"Is just finishing breakfast. He will be down directly. Please be seated,
make yourself entirely at ease. And will you excuse me--?"
"With pleasure," Lanyard assured him, his gravity unbroken.
A doubt clouded Mr. Blensop's bright eyes, but its transit was
instantaneous. He turned forthwith to join the iron-gray man before the
portrait which concealed the safe.
"And now, Mr. Stone," said Mr. Blensop, with indulgence.
"Well, sir," said Mr. Stone quietly, "if you'll be good enough to show me
how this contraption works, maybe I'll find out something interesting,
maybe not."
Mr. Blensop proceeded to oblige by operating the lever and sliding aside
the portrait.
"Thanks," said Mr. Stone, producing a magnifying glass from a waistcoat
pocket and beginning to peer myopically at the face of the safe. "I take
it nobody's been pawing over this since the late, as you might say,
unpleasantness?"
"Not a soul has touched it. By Colonel Stanistreet's order it was covered
as soon as we found it had been tampered with."
"_Um-m_," Mr. Stone acknowledged, bending close to his work.
Partially, perhaps, by way of administering an urbane rebuke to Lanyard for
his readiness to dispense with his society, Mr. Blensop remained in
the neighbourhood of Mr. Stone, hovering round him like a domesticated
humming-bird.
"Do you find anything?" he enquired, when Stone straightened up.
"Fingerprints a-plenty," Mr. Stone admitted with a hint of temper--"a slew
of the damn things. Looks like you must've called in the neighbours to help
make a good show. However, we'll see what we can make of 'em."
He conjured from some recess in his clothing a squat bottle, from another a
stopper in which was fitted a blowpipe, joined the two together, approached
the safe with one end of the pipe between his lips and sprayed it with a
thin film of white powder, the contents of the bottle.
"I say, do tell me what that's for?"
"That," said Mr. Stone patiently, "is to make the fingerprints stand out,
so we can get a good likeness of 'em."
He put the bottle aside, blinked at the safe approvingly, and by further
exercise of powers of legerdemain materialized a pocket kodak and a
flashlight pistol.
"Can't I help you?" Blensop offered eagerly. "I used to be rather a dab at
amateur photography, you know."
"Well, I'm kind of stuck on pressing the button myself," Stone confessed,
adjusting the focus. "But if you want to work that flashlight, I don't
mind."
"Delighted," Mr. Blensop asserted. "How does it go, now?"
"Like this." Stone set his camera down to demonstrate. "Now just stand
behind me," he concluded, "and pull the trigger when I say 'now'."
"I'll do my best, but--I say--will it bang?"
Stone had taken up the camera once more. His sole answer was a grunt upon
which his hearers placed two distinct interpretations--Lanyard's affording
him considerable gratification.
"If you're ready," said Stone--"_now_"
Mr. Blensop squinted unbecomingly and pressed the trigger. A vivid flare
lifted from the pan of the pistol, and winked out in a cloud of vapour,
slowly dissipating.
"Is that all?"
"Yes, sir--that's all of that." Stone stowed the camera away about his
person and from another cranny produced a small cardboard box of glass
slides, one of which he offered. "Now if you'll just run your fingers
through your hair and rest them on this slide, light but steady...."
"What for?" Blensop demanded with a giggle of nervous reluctance. "You
don't think I'm the thief, do you?"
"No, sir, I don't. But if I haven't got your fingerprints, how am I going
to tell them from the thief's?"
"Oh, I see," Blensop said with a note of allayed apprehension, and put
himself on record.
The door opening to admit Colonel Stanistreet, Lanyard rose. At sight of
him the Englishman checked and stared enquiringly, his eyes shadowed by
careworn brows; for it was apparent that, if the events of the night had
not depressed the spirits of the secretary, his employer had known little
sleep or none since the burglary.
"Colonel Stanistreet," Blensop said melodiously, abandoning Stone to his
unsupervised devices, "this is Mr. Ember, the gentleman who called last
night before you got home. It appears he is the person who sent us that
telegram from Edgartown day before yesterday."
"Indeed? Ember is not the name with which the message was signed."
"The message was purposely left unsigned," Lanyard explained.
Stanistreet nodded approval. "I am glad to meet you, Mr. Ember," he said,
offering a hand. "Be seated. I am most anxious first to express our
gratitude, next to learn how you came by your information."
"You will find it an interesting story."
"No doubt of that." Stanistreet took the desk chair, opened a cigar
humidor, and offered it. "I shall be even more interested, however," he
said with an evanescent trace of humour, "to know who the devil you are,
sir."
"That is something I am prepared to prove to your satisfaction."
"If you will be so good.... But excuse me for one moment." Stanistreet
turned in his chair. "Mr. Stone?"
"Yes, sir."
"Have you finished with the safe? If so, I want my secretary to check over
its contents carefully and make sure nothing else is missing."
"I'm all through with it, Colonel Stanistreet. Now, if you don't mind,
I'm going to mouse around and see if I can nose out anything else that's
useful."
"That shall be entirely as you will. Now, Blensop"--Stanistreet nodded to
the secretary--"let us make certain...."
"Yes, sir."
Blithely Mr. Blensop addressed himself to the safe.
"There has been an accident of some sort, Colonel Stanistreet?" Lanyard
enquired civilly, nodding toward the shattered French window.
"A burglary, sir."
"The criminal escaped--?"
Stanistreet nodded. "Our watchman surprised him, and was shot for his
pains--not seriously, I'm happy to say. The burglar got himself tangled
up in that window, but extricated in time, and went over the garden wall
before we could determine which way he had taken."
"I trust you lost nothing of value?"
Stanistreet shrugged. "Unhappily, we did--a diamond necklace, the property
of my sister-in-law, and--ah--a document we could ill afford to part
with.... But you offered to show me credentials, I believe."
"Such as they are," Lanyard replied. "My passports and letters were stolen
from me. But these, I think, should serve as well to prove my bona fides."
He laid out in order upon the desk his plunder from the safe aboard the
U-boat--all but the money--the three cipher codes, the log, the diary
of the commander, the directory of German secret agents, and such other
documents as he had selected.
The first Colonel Stanistreet took up with a dubious frown which swiftly
lightened, yielding, as he pursued his examination into the papers and
began to recognize their surpassing value to the Allied cause, to a subdued
glimmer of gratulatory excitement.
But he was at pains to satisfy himself as to the authenticity of each paper
in turn, providing a lull for which Lanyard was not ungrateful since it
gave him a chance to adjust his understanding to an unexpected development
in the affair.
He lounged at ease, smoking, his eyes, half-veiled by lowered lids, keenly
reviewing the room and its tenants.
Stone, the detective (an operative, Lanyard rightly inferred, of the
American Secret Service, loaned to the British in order to keep the
burglary out of police records and newspapers), had wandered out into the
garden that glowed with young April sunlight beyond the windows. From
time to time he was to be seen stooping and inspecting the earth with the
gravity of an earnest, efficient, sober-sided sleuth of the old school.
Blensop was busy before the safe, extracting the contents of each
pigeonhole in turn, thumbing its dockets of papers, checking each off upon
a typewritten list several pages in length.
To that lithe and debonair figure Lanyard's gaze oftenest reverted.
So not only had the necklace been stolen but "a document" which the British
Secret Service "could ill afford to part with"!
Lanyard entertained no least doubt as to the identity of the document in
question. There could be but one, he felt, which Stanistreet would so
characterize.
That document had not been in the safe when Lanyard had opened it at
midnight.
After a moment Mr. Blensop uttered a musical note of vexation. The lead of
his pencil had broken. He threw it pettishly aside, came over to the desk,
took up a penholder, dipped it in the ink-well, and returned to his task.