Patricia Wentworth - The Listening Eye

Miss Silver looked at him in a manner which reminded Frank Abbott of a bird with its eye upon a worm. There was nothing contemptuous about it, it was just bright and enquiring.

“I do not remember that I mentioned my caller’s name.”

“No, you didn’t. Careful not to, weren’t you? But you did give me the address of the gallery, and you did tell me there was a portrait of her hanging there, that the artist rented her top floor, and that his name was Moray. And no need for anyone to be Sherlock Holmes for Frank here to get his address and go round and see him. And when you hear a couple of the things he walked into, I’m expecting you to have a bit of a shock. There-it’s your pigeon, Frank. You’d better get along with it and tell her.”

Miss Silver transferred her attention to Inspector Abbott.

“Well,” he said, “the gallery identified the picture for me as soon as I said it was a portrait of a deaf woman by an artist called Moray. And a very good portrait I thought it was-streets ahead of most of the other stuff they’d got there, so I wasn’t surprised to see that it was marked ‘Sold’. What did surprise me, and what’s going to surprise you, is the name of the man who bought it. There was an old chap called Pegler taking the entrance money, very friendly and chatty and tumbling over himself to link the picture up with this morning’s smash-hit headlines. Because it seems that the man who bought Miss Paine’s portrait is no other than Lucius Bellingdon, ‘And you’ll have heard all about his having his diamond necklace stolen and his secretary shot in the papers this morning,’ as Mr. Pegler put it.”

Miss Silver said, “Dear me!”

“He had quite a lot to say about Miss Paine one way and another. Told me how she’d been in to see her picture, and how she ‘did that lip-reading a treat’, and had advised him about his grand-daughter who was going deaf. He said she was a very nice lady and a lot of people were ever so interested when he told them how good she was at the lip-reading. ‘They wouldn’t hardly credit it,’ he said. So then he told me about the gentleman that was in there the same time as she was, and how he wouldn’t believe she could tell what anyone was saying-not the length of the gallery-‘but I told him she could, because I’d heard Mr. Moray use those very words, and the gentleman went away and he didn’t look any too pleased’. I asked him if he would know the man again, and he said he would, but when it came to a description it was the sort where there’s nothing to take hold of. He wouldn’t go so far as to say the gentleman was tall, nor yet short-he wasn’t to say fair-complexioned, nor you wouldn’t say he was dark, but he had a black felt hat and a drab raincoat.” Here Inspector Abbott broke off and addressed his Chief. “I don’t suppose we have any statistics as to how many men in Greater London would have been wearing black hats and drab raincoats on that particular day-”

Lamb said curtly, “Get on with your story!”

Frank obliged.

“I got Moray’s address, which is 13 Porlock Square, and I went down there. The woman who came to the door said she lodged in the basement 3and when I asked for Miss Paine she got out her handkerchief and said Miss Paine had been run over by a bus coming home the day before yesterday evening, and they took her off to the hospital but she never came round.”

THE news was a shock. Miss Silver felt it as such. She recalled the moment when Paulina Paine had terminated their interview and gone out to meet her death. Could she have pressed her more strongly to go to the police? She was unable to believe that it would have made any difference. Could she have insisted on calling for a taxi? She did not know. Would insistence have been of any use? If the knowledge accidentally acquired by Miss Paine was so dangerous as to warrant murder, there were other times and other places where this might have been accomplished. She remained silent for a little before saying,

“I was most uneasy. I feel that I should not have let her go.”

Lamb said heartily,

“And that, if you will allow me to say so, is nonsense. You couldn’t possibly have expected the woman to be murdered-if she was murdered, which to my mind is a thing there is no manner of proof about.”

“She had some idea that she might have been followed on her way to me. There was a man in a taxi at the end of the street. She was sufficiently alarmed to turn back and ask one of her tenants to call a taxi for herself. She was not sure of being followed after that. She says the taxi came after them, but she thinks they lost it in the traffic. It looks as if they had not done so. I urged her to let me call a taxi when she took leave of me, but she refused, saying that she thought she had given way to a nervous impulse and made a mountain out of a molehill. I did not feel easy about it, but I let her go.”

Frank Abbott said, “You can’t possibly blame yourself,” to which she replied soberly, “I suppose not. Yet it is difficult not to feel that she came to me for help and that I failed her.”

Lamb said in his most decided voice,

“If she had taken your advice and come to us she would have been safe.”

“Are you sure that you would have taken her story so seriously as to give her police protection? If her death was determined on, nothing less would have saved her.”

He frowned.

“I’m not ready to say that her death wasn’t an accident. She could have been mooning along with her head full of this story, and being deaf she wouldn’t hear a bus coming. We’ve asked for details of the accident, but we haven’t had them yet. What beats me is why should they go to the trouble of murdering her? What, after all, did she hear, or lip-read or whatever you call it? Nothing that’s the least bit of use to us as far as I can see, or the least bit of danger to them.”

Miss Silver looked at him very directly.

“There was the chance that she might recognize the man who spoke.”

Lamb laughed.

“My dear Miss Silver-what a chance! Even if she connected what he said with the theft of the Bellingdon necklace, what sort of odds were there against her ever coming across him again?”

She said gravely,

“I do not know. They may have been less than we imagine. In this connection, one thing she reported him as saying has remained in my mind.”

“And what was that?”

“It was when he was speaking of the robbery, and what he said was this. ‘I won’t take any chances of being recognized, and that’s final.’ From which I infer that he was someone whom the secretary might recognize.”

Lamb said with impatience,

“He’d have taken precautions against that.”

“So strong a precaution as the murder of the person he feared might recognize him?”

Lamb said impatiently,

“You say he was planning a murder?”

“What else, Chief Inspector, when he said that he was not taking any chances of being recognized, and that all he wanted was a clear stretch of road where no one would turn his head at a shot! There may have been a protest from the man whose lips Miss Paine was unable to see, and then the first man said, ‘I tell you I won’t touch it on any other terms. This way it’s a certainty.’ ”

Frank Abbott said, “Now I wonder if this man really said certainty. If we knew that, it would help to place him, because the ordinary crook would almost certainly have said cert.”

Miss Silver gave a slight reproving cough.

“I am repeating Miss Paine’s own words.”

Lamb leaned forward.

“Yes, yes, we know that you can be trusted to be accurate. But Frank has got a point there, you know. Most men, let alone crooks, would have made it cert. Pity we can’t ask Miss Paine whether she prettied it up, but there it is! What would she be likely to say herself? I mean, what was her own way of speaking-schoolmarmish, or plain everyday?”