The Heel of Achilles: A Golden Age Mystery Read online

  At 7.45 a.m. he walked out of Paddington Station and vanished in the maze that is London.

  Twenty-four hours later he learned that he was by no means yet out of the Paignton wood; Sprogson, said a newspaper report, had been apprehended after he had attacked and knocked unconscious one of the police officers pursuing him. He was sent for trial on a charge of burglary, and a further one of inflicting grievous bodily harm on a policeman.

  The police stated that jewellery worth £1,000 was missing from the safe at Yew Tree House, but no jewellery was found on the prisoner when he was apprehended. Sprogson, they added, said that the jewellery was taken by a companion he had with him, who was named Edwins.

  After reading of the betrayal, Jack Edwins died that morning. He became Jack Porter.

  At Sprogson’s trial a month later, the police stated that none of the jewellery had been recovered. They had so far found no trace of the man whom the prisoner said had been with him, and who got away with the jewellery. They had learned that a man named Edwins had been in the town for some time but had now disappeared. The surface of the safe at Yew Tree House revealed the fingerprints of the butler at Yew Tree House and of Sprogson, who was known to them by another name. They believed that the prisoner might have cached the jewellery during a period when they lost sight of him during the chase from Yew Tree House into Paignton. He had been picked up later at Paignton Railway Station, having been recognized by an officer. He denied that he was the man who had been pursued, but his fingerprints identified him. The judge sentenced him to three years’ penal servitude.

  * * * * *

  In the Café Rouge on the morning after the Yew Tree House burglary, Mary had glanced from time to time at the table where her fiancé had made a habit of sitting for his lunch. Her momentary surprise at the lateness of his non-arrival was later turned to wonderment when, at 2 p.m., he still had not put in an appearance. It was the first occasion on which he had not taken his lunch at the café since that day he had first entered for a meal and met her.

  Her feelings gave way to anxiety when Edwins was not at their usual rendezvous at seven o’clock, and although she waited for an hour, he was still missing. Fears that he might have been taken ill, and unable to communicate with her, sent Mary hurrying to his lodgings. There she found, to her alarm, that he had not returned to his bed the night before and had not been seen that day.

  The garage in which he worked was closed by this time and no information was available from his workmates as to whether he had been sent away on a job. She felt certain, however, that had that been indeed the case, he would have sent round to tell her.

  After a night’s tossing, in which sleep was chased away by fears that some tragedy had happened to her lover, Mary, hurrying round to the garage on her way to the café next morning, heard newsboys calling out “Police chase man at Shorton.”

  She remembered that Jack’s disappearance followed the night he was to have spent with Sprogson at the farewell drinking party, and her fears and warning to him returned. Nor were they long in being confirmed. She purchased a paper and turned to the headlined report and Sprogson’s statement that he had had a companion named Edwins.

  Her faith in her lover, though shaken by the reports, still did not accept the allegations made against him. She remembered her distrust of Sprogson and insisted in her own mind that Jack, if he was concerned in the outrage, had been ‘framed’ by the companion against whom she had warned him so tearfully but without any effect, the man who was so sure of himself and of his capacity to walk with bad men and keep his virtue, to misquote Kipling.

  At the end of the second day her trust was rewarded. On reaching her lodgings after her day’s work in the café, she found a letter from him bearing a London postmark. She read it, half aloud:

  Darling—You were right about Sprogson. He led me up the garden path. You’ll have seen by now the trouble I am in. Dearest, I knew nothing of what he was doing until the police whistles went, and it was too late. I had to run for it when I saw the police after Sprogson. I’ve got to London safely, but I can’t come back to you yet.

  Darling, I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. You must believe that. And when I’ve found another job I’ll go on saving if I know you aren’t disappointed in me, and are not giving me up. You mustn’t do that. I couldn’t live without your help now, after I’ve known you.

  You’ve got my share of our savings with yours. Hang on to that, and collect the things from my digs and keep them for me until I can let you know where to send them. God bless you, darling. I love you so much.—Jack.

  There passed slowly weeks of anxious days and nights in which Mary’s agony of dread and suspense fought with her need for sleep. Only now and then a postcard reached her, unsigned, but with a London postmark; and with these new hope stirred in her heart.

  Then, at long last, came blessed relief for Mary that hurt in its unexpectedness. A letter lay on her table awaiting her return from work. She opened it with feelings equally divided, it seemed to her, between dread and hope.

  Good news, darling. Come to London on Friday and I will meet you at Paddington. I think we have found what we have waited for.—Jack.

  CHAPTER IV

  The township of Staines, in Surrey, straddles the wide Thames close by those meadows, lush in history as well as in grass, where John made his mark on the Magna Carta and thus gave a measure of justice to the people of England.

  Some time in the seventh century saintly persons built a church on the banks of the river. A community grew around the church, which was the way of most of the villages of England—first the church and then the congregation; always the church gave birth to the village. In the fields nearby the church more than five hundred years later, when the Magna Carta was signed, the place was still no more than a church and a hamlet. Sixty-five years passed with their winters and summers and someone else, whose name had been lost to history, placed reverently on the river-bank hard by the community, a rough slab of stone with, on it, the inscription ‘God preserve the City of London.’

  Why the sudden invocation, and from what the Almighty was to preserve the city nobody can even now conjecture.

  But the Saxon word for stone was ‘stane’; from the stane the community came by its name of Staines—‘the place of the stone’.

  The years passed by again; the old saintly church fell into decay—disappeared. A new church rose in its place, bigger and mightier. There it stands still as St. Mary’s Church. The ‘place of the stone’ grew from its hamlet to a village; from a village to the busy town which is Staines today. Roads took the place of the rude tracks and paths; the newest of these roads is the great by-pass which takes traffic on towards the West Country.

  A mile or two out of the town along the by-pass on its Surrey side there stood a small garage. It looked unprosperously out, a square brick building, its ground floor a large concreted ‘shop’ with room, perhaps, for a dozen cars. Stairs in a corner led to an upper floor of two rooms.

  The floor of the garage was dirty and oil-stained; the doors and windows were bare for want of a lick of paint. A run-in from the road on either side was no more than a muddy piece of land rammed to some degree of hardness by the wheels of cars and commercial vehicles. Two petrol pumps stood at the roadside edging the run-in. A couple of cars were jacked up in the garage itself, while a mechanic in overalls tinkered with the innards of one of them.

  Jack Porter had walked with Mary Reed from a bus stop two hundred yards or so up the road. He pulled her to a halt outside the building.

  “What do you think of that, Mary?” he asked. He waved a hand in the direction of the garage.

  “It doesn’t look very prosperous, Jack.” The answer came spontaneously. “Is this where you are working?”

  “No. But’s where I may be working, Mary, with you at my side.”

  “With me?” The girl looked her puzzlement. “Why with me, dear?”

  Jack Porter hesitated. This was the moment for wh
ich he had been hoping—and yet fearing. The fear sprang from his knowledge of Mary Reed’s character; from the honesty which looked out from her eyes; the faith which she had in him, and which misfortune had not dimmed—as yet. There were things that Mary Reed did not know of Jack Porter, and which she had to learn; now, he realized, was the time for the learning.

  “Because, Mary,” he answered her question slowly, “this may be the beginning of the dream we had—of a garage of which I shall be the boss, the two rooms in which we can be together and build a future.”

  The words came quietly, and he inflected into his voice hopeful ambition, which, at the moment he was very far from feeling.

  “It doesn’t look much now, Mary,” he agreed, “but that is because it is neglected. A coat of green and cream paint all over—I can do that myself—a concrete run-in—I can do that, too—and the entire place cleaned up and made attractive and there would be a nice little business here, on this busy road. In a couple of years’ time we could extend it with a show-case or two for spares, and so on. And it’s going for £500 freehold. It’s a snip. Can you see it?”

  Mary Reed nodded, interestedly. “Yes, Jack, dear, I can visualize what can be done, and what it would look like. But £500 is a lot of money. We have exactly £100 saved up, haven’t we?”

  The crisis had arrived; the moment Jack Porter had dreaded since the minute that Mary Reed had stepped off the Devonshire train at Paddington, and had run forward and kissed her lover for the first time since the night on which Sprogson had all but led him into the hands of the police, and the gates of a prison.

  “What is the good news, Jack?” she had asked after the greeting, and when they were seated side by side in a train hurrying its way to the Surrey Thames-side.

  “I will tell you at the right time,” he had replied. He knew that his procrastination was the coward’s device to gain time foolish though it was, since the dénouement must of necessity come eventually. Through his worried brain was drumming the realization that there was much more than a cliché, a tag, in the bewailment of Hamlet:

  Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

  Now there had arrived the time when the truth had to be told to Mary. On it, he knew, rested her future—and his.

  “I have £450, Mary,” he replied quietly to her comment, without looking at her; his eyes rested on the garage which stood in front of him, with his hopes.

  His words startled Mary into an ejaculation. “Good Heavens!” she said. “Where on earth have you managed to get that, Jack?” she asked.

  “Well, I’ve lived pretty plainly in a cheap lodging-house, Mary, and I’ve saved £150 out of my wages, and a bit of spare time work I put in on my own. It’s been a sacrifice, but I’ve done it—for you.”

  “And the other £300, Jack. You could not have saved that in the time.” A sudden suspicion came into her mind. “You’ve borrowed it. Don’t let us start on borrowed money. I’d rather wait than have the anxiety of knowing that we may at any time have a demand for repayment after we’ve started out.”

  “I knew you’d feel like that, Mary.” Jack Porter turned and faced the girl. “But chances like this on a busy road and so cheap, do not occur every day. In fact, only once in a lifetime. However, I haven’t borrowed the money, at least, not in the way you’re thinking. We’ll have to pay it back, but there is no time named for when we have to pay it.”

  Mary looked puzzlement from her grey, steadfast open eyes that looked into those of her lover. “Then how have you got it, Jack?” she asked.

  “From the jewellery, Mary. The jewellery that Sprogson pushed in my pocket when he ran for it. I was the one whom he thought would be caught with the goods on me. But I was the one who got away. I sold the jewellery in London.”

  “You kept the jewellery, Jack!”

  The grey eyes looked lustreless into those of Jack Porter, and Mary’s voice lost its timbre of contentment. It came to him with a cadence of drabness. Mary’s world, it seemed to her, had come to an end. The meeting with her lover to which she had looked forward throughout the journey from Devon had lost its joy, now.

  “You kept the jewellery, Jack,” she said again, and horror looked out of her gaze.

  “I had to, Mary. What else could I do?”

  “You could have sent it back, Jack. You didn’t willingly steal it. You could have posted it back to Yew Tree House.”

  “It wasn’t as easy as that, Mary. I had handled it. It had my fingerprints all over it. The wrappings would have had my prints, too. And don’t forget that the police were still looking for the other man—for Jack Edwins. They would have been told by Yew Tree House if the jewels had been returned. They would have got my prints from it. If they ever connected me with Jack Edwins I was done, innocent though I was of wishing to steal. I had to get rid of it.”

  “But you sold it, Jack. Wasn’t that dangerous?”

  “Not to me. I was living in a pretty low quarter in the East End, Mary. I soon found where there was a ‘fence’ who would take it and ask no questions. The police said it was worth a £1,000. All I got was £300, and I only got that much because the jewellery was convenient for getting rid of, and because I stuck out for that much. So I have £450 and there is the £100 you have. That leaves us £50 over to carry on with.”

  He saw the refusal in his woman’s eyes. “It’s our chance, Mary—the chance to make a living together,” he pleaded.

  “No! Not on stolen money, Jack. I would rather die than that,” she said. “We could never be happy on stolen money. I’d—I’d be afraid all my life. I’d never have an easy conscience.”

  Jack Porter turned his back on the garage. He took Mary by an arm. “Let’s walk back into Staines,” he said.

  Mary walked slowly beside him. Once she half-turned and looked back at the garage receding from her—and from him; and the pain in her heart at the lost hopes was reflected in her demeanour, in the listlessness of her walking, the sad solitude of her silence.

  For five minutes they walked without a word. It was Jack who broke into the painful reflections of both of them.

  “I was not asking you to live on stolen money, Mary,” he said gently. “I was planning to use the money until we were settled and then return it. That was what I meant by saying that I had not borrowed it in the way of which you were thinking.”

  “Return it, Jack? How?”

  Jack glanced sharply at her face. He sought for a sign of relenting; the glance showed him nothing.

  “Well, Mary, I’ve seen the figures of the garage, and I know what I can do with it. I can double the earnings in a few months, because I know my job and the chap who’s there now doesn’t. I work it out that we would be able to put by five pounds a week, every week, as a first charge on our takings. Bank it in a separate account. That is £260 a year. In just over four years at the outside it will reach £1,000, which is the value the police place on the jewellery. Then we can send the money to Yew Tree House, and I am quits. And we will have a good business, a home—and each other. That was the plan I had thought of. Nobody loses anything; and we gain everything.”

  They had reached Staines and their hotel before Mary replied to the suggestion. “Let me sleep on it tonight, Jack, and I will tell you tomorrow morning what I decide,” she said.

  Jack nodded. “All right, Mary,” he agreed. “But—”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “If it means a shadow, or something between us, I’d rather wipe the whole thing out. I couldn’t stand that.”

  Mary eyed him gravely and levelly. “If I say yes, Jack,” she said, “there will be no shadow between us. I shall be a partner in it, won’t I?” On that they parted, a feeling of restraint between them; a shadow which kept their eyes averted from each other’s.

  She had her decision ready at the breakfast table next morning. Long hours of argument with herself and her conscience during the silent watches had fought a losing fight with her love. Jack kissed her as she entered the room and waited
, anxiously. Mary caught him eyeing her face anxiously. She smiled when she could no longer tease him.

  “I am saying yes, Jack,” she announced. “But—” she held up a hand—“there is one condition. That is, that the five pounds a week must be put into a separate account and never touched. It must be put in every week, even if it means that we may not have enough for more than one meal a day after it has been subtracted. I don’t know whether I am doing right, but—”

  She said no more.

  Three weeks later the name Jack Porter appeared over the garage on the by-pass. The rooms over the workshop had been furnished, and there Mary kept her housewifely duties while her man repaired cars as they came in, sold petrol, and in between times cleared up and painted the garage in cheerful tones of green and cream. The name ‘The Green Service Station’ proclaimed itself to passing motorists.

  The bargain with justice was religiously kept. Every Monday morning five pounds was paid into the ‘A’ account of Jack Porter. In the later months when trade had a summer fillip more than the five pounds stipulated sum was invested; in a little under three years the owners of Yew Tree House, Paignton, opened a registered packet and found to their astonishment a thousand one-pound notes, and on top of them a typed letter on plain paper which read:

  “Restoration by the second, burglar of three years ago.”

  It caused complications with the insurance society. But the memory of Paignton was wiped out from the mind of Jack Porter and the mind of Mary.

  The three years had seen the Green Service Station expand. There were now two garages and an extensive clientele who came for monthly overhauls of their vehicles under Porter’s Service Scheme. Reasonable charges, and work that was never scamped had established for the garage a reputation.