The constable looked at the sergeant. “If the sergeant here will let me leave the station for half an hour, I expect I can,” he said.
The sergeant was duly placated, and the two set off with Constable Mulligan. He led them, not into the Square, but into the little alley behind St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. There he pointed to the bar of a rather disreputable-looking public-house. “You go in there,” he said to Ellery, “and ask if ‘the Spaniard’ is there. They’d know him. If I were to go in, they’d shut up like a knife when you aren’t looking.”
Ellery went in and ordered a drink. A glance round the bar showed him that “the Spaniard” was not in the bar at the moment. He turned to the woman behind the bar counter and asked her if she knew where to find “the Spaniard.” The woman looked at him with an air of surprise; but she made no reply. Then she turned to a curtained door behind her, and spoke through it. “Alf,” she said, “come here a minute.”
Alf speedily appeared in his shirt-sleeves—a portly, middle-aged man, rather stolid to look at, but with a pair of cunning little eyes that looked at you, not steadily, but with a succession of keen, quick glances. Ellery heard the woman whisper to him, “This gent here’s asking for ‘the Spaniard.’ ”
“And what might you be wanting with ‘the Spaniard,’ mister?” asked Alf, leaning across the bar, and speaking confidentially almost into Ellery’s ear.
“Certainly nothing to his disadvantage. But I want to know something, and I think he may be able to tell me.”
The publican looked at him a trifle suspiciously. “Is the gentleman known to you, maybe?” he asked.
“No; or I could probably find him for myself. I thought you might know him.”
“Well, he ain’t here,” said Alf, apparently making up his mind to Ellery’s disadvantage. Ellery began to expostulate; but at that moment, through the same curtained door through which mine host had come, walked a quite unmistakable figure—a very tall, thin man, with perfectly white hair and beard, the latter cut to a fine point. The new-comer wore a long and very threadbare black cloak, now green with age, and he seemed just about to place upon his head a very wide-brimmed black—or rather greenish—felt hat, which Ellery thought of instinctively as a “sombrero.” In a fine, high-pitched voice, perfectly cultivated but a good deal affected, and with a curious intonation that seemed like the affectation of a foreign accent, he addressed the woman behind the bar. “Did I hear my name spoken among you?” he asked.
The woman turned to Alf, who shrugged his shoulders.