Commodore Graham bent his head over the case of tubes which Hillyard had brought with him.
“We’ll have a look-out kept for these things. There have been none of them in England up till now.”
Martin Hillyard returned to the personality of Mario Escobar.
“Did you suspect him before?” he asked.
Commodore Graham pushed the cigarettes towards Hillyard.
“Scotland Yard has kept an eye on him. That sort of adventurer is always dangerous.”
He rang the bell, and on Miss Cheyne’s appearance called for what information the office had concerning Mario Escobar. Miss Cheyne returned with a book in which Escobar’s dossier was included.
“Here he is,” said Graham, and Hillyard, moving across to the bureau, followed Graham’s forefinger across the written page. He was agent for the Compania de Navigacion del Sur d’España — a German firm on the black list, headquarters at Alicante. Escobar severed his connection with the company on the outbreak of war.
Graham raised his head to comment on the action.
“That, of course, was camouflage. But it checked suspicion for a time. Suspicion was first aroused,” and he resumed reading again, “by his change of lodging. He lived in a small back bedroom in a boarding-house in Clarence Street, off Westbourne Grove, and concealed his address, having his letters addressed to his club, until February, 1915, upon which date he moved into a furnished flat in Maddox Street. Nothing further, however, happened to strengthen that suspicion until, in the autumn of that year, a letter signed Mario was intercepted by the censor. It was sent to a Diego Perez, the Director of a fruit company at Murcia, for Emma Grutsner.”
“You sent me a telegram about her,” exclaimed Hillyard, “in November.”
Commodore Graham’s forefinger travelled along the written lines and stopped at the number and distinguishing sign of the telegram, sent and received.
“Yes,” continued Graham. “Here’s your answer. ‘Emma Grutzner is the governess in a Spanish family at Torrevieja, and she goes occasionally, once a month or so, to the house of Diego Perez in Murcia.’”
“Yes, yes! I routed that out,” said Hillyard. “But I hadn’t an idea that Mario Escobar was concerned in it.”
“That wasn’t mentioned?” asked the Commodore.
“No. I already knew, you see, of B45. If just a word had been added that it was Mario who was writing to Emma Grutzner we might have identified him months ago.”
“Yes,” answered Graham soothingly and with a proper compunction. He was not unused to other fiery suggestions from his subordinates that if only the reasons for his telegrams and the information on which his questions were based, were sent out with the questions themselves, better results in quicker time could be obtained. Telegrams, however, were going out and coming in all day; a whole array of cipherers and decipherers lived in different rookeries in London. Commodore Graham’s activities embraced the high and the narrow seas, great Capitals and little tucked-away towns and desolate stretches of coast where the trade-winds blew. No doubt full explanations would have led in many cases to more satisfactory conclusions. But fuller explanations were out of all possibility. Even with questions fined down to the last succinct syllable the cables groaned. None of the objections were raised, however, by Commodore Graham. It was his business to keep men like Hillyard who were serving him well to their own considerable cost, in a good humour. Remorse was the line, not argument.
“What a pity! I am sorry,” protested the Commodore. “It’s my fault! There’s nothing else to be said. I am to blame about it.”
Martin Hillyard began to feel some compunction that he had ever suggested a fault in the composition of the telegram. But then, it was his business not to betray any such tenderness.
“If we could have in the future a little more information from London, it would save us a good deal of time,” he said stonily. “Sometimes a surname is hurled at us, and will we find him, please, and cable home all details?”
“Yes, that is very wrong,” the Commodore agreed. “We will have that changed.” Then a bright idea appeared to occur to him. His face lighted up. “After all, in this instance the mistake hasn’t done any real harm. For we have got our friend Mario Escobar now, and without these tubes and this letter from Berlin about the use of them and José Medina’s account of the conversation in the next room we shouldn’t have got him. The German governess wasn’t enough. He’s, after all, a neutral. Besides, there was nothing definite in his letter. But now — —”
“Now you can deal with him?” asked Hillyard eagerly.
“To be sure,” replied the Commodore. “We have no proof here to put him on his trial. But we have reasonable ground for believing him to be in communication with our enemies for the purpose of damaging us, and that’s quite enough to lock him up until the end of the war.”
He reached out his hand for the telephone and asked for a number.
“I am ringing up Scotland Yard,” he said to Hillyard over the top of the instrument; and immediately Hillyard heard a tiny voice speaking as if summoned from another planet.
“Hallo!” cried Graham. “Is that you, A.C.? You remember Mario Escobar? Good. I have Hillyard here from the Mediterranean with a clear case. I’ll come over and see you.”
Mr. “A.C.”, whose real name was Adrian Carruthers, thereupon took up the conversation at the other end of the line. The lines deepened upon the Commodore’s forehead as he listened. Then he turned to Hillyard, and swore softly and whole-heartedly.
“Mario Escobar has vanished.”
“But I saw him myself,” Hillyard exclaimed. “I saw him in London.”
“When?”
“On Monday afternoon.”
Graham lifted the mouthpiece to his lips again.
“Wait a bit, A.C. Hillyard saw the man in London on Monday afternoon.”
Again A.C. spoke at the other end from an office in Scotland Yard. Graham put down the instrument with a bang and hung up the receiver.
“He vanished yesterday. Could he have seen you?”
Hillyard shook his head.
“I think not.”
“Oh, we’ll get him, of course. He can’t escape from the country. And we will get him pretty soon,” Graham declared. He looked out of the window on to the river. “I wonder what in the world alarmed him, since it wasn’t you?” he speculated slowly.
But both Scotland Yard and Commodore Graham were out of their reckoning for once. Mario Escobar was not alarmed at all. He had packed his bag, taken the tube to his terminus, bought his ticket and gone off in a train. Only no one had noticed him go; and that was all there was to it.
CHAPTER XX
Lady Splay’s Preoccupations
“IT’S A GOOD race to leave alone, Miranda,” said Dennis Brown. “But if you want to back something, I should put a trifle on Kinky Jane.”
“Thank you, Dennis,” Miranda answered absently. She was standing upon the lawn at Gatwick with her face towards the line of bookmakers upon the far side of the railings. These men were shouting at the full frenzy of their voices, in spite of the heat and the dust. The ring was crowded, and even the enclosure more than usually full.
“But you won’t get any price,” Harold Jupp continued, and he waved an indignant arm towards the bookmakers. “I never saw such a crowd of pinchers in my life.”
“Thank you, Harold,” Miranda replied politely. She was aware that he was advising her, but the nature of the advice did not reach her mind. She was staring steadily in front of her.
Dennis Brown and Harold Jupp looked at one another in alarm. They knew well that sibylline look on the face of Miranda Brown. She was awaiting the moment of inspiration. She was all wrapped up in expectation of it. At times she glanced at her race-card, whilst a thoughtful frown puckered her pretty forehead, as though the name of the winning filly might leap out in letters of gold.
Dennis shook his head dolefully. For the one thing sure and certain was that the fatal
moment of inspiration would come to Miranda in time to allow her to reach the railings before the start. Suddenly a name uttered by an apoplectic gentleman in a voice breaking with fine passion reached her ears, with the odds attached to it of nine to one.
Miranda’s face cleared of all its troubles.
“Oh, why didn’t I think of that before?” she said in an extremity of self-reproach. She walked straight to the apoplectic gentleman, followed by the unhappy pair of scientific punters.
“Callow Girl is nine to one, isn’t it?”
The apoplectic gentleman smiled winningly.
“To you, missie.”
Miranda laughed.
“I’ll have ten pounds on it,” she said, and did not hear the gasp of her husband behind her. She made a note of the bet in her little pocket-book.
“That’s ninety pounds, anyway,” she said, turning to her companions. “They will just buy that simple little Callot frock with the embroidery.”
Yes, racing was as easy as that to Miranda Brown. She wanted a simple little Callot frock which would cost ninety pounds, and Callow Girl was obviously marked out to win it for her.
“Then I shall be a Callot girl,” she said gaily, and as neither of her companions enjoyed her witticism she stamped her small foot in vexation.
“Oh, how dull you both are!” she cried.
“Well, you see,” Dennis rejoined, “we’ve had rather a bad day.”
“So have I,” returned Miranda indignantly. “Yet I keep up my spirits.”
A look of blank amazement overspread the face of Dennis Brown. He gazed around as one who should say, “Did you ever see anything so amazing outside the Ark?”
Miranda corrected her remark with a laugh.
“Well, I mean I haven’t won as much as I should have if I had backed winners.” For she had really mastered the science of the race-course. She knew how to go racing. Her husband paid her losses and she kept her winnings.
Harold Jupp took her seriously by the arm.
“You ought to go into a home, Miranda,” he advised. “You really ought. That little head was never meant for all this weighty thought.”
Miranda walked across to the little stone terrace which looks down the course.
“Don’t be foolish, Harold, but go and collect Colonel Luttrell if you can find him, whilst I see my filly win,” she said. “Dennis has already gone to find the car and we propose to start immediately this race is over.”
Miranda ascended the grass slope and saw the fillies canter down towards the starting post. From the chatter about her she gathered that the odds on Callow Girl had shortened. It was understood that a sum of money had been laid on her at the last moment. She was favourite before the flag was dropped and won by half a length. Miranda ran joyously down the slope.
“What did I tell you, Harold? Aren’t I wonderful? And have you found Colonel Luttrell? You know Millie told us to look out for him?” she cried all in a breath.
Luttrell had written to Lady Splay to say that he would try to motor to Gatwick in time for the last races; and that he would look out for Jupp and Dennis Brown, whom he had already met earlier in the week at a dinner party given by Martin Hillyard.
“There’s no sign of him,” Harold Jupp answered.
There were two more races, but the party from Rackham Park did not wait for them. They drove over the flat country through Crawley and Horsham and came to the wooded roads between high banks where the foliage met overhead, and to the old stone bridges over quiet streams. Harold Jupp was home from Egypt, Dennis Brown from Salonika, and as the great downs, with their velvet forests, seen now over a thick hedge, now in an opening of branches like the frame of a locket, the marvel of the English countryside in summer paid them in full for their peril and endurance.
“I have a fortnight, Miranda,” said Dennis, dropping a hand upon his wife’s. “Think of it!”
“My dear, I have been thinking of nothing else for months,” she said softly. Terrors there had been, nights and days of them, terrors there would be, but she had a fortnight now, perfect in its season, and in the meeting of old friends upon familiar ground — a miniature complete in beauty, like the glimpses of the downs seen through the openings amongst the boughs.
“Yes, a whole fortnight,” she cried and laughed, and just for a second turned her head away, since just for a second the tears glistened in her eyes.
The car turned and twisted through the puzzle of the Petworth streets and mounted on to the Midhurst road. The three indefatigable race-goers found Lady Splay sitting with Martin Hillyard in the hall of Rackham Park.
“You had a good day, I hope,” she said.
“It was wonderful,” exclaimed Dennis Brown. “We didn’t make any money except Miranda. But that didn’t matter.”
“All our horses were down the course,” Harold Jupp explained. “They weren’t running in their form at all”; and he added cheerfully: “But the war may be over before the winter, and then we’ll go chasing and get it all back.”
Millicent Splay rang for tea, just as Joan Whitworth came into the hall.
“You didn’t see Colonel Luttrell then?” asked Lady Splay.
“No.”
“He’ll come down later then.” She had an eye for Joan Whitworth as she spoke, but Joan was so utterly indifferent as to whether Colonel Luttrell would arrive or not that she could not stifle a sigh. She had gathered Luttrell into the party with some effort and now it seemed her effort was to be fruitless. Joan persisted in her mood of austere contempt for the foibles of the world. She was dressed in a gown of an indeterminate shade between drab and sage-green, which did its best to annul her. She had even come to sandals. There they were now sticking out beneath the abominable gown.
“She can’t ruin her complexion,” thought Millicent Splay. “That’s one thing. But if she could, she would. Oh, I would love to smack her!”
Joan, quite unaware of Millie Splay’s tingling fingers and indignant eyes, sat reading “Ferishtah’s Fancies.” Other girls might set their caps at the soldiers. Joan had got to be different. She had even dallied with the pacifists. Martin Hillyard had carried away so close a recollection of her on that afternoon when she had driven him through the golden sunset over Duncton Hill and of the brave words she had then spoken that he had to force himself to realise that this was indeed she.
Millicent Splay had three preoccupations that afternoon but none pressed upon her with so heavy a load of anxiety as her preoccupation concerning Joan Whitworth.
Martin crossed the room to Joan and sat upon the couch beside her.
“Didn’t I see you in London, Miss Whitworth, on Monday afternoon?” he asked.
Joan met his gaze steadily.
“Did you? It was possible. I was in London on Monday. Where did you think you saw me?”
“Coming out of a picture gallery in Green Street.”
Joan did not flinch, nor drop her eyes from his.
“Yes, you saw me,” she replied. Then with a challenge in her voice she added distinctly, so that the words reached, as they were meant to reach, every one in that room. “I was with Mario Escobar.”
The room suddenly grew still. Two years ago, Martin Hillyard reflected, Harold Jupp or Dennis would have chaffed her roundly about her conquest, and she would have retorted with good humour. Now, no one spoke, but a little sigh, a little movement of uneasiness came from Millie Splay. Joan did not take her eyes from Hillyard’s face. But the blood mounted slowly over her throat and cheeks.
“Well?” she asked, and the note of challenge was a trifle more audible in her quiet voice. And since he was challenged, Hillyard answered:
“He is a German spy.”
The words smote upon all in the room like a blow. Joan herself grew pale. Then she replied:
“People say that nowadays of every foreigner.”
The moment of embarrassment was prolonged to a full minute — during which no one spoke. Then to the relief of every one, Sir Chichester S
play entered the hall. He had been sitting all day upon the Bench. He had to attend the Flower Show in Chichester during the next week. Really the life of a country notable was a dog’s life.
“You are going to make a speech at Chichester, Sir Christopher?” Jupp inquired.
“Oh no, my boy,” replied Sir Chichester. “Make a speech indeed! And in this weather! Nothing would induce me. Me for the back benches, as our cousins across the Atlantic would say.”
He spoke pompously, yet with a certain gratification as though Harold Jupp had asked him to dignify the occasion with a speech.
“Have the evening papers not arrived yet?” he asked, looking with suspicious eyes on Dennis Brown.
“No, I am not sitting on them this time,” said Dennis.
“And Colonel Luttrell?”
After the evening papers, Sir Chichester thought politely of his guests. Millie Splay replied with hesitation. While the others of the company were shaking off their embarrassment, she was sinking deeper into hers.
“Colonel Luttrell has not come yet. Nor — nor — the other guest who completes our party.”
Her voice trailed off lamentably into a plea for kind treatment and gentleness. Here was Millie Splay’s second preoccupation. As it was Sir Chichester’s passion to see his name printed in the papers, so it was Millie’s to gather in the personages of the moment under her roof. She had promised that this party should be just a small one of old friends with Luttrell as the only new-comer. But personages were difficult to come by at this date, since they were either deep in work or out of the country altogether. They had to be brought down by a snap shot, and very often the bird brought down turned out to be a remarkably inferior specimen of his class. Millie Splay had been tempted and had fallen; and she was not altogether easy about the quality of her bird, now on its descent to her feet.
“I didn’t know any one else was coming,” said Sir Chichester, who really didn’t care how much Lady Splay gratified her passion, so long as he got full satisfaction for his.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 551