Читать книгу The House in Lordship Lane - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 9

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MR. RICARDO was a trifle uncomfortable as he drove with Hanaud to the Embankment. Police authorities did not, as a rule, endure easily the presence of laymen at their investigations, however simple. But he had heard the voice of Superintendent Maltby as he spoke over the wire. It was hearty. He had jumped at the name. “Mr. Ricardo! You are staying with Mr. Ricardo in Grosvenor Square? Bring him along, of course, my dear Hanaud. The very thing!”

Hearty—yes. Enthusiastic even. But perhaps a little unsettling. He reflected, however:

“It may be that he has heard of me giving Hanaud now and then a tiny help where social knowledge was needed, or some delicate impression was to be felt. One never knows. But I was conscious of quite a shock. Really, I might have been a criminal”; and Mr. Ricardo uttered a little laugh, an uneasy little laugh, as though the great doors of Wormwood Scrubs were opening before him.

“And now,” said Hanaud, tapping him upon the knee, “you tell me, do you not, of Bryan Devisher?”

“To be sure.”

The car was crossing Battersea Bridge. The sunlight was glittering upon the water. Seagulls wheeled and swooped in the inimitable beauty of their flight. Above them and about them was summer, its scents, its warmth; and against that bright background Mr. Ricardo told the story of how the waif from the sea came aboard the ketch Agamemnon.

“In my mind, for it would not have been polite to have said it aloud, I called him meerschaum,” said Mr. Ricardo, who had done nothing of the kind. “See? A piece of meerschaum.”

Hanaud, however, was indifferent at the moment to Ricardo’s witticisms. He sat upright, his broad, shaven face very serious. “No, it would not have been polite to have said anything so stinging aloud,” he replied, his mind far away from his words, and he turned to his companion.

“This man Devisher. Did he really fall overboard?”

Mr. Ricardo replied slowly: “It was thought by the men on Agamemnon that he took a chance.”

“With the odds against him?” said Hanaud.

“Yes.”

Hanaud dug his hands into his pockets. He was obviously puzzled.

“It is not pleasant, of course, to be landed as an undesirable at Gravesend. But, after all, he would be alive.”

Monsieur Hanaud took his hands from his pockets and threw them up. “It is something to be alive.”

“There might be other charges against him?” Ricardo suggested, “waiting for him at Gravesend. He told us that the name upon his passport was false.”

Monsieur Hanaud waved the suggestion aside. Some other question was troubling him.

“And he went ashore at Dartmouth alone, with fifteen pounds in his pocket?”

“Yes.”

“Did he go to the harbour-master’s office?”

“He landed at the slip close to the harbour-master’s office, but I think that if he had gone to the office, some official would have come off to ask whether we corroborated his story.”

Hanaud nodded his head in agreement. Then he asked:

“Do you think the Captain Mordaunt was really asleep in his bath?”

The question had occurred to Mr. Ricardo, but he had made up his mind.

“I do. It is true that Mordaunt was in a hurry to lay up his yacht for the winter. But he really meant that Devisher must make his position clear to the authorities.”

Hanaud, however, was not so confident.

“It will be. Yes. No doubt. But I should like to converse a little with the Captain Mordaunt, none the less.”

Mr. Ricardo shook his head. That would not be so easy. On Sunday, it was true, Captain Mordaunt would be present at one of the famous evenings of Septimus Crottle. But Julius Ricardo did not belong to that circle, and did not propose to do a gate-crash with Hanaud at his elbow. He said:

“There, my friend, I cannot help you.”

“It is a pity,” Hanaud returned, staring out of the window. And suddenly he turned back upon Ricardo.

“This Torbay train? He arrives in London at half-past three?”

“Yes,” said Ricardo.

“And you travel on him?”

“Yes.”

“And you take the luncheon in the dining-car? Yes?”

“No. I slept in my compartment.”

“Was Devisher upon that train?”

“I don’t know. It was a long train with many carriages. I never saw Devisher.”

“So that, for all you know, my friend Ricardo, Bryan Devisher may have arrived in London at half-past three yesterday afternoon. It is agreed?”

“Yes.”

Hanaud twisted his body and shook his big shoulders and made the grunts and moans of discomfort.

“You see how it is,” he cried to Mr. Ricardo, who didn’t see at all how it was. “There is my little affair. I wind it up and I take a vacancy. Good! If it be. But it isn’t. My friend, I do not want my little affair to become your big affair. No.”

“And you’re afraid of that?” replied Ricardo in surprise.

Hanaud laid his hand impressively on Ricardo’s arm.

“So afraid that it gives me the gaiters,” he said solemnly.

Mr. Ricardo translated correctly, but, looking into his friend’s troubled face, knew that this was not the moment for correcting the translation.

“You had better tell me what your little affair is.”

“I will,” Hanaud replied as he pulled his blue paper packet of cigarettes from his pocket, “whilst we smoke the Maryland.” He offered the packet to Mr. Ricardo, who recoiled from it as if it were a dish of poison, and then, having lit one, continued: “It was seven or eight years ago. Daniel Horbury was in a smaller way of business, but he had his fingers in a hundred pies, and you know that a day comes when there must be real money on the table. Mr. Horbury knew the date of that day. Ten thousand pounds on the table—and he had not one sliver.”

“Stiver,” Ricardo corrected.

“As I said, one sliver,” Hanaud agreed equably. “Mrs. Hubbard, she was naked. You understand?”

“Positively,” said Mr. Ricardo.

“Good! But he has associates, not clerks exactly, and not partners. Strap-hangers, you call them.”

“And sometimes hangers-on,” said Mr. Ricardo.

“Amongst them, Bryan Devisher. A valuable one for the Daniel Horburys. He had good manners, good looks, youth, and he was not odd. Public School and the entrance into houses of which the good Horbury only knew the portico. You follow me?”

“I am alongside of you,” Ricardo observed with his eyes on the window. Battersea Park had been left behind. The car had skirted the Park, crossed a main road, dived southward into a street where little houses with little gardens were succeeding terraces. They might reach the end of their journey before Hanaud had reached the beginning of his. “You would be wise to continue.”

“I go.” Hanaud bounced up and down on the seat, marshalling his facts. Then he raised an imperative finger.

“First an historical set of pearls disappears. Second, Mr. Devisher sells them to a jeweller, Gravot, in the Place Vendôme, for ten thousand pounds. Daniel Horbury has his ten thousand pounds on the table. Act one! See?”

Mr. Ricardo nodded his head.

“But the loss of the pearls is discovered,” Hanaud resumed, “and Gravot of the Place Vendôme must give them back. For that is the law. Gravot gives them back, but he is out for Devisher’s blood.”

“I see that,” Ricardo agreed.

“But there is no Devisher. He has gone. One of Horbury’s little pies was a revolution in Venezuela. It was needed. The revolution fails. Devisher finds himself in the Castillo del Libertador, and is there for life, or for as long as Vicente Gomez lives. So at once there is difficulty. There is not, without Devisher himself, proof that the ten thousand pounds Horbury put upon the table were the ten thousand pounds paid by Gravot of the Place Vendôme.”

“So—there’s the jeweller ...”

“Down the drain, as you say in your picturesque way. Exactly, my friend. Oh, how quick you are! That Mr. Ricardo—who shall get by him? He wait—with his glasses not straight upon his nose. Then he pounce—the jaguar! The criminal? Poor fellow! It is over.”

Mr. Ricardo wriggled and blushed and laughed—a small, modest laugh.

“Poor fellow, yes,” he said, playing a little tune upon his knees with his fingers. “It is over.”

“But my Gravot,” resumed Hanaud after his flatteries had been enjoyed, “with him the years have passed. He wants now, not the blood, but his good money. So we try, as I told you, for a friendly settlement.”

Mr. Ricardo frowned over the problem very astutely.

“Yes. No doubt nowadays Daniel Horbury could command ten thousand pounds.”

“Yet he slitted his throat,” replied Hanaud quickly. “Explain that to me. After all, it is not an ordinary behaviour.”

“It is not,” Mr. Ricardo agreed.

It was not reasonable, he thought, even if Hanaud had come....

“By the way,” he asked, “did Horbury know that you had come to London?”

“No.”

Hanaud was emphatic. Superintendent Maltby knew and perhaps one or two officials of his service. And a lawyer. But no one else.

“As I told you, we did not wish the prosecution. I called on the solicitor Preedy, who was employed in the original case, when I left Victoria Station.”

Again Mr. Ricardo was silent. The little houses with the little gardens were giving place to big houses with big gardens. There were big trees, too, chestnuts and oaks and beeches, holding up their thick lacework of leaves and branches, so that even upon the roads there was the cool refreshment of a green world. But there was clearly no comfort for Monsieur Hanaud in the pleasure of the morning.

“Tell me,” he said, “Devisher—Bryan Devisher—did he talk to you on the yacht?”

“A little, yes.”

“For an example?”

“Wait a moment.”

Mr. Ricardo was being bustled, an experience which he disliked extremely. There was something said. It was at the back of his mind, almost tangible, really tangible if he wasn’t bustled. And suddenly he had it.

“He said that after the revolution failed, he might have got away; but he was betrayed.”

“By Horbury?”

Hanaud flashed the question at him.

“He did not say, but he looked as if he knew. Yes, I remember, he was whiter than ever, his eyes staring and his lips working with a curious little smile.” And Mr. Ricardo shivered suddenly, as he had not shivered in the saloon of the yacht when the words were spoken.

Hanaud leaned back in the car. After a little while he said slowly: “He took a chance. Perhaps he took that chance, not because I or Maltby might be waiting at Gravesend for El Rey to anchor, but because Horbury might be—or shall we say Horbury’s friends? Do you see?”

Mr. Ricardo saw very clearly not merely Devisher’s staring eyes and twisted smile, but saw them lost in a great crowd on the arrival platform of a railway station. Three-thirty, the Torbay Limited! Devisher had the advantage of the big rusty steamer by an afternoon—and a night. He had the advantage of Horbury by an afternoon—and a night—of Horbury, who had sold him into six years of hell in the Castillo del Libertador.

“But I do not want my little affair eight years old to widen himself out into the big case of Horbury,” cried Hanaud, spreading out his arms in an extreme vexation. “No! Saperlipopette, I do not want it!”

He took a black cigarette from his blue paper packet and lit it, and as he snapped the lighter he shook off from his big shoulders the suspicions which had troubled him.

“However, we fright ourselves for nothing at all. Men like Horbury! They commit such follies. They are often in the odd street.”

“Queer street,” Mr. Ricardo corrected.

“So I said,” observed Hanaud. “But you will be disappointed,” and he shook his head sadly at his friend. “That Mr. Ricardo! He likes his bit of crime,” and with a laugh he nudged Mr. Ricardo in the ribs.

There were few things which Ricardo detested more heartily than these familiar nudges with the elbow. As a rule he left a sufficient space between himself and Hanaud for them to miss him. But they were travelling in his second Rolls-Royce, a smaller limousine, with no arm-rest to protect him, and the elbow jolted him unexpectedly.

“I am not the only one who will be disappointed,” he said tartly.

“Who else?”

“Gravot of the Place Vendôme,” said Ricardo.

Hanaud smiled.

“Perhaps not, my friend. This Daniel Horbury had a wife. We shall see. She might wish to make the amends.”

A wife! It was the first time that Mr. Ricardo had ever heard of Horbury’s wife. His horses, to be sure! But a wife! Mr. Ricardo was conscious of a sinking at his heart. Had he known that a wife would be present, questioned, harassed, maybe in tears, he would perhaps have sent Monsieur Hanaud on his quest alone. But he had himself to come, he reflected; the police wanted him at their side. He recalled the hearty invitation of Superintendent Maltby over the telephone, but now he recalled it with relief. Certainly Mr. Ricardo could hardly have refused.

“England expects ...” he said to himself—was there a cliché with which he was unfamiliar?—and he sought an anodyne for his uneasiness in a curious speculation. Horbury had married either in his youth, when the passions were hot and the world just waiting to be turned over on its back like a turtle; or in his maturity, when the years had given him a plump and purselike semblance. In the one case he would have married a girl of his own station, but worse educated; in the other a white-fingered daughter of the counties, disdainful and greedy.

In neither case should I care a tuppenny damn, Mr. Ricardo thought, and giggled at the common but expressive phrase.

The car was passing upon its right hand the playing fields of a great school. The school buildings, a fine central hall linked by a covered way with two big blocks of classrooms, all in deep red brick and white stone, faced a second main high road. And this road, too, the motor-car crossed. As it entered a narrower, gently-sloping avenue, Monsieur Hanaud read a name upon a tin plate:

“Lordship Lane. It is here.”

On their left hand, large villas lay hidden amongst trees, behind fences and high laurels. On the right a meadow, set here and there with a great oak or a chestnut, sloped up to a low hedge and the flank of a two-storied small white house. Behind it rose a screen of holly, so thick, so high, that it made a curtain quite isolating the house from its neighbour.

“White Barn,” said Hanaud.

A policeman saluted. The car turned in at the gate and stopped in the gravelled court in front of the door. Already two cars were parked there.