The Red Lacquer Case

Chapter Two

Chapter TwoAt eleven o’clock the same evening M. Lasalle was writing a letter. The fire was dying down, but its bed of red-hot ash glowed warmly. The three little windows on the farther side of the room were shut, hasped, and securely curtained. M. Lasalle held his writing pad upon his knee and wrote with a fountain pen. On the small table to his left, full in view, lay the lacquer case, open.

He was alone. Sally had gone to bed. For a while he could hear her moving to and fro, and during that time he wrote at a furious speed, tearing off sheet after sheet and dropping them on the floor to his right. When the sounds ceased he stopped abruptly, his pen poised, his head a little on one side, listening. He remained like this for a long time, his face troubled, his free hand tapping restlessly on the arm of the chair. Once he took up the lacquer case, drew out the folded paper which it contained, and then after a pause during which he unfolded and refolded it several times, he put it back and pushed the case away from him sharply.

When he moved again it was to rise to his feet and gather up all those closely written pages. He crumpled them in one hand, and dropped them on to the red embers where they smouldered for a moment, curling and blackening along their edges before they flared into flame. He watched the thin black ash fly up, starred with sparks. He watched it settle and whiten. Then he turned back to the chair, and wrote again very slowly.

Outside the wind was rising a little. As he paused between the laboured sentences he could hear it, and the sound seemed to add to the trouble in his face. At last he put what he had written into an envelope, addressed it, and, taking from his waistcoat pocket a battered remnant of violet sealing wax, he sealed the flap of the envelope in three places, pressing down the hot wax with an old-fashioned seal which kept odd company with a cheap, modern watch.

There were at least three violet stains upon Sally’s lamp shade by the time he had finished, but at last the letter was well and truly sealed. He propped it against the stem of the lamp, and, for the last time, took up the crimson lacquer case.

When ten slow minutes had gone by, he went to the hearth and raked the fire out carefully. Then, setting the outer door ajar, he extinguished the lamp, and stood by it for a moment, waiting until he could see his way. He did not wish to wake Sally by stumbling over a stool or a chair.

As soon as the doorway showed its glimmer, he passed through it, locked the door on the outside, and with a jerk pushed the key under the door.

The moon was shining, and the wind was blowing. All the trees were moving, and their shadows, very black, made restless patterns upon Sally’s red brick path and the white dusty road beyond.

M. Lasalle went out of the little wicket gate, and shut it carefully behind him.

He and Sally had walked that afternoon, and he followed the path which they had taken then. After half a mile he left the road for a path that crossed a stretch of moorland. The moon was very bright. It made strange twisted things of what in the daylight had been dead heather and yellowing bracken. The wind blew salt in his face, and the long grating sound of a rough tide that ebbs upon shingle came to his ears. It grew louder. The path rose. There were no trees now, only this empty place under the moon, and the double line where cliff met sea, and sea met sky. A lowering bank of clouds stretched upwards from the horizon and promised storm. No matter, since M. Lasalle had been lighted to his destination.

Twenty yards to the left of the path there was a black hole in the ground. Here, where he was standing now, Sally had stood with him that afternoon.

“They call it Smuggler’s Leap,” she said.

“Everyone here believes that our great local smuggler, Long Tom Brown, dived into it to escape from the excisemen who were hard after him. Anyhow, he was never seen or heard of again. Nothing that falls into the Smuggler’s Leap is ever recovered. Of course they say it’s bottomless.”

M. Lasalle picked his way across the heather until he stood by the open mouth of the hole. Heather and gorse overhung it. A false step would be so very easy.

He stood looking down into impenetrable blackness.

A person who makes no noise is not necessarily asleep. Sally was not asleep. Instead of getting into bed she put on a warm dressing gown, turned out her lamp, and curled up on the window seat to engage in the time-honoured practice of gazing out into the moonlight.

She could see three elm-bordered fields rising on a gentle slope—background. For middle distance, Mrs. Molton’s cottage across the road, with its untidy front garden. She hadn’t even cut her lupins down, let alone her hollyhocks. Foreground—Sally’s own neat plot with the row of standard roses on either side of the brick path.

Sally began to think about Fritzi. Horrid thing, that hand against the window. She knew just how it had happened. The abominable spying creature wanted to listen, and wanted to see. It was absolutely brainless of me to leave those curtains open. If he stood on the path he might see, but he couldn’t hear much, even though the middle window was a little open; and, of course, being an expert criminal, he wouldn’t be such an i***t as to go and leave footprints on the border which I had just cleared and dug. I only wish he had. But, of course, if you’re a mug at that sort of game you die young, or retire to prison. I expect he thought it an awful brain wave to lean across, with one hand on the glass, and his ear up against the open window. I think I convinced Fritzi when I actually showed him how it was done. And poor darling Fritzi holding a guttering candle all over me and my nice raked border, and looking dreadfully solemn and worried! Of course the creature must have heard everything. But, as I told Fritzi, he couldn’t possibly have seen Fritzi showing me the spring, and me opening it. Thank goodness, Fritzi’s nice humpy shoulder spoiled his little game as far as that was concerned. As I said to Fritzi, the only thing he got away with was the quite useful information that, if he did manage to pick Fritzi’s pocket—Can you pick a vest, for I’m sure that’s where he keeps it?—he couldn’t open that wretched case, or even try to, without flooding the whole show with acid—so that’s that.

Sally nodded, and went on looking at the moonlight.

Odd for Fritzi to be so disturbed. Why couldn’t he make up his mind one way or the other? A creature of quick, passionate impulses and swift decisions, she had never, in all her life, known what it was to hesitate before an emergency. If two ways lay before her, the question of which she should take would settle itself on the instant.

Sally stopped looking into the moonlight, pushed another cushion behind her shoulders, locked her arms about her knees, and stared vaguely into the soft dusk of her room.

Fritzi’s talk had brought up the past very vividly. It was years, and years, and years since anyone had spoken to her of her engagement to Bill Armitage. She remembered now how frightfully proud she had been of being engaged at seventeen. It was simply too thrilling to have a diamond ring, and a man at your beck and call. And the rows—the excitement and fascination of them—Bill furious; Sally provoking; and then a delightful scene of reconciliation. Sally frowned and smiled at the recollection. Then Mrs. Vine-Stevens—Sally’s mouth twisted a little; the headlong, passionate worship with which she had flung herself at the feet of the famous suffrage leader was just a little bitter to her now. She remembered Bill’s “And where do I come in?” Poor old Bill, she wasn’t sorry for him then, but now it hurt to remember how he looked when she stamped her foot and flared back at him: “You? Why should you count? You’re not in the same street with her. You’re not on the same side of the world. Why you can’t even begin to understand how I feel about her!”

Yes, it hurt all right. Oh, bother Fritzi for stirring it all up like this.

It was whilst she was bothering Fritzi that M. Lasalle so cautiously shut the front door and pushed the key under the sill. Sally, seven years back in the past, heard nothing. The gate closed noiselessly. Even if she had been listening now, she would not have heard any footfall on a road where the dust lay three inches deep.

Sally went on thinking about Bill Armitage. Presently she dozed, and woke with a start. The wind beat against the window, full of rain. The night was black, and as cold as a seven-year-old love story.

Sally got stiffly to her feet, groped in the darkness, and lit a match.

“Heavens, it’s three o’clock!” she said.

She blew out the match and tumbled into bed.