The hall-porter uttered a cry of horror.
Bill Sage, either from jumpiness and nerves or from sheer inability to keep a straight face, laughed loudly.
“I keep telling Eve a dozen times a day,” he said, “that I’m not to be called ‘doctor.’ I happen to be a surgeon—”
(Here H.M. really did look alarmed.)
“—but I don’t think we need operate. Nor, in my opinion,” Bill gravely addressed the hall-porter, “will it be necessary to remove Sir Henry’s trousers in front of the Senior Conservatives’ Club.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
“We had an infernal nerve to come here,” the young man confessed to H.M. “But I honestly think, Sir Henry, you’d be more comfortable in the car. What about it? Let me give you a hand up?”
Yet even ten minutes later, when H.M. sat glowering in the back of the car and two heads were craned round towards him, peace was not restored.
“All right!” said Eve. Her pretty, rather stolid face was flushed; her mouth looked miserable. “If you won’t come to the picnic, you won’t. But I did believe you might do it to oblige me.”
“Well... now!” muttered the great man uncomfortably.
“And I did think, too, you’d be interested in the other person who was coming with us. But Vicky’s — difficult. She won’t come either, if you don’t.”
“Oh? And who’s this other guest?”
“Vicky Adams.”
H.M.’s hand, which had been lifted for an oratorical gesture, dropped to his side.
“Vicky Adams? That’s not the gal who...?”
“Yes!” Eve nodded. “They say it was one of the great mysteries, twenty years ago, that the police failed to solve.”
“It was, my wench,” H.M. agreed sombrely. “It was.”
“And now Vicky’s grown up. And we thought if you of all people went along, and spoke to her nicely, she’d tell us what really happened on that night.”
H.M.’s small, sharp eyes fixed disconcertingly on Eve.
“I say, my wench. What’s your interest in all this?”
“Oh, reasons.” Eve glanced quickly at Bill Sage, who was again punching moodily at the steering wheel, and checked herself. “Anyway, what difference does it make now? If you won’t go with us...”
H.M. assumed a martyred air.
“I never said I wasn’t goin’ with you, did I?” he demanded. (This was inaccurate, but no matter.) “Even after you practically made a cripple of me, I never said I wasn’t goin’?” His manner grew flurried and hasty. “But I got to leave now,” he added apologetically. “I got to get back to my office.”
“We’ll drive you there, H.M.”
“No, no, no,” said the practical cripple, getting out of the car with surprising celerity. “Walkin’ is good for my stomach if it’s not so good for my behind. I’m a forgivin’ man. You pick me up at my house tomorrow morning. G’bye.”
And he lumbered off in the direction of the Haymarket.
It needed no close observer to see that H.M. was deeply abstracted. He remained so abstracted, indeed, as to be nearly murdered by a taxi at the Admiralty Arch; and he was halfway down Whitehall before a familiar voice stopped him.
“Afternoon, Sir Henry!”
Burly, urbane, buttoned up in blue serge, with his bowler hat and his boiled blue eye, stood Chief Inspector Masters.
“Bit odd,” the Chief Inspector remarked affably, “to see you taking a constitutional on a day like this. And how are you, sir?”
“Awful,” said H.M. instantly. “But that’s not the point. Masters, you crawlin’ snake! You’re the very man I wanted to see.”
Few things startled the Chief Inspector. This one did.
“You,” he repeated, “wanted to see me?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And what about?”
“Masters, do you remember the Victoria Adams case about twenty years ago?”
The Chief Inspector’s manner suddenly changed and grew wary.
“Victoria Adams case?” he ruminated. “No, sir, I can’t say I do.”
“Son, you’re lyin’! You were sergeant to old Chief Inspector Rutherford in those days, and well 1 remember it!”
Masters stood on his dignity.
“That’s as may be, sir. But twenty years ago...”
“A little girl of twelve or thirteen, the child of very wealthy parents, disappeared one night out of a country cottage with all the doors and windows locked on the inside. A week later, while everybody was havin’ screaming hysterics, the child reappeared again: through the locks and bolts, tucked up in her bed as usual. And to this day nobody’s ever known what really happened.”
There was a silence, while Masters shut his jaws hard.
“This family, the Adamses,” persisted H.M., “owned the cottage, down Aylesbury way, on the edge of Goblin Wood, opposite the lake. Or was it?”
“Oh, ah,” growled Masters. “It was.”
H.M. looked at him curiously.
“They used the cottage as a base for bathin’ in summer, and ice-skatin’ in winter. It was black winter when the child vanished, and the place was all locked up inside against drafts. They say her old man nearly went loopy when he found her there a week later, lying asleep under the lamp. But all she’d say, when they asked her where she’d been, was, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
Again there was a silence, while red buses thundered through the traffic press of Whitehall.
“You’ve got to admit, Masters, there was a flaming public rumpus. I say: did you ever read Barrie’s Mary Rose?”
“No.”
“Well, it was a situation straight out of Barrie. Some people, y’see, said that Vicky Adams was a child of faerie who’d been spirited away by the pixies...”
Whereupon Masters exploded.
He removed his bowler hat and made remarks about pixies, in detail, which could not have been bettered by H.M. himself.
“I know, son, I know.” H.M. was soothing. Then his big voice sharpened. “Now tell me. Was all this talk strictly true?”
“What talk?”
“Locked windows? Bolted doors? No attic-trap? No cellar? Solid walls and floor?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Masters, regaining his dignity with a powerful effort, “I’m bound to admit it was true.”
“Then there wasn’t any jiggery-pokery about the cottage?”
“In your eye there wasn’t,” said Masters.
“How d’ye mean?”
“Listen, sir.” Masters lowered his voice. “Before the Adamses took over that place, it was a hideout for Chuck Randall. At that time he was the swellest of the swell mob; we lagged him a couple of years later. Do you think Chuck wouldn’t have rigged up some gadget for a getaway? Just so! Only...”
“Well? Hey?”
“We couldn’t find it,” grunted Masters.
“And I’ll bet that pleased old Chief Inspector Rutherford?”
“I tell you straight: he was fair up the pole. Especially as the kid herself was a pretty kid, all big eyes and dark hair. You couldn’t help trusting her story.”
“Yes,” said H.M. “That’s what worries me.”
“Worries you?”
“Oh, my son!” said H.M. dismally. “Here’s Vicky Adams, the spoiled daughter of dotin’ parents. She’s supposed to be ‘odd’ and ‘fey.’ She’s even encouraged to be. During her adolescence, the most impressionable time of her life, she gets wrapped round with the gauze of a mystery that people talk about even yet. What’s that woman like now, Masters? What’s that woman like now?”
“Dear Sir Henry!” murmured Miss Vicky Adams in her softest voice.
She said this just as William Sage’s car, with Bill and Eve Drayton in the front seat, and Vicky and H.M. in the back seat, turned off the main road. Behind them lay the smoky-red roofs of Aylesbury, against a brightness of late afternoon. The car turned down a side road, a damp tunnel of greenery, and into another road which was little more than a lane between hedgerows.