There was the troublesome business that, although just when at one time the traffic in drugs seemed to be mastered, it had broadened out with a violence and fatality too big, it seemed, for the private trafficker and most difficult to explain. It was thought—no, it was believed—and surely it was more than believed, it was known—that a great and bloody-minded nation which called crime culture and theft civilisation and enslavement hegemony, had, as a wise policy, set out to corrupt and destroy the Egyptians by the illicit smuggling drugs into that country. It was no longer a case of this or that man, or this or that company, running hashish or heroin or cocaine into Egypt for profit at the risk of penal servitude for its officials on the spot. It was a national policy aiming at a national destruction. It was the curse of the fellaheen that he would starve rather, than control his lusts, leave his family to starve and himself, within a few months, die, an idiot and a pauper. However carefully he had tilled his land and paid his dues, however many the hours he had given to the tiny canals and ditches which had watered his fields and secured some sort of a livelihood for his family and himself, they would have no memories to restrain him. There were no cords which would bind him to the mast of his daily work, once the siren music condensed, within those dark blue paper bags was allowed to swell. All would go, industry, food, life. Colossal! One of the great signal posts from which the world’s traffic was controlled would lie open for a great and worthy nation to use it entirely for its own advantage. A people would have perished—well, great nations march to their destiny over roads ballasted by corpses. That was dutiful!
So the slippers of hashish and the envelopes of thick blue paper, filled with the sparkling white crystals of heroin were sunk in waterproof bags off Mersa Matruli, or were carried across Sinai on the back of camels, and were ferried across the Canal. But a centre was needed where all this vital fodder could be collected in safety and distributed with as little danger as was possible. For a national policy, and so magnificent a policy as the destruction of another nation by the most corrupt and vicious incitements, organisation was needed-good, careful organisation, such as this high-class, A.1., sedulous nation had always at its command. It was a short sighted nation, physically, and something of that short sight had crept into its plans as well as into the eyes which passed them as perfect.
The centre had been found, the clearing-house, in the village of Elaoui. Approached by a single road which could be watched night and day and whence ample warning could be given, that honeycomb of houses was the best hiding-place near Cairo. It had moreover a most saintly mosque, dating from the twelfth century, of which one of the Elaoui family was the priest. That this sacred building did, in fact, hide those dangerous cargoes, no one of the authorities concerned could doubt. But the mosque could not be searched. Another point of junction must be discovered, where the village under the rim of the hill touched the great city by the river.
And it was discovered after a great deal of patience.
The family of the Elaoui held itself strictly aloof. If a member of it went down into the city, he made his home there. He was not an outcast, but he had lost his Place in the home circle. He remained on terms of friendship with his kinsmen and, when occasion served, he did business with such as descended to do business with him. There were a good many of that upland who had married and made their homes in Cairo and, carrying on tradition, they cultivated a secret clanship. With the gradual storage of the forbidden drugs in that unassailable village, the opportunity for mutual service arrived. As soon as enough had been gathered in those rambling dwellings and that saintly mosque to soak the town, a youth strolled down from the village to the street of Abdul Azziz and at twelve o’clock noon precisely struck a wooden match in front of a certain provision shop. There was no crime in that. But it was the sign for the Elaoui men in the city to make their secret bargains with the actual dealers, a carpet seller with a big shop in a main street, or a lesser one, like the seller of cigarettes in the blue cloak on the edge of great Bazaar; and in a day or so the traffic was in full swing. At times a dealer was caught and disappeared for years into the grim convict prison. But he never talked. At times a youth was seen to strike his match at the appointed time in the appointed street. But if a man couldn’t light a cigarette in a public place midday, what was the world coming to? The secret of the distribution had been kept, and with that problem the new and unknown officer in the Coast-Guard Directorate was set to deal.
Mordaunt thought over his problem as he waited for Rosalind on a bench in that long avenue which leads at last to the Anglo-American Hospital. So far fortune had served him. He had seen the match actually struck. He had noticed expectation in the bearing of a man whom he knew before the match was struck and relaxation afterwards; and the man himself was suspect.
Mordaunt wondered whether he had been wise to inform Bryan Devisher that he would write to thank Septimus for his kindness. There had been a quite unmistakable flash of fear across Devisher’s face. Yet who but Septimus could have appointed him to a seat in the offices of the Dagger Line?
Mordaunt shrugged his shoulders. The question was not worth a minute of debate. For Mordaunt had written on the evening of his encounter with Devisher thanking Septimus for so readily helping his acquaintance and hoping, without any great conviction, that good would come of it. The letter should have reached London now. It would probably be delivered on Monday morning at the office of the Company. He had addressed his letter to the Chief Office rather than to Portman Square, since it was upon a business matter. Well, in ten days, if not before, he would have an answer; and, as he pushed the trouble away from him, a small hand fell lightly on his shoulder and he looked up to find some other trouble waiting to take its place.
“I am late,” said Rosalind.
“There is always an excuse for it,” Philip replied as he rose from the bench, “and to-day I’m afraid a reason.”
Rosalind nodded and sat down beside him.
“Yes. I had to decide. It was difficult. James thought, that since I had got this job with Mr. Scobell, I might as well get on with it.”
“James?” Mordaunt asked, rather at a loss. “Is he the successor to Septimus?”
“Not that I know. I suppose George and James are equal. But James saw no reason why I should go back. I couldn’t help. George, however, is a real Crottle. We ought to be together, the lot of us, in one room!
Her lips twisted a little crookedly even at this moment as she thought of the code of the Crottles. But Mordaunt knew her well enough to be assured that her trouble was real. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, very quiet, looking straight ahead of her.
“What has happened?” he asked.
“My father.”
He hesitated. But her face was troubled and perplexed, rather than grief-stricken.
“He is ill?”
“Not unless he has lost his memory,” and she swung round to Mordaunt, “and can you imagine Septimus doing that?”
“No,” Mordaunt answered, and now the nature of the disaster was clear. “Septimus has vanished?”
“Yes. He is lost altogether. Of course we always say that such things can’t happen nowadays. But they always are happening.”
Mordaunt sat and stared at Rosalind. He was never very quick to recognise and separate the sets of complications which one event might cause. And several questions were struggling to take form in his thoughts. One came first, and he asked it of her rather breathlessly. “When did Septimus disappear?”
Rosalind gave him the date and Mordaunt traced it back to a day which began forty-eight hours after match had been struck in the street of Abdul Azziz—and after Mordaunt had warned Devisher that he meant to write a letter of thanks to Septimus. Meanwhile Rosalind explained. “I got this telegram this morning from George. The Line has two offices, the main big one in Leadenhall Street and a smaller one in Whitehall, which father, of late years, used. You know how he lived?”
“By watches.”
“He had no fixed rule as to the hour when he went to, his office, but he left it at six every day, from Monday to Friday.”
This was his daily walk, whether fine or wet, whether winter or summer. On this Friday—it was a Friday and the footpaths, for that reason perhaps, a little less crowded than at six o’clock they usually were—he would have walked up Whitehall until he was opposite the mouth of Downing Street. There he would have crossed the road, passed through Downing Street, traversed St. James’s Park to the Mall, and walked up the slope of the Green Park to Piccadilly. At times, if the weather was very fine, he would prolong his constitutional to Hyde Park Corner and the Marble Arch, but as a rule it came to an end in Piccadilly opposite to the Turf Club. Here he hailed a taxi and was driven home to Portman Square.
Now on this Friday night a fog was settling like a brown blanket on the town and the month being October, the nights were closing in. Septimus was recognised by a policeman under the lamp-post at the entrance to Downing Street—and was never seen again. The nephews waited for some days on the chance that some body would have met and recognised Septimus, but now George had thought it wise to telegraph the news to Rosalind and summon her home.
“And you are going?” Mordaunt asked, and when she agreed he nodded his head once or twice like someone reckoning that here was a disaster to be added to the rest.
“I am not going for any but rather mean reasons,” Rosalind continued. “They have always expected me—my family, my father, too—to come crawling home, asking for shelter and the run of the cupboard: I want to go back and show them that one needn’t necessarily fail. I want to wave a flag—yes, it’s beastly and boastful, I know—for five minutes. Then I shall come back again.’’
“And find me packed off on an easier job, I expect.”
Suddenly Rosalind struck the seat with the palm of her hand. “No, no!” she cried with a curious violence. She sprang to her feet. “We have had failures, both of us. But we are not to continue having failures. We are going to do well—both of us.” And she turned away abruptly to hide perhaps the colour which rushed in her face. She was aware, quite unwittingly, of a community in their lives. She had paraded it too far, buoyantly, she had brandished it. She turned back again to Philip with quite another impulse.
“You will still be digging into your problem,” she cried. “I want to see the end of it. If you are ready to blow the Last Post outside the walls of Elaoui, wait please, until I can hear the notes, however far away I am.”
She had the eagerness of a child, she was so certain that the great cause must prevail, that Mordaunt laughed with her on a wave of confidence.
“I’ll try. As you come steaming into Cairo in three weeks, you shall hear them faint as fairy chimes from the edge of the hill.”
They were moving away to take their luncheon for once in the grill-room of Shepheard’s when the idea came into Mordaunt’s head. It was such a scintillating and illustrious idea, such an idea amongst ideas, that Mordaunt wondered how he came by it. He stopped dead on the bridge between the island and the city.
“My word!” he cried.
If ideas were to come to him of such beauty, why, he might solve the problem of Elaoui before Rosalind came back.
“But I wouldn’t like that to happen, Rosalind,” he exclaimed.
“No, Philip, it wouldn’t be pleasant,” Rosalind re turned, and it was noticeable perhaps, although neither of them noticed it, that this was the first time that in talking together they were using their Christian names.
“No. I want you to be in on it,” he said.
“Nothing could be more lucid,” replied Rosalind.
“Of course,” said he, and he suddenly began to walk forward at a great rate.
“Philip, I can’t keep up,” she replied; and he stopped again, full of remorse.
“It was the idea.”
“Yes, ideas do run away with one,” she answered.
“And this one, oh, I want it to be ever so clear.”
“It’s certainly a little involved at the moment.”
“Then I’ve put it wrong,” said Philip.
“You haven’t put it at all,” replied Rosalind. Philip Mordaunt stopped and stared at her.
“No, I suppose I haven’t,” he conceded. “But we’ll go along slowly—”
“We are not moving at all now,” Rosalind interposed.
Mordaunt looked at the bridge as if he expected it to be a staircase on the Underground Railway.
“No, we’re not,” he remarked with surprise.
He walked on again with Rosalind at his side, but now more discreetly.
“Your boat leaves Port Said?”
“To-morrow evening.”
“You’ll get off at Marseilles?”
“Yes.”
“And take the Blue Train?”
“Yes.”
“Right. I’ll tell you what, Rosalind! I’ll get it all clear in my mind and whilst we are lunching I’ll reel it off.”
“That would be a change,” said Rosalind and, with a little gurgle of amusement, she walked by the side of her frowning companion up the long street to the hotel. They had a wash, they drank a cocktail, they sat down to luncheon in the grill-room, and Mordaunt was ready with his idea.
“I took to Portman Square the last time I saw your father, an acquaintance of mine, Julius Ricardo.”
“He was on your yacht with Bryan Devisher.”
“Exactly. And with Ricardo, a friend of his, a French detective of mark, Hanaud.”
“Yes.”
“Hanaud was a big, heavy man with thick black hair and a blue jowl. He looked rather like a French comedian. He appeared to be as clumsy as a rhino, but he moved as lightly as an antelope, and he had quiet eyes which saw everything and a voice which was of no account and suddenly had all the authority in the world. I watched him whilst Septimus was reading—a book about Marie Antoinette’s boy, the young Dauphin of France, and it seemed to me afterward that if I had wanted an account of that queer event with nothing left out, I might have got it from him.”’
Rosalind Leete was listening now and with much the same concentration as Hanaud had shown. She no longer interrupted.
“Hanaud was very interested in the death of Daniel Horbury. He had a question or two to ask of Septimus which I didn’t hear, and he was, I think, inclined to believe that somehow Bryan Devisher was concerned in it.”
“Oh!” She recoiled ever so slightly. “Bryan Devisher,” she repeated.
“That’s the man to keep in mind,” said Mordaunt cheerfully. As long as you kept him in mind, it seemed that all the inferences would come trotting up one after another by themselves. “From the moment he deserted the Agamemnon in Dartmouth Harbour to the moment when I found him by chance in the Sharia Abdul Azziz, he disappeared altogether, although the police the next day were searching for him.”
“He disappeared with a letter from you to my father?”
“Yes.”
“A letter of recommendation?”
“No. Of introduction, yes. I gave what I knew of his history.”
“The black rim round the ankle?”
“Yes.”
“The Horbury swindle over the necklace?”
“I didn’t know of it when I wrote the letter.”
Rosalind nodded at him with a frowning brow. “There’s a lesson for you not to write letters to other people’s fathers recommending engaging scoundrels.”
“You weren’t other people. You aren’t other people. Devisher wasn’t engaging. And the letter wasn’t delivered,” he countered, and then came dolefully to the honest conclusion: “Yet I am beginning to be afraid that that letter did all the harm.”
“How?”
“I suppose because I am only just beginning to think things out,” he said so contritely that Rosalind’s hand slipped across the table and gave his arm upon the table a friendly and comforting shake. “You see, he couldn’t have delivered the letter because he couldn’t have done it until some time on the day when the police net was out for him—the Friday.”
“Still, when you found him here, he was engaged in the office of the Dagger Line,” she argued, and Mordaunt took her up at once.
“All the more reason to suggest that he hadn’t delivered it. The Dagger Line was almost the Holy Grail to Septimus. To put an unknown man out of a prison straight away into the Dagger Line here—in Cairo—no, Septimus would never have done it. If I hadn’t been sure of it at once, I ought to have been absolutely sure the moment I saw the terror in Devisher’s face when I told him that I should write to Septimus and thank him.”
“But you did write that day.”
Yes, I wrote,” said Mordaunt emphasising the word. For it condemned him. He pointed towards her hand-bag at her elbow. “You received a telegram. I gave him a week, a clear week, to telegraph or telephone.”
A silence followed whilst Rosalind followed out the possibilities which that difference of time suggested. This was how the story ran then: Devisher had friend who were expecting him in England, rogues of quality, the Horburys in fact. They had hidden him, obtained for him somehow this cover in the Steamship Office and sent him to take his profits and risks in the drug racket in Cairo. But if Mordaunt’s letter of thanks ever reached old Septimus Crottle, the whole scheme would be blown sky-high. Therefore Septimus must be kidnapped, removed, got out of the way somehow, until Mordaunt’s letter could be surely intercepted and destroyed.
Rosalind shrank from facing that tragical dilemma—but she did face it. Septimus Crottle came of a tough yeoman stock. He could face—he had faced—disasters and conspiracies. She knew of no secret flaws in that old and stubborn man which would defeat him. And such a hue and cry would be raised that all England would be searching for him and not searching in vain.
This was the legend which commended itself to those two novices over the luncheon table.
“I will write carefully a letter to Hanaud explaining everything, the striking of the match, what it means, Devisher’s recognition of it, my foolish letter to Crottle—everything.”
“Yes,” said Rosalind.
“I’ll give you the letter this evening in an open envelope. You will read it and then gum it down so that no one else can read it. I’ll send Hanaud a telegram saying that you will leave the Blue Train at the Gare du Nord on the morning when you arrive, and that you will call on him at the Sûreté that morning and go on by the afternoon train to England.”
“But”—Rosalind asked doubtfully—“you say he’s important. Will he see me?
“I introduced him to Septimus. Of course he will,” Mordaunt replied. “Besides, he’s interested in the letter Horbury wrote to Crottle which was never delivered. Oh, he’ll, see you,” and as if to make sure that a meal so dismal should not end in frowns and gloom, he added: “If you have any luck you’ll meet Mr. Ricardo.”