At last there came the sound of footsteps in the corridor, a key turning in the lock. The door of the room was opened. Greyes presented himself. He looked first at Elida, then he glanced at Hincks, and suddenly he seemed to recognise Florestan. He spoke not one single word. The perfectly-trained, quiet-voiced servant was suddenly a tiger. He sprang at Florestan’s throat, seized him in an almost maniacal grip, flung him on to the divan and knelt there with his knee upon his stomach and his hands still upon his throat.
“You dog!” he cried. “You murdering hound!”
There was a sudden reversal of the position. Florestan, with no apparent effort, slipped from the grip of the man who was holding him. He leaped to his feet and shook his aggressor as a terrier might have done a rat. Hincks rushed to the rescue but he was a moment too late. Florestan, with almost miraculous ease, had thrown his victim with a crash into the corner of the room. Greyes lay there, white and unconscious. Florestan faced the two young people with a composure which had in it something gruesome.
“Let me hear the truth,” he demanded, “and I will at once relieve you of my presence.”
Without a doubt, at that moment Florestan was dominant. Elida had risen unsteadily to her feet and was gazing with horrified eyes across the room towards Greyes’s prostrate figure. Hincks had lost any gift of finesse which he might have possessed and was in a raging temper. He stood between Florestan and his late assailant, his eyes aflame with anger and his voice raised almost to a shout.
“Get out of this, you scoundrel! We have had enough of this melodrama. Find out the truth for yourself. Get out of this, I tell you!”
“Or what?” Florestan enquired with deadly coolness.
“I’ll throw you out,” Hincks threatened. “You and your silly little gun and your jiu-jitsu tricks. Try them on me if you want to. Out you get!”
Hincks strode to the door and threw it open. He came back and confronted Florestan. The smile, half-taunting, half-vicious, was back on the man’s lips. He showed not a single sign of discomposure. He looked from his antagonist to the girl very much with the air of a man studying a chess problem.
“Dear me,” he said. “I always understood that officers in the British Service never lost their temper. Bad form, rather, isn’t it? In your present frame of mind further discussion is perhaps useless. Contessa, I leave you with the earnest hope that it is for your own country you are working. It will be better for your health. As for you, young man, you are either a double-crossing blunderer or a traitor to the Service which maintains you. Either is sufficiently despicable.”
Hincks, holding open the door, was moving his feet impatiently. Florestan, unhurried and not without a certain dignity, paused for a moment as he passed him.
“One word you used,” he said, “was justifiable. There is an element of melodrama about the waving of these little weapons which we so seldom use. The next time we meet I will come without a gun. There are half a dozen ways of breaking your neck.”
Hincks, who had partially recovered his composure, remained contemptuously silent. He waited until Florestan had passed out, then locked the door. He hastened back to the corner of the room where Elida was ministering to Greyes’s slow return to consciousness. The latter staggered a few minutes later to his feet.
“I thank you, sir,” he stammered, “and you, Madam. I should have killed that man while I had the chance. I had no weapon and he has the strength of a devil.”
Hincks took him by the arm and led him into the adjoining bedroom.
“Lie down for a little while,” he begged. “Get yourself some brandy and water. The Contessa is on the point of leaving. When she has gone I will come in and see you.”
“You are very kind, sir,” Greyes replied… .
Hincks returned to the sitting room. Elida was nervously straightening her hat before the mirror. She was still very pale.
“Ronnie,” she faltered, “I am terrified of that man!”
“No need,” he assured her, “he won’t return.”
She gripped his shoulder and pointed to the handle of the door leading into the small hall. As they stood there together they both saw it slowly turned.
“There is someone out there,” she whispered.
“Whoever it is it won’t be Florestan,” he told her with confidence. “Wait!”
He moved softly to the door, quickly turned the key and opened it. On the threshold a woman was standing. She wore a magnificent fur coat but no hat or gloves. She was of strange appearance. Her speech—slow and carefully chosen words—was also unusual.
“I apologise,” she said. “I was looking for the bell. It is very important indeed that I should see Admiral Cheshire.”
“May I ask who you are?” Hincks enquired, gazing at her wonderingly.
“My name is Florestan,” she confided. “Deborah Florestan.”
CHAPTER XXIX
Table of Contents
Mrs. Florestan looked enquiringly across at Elida, then back at Hincks, as she entered the room.
“I am not mistaken?” she asked. “These are the apartments of Admiral Cheshire?”
“The Admiral is away,” Hincks explained. “I am occupying his rooms for a short time. I am a fellow-worker at the Admiralty.”
“When will he be here?” she demanded. “My business is urgent.”
“There’s no chance of his being here for some time to come,” Hincks told her. “It might interest you to know that someone of your name—presumably your husband—was here only a few minutes ago also hoping to see him. He went away disappointed.”
Her eyes were wide, her astonishment convincing.
“My husband was here?” she repeated incredulously.
“In this room. His visit was an unpleasant one and when you appeared at the door I was regretting that I had not seen him leave in charge of the police.”
“My husband’s doings are no concern of mine. On the other hand, it is necessary that I should see Admiral Cheshire. Be so good as to tell me where he is.”
“In hospital. It is quite impossible for you, or anyone else, to see him.”
The fingers which were holding the fur coat around her distinctly trembled. Surprise gave way to terror in those strange expressive eyes.
“Tell me what is the matter with him!” she demanded. “He is not seriously ill?”
“There is nothing more that I can tell you,” was the civil but curt response. “He is, at any rate, unable to receive visitors. I am his fellow worker at the Admiralty and even I am not allowed to see him.”
She sat down a little abruptly. It seemed as though she had forgotten the presence of Elida.
“Has he met with an accident,” she begged breathlessly, “or is it an ordinary illness?”
“I can tell you nothing more,” he repeated.
“But I must know,” she remonstrated. “You are treating me foolishly. If you are really Admiral Cheshire’s fellow worker I could tell you something serious about my husband’s visit here. Until you answer my question I can tell you nothing.”
“About the Admiral?”
“Yes. I know that he and my husband are enemies. I know that my husband is an enemy of this country. I am not. I will prove it if you will tell me where the Admiral is now and if he is in any sort of danger.”
Hincks was standing with his arms folded, looking at her steadfastly. She was a woman whom it was impossible for him to classify, yet he had a curious, although obscured, conviction of the truth. He decided that she was certainly not in league with her husband.
“The Admiral is in St. George’s Hospital. He is suffering from fatigue, owing to overwork. He is also suffering from a wound inflicted by an unknown assailant in Downing Street two days ago. From the overwork he will recover. The wound is dangerous.”
“A revolver shot?”
He nodded. For the first time, he noticed the peculiarity of those strangely-coloured eyes. There was something very much like venom now in their increased brilliance.
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“Do you believe,” she asked, “that he was shot by my husband?”
“I do not,” Hincks replied. “I do not think Mr. Florestan is anxious to take risks of that sort. He is one of those clever men who prefer to hire assassins.”
She moved her head in sympathetic understanding.
“My husband is like that,” she agreed. “Listen, the young lady is Italian?”
“She is,” Hincks said. “There is no harm in your knowing that she is the Contessa Elida Pelucchi.”
The two women looked at one another. They exchanged something in the way of salutation.
“She probably knows,” Deborah Florestan continued, “that my husband is the chief of the Secret Service of her country in England.”
“I realised that only lately,” was the quiet reply.
“You say that he was here a few minutes ago,” she went on. “Shall I tell you where he has gone to now?”
“We should be extremely interested,” Hincks acknowledged.
“He is on his way to a foreign country to put before the authorities there one of his latest discoveries. He believes that certain plans and documents which have been allowed to filter through to headquarters there are grievously and wilfully misleading. He believes that the most important one of all which has passed through the hands of Admiral Cheshire, and which he has been told by you I suppose has already been transmitted to Rome, is a cunningly devised document of Great Britain’s combined offensive and defensive operations to commence without warning or declaration of war the moment your two plenipotentiaries who are now in Europe start on their final voyage back.”
There was a moment’s intense silence. Hincks’s voice, when he spoke, was not altogether steady.
“He treats you with confidence.”
“Sometimes—not always. That is his mistake. I now proceed to give you a word of advice which may save your country from the greatest danger she has ever faced.”
“Well?”
“Stop my husband before he starts for the Continent.”
“How?” Hincks snapped out. “Where is he now?”
She leaned towards the table and took up a scrap of paper. She worked on it rapidly for a few minutes with lines and dots. In the excitement of the moment none of them noticed the stealthy opening of the door leading into the bedroom.
“Here,” Mrs. Florestan said, gripping Hincks’s arm and tapping the paper with her forefinger. “I am trying to explain to you where my husband’s fifth hidden aerodrome is. You probably know that he has a private hangar at Heston and one at Croydon and one in Suffolk. This one you do not know about. He is on his way there now. Just at the bottom of the by-way through Staines, here,” she went on, touching the dot on the sheet of paper, “you turn to the right—so. The sign post may say anything. It does not matter. You get into another by-way. It is one of the national routes out of London. You turn westward and follow it three hundred yards. You come to what seems to be a country lane on the right-hand side. Never mind. Follow it. It gradually widens out until you come to a common. It was thick with furze six months ago. This has all been cleared away and there is a long, low shed hidden under the shelter of a hill. My husband has two planes there. He has planned to start for—well, you know where—immediately in one of them. If he gets there, if he gives the people who direct the Councils his true opinion of the value of the papers drawn up by Admiral Cheshire, and passed on—the Contessa knows how—to Rome, there will be war. You should stop him.”
“Why do you tell me this?” he demanded.
“Because my husband has deceived me,” she said bitterly. “I am one of those women who are easy in their way, but there are things they never forgive a man. I shall not tell you more than that. I am telling you what I do tell you not because I am a jealous wife, but because I have grown to hate my husband more than any living person… . You please yourself. You have your chance. All this underground work does not greatly interest me. I have been living in an atmosphere of it far too long. But listen—if you mean to stop my husband, you will have to take a fast car, you will have to follow him to the spot I have marked on that plan, and the rest must lie with you.”
She shivered a little as she rose and drew her enveloping furs more closely around her. She half smiled at Elida. It might have been taken as a farewell salutation. From the door she looked back at Hincks, who was holding it open.
“You are a man of courage, I hope?”
“I also hope so,” he answered.
“You will need all your wits with Horace Florestan,” she warned him. “He is very strong, he has no fear and he has cunning. No man has ever yet got the best of him. Still, I wish you well.”
“No message?” Hincks asked with faint sarcasm.
“If there is a fight and you are fortunate enough, you or anyone you may take with you, to be on the winning side, you can tell him that it was I who sent you,” she wound up. “So long as it was certain that he was on his way to be shot,” she added, as she passed out, “it would really give me pleasure to have him know that.”
“Ronnie,” Elida exclaimed as the door closed, “what a terrible woman! Do you think she knows what she is talking about? Is it all true, that extraordinary story of hers?”
Hincks had disappeared into the bedroom. She heard him use one of the telephones wildly. He came out in a moment or two wearing a thick tweed coat.
“She is an amazing woman,” he declared, “but Elida, I believe she is telling the truth. There have been rumours of a secret flying ground somewhere in that direction. I know Calthorpe, who is on the observation staff, was going to look into it next week. I know the spot exactly. Do you mind,” he asked wistfully, “if I send you home? It is duty, you know, Elida. I can’t let a chance go.”
She clung to him for a moment.
“Supposing it is a trap,” she suggested. “That woman might have been telling the truth or she might not. I defy anyone to tell.”
“Can’t take any risks,” he declared. “I have rung up Scotland Yard and given them all the directions I can. They will be there probably as soon as I shall. They will stop any flight from that spot, anyway, and hold anyone attempting to get away. You will be all right in a taxi, won’t you, dear, just for once?”
“No need,” she answered. “Sabine promised to send a car for me. It is probably outside now. We could not use it, I suppose, and I come, too?”
“We certainly could not,” was the firm reply. “For one thing my Bentley is faster than anything you people have in the way of town cars and another I want to go into this little affair with only myself to take care of. Come!”
They hurried off arm in arm and descended by the lift into the hall. To Hincks’s amazement, Greyes, looking a little pale but otherwise quite himself, was waiting there.
“Your Bentley is outside, sir,” he announced. “Hassall tells me she is filled up.”
“Good. I’m off.”
He handed Elida over to the care of the Prestley footman, who was waiting on the kerb, and sprang into the driving seat of his own car. Greyes, with a word of apology, scrambled into the vacant place by his side.
“What the devil are you doing, Greyes?” Hincks demanded.
“I shan’t be in the way, sir,” the man pleaded. “You will let me come along, please. I was in the bedroom all the time Mrs. Florestan was telling you her story and I know now that it is through that fiend her husband that the Admiral is lying where he is. I want to see hell coming to him.”
They were out in the Strand. If there had been a block it was Hincks’s idea to have gently assisted Greyes out. They had a clear run, though, and he forgot his companion’s presence. He had once done a little racing and the old fascination took hold of him. It was a dry, hard afternoon, foggy in patches, but considering the hour, there was extraordinarily little traffic about. They were in Pall Mall in a few minutes, through Hammersmith and on the by-way for Staines. Hincks chuckled grimly to himself.
“If we keep this
up,” he muttered, “we shall beat any police car. Let ’em whistle.”
They easily found the narrow road into the second by-pass, six or seven miles of straight running and then the lane. Hincks swung into it, shut off his headlights and finally, trusting to his hearing, turned off the side lights also. Presently they came to the open space of which Deborah had spoken. They could see the hangars now, one with both doors open and a glow of light within. A short distance away in the level field a plane had been run out ready for starting.
“Jove, we’re only just in time!” Hincks said softly. “We have beaten the Yard car, anyway.”
“The four or five men there are mechanics,” Greyes pointed out. “Are you going to wait for the squad, sir?”
“Not I,” was the fierce reply. “I am going to take my chance. You stay where you are, Greyes. I am pulling up in the shadow of the building here.”
They could hear the throb of the aeroplane engines now. Hincks crept round the side of the hangar. The plane, a large and powerful one, was headed for the straight run, her lights were flashing but the steps were still down. One of the mechanics in charge turned round from his place with a growl as Hincks caught hold of the rail.
“Stand clear there!” he ordered. “We’re starting directly.”
“Where is your passenger?” Hincks demanded.
“He is coming right along and loiterers are not allowed here,” was the threatening reply. “Stand clear, I tell you!”
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