There’s only one answer to the blackmailer — no answer. A lagging, like God’s sunlight, hots it up for the blackmailer as well as the blackmailed, and the blackmailer knows it.
But this particular summons, made, of course, over the telephone to Pevensey Crescent, hinted at mutual benefits and a settlement. Preedy wanted to go first and look round before I came. We had neither of us visited White Barn before, but Horbury had given me the bearings so accurately that a mistake could hardly be made. Preedy arrived in his small car a few minutes after half-past nine. A small garage stood on the left-hand side of the house, but the door was locked and the little courtyard was empty. A light, however, was burning in the hall and Preedy, leaving his car on the right of the yard, rang the bell. The lock, he noticed, was of the Yale kind. A man who was undoubtedly, to Preedy’s thinking, Horbury, opened the door and silently contemplated a stranger.
“This is Mr. Horbury’s house?” asked Preedy.
“But there’s no fishing,” said Daniel, and he began to close the door.
“George has not arrived?” Preedy asked again quickly.
“No,” said Horbury, “but we are expecting the Dragon along at any moment,” and he closed the door a little more.
“I am on the staff of the Dagger Line,” Preedy hurried to explain, “and I am George Crottle’s private solicitor.”
For a moment Daniel Horbury was disturbed. Then his face cleared and split with a grin.
“Upon my word,” he said heartily, “in George’s place I should have brought my solicitor with me, too. Meanwhile, come in and meet the wife.”
Mr. Alan Preedy looked and looked again, and drew a deep breath. Olivia laughed and blushed.
“I must apologise, Mrs. Horbury,” said Preedy. “For the most honest compliment I have ever received,” and then Preedy says, to the surprise of them both, he lifted up a finger.
“Crottle’s here,” he said quietly, and with so much certainty that, after a moment of stupor, they began to peer into the corners of the room. Preedy smiled.
“He has just crossed the Turnpike Road into the Lane.”
“Has he now?” cried Horbury, suddenly, as he thought, tumbling to the joke. He listened and nodded “He’s wearing shoes with crêpe soles.”
“He’s driving an Austin twelve,” Preedy corrected, and suddenly a small car drove into the courtyard a stopped.
“My word!” said Horbury. He saw vistas of high service done for him by Alan Preedy. The man might hear the most valuable conversations from impossible distances. “You and I must have a talk, Mr. Preedy, one of these days,” and, as if to emphasise the wish, the front-door bell rang sharply.
It was I who rang. The season was the season of full moon, and a silver light, daylight almost without its harshness, made the world suave and nearly kind. Preedy’s car stood to the right of White Barn, and there was room for me to park mine between his car and the door.
Horbury came to the front door. He did not offer to shake my hand, but his voice cooed: “Your first visit to my refuge, Mr. Crottle? You’ll hope, no doubt, that it will be the last.” He opened a cupboard by the side of the front door and I saw his light brown overcoat hanging on a peg. “What, no overcoat? You boys! Your friend Preedy’s just the same. Wish I could risk it.”
“So Preedy’s before me?” I said as I hung my hat next to Horbury’s overcoat.
“Yes, he’s talking to Olivia in the garden-room.”
I stood, a little startled. “Mrs. Horbury is here, too?”
Horbury nodded his head. “She knows nothing of our little secret and there’ll be no necessity to go into details. But I’m no chauffeur, and the fewer people who know of our meeting here, the better. Olivia drove me down. Romantic, eh? Back to the old house in the suburbs! We shall sleep here to-night after you have gone. Just the two of us in the empty house. Beautiful!” And he reached up and snapped the light off in the hall. Horbury’s little speech was steeped in malice and the grin on his face was impish. He stood very still in the black hall, listening to me breathing and no doubt savouring it with enjoyment. Playing with fire? No, but with a long, heavy, blue-handled knife. No doubt it was very tempting.
“Might I hear what you have to say to me?” I said quietly. “The nut, after all, can’t be expected to enjoy the cracks of the crackers, even if they are wisecracks.”
Horbury threw open the door of the lighted garden room.
“Beautiful, you know Mr. George Crottle, don’t you,” said Horbury with a chuckle. “Isn’t it a disgrace to me that you thought of this wonderful name for Olivia before I did?”
He knelt down by the fire and warmed his hands. “Chilly, these nights,” he said as he stood up again. I didn’t answer. On the floor, by the side of a table, a small chart was pinned on a board. But I wasn’t curious about that. I saw Olivia come forward from her corner. She was dressed in a black gown of satin with a short coat of white ermine which, as the room grew warm, she had thrown open. Against the background of fur, the slender white neck and throat rose from the black gown, too slender, it seemed, for even that small head with its heavy coronal of hair. She was as delicate to the eye as china, rose-white, with the velvet of the crimson rose upon her lips, a creature of health and fire. And I hated her. So they’ve made a joke of me! Robbed me and laughed at me. A harlequin on a string — that’s what I am; and quite slowly I slid my left hand down the breast of my jacket. The comforting hard feel! Beautiful? Yes, she was at that moment, with a look of concern upon her face and question in her eyes. Very likely she knew nothing of this blackmailing business, knew only that I made love to her and laughed at me for my pains. I think that I began to hate her at that moment.
“You go over there, Beautiful,” said Horbury, “and smoke a cigarette whilst I have a word or two with these gentlemen.”
Olivia moved away to a cushioned chair at the corner of the wall. Horbury invited me to a seat on the divan and sat himself on a chair with its back to the wall and with the little table in front of him with a blotting-book upon it — a lady’s blotting-book from a suburban drawing room. Buhl and mother-of-pearl. Preedy — you have to take note of him, if you please — he found a chair with arms like the chair at Horbury’s table, a good chair of Chinese Chippendale with a seat of crimson brocade, and moved it a little so that he sat with his back to the wall on the side of the fireplace opposite to Horbury. Thus all three, Preedy, Horbury and Olivia, were sitting in a parallel, facing the garden windows. I alone sat with my back to them. Not that that mattered, for the blinds were pulled down and the curtains drawn across them. Horbury, Preedy and I, on the other hand, made an isosceles triangle, of which I was the apex, Preedy and Horbury the angles at the base.
Horbury then told us the story of Bryan Devisher, which Preedy, with his lawyer’s eye for facts, condensed into a few sentences.
“There was a lady with a very rich husband in a very big house in the Bayswater Road. She loved the graceful Bryan, and he pinched her pearls, lovely pearls, milk and moonlight. This, remember, was before the Japs had taught the oyster their barbarous efficiency. He sold the pearls to a French jeweller. I think he tried the usual trick of substituting a lump of coal, but it didn’t work. Where the cash went, it is, perhaps, not necessary to state.”
“And how do you know all this?” Horbury exclaimed, startled.
“The lady who loved so unwisely brought her secrets to me in the Gray’s Inn Road,” Preedy returned.
“And you advised her..”
“To make a clean breast of it to her husband.” He smiled idiotically. “A happy metaphor, what?”
“You mean, you advised her to confess to her husband that she had loved and been robbed?”
“I did,” said Preedy, and I blew a long whistle of derision.
“I hope,” he said with dignity, “that I should give the same correct advice to erring wives on all occasions. But I am bound to admit that there were special reasons in this case. Devisher had been spirited awa
y; and although strong suspicions pointed to certain people, there wasn’t actual evidence.”
“And she took your advice?” I asked.
“She did. There was the usual uproar. The police were called in. The husband was going to have a divorce, a resonant, shattering divorce. Wasn’t he just? Then it died down. The pearls came back, you see. The French jeweller had to give them up, since that’s the law. Then the husband recollected that he had run out of the course once or twice himself and that he wanted to get into Parliament and reckoned that it wouldn’t help to let the electors see what his wife thought of him. Finally came an evening when he had a good dinner, and a successful game of bridge, when his wife looked her best in her prettiest frock, and we ring down the curtain on a domestic scene.”
“And what has all this to do with me?” I cried.
“Wait, sir, if you please,” said Preedy, and then, “Ah!” as Horbury stooped and picked up the chart from the floor.
Horbury glanced again at Alan Preedy in surprise. “Then you know of this, too?’ he asked, tapping the ebony board.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Hanaud, the French detective, called on me at five-thirty this afternoon. He came straight from Victoria Station. But continue, please! My friend’s impatient?”
Daniel Horbury described the journey of El Rey. “I marked on this chart, from Lloyd’s reports, the harbours at which the ship discharged its undesirables. It signalled Prawle Point at six this morning and will discharge her English batch at Gravesend to-morrow morning. One of that batch is Bryan Devisher.”
He stood up and, laying the flat of his left hand upon the blotting-book as if he needed its support, took from the mantelshelf a thin little dark blue book. When he sat down again he was aware of a change in the room, a tension, a greater depth in the silence. He looked sharply towards me and saw that my eyes were fixed with more than a little concern upon Preedy. He had been sitting up straight and fairly stiff against the wall, but was, now stiffer than ever and withdrawn into some solitude of his own. His face was shuttered, his eyes blank, he gave me the impression of some lonely lighted house in the country which has suddenly gone black at the distant wail of a warning.
“You weren’t listening to me?” cried Horbury roughly.
He obviously liked to be listened to, as a Member of Parliament should be. Preedy’s eyes — I can’t say opened — for they were open before, but they lived again and a smile took the severity from his face and deepened the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth.
“Believe me, I was listening,” said Preedy. “You are proposing a deal, I think?”
Horbury leaned back in his chair. “You are quick, Mr. Preedy.”
“We have to be in the Gray’s Inn Road.” he retorted. “You want a cabin.”
“Yes.”
“On the Dagger Line.”
“Yes.”
“For Bryan Devisher?”
“As soon as can be.”
“Whither?”
“I don’t mind as long as it’s far away and there’s a job for him at the end of it,” said Horbury.
“On the Company’s staff?”
“That would be desirable,” said Daniel Horbury.
“And what do you offer in return?”
Horbury’s replies had been thought out, but they were no quicker than Preedy’s questions, which came rattling on the answers like the sharp bursts of a machine-gun. Horbury relaxed now, smiling contentedly. “Ah There we are!” he said.
“Are we?”
“To be sure.”
Daniel had no doubts. If there was no eagerness in Preedy’s face, there was enough of it in mine.
“I propose that a couple of letters which, if I had strictly regarded my duty to my country, I should have sent to the Public Prosecutor, but which I have addressed to Mr. Septimus Crottle, should be handed over for delivery to Mr. George Crottle.”
I interrupted here with a good deal too much fervour to please my solicitor Preedy.
“We have a ship the Sheriff, sailing from Southampton at five o’clock to-morrow afternoon. We have a cabin or two free. One of the firm usually goes to Southampton to see the firm’s ship off, and it’s my turn to-morrow.”
No doubt I was a little too ready to agree. I was indeed ready to invite the unknown Devisher, to travel in my car to Southampton, when Preedy objected: “Even so, he’ll want a new passport, won’t he?”
Daniel Horbury handed him the small blue book. Preedy turned it over and opened it.
“The photograph was taken more than six years ago,” agreed Horbury.
“When you sent him gun-running to Venezuela,” Preedy replied. He turned to the page with the photograph and nodded his head.
“Yes, I expect that that will get him on board, especially if he motors with you.”
He gave me a nod and a smile. There was, after all, very little which got by Alan Preedy. But he had, nevertheless, not done with his difficulties. “But will he go? There’s no case against him. The pearls are back, the wife and husband reconciled.”
“But he doesn’t know that,” said Horbury. “Besides, the Frenchman’s here, you said.”
“Yes.”
“Acting for Gravot of the Place Vendôme.”
Again Preedy grinned at Horbury. “I see you know the name all right. Curious, isn’t it?” But Horbury was not the sort of man to be offended by a little sarcasm. He didn’t even blush, and Preedy continued. “Hanaud says Gravot has cooled down, too. He doesn’t want any extradition. He wants his cash back.”
“But Devisher doesn’t know that either. Besides, he probably hasn’t got a farthing, and a pleasant cruise on a tip-top liner with a comfortable easy job at the end of it — not too bad,” Horbury explained anxiously. “Further,” and he looked down at the table and added with a hard note in his voice, “he’s obnoxious to me.”
Preedy laughed.
“Obnoxious is an excellent word. A dandy of a word. All right! When you hand over to me the letter to Septimus Crottle...”
“On the quay-side.”
“I see.”
Preedy tucked the passport away in his pocket. “You’ll go down by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll go in George’s car and hand over the passport to Devisher as you hand the letter to George.”
Horbury beamed. “Good!” he cried. He sprang up from his chair and, still supporting himself with the flat of his left hand, took a cigar from the mantelshelf and bit off the end.
“The ship is the Sheriff,” I said, and I gave the number of the quay at which she berthed.
Horbury took a pen from his waistcoat pocket, lifted a tiny corner of the blotting-book and wrote the name Sheriff upon it. Then he put the pen away in his pocket, lit the cigar and blew a ring of smoke into the air.
“There!” he said, a man conscious of a rather virtuous day’s work. “Now it’s all Sir Garnet.”
I suppose that since I have already used it, I got that old phrase from him. Anyway, he folded his fat arms across his chest and concentrated on blowing exactly rounded rings of smoke into the air. I expect that he was wondering why we didn’t get up from our chairs, say “Until to-morrow, by the Sheriff,” and take our leave. I was wondering that, too, but, after all, if you bring a solicitor with you, you’re a mug if you don’t use him. I watched Preedy. He sat stiff and straight against the wall and looked as if he didn’t mean to move until the Day of Judgment. He was puzzled, too, and annoyed. Finally he seemed to flare up.
“What I don’t understand, Mr. Horbury, is why all the flummery? Why all the pretence? Surely we can fix everything now and have done with it?”
“My dear fellow!” cried Horbury. “My dear fellow!” and even to me, Preedy at that moment seemed a daunting figure. He sat up so inhumanly straight, he spoke with so impersonal a tone, he gazed with so unwinking a stare across the room. One of the gods or kings from the Old Nile come back to sit in judgment.
“My dear fellow, I wouldn’t of course bring those letters here, no, not I!” And the way in which he held tightly pressed against each other the covers of his blotting-book proved to me that there was a good deal more than the word ‘Sheriff’ between the leaves.
I couldn’t help wondering for a moment whether, for all his effectiveness, I had been wise to bring Preedy. If Horbury and I had been alone, those infernal letters might already have been in the fire and an order for a cabin on the Sheriff in Horbury’s pocket. But we were two men against one, and the rules of the game which we were playing excluded neither violence nor any kind of treachery.
“They are safely locked away where they can’t be found,” he exclaimed with a slobbering sort of laugh, and Preedy cut in across his words very quietly now.
“I wasn’t thinking of your bits of paper,” he said.
He moved at last. It was curiously startling to see. His head turned round until he faced Horbury and he asked, with the annoyance most people feel when they see someone complicating a perfectly simple question: “Why on earth don’t you let him in?”
In reply to Horbury’s look of bewilderment, he stretched out an arm with his forefinger pointed towards the curtained windows across the room. Even then no one except Olivia at once understood. She had been sitting not far away, forgotten in the urgency of our deal, but alert to each step of it and to the three characters who were conducting it. She rose from her chair and turned towards us. Was there something protective in her attitude? In her mere rising from her chair? Something which cleared the fog from Daniel’s brain? His eyes followed the line of Preedy’s arm, straight as a bar to the finger’s end.
“Let who in?”
“Devisher.”
Horbury tried to scoff. “Rubbish!” he cried, and laughed, but the laugh was more of a sob of anxiety than a laugh. “Devisher is at this moment tumbling up and down in an old iron ship off Beachy Head” and then in an appeal for confirmation, “Isn’t that true?”
Preedy’s answer came at once, not to be denied; and the very gentleness of his voice made it more than ever implacable. “I have heard the footsteps of a man for the last half-hour. I could almost draw a map of your garden from the sound of them.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 175