‘You know she is alive?’
He nodded, for his voice was choking again. ‘There is evidence which points to a very deep and devilish plot. It may be revenge, but I think it more likely to be policy. Her captors hold her as security for their own fate.’
‘Has Scotland Yard done nothing?’
‘Everything that man could do, but the darkness only grows thicker.’
‘Surely it has not been in the papers. I don’t read them carefully but I could scarcely miss a thing like that.’
‘It has been kept out of the papers – for a reason which you will be told.’
‘Mr Victor,’ I said, ‘I’m most deeply sorry for you. Like you, I’ve just the one child, and if anything of that kind happened to him I should go mad. But I shouldn’t take too gloomy a view. Miss Adela will turn up all right, and none the worse, though you may have to pay through the nose for it. I expect it’s ordinary blackmail and ransom.”
‘No,’ he said very quietly. ‘It is not blackmail, and if it were, I would not pay the ransom demanded. Believe me, Sir Richard, it is a very desperate affair. More, far more is involved than the fate of one young girl. I am not going to touch on that side, for the full story will be told you later by one better equipped to tell it. But the hostage is my daughter, my only child. I have come to beg your assistance in the search for her.’
‘But I’m no good at looking for things,’ I stammered. ‘I’m most awfully sorry for you, but I don’t see how I can help. If Scotland Yard is at a loss, it’s not likely that an utter novice like me would succeed.’
‘But you have a different kind of imagination and a rarer kind of courage. I know what you have done before, Sir Richard. I tell you you are my last hope.’
I sat down heavily and groaned. ‘I can’t begin to explain to you the bottomless futility of your idea. It is quite true that in the War I had some queer jobs and was lucky enough to bring some of them off. But, don’t you see, I was a soldier then, under orders, and it didn’t greatly signify whether I lost my life from a crump in the trenches or from a private bullet on the back-stairs. I was in the mood for any risk, and my wits were strung up and unnaturally keen. But that’s all done with. I’m in a different mood now and my mind is weedy and grass-grown. I’ve settled so deep into the country that I’m just an ordinary hayseed farmer. If I took a hand – which I certainly won’t – I’d only spoil the game.’
Mr Victor stood looking at me intently. I thought for a moment he was going to offer me money, and rather hoped he would, for that would have stiffened me like a ramrod, though it would have spoiled the good notion I had of him. The thought may have crossed his mind, but he was clever enough to reject it.
‘I don’t agree with a word you say about yourself, and I’m accustomed to size up men. I appeal to you as a Christian gentleman to help me to recover my child. I am not going to press that appeal, for I have already taken up enough of your time. My London address is on my card. Goodbye, Sir Richard, and believe me, I am very grateful to you for receiving me so kindly.’
In five minutes he and his Rolls-Royce had gone, and I was left in a miserable mood of shame-faced exasperation. I realized how Mr Julius Victor had made his fame. He knew how to handle men, for if he had gone on pleading he would only have riled me, whereas he had somehow managed to leave it all to my honour, and thoroughly unsettled my mind.
I went for a short walk, cursing the world at large, sometimes feeling horribly sorry for that unfortunate father, sometimes getting angry because he had tried to mix me up in his affairs. Of course I would not touch the thing; I couldn’t; it was manifestly impossible; I had neither the capacity nor the inclination. I was not a professional rescuer of distressed ladies whom I did not know from Eve.
A man, I told myself, must confine his duties to his own circle of friends, except when his country has need of him. I was over forty, and had a wife and a young son to think of; besides, I had chosen a retired life, and had the right to have my choice respected. But I can’t pretend that I was comfortable. A hideous muddy wave from the outer world had come to disturb my little sheltered pool. I found Mary and Peter John feeding the swans, and couldn’t bear to stop and play with them. The gardeners were digging in sulphates about the fig trees on the south wall, and wanted directions about the young chestnuts in the nursery; the keeper was lying in wait for me in the stable-yard for instructions about a new batch of pheasant eggs, and the groom wanted me to look at the hocks of Mary’s cob. But I simply couldn’t talk to any of them. These were the things I loved, but for a moment the gilt was off them, and I would let them wait till I felt better. In a very bad temper I returned to the library.
I hadn’t been there two minutes when I heard the sound of a car on the gravel. ‘Let ’em all come,’ I groaned, and I wasn’t surprised when Paddock entered, followed by the spare figure and smooth keen face of Macgillivray.
I don’t think I offered to shake hands. We were pretty good friends, but at the moment there was no one in the world I wanted less to see.
‘Well, you old nuisance,’ I cried, ‘you’re the second visitor from town I’ve had this morning. There’ll be a shortage of petrol soon.’
‘Have you had a letter from Lord Artinswell?’ he asked.
‘I have, worse luck,’ I said.
‘Then you know what I’ve come about. But that can keep till after luncheon. Hurry it up, Dick, like a good fellow, for I’m as hungry as a famished kestrel.’
He looked rather like one, with his sharp nose and lean head. It was impossible to be cross for long with Macgillivray, so we went out to look for Mary. ‘I may as well tell you,’ I told him, ‘that you’ve come on a fool’s errand. I’m not going to be jockeyed by you or anyone into making an ass of myself. Anyhow, don’t mention the thing to Mary. I don’t want her to be worried by your nonsense.’
So at luncheon we talked about Fosse and the Cotswolds, and about the deer-forest I had taken – Machray they called it – and about Sir Archibald Roylance, my co-tenant, who had just had another try at breaking his neck in a steeplechase. Macgillivray was by way of being a great stalker and could tell me a lot about Machray. The crab of the place was its neighbours, it seemed; for Haripol on the south was too steep for the lessee, a middle-aged manufacturer, to do justice to it, and the huge forest of Glenaicill on the east was too big for any single tenant to shoot, and the Machray end of it was nearly thirty miles by road from the lodge. The result was, said Macgillivray, that Machray was surrounded by unauthorized sanctuaries, which made the deer easy to shift. He said the best time was early in the season when the stags were on the upper ground, for it seemed that Machray had uncommonly fine high pastures… Mary was in good spirits, for somebody had been complimentary about Peter John, and she was satisfied for the moment that he wasn’t going to be cut off by an early consumption. She was full of housekeeping questions about Machray and revealed such spacious plans that Macgillivray said that he thought he would pay us a visit, for it looked as if he wouldn’t be poisoned, as he usually was in Scotch shooting-lodges. It was a talk I should have enjoyed if there had not been that uneasy morning behind me and that interview I had still to get over.
There was a shower after luncheon, so he and I settled ourselves in the library. ‘I must leave at three-thirty,’ he said, ‘so I have got just a little more than an hour to tell you my business in.’
‘Is it worth while starting?’ I asked. ‘I want to make it quite plain that under no circumstances am I open to any offer to take on any business of any kind. I’m having a rest and a holiday. I stay here for the summer and then I go to Machray.’
‘There’s nothing to prevent your going to Machray in August,’ he said, opening his eyes. ‘The work I am going to suggest to you must be finished long before then.’
I suppose that surprised me, for I did not stop him as I had meant to. I let him go on, and before I knew I found myself getting interested. I have a boy’s weakness for a yarn, and Macgillivray knew
this and played on it.
He began by saying very much what Dr Greenslade had said the night before. A large part of the world had gone mad, and that involved the growth of inexplicable and unpredictable crime. All the old sanctities had become weakened, and men had grown too well accustomed to death and pain. This meant that the criminal had far greater resources at his command, and, if he were an able man, could mobilize a vast amount of utter recklessness and depraved ingenuity. The moral imbecile, he said, had been more or less a sport before the War; now he was a terribly common product, and throve in batches and battalions. Cruel, humourless, hard, utterly wanting in sense of proportion, but often full of a perverted poetry and drunk with rhetoric – a hideous, untameable breed had been engendered. You found it among the young Bolshevik Jews, among the young gentry of the wilder Communist sects and very notably among the sullen murderous hobbledehoys in Ireland.
‘Poor devils,’ Macgillivray repeated. ‘It is for their Maker to judge them, but we who are trying to patch up civilization have to see that they are cleared out of the world. Don’t imagine that they are devotees of any movement, good or bad. They are what I have called them, moral imbeciles, who can be swept into any movement by those who understand them. They are the neophytes and hierophants of crime, and it is as criminals that I have to do with them. Well, all this desperate degenerate stuff is being used by a few clever men who are not degenerates or anything of the sort, but only evil. There has never been such a chance for a rogue since the world began.’
Then he told me certain facts, which must remain unpublished, at any rate during our life-times. The main point was that there were sinister brains at work to organize for their own purposes the perilous stuff lying about. All the contemporary anarchisms, he said, were interconnected, and out of the misery of decent folks and the agony of the wretched tools certain smug entrepreneurs were profiting. He and his men, and indeed the whole police force of civilization – he mentioned especially the Americans – had been on the trail of one of the worst of these combines and by a series of fortunate chances had got their hand on it. Now at any moment they could stretch out that hand and gather it in.
But there was one difficulty. I learned from him that this particular combine was not aware of the danger in which it stood, but that it realized that it must stand in some danger, so it had taken precautions. Since Christmas it had acquired hostages.
Here I interrupted, for I felt rather incredulous about the whole business. ‘I think since the War we’re all too ready to jump at grandiose explanations of simple things. I’ll want a good deal of convincing before I believe in your international clearing-house for crime.’
‘I guarantee the convincing,’ he said gravely. ‘You shall see all our evidence, and, unless you have changed since I first knew you, your conclusion won’t differ from mine. But let us come to the hostages.’
‘One I know about,’ I put in. ‘I had Mr Julius Victor here after breakfast.’
Macgillivray exclaimed. ‘Poor soul! What did you say to him?’
‘Deepest sympathy, but nothing doing.’
‘And he took that answer?’
‘I won’t say he took it. But he went away. What about the others?’
‘There are two more. One is a young man, the heir to a considerable estate, who was last seen by his friends in Oxford on the 17th day of February, just before dinner. He was an undergraduate of Christ Church, and was living out of college in rooms in the High. He had tea at the Gridiron and went to his rooms to dress, for he was dining that night with the Halcyon Club. A servant passed him on the stairs of his lodgings, going up to his bedroom. He apparently did not come down, and since that day has not been seen. You may have heard his name – Lord Mercot.’
I started. I had indeed heard the name, and knew the boy a little, having met him occasionally at our local steeplechases. He was the grandson and heir of the old Duke of Alcester, the most respected of the older statesmen of England.
‘They have picked their bag carefully,’ I said. ‘What is the third case?’
‘The cruellest of all. You know Sir Arthur Warcliff. He is a widower – lost his wife just before the War and he has an only child, a little boy about ten years old. The child – David is his name – was the apple of his eye, and was at a preparatory school near Rye. The father took a house in the neighbourhood to be near him, and the boy used to be allowed to come home for luncheon every Sunday. One Sunday he came to luncheon as usual, and started back in the pony-trap. The boy was very keen about birds, and used to leave the trap and walk the last half-mile by a short cut across the marshes. Well, he left the groom at the usual gate, and, like Miss Victor and Lord Mercot, walked into black mystery.’
This story really did horrify me. I remembered Sir Arthur Warcliff – the kind, worn face of the great soldier and administrator, and I could imagine his grief and anxiety. I knew what I should have felt if it had been Peter John. A much-travelled young woman and an athletic young man were defenceful creatures compared to a poor little round-headed boy of ten. But I still felt the whole affair too fantastic for real tragedy.
‘But what right have you to connect the three cases?’ I asked. ‘Three people disappear within a few weeks of each other in widely separated parts of England. Miss Victor may have been kidnapped for ransom, Lord Mercot may have lost his memory, and David Warcliff may have been stolen by tramps. Why should they be all part of one scheme? Why, for that matter, should any one of them have been the work of your criminal combine? Have you any evidence for the hostage theory?’
‘Yes.’ Macgillivray took a moment or two to answer. ‘There is first the general probability. If a band of rascals wanted three hostages they could hardly find three better – the daughter of the richest man in the world, the heir of our greatest dukedom, the only child of a national hero. There is also direct evidence.’ Again he hesitated.
‘Do you mean to say that Scotland Yard has not a single clue to any one of these cases?’
‘We have followed up a hundred clues, but they have all ended in dead walls. Every detail, I assure you, has been gone through with a fine comb. No, my dear Dick, the trouble is not that we’re specially stupid on this side, but that there is some superlative cunning on the other. That is why I want you. You have a kind of knack of stumbling on truths which no amount of ordinary reasoning can get at. I have fifty men working day and night, and we have mercifully kept all the cases out of the papers, so that we are not hampered by the amateur. But so far it’s a blank. Are you going to help?’
‘No, I’m not. But, supposing I were, I don’t see that you’ve a scrap of proof that the three cases are connected, or that any one of them is due to the criminal gang that you say you’ve got your hand on. You’ve only given me presumptions, and precious thin at that. Where’s your direct evidence?’
Macgillivray looked a little embarrassed. ‘I’ve started you at the wrong end,’ he said. ‘I should have made you understand how big and desperate the thing is that we’re out against, and then you’d have been in a more receptive mood for the rest of the story. You know as well as I do that cold blood is not always the most useful accompaniment in assessing evidence. I said I had direct evidence of connection, and so I have, and the proof to my mind is certain.’
‘Well, let’s see it.’
‘It’s a poem. On Wednesday of last week, two days after David Warcliff disappeared, Mr Julius Victor, the Duke of Alcester, and Sir Arthur Warcliff received copies of it by the first post. They were typed on bits of flimsy paper, the envelopes had the addresses typed, and they had been posted in the West Central district of London the afternoon before.’
He handed me a copy, and this was what I read:
Seek where under midnight’s sun
Laggard crops are hardly won; –
Where the sower casts his seed in
Furrows of the fields of Eden; –
Where beside the sacred tree
Spins the seer who cannot see.
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I burst out laughing, for I could not help it – the whole thing was too preposterous. These six lines of indifferent doggerel seemed to me to put the coping-stone of nonsense on the business. But I checked myself when I saw Macgillivray’s face. There was a slight flush of annoyance on his cheek, but for the rest it was grave, composed, and in deadly earnest. Now Macgillivray was not a fool, and I was bound to respect his beliefs. So I pulled myself together and tried to take things seriously.
‘That’s proof that the three cases are linked together,’ I said. ‘So much I grant you. But where’s the proof that they are the work of the great criminal combine that you say you have got your hand on?’
Macgillivray rose and walked restlessly about the room. ‘The evidence is mainly presumptive, but to my mind it is certain presumption. You know as well as I do, Dick, that a case may be final and yet very difficult to set out as a series of facts. My view on the matter is made up of a large number of tiny indications and cross-bearings, and I am prepared to bet that if you put your mind honestly to the business you will take the same view. But I’ll give you this much by way of direct proof – in hunting the big show we had several communications of the same nature as this doggerel, and utterly unlike anything else I ever struck in criminology. There’s one of the miscreants who amuses himself with sending useless clues to his adversaries. It shows how secure the gang thinks itself.’
‘Well, you’ve got that gang anyhow. I don’t quite see why the hostages should trouble you. You’ll gather them in when you gather in the malefactors.’
‘I wonder. Remember we are dealing with moral imbeciles. When they find themselves cornered they won’t play for safety. They’ll use their hostages, and when we refuse to bargain they’ll take their last revenge on them.’
I suppose I stared unbelievingly, for he went on: ‘Yes. They’ll murder them in cold blood – three innocent people – and then swing themselves with a lighter mind. I know the type. They’ve done it before.’ He mentioned one or two recent instances.