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Mr. Felix O’Hara Golbeater knew something of criminal investigation, for he had been a solicitor for eighteen years and had been engaged in work which brought him into touch with the criminal classes, and his ingenuity and shrewd powers of observation had often enabled him to succeed in securing a conviction where ordinary police methods had failed.

A spare man, on the right side of forty, he was distinguished by a closely cropped beard and shaggy eyebrows, and in the cultivation of these he had displayed extraordinary care and patience.

It is not customary, even in legal circles, where so many curious practices obtain, to bother overmuch with one’s eyebrows, but O’Hara Golbeater was a far-seeing man, and he anticipated a day when interested people would be looking for those eyebrows of his, when their portraiture would occupy space on the notice boards of police stations—for Mr. Felix O’Hara Golbeater had no illusions and was well aware of a most vital fact, which was that you cannot fool all men all the time. Therefore he was eternally on the qui vive for that mysterious man who would certainly appear on the scene some day and who would see through Golbeater the lawyer, Golbeater the trustee, Golbeater the patron of field sports, and last and greatest of distinctions, Golbeater the intrepid aviator, whose flights had caused something of a sensation in the little Buckingham village where he had his “country seat.” And he had no desire to be “seen through.”

He was sitting in his office one night in April. His clerks had long since gone home, and the caretaker, whose duty it was to clean up, had also left.

It was not Felix O’Hara Golbeater’s practice to remain at the office until 11 p. m., but the circumstances were exceptional and justified the unusual course.

Behind him were a number of japanned steel boxes. They were arranged on shelves and occupied one half of the wall space from floor to ceiling.

On each box was painted in neat white figures the name of the man, woman, or corporation for whose documents the receptacle was reserved. There was the “Anglo-Chinese Pottery Syndicate” (in liquidation), “The Erly Estate,” “The Late Sir George Gallinger,” to name only a few.

Golbeater was mainly interested in the box inscribed “Estate of the Late Louisa Harringay,” and this stood wide open on his polished desk, its contents sorted into orderly heaps.

From time to time he made notes in a small but stout book by his side, notes for his confidential guidance apparently, for the book possessed a hinged lock.

In the midst of his inspection there came a sharp knock at the door of his sanctum.

He looked up, listening, his cigar stiffly held between his even white teeth.

The knock came again, and he rose, crossed the carpeted floor softly, and bent his head, as though by this process he could intensify his auricular powers.

Again the visitor rapped on the panels of the door, this time impatiently. He followed up his summons by trying the door.

“Who’s there?” asked Golbeater softly.

“Fearn,” came the reply.

“Just one moment.”

Golbeater stepped back to the desk swiftly and bundled all the documents into the open box. This he replaced in the rack, then returning to the door, he unlocked it.

A young man stood in the doorway. His long Raglan was splashed with rain. In his plain, kindly face embarrassment as at an unpleasant mission struggled for mastery with the expression of annoyance peculiar to the Englishman kept waiting on the door-mat.

“Come in,” said Golbeater, and opened the door wide.

The young man stepped into the room and slipped off his coat.

“Rather wet,” he apologized gruffly.

The other nodded.

He closed the door carefully and locked it.

“Sit down,” he said, and dragged forward a chair. His steady black eyes did not leave the other’s face. He was all alert and tense, obeying the atavistic instinct of defense. The very angle of his cigar spoke caution and defiance.

Frank Fearn seated himself.

“I saw your light—I thought I’d drop in,” he said awkwardly.

There was a pause.

“Been aeroplaning lately?”

Golbeater removed his Havana and examined it attentively.

“Yes,” he said, and spoke confidentially to the cigar.

“Queer that a fellow like you should take it up,” said the other, with a glint of reluctant admiration in his eyes. “I suppose studying criminals and being in touch with them . . . helps your nerves . . . and things.”

Fearn was marking time. You could almost hear the tramp of his intellectual boots.

He began again.

“Do you really believe, Golbeater, that a chap could—could escape from justice if he really tried?”

A wild thought which was half a hope flashed through the lawyer’s mind. Had this young fool been adventuring outside the law? Had he overstepped the mark too? Young men do mad things.

And if he had, that would be salvation for Felix O’Hara Golbeater, for Fearn was engaged to the young heiress who had inherited Miss Harringay’s fortune—and Fearn was the man of all men that the solicitor feared. He feared him because he was a fool, a stubborn fool, and an inquisitive fool.

“I really believe that,” he answered; “my contention, based on experience, is that in a certain type of crime the offender need never be detected, and in other varieties, even though he is detected, he can, given a day’s start, avoid arrest.”

He settled down in his chair to pursue his favorite theory—one which had been the subject of discussion the last time he and Fearn had met at the club.

“Take myself for instance,” he said. “Suppose I were a criminal—one of the swell mob—what could be easier than for me to mount my machine, sail gaily away to France, descending where I knew fresh supplies awaited me, and continuing my journey to some unlikely spot. I know of a dozen places in Spain where the aeroplane could be hidden.”

The young man was eyeing him with a glum and dubious expression.

“I admit,” Golbeater went on, with an easy wave of his cigared hand, “that I am exceptionally placed; but really in any case it would only have been a matter of prearrangement: elaborate and painstaking preparation which any criminal could take. It is open to him to follow the same course. But what do we find? A man systematically robs his employer, and all the time he is deluding himself with the belief that a miracle will happen, which will allow him to make good his defalcations. Instead of recognizing the inevitable, he dreams of luck; instead of methodically planning his departure, he employs all his organizing power in hiding today the offense of yesterday.”

He waited for the confession he had encouraged. He was aware that Fearn dabbled on the Stock Exchange; that he was in the habit of frequenting racecourses.

“H’m,” said Fearn. His lean brown face twisted into a momentary grimace.

“It’s a pretty good thing,” he said, “that you aren’t on the lawless side, isn’t it? I suppose you aren’t?”

Now Felix O’Hara Golbeater was a man very shrewd in the subtleties of human nature and very wise in the reading of portents. He knew the truth which is spoken with a smile, and may be taken either as an exhibition of humor or a deadly accusation, and in the question put to him with quizzical good humor he recognized his finish.

The young man was watching him eagerly, his mind filled with vague apprehensions, so vague and so indefinite that he had spent four hours walking up and down the street in which Golbeater’s offices were before he had screwed himself up to the interview.

The lawyer laughed.

“It would be rather awkward for you if I were,” he said, “since I have at this moment some sixty thousand pounds of your fiancée’s money in my possession.”

“I thought it was at the bank,” said the other quickly.

The other shrugged his shoulders.

“So it is,” he said, “but none the less it is in my possession. The magic words, ‘Felix O’Hara Golbeater,’ inscribed in the south-east corner of a check would place the money in my hands.”

“Oh!” said Fearn.

He made no attempt to disguise his relief.

He got up from his chair, a somewhat gauche young man, as all transparently honest young men are, and spoke the thought which was uppermost in his mind.

“I don’t care two cents about Hilda’s money,” he said abruptly. “I’ve enough to live on, but—for her sake, of course—one has to be careful.”

“Oh, you’re being careful all right,” said Golbeater, the corners of his mouth twitching, though the beard hid the fact from his visitor; “you had better put a detective on the bank to see that I don’t draw the money and bolt.”

“I have,” blurted the young man in some confusion; “at least—well, people say things, d’ye know—there was a lot of talk about that Meredith legacy case—really, Golbeater, you didn’t come well out of that.”

“I paid the money,” said Golbeater cheerfully, “if that’s what you mean.”

He walked to the door and opened it.

“I hope you won’t get wet,” he said politely.

Fearn could only mutter an incoherent commonplace and go stumbling and groping down the dark stairs into the street.

Golbeater stepped into an adjoining room, closing the door behind him. There was no light here, and from the window he could observe the other’s movements. He half expected Fearn to be joined by a companion, but the hesitation he showed when he reached the street indicated that he had no engagement and expected to meet nobody.

Golbeater returned to the inner office. He wasted no time in speculation. He knew that the game was up. From an inner drawer in his safe he took a memorandum, and glanced down it.

Twelve months before, an eccentric Frenchman, who had occupied a little country house in Wiltshire, had died, and the property had come into the market; not, curiously enough, into the English market, because its late owner had been the last of a line of French exiles who had made their home in England since the days of the Revolution. The heirs, having no desire to continue residence in a land which had no associations for them, had placed the sale of the property in the hands of a firm of French notaries.

Golbeater, a perfect French scholar and an earnest student of the Parisian papers, came to know of the impending sale. He had purchased it through a succession of agents. It had been refurnished from Paris. The two servants who controlled the tiny ménage had been hired and were paid from Paris, and neither of these staid servitors, who received remittances and letters bearing the Parisian postmark, associated M. Alphonse Didet, the employer they had never seen, with the London solicitor.

Nor did the good people of Letherhampton, the village adjoining the property, trouble their heads overmuch about the change of proprietorship. One “Frenchie” was very much like another; they had grown up accustomed to the eccentricities of the exiled aristocrats, and regarded them with the same indifference which they applied to the other objects of the landscape, and with that contempt which the bucolic mind reserves for the ignorant fellows who do not speak its language.

Also there was in the neighborhood of Whitstable a little bungalow, simply furnished, whither Golbeater was in the habit of making week-end excursions. Most important and most valuable of its contents was a motor cycle; and in the cloakroom of a London terminus were two trunks, old and battered, covered with the labels of foreign places and the picturesque advertisements of foreign hotels. Felix O’Hara Golbeater was very thorough in his methods. But then he had the advantage of others’ experiences; he had seen the haphazard criminal, and had profited by the lesson to be found in the untimely end which rewards carelessness in flight.

He walked to the fireplace, struck a match, and burnt the memorandum to ashes. There was nothing else to burn, for his was the practice of clearing up as he went along. From the safe he took a thick package, opened it, and revealed a tightly compressed wad of banknotes, English and French. They represented the greater part of sixty thousand pounds, which, if every man and woman had their own, should have been at the bankers of Miss Hilda Harringay.

The whole of the sixty thousand was not there, because there were other deficiencies which had claimed more urgent and pressing settlement.

He pulled on a raincoat swiftly, put out the light, artistically left a half-finished letter in the open drawer of his desk, and went out. The advantage of being a bachelor occurred to him as the theatre train pulled out of Charing Cross Station. He had nothing to trouble his conscience: he was the ideal defaulter.

From Sevenoaks Station he made his way on foot along the two-mile road which led to the hangar. He spent the night in the shed reading by the light of a portable electric light. Long before dawn he had changed into his mechanic’s kit, leaving his everyday working clothes neatly folded in a locker.

It was a perfect day for a flight, and at five in the morning, with the assistance of two laborers on their way to work, he started the aeroplane and rose easily over the sleeping town. It was his good fortune that there was no wind, more fortunate still that there was a mist on the sea. He had headed for Whitstable, and when he heard the waters washing beneath him in the darkness, he came down and found the shore; he recognized a coast-guard station and went on for a mile, keeping touch with the beach.

* * * * * * * *

The newspapers which published an account of the aeroplane tragedy described how the machine was found floating upside down two miles from shore: they described the search by coastguards and police for the body of the unfortunate Felix O’Hara Golbeater, who in an endeavor to reach his bungalow had evidently got lost in the mist and was drowned. They observed in guarded language that he was making for the French coast and with good reason.

But none of them described how Felix O’Hara Golbeater had set his planes at a sky-climbing angle when only a few feet from the water—and from the water’s edge by the same token—and had dropped into the sea with close on sixty thousand pounds in the waterproof pocket of his overalls.

Nor how, with surprising swiftness, he had reached the isolated little bungalow on the shore, had stripped his wet things on the verandah, had entered, changed, and reappeared to make his sodden mechanic’s kit into a portable bundle: nor how he had placed this in a specially weighted bag and dropped it down a well at the back of the house. Nor how, with incredible rapidity, he had removed his beard and his eyebrows with such tidiness of operation that not so much as a single hair was ever found by the police.

None of these things were described, for the simple reason that they were not known, and there was no reporter sufficiently imaginative to picture them.

In the early hours of the morning, a clean-shaven, young-looking motor cyclist, goggled and clad in a shapeless mackintosh kit, went spinning back to London, stopping only in such towns and at such hostelries as motor cyclists most frequent. He reached London after nightfall. His motor cycle he left at a garage, together with his wet waterproofs. He had considered a more elaborate scheme for disposing of them, but he did not regard it as necessary, nor was it.

Felix O’Hara Golbeater had ceased to be: he was as dead as though indeed he lay swaying to and fro on the floor of the ocean.

M. Alphonse Didet, from the porter of the Baggage Department, demanded in French good, and in broken English not quite so good, the restoration of his two trunks.

As for Letherhampton, the expected Frenchman had arrived or returned (they were rather vague as to whether or not he had already stayed at the château), and it served as a “fill” to conversations, heavily charged with agricultural problems and the iniquities of Welsh statesmanship.

In the meantime, London, with breathless interest, discussed the story of Felix O’Hara. Scotland Yard conducted a swift examination of Mr. Golbeater’s Bloomsbury offices, and of Mr. Golbeater’s Kensington flat, and of Mr. Golbeater’s banking account, but though they found many things which interested them they did not discover any money.

A white-faced girl, accompanied by a lean and homely young man, interviewed the detective in charge of the case.

“Our theory,” said the policeman impressively, “is that in endeavoring to effect an escape to the French coast he met with a fatal accident. I think he is dead.”

“I don’t,” said the young man.

The detective thought he was a fool, but considered it inexpedient to say so.

“I’m sure he’s alive,” said Fearn vigorously. “I tell you he’s too diabolically clever. If he wanted to leave England, why should he not have gone by last night’s mail-boat? There was nothing to prevent him.”

“I thought you employed private detectives to watch the boats?”

The young man blushed.

“Yes,” he confessed; “I had forgotten that.”

“We’ll circularize all the stations,” the detective went on, “but I must confess that I do not expect to find him.”

To the credit of the police it must be said that they went to work in no half-hearted fashion. The bungalow at Whitstable was searched from end to end without result; there was no trace of him; even the mirror at which Golbeater had shaved was thick with dust; this had been one of the first articles of furniture the detective had examined.

The ground about had been searched as systematically, but it had been a wet day when the fugitive had departed, and moreover he had carried his motor cycle at some discomfort to himself until he had reached the road.

His flat gave no indication of his whereabouts. The half-finished letter rather supported the theory which the police had formed that he had had no intention of making his hurried exit.

Fortunately the case was sufficiently interesting to the French journals to enable Felix O’Hara Golbeater to acquire a working knowledge of what was going on. Punctually every morning there arrived at his château Le Petit Parisien and Le Matin. He did not patronize English papers: he was much too clever for that. In the enterprising columns of the Matin he discovered something about himself: all that he wanted to know, and that all, most satisfactory.

He settled down to the comfortable life of his country house. He had planned the future with an eye to detail. He gave himself six months in this beautiful little prison of his; at the end of that time, he would, by an assiduous correspondence tactfully and scientifically directed, establish his identity as M. Alphonse Didet beyond any fear of identification. At the end of six months he would go away, to France perhaps, by excursion, or more elaborately, by sailing yacht.

For the moment he gave himself over to the cultivation of his roses, to the study of astronomy, to which the late owner’s tiny observatory invited him, to the indictment of a voluminous correspondence with several learned societies situated in France.

Now there was at Letherhampton in those days a police superintendent who was something of a student; there were unkindly people who expressed the opinion that his studies did not embrace one necessary to him in his profession—the study of criminology.

Superintendent Grayson was a self-made man and a self-educated man. He was the sort of individual who patronizes Home Correspondence Schools, and, by a modest outlay and an enormous capacity for absorbing in a parrot-like fashion certain facts obscure to the average individual, he had become in turn an advertising expert, a civil engineer of passable merit, a journalist, and a French and Spanish scholar. His French was of the variety which is best understood in England, preferably by the professors of the Home Correspondence Schools, but of this fact the superintendent lived in blissful ignorance, and he yearned for an opportunity of experimenting upon a real Frenchman.

Before the arrival of M. Alphonse Didet he had called many times at the château and had spoken in their native language with the two servants who were established there. Being poor ignorant menials, they did not, of course, understand the classic language he spoke, and he dismissed his uncomprehending victims as being provincial, though as a matter of fact they were Parisian born and bred.

With M. Alphonse on the scene, Superintendent Grayson searched round for an excuse to call, in the same helpless fashion that the amateur picture-hanger looks round for the hammer at the critical moment. The ordinary sources of inspiration were absent. M. Didet, being a French subject could not be summoned to a jury, he paid his rates duly, he had never run any person down in his motor car, and, indeed, did not possess one.

The inspector was in despair of ever finding an opportunity when an unfortunate member of the constabulary was badly injured in the execution of his duty, and the county started a subscription for the man, with the permission of the Chief Constable. Inspector Grayson was entrusted with the collection of local offerings.

Thus it was he came to the Château Blanche.

M. Alphonse Didet watched the burly figure arriving, booted and spurred, frogged across the chest, and beribboned, as a superintendent with some army experience should be, and tapped his teeth with his pen speculatively. He opened a drawer of his desk and took out his revolver. It was loaded. He threw open the chamber and extracted the cartridges, throwing them, an untidy handful, into the wastepaper basket. Because if this meant arrest, he was not quite sure what he would do, but he was absolutely certain that he would not be hanged.

Paul, the elderly butler, announced the visitor.

“Let him come in,” said M. Alphonse, and posed easily in the big arm-chair, a scientific work on his knee, his big spectacles perched artistically askew on his nose. He looked up under raised eyebrows as the officer entered, rose, and with true French courtesy offered him a seat.

Clearing his throat, the superintendent began in French.

He wished Monsieur good-morning; he was desolated to disturb the professor learned at his studies, but helas! an accident terrible had befallen a gend’arme brave of the force municipal. (It was the nearest the good man could get to county constabulary, and it served.)

The other listened and understood, breathing steadily through his nose, long, long sighs of relief, and feeling an extraordinary shakiness of knee, a sensation he had never thought to experience.

He too was desolated. What could he do?

The superintendent took from his pocket a folded sheet of manuscript. He explained in his French the purport of the appeal which headed it, giving the ancestry and the social position of the great names which offered their patronage. Huge sprawling names they were, monstrously indistinct save in the money column where prudence and self-preservation had advised that the figures of the donations should be unmistakable.

What a relief! Alphonse Didet squared his shoulders and filled his lungs with the air of freedom and respectability.

Very gaily within, though outwardly sedate and still the French professor with spectacles askew, he stepped to his desk. What should he give?

“How much are a hundred francs?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Four pounds,” said the inspector proudly.

So M. Alphonse Didet signed his name, put four pounds carefully in the column allotted for the purpose, took a hundred franc note from his drawer, and handed it with the subscription list to the inspector.

There was some polite bowing and complimentary sentiments murmured on both sides; the superintendent took his departure, and M. Alphonse Didet watched him down the path with every sense of satisfaction and pleasure.

That night when he was sleeping the sleep of the just, two men from Scotland Yard entered his room and arrested him in bed.

Yes, they arrested this most clever of criminals because on the subscription list he had signed “Felix O’Hara Golbeater” in a hand which was bold and exuberant.