“No, Mr. Cleek. He left about a week or so after James Colliver’s disappearance.”
“Know where he is?”
“Not the slightest idea. As a matter of fact, he suddenly inherited some money, and said he was going to emigrate to America. But I don’t know if he did or not. Why?”
“Oh, nothing in particular—only that I shouldn’t be surprised if the person who supplied that money was the pawnbroker who received in pledge the jewels which your father handed over to James Colliver, and that the sum which Felix Murchison ‘inherited’ so suddenly was the £150 advanced upon those gems.”
“How utterly absurd! My dear Mr. Cleek, you must surely remember that the pawnbroker said the chap who pawned the jewels was a gentlemanly appearing person, of good manners and speech, and Murchison is the last man in the world to answer to that description. A great hulking, bull-necked, illiterate animal of that sort, without an H in his vocabulary and with no more manners than a pig!”
“Precisely why I feel so certain now that the pawnbroker’s ‘advance’ was paid over to him,” said Cleek, with a twitch of the shoulder. “Live and learn, my friend, live and learn. Eleven months ago I couldn’t for the life of me understand why those jewels had been pawned at all; to-day I realize that it was the only possible course. Miss Larue, my compliments. Au revoir.” And he bowed her out of the room with the grace of a courtier, standing well out of sight from the hallway until the door had closed behind her and her companion and he was again alone with the superintendent.
“Now for it! as they used to say in the old melodramas,” he laughed, stepping sharply to a wardrobe and producing, first, a broad-brimmed cavalry hat, which he immediately put on, and then a pair of bright steel handcuffs. “We may have use for this very effective type of wristlets, Mr. Narkom; so it’s well to go prepared for emergencies. Now then, off with you while I lock the door. That’s the way to the staircase. Nip down it to the American bar. There’s a passage from that leading out to the Embankment Gardens. A taxi from there will whisk us along Savoy Street, across the Strand and up Wellington Street to Tavistock in less than no time; so we may look to be with Lennard inside of another ten minutes.”
“Righto!” gave back the superintendent. “And I can get rid of this dashed rig as soon as we’re in the limousine. But, I say; any ideas, old chap—eh?”
“Yes, two or three. One of them is that this is going to be one of the simplest cases I ever tackled. Lay you a sovereign to a sixpence, Mr. Narkom, that I solve the riddle of that glass-room before they ring up the curtain of any theatre in London to-night. What’s that? Lying? No, certainly not. There’s been no lying in the matter at all; it isn’t a case of that sort. The pawnbroker did not lie; the porter who says he showed the boy into the room did not lie; and the two women who looked into it and saw nothing but an empty room did not lie either. The only thing that did lie was a vase of pink roses—a bunch of natural Ananiases that tried to make people believe that they had been blooming and keeping fresh ever since last August!”
“Good Lord! you don’t surely think that that Loti chap——”