First Night in London

The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. First Night in London

V. First Night in London

There is often a flaw in the best-laid plans. George Lomax had made one mistake—there was a weak spot in his preparations. The weak spot was Bill.

Bill Eversleigh was an extremely nice lad. He was a good cricketer and a scratch golfer, he had pleasant manners, and an amiable disposition, but his position in the Foreign Office had been gained, not by brains, but by good connections. For the work he had to do he was quite suitable. He was more or less George’s dog. He did no responsible or brainy work. His part was to be constantly at George’s elbow, to interview unimportant people whom George didn’t want to see, to run errands, and generally to make himself useful. All this Bill carried out faithfully enough. When George was absent, Bill stretched himself out in the biggest chair and read the sporting news, and in so doing he was merely carrying out a time-honoured tradition.

Being accustomed to send Bill on errands, George had dispatched him to the Union Castle offices to find out when the Granarth Castle was due in. Now, in common with most well-educated young Englishmen, Bill had a pleasant, but quite inaudible voice. Any elocution master would have found fault with his pronunciation of the word Granarth. It might have been anything. The Clerk took it to be Carnfrae. The Carnfrae Castle was due in on the following Thursday. He said so. Bill thanked him and went out. George Lomax accepted the information and laid his plans accordingly. He knew nothing about Union Castle liners, and took it for granted that James McGrath would duly arrive on Thursday.

Therefore, at the moment he was buttonholing Lord Caterham on the steps of the club on Wednesday morning, he would have been greatly surprised to learn that the Granarth Castle had docked at Southampton the preceding afternoon.

At two o’clock that afternoon Anthony Cade, travelling under the name of Jimmy McGrath, stepped out of the boat train at Waterloo, hailed a taxi, and after a moment’s hesitation ordered the driver to proceed to the Blitz Hotel.

“One might as well be comfortable,” said Anthony to himself, as he looked with some interest out of the taxi windows.

It was exactly fourteen years since he had been in London.

He arrived at the hotel, booked a room, and then went for a short stroll along the Embankment. It was rather pleasant to be back in London again. Everything was changed of course. There had been a little restaurant there—just past Blackfriars Bridge—where he had dined fairly often, in company with other earnest lads. He had been a Socialist then, and worn a flowing red tie. Young—very young.

He retraced his steps back to the Blitz. Just as he was crossing the road, a man jostled against him, nearly making him lose his balance. They both recovered themselves, and the man muttered an apology, his eyes scanning Anthony’s face narrowly. He was a short, thickset man of the working classes, with something foreign in his appearance.

Anthony went on into the hotel, wondering, as he did so, what had inspired that searching glance. Nothing in it probably. The deep tan of his face was somewhat unusual looking amongst these pallid Londoners and it had attracted the fellow’s attention. He went up to his room and, led by a sudden impulse, crossed to the looking-glass and stood studying his face in it. Of the few friends of the old days—just a chosen few—was it likely that any of them would recognize him now if they were to meet him face to face? He shook his head slowly.

When he had left London he had been just eighteen—a fair, slightly chubby boy, with a misleading seraphic expression. Small chance that the boy would be recognized in the lean, brown-faced man with the quizzical expression.

The telephone beside the bed rang, and Anthony crossed to the receiver.

“Hullo!”

The voice of the desk clerk answered him.

“Mr. James McGrath?”

“Speaking.”

“A gentleman has called to see you.”

Anthony was rather astonished.

“To see me?”

“Yes, sir, a foreign gentleman.”

“What’s his name?”

There was a slight pause, and then the clerk said:

“I will send up a page boy with his card.”

Anthony replaced the receiver and waited. In a few minutes there was a knock on the door and a small page appeared bearing a card upon a salver.

Anthony took it. The following was the name engraved upon it:

Baron Lolopretjzyl.

He now fully appreciated the desk clerk’s pause.

For a moment or two he stood studying the card, and then made up his mind.

“Show the gentleman up.”

“Very good, sir.”

In a few minutes the Baron Lolopretjzyl was ushered into the room, a big man with an immense fan-like black beard and a high, bald forehead.

He brought his heels together with a click, and bowed.

“Mr. McGrath,” he said.

Anthony imitated his movements as nearly as possible.

“Baron,” he said. Then, drawing forward a chair. “Pray sit down. I have not, I think, had the pleasure of meeting you before?”

“That is so,” agreed the Baron, seating himself. “It is my misfortune,” he added politely.

“And mine also,” responded Anthony, on the same note.

“Let us now to business come,” said the Baron. “I represent in London the Loyalist party of Herzoslovakia.”

“And represent it admirably, I am sure,” murmured Anthony.

The Baron bowed in acknowledgment of the compliment.

“You are too kind,” he said stiffly. “Mr. McGrath, I will not from you conceal anything. The moment has come for the Restoration of the Monarchy, in abeyance since the martyrdom of His Most Gracious Majesty King Nicolas IV of blessed memory.”

“Amen,” murmured Anthony. “I mean Hear, Hear.”

“On the throne will be placed His Highness Prince Michael who the support of the British Government has.”

“Splendid,” said Anthony. “It’s very kind of you to tell me all this.”

“Everything arranged is—when you come here to trouble make.”

The Baron fixed him with a stern eye.

“My dear Baron,” protested Anthony.

“Yes, yes, I know what I am talking about. You have with you the Memoirs of the late Count Stylptitch.”

He fixed Anthony with an accusing eye.

“And if I have? What have the Memoirs of Count Stylptitch to do with Prince Michael?”

“They will cause scandals.”

“Most memoirs do that,” said Anthony soothingly.

“Of many secrets he the knowledge had. Should he reveal but the quarter of them, Europe into war plunged may be.”

“Come, come,” said Anthony. “It can’t be as bad as all that.”

“An unfavourable opinion of the Obolovitch will abroad be spread. So democratic is the English spirit.”

“I can quite believe,” said Anthony, “that the Obolovitch may have been a trifle high-handed now and again. It runs in the blood. But people in England expect that sort of thing from the Balkans. I don’t know why they should, but they do.”

“You do not understand,” said the Baron. “You do not understand at all. And my lips sealed are.” He sighed.

“What exactly are you afraid of?” asked Anthony.

“Until I have read the Memoirs I do not know,” explained the Baron simply. “But there is sure to be something. These great diplomats are always indiscreet. The apple cart upset will be, as the saying goes.”

“Look here,” said Anthony kindly. “I’m sure you’re taking altogether too pessimistic a view of the thing. I know all about publishers—they sit on manuscripts and hatch ’em like eggs. It will be at least a year before the thing is published.”

“Either a very deceitful or a very simple young man you are. All is arranged for the Memoirs in a Sunday newspaper to come out immediately.”

“Oh!” Anthony was somewhat taken aback. “But you can always deny everything,” he said hopefully.

The Baron shook his head sadly.

“No, no, through the hat you talk. Let us to business come. One thousand pounds you are to have, is it not so? You see, I have the good information got.”

“I certainly congratulate the Intelligence Department of the Loyalists.”

“Then I to you offer fifteen hundred.”

Anthony stared at him in amazement, then shook his head ruefully.

“I’m afraid it can’t be done,” he said, with regret.

“Good. I to you offer two thousand.”

“You tempt me, Baron, you tempt me. But I still say it can’t be done.”

“Your own price name, then.”

“I’m afraid you don’t understand the position. I’m perfectly willing to believe that you are on the side of the angels, and that these Memoirs may damage your cause. Nevertheless, I’ve undertaken the job, and I’ve got to carry it through. See? I can’t allow myself to be bought off by the other side. That kind of thing isn’t done.”

The Baron listened very attentively. At the end of Anthony’s speech he nodded his head several times.

“I see. Your honour as an English gentleman it is?”

“Well, we don’t put it that way ourselves,” said Anthony. “But I dare say, allowing for a difference in vocabulary, that we both mean much the same thing.”

The Baron rose to his feet.

“For the English honour I much respect have,” he announced. “We must another way try. I wish you good morning.”

He drew his heels together, clicked, bowed and marched out of the room, holding himself stiffly erect.

“Now I wonder what he meant by that,” mused Anthony. “Was it a threat? Not that I’m in the least afraid of old Lollipop. Rather a good name for him, that, by the way. I shall call him Baron Lollipop.”

He took a turn or two up and down the room, undecided on his next course of action. The date stipulated upon for delivering the manuscript was a little over a week ahead. To-day was the 5th of October. Anthony had no intention of handing it over before the last moment. Truth to tell, he was by now feverishly anxious to read these Memoirs. He had meant to do so on the boat coming over, but had been laid low with a touch of fever, and not at all in the mood for deciphering crabbed and illegible handwriting, for none of the manuscript was typed. He was now more than ever determined to see what all the fuss was about.

There was the other job too.

On an impulse, he picked up the telephone book and looked up the name of Revel. There were six Revels in the book: Edward Henry Revel, surgeon, of Harley Street; James Revel & Co., saddlers; Lennox Revel of Abbotbury Mansions, Hampstead; Miss Mary Revel with an address in Ealing; Hon. Mrs. Timothy Revel of 487, Pont Street; and Mrs. Willis Revel of 42, Cadogan Square. Eliminating the saddlers and Miss Mary Revel, that gave him four names to investigate—and there was no reason to suppose that the lady lived in London at all! He shut up the book with a short shake of the head.

“For the moment I’ll leave it to chance,” he said. “Something usually turns up.”

The luck of the Anthony Cades of this world is perhaps in some measure due to their own belief in it. Anthony found what he was after not half an hour later, when he was turning over the pages of an illustrated paper. It was a representation of some tableau organized by the Duchess of Perth. Below the central figure, a woman in Eastern dress, was the inscription:

“The Hon. Mrs. Timothy Revel as Cleopatra. Before her marriage, Mrs. Revel was the Hon. Virginia Cawthron, a daughter of Lord Edgbaston.”

Anthony looked at the picture some time, slowly pursing up his lips, as though to whistle. Then he tore out the whole page, folded it up and put it in his pocket. He went upstairs again, unlocked his suit-case and took out the packet of letters. He took out the folded page from his pocket and slipped it under the string that held them together.

Then, at a sudden sound behind him, he wheeled round sharply. A man was standing in the doorway, the kind of man whom Anthony had fondly imagined existed only in the chorus of a Comic Opera. A sinister-looking figure, with a squat brutal head and lips drawn back in an evil grin.

“What the devil are you doing here?” asked Anthony. “And who let you come up?”

“I pass where I please,” said the stranger. His voice was guttural and foreign, though his English was idiomatic enough.

“Another Dago,” thought Anthony.

“Well, get out, do you hear?” he went on aloud.

The man’s eyes were fixed on the packet of letters which Anthony had caught up.

“I will get out when you have given me what I have come for.”

“And what’s that, may I ask?”

The man took a step nearer.

“The Memoirs of Count Stylptitch,” he hissed.

“It’s impossible to take you seriously,” said Anthony. “You’re so completely the stage villain. I like your get up very much. Who sent you here? Baron Lollipop?”

“Baron——?” The man jerked out a string of harsh-sounding consonants.

“So that’s how you pronounce it, is it? A cross between gargling and barking like a dog. I don’t think I could say it myself—my throat’s not made that way. I shall have to go on calling him Lollipop. So he sent you, did he?”

But he received a vehement negative. His visitor went so far as to spit upon the suggestion in a very realistic manner. Then he drew from his pocket a sheet of paper which he threw upon the table.

“Look,” he said. “Look and tremble, accursed Englishman.”

Anthony looked with some interest, not troubling to fulfil the latter part of the command. On the paper was traced the crude design of a human hand in red.

“It looks like a hand,” he remarked. “But, if you say so, I’m quite prepared to admit that it’s a cubist picture of Sunset at the North Pole.”

“It is the sign of the Comrades of the Red Hand. I am a Comrade of the Red Hand.”

“You don’t say so,” said Anthony, looking at him with much interest. “Are the others all like you? I don’t know what the Eugenic Society would have to say about it.”

The man snarled angrily.

“Dog,” he said. “Worse than dog. Paid slave of an effete monarchy. Give me the Memoirs, and you shall go unscathed. Such is the clemency of the Brotherhood.”

“It’s very kind of them, I’m sure,” said Anthony, “but I’m afraid that both they and you are labouring under a misapprehension. My instructions are to deliver the manuscript—not to your amiable Society, but to a certain firm of publishers.”

“Pah!” laughed the other. “Do you think you will ever be permitted to reach that office alive? Enough of this fool’s talk. Hand over the papers, or I shoot.”

He drew a revolver from his pocket and brandished it in the air.

But there he misjudged his Anthony Cade. He was not used to men who could act as quickly—or quicker than they could think. Anthony did not wait to be covered by the revolver. Almost as soon as the other got it out of his pocket, Anthony had sprung forward and knocked it out of his hand. The force of the blow sent the man swinging round, so that he presented his back to his assailant.

The chance was too good to be missed. With one mighty, well-directed kick, Anthony sent the man flying through the doorway into the corridor, where he collapsed in a heap.

Anthony stepped out after him, but the doughty Comrade of the Red Hand had had enough. He got nimbly to his feet and fled down the passage. Anthony did not pursue him, but went back into his own room.

“So much for the Comrades of the Red Hand,” he remarked. “Picturesque appearance, but easily routed by direct action. How the hell did that fellow get in, I wonder? There’s one thing that stands out pretty clearly—this isn’t going to be quite such a soft job as I thought. I’ve already fallen foul of both the Loyalist and the Revolutionary parties. Soon, I suppose, the Nationalists and the Independent Liberals will be sending up a delegation. One thing’s fixed. I start on that manuscript to-night.”

Looking at his watch, Anthony discovered that it was nearly nine o’clock, and he decided to dine where he was. He did not anticipate any more surprise visits, but he felt that it was up to him to be on his guard. He had no intention of allowing his suit-case to be rifled whilst he was downstairs in the Grill Room. He rang the bell and asked for the Menu, selected a couple of dishes and ordered a bottle of Bordeaux. The waiter took the order and withdrew.

Whilst he was waiting for the meal to arrive, he got out the package of manuscript and put it on the table with the letters.

There was a knock at the door, and the waiter entered with a small table and the accessories of the meal. Anthony had strolled over to the mantelpiece. Standing there with his back to the room, he was directly facing the mirror, and idly glancing in it he noticed a curious thing.

The waiter’s eyes were glued on the parcel of manuscript. Shooting little glances sideways at Anthony’s immovable back, he moved softly round the table. His hands were twitching, and he kept passing his tongue over his dry lips. Anthony observed him more closely. He was a tall man, supple like all waiters, with a clean-shaven, mobile face. An Italian, Anthony thought, not a Frenchman.

At the critical moment Anthony wheeled round abruptly. The waiter started slightly, but pretended to be doing something with the salt cellar.

“What’s your name?” asked Anthony abruptly.

“Giuseppe, Monsieur.”

“Italian, eh?”

“Yes, Monsieur.”

Anthony spoke to him in that language, and the man answered fluently enough. Finally Anthony dismissed him with a nod, but all the while he was eating the excellent meal which Giuseppe served to him, he was thinking rapidly.

Had he been mistaken? Was Giuseppe’s interest in the parcel just ordinary curiosity? It might be so, but remembering the feverish intensity of the man’s excitement, Anthony decided against that theory. All the same, he was puzzled.

“Dash it all,” said Anthony to himself, “every one can’t be after the blasted manuscript. Perhaps I’m fancying things.”

Dinner concluded and cleared away, he applied himself to the perusal of the Memoirs. Owing to the illegibility of the late Count’s handwriting, the business was a slow one. Anthony’s yawns succeeded one another with suspicious rapidity. At the end of the fourth chapter, he gave it up.

So far, he had found the Memoirs insufferably dull, with no hint of scandal of any kind.

He gathered up the letters and the wrapping of the manuscript which were lying in a heap together on the table and locked them up in the suit-case. Then he locked the door, and as an additional precaution put a chair against it. On the chair he placed the water-bottle from the bathroom.

Surveying these preparations with some pride, he undressed and got into bed. He had one more shot at the Count’s Memoirs, but felt his eyelids drooping, and stuffing the manuscript under his pillow, he switched out the light and fell asleep almost immediately.

It must have been some four hours later that he awoke with a start. What had awakened him he did not know—perhaps a sound, perhaps only the consciousness of danger which in men who have led an adventurous life is very fully developed.

For a moment he lay quite still, trying to focus his impressions. He could hear a very stealthy rustle, and then he became aware of a denser blackness somewhere between him and the window—on the floor by the suit-case.

With a sudden spring, Anthony jumped out of bed, switching the light on as he did so. A figure sprang up from where it had been kneeling by the suit-case.

It was the waiter, Giuseppe. In his right hand gleamed a long thin knife. He hurled himself straight upon Anthony, who was by now fully conscious of his own danger. He was unarmed and Giuseppe was evidently thoroughly at home with his own weapon.

Anthony sprang to one side, and Giuseppe missed him with the knife. The next minute the two men were rolling on the floor together, locked in a close embrace. The whole of Anthony’s faculties were centred on keeping a close grip of Giuseppe’s right arm so that he would be unable to use the knife. He bent it slowly back. At the same time he felt the Italian’s other hand clutching at his windpipe, stifling him, choking. And still, desperately, he bent the right arm back.

There was a sharp tinkle as the knife fell on the floor. At the same time, the Italian extricated himself with a swift twist from Anthony’s grasp. Anthony sprang up too, but made the mistake of moving towards the door to cut off the other’s retreat. He saw, too late, that the chair and the water-bottle were just as he had arranged them.

Giuseppe had entered by the window, and it was the window he made for now. In the instant’s respite given him by Anthony’s move toward the door, he had sprung out on the balcony, leaped over to the adjoining balcony and had disappeared through the adjoining window.

Anthony knew well enough that it was of no use to pursue him. His way of retreat was doubtless fully assured. Anthony would merely get himself into trouble.

He walked over to the bed, thrusting his hand beneath the pillow and drawing out the Memoirs. Lucky that they had been there and not in the suit-case. He crossed over to the suit-case and looked inside, meaning to take out the letters.

Then he swore softly under his breath.

The letters were gone.

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This book is part of the public domain. Agatha Christie (1998). The Secret of Chimneys. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/65238/pg65238-images.html

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