He showed them to Ricardo and replaced the draft in the envelope, whilst his friend’s eyes lingered over Olivia’s apology. “O. Horbury,” Mr. Ricardo said as he came to the signature.
“Yes,” Hanaud observed with a good deal of significance. “We have seen that name written before — you and I.”
There was a note in Hanaud’s voice which puzzled Ricardo. As if they two had been especially privileged.
“We? You and I? No!”
For answer Hanaud pointed to the drawer in which were locked away two torn halves of a pasteboard card.
“But ‘D. Horbury’ was the name written,” cried Ricardo. “D for Daniel.” He was straining his eyes, as if he could force the name to take shape upon the air. “Yes, D for Dan—”
He got up and, taking his keys from his pocket, opened the drawer. He brought the two pieces of card to a small table by the side of his chair and fitted them together.
“D. Horbury,” he insisted. “Of course, my dear man! D...” and his voice weakened.
The name was written in some sort of flurry. The initial was attached to the name, as if the writer had written it without lifting the pen from the card; great was the need to write it out and have done it for good. Suppose that you started to write O, beginning at the top and following down on the right-hand side and up on the left, and then made a twirl at the top so that the pen might run away to the first letter of the surname, H., you might indeed mistake it for a D, as he himself had done. The more he looked at the writing, the surer he felt. O for Olivia, not D for Daniel — yes, but why?
Mr. Ricardo was not very alert to whispers from the dark pools of fear where knowledge ends, but here something which troubled him, for which he must find, if he could, some quite simple and comfortable explanation. He had seen Agatha Crottle’s face at the exact moment when the lock was broken and the drawer, with a sound of splintering wood, burst open. There had been such a look of terror in her eyes, such a sickly convulsion of her features as he hoped never to see again. He had slammed a shutter across that vision in his mind and by no word had reopened it. But it was in front of him now.
“You saw her that night when she was alone,” said Hanaud with a challenge in his voice.
“I saw her in a mirror. But her hands covered her face. Tears were falling between her fingers and running down the backs of her hands. She was in a storm of misery. Why?” Hanaud could explain it. He had sent him on a pretence just to see and bring back that story. “You expected that I should see what I did,” Ricardo cried.
Hanaud shook his head gravely.
“I was not sure.”
“It was — it was frightening.”
And now, as gravely, Hanaud nodded.
“Yes, that is the word,” he said. “You have heard of people who hate enough to summon death to help them. They use a sort of witchcraft.”
Hanaud’s voice dropped as he spoke, and to Ricardo the room, even on that day of late summer, had suddenly grown cold.
“They write the name of their enemy on a card, and they lock it away in a drawer where no one will see it. They make of that drawer a coffin. And it has been known — whether by chance or some dreadful power of evil — that the victim has fallen sick, has faded until, in an agony of remorse, the would-be murderer has unlocked the drawer and torn up the card.”
“As she did — Agatha?” cried Ricardo in a great relief.
“I wonder,” Hanaud replied sombrely. “One of the name of Horbury has died violently. But not the woman. She had never unlocked the drawer. She did not mean it to be unlocked. Are you sure those passionate tears were not tears of bitter anger? Isn’t it even possible that she thought that she had killed the man when she had meant to kill the wife? In that extremity she might have believed it.”
Mr. Ricardo, of course, chose the obvious explanation of the words. “But you can’t mean,” he gasped, “that Miss Agatha had set her heart on that fat rogue Horbury!”
“I don’t,” Hanaud answered with a grin upon his face in which there was neither humour nor amusement.
“Upon someone else, then?”
“Obviously,” replied Hanaud.
“Who — oh, I see — who had set his heart on Olivia Horbury?”
“So it would seem.”
So here was Mr. Ricardo faced with the triangle of the dramatists. Two women and a man or two men and a woman. It was a triangle of the first sort in this case. A man pursued by Agatha who had set his longings on Olivia.
“Who is it?” cried Ricardo.
“I wish I knew,” Hanaud returned, and the lines of disappointment deepened on Ricardo’s face. After all, what’s the use of a walking Who’s Who if it doesn’t answer your questions? — he asked of himself indignantly.
The Frenchman continued:
“The unknown man. Perhaps my friend, the murderer. There is now something we did not have before, a reason for murder.”
They had Devisher, to be sure, or they would have, if they could lay their hands upon him. But neither Ricardo, nor Hanaud, nor indeed Maltby, had any real belief in the guilt of Devisher. Ricardo was thrown back upon his disinclination to accept the picture of Agatha Crottle presented to him.
“She is middle-aged. I can’t believe she ever had a lover,” he cried. “She is of the kind which finds its consolation in religion.”
And there Hanaud wholly agreed with him.
“Yes, yes, she goes to church, no doubt of it, and prays with all her soul. But to such, what is the witchcraft of the locked drawer but a more desperate prayer? She is helping. Oh, I have seen them, the religious ones, the unconsidered ones, the world’s faded, pitiable wallflowers, when passion comes to them for the first time in middle-age they can be dangerous.”
And so quietly, yet with such significance, did Hanaud let that word fall from his lips that once more Ricardo gazed into a black pit with horror in his eyes.
But Thompson, the unfailing, brought the grim conference to an end. The Rolls Royce (No. 1) was at the door. He himself was now starting in the second car. A quarter of an hour and they should follow.
“I shall come with you,” said Ricardo, and he stood by the train’s side after Hanaud had taken his seat.
“You will come back, I hope,” he said.
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders.
“It may be,” and he suddenly leaned out of the window. “I will tell you a little thing. Maltby will press at the inquest for an open verdict. This affair is not ended, my friend.”
“And there will be danger before it is ended,” Ricardo declared.
But this danger struck first of all where neither of them expected it.
CHAPTER 20
MORDAUNT READS A SIGNAL
IT WAS MR. Ricardo’s way when some high narrative of fact or fancy was acclaimed, to discover some detail or episode, which no one else had remarked, and to applaud it to the exclusion of all other details, and indeed, of the whole pattern. The detail or episode may have been quite insignificant. That did not matter. His concentration upon it made strangers wonder for a moment whether he were not a very deep fellow. And indeed, Mr. Ricardo enjoyed that pleasant sense of equality with his betters which comes from travelling first on a second-class ticket. Thus it was he who noticed what a vastly important part in the explication of the Horbury Affair was played by the one who had the smallest concern in it. “Mordaunt,” Mr. Ricardo would say, standing on his hearthrug before the fire and nodding his head sagely like a mandarin in ivory, “Please don’t forget Mordaunt.” He should have added “verb. sap.”, and perhaps we might add it for him.
For on the morning when probate of Horbury’s will was granted to his widow — that is a few weeks after Horbury’s death — Philip Mordaunt was walking along the street of Nubar Pasha, in Cairo. It was half-past eleven. The wide platform of Shepheard’s Hotel was as yet sparsely occupied and he passed it with a distinct pleasure. He had the time but no longer the wish to explore it. He passed the Esbekiyeh Gardens and cr
ossed the head of the road leading to the great Bazaar. Later, when the platform outside Shepheard’s was filled and the alleys of the Mouski empty, he would walk that way, but for the moment he had a happier task. He continued along the straight broad avenue of Abdul Azziz. Upon his left hand the great sand cliffs of the Nile Valley were closing in. Just behind this street the houses were thinning out on the rising ground. Spaces of brown earth, broken walls, an Arab cemetery replaced them; and then it came into view — the village of Elaoui.
It hung like a cage under the high edge of the cliff, tiny, yet, in that clear air, distinct — three sides of a square rather like Lezardrieux, except in one particular, and an awkward particular. At Lezardrieux the road from the square down to the river ran backwards and forwards across the slope in reasonable gradients, some times invisible under a cliff, sometimes in full view on a plateau. From Elaoui one road, straight as the blade of a sword, dropped like a precipice from the outcrop of rock on which centuries ago the village was built. It dropped for a mile in length till it joined the desolation of broken walls without which no eastern city is complete; and throughout that mile not a building nor a tree cast a shadow across it. Moreover, it was lighted at night at the top, where it passed between old brick walls into the village square, and half-way down, and, most usefully for a keen-eyed watchman in the square, at the bottom where at last it swerved amongst the ruins and was lost. Mordaunt could see it, plain as a panel painted white in a wall of pale red. Not a car, however swift, could ascend that road without advertising its approach. And it was the only road, as the village about the square was one house with a hundred tunnels and passages; for the inhabitants of the village were one close-knit, remote family. A formidable village under the eaves of the high Mokattam Hills — an island with a single causeway, always watched, and time to spare!
Mordaunt took his first look at the Elaoui village, as he walked along the street of Abdul Azziz, with as much indifference as he could counterfeit, and suddenly came to a halt. Straight ahead of him, the owner of a little bar had set out a few iron tables and iron chairs on the pavement; and at one of these, facing him, sat a man he knew. A man whom he had last seen on his yacht in Dartmouth Harbour, wearing a suit of his clothes and with fifteen pounds of his money in his pocket. Devisher! Yes, Devisher, but now a Devisher whose face had begun to fill out, who wore white flannel trousers and white buckskin shoes and a grey coat and waistcoat suitable to the season and the place. It perplexed Mordaunt for a moment that, although they were face to face and the distance with each step that he took narrowing between them, Devisher did not see him. Mordaunt laughed, and the laugh brought no look of recognition to Devisher’s face.
“Well,” Mordaunt reflected, laughing again at the image of the dead-and-gone Mordaunt which rose in his mind, “that would have annoyed me a few months ago. I couldn’t have believed that anyone who had once seen the Mordaunt who was shortly to electrify the world wouldn’t have known him again.”
There was a vanity, too, even in that reflection, Mordaunt began to recognise. But he was too beset by curiosity to continue his analysis. Devisher did not see him because all the senses that he had were gathered and blended into one. He was listening as the blind listen, to hear something far away beyond the hearing of the men with vision. His eyes, a little down-turned, were empty.
Mordaunt was already abreast of the table, but instead of passing on he dropped his hand sharply on Devisher’s shoulder and slid into the iron chair opposite. Devisher’ reaction to that clap of the hand was astonishing. With a yelp which was sharp with terror, Devisher sprang to his feet. He looked around wildly and brought his eyes down at last to Mordaunt’s face.
“You?” he gasped, and then cried sharply: “What are you doing here?”
Philip Mordaunt answered meekly: “Cairo — early October — mayn’t I? Or do you already own the town?”
Devisher laughed a little uneasily, but he was bringing his nerves under control and made a shift to excuse his cry of fear.
“You might have realised, Captain Mordaunt, that for the residents of the Castillo del Libertador, the laying on of hands was a rite seldom associated with pleasure.”
“I am sorry,” Mordaunt answered. “What are you drinking?”
“Beer. Not so bad.”
Mordaunt rapped upon the table and two long glasses topped with snow were set before them.
“Here’s luck!” said Devisher as he drank.
“The skin off your nose!” replied Mordaunt.
“I, too, take in the Sunday newspapers,” said Devisher, and Mordaunt produced a cigar case. “Will you?” he asked, holding out the case.
“No, thank you.”
Mordaunt pinched the end of one of the cigars and put it between his lips and felt in his pocket for a box of matches. But the box was hardly out before he heard a tiny click and a spirit-fed lighter was burning under his nose.
“Why waste a match? Try this!” cried Devisher with a curious urgency.
Mordaunt had it on the tip of his tongue to answer that he preferred a wooden match, but a startling conjecture suddenly struck him dumb. It wasn’t probable; it was hardly tenable at all. But if it were true? It explained the expectancy and concentration of Devisher, the eager offer of his cigar lighter, his presence at this hour, at this bar, in this broad street under the hanging village of Elaoui. Did it explain, too, Devisher’s presence in Cairo? Mordaunt must discover the answer to that question. It was not busybody’s work. It was his appointed work. But he must approach it cunningly and he was a novice in the art.
Luckily for Mordaunt, Devisher was not at his ease. He had a question or two which clamoured for answers.
“You know,” he began as he lit a cigarette and put his lighter back into his pocket, “when I saw you in the cabin of your yacht — whether it was something you said or just an impression that I got — I thought you had evolved out of your experiences a sort of complete new pattern to which you were going to fit your life.”
“I had?” asked Philip, apparently as much at sea now as he had been on his yacht.
“Yes,” Devisher added, with just a hint of disdain for the man who made a plan but couldn’t act on it. “And then, a month or so later, I find you strolling along a street of Cairo, the complete tourist, a walking poster for Mr. Cook.”
Mordaunt’s face flushed. The contemptuous good-humour stung him and he leaned forward sharply to show Mr. Bryan Devisher how wrong he was. But he showed nothing. A warning bell was beginning to ring rather urgently in his brain. Devisher’s scorn was meant to sting, and to sting him into admissions, if admissions there were. Mordaunt lowered his head. He drank his beer silently, shamefacedly. The rush of blood into his face might as truly have expressed his shame as his anger.
“You are quite right,” he confessed. “I had made a plan. I was going to do wonders. But you know what I did do? “ — and he uttered a harsh little laugh — . “I fell asleep in my bath. That’s me, I am afraid.”
He leaned back in his chair, with now and then a jerk of amusement, and now and then a pull at his beer, and now and then a puff at his cigar.
“The complete tourist. Not so bad for you, Mr. Devisher, but too hard a stroke to be pleasant to me. After I had had the nerve too, one night on the Helford river, to give old Septimus Crottle a full history—” Mordaunt broke off suddenly. He had been tilting his chair on to its back legs. He brought the forelegs down with a bang upon the stones. “Of course,” he cried. “I gave you a letter to old Septimus, didn’t I?”
Devisher was not prepared for that question being flung at him. He was distracted, too, by the crash of the chair legs upon the stones. He could listen and talk, but he couldn’t listen as he wished to listen if the talk was to be punctuated by these exclamation marks.
“Yes, you did.”
“And you used it, I hope.”
Devisher jumped at the suggestion. It explained at once his presence in Cairo, his means of livelihood. He would have
been compelled to offer some explanation to the man who had seen him last in such distressful circumstances. Here was a providential explanation provided by this simpleton. Devisher smiled and spread out his hands. “Well, you see. I am here.”
“Permanently?”
“To be sure.”
“The Dagger Line?”
“Thanks to you.”
And Philip Mordaunt began to doubt. Septimus? Was there anything in the world so dear to that old man’s heart as the Dagger Line? Its prestige, the beauty of its ships, their efficiency and speed? Mordaunt had written a fair letter to Septimus, concealing nothing which he knew, not even the deep black ring round Devisher’s ankle. To try such an applicant out in an office under his eye — yes, that the old tyrant might do. But to send him at once abroad to a place so important in the shipping world as the Canal — that didn’t sound like Septimus at all.
“You’re stationed at Port Said, I suppose?”
“No, here. The Line has an office in Cairo.”
Well, that might be so. Mordaunt leaned back in his chair, and Devisher said with a smile. “It looks as if the old man has taken a risk. But that isn’t the case really. I have merely routine work. As you saw, probably, I didn’t want responsibility. Checking up on passages, passing the time of day with Cook’s and the travel agents. And I’m not alone in the office. It just suits me, and if it doesn’t run to cocktails at Shepheard’s, it does to a decent glass of beer in the street of Abdul Azziz.”
He had hardly finished when a match was struck upon the other side of the street. Devisher did not turn his head, but he heard — Mordaunt was sure of it. There was a quick flicker in his eye — Mordaunt classed it with the scratch of the match upon the emery paper — and a relaxation of his face. A signal had been given and taken. Mordaunt, for his part, could look across the road. He saw a tall youth in an Arab gown standing outside a cheap provision shop with a cigarette in his mouth which he had just lighted, and a big box of Bryant & May’s matches in his hand. The young Arab drew at his cigarette to make sure that it was alight and then, putting the match-box into his pocket, strolled away.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 165