"Simon Harlow," he began, "was the owner of the famous Clos du Prince
vineyards on the Côte-d'Or to the east of Dijon. He had an estate in
Norfolk, this big house, the Maison Grenelle in Dijon, and a villa at
Monte Carlo. But he spent most of his time in Dijon, where at the
age of forty-five he married a French lady, Jeanne-Marie Raviart.
There was, I believe, quite a little romance about the affair.
Jeanne-Marie was married and separated from her husband, and Simon
Harlowe waited, I think, for ten years until the husband Raviart
died."
Jim Frobisher moved quickly and Mr. Haslitt, who seemed to be reading
off this history in the pattern of the carpet, looked up.
"Yes, I see what you mean," he said, replying to Jim's movement.
"Yes, there might have been some sort of affair between those two
before they were free to marry. But nowadays, my dear Jim! Opinion
takes a more human view than it did in my youth. Besides, don't you
see, this little secret, to be of any value to Boris Waberski, must
be near enough to Betty Harlowe--I don't say to affect her if
published, but to make Waberski think that she would hate to have it
published. Now Betty Harlowe doesn't come into the picture at all
until two years after Simon and Jeanne-Marie were married, when it
became clear that they were not likely to have any children. No, the
love-affairs of Simon Harlowe are sufficiently remote for us to leave
them aside."
Jim Frobisher accepted the demolition of his idea with a flush of
shame.
"I was a fool to think of it," he said.
"Not a bit," replied Mr. Haslitt cheerfully. "Let us look at every
possibility. That's the only way which will help us to get a glimpse
of the truth. I resume, then. Simon Harlowe was a collector. Yes,
he had a passion for collecting and a very catholic one. His one
sitting-room at the Maison Grenelle was a perfect treasure-house, not
only of beautiful things, but of out-of-the-way things too. He liked
to live amongst them and do his work amongst them. His married life
did not last long. For he died five years ago at the age of
fifty-one."
Mr. Haslitt's eyes once more searched for recollections amongst the
convolutions of the carpet.
"That's really about all I know of him. He was a pleasant fellow
enough, but not very sociable. No, there's nothing to light a candle
for us there, I am afraid."
Mr. Haslitt turned his thoughts to the widow.
"Jeanne-Marie Harlowe," he said. "It's extraordinary how little I
know about her, now I come to count it up. Natural too, though. For
she sold the Norfolk estate and has since passed her whole time
between Monte Carlo and Dijon and--oh, yes--a little summer-house on
the Côte-d'Or amongst her vineyards."
"She was left rich, I suppose?" Frobisher asked.
"Very well off, at all events," Mr. Haslitt replied. "The Clos du
Prince Burgundy has a fine reputation, but there's not a great deal
of it."
"Did she come to England ever?"
"Never," said Mr. Haslitt. "She was content, it seems, with Dijon,
though to my mind the smaller provincial towns of France are dull
enough to make one scream. However, she was used to it, and then her
heart began to trouble her, and for the last two years she has been
an invalid. There's nothing to help us there." And Mr. Haslitt
looked across to Jim for confirmation.
"Nothing," said Jim.
"Then we are only left the child Betty Harlowe and--oh, yes, your
correspondent, your voluminous correspondent, Ann Upcott. Who is
she, Jim? Where did she spring from? How does she find herself in
the Maison Grenelle? Come, confess, young man," and Mr. Haslitt
archly looked at his junior partner. "Why should Boris Waberski
expect her support?"
Jim Frobisher threw his arms wide.
"I haven't an idea," he said. "I have never seen her. I have never
heard of her. I never knew of her existence until that letter came
this morning with her name signed at the end of it."
Mr. Haslitt started up. He crossed the room to his table and, fixing
his folding glasses on the bridge of his nose, he bent over the
letter.
"But she writes to you, Jim," he objected. "'Dear Mr. Frobisher,'
she writes. She doesn't address the firm at all"; and he waited,
looking at Jim, expecting him to withdraw this denial.
Jim, however, only shook his head.
"It's the most bewildering thing," he replied. "I can't make head or
tail of it"; and Mr. Haslitt could not doubt now that he spoke the
truth, so utterly and frankly baffled the young man was. "Why should
Ann Upcott write to me? I have been asking myself that question for
the last half-hour. And why didn't Betty Harlowe write to you, who
have had her affairs in your care?"
"Ah!"
That last question helped Mr. Haslitt to an explanation. His face
took a livelier expression.
"The answer to that is in Waberski's, the second letter. Betty--she
snap her fingers at his awkwardnesses. She doesn't take the charge
seriously. She will have left it to the French notary to dispose of
it. Yes--I think that makes Ann Upcott's letter to you intelligible,
too. The ceremonies of the Law in a foreign country would frighten a
stranger, as this girl is apparently, more than they would Betty
Harlowe, who has lived for four years in the midst of them. So she
writes to the first name in the title of the firm, and writes to him
as a man. That's it, Jim," and the old man rubbed his hands together
in his satisfaction.
"A girl in terror wouldn't get any comfort out of writing to an
abstraction. She wants to know that she's in touch with a real
person. So she writes, 'Dear Mr. Frobisher.' That's it! You can
take my word for it."
Mr. Haslitt walked back to his chair. But he did not sit down in it;
he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out of the window
over Frobisher's head.
"But that doesn't bring us any nearer to finding out what is Boris
Waberski's strong suit, does it? We haven't a clue to it," he said
ruefully.
To both of the men, indeed, Mr. Haslitt's flat, unillumined narrative
of facts, without a glimpse into the characters of any of the
participants in the little drama, seemed the most unhelpful thing.
Yet the whole truth was written there--the truth not only of
Waberski's move, but of all the strange terrors and mysteries into
which the younger of the two men was now to be plunged. Jim
Frobisher was to recognise that, when, shaken to the soul, he resumed
his work in the office. For it was interrupted now.
Mr. Haslitt, looking out of the window over his partner's head, saw a
telegraph-boy come swinging across the square and hesitate in the
roadway below.
"I expect that's a telegram for us," he said, with the hopeful
anticipation people in trouble have that something from outside will
happen and set them right.
Jim turned round quickly. The boy was still upon the pavement
examining the numbers of the houses.
"We ought to have a brass plate upon the door," said Jim with a touch
of impatience; and Mr. Haslitt's eyebrows rose half the height of his
forehead towards his thick white hair. He was really distressed by
the Waberski incident, but this suggestion, and from a partner in the
firm, shocked him like a sacrilege.
"My dear boy, what are you thinking of?" he expostulated. "I hope I
am not one of those obstinate old fogies who refuse to march with the
times. We have had, as you know, a telephone instrument recently
installed in the junior clerks' office. I believe that I myself
proposed it. But a brass plate upon the door! My dear Jim! Let us
leave that to Harley Street and Southampton Row! But I see that
telegram is for us."
The tiny Mercury with the shako and red cord to his uniform made up
his mind and disappeared into the hall below. The telegram was
brought upstairs and Mr. Haslitt tore it open. He stared at it
blankly for a few seconds, then without a word, but with a very
anxious look in his eyes, he handed it to Jim Frobisher.
Jim Frobisher read:
_Please, please, send some one to help me at once. The Prefect
of Police has called in Hanaud, a great detective of the Sûrété
in Paris. They must think me guilty.--Betty Harlowe._
The telegram fluttered from Jim's fingers to the floor. It was like
a cry for help at night coming from a great distance.
"I must go, sir, by the night boat," he said.
"To be sure!" said Mr. Haslitt a little absently.
Jim, however, had enthusiasm enough for both. His chivalry was
fired, as is the way with lonely men, by the picture his imagination
drew. The little girl, Betty Harlowe! What age was she?
Twenty-one! Not a day more. She had been wandering with all the
proud indifference of her sex and youth, until suddenly she found her
feet caught in some trap set by a traitor, and looked about her; and
terror came and with it a wild cry for help.
"Girls never notice danger signals," he said. "No, they walk blindly
into the very heart of catastrophe." Who could tell what links of
false and cunning evidence Boris Waberski had been hammering away at
in the dark, to slip swiftly at the right moment over her wrist and
ankle? And with that question he was seized with a great
discouragement.
"We know very little of Criminal Procedure, even in our own country,
in this office," he said regretfully.
"Happily," said Mr. Haslitt with some tartness. With him it was the
Firm first and last. Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt never went in to
the Criminal Courts. Litigation, indeed, even of the purest kind was
frowned upon. It is true there was a small special staff, under the
leadership of an old managing clerk, tucked away upon an upper floor,
like an unpresentable relation in a great house, which did a little
of that kind of work. But it only did it for hereditary clients, and
then as a favour.
"However," said Mr. Haslitt as he noticed Jim's discomfort, "I
haven't a doubt, my boy, that you will be equal to whatever is
wanted. But remember, there's something at the back of this which we
here don't know."
Jim shifted his position rather abruptly. This cry of the old man
was becoming parrot-like--a phrase, a formula. Jim was thinking of
the girl in Dijon and hearing her piteous cry for help. She was not
"snapping her the fingers" now.
"It's a matter of common sense," Mr. Haslitt insisted. "Take a
comparison. Bath, for instance, would never call in Scotland Yard
over a case of this kind. There would have to be the certainty of a
crime first, and then grave doubt as to who was the criminal. This
is a case for an autopsy and the doctors. If they call in this man
Hanaud"--and he stopped.
He picked the telegram up from the floor and read it through again.
"Yes--Hanaud," he repeated, his face clouding and growing bright and
clouding again like a man catching at and just missing a very elusive
recollection. He gave up the pursuit in the end. "Well, Jim, you
had better take the two letters of Waberski, and Ann Upcott's
three-volume novel, and Betty's telegram"--he gathered the papers
together and enclosed them in a long envelope--"and I shall expect
you back again with a smiling face in a very few days. I should like
to see our little Boris when he is asked to explain those letters."
Mr. Haslitt gave the envelope to Jim and rang his bell.
"There is some one waiting to see me, I think," he said to the clerk
who answered it.
The clerk named a great landowner, who had been kicking his heels
during the last half-hour in an undusted waiting-room with a few
mouldy old Law books in a battered glass case to keep him company.
"You can show him in now," said Mr. Haslitt as Jim retired to his own
office; and when the great landowner entered, he merely welcomed him
with a reproach.
"You didn't make an appointment, did you?" he said.
But all through that interview, though his advice was just the
precise, clear advice for which the firm was quietly famous, Mr.
Haslitt's mind was still playing hide-and-seek with a memory,
catching glimpses of the fringes of its skirt as it gleamed and
vanished.
"Memory is a woman," he said to himself. "If I don't run after her
she will come of her own accord."
But he was in the common case of men with women: he could not but run
after her. Towards the end of the interview, however, his shoulders
and head moved with a little jerk, and he wrote a word down on a slip
of paper. As soon as his client had gone, he wrote a note and sent
it off by a messenger who had orders to wait for an answer. The
messenger returned within the hour and Mr. Haslitt hurried to Jim
Frobisher's office.
Jim had just finished handing over his affairs to various clerks and
was locking up the drawers of his desk.
"Jim, I have remembered where I have heard the name of this man
Hanaud before. You have met Julius Ricardo? He's one of our
clients."
"Yes," said Frobisher. "I remember him--a rather finnicking person
in Grosvenor Square."
"That's the man. He's a friend of Hanaud and absurdly proud of the
friendship. He and Hanaud were somehow mixed up in a rather
scandalous crime some time ago--at Aix-les-Bains, I think. Well,
Ricardo will give you a letter of introduction to him, and tell you
something about him, if you will go round to Grosvenor Square at five
this afternoon."
"Capital!" said Jim Frobisher.
He kept the appointment, and was told how he must expect to be awed
at one moment, leaped upon unpleasantly at the next, ridiculed at a
third, and treated with great courtesy and friendship at the fourth.
Jim discounted Mr. Ricardo's enthusiasm, but he got the letter and
crossed the Channel that night. On the journey it occurred to him
that if Hanaud was a man of such high mark, he would not be free,
even at an urgent call, to pack his bags and leave for the provinces
in an instant. Jim broke his journey, therefore, at Paris, and in
the course of the morning found his way to the Direction of the
Sûrété on the Quai d'Horloge just behind the Palais de Justice.
"Monsieur Hanaud?" he asked eagerly, and the porter took his card and
his letter of introduction. The great man was still in Paris, then,
he thought with relief. He was taken to a long dark corridor, lit
with electric globes even on that bright morning of early summer.
There he rubbed elbows with malefactors and gendarmes for half an
hour whilst his confidence in himself ebbed away. Then a bell rang
and a policeman in plain clothes went up to him. One side of the
corridor was lined with a row of doors.
"It is for you, sir," said the policeman, and he led Frobisher to one
of the doors and opened it, and stood aside. Frobisher straightened
his shoulders and marched in.