“Colonel Lambelet speaks English perfectly,” he said, “so fire away and don’t be nervous!”
When she had finished, the Chief said, addressing Lambelet:
“What do you make of it, Colonel?”
The little Frenchman made an expressive gesture.
“Madame has become aware of the interest you have been taking in her movements, mon cher. She seized the opportunity of this meeting with the daughter of her old friend to get rid of something compromising, a code or something of the kind, qui sait? Perhaps this robbery and its attendant murder was only an elaborate device to pass on some particularly important report of the movements of your ships... qui sait?”
“Then you are convinced in your own mind, Colonel, that this woman is a spy?” The clear-cut voice of the First Sea Lord rang out of the darkness of the room outside the circle of light on the desk.
“Mais certainement!” replied the Frenchman quietly. “Listen and you shall hear! By birth she is a Pole, from Warsaw, of good, perhaps, even, of noble family. I cannot tell you, for her real name we have not been able to ascertain... parbleu, it is impossible, with the Boches at Warsaw, hein? We know, however, that at a very early age, under the name of la petite Marcelle, she was a member of a troupe of acrobats who called themselves The Seven Duponts. With this troupe she toured all over Europe. Bien! About ten years ago, she went out to New York as a singer, under the name of Marcelle Blondinet, and appeared at various second-class theatres in the United States and Canada. Then we lose track of her for some years until 1913, the year before the war, when the famous Oriental dancer, Nur-el-Din, who has made a grand succès by the splendor of her dresses in America and Canada, appears at Brussels, scores a triumph and buys a fine mansion in the outskirts of the capital. She produces herself at Paris, Bordeaux, Lyons, Marseilles, Madrid, Milan and Rome, but her home in Brussels, always she returns there, your understand me, hein? La petite Marcelle of The Seven Duponts, Marcelle Blondinet of the café chantant, has blossomed out into a star of the first importance.”
The Colonel paused and cleared his throat.
“To buy a mansion in Brussels, to run a large and splendid troupe, requires money. It is the men who pay for these things, you would say. Quite right, but listen who were the friends of Madame Nur-el-Din. Bischoffsberg, the German millionaire of Antwerp, von Wurzburg, of Berne... ah ha! you know that gentleman, mon cher?” he turned, chuckling, to the Chief who nodded his acquiescence; “Prince Meddelin of the German Embassy in Paris and administrator of the German Secret Service funds in France, and so on and so on. I will not fatigue you with the list. The direct evidence is coming now.
“When the war broke out in August, 1914, Madame, after finishing her summer season in Brussels, was resting in her Brussels mansion. What becomes of her? She vanishes.”