“I only met him a fortnight ago at the Grand at San Remo,” he answered. “He was there with a friend of his—probably a thief also. But he came on here alone with me. The fellow has taken over eighty thousand dollars!”
I hurried with him to the questore, or chief of police, and telegrams were quickly despatched hither and thither, but the thief had evidently got back to Genoa by the train at three o’clock in the morning, and embarked at once upon some ship for a Mediterranean port—Naples, Marseilles or Algiers. At any rate, though I remained a month in Nervi, we never heard further either of the easy-going naval man, or of the eighty thousand dollars in American notes and negotiable securities. Without doubt it was intended by the thief, or thieves, to throw the first suspicion upon myself, but fortunately the night-porter stated most positively that he had seen the lieutenant coming from his friend, Blenkap’s room, ten minutes before my return with the doctor. The man had left the main door of the hotel ajar in order to admit us, and it was evident that by that means the thief got away unnoticed.
The robbery had been an ingenious and audacious one, and showed the clever cunning of a master-hand.
As you have, no doubt, already guessed, the man who so cleverly got hold of Blenkap’s money, and who had escaped so swiftly, I now recognised as the affable Lieutenant Shacklock, the intimate friend and guest of James Harding Miller.
Was not his presence in that house sufficient to convince me that what had been suspected of Miller was more than a mere surmise? It had been declared that Lucie’s father, though a county gentleman, was also head of the most daring association of criminals in Europe. It seemed to me that Gordon-Wright, alias Shacklock, was one of his ingenious lieutenants whom he was entertaining in his cosy retreat—planning some new scheme perhaps—and who was, at the same time, an ardent admirer of the beautiful girl whose unhappiness and deadly peril was so great a mystery.
Chapter Eighteen.
Plight and Pursuit.
I left the Manor with my eyes dim and my heart beating fast with a sickening pain. I moved down the road without quite well knowing where I went.