Read Walk with Care for Free Online Page A

disclosed the greater part of her emaciated body. Jeremy found himself unwillingly able to count her vertebrae. He reflected, not for the first time, that the female spine was an over-rated spectacle. Mimosa’s seemed to have as many bones as a herring.
    â€œQuite too marvellous!” she was saying. “And I have such lots to tell you! I shall ring you up! I’ve found the most marvellous woman! Oh, my dear, she really is! Quite unbelievable, if you didn’t see it with your own eyes! We’ll go together!”
    She turned and tapped Jeremy on the arm with a bone-white finger, her huge pale eyes staring from the narrow, pinched face which was all white except for a crooked carmine mouth.
    â€œJeremy, you shall come too!”
    â€œWhere?” said Jeremy. Then, with haste, “I work for my living, you know, Mrs Vane.”
    â€œI thought you went everywhere that Rosalind did. The faithful cavalier!” She tapped him again, laughed her light, high laugh, gushed an effusive farewell, and fluttered back to her table.
    Rosalind and Jeremy walked on.
    â€œLord—what a woman!” said Jeremy.
    â€œShe’s a sort of a cousin of Gilbert’s and I’ve known her most of my life,” said Rosalind. She laughed a little. “Why should one person remind you of another when they’re not in the least bit alike? Frank would be so angry if I told him that Mimosa had made me think of him. By the way, do you know my cousin, Frank Garrett, at all? I don’t believe you ever met.”
    He repeated the name.
    â€œGarrett?”
    Rosalind laughed again.
    â€œHe’s in the Foreign Office Intelligence. You can’t have met him—he’s quite impossible to forget—nubbly, you know, and bristly, and all the wrong clothes. Gilbert liked him. He’s coming to see me to-morrow.”
    Jeremy walked beside her for a couple of yards. Then he said,
    â€œWhy did you tell me that, Mrs Denny?”
    Rosalind looked at him seriously.
    â€œBecause he seems very interested in you, Jeremy,” she said.

CHAPTER V
    WHEN JEREMY HAD SAID said good-night to Rosalind Denny at the door of her flat, he ran downstairs without waiting for the lift and walked back to his room.
    Bernard Mannister’s house was in Marsh Street. It stood at the corner where Tilt Street runs in. If you follow Tilt Street for a hundred yards or so, you come to a narrow turning on the left called Nym’s Row, which is given over to what once were stables but have now developed into garages.
    Jeremy had a room over the third garage. It suited his purse, his convenience, and his inclination. There were three rooms in all. The other two were occupied by Mr and Mrs Joseph Walker. Mr Walker drove a taxi-cab, and Mrs Walker, whose Christian name was Lizzie, had once been housemaid to Jeremy’s mother. She remembered Jeremy in long clothes, treated him as if he had not very long outgrown them, and made him a good deal more comfortable than he might have been in rooms which were three or four times as expensive. She allowed him a key under protest and with the gloomiest anticipations, since it was her simple creed that a lost key was certain to be picked up by some bloodthirsty ruffian who would immediately repair to Nym’s Row and murder her and Joseph in their beds. How he was to know what lock out of London’s million locks the key would fit, or what motive even the most desperate criminal could possibly have for the massacre of Mr and Mrs Joseph Walker, she did not pretend to know. Jeremy had his key, and Lizzie Walker swore that she never slept a single blessed wink the nights he was out late. This being so, it was difficult to account for those blended snores which he could always hear as soon as the door swung in.
    He came in now, passed the Walkers’ door, and entered his own room. It was not a very large room, but it was large enough. It held a bed, and a wash-stand, and a chest of