Fire, Burn! Read online

  Cheviot shut down the lid on panicky thoughts.

  “Where have you been, Freddie?” he asked. Bitterness rose in his voice. “Didn’t you—er—disappear with the others?”

  Freddie gulped, as though he wished to bring up some of his liquor and couldn’t.

  “Some of us,” he said, “went on to Carrie’s, you know. Got some new gels, Carrie has. Mine was r-rather good, too.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  But Freddie would not meet his companion’s gaze.

  “I say, though!” he added suddenly. “It’s about last night. That’s why I’m here. Wanted to see you, dash it. Had to see you.”

  “About what?”

  “Well …”

  This was the point at which the waiter reappeared, sliding platters of food across the table, arranging a silver tea service with immense cup and saucer, and doing a twinkling conjuring trick with silver cutlery.

  “Breakfast, Freddie?” suggested Cheviot.

  The boy shuddered. “No, thanks. Stay, though! Pint of claret and a biscuit.”

  “Pint of claret, sir. Biscuit, sir. Very good, sir.” The waiter again melted away.

  Cheviot poured tea and pitched in, trying to conceal his voracity.

  “Jack!”

  “Yes?”

  “Last night.” Freddie cleared his throat. “When you said Peg Renfrew was dead, and asked leave to question all of us, and proclaimed slap-out you were a p’leece-officer—”

  “Freddie, I must thank you and Lady Cork and Miss Tremayne for what efforts you made to help. But the others? They did not even trouble to refuse answering questions. They ignored me altogether, and marched out of the house as though I were the scum of the earth.”

  Freddie writhed.

  “Well, old boy; damme, Jack!—no offence, but they were right!”

  “Oh?”

  “Peelers are the scum of the earth, you know.”

  “Does this apply to Colonel Rowan? Or Richard Mayne? Or Mr. Peel himself?”

  “That’s different. Peel’s a Cabinet Minister. The other two are Commissioners. But the rank and file?” Freddie meditated, plucking a toothpick from the glass. “Deuce take it, I was struck all of a heap! Why didn’t you say you were a crossing-sweeper? Or a body-snatcher, even? They’d have taken it better. A Peeler! A Peeler put questions to an officer of the Guards, like Hogben?”

  Cheviot stopped with his knife and fork above the plate.

  But he said nothing; he knew his difficulty; he knew this boy, sixteen or seventeen years younger than himself, was trying to aid him. And he went on eating.

  “You!” said Freddie, jabbing at the table with a toothpick. “You! A Peeler! Still! At least (or I hope, old fellow?) it’s not too late?”

  “Too late?”

  “You haven’t gone and joined ’em, I hear? Put your fist to a bit of paper, or the like?”

  “No.”

  A ripple of relief went over Freddie’s pale face and small red nose, agitating the bright brown side-whiskers. He put down the toothpick and spoke quietly.

  “You must drop it, old boy. Then they’ll all see the joke and laugh with you.”

  “Joke?”

  “It’s your own rum notion of a joke, a’n’t it? But drop it. Devilish sorry; capital hoax; but you must. If you don’t—”

  Freddie moistened his lips. It was difficult for him, standing in so much awe of his companion as a sportsman, to stare back. But Cheviot suddenly realized that in Freddie Debbitt there were more force and strength of character than he would ever have suspected.

  “Jack! A lot of us—well, dash it, we like you! But if you won’t drop this …”

  “Yes? If I won’t drop it?”

  “Then, damme, we’ll make you drop it!”

  Cheviot put down his knife and fork.

  “Now just how do you propose to do that?”

  Freddie had opened his mouth to retort when two persons arrived together at the table. One was the waiter, with Freddie’s claret and a plate of biscuits on a salver. The other was an officer of the Guards, in full parade uniform.

  This officer was a fair-haired, fair-complexioned young man in his middle twenties. His high bearskin cap, with its red short plume on the right to mark him as of the Second or Coldstream Regiment of Foot Guards, towered up as he held himself unnaturally straight.

  His eyes were sharply intelligent, his manners formal and courteous, though he had the same lofty and languid look as so many of his tribe.

  “Your name is Mr. Cheviot, I believe?”

  “Yes?” said Cheviot.

  He did not rise to his feet, as the officer seemed to expect. He merely eyed the newcomer up and down, without any favour at all.

  “You will not be surprised, sir, when I tell you that I am here on behalf of my friend Captain Hogben, of the First Foot Guards.”

  “Yes?”

  “Captain Hogben begs to express his opinion that your behaviour last night, on at least two occasions, was of such an insulting kind as no gentleman can endure.”

  Freddie Debbitt moaned a whispered oath. The waiter bolted away as though devil-pursued.

  “Yes?” said Cheviot.

  “However,” continued the newcomer, “Captain Hogben requests me to add, considering your present somewhat inferior position as a member of the so-called police, that he is prepared to accept a written apology.”

  Cheviot slid along the oaken bench and rose to his feet.

  “Now damn his eyes,” Cheviot said quite pleasantly, “but what makes him rank the Army above the Metropolitan Police?”

  The other man’s hard, intelligent face grew expressionless. But a slight flush mounted under his high cheek-bones.

  “I bid you take care, sir, or you may have another challenge on your hands. I am Lieutenant Wentworth, of the Second Foot. Here is my card.”

  “Thank you.”

  “However, sir, I have not yet done.”

  “Then have done, sir, by all means.”

  “Failing the tender of a written apology, Captain Hogben begs you to refer me to a friend of yours, that we may arrange a time and place of meeting. What is your answer, sir?”

  “The answer is no.”

  Amazement flashed briefly in Lieutenant Wentworth’s eyes.

  “Do I understand, sir, that you refuse this challenge?”

  “Certainly I refuse it.”

  “You—you prefer to write an apology?”

  “Certainly not.”

  It was deathly still in the coffee-room, except for the faint whistling of the gas-jets.

  “Then what reply am I to take to Captain Hogben?”

  “You may tell him,” Cheviot said almost tenderly, “that I have work to do and that I have no time for adolescent foolery. You may further tender to him my hope that in due course his mind will grow to maturity.”

  “Sir!” exclaimed Lieutenant Wentworth in a human and almost likeable tone. This instantly changed to stiff-jawed grim-ness. “You understand the alternative? You know what Captain Hogben may do with this?”

  “What he may do with it, sir, I trust I need not put into words. Good day, sir.”

  Lieutenant Wentworth stared back at him.

  His left hand dropped to the hilt of his dress-sword. He was too well-mannered to sneer. But the edge of his lip lifted, with very slight contempt, above the chin strap of his bearskin cap. He returned Cheviot’s bow, wheeled round, and marched out of the coffee-room.

  The two men in the far booth, who had stood up to look, hastily sat down again. Cheviot saw his own disgrace mirrored in Freddie Debbitt’s eyes as he continued, with outward quiet and inward boiling rage, to finish the eggs and ham and toast.

  “Jack!”

  “Yes?”

  “You?” blurted Freddie. “A shuffler? A coward?”

  “Is that what you think, Freddie? By the way,” and Cheviot pushed aside his plate, “you were about to tell me how you would force me to resign from the police.”

>   “And now this! My God! Hogben’ll horsewhip—”

  “How, Freddie? How will you force me to resign?”

  “I won’t,” retorted the other, who had swallowed most of the claret. “But everybody will. When this news gets about, damme, you won’t be received anywhere. You’ll have to resign from your clubs. You can’t go to Ascot or Newmarket. As a Peeler, they won’t even admit you to a gambling-house. …”

  “Not even,” said Cheviot, “to Vulcan’s?”

  “Why Vulcan’s?” Freddie asked quickly, after a pause.

  “No matter. It doesn’t signify.”

  “Dash it, Jack, you’re not the same man I saw a fortnight ago! Is it Flora Drayton? Or her influence? Or what?” Due to that last pint of claret, Freddie had become maudlin and half-tearful. “But she can’t have wanted you to turn into a dashed Peeler. Last night all you’d do was go on about Peg Renfrew and jewellery and what not. Why, I could have told you—!” Abruptly he stopped.

  “Yes,” agreed Cheviot. “I rather thought you could.”

  “Eh?”

  “A while ago, Freddie, I thanked you for the help you gave me. You, and Lady Cork, and Louise Tremayne. But you didn’t in fact give real help. Lady Cork was too stubborn; Miss Tremayne too fearful of Lord knows what; you too overawed by your friends.”

  “Not overawed, curse it! Only—”

  “Wait! Even before I questioned you downstairs, it was plain from what Flora and Lady Cork said that you knew a deal of the business. Your high spirits, your sense of humour, persuaded Lady Cork to hide her jewels in the seed containers. You were hovering everywhere.”

  “Only fun, you know!”

  “Granted. But did Margaret Renfrew steal Lady Cork’s jewels, as Lady Cork thinks she did?”

  “Yes!” answered Freddie, with his eyes on the table.

  John Cheviot drew a secret, deep gasp of relief. But his countenance showed nothing.

  “Margaret Renfrew,” he muttered.

  “What’s that, old boy?”

  “I see her.” Cheviot made a gesture. “A vivid brunette, with a high colour and a noble figure. She would have been beautiful, appealing, except for what? Hardness? Defiance? Shame? She’s the one person whose character I can’t grasp.”

  Freddie began to speak, but altered his mind.

  “Listen!” urged Cheviot, seeing that gleam in the blurred young eyes. “She was shot to death, Freddie. She’s the centre of the maze. We shall be nowhere unless we understand her.”

  Whereupon Freddie Debbitt, his expression far away, muttered words which for him were surprising and even startling.

  “‘Fire burn,’” he said, “‘and cauldron bubble!’”

  “What’s that?”

  “I say!” Freddie emerged from his trance. “D’ye know Edmund Kean? The actor fellow?”

  “I have never met him, no,” Cheviot answered with truth.

  “H’m. Just as well. He’s finished now. The drink’s done for him; lost his memory; all that. Though, mind you, he’s shifted to Covent Garden and he still plays.”

  “Freddie! I was asking you—”

  “Little bit of a fellow, no mor’n a dwarf,” insisted Freddie. “But with a big chest and a voice to break the window panes. When Kean was a lion in the old days, my father says he’d seldom go into society. ‘Damn ’em!’ says Kean. Now that he’s done, so weak he can’t more than stagger from Covent Garden to Offley’s, there’s no hostess’ll receive him except Maria Cork.

  “Stop, stop, now!” said Freddie. “One night, month or so gone, Kean was at Maria’s. Saw Peg for the first time, I think. Gives a start like What’s-his-name seeing the Ghost. Stares at her. And—

  “‘Fire burn and cauldron bubble!’ Damme! Out it came, in a voice to make the footmen’s hair stand on end. Can’t say what he meant. Full of brandy-negus, to be sure.”

  Those words, in the gas-lit coffee-room, sent a shiver through Cheviot. Behind Miss Renfrew’s painted face, her curling lip, what went on in her mind and heart and body?

  “Freddie! Will you say what you know of her? And especially this mysterious lover of hers?”

  The other hesitated.

  “If I do,” he said with sudden and youthfully intoxicated cunning, “will you drop your tomfoolery of being a Peeler? Hey?”

  “I can’t promise that. But it might affect my conduct in the future.”

  Freddie glanced left and right, carefully. Then he beckoned with both hands.

  “Listen!” he whispered.

  9

  The Innocence of Flora Drayton

  COLONEL CHARLES ROWAN, standing by the table in his office with Mr. Mayne beyond him and Mr. Henley behind the desk in the corner, was rigid with pride and pleasure.

  Yet little of this showed in Colonel Rowan’s long, undemonstrative face.

  “Mr. Cheviot,” he began, “may I have the honour of making you known to Mr. Robert Peel?”

  The fifth man in the office, who had been staring out of a window at the nearly denuded tree and bushes in Great Scotland Yard, with his hands clasped behind his back and his under-lip upthrust, now wheeled round.

  Mr. Peel was a big man, shock-headed, imperious of presence. He wore a long brown surtout with a high black-velvet collar and frogged buttonholes. At forty-one he was growing florid of face, though with large and curiously sensitive eyes. Cheviot, from reading of him, had imagined him as cold and pompous; certainly Mr. Peel’s speeches in the House walked on stilts and unreeled yards of Latin quotations.

  Nothing could have been more different from his manner now.

  “Mr. Cheviot,” he said, smiling broadly as he gripped Cheviot’s hand, “you’ve won me over. You’ve got it.”

  “Sir?”

  “The position, man! Superintendent of the Home Division!”

  “Mr. Peel,” interposed Colonel Rowan, tapping the many and well-thumbed sheets of paper on the table, “has been much impressed by your report.”

  “Best report I ever read,” Mr. Peel said briefly. “They send you out—on what? A theft of bird-seed. You prove (like that!) it was a jewel-robbery. You demonstrate where the jewels were hid. You surmise who stole them, and virtually lure Maria Cork into admitting you’re right. That’s as neat, concise a bit of mathematical reasoning as anybody could want.—Mathematician, Mr. Cheviot?”

  “No, sir. Mathematics was always my poorest subject.”

  Up and down went the eyebrows.

  “H’m. Pity. You surprise me. Now I’m a mathematician. I’ll tell you more: I’m a Lancashire man, a practical man. If one thing won’t do, use the opposite measure and stay in office: that’s practical politics. Never mind what they call you, if you know you’re right. They’ll call you names in any case, as they call me.”

  Mr. Peel began to pace up and down, like a great wind in a small room. Though the office of Colonel Rowan and Mr. Mayne was not in the least small, the Home Secretary’s tall presence made it seem so.

  Then the florid face and the shock head turned on Cheviot.

  “Thus, sir, concerning you. You are Superintendent of this division. All the same! We can’t run the risk of wits such as yours being knocked out in a street brawl.”

  “But, sir—!”

  “I am speaking, Mr. Cheviot.”

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon, with a nip in the October air. Watery sunlight, streaming past what few yellow leaves remained, poured through the red-curtained windows and hovered above a red Turkey carpet sprinkled grey with tobacco-ash.

  Nothing had changed here since last night. Even the medium-weight pistol, with its silver handle and its hammer at half-cock as a sort of primitive safety-catch, lay undisturbed under a lightless red lamp.

  To Cheviot—bathed, shaved, and in freshly fashionable new clothes—his position already seemed less strange. It seemed less outlandish that he should occupy chambers at the Albany, where a young and dull-witted manservant assisted him with the hot tub and set out the garments he wore.
<
br />   If he reflected on these circumstances, they might have been terrifying. But he did not reflect; the Home Secretary kept his eye hypnotized.

  “I am speaking, Mr. Cheviot!” the Home Secretary repeated.

  “Your pardon, sir.”

  “Granted, granted.” Mr. Peel waved his hand. “Most of your nominal duties, therefore, will be assumed by the senior Inspector. You will not wear a uniform, even with gold lace round the collar to show your authority. You must remain in coloured clothes, as you are now.”

  (“Now why didn’t that occur to me?” Cheviot was thinking. “‘Coloured clothes’ merely means plain clothes, as I ought to have guessed from what the cabman said.”)

  “There can’t be any ‘detective police’ as yet,” announced Mr. Peel. “More than one man in coloured clothes would make the cry of ‘Spy!’ even worse. But we can have him,” and he nodded towards Cheviot, “as a whole detective police under one hat. Are you a mathematician, Colonel Rowan?”

  “Mr. Peel,” courteously began Colonel Rowan, “I have some elementary—”

  “Are you a mathematician, Mr. Mayne?”

  The young barrister, his eyes and his round cheeks bulging from the black circle of side-whiskers, was compelled to check the torrent of words he would have poured out. Mr. Mayne writhed, pop-eyed, and shook his head.

  Mr. Peel chuckled.

  “Ah, well,” he said. “You needn’t be. Merely jot down the rewards we’re obliged to pay these cursed Bow Street men. For taking a house-breaker: forty pounds. For taking a highway robber: forty pounds. For taking a murderer: forty pounds.” Again he nodded towards Cheviot. “You see the amount of money we save with him?”

  “Oh, doubtless,” Colonel Rowan said gravely.

  “Well?” demanded Mr. Peel, and looked full at Cheviot

  There was a brief silence.

  “Yes, sir? What?”

  “I must be off to the House. I can’t stop here. But one thing I must know.”

  Here Mr. Peel retreated to the table, where he struck his big knuckles on the sheets of Cheviot’s report.

  “Who killed Maria Cork’s niece, this woman Margaret Renfrew? And how the devil was it done?”

  Now Cheviot understood why four pairs of eyes bored into him.