“Why, bless me, it’s Mrs. Inglethorne!”
“Yes, it’s Mrs. Inglethorne,” repeated the woman bitterly. “And well you ought to know, considering the trouble you police have brought on me. My old man being as innocent as a babe unborn—and our lodger as nice a young man as ever drew the breath of life.”
She peered at Peter in the reflection from the policeman’s light; he saw a bloated red face, a loose mouth, and eyes of singular smallness. She was short and stout, and wore a red flannel dressing-gown, though apparently she had not disrobed for the night.
“I can’t take you unless you’ve got money,” she said. “I’ve been done before.”
Peter skinned a pound from the roll and showed it to her.
“All right, come in,” she said ungraciously.
Stopping only to thank the policeman for his offices, Peter followed her into the narrow, evil-smelling passage, and the door closed behind him.
Fate had played its supreme joke on Peter Dawlish when it had led him to the unsavoury home of Mrs. Inglethorne.
She struck a match, lit a smelly little oil-lamp, and preceded him up a steep, short flight of stairs to the floor above.
“Here’s the room,” she said, and he followed her into the front and the best bedroom in the house.
To his surprise it was fairly well furnished; the bed was a new one, the walls had been lately papered, the two cheap engravings which constituted the pictorial embellishment of the apartment were in good taste.
“This was my lodger’s room; he furnished it himself,” said Mrs. Inglethorne rapidly. “As nice a man as ever drew the breath of life.” She pronounced the last sentence so quickly that it almost seemed to be one word.
“Has he left you?”
She glanced at him suspiciously, as though she thought that he was already informed as to the lodger’s fate.
“He’s got five for busting a house up at Blackheath. My old man got seven, and an honester man there never was.”
A grim jest this, thought Peter Dawlish, that he, newly from that drab and drear establishment on Dartmoor, should be offered the vacant bedroom of one who had taken his place, was probably in the very cell in B Ward he had occupied.
“Pay in advance—eight shillings. I’ll give you the change tomorrow.” Mrs. Inglethorne held out her hand. In the light of the lamp she was even more unprepossessing than Peter had thought.
He gathered from certain evidence that prohibition would find no vigorous supporter in her; she took the money he gave her, and, setting down the lamp, opened a chest, and extracted two new sheets. Evidently, thought Peter, as he watched the process of bed-making, the burglar lodger was fastidious in the matter of comfort; the sheets were linen. He discovered later that the pillows were of down, and that the bed itself was a luxurious article purchased at great cost in Tottenham Court Road.
“He liked everything of the best,” said Mrs. Inglethorne, pausing in her labours to extol the absent tenant.
She went out soon after, leaving behind her a faint odour of spirituous liquor, and he undressed slowly by the light of the lamp, preparing for the first good night’s sleep he had had in a week.
The bed was soft—too soft. Although he was desperately tired, he tossed from side to side in a vain endeavour to sleep. It must have been two hours before he dozed, and then he woke.
It was a shrill, thin cry that woke him, and he sat up in bed listening. It came again, from somewhere downstairs. It was a cat, he thought, no human voice was capable of such an attenuation of sound.
Again the cry. He got out of bed, walked to the door, opened it, and bent his head, listening. And then the hair of his head rose. It was a child’s sobs he heard, and then a voice.
“I want my daddy! I want my daddy!”
He heard Mrs. Inglethorne’s growling voice, as if she had been wakened from her sleep.
“Shut up, blast you! If I get up to you I’ll break your neck!”
And then the voices ceased, and Peter went back to bed. But it was not until the sound of closing doors in the street told him that the early workers were abroad that he fell into a troubled sleep, disturbed by dreams of a child who cried and moaned all the time: “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!”
V
“104, Severall Street,
“Lambeth.“Dear Miss Maughan,
“I have lodgings at the above address, and, in spite of the neighbourhood, they are very comfortable, though my landlady is certainly the most unprepossessing female. There are six children in the house, ranging from a few months to a little girl of eight years. So, whatever are her faults, Mrs. Inglethorne (who drinks gin and has the fiery face of a Betsey Prig) has served her country most prolifically. I am buying some new clothes and hope to report in a few days that I am riding upward on a tide of prosperity. …”
Leslie Maughan had the letter on the following afternoon when she came back from her office.
What Mr. Coldwell called “The Dawlish Case,” but which she thought about under quite another title, was completely occupying the girl’s mind, sleeping and waking. It was her first big case, in the sense that never before had the wheels of investigation moved of her own volition.
There had been more spectacular events with which she had been associated. She had helped Coldwell in the Kent Tunnel murder; it was her quick mind which had first grasped the fact that the principal informant of the police knew too much about the tragedy for one who had not participated in the crime. She it was who, searching the contents of a prisoner’s pocket, had found the stain of indelible ink upon a silver coin, and had built upon that slender clue the theory which led to the arrest of the Flack Gang, and the
