“Mme. de Vigny—Lucille de Vigny. Do you know anything of her?”
“Perhaps,” said the inspector, touching an electric bell.
A policeman in uniform entered. The inspector handed the man a slip of paper. The constable withdrew. In a few moments he returned, handed some documents to his superior officer, and retired.
“Does your lordship happen to know anything of this Mme. Lucille de Vigny before she came to England a few years ago?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“I suppose we are talking of the same lady”—the inspector looked down at his papers—“a tall, strikingly handsome, dark woman of about thirty-five or forty now. She was in the Prospect Hotel, Harrogate, at the time of the late tragic occurrence there, though she was not herself brought into the case.”
“Yes, that is the lady.”
“Well, we do know something of her here. We have been keeping an eye on her for a little time at the request of the French police. A French detective has been over here about her. It was not until the day before yesterday, when instructions came from Paris to act, that we knew she had left the country.”
“Left the country!” cried Lord Francis, falling back on his chair in consternation.
“Sailed for New York from Liverpool four days ago. She is wanted in France for connection with some wholesale swindling of a bank in Lille four or five years ago. We lost sight of her for a little while lately, but that we have just explained by the fact that she recently went through a form of marriage at a registry with a rich American Senator, Colonel Clutterbuck. I say went through a form of marriage, for her husband, one of the clerks in the Lille bank, is now in the hands of the French police. My lord, you may make your mind easy about your boy. No doubt he is the child who sailed with Colonel and Mrs. Clutterbuck four days ago as Mrs. Clutterbuck’s nephew, Roland Tyrrell, aged six.”