“Don’t!” she said laconically.
“But I have often wondered why a well-educated girl and a nice girl, as far as I know to the contrary, should prefer the life of a crook to. …”
“To earning £2 or £3 a week and working all day to earn it,” she finished for him; “to living my life in one little room on a top floor in Bloomsbury, waiting my turn every morning for my bath. To being made love to by the assistant manager and sacrificing my immortal soul for a half-a-crown dinner and a bottle of red wine! It is funny, isn’t it! I have had the experience for professional purposes and I don’t like it a bit, Mike.”
She looked at him straight in the eyes. She had dropped her air of flippancy, her slang; the voice that spoke was not to be distinguished from that of any other gentlewoman.
“You see, a woman is differently circumstanced to a man. She wants nice things and her attitude toward life, and indeed the whole of her conduct, depends entirely upon the degree of niceness she requires. Men don’t do things for women for nothing. They lend to their men friends all the money in the world and are grateful if they get it back. They expect nothing more than their money and are surprised when they get it. But if I were a typist in a city office and I borrowed £2 from the assistant manager or from the chief bookkeeper or a fiver from one of the partners, why, Mike, I should be booked for supper on Wednesday. Men want more from women than a quid pro quo; they want two quid pro quo. In return for the £2 I borrowed, I should pay interest well outside the range of the multiplication table. Suppose a man lent you £2 and asked you in exchange, not only to repay the money, but to renounce all your dearest principles for the sake of the loan; if he asked you to betray your friends, where you had been loyal to them, and lie, where you had been truthful; break your word where you had been faithful, be a thief where you had been honest? Would you surrender every reticence, every honourable instinct, every precious faith?”
Mike said nothing. For there was nothing to say. He paid the bill and escorted the girl to a cab.
“I am not going to be sorry for you,” he said; “you are having The Life. One of these days I shall come along and take you; but I shall hate it. Hop in, Kate!”
Kate literally hopped into the waiting taxi, waved her hand in farewell and was gone.
Michael Pretherston stood for fully five minutes on the edge of the pavement, meditating upon what the girl had said. She had struck a responsive note in his soul, for she spoke no more than was the truth, as he knew.
He went, a little sadly, back to headquarters, remembering en route that he had forgotten to write the report. Should he go back to the Yard and compose it from memory or should he return to the unsympathetic atmosphere of Felton House? He decided upon the latter and surprised Lord Flanborough in the act of taking an afternoon nap. Michael was full of apologies and was so unusually respectful that his lordship forgot to be annoyed.
“Moya’s out,” he explained.
“I will endeavour to bear up,” replied Michael, seating himself at his lordship’s desk and preparing to take a note of the circumstances which had led to his lordship’s call for assistance. He finished the report, blotted and folded it and placed the document in his pocket.
“I only want to ask you one or two questions and they concern Kate—or Miss Tenby, as you call her. I’m afraid I gave you a shock this morning.”
“It was certainly a surprise,” admitted Lord Flanborough cautiously; “who is this Kate? We have made a very careful search of the house but nothing is missing so far as we can tell.”
Michael laughed.
“You needn’t worry about that. Kate is not a pilferer. Her real name is Katharine Westhanger; they call her Kate and she is the Colonel’s niece. Her age is eighteen or nineteen, and from a child she has been brought up to regard the world as her oyster. Her mother was a wholesome parson’s daughter, her father was a rascal who was kicked out of the army in ’89 for an offence against the Law of Property. Her maternal grandfather was General Sir Shaun Masserfield, the greatest strategist the British army has ever held—Kate inherits his genius but has not learnt his code. Her father died when she was a child and her uncle, who is a greater scoundrel than her father was—the family on the Westhanger side has a criminal history which goes back at intervals for two hundred years—completed her education. Kate has been brought up to be a thief, but a big thief. She is, I believe, the brains of the biggest criminal organisation in the world. Every member of the gang has been taken, but no evidence has ever been offered against Kate. She plans the big swindles and each one is bigger than the last—but never once have we traced the offence to her door.”
“Why is it that the police—?” began Lord Flanborough.
“The police, my dear Flanborough,” said Michael wearily, “are human beings who have to deal with human beings. They are not angels, nor thought readers, nor are they clairvoyant. The laws of this country are so framed that the criminal has six chances to every one possessed by his enemy. We know Kate was concerned in that big bank smashing exploit which took two million crowns from the treasury of the Bank of Holland. It was Kate who organised the raid upon the London jewellers in June of last year. Kate is the mother of Crime Street.
