That evening another meeting was due to be held by the Communist-dominated branch, down at Hammersmith, of a Union to which Barney belonged; so just before seven he clocked in at the rather dreary little hall that was used on such occasions. There ensued a long wrangle, carried over from the previous meeting, during which the leaders urged the men to refuse to work overtime until a new claim for higher wages was settled. A few older men stood up to say that it seemed wrong to them to put a break on production before the employers had actually refused to grant the new rates of pay, but they were accused by the Reds of being mouthpieces of the bosses, and shouted down. The go-slow motion was passed and about nine o'clock the meeting broke up. The little fraternity of Communists who had control of the branch made for the pub they frequented, and Barney with them.
After they had had a few rounds of drinks, the leery little man who had tipped Barney off to lay wagers that Tom Ruddy would not be elected as the new Secretary-General of the C.G.T. drew him aside and asked him if he had made good use of the tip.
'I stand to win about ten quid,' Barney told him with a grin.
'You bloody fool!' the little man snorted, and spat in the cuspidor. 'You ought to have made yerself fifty. But you've missed the blinking boat now. That is for taking on any more suckers. News'll be out tomorrow morning. Mr. bloody Ruddy's standing down.'
'Are you certain?' Barney asked, concealing his dismay under an expression of surprised cheerfulness.
'Course I am,' came the prompt reply. 'He's thrown his hand in. I can't tell you why. Don't know meself. But I had it straight from the horse's mouth that the Comrades meant to put a fast one over him.'
At closing time the groups broke up and, as was his custom on such occasions, Barney set out by a circuitous route back to the Tube Station. On his way he thought of Mary again and his resolution of the morning - to make no further attempt to get into touch with her for the next thirty-six hours. Reconsidered, it seemed to him that he was probably cutting off his nose to spite his face and that, as he was so anxious to make it up with her, the more evidence he gave of his eagerness to do so, the more likely she was to relent. In consequence, instead of taking the Underground to Victoria, he got out at Gloucester Road and walked along to the tall old house in which Mary had her little flat.
On his way there, as it was nearly half past ten, he was expecting to find her in; but she was not. Since it was a Tuesday, it occurred to him that, although she had promised him not to, she might have gone to the weekly meeting at Mrs. Wardeel's. If so, she should soon be back; if not, the odds seemed to be that she had gone to a cinema, in which case also she would soon be home. He decided to wait for her, but feeling that in his 'worker's' clothes he might be taken for a suspicious character if found lurking on her landing by one of the other tenants, he went out into the street and took up a position on the other side of the road.
There had been many occasions when Barney's work had necessitated his waiting outside a block of flats or offices for hours at a stretch; so the undertaking was not new to him and he thought himself lucky that the night was fine. Now and then he changed his position, taking a short stroll but never going beyond clear sight of the house, for to do so would have been to risk her arriving just at the moment when he had ceased to watch; then he might wait on till dawn, accuse her next day of having stayed out all night, and later find that she could show proof that he was entirely mistaken.
Eleven o'clock came, half past, and a quarter to twelve, without Mary appearing. By then he had decided that she must have gone out to dinner with a man and the thought annoyed him considerably. Although she had given him to understand that she had no family, the fact that she appeared to have no friends at all had often puzzled him. Even if she had not been living for a long time in London, it seemed strange that any young widow with her attractions should not have acquired at least one man friend. That she had not, thus leaving him a free field, he had come to accept; so, now he believed that someone had entered it against him, he felt a quite unjustified resentment.
Animated by more than a suspicion of jealousy, he decided to continue his watch, so that when his rival brought Mary home he might have a sight of him. Between midnight and one the volume of passing traffic down London's long main western artery fell steeply, the buses ceased, while private cars and taxis, from having been a steady stream, were reduced to a trickle. By half past one Barney began to think of throwing his hand in. It was an hour since he had run out of cigarettes, and Mary's failure to return suggested that she had not only gone out to dinner or a show, but also gone on to supper somewhere.
He had been telling himself that if she was out with a man it was probably some middle-aged director or important customer of one of the fashion houses for which she modelled, and that she had accepted an invitation to dine rather than give offence; but, if so, she should have been home by this time. The idea that she was more probably dancing with some young, attractive man now became insistent in his mind, and the memory of her firm young body against his own when they had danced together added fuel to his jealous imaginings.
Two o'clock came, and with it the conviction that Mary and her new beau must have gone on to a night club, which meant that she might not now be home for another couple of hours. More put out than he had been for a long time, Barney hailed a taxi that was crawling westward and had himself driven to Warwick Square.
While he undressed, he had a whisky and soda and some biscuits; then, as he got into bed, he tried to put Mary out of his mind. It was no good, but his thoughts did take another direction. Perhaps that evening she had gone out with a chap, yet it seemed strange that she had also been out the night before and out, apparently, on the several occasions when he had tried to ring her up. The explanation might be that she had suddenly decided to take a holiday.
Yet if that were so, why, before leaving London, had she not let him know? The note he had written on Saturday morning must have reached her by first post on Monday. Surely, even if she was furious with him, she would have let him know it by writing a few angry lines in reply, which he should have received that morning? Could she possibly have met with an accident over the week-end and be in hospital? Or, unlikely as it seemed after the way she had broken down at their last meeting, and sworn to have no more to do with the Satanists, had Ratnadatta, after all, again got hold of her?
At that disturbing thought Barney switched on the light again and set his alarm-clock for six o'clock, determined now to go really fully into the question first thing in the morning.
Soon after seven he was back in Cromwell Road. As there were a dozen tenants in the old house, its front door was always left on the latch from first thing in the morning up till eleven at night; so he walked straight in and upstairs. His ring at Mary's door remained unanswered. Hoping that she was still in bed, and perhaps sleeping very soundly after her late night out, he waited for a few minutes then rang again, this time insistently. Taking his finger from the bell he listened but no sound of movement came from within the flat, so he then felt certain that she could not be there. In anticipation of such a possibility, he had brought with him a small implement, the efficient use of which he had been taught when training for his job. With it, in less than a minute he had the door open without damaging the lock. The first thing his eye lit on, face upwards on the mat, was the letter he had posted to Mary on Saturday morning. Evidently the caretaker, or somebody, brought up the tenants' mail and pushed it through their letterboxes. Anyhow, the fact that it was still there showed that Mary had not been in her flat during the past two days.
Closing the door behind him, he took a quick look into each of the four rooms of the flat. The bathroom and tiny kitchen were clean and in good order; the bed had been made up and on the sitting-room table stood a vase holding a dozen long-stemmed roses. In the wastepaper basket he found the four pieces of a card, confirming that they were the roses he had ordered from Constance Spry's for Mary and, from the way in which the card had been ripped across, an indication of her anger on realizing the reason for his sending them to her. Taken together, the roses, the letter on the mat, and the unslept-in bed added up to Mary's having gone out sometime between Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening and not returned. With the hope of coming upon some clue to where she had gone, he began a systematic search of the premises. In the circumstances he felt no scruples about doing so and, as his duties made it necessary for him to carry out such searches fairly frequently, he did the job swiftly and thoroughly but with an automatic care which resulted in everything he disturbed being left exactly as he had found it.