“Charlie ought, I think, to be sent back to the Continent, don’t you agree?” he asked. “A timely warning that the police had learned of his return here, and he’d skip across by the next Channel service. Once over there, matters would be quite easy. The Leleu affair has never been cleared up, you know!” he added in a lower voice.
“I leave it entirely in your hands,” declared the plutocrat whom the public believed to be a high-minded philanthropist. “Whatever you do must be on your own responsibility, recollect.”
“But with your money. I want a couple of hundred.”
“Ah! hard up again, Jim,” sighed the other. But unlocking the safe opposite, the safe that contained the typed copy of the dead man’s document, the Baronet took out some banknotes and handed them to his cat’s-paw.
They were French notes. They were safer than English to give to persons like Jannaway, for the numbers could not be traced in cases of inquiries, while they could always be at once exchanged at any of the tourist offices. Sir Felix Challas, though compelled to employ men of the racing-tout stamp like Jim Jannaway, and unscrupulous concession-hunters like “Red Mullet,” was ever upon his guard.
He trusted his men, but in “Red Mullet” he had confessed himself sadly disappointed.
“Revivalists and missionaries have a lot to answer for,” was one of his pet phrases.
Jim Jannaway, slipping the notes into his pocket-book without troubling to count them, put on his smart overcoat and well-brushed silk hat, and wishing his employer an airy “good-evening,” strolled out into the damp chilliness of Berkeley Square, where he hailed a hansom and drove away.
He had given the man an address in Knightsbridge, but as the cab was turning from the misty gloom of Berkeley Street into the brightness of Piccadilly several persons were waiting at the left-hand kerb in order to cross the road.
Among them he apparently recognised somebody, for in an instant he drew back and turned his head the other way.