ago. Came to consult Cleek about some business regarding a lost pearl, and I took no end of a fancy to him. Hope he pulls out all right; but if he doesn’t—oh, well, we can’t bother over other people’s troubles—we’ve got enough of our own just now with these mysterious murders going on, and the newspapers hammering the Yard day in and day out. Gad! how I wish I knew how to get hold of Cleek—how I wish I did!”
“Can’t you find somebody to put you on the lay, sir? some friend of his—somebody that’s seen him, or maybe heard from him since you have?”
“Oh, don’t talk rubbish!” snapped Narkom, with a short, derisive laugh. “Friends, indeed! What friends has he outside of myself? Who knows him any better than I know him—and what do I know of him, at that? Nothing—not where he comes from; not what his real name may be; not a living thing but that he chooses to call himself Hamilton Cleek and to fight in the interest of the law as strenuously as he once fought against it. And where will I find a man who has ‘seen’ him, as you suggest—or would know if he had seen him—when he has that amazing birth gift to fall back upon? You never saw his real face—never in all your life. I never saw it but twice, and even I—why, he might pass me in the street a dozen times a day and I’d never know him if I looked straight into his eyes. He’d come like a shot if he knew I wanted him—gad, yes! But he doesn’t; and there you are.”
Imagination was never one of Petrie’s strong points. His mind moved always along well-prepared grooves to time-honoured ends. It found one of those grooves and moved along it now.
“Why don’t you advertise for him, then?” he suggested. “Put a Personal in the morning papers, sir. Chap like that’s sure to read the news every day; and it’s bound to come to his notice sooner or later. Or if it doesn’t, why, people will get to knowing that the Yard’s lost him and get to talking about it and maybe he’ll learn of it that way.”
Narkom looked at him. The suggestion was so bald, so painfully ordinary and commonplace, that, heretofore, it had never occurred to him. To associate Cleek’s name with the banalities of the everyday Agony Column; to connect him with the appeals of the scullery and the methods of the raw amateur! The very outrageousness of the thing was its best passport to success.
“By James, I believe there’s something in that!” he said, abruptly. “If you get people to talking.... Well, it doesn’t matter, so that he hears—so that he finds out I want him. You ring up the Daily Mail while I’m scratching off an ad. Tell ’em it’s simply got to go in the morning’s issue. I’ll give it to them over the line myself in a minute.”
He lurched over to his desk, drove a pen into the ink pot, and made such good haste in marshalling his straggling thoughts that he had the thing finished before Petrie had got farther than “Yes; Scotland Yard. Hold the line, please; Superintendent Narkom wants to speak to you.”
The Yard’s requests are at all times treated with respect and courtesy by the controlling forces of the daily press, so it fell out that, late as the hour was, “space” was accorded, and, in the morning, half a dozen papers bore this notice prominently displayed:
“Cleek—Where are you? Urgently needed. Communicate at once.—Maverick Narkom.”
The expected came to pass; and the unexpected followed close upon its heels. The daily press, publishing the full account of the latest addition to the already long list of mysterious murders which, for a fortnight past, had been adding nervous terrors to the public mind, screamed afresh—as Narkom knew that it would—and went into paroxysms of the Reporters’ Disease until the very paper was yellow with the froth of it. The afternoon editions were still worse—for, between breakfast and lunch time, yet another man had fallen victim to the mysterious assassin—and sheets pink and sheets green, sheets gray and sheets yellow were scattering panic from one end of London to the other. The police-detective system of the country was rotten! The Government should interfere—must interfere! It was a national disgrace that the foremost city of the civilized world should be terrorized in this appalling fashion and the author of the outrages remain undetected! Could anything be more appalling?
It could, and—it was! When night came and the evening papers were supplanting the afternoon ones, that something “more appalling”—known hours before to the Yard itself—was glaring out on every bulletin and every front page in words like these:
LONDON’S REIGN OF TERROR
APPALLING ATROCITY IN
CLARGES STREET
SHOCKING DYNAMITE
OUTRAGE
Clarges Street! The old “magic” street of those “magic” old times of Cleek, and the Red Limousine, and the Riddles that were unriddled for the asking! Narkom grabbed the report the instant he heard that name and began to read it breathlessly.
It was the usual station advice ticked through to headquarters and deciphered by the operator there, and it ran tersely, thus:
“4:28 P. M. Attempt made by unknown parties to blow up house in Clarges Street, Piccadilly. Partially successful. Three persons injured and two killed. No clue to motive. Occupants, family from Essex. Only moved in two days ago. House been vacant for months previously. Formerly occupied by retired seafaring man named Capt. Horatio Burbage, who——”
Narkom read no farther. He flung the paper aside with a sort of mingled laugh and blub and collapsed into his chair with his eyes hidden in the crook of an upthrown arm, and the muscles of his mouth twitching.
“Now I know why he cleared out! Good old Cleek! Bully old Cleek!” he said to himself; and stopped suddenly, as though something had got into his throat and half choked him. But after a moment or two he jumped to his feet and began walking up and down the room, his face fairly glowing; and if he had put his thoughts into words they would have run like this:
“Margot’s crew, of course. And he must have guessed that something of the sort would happen some time if he stopped there after that Silver Snare business at Roehampton—either from her lot or from the followers of that Mauravanian johnnie who was at the back of it. They were after him even in that little game, those two. I wonder why? What the dickens, when one comes to think of it, could have made the Prime Minister of Mauravania interest himself in an Apache trick to ‘do in’ an ex-cracksman? Gad! she flies high, sometimes, that Margot! Prime Minister of Mauravania! And the fool faced fifteen years hard to do the thing and let her get off scot free! Faced it and—took it; and is taking it still, for the sake of helping her to wipe off an old score against a reformed criminal. Wonder if Cleek ever crossed him in something? Wonder if he, too, was on the ‘crooked side’ once, and wanted to make sure of its never being shown up? Oh, well, he got his medicine. And so, too, will this unknown murderer who’s doing the secret killing in London, now that this Clarges Street affair is over. Bully old Cleek! Slipped ’em again! Had their second shot and missed you! Now you’ll come out of hiding, old chap, and we shall have the good old times once more.”
His eye fell upon the ever-ready telephone. He stopped short in his purposeless walking and nodded and smiled to it.
“We’ll have you singing your old tune before long, my friend,” he said, optimistically. “I know my man—gad, yes! He’ll let no grass grow under his feet now that this thing’s over. I shall hear soon—yes, by James! I shall.”
His optimism was splendidly rewarded. Not, however, from the quarter nor in the manner he expected. It had but just gone half-past seven when a tap sounded, the door of his office swung inward, and the porter stepped into the room.
“Person
