Complete works of a e w.., p.148
Complete Works of a E W Mason, page 148
“Aha!” said Monsieur Hanaud.
“We hesitated,” continued Mr. Middleton, stroking one of his side whiskers. “Everything was as it should be — the lease of the house, compliance with the regulations of the County Council, the value of the stock — mink, silver fox, sables — all correct, and yet we hesitated.”
“Why?” asked Hanaud.
“Mind, I make no suggestion.” Mr. Middleton was very insistent upon his complete detachment. “It was held to be an accident. The Societe Universelle paid the insurance money. But Mr. Enoch Swallow did have a fire in a similar establishment on the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris three years before.”
“Enoch Swallow? The Boulevard Haussmann?” Hanaud dived deep amongst his memories, but came to the surface with empty hands. “No, I do not remember. There was no case.”
“Oh dear me, no,” Mr. Middleton insisted. “Oh, none at all. Fires happen, else why does one insure? So in the end — it is our business and competition is severe and nothing could have been more straightforward than the conduct of our client — we insured him.”
“For a large sum?”
“For twenty-five thousand pounds.”
Hanaud whistled. He multiplied the amount into francs. It became milliards.
“For a Syrian gentleman, even if he is now an English gentleman, it is a killing.”
“And then last night it all happens again,” cried Mr. Middleton, giving his whisker a twist and a slap. “Would you believe it?”
“I certainly would,” replied Hanaud, “and without bringing the least pressure upon my credulity.”
Mr. Middleton raised a warning hand.
“But, remember please, there is no accusation. No. All is above board. No smell of petrol in the ruins. No little machine with an alarm-clock. Nothing.”
“And yet...” said Hanaud with a smile. “You have your little thoughts.”
The secretary tittered.
“Monsieur Hanaud,” he said coyly, “I have in my day been something of a dasher. I went once to the Moulin Rouge. I tried once to smoke a stringy black cigarette from a blue packet. But the strings got between my teeth and caused me extreme discomfort. Well, today I have Mr. Enoch Swallow between my teeth.”
Mr. Ricardo, who all this time had been sitting silent, thought it a happy moment to make a little jest that if the secretary swallowed Mr. Swallow, he would suffer even more discomfort. But though Middleton tittered dutifully, Hanaud looked a thousand reproaches and Mr. Ricardo subsided.
“I want to hear of last night,” said Hanaud.
IT was the cook-general’s night out. She had permission, moreover, to stay the night with friends at Balham. She had asked for that permission herself. No hint had been given to her that her absence would be welcome. Her friends had invited her and she had sought for this leave on her own initiative.
“Well, then,” continued Mr. Middleton, “at six o’clock she laid a cold supper for the Swallows in the dining-room and took an omnibus to Balham. The employees had already gone. The showrooms were closed and only Enoch Swallow and his wife were left in the house. At seven those two ate their supper, and after locking the front door behind them went to a cinema-house in Oxford Street where a French film was being show. Toto et Fils was the name of the film.”
They arrived at the cinema-house a few minutes past eight. There was no doubt whatever about that. For they met the manager of the house, with whom they were acquainted, in the lobby, and talked with him whilst they waited for the earlier performance to end and its audience to disperse. They had seats in the Grand Circle, and there the manager found them just before eleven o’clock, when he brought them the news that their premises were on fire.
“Yes, the incontestable alibi,” said Hanaud. “I was waiting for him.”
“They hurried home,” Middleton resumed, but Hanaud would not allow the word.
“Home? Have such people a home? A place full of little valueless treasures which you would ache to lose? The history of your small triumphs, your great griefs, your happy hours? No, no, we keep to facts. They had a store and a shop and a lodging, they come back and it is all in flames. Good! We continue. When was this fire first noticed?
“About half-past nine, a passer-by saw the smoke curling out from the door. He crossed the street and he saw a flame shoot up and spread behind a window — he thinks on the first floor. But he will not swear that it wasn’t on the second. It took him a few minutes to find one of the red pillars where you give the alarm by breaking the glass. The summer has been dry, all those painted pitch-pine shelves in the upper storeys were like tinder. By the time the fire brigade arrived, the house was a bonfire. By the time the Swallows were discovered in the cinema and ran back to Bewick Street, the floors were crashing down. When the cook-general returned at six-thirty this morning, it was a ruin of debris and tottering walls.”
“And the Swallows?” Hanaud asked.
“They had lost everything. They had nothing but the clothes they were wearing. They were taken in for the night at a little hotel in Percy Street.”
“The poor people!” said Hanaud with a voice of commiseration and a face like a mask. “And how do they explain the fire?”
“They do not,” said Middleton. “The good wife she weeps, the man is distressed and puzzled. He was most careful, he says, and since the fire did not start until some time after he and his wife had left the house, he thinks some burglar is to blame. Ah yes!” and Mr. Middleton pushed himself forward on his chair. “There is a little something. He suggests — it is not very nice — that the burglar may have been a friend of the cook-general. He has no evidence. No. He used to think her a simple, honest, stupid woman and not a good cook, but now he is not sure. No, it is not a nice suggestion.”
“But we must remember that he was a Syrian gentleman before he became an English one, must we not?” said Hanaud. “Yes, such suggestions were certainly to be expected. You have seen him?”
“Of course,” cried Mr. Middleton, and he edged so much more forward in his chair that it seemed he must topple off. “And I should esteem it a favour if you, Monsieur Hanaud, and your friend Mr. Ricardo” — he gathered the derelict Ricardo gracefully into the council— “would see him too.”
Hanaud raised his hands in protest.
“It would be an irregularity of the most extreme kind. I have no place in this affair. I am the smelly outsider”; and by lighting one of his acrid cigarettes, he substantiated his position.
Mr. Middleton waved the epithet and the argument away. He would never think of compromising Monsieur Hanaud. He meant “see” and not examine, and here his friend Superintendent Holloway had come to his help. The superintendent had also wished to see Mr. Enoch Swallow. He had no charge to bring against Enoch. To Superintendent Holloway, as Superintendent, Enoch Swallow was the victim of misfortune, insured of course, but still a victim. None the less the superintendent wanted to have a look at him. He had accordingly asked him to call at the Marlborough Street police station at five o’clock.
“You see, the superintendent has a kindly, pleasant reason for his invitation. Mr. Swallow will be grateful and the superintendent will see him. Also you, Monsieur Hanaud, from the privacy of the superintendent’s office can see him too and perhaps — who knows — a memory may be jogged?”
Mr. Middleton stroked a whisker and smiled ingratiatingly.
“After all, twenty-five thousand pounds! It is a sum.”
“It is the whole multiplication table,” Hanaud agreed.
He hesitated for a moment. There was the Monument, there were the Crown Jewels. On the other hand, he liked Mr. Middleton’s polite, engaging ways, he liked his whiskers and his frock-coat. Also he, too, would like to see the Syrian gentleman. For...
“He is either a very honest unlucky man, or he has a formula for fireworks.” Hanaud looked at the clock. It was four.
“We have an hour. I make you a proposal. We will go to Berwick Street and see these ruins, though that beautiful frock coat will suffer.”
Mr. Middleton beamed. “It would be worth many frock- coats to see Monsieur Hanaud at work,” he exclaimed, and thereupon Mr. Ricardo made rather tartly — for undoubtedly he had been neglected — his one effective contribution to this story.
“But the frock-coat won’t suffer, Mr. Middleton. Ask Hanaud! It will be in at the brush.”
TO north and south of the house, Berwick Street had been roped off against the danger of those tottering walls. The Salvage Company had been at work since the early morning clearing the space within, but there were still beams insecurely poised overhead, and a litter of broken furniture and burnt furrier’s stock encumbered the ground. Middleton’s pass gave them admittance into the shell of the ground. Middleton’s pass gave them admittance into the shell of the building. Hanaud looked around with the pleased admiration of a connoisseur for an artist’s masterpiece.
“Aha!” he said brightly. “I fear that Misters the Unicorn pay twenty-five thousand pounds. It is of an admirable completeness, this fire. We say either ‘What a misfortune!’ or ‘What a formula!’”
He advanced, very wary of the joists and beams balanced above his head, but shirking none of them. “You will not follow me, please,” he said to Ricardo and Middleton. “It is not for your safety. But, as my friend Ricardo knows, too many cooks and I’m down the drain.”
He went forward and about, mapping out from the fragments of inner walls the lie of the rooms. Once he stopped and came back to the two visitors.
“There was electric light of course,” he said rather than asked. “I can see here and there plugs and pipes.”
“There was nothing but electric light and power,” Middleton replied firmly. “The cooking was done on an electric stove and the wires were all carried in steel tubes. Since the store and the stock were inflammable, we took particular care that these details were carried out.”
Hanaud returned to his pacing. At one place a heavy iron bath had crashed through the first-floor ceiling to the ground, its white paint burnt off and its pipes twisted by the heat. At this bath he stopped again, he raised his head into the air and sniffed, then he bent down towards the ground and sniffed again. He stood up with a look of perplexity upon his face, a man trying to remember and completely baffled.
He moved away from this centre in various directions as though he was walking outwards along the spokes of a wheel, but he always came back to it. Finally, he stooped and began to examine some broken lumps of glass which lay about and in the bath. It seemed to the watchers that he picked one of these pieces up, turned it over in his hands, held it beneath his nose and finally put it away in one of his pockets. He returned to his companions.
“We must be at Marlborough Street at five,” he said. “Let us go!”
Mr. Ricardo at the rope-barrier signaled to a taxi driver. They climbed into it, and sat in a row, both Middleton and Ricardo watching Hanaud expectantly, Hanaud sitting between them very upright with no more expression upon his face than has the image of an Egyptian king. At last he spoke.
“I tell you something.”
A sigh of relief broke from Mr. Middleton. Mr. Ricardo smiled and looked proud. His friend was certainly the Man who found the Lady under the thimble.
“Yes, I tell you. The Syrian gentleman has become an English gentleman. He owns a bath.”
Mr. Middleton groaned. Ricardo shrugged his shoulders. It was a deplorable fact that Hanaud never knew when not to be funny.
“But you smelt something,” said Mr. Middleton reproachfully.
“You definitely sniffed,” said Ricardo.
“Twice,” Mr Middleton insisted.
“Three times,” replied Hanaud.
“Ah!” cried Ricardo. “I know. It was petrol.”
“Yes,” exclaimed Mr. Middleton excitedly. “Petrol stored secretly in the bath.”
Hanaud shook his head.
“Not ‘arf,” he said. “No, but perhaps I sniff,” and he laid a hand upon an arm of each of his companions, “a formula. But here we are, are we not? I see a policeman at a door.”
They had indeed reached Marlborough Street police station. A constable raised the flap of a counter and they passed into a large room. An inner door opened and Superintendent Holloway appeared on the threshold, a large man with his hair speckled with grey, and a genial, intelligent face.
“Monsieur Hanaud!” he said, coming forward with an outstretched hand. “This is a pleasant moment for me.”
“And the same to you,” said Hanaud in his best English.
“You had better perhaps come into my room,” the superintendent continued. “Mr. Swallow has not yet arrived.”
He led his visitors into a comfortable office and, shutting the door, invited them all to be seated. A large — everything about the Marlborough Street police station seemed to Hanaud to be large — a large beautiful ginger cat with amber-coloured lambent eyes lay with his paws doubled up under his chest on a fourth chair, and surveyed the party with a godlike indifference.
“You will understand, Monsieur Hanaud,” said the superintendent, “that I have nothing against Mr. Swallow at all. But I thought that I would like to see him, and I had an excellent excuse for asking him to call. I like to see people.”
“I too,” Hanaud answered politely. “I am of the sociables.”
“You will have the advantage over me, of seeing without being seen,” said the superintendent, and he broke off with an exclamation.
The ginger cat had risen from the chair and jumped down on to the floor. There it stretched out one hind leg and then the other, deliberately, as though it had the whole day for that and nothing else. Next it stepped daintily across the floor to Hanaud, licked like a dog the hand which he dropped to stroke it, and then sprang on to his knee and settled down. Settled down, however, is not the word. It kept its head in the air and looked about in a curious excitement whilst its brown eyes shone like jewels.
“Well, upon my word,” said the superintendent. “That’s the first time that cat has recognized the existence of anyone in the station. But there it is. All cats are snobs.”
It was a pretty compliment, and doubtless Monsieur Hanaud would have found a fitting reply had not the constable in the outer office raised his voice.
“If you’ll come through and take a seat, sir, I’ll tell the superintendent,” he was heard to say, and Holloway rose to his feet.
“I’ll leave the door ajar,” he said in a low voice, and he went into the outer office.
THROUGH the slit left open, Hanaud and Ricardo saw Enoch Swallow rise from his chair. He was a tall, broad man, almost as tall and broad as the superintendent himself, with black short hair and a flat, open, peasant face.
“You wished to see me?” he asked. He had a harsh metallic voice, but the question itself was ordinary and civil. The man was neither frightened, nor arrogant, nor indeed curious.
“Yes,” replied the superintendent. “I must apologize for asking you to call at a time which must be very inconvenient to you. But we have something of yours.”
“Something of mine?” asked Mr. Swallow, perhaps a little more slowly than was quite natural.
“Yes,” said the superintendent briskly, “and I thought that you would probably like it returned to you at once.”
“Of course. I thank you very much. I thought we had lost everything. What is it?” asked Mr. Swallow.
“A cat,” the superintendent answered, and Mr. Swallow stood with his mouth open and the colour ebbing from his cheeks. The change in him was astonishing. A moment before he had been at his ease, confident, a trifle curious; now he was a man struck out of his wits; he watched the superintendent with dazed eyes, he swallowed, and his face was the colour of dirty parchment.
“Yes, a big ginger cat,” Holloway continued easily, “with the disdain of an Emperor. But the poor beast wasn’t disdainful last night, I can tell you. As soon as the door was broken in — you had a pretty good door, Mr. Swallow, and a pretty strong lock — no burglars for you, Mr. Swallow, eh?” and the superintendent laughed genially—” well, as soon as it was broken in, the cat scampered out and ran up one of my officer’s legs under his cape and clung there, whimpering and shaking and terrified out of its senses. And I don’t wonder. It had a near shave of a cruel death.”
“And you have it here, Superintendent?”
“Yes. I brought it here, gave it some milk, and it has owned my room ever since.”
Enoch Swallow sat down again in his chair, and rather suddenly, for his knees were shaking. He gave one rather furtive look round the room and the ceiling. Then he said:
“I am grateful.”
But he became aware with the mere speaking of the words that his exhibition of emotion required an ampler apology. “I explain to you,” he said spreading out his hands. “For me cats are not so important. But my poor wife — she loves them. All last night, all today, she has made great trouble for me over the loss of our cat. In her mind she saw it burnt, its fur first sparks then flames. Horrible!” and Enoch Swallow shut his eyes. “Now that it is found unhurt, she will be happy. My store, my stock all gone, pouf! Of no consequence. But the Ginger King back again, all is well,” and with a broad smile, Enoch Swallow called the whole station to join him a humorous appreciation of the eccentricities of women.
“Right!” the superintendent exclaimed. “I’ll fetch the Ginger King for you”; and at once all Enoch Swallow’s muscles tightened and up went his hands in the air.
“Wait, please!” he cried. “There is a shop in Regent Street where they sell everything. I will run there and buy a basket with a lid for the Ginger King. Then you shall strap him in and I will take him to my wife, and tonight there will be no unpleasantness. One little moment!”
Mr. Enoch Swallow backed out of the entrance and was gone. Superintendent Holloway returned to his office with all the geniality gone from his face. He was frowning heavily.
