“We will go forward slowly?” Hanaud asked.
And suddenly, with a flash of cunning, Septimus replied with another question: “Where to?”
Hanaud nodded with some satisfaction. He had his own answer to that question and wanted no conflict with Septimus over it.
“Let us see!”
He made a sign to Mr. Ricardo and, as the car moved on towards London, Septimus Crottle was questioned as to what he remembered of his disappearance.
“I left the office — it’s almost at the corner of Parliament Street — at six, as I usually did. There was a thick fog, turning brown, and night coming on. It seemed to me the moment to shorten speed, eh? I’ve crept across the Bay in my young days in that sort of weather. There was a street light opposite to Downing Street. I remember crossing there. There was a policeman standing just under the light.”
“There was,” Hanaud agreed.
“I crossed, walked through Downing Street, descended the steps at the end, and passed the Memorial to the Guards opposite to the Parade—”
At that point Septimus Crottle came to an abrupt stop.
“Well?” Hanaud asked, and, shaking his head, Crottle answered in a sullen voice: “I remember not one thing more. The Guards Memorial, yes. I crossed the road, wondering whether I was going to be run down by a car. I crossed quickly and I almost ran into the stone of the Memorial. But I didn’t. No, I didn’t. But I don’t remember one thing more until—” and the old man began to shake. A few little cries, they were less cries than the sobs of child lost in some jungle of horrors, broke from him and grew in loudness. His hand fidgeted with the handle of the door. He looked about him as a man looks, caught by his enemies. He whimpered.
“We shall leave it there,” Monsieur Hanaud cried cheerfully, “until we collect the admirable Maltby,” and a shadow of a smile brightened Septimus Crottle’s face. “If my case is in his hands,—” he cried.
“But it is, Mr. Crottle,” said Hanaud. “We have talked together, he in the Scotch Yard and I in Paris, over the vanishment of monsieur and of something else which I, the obstinate, congregate with it.”
Septimus looked up curiously and bowed.
“But there is now a little thing, is there not?” and he made his two fingers run along the arm of the seat and spring into the air. Hanaud was nervous, Ricardo decided. Now, why? There was a problem, or — to adopt the humorous slang which Mr. Ricardo thought it modern to approve — or was there? But he was nervous. Yes. Once more the fingers ran daintily along the arm at his side and sprang into the air.
“Yes, there is a small—”
“Don’t do that, please,” cried Septimus, watching the two nimble fingers. “It confuses me. What do you mean by it? Do it again and I’ll jump into the road.” The old man, suspicious of this unusual if harmless manoeuvre, was watching Hanaud alertly, one hand upon the lock of the door.
“It’s all right, father,” said Rosalind, and she turned apologetically to Hanaud. “I expect that any new movement disturbs him.”
“Yes. Certainly any movement so typically French,” added Mr. Ricardo sternly but with a warm inward satisfaction.
“Yes, it was French,” Rosalind confirmed. She was eager to make discomfort comfortable for her good friend of the Sureté. She had no reason to realise that if there was one point outside his profession upon which Hanaud prided himself, it was his anomalous internationalism. It was just the Frenchiness of the gesture which worried him.
Mr. Ricardo hugged himself with pleasure, and who shall grudge it to him? Hanaud’s ears would burn. So English wasn’t he? “Mon pied!” Mr. Ricardo exclaimed silently — and aloud: “It’ll be all right when we get hold of Maltby.”
“Ah, yes, Maltby,” Mr. Crottle repeated happily.
Mr. Ricardo nodded towards Hanaud.
“We will drive straight to the Yard. Maltby will not dance his fingers along the arm of the seat. At the Yard—” and a blank determined negative came explosively from the most unexpected quarter:
“No!”
It was Septimus who uttered the word. He was looking from one to the other with just that bright flash of cunning in his eyes which they had all noticed before when he was sitting on the garden seat.
“Maltby, yes — with Monsieur Hanaud, to whose kindness I am deep in debt,” Crottle continued, “but privately. It is the full morning now. If we drive into Scotland Yard we may be seen. There will be many on the Embankment.”
“At home, then!” cried Rosalind, but still Septimus shook his head. “I have servants. I have three daughters — besides you, Rosalind. Within an hour the evening correspondents would be knocking at the door. It is not known that I have come back. I shall go to a nursing home where no inquiries would be answered.”
With an “Ouf!” Monsieur Hanaud showed them as radiant a face as a man of his sallow complexion could. “The nursing home, it is good. But better still is the house of my good friend Mr. Ricardo.”
There was a pause. Mr. Ricardo was not quite sure that he welcomed this interruption of his routine. Also, if the invitation had to be offered, he would, on the whole, have preferred to offer it himself. But Hanaud rushed on. There was an entrance through the Mews at the back of the house. Also, since it would quickly be seen that he, Hanaud of the Sureté was visiting once more his old friend, it would be natural for the good Maltby to call. As for visitors, Thompson, the invaluable, would reject them, and no doubt Maltby would lend a fine young fellow who could fit himself into one of Mr Ricardo’s liveries. There were many spare rooms in the corner house. No one would be so pleased as Mr Ricardo to help in this affair.
Mr. Ricardo could do nothing but agree. He certainly did object to the lack of ceremony in the requisition of his house and perhaps still more to the trifle of malice in Hanaud’s smile. If Maltby was necessary before the necessity for silence could be explained, so, too, was Mr. Ricardo’s fine house in Grosvenor Square.
“Ah, ah, you make fun of your poor Hanaud. Well, well!” Hanaud exclaimed gaily. “After all, we are twins.”
“Personally, I should prefer to say ‘quits,’” Mr. Ricardo replied acidly.
Thus, in any case, it was decided. Septimus was smuggled unnoticed through the Mews at the back of Ricardo’s house and the car was driven on to Waterloo Station with Rosalind and Hanaud.
“I take you out of your way,” Rosalind protested, but Hanaud shook his head and got in beside her.
“We must be sure that the appearance of papa has not altered the story to be told,” he argued. “You are to say that Mordaunt saw Bryan Devisher in the street of Abdul Azziz and drank a bottle of beer with him?”
“Yes.”
“That Devisher said that he had presented Mordaunt’s letter of introduction to Septimus and that Septimus had appointed him to a position in the Cairo office of the Dagger Line.”
“Yes.”
“That Mordaunt had written to Septimus to thank him for his kindness.”
“Yes.”
Hanaud nodded his head.
“And that Devisher was really concerned with a nation’s policy to rot the Egyptian people with drugs.”
Hanaud swung round to the girl. He frowned, he pursed his lips.
“You would say that?” he asked. “Because a match is struck in a street?”
Rosalind was astonished. He had listened to her in Paris without seeming to doubt a word of the story she told.
“Would it be fair to say the match was struck because heroin had come to Elaoui?” He was drumming on his knees, troubled by a doubt whether he was fair to a possible enemy. Rosalind found it a little difficult to identify Hanaud with this extremely scrupulous officer.
“You think that I should forget that circumstance?” she cried.
“Ah, circumstance — yes, the convenient word. But suppose the true word is coincidence. Then you tell your story and this poor man — ouf!”
Rosalind glanced at him again. She said firmly: “I will not mention the matchbo
x, nor Elaoui, nor Philip’s idea at all.”
Monsieur Hanaud’s relief was curiously great. It was all very well to wish to be fair, but to wish for it much, as first his anxiety and now his relief established, Rosalind did not believe. She was not, however, given time to debate the question in her thoughts. Hanaud chattered to her about her sisters until they reached the station. They had to discover a train from Southampton which would fit in with her arrival in a taxi at Portman Square. They were fortunate there, for a train was due in ten minutes.
“Shall I say you crossed with me, Monsieur Hanaud?” she asked as he stood by the door of the taxi.
He shook his head. “No, madame. You can, I am sure, find a friend whom you wished to seize the opportunity to visit. Better still, you went to the Paris office of your Line to find out whether they had news of him. So you missed the boat train.”
He stood back and drew a long breath of relief as Rosalind’s cab drove off. He sent Mr. Ricardo’s Rolls Royce back to Grosvenor Square and took another to Scotland Yard. He took a hurried luncheon with Maltby at a little restaurant in Soho, and at half-past two he looked, at his watch.
“Septimus Crottle has something to tell us,” he said.
“Let us go,” said Maltby; and, finding a taxi at the door — in those days such miracles happened — they drove to the corner house in Grosvenor Square.
CHAPTER 25
AT ARKWRIGHT’S FARM
INDEED SEPTIMUS HAD something to tell. He sat in an arm-chair in a big room overlooking the Square and overlooked by none. He was bathed, shaven, dressed in clean linen borrowed from Ricardo, with a dark-blue dressing-gown over all. But, the marks of terror were still engraved upon his face and his eyes were the eyes, unmistakably explicit, of one who has passed through the shadows of death. They tell no story, they deny that they have a story to tell, but they inspire the prayer, “God forbid that I should suffer as this man has!” And he was years older, shrunken in his spirit and his courage as much as in his frame. He was like, too, some sharp and watchful animal of the forests and the heath. The simplest little unexpected sound set him quivering and, still worse, cringing, as if there were no end to the new horrors which stood darkly about him. That this man had ever commanded a great ship through gales and reefs, across the wide oceans of the world, and brought his cargoes and his passengers safe to far ports, seemed to the most unimaginative of his visitors beyond credulity itself to believe.
Happily Mr. Ricardo had an inspiration from a kindly heart. He came into the room with Maltby and Hanaud at his heels, carrying a box of Havana cigars. It was all very well for Septimus to tell the world that his cigars were the best, but they were no better than Ricardo’s. And, as he held out the box, Ricardo said: “I thought that you might like to lunch alone, Mr. Crottle, after these stormy times, but these I hope you will enjoy in company.”
The old man’s face lit up with the cigar. Mr. Ricardo could have done nothing more wise. The smoke curling upwards, the fragrance which comes from nowhere but Havana, with all its associations of ease and pleasurable moments, brought comfort and a smile to Septimus Crottle.
“I thank you,” he said warmly to Ricardo, and Hanaud, must add his comment.
“He has the tact, my friend Ricardo. Not from the books of the deportment writers. No, no, he has it here,” and he laid his hand admiringly upon his heart.
Septimus, however, was finding his recollection crystallise more easily into speech, now that he had cigar between his lips.
“When I became conscious, my eyes were covered,” he said with a shiver of disgust. “I was aware we were in a car — a man — I think — I can’t be sure, but I doubt if my instincts would lead me astray — a man of the sea and a woman.” He was silent for a little while, and went on choosing rather meticulously his words. “Afterwards — I can’t say more than that now at events — there was I with the nightmare of a life discovered and made true — oh, yes, discovered! When the nightmare began, I can’t remember, for I’ve always remembered the nightmare,” — he shut his eyes and shivered, looking back over years of watchfulness and years of imagined horror.
“To be confronted with it, eh?” he looked at Hanaud and from Hanaud to Ricardo, perhaps with some vague idea that they, who had been present when his voice had broken over the dreadful history of the young Dauphin, would picture to themselves with what detail that history had been staged again.
“They had a lanthorn, which they set upon a white deal table. They emptied my pockets. They took everything from me except two things. This,” he took out of his waistcoat pocket a small thin diary with a single thin pencil in a sheath. “They were very jocose about it. It would pass the time for me to read in the daylight by the chinks of the shutters the engagements I was going to keep. Oh, very jocose they were, and unwise. And the second thing was this. They were funny about this, too.”
The second thing was an old battered silver watch with an old strap and buckle, which he took from his watch-pocket. It was as big as a turnip, thick and round, and indeed, to modern eyes, looked comical enough. But Septimus Crottle handled it as fondly as if it had been a jewel fashioned by Cellini.
“I bought that when I was an apprentice in a clipper. Very funny they were about that, too. What a fortunate thing it was for me that, when I wanted to know the time, I shouldn’t have to ask a policeman! Very funny, and still more unwise.” He looked at the clock. “Listen,” he said.
The hands made the hour to be three and the silence was broken by three faint little silvery chimes from Crottle’s watch.
“A repeater!” exclaimed Ricardo.
“A repeater. They didn’t know. It was just a piece of luggage. They left it with me and slammed the door and locked it. I was in the dark with the watch in my hand and, as I stood there, I heard above the roof of the house the drone of an aeroplane, the throb and pulse of its engines, the rush overhead and the swift decline to silence. Even at that moment it was pleasant, companionable, a promise. I asked my watch the time. It was midnight.”
The next morning, by a ray of light, a golden ray on which the sun danced like Blondin on his tight-rope into the black room, Septimus had ticked off in his diary the day, October the eighth, on which he had been taken, and this new day which had come. That night, too, the friendly aeroplane roared at midnight a friendly “Here I am,” and was gone. Septimus Crottle could test his watch by its passage. There was a water-tap and a basin and a bucket and a straw mattress in his shuttered room besides the deal table. At times — and with difficulty he blurted out a word here and there — he must stand silent with his face to the wall, whilst the room was cleaned and his food brought in. But no one spoke and, like all prisoners, he began to live little things, and, above all, for the moments when he could tick off the day in his diary and when the aeroplane announced from afar its approach, thundered overhead and died away.
“In a little while I was able to expect it,” he said, “sitting in the dark. Then I would hear it and press the spring of the repeater. It was punctual like a postman, sometimes on the tick of twelve, sometimes few seconds later. I think that waiting for the noise it kept me alive all through that first week. And the one night it didn’t come at all.”
To each one of his auditors, so completely were they held by the sombre fire of his eyes and the simplicity of his tale, the sudden drop of his voice to a whisper brought the same shock of catastrophe which the absence of the aeroplane had brought to him.
“Even later on...?” Hanaud began in a hush.
“That night it never passed overhead at all.”
“You are sure?”
“I lay awake until the morning was a grey mist in the room.”
“And what morning was this?” cried Maltby with curious violence.
Old Septimus opened his diary.
“The fourteenth of October. Look! I put a ring about the line which marked the day. For it looked as if I had lost my only friend.”
Maltby almost snatched the d
iary from his hand.
“Yes, the fourteenth. But you heard it the next night?”
Septimus came to life again. There was a smile upon his face, a kind of lilt in his voice.
“Yes, I heard it the next night. And every night of the six nights which followed. I heard it even yesterday.”
But Maltby had not waited to hear the end of that sentence. He was out of the room. They heard his feet running down the stairs to the hall; and a moment afterwards his voice upon the telephone.
But they distinguished none of the words; and now that Septimus had come to the end of his narrative, the fatigue of his adventure was upon him and his head nodding on his shoulders. A bedroom, however, had been prepared for him and Mr. Ricardo’s housekeeper, a matron and such as one could count upon in that household, was at the door.
“A nice sleep, a nice dinner in bed...”
“And another nice cigar after the dinner,” said Crottle with a grin at Ricardo.
“And the gentleman will be himself again,” observed Mrs. Ffennell, the housekeeper, “if he isn’t that already.”
But there was still some knowledge for which Hanaud could not endure to wait until the next morning.
“Before you go, sir,” he exclaimed, throwing himself in front of Septimus and his hands flapping signals of distress to Ricardo.
“Let us finish with it. You are wondering how you came to find me on a bench half-way along the Fairmile?”
“But exactly,” cried Hanaud.
“Well, I can’t tell you. All I know is that these people, the man and the woman, talked late. I heard their voices through the floorboards. Then I heard the motor-car being brought from somewhere. I used my watch. It was three in the morning. They came up the stairs almost immediately afterwards with the lanthorn. But I was not able to see much, as you know,” and now there was more anger than horror at the indignities which he had suffered. “I was no match for them, even if I had possessed my usual strength. I got up and dressed, whilst they hurried me.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 169