“He must have known London pretty well,” observed Romanelli.
“Of course. The evidence proves that he was an Englishman; and that he knew London was quite evident from the fact that he gave instructions to the cabman to drive up the Haymarket, instead of crossing Leicester Square.”
Again a silence fell between them, as a calm-faced elderly waiter, in the most correct garb of the Italian cameriere—a short jacket and long white apron reaching almost to his feet—quickly removed their empty plates. He glanced swiftly from one man to the other, polished Tristram’s plate with his cloth as he stood behind him, and exchanged a meaning look with Romanelli. Then he turned suddenly, and went off to another table, to which he was summoned by the tapping of a knife upon a plate. The glance he had exchanged with the young Italian was one of recognition and mysterious significance.
This man, the urbane head-waiter, known well to frequenters of the Bonciani as Filippo, was known equally well in the remote Rutlandshire village as Doctor Malvano, the man who had expressed fear at the arrival of Vittorina in England, and who, truth to tell, led the strangest dual existence of doctor and waiter.
None in rural Lyddington suspected that their jovial doctor, with his merry chaff and imperturbable good humour, became grave-faced and suddenly transformed each time he visited London; none dreamed that his many absences from his practice were due to anything beyond his natural liking for theatres and the gaiety of town life; and none would have credited, even had it ever been alleged, that this man who could afford that large, comfortable house, rent shooting, and keep hunters in his stables, on each of his visits to London, assumed a badly starched shirt, black tie, short jacket, and long white apron, in order to collect stray pence from diners in a restaurant. Yet such was the fact. Doctor Malvano, who had been so well known among the English colony in Florence, was none other than Filippo, head-waiter at the obscure little café in Regent Street.
“It is still a mystery who the dead girl was,” Tristram observed at last. “The man who told me her name only knew very little about her.”
“What did he know?” Romanelli inquired quickly. “I had often met her at various houses in Livorno, but knew nothing of her parentage.”
“Nobody seems to know who she really was,” Tristram remarked pensively; “and her reason for coming to England seems to have been entirely a secret one.”
“A lover, perhaps,” Arnoldo said.
“Perhaps,” acquiesced his friend.