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Ebook has 1301 lines and 112900 words, and 27 pages

The Affair of the Man Who Vanished

Mr. Maverick Narkom, Superintendent at Scotland Yard, flung aside the paper he was reading and wheeled round in his revolving desk-chair, all alert on the instant, like a terrier that scents a rat.

He knew well what the coming of the footsteps toward his private office portended; his messenger was returning at last.

Good! Now he would get at the facts of the matter, and be relieved from the sneers of carping critics and the pin pricks of overzealous reporters, who seemed to think that the Yard was to blame, and all the forces connected with it to be screamed at as incompetents if every evildoer in London was not instantly brought to book and his craftiest secrets promptly revealed.

The door opened and closed, and Detective Sergeant Petrie stepped into the room, removing his hat and standing at attention.

"Well?" rapped out the superintendent, in the sharp staccato of nervous impatience. "Speak up! It was a false alarm, was it not?"

"No, sir. It's even worse than reported. Quicker and sharper than any of the others. He's gone, sir."

"Yes, sir. Dead as Julius Caesar. Total collapse about twenty minutes after my arrival and went off like that"--snapping his fingers and giving his hand an outward fling. "Same way as the others, only, as I say, quicker, sir; and with no more trace of what caused it than the doctors were able to discover in the beginning. That makes five in the same mysterious way, Superintendent, and not a ghost of a clue yet. The papers will be ringing with it to-morrow."

"Don't talk such rot!" flung out Narkom, impatiently. "Do you think I'd have waited until now to do it if it could be done? Put him on the case, indeed! How the devil am I to do it when I don't know where on earth to find him? He cleared out directly after that Panther's Paw case six months ago. Gave up his lodgings, sacked his housekeeper, laid off his assistant, Dollops, and went the Lord knows where and why."

"My hat! Then that's the reason we never hear any more of him in Yard matters, is it? I wondered! Disappeared, eh? Well, well! You don't think he can have gone back to his old lay--back to the wrong 'uns and his old 'Vanishing Cracksman's' tricks, do you, sir?"

"No, I don't. No backslider about that chap, by James! He's not built that way. Last time I saw him he was out shopping with Miss Ailsa Lorne--the girl who redeemed him--and judging from their manner toward each other, I rather fancied--well, never mind! That's got nothing to do with you. Besides, I feel sure that if they had, Mrs. Narkom and I would have been invited. All he said was that he was going to take a holiday. He didn't say why, and he didn't say where. I wish to heaven I'd asked him. I could have kicked myself for not having done so when that she-devil of a Frenchwoman managed to slip the leash and get off scot free."

"Mean that party we nabbed in the house at Roehampton along with the Mauravanian baron who got up that Silver Snare fake, don't you, sir? Margot, the Queen of the Apaches. Or, at least, that's who you declared she was, I recollect."

"It's pretty safe odds to lay one's head against a brass farthing as to where the woman went, though, I reckon," said Petrie, stroking his chin. "Bunked it back to Paris, I expect, sir, and made for her hole like any other fox. I hear them French 'tecs are as keen to get hold of her as we were, but she slips 'em like an eel. Can't lay hands on her, and couldn't swear to her identity if they did. Not one in a hundred of 'em's ever seen her to be sure of her, I'm told."

"Diplomacy, Petrie, diplomacy! he may be safer where he is. Rumours are afloat that Prince What's-his-name, son and heir of the late Queen Karma, is not only still living, but has, during the present year, secretly visited Mauravania in person. I see by the papers that that ripping old royalist, Count Irma, is implicated in the revolutionary movement and that, by the king's orders, he has been arrested and imprisoned in the Fort of Sulberga on a charge of sedition. Grand old johnny, that--I hope no harm comes to him. He was in England not so long ago. Came to consult Cleek about some business regarding a lost pearl, and I took no end of a fancy to him. Hope he pulls out all right; but if he doesn't--oh, well, we can't bother over other people's troubles--we've got enough of our own just now with these mysterious murders going on, and the newspapers hammering the Yard day in and day out. Gad! how I wish I knew how to get hold of Cleek--how I wish I did!"

"Can't you find somebody to put you on the lay, sir? some friend of his--somebody that's seen him, or maybe heard from him since you have?"

Imagination was never one of Petrie's strong points. His mind moved always along well-prepared grooves to time-honoured ends. It found one of those grooves and moved along it now.

"Why don't you advertise for him, then?" he suggested. "Put a Personal in the morning papers, sir. Chap like that's sure to read the news every day; and it's bound to come to his notice sooner or later. Or if it doesn't, why, people will get to knowing that the Yard's lost him and get to talking about it and maybe he'll learn of it that way."

He lurched over to his desk, drove a pen into the ink pot, and made such good haste in marshalling his straggling thoughts that he had the thing finished before Petrie had got farther than "Yes; Scotland Yard. Hold the line, please; Superintendent Narkom wants to speak to you."

The Yard's requests are at all times treated with respect and courtesy by the controlling forces of the daily press, so it fell out that, late as the hour was, "space" was accorded, and, in the morning, half a dozen papers bore this notice prominently displayed:

The expected came to pass; and the unexpected followed close upon its heels. The daily press, publishing the full account of the latest addition to the already long list of mysterious murders which, for a fortnight past, had been adding nervous terrors to the public mind, screamed afresh--as Narkom knew that it would--and went into paroxysms of the Reporters' Disease until the very paper was yellow with the froth of it. The afternoon editions were still worse--for, between breakfast and lunch time, yet another man had fallen victim to the mysterious assassin--and sheets pink and sheets green, sheets gray and sheets yellow were scattering panic from one end of London to the other. The police-detective system of the country was rotten! The Government should interfere--must interfere! It was a national disgrace that the foremost city of the civilized world should be terrorized in this appalling fashion and the author of the outrages remain undetected! Could anything be more appalling?

It could, and--it was! When night came and the evening papers were supplanting the afternoon ones, that something "more appalling"--known hours before to the Yard itself--was glaring out on every bulletin and every front page in words like these:

LONDON'S REIGN OF TERROR APPALLING ATROCITY IN CLARGES STREET SHOCKING DYNAMITE OUTRAGE

Clarges Street! The old "magic" street of those "magic" old times of Cleek, and the Red Limousine, and the Riddles that were unriddled for the asking! Narkom grabbed the report the instant he heard that name and began to read it breathlessly.

It was the usual station advice ticked through to headquarters and deciphered by the operator there, and it ran tersely, thus:

Narkom read no farther. He flung the paper aside with a sort of mingled laugh and blub and collapsed into his chair with his eyes hidden in the crook of an upthrown arm, and the muscles of his mouth twitching.

"Now I know why he cleared out! Good old Cleek! Bully old Cleek!" he said to himself; and stopped suddenly, as though something had got into his throat and half choked him. But after a moment or two he jumped to his feet and began walking up and down the room, his face fairly glowing; and if he had put his thoughts into words they would have run like this:

His eye fell upon the ever-ready telephone. He stopped short in his purposeless walking and nodded and smiled to it.

His optimism was splendidly rewarded. Not, however, from the quarter nor in the manner he expected. It had but just gone half-past seven when a tap sounded, the door of his office swung inward, and the porter stepped into the room.

"Person wanting to speak with you, sir, in private," he announced. "Says it's about some Personal in the morning paper."

"Send him in--send him in at once!" rapped out Narkom excitedly. "Move sharp; and don't let anybody else in until I give the word."

Then, as soon as the porter had disappeared, he crossed the room, twitched the thick curtains over the window, switched on the electric light, wheeled another big chair up beside his desk and, with face aglow, jerked open a drawer and got out a cigarette box which had not seen the light for weeks.

Quick as he was, the door opened and shut again before the lid of the box could be thrown back, and into the room stepped Cleek's henchman--Dollops.

"Hullo! You, is it, you blessed young monkey?" said Narkom gayly, as he looked up and saw the boy. "Knew I'd hear to-day--knew it, by James! Sent you for me, has he, eh? Is he coming himself or does he want me to go to him? Speak up, and--Good Lord! what's the matter with you? What's up? Anything wrong?"

Dollops had turned the colour of an under-baked biscuit and was looking at him with eyes of absolute despair.

"Know? Know what?"

"No, I've not. Good Lord! haven't you?"

"No, sir. I aren't clapped eyes on him since he sent me off to the bloomin' seaside six months ago. All he told me when we come to part was that Miss Lorne was goin' out to India on a short visit to Cap'n and Mrs. 'Awksley--Lady Chepstow as was, sir--and that directly she was gone he'd be knockin' about for a time on his own, and I wasn't to worry over him. I haven't seen hide nor hair of him, sir, since that hour."

"Nor heard from him?" Narkom's voice was thick and the hand he laid on the chair-back hard shut.

"And what was that?"

"Why, sir, he wrote that he'd jist remembered about some papers as he'd left behind the wainscot in his old den, and that he'd get the key and drop in at the old Clarges Street house on the way 'ome. Said he'd arrive in England either yesterday afternoon or this one, sir; but whichever it was, he'd wire me from Dover before he took the train. And he never done it, sir--my Gawd! he never done it in this world!"

"Good God!" Narkom flung out the words in a sort of panic, his lips twitching, his whole body shaking, his face like the face of a dead man.

"The limousine--as quick as you can get her round!" said Narkom in the sharp staccato of excitement. "To the scene of the explosion in Clarges Street first, and if the bodies of the victims have been removed, then to the mortuary without an instant's delay."

He dashed into the inner room, grabbed his hat and coat down from the hook where they were hanging, and dashed back again like a man in a panic.

Dollops "came on" with a rush; and two minutes later the red limousine swung out into the roadway and took the distance between Scotland Yard and Clarges Street at a mile-a-minute clip.

Arrival at the scene of the disaster elicited the fact that the remains--literally "remains," since they had been well-nigh blown to fragments--had, indeed, been removed to the mortuary; so thither Narkom and Dollops followed them, their fears being in no wise lightened by learning that the bodies were undeniably those of men. As the features of both victims were beyond any possibility of recognition, identification could, of course, be arrived at only through bodily marks; and Dollops's close association with Cleek rendered him particularly capable of speaking with authority regarding those of his master. It was, therefore, a source of unspeakable delight to both Narkom and himself, when, after close and minute examination of the remains, he was able to say, positively, "Sir, whatever's become of him, praise God, neither of these here two dead men is him, bless his heart!"

"So they didn't get him after all!" supplemented Narkom, laughing for the first time in hours. "Still, it cannot be doubted that whoever committed this outrage was after him, since the people who have suffered are complete strangers to the locality and had only just moved into the house. No doubt the person or persons who threw the bomb knew of Cleek's having at one time lived there as 'Captain Burbage'--Margot did, for one--and finding the house still occupied, and not knowing of his removal--why, there you are."

"Margot!" The name brought back all Dollops' banished fears. He switched round on the superintendent and laid a nervous clutch on his sleeve. "And Margot's 'lay' is Paris. Sir, I didn't tell you, did I, that it was from there the guv'ner wrote those two letters to me?"

"Cinnamon! From Paris?"

"Seen them? When? Where?"

"At Charing Cross station, sir, jist before I went to the Yard to see you. As I hadn't had no telegram from the guv'ner, like I was promised, I went there on the off chance, hopin' to meet him when the boat train come in. And there I see 'em, sir, a-loungin' round the platform where the Dover train goes out at nine to catch the night boat back to Calais, sir. I spotted 'em on the instant--from their walk, their way of carryin' of theirselves, their manner of wearin' of their bloomin' hair. Laughin' among themselves they was and lookin' round at the entrance every now and then like as they was expectin' some one to come and join 'em; and I see, too, as they was a-goin' back to where they come from, 'cause they'd the return halves of their tickets in their hatbands. One of 'em, he buys a paper at the bookstall and sees summink in it as tickled him wonderful, for I see him go up to the others and point it out to 'em, and then the whole lot begins to larf like blessed hyenas. I spotted wot the paper was and the place on the page the blighter was a-pointin' at, so I went and bought one myself to see wot it was. Sir, it was that there Personal of yours. The minnit I read that, I makes a dash for a taxi, to go to you at once, sir, and jist as I does so, a newsboy runs by me with a bill on his chest tellin' about the explosion; and then, sir, I fair went off me dot."

They were back on the pavement, within sight of the limousine, when the boy said this. Narkom brought the car to his side with one excited word, and fairly wrenched open the door.

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