I, romantic? Thirty-five and a private inquiry agent! You are—positively feverish, Max.”
“Incurably romantic—or you would have got over it by now: the worst kind.”
“Max, this may prove a most important and interesting case. Will you be serious and discuss it?”
“Jewel cases are rarely either important or interesting. Pearl necklace mysteries, in nine cases out of ten, spring from the miasma of social pretence and vapid competition and only concern people who do not matter in the least. The only attractive thing about them is the name. They are so barren of originality that a criminological Linnæus could classify them with absolute nicety. I’ll tell you what, we’ll draw up a set of tables giving the solution to every possible pearl necklace case for the next twenty-one years.”
“We will do any mortal thing you like, Max, if you will allow Parkinson to administer a bromo-seltzer and then enable me to meet the officials of the Direct Insurance without a blush.”
For three minutes Carrados picked his unerring way among the furniture as he paced the room silently but with irresolution in his face. Twice his hand went to a paper-covered book lying on his desk, and twice he left it untouched.
“Have you ever been in the lion-house at feeding-time, Louis?” he demanded abruptly.
“In the very remote past, possibly,” admitted Mr Carlyle guardedly.
“As the hour approaches it is impossible to interest the creatures with any other suggestion than that of raw meat. You came a day too late, Louis.” He picked up the book and skimmed it adroitly into Mr Carlyle’s hands. “I have already scented the gore, and tasted in imagination the joy of tearing choice morsels from other similarly obsessed animals.”
“‘Catalogue des monnaies grecques et romaines,’” read the gentleman. “‘To be sold by auction at the Hotel Drouet, Paris, salle 8, April the 24th, 25th, etc.’ H’m.” He turned to the plates of photogravure illustration which gave an air to the volume. “This is an event, I suppose?”
“It is the sort of dispersal we get about once in three years,” replied Carrados. “I seldom attend the little sales, but I save up and then have a week’s orgy.”
“And when do you go?”
“To-day. By the afternoon boat—Folkestone. I have already taken rooms at Mascot’s. I’m sorry it has fallen so inopportunely, Louis.”
Mr Carlyle rose to the occasion with a display of extremely gentlemanly feeling—which had the added merit of being quite genuine.
“My dear chap, your regrets only serve to remind me how much I owe to you already. Bon voyage, and the most desirable of Eu—Eu—well, perhaps it would be safer to say, of Kimons, for your collection.”
“I suppose,” pondered Carrados, “this insurance business might have led to other profitable connexions?”
“That is quite true,” admitted his friend. “I have been trying for some time—but do not think any more of it, Max.”
“What time is it?” demanded Carrados suddenly.
“Eleven-twenty-five.”
“Good. Has any officious idiot had anyone arrested?”
“No, it is only——”
“Never mind. Do you know much of the case?”
“Practically nothing as yet, unfortunately. I came——”
“Excellent. Everything is on our side. Louis, I won’t go this afternoon—I will put off till the night boat from Dover. That will give us nine hours.”
“Nine hours?” repeated the mystified Carlyle, scarcely daring to put into thought the scandalous inference that Carrados’s words conveyed.
“Nine full hours. A pearl necklace case that cannot at least be left straight after nine hours’ work will require a column to itself in our chart. Now, Louis, where does this Direct Insurance live?”
Carlyle had allowed his blind friend to persuade him into—as they had seemed at the beginning—many mad enterprises. But none had ever, in the light of his own experience, seemed so foredoomed to failure as when, at eleven-thirty, Carrados ordered his luggage to be on the platform of Charing Cross Station at eight-fifty and then turned light-heartedly to the task of elucidating the mystery of Mrs Straithwaite’s pearl necklace in the interval.
The head office of the Direct and Intermediate Insurance Company proved to be in Victoria Street. Thanks to Carrados’s speediest car, they entered the building as the clocks of Westminster were striking twelve, but for the next twenty minutes they were consigned to the general office while Mr Carlyle fumed and displayed his watch ostentatiously. At last a clerk slid off his stool by the speaking-tube and approached them.
“Mr Carlyle?” he said. “The General Manager will see you now, but as he has another appointment in ten minutes he will be glad if you will make your business as short as possible. This way, please.”
Mr Carlyle bit his lip at the pompous formality of the message but he was too experienced to waste any words about it and with a mere nod he followed, guiding his friend until they reached the Manager’s room. But, though subservient to circumstance, he was far from being negligible when he wished to create an impression.
“Mr Carrados has been good enough to give us a consultation over this small affair,” he said, with just the necessary touches of deference and condescension that it was impossible either to miss or to resent. “Unfortunately he can do little more as he has to leave almost at once to direct an important case in Paris.”
The General Manager conveyed little, either in his person or his manner, of the brisk precision that his message seemed to promise. The name of Carrados struck him as being somewhat familiar—something a little removed from the routine of his business and a matter therefore that he could unbend over. He continued to stand comfortably before his office fire, making up by a tolerant benignity of his hard and bulbous eye for the physical deprivation that his attitude entailed on his visitors.
“Paris, egad?” he grunted. “Something in your line that France can take from us since the days of—what’s-his-name—Vidocq, eh? Clever fellow, that, what? Wasn’t it about him and the Purloined Letter?”
Carrados smiled discreetly.
“Capital, wasn’t it?” he replied. “But there is something else that Paris can learn from London, more in your way, sir. Often when I drop in to see the principal of one of their chief houses or the head of a Government department, we fall into an entertaining discussion of this or that subject that may be on the tapis. ‘Ah, monsieur,’ I say, after perhaps half-an-hour’s conversation, ‘it is very amiable of you and sometimes I regret our insular methods, but it is not thus that great businesses are formed. At home, if I call upon one of our princes of industry—a railway director, a merchant, or the head of one of our leading insurance companies—nothing will tempt him for a moment from the stern outline of the business in hand. You are too complaisant; the merest gossip takes advantage of you.’”
“That’s quite true,” admitted the General Manager, occupying the revolving chair at his desk and assuming
