"Yes, I am," Walter declared.
"Well, briefly, it occurred in this way," said the old officer. "While I was a colonel in India just before the war I was very hard pressed for money and had committed a fault—an indiscretion for which I might easily have been dismissed from the army. On being recalled to London, after war had been declared, I was approached by the fellow Weirmarsh who, to my horror, had, by some unaccountable means, obtained knowledge of my indiscretion! At first he adopted a high moral tone, upbraiding me for my fault and threatening to inform against me. This I begged him not to do. For a fortnight he kept me in an agony of despair, when one day he called me to him and unfolded to me a scheme by which I could make a considerable amount of money; indeed, he promised to pay me a yearly sum for my assistance."
"You thought him to be a doctor—and nothing else?" Walter said.
"Exactly. I never dreamed until quite recently that he was head of such a formidable gang, whose operations were upon so extensive a scale as to endanger our national credit," replied Sir Hugh. "At the time he approached me I was in the Pay Department, and many thousands of pounds in Treasury notes were passing through my safe weekly. His suggestion was that I should exchange the notes as they came to me from the Treasury for those with which he would supply me, and which, on showing me a specimen, I failed to distinguish from the real. I hesitated; I was hard up. To sustain my position after my knighthood money was absolutely necessary to me, and for a long time I had been unable to make both ends meet. The bait he dangled before me was sufficiently tempting, and—and—well, I fell!" he groaned, and then after a pause he went on:
"Whence Weirmarsh obtained the packets of notes which I substituted for genuine ones was, of course, a mystery, but once having taken the false step it was not my business to inquire. Not until quite recently did I discover his real position as chief of a gang of international crooks, who combined forgery with blackmail and theft upon a colossal scale. That he intended Bellairs should furnish him with an impression of the safe key of a diamond dealer in Hatton Garden is now plain. Bellairs defied him and threatened to denounce him to the police. Therefore, the poor fellow's lips were quickly closed by the scoundrel, who would hesitate at nothing in order to preserve his guilty secrets."
"But what caused you to break from him at last?" inquired Walter eagerly.
"Just before the armistice he and his friends had conceived a gigantic scheme by which Europe and the United States were to be flooded with great quantities of spurious paper currency, and though it would, when discovered—as it must have been sooner or later—have injured the national credit, would bring huge fortunes to him and his friends. He was pressing me to send in my papers and go to America, there to act as their agent at a huge remuneration. They wanted a man of standing who should be above suspicion, and he had decided to use me as his tool to engineer the gigantic frauds."
"And you, happily, refused?"
"Yes. I resolved, rather than act further, to relinquish the handsome payments he made to me from time to time. For that reason I got transferred from the Pay Department, so that I could no longer be of much use to him, a fact which annoyed him greatly."
"And he threatened you?"