“You will see in England that dear Mr. Ricardo,” he said as he held open an agate cigarette-box. “Will you, please, at some time suitable, indicate to him I do not offer to my friends those deplorable cigarettes in a blue paper cover which hurt him so much when he smells me smoking them. A match? So! You have a letter for me I think? Thank you! Will you sit here whilst I read it?”
He put her into a comfortable chair whilst he read the letter, and it was not in order to make her feel more at her ease that he read it with, now and then, an exclamation of pleasure. When he had finished it, he laid it down and thumped it with little blows of his fist.
“So-o-o!” he exclaimed slowly and he became aware of his guest. He had gleaned something out of that letter more than they knew who had sent it.
“Madame, the letter is helpful. I sympathise with you over the absence of your father, Mr. Crottle, but I do not think it will be for long. Meanwhile, I say that you and the good Mordaunt torture yourselves without the reason if you think the kidnap was to anticipate Mordaunt’s letter of thanks.”
“Then you are acquitting Bryan Devisher of having any share in all this trouble of the Horburys and the Crottles?”
“Oh, I am? Am I? I plead at all events that we do not exaggerate the share. Listen, as they say in the films,” he continued, hitching his chair forward and then casting his glance in a wide sweep about the room. He lowered his voice, he nodded his head with the sagacity of an alderman. “I will tell you the truth. The negro in the firewood is a bird of another colour.”
“Oh, I thank you!” she cried warmly. “That does make everything so clear.”
Hanaud had the grace to blush. He had intended to save himself from a young lady’s questions by making the young lady feel foolish. All that he had succeeded in doing was to make himself look ever so much more foolish than she could have felt. However, he was not a man of grudges. To get your own back was not really a necessity. He laughed with friendliness.
“I tell you, madame, something more. You are the first to link with the affair of Crottle the affair of Horbury. Yes, they are one. What happened on that moonlit night at White Barn? Who was there? And why? Hours afterwards, when all was over and the moonlight growing grey, who lifted the telephone mouthpiece from its cradle to silence it? And who silenced—oh, something ever so much more important than the telephone . . . ?” He was following his own fancies and forebodings as they had crowded in upon him that August morning in the white house beneath the beech trees and the oaks.
“Who or what silenced Olivia Horbury? Why did she lock her door? For how long did she lie in a swoon against it? Only when we know all that happened at White Barn between the great holly hedge and the toll gate road on that night of late August—only then shall we put an end to the chain of crimes which began there. Daniel Horbury is murdered. That is no great harm, you may say. But Septimus Crottle disappears—and next—ah, what comes next?” He broke off with a shiver of the shoulders, so violent so unexpected, that Rosalind was shocked by it.
“Unless we are quick,” Hanaud continued. He folded Mordaunt’s letter to him without noticing what he was doing, slowly and carefully, so that each crease crossed the paper exactly as it had done; all his urgency rang in the whisper of his voice.
“Yes, unless we are very quick.”
Hanaud looked up. He saw Rosalind Leete with a pair of startled eyes staring at him from a face as white as paper. Was it she? Or that other woman of who he dreaded to hear? He moved to bring himself back from that corner of London. Outside the window those cries were rising from the quay, that flashing silver flood was the river Seine under the midday sun. Besides, this one’s hair was of the colour of a summer sunset. That one’s hair in London of the midnight.
“I frightened you,” he said remorsefully.
“You did.”
“I am sorry.”
“You will come to London perhaps?”
There was an insistence in Rosalind’s question which made him smile.
“Yes, I must pay for frightening you,” he cried and was met with frowns and disfavour. “I am serious,” she said.
Hanaud opened a drawer and produced a passport, a special request from the Sûreté that all help needed shall be granted to him, a special authorisation from the Home Office and finally a ticket.
“As soon as Captain Mordaunt telegraphed to me of your coming, I wrote to my friend the Superintendent, Maltby and at once everything was made easy. But I must say frankly that there is nothing which I can do which Maltby cannot do. We had many talks together, I think in the end we saw with one eye. But frankly, too, I do not like unfinished things.”
Hanaud was preening himself upon the nobility of his character, whilst he disclaimed all superiority to his English colleague. He had a false modesty which earned him jeers and sarcasms and disparagements and a true modesty which kept warm for him the loyalty of his department. It was the false modesty which was talking now, mimicking a humility which he did not possess and depreciating the social value of his calling.
“Now you, Madame Leete, by what route do you travel?”
“I proposed, if I was free, to travel by the afternoon train.”
“Arriving at ten-thirty or so?”
“Yes.”
Hanaud sat for a minute without speaking. Then he proposed to her a change. “If you do not arrive to-night,” he said, “I do not think that anything we fear can happen. You are expected to bring important information?”
“About Bryan Devisher, yes.”
“But no one knows yet what your information is. It may be of more importance than anyone thinks. Therefore it will be waited for.”
“Yes.”
“But if you arrive to-night, you do not know who will meet you or how many there will be in the house to hear your story; and before that awkward hour of midnight it may be known that you have not so much to tell after all.”
Rosalind sat back in her chair. She was breathing rather quickly. She was still frightened. Nay, she was more frightened than ever. She felt so near, as this man talked to her, to some grim lake of horrors writhing just beyond her feet. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“Keep for us this night safe.”
Monsieur Hanaud did not much like the sea. He preferred the shortest Channel crossing. But, if he had affairs to wind up, he could sleep without malaise on the steamer from Havre to Southampton. It was convenient. There was time to dine on arrival at Havre, and time to dine well. There were private cabins on the ship, one of which he would procure for Madame, as well as change her ticket. “La Gare d’Orléans, Madame.” A clerk should accommodate her ticket at Mr. Cook’s. And to-morrow morning Mr. Ricardo should meet them on the quay in his Rolls Royce No. 1, and drive with them to London.
Hanaud rang the bell and consigned her to his clerk. But while that man waited outside the door, the truth forced its way to speech.
“We are neither such clever ones, nor such fools people think. A crime may be committed. Such crafty plans may be invented to hide it up that we could never unravel them. But very often a little accidental thing happens, a change of weather, the departure of a train changed by an hour, some unexpected visitor at a late hour of the night. Ah, if we are quick to seize up that small scrap of grit which blows in from the window and spoils the smooth fine machine, to know it for what it is, then Madame”—no, he couldn’t keep it down, the other side of him must have its turn—“then, Madame Leete, one becomes Hanaud.”
At all events this should be said. By travelling on the Havre packet to Southampton Rosalind did more than save a night. She saved a life.
“We breakfast here, the English breakfast. Yes, I am the cosmopolitan. I like him. I eat him. The eggs, the bacon, the sole, the mutton chops and the Oxford marmalade. The night was untroubled?—yes”—this with a glance of enquiry towards Mr. Ricardo. “So for half an hour! Then we go on to London. We send Mrs. Leete home in a cab from Waterloo Station. We collect Maltby: over the luncheon at the Corner House we hold the council of war. Then perhaps we stretch out the hand—and make an arrest,” he was going to add. “But,” he stopped and heaved a prodigious sigh—“we are in England. Prisoners will not keep in the cell here. They must be aired in public before the magistrates at once, yes, and the police must be ready with their case, pronto, pronto.”
Mr. Ricardo, who was prepared like any true-blue to enter the lists for habeas corpus, regarded his friend’s lament as a tribute rather than as a challenge, and the car drove on through the woods of Hartley Wintney whilst the shadows were folded away. It was broad daylight when they dropped down the hill to Cobham and swept up the left-hand turn on to the open Fairmile. Gorse and heather and the straight white road running through, and not a soul to be seen. At least, so it seemed.
There was no one visible ahead. Monsieur Hanaud, who was sitting opposite to Mr. Ricardo with his back to the bonnet, asked suddenly: “You permit?”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned and rapped upon the glass panel and within a few yards the car stopped. Hanaud turned towards Rosalind.
“Mrs. Leete, I beg you to answer me a question.”
“If I can.”
“Of whom was Miss Agatha enamoured?”
Rosalind listened. She was amazed, then she intrigued, then she was wildly amused. She broke a laugh.
“Agatha! Oh, poor Agatha!”
There was no malice, no scorn in the laughter. It was sufficiently affectionate to persuade her audience that would have wished a lover on Agatha if she could.
“Of no one, then?”
Rosalind took the question seriously. Her thoughts ran back to olden days. She shook her head.
“It’s six years since I ran out. There was no one then. No one was ever expected by the rest of us. Perhaps we made it obvious—you know how cruel women can be without meaning it—and she—”
Hanaud, who was listening in an excitement which no other in the car understood, broke in:
“So that was it, perhaps. She was told too often that she was the spinster, that there was no man for her, and she invented one. Oh, it is no new thing.”
Rosalind, however, would not accept the calumny.
“She was religious. No! If there were a love story, even if it were only a dream of a love story, it would have a real live person for its hero. And I think,” Rosalind added, looking out of the window, “such an apparition would have so astonished her—at the beginning, at all events—that she must have had very good reasons for believing in his sincerity.”
“Oh!”
This fantastic story of the coffin and the locked drawer began to slide out of a grim fairyland into the land fact. “Then Miss Agatha is rich?”
“One might call her so. She was the first child. My mother left her what she had, shares in the Dagger Line, when they were worth very little and they are now worth a good deal.”
“Rich in her own right?”
“Yes.”
“To be signed away over her own hand?”
“If she so chose.”
And the coffin slid out stark before Hanaud’s eyes. The outrageous improbability became solid. Someone in desperate need of money had advanced, had pretended, had prolonged the pretences in the hope of eventual escape, had inspired a passion, had betrayed in what bower his hopes really had their home. Hanaud raised his hands and let them fall rather helplessly. If only he knew what had happened between the holly wall and the turnpike road on that night of ending August!
“If there has been anything, it began after I had gone away,” said Rosalind.
Hanaud smiled gratefully.
“You have told me, not for the first time, more than you think to have told me. I should have asked you this question before.”
“Why?” she asked bluntly.
“Because, if I had waited for another five minutes, I should not have had the chance ever to ask it of you at all.”
To the surprise of everyone, he tapped again upon the glass, and, sliding it to one side, gave an order to the chauffeur.
“Back the car slowly with the least fussiness possible, until I tap. Then stop!
The chauffeur looked behind him. No car was approaching. No one stirred at all in all that wide expanse of heath and road and sky except one old man resting upon a bench at the edge of the common above, the road, with his hands to his face and his elbows propped upon his knees.
The car slid gently past him below, but he took no notice of it. It seemed at first that he was in an abstraction, staring at the ground with his temples between his fingers. Hanaud tapped gently on the glass and the car stopped without a sound. It was seen then that the tips of the old man’s fingers were working.
Hanaud leaned forward and noiselessly opened the door of the car at the side of the bank.
“Madame Leete,” he said, “there is your father. I saw him as our car passed.”