Anne had once, to her extreme discomfort, spent a Christmas holiday in a sporting household in the West of England, where, Sundays apart, non-hunting days were shooting days, and vice versa. She could not ride and had a violent dislike for shooting. Moreover, if while she was there the rain ever stopped for a single moment during the hours of daylight, it must have been when she was not looking. In consequence, while she had succeeded in forgetting most of that disastrous holiday, and in living down what could not be forgotten, one impression remained ineffaceable. It was the memory of long afternoons in the drawing-room, watching the rain splash against the windows, listening to the click of her hostess’s knitting needles as they inexorably compiled yet another pair of sensible shooting-stockings, waiting for tea until the men came in.
She had an absurd sensation of being back in Devonshire just now, as she lay curled up on a sofa, trying to read a book. Despite the fact that there was no fire in the grate and that outside was full daylight instead of the gloom of a winter afternoon, she could not rid herself of the feeling that she was once more “waiting for the men to come in” from the day’s sport, and that at all costs, tea must be kept for them. They might be in at any moment now, their silly white breeches splashed all over with mud, and with a sickly certainty she foresaw that Johnny would be still utterly absorbed in that ghastly Bendish girl, discussing saddle-sores and overreaches, eternally, eternally, and never once noticing . . .
“Damn! Am I going quite off my head?” she said to herself, and sat up on the sofa. It is humiliating to find oneself so vividly remembering what has been so firmly forgotten. She was alone in the house, her mother having gone out soon after lunch. There was not the smallest reason to suppose that Stephen would be home before dinner, if then, and Martin might not choose to come back at all. Detection—if this absurd amateur business could be called that—didn’t keep fixed hours like pheasant shooting or fox hunting, and it was ridiculous to imagine that anything worth speaking of could be done in an afternoon.
At all events, it was time to think of getting herself tea. She got up, and as she did so, noticed lying on the floor the paper recording the results of her investigations in the telephone directory. She picked it up, and reflected somewhat guiltily that it was not very much to show for an afternoon’s work. She put it away with the list of suspects compiled at the end of the conference and then stood quite still for a full half-minute, thinking. That half-minute was the sum total of time given that day to the consideration of the matter which she had told Martin needed thinking out. When it had elapsed, the fact was still there, unchanged—perfectly obvious, perfectly inexplicable—a solid little chunk of reality lodged uncomfortably in her mind. And she remained as perversely determined as ever that for the present it should be shared by nobody else.
She was finishing her first cup of tea when a loud pounding on the door knocker made her start. So the men were back already, or rather one of them. Martin, of course. Stephen had his latchkey, and any other visitor would have rung the bell in the ordinary way. Martin preferred the knocker. Merely to put his finger on a bell push was too tame a method of announcing his presence. She ran to the door to let him in.
“Any tea left? Good!” were his first words, as he plumped down on the sofa beside her.
As she poured him out a cup, it was all that she could do not to ask him whether they had had a good day and where they had killed.
“You’re back earlier than I expected,” she said. “Have you—did you manage to find out anything, Martin?”
Martin popped a small scone into his mouth. He looked thoroughly self-satisfied.
“Depends what you mean by finding-out,” he said with his mouth full. He chewed, swallowed, and then observed, “I’ve seen Mr. Jones, anyway.”
“What?”
“Rather. Charming old gent with a beard. He was very friendly. Wanted me to stay to tea. But I thought I’d rather come back here.”
“Martin, what on earth are you talking about?”
He laughed expansively.
“It was really rather fun,” he said, “and as easy as falling off a log. I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I beetled off to Parbury Gardens, and it turned out to be one of these big blocks of flats, with the names of all the tenants written up in the hall below, just to make things easy for the chap who tells the maid he’s an old friend of the family and then when he’s inside tries to insure your life—you know the sort of thing. Well, I looked at the list of names and the first thing that my eagle eye spotted was that the name opposite No. 15 wasn’t Jones at all. It was Peabody—Mrs. Elizabeth Peabody. I always think there’s something a bit bogus about any woman who calls herself Mrs. Elizabeth anybody, but that doesn’t necessarily prove that she goes about in hotels under the name of Jones. Still, one never could tell, and there was always an odd chance that the Peabody might have let the place to Jones and nobody had bothered to alter the name. So I decided on a spot of finesse. I rang a bell marked ‘Caretaker,’ and after a longish time a small boy appeared. I asked him whether Mr. Jones lived at No. 15. He looked at me rather as if I was half-witted and said that Mrs. Peabody lived there. He didn’t actually ask me whether I could read, but that was what he seemed to imply. I said, oh, I was sorry, but I thought Mr. Jones lived there. Then he seemed to take pity on my innocence and volunteered that a Mr. Jones lived at No. 34, on another staircase. I said Thank you so much and he said Not at all and that was that.”
He devoted himself for a few moments to his tea. Anne poured him out a second cup and murmured, “Yes, darling?”
“Well,” Martin went on, vigorously wiping crumbs off his face with his handkerchief, “there were still two possibilities, of course, (a) Mrs. Peabody might have been staying at Pendlebury as Mrs. Jones. (b) The detective fellow might have made a mistake in the number, and our Jones might be the one living at No. 34. (a) looked rather a stinker. I was loitering on the doorstep, wondering how I could lead the conversation round to Peabody, after all my interest so far had been in Jones, when I had a bit of luck. The boy was just going to slink back into his cubbyhole, after pointing out the way to No. 34, when a delivery van stopped at the door, and a fellow got out with a heavy-looking parcel in his arms. And it was addressed, very plainly, to Mrs. Peabody. Just for something to say, I remarked to the boy, ‘Ah! A parcel for Mrs. Peabody!’ It must have sounded a pretty imbecile remark to make, but it turned up trumps. He said, ‘That’ll be one of her books.’ I said, ‘It looks a jolly heavy book,’ or words to that effect. Then he said, ‘She has to have special sorts of books,’ and suddenly I saw the light. ‘Braille?’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Books for blind people, you know.’ Just to make sure, I asked him, ‘Is Mrs. Peabody blind?’ and he said: “That’s right. It’s a shame, ain’t it?’ Well, I thought after that, I needn’t worry about point (a) any more, so out I went.”
“Darling, that was frightfully clever of you!”
“Well, it was luck as much as anything, of course,” said Martin modestly.
He waited for her to contradict him, but with feminine perverseness she merely said: “Well, that left point (b). He turned out to be the old gentleman who asked you to stay to tea, I suppose?”
“Yes. It was all rather amusing. What happened was this . . .”
But Anne seemed indisposed to listen to further details.
“He wasn’t even ‘M. Jones’ at all, I suppose?” she interrupted.
“As a matter of fact, he was T. P. M. Jones. I thought there was just a chance he might be the right chap, so I—”
“Anyhow, he obviously wasn’t. And I don’t expect Elderson would have made a mistake about the number.”
“Oh, yes. So what we are left with is that the address in the book was a fake, and for all we know, the name, too. It’s odd, though.”
“I don’t see anything odd about it. Just what I expected. Simply a couple out on the loose—”
“I know. That isn’t what I meant. I’ve never done it, so I’m not sure, but do couples out on the loose usually put real addresses in the hotel book?”
“Of course not, silly! They put in a fake address, just as this one did.”
“But that’s just the point. It was a real address—not their own, of course, but somebody else’s. It seems such a funny thing to do. Or perhaps I’m wrong. Tell me, Martin—you’ve had lots of experience. What used you to put in hotel registers?”
Martin had gone a warm pink.
“Oh, I dunno,” he mumbled. “Just anything that came into my head, I suppose.”
If Anne noticed his embarrassment, she was cruelly unfeeling about it.
“Anything that came into your head,” she repeated. “Yes. I suppose that is what one would do. And the anything might be either a purely imaginary address or a real one. But if it was a real one, there must have been something to make it come into one’s head—some association, don’t you see, that made one think of that particular address rather than any other. So I can’t help feeling that we haven’t disposed of the Joneses just by finding out that they didn’t live at 15 Parbury Gardens. If they didn’t, one of them, at all events, probably had some reason for writing it down in the hotel register rather than—than Plane Street, Hampstead, for instance.”
“This is all a bit deep for me,” Martin observed.
“Oh, no, it isn’t. You’re quite sharp, really, and you know it.”
“Anyhow, I don’t see that we can do any more about the Joneses.”
“Neither do I. But it’s unsatisfactory, because of course we haven’t really eliminated them at all.”
“Personally, I don’t think they were ever worth troubling about. They were simply a couple out—”
“Yes, Martin darling, you’ve said that already. You do repeat yourself a lot, you know.”
“Sorry, Annie. Let’s forget them. Do you know, I can think of quite a lot of things I haven’t repeated nearly enough lately.”
And Martin proceeded to repeat them, with a warmth and variety that did him credit.
At the end of a quarter of an hour, a key was heard in the latch of the front door.
“That’ll be Mother,” said Anne, disengaging herself. “Martin, you’ve made my hair in a foul mess. And do go and wipe that powder off your coat.”
But it was not Mrs. Dickinson, but Stephen. He came into the room looking bored and tired. From experience, Anne knew better than to start firing off questions at a man who had obviously not “had a good day.”
“Would you like some tea?” she asked. “It won’t take a minute to make a fresh pot.”
Stephen shook his head.
“Is there any whisky in the house, d’you think?” he asked.
“There’s half a decanter in the dining-room, if you haven’t drunk it already. It’s all there is, because I know Mother said she wasn’t going to order any more till—”
“Till we touch the insurance money, I suppose. What a hope!”
“Well, why don’t you order in some for yourself? After all, you’re the only one who drinks it.”
“Oh, yes, I can order it, all right. Only my credit happens to be a bit low just now.”
“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” remarked Martin unexpectedly. “But will they come when you do call for them? I say! That really is rather neat, don’t you think?”
Stephen gave him a disgusted look and went out of the room. He returned a moment or two later with a full glass. Sitting down, he drank off about half of it in silence. Then he said abruptly:
“Well, I’ve got rid of Davitt, anyhow.”
“Got rid of him?” Anne asked.
“Eliminated him, expunged him, wiped him out. Do I make myself clear?”
“Don’t say that, Stevie!” Martin protested. “Davitt, the man of mystery, my own selection! I can’t bear to see him go!”
Stephen took no notice of him.
“So far as I can see the man is perfectly genuine and has no more to do with Father’s death than—than the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
He emptied his glass, and put it down beside him.
“How about Jones?” he said, turning to Martin.
Martin was opening his mouth to repeat his history, when Anne cut in.
“But Stephen, aren’t you going to tell us about Davitt?”
“I’ve told you. He’s a wash-out.”
“But you can’t leave it just like that. What did you do? How did you find out? You must tell us something!”
Stephen frowned in a bored manner which, in Anne’s experienced eyes, concealed an excited awareness of the interest he was creating.
“Well, if you won’t take my word for it,” he said grudgingly, “here goes.”
He leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and addressed the picture-rail on the opposite side of the room.
“Hawk Street is a depressing place. How anybody can contrive to live there I can’t imagine. It’s tucked away behind Garmoyle Street, and that’s tucked away behind Theobald’s Road. It’s all little two-and three-storied dirty brick houses with aspidistras and lace curtains in the ground floor windows. You know the sort of thing. Practically every house lets apartments, and a good proportion of the lodgers are foreigners, I should say—students, refugees, and so forth.”
“Funny that a chap living in such a poor-class neighbourhood could afford to stay at Pendlebury,” said Martin.
Stephen nodded.
“Just what occurred to me,” he said. “Well, I found No. 42, and it was just like all the others, only perhaps a little dingier. It had the usual card in the window, impinging on the vegetation, to say that there were apartments, or at any rate an apartment, to let. That made it easy, of course. I rang the bell and an amiable old body came to the door. She was what I believe is known as ‘motherly’—not my type, exactly, but I shouldn’t be surprised if she was the answer to the lodger’s prayer. I shall never know for certain, unfortunately. You see, I thought if the worst came to the worst, and Master Davitt seemed worth while investigating, I could take a room in the house and try a little sleuthing at close quarters. I asked the old dame if I could see her apartment and in I went. The room was pretty grisly, but I suppose it might have been worse. It was perfectly clean, anyway. Then I asked her if she hadn’t a front room to let—the one she showed me looked out on the catrun at the back. No, the front room was let. I didn’t ask her outright who it was let to, but she was the nice, gossipy sort of landlady—quite a good type for the learner-detective to practice on—and in next to no time she told me that the room had been occupied these last two years by a steady young man of the name of Davitt. From then on she proceeded to disgorge without any prompting all that she knew of the said steady young man. Which was quite a lot.”
Stephen paused dramatically. His air of boredom had disappeared and he was evidently enjoying his own recital.
“Disregarding inessential details, what it amounted to was this: He is a clerk in a big City firm—she is a bit vague about it, but they appear to be stockbrokers. He is all alone in the world, except for an aged mother in Glasgow, whom he goes to see every Christmas. Very quiet, very shy, no girl friends, and pays his rent regular. (That, of course, was the most important thing about him. There was a sort of Go Thou And Do Likewise look in her eyes when she said it that impressed me a lot.) The only thing that distresses her about him is that he never goes out anywhere in the evenings, but sits indoors all the time writing. And that is the clue to the whole of the great Davitt mystery. He’s by way of being an author of genius. Whether his genius runs to epic poetry or plays or soap advertisements, she couldn’t tell me. Personally, I think a man must have genius of a remarkable order if he can find anything to write about, sitting in a front room in Hawk Street and never poking his nose outside to see what the world is like. But that’s by the way. Of course, his genius isn’t recognized as yet, not completely recognized, I should say, because a month or two ago he did achieve a bit of recognition. He won a prize. Naturally, my thoughts turned at once to Football Pools, but it was nothing so banal. It was a prize offered by a literary magazine—quite a lot of money, she told me. I imagine it was ten or twenty pounds. And what did I think he did with it? By this time, I could have told her but it seemed more satisfactory to let her tell me.”
“You mean he spent his prize money on staying at Pendlebury?” Anne asked.
“No less. It seems a pretty footling thing to do, doesn’t it? His only use for what he had won by his writing, apparently, was to go away somewhere quiet and do yet more writing. He had a week or so of holiday due to him about then, and he couldn’t do anything better with it than that. Rather pathetic, I thought. It seemed to me that he might just as well have saved his cash and stopped at Hawk Street all the time, but I forgot to mention among the charms of the neighbourhood that it’s a favourite by-pass for heavy stuff going to and from the big railway stations, and I quite appreciate what she meant by his wanting somewhere quiet. So there he stayed, right up to the last minute of the last day of his holiday, and came back, I was not surprised to hear, looking as pale and tired as when he started.”
“But why did he have to take all his meals in his room?” Anne asked.
“Same thing. He didn’t want to be disturbed in his writing, or the meditations incidental to his writing. Time and again Mrs. Thing—I never found out her name—had to drag him downstairs by the scruff of his neck to his supper, he was that taken up by his work, you wouldn’t believe. I suppose to have his meals—even Pendlebury meals—brought up to his room three times a day must have been the seventh heaven to him. Poor devil! I don’t expect he’s ever heard of cacoethes scribendi, but he’s got it pretty badly.”
He ended his story, and then added after a pause: “Well, that’s all there is to it. I shook the dust of Hawk Street off my feet as soon as I could, once I’d got what I wanted. I said I’d let the old woman know about the back room. She’ll have to wait a long time before she catches me down there again, though.”
Nobody said anything for a moment or two, and then Martin said: “You didn’t get hold of the name of the stockbrokers, I think you said?”
“No. It didn’t seem to matter much.”
“I was just wondering. Suppose it turned out that Vanning was a stockbroker—”
“Well—” Stephen began, with a shrug that showed what he thought of the suggestion.
“He’s not,” Anne put in. “At any rate, if he is, he doesn’t live in London, or anywhere near it.”
“Lots of stockbrokers live at Brighton,” Martin said.
“My good Martin,” said Stephen, exasperated, “if you want to pursue this ridiculous hare, why don’t you get hold of a list of members of the Stock Exchange and find out for yourself?”
“Quite right, Steve, I hadn’t thought of that. Silly of me. Apologies and all that.”
“And now,” said Stephen, turning to his sister, “who is Vanning, what is he? I hope the Directory has been useful.”
“It all depends what you call useful,” said Anne. “This is what it says.”
She fetched the little document which she had compiled and handed it to him. Stephen read:
Vanning, Alfred & Co., Ltd., Fruit Mrchts., Covt Gdn. W.C.2.
Vanning, Alfred E., Osokosi, Watling Way, Strthm.
Vanning, Chas. C., Grngrcr, 42 Victoria Ave., S.W.16.
Vanning, K. S. T., Barrister-at-Law, 2 Nisi Prius Row, Temple, E.C.4.
Vanning, K. S. T., 46 Exeter Mans., S.W.11.
Vanning, Mrs., 94b Grosvenor Sq., W.1.
Vanning, Peter, Artist, 3 Hogarth Studios, Kingfisher Walk, S.W.3.
Vanning, Thos. B., Grngrcr, 85 Brick St., N.1.
Vanning, Waldron & Smith, Chtrd Acctnts, 14 Gossip Lane, E.C.3.
“Quite amusing in its way,” he remarked. “Observe how Alfred E., no doubt the big noise of the firm at Covent Garden, establishes his younglings in the retail trade to the north and south of him! Wait a bit, though—perhaps they’re only nephews. He seeks higher things for his son, and sends him to the Bar.”
“Where does the artist come in?” said Anne.
“Oh, he’s obviously a sport from the parent stock, who sickened of the sight of whole oranges in crates, and went off to paint half ones on dishes instead. But I can’t quite work in Mrs. Vanning. Grosvenor Square clashes rather with Osokosi, don’t you think? Perhaps—”
“The point is, it seems to me,” said Martin heavily, “does any of this help us to find J. S. Vanning?”
“Not in the least. I suppose we could solemnly go through everyone on the list and try to find if any of them is harboring a son or brother with the initials J. S., but it seems a waste of time when we’ve got another line on him through Parsons.”
“Just what I thought. Well, the upshot of the day’s work is, we’ve knocked Davitt off the list—subject to what I said about stockbrokers—and Vanning and Jones are left much where we found ’em.”
“Jones!” said Stephen. “I forgot. You haven’t told me about him yet.”
And Martin did tell him, with all and more than all the elaboration with which he had already told Anne. Soon the two men were comparing notes on their experiences and arguing like old hands as to the merits of different methods of detective inquiry. To Anne, sitting bored and tired between them, it was all very reminiscent of after-tea conversation in Devonshire. . . . “What you want to do, old man, is to drive the Long Wood first, and put three guns forward, with a stop in the hollow.”—“It’s no good, my dear chap, with the wind in the South—they simply break back over the boundary fence every time.”—“’f course, if you’d only taken my advice last year and cut another ride through the larch plantation. . . .” If it hadn’t been for the consciousness of that nagging little fact, ever present at the back of her mind, she would have gone fast asleep.