Interesting Scene in a Tool-Shed
Reginald Foster was surveying his garden. Every morning, when it was
fine, Reginald Foster surveyed his garden, and both of them felt the
better for it; Mr. Foster, because the garden, which was a large one,
stood for his success in life and Mr. Foster liked surveying his
successes; the garden, because surely nothing could come under Mr.
Foster’s benignant survey and not feel the better for it. Mr. Foster
strolled slowly round the neat paths, his podgy hands clasped behind
his back, and continued to survey benignly.
From a window at the back of the fat red house behind him Mrs. Foster
was also doing a little surveying. She was a tepid, pale-haired little
woman, and she knitted a good deal, persistently and quite
unnecessarily. She was not one of Mr. Foster’s successes.
It was not that Mrs. Foster was not patient, for she was; it was not
that she had not made Mr. Foster a good wife, for she had begun to
live with him nearly thirty years ago and was still doing so, nor had
she yet ever committed suicide; she even endured his talk without
screaming violently or running for the nearest razor. And yet she was
not a success. She had not worn very well, it is true, but that was
not enough to justify these harsh words; her once pretty hair was now
lankly nondescript, her face a little flaccid, and her eyes very weary
and resigned. She looked, in fact, not unlike a disillusioned mouse;
but even the most disillusioned of mice will show signs of emotion
before cheese or cats. Mrs. Foster never showed signs of any emotion
at all.
Mr. Foster was only too well aware that his Agatha was not one of his
successes, and it distressed him very much. He could not understand
it. Here they were, risen from a little house in Balham to something
very like a mansion in the country, with Mr. Foster retired from
business into the position of rustic gentleman, and Agatha seemed no
more excited about it than she had been over the burnt sausages that
morning at breakfast. And the rise was really all the more remarkable
when one reflected that the Fosters ought never to have been in Balham
at all, for it is much easier to rise out of one’s real class than
into it. Mr. Foster had been at one of the minor public schools, and
Agatha was actually related to a Duke. The connection between the
families was not a very recent one perhaps, nor a very close one, but
it was quite indisputable. A stranger seldom had converse with Mr.
Foster very long before finding these two facts insinuated into his
knowledge.
And yet Agatha was not a success. It really was very remarkable. Mr.
Foster never troubled to speculate about his wife’s views on this
disappointing subject, because really, what would be the use? One did
not want to think unkindly of Agatha, but one might just as well
speculate about the views of a piece of dough as the cook puts it into
the oven. Mr. Foster was in the habit of putting it more tactfully in
his own mind by reflecting that Mrs. Foster simply never happened to
hold views.
As is so often the case with our nearest, if not necessarily our
dearest, Mr. Foster was not quite correct in this opinion. As she
stood at her bedroom window and watched the centre of her universe
inspecting his spring greens with an encouraging eye, Mrs. Foster was
holding a quite definite view. She was wishing with singular intensity
that the ground would open and swallow her husband up; then, and then
only so far as she could see, would she be free from the necessity of
going into Abingchester in the big closed car when she had a splitting
headache, listening to the cook’s insolence on the subject of burnt
sausages, and doing all the other hundred and one other repellent
things which the living presence of the cabbage-gazer in the garden
imposed upon her. But above all she would never, never have to listen
to him talk again.
With a faint sigh she turned away from the window. The ground gave no
sign of incipient aperture; it never did. She began to put on her
aching head the new hat Mr. Foster had chosen for her last week (Mr.
Foster always chose his wife’s hats) and which she loathed with
singular intensity.
If a small fairy in whose veracity he could repose no doubt, had
appeared before Mr. Foster among his cabbages at that moment and
remarked: “Good morning, Mr. Foster. Do you know that your wife hates
you with a degree of detestation quite unparalleled in the annals of
Duffley? She does, you know. I thought you might be interested to hear
it. Good-morning,” he would, after the initial shock was over, have
been filled with complete bewilderment.
Why, in the name of Heaven? Why should she? Hadn’t he always been
kindness itself to her? And not only kindness but, far more important,
patience? Her headache, for instance. He had been most sympathetic
about that at breakfast, in spite of the sausages. Naturally he had
told her that it doesn’t do to make too much of a fuss about these
things, for otherwise the things get bigger than the person; and that
really one ought not to refuse to go into Abingchester just on account
of a little headache, like an unbalanced schoolgirl. But the point was
that he had said it kindly. He had not even hinted for a moment at his
opinion that Agatha took trifles just a little bit too seriously, not
for a moment. And that again in spite of the sausages. No, the whole
thing would have been completely beyond him.
It was very fortunate that no little busybody of a fairy put in an
appearance after all.
Ignorant of his fortunate escape, Mr. Foster pulled out his large gold
watch. He frowned. Well past eleven. He had better be going indoors
and seeing that Agatha was . . . A low whistle from the fence behind
him caused him to turn about sharply.
Mr. Foster’s fat red house stood at a corner of the main road, where a
somewhat insignificant turning led to a remote countryside and a
village two miles away. It followed that Mr. Foster’s garden ran along
the side of this insignificant turning, the boundary between
importance and insignificance being marked with a fence. Over the top
of this fence a girl’s face was now regarding Mr. Foster with every
sign of anxiety.
“Good gracious!” said Mr. Foster, and hurried towards it. Pretty faces
hanging anxiously over his fence were something new in Mr. Foster’s
experience. Large yokel faces, decorated with foolish grins, he had
seen before and with pain, but not pretty ones that whistled. He
proceeded to investigate.
“Where can I get in?” cried the owner of the face, in tones of
unmistakable agitation. “They’re after me. They’re—oh, isn’t there a
gate or something? Quickly, please!”
“There is a gate,” admitted the perplexed Mr. Foster. “But——”
“Then open it! Don’t you understand? It’s a matter of life and death.”
“Is it?” asked Mr. Foster wonderingly. “Are you ill?”
“No, _no_! Don’t you recognise me? It was I who spoke to you in the
garden the night before last; who told you——”
“Good Heavens!” Mr. Foster gasped. “So it is. I thought you seemed
very familiar. I mean, your voice sounded familiar. But——”
“Open the gate!” said the girl tersely.
Mr. Foster ran along the fence and did so. The girl tumbled through
and stood for a moment, panting, one hand to her heart.
“Safe!” she muttered. “Oh, thank God! But quick—hide me! They’ll be
here any minute.”
“The deuce they will!” squeaked Mr. Foster.
His little fat legs twinkled along the path towards a tool-shed that
stood in the angle of the fence at the bottom of the garden. He pulled
the door open and shut it behind them.
“Good gracious!” said Mr. Foster, and mopped his brow.
“Oh, thank you,” murmured the girl, with a little sob.
They gazed at one another.
“Who are after you?” panted Mr. Foster. “The—the Man with the Broken
Nose?”
“Yes, and the whole gang with him,” replied Dora, who did not believe
in doing things by halves. For sisters, Dora and Laura had much in
common.
“Whew!” said Mr. Foster, thrilled to the core. “How many of them?”
“Seventeen! Oh, what shall I do—what shall I do?”
Mr. Foster possessed himself of one of her hands and began to pat it.
Mr. Foster was the sort of person who does pat attractive young women.
“I don’t think they’ll bother you _here_,” he said, swelling slightly.
“You just leave things to me, my dear. I’ll look after you. What have
you done, then? Run away?”
“Yes, I simply couldn’t stand it any longer.” Dora made use of a
life-like shudder to withdraw her hand. “The constant murders! Oh, it
was terrible. They do get on your nerves after a time, you know,
murders do. Especially when one is only a woman.” She contrived to
look extremely helpless and appealing.
“Yes, yes,” soothed Mr. Foster. “Quite, quite. Well, I’m glad you’ve
got away, I must say. I thought at the time you had no business to be
mixed up with that sort of thing. Far too pretty and charming, if
you’ll forgive my saying so.”
“Oh, Mr. Foster,” simpered his companion.
Mr. Foster swelled a little further. “That’s all right, then. Now, you
stay here, my dear, all snug and safe, and I’ll run along and
telephone to the police; and then——”
“The police? But why?”
“To let them know you’re here. Don’t you realise that you’re a most
valuable witness? With your evidence we ought to be able to lay these
scoundrels by the heels.”
“No, that’s quite impossible. I may be a valuable witness, but I’d be
a still more valuable capture. Don’t you understand that the police
are after me, just as much as the rest of the gang? I’m—I’m wanted on
scores of charges. That was only one murder I committed; there are
ever so many others. If you tell the police I’m here, you put a rope
round my neck, Mr. Foster, as sure as you’re standing on a rake.”
Mr. Foster moved automatically off the rake. His eyes were fixed on
his companion’s face in an expression in which horror and delight
struggled for supremacy. “Did you say that—that _you_ murd—killed that
man the other night?” he articulated.
Dora hung her head. “Yes,” she whispered.
A faint gasp emanated from Mr. Foster.
Dora raised her face somewhat wildly. “But it wasn’t my fault! Don’t
think that. I was forced into it. They had a hold over me—a terrible
hold. It was something to do with—with my mother. Oh, Mr. Foster,
there is nothing a girl won’t do for her mother. I had to do as they
wished. I had to carry out their assassinations for them, or see my
mother reduced to penury and disgrace. I couldn’t face it! I—I gave
way. Was it _very_ wrong of me?”
“It—well, you see, I don’t know the circumstances,” stammered Mr.
Foster, for once nonplussed.
“It was only to pull a little trigger,” pleaded the girl. “That’s all
I had to do.”
“But that’s a very serious thing indeed, you know—er—pulling triggers
is.”
“Oh, I know it is! Don’t think I didn’t realise it was a serious thing
I was doing. I did, only too well. But what could I do? I was
completely at their mercy. I had to carry out their orders. Besides,”
she added reasonably, “somebody would pull the trigger in any case.
What did it matter whether it was me or not?”
Mr. Foster fingered his chin, but seemed disinclined to argue the
ethics of the case. He eyed his companion interestedly and mentally
compared her, as he did every woman he met, with Agatha. She certainly
was very pretty (somehow this reflection came before its immediate
successor, that she was after all more sinned against than sinning)
and there was an undoubted fascination about her. Fancy! This delicate
creature had killed at least one man and, on her own confession, a
good few others as well. Oh, yes, the situation was intriguing enough,
and so was she. It would be pleasant to earn her unbounded gratitude.
But, of course, Agatha must not know. Agatha would hardly understand.
“But you must beware for yourself,” observed the intriguing young
woman very earnestly. “The Man with the Broken Nose is merciless.
Human life means nothing to him. If he knew you were sheltering me,
he’d kill you as soon as that beetle.”
“Would he?” said the startled Mr. Foster. Perhaps earning this young
woman’s unbounded gratitude would not be quite so pleasant after all,
if it involved being killed as soon as a beetle. Then he recovered
himself. These were civilised times, and people would not go about
killing other people like beetles.
“Would he, though?” he repeated more truculently. “I think you’d find
I’d have something to say about that, my dear.”
Dora reflected that, if the reports of Mr. Foster’s friends were
founded upon fact, this was probably true. She took advantage of the
psychological moment to clasp her hands and assume her most piteous
expression.
“What are you going to do with me, Mr. Foster?” she wailed. “Are you
going to turn me away, or hand me over to the police? Or are you going
to help me?”
“You intend—hm!—you intend to go straight if I give you your chance?”
inquired Mr. Foster in stern, manly accents.
“Oh, yes; I promise. I’ll never shoot anybody again, I swear it. Oh,
do say you’ll shelter me, Mr. Foster? They’ll kill me if you don’t.”
Mr. Foster coughed with some importance. “Don’t distress yourself, my
dear. I’ll shelter you.”
“And they’ll probably kill you if you do,” remarked the girl gloomily.
“Come, come,” adjured Mr. Foster, hiding a certain apprehension under
a very hearty manner. “This sounds almost as bad as a penny-dreadful,
you know.”
“There’s no penny-dreadful ever written half so terrible as The
Exploits of the Man with the Broken Nose,” replied Dora, coining a
snappy title.
“Ah, yes. Now, my dear, we must go into that. I want you, if you won’t
interview the police yourself, to give all possible information about
him to _me_,”—here Mr. Foster, who had become a little deflated,
swelled once more—“and I’ll see that it is put to the best possible
use. Without involving yourself, of course. Now, I’m just going up to
the house to cancel something I was going to do this morning, and then
I’ll come back to hear your story.”
“Very well,” nodded Dora.
The door clicked behind him.
“Well,” observed Dora to its unresponsive surface, “God help his
wife!”
Mr. Foster’s next few minutes were busy ones. Having informed his
Agatha that, in consequence of her headache, he had decided now to
cancel the expedition to Abingchester, he told her she was wanted on
the telephone; he then made use of her absence to extract from her
drawers certain surprising objects. A visit to the spare-room and
elsewhere followed, and then, cautiously as any Boy Scout, Mr. Foster
made his way back to the tool-shed, his burdens under either arm. On
the floor of that refuge he dumped before his astonished suppliant a
camp-bed, two blankets, a pillow and coverlet, a chaste cambric
nightgown with high collar and cuffs, a pink flannel dressing-jacket,
and a basket of food. When Mr. Foster did a thing, he did it well.
He proceeded to erect the camp-bed and set out the contents of the
basket upon an inverted wheelbarrow.
“Now sit down and enjoy yourself,” admonished Mr. Foster. “I expect
you’re starving, so don’t stint yourself. There’s plenty more where
that came from. And don’t you worry, girlie. I’ve got to go away for a
minute or two now, but I’m going to see you through this.”
With a reassuring smile he was gone. Again the door clicked behind
him.
Again Dora gazed at its unresponsive surface. This time her expression
was a little more intense. There were few things Dora really objected
to in this world, but being called “girlie” was one of them. She
waited until such time as she judged the coast to be quite clear, then
tried the door. The next moment she tried it again, and again, and
again. Indubitably it was locked.
“Damn!” said Miss Howard with feeling, and deliberately broke a small
dibber.
Mr. Foster’s reason for retiring was twofold. He wanted to look very
carefully up and down the main road, because it would be horrid to be
killed like a beetle without any warning and there is never any harm
in keeping a weather-eye open for one’s potential murderer. But most
of all he wanted to make sure that Agatha was safely occupied. Mr.
Foster had his doubts as to how Agatha would regard the presence of
this dangerous young woman in his tool-shed.
It is true that Agatha had been properly impressed by his story on
Saturday night. His friends at the golf club, on the other hand, had
not. In the golf club Mr. Foster’s great story had, it is to be
feared, fallen distinctly flat. His friends had not gone so far as to
accuse him of pulling their legs, but they had very plainly hinted at
it. Now Mr. Foster was bubbling over with a scheme for a most crushing
revenge; he would learn all this girl had to tell him, act upon it
with his usual thoroughness and, without calling in the official
police at all, solve the whole mystery and possibly lay by the heels
the sinister Man with the Broken Nose himself. In other words, Mr.
Foster felt that if he had been pitch-forked into the middle of a
veritable penny-dreadful then it was up to him to see that he usurped
the rôle of hero.
But Agatha would almost certainly spoil all that. Agatha would be
terrified at the idea that he might be called upon to face actual
physical danger. Model wife though she was as a rule (and by “model”
Mr. Foster meant “subservient”), she would almost certainly try to put
her spoke into his wheel and cause the whole thing to collapse. It was
a pity, because Mr. Foster saw some promising possibilities in the
situation (“Of course, my dear, it’s no good trying to disguise the
fact from you that I’m in deadly danger. I am. These fellows will
shoot at sight, and when I penetrate their lair I do so with my life
in my hands. I don’t want to exaggerate: I’m simply stating plain
facts. No, don’t cry, Agatha. I’m determined to go through with the
thing. You wouldn’t have me a coward, would you?”), but there the
thing was; Agatha must not know.
Mr. Foster tracked his wife to the kitchen and, listening stealthily,
heard her discussing sausages with the cook. From that they would go
on to to-night’s dinner, and thence to any number of possibilities.
Agatha was safely tethered for the next half-hour.
He strolled out into the road and swept a wary eye up and down it.
Except for a medium-sized boy, with a bias towards stoutness, it was
empty. Not without relief, Mr. Foster turned towards his own front
garden. It was then that the medium-sized boy, who had been regarding
him with stolid intentness, spoke to him.
“I say,” said the boy, “are you Mr. Foster?”
Mr. Foster turned back again. “Yes? Do you want me, my boy?”
“I read about you in _The Courier_,” said the boy.
Mr. Foster brightened. He was all in favour of people who had read
about him in _The Courier_; he was still more in favour of those of
them who came to gaze upon him as if he were a local curiosity. “You
did, did you?” said Mr. Foster genially. “Well, and what did you think
about it all?”
“Jolly fine. Ripping murder, wasn’t it?” The newcomer spoke a trifle
absently; his eyes were fixed on Mr. Foster’s nose. Drawing nearer, he
scrutinised that organ with careful attention. “I say,” he continued,
“have you ever broken your nose?”
Mr. Foster brightened still more. The story of his nose’s rupture was
a good one and its telling never palled; and here was an ideal
audience for it. Schoolboy, boxing. . . . The two of them were
obviously going to be great chums. Of course he mustn’t keep that poor
girl waiting, but perhaps just a couple of minutes. . . .
“Yes,” he said, and did not notice the slight start performed by his
audience. “It was at Beanhurst College, where I was at school. We used
to have an annual boxing tournament at the end of each winter term,
and I had entered for——”
“I say, were you at _Beanhurst_?” interrupted his audience in a voice
of incredible scorn.
Unfortunately a voice of incredible scorn sounds very much like a
voice of incredible awe (if you do not believe this, address yourself
absent-mindedly in a voice of incredible scorn and see whether your
opinion of yourself does not immediately rise). With his customary
complacency Mr. Foster read into this one the latter interpretation.
“I was, yes.”
“Good God!” said his audience simply, with the unmitigated contempt of
one who is at Harrow for one who was at a minor public school.
Misreading the signs again, Mr. Foster prattled on happily.
His audience listened to not a word; he was busy adding up two and
two. Not that there was really any necessity, for the thing was
practically clinched. First of all there was the evidence of the
footprints, which was pretty well conclusive; then the fellow actually
admitted that he had a broken nose; but, most damning of all, the
blighter had actually been at _Beanhurst_, of all filthy, lousy holes!
It was tantamount to a complete confession of guilt.
Reginald Foster, Esq. and Alan Spence had very little in common (the
inexpressible Beanhurst effectually prevented that), but they had
this; they both had dreams of catching the Man with the Broken Nose.
Ever since Alan had propounded his great theory to the Inspector and
Colonel Ratcliffe and noted the unmistakable way in which they had
shown themselves impressed during the subsequent tour of the prints,
he had been revolving this great project in his mind; and on his way
up to Mr. Foster’s house, after leaving the other two still measuring
and looking grave, he had formed a tentative plan for carrying it out.
He now proceeded to put it into effect.
“I say,” he broke without ceremony into the climax of the good story,
“I say, do you know they’ve got hold of a hell of a clue to that
murder the other night?”
Mr. Foster was pained at the interruption, but his pain disappeared
before its significance. He stared at the boy. “Got hold of a hell of
a clue?” he repeated, his thoughts flying at once to that wistful
figure in his tool-shed.
Into Mr. Foster’s unmistakable agitation, indifferently concealed,
Alan read the signs of conscious guilt. Under his studiously stolid
demeanour his heart began to beat furiously. “Yes, rather. I’m Mrs.
Nesbitt’s brother, you see, so I’m in the know. But it’s a ghastly
secret.”
“Is it—is it anything to do with the—the girl in the case?” asked Mr.
Foster with palpable uneasiness.
Alan was quick on his cue. “Oh, yes. Frightfully! All about her. I
should just think it is.”
“Do you mean, they—they’ve found out who she is?”
“I should think they jolly well have. It’s a hell of a clue.” Alan
paused and eyed his victim guardedly, then took his decision. “I say,
would you care to have a look at it?”
Into Mr. Foster’s mind leapt a wonderful idea. Were it humanly
possible he would get hold of this damning clue and, if it could be
safely done, destroy it! This might not prevent the police from
knowing the girl’s identity, but at least it would stop them from
using it in evidence against her. A great and noble scheme, and one
calculated to bring him infinite kudos in those pretty gray eyes.
“Yes, I would,” he answered, trying to speak naturally. “Could it be
done without any one knowing?”
“Oh, rather. My sister’s away and my brother-in-law’s out. Come along
down to the house, and I’ll show it you.”
They walked down the road in almost complete silence, each afraid of
saying that superfluous word which may turn incipient success into
dismal failure.
In the garden of Dell Cottage could be seen two forms bending with a
tape-measure over something on the river bank. Keeping as much as
possible under cover, Alan led the way in at the front-door (prudently
left ajar) and past the kitchen. “It’s in the cellar,” he explained in
a whisper. “They put it there for safety.”
“Quite, quite,” Mr. Foster whispered back.
Two hearts thumped as one as they descended the cellar steps.
“You go first,” Alan muttered, as they reached a stout, iron-bound
door at the bottom of the steps.
Mr. Foster went first, gingerly. The next moment he quickened his pace
considerably, for a heavy foot, accustomed to kicking a football at
the psychological moment, had caught him just below the small of the
back and urged him ungently forward. As he fell on all fours on a damp
floor, the door slammed behind him.