“Certainly, sir.” And Mr. Ricardo, revived by a glass of old port, majestically ascended the stairs Not every one in Grosvenor Square had passed the last night battling in a cockleshell against a gale. There had been times when Monsieur Hanaud had treated him lightly. Those times had gone. Let him give heed now! Let him give heed and listen!
And how right Mr. Ricardo was! If Hanaud had received one hint of the fine story of Agamemnon and his bath, he would have fled from Superintendent Maltby and the dubious dishes of Soho to the fastidious menu at Grosvenor, Square.
Yet Mr. Ricardo, for all his fatigue, slept not so well. At some hour, about which he did not trouble himself to be precise, he was aroused by one of those penetrating conversations in whispers which people use when they are trying not to wake their neighbours.
“Really, really,” Mr. Ricardo murmured drowsily. “If they would only talk quietly, I should still be asleep. But those gasps and hisses remind me of the early days of the Underground, or of First Nights when villains were villains. I can hear every word.”
Addressing thus the emptiness of the room, he did gather that Monsieur Hanaud had arrived and wished to be called early the next morning.
“There is a telephone, of course, in my bedroom?”
A pause followed, a stately pause, meant to tell Hanaud exactly where he got off. It was followed by Thompson’s most glacial voice.
“I think, sir, you must have forgotten that Mr. Ricardo is sensitive to telephones.”
“Ah! He would be!”
“There are three telephone instruments in the house, sir. One in the staff’s quarters on its own line. There is a second one in the hall. From that, again, there is an extension to a third instrument in the library. I think if you are intending to confer with Scotland Yard during the hours of darkness, the hall telephone would be the less disturbing.”
Certainly, Mr. Ricardo reflected with pleasure, Thompson has the most dignified modes of expression, and he fell asleep. But at some later moment, he lay again in the half-way house between consciousness and dreams and seemed to hear a muffled foot glide by his door and down the stairs. But Thompson had been wrong.
Although the library was beneath Mr. Ricardo’s bedroom, the floor was of Cubitt’s making, so that no sound reached to the room above. On the other hand, the hall was less furnished, it was hollow, and noises rose from it. Thus Mr. Ricardo heard a whirr, and another, and another.
“The district,” he thought.
Then came four twirls of the dial.
“The number,” he continued, and, adopting Thompson’s phrase, he explained the matter with a smile “Hanaud is conferring with Scotland Yard during the hours of darkness.”
That Thompson, being wrong in the matter of resonance might also be wrong in the destination of Hanaud’s message, he was far too sleepy to argue. He heard no words, he drifted away into another world where Agamemnon rose out of a black sea with a huge telephone machine in his hand, and cried “It’s the dawning.” Mr. Ricardo was aware of nothing thereafter until the curtain-rings rattled and the blinds were drawn up and his cup of tea was steaming by his bedside.
He dressed deliberately. The mere fact that his friend had arrived that morning neither hurried nor halted him. He descended to his library at nine-thirty, and was surprised. For bending over a copy of The Times sat Monsieur Hanaud, attired for an English day in the country. He wore a rough suit of bright yellow, football stockings, and mountaineering boots. To Mr. Ricardo his appearance was delightful as well as amusing. Even the familiar blue paper-case of black cigarettes was pleasant to his eyes, and he sniffed the acrid fumes as a Malayan returning to his native country after a long absence might sniff his first doerian.
“You have waited for me to share your work. That is kind.”
But Hanaud, after greetings of a warmer character than Mr. Ricardo was used to or, indeed, desired, exclaimed dolefully:
“But there is no work to share. There never was very much. Just a little affair to be privately arranged which would do justice to a certain Parisian and at the same time give me a chance to meet my friend. But...” and before he could even shrug his shoulders the telephone bell rang.
“I tell you afterwards,” said Hanaud as Ricardo lifted the receiver to his ear.
Ricardo confirmed it with a nod. “The message is for you.”
Hanaud took the receiver from Ricardo.
“‘Allo, ‘Allo! Ah, it is the admirable Maltby! Yes, I listen with both my ears. So!”
And Ricardo saw the look upon his friend’s face change from attention to stupefaction. Hanaud held the ear-piece close against his ear Finally he spoke. “In half an hour? Yes I will come. I thank you” and very slowly he replaced the receiver upon its stand To Ricardo, watching his friend’s face, the room had lost its comfort It had become very still, very cold.
“You knew him?” Hanaud asked.
“Whom?”
“Daniel Horbury.”
Ricardo started “I know of him,” he replied. “Who in London didn’t?” He added cautiously: “I will give you, my friend, some information. It is said that the police are on his heels.”
“Oh! no, no! The information is wrong,” cried Hanaud. “He has no heels. He is a shark.”
Mr. Ricardo looked sourly at his friend from the Sureté. He must always have the last word.
“Well, what has Daniel Horbury done now?” Mr Ricardo asked sulkily.
“Ah, that is it,” said Hanaud, nodding his head.
“What is what?
“He has cutted his throat.”
Mr. Ricardo pushed back his chair. “Dead?
“Last night,” Hanaud added gloomily. “I shall go to the house. Yes. But is it worth while? To have Hanaud looking about the room? Yes, the good superintendent thinks well of it. ‘He may see something, that piece of quicksilver, which we do not, to explain this suicide.’ But for me, it’s a tragedy.” He threw up his hands in despair.
“How so?”
“There were two rogues who cheated a Parisian years ago. One Horbury, the second a younger man just released from prison and deported from South America. Without them both, we have not the evidence. With them both, we don’t want the prosecution. We want the money repaid. Now Horbury has slitted his throat, and the man from South America...”
“Bryan Devisher,” said Ricardo carelessly.
“Yes,” replied Hanaud, “that’s the...” He stopped, staring at Ricardo with his mouth open. Never had Ricardo enjoyed such a triumph. His blood sang proudly in his veins. But outwardly he was as negligent as before.
“What of Bryan Devisher?” he asked.
“He was drownded dead yesterday morning...”
“Off the Start Lighthouse from the ship El Rey,” Mr. Ricardo interrupted.
Hanaud nodded gloomily.
“I had made arrangements for a little talk with Devisher after he had landed. Then we go to Horbury together and he pays the bill. But now Horbury has slitted his throat and Devisher is drownded.”
“But Devisher is not drowned dead.”
Hanaud looked at him with awe. Then he seized the telephone and dialled with ferocity, speaking the while to his companion.
“You will come with me to the house of Daniel Horbury? Yes,” and into the mouthpiece “It is Hanaud. Could I speak to Mister the Superintendent Maltby? “ — and so again to Ricardo “You will use your car, yes? And you shall tell me about this Devisher as we go. Is that you, Maltby? I am staying here in the Grosvenor Square with a dear friend who, I can tell you, has been very helpful to me on many delicate occasions,” and Hanaud did not even project a wink down the mouthpiece. “Yes, I should very much like his assistance. Yes, I stay with him in the Grosvenor Square when I come to London. The most charming of hosts.”
“Really, really,” Mr. Ricardo tittered, blushing in his embarrassment.
“His name?” Hanaud continued. “Mr. Julius Ricardo.”
It seemed that something exploded at the ot
her end of the telephone. Was it laughter? Was it surprise? Was it joy?
“We come in his car, a Rolls-Royce. Very fast, very fine. Give me the address again.” Hanaud wrote it down on a pad of paper and rang off.
“What a coincidence,” cried Mr. Ricardo, beaming. “Devisher, me, you, Horbury!”
“Bah!” exclaimed Hanaud, jeering like a schoolboy.
“It might happen once in a hundred times,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“But it does happen every day once in a hundred times,” Hanaud replied, and he hurried off to dress himself in less outrageous clothes, whilst Mr. Ricardo called up his Rolls-Royce, No. 2, to the door.
CHAPTER 7
THE LITTLE AFFAIR THREATENS TO BECOME THE BIG AFFAIR
MR. RICARDO WAS a trifle uncomfortable as he drove with Hanaud to the Embankment. Police authorities did not, as a rule, endure easily the presence of laymen at their investigations, however simple. But he had heard the voice of Superintendent Maltby as he spoke over the wire. It was hearty. He had jumped at the name. “Mr. Ricardo! You are staying with Mr. Ricardo in Grosvenor Square? Bring him along, of course, my dear Hanaud. The very thing!”
Hearty — yes. Enthusiastic even. But perhaps a little unsettling. He reflected, however: “It may be that he has heard of me giving Hanaud now and then a tiny help where social knowledge was needed, or some delicate impression was to be felt. One never knows. But I was conscious of quite a shock. Really, I might have been a criminal;” and Mr. Ricardo uttered a little laugh, an uneasy little laugh, as though the great doors of Wormwood Scrubs were opening before him.
“And now,” said Hanaud, tapping him upon the knee, “you tell me, do you not, of Bryan Devisher?”
“To be sure.”
The car was crossing Battersea Bridge. The sunlight was glittering upon the water. Seagulls wheeled and swooped in the inimitable beauty of their flight. Above them and about them was summer, its scents, its warmth; and against that bright background Mr. Ricardo told the story of how the waif from the sea came aboard the Agamemnon.
“In my mind, for it would not have been polite to have said it aloud, I called him meerschaum,” said Mr. Ricardo, who had done nothing of the kind. “See? A piece of meerschaum.”
Hanaud, however, was indifferent at the moment to Ricardo’s witticisms. He sat upright, his broad, shaven face very serious. “No, it would not have been polite to have said anything so stinging aloud,” he replied, his mind far away from his words, and he turned to his companion.
“This man Devisher. Did he really fall overboard?”
Mr. Ricardo replied slowly “It was thought by the men on Agamemnon that he took a chance.”
“With the odds against him?” said Hanaud.
“Yes.”
Hanaud dug his hands into his pockets He was obviously puzzled. “It is not pleasant, of course, to be landed as an undesirable at Gravesend. But, after all, he would be alive.”
Monsieur Hanaud took his hands from his pockets and threw them up. “It is something to be alive.”
“There might be other charges against him,” Ricardo suggested, “waiting for him at Gravesend He told us that the name upon his passport was false.”
Monsieur Hanaud waved the suggestion aside. Some other question was troubling him. “And he went ashore at Dartmouth alone, with fifteen pounds in his pocket?”
“Yes.”
“Did he go to the harbour-master’s office?”
“He landed at the slip close to the harbour-master’s office, but I think that if he had gone to the office, some official would have come off to ask whether we corroborated his story.”
Hanaud nodded his head in agreement. Then he asked: “Do you think the Captain Mordaunt was really asleep in his bath?”
The question had occurred to Mr. Ricardo, but he had made up his mind.
“I do. It is true that Mordaunt was in a hurry to lay up his yacht for the winter. But he really meant that Devisher must make his position clear to the authorities.”
Hanaud, however, was not so confident. “It will be. Yes. No doubt. But I should like to converse a little with the Captain Mordaunt, none the less.”
Mr. Ricardo shook his head. That would not be so easy. On Sunday, it was true, Captain Mordaunt would be present at one of the famous evenings of Septimus Crottle. But Julius Ricardo did not belong to that circle, and did not propose to do a gate-crash with Hanaud at his elbow. He said: “There, my friend, I cannot help you.”
“It is a pity,” Hanaud returned, staring out of the window. And suddenly he turned back upon Ricardo. “This Torbay train? He arrives in London at half-past three?
“Yes,” said Ricardo.
“And you travel on him?”
“Yes.”
“And you take the luncheon in the dining-car? Yes?
“No. I slept in my compartment.”
“Was Devisher upon that train?”
“I don’t know. It was a long train with many carriages. I never saw Devisher.”
“So that, for all you know, my friend Ricardo, Bryan Devisher may have arrived in London at half-past three yesterday afternoon. It is agreed?
“Yes.”
Hanaud twisted his body and shook his big shoulders and made the grunts and moans of discomfort.
“You see how it is,” he cried to Mr. Ricardo, who didn’t see at all how it was. “There is my little affair. I wind it up and I take a vacancy. Good! If it be. But it isn’t. My friend, I do not want my little affair to become your big affair. No.”
“And you’re afraid of that?” replied Ricardo in surprise.
Hanaud laid his hand impressively on Ricardo’s arm.
“So afraid that it gives me the gaiters,” he said solemnly.
Mr. Ricardo translated correctly, but, looking into his friend’s troubled face, knew that this was not the moment for correcting the translation.
“You had better tell me what your little affair is.”
“I will,” Hanaud replied as he pulled his blue-paper packet of cigarettes from his pocket, “whilst we smoke the Maryland.” He offered the packet to Mr. Ricardo, who recoiled from it as if it were a dish of poison, and then, having lit one, continued: “It was seven or eight years ago. Daniel Horbury was in a smaller way of business, but he had his fingers in a hundred pies, and you know that a day comes when there must be real money on the table. Mr. Horbury knew the date of that day. Ten thousand pounds on the table — and he had not one sliver.”
“Stiver,” Ricardo corrected.
“As I said, one sliver,” Hanaud agreed equably. “Mrs. Hubbard, she was naked. You understand?”
“Positively.” said Mr. Ricardo.
“Good! But he has associates, not clerks exactly, and not partners. Strap-hangers, you call them.”
“And sometimes hangers-on,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“Amongst them, Bryan Devisher. A valuable one for the Daniel Horburys. He had good manners, good looks, youth, and he was not odd. Public School and the entrance into houses of which the good Horbury only knew the portico. You follow me?
“I am alongside of you,” Ricardo observed with his eyes on the window. Battersea Park had been left behind. The car had skirted the Park, crossed a main road, dived southward into a street where little houses with little gardens were succeeding terraces. They might reach the end of their journey before Hanaud had reached the beginning of his. “You would be wise to continue.”
“I go.” Hanaud bounced up and down on the seat, marshalling his facts. Then he raised an imperative finger.
“First an historical set of pearls disappears. Second, Mr. Devisher sells them to a jeweller, Gravot, in the Place Vendôme, for ten thousand pounds. Daniel Horbury has his ten thousand pounds on the table. Act one! See?”
Mr. Ricardo nodded his head.
“But the loss of the pearls is discovered,” Hanaud resumed, “and Gravot of the Place Vendôme must give them back. For that is the law. Gravot gives them back, but he is out for Devishe
r’s blood.”
“I see that,” Ricardo agreed.
“But there is no Devisher. He has gone. One of Horbury’s little pies was a revolution in Venezuela. It was needed. The revolution fails. Devisher finds himself in the Castillo del Libertador, and is there for life, or for as long as Vicente Gomez lives. So at once there is difficulty. There is not, without Devisher himself, proof that the ten thousand pounds Horbury put upon the table were the ten thousand pounds paid by Gravot of the Place Vendôme.”
“So — there’s the jeweller...”
“Down the drain, as you say in your picturesque way. Exactly, my friend. Oh, how quick you are! That Mr. Ricardo — who shall get by him? He wait — with his glasses not straight upon his nose. Then he pounce — the jaguar! The criminal? Poor fellow! It is over.” Mr. Ricardo wriggled and blushed and laughed — a small, modest laugh.
“Poor fellow, yes,” he said, playing a little tune upon his knees with his fingers. “It is over.”
“But my Gravot,” resumed Hanaud after his flatteries had been enjoyed, “with him the years have passed. He wants now, not the blood, but his good money. So we try, as I told you, for a friendly settlement.”
Mr. Ricardo frowned over the problem very astutely.
“Yes. No doubt nowadays Daniel Horbury could command ten thousand pounds.”
“Yet he slitted his throat,” replied Hanaud quickly. “Explain that to me. After all, it is not an ordinary behaviour.”
“It is not,” Mr. Ricardo agreed.
It was not reasonable, he thought, even if Hanaud had come.
“By the way,” he asked, “did Horbury know that you had come to London?”
Hanaud was emphatic. Superintendent Maltby knew and perhaps one or two officials of his service. And a lawyer. But no one else.
“As I told you, we did not wish the prosecution. I called on the solicitor Preedy, who was employed in the original case, when I left Victoria Station.”
Again Mr. Ricardo was silent. The little houses with the little gardens were giving place to big houses with big gardens. There were big trees, too, chestnuts and oaks and beeches, holding up their thick lacework of leaves and branches, so that even upon the roads there was the cool refreshment of a green world. But there was clearly no comfort for Monsieur Hanaud in the pleasure of the morning.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 153