“But can you spare him?” asked Ricardo.
“Perhaps. If Elsie Marsh was for nothing whatsoever in the crimes of Scott Carruthers, we can leave out altogether from the charge, any mention of Nahendra Nao’s infatuation. The pearls went sick. That is all. It has happened before many times without a reason. The Chitipur pearls went sick, and since once or twice Lydia Flight had healed sick pearls by wearing them, she was entrusted with these, and precautions were taken to protect her.”
“Yes, I see,” said Ricardo, after a pause. “There need be no mention at all of Elsie Marsh?”
“At the trial — at the Court of Assize,” Hanaud corrected. “But here, privately, before the Examining Magistrate, we must have the whole story complete. The A to Z of it. That’s what the Examining Magistrate is for.”
Mr. Ricardo did not relish the prospect of an interview with Elsie Marsh in a prison waiting-room at Havre, but he could not for the life of him see how he was to get out of it.
“Why don’t you explain this to her yourself?” he asked.
Hanaud threw up his hands.
“But, my friend, I explain it to her once a day. But she sits stubborn with her eyes on the floor and her mouth shut tight. She says: ‘This Hanaud is the foxy one. He will listen, one big false smile of kindness from ear to ear, to all I say, and then he will bite me to pieces.’ But you can tell her you know me many years, and that I keep my word, and that I say that if she is only one in the Bouchette’s side-show, even a bad one, the Magistrate will let her go. I am not the foxy one. You will tell her that.” Mr. Ricardo could tell her of an occasion when Hanaud had been called a Newfoundland retriever by one whom he had saved.
“Very well,” he agreed reluctantly; and the next morning Mr. Ricardo did have his interview with Elsie Marsh, and was allowed to be present with her afterwards before the Examining Magistrate.
She was confronted first of all with Monsieur Crevette, who had come over from Bond Street to identify the great jewel and testify to the condition in which it had been brought to him. The confrontation was a surprise to Elsie Marsh and it almost wrecked the compromise. She was flung into such a rage at the description of the damage her skin and blood had done, that she was on the point of refusing to utter one word of her confession. Her skin was as clean as anyone else’s. Certainly as clean as the skin of that cunning little Lydia Flight. Oh, she was a cunning one — Elsie Marsh begged the Magistrate to believe. And probably she couldn’t sing at all. If you asked her, Elsie Marsh — nobody was asking her, everybody was sitting quiet until the spate of acrimony was exhausted, but that didn’t matter to Elsie — if you asked her, there had been no question of malady with Lydia Flight. Probably the only thing wrong with Lydia Flight’s throat was that she couldn’t sing, and had been sent away from the Opera House.
“As for you,” she turned on Monsieur Crevette, who stroked his beard bravely, but quailed before this little fury none the less. Elsie pulled herself together. She swept away the interpreter, for her French being primitive and her vocabulary limited, she was in the habit of dashing into long periods of racy English and an interpreter had been necessary.
“Je vous dirai dans votre languidge a vous ce que je pense de vous. Vous êtes un...” Here her knowledge failed her, and she threw an abrupt question at Mr. Ricardo. “What’s a fellow?”
Mr. Ricardo, taken aback, replied hastily:
“Un Professeur.”
“Right!” And facing up to the uneasy Crevette: “Ce que vous êtes c’est un professeur sanguinaire,” and having delivered this astonishing accusation, she fortunately burst into tears.
Tears brought her to her senses. Yes, she had ridden the aquaplane board on the night after the ball. It was the Bouchette’s idea, but she herself had been very wicked. The Bouchette wanted to get rid of Lydia Flight. Everybody would think it was Lydia Flight who rode the board, as indeed, everybody did. She was to ride it again on the Saturday night as Lydia Flight, and this time she would fall, and be dragged into the launch, but Lydia would be drowned. It was very wicked, she acknowledged it, but she had had great provocation.
“Provocation?” exclaimed the Examining Magistrate. But Elsie Marsh was as much surprised by his inability to understand, as he was by the word itself.
“Of course,” she answered.
She was supposed to have spoilt a string of pearls, wasn’t she? And another girl had healed them. Would any girl like that? Would any girl to whom that was supposed to have happened, be likely to be a friend of the other girl who had put the rocks right? Why, she would hate her, wouldn’t she? Fairly hate her. Of course she would!
And there was hate, sheer crude hate, staring out of that little common empurpled stubborn face. Jealousy, humiliation, anger, all accumulating and seething and burning in the mind of Elsie Marsh, one of the undisciplined, until they precipitated a cold solid block of hatred — hatred strong enough to help in killing.
Ricardo watched Hanaud’s face. There was almost pleasure in it. The queer motives of the undisciplined, their utter distortion of values, were of perennial interest to him. Here was a little performer of the music-halls, who because of some taint in her skin and of some healing quality in another’s, contemplated murder and thought it strange that you should think her unreasonable.
“Just an insult to me! That’s what Lydia Flight was. A walking insult!”
Then once more prudence caught her up and laid a quieting hand upon her shoulder.
“But I didn’t do anything at all,” she cried. “I was in one of the cabins when Lydia Flight walked into the net.” The corners of her mouth gave, even at this moment, in a horrid spasm of pleasure. “A bit of a shock for Miss Lydia, feeling those meshes cutting her pretty face, and catching her pretty shoes, and making her more and more helpless.”
The Examining Magistrate cut her short with a brusque question.
“You were hiding in a cabin, then. Proceed!”
“I was in the dark, my ear against the door. I was not to show myself, you understand. I would have liked to have shown myself. Yes, very much.” She nodded, her face mutinous and dark. “But I did not. I crouched by the door, and listened. And I heard” — she pointed a finger at Hanaud— “that he was at Caudebec. It wasn’t good enough, monsieur,” she said to the Magistrate. Elsie Marsh was not going to be one of the Bouchette’s chessmen. Not she! She had Elsie Marsh to consider. She was frightened out of her life. She crouched by the door, listening, in the darkness. She heard the drag on the floor, as Lucrece and Marie hauled Lydia Flight forwards to the store-room. Then she slipped out of her cabin and across the saloon to the stem of the house-boat. Hanaud in Caudebec! No, thank you very much! Not for Elsie! Lydia’s car was waiting on the quay. She hauled in the dinghy, rowed herself on shore, let the dinghy drift to blazes, found the car, switched on the lights and the engine, and was off to Paris.
Thus Elsie Marsh. To Hanaud, her precipitate flight at the mention of his name seemed the most natural thing. He preened himself a little. “I have a certain sympathy with that so swift disappearance,” he said. To Mr. Ricardo she left yet another picture to add to the little gallery of pictures which he had acquired during the last month; the picture of a girl crouching behind a door in the dark, with murder in her heart, suddenly numbed by fear at the mention of Hanaud’s name. To the Examining Magistrate who had a touch of drama in his soul, she was an opportunity for a gesture.
“Elsie Marsh, you shall be sent to England. Usher, open the windows!”
Hanaud and Mr. Ricardo walked away to take their luncheon at the Restaurant du Sceptre. Hanaud was very silent and Ricardo did not wonder at his silence. A young woman contemplating murder, and even eager to take a hand in it, because her skin had spoilt a rope of pearls and another young woman’s had cured it! It provided a glimpse into a fierce underworld of jealousies and animosities which any detective might well ponder over in silence.
But on the quay, just outside the restaurant — and Victor was at the
door bowing to them with servility — Hanaud stopped short. He said:
“I have been thinking of it. You shall explain to me. Vous êtes un professeur sanguinaire. That is an idiom?”
“It is the translation of an idiom,” said Ricardo.
“Then I shall translate him back,” said Hanaud.
“But,” Mr. Ricardo observed with an admonishing accent, “although habitual nowadays in the best circles it is not in good taste in the suburbs.”
“Still I shall use him,” Hanaud announced as he entered the restaurant.
“If you do, may I be there to hear,” remarked Mr. Ricardo as he followed him in.
It was his good fortune to hear Hanaud’s translation a few days afterwards. He was with Hanaud in a corridor of the Hotel de Ville, when George Brymer came marching from the cabinet of the Examining Magistrate. George Brymer stopped in front of Hanaud, with a face deadly and ferocious.
“You, Hanaud!” he cried. “I am going to tell you what I think of you.”
An expression of delight overspread Hanaud’s face. He shook an eager finger.
“Me first! I tell you — not what I think — but what you are. You are — prepare yourself! — you are a full-blooded professeur.”
Whatever George Brymer had meant to say, what flood of abuse, what devastating epithets, all was checked by this astounding accusation. He looked from one of his guards to the other. He shrugged his shoulders.
“He’s balmy,” he said, and walked on.
“Balmy?” exclaimed Hanaud, and he turned, mystified to the point of exasperation, to Ricardo. “What does that type mean? Balmy? It is an adjective of the tropics. But I am not a tropic...”
However, let us leave Hanaud, Inspecteur Principal of the Sûreté Generale, to realise that there were mysteries which he had not solved.
CHAPTER XXVIII
IN VENICE
FURTHER WORD MUST be said of another figure in this odd history. On an evening in the early autumn of the next year, Mr. Ricardo turned into the beautiful little green and gold Opera House, the Fenice at Venice. They were giving Mignon that night, and the prima donna was Lydia Flight. She had recovered her voice; it was pure and clear as a bird’s, but there was now a depth of feeling and a gravity which Ricardo welcomed as a patron of the arts, but was inclined to deplore as a citizen of the world. He sent in his card after the curtain had descended and was received in a little dressing-room overlooking the canal. Lydia gave him both her hands, drew him towards her, and with her eyes full of tears, gave him a kiss. But a kiss which was a kiss. Mr. Ricardo was a little overcome by the warmth of it.
“My dear!” he said, and even over those two words, so easy to pronounce, his voice broke. He had meant to say, very humorously: “Que schiva!”
All those old days at Caudebec came back to him in a rush. Nahendra Nao was back with his pearls in Chitipur, and forgiven. Brymer, Scott Carruthers, Mike Budden, were erased from the world. In some grim prison of the French provinces, Lucrece Bouchette and Marie learned discipline too late. In the minor music-halls of England Elsie Marsh twirled her toes and got a laugh for her veiled obscenities. And here in the Fenice Theatre was someone who had lost the glamour of her youth. He took Lydia to supper at the Luna Restaurant, and for an hour afterwards they lay back in a gondola which now carried them out into the sweep of the Grand Canal, now took them into black chasms between towering houses, where the only sound was the splash of the gondolier’s long oar.
“I come back to England in the spring,” she said.
“To Covent Garden?”
“Yes.”
She told him the parts for which she was engaged. She was looking forward to the season with animation. But it was the animation of the artist; and she fell to talking to him quietly on a different theme.
“When I have a success, I am expecting him to knock at my door. I can’t help it. And he doesn’t come. He can’t come. If a basket of roses is sent to me, I get a thrill. I know it comes from him. But it can’t come from him, and there’s someone else’s card sticking out from the roses. If I’m uncomfortable, I look around for him to put things right. And he’s not there. He can’t be there.” Lydia was silent for a second. Then she added in a low voice: “Still, we had our one day. I am glad to remember that during it I gave him all that I had to give. You’ll come and see me in London? On my first night? Please!”
“I always go to the Opera,” said Mr. Ricardo defiantly. “What an idea! Of course I shall be there!”
He landed her on the steps of her hotel, and she had a grateful smile with which to wish him good night.
“Time!” said Mr. Ricardo, conscious of the profundity of his thought. “Lydia is a youngster. Time will erase her sense of loss and bring another Oliver. Let us leave it to time.”
With a Napoleonic sweep of his arm, he called to his gondolier:
“To the Danieli.”
He might have been saying: “To Austerlitz.”
THE END
The Ginger King (1940)
A SHORT STORY
The Ginger King
MONSIEUR HANAUD was smoking one of Mr. Ricardo’s special Havanas in the dining-room of Mr. Ricardo’s fine house in Grosvenor Square. The trial which had fetched him over from Paris had ended that morning. He had eaten a very good lunch with his friend; he had taken the napkin from his collar; he was at his ease; and as he smoked — alas! — he preached.
“Chance, my friend, is the detective’s best confederate. A little unimportant word you use and it startles... a strange twist of character is provoked to reveal itself — an odd incident breaks in on the routine of your investigation. And the mind pounces. ‘Ping,’ you say, if you play the table- tennis. ‘Pong,’ you say, if you play the Mahjong. And there you are! In at the brush.”
“I beg your pardon.”
For the moment Mr. Ricardo was baffled.
“I said, ‘You are in at the brush,’” Hanaud repeated amicably.
Mr. Ricardo smiled with indulgence. He too had eaten his share of an admirable saddle of lamb and drunk his half of a bottle of exquisite Haut Brion.
“You mean, of course, that you are in at the death,” he said.
“No, no,” Hanaud protested, starting forward. “I do not speak of executions. Detectives are never present at executions and, for me, I find them disgusting. I say, you are in at the brush. It is an idiom from your hunting-field. It means that when all the mess is swept up, you are there, the Man who found the Lady under the thimble.”
Mr. Ricardo was in no mood to pursue his large friend through the winding mazes of his metaphors.
“I am beginning to understand you,” he answered with resignation.
“Yes.” Hanaud nodded his head complacently. “I speak the precision. It is known.”
With a gentle knock, Mr. Ricardo’s incomparable butler Thomson entered the room.
“A Mr. Middleton has called,” he said, offering to Ricardo a visiting-card upon a salver.
Ricardo waved the salver away.
“I do not see visitors immediately after luncheon. It is an unforgivable time to call. Send him away!”
The butler, however, persisted.
“I took the liberty of pointing out that the hour was unseasonable,” he said, “but Mr. Middleton was in hopes that Monsieur Hanaud was staying with you. He seemed very anxious.”
Ricardo took up the card reluctantly. He read aloud.
“Mr. John Middleton, Secretary of the Unicorn Fire Insurance Company. I am myself insured with that firm.” He turned towards his guest. “No doubt he has some reason to excuse him. But it is as you wish.”
Monsieur Hanaud’s strange ambition that afternoon was to climb the Monument and to see the Crown Jewels at the Tower, but his good nature won the day, and since he was to find more than one illustration of the text upon which he had been preaching, he never regretted it.
“I am on view, he said simply.
“We will see Mr. Middleton in the Library,�
�� said Mr. Ricardo; and into that spacious dormitory of deep armchairs and noble books Mr. Middleton was introduced.
Hanaud was delighted with the look of him. Mr. Middleton was a collector’s piece of Victorian England. Middle-aged, with dangling whiskers like lappets at the sides of an otherwise clean-shaved face, very careful and a trifle old-maidish in his speech, he had a tittering laugh and wore the long black frock- coat and the striped trousers which once made the City what is was. He was wreathed in apologies for his intrusion.
“My good friend Superintendent Holloway, of Marlborough Street, whose little property is insured with us, thought that I might find you at Mr. Ricardo’s house. I am very fortunate.”
“I must return to Paris tomorrow,” Hanaud replied. For this afternoon I am at your service. You will smoke?”
From his pocket Hanaud tendered a bright blue packet of black stringy cigarettes, and Mr. Middleton recoiled as if he suddenly saw a cobra on the carpet ready to strike.
“Oh no, no!” he cried in dismay. “A small mild cigar when the day’s work is done. You will forgive me? I have a little story to tell.”
“Proceed!” said Hanaud graciously.
“It is a Mr. Enoch Swallow,” Mr. Middleton began. “I beg you not to be misled by his name. He is a Syrian gentleman by birth and an English gentleman by naturalization. But again I beg you not to be misled. There is nothing of the cunning of the Orient about him. He is a big, plain, simple creature, a peasant, one might say as honest as the day. And it may be so. I make no accusation.”
“He has a business, this honest man?” Hanaud asked.
“He is a furrier.”
“You begin to interest me,” said Hanaud.
“A year ago Enoch Swallow fitted up for his business a house in Berwick Street, towards the Oxford Street end of that long and narrow thoroughfare. The ground floor became his showrooms, he and his wife with a cook-general to wait on them occupied the first floor, and the two storeys above were elaborately arranged for his valuable stock. Then he came to us for an insurance policy.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 147