Kitabı oku: «Cleek of Scotland Yard: Detective Stories», sayfa 15
CHAPTER XXIV
“I’m bothered if I know,” returned Narkom helplessly. “Gad! I’m at my wits’ end. We seem to be as far as ever from any clue to that devilish pair and unless you can suggest something – ” He finished the sentence by taking off his hat, and looking up at Cleek hopefully, and patting his bald spot with a handkerchief which diffused a more or less agreeable odour of the latest Parisian perfume.
“H’m!” said Cleek, reflectively. “We might cross the Heath and have a look round Gospel Oak, if you like. It’s a goodish bit of a walk and I’ve no idea that it will result in anything, I frankly admit, but it is one of the few places we have not tried, so we might have a go at that if you approve.”
“By James! yes. The very thing. There’s always a chance, you know, so long as it’s a district we’ve never done. Gospel Oak it is, then. And look here – I’ll tell you what. You just stop here a bit and wait for me, old chap, while I nip back to the house and ask Sir Mawson’s permission to use his telephone – to ring up the Yard as usual, you know, and tell them in what quarter we’re operating, in case there should be reason to send anybody out to find me in a hurry. Back with you in no time and then we’ll be off to Gospel Oak like a shot.”
“Right you are. I’ll stop here under the trees and indulge in a few comforting whiffs while you are about it. Get along!”
Narkom paused a moment to grip his cuff between finger tips and palm, and run his coat sleeve round the shiny surface of his “topper,” then shook out his handkerchief and returned it to his pocket, jerked down his waistcoat and gave it one or two sharp flicks with the backs of his nails, and before a second diffusion of scent had evaporated, or the whimsical twist it called to Cleek’s lips had entirely vanished, the scene presented nothing more striking than an ordinary man leaning back against a tree and engaged in scratching a match on the side of an ordinary wooden matchbox. The Yard’s Gentleman had gone.
It was full ten minutes later when he lurched into view again, coming down the garden path at top speed, with one hand on his hat’s crown and the other holding the flapping skirts of his frock coat together, and Cleek could tell from the expression of his round, pink face that something of importance had occurred.
It had – and he blurted it out in an outburst of joyous excitement the moment they again stood together. The search for Dutch Ella and Diamond Nick was at an end. The police of Paris had cabled news of their location and arrest that very morning in the French capital, and would hold them under lock and key until the necessary preliminaries were over, relative to their deportation as undesirables, and their return to Canada.
“The news arrived less than an hour ago,” he finished, “and that wideawake young beggar, Lennard, thought it was so important that I ought to know it as soon as possible, so he hopped on to the limousine and put off as fast as he could streak it. He’s up here in this district now – this minute – hunting for us. Come on! let’s go and find him. By James! it’s a ripping end to the business – what?”
“That depends,” replied Cleek without much enthusiasm. “Which limousine is Lennard using to-day? The new blue one?”
“Cinnamon, no! That won’t be delivered until the day after to-morrow. So it will be the good old red one, of course. Will it matter?”
“Come and see!” said Cleek, swinging out of the grounds into the public highway again, and walking fast. “At all events, an ounce of certainty is worth a pound of suspicion, and this little faux pas will decide the question. They are no fools, those Apaches; and Waldemar knows how to wait patiently for what he wants.”
“Waldemar? The Apaches? Good lud, man, what are you talking about? You are not worrying over that business again, I hope. Haven’t I told you over and over again that we couldn’t find one trace of them anywhere in London – that they cleared out bag and baggage after that fruitless trip to Yorkshire? The whole truth of the matter, to my way of thinking, is that they awoke then to the fact that you had ‘dropped’ to their being after you, and knowing you weren’t to be caught napping, gave it up as a bad job.”
“Or altered their tactics and set out to follow some one else.”
“Some one else? Good lud, don’t talk rubbish. What good would following some one else do if they were after you?”
“Come and see,” said Cleek again, and would say no more, but merely walked on faster than ever – up one thoroughfare and down another – flicking eager glances to right and to left in search of the red limousine.
In the thick of the High Street they caught sight of it at last, tooling about aimlessly, while Lennard kept constant watch on the crowd of shoppers that moved up and down the pavement.
“Cut ahead and stop it and we shall see what we shall see, Mr. Narkom. I’ll join you presently,” said Cleek, and he stood watching while the superintendent forged ahead in the direction of the limousine; and continued watching even after he saw him reach it and bring it to a halt, and stand at the kerb talking earnestly with Lennard.
But of a sudden the old crooked smile looped up the corner of his mouth; he stood at attention for a moment or two, breathing hard through his nostrils, and moving not at all until, abruptly starting into activity, he walked rapidly down the pavement and joined Narkom.
“Well?” queried the superintendent, looking up at him quizzically. “Come to any decision, old chap?”
“Yes – and so will you in a second. Don’t turn – don’t do anything hastily. Just look across the street, at the jeweller’s window, opposite, and tell me what you think of it.”
Narkom’s swift, sidelong glance travelled over the distance like a gunshot, arrowed through the small collection of persons gathered about the shop window inspecting the display of trinkets, and every nerve in his body jumped.
“Good God! Waldemar!” he said, under his breath.
“Exactly. I told you he knew how to wait. Now look farther along the kerb on this side. The closed carriage waiting there. It was dawdling along and keeping pace with him when I saw it first. The man on the box is a fellow named Serpice – an Apache. Chut! Be still, will you? – and look the other way. They will do me no harm —here. It isn’t their game, and, besides, they daren’t. It is too public, too dangerous. It will be done, when it is done, in the dark – when I’m alone, and none can see. And Waldemar will not be there. He will direct, but not participate. But it won’t be to-day nor yet to-night, I promise you. I shall slip them this time if never again.”
The superintendent spoke, but the hard hammering of his heart made his voice scarcely audible.
“How?” he asked. “How?”
“Come and see!” said Cleek for yet a third time. Then with an abruptness and a swiftness that carried everything before it, he caught Narkom by the arm, swept him across the street, and without hint or warning tapped Waldemar upon the shoulder.
“Ah, bon jour, Monsieur le Comte,” he said airily, as the Mauravanian swung round and looked at him, blanching a trifle in spite of himself. “So you are back in England, it seems? Ah, well, we like you so much – tell his Majesty when next you report – that this time we shall try to keep you here.”
Taken thus by assault, the man had no words in which to answer, but merely wormed his way out of the gathering about him and, panic stricken, obliterated himself in the crowd of pedestrians teeming up and down the street.
“You reckless devil!” wheezed Narkom as he was swept back to the limousine in the same cyclonic manner he had been swept away from it. “You might have made the man savage enough to do something to you, even in spite of the publicity, by such a proceeding as that.”
“That is precisely what I had hoped to do, my friend, but you perceive he is no fool to be trapped into that. We should have had some excuse for arresting him if he had done a thing of that sort, some charge to prefer against him, whereas, as matters stand, there’s not one we can bring forward that holds good in law or that we could prove if our lives depended upon it. You see now, I hope, Mr. Narkom, why you have seen nothing of him lately?”
“No – why?”
“You have not used the red limousine, and he has been lying low ready to follow that, just as I suspected he would. If he couldn’t trace where Cleek goes to meet the red limousine, clearly then the plan to be adopted must be to follow the red limousine and see where it goes to meet Cleek, and then to follow that much-wanted individual when he parts from you and makes his way home. That is the thing the fellow is after. To find out where I live and to ‘get’ me some night out there. But, my friend, ‘turn about is fair play’ the world over, and having had his inning at hunting me, I’m going in for mine at hunting him. I’ll get him; I’ll trap him into something for which he can be turned over to the law – make no mistake about that.”
“My hat! What do you mean to do?”
“First and foremost, make my getaway out of the present little corner,” he replied, “and then rely upon your assistance in finding out where the beggar is located. We’re not done with him even for to-day. He will follow – either he or Serpice: perhaps both – the instant Lennard starts off with us.”
“You are going back with us in the limousine, then?”
“Yes – part of the way. Drive on, Lennard, until you can spot a plain-clothes man, then give him the signal to follow us. At the first station on the Tube or the Underground, pull up sharp and let me out. You, Mr. Narkom, alight with me and stand guard at the station entrance while I go down to the train. If either Waldemar or an Apache makes an attempt to follow, arrest him on the spot, on any charge you care to trump up – it doesn’t matter so that it holds him until my train goes – and as soon as it has gone, call up your plain-clothes man, point out Serpice to him, and tell him to follow and to stick to the fellow until he meets Waldemar, if it takes a week to accomplish it, and then to shadow his precious countship and find out where he lives. Tell him for me that there’s a ten-pound note in it for him the moment he can tell me where Waldemar is located; and to stick to his man until he runs him down. Now, then, hop in, Mr. Narkom, and let’s be off. The other chap will follow, be assured. All right, Lennard. Let her go!”
Lennard ‘let her go’ forthwith, and a quarter of an hour later saw the programme carried out in every particular, only that it was not Waldemar who made an attempt to follow when the limousine halted at the Tube station and Cleek jumped out and ran in (the count was far too shrewd for that); it was a rough-looking Frenchman who had just previously hopped out of a closed carriage driven by a fellow countryman, only to be nabbed at the station doorway by Narkom, and turned over to the nearest constable on the charge of pocket picking.
The charge, however, was so manifestly groundless that half a dozen persons stepped forward and entered protest; but the superintendent was so pig-headed that by the time he could be brought to reason, and the man was again at liberty to take his ticket and go down in the lift to the train, the platform was empty, the train gone, and Cleek already on his way.
A swift, short flight under the earth’s surface carried him to another station in quite another part of London; a swift, short walk thence landed him at his temporary lodgings in town, and four o’clock found him exchanging his workaday clothes for the regulation creased trousers and creaseless coat of masculine calling costume, and getting ready to spend the rest of the day with her.
CHAPTER XXV
The sky was all aflame with the glory of one of late June’s gorgeous sunsets when he came up over the long sweep of meadowland and saw her straying about and gathering wild flowers to fill the vases in the wee house’s wee little drawing-room, and singing to herself the while in a voice that was like honey – thin but very, very sweet – and at the sight something seemed to lay hold of his heart and quicken its beating until it interfered with his breathing, yet brought with it a curious sense of joy.
“Good afternoon, Mistress of the Linnets!” he called out to her as he advanced (for she had neither seen nor heard his coming) with the big sheaf of roses he had brought held behind him and the bracken and kingcups smothering him in green and gold up to the very thighs.
She turned at the sound, her face illumined, her soft eyes very bright – those wondrous eyes that had lit a man’s way back from perdition and would light it onward and upward to the end – and greeted him with a smile of happy welcome.
“Oh, it is you at last,” she said, looking at him as a woman looks at but one man ever. “Is this your idea of ‘spending the afternoon’ with one, turning up when tea is over and twilight about to begin? Do you know, I am a very busy young woman these days” – blushing rosily – “and might have spent a whole day in town shopping but that Dollops brought me word that I might look for you? But, of course – No! I shan’t say it. It might make you vain to hear that you had the power to spoil my day.”
“Not any vainer than you have made me by telling me other things,” he retorted with a laugh. “I am afraid I have spoiled a good many days for you in my time, Ailsa. But, please God, I shall make up for them all in the brightness of the ones that are to come. I couldn’t help being late to-day – I’ll tell you all about that presently – but may I offer something in atonement? Please, will you add these to your bouquet and forgive me?”
“Roses! Such beauties! How good of you! Just smell! How divine!”
“Meaning the flowers or their donor?” – quizzically. “Or, no! Don’t elucidate. Leave me in blissful ignorance. You have hurt my vanity quite enough as it is. I was deeply mortified – cut to the quick, I may say, if that will express my sense of grovelling shame any clearer – when I arrived here and saw what you were doing. Please, mum” – touching his forelock and scraping his foot backward after the manner of a groom – “did I make such a bad job of my work in that garden that when you want a bouquet you have to come out here and gather wild flowers? I put fifty-eight standard roses on that terrace just under your bedroom window, and surely there must be a bloom or two that you could gather?”
“As if I would cut one of them for anything in the world!” she gave back, indignantly. Then she laughed, and blushed and stepped back from his impetuous advance. “No – please! You fished for that so adroitly that you landed it before I thought. Be satisfied. Besides, Mrs. Condiment is at her window, and I want to preserve as much as possible of her rapidly depreciating estimate of me. She thinks me a very frivolous young person, ‘to allow that young Mr. Hamilton to call so frequent, miss, and if you’ll allow me to say it, at such unseemly hours. I don’t think as dear Captain Burbage would quite approve of it if he knew.’”
“Gad! that’s rich. What a mimic you are. It was the dear old girl to the life. She hasn’t an inkling of the truth, then?”
“Not one. She doesn’t quite approve of you, either. ‘I likes to see a gent more circumpec’, miss, and a trifle more reserved when he’s gettin’ on his thirties. Muckin’ about with a garden fork and such among a trumpery lot of roses, and racin’ here, there, and everywhere over them medders after ferns and things, like a schoolboy on a holiday, aren’t what I calls dignified deportment in full-grown men, and in my day they didn’t use to do it!’ Sometimes I am in mortal terror that she intends to give me notice and to leave me bag and baggage; for she is always saying that she’s ‘sure dear Captain Burbage couldn’t have known what he was a-doing of, poor, innocent, kind-hearted gentleman – and him so much of a gent, too, and so wonderful quiet and sedate!’”
“Poor old girl!” said Cleek, laughing. “What a shock to her if she knew the truth. And what on earth would you do if she were to chance to get a peep at Dollops? But then, of course, there’s no fear of that – the young beggar’s too careful. I told him never to come near the house when he carries any notes.”
“And he never does. Always leaves them under the stone in the path through the woods. I go there, of course, twice every day, and I never know that he has been about until I find one. I am always glad to get them, but to-day’s one made me very, very happy indeed.”
“Because I told you you might expect me?”
“Yes. But not that alone. I think I cried a little and I know I went down on my knees – right there – out in those woods, when I read those splendid words, ‘There is but one more debt to be paid. The “some day” of my hopes is near to me at last.’”
Her voice died off. He uncovered his head, and a stillness came that was not broken by any sound or any movement, until he felt her hand slip into his and remain there.
“Walk with me!” he said, closing his fingers around hers and holding them fast. “Walk with me always. My God! I love you so!”
“Always!” she made answer in her gentle voice; and with her hand shut tight in his, passed onward with him – over the green meadows and into the dim, still woods, and out again into the flower-filled fields beyond, where all the sky was golden after the fierce hues of the sunset had drained away into the tender gleam of twilight, and there was not one red ray left to cross the path of him.
“You have led me this way from the first,” he said, breaking silence suddenly. “Out of the glare of fire, through the dark, into peaceful light. I had gone down to hell but for you – but that you stooped and lifted me. God!” – he threw back his head and looked upward, with his hat in his hand and the light on his face – “God, forget me if ever I forget that. Amen!” he added, very quietly, very earnestly; then dropped his chin until it rested on his breast, and was very still for a long time.
“Yes,” he said, taking up the thread of conversation where it had been broken so long a time ago, “there is but one more debt to be cleared off: the value of the Princess Goroski’s tiara. A thousand pounds will wipe that off – it was not a very expensive one – and I could have had that sum to-day if I had thought of myself alone. Mr. Narkom thinks me a fool. I wonder what you will think when you hear?” And forthwith he told her.
“If you are again ‘fishing’,” she replied with a quizzical smile, “then again you are going to be successful. I think you a hero. Kiss me, please. I am very, very proud of you. And that was what made you late in coming, was it?”
“Not altogether that. I might have been earlier but that we ran foul of Waldemar and the Apaches again, and I had to lose time in shaking them off. But I ought not to have told you that. You will be getting nervous. It was a shock to Mr. Narkom. He was so sure they had given up the job and returned home.”
“I, too, was sure. I should have thought that the rebellion would have compelled that, in Count Waldemar’s case at least,” she answered, gravely. “And particularly in such a grave crisis as his country is now called upon to face. Have you seen to-day’s papers? They are full of it. Count Irma and the revolutionists have piled victory on victory. They are now at the very gates of the capital; the royal army is disorganized, its forces going over in hordes to the insurgents; the king is in a very panic and preparing, it is reported, to fly before the city falls.”
“A judgment, Alburtus, a judgment!” Cleek cried with such vehemence that it startled her. “Your son drinks of the cup you prepared for Karma’s. The same cup, the same result: dethronement, flight, exile in the world’s wildernesses, and perhaps – death. Well done, Irma! A judgment on you, Mauravania. You pay! You pay!”
“How wonderful you are – you seem to know everything!” declared Ailsa. “But in this at least you appear to be misinformed, dear. I have been reading the reports faithfully and it seems that death was not the end of all who shared in Queen Karma’s exile and flight. Count Irma is telling a tale which is calling recruits to the standard of the revolutionists hourly. The eldest son – the Crown Prince Maximilian – is still alive. The count swears to that; swears that he has seen him; that he knows where to find him at any moment. The special correspondent of the Times writes that everywhere the demand is for the Restoration, the battle cry of the insurgents ‘Maximilian!’ and the whole country ringing with it.”
“I can quite believe it,” he said, with one of his queer, crooked smiles. “They are an excitable people, the Mauravanians, but, unfortunately, a fickle one as well. It is up to-day and down to-morrow with them. At present the cry is for Maximillian; this time next month it may be for Irma and a republican form of government, and – Maximillian may go hang for all they want of him. Still, if they maintain the present cry – and the House of Alburtus falls – and the followers of Irma win – But what’s the use of bothering about it? Let us talk of things that have a personal interest for us, dear. Give me to-morrow, if you can. I shall have a whole day’s freedom for the first time in weeks. The water lilies are in bloom in the upper reaches of the Thames and my soul is simply crying for the river’s solitudes, the lilies, the silence, and you! I want you – all to myself – up there, among God’s things. Give me the day, if you can.”
She gave him not one but many, as it turned out; for that one day proved such a magic thing that she was only too willing to repeat it, and as the Yard had no especial need of him, and the plain-clothes man who had been set upon Waldemar’s track had as yet nothing to report, it grew to be a regular habit with him to spend the long days up in the river solitudes with Ailsa, picnicking among the swans, and to come home to Dollops at night tired, but very happy.
It went on like this for more than ten days, uninterruptedly; but at length there came a time when an entry in his notebook warned him that there was something he could not put off any longer – something that must certainly be attended to to-morrow, in town, early – and he went to bed that night with the melancholy feeling that the next day could only be a half holiday, not a whole one, and that his hours with her would be few.
But when that to-morrow came he knew that even these were to be denied him; for the long-deferred call of the Yard had come, and Narkom, ringing him up at breakfast time, asked for an immediate meeting.
“In town, dear chap, as near to Liverpool Street and as early as you can possibly make it.”
“Well, I can’t make it earlier than half-past ten. I’ve got a little private business of my own to attend to, as it happens, Mr. Narkom,” he replied. “I’d put it off if I could, but I can’t. To-day before noon is the last possible hour. But look here! I can meet you at half-past ten in Bishopsgate Street, between St. Ethelburga’s Church and Bevis Narks, if that will do. Will, eh? All right. Be on the lookout for me there, then. What? The new blue limousine, eh? Right you are. I’m your man to the tick of the half hour. Good-bye!”
And he was, as it turned out. For the new blue limousine (a glistening, spic-span sixty-horsepower machine, perfect in every detail) had no more than come to a standstill at the kerb in the exact neighbourhood stated at the exact half hour agreed upon, when open whisked the door, and in jumped Cleek with the swiftness and agility of a cat.
