it comes to anything happening. At any rate here am I with an element of
success after a procession of distinct non-stops. If we get well set,
whatever happens will matter less. Now I haven’t gone to any
Machiavellian lengths in arranging this, but I have taken the chance as
it came along. I’ve told you everything I know. Is there any reason why
you shouldn’t do us all a good turn by keeping it strictly to
yourselves?”
“I don’t know that I particularly owe you any consideration, Mr
Stokesey, or that you owe me any,” announced Mr Enniscorthy. “Just now I
am only concerned in discovering what has become of Miss Roscastle. You
know her address?”
“In Kensington?”
“Well, yes.”
“74 Westphalia Mansions.”
“You sent there of course?”
“Heavens, yes! The various forms of messages must be six inches deep all
over the hall by now. Last Friday I had a man sitting practically all
day on her doorstep.”
“But she has someone there--a housekeeper or maid?”
“I don’t think so. She told me that she was taking a little furnished
flat--asked me if the neighbourhood was a suitable one. I imagine there
was something about a daily woman until she found how she liked it.
We’ve had no one from there anyway.”
“Then it comes to this, that for a week there has been absolutely no
trace of Miss Roscastle’s existence! Do you quite realise your
responsibility, Mr Stokesey?” demanded Enniscorthy with increased
misgivings.
The manager, who had turned to go, caught Mr Carlyle’s eye over the
concerned young man’s shoulder. “I don’t think that Miss Roscastle’s
friends need have any anxiety about her personal safety,” he replied
with expression. “At all events I’ve done everything I can for you; I
hope that you will not fail to meet my views. If there’s anything else
that occurs to you, Mr Carrados, I shall be in my office. Good-night.”
“Callous brute!” muttered Mr Enniscorthy. “He ought to have put it in
the hands of the police a week ago.”
Mr Carlyle glanced at Carrados, who had transferred his interest to the
rendering of the last musical item of the interval.
“Possibly Miss Roscastle would prefer a less public investigation if she
had a voice in the matter,” said the professional man.
“If she happens to be shut up in some beastly underground cellar I
imagine she would prefer whatever gets her out the soonest. I dare say
it sounds fantastic, but such things really do happen now and then, you
know, and why not?”
“You don’t know of any threats or blackmailing letters?”
“No,” admitted the young man; “but I do know this, that if Una was at
liberty she would never allow another actress to take her place and use
her name in this way.”
“A very significant suggestion,” put in Carrados from his detached
attitude. “Mr Enniscorthy has given you a really valuable hint, Louis.”
“I don’t mean that Miss Roscastle is really out-of-the-way jealous,”
Enniscorthy hastened to add, “but in her profession----”
“Oh, most natural, most natural,” agreed the urbane Carlyle. “Everyone
has to look after his own interest. Now----”
“I don’t suppose that you are particularly keen on this act,” interposed
the blind man. “Are you, Mr Enniscorthy?”
“I’d much rather be doing something,” was the reply.
“I was going to suggest that you might go round to Westphalia Mansions,
just to make sure that there is no one there now. Then if you would find
your way to our table at the Savoy we could hear your report.”
“Yes, certainly. I shall be glad to think that I can be of some
assistance by going.”
Mr Carlyle’s optimistic temper was almost incapable of satire, but he
could not refrain from, “You can--poor beggar!” on Enniscorthy’s
departure. “I suppose,” he continued, turning to his friend, “I suppose
you think that Stokesey may----? Eh?”
“I fancy that in the absence of our young friend he may be induced to
become more confidential. He may have some good ground for believing
that the missing lady will not upset his ingenious plan. He, at all
events, discounts the ‘underground cellar.’”
“Oh, that!” commented Carlyle with an indulgent smile. “But, after all,
what is the answer, Max? Enniscorthy is a thoroughly eligible young
fellow and this was the first chance of her career. What is the
inducement?”
“That much we can safely emphasise. What, in a word, would induce an
ambitious young lady to throw up a good engagement, Louis?”
“A better?” suggested Mr Carlyle.
“Exactly,” agreed Carrados; “a better.”
It is unnecessary to follow the course of Mr Carlyle’s inquiry on the
facts already disclosed, for, less than twenty-four hours later, the
whole situation was changed and Mr Stokesey’s discreet prevarication had
been torn into shreds. The manager had calculated in vain--if he had
calculated and not just accepted the chance that presented itself. At
all events the fiction proved too elaborate to be maintained and late in
the afternoon of the following day all the evening papers blazed out
with the
“SENSATIONAL DISAPPEARANCE OF
POPULAR LONDON ACTRESS”
The event was particularly suited to the art of the contents bill, for
when the news came to be analysed there was little else to be learned
beyond the name of the missing actress and the fact that “at the theatre
a policy of questionable reticence is being maintained towards all
inquiry.” That phrase caused two men at least to smile as they realised
the embarrassment of Mr Stokesey’s dubious position.
The conditions being favourable, the Missing Actress sensation caught on
at once and effectually asphyxiated public interest in all the other
sensations that up to that moment had been satisfying the mental
requirements of the nation--a “Mysterious Submarine,” an “Eloping Dean”
(three wives), and an “Are We Becoming Too Intellectual?”
correspondence. Supply followed demand, and it very soon became
difficult to decide, not where Miss Roscastle was, but where she was
not. Public opinion wavered between Genoa, on the authority of a retired
lime and slate merchant of Hull who had had a presentiment while
directing a breathless lady to the docks, when a Wilson liner was on the
point of sailing; Leatherhead, the suggestion of a booking-office clerk
who had been struck by the peculiar look in a veiled lady’s eyes as she
asked for a third-class return to Cheam; and Accrington, where a young
lady with a marked Irish accent and a theatrical manner had inquired
about lodgings at three different houses and then abruptly left, saying
that she would come back if she thought any more about it.
Before the novelty was two days old Scotland Yard had been stirred into
recognising its existence. A London clue was forthcoming, apparently the
wildest and most circumstantial of them all. A plain-clothes constable
of the A Division reported that an hour after midnight three days before
he had noticed a shabby-genteel man, who seemed to be waiting for
someone, loitering on the Embankment near the Boadicea statue. There was
nothing in the circumstance to interest him, but when he repassed the
spot ten minutes later the man had been joined by a woman. The sharp
eyes of the constable told him that the woman was well and even
fashionably dressed, although she had made some precaution to conceal
it, and the fact quickened his observation. As he shambled past--an
Embankment dead-beat for the occasion--he heard the name “Roscastle”
spoken by one of the two. He could not distinguish by which, nor the
sense in which the word was used, but his notebook, with the name
written down under the correct date, corroborated so much. On neither
occasion had he seen the face of the man distinctly--the threadbare
individual had sought the shadows--but he was able to describe that of
the woman in some detail. He was shown half-a-dozen photographs and at
once identified that of Miss Roscastle. The crowning touch requisite to
make this story entirely popular was supplied by an inspector of river
police. According to the newspaper account, the patrol boat was off the
Embankment near Westminster Bridge between one and a quarter-past on the
night in question when a distinct splash was heard. The crew made for
the spot, flashed the lights about and drifted up and down several
times, but without finding a trace of any human presence. At once the
public voice demanded that the river should be dragged from Chelsea to
The Pool, and, pending the result, every shabby wastrel who appeared on
the Embankment arrested.
In his private office Mr Carlyle threw down the last of his morning
papers with an expression that began as a knowing smile but ended rather
dubiously. For his own part he would have much preferred that the
disappearance of Miss Roscastle had not leaked out--that he had been
left to pursue his course unaided, but, in the circumstances, he
carefully read everything on the chance of a useful hint. The Embankment
story both amused and puzzled him.
He dismissed the subject to its proper mental pigeonhole and had turned
to deal with his most confidential correspondence when something very
like an altercation breaking the chaste decorum of his outer office
caused him to stop and frown. The next moment there was a hurrying step
outside, the door was snatched open and Mr Enniscorthy, pale and
distracted, stumbled into the room. Behind him appeared the indignant
face of Mr Carlyle’s chief clerk. Then the visitor extinguished the
outraged vision by flinging back the door as he went forward.
“Have you seen the papers?” he demanded. “Is there anything dreadful in
them?”
“I have seen the papers, yes,” replied the puzzled agent. “I am not
aware----”
“I mean the evening papers--just out. No, I see you haven’t. Here, read
that and tell me. I haven’t--I dare not look.”
Mr Carlyle took the journal that Enniscorthy thrust under his eyes--it
was the earliest _Star_--glanced into his visitor’s face a little
severely and then focussed on the column.
“Good heavens!” he exclaimed, “what is this! ‘MISSING ACTRESS.
EMBANKMENT CLUE. BODY FOUND!’”
“Ah!” groaned Enniscorthy. “That was on the bills. Is it----?”
“It’s all right, it’s all right, my dear sir,” reported Mr Carlyle,
glancing along the lines. “This is the body of a man ... the man who was
seen ... most extraordinary....”
“My God!” was wrung from the distressed young man as he dropped into a
chair. “Oh, my God! I thought----” He took out his handkerchief, wiped
and fanned his face, and for the next few minutes looked rather
languidly on things.
“Very distressing,” commiserated Mr Carlyle when he had come to the end
of the report. “Can I get you anything--brandy, a glass of water----?
The mere act of sipping, I am medically informed, has a beneficial
effect in case of faintness. I have----”
“Nothing, thanks. I shall be all right now. Sorry to have made an ass of
myself. You have heard--anything?”
“Nothing definite so far,” was the admission. “But there may be
something worth following in this story after all. I shall go down to
the mortuary shortly. Do you care to accompany me?”
“No, thanks,” replied the visitor. “I have had enough of that particular
form of excitement for one morning.... Unless, of course, there is
anything I----”
He was assured that there was nothing to be effected by his presence and
half-an-hour later Mr Carlyle made his way alone to the obscure mortuary
where the unclaimed dead hold their grim reception.
An inspector of the headquarters investigation staff who had been put on
to the case was standing by the side of one of the shells when Carlyle
entered. He was a man whom the private agent had more than once
good-naturedly obliged in small matters that had come within his reach.
He now greeted Mr Carlyle with consideration and stood aside to allow
him to approach the body.
“The Embankment case, I suppose, sir?” he remarked. “Not very
attractive, but I’ve seen many worse in here.” He jerked off the upper
part of the rough coverlet and exposed a visage that caused Mr Carlyle
to turn away with a “Tch, tch!” of emotion. Then a sense of duty drew
him round again and he proceeded to note the descriptive points of the
dead man in his pocket-book.
“No marks of violence, I suppose?” he asked.
“Nothing beyond the usual abrasions that we always find. A clear case of
drowning--suicide--it seems to be.”
“And the things?”
The inspector nodded towards a seedy suit laid out for identification
and an overcoat, once rakish of its fashion and now frayed and
mouldering, put with it.
“Fur collar too, Mr Carlyle,” pointed out his guide. “‘Velvet and rags,’
isn’t it? ‘Where moth and rust doth corrupt.’ A sermon could be made out
of this.”
“Very true; very true indeed,” replied Mr Carlyle, who always responded
to the sentimentally obvious. “It is a sermon, inspector. But what have
we here?”
Beside the garments had been collected together a heap of metal
discs--quite a considerable heap, numbering some hundreds. Carlyle took
up a few and examined them. They were all alike--flat, perfectly round
and somewhat under an inch in diameter. They were quite plain and
apparently of lead.
“H’m, curious,” he commented. “In his pockets?”
“Yes; both overcoat pockets. Very determined, wasn’t he? They would have
kept him down till the Day of Judgment. I’ve counted them--just five
hundred.”
“Any money?”
The inspector smiled his tragi-comic appreciation--the coin embellished
the moral of his unwritten sermon--and pointed.
“A halfpenny!” he replied.
“Poor fellow!” said Mr Carlyle. “Well, well; perhaps it is better as it
is. You might pull up the cloth again now, please.... There are no
letters or papers, I see.”
The detective hesitated a moment and then recalled the obligation he was
under.
“There is a scrap of paper that I have kept from the Press so far,” he
admitted. “It was tightly clenched in the man’s right hand--so tight
that we had to use a screw-driver to get it out, and the water had
barely reached it.” He was extracting a slip of paper from his notebook
as he spoke and he now unfolded it. “You won’t put it about, will you,
Mr Carlyle? I don’t know that there’s anything tangible in it,
but--well, see for yourself.”
“Extraordinary!” admitted the gentleman. He read the words a second
time: “‘Fool! What does it matter now?’ Why, it might almost----”
“It might be addressed to the coroner, or to anyone who tries to find
out who he is or what it means, you would say. Well, so it might, sir.
Anyhow, that is all.”
“By the way, I suppose he _is_ the man your fellow saw?”
“Everything tallies, Mr Carlyle--length of immersion, place, and so on.
Our man thinks he is the same, but you may remember that he didn’t claim
to be very positive on this point.”
There seemed nothing else to be learned and Mr Carlyle took his
departure. His acquaintance had also finished and their ways lay
together as far as Trafalgar Square. Before they parted the inspector
had promised to communicate with Mr Carlyle as soon as the dead man was
identified.
“And if he has a room anywhere he probably will be, with all this talk
about Miss Roscastle. Then we may find something there that will help
us,” he predicted. “If he is purely casual the chances are we shall
never hear.”
His experience was justified and he kept his promise. Two days later
Carlyle heard that the unknown had been identified as the occupant of a
single room in a Lambeth lodging-house. He had only occupied it for a
few weeks and he was known there as Mr Hay. Tenement gossip described
him as a foreigner and credited him with having seen better days--an
easy enough surmise in the circumstances. Mr Carlyle had been on the
point of turning his attention to a Monte Carlo Miss Roscastle when this
information reached him. He set off at once for Lambeth, but at Tubb’s
Grove disappointment met him at the door. The landlady of the ramshackle
establishment--a female with a fluent if rather monotonous delivery--was
still smarting from the unappreciated honour of the police officials’
visit and the fierce light of publicity that it had thrown upon her
house. All Mr Carlyle’s bland cajolery was futile and in the end he had
to disburse a sum that bore an appreciable relation to a week’s rent
before he was allowed to inspect the room and to command conversation
that was not purely argumentative.
Then the barrenness of the land was revealed. Mr Hay had been irregular
with his rent at the best, and when he disappeared he was a week in
arrears. After two days’ absence, with the easy casuistry of her
circumstances, the lady had decided that he was not returning and had
proceeded to “do out” the room for the next tenant. The lodger’s “few
things” she had bundled together into a cupboard, whence they had been
retrieved by the police, in spite of her indignant protest. But the
lodger’s “papers and such-like rubbish” she confessed to burning, to get
them out of the way. Mr Carlyle spent a profitless half-hour and then
returned, calling at Scotland Yard on his way back. His friend the
inspector shook his head; there was nothing among the seized property
that afforded any clue.
It was at this point that Mr Carlyle’s ingenuous mind suggested looking
up Carrados, whom he had not seen since the visit to the theatre.
“Max was interested in this case from the first; I am sure he will be
expecting to hear from me about it,” was the form in which the proposal
conveyed itself to him. The same evening he ran down to Richmond for an
hour, after ascertaining that his friend was at home and disengaged.
“You might have brought Enniscorthy with you,” remarked Carrados when
the subject had been started. “Nice, genuine young fellow. Evidently
deeply in love with the girl, but he is young enough to take the attack
safely. What have you told him?”
“He is back in Ireland just now--got an idea that he might learn
something from some people there, and rushed off. What I have told
him--well”--experience endowed Mr Carlyle with sudden caution--“what
would you have told him, Max?”
Carrados smiled at the innocent guile of the invitation.
“To answer that I should have to know just what you know,” he replied.
“I suppose you have gone into this Embankment development?”
“Yes.” He had come intending to make some show of his progress and to
sound Carrados discreetly, but once again in the familiar room and under
the sway of the clear-visioned blind man’s virile personality he
suddenly found himself submitting quite naturally to the suave,
dominating influence. “Yes; but I must confess, Max, that I am unable to
explain much of that incident. It suggests blackmail at the bottom, and
if the plain-clothes man was correct and saw Miss Roscastle there last
Thursday----”
“It was blackmail; but the plain-clothes man was not correct, though he
had every excuse for making the mistake. There is one quiet, retiring
personage in this drama who has been signally overlooked in all the
clamour.”
“You mean----?”
“I suggest that if Miss Linknorth had been subpœnaed for the inquest and
asked to account for her movements after leaving the theatre on Thursday
last it might have turned public speculation into another
channel--though probably a wrong one.”
“Miss Linknorth!” The idea certainly turned Mr Carlyle’s thoughts into a
new channel.
“Has it occurred to you what an extraordinary act of self-effacement it
must have been on the part of this young unknown actress to allow her
well-earned success to be credited to another? As Enniscorthy reminded
us, ladies of the profession are rather keen on their chances.”
“Yes; but Stokesey, you remember, insisted on keeping it dark.”
“I am not overlooking that. But although it was to Stokesey’s interest
to keep up the fiction, and also to the interest of everyone else about
the theatre--people who were merely concerned in the run of the
piece--it would have richly paid the Linknorth to have her identity
established while the iron was hot, whatever the outcome. A paragraph to
the Press the next day would have done it. There wasn’t a hint. I am not
overlooking the fact that Miss Linknorth’s name now appears on the
programme, but that is an unforeseen development so far as she is
concerned, and her golden opportunity has gone by. With the exception of
the first row of the pit and of the gallery you won’t find that one per
cent. of the house now really knows who created ‘Mary Ryan’ or regards
the Linknorth as anything but a makeshift.”
“Then what was the incentive?”
“Suppose it has been made worth Miss Linknorth’s while? It is not
necessarily a crude question of money. Friendship might make it worth
her while, or ambition in some quarter we have not looked for, or a
dozen other considerations--anything but the box-office of the Argosy
Theatre, which certainly did not make it worth her while.”
“Yes, that is feasible enough, Max, but how does it help us?”
“Do you ever have toothache, Louis?” demanded Carrados inconsequently.
“No, I am glad to say,” admitted Mr Carlyle. “Have you got a turn now,
old man? Never mind this confounded ‘shop.’ I’ll go and then you
can----”
“Not at all,” interposed Carrados, smiling benignly at his friend’s
consideration; “and don’t be too ready to condemn toothache
indiscriminately. I have sometimes found it very stimulating. The only
way to cure it is to concentrate the mind so terrifically that you
forget the ache. Then it stops. I imagine that a mathematician could
succeed by working out a monumental problem. I have frequently done it
by ‘discovering’ a hoard of Greek coins of the highest art period on one
of the islands and classifying the find. On Monday night I thought that
I was in for a devil of a time. I at once set myself to discover a
workable theory for everyone’s conduct in this affair, one, of course,
that would stand the test of every objection based on fact. The correct
hypothesis must, indeed, be strengthened by every new circumstance that
came out. At twelve o’clock, after two hours’ mental sudation, I began
to see light--excuse the phrase. By this time the toothache had gone,
but I was so taken up with the idea that I called out Harris and drove
to Scotland Yard then and there on the chance of finding Beedel or one
of the others I know.... Why on earth didn’t you let me have that
‘Fool!’ message, Louis?”
“My dear fellow,” protested Mr Carlyle, “I can’t beat up for advice on
every day of my life.”
“At all events it might have saved me an hour’s strenuous thinking.”
“Well, you know, Max, perhaps that would have left you in the middle of
the toothache. Now the message----?”
“The message? Oh, that settled it. You may take it as assured, Louis,
that although Miss Roscastle’s departure from the theatre was hurried,
in order to allow her to catch the boat-train from Charing Cross, she
had enough time to think out the situation and to secure Miss
Linknorth’s allegiance. Whether Stokesey knows any more than he admits,
we need not inquire. The great thing is that Miss Roscastle had some
reason--some fairly strong reason--for not wanting her absence from the
cast to become public. We agreed, Louis, that a better engagement would
alone satisfactorily explain her defection. What better engagement would
you suggest--it could scarcely be a theatrical one?”
“A brilliant marriage?”
“Our minds positively ident, Louis. ‘A brilliant marriage’--my exact
expression. One, moreover, that suddenly becomes possible and cannot be
delayed. One--here we are on difficult ground--one that may be
jeopardised if at that early stage Miss Roscastle’s identity in it comes
to light, or if, possibly, her absence from London is discovered. That
sign-post,” said Carrados, with his unseeing eyes fixed on the
lengthening vistas that rose before his mind, “points in a good many
directions.”
“The blackmailer?” hazarded Carlyle.
“I gave a good deal of attention to every phase of that gentleman’s
presence,” replied Carrados. “It corroborates, but it does not entirely
explain. I would say that he merely intervened. In my view, Miss
Roscastle would have acted precisely as she did if there had been no Mr
Hay. At all events he _did_ intervene and had to be dealt with.”
“It had occurred to me, Max, whether it was Miss Linknorth’s job to
impersonate the other?”