Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering
ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of
folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means
conspicuous—nor wished to be. There was nothing notable about him,
except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes
and the official gravity of his face. His clothes included a
slight, pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat
with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark by contrast, and
ended in a curt black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an
Elizabethan ruff. He was smoking a cigarette with the seriousness
of an idler. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that
the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat
covered a police card, or that the straw hat covered one of the
most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was Valentin himself,
the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator of
the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the
greatest arrest of the century.
Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had
tracked the great criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from
Brussels to the Hook of Holland; and it was conjectured that he
would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of the
Eucharistic Congress, then taking place in London. Probably he
would travel as some minor clerk or secretary connected with it;
but, of course, Valentin could not be certain; nobody could be
certain about Flambeau.
It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly
ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they
said after the death of Roland, there was a great quiet upon the
earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst) Flambeau
was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser. Almost
every morning the daily paper announced that he had escaped the
consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He
was a Gascon of gigantic stature and bodily daring; and the wildest
tales were told of his outbursts of athletic humour; how he turned
the juge d'instruction upside down and stood him on his head, "to
clear his mind"; how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman
under each arm. It is due to him to say that his fantastic physical
strength was generally employed in such bloodless though
undignified scenes; his real crimes were chiefly those of ingenious
and wholesale robbery. But each of his thefts was almost a new sin,
and would make a story by itself. It was he who ran the great
Tyrolean Dairy Company in London, with no dairies, no cows, no
carts, no milk, but with some thousand subscribers. These he served
by the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside
people's doors to the doors of his own customers. It was he who had
kept up an unaccountable and close correspondence with a young lady
whose whole letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick
of photographing his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides
of a microscope. A sweeping simplicity, however, marked many of his
experiments. It is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a
street in the dead of night merely to divert one traveller into a
trap. It is quite certain that he invented a portable pillar-box,
which he put up at corners in quiet suburbs on the chance of
strangers dropping postal orders into it. Lastly, he was known to
be a startling acrobat; despite his huge figure, he could leap like
a grasshopper and melt into the tree-tops like a monkey. Hence the
great Valentin, when he set out to find Flambeau, was perfectly
aware that his adventures would not end when he had found him.
But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin's ideas
were still in process of settlement.
There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of
disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height. If
Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall
grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duchess, he might have arrested
them on the spot. But all along his train there was nobody that
could be a disguised Flambeau, any more than a cat could be a
disguised giraffe. About the people on the boat he had already
satisfied himself; and the people picked up at Harwich or on the
journey limited themselves with certainty to six. There was a short
railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short
market gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short
widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very short Roman
Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village. When it came
to the last case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The
little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he
had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as
empty as the North Sea; he had several brown paper parcels, which
he was quite incapable of collecting. The Eucharistic Congress had
doubtless sucked out of their local stagnation many such creatures,
blind and helpless, like moles disinterred. Valentin was a sceptic
in the severe style of France, and could have no love for priests.
But he could have pity for them, and this one might have provoked
pity in anybody. He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly
fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end
of his return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to
everybody in the carriage that he had to be careful, because he had
something made of real silver "with blue stones" in one of his
brown-paper parcels. His quaint blending of Essex flatness with
saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the
priest arrived (somehow) at Tottenham with all his parcels, and
came back for his umbrella. When he did the last, Valentin even had
the good nature to warn him not to take care of the silver by
telling everybody about it. But to whomever he talked, Valentin
kept his eye open for someone else; he looked out steadily for
anyone, rich or poor, male or female, who was well up to six feet;
for Flambeau was four inches above it.
He alighted at Liverpool Street, however, quite conscientiously
secure that he had not missed the criminal so far. He then went to
Scotland Yard to regularise his position and arrange for help in
case of need; he then lit another cigarette and went for a long
stroll in the streets of London. As he was walking in the streets
and squares beyond Victoria, he paused suddenly and stood. It was a
quaint, quiet square, very typical of London, full of an accidental
stillness. The tall, flat houses round looked at once prosperous
and uninhabited; the square of shrubbery in the centre looked as
deserted as a green Pacific islet. One of the four sides was much
higher than the rest, like a dais; and the line of this side was
broken by one of London's admirable accidents—a restaurant that
looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an unreasonably
attractive object, with dwarf plants in pots and long, striped
blinds of lemon yellow and white. It stood specially high above the
street, and in the usual patchwork way of London, a flight of steps
from the street ran up to meet the front door almost as a
fire-escape might run up to a first-floor window. Valentin stood
and smoked in front of the yellow-white blinds and considered them
long.
The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A
few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one
human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful
journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of
interrogation. I have seen both these things myself within the last
few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man
named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named
Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. In short, there
is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning
on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed
in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.
Aristide Valentin was unfathomably French; and the French
intelligence is intelligence specially and solely. He was not "a
thinking machine"; for that is a brainless phrase of modern
fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it
cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the
same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked like conjuring,
had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French
thought. The French electrify the world not by starting any
paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They carry a
truism so far—as in the French Revolution. But exactly because
Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason.
Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without
petrol; only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning
without strong, undisputed first principles. Here he had no strong
first principles. Flambeau had been missed at Harwich; and if he
was in London at all, he might be anything from a tall tramp on
Wimbledon Common to a tall toast-master at the Hotel Metropole. In
such a naked state of nescience, Valentin had a view and a method
of his own.
In such cases he reckoned on the unforeseen. In such cases, when
he could not follow the train of the reasonable, he coldly and
carefully followed the train of the unreasonable. Instead of going
to the right places—banks, police stations, rendezvous—he
systematically went to the wrong places; knocked at every empty
house, turned down every cul de sac, went up every lane blocked
with rubbish, went round every crescent that led him uselessly out
of the way. He defended this crazy course quite logically. He said
that if one had a clue this was the worst way; but if one had no
clue at all it was the best, because there was just the chance that
any oddity that caught the eye of the pursuer might be the same
that had caught the eye of the pursued. Somewhere a man must begin,
and it had better be just where another man might stop. Something
about that flight of steps up to the shop, something about the
quietude and quaintness of the restaurant, roused all the
detective's rare romantic fancy and made him resolve to strike at
random. He went up the steps, and sitting down at a table by the
window, asked for a cup of black coffee.
It was half-way through the morning, and he had not breakfasted;
the slight litter of other breakfasts stood about on the table to
remind him of his hunger; and adding a poached egg to his order, he
proceeded musingly to shake some white sugar into his coffee,
thinking all the time about Flambeau. He remembered how Flambeau
had escaped, once by a pair of nail scissors, and once by a house
on fire; once by having to pay for an unstamped letter, and once by
getting people to look through a telescope at a comet that might
destroy the world. He thought his detective brain as good as the
criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage.
"The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the
critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to
his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in
it.
He looked at the vessel from which the silvery powder had come;
it was certainly a sugar-basin; as unmistakably meant for sugar as
a champagne-bottle for champagne. He wondered why they should keep
salt in it. He looked to see if there were any more orthodox
vessels. Yes; there were two salt-cellars quite full. Perhaps there
was some speciality in the condiment in the salt-cellars. He tasted
it; it was sugar. Then he looked round at the restaurant with a
refreshed air of interest, to see if there were any other traces of
that singular artistic taste which puts the sugar in the
salt-cellars and the salt in the sugar-basin. Except for an odd
splash of some dark fluid on one of the white-papered walls, the
whole place appeared neat, cheerful and ordinary. He rang the bell
for the waiter.
When that official hurried up, fuzzy-haired and somewhat
blear-eyed at that early hour, the detective (who was not without
an appreciation of the simpler forms of humour) asked him to taste
the sugar and see if it was up to the high reputation of the hotel.
The result was that the waiter yawned suddenly and woke up.
"Do you play this delicate joke on your customers every
morning?" inquired Valentin. "Does changing the salt and sugar
never pall on you as a jest?"
The waiter, when this irony grew clearer, stammeringly assured
him that the establishment had certainly no such intention; it must
be a most curious mistake. He picked up the sugar-basin and looked
at it; he picked up the salt-cellar and looked at that, his face
growing more and more bewildered. At last he abruptly excused
himself, and hurrying away, returned in a few seconds with the
proprietor. The proprietor also examined the sugar-basin and then
the salt-cellar; the proprietor also looked bewildered.
Suddenly the waiter seemed to grow inarticulate with a rush of
words.
"I zink," he stuttered eagerly, "I zink it is those two
clergy-men."
"What two clergymen?"
"The two clergymen," said the waiter, "that threw soup at the
wall."
"Threw soup at the wall?" repeated Valentin, feeling sure this
must be some singular Italian metaphor.
"Yes, yes," said the attendant excitedly, and pointed at the
dark splash on the white paper; "threw it over there on the
wall."
Valentin looked his query at the proprietor, who came to his
rescue with fuller reports.
"Yes, sir," he said, "it's quite true, though I don't suppose it
has anything to do with the sugar and salt. Two clergymen came in
and drank soup here very early, as soon as the shutters were taken
down. They were both very quiet, respectable people; one of them
paid the bill and went out; the other, who seemed a slower coach
altogether, was some minutes longer getting his things together.
But he went at last. Only, the instant before he stepped into the
street he deliberately picked up his cup, which he had only half
emptied, and threw the soup slap on the wall. I was in the back
room myself, and so was the waiter; so I could only rush out in
time to find the wall splashed and the shop empty. It don't do any
particular damage, but it was confounded cheek; and I tried to
catch the men in the street. They were too far off though; I only
noticed they went round the next corner into Carstairs Street."
The detective was on his feet, hat settled and stick in hand. He
had already decided that in the universal darkness of his mind he
could only follow the first odd finger that pointed; and this
finger was odd enough. Paying his bill and clashing the glass doors
behind him, he was soon swinging round into the other street.
It was fortunate that even in such fevered moments his eye was
cool and quick. Something in a shop-front went by him like a mere
flash; yet he went back to look at it. The shop was a popular
greengrocer and fruiterer's, an array of goods set out in the open
air and plainly ticketed with their names and prices. In the two
most prominent compartments were two heaps, of oranges and of nuts
respectively. On the heap of nuts lay a scrap of cardboard, on
which was written in bold, blue chalk, "Best tangerine oranges, two
a penny." On the oranges was the equally clear and exact
description, "Finest Brazil nuts, 4d. a lb." M. Valentin looked at
these two placards and fancied he had met this highly subtle form
of humour before, and that somewhat recently. He drew the attention
of the red-faced fruiterer, who was looking rather sullenly up and
down the street, to this inaccuracy in his advertisements. The
fruiterer said nothing, but sharply put each card into its proper
place. The detective, leaning elegantly on his walking-cane,
continued to scrutinise the shop. At last he said, "Pray excuse my
apparent irrelevance, my good sir, but I should like to ask you a
question in experimental psychology and the association of
ideas."
The red-faced shopman regarded him with an eye of menace; but he
continued gaily, swinging his cane, "Why," he pursued, "why are two
tickets wrongly placed in a greengrocer's shop like a shovel hat
that has come to London for a holiday? Or, in case I do not make
myself clear, what is the mystical association which connects the
idea of nuts marked as oranges with the idea of two clergymen, one
tall and the other short?"
The eyes of the tradesman stood out of his head like a snail's;
he really seemed for an instant likely to fling himself upon the
stranger. At last he stammered angrily: "I don't know what you 'ave
to do with it, but if you're one of their friends, you can tell 'em
from me that I'll knock their silly 'eads off, parsons or no
parsons, if they upset my apples again."
"Indeed?" asked the detective, with great sympathy. "Did they
upset your apples?"
"One of 'em did," said the heated shopman; "rolled 'em all over
the street. I'd 'ave caught the fool but for havin' to pick 'em
up."
"Which way did these parsons go?" asked Valentin.
"Up that second road on the left-hand side, and then across the
square," said the other promptly.
"Thanks," replied Valentin, and vanished like a fairy. On the
other side of the second square he found a policeman, and said:
"This is urgent, constable; have you seen two clergymen in shovel
hats?"
The policeman began to chuckle heavily. "I 'ave, sir; and if you
arst me, one of 'em was drunk. He stood in the middle of the road
that bewildered that—"
"Which way did they go?" snapped Valentin.
"They took one of them yellow buses over there," answered the
man; "them that go to Hampstead."
Valentin produced his official card and said very rapidly: "Call
up two of your men to come with me in pursuit," and crossed the
road with such contagious energy that the ponderous policeman was
moved to almost agile obedience. In a minute and a half the French
detective was joined on the opposite pavement by an inspector and a
man in plain clothes.
"Well, sir," began the former, with smiling importance, "and
what may—?"
Valentin pointed suddenly with his cane. "I'll tell you on the
top of that omnibus," he said, and was darting and dodging across
the tangle of the traffic. When all three sank panting on the top
seats of the yellow vehicle, the inspector said: "We could go four
times as quick in a taxi."
"Quite true," replied their leader placidly, "if we only had an
idea of where we were going."
"Well, where are you going?" asked the other, staring.
Valentin smoked frowningly for a few seconds; then, removing his
cigarette, he said: "If you know what a man's doing, get in front
of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing, keep behind him.
Stray when he strays; stop when he stops; travel as slowly as he.
Then you may see what he saw and may act as he acted. All we can do
is to keep our eyes skinned for a queer thing."
"What sort of queer thing do you mean?" asked the inspector.
"Any sort of queer thing," answered Valentin, and relapsed into
obstinate silence.
The yellow omnibus crawled up the northern roads for what seemed
like hours on end; the great detective would not explain further,
and perhaps his assistants felt a silent and growing doubt of his
errand. Perhaps, also, they felt a silent and growing desire for
lunch, for the hours crept long past the normal luncheon hour, and
the long roads of the North London suburbs seemed to shoot out into
length after length like an infernal telescope. It was one of those
journeys on which a man perpetually feels that now at last he must
have come to the end of the universe, and then finds he has only
come to the beginning of Tufnell Park. London died away in draggled
taverns and dreary scrubs, and then was unaccountably born again in
blazing high streets and blatant hotels. It was like passing
through thirteen separate vulgar cities all just touching each
other. But though the winter twilight was already threatening the
road ahead of them, the Parisian detective still sat silent and
watchful, eyeing the frontage of the streets that slid by on either
side. By the time they had left Camden Town behind, the policemen
were nearly asleep; at least, they gave something like a jump as
Valentin leapt erect, struck a hand on each man's shoulder, and
shouted to the driver to stop.
They tumbled down the steps into the road without realising why
they had been dislodged; when they looked round for enlightenment
they found Valentin triumphantly pointing his finger towards a
window on the left side of the road. It was a large window, forming
part of the long facade of a gilt and palatial public-house; it was
the part reserved for respectable dining, and labelled
"Restaurant." This window, like all the rest along the frontage of
the hotel, was of frosted and figured glass; but in the middle of
it was a big, black smash, like a star in the ice.
"Our cue at last," cried Valentin, waving his stick; "the place
with the broken window."
"What window? What cue?" asked his principal assistant. "Why,
what proof is there that this has anything to do with them?"
Valentin almost broke his bamboo stick with rage.
"Proof!" he cried. "Good God! the man is looking for proof! Why,
of course, the chances are twenty to one that it has nothing to do
with them. But what else can we do? Don't you see we must either
follow one wild possibility or else go home to bed?" He banged his
way into the restaurant, followed by his companions, and they were
soon seated at a late luncheon at a little table, and looked at the
star of smashed glass from the inside. Not that it was very
informative to them even then.
"Got your window broken, I see," said Valentin to the waiter as
he paid the bill.
"Yes, sir," answered the attendant, bending busily over the
change, to which Valentin silently added an enormous tip. The
waiter straightened himself with mild but unmistakable
animation.
"Ah, yes, sir," he said. "Very odd thing, that, sir."
"Indeed?" Tell us about it," said the detective with careless
curiosity.
"Well, two gents in black came in," said the waiter; "two of
those foreign parsons that are running about. They had a cheap and
quiet little lunch, and one of them paid for it and went out. The
other was just going out to join him when I looked at my change
again and found he'd paid me more than three times too much.
'Here,' I says to the chap who was nearly out of the door, 'you've
paid too much.' 'Oh,' he says, very cool, 'have we?' 'Yes,' I says,
and picks up the bill to show him. Well, that was a knock-out."
"What do you mean?" asked his interlocutor.
"Well, I'd have sworn on seven Bibles that I'd put 4s. on that
bill. But now I saw I'd put 14s., as plain as paint."
"Well?" cried Valentin, moving slowly, but with burning eyes,
"and then?"
"The parson at the door he says all serene, 'Sorry to confuse
your accounts, but it'll pay for the window.' 'What window?' I
says. 'The one I'm going to break,' he says, and smashed that
blessed pane with his umbrella."
All three inquirers made an exclamation; and the inspector said
under his breath, "Are we after escaped lunatics?" The waiter went
on with some relish for the ridiculous story:
"I was so knocked silly for a second, I couldn't do anything.
The man marched out of the place and joined his friend just round
the corner. Then they went so quick up Bullock Street that I
couldn't catch them, though I ran round the bars to do it."
"Bullock Street," said the detective, and shot up that
thoroughfare as quickly as the strange couple he pursued.
Their journey now took them through bare brick ways like
tunnels; streets with few lights and even with few windows; streets
that seemed built out of the blank backs of everything and
everywhere. Dusk was deepening, and it was not easy even for the
London policemen to guess in what exact direction they were
treading. The inspector, however, was pretty certain that they
would eventually strike some part of Hampstead Heath. Abruptly one
bulging gas-lit window broke the blue twilight like a bull's-eye
lantern; and Valentin stopped an instant before a little garish
sweetstuff shop. After an instant's hesitation he went in; he stood
amid the gaudy colours of the confectionery with entire gravity and
bought thirteen chocolate cigars with a certain care. He was
clearly preparing an opening; but he did not need one.
An angular, elderly young woman in the shop had regarded his
elegant appearance with a merely automatic inquiry; but when she
saw the door behind him blocked with the blue uniform of the
inspector, her eyes seemed to wake up.
"Oh," she said, "if you've come about that parcel, I've sent it
off already."
"Parcel?" repeated Valentin; and it was his turn to look
inquiring.
"I mean the parcel the gentleman left—the clergyman
gentleman."
"For goodness' sake," said Valentin, leaning forward with his
first real confession of eagerness, "for Heaven's sake tell us what
happened exactly."