Quite suddenly she stopped talking. She stopped, and held out her hand, and spoke in a different voice, little above a whisper.
"Put out that light, quick. There's someone coming upstairs, and they'll see it under the crack of the door."
After getting my bearings as to Evelyn's position, I moved over and pulled the chain of the lamp; then I joined her in the dark. From out in the hall you could plainly hear the whir of the ascending lift. The hotel was so quiet that you could even hear the lift creaking, and the little bump as it came to a stop on this floor. It was probably only some guest returning late-certainly it was not Keppel come to unmask us-but, all the same, Evelyn was breathing hard in the dark.
There was a small jerking and bumping sound as somebody stepped out of the lift. There were no foot-falls on the soft carpet outside, but we could hear a very low voice speaking as two people approached.
"Here, hold on a bit," said the voice of the hotel clerk. It was no longer either professionally hearty or colourless; it was sharp, and it was shrewd. "We've got to decide what we're going to do. The trouble is, it may be a genuine mistake. He may have got it by mistake. If that's the case, I'd risk my job by cutting up a row, to say nothing of waking up the manager and phoning the police. We don't want any trouble for the hotel. But, if I'm right," the voice whispered exultantly, "there'll be a whole lot of profit for —‘
The voice of the night-porter then seemed to growl an excited question.
"That's what it is," replied the clerk. They had evidently stopped. "Take a look at it. It's a counterfeit ten-shilling note. He gave me four of them to pay for the rooms. Mind you, it's a damn good counterfeit. I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't worked for six years in a bank before I took over this job-"
With her lips against my ear, Evelyn whispered in a kind of despairing wail. She said: "Oh, Lord, what have we done now?"
"Shh!"
"I'll tell you what they've done," said the clerk's voice, heard with such uncanny promptitude under the crack of the door that he seemed to be answering us. We both moved back a little. "As I say, it may be a mistake. But he paid me out of a packet of new notes — all new, all ten-shillings and it seemed to be the only money he had. Does that look as though he'd got 'em innocently?