He lifted his head and became aware of the group about him. He looked at Ricardo and at Hanaud and at Rosalind, and then sat back and drew in some great breaths of air. Then he looked again at Rosalind, and suddenly barked out with a resentful note in his voice: “Rosalind, eh?”
Then he laughed as she shrank a foot or so away from him. “There, my girl, I’m not barking at you for leaving the ship, but for seeing me in this humiliating condition when you come back.”
He held out a hand to her, and with the help of his other hand and the back of the seat he managed to struggle to his feet. He looked at Hanaud and then at Ricardo, balancing himself with difficulty. There was very little in him of the Septimus Crottle whom they could remember. He was shrunken now and a good decade had been added to his years. But the very spirit of the man had gone. They could see it by the way he clung to his daughter’s arm for protection—he, the patriarch!
“Mordaunt sent you—Mordaunt, who thought—what was his word?—that I had no inhibitions, that I was free of the terrors, of the weaknesses, of the degradations under which other men fall—I!” and his voice rose in a scream suddenly, as a car rose up above the hill at Cobham and raced forward towards the group. He sank down upon the bench behind them. But the car went past without slackening. There were people in it, men and women laughing and talking. Septimus watched it between the bodies of his friends, at first only with his eyes, then with a trembling finger until it disappeared in the dust, and then until the dust itself had cleared away.
“All my life I have had that fear,” he went on, communing with himself rather than talking to his companions, “of being shut away in a silent place.”
“Like the Dauphin of France,” Hanaud exclaimed suddenly.
“A small dark place, where no one came, where one spoke, whence you couldn’t escape,” he continue “until—until you died all by yourself. All my life had been afraid of it. That’s why I liked the bridge my ship. The wide air and the stars in front of me. I tried to laugh the fear out of me—to bully it out of me—and then it happened.”
“How?” asked Hanaud, and Septimus Crottle drew back. He tried to throw a great deal of surprise and scorn into his looks.
“What! Don’t you know? You and your friend Maltby? The police?” and then, in a panic of shame and fear: “Strange that I should remember names, but of what happened to me that night—nothing.”
To Mr. Ricardo it occurred that there was a question still more important to be answered. How did the old boy come to find himself alone on the Fairmile in the early morning with his face visored and latticed with sticking plaster? And, arising out of the answer to that question, whatever it might be, was it wise for them all to be standing in plain view on the high footpath above the road?
He suggested that Mr. Crottle might find the cushions of his car more comfortable than the hard rails of the park seat by the roadside. But Crottle was suspicious on the instant. He looked at the great car, at the white empty road, at Mr. Ricardo.
“How do I know?” he asked, and his head twisted from side to side.
“You can trust me, sir, in any case,” declared Hanaud And Mr. Ricardo reflected how seldom Hanaud seemed to be important when he most cried himself up to be and how remarkably dominant and inspiring he could grow when he was not thinking of himself at all. Yesterday in Paris, he had been an expert speaking out of his knowledge and of the wisdom which knowledge had brought. To-day it was Hernani, and not a very good Hernani either.
Mr. Ricardo’s suggestion was obviously reasonable, and the whole party moved to the car. But, even in those few moments, it became still more noticeable how his experience had crippled Septimus, how swift and complete his disintegration had been. He walked irresolutely with his shoulders bowed and eyes which, despite his will, searched at every rustle for an enemy. Even in the car he must sit with his hand upon the lock of the door and the long stretch of road visible ahead of him and the driver’s mirror well within his vision.
“We will go forward slowly?” Hanaud asked.
And suddenly, with a flash of cunning, Septimus replied with another question: “Where to?”
Hanaud nodded with some satisfaction. He had his own answer to that question and wanted no conflict with Septimus over it.
“Let us see!”
He made a sign to Mr. Ricardo and, as the car moved on towards London, Septimus Crottle was questioned as to what he remembered of his disappearance.
“I left the office—it’s almost at the corner of Parliament Street—at six, as I usually did. There was a thick fog, turning brown, and night coming on. It seemed to me the moment to shorten speed, eh? I’ve crept across the Bay in my young days in that sort of weather. There was a street light opposite to Downing Street. I remember crossing there. There was a policeman standing just under the light.”
“There was,” Hanaud agreed.
“I crossed, walked through Downing Street, descended the steps at the end, and passed the Memorial to the Guards opposite to the Parade—”
At that point Septimus Crottle came to an abrupt stop.
“Well?” Hanaud asked, and, shaking his head, Crottle answered in a sullen voice: “I remember not one thing more. The Guards Memorial, yes. I crossed the road, wondering whether I was going to be run down by a car. I crossed quickly and I almost ran into the stone of the Memorial. But I didn’t. No, I didn’t. But I don’t remember one thing more until—” and the old man began to shake. A few little cries, they were less cries than the sobs of child lost in some jungle of horrors, broke from him and grew in loudness. His hand fidgeted with the handle of the door. He looked about him as a man looks, caught by his enemies. He whimpered.
“We shall leave it there,” Monsieur Hanaud cried cheerfully, “until we collect the admirable Maltby,” and a shadow of a smile brightened Septimus Crottle’s face. “If my case is in his hands,—” he cried.
“But it is, Mr. Crottle,” said Hanaud. “We have talked together, he in the Scotch Yard and I in Paris, over the vanishment of monsieur and of something else which I, the obstinate, congregate with it.”
Septimus looked up curiously and bowed.
“But there is now a little thing, is there not?” and he made his two fingers run along the arm of the seat and spring into the air. Hanaud was nervous, Ricardo decided. Now, why? There was a problem, or—to adopt the humorous slang which Mr. Ricardo thought it modern to approve—or was there? But he was nervous. Yes. Once more the fingers ran daintily along the arm at his side and sprang into the air.
“Yes, there is a small—”
“Don’t do that, please,” cried Septimus, watching the two nimble fingers. “It confuses me. What do you mean by it? Do it again and I’ll jump into the road.” The old man, suspicious of this unusual if harmless manoeuvre, was watching Hanaud alertly, one hand upon the lock of the door.
“It’s all right, father,” said Rosalind, and she turned apologetically to Hanaud. “I expect that any new movement disturbs him.”
“Yes. Certainly any movement so typically French,” added Mr. Ricardo sternly but with a warm inward satisfaction.
“Yes, it was French,” Rosalind confirmed. She was eager to make discomfort comfortable for her good friend of the Sûreté. She had no reason to realise that if there was one point outside his profession upon which Hanaud prided himself, it was his anomalous internationalism. It was just the Frenchiness of the gesture which worried him.
Mr. Ricardo hugged himself with pleasure, and who shall grudge it to him? Hanaud’s ears would burn. So English wasn’t he? “Mon pied!” Mr. Ricardo exclaimed silently—and aloud: “It’ll be all right when we get hold of Maltby.”
“Ah, yes, Maltby,” Mr. Crottle repeated happily.
Mr. Ricardo nodded towards Hanaud.
“We will drive straight to the Yard. Maltby will not dance his fingers along the arm of the seat. At the Yard—” and a blank determined negative came explosively from the most unexpected quarter:
“No!”
It was Septimus who uttered the word. He was looking from one to the other with just that bright flash of cunning in his eyes which they had all noticed before when he was sitting on the garden seat.
“Maltby, yes—with Monsieur Hanaud, to whose kindness I am deep in debt,” Crottle continued, “but privately. It is the full morning now. If we drive into Scotland Yard we may be seen. There will be many on the Embankment.”
“At home, then!” cried Rosalind, but still Septimus shook his head. “I have servants. I have three daughters—besides you, Rosalind. Within an hour the evening correspondents would be knocking at the door. It is not known that I have come back. I shall go to a nursing home where no inquiries would be answered.”
With an “Ouf!” Monsieur Hanaud showed them as radiant a face as a man of his sallow complexion could. “The nursing home, it is good. But better still is the house of my good friend Mr. Ricardo.”
There was a pause. Mr. Ricardo was not quite sure that he welcomed this interruption of his routine. Also, if the invitation had to be offered, he would, on the whole, have preferred to offer it himself. But Hanaud rushed on. There was an entrance through the Mews at the back of the house. Also, since it would quickly be seen that he, Hanaud of the Sûreté was visiting once more his old friend, it would be natural for the good Maltby to call. As for visitors, Thompson, the invaluable, would reject them, and no doubt Maltby would lend a fine young fellow who could fit himself into one of Mr Ricardo’s liveries. There were many spare rooms in the corner house. No one would be so pleased as Mr Ricardo to help in this affair.
Mr. Ricardo could do nothing but agree. He certainly did object to the lack of ceremony in the requisition of his house and perhaps still more to the trifle of malice in Hanaud’s smile. If Maltby was necessary before the necessity for silence could be explained, so, too, was Mr. Ricardo’s fine house in Grosvenor Square.
“Ah, ah, you make fun of your poor Hanaud. Well, well!” Hanaud exclaimed gaily. “After all, we are twins.”
“Personally, I should prefer to say ‘quits,’” Mr. Ricardo replied acidly.
Thus, in any case, it was decided. Septimus was smuggled unnoticed through the Mews at the back of Ricardo’s house and the car was driven on to Waterloo Station with Rosalind and Hanaud.
“I take you out of your way,” Rosalind protested, but Hanaud shook his head and got in beside her.
“We must be sure that the appearance of papa has not altered the story to be told,” he argued. “You are to say that Mordaunt saw Bryan Devisher in the street of Abdul Azziz and drank a bottle of beer with him?”
Yes.”
“That Devisher said that he had presented Mordaunt’s letter of introduction to Septimus and that Septimus had appointed him to a position in the Cairo office of the Dagger Line.”
“Yes.”
“That Mordaunt had written to Septimus to thank him for his kindness.”
“Yes.”
Hanaud nodded his head.
“And that Devisher was really concerned with a nation’s policy to rot the Egyptian people with drugs.”
Hanaud swung round to the girl. He frowned, he pursed his lips.
“You would say that?” he asked. “Because a match is struck in a street?”
Rosalind was astonished. He had listened to her in Paris without seeming to doubt a word of the story she told.
“Would it be fair to say the match was struck because heroin had come to Elaoui?” He was drumming on his knees, troubled by a doubt whether he was fair to a possible enemy. Rosalind found it a little difficult to identify Hanaud with this extremely scrupulous officer.
“You think that I should forget that circumstance?” she cried.
“Ah, circumstance—yes, the convenient word. But suppose the true word is coincidence. Then you tell your story and this poor man—ouf!”
Rosalind glanced at him again. She said firmly: “I will not mention the matchbox, nor Elaoui, nor Philip’s idea at all.”
Monsieur Hanaud’s relief was curiously great. It w all very well to wish to be fair, but to wish for it much, as first his anxiety and now his relief established, Rosalind did not believe. She was not, however, give time to debate the question in her thoughts. Hanaud chattered to her about her sisters until they reached the station. They had to discover a train from Southampton which would fit in with her arrival in a taxi at Portman Square. They were fortunate there, for a train was due in ten minutes.
“Shall I say you crossed with me, Monsieur Hanaud?” she asked as he stood by the door of the taxi.
He shook his head. “No, madame. You can, I am sure, find a friend whom you wished to seize the opportunity to visit. Better still, you went to the Paris office of your Line to find out whether they had news of him. So you missed the boat train.”
He stood back and drew a long breath of relief as Rosalind’s cab drove off. He sent Mr. Ricardo’s Rolls Royce back to Grosvenor Square and took another to Scotland Yard. He took a hurried luncheon with Maltby at a little restaurant in Soho, and at half-past two he looked, at his watch.
“Septimus Crottle has something to tell us,” he said.
“Let us go,” said Maltby; and, finding a taxi at the door—in those days such miracles happened—they drove to the corner house in Grosvenor Square.