“Been a wedding to-day, hasn’t there?” he asked with heavy jocularity. “Now, Lila, what’s the good of kicking up a fuss? You know you oughtn’t to come here. Mr. Legge gave orders you weren’t to be admitted whilst you were at Kane’s.”
“Where is Emanuel?” she asked.
“I tell you he’s just gone out,” said the porter in a tone of ponderous despair. “What a woman you are! You don’t believe anything!”
“Has he gone back to his hotel?”
“That’s just where he has gone. Now be wise, girl, and beat it. Anybody might be coming here – Johnny Gray was in last night, and he’s a pal of Peter’s.”
“Johnny knows all about me,” she said impatiently. “Besides, I’ve left Peter’s house.”
She stood undecidedly at the entrance of the open elevator, and then, when the porter was preparing some of his finest arguments for her rapid disappearance, she stepped into the lift and was taken down.
The Highlow was a curious club, for it had no common room. Fourteen private diningrooms and a large and elegantly furnished card-room constituted the premises. Meals were served from the restaurant below, being brought up by service lift to a small pantry. The members of the club had not the club feeling in the best sense of the word. They included men and women, but the chief reason for the club’s existence was that it afforded a safe and not unpleasant meeting-place for members of the common class, and gave necessary seclusion for the slaughter of such innocents as came within the influence of its more dexterous members. How well its inner secrets were kept is best illustrated by the fact that Peter Kane had been a member for twenty years without knowing that his sometime companion in crime had any official connection with its control. Nor was it ever hinted to him that the man who was directing the club’s activities during Emanuel’s enforced absence, was his son.
Peter was a very infrequent visitor to the Highlow; and indeed, on the occasion of his first meeting with the spurious Major Floyd, he had been tricked into coming, though this he did not know.
The porter was busy until half-past nine. Little parties came, were checked off in the book, and then – he looked at his watch.
“Twentyfive to ten,” he said, and pushed a bell button.
A waiter appeared from the side passage.
“Put a bottle of wine in No. 13,” he said.
The waiter looked at him surprised.
“No. 13?” he said, as if he could not believe his ears.
“I said it,” confirmed the porter.
Jeffrey ate a solitary dinner. The humour of the situation did not appeal to him. On his honeymoon, he and his wife were dining, a locked door between them. But he could wait.
Again he tried the queer-shaped pliers upon the key of the second bedroom. The key turned readily. He put the tool into his pocket with a sense of power. The clatter of a table being cleared came to him from the other room, and presently he heard the outer door close and a click of the key turning. He lit his fourth cigar and stepped out on to the balcony, surveying the crowded street with a dispassionate interest. It was theatre time. Cars were rolling up to the Haymarket; the long queue that he had seen waiting at the doors of the cheaper parts of the house had disappeared; a restaurant immediately opposite was blazing with lights; and on a corner of the street a band of ex-soldiers were playing the overture of “Lohengrin.”
Glancing down into the street, he distinguished one of the “minders” his father had put there for his protection, and grinned. Peter could not know; he would have been here before. As to Johnny… ? Emanuel had been very confident that Johnny presented no danger, and it rather looked as though Emanuel’s view was right. But if Peter knew, why hadn’t he come?
He strolled back to the room, looked at the girl’s door and walked toward it.
“Marney!” he called softly.
There was no answer. He knocked on the panel.
“Marney, come along. I want to talk to you. You needn’t open the door. I just wanted to ask you something.”
Still there was no answer. He tried the door; it was locked.
“Are you there?” he called sharply, but she did not reply.
He pulled the pliers from his pocket, and, pushing the narrow nose into the keyhole, gripped the end of the key and turned it. Then, flinging open the door, he rushed in.
The room was empty, and the big bathroom that led out of the suite was empty also. He ran to the passage door: it was locked – locked from the outside. In a sweat of fear he flew through the saloon into the corridor, and the first person he saw was the floor waiter.
“Madam, sir? Yes, she went out a little time ago.”
“Went out, you fool? Where?” stormed Jeff.
“I don’t know, sir. She just went out. I saw her going along the corridor.”
Jeff seized his hat and went down the stairs three at a time. The reception clerk had not seen the girl, nor had any of the pages, or the porter on the door. Oblivious to any immediate danger, he dashed out into the street, and, looking up and down, saw the minder and called him.
“She hasn’t come out this entrance. There’s another in “Pall Mall,” he explained. “Jimmy Low’s there.”
But the second man on the Pall Mall entrance had not seen her either. Jeff went back to interview the manager.
“There is no other way out. Sir, unless she went down the service stairs.”
“It was that cursed maid, the Welsh woman,” snarled Jeffrey. “Who is she? Can I see her?”
“She went off duty this afternoon, sir,” said the manager. “Is there anything I can do? Perhaps the lady has gone out for a little walk? Does she know London?”
Jeff did not stop to reply: he fled up the stairs, back to the room, and made a quick search. The girl’s dressing-case, which he knew had been taken into the bedroom, was gone. Something on the floor attracted his attention. He picked it up, and read the few scribbled lines, torn from a notebook; and as he read, a light came into his eyes. Very carefully he folded the crumpled sheet and put it into his pocket. Then he went back to his sittingroom, and sat for a long time in the big armchair, his legs thrust out before him, his hands deep in his trousers pockets, and his thoughts were not wholly unpleasant.
The light was now nearly gone, and he got up. “Room thirteen,” he said. “Room thirteen is going to hold a few surprises tonight!”
Chapter XIII
To Parker, the valet, as he laid out Johnny’s dress clothes, there was a misfortune and a tragedy deeper than any to which Johnny had been a spectator. Johnny, loafing into his bedroom, a long, black, ebonite
