“A whisky and soda, Monsieur Hanaud?”
“What would be an English evening without it?” Hanaud returned with a flourish. He took a tumbler from the tray and held it out to Septimus. But, even so, there was a twisting of his nostrils as the smell of the liquor reached them, and a gentle writhing of his features, as he realised that he must actually drink it, which was reminiscent of the Christian martyrs. Worse, how ever, was to come. As Hanaud stood with the tumbler in one hand and the other fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette, Septimus produced a large box of cigars from a cabinet.
“But that is a big box, Monsieur Crottle!”
“They are big, big cigars,” Ricardo replied gleefully.
“They look wonderful,” said Monsieur Hanaud. He stared doubtfully into the box, advancing and with drawing a hand; rather, Ricardo thought, like a young lady in the days of his youth on the steps of a bathing machine dipping her toes into the water on some bleak summer morning.
“They’re the best,” Septimus explained. “They are mine.”
Hanaud quivered as he took a cigar of a length associated with one English aristocrat and two English statesmen.
“You’ll spoil me,” he said, holding up a warning finger to Septimus; and, indeed, Mr. Ricardo fancied that that might really happen before Hanaud had reached the end of his cigar. However, diplomacy meant doing a good many repugnant things with an air of extreme pleasure, for the sake of establishing a position, didn’t it?
“Have a light,” said Septimus, and he struck a big wooden match. “You wouldn’t, I am sure, insult that cigar with a briquet.”
“I would not, indeed,” cried Hanaud, hastily withdrawing his hand from his pocket. He carried his cigar and his tumbler to a chair which really was easy and settled himself into it with deliberation. He was marking time. Certainly there was a little noise outside the room for which, indeed, Hanaud was to blame. He had been the last of the five to enter the smoking-room and he had not latched the door. The front door closed once, gently, as Alan Preedy, quiet, as gentlemen of the law should be, departed. Then followed a rustle of skirts and a couple of high-pitched voices on the stairs. The ladies were going to bed—or two of them, at all events.
“Now, Monsieur Hanaud, in what way can I help you? “said Septimus, upright in a straight-backed chair.
“I shall tell you frankly,” Hanaud replied, and he felt in his pockets. He looked at Ricardo. “You can oblige me. I left, or I think I left, a little diary in a topcoat in the hall.”
“I’ll get it for you,” Ricardo answered readily. He had, in truth, not needed the quick glance which Hanaud had thrown at him. He was really wanted now!
“It’s the grey coat,” said Hanaud.
“I remember,” said Ricardo.
He didn’t remember at all, but he went out of the room. In front of him stretched the long corridor to the inner of the two hall doors, empty—but not quite silent. A strange sound made itself faintly heard as he listened. What it was that Hanaud wanted of him, he could not imagine. All the more reason, therefore, to miss nothing, however infinitesimal. The strange sound was rather like the bleating of a sheep. And it came from the drawing-room just in front of the smoking-room, through the open door. And the room was still lit, although the girls, as Septimus had called them, had gone up to bed.
But Ricardo had only heard two voices. Was the third bleating in the drawing-room, and which of the three would it be? He advanced stealthily, noiselessly. He, Julius Ricardo, of Grosvenor Square, was primitive man-trapper, Redskin with the scalping-knife—Mr. Ricardo loved the picture—or perhaps not primitive man at all, but the man of to-day, acute, erudite, the sleuth—Mr. Ricardo liked the picture still more. He held his breath, he moved on tiptoe—and stopped. From the spot where he stood he stared through the doorway into a long oblong mirror against the drawing-room wall. He saw reflected in it the gimcrack table with the gilt handles, and the drawer once more open and, in front of it, seated in the chair which she had used during the reading, Agatha. But not the Agatha of the reading. This was a woman stricken. She sat with her hands to her face, shuddering. At times the shuddering mounted to a sob of horror and so stopped altogether. But it began again, and again so ended. Ricardo noticed that there lay upon her lap a card which had been torn across in two pieces; and even from where he stood he could see that there was writing on the card.
As he watched, he was aware of a change in her. Instead of the horror there was now uneasiness. She moved her shoulders, the hands fluttered upon her face; and he was warned. People who do not know that they are watched, sometimes by some instinct suspect it. He himself was the cause of her uneasiness. He stooped low. He had time to see her snatch her hands from her face, stare with a violent shiver at the torn pieces of the card, and then drop them into a wastepaper basket by the side of the cabinet. The carpet was thick and he made no noise. He stood straight up now, pulling down his coat. He said in a voice no louder than was natural: “The grey topcoat? All right.”
He walked forward past the door of the drawing-room, humming a little tune to himself. He was extremely careful not to direct one glance into the lighted room; and as he reached the contraption by the hall door, with its hat-and coat-rack and its tin trough for umbrellas, he so rattled it that only the most obsessed people in the world could have been unaware that he was pretending with every artifice that he was not pretending. However, it was one of the most obsessed people whom he had to deceive; and whilst he was fumbling in the empty pockets of a coat, he heard a click as a light was switched off, and a moment later the hiss and rustle of a dress upon the stairs.
“There’s nothing,” Mr. Ricardo was saying aloud. Really, he was playing his part admirably. “I can’t understand it.” He heard a door shut upstairs. Then he stopped at once his untheatrical piece of theatre. But he waited, listening for that door perhaps to open again; it did not. Now he hurried back along the corridor. He slipped into the dark drawing-room. Enough light crept in from the hall to define the plan of the room. But he must not stumble over furniture and he must be quick. He slid between the chairs to the wastepaper basket. A great fear was troubling him that the basket might be full with the litter of the day. But his fingers assured him that, except for two small pieces of pasteboard, the basket was empty. He snatched those pieces up. Above his head he heard a woman’s heels tapping. He slipped out and returned to the smoking-room.
“I can’t find it,” he said. “I am very sorry.”
“Oh!” said Hanaud, disappointed. “Well, I’ve no doubt that I can remember all that’s necessary,” he added encouragingly, and Ricardo, with confidence, shut the door.
Hanaud was leaning forward to speak, when Septimus said: “You have let your cigar go out, Monsieur Hanaud.”
“And if you think that’s a good beginning, my friend, you are wrong,” Ricardo commented silently.
Even Hanaud realised his fault. “I have, indeed. It is not to be pardoned. But with a wooden match, I light him again. So.”
“Now blow once.”
Monsieur Hanaud blew.
“Now you can smoke it.”
Hanaud drew in a breath. “It is delicious,” he said.
“Of course,” replied Septimus.
“But I waste the time. There was a man of whom, Monsieur Crottle, you will only have heard. Daniel Horbury.”
From neither James nor George was there a start nor any movement.
“He committed suicide,” said Septimus.
“So it is said.”
“An inquest will be held on Tuesday.”
“And that same verdict will probably be given.”
“But you don’t believe it, Monsieur Hanaud?”
There was no shrugging of the shoulders now in Monsieur Hanaud, no flourishing of arms. “I don’t believe it, Monsieur Crottle.”
“And whether it was suicide or murder—I take murder to be the only alternative—?”
Crottle paused, but his eyes met only a face of wood, and he resumed: “How am I concerned?”
“He wrote a letter to you, sir.”
The sentence was thrown quickly at Septimus—a grenade to produce an explosion. All it produced was a smile of amusement on Crottle’s old pippin of a face.
“They all do.”
Hanaud was clearly puzzled. “They?” he repeated.
“Horbury and men like him,” Septimus repeated.
“What is it, then, they want?”
“A passage on the Dagger Line, Monsieur Hanaud, to the land of their dreams—a land where there are no extradition treaties.”
“But there were enclosures in the letter.”
“There would be. Passages must be paid for.”
“And he didn’t send the letter at once. He kept it by him.”
“That, also, they all do—for Mr. Micawber’s immortal reason.”
“Something turning up,” Mr. Ricardo interpreted.
Hanaud was disappointed. He refused to accept the obvious and practical conclusions of Septimus Crottle.
“But Monsieur Crottle, you will pardon me. Horbury was not in distress. In fact”—if it came to idiomatic phrases, Hanaud could hold his own—“in fact”, he exclaimed triumphantly, “he was upsidaisy.”
“Financially?”
“Yes. We have the evidence, eh, my friend,” and he turned to Ricardo. “Horbury’s nosebag.”
“But was he upsidaisy with the police, Monsieur Hanaud?” Septimus answered with his eyes twinkling.
Hanaud, however, was ready for him there. “The Superintendent Maltby had no intention to arrest him.”
Septimus Crottle smiled. “It might be that the Superintendent Maltby didn’t explain, even to you, Monsieur Hanaud, all that he had in his mind. I am afraid that, after all, you have found a mare’s nest.”
“And I, no doubt, am the foal,” Hanaud returned quickly.
Mr. Ricardo was in the mood to applaud the witticism, even though it was founded on a mispronunciation. He did not like to see his friend so put down. Even Septimus began to laugh, but corrected himself immediately. Instead of a congratulation, he implied a censure. He said: “You have again let your cigar go out.”
“It is the excitement,” returned Hanaud. He rose, and young George Crottle was in front of him with a match-box in his hand. For a moment Hanaud stared at him as if he had forgotten his presence. Then he looked from him to James. Then he said: “Oh, yes, Mr. George Crottle! Mr. James Crottle! You agree, of course, with your uncle?”
The question, though out of keeping no doubt with the times, was quite appropriate to this particular uncle and nephews, so masterful the one, so debonair or amenable the others.
“Yes, I should say old Horbury wrote the letter,” replied the debonair George, “and put it away on the chance that he might some time want it in a hurry. There it was.”
“But there it isn’t,” replied Hanaud.
“It has disappeared?” asked James. He looked quickly at his uncle.
“Without trace. We have searched the office, Horbury’s desk, his blotting-pad, and his house.”
“White Barn?” said James Crottle.
“Yes,” answered Hanaud, and Septimus appeared surprised.
“You know the house?” he asked of his nephew.
“The name was in the evening papers,” George explained.
“There is no reason that I can see”—and Hanaud, who had started smoothly, now halted and pronounced slowly each word, as if he had just begun to see—“why Horbury should have taken the letter to White Barn. But he may have done.”
“However, it wasn’t there, and, mind you, we looked everywhere, Maltby and I.”
“In the blotting-book?” James asked.
“The one on the floor?” said Hanaud, and George Crottle chuckled loudly.
“I’ve heard that Horbury did a good deal of his business over a bottle, or bottles, of Pommery, but I never thought that he couldn’t stand up to it and had to keep his blotting-book on the floor.”
A little long-winded Mr Ricardo thought. Rather silly, too. George Crottle, with all his good fellowship, might become a rattle, when a gaffe had been made, to cover up the man who had made it. But the rally of dialogue was swift enough to cover more than a gaffe. Moreover, Hanaud chose that moment to close a subject which had become interesting to Ricardo. He flung himself away from George Crottle and the big offending box of Bryant and May.
“In a moment I ask or the match, Monsieur George, the splutter, the flame. Yes, I shall ask for them,” and with a laugh he challenged George to contradict him. “But at the moment”—he turned, still smiling, to Septimus—“it is to you, Mr. Crottle, that I would like to tell all, if you will have the patience to listen to me.”
“Of course,” replied Septimus.
“I have little concern in this affair,” and Hanaud explained the case of Devisher and Gravot of the Place Vendôme. “That is all settled. I shall carry back from the widow Horbury in notes of the Bank of England the money owed to him. But I went with Maltby”—and he described with a quiet force what he had seen and what he had inferred; the sudden determination of the Horburys to spend the night at the house in Lordship Lane, the manner of Olivia Horbury itself—“to read what people say is one thing, to hear them saying it is very much another”—the locked door, the telephone receiver lifted and replaced in the dark of the morning, the absence of all the natural fingerprints on the furniture, the want of any reason why suicide should have been committed, the disappearance of Devisher. “Yes, and something more, the disappearance of a little chart, fixed on an ebony board.”
“Chart?” exclaimed Septimus, sitting forward.
“Chart?” George Crottle echoed.
“Chart?” James Crottle repeated.
They were men of the sea, the three of them. Charts were part of their business. There were rolls of charts in the cupboards of the offices of the Dagger Line. It was inevitable that the Crottles should sit up and wonder what in the world Daniel Horbury was doing with a chart.
“Yes. It was marked, too, with pins, little black glass pins, with a white ensign on the top, such as you may buy at a toyshop. They seemed to mark the passage of a steamship—El Rey, which brought Devisher home.”
“And the chart has disappeared?” Septimus asked.
“Yes,” replied Hanaud, “with the letter.”
“Burnt, no doubt,” George returned.
“Cartridge paper,” said Septimus with a shake of the head.
“And the ebony board, too? Yes, it is possible. There was a small fire at White Barn. But why should Horbury be so anxious to burn so carefully that not splinter of the wood nor an edge of the cartridge paper should be left for us to find? And after so much trouble to stretch his chart flat and prick it day by day? It doesn’t sound reasonable.”
Septimus Crottle nodded his head.
“No, it doesn’t. But this man, Devisher? He was rescued by Mordaunt’s yacht. He left Kingswear by the Torbay Express”—once more Septimus went over the old ground. “Devisher is the man to look for.”
“No doubt,” said Hanaud. “Yes, no doubt, and Maltby is looking for him.”
Septimus Crottle was watching Hanaud’s face closely. “But he has disappeared?”
Hanaud nodded his head. “Yes. Like Horbury’s letter to you, the marked chart: and the ebony board.”
“With them, perhaps,” suggested George Crottle, and Hanaud swung swiftly round to him.
“Then Devisher was at White Barn on Thursday night,” returned Hanaud, and George Crottle’s face flamed red. He began to make in a kind of hurry some faltering suggestions which seemed superlatively foolish to Mr. Ricardo.
“Then he will have taken the letter.”
“From the blotting-book on the floor,” Hanaud interposed with a grin.
“And the chart,” James Crottle added without remarking upon the interposition, “and gone off according to his plan.”
Hanaud broke in again, shaking his head as if thus he shook all the plans away into the air.
“How can he have made plans, Mr. James? He arrived in London by the Torbay Express. He had no luggage, no friends, a borrowed suit of clothes, and ten or eleven pounds, and he had been at least six years away, buried in a foreign prison. Yet, within a few hours, he has made such fine plans that he can commit a murder in Lordship Lane and make a vanishing that all the police in London cannot explain.”
Septimus Crottle was as interested now as if some baffling crime had been committed on a ship under his command.
“But he has disappeared, Monsieur Hanaud! That’s the fact, the impossible fact which is always happening.”
“I do not lose sight of him. It is one of the facts which make me think he did not murder on Thursday night. I think that somehow he fitted in with other plans—maybe Horbury’s, if, indeed, Horbury did the slitting, maybe some unknown murderer’s.” He turned with confidence to Ricardo. “My very good friend and consultationist”—Ricardo shivered a little at the coinage of that new and, alas! adoptable word—“Ricardo was for some hours on Mordaunt’s boat with Devisher. Tell us what you thought of Bryan Devisher, Mr. Julius.”
Among the innumerable irritations which vexed the even flow of Mr. Ricardo’s spirit, perhaps none hurt so much as liberties taken with his name. To be “Mr. Julius” was to be a younger son addressed by a superior being—like a butler, say. He was being bidden to speak up and tell his little story. On the other band, his good name as a man of observation was at stake, and that was more important than irritation. Mr. Ricardo spoke up.
“He did not seem to be revengeful. He was hard, yes. But six years in the island dungeon had killed I think, the spirit in him. To lie soft and easy was the idea, and he saw a way of realising it, so long as he could get away from the steamer El Rey without reporters, and the police checking up on him. No, I agree with Hanaud, I doubt if he was the man to commit a murder.”
“So the murderer escapes,” said George Crottle with a smile of sympathy. “I am afraid we all prefer a laugh at the police to the capture of a criminal.”
Hanaud took up the statement very good-humouredly. He laughed with George Crottle.
“Yes, to be sure, that is so. But why do we prefer a laugh at the police? Because, in our heart and soul, we know that the criminal will not escape, after all.”
“He will do it again, you mean?”
“I mean more. The little offences, if they escape, at once there is some bad example and some harm is done. That is all. But the big crimes like murder, they may not escape. Once or twice, in the blue of the moon, there may be a nobility and it never fails to be recognised. Oh, never! But, as a rule, Monsieur George, accept the creed of an old tracker, the two remarkable characteristics of the big crime are its meanness and its cruelty.”
Septimus Crottle was undoubtedly interested. He nodded his head, sitting upright in his high-backed chair.
James Crottle said with a trifle of cynicism: “It would need a bold man to hold out against you and Mr. Ricardo.”
“I hope that one day, Monsieur Hanaud,” Septimus added, “you will come on some other than a Sunday evening and tell me in detail a few of your cases.”
“I hope,” cried Hanaud, “that I may give you some day the whole story of the night at White Barn in the Lordship Lane.”
As this was spoken, it took on a more important meaning, certainly in Hanaud’s ears, no less certainly in Mr. Ricardo’s. Hanaud glanced slyly at George Crottle and James.
“It may be, after all, that I make a mistake. Once I made one. In this case, however, I am sure.”
“Although the coroner’s jury will say suicide?” James Crottle asked.
“Yes.”
“But in that case it is over.”
“No. You see, Mr. James, Maltby is not satisfied.”
“Oh?”
The exclamation came from Septimus. What this flibbertigibbet of a Frenchman, who hadn’t the stomach to let him smoke a Romeo and Juliet Corona cigar, thought, was one thing—of the mere weight of a cigarette, say. What the Superintendent Maltby, of the tenacious, deliberate mind, thought, was quite another—of the weight of a Romeo and Juliet Corona cigar, in fact.
“Therefore, if the letter from the late Horbury were to reach you,” Hanaud continued, as he rose from his chair, “it might, perhaps, help to send it on to Maltby.”
“I will do so,” said Septimus, accompanying his two guests to the front door.
Hanaud drove home uncomfortably by Ricardo’s side in the Rolls-Royce No. 1, which had that evening arrived by way of Cherbourg. He had many postures, but no words, and experience had made Mr. Ricardo too wary to provoke them.