Josephine Tey - The Collected Works

With a sigh for its unproductiveness he locked the dagger away in its drawer again and set off for home. He came out on to the Embankment to find that it was a fine night with a light, frosty mist in the air, and he decided that he would walk home. The midnight streets of London—always so much more beautiful than the choppy crowded ones of the daytime—fascinated him. At noon London made you a present of an entertainment, rich and varied and amusing. But at midnight she made you a present of herself; at midnight you could hear her breathe.

When at length he turned into the road where he lived he had come to the stage of walking automatically, and a starry mist possessed his brain. For a little while Grant had “shut his eyes.” But he was not asleep, actually or metaphorically, and the eyes of his brain opened with a start at the dim figure that was waiting on the opposite corner just outside the lamplight. Who was hanging about at this hour?

He debated rapidly whether or not to cross and walk down the other side of the street, and so come within criticizing distance of the figure. But it was rather late to change his direction. He held on, ignoring the loiterer. Only when he was turning in at his own gate he looked back. The figure was still there, almost indistinguishable in the gloom.

It was after twelve when he let himself in with his latchkey, but Mrs. Field was waiting up for him. “I thought you’d like to know that there has been a gentleman here asking for you. He wouldn’t wait and he wouldn’t leave a message.”

“How long ago was that?”

More than an hour, Mrs. Field said. She didn’t see him rightly. He had stood well out beyond the step. But he was young.

“No name?”

No, he had refused to give a name.

“All right,” said Grant. “You go to bed. If he comes back, I’ll let him in.”

She hesitated in the doorway. “You won’t do anything rash, will you?” she said solicitously. “I don’t like the thought of you bin here all alone with some one who might be an anarchist for all we know.”

“Don’t you worry, Mrs. Field. You won’t be blown up tonight.”

“It isn’t blowing up I’m afraid of,” she said. “It’s the thought of you lyin’ here perhaps bleeding to death and no one knowing. Think how I’d feel when I came in in the morning and found you like that.”

Grant laughed. “Well, you can comfort yourself. There isn’t the slightest chance of anything so thrilling happening. No one has ever spilt my blood except a Jerry at Contalmaison, and that was more by luck than good management.”

She conceded the point. “See and have a bite before you go to bed,” she said, indicating the food on the sideboard. “I got you some English tomatoes, and the beef is Tomkins’ best pickled.” She said good night and went, but she could not have reached her kitchen before a knock sounded on the door. Grant heard her go to the door, and even while his brain was speculating about his visitor, the looker-on in him was wondering whether it was spunk or curiosity that had sent Mrs. Field so willingly to answer the knock. A moment later she threw open the sitting-room door and said, “A young gentleman to see you, sir,” and into Grant’s eager presence came a youth of nineteen or twenty, fairly tall, dark, broad-shouldered, but slight, and poised on his feet like a boxer. As he came forward he shot a furtive glance from his brilliant dark eyes into the corner behind the door, and he came to a halt some yards from the inspector in the middle of the room, turning a soft felt hat in his slim gloved hands.

“You are Inspector Grant?” he asked.

Grant motioned him to a chair, and the youth, with a completely un-English grace, subsided sideways on to it, still clutching his hat, and began to talk.

“I saw you tonight at Laurent’s. I am in the pantry there. I clean the silver and things like that. They told me who you were, and after I think for a while, I decided to tell you all about it.”

“A very good idea,” said Grant. “Carry on. Are you Italian?”

“No; I am French. My name is Raoul Legarde.”

“All right; carry on.”

“I was in the queue the night the man was killed. It was my night off. For a long time I was standing next the man. He trod on my foot in accident, and after that we talked a little—about the play. I was on the outside and he was next the wall. Then a man came to talk to him and came in in front of me. The man who was new wanted something from the other man. He stayed until the door opened and the people moved. He was angry about something. They were not quarrelling—not as we quarrel—but I think they were angry. When the murder happened I ran away. I did not want to be mixed up with the police. But tonight I saw you, and you looked gentil, and so I made up my mind to tell you all about it.”

“Why didn’t you come to Scotland Yard and tell me?”

“I do not trust the Sûreté. They make very much out of nothing. And I have no friends in London.”

“When the man came to talk to the man who was murdered, and pushed you back a place, who was between you and the theatre wall?”

“A woman in black.”

Mrs. Ratcliffe. So far the boy was telling the truth.

“Can you describe the man who came and went away again?”

“He was not very tall. Not as tall as me. He had a hat like mine, only more brown, and a coat like mine”—he indicated his tight-fitting, waisted navy-blue coat—“only brown too. He was very dark, without moustache, and these stuck out.” He touched his own beautifully modelled cheek and chin bones.

“Would you know him again if you saw him?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well enough to swear to?”

“What is that?”

“To take your oath on.”

“Oh, yes.”

“What did the two men quarrel about?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear. I was not deliberately listening, you understand, and though I speak English, I do not understand if people talk very quickly. I think the man who came wanted something that the man who was killed would not give him.”

“When the man went away from the queue, how is it that no one saw him go?”

“Because just then the policeman was walking down saying ‘Stand back’ to the people.”

That was too glib. The inspector took out his notebook and pencil and, laying the pencil on the open page, held it out to his visitor. “Can you show me how you stood in the queue? Put marks for the people, and label them.”

The boy stretched out his left hand for the book, took the pencil in his right, and made a very intelligent diagram, unaware that he had at that moment defeated the distrusted Sûreté’s attempt to make something out of nothing.

Grant watched his serious, absorbed face and thought rapidly. He was telling the truth, then. He had been there until the man collapsed, had backed with the others away from the horror, and had continued backing until he could walk away from the danger of being at the mercy of foreign police. And he had actually seen the murderer and would recognize him again. Things were beginning to move.

He took back the book and pencil that the boy extended to him, and as he raised his eyes from the consideration of the diagram he caught the dark eyes resting rather wistfully on the food on the sideboard. It occurred to him that Legarde had probably come straight from his work to see him.

“Well, I’m very grateful to you,” he said. “Have some supper with me now, before you go.”

The boy refused shyly, but allowed himself to be persuaded, and together they had a substantial meal of Mr. Tomkins’ best pickled. Legarde talked freely of his people in Dijon—the sister who sent him French papers, the father who disapproved of beer since one ate grapes but not hops; of his life at Laurent’s and his impression of London and the English. And when Grant eventually let him out into the black stillness of the early morning, he turned on the doorstep and said apologetically and naïvely, “I am sorry now that I did not tell before, but you understand how it was? To have run away at first made it difficult. And I did not know that the police were so gentil.”