It occurred about six weeks after the return of the party from San Remo.
It was dismal and wet in London, one of those damp yellow days with which we, alas I are too well acquainted.
About two o’clock in the afternoon, attired in yellow fishermen’s oil-skins instead of his showy grey livery, Garrett sat at the wheel of the new “sixty” six-cylinder car of Finch Grey’s outside the Royal Automobile Club, in Piccadilly, bade adieu to the exemplary Bayswater parson, who stood upon the steps, and drew along to the corner of Park Lane, afterwards turning towards the Marble Arch, upon the first stage of a long and mysterious journey.
When it is said that the journey was a mysterious one Garrett was compelled to admit that, ever since he had been in the service of Prince Albert of Hesse-Holstein his journeys had been made for the most part with a motive that, until the moment of their accomplishment, remained to him a mystery. His employer gave him orders, but he never allowed him to know his plans. He was paid to hold his tongue and obey. What mattered if his Highness, who was such a well-known figure in the world of automobilism was not a Highness at all; or whether the Rev. Thomas Clayton held no clerical charge in Bayswater. He, Garrett, was the Prince’s chauffeur, paid to close his ears and his eyes to everything around him, and to drive whatever lady who might be in the car hither and thither, just as his employer or his audacious friends required.
For two years his life had been one of constant change, as these secret records show. In scarcely a country in Europe he had not driven, while fully half a dozen times he had driven between Boulogne and the “Place” at Monte Carlo, four times from Calais due east to Berlin, as well as some highly exciting runs over certain frontiers when compelled to evade the officers of the law.
The good-looking Prince Albert, whose real name was hidden in obscurity, but who was best known as Tremlett, Burchell-Laing, Drummond, Lord Nassington, and half a dozen other aliases, constantly amazed and puzzled the police. Leader of that small circle of bold and ingenious men, he provided the newspapers with sensational gossip from time to time, exploits in which he usually made use of one or other of his high-power cars, and in which there was invariably a lady in the car.
Prince Albert was nothing if not a ladies’ man, and in two years had owned quite a dozen cars of different makes with identification plates innumerable, most of them false.
His Highness, who always found snobs to bow and dust his boots, and who took good care to prey upon their snobbishness, was a perfect marvel of cunning. His cool audacity was unequalled. The times which he passed unsuspected and unidentified beneath the very noses of the police were innumerable, while the times in which Garrett had been in imminent peril of arrest were not a few.
The present journey was, however, to say the least, a very mysterious one.
That morning at ten o’clock he had sat, as usual, in the cosy chambers in Dover Street. His Highness had given him a cigar, and treated him as an equal, as he did always when they were alone.