CHAPTERXXV.THE CITY OF SMILES.
Paris has greatly changed since the war. Thebonhomieof the boulevards, so marked a feature before the year 1914, has subsided a good deal. The inhabitants, considered collectively, are more serious.
Hopford and Johnson’s friend, Idris Llanvar, with whom Hopford was now staying, were discussing these and other matters one morning in Paris, when they were joined by Hopford’s friend who worked forLe Matin. Tall, slim, good-looking, and with the charming manner peculiar to descendants of the old French noblesse, he raised his hat as he approached, then apologized in excellent English for his unpunctuality.
“We had a fire at the office ofLe Matin,” he said, “which almost prevented the paper from coming out; but thanks to the courtesy of theJournal des Débats, which afforded us facilities for printing, the situation was saved at the eleventh hour.”
He poured himself out a glass of wine from the bottle on the table—they were sitting outside a café on the Boulevard des Italiens—and continued:
“I have a proposal to make to you, Hopford, and to you, too, monsieur,” he said, turning to Idris Llanvar, “which, if it meets with your approval, may have a rather important result. I understandfrom my friend Hopford here that we three are to put our heads together to try to make certain discoveries which, if we succeed, will create something of a sensation when made public. I have already told Hopford I know of certain happenings in Paris which, I believe, bear directly on affairs which have occurred in London within the past year or two, and more particularly recently. Now, two friends of mine belong to the Secret Service Police of Paris, and what they don’t know concerning the movements and methods of international criminals is, as you say in England, not worth knowing. One is a man, the other a woman. They are coming to me to-night, and I hope you will both come along too, so that the five of us may discuss certain affairs. Will that suit you both?”
And so, late that night, four men and a woman, all of exceptionally keen intelligence, endowed with the peculiar attributes which go to the making of a clever police detective or a successful newspaper reporter, were gathered together in a small room in one of those quaint, low-roofed houses with which visitors to the Quartier Latin are familiar.
The woman was an odd-looking person of about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, with hair cut short like a man’s, a pale face, firm lips, and dark, extremely shrewd eyes. She bore the reputation, Hopford’s friend said, of possessing more dogged perseverance than any other member of the Paris detective force. During the war, he told them, she had succeeded in bringing no less than seven spiesto book without any assistance whatever, all of whom had eventually been put to death.
Hopford had finished giving the assembled party all the information he possessed concerning the two epidemics of suicide in London; the various thefts which had occurred in connection with this narrative; and other matters with which the reader is acquainted, and was lighting a fresh cigar, when the woman, after a pause, inquired:
“This Madame Vandervelt who threw herself out of the hotel window. When did that happen?”
Hopford mentioned the date. He had all data at his fingers’ ends.
“I knew Leonora Vandervelt,” she said. “For months we shared anappartementclose to the Madeleine. By that means I became intimate with her; and eventually I discovered something I wanted to know about her—at that time she masqueraded under an assumed name. Finally I brought about her arrest, and she was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, though she deserved three years. Upon her release she left France, and I lost sight of her. This is the first time since then that I have heard of her. I did not know she was dead. At one time she and Angela Robertson of Shanghai were close friends. Then they quarreled, parted in anger, and Angela Robertson, whom you call Jessica Mervyn-Robertson, declared in my hearing she would be revenged—revenged for what I did not know. That, of course, was before Vandervelt went to prison.
“When Vandervelt became suspected of larceny, I went at once to Angela Robertson, who then lived in Paris, and placed all the facts before her. As I expected, she jumped at the chance of getting her revenge, and largely through the information she gave me I was able to bring Leonora Vandervelt to book. And now you tell me Vandervelt committed suicide. Of course I know who made her do it. It was Angela Robertson again.”
“How do you know that?” Hopford inquired. He had listened attentively to every word.
“No matter. You will gather that later. Do you know how Mrs. Robertson comes to be so rich?”
“Through levying blackmail I should imagine,” Hopford answered quickly.
“As you say, through levying blackmail. She and her companions you have told me about, Archie La Planta and Aloysius Stapleton, are three of the most cunning and persistent blackmailers in your country. They have practiced the ‘art’ in Continental capitals, and now reside in London because your countryfolk are the most easy to blackmail, also because they have much money and are easily induced to part with it. You say she pretends to be Australian. She is not Australian, nor has she been in Australia, though she had a married sister living in Monkarra, in Queensland, years ago, governess to the children of a rich sheep farmer there. When Mrs. Robertson and Stapleton left Shanghai for good they went first to Amsterdam, where they became acquainted with Archie La Planta, a rogue inevery way, though a charming man to talk to. At that time he was representing a British insurance company in Amsterdam.”
“Controlled by Lord Froissart,” Hopford put in.
“Yes. Controlled by the late Lord Froissart. While there,” she went on, “La Planta was introduced to Angela Robertson and to Stapleton by a man named Alphonse Michaud, of whose occupation the less said the better. Finally the four lived together at an hotel in the Kalverstraat, the name of which has for the moment escaped me.”
“That is curious,” Hopford exclaimed, “because when Mrs. Robertson and Michaud came face to face in Dieppe the other day, they apparently did not know each other. A friend of mine, Captain Preston, said so in a letter to Doctor Johnson.”
“Not Captain Charles Preston who is going to marry a girl called Yootha Hagerston?” the other detective asked quickly, now speaking for the first time.
“That is the man,” Hopford replied. “I served under him during the war, and I know Miss Hagerston too.”
The detective glanced across at his female colleague.
“Isn’t that a coincidence?” he said.
“Oh, coincidences never surprise me,” she answered with a shrug.
“But it points to further collusion,” the man said.
“Then I take it,” Llanvar put in, “there exists in London at the present time, and has existed fora year or more, some sort of organization for extorting money in considerable sums from rich and well-known people by means of direct or indirect blackmail?”
“Not only that,” the woman answered. “I am in a position to know that some members of the organization have levied blackmail on each other. There is no honor among miscreants of that type. They would blackmail their own parents if they got the chance, and could benefit. Such people deserve life sentences. Yet in spite of the cunning and cleverness of this particular gang I think we are on the right road to tracking them all down now, although they do pretend to belong to the best society, and no doubt have influential friends.”
Hopford felt elated as he wandered homeward that night, arm in arm with his host, the mental specialist, Idris Llanvar. Each member of the little gathering had, during the informal conference, contributed some link, or part of a link, to the chain of evidence they were forging between them to justify steps being taken to arrest Jessica and the people whom they now knew beyond doubt to be her accomplices in crime.
The town of Singapore had been mentioned incidentally, and Llanvar had provided some useful data. Angela Robertson and Fobart Robertson her husband, Timothy Macmahon, Julius Stringborg, and his wife Marietta, Aloysius Stapleton, and two or three more had apparently, when living in Shanghai, formed an exclusive little clique concerningwhich the strangest of rumors had been rife. The rumor most commonly credited was that the clique was actively interested in the secret exportation of a peculiarly potent drug said to possess several remarkable attributes. To what country or countries they exported it, nobody had been able to discover, but “on good authority” it was declared that high officials in Shanghai, Hong Kong and other important ports were in the habit of receiving heavy bribes not to notice what was happening.
Llanvar himself, he said, had once been indirectly approached by a native acting obviously on the instructions of some European, with a view to the possibility of his benefiting financially if, “as a matter of form,” he would sign his name to certain documents which would be brought to him secretly. He had pretended to consent, hoping thereby to discover what was happening, but nothing further had transpired, from which he concluded, he said, that the members of the clique had decided not to trust him.
Hopford and Llanvar sat talking in the latter’s sitting-room over a whisky and soda before going to bed. Mostly they discussed the affairs of the evening; but from one subject to another they drifted until presently Hopford said:
“I wonder Johnson has never married, Llanvar. He is such a good fellow, and the sort of man women like, and he must be fairly well off.”
For some moments his host remained silent.
“Well, he wouldn’t mind my telling you, I think,”he said at last, “but in point of fact he was badly turned down some years ago by a girl, I think between ourselves he was fortunate not to marry. He was terribly in love with her, though, and it took him a long time to recover from the disappointment; I doubt if he has really recovered from it yet. He told me all about it once, and I think the confidence relieved his mind to some extent. It is bad to brood in complete silence over that sort of thing.”
“Was she English?”
“Yes, a Devonshire girl. She broke it off in order to marry a viscount; and three years after the marriage they separated. Whose fault it was of course I don’t know, but the girl was a selfish, self-centered little thing, and I think her husband must have been well rid of her.”
“Then you knew her?”
“Oh yes, I knew her.”
He smiled.
“She set her cap at me once, when she fancied, and I believed, I was coming into a small fortune from my father’s sister. But my father’s sister took a dislike to me and when she died the money went to some missionary society. Directly the girl heard that, she found she no longer cared for me and turned her attention to Johnson, with whom I was living at the time, and who was already head over ears in love with her.”
“That was out East, I suppose?”
“Yes, in Hong Kong, which we have been talkingabout so much to-night. I don’t think Johnson will ever marry.”
“Don’t you? I do. In fact I am prepared to wager he will be married within the year.”
Llanvar looked at him in astonishment.
“You don’t mean that!” he exclaimed. “Why, who is the lady?”
Then it was that Hopford proceeded to tell him about the pretty widow, as he called her, Cora Hartsilver, and what he had noticed while in Jersey. And they were both in Jersey still, he said, and, in his opinion, likely to remain there some time.
“In fact, it would not surprise me at all,” he ended, “if Johnson and Mrs. Hartsilver were to become engaged before returning to England. Johnson has not even hinted to me that the widow attracts him, but I have noticed his expression when he speaks of her, and, more than that, I have noticed the way she looks at him when they are together.”