Читать книгу The House in Lordship Lane - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 8

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MR. RICARDO arrived in London at half-past three. He had slept in the train and was looking forward to giving his friend, Monsieur Hanaud, over a charming little dinner for two, quite a comical account of his night’s adventure on the mail ship Agamemnon, plying between Brittany and the Dart.

But, alas! though he rehearsed the scene diligently, letting the real terrifying danger leak through the amusing episodes, making much of the mate’s miscalculation of the dawn, it was good work wasted. Only Hanaud’s suit-case arrived in Grosvenor Square in time for dinner.

With the bag, however, there was a note of eastern abasement, written hastily in pencil at Victoria Station. Hanaud had a telephone call and a visit to make, and he must attend a conference after that with Superintendent Maltby, who would keep him to dinner.

Mr. Ricardo was torn between testiness and gratitude. On the one hand he had, in order to fulfil the duties of a host, endured through a long, dark night the impact of those black, snow-crested waves. On the other hand, even as he spread his napkin over his knees, his eyes closed and his head nodded. Mr. Ricardo, in fact, was exhausted, and as soon as the formula of his dinner was complete, he rang for his butler.

“Thompson, I shall go to bed. You will see when Monsieur Hanaud comes in that he has everything he wants. You will ask him what he would like for his breakfast. For me, after my usual breakfast upstairs at eight, I shall come down at nine-thirty. Will you please tell him?”

“Certainly, sir.” And Mr. Ricardo, revived by a glass of old port, majestically ascended the stairs. Not everyone in Grosvenor Square had passed the last night battling in a cockleshell against a gale. There had been times when Monsieur Hanaud had treated him lightly. Those times had gone. Let him give heed now! Let him give heed and listen!

And how right Mr. Ricardo was! If Hanaud had received one hint of the fine story of Agamemnon and his bath, he would have fled from Superintendent Maltby and the dubious dishes of Soho to the fastidious menu at Grosvenor Square.

Yet Mr. Ricardo, for all his fatigue, slept not so well. At some hour, about which he did not trouble himself to be precise, he was aroused by one of those penetrating conversations in whispers which people use when they are trying not to wake their neighbours.

“Really, really,” Mr. Ricardo murmured drowsily. “If they would only talk quietly, I should still be asleep. But those gasps and hisses remind me of the early days of the Underground, or of First Nights when villains were villains. I can hear every word.”

Addressing thus the emptiness of the room, he did gather that Monsieur Hanaud had arrived and wished to be called early the next morning.

“There is a telephone, of course, in my bedroom?”

A pause followed, a stately pause, meant to tell Hanaud exactly where he got off. It was followed by Thompson’s most glacial voice.

“I think, sir, you must have forgotten that Mr. Ricardo is sensitive to telephones.”

“Ah! He would be!”

“There are three telephone instruments in the house, sir. One in the staff’s quarters on its own line. There is a second one in the hall. From that, again, there is an extension to a third instrument in the library. I think if you are intending to confer with Scotland Yard during the hours of darkness, the hall telephone would be the less disturbing.”

Certainly, Mr. Ricardo reflected with pleasure, Thompson has the most dignified modes of expression, and he fell asleep. But at some later moment, he lay again in the half-way house between consciousness and dreams and seemed to hear a muffled foot glide by his door and down the stairs. But Thompson had been wrong. Although the library was beneath Mr. Ricardo’s bedroom, the floor was of Cubitt’s making, so that no sound reached to the room above. On the other hand, the hall was less furnished, it was hollow, and noises rose from it. Thus Mr. Ricardo heard a whirr, and another, and another.

“The district,” he thought.

Then came four twirls of the dial.

“The number,” he continued, and, adopting Thompson’s phrase, he explained the matter with a smile: “Hanaud is conferring with Scotland Yard during the hours of darkness.”

That Thompson, being wrong in the matter of resonance might also be wrong in the destination of Hanaud’s message, he was far too sleepy to argue. He heard no words, he drifted away into another world where Agamemnon rose out of a black sea with a huge telephone machine in his hand, and cried “It’s the dawning.” Mr. Ricardo was aware of nothing thereafter until the curtain-rings rattled and the blinds were drawn up and his cup of tea was steaming by his bedside.

He dressed deliberately. The mere fact that his friend had arrived that morning neither hurried nor halted him. He descended to his library at nine-thirty, and was surprised. For bending over a copy of The Times sat Monsieur Hanaud, attired for an English day in the country. He wore a rough suit of bright yellow, football stockings, and mountaineering boots. To Mr. Ricardo his appearance was delightful as well as amusing. Even the familiar blue paper-case of black cigarettes was pleasant to his eyes, and he sniffed the acrid fumes as a Malayan returning to his native country after a long absence might sniff his first doerian.

“You have waited for me to share your work. That is kind.”

But Hanaud, after greetings of a warmer character than Mr. Ricardo was used to or, indeed, desired, exclaimed dolefully:

“But there is no work to share. There never was very much. Just a little affair to be privately arranged which would do justice to a certain Parisian and at the same time give me a chance to meet my friend. But ...” and before he could even shrug his shoulders the telephone bell rang.

“I tell you afterwards,” said Hanaud as Ricardo lifted the receiver to his ear.

Ricardo confirmed it with a nod. “The message is for you.”

Hanaud took the receiver from Ricardo.

“ ’Allo, ’Allo! Ah, it is the admirable Maltby. Yes, I listen with both my ears. So!”

And Ricardo saw the look upon his friend’s face change from attention to stupefaction. Hanaud held the earpiece close against his ear. Finally he spoke:

“In half an hour? Yes, I will come. I thank you”; and very slowly he replaced the receiver upon its stand. To Ricardo, watching his friend’s face, the room had lost its comfort. It had become very still, very cold.

“You knew him?” Hanaud asked.

“Whom?”

“Daniel Horbury.”

Ricardo started. “I know of him,” he replied. Who in London didn’t? He added cautiously: “I will give you, my friend, some information. It is said that the police are on his heels.”

“Oh! no, no! The information is wrong,” cried Hanaud. “He has no heels. He is a shark.”

Mr. Ricardo looked sourly at his friend from the Sûreté. He must always have the last word.

“Well, what has Daniel Horbury done now?” Mr. Ricardo asked sulkily.

“Ah, that is it,” said Hanaud, nodding his head.

“What is what?”

“He has cutted his throat.”

Mr. Ricardo pushed back his chair.

“Dead?”

“Last night,” Hanaud added gloomily. “I shall go to the house. Yes. But is it worth while? To have Hanaud looking about the room? Yes, the good superintendent thinks well of it. ‘He may see something, that piece of quicksilver, which we do not, to explain this suicide.’ But for me, it’s a tragedy.” He threw up his hands in despair.

“How so?”

“There were two rogues who cheated a Parisian years ago. One Horbury, the second a younger man just released from prison and deported from South America. Without them both, we have not the evidence. With them both, we don’t want the prosecution. We want the money repaid. Now Horbury has slitted his throat, and the man from South America ...”

“Bryan Devisher,” said Ricardo carelessly.

“Yes,” replied Hanaud, “that’s the ...”

He stopped, staring at Ricardo with his mouth open. Never had Ricardo enjoyed such a triumph. His blood sang proudly in his veins. But outwardly he was as negligent as before.

“What of Bryan Devisher?” he asked.

“He was drownded dead yesterday morning ...”

“Off the Start Lighthouse from the ship El Rey,” Mr. Ricardo interrupted.

Hanaud nodded gloomily.

“I had made arrangements for a little talk with Devisher after he had landed. Then we go to Horbury together and he pays the bill. But now Horbury has slitted his throat and Devisher is drownded.”

“But Devisher is not drowned dead.”

Hanaud looked at him with awe. Then he seized the telephone and dialled with ferocity, speaking the while to his companion.

“You will come with me to the house of Daniel Horbury? Yes,” and into the mouthpiece: “It is Hanaud. Could I speak to Mister the Superintendent Maltby?”—and so again to Ricardo: “You will use your car, yes? And you shall tell me about this Devisher as we go. Is that you, Maltby? I am staying here in the Grosvenor Square with a dear friend who, I can tell you, has been very helpful to me on many delicate occasions,” and Hanaud did not even project a wink down the mouthpiece. “Yes, I should very much like his assistance. Yes, I stay with him in the Grosvenor Square when I come to London. The most charming of hosts.”

“Really, really,” Mr. Ricardo tittered, blushing in his embarrassment.

“His name?” Hanaud continued. “Mr. Julius Ricardo.”

It seemed that something exploded at the other end of the telephone. Was it laughter? Was it surprise? Was it joy?

“We come in his car, a Rolls-Royce. Very fast, very fine. Give me the address again.” Hanaud wrote it down on a pad of paper and rang off.

“What a coincidence,” cried Mr. Ricardo, beaming. “Devisher, me, you, Horbury!”

“Bah!” exclaimed Hanaud, jeering like a schoolboy.

“It might happen once in a hundred times,” said Mr. Ricardo.

“But it does happen every day once in a hundred times,” Hanaud replied, and he hurried off to dress himself in less outrageous clothes, whilst Mr. Ricardo called up his Rolls-Royce, No. 2, to the door.