“Did you take him for a detective as soon as you saw him?”
“Well—no. I couldn’t place the blighter at first. I thought he might be one of these reporter chaps who wanted to pump me about our cruise for the local rag, but when he told me that he was a detective I was fool enough to believe him.”
“Did the man he arrested in the public-house behave as a criminal would if a detective pounced on him suddenly?”
“He kept saying, ‘You’ve made a mistake, Guv’nor. Beale’s not my name,’ and when my man stuck to it that it was, he turned nasty and tried to wriggle himself free until I got hold of his other arm. Then he said, ‘All right, Guv’nor, I’ll go quiet, but leave go of my arm: you’re hurting me.’”
“How was he dressed?”
“Like a dock labourer, I should say. I remember that his clothes didn’t seem to fit him and that he’d a dirty muffler round his neck instead of a collar. But I’d know him again if I saw him. I’d know them both. There’s another thing about Flaxton, the detective, which I suppose you ought to know. He had a folded newspaper sticking out of his left pocket: it fell out on the seat when he was driving and he left it behind when he went off. It was a Mercury, and one of the paragraphs was heavily marked in blue pencil—something about a political meeting in Cardiff addressed by a political bloke named Ralph Lewis.”
“Have you still got the paper?” asked Dick, trying to disguise his interest.
“Yes, here it is.”
Dick Meredith read the paragraph, headlines and all. It described the meeting and gave a brief resume of Lewis’s speech, referring to the speaker as a young Liberal of whom more was likely to be heard in the near future. “May I keep this paper?” he asked.
“Certainly. Keep it as long as you like. I don’t want it back.”
“You haven’t shown it to the police?”
“Good Lord, no! I’ve had enough of the police to last me for the rest of my natural life.”
“I think they ought to be told, but you can leave that to me, if you like. Now, on the face of your story, three men were members of the same gang—the man who pinched your pocket-book in the hotel, the sham detective, and the man he pretended to arrest. Apparently you can identify two of them. I suppose that you don’t care to tell me how you spent the morning between the time you left the ship and the time you sat down to lunch?”
“Oh, that has nothing whatever to do with the case.”
“Very well. Now the part of the business that really presses is to clear you of the charges in Somersetshire on which you are remanded. For that you must employ a solicitor, and I can give you the name and address of the very man…”
Eccles’ face fell. “I hoped that you would undertake the case yourself.”
“I’m a barrister, not a solicitor, and a barrister can’t undertake a case except on instructions from a solicitor.”
“But if I tell the solicitor that I’d rather have you?
“Ah, then it would rest with him, but to employ counsel to represent you in what is now a preliminary hearing in a police court would double your costs.”
“Oh, blow the expense! My uncle told me to get the best man whatever it cost.”
“Then hold on while I scribble a note to the solicitor. You’ll find a cigarette-box at your elbow and whisky and a siphon on that sideboard. Help yourself while I’m writing.”
The silence was broken only by the fizz of the siphon as it squirted a few thimblefulls into the glass, for Eccles was a young man who did not believe in drowning good liquor. He was feeling more at peace with the world now that he was in the hands of this sensible and competent young man who knew what to do and how to do it. Before he had had time to empty his glass his host rose from his writing-table.
“Here’s the note. You’ll find the name in the Law List and the Telephone Directory. In your place I should ring him up, tell him who you are, and say that you have a note from me and you would like to make an appointment for to-morrow morning. Stop—I forgot that probably you haven’t a club in London. I’ll ring him up for you.”
Dick went to his telephone, and Ronald Eccles listened to one half of the conversation. “Meredith speaking—yes—Dick Meredith. Are you full up for to-morrow morning?—No, nothing of the kind. I’ve a naval officer here—a friend of my brother—who wants to consult you. He’s in trouble with the Somerset Constabulary. It seems from what he’s told me to be an interesting case—one after your own heart…at what time?…ten o’clock? Good, he’ll be there.”
As soon as Meredith was alone he picked up the newspaper again, reflecting that it was a remarkable coincidence that he had twice encountered the name of Ralph Lewis on the same afternoon, and that a man denounced to him as a car-thief should have been carrying a newspaper with a paragraph about Lewis marked in blue.
“Curious, isn’t it, James?”
“Absolutely,” agreed the parrot.
James had taken kindly to his new quarters, and for the first eighteen hours all went well. He rattled at his cage door, demanding liberty; climbed to the roof of his prison and surveyed the world with one yellow eye; bowed his green head for caresses, and seemed to take no note of the open window or of the sunshine streaming through it. Dick wished that his temporary mistress had looked in on her way downstairs to see what an admirable caretaker he was, but he had heard her pass his door with her suit-case early that morning. And then, as he turned away from the cage, came the catastrophe. His foot caught the leg of the stool on which the cage was standing. Feeling the foundations of his solid world rocking beneath him, James might have been forgiven for what he did. With a whir of his green wings he shot across the room and out through the open window into the vast spaces of London.
Dick ran to the window in the vain hope that he would be able to take the bearings of James’s flight, but he was out of sight. Surely, thought Dick, he must have made for one of the parks: row upon row of chimney-pots would have little attraction for a bird reared in a Brazilian forest. The first obvious step was to advertise; the second to invoke the help of the Metropolitan Police. He rang up the Advertisement manager of the Daily Mail and dictated an advertisement offering a generous reward to James’s finder, dismissing the thought that the hall-porter downstairs would be beset next day by persons of both sexes with Amazon parrots for whom they had failed to find a market. Then he betook himself to the police station to take counsel with the sergeant in charge.
The station sergeant listened to his story with cleverly simulated sympathy. “You say that the bird took to flight this morning, sir.”
“Yes, not half an hour ago.”
“Then, sir, he’s pretty sure to be in one of the squares, or in Chelsea Hospital Gardens, or in Hyde Park. Quite a number of parrots are lost in London, but I’m afraid that the owners don’t very often get them back. I remember one that was loose in St. James’s Park for an entire summer and autumn. It used to come down to feed with the ducks. I suppose the cold weather in the winter killed the poor thing, but the owner never got him back though he offered a good reward for him.”
Dick went on to his club to ask for letters. He was turning away from the porter’s box in deep dejection when a hand tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to find his Canadian friend, Jim Milsom, a cheerful, irresponsible young man reputed to be the heir to a millionaire uncle.
He scrutinized Dick’s face gravely. “What’s the matter, old man? Have you been backing a loser, or having a dust-up with a judge?”
“Neither. I’m all right.”
“Bunk! Something’s been biting you. Where’s the merry smile? Come into the card-room and unburden your soul. Consultations free from two to four.”
Dick allowed himself to be led. Milsom rang for drinks.
“Now that we’re alone, out with it. These walls have no ears.”
“What would you do if someone left you in charge of a parrot and you lost it?”
“I shouldn’t make a song about that. I’d go down to the
docks and buy its double.”
“And lie about it?”
“A lie is a very present help in trouble. If the lie would bring happiness to a stricken home it will bring its reward. But maiden aunts who dote on parrots deserve all that’s coming to them.”
“The owner of this bird isn’t a maiden aunt, and she hated it,” said Dick warmly.
“Well, then, she’ll be grateful to you.”
“You don’t understand. I’d better tell you the whole story.”
His irrepressible friend heard him out and began to chuckle.
“This is a job for an expert, old man. You’ll have to leave it to me. You say he’s a yellow-fronted Amazon. I know the brutes well. They’re dressed in the worst possible taste—bilious green, with touches of coral pink in the wrong places, and a thoroughly vicious yellow eye. There are dozens of them down at the docks, as like one another as golf-balls.”
“It’s no good, my dear fellow. You couldn’t find one that croaks ‘Absolutely’ with appalling distinctness. Unless your bird did that the fraud would be detected at once.”
“Lord! That’s nothing. All you have to do is to stick my bird in a dark boot-cupboard for forty-eight hours and repeat the word to him in a parrot-sort-of-voice for three hours a day without stopping, and then you take him in to the lady, and she says, ‘Is this really my bird?’ and he says, ‘Absolutely,’ and she falls into your arms crying, ‘My preserver,’ and the scene fades out to slow music.”
“Dash it! Her flat’s just overhead. If she heard me chanting ‘Absolutely’ for hours on end she’d ring up for the looney squad and get me put away.”
“Then I’ll do the training. The man overhead in my flat is a futurist painter and he’s been certifiable for months past. Now, Dick, I’ve listened to your tale of woe and I’ll have you listen to mine, and give me a little of the professional advice for which you are so justly famous.”
“I’ll listen to you as long as you like if you’ll just give me time to send a telegram. Sit tight while I take it down to the porter.”
He ran downstairs, and after a brief search in his pocket-book for Patricia’s address and a telegraph form, handed the following message to the porter:
“MISS PATRICIA CAREY, VICARAGE, WENDLESHAM.
James lost. Very sorry.—MEREDITH.”
Chapter Five
“NOW I’M READY to hear the worst,” said Dick, flinging himself into a chair after dispatching his telegram.
“Well—as I’ve told you before, when I’ve nothing better to do, I like to slip down to the London docks. They’ve a sort of fascination for me.”
“Take care, old man; I’ve heard that it grows upon a man like drink. What’s the attraction?”
“Oh, the ships and the men who sail in them, I suppose. Sometimes I run across old friends, and there are always the bird and animal merchants. I was looking into my pet bird-fancier—an old ruffian who buys birds from the sailors—or rather, did buy them before the doctors who didn’t like parrots invented the disease of psittacosis to account for diseases they couldn’t cure. While I was talking to him, a guy poked me in the back. I swung round on him and I’m damned if it wasn’t Harding Moore—a guy we used to call ‘Poker’ Moore because of his poker dial when he used to play the game he lived on. I must have told you about him?”
“Have you?” said Dick absently. “I don’t remember it.”
“Well, listen. Poker Moore has about as much expression in his face as a cow looking at a passing train: he has eyes like a boiled cod, and a nose and mouth to match. I’d dare you to guess what he’s thinking about. ‘What ho, Poker,’ I said. ‘What brings you over?’ ‘Never mind what brought me over,’ he said, ‘but if you want to know, I’ll tell you. I’ve an account to square.’”
“An account to square?”
“That’s what he said, and when a man like Poker says that, you’ve got to sit up and take notice, because he means what he says. He went on to tell me that the guy he was looking for was a young Welshman named Owen Jones.”
Dick Meredith permitted himself to yawn. He had graver things to think about than the ups and downs of professional card-players.
“Most Welshmen are named Owen Jones, aren’t they?”
“That’s what I said. I asked him how he was going to find him. ‘I’ve found him already, my boy,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’ He pulled out of his pocket a poster of a meeting at the Albert Hall and pointed to a portrait on it. ‘That’s my man,’ he said. It was a picture of the principal speaker at the meeting—a guy called Ralph Lewis.”
If Dick had been inattentive up to this point, he made up for it now. “How did your friend think that Owen Jones could be Ralph Lewis when the name was staring him in the face?”
“That’s exactly what I said to him, but I never got the mystery cleared up, because at that moment one of his pals barged in and they went off together. Before he went Poker gave me his address—Suffolk Hotel, Bloomsbury—and I gave him mine. He said that he would come round and dine with me to tell me the rest of his story, but he never came. I rang up the Suffolk Hotel and they told me that he had gone away without his luggage and without paying his bill—they didn’t know where. That was six days ago and I’ve never seen or heard of him since.”
“Perhaps he went off somewhere with his friend. In any case, he’s not in the least likely to find the man he’s looking for.”
“So anyone might say if he didn’t know Poker Moore, but when Poker’s on the job, you could safely back him against any ferret. Besides, he thinks that he’s run the man to ground already.”
“You mean Ralph Lewis? He can take care of himself. He hasn’t got a past.”
“Hasn’t he? Why, everybody’s got a past. You might not think it, but I have a sultry past. I once kidnapped a child.”
“Oh, do be serious.”
“It’s a fact. It was only my appealing eyes that saved me from prosecution and a long term in a penitentiary. But never mind about me. This guy, Harding Moore, means to attend that meeting in the Albert Hall and lay the speaker out.”
“Give him a thrashing, you mean?”
“If he stopped at beating him up, I wouldn’t raise a finger to stop him. The young politician who’s set on making a living out of the politics business is asking for it, but Poker Moore, if I know the guy, won’t stop at beating an enemy up. He’s got a gun. Now, I don’t want to see poor old Poker in the condemned cell, but that’s where he’s likely to be if we don’t get busy. Suppose he bores a hole in the wrong guy?”
“If he’s going on a portrait on a poster, he will. Would you mind telling me where I come in?”
“As a man of law to keep me straight. I’d rather take your advice than any solicitor’s. You know what a solicitor would do—pull a long face and advise me to go to Scotland Yard, and then some heavy-footed sleuth would be put on the heels of Poker, and he’d turn on the blighter and cop him one on the jaw, and I’d have to go down and bail him out. No, Dick, old man, your advice is good enough for me.”
“I’m not sure that I shouldn’t give you the same advice—to go to Scotland Yard. Does it matter very much to you if your friend, Moore, does assault Ralph Lewis?”
Jim Milsom’s eye roved meditatively over the past. “Poker Moore did me a big service at the risk of his life years ago, and I shouldn’t like him to think that there was a streak of yellow in me.”
“I understand. Give me to-day to think it over, and come and see me to-morrow.”
The more Dick thought over what he had been told, the less he liked it. If this professional gambler had mistaken Ralph Lewis for another man, as it was evident that he had, and in that belief assaulted, and, in Jim Milsom’s expressive phrase, “beat him up,” Lewis would become a greater hero than before to his flapper band of admirers. Ought he, Dick Meredith, to waste an evening listening to this rising political luminary? His blood ran cold at the very thought of it. True, he had half-promised Patricia that he would, but that
was in those happier days when she trusted him—before that little demon, James, took to wing, carrying her trust with him.
He lunched at the Temple and listened to the gossip of his fellow-lunchers. Then back in his chambers again, he tried to distract his mind by work, but at five o’clock he took the Underground to Sloane Square and went home.
The loathly Albert met him on the doorstep to impart information. “Miss Carey’s back from the country. She’s in a terrible way about her parrot you lost.”
Dick could have relieved his feelings by kicking him behind as he retreated, but he forbore. If Patricia was upstairs, he must go and make his peace with her if he could. Rejecting Albert’s offer of the lift, he toiled up to the fifth floor and tapped at Patricia’s door. She found a figure of contrition standing on the doormat. “I’m awfully sorry,” it began.
“James must be found,” she said firmly, feeling that with people lacking in the sense of responsibility firmness was the only possible attitude.
“I’ve done everything I could think of—advertised a big reward and applied to the police.”
“How did it happen?”
“May I come in and explain?” He felt that her manner as a hostess lacked something of the sense of welcome. “I don’t know what possessed that bird. He seemed to have quite taken to me—let me scratch his head, showed a strong partiality for buttered toast at breakfast-time, and behaved as if the butter wouldn’t melt in his beak. He kept rattling at the cage door, so I let him out—”
“And left the window open? I might have known it.”
“Certainly the window did happen to be open, but to do the bird justice, I don’t believe that he was thinking of the window. He was quite happy with me. No, it was an accident that made him take to wing. I’ll make a clean breast of it. My foot caught against the foot of the stool under his cage—”
“And naturally he took to wing. He’s done that before, but though his master may be a prosy old man, he never had the window open when James was out of his cage. It was my fault for leaving him with a stranger.”
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