The Second Seal Page 9

  A quarter of an hour later he escorted her upstairs and out into the street, where a taxi he had ordered was waiting. He had already obtained her address, and as soon as she was inside gave it to the driver. Leaning forward, he took and kissed her hand for the second time that night, then murmured blandly:

  “I do hope you will forgive me, but the night air is bad for my bronchitis, so I must deny myself the pleasure of seeing you home. The driver is paid and tipped. I have greatly enjoyed this evening, and I hope that we shall renew our acquaintance when I am next in London.”

  Poor Emily Stiggins had drunk her share of the champagne and had a double crème de menthe on top of it, so her vision of the Duke as he closed the door of the cab was slightly blurred and her reactions slow. By the time the blissful smile had faded from her pretty face, to give way to an expression of petulant annoyance, the taxi was bowling along the now almost empty Strand on its way to Clapham. She never saw the Duke again, but it is pleasant to be able to record that three years later she married an ironmonger in a good way of business and made him an excellent wife.

  As for de Richleau, before the taxi was even out of sight she had passed from his mind as completely as the quail he had eaten at supper. At the moment he had many more important things to think of, and the principal of them was that he believed he was being shadowed.

  Just as he handed Lottie into the cab, out of the corner of his eye, he had noticed a tall, thin, shabby-looking man, wearing a pork-pie hat, who was standing half-concealed in a shop entrance a few yards along the street from the restaurant. De Richleau was prepared to swear that the same figure had been lurking near the stage-door of the Gaiety when he picked up Lottie; and after he had walked a little way towards Trafalgar Square, a casual glance over his shoulder verified his impression. The man had left cover and was following him.

  The thought that instantly jumped to the Duke’s mind was that the charming Miss de Vaux might be married, and the man a private detective who was endeavouring to secure evidence for divorce against her. The good wine he had drunk, and Lottie’s vivacious company, had put him in a merry mood, moreover he felt that he owed her something over and above the fiver for the disappointment he had caused her. So he promptly decided to give the unfortunate detective a lesson that would make him chary about following her friends in future.

  Ignoring the invitation of a prowling growler, he continued on across Trafalgar Square, now walking a little erratically, as though he had had too much to drink; his object being to nullify the steady rhythmic ring of his footfalls on the pavement.

  Turning up the Haymarket, he entered Piccadilly Circus. There were still quite a number of ladies of the town about, and several of them called invitations to him. Outside Appenrodts’ German restaurant he stopped, ostensibly to talk to two of them, but actually because it gave him an opportunity to turn round quite naturally and see if he was still being trailed. He was. The man in the pork-pie hat had also halted, and was buying an early edition of the morning paper from a newspaper boy on the corner.

  Waving aside the inducements offered by the two girls with a merry “Good-night!” the Duke crossed the Circus to Swan and Edgar’s corner and, with several pauses, during which he acted ineffectual attempts to light a cigarette, continued on his way westward. As he passed Bond Street, seeing his apparent condition, another girl was bold enough to come up beside him, take his arm, and plead in a husky voice:

  “Come home with me, dearie. You’ll get what for from your wife if you go home to her like this. I’ve got a nice place—honest I have, and it’s not far from here. Come back with me and I’ll make you a nice cup a’ tea. That’ll sober you up.”

  The Duke thanked her politely, but persistently declined her offers and managed to shake her off by the time he turned down Berkeley Street. Normally, he would have gone across Berkeley Square, and up Mount Street to the curve of Carlos Place, on which the Coburg Hotel was situated. Instead, he crossed the road when he reached Hay Hill and stumbled down the steps into Lansdown Passage.

  The passage was some feet lower than the street; wide enough for only two people to walk abreast, and enclosed by high walls on both sides. The south wall was the boundary of the private garden that ran right up to the Duke of Devonshire’s mansion in Piccadilly; the north wall bounded the slightly smaller garden of the Marquis of Lansdown’s mansion overlooking Berkeley Square. At its far end the passage opened on to the dead-end of Curzon Street, and could be used as a short cut only by pedestrians either going in, or coming from, that direction. In consequence it was secure from observation, both from the windows of nearby houses and passing traffic. A bracket lamp cast a pool of light in its centre, but its two ends were in deep shadows cast by the high walls, and at this hour it was deserted.

  On emerging into the cul-de-sac at the lower end of Curzon Street, de Richleau took a step to the right and flattened himself against the wall. After leaning his malacca cane up against the projection of a pillar, so as to have both his hands free, he remained absolutely motionless. He was reasonably confident that his shadow would not become suspicious at the cessation of his footsteps, owing to his erratic course and frequent halts in Piccadilly. His thin mouth now closed like a trap, he waited to spring the ambush he had so skilfully prepared.

  Footfalls were now echoing hollowly from the long passage. It seemed quite a time before they grew nearer. Then all at once they were close at hand. The thin man came hurrying out of the narrow entrance, like a rabbit from a burrow; and, his eyes peering straight ahead up the ill-lighted street, he would have passed the Duke without realising his presence.

  Like a bolt from the blue, de Richleau’s left hand shot out and caught him by the throat. As he clutched at it he was swung round and forced against the wall. Next second, the Duke had driven his right fist with all his force into the fellow’s stomach.

  With a horrid choking sound, the man’s head jerked forward; his knees lifted and his heels began to beat an uneven tattoo on the pavement. He would have slumped to the ground and lain retching there, had not the Duke’s grip on his throat been strong enough to keep him propped against the wall.

  After giving him a moment to recover, de Richleau eased the pressure on his windpipe, and snarled, “Try any tricks and I will tear you limb from limb. You were following me, weren’t you? Why?”

  “Nein!” gasped the wretched man, spittle running down his chin. “Nein! I follow no ones.”

  “So, you’re a German, eh! You lying rat! I’ll make you talk. Take that!” As de Richleau spoke, he struck his victim a glancing blow downward across the face. It was an old apache trick and, as he knew would be the case, the kid of his glove taut over his knuckles caught on the man’s cheek, tearing the skin open for a couple of inches.

  “Ples!” whimpered the man. “Ples! I do not follow you. I am printer. I work late. I often goes home zis way.”

  “And you do your printing outside the stage-door of the Gaiety, I suppose?” mocked the Duke with an angry chuckle.

  Then, taking a firm grip of the man’s left ear, he began to shake him violently by it, as he added: “I have a prejudice against being followed. A very strong prejudice. And let me tell you that Tonight you have been very lucky. Had I had a knife on me it would not have been my fist that I should have stuck into your miserable stomach. See what an escape you have had! But things will yet go ill with you should you persist in refusing to tell me what I wish to know. I shall tear off both these big ears of yours and ram them down your throat. Then you will suffer such acute indigestion that you will find it difficult to talk to anyone. Are you prepared to answer my questions, or must I proceed to make you into a cannibal?”

  The man had seized de Richleau’s wrist with both hands, and was desperately trying to stop the alternate tugs and shoves that were rocking him back and forth and threatened to wrench his ear from his head at any moment. But, finding the Duke’s grip too firm to be broken, he suddenly moaned: “Ja! I talk! I talk! Only I beg l
et go, mister.”

  “Well?” said the Duke, temporarily stopping his vigorous action.

  “I haf follow you. But I mean no harm. I follow only to make report on your movements.”

  “Why?”

  “I am a poor man. I make a liddle money that way.”

  “Who from?”

  “Der Argus agency.”

  “Who are they?”

  “A firm for the inquiry making.”

  De Richleau nodded. “How long have you been trailing Miss de Vaux?”

  The man looked blank. “Die spiel-fräulein you have given abendessen? I do not follow her. I haf her name only from the porter at the restaurant.”

  “You’re lying!” snapped the Duke, seizing the man by the lapel of his coat in preparation for another attack upon him.

  With tears and blood still running down his face, the terrified wretch cowered back against the wall. “Bitte! Bitte!” he begged, “I tell truth. But perhaps some other agent follow her. Those who employ me tell me noddings.”

  After a moment de Richleau decided that the odds were he had now got as much of the truth as he was likely to get from this poor underling of some shady detective agency. The business of shadowing people, which entailed hours of hanging about on draughty street corners, often in the rain, was, he knew, a poorly paid occupation, in spite of its intense dreariness and discomfort; so, except where the police were concerned, or in important cases, only the lowest type of nark was employed upon it. Such people were rarely told to what end inquiries were being made, and if Lottie de Vaux had a husband it seemed unlikely that he would be in a position to afford having her watched by sleuths of a high calibre. What little the Duke had learned fitted in with his original assumption. But there was one more line he could try before releasing his victim.

  Jerking the man forward, he thrust his free hand into the fellow’s inside breast pocket. His fingers closed upon a few thin papers. Pulling them out, he gave the German a push, and said: “Stay where you are, or I’ll catch you and choke the life out of you.”

  Then he turned, tucked his cane under his arm, and walked up the road towards the nearest street lamp.

  He had hardly covered ten paces when he heard a slither of feet, followed by the sound of footsteps pelting away down the passage. Despite the blood-curdling threat he had made, he had expected that, as the fellow would have had to be a moron not to seize such an opportunity to escape from his tormentor. Having no further use for him, the Duke had thought it as good a way as any other to terminate the interview.

  Under the street lamp he examined the papers. They were two letters recently delivered to Herr Heinrich Kronauer at an address in the East End of London. Both were in German. One had been posted in the same neighbourhood, and was simply a note making an appointment for a hair-cut. The other had been posted in Hanover. Its writing was uneducated, and it gave only news of a German family with a casual reference to Herr Kronauer’s hair-dressing activities in Walthamstow.

  It did not strike the Duke as at all strange that his shadower had proved to be a German, as there were then said to be over 100,000 Germans earning their living in England. There was a German band, and often several, in every town of any size; every theatre orchestra in the country contained a high percentage of them. Their blond, cropped heads were to be seen among the waiters in every restaurant, and hundreds of them worked in barbers’ shops. The latter fact confirmed the Duke in his impression that his victim was no more than he appeared to be—simply a poor foreigner who eked out a precarious living by occasionally taking on the job of tailing people in the evening, and a pathetic rather than a sinister figure.

  Ten minutes later de Richleau had reached the Coburg, but before turning-in he took the trouble to look up the Argus Inquiry Agency in the telephone book. It was not there.

  That did not surprise him. It simply showed that the man had lied about the name of his employers, and, in the circumstances, it was to be expected; for they would certainly not have employed him further if his indiscretion had led to a violent character like de Richleau appearing at their office the following day and threatening to murder everyone in it.

  With a shrug, de Richleau closed the book and retired to bed. But his head had hardly touched the pillow when he sat bolt upright again. Why the point had failed to register before, he could not think, but it was only at the threat of further maltreatment that the man had admitted as a possibility that some other agent might have been detailed to follow Lottie. His job, as he had confessed from the first, had been to report upon the movements of the man he had followed down Lansdown Passage, and not merely because he had happened to be Lottie’s cavalier of that evening. In his terror the poor sleuth had given it away that he had not even known Lottie’s name until he had got it from the porter outside Romanos.

  That put a very different complexion on the matter.

  Chapter VI

  Stormy Passage

  Belatedly, but swiftly now, de Richleau realised that he had fooled himself by allowing his theory, that Lottie had a husband who was trying to secure evidence on which to divorce her, to dominate his mind. Lottie did not even enter into the affair. The sleuth must have been put on to watch him, de Richleau, before either of them even knew of Lottie’s existence.

  But why?

  Could it possibly be that the German Secret Service had already got wind of his projected activities in Serbia? That seemed in the highest degree improbable. Yet what other explanation was there? It recurred to him that his victim had used the word ‘agent’. That might easily be an inexactitude due to a foreigner’s imperfect understanding of English. On the other hand, the term was more generally applicable to persons acting under official orders than to the casual employees of a private firm. Perhaps the two visits he had paid to Major Hankey’s office since lunching with Sir Bindon Blackers at the Carlton Club had aroused the interest of a spy whose job it was to watch comings and goings there. If so, to order the tailing of such casual visitors as a matter of routine, the German Secret Service in Great Britain must be both much more active and employ a far larger personnel than he had supposed.

  Once made, these somewhat perturbing speculations did not rob the Duke of any sleep. But, when he recalled them immediately on waking the following morning, he decided that, even if he were barking up the wrong tree, caution counselled observance of the old tag, ‘he who is forewarned is forearmed’; so he decided to take such precautions as he could to evade observation during his mission.

  As his reservations on the Orient Express were already made, and his baggage already labelled ‘Belgrade Via Dover-Ostend’, short of putting himself to enormous inconvenience, there seemed nothing he could do to cover his tracks for the moment; so he pushed the matter into the back of his mind and, after a hearty breakfast, set out for Victoria.

  The day was fine, and now that May had come the streets had assumed an air of summer gaiety. The more solid citizens were making their way to business in black top hats and short coats as usual, but here and there a less conventional figure was to be seen in a straw boater with a bright ribbon. In South Audley Street he passed a party making an early start for a day’s racing in a coach-and-four, and all the men on its roof were sporting grey toppers. Then, in Grosvenor Place he noticed a little group of sailors wearing the wide-brimmed round straw hats still favoured by the Navy; while all along the way there were girls and women in colourful dresses, crowned with the milliners’ flower-decked creations of the period, and holding ruffled parasols.

  At Victoria station de Richleau kept an alert eye open for his acquaintance of the previous night; but that unfortunate personage was no doubt endeavouring to explain away his battered appearance to some customer he was shaving in Walthamstow, as he was nowhere to be seen; neither could the Duke spot any other suspicious character covertly observing him. So he took his seat on the train some moments before it was due to leave, and the journey to Dover passed without episode.

  In those days
, in the greater part of the world true freedom still existed. Men had not been robbed yet of their natural right to go where they would, either on business, pleasure, or, taking their families and all their worldly wealth with them, to settle in a distant land for the remainder of their days. Passports were rare and potent documents, issued only at the request of travellers going to uncivilised parts of the earth, where they might need to call upon His Majesty’s Consuls to assist them in securing pack mules, guides, or native porters for a journey into little-known territory. And, such was the prodigious plenty and wealth of Britain that no Customs officer had ever dreamed the day would come when he would be called on to search outgoing passengers’ baggage, as a precaution against a woman going abroad with her engagement ring, or a man taking a York ham as a present to friends with whom he was going to stay on the continent.

  In consequence, the Duke walked from the train on to the Dover-Ostend boat without let or hindrance, and, proceeding at once to the first-class upper deck amidships, settled himself comfortably in a steamer chair that had its back to a roped-off part of the deck abaft the funnel.

  He had been seated there only a moment when out of the crowd that was seething about him emerged a tall, youngish man of about his own age, who greeted him with surprise and pleasure. It was a Count Julien Esterházy, whom he had met, and by whom he had been most kindly entertained, a few years previously in Budapest.

  When they had shaken hands, de Richleau quickly removed his dressing-case from the chair beside the one in which he had been sitting, and the two old acquaintances settled down side by side to gossip about their doings since they had last seen one another.

  The crowd sorted itself out; the porters grabbed their tips and hurried down the gangways; the steamer’s siren blew two long blasts, signifying that she was about to proceed to sea. Only then did the two men catch the sound of footsteps and scraping chairs behind them. At the last moment, the private party, for whom a portion of the after-deck had been roped off, had come aboard and were now being ushered to the space reserved for them.