He knew a good deal of the lives of men about town; and among the baser specimens of this trivial race he knew Richard Rannock, late of the Lanarkshire Regiment. When he left Grosvenor Square, with Lady Perivale’s case neatly engraved upon the tablet of his brain, needing no shorthand note to assist his memory, he was prepared to find that the slander from which the lady suffered had been brought about by some deliberate perfidy on the part of her rejected suitor. He knew of cruel things, and dastardly things, that Rannock had done in the course of his chequered career, mostly in the relation of hawk to pigeon; he knew the man’s financial affairs to have been desperate for the last ten years; and that although he had contrived to live among young men of means and position, with the reputation of being an open hearted, wild kind of fellow, he had lived like the buzzard and the kite, and the cruel eye had been ever on the watch, and the hungry beak ever ready to pounce upon the unsuspecting quarry.
Faunce’s first business was to find the woman. When he had marked her down, he would turn his attention to the man. He was in Algiers as soon as train and boat could take him there, and being as much at his ease in Africa as at Charing Cross, sauntered slowly under the meridian sun along the dazzling street from the steamer to the hotel, chose his room amidst the echoing emptiness of the corridors, where the hum of the mosquito was the only sound, made his expeditious toilet, and, with clean-shaved chin spotless shirt, and well-brushed alpaca coat, lounged into the French manager’s bureau.
The manager knew Mr. Faunce, who had spent a week at the hotel during the previous autumn, in the interests of a wronged husband, high-born had danced away from the marital mansion with a favourite partner, as gaily as if an elopement were only a new figure in the cotillon. Faunce had run the poor little lady to earth in this very hotel, hidden in an armoire, among perfumed silk petticoats and lace flounces. He had found her, and had taken her straight home to her husband, tearful and ashamed, but only guilty of such a girlish escapade as husbands can forgive.
She had parted with her lover at Marseilles. He was to cross in a different steamer, to throw pursuers off the scent. And his steamer had been delayed, and she was alone at the hotel in Algiers, frightened out of her wits, when Faunce retrieved her.
The manager was delighted to see the English detective, offered his cigar-case, proposed drinks. Faunce never refused a cigar, and rarely accepted a drink.
“Merci, mon ami, I had breakfast on the steamer half an hour ago,” and then Faunce unfolded his business.
He affected no secrecy with M. Louis, the manager, who was bon zig, and the essence of discretion.
Such and such a man — here followed a graphic description of Colonel Rannock — had been at the hotel in the last tourist season — date unknown. It might have been before Christmas, or it might have been any time before April. He had come from Sardinia or Corsica, or he was going to one of those islands. He had a lady with him, young and handsome, and he was supposed to be travelling under an alias, and not under his own name — Rannock.
The manager looked puzzled. The most minute description will hardly conjure up the distinct image of one particular man. There are generally a dozen men in any prosperous hotel who would fit Faunce’s description of Colonel Rannock — tall, dark, an aquiline nose, a heavy moustache, eyes rather too near together, forehead prominent over the eyes, receding sharply above the perceptive ridge, hands and feet small, air thoroughbred.
“Que diable,” said the manager,”we had a very good season. Les messieurs de cette espece fourmillaient dans I’hotel. I could count one such on every finger.”
“Could you count ten such women as that?” asked Faunce, taking Lady Perivale’s photograph from his letter-case and laying it on the manager’s desk.
“Sapristi!” said M. Louis, looking at Lady Perivale’s photograph. “Yes, I remember her. Elle était une drôlesse.”
If Faunce’s mind had harboured any lingering doubt of Lady Perivale’s innocence, that phrase would have dispelled it. In no circumstances could the woman he had seen in Grosvenor Square have so conducted herself as to merit such a description.
“Look at it a little closer,” said Faunce, “and tell me pour sur that you know the lady.”
“No, I don’t know her. Your photograph is uncommonly like her, but not the very woman — unless it was taken some years, ago. This lady is younger than the woman who was here last February, by at least half a dozen years.”
“The photograph was taken recently, as you can see by the dress,” said Faunce; “and now tell me about the woman who was here.”
“You are looking for her?”
“Yes!”
“Forgery, or” — and the manager’s eyes opened wider, and his nostrils quivered with excitement—”murder?”
“Neither. I want the lady in the witness-box, not in the dock. Her evidence is required in the interests of a client of mine, and I am prepared to pay handsomely for any information that will help me to find her.”
“Monsieur Faunce has always the good sense. Well, what do you want to know about her?”
“Everything that you or any of your personnel can tell me.”
“She was here for a little over a fortnight, with her husband — now that I think of him, just the man you describe — tall, dark, hook-nose, prominent brow, eyes near together, heavy moustache, drank a good deal, chiefly Cognac, the lady preferred champagne; spent every night at the club, seldom came home till the hotel was shut; the night porter would tell you his hours; quarrelled with the lady, tried to beat her, and got the worst of it; came to the déjeuner with a black eye and a scratched cheek. My faith, but they were a pretty couple! They would have made a pretty scandal if they had stayed much longer.”
“Was he able to pay his bill?”
“Oh yes; he would always be able. There were two young Americans — what is it you others call your richards? Les oiseaux d’ouf. They went to the club with him every night, they played piquet in his salon of an afternoon, they brought flowers and gloves and chocolates for the lady. The poor children! How they were played! And there was a diamond merchant from the Transvaal. He, too, admired Madame, and he, too, played piquet in the salon.”
“And Madame; was she very civil to these gentlemen?”
“Civil? She treated them like the dirt under her feet. She laughed at them to their noses. Elle faisait ses farces sur tout le monde. Ah! but she had a droll of tongue. Quel esprit, quelle blague, quel chic! But it was a festival to listen to her.”
“Had she the air of a woman who had been a lady, and who had dégringolé?”
“Pas le moins du monde. She was franchement canaille. Elle n’avait pas dégringolé. She had rather risen in the world. Some little grisette, perhaps; some little rat of the Opera — but jolie à croquer — tall, proud, with an air of queen!”
“You often had a chat with her, I dare say, Monsieur Louis, as she went in and out of the hotel?”
“Mais, oui. She would come into the bureau, to ask questions, to order a carriage, and would stop to put on her gloves — she had no femme de chambre — and though her clothes were handsome, she was a slovenly dresser, and wore the same gown every day, which is not the mark of a lady.”
“In these casual conversations did you find out who she is, where she lives, in London or elsewhere?”
“From her conversation I would say she lives nowhere — a nomad, drifting about the world, drinking her bottle of champagne with her dinner, crunching pralines all the afternoon, smoking nine pas mal d’argent to the person who has to pay for her caprices. She talked of London, she talked of Rome, of Vienna — she knows every theatre and restaurant in Paris, but not half a dozen sentences of French.”
“A free lance,” said Faunce. “Now for the name of this lady and gentleman.”
The name had escaped Monsieur Louis. He had to find the page in his ledger.
“Mr. and Mrs. Randall, numbers 11 and 12, first floor, from February 7th to February 25th.”
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p; Randall! The name that Miss Rodney’s Duchess had told her, and which Lady Perivale had told Faunce.
“And the lady’s Christian name? Can you remember that? You must have heard her pseudo-husband call her by it.”
Louis tapped his forehead smartly, as if he were knocking at the door of memory.
“Tiens, tiens, tiens! I heard it often — it was some term of endearment. Tiens! It was Pig!”
“Pig! — Pigs are for good luck. I wonder what kind of luck this one will bring Colonel —— Randall. And what did she call him? Another term of endearment?”
“She called him sometimes Dick, but the most often Ranny. When they were good friends, bien entendu. There were days when she would not address him the word. Elle savait comment se faire valoir!”
“They generally do know that, when they spring from the gutter,” said Faunce.
He had learnt a good deal. Such a woman — with such beauty, dash, devilry — ought to be traceable in London, Paris, or New York, anywhere. He told himself that it might take him a long time to find her — or time that would be long for him, an adept in rapid action — but he felt very sure that he could find her, and that when he found her he could mould her to his will.
There was only one thing, Faunce thought, that would make her difficult — a genuine attachment to Rannock. If she really loved him, as such women can love, it might be hard work to induce her to betray him, even though no fatal consequences to him hung upon her secrecy. He knew the dogged fidelity which worthless women sometimes give to worthless men.
The hotel was almost empty, so after a prolonged siesta, Mr. Faunce dined with the manager in the restaurant, which they had to themselves, while half a dozen tourists made a disconsolate little group in the desolation of the spacious dining-room.
Faunce did not pursue the subject of the Randalls and their behaviour during the social meal, for he knew that the manager’s mind having been set going in that direction he would talk about them of his own accord, a surmise which proved correct, for M. Louis talked of nothing else; but there were no vital facts elicited over the bottle of Pommery which Mr. Faunce ordered.
“The lady was something of a slattern, you say?” said Faunce. “In that case she would be likely to leave things — odd gloves, old letters, trinkets — behind her. Now, in my work things are often of the last importance. Trifles light as air, mon ami, are sign-posts and guiding stars for the detective. You may remember Muller’s hat — his murdered victim’s, with the crown cut down — thriftiness that cost the German youth dear. I could recall innumerable instances. Now, did not this lady leave some trifling trail, some litter of gloves, fans, letters, which your gallantry would treasure as a souvenir?”
“If you come to that, her room was a pigsty.”
“To correspond with her pet name.”
“But the hotel was full, and I set the chambermaids at work ten minutes after the Randalls drove to the boat. We had people coming into the rooms that afternoon.”
“And you had neither leisure nor curiosity to seek for relics of the lovely creature?”
Monsieur Louis shrugged his shoulders.
“Is my room on the same floor?”
“Mais oui.”
“And I have the same chambermaid?”
“Yes. She is the oldest servant we have, and she stays in the hotel all the summer; while most of our staff are in Switzerland.”
This was enough for Faunce. He retired to his under the palm trees in front of the hotel, in the sultry hush of the summer night. The scene around him was all very modern, all very French — a café-concert on the right, a café-concert on the left — and it needed an occasional Arab stalking by in a long white mantle to remind him that he was in Africa. He meant to start on his return journey to London by the next boat. He was not going to Corsica or Sardinia in search of new facts. He trusted to his professional acumen to run the lady to ground in London or Paris.
He shut the window against insect life, lighted his candles, and seated himself at the table, with his writing-case open before him, and then rang the dual summons which brings the hotel chambermaid.
“Be so good as to get me some ink,” he said.
The chambermaid, who was elderly and sourvisaged, told him that ink was the waiter’s business, not hers. He should have rung once, not twice, for ink.
“Never mind the ink, Marie,” he said, in French. “I want something more valuable even than ink. I want information, and I think you can give it to me. Do you remember Monsieur and Madame Randall, who had rooms on this floor before Easter?”
Yes, she remembered them; but what then?
“When Madame Randall left she was in a hurry, was she not?”
“She was always in a hurry when she had to go anywhere — unless she was sulky and would not budge. She would sit like a stone figure if she had one of her tempers,” the chambermaid answered, with many contemptuous shrugs.
“She left hurriedly, and she left her room in a litter — left all sorts of things behind her?” suggested Faunce, with an insinuating smile.
The chambermaid’s sharp black eyes flashed angrily, and the chambermaid tossed her head in scorn. And then she held out a skinny forefinger almost under Faunce’s nose.
“She has not left so much as that,” she said, striking the finger on the first joint with the corresponding finger of the other hand. “Not so much as that!” and from her vehemence Faunce suspected that she had reaped a harvest of small wares, soiled gloves and lace-bordered handkerchiefs, silk stockings with ravelled heels.
“What a pity,” he said in his quietest voice, “for I should have been glad to have given you a couple of napoleons for any old letters or other documents that you might have found among the rubbish when you swept the rooms.”
“For letters, they were all in the fireplace, torn to shreds,” said the chambermaid; “but there was something — something that I picked up, and kept, in case the lady should come back, when I could return it to her.”
“There is always something,” said Faunce. “Well, Marie, what is it?”
“A photograph”
“Of the lady?”
“No, Monsieur, of a young man — pas grand’ chose. But if Monsieur values the portrait at forty francs it is at his disposition, and I will hazard the anger of Madame should she return and ask me for it.”
“Pas de danger! She will not return. She belongs to the wandering tribes, the people who never come back. Since the portrait is not of the lady herself, and may be worth nothing to me, we will say twenty francs, ma belle.”
The chambermaid was inclined to haggle, but when Faunce shrugged his shoulders, laid a twenty-franc piece upon the table, and declined further argument, she pocketed the coin, and went to fetch the photograph.
It was the least possible thing in the way of portraits, of the kind called “midget,” a fulllength portrait of a young man, faded and dirty, in a little morocco case that had once been red, but was soiled to blackness.
“By Jove!” muttered Faunce, “I ought to know that face.”
He told himself that he ought to know it, for it was a familiar face, a face that spoke to him out of the long ago; but he could not place it in the record of his professional experiences. He took the photo out of the case, and looked at the back, where he found what he expected. There is always something written upon that kind of photograph by that kind of woman.
“San Remo,
“Poor old Tony. November 22th,’88.”
The 22th, the uneducated penmanship sprawling over the little card, alike indicated the style of the writer.
“Poor old Tony!” mused Faunce, slowly puffing his last cigarette, with the midget stuck up in front of him, between the two candles. “Who is Tony? A swell, by the cut of his clothes, and that — well, the good-bred ones have an air of their own, an air that one can no more deny than one can describe it. Poor old Tony! At San Remo — condemned by the doctors. There’s death in every line of the face and figure. A co
nsumptive, most likely. The last sentence has been passed on you, poor beggar! Poor old Tony! And that woman was with you at San Remo, the companion of a doomed man, dying by inches. And she must have been in the flower of her beauty then, a splendid creature. Was she very fond of you, I wonder, honestly, sincerely attached to you? I think she was, for her hand trembled when she wrote those words! Poor old Tony! And there is a smudge across the date, that might indicate a tear. Well, if I fail in running her to earth in London, I could trace some part of her past life at San Remo, and get at her that way. But who was Tony? I’m positive I know the face. Perhaps the reflex action of the brain will help me,” concluded Faunce.
The reflex action did nothing for Mr. Faunce, in the profound slumber which followed upon the fatigue of a long journey. No suggestion as to the original of the photograph had occurred to him when he put it in his letter-case next morning. It was hours afterwards, when he was lying in his berth in the steamer, “rocked in the cradle of the deep,” wakeful, but with his brain in an idle, unoccupied state, that Tony’s identity flashed upon him.
“Sir Hubert Withernsea,” he said to himself, sitting up in his berth, and clapping his hand upon his forehead.” That’s the man! I remember him about town ten years ago — a Yorkshire baronet with large estates in the West Riding — a weak-kneed youth with a passion for the Fancy, always heard of at prize-fights, and entertaining fighting men, putting up money for private glove-fights; a poor creature, born to be the prey of swindlers and loose women.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 991