‘I am afraid that a good many people know about them, most undesirable people, too. If you will show them to me—I am asking officially—I will tell you what I know.’
Cary led the way to his study. Dawson glanced round the room, at the papers heaped upon the table, at the tall windows bare of curtains—Cary, who loved light and sunshine, hated curtains—and growled. Then he locked the door, pulled down the thick blue blinds required by the East Coast lighting orders, and switched on the electric lights though it was high noon in May. ‘That’s better,’ said he. ‘You are an absolutely trustworthy man, Mr. Cary. I know all about you. But you are damned careless. That bare window is overlooked from half a dozen flats. You might as well do your work in the street.’
Dawson picked up some of the papers, and their purport was explained to him by Cary. ‘I don’t know anything of naval details,’ said he, ‘but I don’t need any evidence of the value of the stuff here. The enemy wants it, wants it badly; that is good enough for me.’
‘But,’ remonstrated Cary, ‘no one knows of these papers, or of the use to which I am putting them, except my son in the Navy, my wife (who has not read a line of them), and my publisher in London.’
‘Hum!’ commented Dawson. ‘Then how do you account for this?’
He opened his leather despatch-case and drew forth a parcel carefully wrapped up in brown paper. Within the wrapping was a large white envelope of the linen woven paper used for registered letters, and generously sealed. To Cary’s surprise, for the envelope appeared to be secure, Dawson cautiously opened it so as not to break the seal which was adhering to the flap and drew out a second smaller envelope, also sealed. This he opened in the same delicate way and took out a third; from the third he drew a fourth, and so on until eleven empty envelopes had been added to the litter piled upon Cary’s table, and the twelfth, a small one, remained in Dawson’s hands.
‘Did you ever see anything so childish?’ observed he, indicating the envelopes. ‘A big, registered, sealed Chinese puzzle like that is just crying out to be opened. We would have seen the inside of that one even if it had been addressed to the Lord Mayor, and not to—well, someone in whom we are deeply interested, though he does not know it.’
Cary, who had been fascinated by the succession of sealed envelopes, stretched out his hand towards one of them. ‘Don’t touch,’ snapped out Dawson. ‘Your clumsy hands would break the seals, and then there would be the devil to pay. Of course all these envelopes were first opened in my office. It takes a dozen years to train men to open sealed envelopes so that neither flap nor seal is broken, and both can be again secured without showing a sign of disturbance. It is a trade secret.’
Dawson’s expert fingers then opened the twelfth envelope and he produced a letter. ‘Now, Mr. Cary, if we had not known you and also known that you were absolutely honest and loyal—though dangerously simple-minded and careless in the matter of windows—this letter would have been very awkward indeed for you. It runs: “Hagan arrives 10.30 P.M. Wednesday to get Cary’s Naval Notes. Meet him. Urgent.” Had we not known you, Mr. Richard Cary might have been asked to explain how Hagan knew all about his Naval Notes and was so very confident of being able to get them.’
Cary smiled. ‘I have often felt,’ said he, ‘especially in war-time, that it was most useful to be well known to the police. You may ask me anything you like and I will do my best to answer. I confess that I am aghast at the searchlight of inquiry which has suddenly been turned upon my humble labours. My son at sea knows nothing of the Notes except what I have told him in my letters, my wife has not read a line of them, and my publisher is the last man to talk. I seem to have suddenly dropped into the middle of a detective story.’ The poor man scratched his head and smiled ruefully at the Scotland Yard officer.