‘Oh, all the time I was making inquiries about Medina’s past not very fruitful—I’ve told you most of the results. Then I went to see Ram Dass—you remember my speaking about him. I thought he was in Munich, but I found him in Westphalia, keeping an eye on the German industrials. Don’t go to Germany for a holiday, Dick; it’s a sad country and a comfortless.I had to see Ram Dass, for he happens to be the brother of Kharama.’
‘What size of a fellow is Kharama?’ I asked.
Sandy’s reply was: ‘For knowledge of the practice unequalled but only a second-class practitioner’—exactly what Medina had said.
‘Ram Dass told me most of what I wanted to know. But he isn’t aware that his brother is in Europe. I rather fancy he thinks he is… That’s all I need to tell you now. Fire away, Dick, and give me an exact account of your own doings.
I explained as best I could the gradual change in Medina’s manner from friendship to proprietorship. I told how he had begun to talk freely to me, as if I were a disciple, and I described that extraordinary evening in Hill street when I had met his mother.
‘His mother!’ Sandy exclaimed, and made me go over every incident several times—the slap in the face, the spitting, my ultimate fainting. He seemed to enjoy it immensely. ‘Good business,’ he said. ‘You never did a better day’s work, old man.’
‘I have found the Blind Spinner at any rate,’ I said.
‘Yes. I had half guessed it. I didn’t mention it, but when I got into the house in Gospel Oak as the electric light man, I found a spinning-wheel in the back room, and they had been burning peat on the hearth. Well, that’s Number One.’
‘I think I am on my way to find Number Two,’ I said, and I told him of the talk I had overheard between the two about secundus and sending ‘the doctor’ somewhere, and of how I had discovered that Dr Newhover was starting this very day. for the Skarso. ‘It’s the first clear clue,’ I said, ‘and I think I ought to follow it up.’
‘Yes. What do you propose to do?’
‘I am travelling this evening on the Gudrun and I’m going to trail the fellow till I find out his game. I’m bound to act upon what little information we’ve got.’
‘I agree… But this means a long absence from London, and secundus is only one of three.’
‘Just a week,’ I said. ‘I’ve got sick leave from Medina for a week, and I’m supposed to be having a rest cure at Fosse, with Mary warding off visitors. I’ve arranged with Archie Roylance to pick me up in an aeroplane about the 28th and bring me back. It doesn’t allow me much time, but an active man can do the deuce of a lot in a week.’
‘Bravo!’ he cried. ‘That’s our old moss-trooping self!’
‘Do you approve?’
‘Entirely. And, whatever happens, you present yourself to Medina on the 29th? That leaves us about six weeks for the rest of the job.’
‘More like five,’ I said gloomily, and I told him how I had learnt that the gang proposed to liquidate by midsummer, and that Macgillivray had therefore moved the date when he would take action ten days forward. ‘You see how we are placed. He must collect all the gang at the same moment, and. we must release all three hostages, if we can, at the same time. The releasing mustn’t be done too soon or it will warn the gang. Therefore if Macgillivray strikes on the 10th of June, we must be ready to strike not earlier than the 9th and, of course, not later.’
‘I see,” he said, and was silent for a little. ‘Have you anything more to tell me?’
I ransacked my memory and remembered about Odell. He wrote down the name of the dancing club where I had seen that unprepossessing butler. I mentioned that I had asked Macgillivray to get on to his dossier.
‘You haven’t told Macgillivray too much?’ he inquired anxiously and seemed relieved when I replied that I had never mentioned the Medina business.
‘Well, here’s the position,’ he said at last. ‘You go off for a week hunting Number Two. We are pretty certain that we have got Number One. Number Three—that nonsense about the fields of Eden and the Jew with a dyed beard in a curiosity shop in Marylebone still eludes us. And of course we have as yet no word of any of the three hostages. There’s a terrible lot still to do. How do you envisage the thing, Dick? Do you think of the three, the girl, the young man, and the boy, shut up somewhere and guarded by Medina’s minions’? Do you imagine that if we find their places of concealment we shall have done the job?’
‘That was my idea.’
He shook his head. ‘It is far subtle? than that. Did no one ever tell you that the best way of hiding a person is to strip him of his memory? Why is it that when a man loses his memory he is so hard to find? You see it constantly in the newspapers. Even a well-known figure, if he loses his memory and wanders away, is only discovered by accident. The reason is that the human personality is identified far less by appearance than by its habits and mind. Loss of memory means the loss of all true marks of identification, and the physical look alters to correspond. Medina has stolen these three poor souls’ memories and set them adrift like waifs. David Warcliff may at this moment be playing in a London gutter along with a dozen guttersnipes and his own father could scarcely pick him out from the rest. Mercot may be a dock labourer or a deck hand, whom you wouldn’t recognizee if you met him, though you had sat opposite him in a college hall every night for a year. And Miss Victor may be in a gaiety chorus or a milliner’s assistant or a girl in a dancing saloon. Wait a minute. You saw Odell at a dance-club? There may be something in that.’ I could see his eyes abstracted in thought.
‘There’s another thing I forgot to mention,’ I said. ‘Miss Victor’s fiancé’ is over here, staying in Carlton House Terrace. He is old Turpin, who used to be with the division—the Marquis de la Tour du Pin.’
Sandy wrote the name down. ‘Her fiancé.’ He may come in useful. What sort of fellow?’
‘Brave as a lion, but he’ll want watching, for he’s a bit of a Gascon.’
We went out after breakfast and sat in an arbour looking down a shallow side-valley to the upper streams of the Windrush. The sounds of morning were beginning to rise from the little village far away in the bottom, the jolt of a wagon, the ‘clink-clenk’ from the smithy, the babble of children at play. In a fortnight the may-fly would be here, and every laburnum and guelder rose in bloom. Sandy, who had been away from England for years, did not speak for a long time, but drank in the sweet-scented peace of it. ‘Poor devil,’ he said at last. ‘He has nothing like this to love. He can only hate.’
I asked whom he was talking about, and he said ‘Medina.’
‘I’m trying to understand him. You can’t fight a man unless you understand him, and in a way sympathise with him.’
‘Well, I can’t say I sympathise with him, and I most certainly don’t understand him.’
‘Do you remember once telling me that he had no vanity? You were badly out there. He has a vanity which amounts to delirium.
‘This is how I read him,’ he went on. ‘To begin with, there’s a far-away streak of the Latin in him, but he is mainly Irish, and that never makes a good cross. He’s the deraciné Irish, such as you find in America.
