Barnish said that he had none, and stood in the door way as if that ended the matter. But Cox was pertinacious and said that he would go in and have a look round. For a moment it seemed that Barnish would hinder him, as, of course, he had a right to do, but he stood aside at last.
“‘All right,’ he said. ‘But you people in your uniforms, you upset women, you know.’”
And certainly when Cox pushed his way into the kitchen he saw a very frightened woman. But there was no dog, though he looked into the cellar to find him. Cox did not go upstairs. First, because the stairs weren’t visible from the kitchen. They were behind a door at the end of a corridor. Second, if the animal were locked up anywhere, it would be in the outbuildings. Cox searched the outbuildings beyond the arch, with Barnish and his wife treading upon his heels, and it had none of the pleasure of a treasure-hunt. He was very glad to make sure that there was no dog upon the premises, get upon his bicycle again — this last the Inspector underlined with a formal little bow to Mr. Ricardo — and report to headquarters.
“Cox wasn’t comfortable about his visit to Arkwright’s,” Lance continued. “There was something about the two Barnishes which he didn’t understand, something which gave him gooseflesh, he said, and Cox isn’t the man to get queer fancies. Then, at four o’clock to-day, you telephoned.”
Inspector Lance walked to the door.
“You would like to see Arkwright’s, no doubt,” he said. Hanaud directed an imploring glance towards Maltby and Maltby understood and replied accordingly: “Very much, if it could be early.”
“We’ll make it eight o’clock if you like, and you could catch a fast train up to London at nine-fifteen.”
Thus it was arranged. Hanaud stood looking into the fire after Lance had gone with a curious smile breaking the composure of his face and then vanishing and recurring again. He was remembering the speech he had made to Mrs. Leete in Paris, and how pat this example had come upon it. A plot was worked out, watertight, undiscoverable, with its sequences and rehearsals; a foggy night, a kidnapping, a lonely farm where, sooner or later, release could be arranged, unless, happiest consequence of all, madness solved all the troubles and made truth an acrostic which none could ever read. But for two small accidents! An aeroplane crossing the sky each night above the prison house at midnight, and a sheep-killing dog which brought a policeman from town.
“No doubt,” said Hanaud, “Barnish and his wife thought the game was up, the dog licence an excuse for the snoop, and, one, two, they get rid of their prisoner and disappear. The little accidents one cannot foresee, they burst open perfect crimes.”
But the morning was advancing, and no one, not even Mr. Ricardo, was willing to listen further.
“Yes,” said Maltby curtly. “Rouse[?] and two people who walk a mile or so home from a country dance. And a newsboy sent back one morning for a fresh batch of papers who passes a door three times, and sees it shut, and finds it open, and next time it’s shut again. Oh, yes! Suppose we go to bed!”
To bed they went. And a few minutes after eight that morning they were trampling, with a little more noise than perhaps was necessary, about the squalid house and precincts of Arkwright’s Farm. Why they were noisy, no one of them was quite sure, no one would have admitted it if he had been sure. Horror and fear and suffering had left behind them in that house an air which was heavy and charged with dim threats. For no reason, each one looked quickly over his shoulder when he had passed a door, or, if he turned a sharp corner, made shift to return upon his steps in silence to see whether he was followed. And in one room the three of them halted with one accord. It was a bare room with no furniture in it but a deal table in a squat tower with a broken window over the back yard and a little hatch upon the corridor.
All eagerly agreed with Lance that it was the service hatch which had turned their suspicions into certainties. But it was nothing of the kind. As they stood in the wretched room, they knew that they had reached the end of their search. There was an oppression which weighed upon their brains, a cruelty which clutched at heir hearts until they hurt. Maltby stepped forward, but very quietly, like a churchwarden in a church, and, pulling forward one of the shutters from the clip which held it to the outside wall, showed them where the screws had fixed it to the window frame.
“Yes,” he said, as though he were confirming some thing they were all agreed about, “it was here.”
“Yes, the room is hateful,” said a voice which Ricardo hardly recognised as Hanaud’s, so quiet and yet so respectful was the sound of it. But no more was said. Inspector Lance was looking at his watch. “If you gentlemen want to catch the nine-fifteen—” and Hanaud started again into animation.
“I think we do,” said Maltby, and to Hanaud: “You agree?”
But Hanaud’s face was so smoothed out with relief that no words were needed from him. He uttered them none the less, and they remained for a long while stark in Mr. Ricardo’s thoughts.
“What I see and smell and touch through all this house, and, above all, in this empty room, is cruelty. We ought to be quick.”
CHAPTER 27
SHATTERING QUESTIONS
“THE FIRST THING to do always,” said Maltby, “is put people in their proper places.”
“The difficulty is to know what are their proper places,” Hanaud complained.
“Well, I know mine,” said Septimus. “I am Chairman of the Dagger Line of Steamships, and my first business is to know what sort of hash my young directors have made of my business during my weeks of absence.”
He pressed the butt of his cigar down in an ashtray and looked towards Maltby. “And perhaps you, Superintendent, could find time to come with me and learn whether any demand for ransom has been made?”
“Ransom? Ah! That is an idea. Yes,” Hanaud cried with a bright look, as though the suggestion of ransom was one of those original strokes of genius which suddenly illuminate a mystery. “You will go to your main office in Leadandall Street?
“Leadenhall Street,” Mr. Crottle corrected.
“Yes, so I said,” Hanaud replied. “Then if I come with you, perhaps, Mr. Crottle, you will tell a clerk to find a cabin for me on a nice big ship to Cherbourg?”
Mr. Crottle turned with a little disappointment in his face. “You are returning?”
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders. “You sail on Fridays. I remember that you said so.”
“Yes, but to-day — this morning—” Maltby exclaimed in perplexity, “you spoke very seriously.”
“I am a serious person,” said Hanaud.
“You spoke some other words,” Maltby hesitated to repeat them in Mr. Crottle’s presence. “And after them, ‘We ought to be quick.’”
“So, you see, I shall only have a few hours to roll with my friend Ricardo.”
For a moment there was the silence of stupefaction. But Mr. Ricardo was an expert interpreter: “He means to loaf,” he explained; but it was not the alluring picture of Hanaud and Ricardo rolling in each others’ arms across Grosvenor Square which had brought Maltby so sharply up. He and Hanaud were staring at one another. Quite slowly Hanaud nodded thrice, and the doubt cleared away from Maltby’s face.
“Very well.”
Now, all these vague sentences and vaguer glances which had been spoken and exchanged since Hanaud had asked Septimus for a passage to Cherbourg were intelligible enough to Mr. Ricardo. The affair would finish before to-night. The whole affair. Horbury as well as Crottle. That was clear. But the conversation up to that moment was a different matter altogether.
It took place after luncheon in Ricardo’s dining-room. The three — Maltby, Hanaud and Ricardo — had got back to the house to find Septimus up and dressed and impatiently walking an imaginary bridge in Mr. Ricardo’s library; and whilst Julius was ordering luncheon and the appropriate wine to go with it, and causing as much delay as was possible, the other two had some kind of a conference with Septimus Crottle. From that conference resulted undoubtedly Crottle’s proposal to
present himself at once at his head office with Maltby, and Hanaud’s decision to seek at the same place a passage to Cherbourg. The conversation, however, seemed natural and spontaneous enough, but there was no debate, and to Mr. Ricardo, who liked now and then to enliven his language with a slang word, it all sounded phoney. It gave him the impression that he was being deliberately excluded from the climax. He didn’t like that at all.
“After all, where would they have been without me?” he asked of himself indignantly. He had noticed things every now and then. He had been the first to distinguish Arkwright’s Farm, hadn’t he? And here they were leaving him at home. In fact, here was Septimus holding out his hand to him.
“I thank you very much for your hospitality,” he said. “From the office I shall go home to Portman Square, where I shall look forward to the pleasure of seeing you.”
It was almost worse to hear Maltby observing with a kindly nod: “You will, perhaps, let me disturb you again when we have put our heads together with the young directors?”
Mr. Ricardo, indeed, was almost in tears. An outsider, he! The mere caretaker of the corner house! And at that, as Crottle and Maltby were going out of the door, the voice of Hanaud fell upon his ears like balm upon an open wound.
“Let them go first in a taxi. We follow in the Rolls Royce. It will be easy.”
“But it’s in the garage,” cried Ricardo in despair.
Hanaud shook his head with a beaming smile.
“I took the liberty. I spoke to Thompson. It was not my place. You forgive?”
“But I am grateful,” Ricardo explained; and the taxi was still in sight across the square when the Rolls Royce slid noiselessly to the door. It was not Mr. Ricardo’s habit to look with any complacency upon intruders who took upon themselves to ride his small thunders and direct his storms, but he rejoiced that they were easily able to keep the taxicab within their vision.
“It is the fault of Monsieur Crottle,” Hanaud explained, rather nobly to Mr. Ricardo’s thinking. “He cannot forgive me for that I prefer the peppermint and the cigarette.”
Mr. Ricardo must answer nobility with nobility. “No, no, my friend, blame me and Maltby. It is not formal and correct that I should be here.”
And so, disputing gracefully, they drove up to the door of the Dagger Line in Leadenhall Street on the number plate of the taxi; and Mr. Ricardo stepped nimbly from the car to the annoyance of Superintendent Maltby. But he said nothing. For Septimus walked straight from the street into the big front office.
By the door a commissionaire sat at a small desk and at the sight of Septimus he uttered a cry. Then he rose to his feet and stood with his hand at the salute. And that was more than enough. Behind a long counter which ran from wall to wall there were many desks. From each of those desks there rose a man with some warm exclamation of welcome in his mouth. They crowded to the long counter. One or two of the chief clerks held out their hands, and as Septimus, for once in a way openly moved, grasped them and said with a smile of mock surprise, “Well, upon my word, I seem to be popular with my officers,” there broke forth laughter and rapping on the long mahogany board, and a lift of voices which were obviously going to end in a rousing chorus of “For he’s a jolly good fellow.”
But the welcome never rose to that height. For, just when all Leadenhall Street was about to ring with a celebration which really belonged more to Lloyds across the way, a bell rang and an angry voice shouted through the room on a loud-speaker: “I can’t hear myself speak.”
Septimus stepped back and all the joyous clamour died suddenly. Mr. Ricardo noticed a change in Crottle’s face which baffled his understanding. It moved in a second from good humour to an anger so violent as to pass belief. That so much fire could blaze in old eyes, or that an old face, carved by time, could twist into a shape so malignant, was the strangest of metamorphoses. It was the flash of a moment, like some swift scene in a moving picture, so swift that it was almost invisible, but so vivid that it left a memory more real and complete than a mountain of detail could have done.
Crottle lowered his head then, so that none could see his face, and stood as still as a statue in a silence which had grown constrained and somehow rather alarming. Then, in a quiet voice, he said:
“That complaint came from my room, I think.”
The head clerk flushed and stammered. “Yes, sir. They moved in there.”
“They?”
“Mr. George and Mr. James.”
“I see.”
It was more than a trifle shocking to Mr. Ricardo to see how deeply the old man was moved by this encroachment of his nephews. They had been tactless, culpably tactless, too ready to assume that Septimus’s chair was empty and too quick to share it. The business of the Dagger Line had to go on, that was evident, but they could have controlled it for a few weeks without changing their offices. They wanted all the trappings at once. It was not very clever. At the same time, the old man’s rage was quite extravagant.
“I’m glad I didn’t serve under him,” was one of Ricardo’s thoughts, and, “Upon my word, Rosalind was quite right to run out,” another. For still Septimus dared not show them his face and, though his body was quiet, his voice shook.
“Well,” he said at last, “it’s a good rule to take the first of the tide. Only the tide don’t always run true,” and in an effort to smile with good humour he contrived the ugliest grimace which Ricardo had ever seen.
A clerk lifted a flap in the counter.
“I’ll tell the young gentlemen that you have returned, sir,” he said, and at once Septimus stopped him.
“You won’t, indeed,” Septimus replied; and now there was some pleasure in his voice, a rather acid pleasure. He laughed. “We’ll surprise them. You, too, Mr. Ricardo. I’m glad that we didn’t leave you behind after all.”
Septimus was chuckling with enjoyment. School-boyish, perhaps, and a grim sort of schoolboyishness at that, Ricardo reflected. Septimus was preparing his surprise with all the dramatic effects and an audience into the bargain. He would relish his little triumph, but Ricardo would have bet a large slice of his fortune that not a glimpse would Crottle give to either of his heirs of the misery and torture which he had endured at Arkwright’s farm.
“Come,” said Septimus, and he led the way into a passage at the side of the main office.
“The first door’s my room,” he said, stopping before it. “The next door is theirs. You’ll be able, in their room, Monsieur Hanaud, to select your cabin to Cherbourg.”
He looked about him to make sure that his audience was complete, and then gently opened the door and stepped inside. The two nephews were seated opposite to each other at a big leather-padded table, George with his back to the door and James with his face to it. But his face was bent upon his papers and George did not turn.
“I didn’t ring,” said James without looking up. “Mr. George objected very properly to the noise.”
“No doubt my welcome home was a little obstreperous,” said Septimus, and at the sound of his voice James dropped his papers and sprang to his feet. He was white as a sheet.
“George,” he cried sharply. For George had no risen, had not even turned his head, so engrossed was he upon his work.
“I am sorry,” he said, looking up towards James. But the attitude and the pallor of his stepbrother’s face startled him. He came out of a dream, a dream of ships and cargoes. “What is it?” he began, and he turn round with a perplexity so marked upon his face that he seemed hardly yet aware of any new big crisis in the affairs of the Dagger Line. But now he saw Septimus standing two feet from him. He reeled back against the desk. His voice rang out in a cry of delight, his face beamed, and if he didn’t hold out his hands it was because they clutched the edge of the table behind him to hold him up.
“You, sir! At last! Thank Heaven! We’ve wanted you!”
“And my room, too,” said Crottle drily — a reply which, to Mr. Ricardo, lowered the whole dignity of this welcome home.
“A fortnight,” answered Septimus.
“A fortnight, yes,” said George. “A long time, sir, for the Dagger Line with a jury-rigged rudder,” and he laughed and made a little bow. “We were afraid,” he explained again, “that something had happened to you. You were staying...?”
And Septimus took him up in the same cordial tone.
“At Arkwright’s Farm. A few miles from Sedgemoor.”
“Sedgemoor?” George repeated with hardly a stammer, and “Sedgemoor,” James Crottle repeated again, idiotically. “Why, that’s where...
“Yes, where Monmouth was defeated, wasn’t it?” added George.
Septimus nodded his head.
“I think we might read about it on a Sunday evening. It would make kindlier reading than the history of the Dauphin of France.”
“My word, yes,” said George Crottle heartily, and Septimus took a step forward.
“By the way,” he asked easily, “do either of you remember that we employed a man named Barnish on one of our ships? “ — and at Ricardo’s side even Hanaud jumped a little.
James Crottle was obviously troubled, but less by the name, Ricardo would have said, than by the oddity of the question.
“Barnish?” James echoed, and again “Barnish?” but on different inflexions.
“Frank Barnish,” Septimus repeated and, as George Crottle shook his head, he turned and drew Maltby into the room. “But it doesn’t matter. This is Superintendent Maltby of Scotland Yard,” he explained. “The Superintendent will see if the staff can turn up his name,” and with a pleasant nod he dismissed the Superintendent upon this business. Then, as though he had just noticed Hanaud and Ricardo for the first time, he called them forward.
“Monsieur Hanaud and Mr. Ricardo, you do know. Monsieur Hanaud pays us the compliment of wishing to return to Paris via Cherbourg on one of our ships. If you,” and he looked towards Hanaud and Ricardo, “will go into the office which my nephews use as a rule, Jenkins will see what he can do for you.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 171