to meet me frankly,' said Troth, 'and you have run away, but don't imagine you can escape me. I will follow you till I track you down, though I have to give up my life to the job, and the price you will have to pay will double with each month I have to wait.' It was brigandage now, naked brigandage.
I am not sure that I believed all this tale, but there was one thing I couldn't doubt—Valdemar believed it, and was sweating with terror. That big man, who should have marched stoutly through life, had eyes like a hunted deer's.
'What an infernal nuisance for you!' I said. 'You can't go home, because of the threats of those scallywags! Well, anyhow, you're safe enough here, and can have an easy mind till we think out some plan.'
'I am not safe here,' he said solemnly. 'At first I thought that no one knew me in England. But I was wrong. They have had descriptions of me—photographs—from the Norlands and from Copenhagen. They have found people who can identify me… . One day in the street I saw a barber from Denmark who has often shaved me, and he recognized me, and tried to follow me. He is a poor man and would not have come here on his own account. He has been brought to London. The net is drawing in on me, and I know from many small things that they are very close on my trail. I change my dwelling often, but I feel that I cannot long escape them. So I am very desperate, and that is why I have sought out my father's friends.'
He sat huddled in his chair, his chin sunk on his breast, the image of impotence and despair. I realized that Lombard and I were going to have a difficult job with him. I had an uneasy suspicion, as I looked at him, that his story might be all moonshine, the hallucination of a lonely neurotic, and I wished I had never heard of him. Keeping a promise was one thing, but nursing a lunatic was quite another.
'It is not only for myself I fear,' he said in a leaden voice. 'There is my little daughter. I dare not visit her in case they follow me. They might kidnap her, and then I should assuredly go mad.'
To that I had nothing to say, for the mention of kidnapping always made me windy. I had had too much of it in the affair with Medina, which I have already written about.[1]
'There is my father, too,' he went on. 'He may at any moment go to the Norlands or come to England, and I cannot warn him.'
'You needn't worry about that,' I said gently. 'Your father died two years ago—at a place called Gutok, in Chinese Tibet.' And I repeated briefly what Sandy Clanroyden had told me.
You never saw such a change in a man. The news seemed to pull him together and put light into his eyes. To him, apparently, it was not a matter of grief, but of comfort.
'Thesauro feliciter invento,' he repeated. 'Then he succeeded—he has died happy. I cannot sorrow for him, for he has greatly ended a great life.'
He put his chin on his hand and brooded, and in that moment I was possessed by one of those queer irrational convictions which I have always made a habit of accepting, for I have never found them wrong. This Valdemar Haraldsen was as sane as myself, and he was in deadly peril. I believed implicitly every word of his tale, and my duty to help him was plain as a pikestaff. My first business must be to tuck him away comfortably somewhere out of the road.
I asked him where he was living and if he was sure he had not been followed here. He said that he had only moved into his new quarters two days before, and was pretty certain that he was safe for the moment. 'But not for long,' he added dismally.
'Well, you must clear out,' I said. 'Tomorrow you pack your kit. You are coming to stay with me for a little. I will go down by an earlier train, for we shouldn't be seen together. Put on your oldest clothes and travel third-class—I'll send my keeper to meet you, and he'll bring you up in the old Ford. Your name is still Bosworth.'
I fixed up a train, offered him a whisky-and-soda, which he declined, and saw him shamble off in the direction of his Bayswater lodgings. He looked like a store-farmer who had borrowed an ancient suit of his father's dress-clothes, and that was the rôle I wanted him to play. Then I rang up Macgillivray in his Mount Street rooms, found that he was at home, and went round to see him.
Chapter 6 Sundry Doings at Fosse
I found Macgillivray reading Greek with his feet on the mantelpiece and the fire out. He was a bit of a scholar and kept up his classics. Of all my friends he was the one who had aged least. His lean, dark head and smooth, boyish face were just as I remembered them twenty years ago. I hadn't seen him for months, and he gave me a great welcome, rang for beer to which he knew I was partial, and settled me in his best armchair.
'Why this honour?' he asked. 'Is it friendship or business? A sudden craving for my company, or a mess you want to be helped out of?'
'Both,' I said. 'But business first.'
'A job for the Yard?'
'No-o. Not just yet, anyhow. I want some information. I've just got on the track of a rather ugly affair.'
He whistled. 'You have a high standard of ugliness. What is it?'
'Blackmail,' I said.
'Yourself? He must be a bold blackmailer to tackle you.'
'No, a friend. A pretty helpless sort of friend, who will go mad if he isn't backed up.'
'Well, let's have the story.'
'Not yet,' I said. 'It's a private affair which I would rather keep to myself for a little till I see how things shape. I only want an answer to a few questions.'
He laughed. 'That was always your way, Dick. You "keep your ain fish-guts for your ain sea-mews," as they say in Scotland. You never let in the Yard till the fruitiest episodes are over.'
'I've done a good deal for you in my time,' I said.
'True. And you may always count upon us to do our damnedest.'
Then he suddenly became serious.
'I'm going to talk to you like a grandfather, Dick. You're not ageing properly.'
'I'm ageing a dashed sight too fast,' I said.
'No, you're not. We're all getting old, of course, but you're not acquiring the virtues of age. There's still an ineradicable daftness about you. You've been lying pretty low lately, and I had hoped you had settled down for good. Consider. You're a married man with a growing son. You have made for yourself what I should call a happy life. I don't want to see you wreck it merely because you are feeling restless. So if it's only a craze for adventure that is taking you into this business, my advice to you as a friend is to keep out of it.'
He picked up the book he had been reading.
'Here's a text for you,' he said. 'It is Herodotus. This is the advice he makes Amasis give to his friend Polycrates. I'll translate. "I know that the Gods are jealous, for I cannot remember that I ever heard of any man who, having been constantly successful, did not at last utterly perish." That's worth thinking about. You've been amazingly lucky, but you mustn't press your luck too far. Remember, the Gods are jealous.'
'I'm not going into this affair for fun,' I replied. 'It's a solid obligation of honour.'
'Oh, in that case I have no more to say. Ask your questions.'
'Do you know anything about a fellow called Albinus, Erick Albinus? A man about my own age—a
