‘He’s well inside. And he stays there till the cheque matures-there’s enough food and water in the cellar to last him a week.’
‘Did you get him?’ asked the bearded Russian.
‘Get him! He was easy,’ said the other scornfully. ‘Now, you boys and girls, skip, and skip quick! I’ve got a letter from this guy to his bank manager, telling him to-’ he consulted the letter and quoted-’”to cash the attached cheque for my friend Mr. Arthur Lomer.’”
There was a murmur of approval from the troupe.
‘The aeroplane’s gone back, I suppose?’
The man in the leather coat nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I only hired it for the afternoon.’
‘Well, you can get back too. Ray and Al, you go to Paris and take the C.P. boat from Havre. Slicky, you get those whiskers off and leave honest from Liverpool. Pauline and Aggie will make Genoa, and we’ll meet at Leoni’s on the fourteenth of next month and cut the stuff all ways!’
Two days later Mr. Art Lomer walked into the noble offices of the Northern Commercial Bank and sought an interview with the manager. That gentleman read the letter, examined the cheque and touched a bell.
‘It’s a mighty big sum,’ said Mr. Lomer, in an almost awestricken voice.
The manager smiled. ‘We cash fairly large cheques here,’ he said, and, to the clerk who came at his summons: ‘Mr. Lomer would like as much of this in American currency as possible. How did you leave Mr. Staffen?’
‘Why, Bertie and I have been in Paris over that new company of mine,’ said Lomer. ‘My! it’s difficult to finance Canadian industries in this country, Mr. Soames, but we’ve made a mighty fine deal in Paris.’
He chatted on purely commercial topics until the clerk returned and laid a heap of bills and banknotes on the table. Mr. Lomer produced a wallet, enclosed the money securely, shook hands with the manager and walked out into the general office. And then he stopped, for Mr. J.G. Reeder stood squarely in his path.
‘Pay-day for the troupe, Mr. Lomer-or do you call it “treasury”? My theatrical glossary is rather rusty.’
‘Why, Mr. Reeder,’ stammered Art, ‘glad to see you, but I’m rather busy just now-’
‘What do you think has happened to our dear friend, Mr. Bertie Claude Staffen?’ asked Reeder anxiously.
‘Why, he’s in Paris.’
‘So soon!’ murmured Reeder. ‘And the police only took him out of your suburban cellar an hour ago! How wonderful are our modern systems of transportation! Marlow one minute, Paris the next, and Moscow, let us say, the next.’
Art hesitated no longer. He dashed past, thrusting the detective aside, and flew for the door. He was so annoyed that the two men who were waiting for him had the greatest difficulty in putting the handcuffs on his wrists.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr. Reeder to his chief, ‘Art always travels with his troupe. The invisibility of the troupe was to me a matter for grave suspicion, and of course I’ve had the house under observation ever since Mr. Staffen disappeared. It is not my business, of course,’ he said apologetically, ‘and really I should not have interfered. Only, as I have often explained to you, the curious workings of my mind –’
Chapter 4
The Stealer of Marble
Margaret Belman’s chiefest claim to Mr. Reeder’s notice was that she lived in the Brockley Road, some few doors from his own establishment. He did not know her name, being wholly incurious about law-abiding folk, but he was aware that she was pretty, that her complexion was that pink and white which is seldom seen away from a magazine cover. She dressed well, and if there was one thing that he noted about her more than any other, it was that she walked and carried herself with a certain grace that was especially pleasing to a man of aesthetic predilections.
He had, on occasions, walked behind her and before her, and had ridden on the same street car with her to Westminster Bridge. She invariably descended at the corner of the Embankment, and was as invariably met by a goodlooking young man and walked away with him. The presence of that young man was a source of passive satisfaction to Mr. Reeder, for no particular reason, unless it was that he had a tidy mind, and preferred a rose when it had a background of fern and grew uneasy at the sight of a saucerless cup.
It did not occur to him that he was an object of interest and curiosity to Miss Belman.
‘That was Mr. Reeder-he has something to do with the police, I think,’ she said.
‘Mr. J.G. Reeder?’
Roy Master looked back with interest at the middle-aged man scampering fearfully across the road, his unusual hat on the back of his head, his umbrella over his shoulder like a cavalryman’s sword.
‘Good Lord! I never dreamt he was like that.’
‘Who is he?’ she asked, distracted from her own problem.
‘Reeder? He’s in the Public Prosecutor’s Department, a sort of a detective-there was a case the other week where he gave evidence. He used to be with the Bank of England-’
Suddenly she stopped, and he looked at her in surprise.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want you to go any farther, Roy,’ she said. ‘Mr. Telfer saw me with you yesterday, and he’s quite unpleasant about it.’
‘Telfer?’ said the young man indignantly. That little worm! What did he say?’
‘Nothing very much,’ she replied, but from her tone he gathered that the ‘nothing very much’ had been a little disturbing.
‘I am leaving Telfers,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘It is a good job, and I shall never get another like it-I mean, so far as the pay is concerned.’
Roy Master did not attempt to conceal his satisfaction.
‘I’m jolly glad,’ he said vigorously. ‘I can’t imagine how you’ve endured that boudoir atmosphere so long. What did he say?’ he asked again, and, before she could answer: ‘Anyway, Telfers are shaky. There are all sorts of queer rumours about them in the City.’
‘But I thought it was a very rich corporation!’ she said in astonishment.
He shook his head.
‘It was-but they have been doing lunatic things-what can you expect when a halfwitted weakling like Sidney Telfer is at the head of affairs? They underwrote three concerns last year that no brokerage business would have touched with a barge-pole, and they had to take up the shares. One was a lost treasure company to raise a Spanish galleon that sank three hundred years ago! But what really did happen yesterday morning?’
‘I will tell you tonight,’ she said, and made her hasty adieux.
Mr. Sidney Telfer had arrived when she went into a room which, in its luxurious appointments, its soft carpet and dainty etceteras, was not wholly undeserving of Roy Masters’ description.
The head of Telfers Consolidated seldom visited his main office on Threadneedle Street. The atmosphere of the place, he said, depressed him; it was all so horrid and sordid and rough. The founder of the firm, his grandfather, had died ten years before Sidney had been born, leaving the business to a son, a chronic invalid, who had died a few weeks after Sidney first saw the light. In the hands of trustees the business