The Greatest Thrillers of Edgar Wallace. Edgar WallaceЧитать онлайн книгу.
give it up,” said Tarling, half to himself and half aloud.
He was undecided as to whether he should wait for his subordinate’s return from Scotland Yard and tax him with the crime, or whether he should let matters slide for a day or two and carry out his intention to visit Odette Rider. He took that decision, leaving a note for the Chinaman, and a quarter of an hour later got out of his taxi at the door of the West Somerset Hotel.
Odette Rider was in (that he knew) and waiting for him. She looked pale and her eyes were tired, as though she had slept little on the previous night, but she greeted him with that half smile of hers.
“I’ve come to tell you that you are to be spared the ordeal of meeting the third degree men of Scotland Yard,” he said laughingly, and her eyes spoke her relief.
“Haven’t you been out this beautiful morning?” he asked innocently, and this time she laughed aloud.
“What a hypocrite you are, Mr. Tarling!” she replied. “You know very well I haven’t been out, and you know too that there are three Scotland Yard men watching this hotel who would accompany me in any constitutional I took.”
“How did you know that?” he asked without denying the charge.
“Because I’ve been out,” she said naively and laughed again. “You aren’t so clever as I thought you were,” she rallied him. “I quite expected when I said I’d not been out, to hear you tell me just where I’d been, how far I walked and just what I bought.”
“Some green sewing silk, six handkerchiefs, and a toothbrush,” said Tarling promptly and the girl stared at him in comic dismay.
“Why, of course, I ought to have known you better than that,” she said. “Then you do have watchers?”
“Watchers and talkers,” said Tarling gaily. “I had a little interview with the gentleman in the vestibule of the hotel and he supplied me with quite a lot of information. Did he shadow you?”
She shook her head.
“I saw nobody,” she confessed, “though I looked most carefully. Now what are you going to do with me, Mr. Tarling?”
For answer, Tarling took from his pocket a flat oblong box. The girl looked wonderingly as he opened the lid and drew forth a slip of porcelain covered with a thin film of black ink and two white cards. His hand shook as he placed them on the table and suddenly the girl understood.
“You want my finger prints?” she asked and he nodded.
“I just hate asking you,” he said, “but—”
“Show me how to do it,” she interrupted and he guided her.
He felt disloyal — a very traitor, and perhaps she realised what he was thinking, for she laughed as she wiped her stained finger tips.
“Duty’s duty,” she mocked him, “and now tell me this — are you going to keep me under observation all the time?”
“For a little while,” said Tarling gravely. “In fact, until we get the kind of information we want.”
He put away the box into his pocket as she shook her head.
“That means you’re not going to tell us anything,” said Tarling. “I think you are making a very great mistake, but really I am not depending upon your saying a word. I depend entirely upon—”
“Upon what?” she asked curiously as he hesitated.
“Upon what others will tell me,” said Tarling
“Others? What others?”
Her steady eyes met his.
“There was once a famous politician who said ‘Wait and see,’” said Tarling, “advice which I am going to ask you to follow. Now, I will tell you something, Miss Rider,” he went on. “Tomorrow I am going to take away your watchers, though I should advise you to remain at this hotel for a while. It is obviously impossible for you to go back to your flat.”
The girl shivered.
“Don’t talk about that,” she said in a low voice. “But is it necessary that I should stay here?”
“There is an alternative,” he said, speaking slowly, “an alternative,” he said looking at her steadily, “and it is that you should go to your mother’s place at Hertford.”
She looked up quickly.
“That is impossible,” she said.
He was silent for a moment.
“Why don’t you make a confidant of me, Miss Rider?” he said. “I should not abuse your trust. Why don’t you tell me something about your father?”
“My father?” she looked at him in amazement. “My father, did you say?”
He nodded.
“But I have no father,” said the girl.
“Have you—” he found a difficulty in framing his words and it seemed to him that she must have guessed what was coming. “Have you a lover?” he asked at length.
“What do you mean?” she countered, and there was a note of hauteur in her voice.
“I mean this,” said Tarling steadily. “What is Mr. Milburgh to you?”
Her hand went up to her mouth and she looked at him in wide-eyed distress, then:
“Nothing!” she said huskily. “Nothing, nothing!”
XVIII. The Finger Prints
Tarling, his hands thrust into his pockets, his chin dropped, his shoulders bent, slowly walked the broad pavement of the Edgware Road on his way from the girl’s hotel to his flat. He dismissed with good reason the not unimportant fact that he himself was suspect. He, a comparatively unknown detective from Shanghai was by reason of his relationship to Thornton Lyne, and even more so because his own revolver had been found on the scene of the tragedy, the object of some suspicion on the part of the higher authorities who certainly would not poohpooh the suggestion that he was innocent of any association with the crime because he happened to be engaged in the case.
He knew that the whole complex machinery of Scotland Yard was working, and working at top speed, to implicate him in the tragedy. Silent and invisible though that work may be, it would nevertheless be sure. He smiled a little, and shrugged himself from the category of the suspected.
First and most important of the suspects was Odette Rider. That Thornton Lyne had loved her, he did not for one moment imagine. Thornton Lyne was not the kind of man who loved. Rather had he desired, and very few women had thwarted him. Odette Rider was an exception. Tarling only knew of the scene which had occurred between Lyne and the girl on the day he had been called in, but there must have been many other painful interviews, painful for the girl, humiliating for the dead millionaire.
Anyway, he thought thankfully, it would not be Odette. He had got into the habit of thinking of her as “Odette,” a discovery which had amused him. He could rule her out, because obviously she could not be in two places at once. When Thornton Lyne was discovered in Hyde Park, with Odette Rider’s nightdress round about his wound, the girl herself was lying in a cottage hospital at Ashford fifty miles away.
But what of Milburgh, that suave and oily man? Tarling recalled the fact that he had been sent for by his dead relative to inquire into Milburgh’s mode of living and that Milburgh was under suspicion of having robbed the firm. Suppose Milburgh had committed the crime? Suppose, to hide his defalcations, he had shot his employer dead? There was a flaw in this reasoning because the death of Thornton Lyne would be more likely to precipitate the