WHAT THE RED ENVELOPE HELD
“My dear Angel,” wrote Jimmy, “I commend to you one Mr. Spedding,
an ingenious man. If by chance you ever wish to visit him, do so in
business hours. If you desire to examine his most secret possession,
effect an entrance into a dreary-looking house at the corner of Cley’s
Road, a stone’s-throw from ‘High Holly Lodge.’ It is marked in plain
characters ‘To Let.’ In the basement you will find a coal-cellar.
Searching the coal-cellar diligently, you will discover a flight of
stone steps leading to a subterranean passage, which burrows under the
ground until it arrives at friend Spedding’s particular private vault.
If this reads like a leaf torn from Dumas or dear Harrison Ainsworth it
is not my fault. I visited our legal adviser last night, and had quite
a thrilling evening. That I am alive this morning is a tribute to my
caution and foreseeing wisdom. The result of my visit is this: I have
the key of the ‘safe-word’ in my hands. Come and get it.”
Angel found the message awaiting him when he reached Scotland Yard
that morning. He too had spent sleepless hours in a futile attempt to
unravel the mystery of old Reale’s doggerel verse.
A telegram brought Kathleen Kent to town. Angel met her at a quiet
restaurant in Rupert Street, and was struck by the delicate beauty of
this slim girl with the calm, gray eyes.
She greeted him with a sad little smile.
“I was afraid you would never see me again after my outburst of the
other night,” she said. “This--this--person is a friend of yours?”
“Jimmy?” asked the detective cheerily. “Oh, yes, Jimmy’s by way of
being a friend; but he deserved all you said, and he knows it, Miss
Kent.”
The girl’s face darkened momentarily as she thought of Jimmy.
“I shall never understand,” she said slowly, “how a man of his gifts
allowed himself to become----”
“But,” protested the detective, “he told you he took no part in the
decoying of your father.”
The girl turned with open-eyed astonishment.
“Surely you do not expect me to believe his excuses,” she cried.
Angel Esquire looked grave.
“That is just what I should ask you to believe,” he said quietly.
“Jimmy makes no excuses, and he would certainly tell no lie in
extenuation of his faults.”
“But--but,” said Kathleen, bewildered, “he is a thief by his own
showing--a bad man.”
“A thief,” said Angel soberly, “but not a bad man. Jimmy is a puzzle to
most people. To me he is perfectly understandable; that is because I
have too much of the criminal in my own composition, perhaps.”
“I wish, oh, how I wish I had your faith in him! Then I could absolve
him from suspicion of having helped ruin my poor father.”
“I think you can do that,” said the detective almost eagerly. “Believe
me, Jimmy is not to be judged by conventional standards. If you ask
me to describe him, I would say that he is a genius who works in an
eccentric circle that sometimes overlaps, sometimes underreaches the
rigid circle of the law. If you asked me as a policeman, and if I
was his bitterest enemy, what I could do with Jimmy, I should say,
‘Nothing.’ I know of no crime with which I could charge him, save
at times with associating with doubtful characters. As a matter of
fact, that equally applies to me. Listen, Miss Kent. The first big
international case I figured in was a gigantic fraud on the Egyptian
Bank. Some four hundred thousand pounds were involved, and whilst
from the outsider’s point of view Jimmy was beyond suspicion, yet we
who were working at the case suspected him, and pretty strongly. The
men who owned the bank were rich Egyptians, and the head of all was
a Somebody-or-other Pasha, as great a scoundrel as ever drew breath.
It is impossible to tell a lady exactly how big a scoundrel he was,
but you may guess. Well, the Pasha knew it was Jimmy who had done the
trick, and we knew, but we dare not say so. The arrest of Jimmy would
have automatically ruined the banker. That was where I realized the
kind of man I had to deal with, and I am always prepared when Jimmy’s
name is mentioned in connection with a big crime to discover that his
victim deserved all he got, and a little more.”
The girl gave a little shiver.
“It sounds dreadful. Cannot such a man as that employ his talents to a
greater advantage?”
Angel shrugged his shoulders despairingly.
“I’ve given up worrying about misapplied talents; it is a subject that
touches me too closely,” he said. “But as to Jimmy, I’m rather glad you
started the conversation in that direction, because I’m going to ask
you to meet him to-day.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t,” she began.
“You are thinking of what happened on the night the will was read?
Well, you must forget that. Jimmy has the key to the verse, and it is
absolutely imperative that you should be present this afternoon.”
With some demur, she consented.
* * * * *
In the sitting-room of Jimmy’s flat the three sat round a table
littered with odds and ends of papers.
The girl had met him with some trepidation, and his distant bow had
done more to assure her than had he displayed a desire to rehabilitate
himself in her good opinion.
Without any preliminaries, Jimmy showed the contents of the packet. He
did not explain to the girl by what means he had come into possession
of them.
“Of all these papers,” began Jimmy, tapping the letter before him,
“only one is of any service, and even that makes confusion worse
confounded. Reale had evidently had this cursed cryptogram in his mind
for a long time. He had made many experiments, and rejected many. Here
is one.”
He pushed over a card, which bore a few words in Reale’s characteristic
hand.
Angel read:--
“The word of five letters I will use, namely:
1. White every 24 sec.
2. Fixed white and red.
3. White group two every 30 sec.
4. Group occ. white red sec. 30 sec.
5. Fixed white and red.”
Underneath was written: “No good; too easy.”
The detective’s brows were bent in perplexity.
“I’m blessed if I can see where the easiness comes in,” he said. “To me
it seems so much gibberish, and as difficult as the other.”
Jimmy noted the detective’s bewilderment with a quiet smile of
satisfaction. He did not look directly at the girl, but out of the
corner of his eyes he could see her eager young face bent over the
card, her pretty forehead wrinkled in a despairing attempt to decipher
the curious document.
“Yet it was easy,” he said, “and if Reale had stuck to that word, the
safe would have been opened by now.”
Angel pored over the mysterious clue.
“The word, as far as I can gather,” said Jimmy, “is ‘smock,’ but it may
be----”
“How on earth----” began Angel in amazement.
“Oh, it’s easy,” said Jimmy cheerfully, “and I am surprised that an old
traveler like yourself should have missed it.”
“Group occ. white red sec. 30 sec.,” read Angel.
Jimmy laughed.
It was the first time the girl had seen this strange man throw
aside his habitual restraint, and she noted with an unaccountable
satisfaction that he was decidedly handsome when amused.
“Let me translate it for you,” said Jimmy. “Let me expand it into,
‘Group occulting White with Red Sectors every Thirty Seconds.’ Now do
you understand?”
Angel shook his head.
“You may think I am shockingly dense,” he said frankly, “but even with
your lucid explanation I am still in the dark.”
Jimmy chuckled.
“Suppose you went to Dover to-night, and sat at the end of the
Admiralty Pier. It is a beautiful night, with stars in the sky, and you
are looking toward France, and you see----?”
“Nothing,” said Angel slowly; “a few ships’ lights, perhaps, and the
flash of the Calais Lighthouse----”
“The occulting flash?” suggested Jimmy.
“The occ.! By Jove!”
“Glad you see it,” said Jimmy briskly. “What old Reale did was to take
the names of five famous lights--any nautical almanac will give you
them:
Sanda.
Milford Haven.
Orkneys.
Caldy Island.
Kinnaird Head.
They form an acrostic, and the initial letters form the work ‘smock’;
but it was too easy--and too hard, because there are two or three
lights, particularly the fixed lights, that are exactly the same, so he
dropped _that_ idea.”
Angel breathed an admiring sigh.
“Jimmy, you’re a wonder,” he said simply.
Jimmy, busying himself amongst the papers, stole a glance at the girl.
“I am very human,” he thought, and was annoyed at the discovery.
“Now we come to the more important clue,” he said, and smoothed a
crumpled paper on the table.
“This, I believe, to have a direct bearing on the verse.”
Then three heads came close together over the scrawled sheet.
“A picture of a duck, which means T,” spelt Angel, “and that’s erased;
and then it is a snake that means T----”
Jimmy nodded.
“In Reale’s verse,” he said deliberately, “there are six words; outside
of those six words I am convinced the verse has no meaning. Six words
strung together, and each word in capitals. Listen.”
He took from his pocketbook the familiar slip on which the verse was
written:--
“Here’s a puzzle in language old,
Find my meaning and get my gold.
Take one BOLT--just one, no more--
Fix it on behind a DOOR.
Place it at a river’s MOUTH
East or west or north or south.
Take some LEAVES and put them whole
In some WATER in a BOWL.
I found this puzzle in a book
From which some mighty truths were took.”
“There are six words,” said Jimmy, and scribbled them down as he
spoke:--
“Bolt (or Bolts). Leave (or Leaves).
Door. Water.
Mouth. Bowl.
Each one stands for a letter--but what letter?”
“It’s rather hopeless if the old man has searched round for all sorts
of out-of-the-way objects, and allowed them to stand for letters of the
alphabet,” said Angel.
The girl murmured something, and met Jimmy’s inquiring eyes.
“I was only saying,” she said hesitatingly, “that there seems to be a
method in all this.”
“Except,” said Jimmy, “for this,” and he pointed to the crossed-out
duck. “By that it would seem that Reale chose his symbols haphazard,
and that the duck not pleasing him, he substituted the snake.”
“But,” said Kathleen, addressing Angel, “doesn’t it seem strange that
an illiterate man like Mr. Reale should make even these rough sketches
unless he had a model to draw from?”
“Miss Kent is right,” said Jimmy quickly.
“And,” she went on, gaining confidence as she spoke, “is there not
something about these drawings that reminds you of something?”
“Of what?” asked Angel.
“I cannot tell,” she replied, shaking her head; “and yet they remind me
of something, and worry me, just as a bar of music that I cannot play
worries me. I feel sure that I have seen them before, that they form a
part of some system----” She stopped suddenly.
“I know,” she continued in a lower voice; “they are associated in my
mind--with--with the Bible.”
The two men stared at her in blank astonishment. Then Jimmy sprang to
his feet, alight with excitement.
“Yes, yes,” he cried. “Angel, don’t you see? The last two lines of
Reale’s doggerel--
“‘I found this puzzle in a book
From which some mighty truths were took.’”
“Go on, go on, Miss Kent,” cried Angel eagerly. “You are on the right
track. Try to think----”
Kathleen hesitated, then turned to Jimmy to address the first remark
she had directed to him personally that day.
“You haven’t got----?”
Jimmy’s smile was a little hard.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, Miss Kent, but I _have_ got a copy,”
he said, with a touch of bitterness in his tone. He walked to the
bookcase at one end of the room and reached down the book--a well-worn
volume--and placed it before her.
The rebuke in his voice was deserved, she felt that.
She turned the leaves over quickly, but inspiration seemed to have
died, for there was nothing in the sacred volume that marshaled her
struggling thoughts.
“Is it a text?” asked Angel.
She shook her head.
“It is--something,” she said. “That sounds vague, doesn’t it? I
thought if I had the book in my hand, it would recall everything.”
Angel was intently studying the rebus.
“Here’s one letter, anyway. You said that, Jimmy?”
“The door?” said Jimmy. “Yes, that’s fairly evident. Whatever the word
is, its second letter is ‘P.’ You see Reale’s scribbled notes? All
these are no good, the other letters are best, I suppose it means; so
we can cut out ‘T,’ ‘O,’ and ‘K.’”
“The best clue of all,” he went on, “is the notes about the
‘professor.’ You see them:
“‘Mem.: To get the professor’s new book on it.
Mem.: To do what the professor thinks right.
Mem.: To write to professor about----’
Now the questions are: Who is the professor, what is his book, and what
did he advise? Reale was in correspondence with him, that is certain;
in his desire for accuracy, Reale sought his advice. In all these
papers there is no trace of a letter, and if any book exists it is
still in Sped--it is still in the place from whence this red envelope
came.”
The two men exchanged a swift glance.
“Yes,” said Angel, as if answering the other’s unspoken thought, “it
might be done.”
The girl looked from one to the other in doubt.
“Does this mean an extra risk?” she asked quietly. “I have not
questioned you as to how this red envelope came into your possession,
but I have a feeling that it was not obtained without danger.”
Angel disregarded Jimmy’s warning frown. He was determined that the
better side of his strange friend’s character should be made evident to
the girl.
“Jimmy faced death in a particularly unpleasant form to secure the
packet, Miss Kent,” he said.
“Then I forbid any further risk,” she said spiritedly. “I thought I had
made it clear that I would not accept favors at your friend’s hands;
least of all do I want the favor of his life.”
Jimmy heard her unmoved. He had a bitter tongue when he so willed, and
he chose that moment.
“I do not think you can too strongly impress upon Miss Kent the fact
that I am an interested party in this matter,” he said acidly. “As she
refused my offer to forego my claim to a share of the fortune, she
might remember that my interest in the legacy is at least as great
as hers. I am risking what I risk, not so much from the beautifully
quixotic motives with which she doubtless credits me, as from a natural
desire to help myself.”
She winced a little at the bluntness of his speech; then recognizing
she was in the wrong, she grew angry with herself at her indiscretion.
“If the book is--where these papers were, it can be secured,” Jimmy
continued, regaining his suavity. “If the professor is still alive he
will be found, and by to-morrow I shall have in my possession a list of
every book that has ever been written by a professor of anything.”
Some thought tickled him, and he laughed for the second time that
afternoon.
“There’s a fine course of reading for us all,” he said with a little
chuckle. “Heaven knows into what mysterious regions the literary
professor will lead us. I know one professor who has written a treatise
on Sociology that runs into ten volumes, and another who has spoken his
mind on Inductive Logic to the extent of twelve hundred closely-printed
pages. I have in my mind’s eye a vision of three people sitting amidst
a chaos of thoughtful literature, searching ponderous tomes for
esoteric references to bolts, door, mouth, et cetera.”
The picture he drew was too much for the gravity of the girl, and her
friendship with the man who was professedly a thief, and by inference
something worse, began with a ripple of laughter that greeted his sally.
Jimmy gathered up the papers, and carefully replaced them in the
envelope. This he handed to Angel.
“Place this amongst the archives,” he said flippantly.
“Why not keep it here?” asked Angel in surprise.
Jimmy walked to one of the three French windows that opened on to a
small balcony. He took a rapid survey of the street, then beckoned to
Angel.
“Do you see that man?” He pointed to a lounger sauntering along on the
opposite sidewalk.
“Yes.”
Jimmy walked back to the center of the room.
“That’s why,” he said simply. “There will be a burglary here to-night
or to-morrow night. People aren’t going to let a fortune slip through
their fingers without making some kind of effort to save it.”
“What people?” demanded the girl. “You mean those dreadful men who took
me away?”
“That is very possible,” said Jimmy, “although I was thinking of
somebody else.”
The girl had put on her wrap, and stood irresolutely near the door, and
Angel was waiting.
“Good-by,” she said hesitatingly. “I--I am afraid I have done you an
injustice, and--and I want to thank you for all you have undergone for
me. I know--I feel that I have been ungracious, and----”
“You have done me no injustice,” said Jimmy in a low voice. “I am all
that you thought I was--and worse.”
She held out her hand to him, and he raised it to his lips, which was
unlike Jimmy.