“My four candles burn in the dusk like little flaming spears, the brighter as the darkness grows. I have two flaming spears one on each side of me, and the blacker the problem, the more brilliantly they will pierce it.”
Hanaud shook his head. It was difficult for Ricardo to gauge the hooded look of his face, but he replied with a gravity in his voice which Ricardo had heard only once or twice before. “For myself, I could find a better image in one of your candles than a spear pointing to the truth.”
“Yes?”
“A heart turned upside down.”
Julius Ricardo was as much startled by the quiet voice as by the strange figure which he used. “By what?” he began, but he felt Maltby’s hand close upon his arm. Hanaud, however, answered the unfinished question.
“By fear.”
And for a moment the darkness seemed to deepen and the illumination of the candles to grow dim.
“I have been feeling like a man who is sent to find a number in one of the narrow corridors of your new hotels. You cannot find it, and at the end the corridor turns, and again the corridor turns, and again you cannot find the room. But for me, I meet fear.”
Once more there was silence, but Ricardo no longer wished to interrupt it, and Maltby’s hand was withdrawn from his sleeve. Then Hanaud resumed:
“Permit that I tell you how it grew. First we have a suicide, a thing simple, and with the Horburys almost natural. The razor close to the throat, as the good Foster said. But not now. The business is up, up, up. Horbury’s Newsbag becomes Horbury’s nosebag. The great poster will be on all the streets. Laughter and money and cocks porping—yes, yes, yes. But suicide. No!”
“There was the chart,” said Maltby.
“The chart Horbury leans over to hide from the Foster eyes, I do not forget him. One cannot doubt what he represented with his black glass pins with the white ensign, and the last pin jammed in angrily opposite to the Prawle Station. It marked the journey of that old steamship El Rey, the ports she had put into to deliver back her unsatisfactory visitors, the Lloyds Stations she had signalled. A trouble, yes. A danger, perhaps; but to be met to-morrow. That night, no danger at all. El Rey was still upon its way. It was rounding Beachy Head.”
“That’s quite right,” Maltby agreed. “There was a clerk from Horbury’s office at Gravesend to meet El Rey in the morning. Horbury couldn’t have expected Devisher.”
“Yet he took with him to White Barn the chart?” I said Hanaud, pursuing his own thoughts. “Why?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” answered Maltby. He leaned back and drew at his cigar with a greater ease than he had shown before. “He had tried to hide it already from Foster. He wanted to get rid of it.”
“And he certainly did,” cried Mr. Ricardo, clenching the matter finally with a rather irritating laugh.
“How?” asked Hanaud swiftly.
“There was a log fire,” Mr. Ricardo replied no less swiftly.
“Saperlipopette!” cried Hanaud, beating with his fist on the table. “That will not do. That tough white paper of which the charts are made. That little flat ebony board. All burnt up in a small log fire so that not an ash of blackened paper, not a splinter of the board, not even a brass drawing-pin is left to tell us here it was burnt. I am for the miracle, yes; but miracles must be reasonable.”
It did occur to Ricardo that the question whether a miracle could be a miracle if it was reasonable might be a diverting subject for a debating society. But Hanaud was too much in earnest. He had never known Hanaud utter that explosive outrage of a word—Saperlipopette—unless he was in his most serious mood. So without flippancy he suggested: “That chart may have been overlooked in White Barn.”
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. “My dear friend! The English police! They may be accused of the want of imagination, perhaps, but they do not overlook things, no, not anything. And a little chart nailed on an ebony board with glass pins pricked in? No, no, let us be serious.”
“All the more serious,” added Maltby imperturbably, “because a second search was made in White Barn after we had left Horbury’s office this evening and nothing was found.”
“Very well.” Mr. Ricardo would accept the disappearance of the chart by another agency than the log fire. The explanation was to be found with the explanation of Horbury’s death in Hanaud’s hinted theory of the morning.
“Very well. The man Devisher comes to White Barn. It is the address of Horbury which he remembers. He comes late, he quarrels, having good reason for a quarrel. He murders—that was your fear—and, taking the chart with him, he goes—”
“Where?”
The abrupt question shot at him across the table brought Mr. Ricardo to a stop. After all, that was to be considered, and at once a mountain of difficulties confronted him. Devisher had arrived probably at half-past three in London, in a borrowed suit of clothes, what was left of fifteen pounds after his fare and his luncheon had been paid, and no luggage. He had found his way to Lordship Lane, if the theory of a revengeful murder were accepted, unnoticed, and had unnoticed got away in the middle of the night to some place where he could lie in safety.
“Ever since you gave us his name and description, the search has gone on,” said Maltby gloomily. “Hotels, lodging-houses, shelters—a man without passport or luggage.”
“Add that he has not been in England or in touch with anyone in England for seven years, shall we say?—and then that he disappears as easily as if he had a place in every thieves’ kitchen in London—that is hard to believe.”
“But it might happen,” cried Mr. Ricardo, “and perhaps it might be the more likely to happen if he were unaware that anyone was looking for him.”
Monsieur Hanaud threw up his hands.
“We lose ourselves in the dialectic. We make up the fairy tale. We sober policemen! I tell you my trouble.”
He pushed everything away from in front of him-plates, cups and saucers, table-mats—making an empty space as though he were about to deal a pack of cards.
“In the first place, there is no reason for suicide. The excellent Foster makes that clear. In the second, Horbury has a poor little wretch whom he has injured, due to arrive in England this morning. Horbury has made his arrangements that the man shall be met. That he was afraid of him there is no sign. But the man was already in England. It may be that he made his way to White Barn last night. It may be that murdered Horbury—just settling his account. I do not say no. But I do not say yes. I say that if he was at White Barn, taking a desperate chance, he blundered in upon some much bigger affair, and must be hidden away now.”
Superintendent Maltby pushed out his underlip and glowered at the mahogany table.
“I haven’t got that,” he protested. “Devisher was not alone, or, at all events, ceased to be alone? Of course, his disappearance, a man without money or luggage or friends—yes, I suppose you might infer that there were others, or one other, who was concerned in seeing that he got safely away.”
“And the wife,” Hanaud added quickly. “Olivia Horbury. Let us not forget her. Whatever we told her, whatever we showed her, she was not startled. Full of horror, as anyone would be who was forced to live over again some dreadful hours, but surprised—no. She knew. She was present. Yet she would not speak.”
“Perhaps she had been cowed . . . ” Ricardo began, but he suffered his very frequent experience of never being allowed to finish a sentence.
“Ah! Ah! Ah!” exclaimed Hanaud. “I see you. But she was not cowed to-day with the police at the gate and in the house. Then what was the compulsion which shut her lips? Something grim—something brutal. The sure knowledge that if she spoke, she would follow on the husband’s road. Oh, there was someone else at White Barn last night, and that someone returned.”
“Devisher?” Mr. Ricardo suggested “To recover the chart on the ebony board.”
Hanaud nodded his head once or twice, dissatisfied but unable to disregard the argument. “It may be. He would not want the chart discovered. It points too clearly towards him.”
“But you yourself think that someone else came for something else?” said Maltby.
There was amusement in his voice and, at the same time, respect. It was amusing that Hanaud should so shut his eyes to the obvious explanations of Horbury’s death, suicide or murder by Bryan Devisher; that he should chase in his mind some phantasm of his own creation. And yet, he had the power to leave one uneasy. That image of a narrow corridor, and another, and another, and at the end—fear. Maltby certainly did not like it.
“You think Mrs. Horbury is in danger?” he said.
“That, I think, could be,” replied Hanaud.
“From Devisher?” Maltby persisted, and Hanaud suddenly thrust forth his hands, palms outwards.
“No, no, no! My Maltby. I am not here to make the confusion, to tickle you with the red-hot poker. Joey in the woodpile. No! I abandon you for your delight and go upon my vacancy.”
And the three men lost at once their tension. Cigars were renewed, a business-like decanter of Armagnac went forth upon its rounds. Maltby, Ricardo, both were at pains to discover the ideal place where Hanaud might pass his vacancy. “Margate,” said Maltby. Ricardo plumped for Brighton. But the unaccountable Hanaud had already his own plan.
“Cathedrals,” he said “I like to sit on the pavement under a stripy awning at a marble table and look at them. They are solid. If I cross the road to one and say, ‘I arrest you,’ it does not mind. It just says, ‘Here is that foolish little Hanaud,’ and very far away, in the depths of her, I hear a chuckle. Yes, I shall to see a cathedral to-morrow. I am told she is very beautiful.”
It was astonishing, even to Ricardo, to discover so much romance under the practical urgency of Hanaud’s character, but he was startled to hear the Frenchman add: “She has what is rare, perhaps, the flying buttocks.”
Maltby jumped in his chair. Mr. Ricardo looked, coldly at his friend. “A French cathedral, no doubt,” he commented acidly.
“No, no!” Monsieur Hanaud was as serious as a man could be. “I shall not give you the laugh by pronouncing the barbaric word of the city which she makes beautiful. No, I shall lead a porter at the rail way station to a board. I shall point with my stick, I shall press money into his thorny hand.”
“Horny,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“And I shall say,” continued Hanaud, without paying the slightest attention to Ricardo’s interruption, “’Please to buy me the go and return ticket to that unpronounceable place. For I am now upon my vacancy.’”
Superintendent Maltby stubbed out the butt of his cigar into an ashtray.
“I should like to see the porter’s reaction to your request,” he said, and then the smile left his face. “So you give up?” he cried with a challenge in his voice; and, indeed, that was to Ricardo the most astounding factor in the whole case. Hanaud gave up. He would go on a vacancy and moon under a stripy awning on Gothic architecture.
“Yes, my dear Maltby. You shall have your way. You shall make that amusing Horbury a fellow of the sea. It shall all be as you wish. And yet I hope that when I come back and have my little meeting with the adorable Madame Horbury and carry off my cheque for the patient Gravot of the Place Vendôme, you, as you say good-bye, will tell me something I much wish to know.”
“Oh?” Superintendent Maltby put his interrogation suspiciously. “And what is that something?”
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. He flapped a hand and flung the subject away. Yet he was curious.
“Yes, I would like to know what switchback business had to write to big business. What Horbury’s Newsbag had to say to the great Dagger Line of Steamships. And what Daniel Horbury enclosed to Septimus Crottle in so carefully sealed an envelope.”
“But that letter has disappeared,” cried Ricardo.
“Precisely, my friend,” Hanaud returned. “That is why I am curious.”