writhed like a woman demented. And in her dementia she broke the habit of a lifetime and told
