“Fletcher, of course, was ready to pay something handsome,” reflected Jeremy.
“Of course. They’re clever, you see, these crooks, and they know how to play a waiting game. They’d had that information about Abernethy for months. So much we discovered. And they might have made use of it to get something out of him. But he wasn’t a rich man, and they decided to keep the information till its value rose, and by waiting for their market they could command a much higher price. Sooner or later they would be in a position to insist on favours, and so they were ready to hold their hands for the time being. Well, admittedly they didn’t win, but they were in much the position of the pugilist who gets a bigger purse if he goes down than if he keeps on his feet. There were plenty of people to put two and two together, and if the affair didn’t swell his coffers, at least it increased the Spider’s prestige, in the sense that it put the fear of God into a number of people who might, in due course, be useful in one capacity or another to the organisation. And when you’ve got a man into a funk, half your battle’s won.”
“And you don’t know yet who the Spider is?”
“No. We adopted that name for him because of the tremendous risk connected with the work of establishing the pest’s identity. You see, there are obviously numbers of cogs in a machine of that size, men and women who very likely know nothing of the value of the information for which they’re paid, but who are essential, like tiny parts of any technical machinery. We calculate that the Spider must have two-thirds of the ladies-maids and butlers in society in his pay. And probably numbers of other small fry, secretaries, confidential clerks and the like. The very man who brings in the agents’ reports may be a spy. We can’t tell. So we have to work very obscurely. Ask any man in the street who the Spider is and he’ll tell you vaguely that he’s the headpiece of this cat burglar gang that’s occupying a lot of space in the press at the moment. It suits our book that they should think that. Our telegrams, etc., come in code.”
“And the very man who decodes them may be in the Spider’s pay?”
“Only four people understand that code. Myself, Detective-Inspector Horsley of the C.I.D., my understudy here, a man called Atkinson, and a fellow from the Foreign Office who’s helping us in this case, a chap called Dennis.”
“Arthur Dennis!”
“That’s the man. Know him?”
“By repute,” said Jeremy guardedly.
“He’s a clever chap, and he’s in this with us because we believe there may be foreigners mixed up with the gang. He did secret service during the war, did Dennis, and he may be deuced useful to us. He’s down at Feltham now.”
“Does Feltham come into this?”
“Of course it does. I told Keith so in my letter.”
“Which of them is being threatened?”
“According to our information, it’s the girl, Hilary Feltham. Why, I couldn’t tell you.”
I put in that she would inherit this ten thousand pounds from her father in the course of the next week or two, and that might attract some scamp.
“But what hold has he got over her?” Jeremy asked. “I don’t exactly see Hilary lying down and allowing herself to be blackmailed. She’s much more likely to hit the fellow over the head and tell him to do his bloodiest.”
I agreed with him there. I knew Hilary pretty well; as a youngster I’d seen her take any number of falls hunting, and I never remember her either bawling or going home before the kill.
“Are you sure it isn’t Lady Nunn?” Jeremy urged. “She’d be a splendid person to get your claws into. She’s got a rich husband, an extremely rich husband, I gather. Of course, I don’t know what they could get her on. There was the Percy Feltham scandal, but they hardly can be resurrecting that at this time of day.”
“We don’t know what their hold is,” Philpotts confessed. “This young woman may have been indiscreet—there’s a lot of foolish behaviour in society these days…”
“Still, damn it all!” Jeremy protested. “I haven’t seen the girl for two or three years certainly, but mere indiscretion wouldn’t land her in this sort of mess.”
It was queer, certainly, to think of Hilary being afraid of anyone. Still, there was Eleanor’s letter, and that mentioned her, too.
“Does our dear friend, Ralph Feltham, come into this?” Jeremy asked. “It sounds uncommonly like his line of country.”
“I should think most probably,” Philpotts agreed, “but Dennis will be able to tell you more about that. He’s been down there three or four days, smelling out the country. All I can say is that we do definitely know that the Spider is at work at Feltham. And for heaven’s sake, don’t make the colossal blunder of under-estimating the power of the gang. You remember my telling you about Lady Millican’s jewels? Well, after that, we got into touch with various prominent jewellers and money-lenders, and though, of course, we haven’t been furnished with names, we have been assured that a tremendous amount of valuable jewellery is being sold, and paste being employed to disguise the fact, while large sums of money are being raised, through money-lenders, by numbers of people prominent in society. It’s a rich time for them, believe me. I could name a dozen men who have never been in a bad scrape in their lives, and to whom the word debt has been practically unknown, who’re up against it now, and may be bankrupted and ruined at any moment. And in quite half those cases I’m convinced we have the Spider to thank for the position. It’s astonishing, if you come to examine family history, how often the most correct men have skeletons, for which they themselves are not responsible, tucked away in their cupboards. The Spider has made it his business to discover those skeletons and threatens to exhibit them. The ancient Church was right when she named pride the most deadly of the sins; but for pride, men like the Spider would have to go out of business. It’s the wound to family pride, not anything personal, that makes that scoundrel a rich man.”
“Quite,” Jeremy agreed. “Well, I suppose we’d better be off.”
“And at once. You may be in time to save another death.”
“Another? Whose?”
“Arthur Dennis’s.”
We were both surprised and showed it. “Dennis? But why that man? Because he’s dangerous?”
“He’s doubly dangerous. He’s in this officially, on our account, and privately, on his own, because he’s engaged to this girl, though, if you only landed this morning, you perhaps hadn’t heard of the engagement.”
“Oh, we’d heard of that. And let me assure you that it won’t last long.”
“That’s what we’re afraid of.”
“We?”
“The whole Department, and Dennis in particular.”
Jeremy grinned. “One man’s meat,” he murmured. “Ah well. I shall be interested to know what Hilary has done to get into this mess. Unless,” he added, the thought striking him, “they’re trying to get her on this Percy-Feltham affair.”
“Why should they go for her?” Philpotts asked.
“She was Feltham’s daughter, so she’s involved, just as Feltham’s wife was. She has this ten thousand pounds coming in; she’s reckless, and is quite capable of refusing to treat with anyone.”
“Telling them to do their bloodiest,” quoted Philpotts, “without in the least realising what their bloodiest is… Well, it may be that.” But he sounded doubtful. So was I.
“Surely that’s very ancient history,” I said.
“Unless they’ve produced definite proof. The affair was never allowed to become public. And it would be a tremendous scoop for the papers. This is the age for raking over the muck-heaps of dead men’s shortcomings.”
“It may be,” Jeremy agreed, “but they won’t get any proof in this case, because there is none. Feltham was no more guilty than you or I.”
“You can prove that?”
“No. It’s a matter of common sense, that’s all. The man wasn
’t capable of treachery. Besides, what motive had he? He was a comparatively rich man, rich enough to satisfy himself anyway. The defence took a great deal of money, I know, or he’d have left Hilary a great deal better off.”
“Even rich men do incredible things for the sake of getting more money. It acts on them like a disease.”
“Not men like Percy Feltham. He didn’t care two straws about money. In himself, he was absolutely detached from all the material side of success. He wanted to succeed, because he felt he owed it to himself to succeed. But the satisfaction was on the spiritual, not the material, plane. And he wouldn’t have sold official secrets because to his mind that would imply the final degradation; it would make no difference to him whether he was found out or not. I don’t believe that man ever cared a rap what people thought.”
“And yet he took his life when the crash came?”
“It was that or publicity. And I believe he thought it was just, in a peculiar sort of way. He’d regard death as the penalty life—or his own spirit—exacted from him for his failure. Oh, yes, he failed. He didn’t sell State secrets during his tenure of office, but the secrets were sold, and officially and morally he knew himself responsible. And his code was a severe one.”
We were all silent for a minute, thinking of that stiff, proud, shy man, whose life had collapsed so ignobly more than a dozen years before. He had been my guardian, but I had never felt I knew him, and I envied Jeremy that power of his of summing up men.
That was all Philpotts could tell us, except that we must realise that whatever happened we couldn’t claim any sort of official protection; we might get caught by the Spider ourselves, or mauled about or put out of the way, and it was entirely our own affair. Jeremy and I agreed, he with astounding cheerfulness.
“It ought to be a bit of a lark,” he said, “seeing this chap must be a bit of a sleuth himself.”
I stared at him; already he was relegating Hilary and Hilary’s peril to the second place in his mind. The adventure came first, and I thought it would always be like that, and wondered whether Hilary would care, when she found out. Or whether she wasn’t of the same calibre herself, in which case they’d make an excellent couple.
“And remember you have got Dennis with you,” Philpotts wound up, in much the same tone as one of the Higher Powers might have used to Tobias, saying, “Remember, you have got your angel.”
“Oh, we shan’t forget Dennis,” Jeremy assured him politely.
“There ought to be someone always keeping an eye on Miss Feltham, you see.”
“What else did Heaven cast Dennis for?”
“He does happen to be rather interested in clearing up the mystery and getting this vile persecution stopped.”
“A man in love ought to realise his limitations.”
“And—er—you?” hinted Philpotts, delicately.
“I have them, of course,” Jeremy agreed, “but my sight isn’t good enough for me to recognise them at that distance.” We all laughed and Jeremy went on, “Do we report to you—or what?”
Philpotts said, “You’re forgetting Dennis already.”
“True, true. Well, good-bye, sir. You’ll hear of us through him, presumably.”
“If anyone had ever told me I’d be meekly reporting to a civil servant, I’d have told him I’d see him damned first,” Jeremy observed as we came away. “However, I daresay we shall manage to get a lot of fun, even with him cluttering up the ground.” He brooded for a moment, then said, “Official securities, indeed. To hell with the lot. I know the kind things the government does to protect you against yourself. You mustn’t drink except between certain hours because it’s bad for your health; and you mustn’t buy your young woman candy after certain hours, presumably because it’s bad for hers. Oh, a murrain on all Governments, say I. One moment to drink our jolly good health and then we’re off.”
Chapter III
1
When we came out the fog had deepened considerably. The sky was invisible above the housetops. The city was wrapped in a wet grey blanket. Jeremy regarded it with expert eyes.
“Going to be a nice run,” he observed cheerfully. “No time to waste.”
“The next train goes at 3.2,” I told him. “We’ve time for lunch first.”
“To-morrow, perhaps,” he agreed.
“To-morrow be blowed. I’m talking about to-day. If you propose to go down to Feltham Abbey, as I imagine you do, the only train is the 3.2. There’s a 1.57 to Rockingham, certainly, but that’s a slow train, involving a change, and we shouldn’t get in till about seven. Besides, Rockingham’s the last place on earth you’d choose to get stranded. There’s never a car to be had, and anyhow there wouldn’t be on a day like this; and if you’re lucky, you may get a lift in a tradesman’s cart. I once crawled over to Feltham like that, in my salad days, before I knew the railway line quite so well as I do now. Of course, you might telegraph to the house for a car, but as they all belong to Nunn, whom neither of us has met, I should think even you might think twice about it.”
Jeremy said kindly, “Let me point out two or three facts that should be obvious even to a half-wit. One, that Nunn doesn’t own every car on the face of the earth. Two, that if this fog gets any worse your 3.2 won’t run. Three, that I don’t care for my prospective wife to be engaged to any other man an instant longer than is absolutely necessary. Four, that these fiends are after Hilary.”
“Are you proposing to fly, then?”
“Don’t be more of a fool than the Lord made you. No. Drive, of course. Where’s the nearest garage?”
He wasn’t asking me, but a convenient policeman, who produced a garage as obligingly as if it had been a match.
“No one’s going to drive you a hundred and fifty miles on an afternoon like this,” I protested. “The 3.2 is an express. It gets you down at six, so far as I remember. Do show a little sense.”
Jeremy retorted pleasantly, “Take your express and go to hell in it. What do you suppose I’m going to do while Hilary, the future Mrs. Freyne, mark you, is mauled by some cad in the Civil Service? It’s bad enough she should ever be engaged to him at all. It’s intolerable that she should remain so an instant longer than I can prevent.”
He waved away the first car offered him, on the ground that it would suit him excellently when he was being driven to the scaffold, and would presumably wish to prolong his journey, and chartered a low, wicked-looking racer that he proposed to drive himself.
“You’ll never find the way,” I warned him. “They’ve built a new by-pass since you were down here.”
“Then for Heaven’s sake, stop behaving like a maiden aunt at a funeral and get in beside me. You’ll be useful to point out the way, if nothing else.”
And so I got in beside Jeremy, wearing the world’s worst Burberry, and we started. I was devoutly thankful I had no dependants when I realised the pace at which Jeremy proposed to take us to Feltham.
“Now,” he said cheerfully, narrowly avoiding murder and felo-de-se as he rounded a corner on two wheels, “tell me something about the household. Who’s Nunn?”
“I only know the fellow by reputation. He’s what’s called a self-made man. He founded the Nunn Insurance Company. You must have heard of the Nunn Better Policy.”
“No insurance company will take me on,” said Jeremy, complacently. “I’m too much of a risk. Well, is this chap likely to be concerned in the plot?”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“Well, if you’ve never met him, you’re in no position to judge. We don’t really know that his teeming millions come from Insurance. They may come from bleeding poor sinners white.”
“He’d hardly be bleeding his own wife,” I objected. “And what does he stand to gain out of Hilary?”
“That’s one of the things we’ve yet to discover. How long has he been married? I take it, he knew the P
ercy-Feltham story?”
“I don’t see how he could not know it. Everyone knew.”
“Not everyone. I admit I developed a certain respect for the Powers That Be when I realised how they can keep secrets if necessary. Oh, I grant you a lot of people knew, but the general public didn’t. I doubt if they even realised that our men were walking into ambushes through the treachery of one of our own side. When Feltham shot himself, it was put down to nerve strain by most people. By the way, what did they prove? I wasn’t in England at the time.”
Death in Fancy Dress Page 4