"Shall I name him?" asked Hillyard.
"I will," returned Sir Charles. "Mario Escobar."
Hillyard nodded. He took another pull at his whisky-and-soda. Then he lit a cigarette and leaned forward, with his elbows upon his knees; and all the while Sir Charles Hardiman, his body in a majestic repose, contemplated him placidly. Hardiman had this great advantage in any little matter of debate; he never wished to move. Place him in a chair, and he remained, singularly immobile.
"Since you were so quick to guess at once the reason of my question,"
continued Hillyard, "I can draw an inference. Mario Escobar has been at Rackham Park a good deal?"
Sir Charles Hardiman"s smile broadened.
"Even now you don"t express your inference," he retorted. "You mean that Mario Escobar has been at Rackham Park too much." He paused whilst he drew out his cigarette-case and selected a cigarette from it. "And I agree," he added. "Mario Escobar is too picturesque a person for these primitive days."
Hillyard was not sure what Sir Charles Hardiman precisely meant. But on the other hand he was anxious to ask no direct questions concerning Escobar. He sought to enter in by another gate.
"Primitive?" he said.
"Yes. We have become rather primitive, especially the women. They have lost a deal of self-consciousness. They exact less. They give more--oh, superbly more! It"s the effect of war, of course. They have jumped down off their little pinnacles. Let me put it coa.r.s.ely. They are saved from rape by the fighting man, and they know it. Consequently all men benefit and not least," Sir Charles lit his cigarette, "that beast of abomination, the professional manipulator of women, the man who lives by them and on them, who cajoles them first and blackmails them afterwards, who has the little attentions, the appealing voice, in fact all the tricks of his trade ready at his fingers" ends. However, Millie Splay"s awake to the danger now."
"Danger!" Hillyard sharply exclaimed.
"Quite right. It"s too strong a word. I take it back," Hardiman agreed at once. But he was not in the habit of using words wildly. He had said exactly what he meant to say, and having aroused the attention which he meant to arouse, he calmly withdrew the word. "I rubbed it into Chichester"s thick head that Escobar was overmuch at Rackham Park, and in the end--it percolated."
Much the same account of Escobar, with this instance of Rackham Park omitted, was given to Hillyard by Commodore Graham on the Friday morning.
"He is the kind of man whom men loathe and women like. He runs about London, gets a foot in here and there. You know what London is, even now in the midst of this war, with its inability to be surprised, and its indifference to strange things. You might walk down Regent Street dressed up as a Cherokee Indian, feathers and tomahawk and all, and how many c.o.c.kneys would take the trouble to turn round and look at you twice? It was pretty easy for Escobar to slip about unnoticed."
Commodore Graham bent his head over the case of tubes which Hillyard had brought with him.
"We"ll have a look-out kept for these things. There have been none of them in England up till now."
Martin Hillyard returned to the personality of Mario Escobar.
"Did you suspect him before?" he asked.
Commodore Graham pushed the cigarettes towards Hillyard.
"Scotland Yard has kept an eye on him. That sort of adventurer is always dangerous."
He rang the bell, and on Miss Cheyne"s appearance called for what information the office had concerning Mario Escobar. Miss Cheyne returned with a book in which Escobar"s dossier was included.
"Here he is," said Graham, and Hillyard, moving across to the bureau, followed Graham"s forefinger across the written page. He was agent for the Compania de Navigacion del Sur d"Espana--a German firm on the black list, headquarters at Alicante. Escobar severed his connection with the company on the outbreak of war.
Graham raised his head to comment on the action.
"That, of course, was camouflage. But it checked suspicion for a time.
Suspicion was first aroused," and he resumed reading again, "by his change of lodging. He lived in a small back bedroom in a boarding-house in Clarence Street, off Westbourne Grove, and concealed his address, having his letters addressed to his club, until February, 1915, upon which date he moved into a furnished flat in Maddox Street. Nothing further, however, happened to strengthen that suspicion until, in the autumn of that year, a letter signed Mario was intercepted by the censor. It was sent to a Diego Perez, the Director of a fruit company at Murcia, for Emma Grutsner."
"You sent me a telegram about her," exclaimed Hillyard, "in November."
Commodore Graham"s forefinger travelled along the written lines and stopped at the number and distinguishing sign of the telegram, sent and received.
"Yes," continued Graham. "Here"s your answer. "Emma Grutzner is the governess in a Spanish family at Torrevieja, and she goes occasionally, once a month or so, to the house of Diego Perez in Murcia.""
"Yes, yes! I routed that out," said Hillyard. "But I hadn"t an idea that Mario Escobar was concerned in it."
"That wasn"t mentioned?" asked the Commodore.
"No. I already knew, you see, of B45. If just a word had been added that it was Mario who was writing to Emma Grutzner we might have identified him months ago."
"Yes," answered Graham soothingly and with a proper compunction. He was not unused to other fiery suggestions from his subordinates that if only the reasons for his telegrams and the information on which his questions were based, were sent out with the questions themselves, better results in quicker time could be obtained. Telegrams, however, were going out and coming in all day; a whole array of cipherers and decipherers lived in different rookeries in London. Commodore Graham"s activities embraced the high and the narrow seas, great Capitals and little tucked-away towns and desolate stretches of coast where the trade-winds blew. No doubt full explanations would have led in many cases to more satisfactory conclusions. But fuller explanations were out of all possibility. Even with questions fined down to the last succinct syllable the cables groaned. None of the objections were raised, however, by Commodore Graham. It was his business to keep men like Hillyard who were serving him well to their own considerable cost, in a good humour. Remorse was the line, not argument.
"What a pity! I _am_ sorry," protested the Commodore. "It"s my fault!
There"s nothing else to be said. I am to blame about it."
Martin Hillyard began to feel some compunction that he had ever suggested a fault in the composition of the telegram. But then, it was his business not to betray any such tenderness.
"If we could have in the future a little more information from London, it would save us a good deal of time," he said stonily. "Sometimes a surname is hurled at us, and will we find him, please, and cable home all details?"
"Yes, that is very wrong," the Commodore agreed. "We will have that changed." Then a bright idea appeared to occur to him. His face lighted up. "After all, in this instance the mistake hasn"t done any real harm.
For we have got our friend Mario Escobar now, and without these tubes and this letter from Berlin about the use of them and Jose Medina"s account of the conversation in the next room we shouldn"t have got him.
The German governess wasn"t enough. He"s, after all, a neutral. Besides, there was nothing definite in his letter. But now----"
"Now you can deal with him?" asked Hillyard eagerly.
"To be sure," replied the Commodore. "We have no proof here to put him on his trial. But we have reasonable ground for believing him to be in communication with our enemies for the purpose of damaging us, and that"s quite enough to lock him up until the end of the war."
He reached out his hand for the telephone and asked for a number.
"I am ringing up Scotland Yard," he said to Hillyard over the top of the instrument; and immediately Hillyard heard a tiny voice speaking as if summoned from another planet.
"Hallo!" cried Graham. "Is that you, A.C.? You remember Mario Escobar?
Good. I have Hillyard here from the Mediterranean with a clear case.
I"ll come over and see you."
Mr. "A.C.", whose real name was Adrian Carruthers, thereupon took up the conversation at the other end of the line. The lines deepened upon the Commodore"s forehead as he listened. Then he turned to Hillyard, and swore softly and whole-heartedly.
"Mario Escobar has vanished."
"But I saw him myself," Hillyard exclaimed. "I saw him in London."
"When?"
"On Monday afternoon."
Graham lifted the mouthpiece to his lips again.
"Wait a bit, A.C. Hillyard saw the man in London on Monday afternoon."