"I think I had better go," he said, suddenly. "Your brandy is too strong for my head, Grenier. Call and see me in the morning."
The astute rogue whom he addressed raised no objection to his departure. He instantly embraced Langdon's attitude in his wider horizon.
"Yes," he agreed, "let us sleep on it. We will all be better able to discuss matters more clearly to-morrow."
Thenceforth the flat in Shaftesbury Avenue became a spider's web into which the flies that buzzed around Philip's life were drawn one by one, squeezed dry of their store of information, and cast forth again unconscious of the plot being woven against their master.
Within a month, Grenier knew Anson's habits, his comings and goings, his bankers, his brokers, many of his investments, the names of his chief employees, the members of his yacht's crew, the topography of his Sussex estate. Nothing was too trivial, no detail too unimportant, to escape a note undecipherable to others and a niche in a retentive memory.
He made a friend of one of Philip's footmen by standing treat and listening reverently to his views on the next day's racing. He persuaded one kitchen maid in Park Lane and another at Fairfax Hall that he had waited all his life to discover a woman he could love devotedly. It was a most important discovery when he unearthed in a dingy hotel the man whom Philip had dismissed for tampering with the locked portmanteau. From this worthy he first heard of the quaint adjunct to the belongings of the young millionaire, and judicious inquiry soon revealed that there was hardly a servant in Philip's employ who did not credit the Gladstone bag with being the repository of the millionaire's fortunes.
Ordinary people will credit any nonsense where diamonds are concerned. Even an educated criminal like Victor Grenier believed there might be some foundation for the absurd theory which found ready credence among the domestics.
He never made the error of planning a burglary or adroit robbery whereby the bag might come into his possession. If it did contain diamonds, and especially if it contained unique specimens, it was absolutely useless to him. But his vitals yearned for Anson's gold, and the question he asked himself in every unoccupied moment was how he might succeed in getting some portion of it into his own pocket.
One day a quaint notion entered his mind, and the more he thought of it the more it dominated him. He was tall and well-made, if slim in figure, and his face had never lost the plasticity given it by his stage experience.
He had only heard Philip's voice once, but his features and general appearance were now quite familiar to him, and he undertook a series of experiments with clothing and make-up to ascertain if he could personate Anson sufficiently well to deceive anyone who was not an intimate acquaintance. Soon the idea became a mania, and the mania absorbed the man's intellect. To be Philip Anson for a day, a week! What would he not give for the power!