At half-past six that evening, Mr. Arnold Serle entered a room that he was beginning to hate. His fat face was twisted in an unpleasant grin. He limped a little, as a result of a chance bullet through the fleshy part of his leg, and his left hand was bandaged. He had not escaped scatheless from the affair at the White House.
About that affair he believed that he had a grievance.
Everything had worked as well as he had expected. The ruse to get Kenyon to Godalming had succeeded. But for that aeroplane move, Kenyon must have been finished. As it was, the big man was as dangerous as ever.
And then the man who controlled the destiny of Arnold Serle had also turned—or tried to turn—the tables. He had ordered the wholesale shooting, and had endangered Serle’s life. It was only luck that had saved the cricketer, who had been so rattled at this treachery that for a few minutes after the escape of the rescue party in the second plane, he had actually felt a bitter satisfaction.
And then he had remembered that Kenyon was still at large.
It was his sense of grievance that was uppermost as he entered the room. He was still more annoyed when he found that he would have to wait. He smoked three cigarettes, one after the other, and the scowl on his face deepened.
The door opened, suddenly, and the great man entered.
He looked, if possible, more distinguished than ever, as he offered Serle his hand—a rare condescension—and congratulated him on his escape that morning.
‘You hardly contributed towards it,’ said Serle, stiffly.
The other smiled, and clipped the end off a cigar. There was a hardness in his smile—a frostiness.
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I was reluctantly compelled to endanger you, and another very good friend.’
Serle looked puzzled.
‘I mean Wyett.’
Serle still looked puzzled.
‘But only this morning,’ he snapped, ‘Wyett was making it as difficult as he could for me...’
‘You obviously didn’t handle him properly,’ said the other, ‘or else you failed to understand him. He arrived here a short while ago.’
‘You mean—he escaped from Kenyon?’
‘He did indeed. And it seems safe to say that he did so at a very opportune moment. But that is by the way. Kenyon and his men were at Glinsea, on the Essex coast, at three o’clock this afternoon. I have already telephoned instructions to the local police, and had the Chief Constable confirm my orders, but I’m not sure they will be enforced. Kenyon has a remarkable way of banging his head against a brick wall and wearing through to the other side. So make sure his men cannot move.’
‘Supposing they’ve gone?’ asked Serle.
‘In that case,’ said the distinguished-looking man, ‘you must find them.’
At half-past seven that evening, Mary Randall, nearly distraught with anxiety and with something that seemed almost too terrible to believe, heard the key of the door of her room turn. She stared towards the door as it slowly opened.
Early that morning she had been at her father’s hotel. She had left with him after a messenger had called, purporting to bring a message from Mick. She had feared the worst from the first, but her father had refused to believe that there was anything suspicious about the message.
And that was all she knew. She had been drugged while in the car. When she recovered consciousness, she had found herself in this room. She had no idea where it was, for the only window looked over an unfamiliar back yard. The crowded houses and the dingy roofs suggested it was London.
Her anxiety might not have been so acute but for the fact that Arnold Serle had visited her.
Serle had been smarting from the affair of the morning, although she knew nothing about that. He told her, brutally, where Mick Randall was, how Mick’s Irene had suffered and would suffer. Arnold Serle, in fact, had talked more than was wise. And if ever Mary Randall had been frightened, she was frightened then. She had seen Wyett, under the drug’s influence; and now she knew that Mick was under it. And, possibly, her father.
And—Jim Kenyon.
A dozen times that weary afternoon she wished she had taken Jim’s advice more literally. He had warned her, not once but a hundred times, about going out alone. But she had visited her father that morning, hardly realising the need for telling the Chesters where and why she was going.
If she had acted on Jim’s advice, she would have been safe. It was not her own danger that worried her; she guessed that her capture would be used to trap Jim. And at that time he needed complete freedom of thought and mind.
But it had happened. She could almost see the smile on his face, the shrug of his square shoulders, and the casual:
‘The only thing to do, once you’re in, is to get out.’
He would say that, or something like it, and he would never stop trying to find a way out.
But even if she was free, even if she had still been at the Chesters’ home, was it possible that Jim could have done anything to stop Serle?
She didn’t know, but in her heart she doubted it. She knew, since Serle had talked to her, just what the New Age Party was. She knew, too, that her father had been recalled from Paris because he was not amenable to the suggestions made by Serle’s leaders.
Serle’s words, and his brutal laugh, seemed to echo about the room.
‘He’ll pay for it, my dear—they’ll all pay for it. And Kenyon more than ever—when I get him.’
In those last four words had been the one grain of hope for the girl. ‘When I get him.’ At least Jim was still free.
She was very near prostration when the door opened, at half-past seven.
‘You!’ she exclaimed. ‘Thank goodness...’
Colonel Martin Wyett entered the room, and behind him she saw the Rev. Denbigh Morse. Just for a moment she thought that it meant rescue.
And then she saw that Wyett was looking sheepish, and that Denbigh Morse was avoiding her eyes. She watched them as they entered the room and closed the door behind them.
‘We just came to tell you,’ said Wyett, ‘that you will be all right, my dear. We will look after you, and your father.’
‘Daddy?’ said Mary, and her arms went out, supplicatingly. ‘You’ll look after him, won’t you?’
‘We’ll do everything we possibly can,’ promised Wyett.
Mary was suddenly very still. She stared at the two men, who, until a few weeks before, she had known only as two lovable, rather old-fashioned relatives of the highest integrity. She saw something on their faces that had never been there before.
‘You’re not’—she faltered, her lips quivering—’you’re not on—on Serle’s side, are you?’
‘You’ve nothing to worry about,’ said Wyett, as though repeating a lesson.
‘Nothing,’ echoed Denbigh Morse.
Mary stared at them, horror in her eyes, dread on her face.
‘Dear God!’ she said brokenly. ‘Men like you...!’
The Rev. Denbigh Morse cleared his throat. For a moment he looked more like the old, kindly clergyman whom she had known so well. There was a suspicion of a smile on his lips.
‘It’s not as bad as you think, my dear. After all—a revolutionary change like this—amazing that there will be such little bloodshed.’
‘It’s just that’—Wyett coughed—’it’s just that you and—one or two of your friends—have been unlucky, my dear. It’s the personal issue that’s worrying you. The wider one, the national one, is apt to be forgotten. Try to bear up.’
‘Bear up!‘ Shocked, incredulous, Mary’s voice carried horror and heartbreak. ‘Go! I tell you. Go. Go. I can’t stand it—you—talking like that—agreeing with these—these devils!’
She flung herself on to the bed and lay there, sobbing, as Wyett and Denbigh Morse turned and left the room.
She hardly knew how long she stayed huddled there, shivering and crying. But gradually the heaviness in her heart eased. Dull and inert, she moved at last to the window, staring emptily out. Then she turned to the table.
Something lay on the surface, a small slip of paper that had not been there before the two men had visited her. Even at that distance she recognised the bold hand of the Rev Denbigh Morse.
Breathlessly, she snatched up the note and read:
The room will be unlocked at three o’clock. A car will be waiting outside.