The Man in the Queue Read Online Free PDF Page A

was walled half with mirrors and half with wardrobes, and that looked more like a florist's shop than any apartment designed for human habitation. She indicated the flowers with a wave of her hand.
    "My flat won't hold any more, so these have to stay here. The hospitals were very polite, but they said quite firmly that they had had as much as they could do with. And I can't very well say, 'No flowers,' as they do at funerals, without hurting people."
    "It's the only thing most people can do," Grant said.
    "Oh, yes, I know," she said. "I'm not ungrateful. Only overwhelmed."
    When tea was ready she poured out for him, and the maid produced shortbread from a tin. As he was stirring his tea and she was pouring out her own his mind brought him up with a sudden jerk, as an inexperienced rider jabs at his horse's mouth when startled. She was left-handed!
    "Great heavens!" he said to himself disgustedly. "It isn't that you deserve a holiday, it's that you need it. What did you want to italicize a statement like that for? How many left-handed people do you think there are in London? You're developing the queerest kind of nerves."
    To break a silence and because it was the first thing that came into his head, he said, "You're left-handed."
    "Yes," she said indifferently, as the subject deserved, and went on to ask him about his investigations. He told her as much as would appear in the morrow's press and described the knife, as being the most interesting feature of the case.
    "The handle is a little silver saint with blue-and-red enamel decoration."
    Something leaped suddenly in Ray Marcable's calm eyes.
    "What?" she said involuntarily.
    He was about to say, "You've seen one like it?" but changed his mind. He knew on the instant that she would say no, and that he would have given away the fact that he was aware that there was anything to be aware of. He repeated the description and she said:
    "A saint! How quaint! And how inappropriate!—And yet, in a big undertaking like a crime, I suppose you'd want some one's blessing on it."
    Cool and sweet she put out her left hand for his cup, and as she replenished it he watched her steady wrist and impassive manner and wondered if this too could be unreasonableness on his part.
    "Certainly not," said his other self. "You may be suffering from attacks of flair in queer places, but you haven't got to the stage of imagining things yet."
    They discussed America, which Grant knew well and to which she was about to make her first visit, and when he took his leave he was honestly grateful to her for the tea. He had forgotten all about tea. Now it wouldn't matter how late he had dinner. But as he went out he sought a light for his cigarette from the doorkeeper, and in the course of another ebullition of chatter and good will learned that Miss Marcable had been in her dressing-room from six o'clock the previous evening until the call-boy went for her before her first cue. Lord Lacing was there, he said, with an eloquent lift of his eyebrow.
    Grant smiled and nodded and went away, but as he was making his way back to the Yard, he was not smiling. What was it that had leapt in Ray Marcable's eyes? Not fear. No, Recognition? Yes, that was it. Most certainly recognition.

3—Danny Miller
    Grant opened his eyes and regarded the ceiling of his bedroom speculatively. For the last few minutes he had been technically awake, but his brain, wrapped in the woolliness of sleep and conscious of the ungrateful chilliness of the morning, had denied him thought. But though the reasoning part of him had not wakened, he had become more and more conscious of mental discomfort. Something unpleasant waited him. Something exceedingly unpleasant. The growing conviction had dispelled his drowsiness, and his eyes opened on the ceiling laced across with the early sunlight and the shadows of a plane tree; and on recognition of the unpleasantness. It was the morning of the third day of his investigations, the day of the inquest,