For a quarter of an hour, while Reggie was engaged with Dawson père et fille, I took counsel with the widow, endeavouring to form some idea of where Mabel had concealed herself. Mrs Percival’s idea was that she would reveal her whereabouts ere long, but, knowing her firmness of character as well as I did, I held a different opinion. Her letter was one of a woman who had made a resolve and meant at all hazards to keep it. She feared to meet me, and for that reason would, no doubt, conceal her identity. She had a separate account at Coutts’ in her own name, therefore she would not be compelled to reveal her whereabouts through want of funds.
Ford, the dead man’s secretary, a tall, clean-shaven, athletic man of thirty, put his head into the room, but, finding us talking, at once withdrew. Mrs Percival had already questioned him, she said, but he was entirely unaware of Mabel’s destination.
The man Dawson had now usurped Ford’s position in the household, and the latter, full of resentment, was on the constant watch and as full of suspicion as we all were.
Reggie rejoined me presently, saying, “That fellow is absolutely a bounder of the very first water. Actually invited me to have a whisky-and-soda—in Blair’s house, too! He’s treating Mabel’s flight as a huge joke, saying that she’ll be back quickly enough, and adding that she can’t afford to be away long, and that he’ll bring her back the very instant he desires her presence here. In fact, the fellow talks just as though she were as wax in his hands, and as if he can do anything he pleases with her.”
“He can ruin her financially, that’s certain,” I remarked, sighing. “But read this, old chap,” and I gave him her strangely-worded letter.
“Good Heavens!” he gasped, when he glanced at it, “she’s in deadly terror of those people, that’s very certain. It’s to avoid them and you that she’s escaped—to Liverpool and America, perhaps. Remember she’s been a great traveller all her youth and therefore knows her way about.”
“We must find her, Reggie,” I declared decisively.
“But the worst of it is that she’s bent on avoiding you,” he said. “She has some distinct reason for this, it seems.”
“A reason known only to herself,” I remarked pensively. “It is surely a contretemps that now, just at the moment when we have gained the truth of the Cardinal’s secret which brought Blair his fortune, Mabel should voluntarily disappear in this manner. Recollect all we have at stake. We know not who are our friends or who our enemies. We ought both to go out to Italy and discover the spot indicated in that cipher record, or others will probably forestall us, and we may then be too late.”
He agreed that the record being bequeathed to me, I ought to take immediate steps to establish my claim to it, whatever might be. We could not disguise from ourselves the fact that Dawson, as Blair’s partner and participator of his enormous wealth, must be well aware of the secret, and that he had already, most probably, taken steps to conceal the truth from myself, the rightful owner. He was a power to be reckoned with—a sinister person, possessed of the wiliest cunning and the most devilish ingenuity in the art of subterfuge. Report everywhere gave him that character. He possessed the cold, calm manner of the man who had lived by his wits, and it seemed that in this affair his ingenuity, sharpened by a life of adventure, was to be pitted against my own.