Читать книгу Advice Limited: A Series of Stories - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 3

Table of Contents

The long boat-train which had only a few minutes before started from Dover Pier Station on its way to Victoria came to an unexpected halt alongside the almost deserted platform of the Town Station. Habitual travellers, who knew the irregularity of such a proceeding, let down the windows and leaned out from their places. There was little to be seen, however, and nothing to be learnt from the various attendants. About a dozen station officials and a few other men who looked like officials in mufti were forming a sort of a ring around one of the vans in the rear of the train from which a number of heavy, iron-clamped cases were being unloaded. The proceedings were entirely unusual. Curious questions and comments flashed backwards and forwards amongst the passengers. The train attendants, however, knew nothing of what was transpiring.

John Woolston, for fifteen years superintendent of Pullman cars upon the boat-trains, badgered from all directions by questions as to what was going on, confided to his underling that he had no intention of answering another enquiry of any sort. He changed his mind, however, when the most beautiful woman from amongst his regular patrons leaned out of the coupé which, according to custom, he had reserved specially for her use.

“What is this delay, Woolston?” she asked pathetically. “And what are those funny-looking boxes there thrown out on to the platform?”

The man stepped inside the coupé and removed his cap. Except for one mad English duke, who sometimes had lapses of memory and therefore was not altogether to be relied upon, this was the most profitable of all his regular passengers.

“To tell your ladyship the truth,” he confided, “I’ll guarantee there’s not one of us on the train—unless maybe the guard—who knows what is going on. I can tell you what the boxes are, though. They’re made specially down in Tooley Street and they’re used for transporting gold.”

The lady pushed back the veil she was wearing and looked at him through wide-opened eyes.

“But my good man,” she protested, speaking very musically but with a slight foreign accent, “who on earth in their senses would unload bar gold on the platform of Dover Town Station?”

The man’s wrinkled face betrayed his own bewilderment.

“All I can say, your ladyship,” he pointed out, “is that they’re doing it. The cases came off the boat, the French guard left us and the Bank of England men took over the job. They were placed in the usual van, and here we are, barely started on the journey, and half an hour late already, when on go the brakes and out come them boxes. If I hear anything later, your ladyship, I will let you know.”

“Do,” she begged. “It seems such an odd thing to happen.”

“Your ladyship’s car will be at Victoria as usual?” he asked.

She nodded.

“And my maid will see the things through the Customs,” she said. “I shall hurry away. You might see that I have an intelligent porter. I shall only take my dressing-case with me.”

The man, resuming his cap, passed on his way. Clara, Baroness Linz, shook out from the long holder the remains of the cigarette which she had been smoking and looked curiously out of the window. Her eyes were fixed upon the silent group of men standing almost in a circle around the pile of boxes. Every few seconds a porter with one on his shoulder hurried off, escorted as far as the subway by a custodian who was evidently some sort of an official. She yawned and rang the bell.

“Some tea,” she ordered of the attendant.

Long before it was brought, the train, with its snakelike bend, had glided away from the station. The baroness rose to her feet and, leaning over one of the inlaid panels of the car, studied with some interest a map of the south-eastern corner of Kent.

Through the grim, falling darkness the boat-train, flaring with lights, spitting flame and vomiting smoke from the funnels of both its engines, tore through the countryside on its rush to London. Almost parallel with it but continually veering eastwards a motor van, built after the style of the modern armoured car, travelling also at great speed, was cleaving the same blackness of the winter night increased by the grey mists rolling inland from the river. The latter came at last to a stretch where the shroud of vapour was less dense and the chauffeur gave vent to a grunt of relief. With his left hand firmly upon the wheel of the formidable vehicle he was driving he fumbled in his right-hand pocket for pipe and tobacco. Larson, the trusted official of the Bank of England, who was seated by his side with a revolver bulging in his overcoat pocket, frowned disapprovingly.

“This is the rottenest bit of road we’ve got to tackle, Jim,” he reminded his companion. “Not a house for four miles and that filthy canal within a few yards all the way. I’d wait to smoke till we get this beastly job over. I never did care for it and I’m liking it less every moment.”

The driver, holding his pipe between two fingers, opened his pouch dexterously with his thumb and another finger.

“All very well for you, Mr. Larson, sir,” he mumbled. “You don’t care about tobacco. I do. Gawd!”

The sandy-haired little man gave a start which would have been comical but for the fact that it was the start of death. The pipe fell on to the dashboard and out into the road. He himself lay crumpled over the wheel. His companion, though his movements seemed swift enough, never reached the revolver towards which his fingers were groping. The observation window behind had been broken with a crash and he felt the cold, menacing pressure of metal into his side, almost at the same time as two deafening reports reached him from the interior of the vehicle.

“Take hold of that wheel and stop the car,” a harsh voice ordered. “Put your foot on the clutch. Lean over for the footbrake. Keep the car on the road, I tell you, or you’ll get what he got.”

Larson had plenty of courage of the ordinary sort, but there was another gun pressing into the small of his back by this time, and it was obvious that he was in a hopeless position. He leaned over the limp body of the driver and brought the car almost to a standstill, a great fear all the time chilling his blood and setting his hand shaking. This was no ordinary hold-up.

“You fellows,” he faltered. “You’ve got us cold. What’s it—mean?”

He fell over—dead—with a roar like the roar of a cannon in his ears and the smell of gunpowder in his nostrils. A man who had apparently been lurking in the shadows of the hedge boarded the car, took the wheel and drew in to the side of the road. The door of the van slammed. From invisible places three or four other figures stole into sight.

“Not a light for over a mile either way,” one of them declared.

“Get at these two,” was the savage order from the man who still stood with his revolver in his hand. “Strip them both and fling them into the canal. We want their clothes—Buddy and I. The rest of you can tramp it to where the car is waiting. We meet at the Orchard Inn by Pender’s Creek. Get me?”

There was a muttered assent. The speaker, who appeared to be in charge of these amiable proceedings, was all the time throwing off his coat and waistcoat. In a darkness which was almost complete, with rapid breathing and clumsy fingers, the little group of men went on with their grisly task. Ten minutes had barely passed before the car was once more on its way. Even the stains of blood, which were scanty, were wiped from the seat. The man who had boarded the car drove with one hand and held the flask, which he had found in the leather pocket of the door, to his lips.

“Not too much of that,” a voice from behind snarled. “You can swim in it when we’re through with this job.”

An arm stretched through the aperture leading to the back of the car. The flask went spinning over the hedge into the darkness and fell in the muddy waters of the canal. After that, except for the roar of the engine as it picked up speed, there was silence.

Except that the company was more brilliant than usual the Porchester House charity dinner, for which Clara Linz had hurried home, differed very little from most functions of its sort. The young baroness had the air, however, of enjoying herself extremely. She had chosen to wear a gown of dark violet colour which seemed to bring out marvellous lights from her uncannily beautiful eyes, and she was easily the most admired woman in the room. The Duchess of Porchester, who was senior hostess, looked more than once across the floor with a sigh of regret.

“I cannot imagine,” she complained, “why Clara should have chosen a place at Felix Blondel’s table. Sir Felix is all very well in his way, of course, but he always seems to me so hopelessly mute.”

“A man cannot very well be a successful banker and remain a human being,” her neighbour observed.

“Clara always has a purpose in everything she does,” the man on her other side remarked. “Felix Blondel may have some secret attraction that none of us others have ever been able to discover. In any case bankers are rather the fashion this season. Everyone loves to talk about money—especially those of us who haven’t any.”

“Blondel is not exactly a banker, is he?” another of the guests pointed out. “He buys and sells specie. Deals in the real stuff, you know, not in notes and oblong strips of paper. Sits in his office with a million pounds’ worth of gold ingots in the cellar underneath him.”

“Anyhow,” the duchess observed, “Clara seems to have succeeded in making him talk. Perhaps he will bring out his cheque-book before the evening’s over....”

Clara had certainly succeeded in making Felix Blondel talk. He was a small pink-and-white man, the quintessence of neatness in his attire, speech and general deportment. To-night, however, he seemed to be letting himself go. With the air of a man upon whom the gods have showered their gifts he leaned towards his neighbour with unmistakable empressement.

“I suppose you are right, baroness,” he admitted. “There is a great deal of romance attached to a business such as ours. We are merchants, it is true, but we are operating behind the barterer in mere commodities. We are dealing in the sinews of the world—with what makes commerce possible, in fact.”

“You express so well what I was trying to say myself,” Clara murmured. “By the by,” she added, after a moment’s pause, “is it true that there has been a great robbery of gold this afternoon? I heard the boys calling out but I never read the evening paper.”

Blondel’s expression changed. There was a more serious light in his eyes although his tone was casual enough.

“There is a report of something of the sort,” he acknowledged thoughtfully. “Personally I am inclined to think that the whole thing must be greatly exaggerated. There has not been a successful theft of gold in transit during my recollection.”

A man from opposite leaned across the table.

“I believe there has been a robbery,” he intervened, “and quite a serious one. A shipment from France to England which seems to have been stolen from under the very noses of the custodians. You are not interested, I hope, Blondel?”

The banker shook his head in a superior fashion.

“We are not direct buyers of gold at present,” he confided. “We would rather sell if there was anything doing. And I would fill your house with silver, Lord Ragley, if you would give me my price! No. The gold was consigned to the Bank of England.”

“Do tell us some more about it,” Clara begged. “I thought gold bars were such heavy, clumsy things.”

She shut up her vanity-case with a click and smiled invitingly at her neighbour. The little pink-and-white man shivered with delight.

“I wish I knew more, baroness,” he regretted. “It seems the gold was landed and handed over to messengers from the Bank of England. That lets the senders out, of course. The boxes were packed in the special van of the boat-train and then, to everyone’s surprise, the train stopped at Dover Town Station and the boxes were all unloaded. What became of them from that moment no one can even guess. Presumably they were handed over to someone else, but to whom and in what manner not a soul seems to know.”

“I was on the train,” Clara sighed. “I wish I had known about it. I am so good at spotting thieves and there were a strange-looking lot of men on the platform.”

“Bank of England guards, I suppose, and probably the men who took over,” Blondel remarked.

“I expect you know all about such things, Sir Felix. Tell me, why do you think the boxes were taken out of the train at Dover Town Station?”

Sir Felix shook his head.

“Baroness,” he assured her, “there is a limit to the scraps of information which have come my way. I cannot imagine any possible reason why the gold should have been changed. To-morrow I expect the whole story will be told. The evening papers are not much to go by.”

Lord Ragley, who was the duchess’s second son, rose from the table as the newly arrived orchestra started its dance music. He bowed across to Clara.

“Will you honour me, baroness?” he begged.

She assented with a smile, but quitted her seat with reluctance.

For several days after her journey from Dover and the dinner-party at Porchester House, Clara Linz occupied herself in making various excursions in the neighbourhood of London of an apparently indeterminate nature. Afterwards she established herself in the small salon of her queerly situated London house and, refusing all invitations, sat down to wait. Her window commanded a view of Adelphi Terrace and the river. The house itself, though dingy, was neat, with a green front door and the smallest brass plate in London upon which was inscribed:

“ADVICE LIMITED”

It was here that Clara, Baroness Linz, received her callers and occupied herself with the commissions with which she was frequently entrusted. It was here that she received, in due course, the visitor whose arrival she had been expecting for the last two days. He was shown in by the dark, melancholy-looking butler whom she had brought with her from abroad.

“Colonel Grainger, madam,” he announced.

Clara held out her hand and waved her visitor to a seat. Taken as a whole he was fairly true to type. His appearance was a trifle too military for the profession into which he had recently drifted, but he had the keen blue eyes and firm lips of a man of insight and determination. He was perhaps a little ruffled this morning, for although Scotland Yard had had earlier relations with the mysterious firm whom he had come to visit they had not been of his choosing.

“I have come to consult you, baroness,” he began with soldierlike directness, “at the urgent request of the directorate of the Bank of England concerning the theft of those gold bars you may have read about. I have acted as liaison officer before on several occasions between the bank and Scotland Yard.”

“I shall be very happy to assist you in every possible way,” Clara replied. “Will you tell me how far your investigations have gone?”

“I will give you a brief résumé of the case,” was the somewhat grudging reply. “You can ask any questions you like. We received due notice from the Bank of England that the gold was coming over on the usual boat, the Maid of Kent, and was to be transferred to the boat-train in the customary fashion. We sent down an adequate number of men to cover the landing and stow the boxes in the special van. The stowing away was on the point of being completed when the Bank of England representative, who I understand was a man above suspicion, received a message written on Bank of England notepaper, brought by an official messenger and written partly in the code used when any matter of the transport of gold is concerned.”

“You kept the order, of course?”

“We have never seen it,” was the slightly contemptuous reply. “This poor fellow—Larson his name was—read it, showed it to the station-master at Dover and never for a moment doubted its genuineness. He was informed that the gold had been resold to a firm in Amsterdam, and his instructions were to have the boxes unloaded at Dover Town Station and repacked in a Scotland Yard armoured car, which was duly waiting in the station yard, and which it transpired later had been obtained from the Yard with its chauffeur on a forged order signed by a person in authority. The chauffeur was one of our regular and most reliable servants. With him, of course, was Larson, two armed policemen in plain clothes and two men who were supposed to have been sent from the country to which the gold was to be reshipped.”

“Larson started off with the gold?” Clara enquired.

“It was Larson’s duty not to leave the boxes, after he had signed for them, until they were in the vaults of the bank to which they were consigned or handed over to some recognised authority.”

“That means six men in the car?”

“Precisely,” Colonel Grainger agreed.

“And what were Larson’s new instructions respecting the delivery of the gold?”

“He was to proceed in the car with his companions direct to a port on the river where a vessel was waiting to transport the boxes across the North Sea. You probably do not know Kent intimately but the bodies of Larson and the chauffeur, stripped of a portion of their outside clothing, were found in a canal along one of the loneliest stretches of road in the county. Both had been shot and had been dead for many hours. The armoured car was found in a deserted lane not many miles farther on. The bodies of the two policemen were only discovered yesterday.”

“And the gold?”

“The gold had disappeared.”

Clara had the air of one pleasantly but not supremely interested.

“Your story,” she remarked, “is even stranger than the newspaper versions.”

“The truth,” her visitor retorted somewhat tritely, “is usually stranger than fiction.... I am entirely at your disposal in case there are any further questions you would like to ask.”

“I should like to know the precise spot where the police car was discovered,” she said.

The colonel drew a road map from his pocket and handed it across.

“I have prepared this for you,” he confided. “You will find the place marked here where the bodies of Larson and the chauffeur were found, farther on the lane where the car was discovered abandoned and a little to the right is the lime quarry where the bodies of the two policemen were found. Anything else?”

“I should like to know the name of the agent in London who purchased the gold from the bank for delivery in Amsterdam?”

The colonel stroked his stubbly moustache.

“These are delicate matters,” he said, “but I suppose it is information to which you have a right. The agents for the firm are Max Shuster, Raymond and Blondel, metal brokers.”

“Are they in any way responsible for the loss of the gold?” Clara enquired.

“As it happens they are not,” Colonel Grainger replied. “The robbery of the gold took place during transit and the representative of the Bank of England having signed at Dover, the bank themselves are responsible until delivery is effected.”

“Quite an interesting case,” Clara reflected, lighting a cigarette and offering one to her companion.

“I am glad you consider it as such,” was the somewhat stiff rejoinder. “I hope that you will be able to help us elucidate it.”

“We have never yet had a downright failure,” she remarked, leaning farther back in her chair, “and I can see several avenues in connection with the present case along which profitable enquiries might be made.”

“You seriously think that you will be able to help us recover the gold?” her client asked bluntly.

“I feel sure of it,” was the confident reply.

Colonel Grainger looked about him in amazement. The little salon was very comfortable, very homely and essentially a woman’s apartment.

“But where is your establishment?” he asked. “Your bureaux—your staff?”

“Not where the public can get at them,” she assured him, smiling. “Nevertheless, let me warn you that we are not a cheap firm to do business with. Our fee for a week’s investigations will be a thousand guineas and if we return you the gold or give you information as to where it is we shall require a fee of twenty thousand. As the value of the gold is well over a million you will not, I hope, think this excessive.”

“The bank will pay the sum you suggest, of course, provided you are successful,” Colonel Grainger assured her. “I must confess, however, that personally I should feel a little more confidence in the success of your activities if you could give me some idea of the lines upon which you propose to proceed and what measure of professional help you could rely on.”

Clara shook her head.

“My dear colonel,” she told him, “the secret of our success, and we have met with a certain amount of success in various directions, has been the secrecy of our operations. If the Prime Minister himself were to consult us about a stolen treaty or a murdered ambassador he would learn no more of our methods than we have confided to you.”

The door was noiselessly opened and the saturnine-looking butler remained respectfully upon the threshold. Colonel Grainger’s sense of humour prevailed. He bowed over the fingers of this strange young lady and took his leave.

Clara, contrary to her custom, was lunching alone a few days later with the little pink-and-white man. They were seated at a retired table in a corner of the Ritz Grill, and a very beautiful bunch of orchids reposed by her plate.

“I suppose you know,” she said to her companion, “that you are spoiling me shamefully. You are quite one of the most generous of my admirers in London.”

He was so much in earnest that his words were almost pathetic.

“I wish,” he declared, “that you liked London well enough to——-”

“To what?”

“To live here altogether.”

“But, my dear man,” she protested, “you yourself must care for other places too. You have travelled, you are not hopelessly British. In fact, you are not British at all, are you?”

“By naturalisation—yes.”

“At any rate you have not the prejudices. I wander through Florence, where I have a little flat which I call home. It is a city of beauty. All the time there are things which pull at my heartstrings to be seen and loved. All the time there are things which keep your head in the air and you forget to look down. And I walk, or I drive, or I fly over London and what on earth do I see? A few huge buildings wrapped in mist—cold grey mist, unsympathetic, colourless, depressing—nothing beautiful. And I say to myself: ‘It is time I left this place.’ The rivers of the world! Think of some of the beautiful ones, Sir Felix! Look at the Thames. Yesterday afternoon, to please a friend, I flew up the Thames. I ask you to remember it for the last five miles, say, before you come to London Bridge. Those hideous factories belching out smoke and smells. Why, there were some works on what seemed to be a flat mud island with curls of black smoke crawling up to the sky and disfiguring the landscape as far as you could see.”

“Whereabouts was that?” he enquired curiously.

“How should I know?” she answered. “Or stop! I think they actually call it Mud Pie Island. There seemed no one at work in the factory and yet we felt the heat from the furnaces hundreds of feet up. Oh, it is all so ugly.”

The little pink-and-white man was suddenly serious. His eyes seemed to be boring into his companion’s. He had the air of one assailed by disturbing thoughts.

“Why do you mention that place particularly?” he asked with an unaccustomed harshness in his tone.

She shrugged her shoulders. Her attention had wandered to the next dish which she was discussing with the maître d’hôtel. She turned back to her host a few moments later.

“Forgive me,” she begged. “This sole colbert looked so marvellous. You are asking why I mentioned that place particularly. I think it was because of the hugeness of the factory chimney, the emptiness of the whole place, the stark ugliness of it and also because my pilot told me that it must have been somewhere within about a mile of there that the gang who stole the gold bars from the Bank of England reached the river.”

Sir Felix frowned.

“How could he or anyone else know that they really did reach the river?” he queried dolefully. “Scotland Yard cannot tell me. No one can tell me. I was keeping the secret to myself, but I was the agent for the sale of that gold and I have had to see a good commission disappear.”

“It may be recovered.”

“Little chance.”

“Tell me, what could the thieves do with it?” she asked. “Supposing the gang who murdered the custodians and got away with it reached the river. Supposing then they had had motor boats to meet them—what could they do with the gold? There could be no market for it with the government stamp there. To have even offered it would have given the whole show away.”

“I have not followed the case,” he admitted. “I am very ignorant indeed about it. Why are you so interested?”

“I don’t know that I am particularly interested,” Clara assured him. “One must talk about something.”

“Then let us talk about ourselves,” he begged gallantly.

“Very well,” she agreed. “You shall commence by telling me why you part with the loss of a commission upon your gold bars so easily.”

He looked at her intently and if ever she had been inclined to think him the slightest degree of a fool she changed her mind. She had been getting too lax, she decided. This man had cunning even if he lacked brain.

“So far as I am concerned,” he said quietly, “the loss of ten thousand pounds is no great matter. Tell me, though, why you are so interested in this extraordinary robbery?”

“I really do not know myself,” she confessed. “Perhaps because I never heard of gold bars before and I had no idea that all the governments kept them locked up in their strong rooms. Secondly, because I cannot imagine what use they are unless to make coins out of them. Could I, for instance, go into Cartier’s with a gold bar under my arm and buy a diamond bracelet?”

“The necessity for buying a diamond bracelet for yourself should never arise,” he said, with a faint meaning underneath his words, “but if it did—supposing you took a gold bar under your arm and Cartier’s weighed and tested it—without a doubt they would accept it as payment for your diamond bracelet.”

“Supposing you had bought those from the Government,” she persisted, “what should you have done with them?”

“I should have passed them on at a very considerable profit to the firm upon the Continent with whom I was already in negotiation,” he answered. “The business was already arranged. What does it matter? There are other days and larger profits. Large enough,” he went on with another of those sidelong glances which set a chill aversion shivering even in a person of Clara’s nerve, “to pay for that bracelet at Cartier’s!”

They had arrived at the stage of coffee. He offered her cigarettes from a wonderful case. Clara took one and turned it over curiously. She smelt the deep orange-coloured paper and looked at the mouthpiece.

“Genuine Russian,” she observed. “I thought there was no longer such a thing in the world.”

“There is only one place in Moscow where they can be found,” he replied. “My correspondent there sends me a few now and then whenever it is possible.”

She turned the cigarette over in her fingers and finally lit it.

“So you do business in Moscow?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Everyone does more or less secretly. No one can afford to run the risk of offending what may some day become a very great nation.”

“At present,” she remarked, as she sniffed appreciatively at the blue smoke curling upwards, “their methods strike one as a little crude.”

He smiled.

“You would think so if you had to do with them. Luftstein, their agent, who is over here now—— All the time,” he broke off impatiently, “we talk of such unpleasant subjects! Baroness, I have been wondering whether I dared ask you to honour me by strolling a little way up Bond Street when we leave here.”

“We might look in at the windows of Cartier’s!” she suggested, her elbows upon the table supporting her smiling face whilst she looked across at him.

“It would give me great pleasure,” he agreed.

She smoked in silence for a minute or two. Then she asked him an abrupt question.

“Have you ever been in Russia?”

“Many times,” he answered. “I myself am half Russian.”

She looked at him long and curiously and the longer she looked the more poignant grew a queer sensation of uneasiness in the pink-and-white man. Women as a rule, even the most beautiful women, even women of Clara’s position, had been so quick to respond to the little hints he had thrown out. Suddenly he had the idea that she had been playing with him. Why? He wondered. She was the famous Baroness Linz, the great aristocrat, with the entrée to many courts through her own family and the exalted personages who were her friends. Yet in these days nobody was safe.

“Well, I must be going,” she said suddenly.

He signed his bill and walked with her towards the door.

“I have enjoyed my luncheon, and more than anything your divine cigarettes,” she assured him.

“I have still a box for my friends in Curzon Street,” he told her.

“Don’t smoke them all, then,” she begged. “You may see me at any moment.”

“But this afternoon—this evening?” he whispered softly as they stood on the pavement.

“These tiresome dressmakers,” she murmured, stepping into the taxi which the commissionaire had called.

Sir Felix Blondel was bowed obsequiously into his own waiting automobile but for several moments he lingered on the kerbstone. His eyes were following that disappearing taxi. A beautiful woman. A fascinating woman. And yet he had always felt something which amounted almost to fear of any personal element in life which he failed to understand. He leaned back in the corner of his very luxurious car, muttered the address to his chauffeur through the tube and became once more, as he drove through the crowded streets, the little pink-and-white millionaire of Mayfair, a man without a care, the head of an old-established and famous City firm. His thoughts travelled back through the last few years. They travelled forward through the years to come. The present he left alone, for it was the present he feared. He had never meant these wild connections of his to take such risks. He had never meant to have become so closely involved with them. A hundred thousand pounds was a very nice sum to handle, it had been even necessary money, but he hated risks. He liked to do his business and multiply his capital across his rosewood desk, smiling but with the cunning of a fox all the time, confident that before the end his cunning would have triumphed and that the deal he sought to close would be made. He understood bargaining, he understood the clever by-ways of his own business. He had never been in such deep waters before.... His passage through the stately thoroughfares of the City into the slums, to the grey-hung, half-empty streets of dockland seemed to him almost allegorical. He reached at last his destination. A great gate was rolled open, the car moved slowly on to a heavy ferry. There was a moment’s delay. He let down the window and looked ahead at the huge silent factory upon that stretch of land which at high tide was little more than a swamp. From a hundred windows there came scarcely a light, but from that annex, from the great round furnace and the high chimney close at hand, it was possible to catch a glimpse of flames leaping through the darkness, great billowy clouds of smoke darker even than the darkness itself. They moved slowly forward through the black muddy water. Now he could hear the roar of the flames, the throb of the great generator. A stupid game this to have been mixed up in.

He stepped out on to the pier. Almost immediately he was confronted by a couple of watchers, men with dour faces and of threatening aspect. They recognised him, however, and waved him on. He hurried up the short avenue. The doorkeeper looked at him suspiciously but passed him in to a huge dirty hall. From there he was admitted into a large untidy office. There were no blinds upon the windows and only one green-shaded lamp in the way of illumination. A man swung round in his chair, a man as alien from his surroundings as Blondel himself. He was elegantly dressed, he smelt of perfume, his long pale face was lined and anxious—the face of a man who had seen much of life.

“What on earth do you want down here, Blondel?” he demanded.

The banker shrugged his shoulders. He sank into the one spare chair—a broken-down affair without springs or cushions.

“How are things going?”

“Can’t you hear? Can’t you see the flames? Hear the roar of the dynamos? We are ahead of time. By the day after to-morrow we shall be on our way to the Baltic.”

“I wish,” the other sighed anxiously, “that you were off to-night.”

“Is anything wrong?”

Blondel shook his head.

“Nothing definite. You have read all the papers, of course. We faded out of the news to-day. I always think it is a bad sign when the police leave off talking. Nothing happened down here?”

“Not a thing.”

“Anyone called?”

“Only oil salesmen and mechanics and people on business. No one is allowed inside the building. No one can possibly make a guess at what we are really doing.”

“You think,” Blondel asked anxiously, “that you will carry this through?”

His companion laughed harshly.

“Too late to have fears, my friend,” he said. “We shall carry it through. You shall have your hundred thousand pounds at the end of the week or we shall vanish off the face of the earth. I myself have no wish to vanish off the face of the earth, and what I wish generally happens. Don’t be a fool, Blondel. How should you like to have to sit down here morning and night, never sleeping, never eating a decent meal or seeing a pretty woman—doing nothing except listening and watching and goading on these few mechanics? Going to dine at the Embassy or somewhere, I suppose. Curse you! Well, be off. Take my advice. Don’t come near here again. I will send you a wireless in code the moment we are in the North Sea.”

Blondel felt his confidence returning. The man with whom he talked was famous and he had never known failure. It was his scheme this, and there were only forty-eight hours more of anxiety.

“Very well, Nicholas,” he agreed. “I will be off and keep away. As you say—it is best.”

“I shall be at the Ritz in Paris the first week in June,” the other promised. “See you then.”

Blondel stumbled out into the darkness. A rough shape of a man piloted him into his car at the end of the pier. The ferry creaked and wheezed and stole into the blackness of the river. Lights were not popular in that part of the world.

“Drive fast,” the banker ordered his chauffeur as soon as they reached terra firma.

The man obeyed. Soon they were in the brightly lit streets, amongst the crowds of men and women jostling one another on the pavement, all going about their business, they themselves unnoticed cogs in the wheel of everyday life. Blondel leaned forward and opened a small cupboard in the car. He drew out a bottle and a glass and half filled the latter with brandy. He drank it in one gulp—he at all times a moderate man! He scarcely felt the strength of it, but it was good. He composed himself in an easy position. That woman—God, how beautiful she was! What a fool to have given way, almost for the first time in his life, to nerves.

Colonel Grainger shook hands with the representative of Advice Limited and accepted her invitation to be seated with a slightly cynical smile.

“Well,” he remarked, “the week is up.”

“We seem to have timed it exactly,” Clara replied. “I was just going to ring you up.”

“You have news?” he asked quickly.

“Certainly. The gold is at a riverside smelting works on a strip of waste land called Mud Pie Island. I have prepared a plan showing you the locality and how to get there.”

She pushed a folded sheet of paper across the table. Her visitor picked it up and stared at it incredulously.

“You will find at least twenty or thirty men to deal with,” Clara continued, “and a fairly desperate crowd, I should imagine. The principal was on Dover Town Station platform when the gold was unshipped. He passed himself off as the representative of the foreign bank, and it was he, no doubt, who committed the murders. The rest of the gang were probably picked up along the road.”

“Look here,” Colonel Grainger said, recovering his calm with a great effort. “Are you talking seriously?”

“Why ask me such a foolish question?” she protested. “Remember that although as a matter of fact I am a very insignificant person, I am in this matter the representative of Advice Limited. We have never failed. We never shall fail. We have found your gold. In a few days we expect your payment. In ten minutes you had better be on your way to Scotland Yard making your plans. Before you go I will put you in possession of a few more facts. These works have an enormous furnace and they were hired by foreigners some months ago evidently for this exact purpose. The motor boats that were dashing up and down the river and the empty boxes that were found by your police were only meant to put you off. The gold was stored away in the works before daylight the morning after the robbery.”

“Why?” he demanded.

She looked at her visitor slowly and he fancied that he sensed a gleam of contempt in her curling lips.

“The bars have been through the furnace,” she answered, “or most of them. They could not have been taken anyway with their stamps on. I don’t suppose they are materially changed—except in shape. There is a steamer lying about a hundred yards off—looks like an old tub but in reality has very fine engines. The gang are expecting to load her up with the gold to-morrow night and she will be in the Baltic by the end of the week.”

Colonel Grainger pulled himself together. The woman spoke convincingly. After all, Advice Limited had already performed miracles. Let him assume that she was speaking the truth.

“Who was at the top end of this?” he asked rapidly. “Remember, there were the messengers from the Bank of England, there were the code instructions—everything in order.”

“A man named Blondel—Sir Felix Blondel—was responsible for that,” she confided. “He is a partner in the firm you spoke of on your first visit. The gang who have the gold are associates of his. He has often worked with the Bank of England as their agent in arranging shipments.”

“My God!” Grainger muttered. “He was dining at the Embassy last night.”

“Our information leads us to believe,” Clara Linz concluded, “that the gold will not be given up without a fight. You ought to take plenty of men, and if you want to avoid bloodshed you should surround the place and rush it as soon as it is dark.... We shall expect a settlement from you during the week.”

The little pink-and-white man was in a grievous state. His tie was awry, his hair was ruffled. One side of the white slip of his waistcoat had disappeared. He was walking up and down the large, bleak office of the Mud Pie Island works with quick, uneven footsteps. Lounging against the desk the young man Nicholas—calm and sleekly debonair—was watching him with a half-amused, half-contemptuous air.

“Nerves,” Blondel repeated for the twentieth time, endeavouring to reassure himself. “Nerves. That’s what I am suffering from. You have seen nothing suspicious? You assured me of that, Nicholas, didn’t you? No spies about—nothing of that sort?”

The younger man shrugged his shoulders.

“As for that,” he remarked, striking a match and lighting a cigarette, “who can tell? In this blasted country there is never enough light to see fifty yards away.”

“Do you think you can get the gold safely on board?” Blondel asked feverishly.

“The last lot is in the cooling vat,” Nicholas replied. “They will pack it at midnight. We expect to be on board before dawn.”

“I wish to God you were there now,” Blondel groaned. “It came on me all of a sudden, this fit of nerves. I had to rush down here. I don’t know how I shall ever find my way back.”

The two men stood before the high dusty window. Fog—the great elementary terror of the riverside toilers and the captains of the ships, small and large, which pass up and down the narrow river—had blotted out the world, had deadened sound as well as sight. They gazed out upon nothing.

“It’s a loathsome hole, this,” Nicholas exclaimed with a shiver. “If you had been down here as I have been all these nights urging them on, watching the furnaces, doing sentinel at night and slave-driver by day you might talk about nerves!”

With a start so slight as to be scarcely noticeable and without a spoken word he peered suddenly forward. A row of strange orange flares had appeared on the other bank of the cut. They were moving in line now. Nicholas—stooping down—with a great effort threw open the window. Blondel went choking backwards. Nicholas ignored the fog which was drifting in. He was listening. Suddenly the telephone sounded. He stretched out his hand and took off the receiver.

“How many?” he asked in response to some spoken words from the other end. “Are you there, Paul? Blow up the ferry. You’ve got the stuff on?”

Nicholas too, it seemed, was sometimes subject to nerves. He seized the telephone instrument and dashed it on to the ground. His thumb was pressed upon a bell in the wall.

“Curse you and your nerves, Blondel!” he exclaimed. “Anyway, you’ve got something to be nervous about now,” he added with a short fierce laugh. “Listen!”

They heard the ferry boat starting on its creaking and groaning passage. The orange lights seemed somehow or other to be on board. Down the passages of the works overhead and all around was the sound of flying footsteps.

“What is it?” Blondel shrieked. “Tell me what it is, Nicholas. What’s wrong?”

“Not much,” the young man answered coolly, picking up his cigarette from the table. “There are forty policemen on that ferry half-way across the cut by now, I should think. We had a mine laid on the boat but they evidently found it and cut the wire. Look at the lights down either side. They are trying to hem us in.”

He started tearing off his coat and waistcoat.

“What are you going to do?” Blondel cried.

“Swim across to my motor boat behind,” was the quick answer. “Are you coming?”

“I can’t swim,” Blondel sobbed. “Don’t leave me here, Nicholas.”

The young man laughed. He was in his shirt and trousers now.

“A pretty sort of a fool I should be,” he scoffed, “to stop and keep you company! Here—you can have this,” he added, throwing a revolver which he had drawn from his hip pocket on to the table. “Much good may it do you!”

He rushed from the room. Blondel would have followed him but his knees gave way. The sound of flying footsteps had ceased. The silence of emptiness was upon the place. Blondel staggered to the window. The fog was denser than ever in the room and he felt himself choking. The ferry boat was looming up, a great black shape, barely fifty yards away. Already he could hear the creaking of the chains. He took up the revolver, laid it down, picked it up again with a sob. The fog drifted in. Somehow the darkness made it easier.

The inspector-in-chief landed his men safely and sent them swarming through the place. The gold was there, lying about in all directions in the great shed near the furnace. There were coats and hats lying about too, but the only sign of any human being was the little pink-and-white man stone dead with a revolver still grasped in his hand.