“And now,” said Maltby, “there is one question which we all wish to ask, Monsieur Hanaud.”
Luncheon was over. Coffee smoked upon the table and a cigar, a pipe, a cigarette smoked in the air, dimming the bright aspect of the Thames.
Monsieur Hanaud beamed.
“Ask!” he answered with simplicity.
“Where was the Crottle letter hidden?”
“And how did you find out?”
The questions were fired at him from right and left.
“It was not so difficult to find out, but it was amusing all the same. Maltby, with Bryan Devisher and the Dagger Line and the Caledonian Market all on his shoulders at once, he leaves that little problem to me! Listen! The letter was in the blotting-book. Horbury had come to make a bargain. It was not in nature that he should not have with him his evidence that there was a bargain to be made. That was clear the next day when in the secret drawer in Horbury’s office the letter was no longer to be found. But I was sure of it in the morning. I could not see how, in falling forward, Horbury had pushed that book with its heavy cover off the table. It seemed to me to have been worked from under him by someone else. The book was empty. Who, then, had the letter? Someone had come back for it. Someone who heard the telephone ring hours after Horbury was dead? Had he found it? I thought not. I thought that the lady who faced us in the dining-room would have had the courage to secure that weapon for herself as soon as she was left alone. Well, then, where was it? The police went through the house with a toothbrush. . . . ”
“Comb,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“As I said,” Hanaud continued imperturbably, “and they did not find it. Therefore it was not in the house. But it was near.”
“In Olivia Horbury’s handbag,” Ricardo suggested.
“Not safe enough,” replied Maltby.
“And too bulky for her dress,” Hanaud corroborated. “So I smoke a cigarette and I reflect. The garden?—with a gardener one day a week, that’s what it looked like. Yes?”
“Yes,” said Ricardo; and Maltby, looking out on his own patch of carefully tended flowers, nodded vigorously.
“But there was a fine thing in that garden which was tended with all the loving care it merited.”
“The holly hedge,” cried Maltby.
“Yes. It stood twenty feet high. It was clipped. It was smooth as a yew hedge. I wondered. Then, when I called on that kind lady for the money for my patient Gravot of the Place Vendôme, I praise the fine hedge and her face lights up. Always in the old days when they were poor, she had clipped it on a ladder and looked after it herself, and still trusted it to no one. Then, a little quickly, she adds that it requires little attention now. ‘Once a year. I clipped it in the autumn,’ and, rather red in the face, she wished me good morning. So I have it! Carefully wrapped in waterproof rubber, it is, when it is advisable to hide it, hidden in the hedge. Then I make pictures. It will be high, yes. We will need the ladder. It will be at the end near the road. No, no. Then I get from Maltby a description of her bedroom. There are two windows opening on to meadows and one window opposite the holly hedge. I do not need to seek more. On a level with the window, whence it could just be seen, thrust into the hedge out of reach.”
At this moment, Monsieur Hanaud looked at his watch and leaped to his feet.
“My dear friends, I have to fly. I have promised to say good-bye to a young lady at the boat train on the Victoria Station at five o’clock.”
“Oh, you Frenchmen! Ha! ha!” roared Maltby, shaking with delight.
“No, no!” replied Hanaud, catching up his hat and his gloves and his stick. “The days of the wink and the gay twinkle in the eyes are past for me. I say good-bye in all respect to a lady who returns to her duties in Cairo as the secretary of a famous archaeologist.”
“Oh!” cried Ricardo, to whom this announcement was news. “Mrs. Rosalind Leete.”
“Mrs Leete,” Hanaud agreed with a smile “It is pleasant to see the young so devoted to such serious topics as Neferti and the mummies of dead kings. But I do not think that her duties will be prolonged.”
“And how is that?” asked Maltby, who had no liking for allusions.
“I gather from a word dropped here and there that the excellent Mordaunt will be on the quay at Port Said.”
Mordaunt and Rosalind Yes, you have got to have it, you know. . . . Well, perhaps you needn’t. We can more suitably complete the pattern of this story with the few words which passed between the two unlikely friends the next morning at the corner house and Hanaud’s departure for the Continent.
For the end of the holiday so often postponed had really come. At two o’clock in the afternoon, Hanaud was to take the train to Folkestone. Meanwhile, over his cigarette after breakfast, he looked backwards to the morning at the end of August when, with seagulls swooping over the river, he had driven with Ricardo across Battersea Bridge.
“Until you told me the story of Devisher’s rescue, I was ready to accept the theory of Horbury’s suicide. But that made a difference, eh? Here was a man, free as any stranger in London, with as black a score against Horbury as a man could have. Also he knew White Barn as Horbury’s home. Someone was at White Barn unexpectedly that night. Otherwise all the usual, natural fingerprints wouldn’t have been removed. Some one was too anxious. But, if Devisher had broken in and exacted his revenge, what was he doing in the house three and a half to four hours after he had committed his murder? And why did Olivia Horbury protect him?”
Ricardo nodded his head very wisely.
“So I began to wonder whether there was not, besides Devisher, someone else in the garden-room. And I was puzzled by that word ‘Sheriff’ written on the corner of the blotting-pad. Yes, I was very puzzled. Could there perhaps be something else which explained Mrs. Horbury’s silence, the lifting of the telephone receiver, the locked door, the Sheriff everything?”
“That afternoon Septimus Crottle swung into the picture,” said Ricardo.
“The name of Crottle brought Maltby to help us. Why was it that this man without money, without friends, Bryan Devisher, could not be found? Because, on Friday afternoon, the steamship Sheriff of the Dagger Line sailed with a last-minute passenger whom George Crottle had motored that morning to Southampton. The beautiful routine work, my friend, of the British police!”
Hanaud and Mr. Ricardo said good-bye a few hours later on the platform at Victoria Station, Mr. Ricardo all friendship and regret, Monsieur Hanaud a little lost, as though he had forgotten something important to remember. But, as the whistle blew and, the train started, his face cleared. He stood in the doorway of the coach, beaming.
“You are quite yourself, eh?” cried the anxious Ricardo.
Hanaud nodded. He had remembered. He laughed. He answered: “I am all Sir Garnet.”