Max Carrados, Ernest Bramah [children's books read aloud .TXT] 📗

report something.”

“Hope so,” vouchsafed the Manager. “’Morning.”

From his position near the window, Carrados appeared to wake up to the fact that the interview was over.

“But so far,” he remarked blandly, with his eyes towards the great man in the chair, “you have told us nothing of the theft.”

The Manager regarded the speaker dumbly for a moment and then turned to Mr Carlyle.

“What does he mean?” he demanded pungently.

But for once Mr Carlyle’s self-possession had forsaken him. He recognized that somehow Carrados had been guilty of an appalling lapse, by which his reputation for prescience was wrecked in that quarter for ever, and at the catastrophe his very ears began to exude embarrassment.

In the awkward silence Carrados himself seemed to recognize that something was amiss.

“We appear to be at cross-purposes,” he observed. “I inferred that the disappearance of the necklace would be the essence of our investigation.”

“Have I said a word about it disappearing?” demanded the Manager, with a contempt-laden raucity that he made no pretence of softening. “You don’t seem to have grasped the simple facts about the case, Mr Carrados. Really, I hardly think——Oh, come in!”

There had been a knock at the door, then another. A clerk now entered with an open telegram.

“Mr Longworth wished you to see this at once, sir.”

“We may as well go,” whispered Mr Carlyle with polite depression to his colleague.

“Here, wait a minute,” said the Manager, who had been biting his thumb-nail over the telegram. “No, not you”—to the lingering clerk—“you clear.” Much of the embarrassment that had troubled Mr Carlyle a minute before seemed to have got into the Manager’s system. “I don’t understand this,” he confessed awkwardly. “It’s from Bellitzer. He wires: ‘Have just heard alleged robbery Straithwaite pearls. Advise strictest investigation.’”

Mr Carlyle suddenly found it necessary to turn to the wall and consult a highly coloured lithographic inducement to insure. Mr Carrados alone remained to meet the Manager’s constrained glance.

“Still, he tells us really nothing about the theft,” he remarked sociably.

“No,” admitted the Manager, experiencing some little difficulty with his breathing, “he does not.”

“Well, we still hope to be able to report something to-morrow. Good-bye.”

It was with an effort that Mr Carlyle straightened himself sufficiently to take leave of the Manager. Several times in the corridor he stopped to wipe his eyes.

“Max, you unholy fraud,” he said, when they were outside, “you knew all the time.”

“No; I told you that I knew nothing of it,” replied Carrados frankly. “I am absolutely sincere.”

“Then all I can say is, that I see a good many things happen that I don’t believe in.”

Carrados’s reply was to hold out a coin to a passing newsboy and to hand the purchase to his friend who was already in the car.

“There is a slang injunction to ‘keep your eyes skinned.’ That being out of my power, I habitually ‘keep my ears skinned.’ You would be surprised to know how very little you hear, Louis, and how much you miss. In the last five minutes up there I have had three different newsboys’ account of this development.”

“By Jupiter, she hasn’t waited long!” exclaimed Mr Carlyle, referring eagerly to the headlines. “‘PEARL NECKLACE SENSATION. SOCIETY LADY’S ₤5000 TRINKET DISAPPEARS.’ Things are moving. Where next, Max?”

“It is now a quarter to one,” replied Carrados, touching the fingers of his watch. “We may as well lunch on the strength of this new turn. Parkinson will have finished packing; I can telephone him to come to us at Merrick’s in case I require him. Buy all the papers, Louis, and we will collate the points.”

The undoubted facts that survived a comparison were few and meagre, for in each case a conscientious journalist had touched up a few vague or doubtful details according to his own ideas of probability. All agreed that on Tuesday evening—it was now Thursday—Mrs Straithwaite had formed one of a party that had occupied a box at the new Metropolitan Opera House to witness the performance of La Pucella, and that she had been robbed of a set of pearls valued in round figures at five thousand pounds. There agreement ended. One version represented the theft as taking place at the theatre. Another asserted that at the last moment the lady had decided not to wear the necklace that evening and that its abstraction had been cleverly effected from the flat during her absence. Into a third account came an ambiguous reference to Markhams, the well-known jewellers, and a conjecture that their loss would certainly be covered by insurance.

Mr Carlyle, who had been picking out the salient points of the narratives, threw down the last paper with an impatient shrug.

“Why in heaven’s name have we Markhams coming into it now?” he demanded. “What have they to lose by it, Max? What do you make of the thing?”

“There is the second genuine string—the one Bellitzer saw. That belongs to someone.”

“By gad, that’s true—only five days ago, too. But what does our lady stand to make by that being stolen?”

Carrados was staring into obscurity between an occasional moment of attention to his cigarette or coffee.

“By this time the lady probably stands to wish she was well out of it,” he replied thoughtfully. “Once you have set this sort of stone rolling and it has got beyond you——” He shook his head.

“It has become more intricate than you expected?” suggested Carlyle, in order to afford his friend an opportunity of withdrawing.

Carrados pierced the intention and smiled affectionately.

“My dear Louis,” he said, “one-fifth of the mystery is already solved.”

“One-fifth? How do you arrive at that?”

“Because it is one-twenty-five and we started at eleven-thirty.”

He nodded to their waiter, who was standing three tables away, and paid the bill. Then with perfect gravity he permitted Mr Carlyle to lead him by the arm into the street, where their car was waiting, Parkinson already there in attendance.

“Sure I can be of no further use?” asked Carlyle. Carrados had previously indicated that after lunch he would go on alone, but, because he was largely sceptical of the outcome, the professional man felt guiltily that he was deserting. “Say the word?”

Carrados smiled and shook his head. Then he leaned across.

“I am going to the opera house now; then, possibly, to talk to Markham a little. If I have time I must find a man who knows the Straithwaites, and after that I may look up Inspector Beedel if he is at the Yard. That is as far as I can see yet, until I call at Luneburg Mansions. Come round on the third anyway.”

“Dear old chap,” murmured Mr Carlyle, as the car edged its way ahead among the traffic. “Marvellous shots he makes!”

In the meanwhile, at Luneburg Mansions, Mrs Straithwaite had been passing anything but a pleasant day. She had awakened with a headache and an overnight feeling that there was some unpleasantness to be gone on with. That it did not amount to actual fear was due to the enormous self-importance and the incredible ignorance which ruled the butterfly brain of the young society beauty—for in spite of three years’ experience of married life Stephanie Straithwaite was as yet on the enviable side of two and twenty.

Anticipating an early visit from a particularly obnoxious sister-in-law, she had remained in bed until after lunch in order to be able to deny herself with the more conviction. Three journalists who would have afforded her the mild excitement of being interviewed had called and been in turn put off with polite regrets by her husband. The objectionable sister-in-law postponed her visit until the afternoon and for more than an hour Stephanie “suffered agonies.” When the visitor had left and the martyred hostess announced her intention of flying immediately to the consoling society of her own bridge circle, Straithwaite had advised her, with some significance, to wait for a lead. The unhappy lady cast herself bodily down upon a couch and asked whether she was to become a nun. Straithwaite merely shrugged his shoulders and remembered a club engagement. Evidently there was no need for him to become a monk: Stephanie followed him down the hall, arguing and protesting. That was how they came jointly to encounter Carrados at the door.

“I have come from the Direct Insurance in the hope of being able to see Mrs Straithwaite,” he explained, when the door opened rather suddenly before he had knocked. “My name is Carrados—Max Carrados.”

There was a moment of hesitation all round. Then Stephanie read difficulties in the straightening lines of her husband’s face and rose joyfully to the occasion.

“Oh yes; come in, Mr Carrados,” she exclaimed graciously. “We are not quite strangers, you know. You found out something for Aunt Pigs; I forget what, but she was most frantically impressed.”

“Lady Poges,” enlarged Straithwaite, who had stepped aside and was watching the development with slow, calculating eyes. “But, I say, you are blind, aren’t you?”

Carrados’s smiling admission turned the edge of Mrs Straithwaite’s impulsive, “Teddy!”

“But I get along all right,” he added. “I left my man down in the car and I found your door first shot, you see.”

The references reminded the velvet-eyed little mercenary that the man before her had the reputation of being quite desirably rich, his queer taste merely an eccentric hobby. The consideration made her resolve to be quite her nicest possible, as she led the way to the drawing-room. Then Teddy, too, had been horrid beyond words and must be made to suffer in the readiest way that offered.

“Teddy is just going out and I was to be left in solitary bereavement if you had not appeared,” she explained airily. “It wasn’t very compy only to come to see me on business by the way, Mr Carrados, but if those are your only terms I must agree.”

Straithwaite, however, did not seem to have the least intention of going. He had left his hat and stick in the hall and he now threw his yellow gloves down on a table and took up a negligent position on the arm of an easy-chair.

“The thing is, where do we stand?” he remarked tentatively.

“That is the attitude of the insurance company, I imagine,” replied Carrados.

“I don’t see that the company has any standing in the matter. We haven’t reported any loss to them and we are not making any claim, so far. That ought to be enough.”

“I assume that they act on general inference,” explained Carrados. “A limited liability company is not subtle, Mrs Straithwaite. This one knows that you have insured a five-thousand-pound pearl necklace with it, and when it becomes a matter of common knowledge that you have had one answering to that description stolen, it jumps to the conclusion that they are one and the same.”

“But they aren’t—worse luck,” explained the hostess. “This was a string that I let Markhams send me to see if I would keep.”

“The one that Bellitzer saw last Saturday?”

“Yes,” admitted Mrs Straithwaite quite simply.

Straithwaite glanced sharply at Carrados and then turned his eyes with lazy indifference to his wife.

“My dear Stephanie, what are you thinking of?” he drawled. “Of course those could not have been Markhams’ pearls. Not knowing that you are much too clever to do such a foolish thing, Mr Carrados will begin to think that you have had fraudulent designs upon his company.”

Whether the tone was designed to exasperate or merely fell upon a fertile soil, Stephanie threw a hateful little glance in his direction.

“I don’t care,” she exclaimed recklessly; “I haven’t the least little objection in the world to Mr Carrados knowing exactly how it happened.”

Carrados put in an instinctive word of warning, even raised an arresting hand, but the lady was much too excited, too voluble, to be denied.

“It doesn’t really matter in the least, Mr Carrados, because nothing came of it,” she explained. “There never were any real pearls to be insured. It would have made no difference to the company, because I did not regard this as an ordinary insurance from the first. It was to be a loan.”

“A loan?” repeated Carrados.

“Yes. I shall come into heaps and heaps of money in a few years’ time under Prin-Prin’s will. Then I should pay back whatever had been advanced.”

“But would it not have been better—simpler—to have borrowed purely on the anticipation?”

“We have,” explained the lady eagerly. “We have borrowed from all sorts of people, and both Teddy and I have signed heaps and heaps of papers, until now no one will lend any more.”

The thing was too tragically grotesque to be laughed at. Carrados turned his face from one to the other and by ear, and by even finer perceptions, he focussed them in his mind—the delicate, feather-headed beauty, with the heart of a cat and the irresponsibility of a kitten, eye and mouth already hardening under the stress of her frantic life, and, across the room, her debonair consort, whose lank pose and nonchalant attitude towards the situation Carrados had not yet categorized.

Straithwaite’s dry voice, with its habitual drawl, broke into his reflection.

“I don’t suppose for a moment that you either know or care what this means, my dear girl, but I will proceed to enlighten you. It means the extreme probability that unless you