PERFUME.
Search of house and grounds was fruitless.
Before half-past eleven the rainstorm was over, and a bright moon
lighted the brothers and the men-servants to the discovery of just
nothing at all.
Except to give an order, or make a suggestion, neither Bellamy spoke
until they stood alone together in the hall.
They looked at each other like men who from dreams of hell have waked to
find it.
Then the elder groaned, beside himself.
"The poor girl!" he said. "To think of her ill-used--murdered, perhaps!"
The younger man cut him short with a glance, which even through his
agony pierced Randal as if the livid lightning of a god had been
launched at the ineptitude of human compassion.
"Cut it out," said Dick. "That's a car coming. The father. Take him
right back to town in it. You've got the pull. You can make the
political coves get Scotland Yard and the police of the world working,
before you'd get the county bobbies into their trousers."
The car drew up in front of the house.
"How shall I tell him?" said Randal.
"I shall," answered Dick. "You get into tweeds--jump." And he went to
meet Caldegard at the door.
"Good God!" said the old man, when he saw the young one's face. "What's
happened?"
"I'll tell you," said Dick. "Is that a good car?"
Caldegard knew how to obey. "It's Broadfoot's--Rolls-Royce, six
cylinder," he replied promptly.
"Tell the man he must take you back to town."
When the order was given, the lover, in curt and terrible phrases, told
the father what had happened. And Caldegard's face, as he listened
without a word, was a tragedy which Dick Bellamy, heeding it not at all
for the moment, remembered all his life.
"Set every dog in the world on the men who've stolen Ambrotox," he said
in conclusion, "and you'll find Amaryllis. A trace of one is a track of
the other; news of either is news of both. Leave the local work to me."
Caldegard looked into the strange face, and almost flinched from the
terrible eyes.
"I'll do all you say," he replied simply.
Then Randal came, pulling on his coat. His brother made him swallow
whisky and water, forced the elder man to do the same, and before they
left, demanded money of Randal.
"There's a hundred and twenty pounds in notes, in the small right-hand
drawer in the safe," he replied, "--unless they got that too."
"No," said Dick. "They were hustled. Let her rip," he said to the
driver, and went back into the house.
Trembling with excitement and keeping back genuine tears for Amaryllis,
a guest to serve whom had been pleasure, the parlour-maid fetched him
cold meat, bread and beer. When he had changed his clothes, he ate
hastily in the hall, swallowing doggedly what he could not taste.
"Twenty-five minutes--they'll be in town. Another fifteen and the
wires'll be humming," he calculated. "Twenty more--the local police will
be here, and rub out every trace. Is there a trace, a mark--a print--a
smell, even? I've got an hour."
He sent all the servants to bed, except Randal's chauffeur, whom he
summoned to the hall.
"My car's fit to travel, Martin," he said. "Shove in as many tins of
petrol as she'll hold. I may want her to-night. Run her out into the
drive, put on an overcoat and sit inside till I come."
Then he went to the study, lit all the candles and another lamp, opened
the safe with the duplicate key, and found, as he had expected, the
money in its drawer.
"Mostly one-pound notes," he muttered, as he locked the safe.
Turning to leave it, he stood suddenly stock-still, head up and sniffing
the air, puzzled by an intangible association of sense and memory.
Failing to fix it, he left the alcove, and went to the writing-table,
choosing the chair she had sat in, when she could not, or would not,
give reason for her tears. And now he gave a flash of thought where
before he had refrained even from speculation. Could it have been the
forgotten letter that had made her weep? Yet there had been no trouble
in her face while she read it, and it seemed certain that the
handwriting was unfamiliar.
While he mused his eyes were fixed on the alcove at the end of the room.
The light of the candle he had left there outlined sharply the edges of
the two curtains which hung from the rod crossing the recess. At the
ceiling their edges met, but, at a height of some two and a half feet
from the floor, their folds were looped back to the wall in a style
formally old-fashioned. And now, even before his mind became concerned,
his eye was irritated by a lack of symmetry in the draping; for the
drooping fold of the right-hand curtain was out of shape. Again, his
thought ran, if thieves playing for so great a stake as Ambrotox had
found a woman in their way, their best card was prompt murder. If they
could abduct in silence, they could have killed silently. And this made
clear to him the soundness of what had been hitherto a merely
instinctive conviction; since they had not left her body dead, they had
taken it away alive--and with no intent to kill elsewhere. For, if
murder were to be done, the dead was safest of all behind them in the
place of the theft.
Then again--while the distorted loop of the curtain haunted his
subconscious mind, so that with imaginary fingers he was adjusting its
curves, even while his mind pulled and twisted the elements of his
problem--then, again, he thought, this thief--had he shrunk from murder,
or merely from _this_ murder?
"If I could know that!"
And before he was well aware of what he did, he was in the opening of
the alcove, handling that awkward fold--and again he drew breath, deep
and slow through the nose; again the vague memory--again the elusive
association. Was the scent--sweet as well as musty--was it in the
curtain? But as he stooped, he saw what made him forget that vague
odour: a crumpled bunch of the soft linen had been squeezed together,
and was not yet recovered from the strain of some violent compression.
Gently stretching the stuff, and bringing it closer to the light, he
found the almost regular marks, above and below, as of some serrated,
semi-trenchant tool which had been closed upon the doubled piece of
cloth.
"Teeth, by God!" said Dick. "Tried to gag her with it--shoved a bag of
it in with his fingers, gets 'em out, and stoppers the lot with his
hand. Before she faints, she bites--here and there she's gone clean
through the stuff."
Indecision gone, he took the smaller lamp in his hand, and made a tour
of the room.
At an angle to the fireplace was a broad-seated, high-backed oaken
settee, covered with cushions. The back almost hid the hearth from the
french-window. The silk pillow nearest the alcove still kept the impress
of a head.
"When they came in," he reasoned, "the back of that thing hid her. She'd
lain down to rest, and stop that sobbing before she came back to me.
Fell asleep--women'll do that, happy or wretched, before they know where
they are. They reached the safe, and that arm at the end would hide even
her hair. While they're messing round with the safe, she wakes and peeps
at 'em--was it cold feet or sand kept her from yelling? What next?"
He was back at the alcove now, on hands and knees, the lamp set on the
ground, searching the thick pile of the carpet for signs of the struggle
there must have been. And again the smell--near the right hand curtain
where the wool of the carpet was rubbed.
Roses--attar of roses! Where had he heard of attar of roses combined
with--with what? And again the two wires would not touch--but they were
throwing a spark across the gap.
Yes, it was Caldegard--Caldegard had said something--something of a foul
man and a rotten stink. It was some story he'd been telling that first
night at dinner.
Then a glitter in the carpet. Half-hidden--trodden in amongst the
roughened wool, he found it--a morsel of bright steel--the needle of a
hypodermic syringe. Who had spoken lately of a morphinomaniac that
carried his syringe always with him?
Why, Caldegard, Caldegard!
"Melhuish?--Melford?--Meldrum?--Melcher?-_Melchard!_ By God, the swine
that stank!"
And he remembered how he had upset the silver candlestick, setting fire
to the shades, to cover the girl's discomfort, and the smile she had
paid him with. Then it was this particular murder from which the thief
had shrunk.
Melchard, the chemist, had guessed at the direction of Caldegard's
research. Discharged at a moment when his hope of mastering a valuable
secret was at its height, he had found means to track Caldegard's
movements, and even, it seemed, to discover the hiding-place of the
perfected drug and its formula.
"Agent--or, p'r'aps, a leading member of the Dope Gang Caldegard hinted
at. He lays his plans to grab the stuff and the formula. Just as he gets
his fingers on it, up pops the only being on earth he'd give a damn
about knifing. Twenty years' clink if he leaves her to talk. Takes her
with him--hell's blight on him! Wouldn't have been dosing himself on a
game like this. Used the syringe on her."
To find Melchard was to find Amaryllis. The first thing to do,
therefore, was to find Melchard's address, and the first man to ask was
Caldegard. If Caldegard could not give it to him, it meant a long hunt
with the police. Anyway, he must begin with Caldegard.
He crossed to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and, hearing no
tinkle, blew into the transmitter with the receiver at his ear. Hearing
nothing, he hung it up with a curse.
Sitting at Randal's desk, he wrote rapidly the following note:
"Got the money. Enclose key. Melchard's the man we want. Get his
address. 'Phone cut outside. Wire me address P.D.Q.--DICK."
Through the window he went to his car in the drive.
"Martin," he said, "get out Sir Randal's car and take this note to him.
Go to New Scotland Yard. They'll tell you where he is. Drive like hell."
He went back into the house, ran upstairs, lit a candle in his room,
stuffed one pocket with handkerchiefs, and into another dropped a tin of
tobacco and an electric torch.
Why hadn't he brought a gun? Oh, well, it only meant five minutes at his
flat in Great Windmill Street.
As he came down the passage, his eyes, obeying a new habit which seemed
already old, lingered a moment on Amaryllis' door. But it was not
sentiment which checked his feet.
"There might be something," he muttered, and, without hesitation,
entered the room.
An oppression of silence weighed upon him painfully as he felt for his
match-box. When the candle showed it, the pretty room was a cruel jest.
His examination was made with business-like care. On the dressing-table
was nothing but the pretty things which served her toilet; but on the
writing-table in the window lay a pile of letters. The topmost he
recognised at once for that which she had read in his presence after
dinner.
As he pulled the stiff sheet from the envelope, he was aware once more
of the odour which he had smelt first in the alcove of the study.
He spread the letter open. It was signed "Alban Melchard."
It was written on good paper, stamped with the address, and read as
follows:
"Rue de la Harpe, 31,
"Paris,
"_June_ 18_th_.
"MY DEAR MISS CALDEGARD,
"I fear that you will be surprised at my venturing to write to you,
considering the distressing circumstances under which we parted.
Although the small request I have to make of you is of some
importance to me, I should not have the presumption to make it, if
it were not that it gives me the opportunity to assure you that the
passage of time has made a wiser man of me--and a grateful one, for
the delicate forbearance with which you taught me my place.
"I have recently met with good fortune in my profession, and am
settling down as a man of business in the neighbourhood of
Millsborough, with considerable prospect of success.
"In the happy days when it was my privilege to pick up unconsidered
scraps of your father's scientific wisdom, I kept, jotted down in a
notebook, many items for future use. Until recently I have had no
occasion to refer to these notes, which I now find are essential to
the success of my most promising scheme. I must have left the
memoranda behind me with some other things, when I departed so
suddenly last September.
"If you can have this notebook found for me, I will ask that it may
be posted to me at The Myrtles, Grove End, near Millsborough, as I
shall only be in Paris for three days longer.
"I heard, quite by chance from a friend, that Professor Caldegard
was staying with Sir Randal Bellamy in Hertfordshire, so I have
ventured to use his address.
"Thanking you gratefully in anticipation,
"I remain,
"My dear Miss Caldegard,
"Yours very sincerely,
"ALBAN MELCHARD."
"H'm, in Paris, is he? No more in Paris than I am. Wrote this in case he
should be suspected, but didn't count on having to cart the girl along.
False addresses wouldn't help him. These two are straight goods. Clever
move, if it hadn't been for the girl. Your alibi'll hang you, Alban
Melchard. That fixes Millsborough."
Savagely he cranked up his engine and jumped into the driving-seat. The
car rushed forward.
When St. Albans was behind him the confusion of excitement began to
settle, and his thoughts presented themselves clear as those of a
dispassionate spectator. For him, in all this tangle, there was one
thing, and one thing only, that mattered; to be in time. He did not fear
murder; but the very reason of her security from death was the cause of
a fear so horrible, that he knew inaction would have been torture past
endurance.