CHAPTERXIX.WITHOUT A STAIN.
Alix Stothert, the mysterious manager of the Metropolitan Secret Agency, lived in the house with the bronze face, on the top floor, and so did his partner, the woman known as Madame Camille Lenoir.
They were a sinister couple, of whom nobody seemed to know anything, and the police, when questioned concerning them, as they had been on more than one occasion, refused to make any statement. That the police looked upon them with no favorable eye was generally admitted by those in a position to know, and the inference naturally drawn was that Scotland Yard was jealous of the Metropolitan Secret Agency’s extraordinary success in making discoveries which led to the arrest of criminals while the police failed to obtain even clues.
They lived a strange life, apparently, for the door leading into the suite of rooms which they occupied was always kept locked—it had two Yale locks—and no servants or other helpers were ever admitted.
The sitting-room, “living-room” would have been a better name for it, had three telephones, and a metaphone which connected with their office on the first floor. It had also a tape-machine, and inStothert’s bedroom was a speaking tube which went down to the back entrance of the house and was so arranged that Stothert could be spoken to from a blind alley off the narrow little street. On to this blind alley the door opened.
Stothert and Camille Lenoir were alone in their living room about ten o’clock one night during the first week of August, when the speaking tube whistled shrilly in the room adjoining. At once the man got up and went into the bedroom to find out who wanted him. For only a few seconds he listened. Then he spoke one word, pushed the whistle in again, and rejoined his partner.
“They are hot on the trail of Jessica,” he said calmly, as he seated himself again, and readjusted the eye-shade which he had taken off when he went into the next room. “I believe in the end they will prove her undoing, and Stapleton’s.”
“Shall you warn her?” the woman asked anxiously.
“Certainly not. It is no concern of ours.”
“How do you mean—no concern of ours?”
“In the circumstances. Had she treated us differently——”
“I understand. And whom has she mostly to fear?”
“Preston. He is so clever, and has such foresight and imagination, that Stapleton and La Planta may find themselves presently on the horns of a dilemma of their own creating.”
After a minute’s pause, during which he seemed to be thinking deeply, he unhooked the receiverfrom the transmitter on the table at his elbow, and waited with it pressed to his ear, without asking for any number.
“Please come here at once,” he said suddenly, speaking into the transmitter.
“Yes, most important.”
“Yes, without any delay.”
Then he replaced the receiver, relit his pipe, which had gone out, picked up a newspaper and began carelessly to scan its headlines.
“I see Preston’s wedding is to take place shortly,” he said presently.
“Perhaps,” his companion observed significantly.
“Hulloa!” Stothert exclaimed suddenly, “have you seen this, Camille? Levi Schomberg’s body is to be exhumed.”
The woman sprang up from her chair, and leant over Stothert’s shoulder to read the startling announcement. It was contained in two lines in the stop press. No reason for the exhumation was given or hinted at.
“Alix, that will discomfort our friend,” she said with a grin. “And Jessica and Stapleton too. I wonder who brought that about.”
“That Doctor Johnson, you may depend. He was much upset, as I told you, at his opinion at the inquest being turned down by the coroner. This may have an interesting sequel, not calculated to set Jessica’s mind at rest.”
“And may strengthen Preston’s hand. I believe that, all along, he and Blenkiron have suspected La Planta.”
They went on talking about the exhumation and what it might eventually lead to, until the whistle of the speaking tube interrupted them once more. After answering it Stothert pressed a button in the wall, and waited. A minute later the door of the room opened and a woman entered.
Young and very pretty, she was dressed apparently for a ball or a reception. She shut the door after her, then without ceremony went over and sat down in a big arm-chair near the two occupants of the room, neither of whom had risen or greeted her when she entered.
“What do you want?” she asked curtly, addressing Stothert.
“We want you to find out as soon as possible, to-night if you can, where Mrs. Timothy Macmahon is now, the woman to whom Lord Froissart left his fortune which should have been inherited by his elder daughter, Mrs. Ferdinand Westrup. When last we heard of Mrs. Macmahon she still resided in Cashel, County Tipperary. Where are you going to-night?”
“To a reception in Berkeley Square,” and she mentioned the name of her hostess. “You have put me to great inconvenience by making me come here at this hour.”
Stothert shrugged his shoulders.
“We are all put to inconvenience at times,” he said. “You surely did not expect me to make an exception in your case? People of higher social standing than you have been put to inconvenience on our account.”
“Shall I ring you up if I discover the woman’s whereabouts?” his visitor inquired, changing the subject.
“If you please. Also you will notice if any people of interest to us attend the reception. And take this.” He handed her a sealed envelope. “Its contents you can read when you have left here.”
For fully five minutes after the pretty visitor had gone, Stothert sat in silence, sucking thoughtfully at his pipe. His companion, apparently still thinking about the announcement in the newspaper, made no attempt to interrupt him. Suddenly he turned to her and removed his pipe from his mouth.
“Froissart’s death was most unfortunate,” he said, “most unfortunate. I particularly wanted him to attend the Albert Hall ball, and he was going to on our advice, if you remember.”
“Not more unfortunate than Sir Stephen Lethbridge’s death,” Camille Lenoir answered, “or, for that matter, Leonora Vandervelt’s. We have to face these setbacks. Still, nobody up to the present suspects our methods.”
“Up to the present—no. But don’t be too confident. The police would ask nothing better than to be able to find out all about us, and how we work, and then let us down in order to get back on us. If the true verdict had been brought in regarding Vera Froissart’s death, and the cause of her suicide, it would have been a bad day for us. I shall not be sorry when we cut adrift from this business. There are times when the excitement ofcarrying on becomes too tense for a man of my age.”
His companion smiled.
“How you keep on about your age,” she said. “You may be getting on physically, but how many men of your age possess your clear brain and your clear intelligence? I don’t look forward to the Schomberg inquiry, I can assure you. What can they suspect? And who can have applied for the exhumation? Not his relatives, I am sure. They were too anxious to inherit his estate to be likely to want inquiries to be made. And I am not of your opinion that Johnson and Blenkiron made the application.”
Nobody, listening to Camille then, would have believed her to be the common French woman familiar to clients of the Metropolitan Secret Agency. For now, closeted with her partner in their private sitting-room, she spoke excellent English, while her foreign accent was barely perceptible.
The telephone bell rang, and Camille answered it. Then she pressed her palm on the transmitter.
“Preston,” she said laconically. “He wants to speak to you at once.”
Stothert took the instrument.
“That you, Captain Preston?” he asked.
“No, I can’t see you to-night.”
“Yes. Almost any time to-morrow would suit me.”
“I am sorry. I have no further news as yet, but I hope to have some soon.”
“Oh, yes, we are getting on famously, and on the right line, I feel sure. By the way, I take it the announcement of your approaching marriage in to-day’s papers is official?”
“It is. Then I congratulate you. Good night, Captain Preston.”
“He has not read the announcement about the exhumation, apparently, and it was no affair of mine to tell him,” Stothert remarked, when he had rung off. “We must tell him something soon about Jessica, if only to keep him quiet. By the way, Stapleton told me recently that Levi Schomberg had hinted to him more than once that Mrs. Hartsilver was a designing woman. What can Schomberg’s reason have been for saying what we know to be manifestly untrue?”
“Probably the same reason which prompted him to make other false statements,” Camille replied. “We may learn that, and other curious things concerning Levi at the inquiry.”
The news that apparently some mystery surrounded Levi Schomberg’s death aroused considerable comment. Though rarely seen in public places, he had been well known to a comparatively large circle of London Society, and had borne, rightly or wrongly, the reputation of being the most “accommodating” man of his calling in London.
This reputation had been due possibly to the fact that his knowledge of the class for which he catered had been exceedingly deep, also that he happened to be an excellent judge of character and of humannature. Thus where he would politely refuse to accommodate A, B and C, with a loan, no matter how small, to D, E and F, though in no better circumstances and with no better security to offer, he would readily advance quite large sums, instinctively knowing them to be people who would eventually repay the loans of their own accord, also the heavy interest which he charged, even though before doing so they might need to renew their bills perhaps several times.
“Odd thing, this exhumation of Schomberg’s body,” Blenkiron remarked carelessly as he stood chatting with La Planta at the corner of Brook Street one morning. “What do you make of it, Archie?”
“Don’t ask me,” La Planta replied quickly. “I only hope I shall not be dragged in to give evidence. I begin to wish to heaven I had not met Schomberg that night, but Louie would invite him.”
“I wish you had been present at the inquest,” Blenkiron went on. “Your documentary evidence left several points undecided, as the coroner clearly explained. I believe if those points had been cleared up this exhumation business would never have come about.”
“Yes. I now wish, too, that I had been there, though I congratulated myself at the time on being out of it all. The doctor, you see, wouldn’t let me out of bed—I had such a bad chill. What is your theory concerning the cause of death?”
“Oh, I have no theory,” Blenkiron answered. “The coroner attributed death to natural causes, so I stand by his decision.”
“That is exactly my argument,” La Planta said hurriedly. “Yet I meet fellows who declare they thought all along there was something ‘fishy,’ as they call it, about the poor fellow’s death, though you may depend on it the ‘fishiness’ would never have occurred to them if this exhumation had not been ordered. The police, I hear, were notified privately that there were certain doubts as to the cause of death.”
Yet when the inquiry did take place, the report was not wholly satisfactory. Though no traces of any sort of poison could be found, the condition of the remains was declared to be abnormal.
There is no need to go into details. The next startling announcement was that Archie La Planta had been arrested.
At once the newspapers focused the attention of the public on the unhappy young man, and then for the first time the searchlight of notoriety illuminated as much of his past life as the press was able to rake up. Indeed, it came as rather a shock to some of his friends to find that apparently nothing was known about him prior to his arrival in London some years previously.
Questioned on this point during his cross-examination, La Planta admitted having spent some years of his life in the East, also that he had known Stapleton in China. The question put as a trap: “Didyou ever borrow money from deceased?” he emphatically negatived.
“Now can you,” asked the cross-examiner a little later, “account for the fact that some drops of a very rare perfume, the name and nature of which I need not for the moment specify, were found on the left sleeve of the fancy tunic you wore at the Albert Hall ball, and that some of the same perfume was discovered on the fancy dress suit worn by deceased that night?”
“Certainly,” La Planta answered without an instant’s hesitation. “I had a little phial of the perfume with me at the ball, and as Mr. Schomberg told me he liked the scent very much I gave him a little. In fact I sprayed it on his clothes myself.”
“And where did you obtain the perfume? I understand it is not to be had in London.”
“Quite true. I have to get it from abroad.”
“‘Abroad,’ is a big place, Mr. La Planta,” the examining counsel observed dryly. “May I ask you to be more definite in your statement? Perhaps you will tell me from what town or place ‘abroad’ it is, or was, sent to you?”
“Shanghai.”
“Shanghai! Indeed! This is most interesting. And who sends it to you from Shanghai? May I have his—or her—name and address?”
At once La Planta scribbled on a scrap of paper which he then handed to counsel for the prosecution.
When the latter had conferred in undertones with his solicitor, he continued:
“Are you aware, Mr. La Planta, that this perfume may not be legally sold or bought in this country without a special license, also that to import it is illegal, owing to its being, in addition to a perfume, an extremely potent drug possessing peculiar properties?”
“I am aware of that.”
“And yet you deliberately imported it?”
“I did.”
To all present in Court it was obvious examining counsel was becoming annoyed at La Planta’s frank and unhesitating replies to questions meant to disconcert him. For nearly two hours the examination continued, and when at last it ended the witness left the Court “without a stain upon his character” so far as the Jew’s death was concerned.