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CHAPTER 8

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FOG IN HIGH PLACES

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That phenomenal fog was getting its grip upon London again when the party set out. But in the specially equipped car, fair headway was made. At the mysterious, deserted house of Professor Ambroso, Gallaho and Sterling were dropped. The detective had certain important inquiries to make there relative to the accessibility of the adjoining ground-floor flat from the studio of Pietro Ambroso. Nayland Smith went on alone.

He had established contact by telephone from Dr. Norton’s house with the man he was going to see. He knew this man, his lack of imagination, his oblique views of life. He knew that the task before him was no easy one. But he had attempted and achieved tasks that were harder.

The slow progress of the car was all but unendurable. Nayland Smith snapped his fingers irritably, peering out first from one window, then from another. In the brightly lighted West End streets better going was made, and at last the car pulled up before a gloomy, stone-porched house a few paces from Berkeley Square.

In a coldly forbidding library, a man sat behind a vast writing-table. Its appointments were frigidly correct. His white tie, for he was in evening dress, was a miracle of correctness. He did not stand up as Sir Denis was shown in by a butler whose proper occupation was that of an undertaker.

“Ah! Smith.” He nodded and pointed to an armchair. “Just in time.” He glanced at a large marble clock. “I have only five minutes.”

Nayland Smith’s nod was equally curt.

“Good evening, Sir Harold,” he returned, and sat down in the hard, leather-covered chair.

Sir Denis Nayland Smith’s relations with His Majesty’s Secretary for Home Affairs had never been cordial. Indeed it is doubtful if Sir Harold Sims, in the whole course of his life, had ever known either friendship or love. Nayland Smith, staring at the melancholy face with its habitual expression of shocked surprise, thought that Sir Harold’s scanty hair bore a certain resemblance to red tape chopped up. From a pocket of his tweed suit, Nayland Smith took out several documents, opened them, glanced at them, and then, standing up, placed them on the large, green blotting-pad before Sir Harold Sims.

“You know,” said the latter, adjusting a pair of spectacles, and glancing down at the papers, “your methods have always been too fantastic for me, Smith. I mean, they were when you were associated with the Criminal Investigation Department. This thing, which you are asking me to do, is irregular—wholly irregular.”

Nayland Smith returned to the armchair. A man of vision and dynamic energy, he always experienced, in the proximity of Sir Harold Sims, an all but unconquerable urge to pick up His Majesty’s Secretary and to shake him until his teeth rattled.

“There are times, Sir Harold,” he said, quietly, “when one can afford to dispense with formalities. In this case, your consent is necessary; hence my intrusion.”

“You know——” Sims was scanning the documents suspiciously—“this bugbear of yours, this obsession with the person known as Fu Manchu, has created a lot of unpleasant feeling.”

This was no more than a statement of fact. Sir Denis’s retirement from the Metropolitan Police had coincided fairly closely with the appointment of Sir Harold to the portfolio which he still held.

“You may term it an obsession if you like—perhaps it is. But you are fully aware, Sir Harold, of the extent of my authority. I am not alone in this obsession. The most dangerous man living in the world to-day is here, in England, and likely to slip through our fingers. Any delay is dangerous.”

Sir Harold nodded, setting one document aside and beginning to read another.

“I shall be bothered by the Roman Catholic authorities,” he murmured; “you know how troublesome they can be. If you could give me two or three days, in order that the matter might be regularised....”

“It is to-night, or never,” snapped Nayland Smith, suddenly standing up.

“Really....”

Sir Harold began to shake his head again.

“It is perhaps unfair of me to remind you that I can bring pressure to bear.”

Sir Harold looked up.

“You are not suggesting that you would bother the Prime Minister with this trivial but complicated affair?” he asked pathetically.

“I am suggesting nothing. I only ask for your signature. I should not be here if the matter were as trivial as you suppose.”

“Really—really, Smith....”

The light-blue eyes peering through spectacle lens were caught and arrested by the gaze of eyes deep-set, steely and penetrating. Sir Harold hated this man’s driving power—hated his hectoring manner, the force of a personality which brooked no denial....

Five minutes later the police car was stealing through a mist, yellow, stifling, which closed in remorselessly, throttling London.

Trail of Fu Manchu

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