Читать книгу The Finger of Fate and Other Stories - Sapper - Страница 6

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IT is at this point that I can imagine the intelligent reader saying with a bewildered air—"What the deuce is all this about? What's the point of it?"

Sir, you are justified in your query. And if it hadn't been that my doctor ordered me to Carlsbad a week ago, I should not have wasted my own time and yours in writing it down. But he did, and the first night I was there I noticed an elderly man of unprepossessing appearance around whom the staff buzzed like bluebottles. It was Guggenheimer—the German millionaire.

I was watching him idly, when suddenly a flutter of excitement ran through the lounge. And the cause of it was a girl with a monkey perched on her shoulder. I gazed at her speechlessly—a perfectly gowned, soigné, cosmopolitan woman. I gazed at her speechlessly—Guggenheimer's latest. I gazed at her speechlessly—Beryl Langton. And as she passed close to me I noticed she was wearing a lovely diamond and emerald bracelet.

But so dense can the human brain be at times that even when a biggish red-faced man came up and spoke to Guggenheimer I didn't realise anything was amiss. In fact I didn't realise it until I saw the German introduce him to the girl.

Then the brain did begin to function. For why it was necessary to introduce Mark Jefferson to Beryl Langton was a thing no feller could understand...

My mind went back to that voyage out East, and from a totally new angle I set out to consider the things that had happened.

That Mark Jefferson and Beryl Langton could have forgotten one another was obviously absurd: therefore they were playing a game: therefore they were in collusion.

If they were in collusion now, there was no inherent reason why they shouldn't have been in collusion then. With Stanton Blake as the third member of the gang.

And if that was so the three of them had fooled us all from the very first.

I lit a cigar: the thing wanted thought. They had fooled us with only one idea—to lead up to that culminating moment in the smoking-room when they stole Mrs. Delmorton's hair-slide.

I ran over things from the beginning. They knew Mrs. Delmorton would be travelling by the boat: they knew her habits—and they laid their plans accordingly. And then when the two men of the gang had got the attention of everyone in the smoking-room rivetted on themselves, the girl switched off the lights.

One of them—Blake probably: he had the touch of a conjuror—had whipped it out of her head in the darkness. But the point was—what the deuce had he done with it? It hadn't been on him or in that room when the search took place. That I could swear to.

And then suddenly it dawned on me, in all its rich genius. The monkey. The whole bet about the monkey became pointless if they were members of the same gang, unless the object was to introduce the animal into the room in a perfectly natural way.

It was the monkey that had passed the slide to the girl through the open port-hole—it had been sitting there chattering when the lights went on. And if the lights had gone on the fraction of a second too soon, it would merely have been taken as a mischievous trick.

Clever—you know: deuced clever. Of course, I may be wrong: possibly that slide is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

But Beryl Langton, who now calls herself Louise van Dyck, cannot have completely forgotten Mark Jefferson, who now calls himself John P. Mellon, in two years. And she does wear a lovely diamond and emerald bracelet. And she did give a start of unfeigned amazement when we found ourselves drinking the water at neighbouring tables. And she did look a bit nonplussed when I asked her about Stanton Blake and her uncle in Shanghai.

Of course, I suppose I ought by rights to warn the police or old Guggenheimer.

But I shan't. He's an unpleasant-looking man. And she was perfectly adorable on the boat deck that night. Moreover, I may be wrong, but I have a sort of idea that she might...

No—damn it! I came here to drink the waters.