‘I’m glad to hear it.’
Then he suddenly released my arm.
‘I see Arbuthnot has gone abroad.’
There was a coldness in his voice to which I hastened to respond.
‘So I saw in the papers,’ I said carelessly. ‘He’s a hopeless fellow. A pity, for he’s able enough; but he won’t stay put, and that makes him pretty well useless.’
‘Do you care much for Arbuthnot?’
‘I used to,’ I replied shamelessly. ‘But till the other day I hadn’t seen him for years, and I must say he has grown very queer. Didn’t you think he behaved oddly at the Thursday dinner?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wasn’t much taken by him. He’s too infernally un-English. I don’t know how he got it, but there seems to be a touch of the shrill Levantine in him. Compare him with those fellows tonight. Even the Frenchmen—even Victor, though he’s an American and a Jew—are more our own way of thinking.’
We were at the Club door, and as I stopped he looked me full in the face.
‘If I were you I wouldn’t have much to do with Arbuthnot,’ he said, and his tone was a command. I grinned sheepishly, but my fingers itched for his ears.
I went to bed fuming. This new possessory attitude, this hint of nigger-driving, had suddenly made me hate Medina. I had been unable to set down the hypnotist business clearly to his account, and, even if I had been certain, I was inclined to think it only the impertinent liberty of a faddist—a thing which I hotly resented but which did not arouse my serious dislike. But now to feel that he claimed me as his man, because he thought, no doubt, that he had established some unholy power over me that fairly broke my temper. And his abuse of Sandy put the lid on it—abuse to which I had been shamefully compelled to assent. Levantine, by gad! I swore that Sandy and I would make him swallow that word before he was very much older. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. By this time I was perfectly willing to believe that Medina was up to any infamy, and I was resolved that in him and him alone lay the key to the riddle of the three hostages. But all the time I was miserably conscious that if I suggested such an idea to anyone except Sandy I should be set down as a lunatic. I could see that the man’s repute was as solidly planted as the British Constitution.
Next morning I went to see Macgillivray. I explained that I had not been idle, that I had been pursuing lines of my own, which I thought more hopeful than his suggestion of getting alongside the Shropshire squire. I said I had nothing as yet to report, and that I didn’t propose to give him the faintest notion of what I was after till I had secured some results. But I wanted his help, and I wanted his very best men.
‘Glad to see you’ve got busy, Dick,’ he said ‘I await your commands.’
‘I want a house watched. No. 4 Palmyra Square, up in North London. So far as I know it is occupied by a woman, who purports to be a Swedish masseuse and calls herself Madame Breda, one or more maids, and an odd-looking little girl. I want you to have a close record kept of the people who go there, and I want especially to know who exactly are the inmates of the house and who are the frequent visitors. It must be done very cautiously for the people must have no suspicion that they are being spied on.’
He wrote down the details.
‘Also I want you to find out the antecedents of Medina’s butler.’
Re whistled. ‘Medina. Dominick Medina, you mean?’
‘Yes. Oh, I’m not suspecting him.’ We both laughed, as if at a good joke. ‘But I should like to hear something about his butler, for reasons which I’m not yet prepared to give you. He answers to the name of Odell, and has the appearance of an inferior prize fighter. Find out all you can about his past, and it mightn’t be a bad plan to have him shadowed. You know Medina’s house in Hill Street. But for Heaven’s sake, let it be done tactfully.’
‘I’ll see to that for my own sake. I don’t want headlines in the evening papers—“House of Member of Parliament Watched. Another Police Muddle.”’
‘Also, could you put together all you can get about Medina? It might give me a line on Odell.’
‘Dick,’ he said solemnly, ‘are you growing fantastic?’
‘Not a bit of it. You don’t imagine I’m ass enough to think there’s anything shady about Medina. He and I have become bosom friends and I like him enormously. Everybody swears by him, and so do I. But I have my doubts about Mr Odell, and I would like to know just how and where Medina picked him up. He’s not the ordinary stamp of butler.’ It seemed to me very important to let no one but Sandy into the Medina business at present, for our chance lay in his complete confidence that all men thought well of him.
‘Right,’ said Macgillivray. ‘It shall be done. Go your own way, Dick. I won’t attempt to dictate to you. But remember that the thing is desperately serious, and that the days are slipping past. We’re in April now, and you have only till midsummer to save three innocent lives.
I left his office feeling very solemn, for I had suddenly a consciousness of the shortness of time and the magnitude of the job which I had not yet properly begun. I cudgelled my brains to think of my next step. In a few days I should again visit Dr Newhover, but there was not likely to be much assistance there. He might send me back to Palmyra Square, or I might try to make an appointment with Madame Breda myself, inventing some new ailment; but I would only find the same old business, which would get me no further forward. As I viewed it, the Newhover and Palmyra Square episodes had been used only to test my submission to Medina’s influence, and it was to Medina that I must look for further light. It was a maddening job to sit and wait and tick off the precious days on the calendar, and I longed to consult with Sandy. I took to going down to Fosse for the day, for the sight of Mary and Peter John somehow quieted my mind and fixed my resolution. It was a positive relief when at the end of the week Medina rang me up and asked me to luncheon.
We lunched at his house, which, seen on a bright April day’ was a wonderful treasury of beautiful things. It was not the kind of house I fancied myself, being too full of museum pieces, and all the furniture strictly correct according to period. I like rooms in which there is a pleasant jumble of things, and which look as if homely people had lived in them for generations. The dining-room was panelled in white, with a Vandyck above the mantelpiece and a set. of gorgeous eighteenth-century prints on the walls. At the excellent meal Medina as usual drank water, while I obediently sampled an old hock, an older port, and a most prehistoric brandy. Odell was in attendance, and I had a good look at him—his oddly-shaped head, his flat sallow face, the bunches of black eyebrow above his beady eyes. I calculated that if I saw him again I would not fail to recognizee him.’ We never went near the library on the upper floor, but sat after luncheon in a little smoking-room at the back of the hall, which held my host’s rods and guns in glass cabinets, and one or two fine beads of deer and ibex.
I had made up my mind, as I walked to Hill Street, that I was going to convince Medina once and for all of the abjectness of my surrender. He should have proof that I was clay in his hands, for only that way would he fully reveal himself. I detested the job, and as I walked through the pleasant crisp noontide I reflected with bitterness that I might have been fishing for salmon in Scotland, or, better still, cantering with Mary over the Cotswold downs.
All through luncheon I kept my eyes fixed on him like a dog’s on his master. Several times I wondered if I were not overdoing it, but he seemed to accept my homage as quite natural. I had thought when I first met him that the man had no vanity; now I saw that he had mountains of it, that he was all vanity, and that his public modesty was only a cloak to set off his immense private conceit. He unbent himself, his whole mind was in undress, and behind the veneer of good-fellowship I seemed to see a very cold arrogant soul. Nothing worse, though that was bad enough. He was too proud to boast in words, but his whole attitude was one long brag. He was cynical about everything, except, as I suspected, his private self-worship. The thing would have been monstrously