The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder Read Free Page A

cell where a distracted man sat, his head upon his hands, his pale eyes gazing into space.
    ‘It’s true; it’s true! Every word.’ Green almost sobbed the words.
    He was a pallid man, inclined to be bald. Reeder, with his extraordinary memory for faces, recognized him the moment he saw him, though it was some time before the recognition was mutual.
    ‘Yes, Mr Reeder, I remember you now. You were the gentleman who caught me before. But I’ve been as straight as a die. I’ve never taken a farthing that didn’t belong to me. What my poor girl will think–’
    ‘Are you married?’ asked Mr Reeder sympathetically.
    ‘No, but I was going to be – rather late in life. She’s nearly thirty years younger than me, and the best girl that ever–’
    Reeder listened to the rhapsody that followed, the melancholy deepening in his face.
    ‘She hasn’t been into the court, thank God, but she knows the truth. A friend of mine told me that she has been absolutely knocked out.’
    ‘Poor soul!’ Mr Reeder shook his head.
    ‘It happened on her birthday, too,’ the man went on bitterly.
    ‘Did she know you were going away?’
    ‘Yes, I told her the night before. I’m not going to bring her into the case. If we’d been properly engaged it would be different; but she’s married; she’s divorcing her husband, but the decree hasn’t been made absolute yet. That’s why I never went about with her or saw much of her. And, of course, nobody knew about our engagement, although we lived in the same street.’
    ‘Firling Avenue?’ asked Reeder, and the bank manager nodded despondently.
    ‘She was married when she was seventeen to a brute. It was pretty galling for me, having to keep quiet about it – I mean, for nobody to know about our engagement. All sorts of men were making up to her, and I had just to grind my teeth and say nothing. Impossible people! Why, that fool Burnett, who arrested me, he’d fallen for her; used to write her poetry – you wouldn’t think it possible in a policeman, would you?’
    The outrageous incongruity of a poetical policeman did not seem to shock the detective.
    ‘There is poetry in every soul, Mr Green,’ he said gently, ‘and a policeman is a man.’
    Though he dismissed the eccentricity of the constable so lightly, the poetical policeman filled his mind all the way home to his house in the Brockley Road, and occupied his thoughts for the rest of his waking time.
    It was a quarter to eight o’clock in the morning, and the world seemed entirely populated by milkmen and whistling newspaper boys, when Mr J G Reeder came into Firling Avenue.
    He stopped only for a second outside the bank, which had long since ceased to be an object of local awe and fearfulness, and pursued his way down the broad avenue. On either side of the thoroughfare ran a row of pretty villas – pretty although they bore a strong family resemblance to one another; each house with its little forecourt, sometimes laid out simply as a grass plot, sometimes decorated with flowerbeds. Green’s house was the eighteenth in the road on the right-hand side. Here he had lived with a cook–housekeeper, and apparently gardening was not his hobby, for the forecourt was covered with grass that had been allowed to grow at its will.
    Before the house numbered 412 Mr Reeder paused and gazed with mild interest at the blue blinds which covered every window. Evidently Miss Magda Grayne was a lover of flowers, for geraniums filled the window-boxes and were set at intervals along the tiny border under the bow window. In the centre of the grass plot was a circular flowerbed with one flowerless rose tree, the leaves of which were drooping and brown.
    As he raised his eyes to the upper window, the blind went up slowly, and he was dimly conscious that there was a figure behind the white net curtains. Mr Reeder walked hurriedly away, as one caught in an immodest act, and resumed his peregrinations until he came to the big nursery