“It’ll give ’em hell if they run up against it—make no blooming error about that!” rapped out the superintendent too “hot in the choler” to be choice of words. “It’s a nasty little handful to fall foul of when its temper is up; and this damned spy business, done behind a mask of friendship in times of peace——Look here, Cleek! If it comes to the point, just give me a gun with the rest. I’ll show the Government that I can lick something beside insurance stamps for my country’s good—by James, yes!”
“Just so,” said Cleek, with one of his curious, crooked smiles. He was used to these little patriotic outbursts on the part of Mr. Narkom whenever the German bogey was dragged out by the Press. “But let us hope it will not come to that. It would be an embarrassment of riches so far as our friends the editors are concerned, don’t you think, to have two wars on their hands at the same time? And I see by papers that the long-threatened Mauravanian revolution has broken out at last. In short, that our good friend Count Irma has made his escape from Sulberga, put himself at the head of the Insurgents, and is organizing a march on the capital——”
Here he pulled himself up abruptly, as if remembering something, and, before Mr. Narkom could put in a word, launched into the subject of the case in hand and set him thinking and talking of other things.
CHAPTER XVII
It had gone nine by all the reliable clocks in town when the wild race to the coast came to an end, and after darting swallowlike through the wind-swept streets of Portsmouth, the limousine, mud splashed and disreputable, rushed up to the guarded entrance of the suspended dock master’s house at Portsea; and precisely one and a quarter minutes thereafter Cleek stood in the presence of the three men most deeply concerned in the clearing up of this mystifying affair.
He found Sir Charles Fordeck, a dignified and courtly gentleman of polished manners and measured speech, although now, quite naturally, labouring under a distress of mind which visibly disturbed him. He found Mr. Paul Grimsdick, his secretary, a frank-faced, straight-looking young Englishman of thirty; Mr. Alexander MacInery, a stolid, unemotional Scotsman of middle age, with a huge knotted forehead, eyebrows like young moustaches, and a face like a face of granite; and he found, too, reason to believe that each of these was, in his separate way, a man to inspire confidence and respect.
“I can hardly express to you, Mr. Cleek, how glad I am to meet you and to have you make this quick response to my appeal,” said the Admiral Superintendent, offering him a welcoming hand. “I feel that if any man is likely to get to the bottom of this mysterious business you are that man. And that you should get to the bottom of it—quickly, at whatever cost, by whatever means—is a thing to be desired not only in the nation’s interest, but for the honour of myself and my two colleagues.”
“I hardly think that your honour will be called into question, Sir Charles,” replied Cleek, liking him the better for the manliness which prompted him in that hour of doubt and difficulty to lay aside all questions of position, and by the word “colleague” lift his secretary to the level of himself, so that they might be judged upon a common plane as men, and men alone. “It would be a madman indeed who would hint at anything approaching treason with regard to Sir Charles Fordeck.”
“No madder than he who would hint it of either of these,” said Sir Charles, laying a hand upon the shoulder of the auditor and the secretary, and placing himself between them. “I demand to be judged by the same rule, set upon the same plane with them. We three alone were in this house when that abominable thing happened; we three alone had access to the records from which that information was wired. It never, for so much as the fraction of one second, passed out of our keeping or our sight; if it was wired at all it must have been wired from this house, from that room, and in that case, one or other of us must positively have been the person to do so. Well, I did not; MacInery did not; Grimsdick did not. And yet, as you know, the ‘wiring’ was done—we should never stand a chance of knowing to whom, nor by whom, but for the accident which deflected the course of the message.”