Of course the idea must have been in my mind. I had, in fact, prepared a hidey-hole for myself in the West Country in case it should be necessary. But I had never formulated a time or a place or a definite point of the dialogue which I should reach before—before the collar of white paper split. Certainly I did not on this Thursday evening. For I took Preedy with me. Preedy was a smart, quick, sedulous small-job attorney who had been very useful in resisting claims when I was in trouble and in settling them when I was better off. I had managed, in return, to slip him into the company’s affairs. A few small cases which he handled very well did his reputation a world of good. He was devoted to me, and I certainly should not have taken him to White Barn had I definitely meant to turn the grim word into fact. Indeed, he was so angry that I had allowed myself to be blackmailed without consulting him, that I seldom mentioned Horbury to him at all.
There’s only one answer to the blackmailer—no answer. A lagging, like God’s sunlight, hots it up for the blackmailer as well as the blackmailed, and the blackmailer knows it.
But this particular summons, made, of course, over the telephone to Pevensey Crescent, hinted at mutual benefits and a settlement. Preedy wanted to go first and look round before I came. We had neither of us visited White Barn before, but Horbury had given me the bearings so accurately that a mistake could hardly be made. Preedy arrived in his small car a few minutes after half-past nine. A small garage stood on the left-hand side of the house, but the door was locked and the little courtyard was empty. A light, however, was burning in the hall and Preedy, leaving his car on the right of the yard, rang the bell. The lock, he noticed, was of the Yale kind. A man who was undoubtedly, to Preedy’s thinking, Horbury, opened the door and silently contemplated a stranger.
“This is Mr. Horbury’s house?” asked Preedy.
“But there’s no fishing,” said Daniel, and he began to close the door.
“George has not arrived?” Preedy asked again quickly.
“No,” said Horbury, “but we are expecting the Dragon along at any moment,” and he closed the door a little more.
“I am on the staff of the Dagger Line,” Preedy hurried to explain, “and I am George Crottle’s private solicitor.”
For a moment Daniel Horbury was disturbed. Then his face cleared and split with a grin.
“Upon my word,” he said heartily, “in George’s place I should have brought my solicitor with me, too. Mean while, come in and meet the wife.”
Mr. Alan Preedy looked and looked again, and drew a deep breath. Olivia laughed and blushed.
“I must apologise, Mrs. Horbury,” said Preedy. “For the most honest compliment I have ever received,” and then Preedy says, to the surprise of them both, he lifted up a finger.
“Crottle’s here,” he said quietly, and with so much certainty that, after a moment of stupor, they began to peer into the corners of the room. Preedy smiled.
“He has just crossed the Turnpike Road into the Lane.”
“Has he now?” cried Horbury, suddenly, as he thought, tumbling to the joke. He listened and nodded “He’s wearing shoes with crêpe soles.”
“He’s driving an Austin twelve,” Preedy corrected, and suddenly a small car drove into the courtyard a stopped.
“My word!” said Horbury. He saw vistas of high service done for him by Alan Preedy. The man might hear the most valuable conversations from impossible distances. “You and I must have a talk, Mr. Preedy, one of these days,” and, as if to emphasise the wish, the front-door bell rang sharply.
It was I who rang. The season was the season of full moon, and a silver light, daylight almost without it harshness, made the world suave and nearly kind Preedy’s car stood to the right of White Barn, and there was room for me to park mine between his car and the door.
Horbury came to the front door. He did not offer to shake my hand, but his voice cooed: “Your first visit to my refuge, Mr. Crottle? You’ll hope, no doubt, that it will be the last.” He opened a cupboard by the side of the front door and I saw his light brown overcoat hanging on a peg. “What, no overcoat? You boys! Your friend Preedy’s just the same. Wish I could risk it.”
“So Preedy’s before me?” I said as I hung my hat next to Horbury’s overcoat.
“Yes, he’s talking to Olivia in the garden-room.”
I stood, a little startled. “Mrs. Horbury is here, too?”
Horbury nodded his head. “She knows nothing of our little secret and there’ll be no necessity to go into details. But I’m no chauffeur, and the fewer people who know of our meeting here, the better. Olivia drove me down. Romantic, eh? Back to the old house in the suburbs! We shall sleep here to-night after you have gone. Just the two of us in the empty house. Beautiful!” And he reached up and snapped the light off in the hall. Horbury’s little speech was steeped in malice and the grin on his face was impish. He stood very still in the black hall, listening to me breathing and no doubt savouring it with enjoyment. Playing with fire? No, but with a long, heavy, blue-handled knife. No doubt it was very tempting.
“Might I hear what you have to say to me?” I said quietly. “The nut, after all, can’t be expected to enjoy the cracks of the crackers, even if they are wisecracks.”
Horbury threw open the door of the lighted garden room.
“Beautiful, you know Mr. George Crottle, don’t you,” said Horbury with a chuckle. “Isn’t it a disgrace to me that you thought of this wonderful name for Olivia before I did?
He knelt down by the fire and warmed his hands. “Chilly, these nights,” he said as he stood up again. I didn’t answer. On the floor, by the side of a table, a small chart was pinned on a board. But I wasn’t curious about that. I saw Olivia come forward from her corner. She was dressed in a black gown of satin with a short coat of white ermine which, as the room grew warm, she had thrown open. Against the background of fur, the slender white neck and throat rose from the black gown, too slender, it seemed, for that small head with its heavy coronal of hair. She was as delicate to the eye as china, rose-white, with the velvet of the crimson rose upon her lips, a creature of health and fire. And I hated her. So they’ve made a joke of me! Robbed me and laughed at me. A harlequin on a string—that’s what I am; and quite slowly I slid my left hand down the breast of my jacket. The comforting hard feel! Beautiful? Yes, she was at that moment, with a look of concern upon her face and question in her eyes. Very likely she knew nothing of this blackmailing business, knew only that I made love to her and laughed at me for my pains. I think that I began to hate her at that moment.
“You go over there, Beautiful,” said Horbury, “and smoke a cigarette whilst I have a word or two with these gentlemen.”
Olivia moved away to a cushioned chair at the corner of the wall. Horbury invited me to a seat on the divan and sat himself on a chair with its back to the wall and with the little table in front of him with a blotting-book upon it—a lady’s blotting-book from a suburban drawing room. Buhi and mother-of-pearl. Preedy—you have to take note of him, if you please—he found a chair with arms like the chair at Horbury’s table, a good chair of Chinese Chippendale with a seat of crimson brocade, and moved it a little so that he sat with his back to the wall on the side of the fireplace opposite to Horbury. Thus all three, Preedy, Horbury and Olivia, were sitting in a parallel, facing the garden windows. I alone sat with my back to them. Not that that mattered, for the blinds were pulled down and the curtains drawn across them. Horbury, Preedy and I, on the other hand, made an isosceles triangle, of which I was the apex, Preedy and Horbury the angles at the base.
Horbury then told us the story of Bryan Devisher, which Preedy, with his lawyer’s eye for facts, condensed into a few sentences.
“There was a lady with a very rich husband in a very big house in the Bayswater Road. She loved the graceful Bryan, and he pinched her pearls, lovely pearls, milk and moonlight. This, remember, was before the Japs had taught the oyster their barbarous efficiency. He sold the pearls to a French jeweller. I think he tried the usual trick of substituting a lump of coal, but it didn’t work. Where the cash went, it is, perhaps, not necessary to state.”
“And how do you know all this?” Horbury exclaimed, startled.
“The lady who loved so unwisely brought her secrets to me in the Gray’s Inn Road,” Preedy returned.
“And you advised her . . . ”
“To make a clean breast of it to her husband.” He smiled idiotically. “A happy metaphor, what?”
“You mean, you advised her to confess to her husband that she had loved and been robbed?”
“I did,” said Preedy, and I blew a long whistle of derision.
“I hope,” he said with dignity, “that I should give the same correct advice to erring wives on all occasions. But I am bound to admit that there were special reasons in this case. Devisher had been spirited away; and although strong suspicions pointed to certain people, there wasn’t actual evidence.”
“And she took your advice?” I asked.
“She did. There was the usual uproar. The police were called in. The husband was going to have a divorce, a resonant, shattering divorce. Wasn’t he just? Then it died down. The pearls came back, you see. The French jeweller had to give them up, since that’s the law. Then the husband recollected that he had run out of the course once or twice himself and that he wanted to get into Parliament and reckoned that it wouldn’t help to let the electors see what his wife thought of him. Finally came an evening when he had a good dinner, and a successful game of bridge, when his wife looked her best in her prettiest frock, and we ring down the curtain on a domestic scene.”
“And what has all this to do with me?” I cried.
“Wait, sir, if you please,” said Preedy, and then, “Ah!” as Horbury stooped and picked up the chart from the floor.
Horbury glanced again at Alan Preedy in surprise. “Then you know of this, too?’ he asked, tapping the ebony board.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Hanaud, the French detective, called on me at five-thirty this afternoon. He came straight from Victoria Station. But continue, please! My friend’s impatient?’
Daniel Horbury described the journey of El Rey. “I marked on this chart, from Lloyd’s reports, the harbours at which the ship discharged its undesirables. It signalled Prawle Point at six this morning and will discharge her English batch at Gravesend to-morrow morning. One of that batch is Bryan Devisher.”
He stood up and, laying the flat of his left hand upon the blotting-book as if he needed its support, took from the mantelshelf a thin little dark blue book. When he sat down again he was aware of a change in the room, a tension, a greater depth in the silence. He looked sharply towards me and saw that my eyes were fixed with more than a little concern upon Preedy. He had been sitting up straight and fairly stiff against the wall, but was, now stiffer than ever and withdrawn into some solitude of his own. His face was shuttered, his eyes blank, he gave me the impression of some lonely lighted house in the country which has suddenly gone black at the distant wail of a warning.
“You weren’t listening to me?” cried Horbury roughly.
He obviously liked to be listened to, as a Member of Parliament should be. Preedy’s eyes—I can’t say opened—for they were open before, but they lived again and a smile took the severity from his face and deepened the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth.
“Believe me, I was listening,” said Preedy. “You are proposing a deal, I think?”
Horbury leaned back in his chair. “You are quick, Mr. Preedy.”
“We have to be in the Gray’s Inn Road.” he retorted. “You want a cabin.”
“Yes.”
“On the Dagger Line.”
“Yes.”
“For Bryan Devisher?”
“As soon as can be.”
“Whither?”
“I don’t mind as long as it’s far away and there’s a job for him at the end of it,” said Horbury.
“On the Company’s staff?”
“That would be desirable,” said Daniel Horbury.
“And what do you offer in return?”
Horbury’s replies had been thought out, but they were no quicker than Preedy’s questions, which came rattling on the answers like the sharp bursts of a machine-gun. Horbury relaxed now, smiling contentedly. “Ah There we are! “he said.
“Are we?”
“To be sure.”
Daniel had no doubts. If there was no eagerness in Preedy’s face, there was enough of it in mine.
“I propose that a couple of letters which, if I had strictly regarded my duty to my country, I should have sent to the Public Prosecutor, but which I have addressed to Mr. Septimus Crottle, should be handed over for delivery to Mr. George Crottle.”
I interrupted here with a good deal too much fervour to please my solicitor Preedy.
“We have a ship the Sheriff, sailing from Southampton at five o’clock to-morrow afternoon. We have a cabin or two free. One of the firm usually goes to Southampton to see the firm’s ship off, and it’s my turn to-morrow.”
No doubt I was a little too ready to agree. I was indeed ready to invite the unknown Devisher, to travel in my car to Southampton, when Preedy objected: “Even so, he’ll want a new passport, won’t he?”
Daniel Horbury handed him the small blue book. Preedy turned it over and opened it.
“The photograph was taken more than six years ago,” agreed Horbury.
“When you sent him gun-running to Venezuela,” Preedy replied. He turned to the page with the photograph and nodded his head
“Yes, I expect that that will get him on board, especially if he motors with you.”
He gave me a nod and a smile. There was, after all, very little which got by Alan Preedy. But he had, nevertheless, not done with his difficulties. “But will he go? There’s no case against him. The pearls are back, the wife and husband reconciled.”
“But he doesn’t know that,” said Horbury. “Be sides, the Frenchman’s here, you said.”
“Yes.”
“Acting for Gravot of the Place Vendôme.”
Again Preedy grinned at Horbury. “I see you know the name all right. Curious, isn’t it?” But Horbury was not the sort of man to be offended by a little sarcasm. He didn’t even blush, and Preedy continued. “Hanaud says Gravot has cooled down, too. He doesn’t want any extradition. He wants his cash back.”
“But Devisher doesn’t know that either. Besides, he probably hasn’t got a farthing, and a pleasant cruise on a tip-top liner with a comfortable easy job at the end of it—not too bad,” Horbury explained anxiously. “Further,” and he looked down at the table and added with a hard note in his voice, “he’s obnoxious to me.”
Preedy laughed.
“Obnoxious is an excellent word. A dandy of a word. All right! When you hand over to me the letter to Septimus Crottle. . . . ”
“On the quay-side.”
“I see.”
Preedy tucked the passport away in his pocket. “You’ll go down by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll go in George’s car and hand over the passport to Devisher as you hand the letter to George.”
Horbury beamed. “Good!” he cried, He sprang up from his chair and, still supporting himself with the flat of his left hand, took a cigar from the mantelshelf and bit off the end.
“The ship is the Sheriff,” I said, and I gave the number of the quay at which she berthed.
Horbury took a pen from his waistcoat pocket, lifted a tiny corner of the blotting-book and wrote the name Sheriff upon it. Then he put the pen away in his pocket, lit the cigar and blew a ring of smoke into the air.
“There!” he said, a man conscious of a rather virtuous day’s work. “Now it’s all Sir Garnet.”
I suppose that since I have already used it, I got that old phrase from him. Anyway, he folded his fat arms across his chest and concentrated on blowing exactly rounded rings of smoke into the air. I expect that he was wondering why we didn’t get up from our chairs, say “Until to-morrow, by the Sheriff,” and take our leave. I was wondering that, too, but, after all, if you bring a solicitor with you, you’re a mug if you don’t use him. I watched Preedy. He sat stiff and straight against the wall and looked as if he didn’t mean to move until the Day of Judgment. He was puzzled, too, and annoyed. Finally he seemed to flare up.
“What I don’t understand, Mr. Horbury, is why all the flummery? Why all the pretence? Surely we can fix everything now and have done with it?”
“My dear fellow!” cried Horbury. “My dear fellow!” and even to me, Preedy at that moment seemed a daunting figure. He sat up so inhumanly straight, he spoke with so impersonal a tone, he gazed with so unwinking a stare across the room. One of the gods or kings from the Old Nile come back to sit in judgment.
“My dear fellow, I wouldn’t of course bring those letters here, no, not I!”; and the way in which he held tightly pressed against each other the covers of his blotting-book proved to me that there was a good deal more than the word ‘Sheriff’ between the leaves.
I couldn’t help wondering for a moment whether, for all his effectiveness, I had been wise to bring Preedy. If Horbury and I had been alone, those infernal letters might already have been in the fire and an order for a cabin on the Sheriff in Horbury’s pocket. But we were two men against one, and the rules of the game which we were playing excluded neither violence nor any kind of treachery.
“They are safely locked away where they can’t be found,” he exclaimed with a slobbering sort of laugh, and Preedy cut in across his words very quietly now.
“I wasn’t thinking of your bits of paper,” he said.
He moved at last. It was curiously startling to see. His head turned round until he faced Horbury and he asked, with the annoyance most people feel when they see someone complicating a perfectly simple question: “Why on earth don’t you let him in?”
In reply to Horbury’s look of bewilderment, he stretched out an arm with his forefinger pointed towards the curtained windows across the room. Even then no one except Olivia at once understood. She had been sitting not far away, forgotten in the urgency of our deal, but alert to each step of it and to the three characters who were conducting it. She rose from her chair and turned towards us. Was there something protective in her attitude? In her mere rising from her chair? Something which cleared the fog from Daniel’s brain? His eyes followed the line of Preedy’s arm, straight as a bar to the finger’s end.
“Let who in?”
“Devisher.”
Horbury tried to scoff. “Rubbish!” he cried, and laughed, but the laugh was more of a sob of anxiety than a laugh. “Devisher is at this moment tumbling up and down in an old iron ship off Beachy Head” and then in an appeal for confirmation, “Isn’t that true?”
Preedy’s answer came at once, not to be denied; and the very gentleness of his voice made it more than ever implacable. “I have heard the footsteps of a man for the last half-hour. I could almost draw a map of your garden from the sound of them.”
No other words could have so affected Horbury. They were the drops in the laboratory phial which change in a second the red to blue. Terror swept over him. He saw a panther slinking, padding his garden paths, waiting for the guests to go—Devisher. It was one thing to send an agent to Gravesend who would promise compensation, claim El Rey’s passenger as his friend, wrap him in the favour of a Member of Parliament and bring him along to King Street, St. James’s, in broad daylight. It was quite another thing to find him hiding in this quiet garden for a solitary interview with him in an empty house. Horbury uttered a little screech and his face turned yellow. The whole casing of the man collapsed, his small mouth dropped open—it looked horrid, obscene, and his eyes could not turn from the curtains.
There was no doubt why he was afraid. He had sent Devisher out of the country and then betrayed him to that soft-hearted man, the Dictator of Venezuela. He had imagined himself free of him until the Judgment Day and here he was in the moonlit garden of White Barn with six years of the Castillo del Libertador behind him. I had never seen so much fear made visible. And I enjoyed it! My word, how I enjoyed it!
“You are afraid, Mr Daniel Horbury,” I said with a chuckle of pleasure “You don’t mind facing a body of shareholders thirsting for your blood. A mellifluous voice and silky-smooth words, and they want to give you what you’ve left them. But one man with a nasty account to settle, waiting in a lonely garden—that’s quite a different affair.”
And quietly, just as quietly as Preedy talked, Olivia came across the room to Horbury’s side.
“Hold your tongue,” she said to me.
Why couldn’t she stay in her corner? It wasn’t her business we were discussing. She had been told to stay there. But he was throwing out his left hand to her and she took it and held it and willed him to resistance.
“Well, if he is here—I don’t see how he can be—yes, we had better get him in,” he quavered, “whilst we’re all together. Then, when we’ve settled everything, Mr. Preedy, perhaps, will take him back to town.”
Nobody said a word. Nobody doubted that somehow, translated from the moonlit Channel, Devisher was waiting in the moonlit garden. Olivia put an end to the tension. She uttered a little cry of revolt. “I can’t bear it!”
Preedy’s arm fell straight to his side—a decision given and not to be gainsaid. Olivia moved—did she ever walk?—across the room to the curtains.
“Let us make quite sure first,” Horbury quavered.
“You must put out the lights, then.”
“Oh, no,” Horbury wailed, but no one took any notice of him at all.
There was but the one switch to control all the lights in the room, although, here and there, the walls were plugged for standard lamps, and that switch was at the side of the door into the hall. I stood up and, after turning round, walked to the door. It was set in the wall at a right-angle to the garden wall. I turned. Preedy still sat stiff against his wall like the effigy of a god. Horbury had been smoking a cigar when the warning of Devisher’s presence had stunned him. The cigar had fallen from his mouth and bounced upon the table. He had put it into his mouth again and, just in order to do something, was drawing upon it, though only the tiniest grey spirals of vapour curled up from an edge and the end was as black as that ebony board on which the chart was fixed.
Olivia stood by the curtains. “Wait! The fire,” she said.
“It is out,” I answered, but the grate was obscured from me by the back of the divan.
“Then go!” Olivia ordered, and I turned down the switch. But I had been wrong about the fire. As the darkness fell, one of the logs sent forth a little spurt of flame which strengthened into a flickering blaze and gleamed upon the white ceiling and sparkled in every polished panel in the room. I heard a small gasp of relief from Horbury—how he was petrified by this ordeal!—and though I took no stock of it, I noticed that the spiral of smoke from his black cigar was a trifle heavier.
The log moved in the grate, the spurt of flame died altogether, the fire was out and the last glimpse of Daniel Horbury was gone.
“Now,” Olivia whispered.
Without letting one ring rattle upon the pole, she drew the curtains apart so that one panel of the long glass door was exposed from the lintel to the ground. A thin curtain of brown linen hung over it and the moon made of it a sheet of silver and dappled the floor about its edges with pools of silver, but left the hollow of the room black with the depth of a Rembrandt.
Except for the shadows of some boughs of the oak trees in the meadow beyond the garden, the screen was blank. Yet so completely had Preedy taken the mastery of our minds that no one holding his breath in the dark ness of the room doubted that he had only to wait in order to see it occupied.
One could not see or hear Olivia move, but a sharp click rang like a pistol shot through the darkness. She had unlocked the glass door. Again one could not see or hear Olivia move, but I know now that without touching chair or table she slipped back to her seat in the corner of the room. I remained by the light switch at the angle, and suddenly a figure was on the blind, to me at all events it looked gigantic and grotesque. Daniel Horbury yelped—there is no other word for the sharp, queer cry of pain which broke from him. But the figure advanced and the nearer it came, the less formidably supernatural it became. It was now no more than a huge man, clumsy but dangerous still, for it lurched this way and that, a night bird scouting for a victim. And now, as he advanced yet nearer, he was slender as a youth and his twistings mere hesitation and timidity. He wore a felt hat and, since his back was towards the moon, it was impossible to distinguish his features. As if he were tired of waiting for the cars in the court yard to take their departure, he came forward on tiptoe across a gravel path and laid his ear against the glass pane of the door. Satisfied, apparently, that the room was empty, he tried the handle and the glass door swung open at his touch. He stepped over the threshold silently and easily into—of course—an empty room.
“Who’s there?”
This wasn’t the challenge of the buccaneer. His voice was a whisper, his question an appeal.
“Devisher!” cried Horbury.
No one answered him. But Bryan Devisher had not spent six years in the dungeons of the Castillu del Libertador for nothing. He knew his mistake as soon as he had made it. There were others in the room be sides Horbury. He sprang to one side out of that picture frame of moonlight.
“This is a trap, what?”
And, by the most wondrous luck, Horbury’s cigar glowed red. He had puffed and drawn the black thing into life, unaware of what he was doing. Devisher flung the curtains across the glass door. There was no caution about the rings on the pole this time. They rattled like all the clogs on the French market stones. His voice changed to anger.
“A trap!” he repeated.
Oh, it was Devisher—and my great moment. Never did I deserve it. He dashed for the door, close at my side, stopped, searched for the handle, breathing hard. And precisely then, with one movement, as I had been taught, I tore the knife from its sheath and flung it. It sped true, true, true, with a hiss. For the fraction of a second I saw it by the light of Horbury’s cigar curve down and inwards and take him by the throat. I heard a horrible gurgle, a heavy fall of a heavy body upon the table, a jet like a fountain bursting, and a burning cigar described a circle in the air. But I had my own to do. Devisher was dragging and scuffling at the door. He had forgotten, in his absence of more than six years the height of the handle from the ground and whether the door opened inwards or outwards. I grappled with him, the blood surging in every vein. I was free from the old rogue with the lovely voice and the silky-smooth words and the cruelty of a cat.
“No, you don’t!” I cried. “You don’t get away like that! No, sir! “
But I found the handle for him nonetheless, and tore open the door. He had shaken me off and flung himself through the doorway in a trice. I didn’t make it very difficult for him. He was as panic-stricken as old dead Demosthenes Junior had been, but he kept his wits and, once he was out in the hall, he slammed the door hard and locked us all in. In the sudden silence, drop-drop-drop, measured like the drops from a medicine bottle, pattered on the floor. Olivia’s voice rose in a scream.
“Lights! Lights! Lights!”
Never did Hamlet’s uncle call for them so eagerly. I turned the switch and the room sprang to light.
Preedy stooped, picked up a burning cigar from the mat and tossed it into the fire. So far as I remember, that was the third movement he had made during that evening.