Anna, Where Are You?

CHAPTER XVIII

Ledlington has a good many points in common with other county towns. Some of it is old and picturesque, and some of it is not. In the years between the two world wars its approaches have been cluttered up with small houses of every type and shape. When these have been passed there are the tall, ugly houses of the late Victorian period with their basements, their attics, their dismal outlook upon the shrubberies which screen them from the road. Still farther on a beautiful Georgian house or two, or older still, the mellow red brick and hooded porch of Queen Anne’s time-comfortable houses in their day, converted now for the most part to offices and flats. Here the road narrows to the High Street, winding amongst houses which were built in Elizabethan days. New fronts have been added to some, incongruous plate-glass windows front the street. A turning on one side, very competently blocked by the quite hideous monument erected under William IV to a former mayor, leads to the station. Nothing more inconvenient could possibly have been devised, but the answer of course is that nobody devised it. Like nearly everything else in England it just happened that way. Every few years some iconoclast on the council proposes that tne monument should be removed, but nothing is ever done about it. A little farther on, upon the opposite side of the High Street, an even narrower turning conducts to the Market Square, which has a colonnaded walk on two sides, the George Inn on a third, and some really beautiful old houses on the fourth.

Upon this picturesque scene the much more than life-size statue of Sir Albert Dawnish looks down. It has been named by some as the most frightful statue in the British Isles, but the competition is, of course, very strong. Ledlington owes a good deal to Sir Albert, the originator of the Dawnish Quick Cash Stores. His original shop, the cradle of the enormous Dawnish fortune, was for many years a well-known eyesore at the corner of the Square. It was pulled down in 1935 and re-erected where the High Street widens out, but the statue of Sir Albert most unfortunately remains. Of the some twenty bombs which fell in and around the town, not one inflicted so much as a scratch upon his marble trousers.

The bus from Deep End, coming in by the new by-pass, drew up in front of the station at seven minutes to three-an advance on the scheduled time which enabled the driver and conductor to adjourn for refreshment to an adjacent snack-bar. Miss Silver alighted.

At precisely the same moment a man came out of the station. He was of a noticeable and somewhat pitiful appearance, since his head and all one side of his face was heavily bandaged and he leaned upon a stick with a gloved right hand. In spite of his disability and the fact that he was burdened with a small suitcase he got along surprisingly fast and took his way past the Mayor’s monument into the High Street, where he turned to the left, emerging from the bottleneck upon the good wide road of Regency times. One of the large houses fronting upon the street is now the County Bank.

At precisely three minutes to three the bandaged man limped up two shallow steps and pushed open the door of the bank. A girl who was coming out held the door for him and stood aside to let him pass. Then she came down the steps, got into a small car which was standing at the kerb, and started up the engine. Rather a striking looking young person by the accounts of two or three of the people who were passing at the time and who happened to notice her. A baker’s boy was able to state the make of the car and give the first two figures of its number-a not very useful piece of observation, since it merely proved the car to have been a stolen one.

Miss Muffin, on her way to the post with old Mrs. Wotherspoon’s letters, was more helpful.

“Oh, yes, very golden hair. I mean, one couldn’t help wondering whether it was natural, though of course-girls do do such things to their hair nowadays-I mean, quite respectable girls…Oh, yes-very much made-up, Inspector. Eyebrows halfway up her forehead-so odd. And the sort of complexion that must take hours to do-if you know what I mean. But quite unnoticeable sort of clothes-just a dark coat and skirt, and a plain felt hat-black, I think, though it might have been a very dark navy-so difficult to tell in a poor light, and the sky was very much overcast at the time.”

Since it appeared that she had merely walked past the car with the letters in her hand, and that she had been hurrying because Mrs. Wotherspoon didn’t care about being left alone in the house, Inspector Jackson thought she had managed to get a considerable eyeful.

Mr. Edward Carpenter’s contribution, though less detailed, was not without value. His eye had not only observed but disapproved. When he was younger he would have known just how to place the lady, but now of course there was no telling- she might be anyone. You couldn’t be sure that your own nieces and cousins wouldn’t turn up looking as if the less said about them the better.

Young Pottinger, on the other hand, was quite appreciative.

“Some blonde! I’m telling you!-what I could see of her, that is. She’d got her hand up doing something to her hat as I passed, and you can’t just stand and gape-well, can you?”

It was not, unfortunately, possible to obtain a statement from the bank manager or from the young clerk, Hector Wayne; any evidence they might have to give being of necessity deferred to a day of final account. At the moment when the bandaged man shut the door of the bank behind him and came down the two shallow steps into the street one of them was already dead and the other drawing his last few laboured breaths.

Miss Muffin, voluble after the event, was sure that she had heard the shots. The baker’s boy had thought there was a motorbike starting up in the Square. Mr. Carpenter enquired how anyone could tell one sound from another in what he termed the damnable babel of the High Street. Young Pottinger said there was a brewer’s dray backing out of Friar’s Cut, which is immediately opposite the bank, and he didn’t suppose anyone could have heard anything. And since the bandaged man had used a silencer, it is quite probable that he was right.

However that may be, the man, with his suit-case in his hand, walked some ten feet along the pavement and got into the waiting car. The engine was running and they got off without any delay. It was not until an hour later that the car was found abandoned seven miles away in one of the lanes near Ledstow. But nobody had seen a spectacular blonde, and nobody had seen a bandaged man.