There was a tap at the door, and the unpleasant but smiling face of Joe the Runner appeared. He occupied an attic bedroom, and was a source of worry to his landlady. Once he had been in the newspaper business, running evening editions, and the name stuck to him. He had long ceased to be associated with the Press, save as a subject for its crime reporters, but this the Willetts did not know.
‘Just thought I’d pop in and see you before I went, miss,’ he said. ‘I’m going off into the country to do a bit of work for a gentleman. About that dollar, miss, that you lent me last week.’
Angela looked uncomfortable.
‘Oh, please don’t mention it,’ she said hastily.
‘I haven’t forgotten it,’ said Joe, nodding solemnly. ‘The minute I come back, I’ll bring it to you.’ And with a large and sinister grin he vanished.
‘I lent him the money because he couldn’t pay his rent,’ said Angela penitently, but her husband waved her extravagance away.
‘Let’s talk about Christmas dinner. What about sausages…!’
‘If Uncle Peter—’ she began.
‘Let’s talk about sausages,’ said Jack gently.
Foodstuffs were also the topic of conversation between Lord Carfane and Prince Riminoff as they sat at lunch at the Ritz-Carlton. Lord Carfane emphasized his remarks with a very long cigar.
‘I always keep up the old English custom of distributing food to the poor,’ he said. ‘Every family on my estate on Christmas Eve has a turkey from my farm. All my workers,’ he corrected himself carefully, ‘except old Timmins. Old Timmins has been very rude to me, and I have had to sack him. All the tenants assemble in the great hall… But you’ll see that for yourself, Prince.’
Prince Riminoff nodded gravely and tugged at his short beard. That beard had taken Harry the Valet five months to grow, and it was so creditable a production that he had passed Chief Inspector Mailing in the vestibule of the Ritz-Carlton and had not been recognised.
Very skilfully he switched the conversation into more profitable channels.
‘I do hope, my dear Lord Carfane, that you have not betrayed my identity to your guests?’
Ferdie smiled.
‘I am not quite a fool,’ he said, and meant it.
‘A great deal of the jewellery that I am disposing of, and of which you have seen specimens, is not mine. I think I have made that clear. I am acting for several of my unfortunate compatriots, and frankly it would be embarrassing for me if it leaked out that I was the vendor.’
Ferdie nodded. He suspected that a great deal of the property which he was to acquire had been secured by underhand means. He more than suspected that, for all his princely origin, his companion was not too honest.
‘That is why I have asked that the money you pay should be in American currency. By the way, have you made that provision?’ Lord Carfane nodded. ‘And, of course, I shall not ask you to pay a single dollar until you are satisfied that the property is worth what I ask. It is in fact worth three times as much.’
Lord Carfane was nothing if not frank.
‘Now, I’m going to tell you, my dear chap,’ he said, ‘there will only be one person at Carfane Hall who will know anything whatever about this little transaction of ours. He’s an expert jeweller. He is an authority, and he will examine every piece and price it before I part with a single bob!’
His Highness heartily, but gravely, approved of this act of precaution.
Lord Carfane had met his companion a few weeks before in a highly respectable night club, the introduction having been effected through the medium of a very beautiful lady who had accidentally spilt a glass of champagne over his lordship’s dress trousers. She was so lovely a personage that Lord Carfane did no more than smile graciously, and a few minutes later was introduced to her sedate and imposing presence.
Harry the Valet invariably secured his introductions by this method. Usually he worked with Molly Kien, and paid her a hundred pounds for every introduction.
He spoke no more of jewels smuggled from Russia and offered at ridiculous prices, but talked sorrowfully of the misfortunes of his country; spoke easily of his estates in the Crimea and his mines in the Urals, now, alas! in Bolshevik hands. Lord Carfane was immensely entertained.
On the following evening, Harry drove down in Lord Carfane’s limousine to Berkshire, and was introduced to the glories of Carfane Hall; to the great banqueting chamber with its high raftered roof; to the white-tiled larder where petrified turkeys hung in rows, each grisly corpse decorated with a gay rosette…
‘My tenants come in on Christmas Eve,’ explained Lord Carfane,’ and my butler presents each one with a turkey and a small bag of groceries—’
‘An old feudal custom?’ suggested the Prince gravely.
Lord Carfane agreed with equal gravity.
The Prince had brought with him a large, heavily locked and strapped handbag, which had been deposited in the safe, which was the most conspicuous feature of Ferdie’s library. The expert jeweller was arriving on the morrow, and his lordship looked forward, with a sense of pleasurable anticipation, to a day which would yield him 400 per cent profit on a considerable outlay.
‘Yes,’ said Ferdie at dinner that night, ‘I prefer a combination safe. One can lose keys, but not if they’re here’—he tapped his narrow forehead and smiled.
Harry the Valet agreed. One of his greatest charms was his complete agreement with anything anybody said or did or thought.
Whilst he dwelt in luxury in the halls of the great, his unhappy confederate had a more painful task. Joe the Runner had collected from a garage a small, light trolley. It was not beautiful to look upon, but it was fast, and under its covered tilt, beneath sacks and amidst baskets, a man making a swift getaway might lie concealed and be carried to London without exciting attention.
Joe made a leisurely way into Berkshire and came to the rendezvous at the precise minute he had been ordered. It was a narrow lane at the termination of a footpath leading across the Carfane estate to the house. It was a cold, blue- fingered, red-nosed job, and for three hours he sat and shivered. And then, coming across the field in the blue dusk, he saw an old man staggering, carrying a rush basket in one hand and an indescribable something in the other. He was evidently in a hurry, this ancient. From time to time he looked back over his shoulder as though he expected pursuit. Breathlessly, he mounted the stile and fell over rather than surmounted it.
Stumbling to his feet, he saw Joe sitting at the wheel of the van, and gaped at him toothlessly, his eyes wide with horror. Joe the Runner recognised the signs.
‘What have you been doin’?’ he demanded sternly.
For a few minutes the breathless old man could not speak; blinked fearfully at his interrogator; and then:
‘He’s fired me,’ he croaked. ‘Wouldn’t give me no turkey or nothin’, so I went up to the ‘All and pinched one.’
‘Oh!’ said Joe judiciously.
It was not an unpleasant sensation, sitting in judgment on a fellow creature.
‘There was such a bother and a fuss and shouting going on…what with the safe bein’ found broke open, and that foreign man being caught, that nobody seed me,’ whimpered the elderly Mr Timmins.
‘Eh?’ said Joe. ‘What’s that—safe broken open?’
The old man nodded.
‘I heered ‘em when I was hiding in the pantry. His lordship found that the safe had been opened an’ money took. He sent for the constable, and they’ve got the prince locked up in a room, with the under-gardener and the butler on guard