XXI
River House
Thalia went straight back to the office and found Derrick Yale sitting in his room reading through a heap of unanswered correspondence.
“Is that the key? Thank you. Put it down there,” he said. “I am afraid you will have to answer most of these yourself. The majority of them are from foolish young people who wish to be trained as private detectives. You will find a form reply, and you can sign the answers yourself. And will you tell this lady,” he handed a letter across to her, “that I am so busy now that I cannot undertake any further commissions?”
He took up the key from the table and held it for a second on his hand.
“You saw Mr. Parr?”
She laughed.
“You’re almost terrifying, Mr. Yale. I did see Mr. Parr, but how did you know?”
He shook his head smilingly.
“It is really very simple, and I should take no credit for my gift,” he said, “any more than you take credit for your good looks and your predisposition to—shall I say ‘take things as you find them’?”
She did not answer at once, then:
“I am a reformed character.”
“I believe you will reform in time. You interest me,” said Yale, and then, after a pause, “immensely!” And with a jerk of his head he dismissed her.
She was in the midst of her work and her typewriter was clacking furiously when he appeared at the door of his room.
“Will you try to get Mr. Parr on the telephone?” he said. “You will find his number on the register.”
Mr. Parr was not in his office when she called, but half an hour later she reached him, and switched through the wire to the next room.
“Is that you, Parr?”
She heard his voice through the door, which was left ajar.
“I am going to Beardmore’s river property to make a search. I have an idea that Brabazon may be hiding there! … After lunch; all right. Will you be here at half-past two?”
Thalia Drummond listened and made a shorthand note on her blotting-pad.
At half-past two Parr called. She did not see him, for there was a direct entrance to Yale’s room from the corridor without, but she heard the rumble of his voice, and presently they went out.
She waited until their footsteps had died away, then she took a telegraph form, and addressing it to Johnson, 23, Mildred Street, City, she wrote:
Derrick Yale has gone to search Beardmore’s riverside house.
Thalia Drummond was nothing if not dutiful.
The house stood upon a little wharf, and was a picture of desolation and neglect. The stone foundation of the wharf was in decay, the parapet broken, the yard a wilderness of weed; rank grasses and nettles formed almost an impenetrable barrier to their progress after they had opened the gate which led from the mean east-end street in which the wharfage was cited.
The house itself might at one time have been picturesque, but now, with its broken lower windows, its weather-stained woodwork and discoloured walls, it was a pitiable piece of architectural wreckage.
At one end was a big, gaunt, stone store, built flush with the wharf’s edge, and apparently communicating with the house. An air-raid during the war had demolished one corner of the wall, and robbed it of a few slates which remained, leaving the skeleton of rotting roof ribs nakedly bare to inspection.
“A cheerful place,” said Yale, as he opened the door. “It is not the sort of setting in which one could imagine the elegant Brabazon, is it?”
The passageway was dusty. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and the house was silent and lifeless. They made a rapid tour through the rooms, without, however, discovering any sign of the fugitive.
“There is a garret here,” said Yale, pointing to a flight of steps that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling of the upper floor.
He ran up the steps, pushed open the flap and disappeared. Parr heard him walking along and presently he came down.
“Nothing there,” he said as he slammed the trapdoor in its place.
“I never expected that you would find anything,” said Parr as he led the way out of the house.
They crossed the weed-grown path to the outer gate, and from a garret window a white-faced man watched them through the dusty glass; a man with a week’s growth of beard, whom even his most intimate friends would never have recognised as Mr. Brabazon, the well-known banker.