“The difficulty is to know what are their proper places,” Hanaud complained.
“Well, I know mine,” said Septimus. “I am Chairman of the Dagger Line of Steamships, and my first business is to know what sort of hash my young directors have made of my business during my weeks of absence.”
He pressed the butt of his cigar down in an ashtray and looked towards Maltby. “And perhaps you, Superintendent, could find time to come with me and learn whether any demand for ransom has been made?”
“Ransom? Ah! That is an idea. Yes,” Hanaud cried with a bright look, as though the suggestion of ransom was one of those original strokes of genius which suddenly illuminate a mystery. “You will go to your main office in Leadandall Street?
“Leadenhall Street,” Mr. Crottle corrected.
“Yes, so I said,” Hanaud replied. “Then if I come with you, perhaps, Mr. Crottle, you will tell a clerk to find a cabin for me on a nice big ship to Cherbourg?”
Mr. Crottle turned with a little disappointment in his face. “You are returning?”
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. “You sail on Fridays. I remember that you said so.”
“Yes, but to-day—this morning—” Maltby exclaimed in perplexity, “you spoke very seriously.”
“I am a serious person,” said Hanaud.
“You spoke some other words,” Maltby hesitated to repeat them in Mr. Crottle’s presence. “And after them, ‘We ought to be quick.’”
“So, you see, I shall only have a few hours to roll with my friend Ricardo.”
For a moment there was the silence of stupefaction. But Mr. Ricardo was an expert interpreter: “He means to loaf,” he explained; but it was not the alluring picture of Hanaud and Ricardo rolling in each others’ arms across Grosvenor Square which had brought Maltby so sharply up. He and Hanaud were staring at one another. Quite slowly Hanaud nodded thrice, and the doubt cleared away from Maltby’s face.
“Very well.”
Now, all these vague sentences and vaguer glances which had been spoken and exchanged since Hanaud had asked Septimus for a passage to Cherbourg were intelligible enough to Mr. Ricardo. The affair would finish before to-night. The whole affair. Horbury as well as Crottle. That was clear. But the conversation up to that moment was a different matter altogether.
It took place after luncheon in Ricardo’s dining-room. The three—Maltby, Hanaud and Ricardo—had got back to the house to find Septimus up and dressed and impatiently walking an imaginary bridge in Mr. Ricardo’s library; and whilst Julius was ordering luncheon and the appropriate wine to go with it, and causing as much delay as was possible, the other two had some kind of a conference with Septimus Crottle. From that conference resulted undoubtedly Crottle’s proposal to present himself at once at his head office with Maltby, and Hanaud’s decision to seek at the same place a passage to Cherbourg. The conversation, however, seemed natural and spontaneous enough, but there was no debate, and to Mr. Ricardo, who liked now and then to enliven his language with a slang word, it all sounded phoney. It gave him the impression that he was being deliberately excluded from the climax. He didn’t like that at all.
“After all, where would they have been without me?” he asked of himself indignantly. He had noticed things every now and then. He had been the first to distinguish Arkwright’s Farm, hadn’t he? And here they were leaving him at home. In fact, here was Septimus holding out his hand to him.
“I thank you very much for your hospitality,” he said. “From the office I shall go home to Portman Square, where I shall look forward to the pleasure of seeing you.”
It was almost worse to hear Maltby observing with a kindly nod: “You will, perhaps, let me disturb you again when we have put our heads together with the young directors?”
Mr. Ricardo, indeed, was almost in tears. An outsider, he! The mere caretaker of the corner house! And at that, as Crottle and Maltby were going out of the door, the voice of Hanaud fell upon his ears like balm upon an open wound.
“Let them go first in a taxi. We follow in the Rolls Royce. It will be easy.”
“But it’s in the garage,” cried Ricardo in despair.
Hanaud shook his head with a beaming smile.
“I took the liberty. I spoke to Thompson. It was not my place. You forgive?”
“But I am grateful,” Ricardo explained; and the taxi was still in sight across the square when the Rolls Royce slid noiselessly to the door. It was not Mr. Ricardo’s habit to look with any complacency upon intruders who took upon themselves to ride his small thunders and direct his storms, but he rejoiced that they were easily able to keep the taxicab within their vision.
“It is the fault of Monsieur Crottle,” Hanaud explained, rather nobly to Mr. Ricardo’s thinking. “He cannot forgive me for that I prefer the peppermint and the cigarette.”
Mr. Ricardo must answer nobility with nobility. “No, no, my friend, blame me and Maltby. It is not formal and correct that I should be here.”
And so, disputing gracefully, they drove up to the door of the Dagger Line in Leadenhall Street on the number plate of the taxi; and Mr. Ricardo stepped nimbly from the car to the annoyance of Superintendent Maltby. But he said nothing. For Septimus walked straight from the street into the big front office.
By the door a commissionaire sat at a small desk and at the sight of Septimus he uttered a cry. Then he rose to his feet and stood with his hand at the salute. And that was more than enough. Behind a long counter which ran from wall to wall there were many desks. From each of those desks there rose a man with some warm exclamation of welcome in his mouth. They crowded to the long counter. One or two of the chief clerks held out their hands, and as Septimus, for once in a way openly moved, grasped them and said with a smile of mock surprise, “Well, upon my word, I seem to be popular with my officers,” there broke forth laughter and rapping on the long mahogany board, and a lift of voices which were obviously going to end in a rousing chorus of “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”
But the welcome never rose to that height. For, just when all Leadenhall Street was about to ring with a celebration which really belonged more to Lloyds across the way, a bell rang and an angry voice shouted through the room on a loud-speaker: “I can’t hear myself speak.”
Septimus stepped back and all the joyous clamour died suddenly. Mr. Ricardo noticed a change in Crottle’s face which baffled his understanding. It moved in a second from good humour to an anger so violent as to pass belief. That so much fire could blaze in old eyes, or that an old face, carved by time, could twist into a shape so malignant, was the strangest of metamorphoses. It was the flash of a moment, like some swift scene in a moving picture, so swift that it was almost invisible, but so vivid that it left a memory more real and complete than a mountain of detail could have done.
Crottle lowered his head then, so that none could se his face, and stood as still as a statue in a silence which had grown constrained and somehow rather alarming. Then, in a quiet voice, he said:
“That complaint came from my room, I think.”
The head clerk flushed and stammered. “Yes, sir. They moved in there.”
“They?”
“Mr. George and Mr. James.”
“I see.”
It was more than a trifle shocking to Mr. Ricardo to see how deeply the old man was moved by this encroachment of his nephews. They had been tactless, culpably tactless, too ready to assume that Septimus’s chair empty and too quick to share it. The business of the Dagger Line had to go on, that was evident, but they could have controlled it for a few weeks without changing their offices. They wanted all the trappings at once. It was not very clever. At the same time, the old man’s rage was quite extravagant.
“I’m glad I didn’t serve under him,” was one of Ricardo’s thoughts, and, “Upon my word, Rosalind was quite right to run out,” another. For still Septimus dared not show them his face and, though his body was quiet, his voice shook.
“Well,” he said at last, “it’s a good rule to take the first of the tide. Only the tide don’t always run true,” and in an effort to smile with good humour he contrived the ugliest grimace which Ricardo had ever seen.
A clerk lifted a flap in the counter.
“I’ll tell the young gentlemen that you have returned, sir,” he said, and at once Septimus stopped him.
“You won’t, indeed,” Septimus replied; and now there was some pleasure in his voice, a rather acid pleasure. He laughed. “We’ll surprise them. You, too, Mr. Ricardo. I’m glad that we didn’t leave you behind after all.’’
Septimus was chuckling with enjoyment. School-boyish, perhaps, and a grim sort of school-boyishness at that, Ricardo reflected. Septimus was preparing his surprise with all the dramatic effects and an audience into the bargain. He would relish his little triumph, but Ricardo would have bet a large slice of his fortune that not a glimpse would Crottle give to either of his heirs of the misery and torture which he had endured at Arkwright’s farm.
“Come,” said Septimus, and he led the way into a passage at the side of the main office.
“The first door’s my room,” he said, stopping before it. “The next door is theirs. You’ll be able, in their room, Monsieur Hanaud, to select your cabin to Cherbourg.”
He looked about him to make sure that his audience was complete, and then gently opened the door and stepped inside. The two nephews were seated opposite to each other at a big leather-padded table, George with his back to the door and James with his face to it. But his face was bent upon his papers and George did not turn.
“I didn’t ring,” said James without looking up. “Mr. George objected very properly to the noise.”
“No doubt my welcome home was a little obstreperous,” said Septimus, and at the sound of his voice James dropped his papers and sprang to his feet. He was: white as a sheet.
“George,” he cried sharply. For George had no risen, had not even turned his head, so engrossed was he upon his work.
“I am sorry,” he said, looking up towards James. But the attitude and the pallor of his stepbrother’s face startled him. He came out of a dream, a dream of ships and cargoes. “What is it?” he began, and he turn round with a perplexity so marked upon his face that he seemed hardly yet aware of any new big crisis in the affairs of the Dagger Line. But now he saw Septimus standing two feet from him. He reeled back against the desk. His voice rang out in a cry of delight, his face beamed, and if he didn’t hold out his hands it was because they clutched the edge of the table behind him to hold him up.
“You, sir! At last! Thank Heaven! We’ve wanted you!”
“And my room, too,” said Crottle drily—a reply which, to Mr. Ricardo, lowered the whole dignity of this welcome home.
“Well, we had to find our way, sir, through so many complications which you naturally had kept under your own control,” George explained apologetically. “You have been away a long time.”
“A fortnight,” answered Septimus.
“A fortnight, yes,” said George. “A long time, sir, for the Dagger Line with a jury-rigged rudder,” and he laughed and made a little bow. “We were afraid,” he explained again, “that something had happened to you. You were staying . . . ?”
And Septimus took him up in the same cordial tone.
“At Arkwright’s Farm. A few miles from Sedgemoor.”
“Sedgemoor?” George repeated with hardly a stammer, and “Sedgemoor,” James Crottle repeated again, idiotically. “Why, that’s where . . .
“Yes, where Monmouth was defeated, wasn’t it?” added George.
Septimus nodded his head.
“I think we might read about it on a Sunday evening. It would make kindlier reading than the history of the Dauphin of France.”
“My word, yes,” said George Crottle heartily, and Septimus took a step forward.
“By the way,” he asked easily, “do either of you remember that we employed a man named Barnish on one of our ships?”—and at Ricardo’s side even Hanaud jumped a little.
James Crottle was obviously troubled, but less by the name, Ricardo would have said, than by the oddity of the question.
“Barnish?” James echoed, and again “Barnish?” but on different inflexions.
“Frank Barnish,” Septimus repeated and, as George Crottle shook his head, he turned and drew Maltby into the room. “But it doesn’t matter. This is Superintendent Maltby of Scotland Yard,” he explained. “The Superintendent will see if the staff can turn up his name,” and with a pleasant nod he dismissed the Superintendent upon this business. Then, as though he had just noticed Hanaud and Ricardo for the first time, he called them forward.
“Monsieur Hanaud and Mr. Ricardo, you do know. Monsieur Hanaud pays us the compliment of wishing to return to Paris via Cherbourg on one of our ships. If you,” and he looked towards Hanaud and Ricardo, “will go into the office which my nephews use as a rule, Jenkins will see what he can do for you.”
He waved his hand to the head clerk, who was standing just within the doorway, and then unlatched a communicating door between his office and that of the nephews.
George moved forward.
“I had better see that they are comfortable . . . ” he began, but Septimus interrupted him with a laugh.
“Oh, they will only have a minute or so to wait. Jenkins will go along to them. It’s obvious from what you said when I first came in that we have a bit of work to do, and the sooner we confer about it, the quicker we’ll get it done.”
He opened the connecting-door and invited Hanaud and his friend to enter. He shut the door behind them and, seeing that Jenkins had already gone and closed the door upon the passage, he drew up a chair to their table.
“Now let’s put our three heads together,” he cried, relaxing into some sort of gaiety. Indeed, neither of his two nephews could ever have seen the old man in a more genial mood.
“But he is superb,” he cried, “absolutely superb! And it was shattering, mind you, all of it quite shattering. But none the less, he was superb!” and, putting the tips of his fingers to his lips, Hanaud blew a fervent kiss to so glorious a comedian.
Julius Ricardo was inclined to think the applause a little too French and explosive, but he realised that some tribute from himself was due. So he said: “Yes, he was remarkable, especially after those dreadful days he must have spent at Arkwright’s Farm,” and he did not notice the open-mouthed stupefaction with which Hanaud received the comment.
It was natural indeed that he should not. For Hanaud was already engaged in a kind of visual catalogue of the room’s contents. A big single knee-hole table for James, another like it for George, a filing cabinet, a bookcase in which some Admiralty Guides kept company with some naval almanachs, some chairs, a shelf against the wall, on which stood a chronometer in a mahogany box and—just what Hanaud was looking for.
“Ha!” said he, and he was out of his chair and across the room with that light, swift step, which, after all these years, Ricardo could never quite reconcile with his cumbrous build. Behind the chronometer, on the shelf, was a roll of big charts. And suddenly Ricardo was aware that Hanaud had a pair of fine indiarubber gloves upon his hands. But when he had slipped them on, he had not one idea.
Hanaud lifted the charts carefully from the shelf and brought them over to the table.
“Listen for Jenkins in the passage,” he said, “but he’ll give us time.”
Hanaud unrolled the charts and they sprang back into a roll.
“There are some paper weights.”
He nodded to two which he had pushed aside-heavy things of bronze and malachite. Under Hanaud’s direction, Ricardo placed them, one at each corner of the lower end of the charts. He unrolled the charts again from the bottom and held them flat. The one uppermost was a big chart of the English Channel. He let it slip from his fingers and it rolled itself again down to the paper weights. The next one was of the Indian Ocean, and the third of the Mediterranean Sea, and the fourth of the Great Barrier Reef on the coast of Australia. They were in no sort of order at all, and from the clean look of them and the speed with which each one rolled, itself up the moment it was released, it looked as if the had not been examined for many a day.
Hanaud looked at, and let go, seven of them quickly and then stopped with a little cry. From the side of the last sheet, so quick to hide its secrets, the corner of another paper was sticking out-and, of course, just a that moment Jenkins must knock upon the passage door.
Hanaud swore, and not his favourite polysyllabic oath: “Will you stand in front of the table, please, friend?”
He ran to the door and opened it. But he planted himself in the doorway and thrust his hands in his pockets.
“You can arrange for me? So! That is good. The Formosa. On the Friday, to be sure.”
Mr. Ricardo, with some surprise, heard Hanaud making his plans, but it was altogether a surprising day for Mr. Ricardo.
“Then you will make out for me a ticket and I pick him up at the desk as I go out. Yes? I thank you. You are the kindness itself.” He closed the door upon Jenkins. “And please to keep the snotty nose out of this room for the future.”
“Really, really,” said Ricardo, who disliked such phrases. Monsieur Hanaud, on the other hand, was radiant because he had used this one so appositely.
“It is not a pleasant word?” he asked.
“It is not,” said Mr. Ricardo with severity.
Hanaud nodded his head vigorously once or twice.
“I thought so. It was used upon me once in my early days by an English chauffeur who thought I was examining too inquisitively the interior of his good lady’s motor-car. However, work, not words—how often do our good statesmen tell us so!”
Hanaud was again at the table. He uncurled the seventh map and there, lying upon the centre of it was a much smaller chart with, here and there, pin-points marked upon it.
“Do you see?” he asked in a low voice. “Do you see the corners where it has been stretched out and fixed by drawing-pins to a board?”
“Yes,” said Ricardo. “I do.”
It was a small chart of the western seaboard of Europe; the southern coastline of Spain, Gibraltar, Portugal, the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel.
“Look where the pins were set. Cadiz first, then round on the west at Lisbon, next up at Vigo. El Rey had landed her undesirables in Spain and Portugal. Then straight across the Bay to Brest, where she discharges her French load. Then across to the Start, just after she made her number. Do you remember Foster, Horbury’s clerk? On the afternoon of the night when he died, Horbury, reading in the Evening Standard that El Rey had made her number at Lloyd’s station at Prawle Point at six in the morning, stuck in his little black pin with the white top there, at the Start lighthouse, just by, and chanced a final one opposite to Selsea Bill—see?—which he reckoned El Rey to have reached just at that moment.”
“El Rey?” exclaimed Mr. Ricardo, staring at the map. He remembered very clearly that rusty old iron boat in the dim of the morning floundering amidst a welter of white foam at the end of the bowsprit of Agamemnon.
“And here, just beyond Start Point, you picked up the passenger with the black rim round his ankle.”
“Yes—Devisher,” he cried.
“Bryan Devisher,” Hanaud agreed. “At last we know,” Ricardo exclaimed, “the murderer of Daniel Horbury.”
Hanaud choked suddenly and swallowed and came to himself. He made a low bow.
“As your proverb says. The costumier is alway right.”
But Hanaud had not yet finished with the chart. Whilst talking to Jenkins he had slipped off a glove in his pocket, and he began to press the ungloved fingers of that hand upon the chart.
“Now yours, please!”
“Mine?”
Mr. Ricardo hesitated, wondering whether or no he was condoning or implicating himself in some great crime. But Hanaud seized his hand and dabbed it down upon the paper in one place and in another.
“There!” he said, and he began to roll up the charts again with great care. “They must look just as they did.”
“They?” said Mr. Ricardo in a hushed voice. “Yes. But what have we done?”
Hanaud carried the roll back to the shelf and meticulously replaced it behind the chronometer.
“We?” he asked. “Why, we have left our evidence quite beyond all challenge that we saw the Horbury’s chart with the pin-pricks, slipped, as we expected to find it, in a sheaf of other charts in the office of the younger Mr. Crottles.”
Mr. Ricardo stepped back.
“Oh!” he whispered.
He was in a maze. He was also conscious, proudly conscious, that the presentiment which had so stirred him at Lézardrieux was true. He was engaged in the elucidation of a great and mysterious crime.
“Oh!” he said again.
He looked at the door which communicated with the office of Septimus Crottle. He pointed towards it.
“You did not expect that you would be interrupted from that room?”
“No,” Hanaud answered. “I thought that Mr. Septimus would prevent it.”
So this was the explanation of those secret conferences before luncheon at the corner house. It was reckoned a possibility, perhaps more than a possibility, that the small chart which had disappeared from White Barn on the night of Horbury’s death might be found in a roll of charts in one particular office of the Line. It had been arranged that Hanaud should have time to search for it.
“It was one of the nephews, then,” said Ricardo in a whisper.
Hanaud did not pretend to misunderstand him.
“Which?” he asked.
“Why not both?” asked Ricardo.
“Why not?” Hanaud echoed.
“We must find out,” Ricardo urged.
“I think we shall to-night,” replied Hanaud. “Now we ought to say that the ticket is arranged.”
He went to the communicating door and knocked upon it and entered. Septimus was seated at the head of the table discussing genially with his young partners the affairs of the Line. Was it possible that those two young men, or one of them, had murdered Horbury and planned the sequestration of Septimus, and that Septimus knew of it at this moment? Ricardo could hardly believe it.
“It is fixed?” cried Septimus. “We carry the great detective to Cherbourg, do we?”
Septimus is untrue to Septimus, Mr. Ricardo reflected. There’s something in it. Aloud, Septimus continued: “That is good news to compensate for our bad news.”
“Ah!” Hanaud replied. “My sincere regrets. It is not, I hope, serious.”
Septimus was obviously not overwhelmed. “Not very serious, but troublesome, as all new arrangements are. Preedy has left us.”
The statement took both Hanaud and Ricardo by surprise. Preedy? It was almost an effort to remember him. Of such small importance had he seemed to be in the great affairs of the Line.
“Why has he gone, Mr. Crottle?” Ricardo asked, and, with a touch of malice in his tone, Septimus answered:
“He saw the red light.”
Both George and James ducked their heads a little over their papers.
“He is in trouble with his lungs. He is leaving—I think, George, that you said he had left—for Switzerland, and will be away for two years.”
“That is unfortunate,” said Hanaud, and Septimus agreed.
“Preedy was a very useful ally. These Barnishes, for instance. It looks as if they had got away. But Preedy would have laid his hands upon them. Well, it can’t be helped! I shall see you at my house to-night”; and with a wave of his hand Septimus dismissed them.
Ricardo had entered the corridor by the second door. He saw Hanaud emerge from Septimus’s room, close the door, and lean against it.
“Preedy! I never gave a thought to him!” he muttered, his mind disturbed. “Should I have? For what reason?”
Although he only communed with himself, his last question reached Ricardo’s ears and he answered it: “Preedy had a special gift.”
Hanaud answered: “Yes, to be sure.”
They walked slowly along the corridor to the main office. Ricardo had, in fact, answered Hanaud’s question better than either of them knew.
At the, counter in the outmost office Hanaud asked for and received his ticket by the SS Formosa to Cherbourg. And that again stirred Mr. Ricardo indescribably. Hanaud, who hated the sea, who never travelled to England except by the shortest passage between Calais and Dover, meant actually to sail on an ocean-going steamship to Cherbourg. Oh, certainly Mr. Ricardo was in the way of great events.