Clo thought she could come close to guessing what the charge had been,
and it would have needed more than the word of a ferret to assure her of
his "innocence." The man was a born sneak-thief or pickpocket. His hands
were slim and small as a girl's. Perhaps if temptation had been put in
his way while he "waited at the newsstand" for Beverley, all those
months ago, he had been unable to resist and thus had missed his
appointment. Not that the girl much cared as to this detail; it was not
her affair. But it was odd, almost "creepy," how the links were being
joined together in the chain of evidence against O'Reilly, the man who
had followed Angel into the Limited--the man against whom Clo had
presently to try her wits. What concerned her most was that her first
attempt at bluff had failed. Something in Peterson's manner forced her
to believe that he had indeed served out his full sentence, and for the
moment had nothing to fear from the police. Clodagh hid her
disappointment with a little swagger.
"It suits us just as well as you, to finish up at ten o'clock and get it
over," she said. "If we can, we will. If we can't, you'll have to wait.
The way things are, you have to be in with us, you see, not against us."
"Oh, do I? I ain't so sure!" he flung back. "I ain't sure my fine
madam's not in the game t'other way round--and her husband, too. I know
now that she and Roger Sands travelled in the same train from where she
started. Blowed if I see why she'd do it, but it might be they fixed a
frame-up between them. I can see why it would suit Sands, if it wouldn't
her, and a man's stronger than a woman. Sands was working for John Heron
at the time. That means a lot."
"It doesn't mean that Mrs. Sands would be disloyal to her word. I know
she's true as steel," Clo insisted. She spoke crisply, but her thoughts
wandered. They had caught at the name of John Heron; Beverley had never
mentioned it. The girl had no means of guessing how it might bear upon
the case now in her small, determined hands. She did not see how, or
where, she could have heard it before, yet it did not sound strange to
her. The feeling she had on hearing it puzzled and even thrilled her
vaguely. It was as if the name, "John Heron," had been whispered into
her ear in a dream--a dream not forgotten, but buried under other things
in her brain. The girl was suddenly alert. There was only one fact which
she grasped with straining certainty. In that buried dream there were
other sounds connected with the whispered name: sounds of sobbing, as of
someone crying in the dark.
"Anyhow," Peterson went on, "there was a frame-up, and those that was in
it has got to pay me for what I went through. That's partly why I'm here
in Noo York. If I don't have those papers by ten I'll show up at the
Sands flat and ask for the missis."
"You wouldn't find Mr. Sands at home," the girl cut in. "He's out. When
he comes back he's likely to go away again at once."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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