The Victorian Villains Megapack (9 page)

“M’sieu Dorrington—M’sieu Dorrington!” the man exclaimed, excitedly, as the door was opened.

“’E’s gawn ’ome long ago,” the caretaker growled; “you might ’a known that. Oh, ’ere ’e is though—good evenin’, sir.”

“I am Mr. Dorrington,” the inquiry agent said politely. “Can I do anything for you?”

“Ah yes—it is important—at once! I am robbed!”

“Just step upstairs, then, and tell me about it.”

Dorrington had but begun to light the gas in his office when his visitor broke out, “I am robbed, M’sieu Dorrington, robbed by my cousin—
coquin!
Rrrobbed of everything! Rrrobbed I tell you!” He seemed astonished to find the other so little excited by the intelligence.

“Let me take your coat,” Dorrington said, calmly. “You’ve had a downer in the mud, I see. Why, what’s this?” he smelt the collar as he went toward a hat-peg, “Chloroform!”

“Ah yes—it is that rrrascal Jacques! I will tell you. This evening I go into the gateway next my house—Café des Bons Camarades—to enter by the side-door, and—paf!—a shawl is fling across my face from behind—it is pull tight—there is a knee in my back—I can catch nothing with my hand—it smell all hot in my throat—I choke and I fall over—there is no more. I wake up and I see my wife, and she take me into the house. I am all muddy and tired, but I feel—and I have lost my property—it is a diamond—and my cousin Jacques, he has done it!”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Sure? Oh yes—it is certain, I tell you—certain!”

“Then why not inform the police?”

The visitor was clearly taken aback by this question. He faltered, and looked searchingly in Dorrington’s face. “That is not always the convenient way,” he said. “I would rather that you do it. It is the diamond that I want—not to punish my cousin—thief that he is!”

Dorrington mended a quill with ostentatious care, saying encouragingly as he did so, “I can quite understand that you may not wish to prosecute your cousin—only to recover the diamond you speak of. Also I can quite understand that there may be reasons—family reasons perhaps, perhaps others—which may render it inadvisable to make even the existence of the jewel known more than absolutely necessary. For instance, there may be other claimants, Monsieur Léon Bouvier.”

The visitor started. “You know my name then?” he asked. “How is that?”

Dorrington smiled the smile of a sphinx. “M. Bouvier,” he said, “it is my trade to know everything—everything.” He put the pen down and gazed whimsically at the other. “My agents are everywhere. You talk of the secret agent of the Russian police—they are nothing. It is my trade to know all things. For instance “—Dorrington unlocked a drawer and produced a book (it was but an office diary), and, turning its pages, went on. “Let me see—B. It is my trade, for instance, to know about the Café des Bons Camarades, established by the late Madame Bouvier, now unhappily deceased. It is my trade to know of Madame Bouvier at Bonneuil, where the charcoal was burnt, and where Madame Bouvier was unfortunately left a widow at the time of the siege of Paris, because of some lamentable misunderstanding of her husband’s with a file of Prussian soldiers by an orchard wall. It is my trade, moreover, to know something of the sad death of that husband’s brother—in a pit—and of the later death of his widow. Oh yes. More” (turning a page attentively, as though following detailed notes), “it is my trade to know of a little quarrel between those brothers—it might even have been about a diamond, just such a diamond as you have come about tonight—and of jewels missed from the Tuileries in the great Revolution a hundred years ago.” He shut the book with a bang and returned it to its place. “And there are other things—too many to talk about,” he said, crossing his legs and smiling calmly at the Frenchman.

During this long pretence at reading, Bouvier had slid farther and farther forward on his chair, till he sat on the edge, his eyes staring wide, and his chin dropped. He had been pale when he arrived, but now he was of a leaden gray. He said not a word.

Dorrington laughed lightly. “Come,” he said, “I see you are astonished. Very likely. Very few of the people and families whose
dossiers
we have here” (he waved his hand generally about the room) “are aware of what we know. But we don’t make a song of it, I assure you, unless it is for the benefit of clients. A client’s affairs are sacred, of course, and our resources are at his disposal. Do I understand that you become a client?”

Bouvier sat a little farther back on his chair and closed his mouth. “A—a—yes,” he answered at length, with an effort, moistening his lips as he spoke. “That is why I come.”

“Ah, now we shall understand each other,” Dorrington replied genially, opening an ink-pot and clearing his blotting-pad. “We’re not connected with the police here, or anything of that sort, and except so far as we can help them we leave our client’s affairs alone. You wish to be a client, and you wish me to recover your lost diamond. Very well, that is business. The first thing is the usual fee in advance—twenty guineas. Will you write a cheque?”

Bouvier had recovered some of his self-possession, and he hesitated. “It is a large fee,” he said.

“Large? Nonsense! It is the sort of fee that might easily be swallowed up in half a day’s expenses. And besides—a rich diamond merchant like yourself!”

Bouvier looked up quickly. “Diamond merchant?” he said. “I do not understand. I have lost my diamond—there was but one.”

“And yet you go to Hatton Garden every day.”

“What!” cried Bouvier, letting his hand fall from the table, “you know that too?”

“Of course,” Dorrington laughed, easily; “it is my trade, I tell you. But write the cheque.”

Bouvier produced a crumpled and dirty chequebook and complied, with many pauses, looking up dazedly from time to time into Dorrington’s face.

“Now,” said Dorrington, “tell me where you kept your diamond, and all about it.”

“It was in an old little wooden box—so.” Bouvier, not yet quite master of himself, sketched an oblong of something less than three inches long by two broad. “The box was old and black—my grandfather may have made it, or his father. The lid fitted very tight, and the inside was packed with fine charcoal powder with the diamond resting in it. The diamond—oh, it was great; like that—so.” He made another sketch, roughly square, an inch and a quarter across. “But it looked even much greater still, so bright, so wonderful! It is easy to understand that my grandfather did not sell it—beside the danger. It is so beautiful a thing, and it is such great riches—all in one little box. Why should not a poor charcoal-burner be rich in secret, and look at his diamond, and get all the few things he wants by burning his charcoal? And there was the danger. But that is long ago. I am a man of beesness, and I desired to sell it and be rich. And that Jacques—he has stolen it!”

“Let us keep to the point. The diamond was in a box. Well, where was the box?”

“On the outside of the box there were notches—so, and so. Bound the box at each place there was a tight, strong, silk cord—that is two cords. The cords were round my neck, under my shirt, so. And the box was under my arm—just as a boy carries his satchel, but high up—in the armpit, where I could feel it at all times. Tonight, when I come to myself, my collar was broken at the stud—see—the cords were cut—and all was gone!”

“You say your cousin Jacques has done this. How do you know?”

“Ah! But who else? Who else could know? And he has always tried to steal it. At first, I let him wait at the Café des Bons Camarades. What does he do? He prys about my house, and opens drawers; and I catch him at last looking in a box, and I turn him out. And he calls me a thief!
Sacré!
He goes—I have no more of him; and so—he does this!”

“Very well. Write down his name and address on this piece of paper, and your own.” Bouvier did so. “And now tell me what you have been doing at Hatton Garden.”

“Well, it was a very great diamond—I could not go to the first man and show it to sell. I must make myself known.”

“It never struck you to get the stone cut in two, did it?”

“Eh? What?—
Nom de chien
! No!” He struck his knee with his hand. “Fool! Why did I not think of that? But still”—he grew more thoughtful—“I should have to show it to get it cut, and I did not know where to go. And the value would have been less.”

“Just so—but it’s the regular thing to do, I may tell you, in cases like this. But go on. About Hatton Garden, you know.”

“I thought that I must make myself known among the merchants of diamonds, and then, perhaps, I should learn the ways, and one day be able to sell. As it was, I knew nothing—nothing at all. I waited, and I saved money in the café. Then, when I could do it, I dressed well and went and bought some diamonds of a dealer—very little diamonds, a little trayful for twenty pounds, and I try to sell them again. But I have paid too much—I can only sell for fifteen pounds. Then I buy more, and sell them for what I give. Then I take an office in Hatton Garden—that is, I share a room with a dealer, and there is a partition between our desks. My wife attends the café, I go to Hatton Garden to buy and sell. It loses me money, but I must lose till I can sell the great diamond. I get to know the dealers more and more, and then tonight, as I go home—” he finished with an expressive shrug and a wave of the hand.

“Yes, yes, I think I see,” Dorrington said. “As to the diamond again. It doesn’t happen to be a
blue
diamond, does it?”

“No—pure white; perfect.”

Dorrington had asked because two especially famous diamonds disappeared from among the French Crown jewels at the time of the great Revolution. One blue, the greatest coloured diamond ever known, and the other the “Mirror of Portugal.” Bouvier’s reply made it plain that it was certainly not the first which he had just lost.

“Come,” Dorrington said, “I will call and inspect the scene of your disaster. I haven’t dined yet, and it must be well past nine o’clock now.”

They returned to Beck Street. There were gates at the dark entry by the side of the Café des Bons Camarades, but they were never shut, Bouvier explained. Dorrington had them shut now, however, and a lantern was produced. The paving was of rough cobble stones, deep in mud.

“Do many people come down here in the course of an evening?” Dorrington asked.

“Never anybody but myself.”

“Very well. Stand away at your side door.”

Bouvier and his wife stood huddled and staring on the threshold of the side door, while Dorrington, with the lantern, explored the muddy cobble stones. The pieces of a broken bottle lay in a little heap, and a cork lay a yard away from them. Dorrington smelt the cork, and then collected together the broken glass (there were but four or five pieces) from the little heap. Another piece of glass lay by itself a little way off, and this also Dorrington took up, scrutinising it narrowly. Then he traversed the whole passage carefully, stepping from bare stone to bare stone, and skimming the ground with the lantern. The mud lay confused and trackless in most places, though the place where Bouvier had been lying was indicated by an appearance of sweeping, caused, no doubt, by his wife dragging him to his feet. Only one other thing beside the glass and cork did Dorrington carry away as evidence, and that the Bouviers knew nothing of; for it was the remembrance of the mark of a sharp, small boot-heel in more than one patch of mud between the stones.

“Will you object, Madame Bouvier,” he asked, as he handed back the lantern, “to show me the shoes you wore when you found your husband lyi
ng out here?”

Madame Bouvier had no objection at all. They were what she was then wearing, and had worn all day. She lifted her foot and exhibited one. There was no need for a second glance. It was a loose easy cashmere boot, with spring sides and heels cut down flat for indoor comfort.

“And this was at what time?”

It was between seven and eight o’clock, both agreed, though they differed a little as to the exact time. Bouvier had recovered when his wife raised him, had entered the house with her, at once discovered his loss, and immediately, on his wife’s advice, set out to find Dorrington, whose name the woman had heard spoken of frequently among the visitors to the café in connection with the affair of the secret society already alluded to. He had felt certain that Dorrington would not be at his office, but trusted to be directed where to find him.

“Now,” Dorrington asked of Bouvier (the woman had been called away), “tell me some more about your cousin. Where does he live?”

“In Little Norham Street; the third house from this end on the right and the back room at the top. That is unless he has moved just lately.”

“Has he been ill recently?”

“Ill?” Bouvier considered. “Not that I can say—no. I have never heard of Jacques being ill.” It seemed to strike him as an incongruous and new idea. “Nothing has made him ill all his life—he is too good in constitution, I think.”

“Does he wear spectacles?”

“Spectacles?
Mais non
! Never! Why should he wear spectacles? His eyes are good as mine.”

“Very well. Now attend. Tomorrow you must not go to Hatton Garden—I will go for you. If you see your cousin Jacques you must say nothing, take no notice; let everything proceed as though nothing had happened; leave all to me. Give me your address at Hatton Garden.”

“But what is it you must do there?”

“That is my business. I do my business in my own way. Still I will give you a hint. Where is it that diamonds are sold? In Hatton Garden, as you so well know—as I expect your cousin knows if he has been watching you. Then where will your cousin go to sell it? Hatton Garden, of course. Never mind what I shall do there to intercept it. I am to be your new partner, you understand, bringing money into the business. You must be ill and stay at home till you hear from me. Go now and write me a letter of introduction to the man who shares the office with you. Or I will write it if you like, and you shall sign it. What sort of a man is he?”

“Very quiet—a tall man, perhaps English, but perhaps not.”

“Ever buy or sell diamonds with him?”

“Once only. It was the first time. That is how I learned of the half-office to let.”