“That’s all very well,” said Maltby. “But that little cupboard you’ve opened is as empty as Mother Hubbard’s. There’s nothing in it.”
Foster grinned. “It’s not as easy as all that, you know. There’s a little wooden latch in the roof of it.” He felt with the tip of his middle finger and shot back a wooden peg. Then he stretched his hand in to the back of the cupboard where a hole had been cut in the side wall. “Here she comes!” He was now able to slide forward the pillar on the left side of the cupboard. It was seen to be a narrow drawer set vertically, so that the opening was at the top. He took it out, turned it upside down and shook it. It was as empty as the cupboard. He tapped the sides and shook it a second time. He peered into it.
“It was there!” he cried. “He put it away for safety.”
Superintendent Maltby took the drawer and examined it. “Anyone who knew the trick might have stolen it,” he argued.
“No. He would need to open this little door first, and for that he would want the key.”
“Can you tell when he took it away?”
Foster nodded his head. “Yesterday,” he answered. “Horbury was very busy with his first number of the Newsbag. So it was only two days ago that he had an hour or two to spare. He made up his packet and sealed the envelope and put it away ready in the secret drawer the day before yesterday.”
“Yesterday, then,” Maltby agreed. “And ready for use, if the person whom it affected was not amenable, eh?”
Mr. Foster set back the secret drawer in its place, shot the wooden latch into its place, locked the cupboard drawer, and, with a great formality, handed back the keys to the Inspector. He was once more the managing clerk, official and discreet.
“I could not for a moment, Superintendent, subscribe to any such suggestion,” he said, and Monsieur Hanaud rose with a smile from his chair.
“No, no, my friend, that is clear, and the Superintendent never meant that you should,” he said gaily. “But one thing, you can tell us, the great boum to whom the package was addressed.”
“The Big Noise,” Mr. Ricardo said usefully to a rather perplexed managing clerk.
“Yes. You certainly have a right to the name,” the managing clerk replied. “It was the name of Septimus Crottle, the Head of the great Dagger Line, and it was addressed to him at his private residence, 41A, Portman Square.”
CHAPTER 13
FEARS, DOUBTS, CURIOSITY
DINNER WAS FINISHED. The windows were open and the road across Grosvenor Square was quiet as a country lane. Yet even so, it was hardly more quiet than the dining-room where the three men sat about Mr. Ricardo’s round table. Four pale blue candles, set in tall, painted candlesticks of Battersea enamel burned, and no other light. The three men had pushed their coffee cups aside; they were smoking; but they were not talking, until Mr. Ricardo, embarrassed by the silence, must needs break it with a not very happy fancy.
“My four candles burn in the dusk like little flaming spears, the brighter as the darkness grows. I have two flaming spears one on each side of me, and the blacker the problem, the more brilliantly they will pierce it.”
Hanaud shook his head. It was difficult for Ricardo to gauge the hooded look of his face, but he replied with a gravity in his voice which Ricardo had heard only once or twice before. “For myself, I could find a better image in one of your candles than a spear pointing to the truth.”
“Yes?”
“A heart turned upside down.”
Julius Ricardo was as much startled by the quiet voice as by the strange figure which he used. “By what?” he began, but he felt Maltby’s hand close upon his arm. Hanaud, however, answered the unfinished question.
“By fear.”
And for a moment the darkness seemed to deepen and the illumination of the candles to grow dim.
“I have been feeling like a man who is sent to find a number in one of the narrow corridors of your new hotels. You cannot find it, and at the end the corridor turns, and again the corridor turns, and again you cannot find the room. But for me, I meet fear.”
Once more there was silence, but Ricardo no longer wished to interrupt it, and Maltby’s hand was withdrawn from his sleeve. Then Hanaud resumed:
“Permit that I tell you how it grew. First we have a suicide, a thing simple, and with the Horburys almost natural. The razor close to the throat, as the good Foster said. But not now. The business is up, up, up. Horbury’s Newsbag becomes Horbury’s nosebag. The great poster will be on all the streets. Laughter and money and cocks porping — yes, yes, yes. But suicide. No!”
“There was the chart,” said Maltby.
“The chart Horbury leans over to hide from the Foster eyes, I do not forget him. One cannot doubt what he represented with his black glass pins with the white ensign, and the last pin jammed in angrily opposite to the Prawle Station. It marked the journey of that old steamship El Rey, the ports she had put into to deliver back her unsatisfactory visitors, the Lloyds Stations she had signalled. A trouble, yes. A danger, perhaps; but to be met to-morrow. That night, no danger at all. El Rey was still upon its way. It was rounding Beachy Head.”
“That’s quite right,” Maltby agreed. “There was a clerk from Horbury’s office at Gravesend to meet El Rey in the morning. Horbury couldn’t have expected Devisher.”
“Yet he took with him to White Barn the chart?” said Hanaud, pursuing his own thoughts. “Why?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” answered Maltby. He leaned back and drew at his cigar with a greater ease than he had shown before. “He had tried to hide it already from Foster. He wanted to get rid of it.”
“And he certainly did,” cried Mr. Ricardo, clenching the matter finally with a rather irritating laugh.
“How?” asked Hanaud swiftly.
“There was a log fire,” Mr. Ricardo replied no less swiftly.
“Saperlipopette!” cried Hanaud, beating with his fist on the table. “That will not do. That tough white paper of which the charts are made. That little flat ebony board. All burnt up in a small log fire so that not an ash of blackened paper, not a splinter of the board, not even a brass drawing-pin is left to tell us here it was burnt. I am for the miracle, yes; but miracles must be reasonable.”
It did occur to Ricardo that the question whether a miracle could be a miracle if it was reasonable might be a diverting subject for a debating society. But Hanaud was too much in earnest. He had never known Hanaud utter that explosive outrage of a word — Saperlipopette — unless he was in his most serious mood. So without flippancy he suggested: “That chart may have been overlooked in White Barn.”
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. “My dear friend! The English police! They may be accused of the want of imagination, perhaps, but they do not overlook things, no, not anything. And a little chart nailed on an ebony board with glass pins pricked in? No, no, let us be serious.”
“All the more serious,” added Maltby imperturbably, “because a second search was made in White Barn after we had left Horbury’s office this evening and nothing was found.”
“Very well.” Mr. Ricardo would accept the disappearance of the chart by another agency than the log fire. The explanation was to be found with the explanation of Horbury’s death in Hanaud’s hinted theory of the morning.
“Very well. The man Devisher comes to White Barn. It is the address of Horbury which he remembers. He comes late, he quarrels, having good reason for a quarrel. He murders — that was your fear — and, taking the chart with him, he goes—”
“Where?”
The abrupt question shot at him across the table brought Mr. Ricardo to a stop. After all, that was to be considered, and at once a mountain of difficulties confronted him. Devisher had arrived probably at half-past three in London, in a borrowed suit of clothes, what was left of fifteen pounds after his fare and his luncheon had been paid, and no luggage. He had found his way to Lordship Lane, if the theory of a revengeful murder were accepted, unnoticed, and had unnoticed got away in the middle of the night to
some place where he could lie in safety.
“Ever since you gave us his name and description, the search has gone on,” said Maltby gloomily. “Hotels, lodging-houses, shelters — a man without passport or luggage.”
“Add that he has not been in England or in touch with anyone in England for seven years, shall we say? — and then that he disappears as easily as if he had a place in every thieves’ kitchen in London — that is hard to believe.”
“But it might happen,” cried Mr. Ricardo, “and perhaps it might be the more likely to happen if he were unaware that I was looking for him.”
Monsieur Hanaud threw up his hands.
“We lose ourselves in the dialectic. We make up the fairy tale. We sober policemen! I tell you my trouble.”
He pushed everything away from in front of him — plates, cups and saucers, table-mats — making an empty space as though he were about to deal a pack of cards.
“In the first place, there is no reason for suicide. The excellent Foster makes that clear. In the second, Horbury has a poor little wretch whom he has injured, due to arrive in England this morning. Horbury has made his arrangements that the man shall be met. That he was afraid of him there is no sign. But the man was already in England. It may be that he made his way to White Barn last night. It may be that he murdered Horbury — just settling his account. I do not say no. But I do not say yes. I say that if he was at White Barn, taking a desperate chance, he blundered in upon some much bigger affair, and must be hidden away now.”
Superintendent Maltby pushed out his underlip and glowered at the mahogany table.
“I haven’t got that,” he protested. “Devisher was not alone, or, at all events, ceased to be alone? Of course, his disappearance, a man without money or luggage or friends — yes, I suppose you might infer that there were others, or one other, who was concerned in seeing that he got safely away.”
“And the wife,” Hanaud added quickly. “Olivia Horbury. Let us not forget her. Whatever we told her, whatever we showed her, she was not startled. Full of horror, as anyone would be who was forced to live over again some dreadful hours, but surprised — no. She knew. She was present. Yet she would not speak.”
“Perhaps she had been cowed...” Ricardo began, but he suffered his very frequent experience of never being allowed to finish a sentence.
“Ah! Ah! Ah!” exclaimed Hanaud. “I see you. But she was not cowed to-day with the police at the gate and in the house. Then what was the compulsion which shut her lips? Something grim — something brutal. The sure knowledge that if she spoke, she would follow on the husband’s road. Oh, there was someone else at White Barn last night, and that someone returned.”
“Devisher?” Mr. Ricardo suggested “To recover the chart on the ebony board.”
Hanaud nodded his head once or twice, dissatisfied but unable to disregard the argument. “It may be. He would not want the chart discovered. It points too clearly towards him.”
“But you yourself think that someone else came for something else?” said Maltby.
There was amusement in his voice and, at the same time, respect. It was amusing that Hanaud should so shut his eyes to the obvious explanations of Horbury’s death, suicide or murder by Bryan Devisher; that he should chase in his mind some phantasm of his own creation. And yet, he had the power to leave one uneasy. That image of a narrow corridor, and another, and another, and at the end — fear. Maltby certainly did not like it.
“You think Mrs. Horbury is in danger?” he said.
“That, I think, could be,” replied Hanaud.
“From Devisher?” Maltby persisted, and Hanaud suddenly thrust forth his hands, palms outwards.
“No, no, no! My Maltby. I am not here to make the confusion, to tickle you with the red-hot poker. Joey in the woodpile. No! I abandon you for your delight and go upon my vacancy.”
And the three men lost at once their tension. Cigars were renewed, a business-like decanter of Armagnac went forth upon its rounds. Maltby, Ricardo, both were at pains to discover the ideal place where Hanaud might pass his vacancy. “Margate,” said Maltby. Ricardo plumped for Brighton. But the unaccountable Hanaud had already his own plan.
“Cathedrals,” he said “I like to sit on the pavement under a stripy awning at a marble table and look at them. They are solid. If I cross the road to one and say, ‘I arrest you,’ it does not mind. It just says, ‘Here is that foolish little Hanaud,’ and very far away, in the depths of her, I hear a chuckle. Yes, I shall to see a cathedral to-morrow. I am told she is very beautiful.”
It was astonishing, even to Ricardo, to discover so much romance under the practical urgency of Hanaud’s character, but he was startled to hear the Frenchman add: “She has what is rare, perhaps, the flying buttocks.”
Maltby jumped in his chair. Mr. Ricardo looked, coldly at his friend. “A French cathedral, no doubt,” he commented acidly.
“No, no!” Monsieur Hanaud was as serious as a man could be. “I shall not give you the laugh by pronouncing the barbaric word of the city which she makes beautiful. No, I shall lead a porter at the rail way station to a board. I shall point with my stick, I shall press money into his thorny hand.”
“Horny,” said Mr. Ricardo.
“And I shall say,” continued Hanaud, without paying the slightest attention to Ricardo’s interruption, “‘Please to buy me the go and return ticket to that unpronounceable place. For I am now upon my vacancy.’”
Superintendent Maltby stubbed out the butt of his cigar into an ashtray.
“I should like to see the porter’s reaction to your request,” he said, and then the smile left his face. “So you give up?” he cried with a challenge in his voice; and, indeed, that was to Ricardo the most astounding factor in the whole case. Hanaud gave up. He would go on a vacancy and moon under a stripy awning on Gothic architecture.
“Yes, my dear Maltby. You shall have your way. You shall make that amusing Horbury a fellow of the sea. It shall all be as you wish. And yet I hope that when I come back and have my little meeting with the adorable Madame Horbury and carry off my cheque for the patient Gravot of the Place Vendôme, you, as you say good-bye, will tell me something I much wish to know.”
“Oh?” Superintendent Maltby put his interrogation suspiciously. “And what is that something?”
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. He flapped a hand and flung the subject away. Yet he was curious.
“Yes, I would like to know what switchback business had to write to big business. What Horbury’s Newsbag had to say to the great Dagger Line of Steamships. And what Daniel Horbury enclosed to Septimus Crottle in so carefully sealed an envelope.”
“But that letter has disappeared,” cried Ricardo.
“Precisely, my friend,” Hanaud returned. “That is why I am curious.”
CHAPTER 14
A MEETING IS ARRANGED
WHEN THE UNOBTRUSIVE Thompson slid into Mr. Ricardo’s bedroom the next morning with his morning tea, carried over land through how many countries, lest one tang of the sea should tincture its fragrance, he carried in upon the tray a note from Hanaud. Mr. Ricardo was grateful. No man was less hail-fellow-well-met in the morning, than he. Rosy-cheeked people who hardly knocked before they bustled in, nephews and nieces and such-like modern importunities, were not allowed. The act of getting up was a slow and quiet ritual, to be conducted without words. Not until he was afoot and dressed would he consider with what rocks and stones and trees he was to be rolled round in earth’s diurnal course.
It was, therefore, with a desire to do what he could for his friend that he opened his note. Mr. Ricardo read that Hanaud had put off his visit to the unpronounceable city owing to the persistence of a surprising idea. He himself must see this Septimus Crottle. He had no authority by which he could claim an interview. He was of no account in this Horbury affair. It was even possible that Septimus had never heard the name of Hanaud, for nothing was more curious than the smallness of the orbits within which fame was circum
scribed. As Mr. Ricardo had himself observed, no one could answer what Mr. Gladstone had said in 1884. Well, then, it would be desirable that Hanaud should have an introduction to Septimus Crottle, and who could give it but that excellent Mister the Captain Mordaunt, who, one might think — No? Yes? — had a passion for introducing strangers to Septimus Crottle. Monsieur Hanaud threw himself at the feet of his dear friend. ‘I understand, the note concluded, that Septimus Crottle is difficult, but as you know I am at my best with difficult people. You have seen me at work. I am inspired, I soar.’ and he signed in his usual style as a peer of the realm.
Mr. Ricardo derided the signature and scoffed in his mild way at the vanity of the writer. But he, too, was reluctant to leave this odd matter of Horbury’s letter to Septimus Crottle undiscovered. He wanted to know the answer to a host of other questions besides. Who had come to the house and lifted the telephone receiver in the early morning? Why had Olivia Horbury locked her door? And when? And why, with Horbury’s Newsbag ready to become Horbury’s Nosebag, had Horbury drawn that unusual blue-handled knife across his carotid artery — if he had?
Mr. Ricardo accordingly rose, dressed with his usual circumspection, and found Captain Mordaunt preparing to eat his luncheon at his club and more than a little worried. He drew Ricardo into the bar as if he had been his dearest friend. “A cocktail before we lunch?”
The invitation was, in the modern phrase, telescoped. “I’d rather have a Manzanilla,” said Mr. Ricardo, and the barman gazed at him with the awe due to a customer who knew of a drink unknown to the barman.
“We’re just out of it, sir,” he said. He thought of embroidering his statement with the news that there had been a great run lately on that there drink, but the theme was dangerous.
“A glass of your driest sherry, then,” said Mr. Ricardo, and with Uncle Pepe the barman walked on solid ground.
At luncheon, Mordaunt began whilst Mr. Ricardo was still twittering. Maltby had called on him this morning, Maltby with an infernal fellow with a notebook. Where was Bryan Devisher? Why wasn’t his arrival notified to the authorities? Etcetera, etcetera.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 160