He waved his hand to the head clerk, who was standing just within the doorway, and then unlatched a communicating door between his office and that of the nephews.
George moved forward.
“I had better see that they are comfortable...” he began, but Septimus interrupted him with a laugh.
“Oh, they will only have a minute or so to wait. Jenkins will go along to them. It’s obvious from what you said when I first came in that we have a bit of work to do, and the sooner we confer about it, the quicker we’ll get it done.”
He opened the connecting-door and invited Hanaud and his friend to enter. He shut the door behind them and, seeing that Jenkins had already gone and closed the door upon the passage, he drew up a chair to their table.
“Now let’s put our three heads together,” he cried, relaxing into some sort of gaiety. Indeed, neither of his two nephews could ever have seen the old man in a more genial mood.
* * * * *
There were two tables in this second room. Into a chair by the nearest Hanaud dropped, exhausted with admiration.
“But he is superb,” he cried, “absolutely superb! And it was shattering, mind you, all of it quite shattering. But none the less, he was superb!” and, putting the tips of his fingers to his lips, Hanaud blew a fervent kiss to so glorious a comedian.
Julius Ricardo was inclined to think the applause a little too French and explosive, but he realised that some tribute from himself was due. So he said: “Yes, he was remarkable, especially after those dreadful days he must have spent at Arkwright’s Farm,” and he did not notice the open-mouthed stupefaction with which Hanaud received the comment.
It was natural indeed that he should not. For Hanaud was already engaged in a kind of visual catalogue of the room’s contents. A big single knee-hole table for James, another like it for George, a filing cabinet, a bookcase in which some Admiralty Guides kept company with some naval almanachs, some chairs, a shelf against the wall, on which stood a chronometer in a mahogany box and — just what Hanaud was looking for.
“Ha!” said he, and he was out of his chair and across the room with that light, swift step, which, after all these years, Ricardo could never quite reconcile with his cumbrous build. Behind the chronometer, on the shelf, was a roll of big charts. And suddenly Ricardo was aware that Hanaud had a pair of fine india-rubber gloves upon his hands. But when he had slipped them on, he had not one idea.
Hanaud lifted the charts carefully from the shelf and brought them over to the table.
“Listen for Jenkins in the passage,” he said, “but he’ll give us time.”
Hanaud unrolled the charts and they sprang back into a roll.
“There are some paper weights.”
He nodded to two which he had pushed aside — heavy things of bronze and malachite. Under Hanaud’s direction, Ricardo placed them, one at each corner of the lower end of the charts. He unrolled the charts again from the bottom and held them flat. The one uppermost was a big chart of the English Channel. He let it slip from his fingers and it rolled itself again down to the paper weights. The next one was of the Indian Ocean, and the third of the Mediterranean Sea, and the fourth of the Great Barrier Reef on the coast of Australia. They were in no sort of order at all, and from the clean look of them and the speed with which each one rolled, itself up the moment it was released, it looked as if they had not been examined for many a day.
Hanaud looked at, and let go, seven of them quickly and then stopped with a little cry. From the side of the last sheet, so quick to hide its secrets, the corner of another paper was sticking out — and, of course, just a that moment Jenkins must knock upon the passage door.
Hanaud swore, and not his favourite polysyllabic oath: “Will you stand in front of the table, please, friend?”
He ran to the door and opened it. But he planted himself in the doorway and thrust his hands in his pockets.
“You can arrange for me? So! That is good. The Formosa. On the Friday, to be sure.”
Mr. Ricardo, with some surprise, heard Hanaud making his plans, but it was altogether a surprising day for Mr. Ricardo.
“Then you will make out for me a ticket and I pick him up at the desk as I go out. Yes? I thank you. You are the kindness itself.” He closed the door upon Jenkins. “And please to keep the snotty nose out of this room for the future.”
“Really, really,” said Ricardo, who disliked such phrases. Monsieur Hanaud, on the other hand, was radiant because he had used this one so appositely.
“It is not a pleasant word?” he asked.
“It is not,” said Mr. Ricardo with severity.
Hanaud nodded his head vigorously once or twice.
“I thought so. It was used upon me once in my early days by an English chauffeur who thought I was examining too inquisitively the interior of his good lady’s motor-car. However, work, not words — how often do our good statesmen tell us so!”
Hanaud was again at the table. He uncurled the seventh map and there, lying upon the centre of it was a much smaller chart with, here and there, pin-points marked upon it.
“Do you see?” he asked in a low voice. “Do you see the corners where it has been stretched out and fixed by drawing-pins to a board?”
“Yes,” said Ricardo. “I do.”
It was a small chart of the western seaboard of Europe; the southern coastline of Spain, Gibraltar, Portugal, the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel.
“Look where the pins were set. Cadiz first, then round on the west at Lisbon, next up at Vigo. El Rey had landed her undesirables in Spain and Portugal. Then straight across the Bay to Brest, where she discharges her French load. Then across to the Start, just after she made her number. Do you remember Foster, Horbury’s clerk? On the afternoon of the night when he died, Horbury, reading in the Evening Standard that El Rey had made her number at Lloyd’s station at Prawle Point at six in the morning, stuck in his little black pin with the white top there, at the Start lighthouse, just by, and chanced a final one opposite to Selsea Bill — see? — which he reckoned El Rey to have reached just at that moment.”
“El Rey?” exclaimed Mr. Ricardo, staring at the map. He remembered very clearly that rusty old iron boat in the dim of the morning floundering amidst a welter of white foam at the end of the bowsprit of Agamemnon.
“And here, just beyond Start Point, you picked up the passenger with the black rim round his ankle.”
“Yes — Devisher,” he cried.
“Bryan Devisher,” Hanaud agreed. “At last we know,” Ricardo exclaimed, “the murderer of Daniel Horbury.”
Hanaud choked suddenly and swallowed and came to himself. He made a low bow.
“As your proverb says. The costumier is alway right.”
But Hanaud had not yet finished with the chart. Whilst talking to Jenkins he had slipped off a glove in his pocket, and he began to press the ungloved fingers of that hand upon the chart.
“Now yours, please!”
“Mine?”
Mr. Ricardo hesitated, wondering whether or no he was condoning or implicating himself in some great crime. But Hanaud seized his hand and dabbed it down upon the paper in one place and in another.
“There!” he said, and he began to roll up the charts again with great care. “They must look just as they did.”
“They?” said Mr. Ricardo in a hushed voice. “Yes. But what have we done?”
Hanaud carried the roll back to the shelf and meticulously replaced it behind the chronometer.
“We?” he asked. “Why, we have left our evidence quite beyond all challenge that we saw the Horbury’s chart with the pin-pricks, slipped, as we expected to find it, in a sheaf of other charts in the office of the younger Mr. Crottles.”
Mr. Ricardo stepped back.
“Oh!” he whispered.
He was in a maze. He was also conscious, proudly conscious, that the presentiment which had so stirred him at Lezardrieux was true. He was engaged in the elucidation of a great and myster
ious crime.
“Oh!” he said again.
He looked at the door which communicated with the office of Septimus Crottle. He pointed towards it.
“You did not expect that you would be interrupted from that room?”
“No,” Hanaud answered. “I thought that Mr. Septimus would prevent it.”
So this was the explanation of those secret conferences before luncheon at the corner house. It was reckoned a possibility, perhaps more than a possibility, that the small chart which had disappeared from White Barn on the night of Horbury’s death might be found in a roll of charts in one particular office of the Line. It had been arranged that Hanaud should have time to search for it.
“It was one of the nephews, then,” said Ricardo in a whisper.
Hanaud did not pretend to misunderstand him.
“Which?” he asked.
“Why not both?” asked Ricardo.
“Why not?” Hanaud echoed.
“We must find out,” Ricardo urged.
“I think we shall to-night,” replied Hanaud. “Now we ought to say that the ticket is arranged.”
He went to the communicating door and knocked upon it and entered. Septimus was seated at the head of the table discussing genially with his young partners the affairs of the Line. Was it possible that those two young men, or one of them, had murdered Horbury and planned the sequestration of Septimus, and that Septimus knew of it at this moment? Ricardo could hardly believe it.
“It is fixed?” cried Septimus. “We carry the great detective to Cherbourg, do we?”
Septimus is untrue to Septimus, Mr. Ricardo reflected. There’s something in it. Aloud, Septimus continued: “That is good news to compensate for our bad news.”
“Ah!” Hanaud replied. “My sincere regrets. It is not, I hope, serious.”
Septimus was obviously not overwhelmed. “Not very serious, but troublesome, as all new arrangements are. Preedy has left us.”
The statement took both Hanaud and Ricardo by surprise. Preedy? It was almost an effort to remember him. Of such small importance had he seemed to be in the great affairs of the Line.
“Why has he gone, Mr. Crottle?” Ricardo asked, and, with a touch of malice in his tone, Septimus answered:
“He saw the red light.”
Both George and James ducked their heads a little over their papers.
“He is in trouble with his lungs. He is leaving — I think, George, that you said he had left — for Switzerland, and will be away for two years.”
“That is unfortunate,” said Hanaud, and Septimus agreed.
“Preedy was a very useful ally. These Barnishes, for instance. It looks as if they had got away. But Preedy would have laid his hands upon them. Well, it can’t be helped! I shall see you at my house to-night;” and with a wave of his hand Septimus dismissed them.
Ricardo had entered the corridor by the second door. He saw Hanaud emerge from Septimus’s room, close the door, and lean against it.
“Preedy! I never gave a thought to him!” he muttered, his mind disturbed. “Should I have? For what reason?”
Although he only communed with himself, his last question reached Ricardo’s ears and he answered it: “Preedy had a special gift.”
Hanaud answered: “Yes, to be sure.”
They walked slowly along the corridor to the main office. Ricardo had, in fact, answered Hanaud’s question better than either of them knew.
At the counter in the outmost office Hanaud asked for and received his ticket by the SS Formosa to Cherbourg. And that again stirred Mr. Ricardo indescribably. Hanaud, who hated the sea, who never travelled to England except by the shortest passage between Calais and Dover, meant actually to sail on an ocean-going steamship to Cherbourg. Oh, certainly Mr. Ricardo was in the way of great events.
CHAPTER 28
HANAUD BORROWS ROLLS ROYCE NO. 2
SEPTIMUS ARRIVED IN a small car, with a constable on the seat by the side of the driver, at the corner house half an hour after Hanaud and Ricardo. Maltby had sent the car for him, and it was as well, Ricardo reflected. For it was no longer the Septimus whom anger had inspired to establish his old authority and sow confusion amongst his partners. He was tired; the fire had gone from him; he was that haggard and humbled man on the bench above the Fairmile.
“Maltby told me that he would be here,” he complained in a weak, querulous voice, as he was shown by Thompson into the library.
“A cup of tea, sir,” Ricardo suggested, and the old man had hardly raised the cup to his lips before Maltby hurried in.
“I have some news,” he said as Ricardo handed a cup to him.
“Good?” Hanaud asked.
“It fits in.”
He leaned forwards to Septimus.
“Frank Barnish was the bo’sun of your first oil-driven ship.”
“The Acropolis. Was he?” exclaimed Septimus with a sudden smile. But the smile was for that adventure in new ships rather than for her bo’sun.
“Yes, sir. He gave trouble, drank too much, resented orders, and, once the voyage was over, was not signed on again. It was a grievance which he didn’t forget. He had the reputation of being a revengeful fellow although a capable seaman, never held up a job for long. It must have been a blessing for him when he was put in to Arkwright’s Farm.”
“That wouldn’t have been a long job, either,” said Septimus. “More than that, it wasn’t meant to be a long job.”
And he sat for a moment or two shaking. He was back in that shuttered room at Arkwright’s.
“Come, sir, that’s all over,” Maltby declared. “We are looking after you now.”
“Yes, yes,” Septimus cried eagerly, and he caught Maltby by the arm. “I have great confidence in you, Maltby. You were to give me some instructions, I think.”
He asked for them rather pitifully.
“I think you should go home, sir. There is a constable in the front of your car. There will be another outside your house. I shall be obliged if you will refuse to discuss your absence at all, but just take everything easily. If you will leave it all to us, we will keep in touch with you.”
Words — and words which meant nothing at all — but they satisfied Septimus. He rose from his chair with some difficulty and went, downstairs on Maltby’s arm. Ricardo, at the window, watched the car drive away in the darkness. In old age, he thought, how swift the change can be from great authority to exhaustion and how permanent! It was the horror which Septimus had suffered that filled his mind now, no longer the audacity of the crime nor its authors. Maltby spoke at his shoulder in attune with his thoughts:
“It’s a new family that the old gentleman will find in Portman Square. One of the daughters ran out, did she? Well they’ve all run out now. New clothes, a theatre or two, friends to entertain. A little cruel it sounds, perhaps. But after those years of submission and boredom and orders and what not, to be expected, what? Pretty natural. I don’t think he’ll round them up again. Patriarchs don’t go down in the twentieth century. Or do they?”
“And Miss Agatha?” Hanaud asked suddenly from the room behind them. But Maltby merely shrugged his shoulders in surprise. He had no answer to that question; and now that Septimus had been packed off home, he was anxious and hurried. Hanaud pointed to the chairs.
“In a dry we finish everything.”
Maltby was puzzled but took a seat.
“He means in a sec,” Ricardo explained, and took another. Maltby nodded and turned to Hanaud.
“So you have found something?”
“That chart.”
Maltby sat back in his chair.
“The chart with the black pins which Horbury brought from his office to White Barn on Thursday, August the twenty-sixth.”
“And which Devisher took away?” said Maltby.
“But he didn’t take it away,” cried Hanaud. “We found it this afternoon slipped into a great roll of charts in the office of the young Crottles.”
“You are sure?” Malt
by exclaimed. He was more astounded, more troubled than Ricardo expected.
“So you see. The affair of Horbury and the affair of Crottle — they are one.”
It was Hanaud’s old point once more enforced upon unwilling ears.
“There is the vanishing of Devisher, too,” Hanaud continued, ticking off the points on his fingers.
“Still...” Maltby doubted
“The man without money and without friends. There is his reappearance, besides.”
“I know, but..”
“There is the telephone which was lifted and replaced. There is the blotting-book. There is the door which was locked.”
Hanaud was rushing back through the events of that night of death, Thursday, August the twenty-sixth.
Still Maltby was not convinced, though what course, Hanaud was urging upon him, Ricardo could not tell.
“And there was another night. Oh, if you had been there you would not doubt — when, in a deep silence, a sigh was breathed.”
Maltby stared between his knees at the carpet. “There is not enough,” he said, shaking his head.
“Not when we add to-day the finding of the chart?” Maltby rose ponderously to his feet, whilst Hanaud watched his every movement with hopeful, eager eyes. “We must be quick,” he said. Maltby nodded his great head.
“This is our one night. After the old man’s appearance at his office, to-night there will be action,” Hanaud argued.
Maltby flung back his head and swore. “If only we had the Barnishes!” he cried.
“The Barnishes!” cried Hanaud in almost a scream of disdain. “They are nothing.”
Maltby frowned gloomily at the Frenchman. A man who had to decide between peace and war might look like that. So might a youth who had to choose between a blonde and a brunette. He heaved a great sigh. He made a great resolve — to hesitate again.
“I must go to the Yard,” he said, and as disappointment deepened on Hanaud’s face: “I shall make all the arrangements, however — you know.” He nodded portentously. “And I shall come back. Let me see!”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 172