THE
GIRL FROM
SCOTLAND YARD
EDGAR WALLACE
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY--NEW YORK--1928
[COPYRIGHT]
COPYRIGHT, 1926, 1927, BY EDGAR
WALLACE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
CONTENTS
I. At Tea
II. The Girl Detective
III. Meeting Peter
IV. Peter’s Lodgings
V. A Dead Man
VI. The Effect on Lady Raytham
VII. Leslie’s Interview
VIII. A Surprise for Leslie
IX. Druze’s Handicap
X. A Doctor’s Confession
XI. The Document
XII. Peter’s Mother
XIII. Peter Tells
XIV. An Arrest
XV. Trapped
XVI. An Old Record
XVII. The Telltale Perfume
XVIII. Anita’s Fright
XIX. Captured
XX. A Silk Shawl
XXI. Anita’s Cards
XXII. A Real Father
XXIII. And a Mother
XXIV. These Women
THE GIRL FROM
SCOTLAND YARD
CHAPTER I.
AT TEA
As Lady Raytham drew aside the long velvet curtains, she looked down
into Berkeley Square. It was half-past four o’clock on a cheerless
February evening. Rain and sleet were falling and a thin yellow mist
added to the gloom of the dying day. An interminable string of cars
and taxicabs was turning toward Berkeley Street, their shining black
roofs reflecting the glare of the overhead light that had just then
hissed and spluttered to life.
She looked blankly toward the desolation of the gardens, a place of
bare-limbed trees and shivering shrubs--stared, as though she expected
to see some fog wraith take a definite and menacing shape and give
tangible form to the shadows that menaced reason and life.
She was a woman of twenty-eight, straight and slim. Hers was the type
of classical beauty which would defy the markings of age for the
greater part of a lifetime. A fascinating face, calm, austere. Her
eyes were a cold English gray. You might imagine her the patrician
abbess of some great conventual establishment, or a lady of broad
manors defending inexorably the stark castle of her lord against the
enemy who came in his absence. Analyse her face, feature by feature,
put one with the other, and judge her by the standards which profess
to measure such things, and brow and chin said “purpose” with
unmistakable emphasis.
She was not in her purposeful mood now; rather was she uncertain and
irritable, the nearest emotions to fear that she knew.
She let the curtains fall back until they overlapped, and walked
across to the fireplace, glancing at the tiny clock. The salon was
half lit; the wall sconces were dark, but the big lamp on the table
near the settee glowed brightly. This room bore evidence of money
lavishly spent. The greater part of its furnishings would one day
reach the museums of millionaire collectors; three pictures that hung
upon the apple-green walls were earmarked for the National Gallery.
As she stood looking down into the fire, there was a gentle tap at the
door, and the butler came in. He was a tall man, rather portly in his
way; a man with double chin and an unlined face. He carried a small
salver in his hand, a buff oblong in the centre.
Lady Raytham tore open the envelope. It was dated from Constantinople,
and was from Raytham. She had been expecting the telegram all that
afternoon. Raytham, of course, had changed his plans. In that sentence
was epitomized his life and career. He was going on to Basra and
thence to Bushire, to see the interstate oil wells, or the sites of
them. He was expensively apologetic for two closely written sheets. If
he could not return before April, would she go on to Cannes as she had
arranged? He was “awfully sorry,” he must have said that at least four
times.
She read it again, folded the pink sheets and laid them on the table.
The butler was waiting, head slightly bent forward as though to catch
her slightest whisper. She did not look at him.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you, m’lady.”
He was opening the door when she spoke.
“Druze, I am expecting the Princess Bellini and possibly Mrs. Gurden.
I will have tea when they come.”
“Very good, m’lady.”
The door closed softly behind him. She raised her sombre eyes and
looked at the polished wood of it with a curious, listening lift of
her head as though she expected to hear something. But the butler was
going slowly down the stairs, a quizzical smile in his eyes; his
white, plump hands sliding in and over one another. He stopped on the
landing to admire the little marble statue of Circe that his lordship
had brought from Sicily. It was a habit of his to admire that Circe
with the sly eyes and the beckoning finger. And as he looked, his
mouth was puckered as though he were whistling.
A sharp rat-tat on the door made him withdraw from his contemplation.
He reached the hall as the second footman opened the door.
Two women entered. Through the open door he had a glimpse of a
limousine drawing away.
“Her ladyship is in the drawing room, your highness. Shall I take your
highness’s coat?”
“You can’t,” said the first and the bigger woman brusquely. “Help Mrs.
Gurden out of hers. Why you wear such horrible contraptions I can’t
understand.”
Mrs. Gurden smiled largely.
“Darling, I must wear something. Thank you, Druze.”
Druze took the transparent silk coat and handed it to the second
footman. The princess was already stamping up the stairs. She pushed
open the door and walked in unannounced. Lady Raytham, standing by the
fire, her head pillowed on her arm, looked up, startled.
“I’m so awfully sorry. Push the lights, Anita. The button is by your
hand. Well?”
The Princess Anita Bellini struggled unaided out of her tweed coat and
threw it over the back of a chair, jerked off her hat with another
movement and tossed it after the coat.
People who saw Anita Bellini for the first time gazed at her in awe;
there was a certain ruthless strength in every line, every feature.
She was something more than fifty and was just under six feet in
height.
The masculinity of the powerful face was emphasized by the gray hair,
cut close in an Eton crop, and the rimless monocle which never left
her eye. Between her white teeth she gripped a long amber holder in
which a cigarette was burning.
Her speech was direct, abrupt, almost shocking in its frankness.
“Greta?”
She jerked the end of the cigarette holder toward the door.
“Being fussed over by Druze. That woman would ogle a dustman! She’s
that age. It is a horrible thing to have been pretty once and to have
produced certain reactions. You can never believe that the spirit has
evaporated.”
Jane Raytham smiled.
“They say you were an awfully pretty girl, Nita----” she began.
“They lie,” said Princess Anita calmly. “Russell’s used to retouch my
photographs till there was nothing left but the background.”
Greta floated in, hands outstretched, her big red mouth opened
ecstatically.
“Darling!” she burst forth, and caught both Jane’s hands in hers.
Anita Bellini’s fleshy nose wrinkled in a sneer.
And yet she should have grown accustomed to Mrs. Gurden, for ecstasy
was Greta’s normal condition. She had that habit of touching people,
holding them by the arms, stooping to look up into their faces with
her big black eyes that sometimes squinted a little.
She had been pretty, but now her face was long and a little haggard,
the face of a woman who was so afraid of missing something that she
could not spare the time to sleep. Her lips were heavily carmined, her
eyes carefully made up as though she were still expecting a call to
return to the chorus from which Anita had rescued her.
“My lovely Jane! Exquisite as usual. That dress--don’t tell me!
Chenel--isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Jane Raytham scarcely looked down. “No, I think it is a dress
I bought in New York last year.”
Greta shook her head speechlessly.
Anita Bellini blew out a smoke ring and tapped off the ash in the
fireplace.
“Greta lays it on thick when she lays it at all,” she said, and cast a
critical eye over her hostess. “You’re peaky, Jane. Missing your
husband?”
“Terribly.”
The irony of tone was not lost on Anita.
“Raytham--what is he doing? The man is ill of money and yet won’t take
a day off making it. Where the---- Oh, here he is.”
Druze wheeled in the tea wagon.
“Give me a whisky-and-soda, Druze, or I’ll perish!”
She drank the contents of the goblet at a gulp and handed back the
glass. She fixed her monocle more firmly and lit another cigarette.
The door closed behind the butler.
“Druze wears well, Jane. Where did you get him?”
Lady Raytham looked up quickly.
“Does he? I scarcely notice him. He has always been the same as long
as I can remember. He was with Lord Everreed before.”
“That goes back a few years. I remember him when he was a young man.”
The princess had an unhappy habit of smiling with her mouth closed. It
was not very pretty.
“It is funny how age comes: thirty to fifty goes like a flash of
lightning!”
She changed the subject abruptly and talked about her call of the
afternoon.
“I went for bridge and got a string quartet playing every kind of
music except one with a tune in it.”
“It was lovely!” exclaimed Greta, her eyes screwed tight in an agony
of admiration.
“It was rotten,” retorted the gray-haired Anita. “And more rotten
because my sister-in-law was there. The woman’s narrowness depresses
me.”
Lady Raytham’s eyes had returned to the fire.
“Oh!” she said.
“I asked her what she was going to do about Peter. Thank heavens she
has a little sense there! Peter has been wiped off the slate. Margaret
would not even discuss him. The only person who believed in him is
Everreed, but Everreed was always a simpleton. He would never have
prosecuted, but the bank forced his hand.”
She said this with some satisfaction. She had never liked her nephew,
and Peter hated her, hated her gibes at him when he, the son of a
wealthy man, had preferred a private secretaryship with that great
parliamentarian, Viscount Everreed, to entering his father’s bank. She
had sat in court with a contemptuous smile on her lips when the
haggard boy had been sentenced for forging his employer’s name to a
check for five thousand pounds.
The woman by the fire stirred her tea absently.
“When does----”
“He come out? About now, I think. Let me see. He had seven years, and
they tell me that these people get a remission of sentence for good
conduct--three months in every year. Why, Heaven knows. We pay
enormous sums to catch ’em, and as soon as they are safe under lock
and key, we go tinkering with the lock to get them out.”
“Disgraceful!” murmured Greta.
But Jane Raytham did not hear her.
“I wonder what he will do?” she mused. “Life will go pretty badly for
a man like Peter----”
“Rubbish!” Anita snapped the word. “For goodness’ sake don’t get
melancholy about Peter! He has been five years in prison; and at
Dartmoor, or wherever he is, they teach men to use their hands to do
something besides forge checks. He will probably make an excellent
farm hand.”
Lady Raytham shivered.
“Ugh! How awful!”
The princess smiled.
“Peter Dawlish is just a fool. He belongs to the type of humans that
is made for other people’s service. If you start worrying about Peter,
you’ll shed tears over the partridge that comes to your table! I
wonder what he thinks about Druze?”
Lady Raytham looked up.
“Do you think he still hates him?”
Anita pursed her large lips.
“Druze was Everreed’s butler and cashed the check; the next day Peter
disappears on his holiday--in reality on his great adventure. He
returns and is arrested, swears he knows nothing about the check, and
accuses poor Druze of forgery--which doesn’t save him from
imprisonment.”
Lady Raytham said nothing.
“Naturally Peter feels sore--if he was still right in believing Druze
the villain of the piece. There may be trouble; we needn’t deceive
ourselves.”
Her cigarette had gone out. She opened her bag with an impatient tug
and searched.
“Matches? Never mind.”
There was a letter in the bag; she tore a strip from the top and,
bending, lit the paper at the fire.
“Who is Leslie Maughan?”
She was glancing at the signature which footed the letter.
“Leslie Maughan! I don’t know him. Why?”
Anita crumpled the paper into a ball.
“Leslie Maughan would like to see me on a personal matter.” Anita
invented the stilted and supercilious accent which she supposed the
writer of the letter might assume. “And Leslie Maughan will be glad to
know what hour will be convenient for me to see him. He is an inventor
or a borrower of money, or he has an expedition to the Cocos Islands
that he would like me to finance. To the devil with Leslie Maughan!”