Страница 29 из 53
The «social» broke up at the eminently respectable hour of nine-forty-five, and Simpson once more helped the committee to play the game of robbing Peter to pay Paul, and then "saw home" the most gossiping of the females who had been nice to him. So it was on the following morning that Grant interviewed him and heard all that was to be known of Mrs. Everett.
Mrs. Everett was Scotch. Her lack of accent was explained by the fact that she had been for twenty-five years in London, and that initially she came from the West Coast. Her father had been the minister of a Wee Free church in a village on the west coast of Ross, and now her brother was a minister there. Her name was Logan. She had been a widow for fifteen years and had no children. She was not very popular because she kept herself to herself, but she was greatly respected. Not even the fact that she let her rooms to two bookmakers had been sufficient to degrade her in the eyes of the Brightlingside Congregational Church. Sorrell had gone to her on coming out of the Army, and he had not been a bookmaker then, so perhaps she was absolved from any charge of deliberately choosing depravity as a boarder. The two men had not been known personally to any of the church community. They had been regarded from afar, Grant understood, as moral lepers without equal, but the subject of them seemed to have that never-palling attraction that thorough-paced wickedness has for virtue, and no detail of their lives was hidden from people whom the two men had quite certainly not known by sight. The two men, as Mrs. Everett had said — Mrs. Everett, Grant thought, would not lie about something that could be verified! — went everywhere together. Neither had had a "girl." They were both very smart according to Brightlingside standards, and Mrs. Everett waited hand and foot on them. Mrs. Everett had no relations in London that any one knew of, but once a year usually she went to Scotland, and if her boarders happened not to be away, engaged and paid some one to look after them.
When Simpson had taken his burnished presence out of the room, Grant sent for the men who had been on duty at King's Cross and Euston on Monday night, and asked them to describe the suspects they had examined. At the King's Cross man's tale of a young man with his mother, he halted. "Describe the mother," he said, and the man did, quite accurately.
"Were there no other possibles on that train?"
Oh, yes, the man said, several. He inferred bitterly that the original home of thin, dark men with high cheekbones must be the north of Scotland. They swarmed on all northbound trains.
"What made you think he wasn't the man you wanted?"
"His ma
Well done, Mrs. Everett! thought Grant. It wasn't the man who left the notes in the drawer that thought of the golf-bag. He wondered if leaving the case like that had been deliberate. He could hardly credit that any one would risk u
Where was he going?
There were no labels on his luggage, but the ticket collector had said he was going to Edinburgh.
It did not take Grant long to find out Lamont's probable destination. There were not many Logans in the Church of Scotland, and only one had a church in Rossshire. He was minister of the United Free church in Carni
Grant went in to Barker and said, "I'm going fishing in Scotland for a day or two."
"There are more comfortable places than Scotland for hiding your diminished head," said Barker, who knew all about the arrest that had side-slipped.
"May be, but the fishing isn't so good. That's my approximate address. Two days will do me, I expect."
"Taking any one along?"
"No."
"I think you'd better. Think for a moment what a Highland rural policeman is like."
"He can always kill the fish by falling on it — but I don't think it will come to that. I may want some one to take the fish to London, though."
"All right. When are you going?"
"I'm going with the seven-thirty from King's Cross tonight, and I'll be in Inverness before ten tomorrow morning. After that I'll advise you."
"Right!" said Barker. "Good fishing! Don't get stuck on your own hooks."
Grant spent a considerable time arranging for the prosecution of the search in his absence. He had no guarantee that the man who had gone to Carni
As he was getting his fishing tackle together and looking out his old clothes, Mrs. Field came in with sandwiches and commiseration, neither of which Grant felt to be appropriate. He refused the former on the ground that he would have a very good di
"Yes," she said; "that's all very well, but look at the long night there'll be. You never know the minute you'll waken up hungry and be glad of the sandwiches even if it's only to pass the time. They're chicken, and you don't know when you'll have chicken again. It's a terribly poor country, Scotland. Goodness only knows what you'll get to eat!"
Grant said that Scotland nowadays was very like the rest of Britain, only more beautiful.
"I don't know anything about beauty," said Mrs. Field, putting the sandwiches resolutely away in the rug-strap, "but I do know that a cousin of mine was in service there once she went for the season with her people from London — and there wasn't a house to be seen in the whole countryside but their own, and not a tree. And the natives had never heard of teacakes, and called scones 'skons. "
"How barbaric!" said Grant, folding his most ancient tweed lovingly away in his case.
As the train steamed out of King's Cross he settled down to the study of a one-inch survey map of the Carni
Grant studied the map. The village of Carni