It was then nearly half-past three in the morning, and my only object in taking a room was to inform Rayne by telephone of my narrow escape.
Rayne was remaining the night at Half Moon Street, while Lola and Madame Duperre were at the Carlton. We had all come up from Overstow a couple of days before, and two secret meetings had been held at Half Moon Street.
Of the nature of the plot in progress I was in entire ignorance. They never let me completely into their plans; indeed, I only knew their true import when they were actually accomplished.
The half-awake "boots" at the Swan indicated the telephone, and a quarter of an hour later I was speaking to Rayne in his bedroom in London. Very guardedly I explained how nearly I had been trapped, whereupon I heard him chuckle.
"A very good lesson for you, Hargreave!" he replied. "Our friends are apparently on the watch, so get back to London as soon as you can.
You"ll be here at breakfast-time. Leave the car at Lloyd"s and come along to me. Good luck to you!" he added, and then switched off.
The Lloyd"s garage he mentioned was in Bloomsbury, a place kept for the accommodation of motor-thieves. Many a car which disappeared quickly found its way there, and in a few hours the engine numbers were removed and fresh ones subst.i.tuted, while the bodies were repainted and false number-plates attached.
As I put down the telephone receiver, it suddenly occurred to me that already the Bristol police might have telephoned a description of the car along the various roads leading out of the city. Therefore it would be too risky to remain there. Hence, as though in sudden decision, I paid the "boots" for my bed, and five minutes later was again on the road speeding towards London.
I chose the road to Salisbury, and after "blinding" for half an hour, I stopped and put on the false number-plates and license with which Rayne always provided me.
It was as well that I did so, for in the gray morning as I went through Salisbury a police-sergeant and a constable hailed me just as I turned into St. John Street, near the White Hart, calling upon me to stop. I could see by their att.i.tude that they were awaiting me, therefore pretending not to hear I quickened my pace and, knowing the road, soon left the place behind me.
Again, in a village some ten miles farther on, a constable shouted to me as I continued my wild flight, hence it seemed apparent that a cordon had been formed around me, and I now feared that to enter Winchester would be to run right into the arms of the police.
The only way to save myself was to abandon the car and get back to London by rail. As I contemplated this I was already pa.s.sing beside the high embankment of the South Western Railway, where half a mile farther on I found a little wayside station. Therefore I turned the car into a small wood, and destroying my genuine license and hiding the genuine number-plate, I took the next train to Winchester, and thence by express to Waterloo after a very wild and adventurous night.
That I had been within an ace of capture was palpable. But why?
I was in the service of the man who controlled that vast criminal organization which the police of Europe were ever trying to break up.
But why should I be sent to meet the mysterious hunchback Tarrant on Clifton Bridge?
"There seemed to have been a little flaw in our plans, Hargreave,"
said the alert, good-looking man as I sat with him in his cosy chambers in Half Moon Street that morning. "The police evidently got wind of the fact that old Morley was meeting you, and Benton tried to impersonate him. I know Benton. He"s always up against me. He might have succeeded had he made the hump on his back a hard one, eh?" he laughed, as though rather amused than otherwise.
"But he didn"t know the pa.s.sword," I remarked in triumph.
"No! It was fortunate for you that I had arranged it with old Morley,"
said the man with the master-mind. "One must be ever wary when one treads crooked paths, you know. The slightest slip--and the end comes!
But, at any rate, last night"s adventure has sharpened your wits."
"And it has cost us the "A. C."!" I remarked.
"Bah! What"s a motor-car more or less when one is working a big thing!" he exclaimed. "Never let ideas of economy stand in your way, or you"ll never make a fortune. In order to make money you must always spend money."
I often recollected that adage of his in later days, when the pace grew even hotter.
Rayne paused for a few minutes. Then he said:
"I"ve already heard from old Morley on the telephone half an hour ago.
He was on the bridge and watched the fun. Then he discreetly withdrew and went back to his hotel in Clifton. He declares that you acted splendidly."
"I"m much gratified by his testimonial," I said.
"I"ve arranged that he shall meet you to-night here in London--outside the Three Nuns Hotel at Aldgate. Go to Lloyd"s and get a car. At half-past seven it will be dark. Drive up, go into the bar and have a drink. You"ll find him there and recognize him by his deformity.
Outside he will mention the pa.s.sword and you will drive him where he directs. That"s all!"
And the man who had, on engaging me, so particularly wanted to know if I could sing, and had never asked me to do so, dismissed me quite abruptly, as was his habit. His quick alertness, keen shrewdness and sharp suspicion caused him to speak abruptly--almost churlishly--to those about him. I, however, now understood him. Yet I wondered what evil work was in progress.
He had often pitted his wits against the most famous detective inspector, the great Benton, who had achieved so much notoriety in the Enfield poisoning case, the Sunbury mystery in which the body of a young girl shop-a.s.sistant had been found headless in the Thames, the great Maresfield drug drama of Limehouse and Mayfair, and the disappearance of the Honorable Edna Newcomen from her mother"s house in Grosvenor Gardens. Superintendent Arthur Benton was perhaps the most wideawake hunter of criminals in the United Kingdom. As chief of his own particular branch at Scotland Yard he performed wonderful services, and his record was unique. Yet, hampered as he was by official red-tape and those regulations which prevented his men from taking a third-cla.s.s railway ticket when following a thief, unless they waited for weeks for the return of the expenditure from official sources, he was no match for the squire of Overstow, who had a big bank balance, who moved in society, official, political and otherwise, and who actually entertained certain high officials at his table.
From a man in the Department of the Public Prosecutor at Whitehall, Rayne often learnt much of the inner workings of Scotland Yard and of secret inquiries, for a civil servant at a well-laid sumptuous table is frequently p.r.o.ne to indiscretion.
Arthur Benton was a well-meaning and very straight-dealing public servant with a splendid record as a detector of crime, but against money and such influence he could not cope. Indeed, more than once Rayne declared to me that he intended evil against Benton.
"Yet I rather like him," he had said when we were discussing him one day. "After all, he"s a real good sportsman!"
So according to Rayne"s orders I met the hunchback Tarrant at the Three Nuns Hotel at Aldgate. I had taken another car from Lloyd"s garage--a Fiat landaulette, stolen, no doubt--and in it, at the old man"s directions, I drove out to Maldon, in Ess.e.x, where at a small house outside the town I found, to my surprise, Rayne already awaiting us.
What, I wondered, was in progress?
CHAPTER IV
THE FOUR FALSE FINGERS
The house outside Maldon proved to be a newly built, detached, eight-roomed villa in a lonely spot on the high road to Witham. As I idled about it, I smelt a curious odor of melting rubber. Apparently the place had been taken furnished, but with what object I could not guess. Tarrant was a queer, rather insignificant-looking old fellow with a shock of white hair and a scraggy white beard.
Both he and Rayne were closeted together in the little dining-room for nearly two hours, while I sat in the adjoining room. I could hear them conversing in low tones, and the smell of rubber warmed by heat became more pungent. What game was being carried on? Something very secret without a doubt. I thought I heard the sound of a third man"s voice.
Indeed, there might be a third person present, for I had not been admitted to the room.
At last, leaving Rayne there, I drove the old man on to Witham, where I left him at his own request at a point near the wireless telegraph station, and turning, went back to the thieves" garage and there left the car.
I did not see Rudolph Rayne again for several days, but according to instructions I received from Madame Duperre, I went by train up to Yorkshire and awaited their arrival.
From Duperre, who arrived three days after I had got to Overstow, I gathered that Rayne had suddenly been called away to the Continent on one of his swift visits, "on a little matter of business," added Vincent with a meaning grin.
We were smoking together in the great old library, when I told him of my narrow escape on Clifton Bridge.
"Yes," he said. "Benton is always trying to get at us. It was sly of him to impersonate old Morley. I wonder how he got to know that you were meeting him? Someone must have betrayed Rayne. I have a suspicion who it may be. If he has, then woe betide him! Rudolph never forgives an enemy or a blunderer."
I tried to get from Duperre the reason why the hunchback had met Rayne in such secrecy, but he would divulge nothing.
Next day his wife and Lola returned, and that same evening as I sat with the latter in the chintz-covered drawing-room--for though I had been engaged as chauffeur I was now treated as one of the family--I had a delightful chat with her.
That she was sorely puzzled at her father"s rapid journeys to and fro across Europe without any apparent reason, of the strange a.s.sortment of his friends and the secrecy in which he so often met them, I had long ago observed.
The truth was that I had fallen deeply in love with the sweet dainty girl whose father was the most audacious and cunning crook the modern world had produced. I believed, on account of the small confidence we had exchanged, that Lola, on her part, did not regard me with actual disfavor.
"When will your father be back, do you think?" I asked her as she lounged upon a settee with a big orange silk cushion behind her. She looked very sweet. She wore a pretty but very simple dance-frock of flame-colored ninon, in which I had seen her at the Carlton on the night when I set out to meet the man Tarrant and was so nearly caught.
I had given her a cigarette, and we were smoking together cosily--Duperre and his wife being somewhere in the great old house. I think Duperre was, after all, a sportsman, even though he was a practiced crook, for on that night he and his wife allowed me to be alone with Lola.