Phase
VI
Jane Brown
Two or three days after Lomas received an invitation to lunch in Wimpole Street.
“I owe you one,” Reggie wrote. “I owe myself one. I want to forget the high tea of Alwynstow. Do you remember the pickles? And the bacon? What had that pig been doing? A neurasthenic, I fear. A student of the Nematoda.”
So naturally when Lomas came his first question was what may Nematoda be.
“Never mind,” Reggie sighed. “It’s a painful subject. A disgusting subject. Same like what we make our living by. They are among the criminals of animal life. Real bad eggs. A sad world, Lomas, old thing. Let’s forget all about crime.”
They did. For an hour and a half. At the end of which Lomas said dreamily, “You’re a remarkable fellow, Fortune. I don’t know how you can retain any brain. You do yourself so well. Yes, most seductive habit of life. I meant to say something when I came. What was it? I believe you have talked of everything else in creation. Ah, yes, did you ever hear of the Kimball case? Well, I think we have combed it all out.”
“Have you, though?” Reggie sat up.
“Yes. We’ve been dealing with a stockbroker or two. I’m really afraid there was a little bullying. We hinted that there might be developments about a certain murder case. And two of them began to talk. We’ve got Rand-Mason’s past.”
“Oh, that!” Reggie said. “Quite obvious, wasn’t it? Kimball meant to use this coal scheme to ruin Sandford. He sent Mason, who had probably been his go-between in other financial things, to give the brokers the tip. It was also Rand-Mason who paid the money into Sandford’s account. Remember the stout man in glasses. Then probably he struck for better pay or they had a row. Anyway, he threatened to give the show away. Kimball couldn’t trust him any more. Daren’t trust him. So he wiped Rand-Mason out. Is that right, sir?”
“I’m not omniscient myself. But certainly Rand-Mason was the man who put the brokers on to it. There is not much doubt he went to Sandford’s bank. By the way, Kimball had several big sticks. His valet says he liked weight.”
“I dare say. Had Kimball any papers?”
“Not a line that throws light on this. As you know everything, I’d like to hear why Kimball tried this murder plan last instead of first?”
“How can you be so unkind, Lomas? I keep telling you I don’t know anything. I come and shout it in your ear. I don’t know the thing that really matters. Who was Kimball? Who is Sandford? What is he that Kimball couldn’t bear him? I said that at the beginning. I say it now in italics. Good Lord, you can hear Kimball laughing at us!”
“Don’t be uncanny.”
“Well, I’m not really sure he is laughing at us. Wait a while. But why did Kimball try murder last instead of first? Oh, that’s easy. He was an epicure in hate! He didn’t want mere blood. He wanted the beggar to suffer—to be ruined, not just dead. Hence he went to break Sandford. Then Rand-Mason complicated the affair. Kimball had a murder on his back and I scared him. He thought we had enough to convict him or that we’d get it. He said to himself, ‘I’m for it, anyway. I’ll have to die. Well, why shouldn’t my death hang Sandford?’ And he played that last card.”
“I suppose so,” Lomas agreed. “In a way it’s all quite rational, isn’t it?”
“I always said it would be. Grant that it was worth anything to ruin Sandford and Kimball’s a most efficient fellow. But why was it worth anything to ruin Sandford?”
“Ah, God knows,” said Lomas gravely.
“Yes. I wonder if Jane Brown does.” He handed Lomas a letter.
“Dear Sir,—Your advertisement for information about Mrs. Ellen Edith Sandford. I have some which is at your service if you can satisfy me why you want it.—Yours truly, Jane Brown.”
“I should say Jane is a character,” said Lomas.
“Yes, she allured me. I told her who I was and she said she’d come to tea.”
She kept her appointment. Reggie found himself facing a large young woman. In her construction nature had been very happy. She had decorated its work with admirable art. She was physically in the grand style, but she had a merry eye, and her clothes were not only charming but of a sophisticated elegance.
Reggie, there is no doubt, stared at her for a moment and a half. “Miss—Jane—Brown,” he said slowly.
“I haven’t brought my godfathers and godmothers, Mr. Fortune,” she smiled. “But I am Jane Brown really. I always felt I couldn’t live up to it. I see you know me.”
“If seeing were knowing, I should know Miss Joan Amber very well. It’s delightful to be able to thank her for the real Rosalind—all the Rosalind there is.”
She made him a curtsy. “I’m lucky. I didn’t think you’d be like this. I expected an old man with glasses and—”
“This,” said Reggie maliciously—“this is the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department—Mr. Lomas.”
Lomas let his eyeglass fall. “I also am young enough to go to the theatre. I shall go on being young so long as Miss Amber is acting.”
“May I sit down?” said she pathetically. “You’re rather overwhelming. I thought it would be terrific and severe and suspicious. But you know you are bland—simply bland.”
“This is your fault, Lomas,” said Reggie severely. “I have often been called flippant and even futile, but never bland before—never bland.”
“It is a tribute to your maturity, my dear Fortune.”
Her golden eyes sent a glance at Reggie. “Mature!” she said. “I suppose you are real? Oh, let’s be serious. I am Jane Brown, you know. Amber—of course I had to have another name for the stage—Amber because of my hair.” She touched it.
“And your eyes,” said Reggie.
“Never mind,” said she, with another glance, but the gaiety had gone out of them. “My father was a doctor in Liverpool. He is worth twenty thousand of me, and he never made enough to live on. A poor middle-class practice, the work wore him out by the time he was fifty, and now he’s an invalid in Devonshire. He can’t walk upstairs even—heart, you know. And he simply pines to work. Oh, I know this doesn’t matter to you, but I can’t forget it. If only people were paid what they’re worth! I beg your pardon. This isn’t businesslike. Well, he was the doctor the Kimball family went to. Old Mr. Kimball was a clerk, and the son, the man who was drowned the other day, began like that too. The old people died about the time young Mr. Kimball and his sister grew up. She kept house for her brother. He began as a broker and got on. In a way—my father always says that—in a way he was devoted to her. Nothing he could pay for was too good for her. He always wanted her with him. But he made awful demands on her. She mustn’t have any interests of her own. She mustn’t make any friends. Like some men are with their wives, you know. Horrible, isn’t it?” She turned upon Reggie.
“Common form of selfishness. Passing into mania. Not only male, you know. Some mothers are like that.”
“Yes, I know they are. But it’s worst with men and their wives.”
“The wife can’t grow up. The children can,” Reggie agreed.
“It is exactly that,” said she eagerly. “You understand. Oh, well, this isn’t businesslike either. Ellen Kimball fell in love. He was just an ordinary sort of man, a clerk of some sort—Sandford was his name. Horace Kimball was furious. My father says Sandford was nothing in particular. There was no special reason why she should marry him or why she shouldn’t. He was insignificant.”
“Heredity.” Reggie nodded to Lomas.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your father understood men. Miss Amber.”
“Indeed he does. Of course Horace Kimball did the absurd thing, said she mustn’t marry, abused Sandford, and so on, and of course that made her marry. Unfortunately—this really seems to be the only thing against her—unfortunately she was married in a sly, secret sort of way. She didn’t tell her brother she’d made up her mind, or when the marriage was to be or anything. She simply slunk out of his house and left him to find out. I suppose he had terrified her, poor thing, or his bullying made her sullen,” said Miss Amber. “It was rather feeble of her. Only one hates to blame her. Her brother was furious. My father says that he never saw such a strange case of a man holding down a passionate rage. He thought at one time that Horace Kimball would have gone mad. The thing seemed like an obsession. Doesn’t it seem paltry? A man wild with temper because he was jealous of his sister marrying!”
“Most jealousy is paltry.” Lomas shrugged.
“Jealous of his sister marrying,” Reggie repeated. “Yes, I dare say seven men in ten are. Common human emotion. Commonest in the form of mothers hating their sons’ wives, Miss Amber. Still, men do their bit. Fathers proverbially object to daughters marrying. Brothers—well, there’s quite a lot of folklore about brothers killing their sisters’ lovers. Yes, common human emotion.”
“I think jealousy is simply loathsome,” said Miss Amber, with a quiver of her admirable nose. “Well, it’s fair to say Horace Kimball seemed to get over the worst of his. He just lost himself in his business, my father says. He wouldn’t see his sister again, not even when her child was born (it was a boy). He simply swept her out of his life. Even when Sandford got into trouble, he wouldn’t hear of helping her. My father quarrelled with him over that. He said to my father, ‘She’s made her bed, and they can all die in it.’ Oh, I know he’s dead, and one oughtn’t to say things. But I call that simply devilish.”
“Yes, I believe in the devil too,” said Reggie. “Devilish! You’re exactly right, Miss Amber. Sandford got into trouble, did he? What was that?”
“It was some scandal about his business. A breach of trust in some way. His employers didn’t prosecute, but they dismissed him in disgrace. My father doesn’t remember the details. It was giving away some business secrets.”
Reggie looked at Lomas. “That’s very interesting,” he said.
“Interesting! Poor people, it was misery for them. Sandford was ruined. My father says he never really tried to make a fresh start. He just died because he didn’t want to go on living. And his wife broke her heart over it. She seemed like a woman frightened out of her senses, my father says. She got it into her head that it was all her brother’s fault, that he had planned the whole thing. It was absurd, of course, but can you wonder?”
“I don’t wonder,” said Reggie.
“She was deadly afraid of her brother. She made up her mind that he would be the death of her baby too. So she ran away from Liverpool and hid in a little village in North Wales, Llanfairfechan, and nobody knew where she had gone. She had a little money of her own, and her husband had been well insured. She had just enough, and she lived quite alone in a cottage off the road to the mountains, and there she died. My father says her son did rather well. He got scholarships to Oxford, and my father fancies he went into the Civil Service, but he lost sight of him after the mother died.”
“I’m infinitely obliged to you. Miss Amber,” said Reggie, and rang for tea.
“Oh, no, don’t! I always thought that poor woman’s story was too miserably sad. I don’t know why you wanted it—no, no, I’m not asking—but if it could set anything right, or do anybody any good, it seems somehow to make it better. It wouldn’t be so uselessly cruel.”
“Over the past the gods themselves have no power,” Reggie said. “We can’t help her, poor soul. I dare say it’s something to her to know that her son is safe and making good—in spite of all the devilry.”
“Something to her—of course it is!” said Miss Amber, and looked divine.
“There’s that,” said Reggie, watching her.
“You won’t mind my saying professionally that you have been very useful. Miss Amber,” said Lomas. “You have cleared up what was a very tiresome mystery. I was being bothered. That’s a serious disturbance of the machinery of Empire.” He succeeded, as he desired, in setting the conversation to a lighter tune. He made Miss Amber’s eyes again merry. He did not prevent Reggie from looking at her. “You must promise me another opportunity to thank you,” he said, as she was going.
“Dear me, I thought you had been doing nothing else,” said she demurely, and looked at the table and made a face. “Oh, Mr. Fortune, what, what a tea! I leave all my reputation behind me. Men hate to see women eat, don’t they? But do men always make teas like this?”
“I’ve a simple mind. I live the simple life.”
She looked at him fairly. “You said simple. Do you know how I feel? I feel as if I hadn’t a secret left all my own,” and she swept away. He was a long time gone letting her out.
“And that’s that,” Reggie said when he came back.
“Really?” Lomas was dim behind cigar smoke.
“All quite natural now, isn’t it?”
“My dear fellow, you knew it all and you knew it right. You told me so. Kamerad, kamerad.”
Reggie lit his pipe. “Jealously, hate, mania. He broke the man the girl married. Curious that affair, wasn’t it? Even the great criminal, he runs in a groove, he keeps to one kind of crime. The same dodge for the son that he used for the father. Then either he lost track of the mother or he preferred to hurt her through the son. He was an epicure in his little pleasures. The son came along. I dare say Kimball took that department because the son was in it. And then he was ready to smash everything for the sake of his hate—damage his own career, do a filthy murder, die himself, if he could torture his sister’s child. Yes. The devil is with power, Lomas.”
“I fancy you annoy him a little, my dear Fortune. But how can you believe in the devil? You have just seen—her.”
Reggie smiled. “She is a woman, isn’t she?”
“I think you might act on that theory. When is it to be?”
“Lomas, old thing, you’re not only bland, you’re obvious. Which is much worse.”