"If you do, you shall repay me," he replied. "In the meantime I will send you round a small sum to do your shopping with. Let me see, where are you staying?"
An hour later a bank messenger arrived with an envelope containing £100 in notes. Juliet had never seen so much money in her life, and thought it far too much. "I shall be sure to lose it," was her first thought. Her second was to deposit it with the proprietor of the hotel; after which she felt safer. Then, in huge delight, she sallied forth again with her maid, the alluring memory of some of the shop windows into which she had gazed that morning calling to her loudly; she had never thought to look at those fascinating garments from the other side of the glass. Intoxicating hours followed, in which a couple of tweed dresses were purchased that seemed as if they must have been made on purpose for her; nor were thick walking shoes, and country hats, and other accessories neglected. By evening her room was strewn with cardboard boxes, and on Wednesday more were added, so that a trunk to pack them in had to be bought as well. The shops were very empty; Juliet had the entire attention of the shop people, and revelled in her purchases. Time flew, and she was quite sorry, as she drove to Euston on the following evening, to think that she was leaving this fascinating town of London.
CHAPTER IV
On Tuesday afternoon, when Juliet, having hung up the telephone through which she had been conversing with Lord Ashiel, hurried out to see what Bond Street could provide her with, a little man was sitting writing in a luxuriously furnished room in a flat in Whitehall. He was small and thin, and possessed a pair of extraordinarily bright and intelligent brown eyes, which saw a good deal more of what happened around him than perhaps any other eyes within a radius of a mile from where he sat. He was, in other words, observant to a very high degree; and, what was more remarkable, he knew how to use his powers of observation. There was not a criminal in the length and breadth of the country who did not wonder uneasily whether he had really left the scene of his crime as devoid of clues as he imagined, when he heard that the celebrated detective, Gimblet, had visited the spot in pursuit of his investigations.
For this was the man, who, in a few years, had unravelled more apparently insoluble mysteries, and caused the arrest of more hitherto evasive scoundrels, than his predecessors had managed to secure in a decade. The name of Gimblet was known and detested wherever a coiner carried on his forbidden craft, or a blackmailer concocted his cowardly plans; burglars and forgers cursed freely when he was mentioned, and there was hardly an illicit trade in the country which had not suffered at one time or another from his inquisitive habit of interesting himself in other people's affairs. Scotland Yard officials were never too proud to call upon him for help, and many a difficulty he had helped them out of, though he refused an offer of a regular post in the Criminal Investigation Department, preferring to be at liberty to choose what cases he would take up. Above all things he loved the strange and inexplicable. Gimblet had not always been a detective. Indeed, he often smiled to himself when he thought of the extraordinary confidence which the public now elected to repose in him.
No one was more conscious than himself that he was far from being infallible; in fact, his admirers appeared to him to be wilfully blind to that elementary truth; so that when he failed to bring a case to a successful issue people were apt to show an amount of disappointment that he, for his part, thought very unreasonable. It was, perhaps, in the nature of things that the puzzles he solved correctly received so much more publicity than was given to his mistakes; but he often could not avoid wishing that less were expected of him, and that his reputation had not grown so tropically on what he could but consider insufficient nourishment.
In early days, after leaving Oxford, he had gone into an architect's office and had flourished there; till one day an accident had turned his energies in the direction they had since taken.
A crime had been committed during the erection of a house he was building, and, when the police were at a loss to know how to account for the somewhat peculiar circumstances, the young architect, going his ordinary rounds of inspection, had seen in a flash that there was something unusual in the disposal of a portion of the building material; which observation, with certain deductions following thereon, had led to the detection and arrest of the criminal. From that time on he had been more and more drawn to the fascination of tracing events to their causes, when these appeared connected with deeds of violence and fraud, till of late years he had completely dropped the study of the carrying powers of wood and stone for the more interesting lessons to be derived from the contemplation of the strange vagaries indulged in by his fellow human beings.
He kept, however, a strong taste for art and all that appertained to it; more especially he was devoted to the collection of old and rare bric-à-brac. There was not a curiosity shop in London that did not know him, and he was equally happy when he had discovered some dust-hidden treasure in the back regions of a secondhand furniture shop, or when he was engaged in running to earth some human vermin who up till then had lain snug in his own particular back region of crime, straining his ears, in a mixture of contempt and anxiety, as the sounds of the hunt went by.
Having finished his letter, Gimblet put his stylo in his pocket, and turned round to look at the clock.