XXIII
He took off his old tweed coat and, in spite of her protests, made her put it on to protect her from the clammy cold of the fog. Making her as comfortable as possible on the damp earth, he lit a cigarette and paced meditatively to and fro in short staccato strides, ever and again throwing a thoughtful glance upon the girl.
She lay passive and silent for a while, intent on regaining her strength, and her eyes followed him contentedly. As for Labar, he felt a sense of elation that he had at least got her from the clutches of Larry Hughes, though he chafed to think that he was held from any farther action till the night was out. He had a shrewd idea that when the pursuit proved hopeless things would happen swiftly at the house on the marshes. He could scarcely expect that Larry’s people would calmly await the return of Penelope or himself some time the next day with a posse of police. The only chance was that the fog which seemed likely to confine the girl and himself to the marsh for the night, would also delay any active measures of escape that the others might initiate.
“You are shivering,” said Penelope. “I wish you would take your coat. I feel quite warm. I really don’t need it.”
He smiled down at her. “I am perfectly all right while I move about. You rest yourself for the while. Presently we will move on, although I am afraid we shall get nowhere. Do you happen to have any idea where we are?”
She shook her head. “Beyond the fact that we are on the Romney Marshes I haven’t the faintest idea. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “It looks as if we may have to spend the night in the open. It will be a bit of an ordeal for you, I am afraid.”
The girl gave a little shiver, but she smiled at the same time. “I don’t mind that. At any rate I am out of the hands of Larry Hughes. I think I could stand anything better than the dread of what might have happened.”
He stopped abruptly in his walk, and his face became stern and set. “Did Hughes—has anyone—” He felt some difficulty in framing the question that was in his mind. “Have you been badly treated?”
“Not physically. There have been hints—threats.” She pulled herself to a sitting posture and spread an arm in an expressive gesture. “I have been on the edge of terror and despair for days. Oh, it was worse than anything that you can imagine.”
He came and sat down on the grass beside her. She made no resistance when he caught one of her hands in his own. “Not altogether,” he said. “I think that I can realise something of what you have gone through. Now I want you to tell me—not, if you will allow me to say so, as a police official but as a friend—what has happened since you were taken away from London.”
“As a friend,” she repeated.
“As something more than a friend if you will, Penelope,” he said, and his voice sounded in his own ears as a hoarse whisper. “As a man who would do anything in the world to be more than your friend. It is presumption—I am only a police inspector—you scarcely know me—but if—”
He paused aghast at his own incoherent ineptitude. The girl pulled her hand away from him and sat silent staring into the fog. Labar mentally cursed himself as something worse than an imbecile. How could it be supposed that this girl could have any interest in him in that way? If he had waited?
Penelope made an impetuous movement. He felt the rough sleeve of his old tweed coat about his neck. A cold face was near his own. He flung his arms about the girl and half laughing, half crying, she settled there in passive content. How long they remained thus he never knew. Night was adding a more sombre tinge to the fog, when she gently freed herself.
“I can’t believe it,” he whispered. “You the wife of just an ordinary policeman.”
She put her hand in front of his mouth. “A very extraordinary policeman,” she corrected with a laugh. “I won’t have you call yourself names.”
He bent and kissed her, and then got to his feet. “Shall we move?” he asked. “You will be getting chilled.”
Hand in hand like two children, they strolled leisurely into the night and the fog. Although it was a summer night the cold was bitter. There was no possibility of finding a way out of the marsh till daylight or at least till the fog waned, but even a purposeless tramp was better than catching a cold.
As they walked they talked of many things, but at last the conversation drifted to the abduction of the girl. Although Harry Labar was a lover, he could not forget that he was also a police officer with an object to achieve.
There were many obscure points which he felt that she could make plain, and she spoke without reserve of the events that had brought her into the case. He interrupted seldom, letting her tell the things in her own way until she was finished.
“I must have seemed a brute to you,” he said. “I know now—I was perhaps able to guess a little even then—that you were shielding someone. I thought—God forgive me—that you might even be in love with Larry Hughes. I had found your photograph in his room, and like a mad fool I jumped to conclusions.”
“You weren’t,” she retorted with a faint pressure of his hand. “I can’t reproach you with anything. You had to do your duty and you acted like a chivalrous gentleman. My dear, I felt the meanest creature on earth when you would not lock me up. As for the photograph I haven’t the faintest doubt that he stole it, or perhaps he got it from Mrs. Gertstein. Now there are one or two things I want to ask you, if you will tell me.”
Against all the traditions of the Criminal Investigation Department, Harry Labar allowed himself to be pumped by this slip of a girl until she knew as much as he did of the progress of the case. She shuddered and drew closer to him as he told of the fight at “Maid’s Retreat,” and now and again she elucidated some point that still remained obscure.
“And now,” he said when he had finished his narration, “there still remains something in the way of cross-examination.”
“As long as you are not too ferocious,” she agreed. “What does my lord wish to know? I shall obey the court in every particular. Who is going to question me—the divisional detective inspector of Grape Street or Harry Labar?”
“The divisional detective inspector,” he retorted. “What I am anxious to know is what your attitude may be to Adèle Gertstein now? You have run big risks to protect her. Do you still think that she is worth it?”
She stiffened a fraction. “She was my friend,” she said.
“Is she still your friend?” he asked quietly. “You have said as little as possible even now about her—little that I do not know of my own knowledge. And things being as they are, Penelope, if she is still your friend there is only one thing that I can do.”
“That is?”
“To resign from the service, and find some other profession that will enable me to support a wife.”
Both had come to a halt and she now lifted her grey eyes to his. “I see,” she said. Then after a pause: “You mean that as a police officer you will have to go on and arrest her?”
“I mean more than that, my dear. I mean that I cannot suppress what I believe to be the important evidence of a vital witness.”
“However much I begged you?”
He put his arm about her. “I am not going to try to persuade you, Penelope, whatever I may think of your scruples. My resignation will go in the moment we get back to London.”
“Suppose,” she asked, softly, “suppose I told you that I felt freed from every obligation to this woman who was my friend? Suppose I told you that I had found her to be as treacherous as a snake, and that I would stamp on her as readily as I would upon a snake? What would you say then?”
“I should say that Donna Quixote Penelope had some very good reason. But honestly, dear, I don’t want to put you in the witness box unless you wish.”
She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him. “Thank you. I hate the thought. Still if I am to be a detective’s wife I don’t want to begin by crossing my husband-to-be. But it will be difficult for me.”
“I know that. Trust me as far as you can.”
“That is all the way,” she replied. “But if Adèle even at the last had acted in a different way, I might still have hesitated. After all, she is a woman you cannot judge by ordinary standards. She is an impulsive, self-willed child.”
Labar checked the interruption that there were many criminals like that, and the girl went on.
“When she came with Hughes to this place I felt sorry for her, until I knew that she had tried to kill you. I felt sorry for her but relieved to think that I had someone with me to whom I might talk freely. But she was mad with panic. When I suggested that she might give herself up she would not hear of it. She had some wild idea of escaping to South America.”
“With Larry Hughes?”
“I suppose so. Well, it was decided that we should sleep in the same room. That evening when we were alone together she used every artifice and argument that was possible to persuade me to agree to marry him. I haven’t the faintest doubt that some of the reasons she tried to urge on me were supplied by Hughes himself. She would not have thought of them by herself. The more I resisted the more vehement she became. She pointed out how much I owed to her and her husband. It was the only chance of safety she had. If I did not marry him, he would most likely abandon her to the chances of the law. If I had the faintest shred of gratitude or friendship for her I ought to do this thing. Why should I hesitate to help her? He was a wealthy man. You can probably imagine the kind of persuasion that she would use.”
“I can,” said Labar, grimly. “Go on.”
“She lost all control over herself at last. She swore like a fishwife, and ended by taking an oath that if I did not agree she would accuse me of being her confederate in the forgery of her husband’s cheque, and the person who attempted to kill you near Grape Street police station. No one would believe, she said, that I was not mixed up in the crime. In a frenzy she fetched Larry Hughes who, smiling and sardonic, promised that he also would manufacture proof that I was concerned in the Streetly House robbery.”
“You poor kid,” murmured Labar. “And what did you say?”
“I told them that I did not care what happened to me. There was nothing on earth that would induce me to agree. Larry laughed and went away. Adèle reviled me like a mad thing for ten minutes or more, and to escape the vituperation I went to bed and pretended to go to sleep. She cooled down at last and I actually did go to sleep. I woke sometime in the middle of the night and found her bending over me. She said I had been moaning and muttering in my sleep and that she had got up to see if there was anything that she could do—but, Harry, there was a knife in her hand. I could swear to that. I feigned to accept her explanation, but I slept no more. In fact, since then I have had very little sleep except at odd hours. I have been afraid.”
“Ah.” Labar’s face was stern. “That was the only direct attempt on your life that you know of?”
“That was all. She was as friendly as possible in the morning, although both she and Hughes were persistent in trying to persuade me to alter my decision. But I was spared much from him because he has been busy making arrangements to get away.”
“Yes. I am going to talk to you about that. Tell me now what would you have done had not the chance presented itself for you to escape?”
She looked down at her feet and shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know. If I could summon up courage I had made up my mind to kill myself. But I am afraid that if it came to the point I shouldn’t have had enough nerve.”
The fog had lessened considerably while they walked. A watery moon made itself dimly perceptible. Labar stole a glance at the girl’s firm moulded chin and resolute grey eyes. “I am glad I came when I did,” he said. “I am afraid that you would have found the nerve.”
They walked steadily on ever and again having to divert their course on meeting one of the numerous dykes. And while they walked he questioned her, and made mental notes. For Penelope had much to tell. During her sojourn as a prisoner she had used both her eyes and her ears, and where she had been unable to draw conclusions the detective was able to make something in the nature of guesses. He believed that he was on the verge of a discovery that would simplify, if not the question of Larry’s capture, at least the difficulty of establishing his complicity in the Gertstein robbery.
The early dawn broke on a weary couple, but almost as the sun rose they struck a track which followed for a mile or two brought them to a made road. A little later they met an early rising shepherd, who, though he eyed with curiosity the shirt-sleeved and dirty man who was escorting a pretty girl, gave them directions that would carry them back to Rye.
That picturesque town was beginning to stir as they passed through the Ypres Tower almost to the minute twenty-four hours after Labar had left it.