At regular intervals the Count sent me money, but he was, as usual, travelling constantly. I wrote to him to a newspaper-shop in the Tottenham Court Road, reporting my movements and my whereabouts; therefore I knew not from one day to another when I should receive sudden orders to rejoin him.
The London papers had been full of the affair of the six novels, for it was now well known that the person who had abstracted the jewels was the same who had executed such a neat manœuvre at Gilling’s. One or two of the papers actually published leaderettes upon the subject, severely criticising the incompetency of the police in such matters. I have since heard, however, that at Scotland Yard there is a proverb that the wealthier the thief the less chance of his being caught. Bindo and his friends certainly did not lack funds. The various hauls they had made, even since my association with them, must have put many thousands into their pockets.
They were a clever and daring trio. They never met unless absolutely necessary in order to arrange some ingenious piece of trickery, and they could all live weeks at the same hotel without either, by word or sign, betraying previous knowledge of each other. Indeed, Count Bindo di Ferraris was the very acme of well-dressed, well-groomed scoundrelism.
Under the name of Ernest Crawford I was idling away some pleasant weeks at the Europäischer Hof, in the Alstadt, in Dresden, where I had made the acquaintance of a fair-haired Englishman named Upton, and his wife, a fluffy little woman some five years his junior. They had arrived at the hotel about a week after I had taken up my quarters, and as they became friendly I often took them for runs. Upton was the son of a rich Lancashire cotton-spinner, and was, I believe, on his honeymoon. Together we saw the sights of Dresden, the Royal Palace, the Green Vault, the museums and galleries, and had soon grown tired of them all. Therefore, almost daily we went for runs along the Elbe valley, delightful at that season of the vintage.
One evening, while we were sitting at coffee in the lounge and I was chatting with Mrs. Upton, her husband was joined by a friend from London, a tall, rather loud-spoken, broad-shouldered man, with a pair of merry, twinkling eyes and a reddish moustache. He was a motor-expert, I soon discovered, for on the afternoon following his arrival, when I brought the car round to the hotel, he began to examine it critically.
I had invited him to go with us to the Golden Höhe, about six miles distant, and take tea at the restaurant, and he sat at my side as I drove. While passing through the little village of Rächnitz, Mr. Gibbs—for that was his name—suddenly asked—
“What make of car is yours?”
No wonder he asked, for so constantly had its identity been disguised that it nowadays bore about as much resemblance to a Napier as it did to a Panhard. I had always before me the fact that the police were on the look-out for a forty “Napier”; therefore I had managed to disguise it outwardly, although a glance within the “bonnet” would, of course, reveal the truth.
“Oh,” I replied lightly, “it’s quite an unknown make—Bellini, of Turin. I’ve come to the conclusion that small makers can turn out just as good a car as, and perhaps even better than, the larger firms—providing you pay a fair price.”