“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said in her clear, slow voice, “two years ago, when none of you knew me, you were kind to me. You overwhelmed me then. Tonight you have overwhelmed me again. I can only say thank you.”
Very neat, thought Grant, as they cheered her to the echo. Quite in the part. And he turned away. He knew what was coming—speeches by every one down to the callboy, and he had heard enough. He went down through the crimson and buff vestibule and out into the night with a queer constriction in his chest. If he had not in his thirty-five years cast overboard all such impedimenta as illusion, one would have said that he was disillusioned. He had quite liked Ray Marcable.
Chapter 7.
THINGS MOVE
“It’s not a Christian life at all,” said Mrs. Field as she put the inevitable bacon and eggs in front of him. Mrs. Field had tried to cure Grant of the bacon-and-eggs habit by providing wonderful breakfasts with recipes culled from her daily paper, and kidneys and other “favours” wrested from Mr. Tomkins at the threat of withdrawing her custom, but Grant had defeated her—as he defeated most people in time. He still had bacon and eggs, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. It was now eight o’clock on Sunday morning, which was the fact that had called forth Mrs. Field’s remark. “Unchristian” in Mrs. Field’s vocabulary meant not any lack of conformity but an absence of comfort and respectability. The fact that he was having breakfast before eight on a Sunday morning shocked her infinitely more than the fact that his day was to be spent in the most mundane of work. She grieved over him.
“It’s a wonder to me that the King doesn’t give you inspectors decorations oftener than he does. What other man in London is having breakfast at this hour when he needn’t!”
“In that case I think inspectors’ landladies should be included in the decoration. Mrs. Field, O.B.E.—for being an inspector’s landlady.”
“Oh, the honour’s enough for me without the decoration,” she said.
“I’d like to think of a good rejoinder to that, but I never could say graceful things at breakfast. It takes a woman to be witty at eight in the morning.”
“You’d be surprised really at the standing it gives me, you being an inspector at Scotland Yard.”
“Does it really?”
“It does; but don’t you be afraid. I keep my mouth shut. Nothing ever comes out through me. There’s lots would like to know what the inspector thought, or who came to see the inspector, but I just sit and let them hint. You don’t have to see a hint unless you like.”
“It is very noble of you, Mrs. Field, to achieve a reputation for obtuseness for my sake.”
Mrs. Field blinked and recovered herself. “It’s my duty, if it wasn’t my pleasure,” she said, and made a graceful exit.
As he was going away after breakfast she surveyed the untouched toast sorrowfully. “Well, see that you have a good meal in the middle of the day. You can’t think to any advantage on an empty stomach.”
“But you can’t run to any advantage on a full one!”
“You’ll never have to run very far after any one in London. There’s always some one to head them off.”
Grant was smiling to himself as he went down the sunny road to the bus-stop at this simplification of the work of the C.I.D. But there was no heading off the people who claimed to have seen the wanted man. Nearly half London appeared to have set eyes on him—his back as often as not. And the number of cut hands that required investigation would have been incredible to any one who has not witnessed a man-hunt from the inside. Patiently Grant sifted the reports through the long, bright morning, sitting at his desk and sending his lieutenants out here and there as a general arranges his forces on a battle-field. The provincial clues he ignored, with the exception of two, which were too good to be passed over—there was always the odd chance that the man in the Strand had not been the Levantine. Two men were sent to investigate these—one to Cornwall and one to York. All day long the telephone at his elbow buzzed, and all day long messages of failure came over it. Some of the men they had been sent out to observe had not, in the detective’s opinion, the remotest resemblance to the wanted man. This valuable information was obtained often enough at the cost of a long afternoon’s vigil behind the Nottingham lace curtains of a suburban villa waiting for “the man three houses down” to pass within examining distance. One suspect proved to be a nobleman well known to the public as a polo player. The officer who tracked him down saw that he had aroused the earl’s curiosity—the noble lord had been run to earth in a garage where he was collecting his car preparatory to having a little flip of three or four hundred miles as a slight Sunday diversion—and confessed what his business was.
“I thought you were tailing me,” said the peer of the realm, “and as my conscience is particularly good at the moment I wondered what you were up to. I have been accused of many things in my short time, but never of looking like a murderer before. Good luck to you, by all means.”
“Thank you, sir, same to you. I hope your conscience will be as clear when you come back.” And the earl, who had more convictions for exceeding the speed limit than any one else in England, had grinned appreciatively.
Truly it was the men who went out that found work light that Sunday, and it was Grant, sitting pulling strings with mechanical competence, that found it tedious. Barker came in in the afternoon, but had no suggestion to make which might expedite matters. They could afford to ignore nothing; the least helpful of the clues had to be investigated in the relentless process of elimination. It was spadework, and most unchristian, in the Field sense. Grant looked enviously from his window, through the bright mist that hung over the river, at the Surrey side, lit now by the westering sun. How good it would be to be in Hampshire today! He could see the woods on Danebury in their first green. And a little later in the evening, when the sun went, the Test would be just right for fly.
It was late when Grant got home, but he had not left an avenue of exploration untrodden. With the coming of evening the spate of reported appearances had gradually diminished and died away. But as he ate his supper—to Mrs. Field a meal was a necessary concomitant to a homecoming—he was wearily conscious of the telephone by the fireplace. He went to bed and dreamed that Ray Marcable called him by telephone and said, “You’ll never find him, never, never!” She kept repeating the phrase, unheeding of his pleas for information and help, and he wished that the exchange girl would say “Time up” and release him. But before that relief had come the telephone had turned into a fishing-rod without exciting any surprise on his part, and he was using it, not as a fishing-rod but as a whip to encourage the four-in-hand which he was driving down a street in Nottingham. At the end of the street was a marsh, and in front of the marsh, and exactly in the middle of the street, stood the waitress from the hotel. He tried to call out to her as the horses advanced, but his voice died in his throat. Instead, the waitress grew bigger and bigger, until she filled the whole street. As the horses were about to charge into her she had grown so that she towered over Grant and overwhelmed him, the horses, the street, and everything. He had that sense of inevitability which attends the moment