minute. “Good,” he said at length, “and bad! Admirable in the general plan, but absurd in some of the details.”
“The general plan was mine,” said Baggin gruffly.
“And the absurd details were probably mine,” admitted Grayson with cheerfulness.
“May I give you some suggestions?” asked the count politely.
“Go ahead!” returned Baggin.
“This afternoon — after I had deciphered your notes — it took me precisely two . hours by the cathedral chimes to work out the key — I ventured to revise them, and also to devise a different plan of retirement for the committee. You would care to know it?” He looked deferentially at Baggin, whose bent brows relaxed.
“Draw up your chair to the table,” he said in reply. “We’ll overhaul the entire proposition. There will be difficulties If you could invest an equal share of money—”
“I thought of that,” answered the count simply.
“And I fancy I can — how you say — raise the required amount. May I speak for a moment to Mr. Grayson — on a very personal matter?”
He drew the older man aside, and conversed with him briefly, in low tones.
Surprise, incredulity, displeasure chased each other across Grayson’s countenance in rapid succession. “Very well,” he said finally, somewhat brusquely. “You have my consent — until I see Doris.”
They returned to the table. “I will be security for Count Poltavo,” he declared to Baggin, “for half-a-million pounds.”
7. Some Disappearances
In the last week of April, 1908, a notice was posted on the doors of the London, Manhattan, and Jersey Syndicate, in Moorgate Street. It was brief, but it was to the point:
“Owing to the disappearance of Mr. George T. Baggin, the L. M. and J. Syndicate has suspended operations.”
With Mr. Baggin had disappeared the sum of £247,000. An examination of the books of the firm revealed the fact that the London, Manhattan, and Jersey Syndicate was — Mr. Baggin; that its imposing title thinly disguised the operations of a bucket-shop, and the vanished bullion had been most systematically collected in gold and foreign notes.
Mr. Baggin had disappeared as though the earth had swallowed him up. He was traced to Liverpool. A ticket to New York had been purchased by a man answering to his description, and he had embarked on the Lucania. The liner called at Queenstown, and the night she left, Mr. “Coleman” was missing. His clothing and trunks were found intact in his cabin. The ship was searched from stem to stern, but no trace of the unfortunate man could be discovered. The evening newspapers flared forth with, “Tragic End of a Defaulting Banker,” but Scotland Yard, ever sceptical, set on foot certain enquiries and learnt that a stranger had been seen in Queenstown after the ship sailed. A stranger who left for Dublin, and who doubled back to Heysham; who came, via Manchester, back to London again. In London he had vanished completely. Whether or not this was the redoubtable George T. Baggin, was a matter for conjecture.
T.B. Smith, of Scotland Yard, into whose hands the case was put, had no doubt at all. He believed that Baggin was alive.
Most artistic of all was the passing of Lucas Damant, the Company Promoter. Damant’s defalcations were the heaviest, for his opportunities were greater. He dealt in millions and stole in millions. Taking his holiday in Switzerland, Mr. Damant foolishly essayed the ascent of the Matterhorn without a guide. His alpenstock was picked up at the edge of a deep crevasse, and another Alpine disaster was added to the alarming list of mountaineering tragedies. What time four expert guides were endeavouring to extricate the lost man from a bottomless pit, sixteen chartered accountants were engaged in extracting from the chaos of his documentary remains the true position of Mr. Damant’s affairs, but the sixteen accountants, had they been sixteen hundred, and the space of time occupied in their investigations a thousand years, would never have been able to balance the Company Promoter’s estate to the satisfaction of all concerned, for between debit and credit yawned an unfathomable chasm that close on a million pounds could not have spanned.
In the course of time a fickle public forgot the sensational disappearance of these men; in course of time their victims died or sought admission to the workhouse. There were spasmodic discussions that arose in smokerooms and tap-rooms, and the question, as to whether they were dead or whether they had merely bolted, was hotly debated, but it may be truthfully said that they were forgotten; but not by Scotland Yard, which neither forgets nor forgives.
The Official Memory sits in a big office that overlooks the Thames Embankment. It is embodied in a man who checks, day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute, the dark happenings of the world. He is an inconsiderable person, as personalities go, for he enters no witnessbox to testify against a pallid prisoner. He grants no interviews to curious newspaper reporters, he appears in no magazines as a picturesque detector of crime, but silently, earnestly, and remorselessly he marks certain little square cards, makes grim entries in strange ledgers, consults maps, and pores over foreign newspaper reports. Sometimes he prepares a dossier as a cheap-jack makes up his prize packet, with a paper from this cabinet, a photograph from that drawer, a newspaper-cutting, a docketed deposition with the sprawling signature of a dying man, a fingerprint card — and all these he places in a large envelope, and addresses it in a clerkly hand to Chief Inspector So-and-So, or to the “Director of Public Prosecutions.” When the case is over and a dazed man sits in a cell at Wormwood Scrubbs pondering his sentence, or, as it sometimes happens, when convict masons are at work carving initials over a grave in a prison-yard, the envelope comes back to the man in the office, and he sorts the contents jealously. It is nothing to him, the sum of misery they have cast, or the odour of death that permeates them. He receives them unemotionally, distributes the contents to their cabinets, pigeonholes, guard-books, and drawers and proceeds to make up yet another dossier.
All things come to him; crime in all its aspects is veritably his stockin-trade.
When George T. Baggin disappeared in 1908, his simple arrangement of indexing showed the connection between the passing of Lucas Damant, six months later, and the obliteration of Gerald Grayson. The Official Memory knew, too, what the public had no knowledge of: namely, that there had been half-a-dozen minor, but no less mysterious, flittings in the space of two years.
Their stories, briefly and pithily told, were inscribed on cards in the silent man’s cabinet. Underneath was the significant word, “Incomplete.” They were stories to be continued; some other hand than his might take up the tale at a future time, and subscribe “Finis” to their grim chapters. He was satisfied to carry the story forward as far as his information allowed him.
There never was a more fascinating office than this of the Silent Recorder’s. It was terribly businesslike, with its banked files, its innumerable drawers, its rows of deep cabinets. “A, B, C, D,” they ran; then began all over again, “AA, BB, CC,” except the big index drawer where “Aabot, Aaroon, Aato, Abard, Abart” commenced the record of infamous men. There were forgers here, murderers, coiners, defaulters great and small. There are stories of great swindles, and of suspected swindles, of events apparently innocent in themselves, behind which lie unsuspected criminalities.
I show you this office, the merest glimpse of it, so that as this story progresses, and information comes mysteriously to the hand of the
