Enid and Mrs. Caldwell had altered their plans, and had gone to Sicily instead of to Egypt, first visiting Palermo and Syracuse, and were at the moment staying at the popular "San Domenico" at Taormina, amid that gem of Mediterranean scenery. Sir Hugh and his wife, much upset by Blanche's sudden arrival in London, had not gone abroad that winter, but had remained at Hill Street to comfort Paul's wife and child.
As for Walter, he had of late been wandering far afield, in Petrograd, Geneva, Rome, Florence, Málaga, and for the past week had been at Monte Carlo. He was not there wholly for pleasure, for, if the truth be told, there were seated at the farther end of the terrasse a smartly dressed man and a woman in whom he had for the past month been taking a very keen interest.
This pair, of Swiss nationality, he had watched in half a dozen Continental cities, gradually establishing his suspicions as to their real occupation.
They had come to Monte Carlo for neither health nor pleasure, but in order to meet a grey-haired man in spectacles, whom they received twice in private at the Métropole, where they were staying.
The Englishman had first seen them sitting together one evening at one of the marble-topped tables at the Café Royal in Regent Street, while he had been idly playing a game of dominoes at the next table with an American friend. The face of the man was to him somehow familiar. He felt that he had seen it somewhere, but whether in a photograph in his big album down at Idsworth or in the flesh he could not decide.
Yet from that moment he had hardly lost sight of them. With that astuteness which was Fetherston's chief characteristic, he had watched vigilantly and patiently, establishing the fact that the pair were in England for some sinister purpose. His powers were little short of marvellous. He really seemed, as Trendall once put it, to scent the presence of criminals as pigs scent truffles.
They suddenly left the Midland Hotel at St. Pancras, where they were staying, and crossed the Channel. But the same boat carried Walter Fetherston, who took infinite care not to obtrude himself upon their attention.
Monte Carlo, being in the principality of Monaco, and being peopled by the most cosmopolitan crowd in the whole world, is in winter the recognised meeting-place of chevaliers d'industrie and those who finance and control great crimes.
In the big atrium of those stifling rooms many an assassin has met his hirer, and in many of those fine hotels have bribes been handed over to those who will do "dirty work." It is the European exchange of criminality, for both sexes know it to be a safe place where they may "accidentally" meet the person controlling them.
It is safe to say that in every code used by the criminal plotters of every country in Europe there is a cryptic word which signifies a meeting at Monte Carlo. For that reason was Walter Fetherston much given to idling on the sunny terrasse of the café at a point where he could see every person who ascended or descended that flight of red-carpeted stairs which gives entrance to the rooms.