“So it was here that the Horbury lunched,” said Hanaud, looking about him. “Good! So we get the atmosphere, and that is enough. We eat and we keep our eyes open, and we talk of the ballet and whether the filet mignon is as tender here as at Lame’s.”
And in that way the meal was eaten pleasantly enough, with a bottle of Clos de Tart to keep it company. At the end of it, Hanaud produced his inevitable blue packet of black cigarettes. But Mr. Ricardo was firm and stern. “You shall not,” he said. “There are limits. On the borderland of the Clos de Tart there are Hoyo de Monterrey cigars, but not your revolting cigarettes.”
Monsieur Hanaud was, having been well fed, docile. He lit his cigar. “Am I allowed a peppermint?” he asked.
Mr. Ricardo smiled indulgently. “You are. A simple glass of Signor Bentano’s brandy will do for me.”
Hanaud smiled affably as he sipped his peppermint. “What did your Mr. Gladstone say in 1884?”
“That will never be known,” Ricardo declared firmly. He was not prepared to argue. By three o’clock Signor Bentano’s clients had gone back to their amusements or their business. At a quarter past, Mr. Ricardo paid his bill, and the pair travelled in the Rolls-Royce to Scotland Yard. Maltby and Herbert were waiting, and Maltby handed an envelope to Hanaud.
“You will find in that a copy of all we know about Olivia Horbury. It is much what you would expect, I think.”
Hanaud put the envelope away in his pocket, and the half-hour had not struck when they were on their way to what had once been Witherton’s Rooms in St. James’.
They were received in a small office of unnoticeable appointments by a long grey man, as thin as a question mark and almost as bent. He was handsomely dressed in a dark grey suit with a cutaway morning coat, a stiff white collar and a grey silk tie. He had a thin grey Chinaman’s moustache, of which he would lure the ends into his mouth and by biting them assure himself that there was something he need not question. He had so few qualities akin to the boisterous roguery of Mr. Horbury’s career that all the four men counted him as a watchdog, put in by a firm which was owed money. The grey man, however, rose to his feet and made a small bow.
“Superintendent Maltby, I believe. I have been instructed to put the office at your disposal.”
“Mr. Foster, then?”
“Yes.”
“You have been Mr. Horbury’s manager for five years?”
There was still some surprise in Maltby’s voice and it brought a sardonic smile to Foster’s mouth. “His managing clerk,” he answered, lifting a hand in correction. “Mr. Horbury’s business was, in the main, personal and conducted by himself. I fancy that I owe my length of service and my very good salary to the fact that I was honest and that, however uncongenial some of his activities may have been, I did not pry into what didn’t concern me.”
“I see,” said Maltby dryly. “It’s no use coming to you for secrets.”
“No. For I don’t know any,” said Foster. He crossed the room to a door and, with something of mockery in the gesture, flung it open. “This, gentlemen, was Mr. Horbury’s private office.”
They went into it one by one and stared. Maltby pursed up his lips and whistled. Rosewood panels decorated the walls, the furniture was upholstered in red damask, leather arm-chairs stood on each side of the Adam fireplace, and in the centre, on a thick Aubusson carpet, stood a beautiful big walnut writing-table, with a semi-circular top of pigeon-holes and drawers.
“Queen Anne,” Mr. Ricardo thought, looking at it with envy.
“Yes, all sheen and costliness,” said Mr. Foster, in answer to the Superintendent’s whistle. Maltby, how ever, was less concerned with the glitter of the office than with his need to reach more familiar terms with this difficult managing clerk. He had not noticed the irony in Foster’s voice, and was led consequently to make the most unfortunate mistake. He looked about him with admiration.
“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Big Business, eh?” and saw disdain completely occupy Foster’s face.
“Forty years in the City have led me to associate Big Business with furniture which invites you to go away as soon as your business is concluded.”
The Superintendent’s approach had been faulty. But he had still one other pebble if he could fit it somehow into his sling. At the present moment, however, Foster was not mixing his metaphors. He was driving straight on.
“Mr. Horbury himself, who had the most redeeming sense of humour, knew quite well that Big Business had nothing to do with the style of this room. For I ventured, falling, if I may say so, into your mistake, Superintendent, to expostulate with Mr. Horbury upon it, and he answered, ‘My good Foster, the sort of clients you are used to will no doubt shudder, but the sort of clients I expect will imagine this is the replica of a nobleman’s study.’”
Mr. Ricardo felt internally a sort of warmth. It is, after all, always pleasant to see a policeman put in his place.
“Big Business,” continued Mr. Foster, warming to his theme. He crossed the room, unlocked a cupboard and flung open the door. On one shelf stood glasses, capacious goblets of thin glass. On the other bottle upon bottle of Pommery ’06. “Look! “cried Mr. Foster, and he added with the most assertive waggings of his head, “Cocks don’t porp in Big Business.”
Mr. Ricardo here felt constrained to intervene. “Mr. Foster means, of course, that corks don’t-” but he was allowed to get no further.
“No, no, my friend,” cried Hanaud. “I like him as he is. Cocks don’t porp in Big Business. There is a profundity there.” He turned with a bow to Foster. “I thank you, sir. I use him.”
But Mr. Foster was staring curiously at Hanaud. He said to the Superintendent:
“You did not, I think, present me to these gentlemen.”
“I am sorry,” Maltby answered with a little discomfort. “This is Monsieur Hanaud of the Sûreté of Paris.”
He paused, his eyes watching the clerk keenly, but on Foster’s face there was nothing but bewilderment, no realisation that here was Horbury’s enemy; not even any recognition of the name.
“Monsieur Hanaud?” he repeated with an inquisitive glance at the Frenchman. “But as I told you, Superintendent, Mr. Horbury worked alone.” His eyes came quickly back to the Frenchman’s face. “Might I ask you, sir, whether we owe to your sudden arrival the—the crisis of last night? If my question is incorrect, I beg you to forget it.”
“Your question is incorrect to the last degree,” Hanaud returned with a smile. “But I am glad that you asked. For everywhere I see eyes of suspicion and hear ditto voices. I came from France yesterday, the complete incog of the wheel. No one knows me. I came to see the Horbury, it is true, but on a small matter of business.”
Foster’s gaze passed doubtfully on.
“And this,” said Maltby, “is Mr. Ricardo.”
“Oh!” cried Foster. “That is interesting. You rang up Mr. Horbury yesterday afternoon.”
“I did!” exclaimed the astounded Ricardo.
“Yes,” said Maltby keenly. “I want the details of that call, Mr. Ricardo.”
Ricardo stared blankly at the Superintendent. “You knew about it?”
“Certainly I did. At my first contact with this office I was told that an unknown Mr. Ricardo had rung up yesterday and obtained from some incautious clerk Mr. Horbury’s address in the suburbs. Come, come, sir! You have been very quiet about it all, but we have been waiting for you.”
Superintendent Maltby, Mr. Foster the clerk, and Inspector Herbert were all closing in on Mr. Ricardo with determination. He seemed to hear the handcuffs jingling, he almost looked round for the ewer of his prison-cell that he might wet his throat.
“Take out your notebook, Inspector, and set down the business Mr. Ricardo had with Horbury yesterday afternoon.”
“I had no business with Horbury,” Ricardo persisted.
“And why he wanted the address in Lordship Lane,” he exclaimed.
“What time was it when Mr. Ricardo rang up?” Maltby asked.
“Immediately after five,” Foster returned; and a great light shone in upon Ricardo’s troubled mind.
“Yes, of course, and he rang up from Victoria Station,” he declared, gazing at Monsieur Hanaud with indignant eyes. “The Continental train was no doubt punctual.”
Hanaud was seldom abashed. “Evidently I rang up from the Victoria Station. I did not wish my visit to excite the fear, so I did not give my name.”
“That’s no excuse for giving mine. And why should people be afraid of you?” Mr. Ricardo straightened his knees and scoffed at Hanaud’s self-importance.
The Frenchman shook his head in melancholy reproof. “So! You trample on the poor Hanaud, the alien, the humble one. Yet how you are unjust! It is a mixture, a jumble up. If I say it is someone who stays with the fine Mr. Ricardo of Grosvenor Square it becomes, before you can twinkle a bedpost, Mr. Ricardo himself. You all see that, I am sure.”
What Mr. Ricardo saw was that the prison walls were fading into air: what Superintendent Maltby saw was that a hopeful clue to the suicide of Horbury, upon which he had set some store, was dead as a doornail.
“Yes, it is a puzzle,” said Foster frowning thoughtfully at Maltby. “You see we are not Big Business, but Switchback Business. Sometimes we are up, up, up . . . ”
“With cocks porping,” Hanaud interposed.
“And the Banks smiling. Sometimes we are down, down, down, with the creditors filling King Street and Mr. Horbury invisible—and perhaps Superintendent Maltby not so far away.”
“And what was it this time?” Maltby asked quickly, but Foster was equally quick to avoid an answer. He shrugged his shoulders.
“It was, as I told you, a personal business. We shall know when the accountants make their report,” he said frostily. “But do not expect Big Business. Even those fine gentlemen,” and he pointed to a photograph of a horse hanging upon a nail, “never won a race except at Ostend.”
“Ah,” cried Maltby, seizing his opportunity at last, “I’d sooner see a Rugby football match at Twickenham any day.”
Foster gasped. Under the solemn aspect of Superintendent Maltby, he had found a brother. “Would you?” he cried.
“Rather! Wouldn’t you?”
Both faces went back to the Ostend champion, but their thoughts had nothing to do with the sport of kings. Mr. Foster was turning over in his mind pictures of finely fought football matches. Maltby was saying prudently to himself, “You’ve hooked him. Play him carefully!” With invariable care, he had left a direction early that morning for a check-up of Horbury’s staff, and of the few discoveries this was apparently the most valuable. It established him on a brotherly footing with the old clerk.
“Do you remember the last England and Scotland match?” Foster asked eagerly.
“My word, yes,” Maltby exclaimed ecstatically. He had never seen a Rugby game since his boyhood. “That was a match!”
“Just a run away from the beginning.”
“To the end,” Maltby was about to add, and fortunately saved his prestige by smiling at the ceiling.
“Until the last two quick goals saved us,” cried Foster. He laughed aloud. He almost stood upright. Every Saturday he hurried from the office, drank a glass of beer, swallowed a sandwich, and passed an afternoon of enchantment, watching heroes. He turned to Maltby and grasped him by the arm. “I’ll show you what is puzzling me.”
He led the Superintendent to a panel of the wall where a large—map, was it?—or cartoon?—was wound up on a spring roller. Foster pulled upon a string, unrolled it and made the string fast to a nail; and, as if a military command had been given, everyone in that room took a step backwards and stared. Maltby was the first to find his tongue.
“It’s difficult to surprise me, but if not Big Business, then Hot Stuff!”
Mr. Ricardo, though he sought for a pointed and devastating phrase, could not achieve it. No doubt he was stunned. “Really, really, what vulgarity!” he stammered.
Inspector Herbert said nothing and made a note. Perhaps Monsieur Hanaud was the only one of the four to appreciate it properly. A laugh of enjoyment, if so thin a sound could be so described, tinkled suddenly. “He was a—what you call him?—a gamin, a monkey, an urchin, that Horbury! How I would have liked it if he had lived.”
Foster swung round, surprised, and in spite of himself pleased. He was not as a rule in favour of foreigners. Finicking people who would be frightened by a good square meal off a saddle of South Down lamb, and hadn’t learnt how to be beaten at games. Yet this one had got nearer to the truth than any of his visitors.
“That’s right, monsieur. A touch of the gutter boy in him, to be sure. Always winked at himself, whatever roguery he was up to.”
The Wembley Stadium had noticeably diminished the correctitude of the clerk, who chuckled and rubbed his hands. “Half of that was just fun to him,” he cried, pointing to the wall on which the big cartoon blazed.
It represented a crowded House of Commons, Horbury standing in the Prime Minister’s usual place at the Treasury Bench, with his hand on a red box and an incredulous face turned towards an opponent who had dared to interrupt him, and the Speaker on his feet with a shocked expression and these words enclosed, as it were, in a bubble issuing from his lips: “Order! Order! If it’s in Horbury’s Newsbag, it is so.”
“Pretty crude, the colours,” said Maltby with a grin.
“No doubt, but it would nobble the public,” Foster returned.
“Horbury’s Newsbag,” said Maltby. “A newspaper?”
“A weekly,” returned Foster.
“But I’ve never heard of it.”
“You were going to,” Foster replied. “Switchback business. A big lottery on the Derby in Switzerland put us up. Horbury’s Newsbag was going to put us higher. In a fortnight that poster was going to go on every hoarding big enough to hold it which Horbury could lay his hands upon. A week afterwards the first number was to he published. He had got his staff for it. There were to be competitions with tremendous prizes. All the political stuff he was going to write himself. I warned him that he was overdoing it. But he wouldn’t hear a word. He just looked at that cartoon—I told you he had a sense of humour—and cried with a grin as broad as his face, ‘I tell you, Foster, Horbury’s News-Bag is going to be Horbury’s Nosebag, and pretty full too!’ Now mark me, Superintendent”—and Foster sat down in one of those too easy chairs and shook his finger at the Superintendent—“and you too, the detective of France. Horbury said that to me less than a week ago! Well then, explain to me last night!”
Maltby nodded his head thoughtfully and Hanaud sat himself down at Foster’s side. “There was real money in the bank?” he asked.
Foster answered him a little more stiffly than he would have answered Maltby. “Lots of it. The accountants, Trenlove and Timmins, a firm of the highest integrity, will no doubt supply you with a statement.”
“You were up, up, up,” said Hanaud, “with the cocks porping.”
Foster agreed with a smile. “That little joke amused you, eh? “and he added with a shrug of the shoulders, “but there have been times when the car rushed head-long down the curve, and there, perhaps, was the Superintendent at the bottom of the curve, waiting for the smash, and the razor perhaps not so far from the throat, But last night—no!”
Ricardo was oddly affected by the scene, so that he felt always on the edge of a revelation, but a revelation which never broke. Maltby, greatly annoyed that a simple verdict of suicide was becoming less and less acceptable, and at the same time honestly troubled as to what dark mystery the evidence was leading to, stood alone, staring now at the preposterous cartoon, now at the portraits of Horbury’s second-class racehorses. And in the two armchairs, side by side, Hanaud and the clerk talked in low voices quickly together. Anyone who has stumbled into an accidental witticism and finds it credited to him as intentional will regard with favour the man who has made this pleasant error. Altogether, what with this engaging Frenchman and the comrade of Wembley, Foster was now inclined to give all the help which he had meant to deny.
“Apart from his lottery and the nosebag,” Hanaud asked, “was there, do you think, any private affair which troubled him?” Mr. Foster shook his head. “Any enemy getting nearer and nearer to him?” Foster looked sharply at Hanaud and pondered and pondered in vain. “Did you ever hear him mention Bryan Devisher?”
Foster sprang at the name. Here at all events was something definite, even if it was definitely to be denied. “I never heard the name before you spoke it.”
The hopefulness died out of Hanaud’s voice and Mr. Ricardo recognised that the moment had come for him to encourage his friend. “But Mr. Horbury, no doubt, was a man of many secrets,” he said.
“Secrets is it?” cried Foster. “To be sure, there were secrets! His, mind you.”
“Yes, his, of course. But sometimes perhaps these secrets had outward signs with them?”
Superintendent Maltby had swung round upon this question and stood, holding his attitude, afraid lest a movement catching the eye or ear should distract Foster’s attention.
“Outward signs?” Foster repeated.
“Such as an unlikely visitor and a long conference?”
Mr. Foster reflected, heaved a sigh and shook his head.
“Some unusual thing he did and hid?”
Mr. Foster sat up straight.
“Oh!” he said. “I wonder,” and then he sat so long with his eyes bright and his head on one side like a bird that patience herself could hardly have borne it.
“I wonder,” he whispered to himself, and every head was bent towards him. But he only relaxed in his chair. He was still seeing something that no other of them could see. “And hid, you said?” He turned towards Hanaud.
“And hid,” Hanaud confirmed.
“Did and hid?”
“Did and hid,” repeated Hanaud.
“Yesterday,” said Mr. Foster suddenly, and of the four, three started and smiled, and were warned by a movement of Hanaud’s wrist.
“Yesterday,” Hanaud whispered.
Foster rose from his chair and crossed the room to the walnut writing-table. There was a row of pigeon-holes with drawers underneath them and in the middle a small locked door with walnut wood pillars on each side. Underneath the table there was a long drawer across and two smaller drawers, one on each side. Foster pulled at the brass handle of the smaller and lower drawer on the left-hand side and found it locked. He looked up at Maltby. “You have Horbury’s keys?”
Inspector Herbert advanced, he took an envelope from his pocket and the bunch of keys from the envelope.
“Thank you!”
Mr. Foster tried one or two before he lit upon the right one. It might have been play-acting, but, to Ricardo’s thought, the man was feverishly eager now to reveal the secret of that drawer.
“Now we shall see,” and he pulled it open. He peered into it, he thrust his hand into the furthest end of it, and drew it out again with a cry of disappointment. The drawer was empty. He sat back in Horbury’s chair and looked from face to face, bidding them notice how the fates played with men.
“But it was there! I saw him put it away when he had done with it and lock the drawer before he went to his bath. Ah!”
He sprang up, passed through his own room along a corridor. At the end of the corridor a dressing-room led into a bathroom. A charwoman had evidently cleaned the room after Horbury had dressed, for the clothes he had worn in his office lay neatly folded on a couch.
“Oh!” cried Mr. Foster and he darted forward. “To be sure! To be sure! I had forgotten.” He turned round, flourishing triumphantly a copy of an evening newspaper above his head.
“Was that what you were looking for?” Maltby asked glumly.
“Oh no,” he admitted, dropping at once to disappointment. Mr. Foster was rather like a rock which expands in the sun and contracts sharply in a frost. “No, and I don’t see it anywhere at all. However, we have got the evening paper,” and once more he flourished the paper. He had found it carefully folded like the clothes and half hidden beneath them. “And that may help!”
“How?” asked Mr. Ricardo.
But Mr. Foster was lost in thought and to Ricardo’s idea, most provokingly. “I have a notion,” Foster exclaimed, and he turned to the corridor.
“What we want is a fact,” Maltby returned.
Over his shoulder Foster called out, “A notion is the cocoon of a fact.”
He hurried down the passage back to Horbury’s office, seated himself importantly in Horbury’s chair and, after a definite poise of his left hand to make clear to all the thing which he was doing, he struck a gong upon the table with the flat of his palm and sat back, his arms folded.
“Napoleon,” Hanaud whispered. “Something will come of it.”
A boy came of it. He sat in the general clerks’ room, behind Foster’s, and appeared by a parallel doorway.
“John,” said Mr. Foster with dignity.
“John yourself,” said the boy. “Mr. John Urwick Esquire to you, please!” So quickly had the discipline of Daniel Horbury’s firm disintegrated.
“Mr. John Urwick, will you ask the commissionaire to step here for a moment?”
“I don’t mind, seeing it’s you,” John Urwick answered as he swaggered by. But he swaggered by Mr. Ricardo too, and he, incensed by so much impertinence crowning so many failures and delays, was carried, to the very extreme of violence. “Really! Really?” he cried and, swinging his leg, he landed Mr. John Urwick Esquire a real one in the right place with the right foot. John with a yelp flew across the room, dropping the Mr. on one side and the Esquire on the other. He dashed out of the door and with a speed which marked a new era in his life, brought in the commissionaire and slunk away behind him to his office. Mr. Ricardo, however, rather pleased with his resource, was completely occupied by the commissionaire, who stood at attention before Mr. Foster.
“Brown, you saw Mr. Horbury go away from the office yesterday?”
“I did, sir.”
“Did he take anything with him?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know what it was?”
“I couldn’t help knowing, sir. I was a petty officer in the Navy.”
“Oh!” and Mr Foster was not the only one of that company who was startled by the answer. “What was it that he took away?”
“A chart, sir,” and Foster’s hand thumped down upon the table. “Of course!” and for the first time the Superintendent and his companions began to learn something of that missing article which had so intrigued the secretary.
It was a small chart pinned at the four corners on to a flat ebony board by ordinary flat brass drawing-pins. It was easy enough to carry and it might have been carried under the arm, but for a difficulty. Pins had been pricked into the chart as if to mark out a course—only a few of them, but long ones, black ones with glass heads in the shape and colour of white ensigns.
Mr. Foster’s memory responded to this extra flick. His hand darted to a small flat box of white cardboard. Within a decorative wreath on the outside was the name Hamley, and an address. Mr. Foster lifted out the box from the pigeon-hole in which it lay and opened it. “Like that?” he asked, holding up just such a pin as Brown had described.
“Exactly that,” Brown answered.
Maltby closed the box and took it up from under his nose. Not a very considerate action, in Mr. Ricardo’s judgment, but to be expected. Fortunately, however, Foster’s fingers were still holding the pin which he had taken out of the box for Brown’s inspection. He stepped noiselessly forward. “One for me, please!” and he snatched at it.
But he only scratched a red line across the back of his hand, for which the managing clerk made no apology.
“Later on, no doubt,” he said, waving the pin back wards and forwards and using familiar words to answer familiar questions, but with his mind lost in other matters.
“Horbury was sitting where I am,” they heard him say, “and I came in behind him from my office with some letters for him to sign. Yes. He hadn’t heard me come in. He was bending over something in front of him, which I now know to be a chart, hunched over it. But where does the evening paper come in?—wait a bit—I know. Horbury grabbed at it. It was lying on the top of the desk above the pigeon-holes. He turned over the pages, hardly read a line at the top of a page, and drove in a new pin rather viciously. Did he turn the pages of the paper back again—?”
“No,” Monsieur Hanaud broke in.
Maltby turned round, half jealous, half friendly.
“How do you know?”
“Look!” Hanaud pointed to the top line of the page. “Shipping news,” and underneath it, “El Rey passed Frawle Point at 6 a.m.”
Maltby recognised the name and all that it meant in the shape of further investigation. He heaved a sigh, reluctant to abandon the simple verdict of suicide. But he was honest down to the soles of his boots. He smiled grimly at Hanaud. “Yes, that was the ship which carried Bryan Devisher. And seven miles farther on, Devisher took a header into a rough sea. Yes—but damn!”
The oath came from the heart of a busy, overworked public servant who couldn’t have shirked the least item of his job even had he wished to.
Mr. Foster had no ears at this moment for either Hanaud or Maltby. He was sunk deep in his recollections.
“I was standing”—he looked round—“just where Brown is standing. There was, yes—I think I can say that—a little gasp of fear when he looked at the evening paper, and he jabbed rather viciously the last pin into the chart. By the way—” and he turned round with a smile. “All right, Brown, that will do,” but when Brown had gone, the smile was still upon his face. “Did you notice those pins? Black pins with the White Ensign flying. Very characteristic of Horbury. All for King and Country. The old rogue—you couldn’t but like him. He must have gone out of his way to the toy shop in Regent Street to get those pins. However, there he was jabbing his pin in, and he was suddenly aware of me behind him. He just flung himself over the chart and said: ‘You can leave those letters on the little table by the fireplace. I’ll sign them before I go,’ and he pulled out the lower drawer on his left hand, as if he were going to replace the chart as soon as I left the room. But, you see, he took it away.”
Mr. Foster swung round in his chair.
“Yes,” said Maltby.
“Yes,” said Hanaud.
“Yes,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“Yes,” said Inspector Herbert.
They stood in a semicircle about Foster’s chair, brooding upon him. Mr. Ricardo could imagine nothing more intimidating than the group they formed, and, indeed, felt some secret pleasure that he was one of the intimidators. Foster was undoubtedly affected. He rubbed the palms of his hands together, leaning forward in his chair.
“There, that’s all,” he cried, throwing himself back and meeting Ricardo’s gaze rather than the gaze of any of the others.
“Ah, ha! he looks at you. You are the magnetic one,” said Hanaud in a low voice.
Ricardo wished that the charge were true. “I accuse him less,” he answered regretfully.
“It is curious, though, that Horbury should have taken that chart away with him to White Barn,” Foster resumed carelessly. He was seeking an opportunity of breaking up that arc of intimidating bodies and faces and slipping out of it. But Hanaud was too quick for him.
“It is still more curious that not a fragment of the chart, not a splinter of the ebony board, nor even one of the drawing-pins was to be found at White Barn.”
“Yes; that is more curious still,” Foster admitted. “Someone must have taken it away.”
“Then you admit a someone,” said Maltby sternly.
“No, I do not,” cried Foster agitatedly, and then surrendering: “Kamerad!”
He took the bunch of keys from the lower left-hand drawer where it dangled and, fitting one to the lock of the small chamber in the middle of the pigeon-holes, he said:
“There’s a letter. It won’t help you. I didn’t mean to mention it because it could clearly have nothing whatever to do with your case. It is written to really big business, you know. I was more than a little astonished that Horbury should be writing at all to this person. However, he was, and a long letter, too.”
“Do you know what it was about? “ Maltby asked.
“Not an idea,” replied Foster. “But it had enclosures, I remember noticing that.”
“And the address?” said Hanaud.
“Oh, yes. The address, of course. Horbury made no secret from me that there was such a letter, you must understand. If anything happened to him—you know the way men talk—I was to see that it went.”
“He said that?” exclaimed Mr. Ricardo. “If anything happened to him—”
“I think the material words were I was to see that it went,” replied Foster. “For he said them with a wink . . . ”
“A wink?” repeated Hanaud.
Foster nodded. “A bit phoney, eh? But you’ll be able to break the seal and see for yourselves.”
“It was sealed, was it?”
“Yes, black wax. Horbury pointed that out to me and winked again. Suggestive, eh? Hot stuff, I think, my late employer.”
“That’s all very well,” said Maltby. “But that little cupboard you’ve opened is as empty as Mother Hubbard’s. There’s nothing in it.”
Foster grinned. “It’s not as easy as all that, you know. There’s a little wooden latch in the roof of it.” He felt with the tip of his middle finger and shot back a wooden peg. Then he stretched his hand in to the back of the cupboard where a hole had been cut in the side wall. “Here she comes!” He was now able to slide forward the pillar on the left side of the cupboard. It was seen to be a narrow drawer set vertically, so that the opening was at the top. He took it out, turned it upside down and shook it. It was as empty as the cupboard. He tapped the sides and shook it a second time. He peered into it.
“It was there!” he cried. “He put it away for safety.”
Superintendent Maltby took the drawer and examined it. “Anyone who knew the trick might have stolen it,” he argued.
“No. He would need to open this little door first, and for that he would want the key.”
“Can you tell when he took it away?”
Foster nodded his head. “Yesterday,” he answered. “Horbury was very busy with his first number of the Newsbag. So it was only two days ago that he had an hour or two to spare. He made up his packet and sealed the envelope and put it away ready in the secret drawer the day before yesterday.”
“Yesterday, then,” Maltby agreed. “And ready for use, if the person whom it affected was not amenable, eh?
Mr. Foster set back the secret drawer in its place, shot the wooden latch into its place, locked the cupboard drawer, and, with a great formality, handed back the keys to the Inspector. He was once more the managing clerk, official and discreet.
“I could not for a moment, Superintendent, subscribe to any such suggestion,” he said, and Monsieur Hanaud rose with a smile from his chair.
“No, no, my friend, that is clear, and the Superintendent never meant that you should,” he said gaily. “But one thing, you can tell us, the great boum to whom the package was addressed.”
“The Big Noise,” Mr. Ricardo said usefully to a rather perplexed managing clerk.
“Yes. You certainly have a right to the name,” the managing clerk replied. “It was the name of Septimus Crottle, the Head of the great Dagger Line, and it was addressed to him at his private residence, 41A, Portman Square.”