M’m. Mr. Smith wouldn’t by any chance have a daughter himself, who had lost her way in life—?
‘Me, sir?’ said Smith. He drew himself up. ‘Do I look like a man who could have a daughter fallen to such depths as that?’
But he’d forgotten, confided her highly placed friend to Mrs. Jones, that he wasn’t now wearing a smart uniform and peaked cap; in mufti, any man might look as though he could have had a daughter gone wrong. Which could have been a motive—
‘But what about my rough looking man?’ insisted Mrs. Jones. ‘I mean that must let him out?’
And in fact it did. The cab driver was sought and found, and conceded that, though he’d been looking ahead, watching the traffic, he might just have caught out of the corner of his eye, a glimpse of the rough looking man in the Rolls. The police sighed heavily and said goodbye to Mr. Smith. No one, not even back home in Where-ever-it-was, as Mrs. Jones would have said—was anything but delighted that Sheik Horror-horror had got his just deserts. It was highly embarrassing to the British Government, all the same. The police are understood to be keeping a sharp eye out to this day for Mrs. Dorinda Jones’ rough looking man.
Mr. Smith, however, in an ecstasy of gratitude, approached Mrs. Jones with a large—if rather ill-assorted—bunch of flowers. He had now joined a car-hire firm and any time Mrs. Jones wanted to do a bit of shopping—that would be on the house. Mrs. Jones accepted with simple delight and upon their first excursion suggested driving past the scene of the crime: there had been a rather divine pair of boots in the window of a shop, and she wondered if they might not still be there.
At the Arab restaurant, the lunch time rush had not yet begun and the commissionaire came forward hopefully when the traffic halted their car outside its doors. He seemed to recognize her—Mrs. Jones is highly photogenic and her pictures had vied in the papers with Identikit portraits of the rough looking man—and his large, florid face took on a rather strange tinge of grey. ‘How odd!’ thought Mrs. Jones. ‘Just a minute,’ she said to Smith, and stepped out of the opened door. ‘You’ve given up your nice white cotton gloves,’ she said to the commissionaire.
He went greyer still. ‘I found that they showed the dirt, Madam.’
‘And stains? But if they got stained, you could take them off and stuff them into a pocket. And then of course, there’s the question of fingerprints.’ She looked at him very kindly. ‘Have you by any chance got a young daughter?’ she said.
His hands were beginning to shake: it was horrible. ‘I had a daughter, Madam,’ he said. ‘She’s dead now. She died in hospital of—injuries.’ He pulled himself together. ‘The police asked me these questions, Mrs. Jones. It was you, yourself, who told them that when you saw him in the car driving away from here—the Sheik was alive and well.’
‘He was alive,’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘I wouldn’t know about well. He did open his eyes, it’s true, and looked at me. But—I ought to have realised it before—not at all the look that a gentleman all that keen on girls might be expected to give one. A terrible look—almost as though… Well, almost as though I’d stabbed him in the back. Or someone had stabbed him in the back. Then his eyes closed again.’
A silence. He said at last: ‘What will you do?’
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘I mean—there’s one’s duty and all that. But I’d let you know first.’ She got back into the car, but before he closed the door on her, she leaned out and put her small, gloved hand on his arm. ‘I’m very, very sorry about your daughter,’ she said.
It was an awful situation, all the same. ‘I don’t know,’ she said to Smith as the car moved on again. ‘Ought one to tell?’
They came once more opposite the black marble nursing home with its golden curlicues. ‘You’ve forgotten, Madam,’ said Smith. ‘There’s still the rough looking man.’
‘Oh, yes, so there is,’ said Mrs. Jones, thankfully. She gave no thought at all to the divine boots in the shop across the road. ‘We’d stopped just about here. The man was sitting…’ She broke off. A car was drawn up at the door of the nursing home, a patient being assisted to alight. Only the driving seat was now occupied. ‘What an odd coincidence!’ said Mrs. Jones. ‘Their chauffeur has just the same uniform as you have.’
Smith turned his head to look and in the same movement the chauffeur turned and looked straight back at him. ‘Yes, he has, Madam, hasn’t he?’ said Smith. ‘And what’s more—just the same face.’