not able to turn her head at the clatter of the bell, which caused
the private investigator Heat to spin round on his heel. Mr Verloc
had shut the door, and for a moment the two men looked at each
other.
Mr Verloc, without looking at his wife, walked up to the Chief
Inspector, who was relieved to see him return alone.
“You here!” muttered Mr Verloc heavily. “Who are you after?”
“No one,” said Chief Inspector Heat in a low tone. “Look here, I
would like a word or two with you.”
Mr Verloc, still pale, had brought an air of resolution with him.
Still he didn’t look at his wife. He said:
“Come in here, then.” And he led the way into the parlour.
The door was hardly shut when Mrs Verloc, jumping up from the
chair, ran to it as if to fling it open, but instead of doing so
fell on her knees, with her ear to the keyhole. The two men must
have stopped directly they were through, because she heard plainly
the Chief Inspector’s voice, though she could not see his finger
pressed against her husband’s breast emphatically.
“You are the other man, Verloc. Two men were seen entering the
park.”
And the voice of Mr Verloc said:
“Well, take me now. What’s to prevent you? You have the right.”
“Oh no! I know too well who you have been giving yourself away to.
He’ll have to manage this little affair all by himself. But don’t
you make a mistake, it’s I who found you out.”
Then she heard only muttering. Inspector Heat must have been
showing to Mr Verloc the piece of Stevie’s overcoat, because
Stevie’s sister, guardian, and protector heard her husband a little
louder.
“I never noticed that she had hit upon that dodge.”
Again for a time Mrs Verloc heard nothing but murmurs, whose
mysteriousness was less nightmarish to her brain than the horrible
suggestions of shaped words. Then Chief Inspector Heat, on the
other side of the door, raised his voice.
“You must have been mad.”
And Mr Verloc’s voice answered, with a sort of gloomy fury:
“I have been mad for a month or more, but I am not mad now. It’s
all over. It shall all come out of my head, and hang the
consequences.”
There was a silence, and then Private Citizen Heat murmured:
“What’s coming out?”
“Everything,” exclaimed the voice of Mr Verloc, and then sank very
low.
After a while it rose again.
“You have known me for several years now, and you’ve found me
useful, too. You know I was a straight man. Yes, straight.”
This appeal to old acquaintance must have been extremely
distasteful to the Chief Inspector.
His voice took on a warning note.
“Don’t you trust so much to what you have been promised. If I were
you I would clear out. I don’t think we will run after you.”
Mr Verloc was heard to laugh a little.
“Oh yes; you hope the others will get rid of me for you – don’t
you? No, no; you don’t shake me off now. I have been a straight
man to those people too long, and now everything must come out.”
“Let it come out, then,” the indifferent voice of Chief Inspector
Heat assented. “But tell me now how did you get away.”
“I was making for Chesterfield Walk,” Mrs Verloc heard her
husband’s voice, “when I heard the bang. I started running then.
Fog. I saw no one till I was past the end of George Street. Don’t
think I met anyone till then.”
“So easy as that!” marvelled the voice of Chief Inspector Heat.
“The bang startled you, eh?”
“Yes; it came too soon,” confessed the gloomy, husky voice of Mr
Verloc.
Mrs Verloc pressed her ear to the keyhole; her lips were blue, her
hands cold as ice, and her pale face, in which the two eyes seemed
like two black holes, felt to her as if it were enveloped in
flames.
On the other side of the door the voices sank very low. She caught
words now and then, sometimes in her husband’s voice, sometimes in
the smooth tones of the Chief Inspector. She heard this last say: