THE CITY OF SMILES.
Paris has greatly changed since the war. The _bonhomie_ of the
boulevards, so marked a feature before the year 1914, has subsided a
good deal. The inhabitants, considered collectively, are more serious.
Hopford and Johnson’s friend, Idris Llanvar, with whom Hopford was
now staying, were discussing these and other matters one morning in
Paris, when they were joined by Hopford’s friend who worked for _Le
Matin_. Tall, slim, good-looking, and with the charming manner peculiar
to descendants of the old French noblesse, he raised his hat as he
approached, then apologized in excellent English for his unpunctuality.
“We had a fire at the office of _Le Matin_,” he said, “which almost
prevented the paper from coming out; but thanks to the courtesy of the
_Journal des Débats_, which afforded us facilities for printing, the
situation was saved at the eleventh hour.”
He poured himself out a glass of wine from the bottle on the
table--they were sitting outside a café on the Boulevard des
Italiens--and continued:
“I have a proposal to make to you, Hopford, and to you, too, monsieur,”
he said, turning to Idris Llanvar, “which, if it meets with your
approval, may have a rather important result. I understand from my
friend Hopford here that we three are to put our heads together to
try to make certain discoveries which, if we succeed, will create
something of a sensation when made public. I have already told Hopford
I know of certain happenings in Paris which, I believe, bear directly
on affairs which have occurred in London within the past year or two,
and more particularly recently. Now, two friends of mine belong to the
Secret Service Police of Paris, and what they don’t know concerning
the movements and methods of international criminals is, as you say in
England, not worth knowing. One is a man, the other a woman. They are
coming to me to-night, and I hope you will both come along too, so that
the five of us may discuss certain affairs. Will that suit you both?”
And so, late that night, four men and a woman, all of exceptionally
keen intelligence, endowed with the peculiar attributes which go to
the making of a clever police detective or a successful newspaper
reporter, were gathered together in a small room in one of those
quaint, low-roofed houses with which visitors to the Quartier Latin are
familiar.
The woman was an odd-looking person of about twenty-eight or
twenty-nine, with hair cut short like a man’s, a pale face, firm lips,
and dark, extremely shrewd eyes. She bore the reputation, Hopford’s
friend said, of possessing more dogged perseverance than any other
member of the Paris detective force. During the war, he told them, she
had succeeded in bringing no less than seven spies to book without any
assistance whatever, all of whom had eventually been put to death.
Hopford had finished giving the assembled party all the information
he possessed concerning the two epidemics of suicide in London; the
various thefts which had occurred in connection with this narrative;
and other matters with which the reader is acquainted, and was lighting
a fresh cigar, when the woman, after a pause, inquired:
“This Madame Vandervelt who threw herself out of the hotel window. When
did that happen?”
Hopford mentioned the date. He had all data at his fingers’ ends.
“I knew Leonora Vandervelt,” she said. “For months we shared an
_appartement_ close to the Madeleine. By that means I became intimate
with her; and eventually I discovered something I wanted to know
about her--at that time she masqueraded under an assumed name.
Finally I brought about her arrest, and she was sentenced to a year’s
imprisonment, though she deserved three years. Upon her release she
left France, and I lost sight of her. This is the first time since
then that I have heard of her. I did not know she was dead. At one
time she and Angela Robertson of Shanghai were close friends. Then
they quarreled, parted in anger, and Angela Robertson, whom you
call Jessica Mervyn-Robertson, declared in my hearing she would be
revenged--revenged for what I did not know. That, of course, was before
Vandervelt went to prison.
“When Vandervelt became suspected of larceny, I went at once to Angela
Robertson, who then lived in Paris, and placed all the facts before
her. As I expected, she jumped at the chance of getting her revenge,
and largely through the information she gave me I was able to bring
Leonora Vandervelt to book. And now you tell me Vandervelt committed
suicide. Of course I know who made her do it. It was Angela Robertson
again.”
“How do you know that?” Hopford inquired. He had listened attentively
to every word.
“No matter. You will gather that later. Do you know how Mrs. Robertson
comes to be so rich?”
“Through levying blackmail I should imagine,” Hopford answered quickly.
“As you say, through levying blackmail. She and her companions you have
told me about, Archie La Planta and Aloysius Stapleton, are three of
the most cunning and persistent blackmailers in your country. They have
practiced the ‘art’ in Continental capitals, and now reside in London
because your countryfolk are the most easy to blackmail, also because
they have much money and are easily induced to part with it. You say
she pretends to be Australian. She is not Australian, nor has she been
in Australia, though she had a married sister living in Monkarra, in
Queensland, years ago, governess to the children of a rich sheep farmer
there. When Mrs. Robertson and Stapleton left Shanghai for good they
went first to Amsterdam, where they became acquainted with Archie La
Planta, a rogue in every way, though a charming man to talk to. At
that time he was representing a British insurance company in Amsterdam.”
“Controlled by Lord Froissart,” Hopford put in.
“Yes. Controlled by the late Lord Froissart. While there,” she went on,
“La Planta was introduced to Angela Robertson and to Stapleton by a man
named Alphonse Michaud, of whose occupation the less said the better.
Finally the four lived together at an hotel in the Kalverstraat, the
name of which has for the moment escaped me.”
“That is curious,” Hopford exclaimed, “because when Mrs. Robertson and
Michaud came face to face in Dieppe the other day, they apparently did
not know each other. A friend of mine, Captain Preston, said so in a
letter to Doctor Johnson.”
“Not Captain Charles Preston who is going to marry a girl called Yootha
Hagerston?” the other detective asked quickly, now speaking for the
first time.
“That is the man,” Hopford replied. “I served under him during the war,
and I know Miss Hagerston too.”
The detective glanced across at his female colleague.
“Isn’t that a coincidence?” he said.
“Oh, coincidences never surprise me,” she answered with a shrug.
“But it points to further collusion,” the man said.
“Then I take it,” Llanvar put in, “there exists in London at the
present time, and has existed for a year or more, some sort of
organization for extorting money in considerable sums from rich and
well-known people by means of direct or indirect blackmail?”
“Not only that,” the woman answered. “I am in a position to know
that some members of the organization have levied blackmail on each
other. There is no honor among miscreants of that type. They would
blackmail their own parents if they got the chance, and could benefit.
Such people deserve life sentences. Yet in spite of the cunning and
cleverness of this particular gang I think we are on the right road to
tracking them all down now, although they do pretend to belong to the
best society, and no doubt have influential friends.”
Hopford felt elated as he wandered homeward that night, arm in arm with
his host, the mental specialist, Idris Llanvar. Each member of the
little gathering had, during the informal conference, contributed some
link, or part of a link, to the chain of evidence they were forging
between them to justify steps being taken to arrest Jessica and the
people whom they now knew beyond doubt to be her accomplices in crime.
The town of Singapore had been mentioned incidentally, and Llanvar had
provided some useful data. Angela Robertson and Fobart Robertson her
husband, Timothy Macmahon, Julius Stringborg, and his wife Marietta,
Aloysius Stapleton, and two or three more had apparently, when living
in Shanghai, formed an exclusive little clique concerning which the
strangest of rumors had been rife. The rumor most commonly credited was
that the clique was actively interested in the secret exportation of a
peculiarly potent drug said to possess several remarkable attributes.
To what country or countries they exported it, nobody had been able to
discover, but “on good authority” it was declared that high officials
in Shanghai, Hong Kong and other important ports were in the habit of
receiving heavy bribes not to notice what was happening.
Llanvar himself, he said, had once been indirectly approached by a
native acting obviously on the instructions of some European, with a
view to the possibility of his benefiting financially if, “as a matter
of form,” he would sign his name to certain documents which would be
brought to him secretly. He had pretended to consent, hoping thereby to
discover what was happening, but nothing further had transpired, from
which he concluded, he said, that the members of the clique had decided
not to trust him.
Hopford and Llanvar sat talking in the latter’s sitting-room over a
whisky and soda before going to bed. Mostly they discussed the affairs
of the evening; but from one subject to another they drifted until
presently Hopford said:
“I wonder Johnson has never married, Llanvar. He is such a good fellow,
and the sort of man women like, and he must be fairly well off.”
For some moments his host remained silent.
“Well, he wouldn’t mind my telling you, I think,” he said at last,
“but in point of fact he was badly turned down some years ago by a
girl, I think between ourselves he was fortunate not to marry. He was
terribly in love with her, though, and it took him a long time to
recover from the disappointment; I doubt if he has really recovered
from it yet. He told me all about it once, and I think the confidence
relieved his mind to some extent. It is bad to brood in complete
silence over that sort of thing.”
“Was she English?”
“Yes, a Devonshire girl. She broke it off in order to marry a viscount;
and three years after the marriage they separated. Whose fault it was
of course I don’t know, but the girl was a selfish, self-centered
little thing, and I think her husband must have been well rid of her.”
“Then you knew her?”
“Oh yes, I knew her.”
He smiled.
“She set her cap at me once, when she fancied, and I believed, I was
coming into a small fortune from my father’s sister. But my father’s
sister took a dislike to me and when she died the money went to some
missionary society. Directly the girl heard that, she found she no
longer cared for me and turned her attention to Johnson, with whom I
was living at the time, and who was already head over ears in love with
her.”
“That was out East, I suppose?”
“Yes, in Hong Kong, which we have been talking about so much to-night.
I don’t think Johnson will ever marry.”
“Don’t you? I do. In fact I am prepared to wager he will be married
within the year.”
Llanvar looked at him in astonishment.
“You don’t mean that!” he exclaimed. “Why, who is the lady?”
Then it was that Hopford proceeded to tell him about the pretty widow,
as he called her, Cora Hartsilver, and what he had noticed while in
Jersey. And they were both in Jersey still, he said, and, in his
opinion, likely to remain there some time.
“In fact, it would not surprise me at all,” he ended, “if Johnson and
Mrs. Hartsilver were to become engaged before returning to England.
Johnson has not even hinted to me that the widow attracts him, but I
have noticed his expression when he speaks of her, and, more than that,
I have noticed the way she looks at him when they are together.”