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A.E.W. Mason's 'The House of the Arrow' is a classic mystery novel set in the early 20th century. The story follows a French detective, Inspector Hanaud, as he investigates a murder at the quiet English cottage known as 'The House of the Arrow'. The book is filled with twists and turns, keeping the reader on the edge of their seat until the very end. Mason's writing style is engaging and descriptive, immersing the reader into the world of the investigation. The novel is reminiscent of the Golden Age of detective fiction, with its intricate plot and well-developed characters. 'The House of the Arrow' is a captivating mystery that will appeal to fans of classic crime fiction and those who enjoy a good whodunit. With its expertly crafted storyline and clever clues, this book is sure to keep readers guessing until the final reveal.
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The House of the Arrow
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 LETTERS OF MARK
Messrs. Frobisher and Haslitt, the solicitors on the east side of Russell Square, counted amongst their clients a great many who had undertakings established in France; and the firm was very proud of this branch of its business.
"It gives us a place in history," Mr. Jeremy Haslitt used to say. "For it dates from the year 1806, when Mr. James Frobisher, then our very energetic senior partner, organized the escape of hundreds of British subjects who were detained in France by the edict of the first Napoleon. The firm received the thanks of His Majesty's Government and has been fortunate enough to retain the connection thus made. I look after that side of our affairs myself."
Mr. Haslitt's daily batch of letters, therefore, contained as a rule a fair number bearing the dark-blue stamp of France upon their envelopes. On this morning of early April, however, there was only one. It was addressed in a spidery, uncontrolled hand with which Mr. Haslitt was unfamiliar. But it bore the postmark of Dijon, and Mr. Haslitt tore it open rather quickly. He had a client in Dijon, a widow, Mrs. Harlowe, of whose health he had had bad reports. The letter was certainly written from her house, La Maison Grenelle, but not by her. He turned to the signature.
"Waberski?" he said, with a frown. "Boris Waberski?" And then, as he identified his correspondent, "Oh, yes, yes."
He sat down in his chair and read. The first part of the letter was merely flowers and compliments, but half-way down the second page its object was made clear as glass. It was five hundred pounds. Old Mr. Haslitt smiled and read on, keeping up, whilst he read, a one-sided conversation with the writer.
"I have a great necessity of that money," wrote Boris, "and—"
"I am quite sure of that," said Mr. Haslitt.
"My beloved sister, Jeanne-Marie—" the letter continued.
"Sister-in-law," Mr. Haslitt corrected.
"—cannot live for long, in spite of all the care and attention I give to her," Boris Waberski went on. "She has left me, as no doubt you know, a large share of her fortune. Already, then, it is mine—yes? One may say so and be favourably understood. We must look at the facts with the eyes. Expedite me, then, by the recommended post a little of what is mine and agree my distinguished salutations."
Haslitt's smile became a broad grin. He had in one of his tin boxes a copy of the will of Jeanne-Marie Harlowe drawn up in due form by her French notary at Dijon, by which every farthing she possessed was bequeathed without condition to her husband's niece and adopted daughter, Betty Harlowe. Jeremy Haslitt almost destroyed that letter. He folded it; his fingers twitched at it; there was already actually a tear at the edges of the sheets when he changed his mind.
"No," he said to himself. "No! With the Boris Waberskis one never knows," and he locked the letter away on a ledge of his private safe.
He was very glad that he had when three weeks later he read, in the obituary column of The Times, the announcement of Mrs. Harlowe's death, and received a big card with a very deep black border in the French style from Betty Harlowe inviting him to the funeral at Dijon. The invitation was merely formal. He could hardly have reached Dijon in time for the ceremony had he started off at that instant. He contented himself with writing a few lines of sincere condolence to the girl, and a letter to the French notary in which he placed the services of the firm at Betty's disposal. Then he waited.
"I shall hear again from little Boris," he said, and he heard within the week. The handwriting was more spidery and uncontrolled than ever; hysteria and indignation had played havoc with Waberski's English; also he had doubled his demand.
"It is outside belief," he wrote. "Nothing has she left to her so attentive brother. There is something here I do not much like. It must be one thousand pounds now, by the recommended post. 'You have always had the world against you, my poor Boris,' she say with the tears all big in her dear eyes. 'But I make all right for you in my will.' And now nothing! I speak, of course, to my niece—ah, that hard one! She snap her the fingers at me! Is that a behaviour? One thousand pounds, mister! Otherwise there will be awkwardnesses! Yes! People do not snap them the fingers at Boris Waberski without the payment. So one thousand pounds by the recommended post or awkwardnesses"; and this time Boris Waberski did not invite Mr. Haslitt to agree any salutations, distinguished or otherwise, but simply signed his name with a straggling pen which shot all over the sheet.
Mr. Haslitt did not smile over this letter. He rubbed the palms of his hands softly together.
"Then we shall have to make some awkwardnesses too," he said hastily, and he locked this second letter away with the first. But Mr. Haslitt found it a little difficult to settle to his work. There was that girl out there in the big house at Dijon and no one of her race near her! He got up from his chair abruptly and crossed the corridor to the offices of his junior partner.
"Jim, you were at Monte Carlo this winter," he said.
"For a week," answered Jim Frobisher.
"I think I asked you to call on a client of ours who has a villa there—Mrs. Harlowe."
Jim Frobisher nodded. "I did. But Mrs. Harlowe was ill. There was a niece, but she was out."
"You saw no one, then?" Jeremy Haslitt asked.
"No, that's wrong," Jim corrected. "I saw a strange creature who came to the door to make Mrs. Harlowe's excuses—a Russian."
"Boris Waberski," said Mr. Haslitt.
"That's the name."
Mr. Haslitt sat down in a chair.
"Tell me about him, Jim."
Jim Frobisher stared at nothing for a few moments. He was a young man of twenty-six who had only during this last year succeeded to his partnership. Though quick enough when action was imperative, he was naturally deliberate in his estimates of other people's characters; and a certain awe he had of old Jeremy Haslitt doubled that natural deliberation in any matters of the firm's business. He answered at length.
"He is a tall, shambling fellow with a shock of grey hair standing up like wires above a narrow forehead and a pair of wild eyes. He made me think of a marionette whose limbs have not been properly strung. I should imagine that he was rather extravagant and emotional. He kept twitching at his moustache with very long, tobacco-stained fingers. The sort of man who might go off at the deep end at any moment."
Mr. Haslitt smiled. "That's just what I thought."
"Is he giving you any trouble?" asked Jim.
"Not yet," said Mr. Haslitt. "But Mrs. Harlowe is dead, and I think it very likely that he will. Did he play at the tables?"
"Yes, rather high," said Jim. "I suppose that he lived on Mrs. Harlowe."
"I suppose so," said Mr. Haslitt, and he sat for a little while in silence. Then: "It's a pity you didn't see Betty Harlowe. I stopped at Dijon once on my way to the South of France five years ago when Simon Harlowe, the husband, was alive. Betty was then a long-legged slip of a girl in black silk stockings with a pale, clear face and dark hair and big eyes—rather beautiful." Mr. Haslitt moved in his chair uncomfortably. That old house with its great garden of chestnuts and sycamores and that girl alone in it with an aggrieved and half-crazed man thinking out awkwardnesses for her—Mr. Haslitt did not like the picture!
"Jim," he said suddenly, "could you arrange your work so that you could get away at short notice, if it becomes advisable?"
Jim looked up in surprise. Excursions and alarms, as the old stage directions have it, were not recognized as a rule by the firm of Frobisher and Haslitt. If its furniture was dingy, its methods were stately; clients might be urgent, but haste and hurry were words for which the firm had no use. No doubt, somewhere round the corner, there would be an attorney who understood them. Yet here was Mr. Haslitt himself, with his white hair and his curious round face, half-babyish, half-supremely intelligent, actually advocating that his junior partner should be prepared to skip to the Continent at a word.
"No doubt I could," said Jim, and Mr. Haslitt looked him over with approbation.
Jim Frobisher had an unusual quality of which his acquaintances, even his friends, knew only the outward signs. He was a solitary person. Very few people up till now had mattered to him at all, and even those he could do without. It was his passion to feel that his life and the means of his life did not depend upon the purchased skill of other people; and he had spent the spare months of his life in the fulfilment of his passion. A half-decked sailing-boat which one man could handle, an ice-axe, a rifle, an inexhaustible volume or two like The Ring and the Book—these with the stars and his own thoughts had been his companions on many lonely expeditions; and in consequence he had acquired a queer little look of aloofness which made him at once noticeable amongst his fellows. A misleading look, since it encouraged a confidence for which there might not be sufficient justification. It was just this look which persuaded Mr. Haslitt now. "This is the very man to deal with creatures like Boris Waberski," he thought, but he did not say so aloud.
What he did say was: "It may not be necessary after all. Betty Harlowe has a French lawyer. No doubt he is adequate. Besides"—and he smiled as he recollected a phrase in Waberski's second letter—"Betty seems very capable of looking after herself. We shall see."
He went back to his own office, and for a week he heard no more from Dijon. His anxiety, indeed, was almost forgotten when suddenly startling news arrived and by the most unexpected channel.
Jim Frobisher brought it. He broke into Mr. Haslitt's office at the sacred moment when the senior partner was dictating to a clerk the answers to his morning letters.
"Sir!" cried Jim, and stopped short at the sight of the clerk. Mr. Haslitt took a quick look at his young partner's face and said: "We will resume these answers, Godfrey, later on."
The clerk took his shorthand notebook out of the room, and Mr. Haslitt turned to Jim Frobisher.
"Now, what's your bad news, Jim?"
Jim blurted it out. "Waberski accuses Betty Harlowe of murder."
"What!"
Mr. Haslitt sprang to his feet. Jim Frobisher could not have said whether incredulity or anger had the upper hand with the old man, the one so creased his forehead, the other so blazed in his eyes.
"Little Betty Harlowe!" he said in a wondering voice.
"Yes. Waberski has laid a formal charge with the Prefect of Police at Dijon. He accuses Betty of poisoning Mrs. Harlowe on the night of April the 27th."
"But Betty's not arrested?" Mr. Haslitt exclaimed.
"No, but she's under surveillance."
Mr. Haslitt sat heavily down in his arm-chair at his table. Extravagant! Uncontrolled! These were very mild epithets for Boris Waberski. Here was a devilish malignity at work in the rogue, a passion for revenge just as mean as could be imagined.
"How do you know all this, Jim?" he asked suddenly.
"I have had a letter this morning from Dijon."
"You?" exclaimed Mr. Haslitt, and the question caught hold of Jim Frobisher and plunged him too among perplexities. In the first shock of the news, the monstrous fact of the accusation had driven everything else out of his head. Now he asked himself why, after all, had the news come to him and not to the partner who had the Harlowe estate in his charge.
"Yes, it is strange," he replied. "And here's another queer thing. The letter doesn't come from Betty Harlowe, but from a friend, a companion of hers, Ann Upcott."
Mr. Haslitt was a little relieved.
"Betty had a friend with her, then? That's a good thing." He reached out his hand across the table. "Let me read the letter, Jim."
Frobisher had been carrying it in his hand, and he gave it now to Jeremy Haslitt. It was a letter of many sheets, and Jeremy let the edges slip and nicker under the ball of his thumb.
"Have I got to read all this?" he said ruefully, and he set himself to his task. Boris Waberski had first of all accused Betty to her face. Betty had contemptuously refused to answer the charge, and Waberski had gone straight off to the Prefect of Police. He had returned in an hour's time, wildly gesticulating and talking aloud to himself. He had actually asked Ann Upcott to back him up. Then he had packed his bags and retired to an hotel in the town. The story was set out in detail, with quotations from Waberski's violent, crazy talk; and as the old man read, Jim Frobisher became more and more uneasy, more and more troubled.
He was sitting by the tall, broad window which looked out upon the square, expecting some explosion of wrath and contempt. But he saw anxiety peep out of Mr. Haslitt's face and stay there as he read. More than once he stopped altogether in his reading, like a man seeking to remember or perhaps to discover.
"But the whole thing's as clear as daylight," Jim said to himself impatiently. And yet—and yet—Mr. Haslitt had sat in that arm-chair during the better part of the day, during the better part of thirty years. How many men and women during those years had crossed the roadway below this window and crept into this quiet oblong room with their grievances, their calamities, their confessions? And had passed out again, each one contributing his little to complete the old man's knowledge and sharpen the edge of his wit? Then, if Mr. Haslitt was troubled, there was something in that letter, or some mission from it, which he himself in his novitiate had overlooked. He began to read it over again in his mind to the best of his recollection, but he had not got far before Mr. Haslitt put the letter down.
"Surely, sir," cried Jim, "it's an obvious case of blackmail."
Mr. Haslitt awoke with a little shake of his shoulders.
"Blackmail? Oh! that of course, Jim."
Mr. Haslitt got up and unlocked his safe. He took from it the two Waberski letters and brought them across the room to Jim. "Here's the evidence, as damning as anyone could wish."
Jim read the letters through and uttered a little cry of delight. "The rogue has delivered himself over to us."
"Yes," said Mr. Haslitt.
But to him, at all events, that was not enough; he was still looking through the lines of the letter for something beyond, which he could not find.
"Then what's troubling you?" asked Frobisher.
Mr. Haslitt took his stand upon the worn hearthrug with his back towards the fire. "This, Jim," and he began to expound. "In ninety-five of these cases out of a hundred, there is something else, something behind the actual charge, which isn't mentioned, but on which the blackmailer is really banking. As a rule it's some shameful little secret, some blot on the family honour, which any sort of public trial would bring to light. And there must be something of that kind here. The more preposterous Waberski's accusation is, the more certain it is that he knows something to the discredit of the Harlowe name, which any Harlowe would wish to keep dark. Only, I haven't an idea what the wretched thing can be!"
"It might be some trifle," Jim suggested, "which a crazy person like Waberski would exaggerate."
"Yes," Mr. Haslitt agreed. "That happens. A man brooding over imagined wrongs, and flighty and extravagant besides—yes, that might well be, Jim." Jeremy Haslitt spoke in a more cheerful voice. "Let us see exactly what we do know of the family," he said, and he pulled up a chair to face Jim Frobisher and the window. But he had not yet sat down in it, when there came a discreet knock upon the door, and a clerk entered to announce a visitor.
"Not yet," said Mr. Haslitt before the name of the visitor had been mentioned.
"Very good, sir," said the clerk, and he retired. The firm of Frobisher and Haslitt conducted its business in that way. It was the real thing as a firm of solicitors, and clients who didn't like its methods were very welcome to take their affairs to the attorney round the corner. Just as people who go to the real thing in the line of tailors must put up with the particular style in which he cuts their clothes.
Mr. Haslitt turned back to Jim. "Let us see what we know," he said, and he sat down in the chair.
CHAPTER 2 A CRY FOR HELP
"Simon Harlowe," he began, "was the owner of the famous Clos du Prince vineyards on the Côte d'Or to the east of Dijon. He had an estate in Norfolk, this big house, the Maison Grenelle in Dijon, and a villa at Monte Carlo. But he spent most of his time in Dijon, where at the age of forty-five he married a French lady, Jeanne-Marie Raviart. There was, I believe, quite a little romance about the affair. Jeanne-Marie was married and separated from her husband, and Simon Harlowe waited, I think, for ten years until the husband Raviart died."
Jim Frobisher moved quickly and Mr. Haslitt, who seemed to be reading of this history in the pattern of the carpet, looked up.
"Yes, I see what you mean," he said, replying to Jim's movement. "Yes, there might have been some sort of affair between those two before they were free to marry. But nowadays, my dear Jim! Opinion takes a more human view than it did in my youth. Besides, don't you see, this little secret, to be of any value to Boris Waberski, must be near enough to Betty Harlowe—I don't say to affect her if published, but to make Waberski think that she would hate to have it published. Now Betty Harlowe doesn't come into the picture at all until two years after Simon and Jeanne-Marie were married, when it became clear that they were not likely to have any children. No, the love-affairs of Simon Harlowe are sufficiently remote for us to leave them aside."
Jim Frobisher accepted the demolition of his idea with a flush of shame. "I was a fool to think of it," he said.
"Not a bit," replied Mr. Haslitt cheerfully. "Let us look at every possibility. That's the only way which will help us to get a glimpse of the truth. I resume, then. Simon Harlowe was a collector. Yes, he had a passion for collecting and a very catholic one. His one sitting-room at the Maison Grenelle was a perfect treasure-house, not only of beautiful things, but of out-of-the-way things too. He liked to live amongst them and do his work amongst them. His married life did not last long. For he died five years ago at the age of fifty-one."
Mr. Haslitt's eyes once more searched for recollections amongst the convolutions of the carpet.
"That's really about all I know of him. He was a pleasant fellow enough, but not very sociable. No, there's nothing to light a candle for us there, I am afraid."
Mr. Haslitt turned his thoughts to the widow.
"Jeanne-Marie Harlowe," he said. "It's extraordinary how little I know about her, now I come to count it up. Natural too, though. For she sold the Norfolk estate and has since passed her whole time between Monte Carlo and Dijon and—oh yes—a little summer-house on the Côte d'Or amongst her vineyards."
"She was left rich, I suppose?" Frobisher asked.
"Very well off, at all events," Mr. Haslitt replied. "The Clos du Prince Burgundy has a fine reputation, but there's not a great deal of it."
"Did she come to England ever?"
"Never," said Mr. Haslitt. "She was content, it seems, with Dijon, though to my mind the smaller provincial towns of France are dull enough to make one scream. However, she was used to it, and then her heart began to trouble her, and for the last two years she has been an invalid. There's nothing to help us there." And Mr. Haslitt looked across to Jim for confirmation.
"Nothing," said Jim.
"Then we are only left the child Betty Harlowe and—oh yes, your correspondent, your voluminous correspondent, Ann Upcott. Who is she, Jim? Where did she spring from? How does she find herself in the Maison Grenelle? Come, confess, young man," and Mr. Haslitt archly looked at his junior partner. "Why should Boris Waberski expect her support?"
Jim Frobisher threw his arms wide. "I haven't an idea," he said. "I have never seen her. I have never heard of her. I never knew of her existence until that letter came this morning with her name signed at the end of it."
Mr. Haslitt started up. He crossed the room to his table and, fixing his folding glasses on the bridge of his nose, he bent over the letter.
"But she writes to you, Jim," he objected. "'Dear Mr. Frobisher,' she writes. She doesn't address the firm at al!"; and he waited, looking at Jim, expecting him to withdraw his denial.
Jim, however, only shook his head.
"It's the most bewildering thing," he replied. "I can't make head or tail of it"; and Mr. Haslitt could not doubt now that he spoke the truth, so utterly and frankly baffled the young man was. "Why should Ann Upcott write to me? I have been asking myself that question for the last half-hour. And why didn't Betty Harlowe write to you, who have had her affairs in your care?"
"Ah!"
That last question helped Mr. Haslitt to an explanation. His face took a livelier expression.
"The answer to that is in Waberski's second, letter. Betty—she snap her fingers at his awkwardnesses. She doesn't take the charge seriously. She will have left it to the French notary to dispose of it. Yes—I think that makes Ann Upcott's letter to you intelligible, too. The ceremonies of the law in a foreign country would frighten a stranger, as this girl is apparently, more than they would Betty Harlowe, who has lived for four years in the midst of them. So she writes to the first name in the title of the firm, and writes to him as a man. That's it, Jim," and the old man rubbed his hands together in his satisfaction.
"A girl in terror wouldn't get any comfort out of writing to an abstraction. She wants to know that she's in touch with a real person. So she writes, 'Dear Mr. Frobisher.' That's it! You can take my word for it."
Mr. Haslitt walked back to his chair. But he did not sit down in it; he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out of the window over Frobisher's head. "But that doesn't bring us any nearer to finding out what is Boris Waberski's strong suit, does it? We haven't a clue to it," he said ruefully.
To both of the men, indeed, Mr. Haslitt's flat, unillumined narrative of facts, without a glimpse into the characters of any of the participants in the little drama, seemed the most unhelpful thing. Yet the whole truth was written there—the truth not only of Waberski's move, but of all the strange terrors and mysteries into which the younger of the two men was now to be plunged. Jim Frobisher was to recognize that, when, shaken to the soul, he resumed his work in the office. For it was interrupted now.
Mr. Haslitt, looking out of the window over his partner's head, saw a telegraph-boy come swinging across the square and hesitate in the roadway below. "I expect that's a telegram for us," he said, with the hopeful anticipation people in trouble have that something from outside will happen and set them right.
Jim turned round quickly. The boy was still upon the pavement examining the numbers of the houses.
"We ought to have a brass plate upon the door," said Jim with a touch of impatience; and Mr. Haslitt's eyebrows rose half the height of his forehead towards his thick white hair. He was really distressed by the Waberski incident, but this suggestion, and from a partner in the firm, shocked him like a sacrilege.
"My dear boy, what are you thinking of?" he expostulated. "I hope I am not one of those obstinate old fogies who refuse to march with the times. We have had, as you know, a telephone instrument recently installed in the junior clerks' office. I believe that I myself proposed it. But a brass plate upon the door! My dear Jim! Let us leave that to Harley Street and Southampton Row! But I see that telegram is for us."
The tiny Mercury with the shako and red cord to his uniform made up his mind and disappeared into the hall below. The telegram was brought upstairs and Mr. Haslitt tore it open. He stared at it blankly for a few seconds, then without a word, but with a very anxious look in his eyes, he handed it to Jim Frobisher.
Jim Frobisher read: Please, please, send someone to help me at once. The Prefect of Police has called in Hanaud, a great detective of the Sûreté in Paris. They must think me guilty.—BETTY HARLOWE.
The telegram fluttered from Jim's fingers to the floor. It was like a cry for help at night coming from a great distance.
"I must go, sir, by the night boat," he said.
"To be sure!" said Mr. Haslitt a little absently. Jim, however, had enthusiasm enough for both. His chivalry was fired, as is the way with lonely men, by the picture his imagination drew. The little girl, Betty Harlowe! What age was she? Twenty-one! Not a day more. She had been wandering with all the proud indifference of her sex and youth, until suddenly she found her feet caught in some trap set by a traitor, and looked about her; and terror came and with it a wild cry for help.
"Girls never notice danger signals," he said. "No, they walk blindly into the very heart of catastrophe." Who could tell what links of false and cunning evidence Boris Waberski had been hammering away at in the dark, to slip swiftly at the right moment over her wrist and ankle? And with that question he was seized with a great discouragement.
"We know very little of Criminal Procedure, even in our own country, in this office," he said regretfully.
"Happily," said Mr. Haslitt with some tartness. With him it was the Firm first and last. Messrs. Frobisher and Haslitt never went into the Criminal Courts. Litigation, indeed, even of the purest kind, was frowned upon. It is true there was a small special staff, under the leadership of an old managing clerk, tucked away upon an upper floor, like an unpresentable relation in a great house, which did a little of that kind of work. But it only did it for hereditary clients, and then as a favour.
"However," said Mr. Haslitt as he noticed Jim's discomfort, "I haven't a doubt, my boy, that you will be equal to whatever is wanted. But remember, there's something at the back of this which we here don't know."
Jim shifted his position rather abruptly. This cry of the old man was becoming parrot-like—a phrase, a formula. Jim was thinking of the girl in Dijon, and hearing her piteous cry for help. She was not "snapping her the fingers" now.
"It's a matter of common sense," Mr. Haslitt insisted. "Take a comparison. Bath, for instance, would never call in Scotland Yard over a case of this kind. There would have to be the certainty of a crime first, and then grave doubt as to who was the criminal. This is a case for an autopsy and the doctors. If they call in this man Hanaud"—and he stopped.
He picked the telegram up from the floor and read it through again.
"Yes—Hanaud," he repeated, his face clouding and growing bright and clouding again like a man catching at and just missing a very elusive recollection. He gave up the pursuit in the end. "Well, Jim, you had better take the two letters of Waberski, and Ann Upcott's three-volume novel, and Betty's telegram"—he gathered the papers together and enclosed them in a long envelope—"and I shall expect you back again with a smiling face in a very few days. I should like to see our little Boris when he is asked to explain those letters."
Mr, Haslitt gave the envelope to Jim and rang his bell. "There is someone waiting to see me, I think," he said to the clerk who answered it.
The clerk named a great landowner, who had been kicking his heels during the last half-hour in an undusted waiting-room with a few mouldy old law books in a battered glass case to keep him company.
"You can show him in now," said Mr. Haslitt as Jim retired to his own office; and when the great landowner entered, he merely welcomed him with a reproach.
"You didn't make an appointment, did you?" he said.
But all through that interview, though his advice was just the precise, clear advice for which the firm was quietly famous, Mr. Haslitt's mind was still playing hide-and-seek with a memory, catching glimpses of the fringes of its skirt as it gleamed and vanished.
"Memory is a woman," he said to himself. "If I don't run after her she will come of her own accord."
But he was in the common case of men with women: he could not but run after her. Towards the end of the interview, however, his shoulders and head moved with a little jerk and he wrote a word down on a slip of paper. As soon as his client had gone, he wrote a note and sent it off by a messenger who had orders to wait for an answer. The messenger returned within the hour and Mr. Haslitt hurried to Jim Frobisher's office.
Jim had just finished handing over his affairs to various clerks and was locking up the drawers of his desk.
"Jim, I have remembered where I have heard the name of this man Hanaud before. You have met Julius Ricardo? He's one of our clients."
"Yes," said Frobisher. "I remember him—a rather finicking person in Grosvenor Square."
"That's the man. He's a friend of Hanaud and absurdly proud of the friendship. He and Hanaud were somehow mixed up in a rather scandalous crime some time ago—at Aix-les-Bains, I think. Well, Ricardo will give you a letter of introduction to him, and tell you something about him, if you will go round to Grosvenor Square at five this afternoon."
"Capital!" said Jim Frobisher.
He kept the appointment, and was told how he must expect to be awed at one moment, leaped upon unpleasantly at the next, ridiculed at a third, and treated with great courtesy and friendship at the fourth. Jim discounted Mr. Ricardo's enthusiasm, but he got the letter and crossed the Channel that night. On the journey it occurred to him that if Hanaud was a man of such high mark, he would not be free, even at an urgent call, to pack his bags and leave for the provinces in an instant. Jim broke his journey, therefore, at Paris, and in the course of the morning found his way to the direction of the Sûreté on the Quai de l'Horloge just behind the Palais de Justice.
"Monsieur Hanaud?" he asked eagerly, and the porter took his card and his letter of introduction. The great man was still in Paris, then, he thought with relief. He was taken to a long dark corridor, lit with electric globes even on that bright morning of early summer. There he rubbed elbows with malefactors and gendarmes for half an hour whilst his confidence in himself ebbed away. Then a bell rang and a policeman in plain clothes went up to him. One side of the corridor was lined with a row of doors.
"It is for you, sir," said the policeman, and he led Frobisher to one of the doors and opened it, and stood aside. Frobisher straightened his shoulders and marched in.
CHAPTER 3 SERVANTS OF CHANCE
Frobisher found himself at one end of an oblong room. Opposite to him a couple of windows looked across the shining river to the big Théâtre du Châtelet. On his left hand was a great table with a few neatly arranged piles of papers, at which a big, rather heavily built man was sitting. Frobisher looked at that man as a novice in a duelling held might look at the master swordsman whom he was committed to fight, with a little shock of surprise that after all he appeared to be just like other men. Hanaud, on his side, could not have been said to have looked at Frobisher at all; yet when he spoke it was obvious that somehow he had looked and to very good purpose. He rose with a little bow and apologized.
"I have kept you waiting, Mr. Frobisher. My dear friend Mr. Ricardo did not mention your object in his letter. I had the idea that you came with the usual wish to see something of our underworld. Now that I see you, I recognize your wish is more serious."
Hanaud was a man of middle age with a head of thick dark hair, and the round face and shaven chin of a comedian. A pair of remarkably light eyes under rather heavy lids alone gave a significance to him, at all events when seen for the first time in a mood of good-will. He pointed to a chair.
"Will you take a seat? I will tell you, Mr. Frobisher, I have a very soft place in my heart for Mr. Ricardo, and a friend of his. These are words, however. What can I do?"
Jim Frobisher laid down his hat and stick upon a side-table and took the chair in front of Hanaud's table.
"I am partner in a firm of lawyers which looks after the English interests of a family in Dijon," he said, and he saw all life and expression smoothed out of Hanaud's face. A moment ago he had been in the company of a genial and friendly companion; now he was looking at a Chinaman.
"Yes?" said Hanaud.
"The family has the name of Harlowe," Jim continued.
"Oho!" said Hanaud.
The ejaculation had no surprise in it, and hardly any interest. Jim, however, persisted.
"And the surviving member of it, a girl of twenty, Betty Harlowe, has been charged with murder by a Russian who is connected with the family by marriage—Boris Waberski."
"Aha!" said Hanaud. "And why do you come to me, Mr. Frobisher?"
Jim stared at the detective. The reason of his coming was obvious.
And yet—he was no longer sure of his ground. Hanaud had pulled open a drawer in his table and was beginning to put away in it one of his files.
"Yes?" he said, as who should say, "I am listening."
"Well, perhaps I am under a mistake," said Jim. "But my firm has been informed that you, Monsieur Hanaud, are in charge of the case," he said, and Hanaud's movements were at once arrested. He sat with the file poised on the palm of his hand as though he was weighing it, extraordinarily still; and Jim had a swift impression that he was more than disconcerted. Then Hanaud put the file into the drawer and closed the drawer softly. As softly he spoke, but in a sleek voice which to Frobisher's ears had a note in it which was actually alarming.
"So you have been informed of that, Mr. Frobisher! And in London! And—yes—this is only Wednesday! News travels very quickly nowadays, to be sure! Well, your firm is correctly informed. I congratulate you. A point is scored by you."
Jim Frobisher was quick to seize upon that word. He had thought out upon his journey in what spirit he might most usefully approach the detective. Hanaud's bitter little remark gave him the very opening which he needed.
"But, Monsieur Hanaud, I don't take that point of view at all," he argued earnestly. "I am happy to believe that there is going to be no antagonism between us. For, if there were, I should assuredly get the worst of it. No! I am certain that the one wish you have in this matter is to get at the truth. Whilst my wish is that you should just look upon me as a very second-rate colleague who by good fortune can give you a little help."
A smile nickered across Hanaud's face and restored it to some of its geniality.
"It has always been a good rule to lay it on with a trowel," he observed. "Now, what kind of help, Mr. Frobisher?"
"This kind of help, Monsieur Hanaud. Two letters from Boris Waberski demanding money, the second one with threats. Both were received by my firm before he brought this charge, and both of course remain unanswered."
He took the letters from the long envelope and handed them across the table to Hanaud, who read them through slowly, mentally translating the phrases into French as he read. Frobisher watched his face for some expression of relief or satisfaction. But to his utter disappointment no such change came; and it was with a deprecating and almost regretful air that Hanaud turned to him in the end.
"Yes—no doubt these two letters have a certain importance. But we mustn't exaggerate it. The case is very difficult."
"Difficult!" cried Jim in exasperation. He seemed to be hammering and hammering in vain against some thick wall of stupidity. Yet this man in front of him wasn't stupid.
"I can't understand it!" he exclaimed. "Here's the clearest instance of blackmail that I can imagine—"
"Blackmail's an ugly word, Mr. Frobisher," Hanaud warned him.
"And blackmail's an ugly thing," said Jim. "Come, Monsieur Hanaud, Boris Waberski lives in France. You will know something about him. You will have a dossier."
Hanaud pounced upon the word with a little whoop of delight, his face broke into smiles, he shook a forefinger gleefully at his visitor.
"Ah, ah, ah, ah! A dossier! Yes, I was waiting for that word! , The great legend of the dossiers! You have that charming belief too, Mr. Frobisher. France and her dossiers! Yes! If her coal-mines fail her, she can always keep warm by burning her dossiers! The moment you land for the first time at Calais—boum! your dossier begins, eh? You travel to Paris—so! You dine at the Ritz Hôtel—so! Afterwards you go where you ought not to go—so-o-o! And you go back late to the hotel very uncomfortable because you are quite sure that somewhere in the still night six little officials with black beards and green-shaded lamps are writing it all down in your dossier. But—wait!"
He suddenly rose from his chair with his finger to his lips, and his eyes opened wide. Never was a man so mysterious, so important in his mystery. He stole on tiptoe, with a lightness of step amazing in so bulky a man, to the door. Noiselessly and very slowly, with an alert, bright eye cocked at Frobisher like a bird's, he turned the handle. Then he jerked the door swiftly inwards towards him. It was the classic detection of the eavesdropper, seen in a hundred comedies and farces; and carried out with so excellent a mimicry that Jim, even in this office of the Sûreté, almost expected to see a flustered chambermaid sprawl heavily forward on her knees. He saw nothing, however, but a grimy corridor lit with artificial light in which men were patiently waiting. Hanaud closed the door again, with an air of intense relief.
"The Prime Minister had not overheard us. We are safe," he hissed, and he crept back to Frobisher's side. He stooped and whispered in the ear of that bewildered man: "I can tell you about those dossiers. They are for nine-tenths the gossip of the concierge translated into the language of a policeman who thinks that everybody had better be in prison. Thus, the concierge says: 'This Mr. Frobisher—on Tuesday he came home at one in the morning and on Thursday at three in fancy dress'; and in the policeman's report it becomes, 'Mr. Frobisher is of a loose and excessive life.' And that goes into your dossier—yes, my friend, just so! But here in the Sûreté—never breathe a word of it, or you ruin me!—here we are like your Miss Betty Harlowe, 'we snap us the fingers at those dossiers.'"
Jim Frobisher's mind was of the deliberate order. To change from one mood to another required a progression of ideas. He hardly knew for the moment whether he was upon his head or his heels. A minute ago Hanaud had been the grave agent of Justice; without a hint he had leaped to buffoonery, and with a huge enjoyment. He had become half urchin, half clown. Jim could almost hear the bells of his cap still tinkling. He simply stared, and Hanaud with a rueful smile resumed his seat.
"If we work together at Dijon, Monsieur Frobisher," he said with whimsical regret, "I shall not enjoy myself as I did with my dear little friend Mr. Ricardo at Aix. No, indeed! Had I made this little pantomime for him, he would have sat with the eyes popping out of his head. He would have whispered, 'The Prime Minister comes in the morning to spy outside your door—oh!' and he would have been thrilled to the marrow of his bones. But you—you look at me all cold and stony, and you say to yourself, 'This Hanaud, he is a comic!'"
"No," said Jim earnestly, and Hanaud interrupted the protest with a laugh.
"It does not matter."
"I am glad," said Jim. "For you just now said something which I am very anxious you should not withdraw. You held me out a hope that we should work together."
Hanaud leaned forward with his elbows on his desk. "Listen," he said genially. "You have been frank and loyal with me. So I relieve your mind. This Waberski affair—the Prefect at Dijon does not take it very seriously; neither do I here. It is, of course, a charge of murder, and that has to be examined with care."
"Of course."
"And equally, of course, there is some little thing behind it," Hanaud continued, surprising Frobisher with the very words which Mr. Haslitt had used the day before, though the one spoke in English and the other in French. "As a lawyer you will know that. Some little unpleasant fact which is best kept to ourselves. But it is a simple affair, and with these two letters you have brought me, simpler than ever. We shall ask Waberski to explain these letters and some other things too, if he can. He is a type, that Boris Waberski! The body of Madame Harlowe will be exhumed today and the evidence of the doctors taken, and afterwards, no doubt, the case will be dismissed and you can deal with Waberski as you please."
"And that little secret?" asked Jim.
Hanaud shrugged his shoulders.
"No doubt it will come to light. But what does that matter if it only comes to light in the office of the examining magistrate, and does not pass beyond the door?"
"Nothing at all," Jim agreed.
"You will see. We are not so alarming after all, and your little client can put her pretty head upon the pillow without any fear that an injustice will be done to her."
"Thank you, Monsieur Hanaud!" Jim Frobisher cried warmly. He was conscious of so great a relief that he himself was surprised by it. He had been quite captured by his pity for that unknown girl in the big house, set upon by a crazy rascal and with no champion but another girl of her own years. "Yes, this is good news to me."
But he had hardly finished speaking before a doubt crept into his mind as to the sincerity of the man sitting opposite to him. Jim did not mean to be played and landed like a silly fish, however inexperienced he might be. He looked at Hanaud and wondered. Was this present geniality of his any less assumed than his other moods? Jim was unsettled in his estimate of the detective. One moment a judge, and rather implacable, now an urchin, now a friend! Which was travesty and which truth? Luckily there was a test question which Mr. Haslitt had put only yesterday as he looked out from the window across Russell Square. Jim now repeated it.
"The affair is simple, you say?"
"Of the simplest."
"Then how comes it, Monsieur Hanaud, that the examining judge at Dijon still finds it necessary to call in to his assistance one of the chiefs of the Sûreté in Paris?"
The question was obviously expected, and no less obviously difficult to answer. Hanaud nodded his head once or twice.
"Yes," he said, and again "Yes," like a man in doubt. He looked at Jim with appraising eyes. Then with a rush, "I shall tell you everything, and when I have told you, you will give me your word that you will not betray my confidence to anyone in this world. For this is serious."
Jim could not doubt Hanaud's sincerity at this moment, nor his friendliness. They shone in the man like a strong flame.
"I give you my word now," he said, and he reached out his hand across the table. Hanaud shook it. "I can talk to you freely, then," he answered, and he produced a little blue bundle of very black cigarettes. "You shall smoke."
The two men lit their cigarettes and through the blue cloud Hanaud explained: "I go really to Dijon on quite another matter. This Waberski affair, it is a pretence! The examining Judge who calls me in—see, now, you have a phrase for him," and Hanaud proudly dropped into English more or less. "He excuse his face! Yes, that is your expressive idiom. He excuse his face, and you will see, my friend, that it needs a lot of excusing, that face of his, yes. Now listen! I get hot when I think of that examining judge."
He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and, setting his sentence in order, resumed in French.
"The little towns, my friend, where life is not very gay and people have the time to be interested in the affairs of their neighbours, have their own crimes, and perhaps the most pernicious of them all is the crime of anonymous letters. Suddenly out of a clear sky they will come like a pestilence, full of vile charges difficult to refute and—who knows?—sometimes perhaps true. For a while these abominations flow into the letter-boxes and not a word is said. If money is demanded, money is paid. If it is only sheer wickedness which drives that unknown pen, those who are lashed by it none the less hold their tongues. But each one begins to suspect his neighbour. The social life of the town is poisoned. A great canopy of terror hangs over it, until the postman's knock, a thing so welcome in the sane life of every day, becomes a thing to shiver at, and in the end dreadful things happen."
So grave and quiet was the tone which Hanaud used that Jim himself shivered, even in this room whence he could see the sunlight sparkling on the river and hear the pleasant murmur of the Paris streets. Above that murmur he heard the sharp knock of the postman upon the door. He saw a white face grow whiter still and eyes grow haggard with despair.
"Such a plague has descended upon Dijon," Hanaud continued. "For more than a year it has raged. The police would not apply to Paris for help. No, they did not need help, they would solve this pretty problem for themselves. Yes, but the letters go on and the citizens complain. The police say, 'Hush! The examining magistrate, he has a clue. Give him time!' But the letters still go on. Then after a year comes this godsend of the Waberski affair. At once the Prefect of Police and the magistrate put their heads together. 'We will send for Hanaud over this simple affair, and he will find for us the author of the anonymous letters. We will send for him very privately, and if anyone recognizes him in the street and cries "There is Hanaud," we can say he is investigating the Waberski affair. Thus the writer of the letters will not be alarmed and we—we excuse our faces.' Yes," concluded Hanaud heatedly, "but they should have sent for me a year ago. They have lost a year."
"And during that year the dreadful things have happened?" asked Jim.
Hanaud nodded angrily. "An old, lonely man who lunches at the hotel and takes his coffee at the Grande Taverne and does no harm to anyone, he flings himself in front of the Mediterranean express and is cut to pieces. A pair of lovers shoot themselves in the Forfit des Moissonieres. A young girl comes home from a ball; she says good night to her friends gaily on the doorstep of her house, and in the morning she is found hanging in her ball dress from a rivet in the wall of her bedroom, whilst in the hearth there are the burnt fragments of one of these letters. How many had she received, that poor girl, before this last one drove her to this madness? Ah, the magistrate. Did I not tell you? He has need to excuse his face."
Hanaud opened a drawer in his desk and took from it a green cover. "See, here are two of those precious letters," and removing two typewritten sheets from the cover he handed them to Frobisher. "Yes," he added, as he saw the disgust on the reader's face, "those do not make a nice sauce for your breakfast, do they?"
"They are abominable," said Jim. "I wouldn't have believed—"He broke off with a little cry.
"One moment, Monsieur Hanaud!" He bent his head again over the sheets of paper, comparing them, scrutinizing each sentence. No, there were only the two errors which he had noticed at once. But what errors they were! To anyone, at all events, with eyes to see and some luck in the matter of experience. Why, they limited the area of search at once!
"Monsieur Hanaud, I can give you some more help," he cried enthusiastically. He did not notice the broad grin of delight which suddenly transfigured the detective's face. "Help which may lead you very quickly to the writer of these letters."
"You can?" Hanaud exclaimed. "Give it to me, my young friend. Do not keep me shaking in excitement. And do not—oh! do not tell me that you have discovered that the letters were typed upon a Corona machine. For that we know already."
