Patricia Wentworth - She Came Back

In the study she put on the overhead light and sat down to the table. The locked despatch-case was on her left. She pulled it down across the blotting-pad, fitted the smallest of the keys, and threw back the lid. Right on the top was her piece of unbelievable luck-the code-book. She took a long breath, savouring her triumph, full of that sense of power.

Philip Jocelyn did not go directly to his own room at the War Office next morning. With the case he had taken home the night before, he made his way along a number of corridors. In the room he entered, Garth Albany sat writing. He looked up, and received a slight shock. Philip never had much colour, but this morning he looked ghastly-skin bloodless, face drawn, every line deepened and emphasised.

He said, “Well?” and was rather horrified when Philip laughed.

“Is it? Perhaps it is. We’ll see-unless she’s been too clever for us. I was doped last night.”

“What!”

Philip gave a casual nod.

“Undoubtedly. Slept like the dead. I’m not really out of it yet, in spite of cold water and the very excellent breakfast coffee which was provided. It’s a pity Miss Annie Joyce is an enemy agent, because she’s a very good cook. Anyhow she drugged me last night, and what she did after that I am not in a position to say. You’d better get your fingerprint people on to the contents of my case and my keys. I’ve taken care not to touch them, or anything inside or outside the case except the handle. Of course she may have worn gloves, in which case she’s done us down, but I hardly think she’d do that-not in the domestic circle.” He set the case down and dropped a knotted handkerchief on Garth’s blotting-pad. The shape of the keys showed through the linen, the key-chain clinked. With a brief “See you later,” he turned and went out of the room.

Garth Albany felt relief. A beastly business, and Philip was taking it hard.

At a little after one o’clock Lyndall Armitage was in the. drawing-room of Lilla Jocelyn’s flat. It was a charming room, L-shaped, with windows looking east and west so that it caught both the morning and the evening sun. The two west windows faced you as you came in at the door, but the one east window was out of sight round the corner of the L. Lilla’s piano stood there, and at the moment in which the bell rang Pelham Trent had just lifted his hands from the keyboard and swung round upon the piano stool.

Lilla said, “That was lovely.”

If Lyndall had been going to speak, the sound of footsteps in the hall put it out of her head. Her heart beat a little faster, and without meaning to do so she found herself on her feet, moving towards the part of the room which faced the door. Because it was Philip’s step in the hall. She knew it too well not to recognize it now. Not even to herself would she admit how everything in her quickened at the sound. She ought to have stayed with the others-she oughtn’t to have come to meet him-there wasn’t any reason why she shouldn’t come to meet him. These thoughts were all in her mind at the same time, not very clearly defined, and not taking up any time at all. She was shaking a little, she didn’t quite know why, and her thoughts were shaken too. She passed out of sight of the two by the piano, and then the door was opening and Philip was coming into the room. Something came in with him- she didn’t know what it was. It was like cold air coming into a heated room. But the cold was not physical; she felt it in her mind, and she saw it in Philip’s face.

He shut the door behind him, stood back against it, and said,

“Anne’s dead.”

Lyndall drew in her breath, but she made no sound. It was Lilla who said, “Oh!”

And with that, and with the sudden movement and stir in the part of the room that was out of his sight, it came to Philip Jocelyn that they were not alone. He stood stiffly where he was for a moment. Then he stepped away from the door, opened it, and went out, shutting it behind him. Before Lyndall could follow him he was gone. The clap of the outer door came back to her across the hall.

It was just a little earlier than this that Chief Detective Inspector Lamb and Sergeant Abbott emerged from the lift and rang the bell of No. 3 Tenterden Court Mansions, a high-sounding name for the block of flats put up at the corner of Tenterden Gardens just before the war. Of the gardens which gave the curving crescent its name there remained no more than a strip of shrubbery, trodden flat since the removal of the railings for salvage, and a few old leafless trees, one of which had been damaged by a bomb splinter. Two of the houses in the middle of the row were empty shells, but the flats were intact.

When Sergeant Abbott had had his finger on the bell for something like a minute he shrugged his shoulders and looked round at his Chief Inspector. They could hear the bell ringing in an empty space, but from inside the flat no other sound struck on the ear.

“No one there, sir.”

Lamb frowned.

“She may have cut and run, or she may have slipped out for a bit of shopping. Go along down and ask the porter whether he’s seen her go out.”

“And if he hasn’t?”

Lamb considered this. He had his search-warrant, but he didn’t want to make more talk than he could help. He didn’t want to bring the porter into it. No harm in asking whether he’d seen Lady Jocelyn go out. If he had-well, he’d have to think about that.

When Abbott came back to say that the porter hadn’t seen Lady Jocelyn all the morning the Chief Inspector frowned again, dipped into his pocket, and produced the latchkey with which he had been furnished.

“Fact is,” he said, “I’d have liked it a deal better if Sir Philip had come along and let us in himself-it would have been more regular to my mind. I suppose he’s got his feelings when you come to this kind of a job. Well, there you are- in we go!”

Frank Abbott put the key in the lock and opened the door. They came into a small empty hall with a door to the right, and another facing them. Both doors were half open, as if someone had been going in and out between them, easily. But the flat felt dead empty.

They went directly into the drawing-room. A little pale sunshine slanted through the windows. Everything was neat, everything was in order. The chairs were undinted, the cushions plumped up. But the grate had not been done. The charred shell of one of last night’s logs lay upon a bed of tumbled ash. Frank Abbott cocked an eyebrow at it.

Lamb grunted, swung round, and went out across the hall to the other open door. It stood a little wider. No need to touch it. No need to cross the threshold in order to find Lady Jocelyn. The room was Philip Jocelyn’s study. She lay in a heap beside the writing-table, and both men knew at once that she was dead.

After a brief pause Lamb stepped inside and crossed the room. The woman he had come to arrest would never stand her trial. Whoever she had been, or whatever she had done, she was no longer here. The body lay upon its face with the table telephone dragged down from the desk and lying beside it. There was blood on the bright hair, and on the plain drab carpet.

Lamb bent over her without touching anything.

“Shot from behind at close quarters,” he said. “Looks as if she’d been trying to reach the telephone. Well, we’ll have to ring up the Yard. We can’t use this.” He indicated the fallen instrument. “See if there’s an extension in a bedroom.”

There was-a smart pale blue affair, looking oddly incongruous beside Philip Jocelyn’s unmade bed, with his shoes standing about, his brushes on the dressing-table, the general air of a man’s room in disorder.

Frank Abbott came back and reported.