“And you will advise us in advance of the costume you will wear? Please don’t fail to do that. A mask and fancy costume are to be obligatory, I hear.”
When Lord Froissart had gone, Stothert and his partner breathed more freely. It was true that their “firm” calling itself the Metropolitan Secret Agency, had obtained a wonderful reputation for getting secret information about people’s private lives, but rumors were rife regarding the methods it employed to achieve its aim. Women of high station, anxious to rid themselves of their husbands; husbands desiring to prove their wives’ alleged infidelity, and many others, now almost invariably went straight to the Metropolitan Secret Agency, or “the house with the bronze face” as Society people too had come to call it, and generally within a week the Agency would put them in possession of enough indisputable evidence to damn the suspected party irrevocably and forever.
Certainly the amount the Agency knew about the private lives and affairs of more than half the peerage was astonishing. How they came by it all was a problem which rival agencies tried in vain to solve, and, having failed to solve it, some would proceed to vent their spleen by spreading false stories concerning the house with the bronze knocker, its inmates, and the way the business carried on there was conducted.
Not that either Stothert or his French partner cared in the least what was said about them. As the former was fond of remarking: “They can say what they like about us, but they can’t prove the truth of even a single statement.”
As Lord Froissart drove homeward in a taxi, his thoughts became centered on the house with the bronze face, and its strange tenants. The Metropolitan Secret Agency had been in existence less than three years, yet already it was looked upon as the premier inquiry agency in London. Though it never advertised, everybody in Society knew of its existence, and the rapidity with which it supplied information, which was invariably accurate, was common talk.
Then, who were Stothert and his companion, Madame Camille Lenoir? He had been told that they had come to London together and started their strange business without friends or introductions. Had they other partners? And if so, who were they? Madame Leonora Vandervelt, the beautiful adventuress who had committed suicide by throwing herself out of an hotel window, had been convicted on each of the three occasions she had appeared in the divorce court on evidence supplied by the Metropolitan Secret Agency. Twice the well-known Society woman, Mrs. Mervyn-Robertson, had visited the house with the bronze face with reference to thefts of some of her valuable jewelry, and each time the thief had been caught within a fortnight. Then her friend Stapleton when his Fiat car was stolen while he was choosing shirts at Wing’s in Piccadilly—this fact mentioned in Court created some amusement—had gone direct to Bloomsbury and interviewed Alix Stothert, with the result that both car and thief had been traced to Llandudno, and the thief arrested there while actually in the car.
That and a dozen similar examples of the Metropolitan Secret Agency’s amazing efficiency occurred to him, and the more he thought about the Agency, the more he marveled. Another question he asked himself was why the Agency should have rented that big house in Bloomsbury, seeing that their offices in it occupied apparently no more than four rooms, the rest of the house being in consequence empty and waste space. When he had lost himself in the house that afternoon he must have wandered, he reflected, into a dozen rooms or more, not one of which was even furnished, though nearly all had carpets. On the previous occasion when he had visited the Agency, he had seen six or eight clerks apparently hard at work, but the only people in authority were Stothert and the rather common Frenchwoman.
And the more he thought, the more puzzling the problem seemed to be. Not the least astonishing thing was that the partners should have found it necessary to continue working so late at night after probably working hard all day. He had, like most people, heard rumors about the house, including the story that people were seen to enter it who never came out again, but to such legends he paid no heed. He had just asked himself if it might not be advisable to deal carefully with this man and woman who treated him always with so much deference and outward courtesy, when the taxi drew up at his house in Queen Anne’s Gate.