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« on: May 09, 2023, 08:40:36 am » |
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THEY had a rush to catch the train, and, of course, they had no reservations, so it was necessary to resign themselves to spending the night in an ordinary railway carriage till they arrived in Paris at three in the morning.
“I do beg your pardon,” said Denton, springing up. “Please. Let me remove our truck.” He opened the window, and with a simple gesture hurled the records far into the night.
“I’ll go and fetch my violin, if I may,” said the stranger. “I cannot allow it to travel in the van.” When he returned he introduced himself. “My name is Ogilvie, and I am a third-rate fiddler.”
“I doubt the adjective,” said Denton, looking at the long sensitive fingers. “This is Fräulein Elisabeth Weber, and I’m Charles Denton.”
“Have you come far to-day?”
“Only from Basle.”
“I have had two days in Strasbourg,” said Ogilvie, “but before that I was in Rome. My nephew gave a recital there on Monday, and another in Strasbourg last night. In fact, we have made quite a tour, but he is staying a few days with friends while tiresome business calls me home.”
“I am completely uncultured,” said Denton, “but somehow the name of Ogilvie suggests music to me.”
“You are thinking of my nephew, Dixon Ogilvie, who is a pianist. He is---well, rather famous.”
“Dixon Ogilvie.”
“Perhaps you have heard him somewhere. I have here,” Ogilvie rummaged in his music-case, “a programme with his photograph upon it, here it is.”
“Has he played in Berlin, sir?” asked Liese in her careful English. Miranda calls Prospero “sir,” and Shakespeare must know.
“Not yet, but perhaps he will some day. He has a foolish prejudice against going again to Germany, he was a prisoner of war there, my dear young lady.”
“But,” said Liese, “if he is a great musician, he will be very welcome in Germany. We---they---are very musical.”
“He knows that quite well. In fact, he has been invited to go, but he says he is afraid that if he hears German spoken all round him again, he will get that locked-up feeling. It must be terrible, to be in prison. You have heard him play somewhere, possibly,” to Denton, who was looking at the photograph.
“No,” said Denton, “but I have seen him play.”
“Seen, but not heard---like a good child?” But Denton did not smile.
“He was playing five-finger exercises on a packing-case when I saw him. Someone who was with me said that was Dixon Ogilvie, a musician.”
“And this was----”
“A very long time ago,” said Denton, looking away out of the window into the dark, and Ogilvie was too tactful to pursue the subject.
“Are you going to stay in Paris, sir?” asked Denton, returning to the present day.
“I fear not, this time. I am going straight through. Now I think we should all try to sleep a little, it is getting late and those must be the lights of Nancy.”
---
Hambledon went to Weber’s, the tobacconist’s, to buy cigarettes and found him in a state of mental disturbance. He knocked things over, produced the wrong brand, muttered to himself, and forgot the price.
“I’m afraid something is worrying you to-day,” said the Deputy Chief of Police sympathetically.
“It is kind of you to notice it,” said Weber. “I have had distressing news, Herr Lehmann, that is all.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Can I do anything?”
“No one can do anything. I have lost my daughter.”
“Great heavens!” said the startled Hambledon. “That charming child dead! What can have happened?”
“She was to go and spend a little while with an aunt in Switzerland, and in the disturbed state of affairs at the moment I thought it better she should travel with an escort rather than alone. She went, therefore, with a Swiss friend of mine, Herr Dedler, whom I could have sworn to be a man completely trustworthy. But what happened?”
“Herr Dedler is, I think you said, a Swiss? They will not be Germans.”
The tobacconist dropped his eyes instantly, but Hambledon had seen in them the gleam which he expected, also the slow colour rose to Weber’s temples.
“I---had not thought of that,” he muttered.
“They will come here to see you, of course. But they will be brought up in another land, go to distant schools, and play in fields that are very far away.”
Weber bit his lip and did not answer.
“I did not mean to distress you, Herr Weber. I will come again some day soon,” said Hambledon, and walked out of the shop.
“Distress me!” said Weber to himself. “That German said the one thing that would really comfort me, if he only knew it. I have a good excuse, now, in going to see my married daughter, and who cares if an obscure tobacconist stays in Switzerland or goes on to England? Then I myself will walk again in those fields which are very far away.”
“Poor old buffer,” said Hambledon to himself. “I bet he bolts off to England via Switzerland before many moons have waned. Why am I so poetic? Oh, yes, honeymoon of course; who’d have thought it of Denton? That thump on the head must have been much too hard, it’s softened his brain. He’s a lucky man, though, she’s a nice little thing---that is, if you like nice domestic little things---- Fancy my telling him to go and elope, and he actually did it, what a frightful responsibility.”
He reached home without incident, since the Purge had ceased its more active manifestations some days earlier, and went in search of Reck with a bottle of sparkling Moselle in his hand. He found the old man in his bedroom, sitting slumped in an armchair staring at nothing.
“Cheer up, old thing,” said Hambledon breezily, “and have a drink. I’ve got a toast for you to honour.”
“Eh? What? I’ll have a drink, certainly, though I don’t like that gassy stuff. What is there to drink to; has the shooting stopped?”
“Days ago, you old dormouse,” said Hambledon, extracting the cork. “Why don’t you go out and see for yourself instead of frowsting in here this lovely weather? Do you good.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” growled Reck. “I hate these hearty cold-bath ideas of yours about health. The window’s open, what more d’you want?”
“Here you are,” said Hambledon, handing him a glass. “It should be Veuve Clicquot, of course, but that’s unpatriotic so we drink Moselle. Hoch!”
“Hoch. But we aren’t a happy pair, at least I’m not if you are.”
“No, I’m still completely single. We are drinking to two people you’ve never met. Yes, of course you did. Denton, remember Denton? He was in Köln with Bill after I left.”
“Was that his name? He called himself Wolff then, I remember, Ludwig Wolff. An impertinent youth in those days. Is he married? Serve him right, I hope she beats him.”
“You’re a cheerful sort of devil to celebrate with, I must say. Never mind, here’s luck to them. Now, here’s a message I want coded and sent out to-night . . .”
---
Denton came to the Foreign Office to report to his Chief, and the old Colonel from Sussex, who could not let this riddle alone, was there also.
“I found out who it is,” he said. “As you were, that’s wrong. I didn’t find him out, he found me. It is Hambledon.”
“Hambledon,” said the Foreign Office man. “Good Lord, it can’t be, he’s dead.”
“Hambledon,” said the Colonel. “Thank God.”
Denton told his story in full detail up to the point where Hambledon left him for the last time.
“So we don’t know now who he is in Germany,” said Denton’s Chief, “and instructions will be issued forthwith that no attempt shall be made to find out.”
“From what I remember of the man he is probably impersonating Adolf Hitler,” said the Colonel, “having thrown the original, wrapped in wire netting with a couple of flagstones as anchor, down the well of somebody he doesn’t like.”
“He is certainly a star,” said Denton. “If I’d organized a man-sized revolution in a foreign capital city and it had ‘gone wrong a little’ as he put it, I should bolt at once. Not he. He opens the door to callers, with a gun in each of his pockets, and waits till the storm subsides. All the same, I wouldn’t like to be the man who shot Bill Saunders, if anyone did.”
“Were there many people---er---I think liquidated is the fashionable phrase?” asked the Colonel.
“I don’t know, sir. I was too busy skulking in a cellar to inquire.”
“By the way, you have not told us how you got out.”
“Oh, quite easily. Hambledon provided facilities and I came home via Switzerland. I had a week in bed at Basle as my head came back at me, and then pottered home.”
“Facilities,” repeated the Colonel, and smiled.
“Anything more to report, Denton?”
“No, sir. Except that I’ve committed holy matrimony.”
If he expected surprise he was mistaken, for the Colonel merely smiled again and the Foreign Office man uncovered a short memorandum.
“I have here,” he said, “congratulations for you, which have been awaiting you here since 4.15 a.m.”
Denton took the paper. The message ran: “T-L-T Denton Foreign Office a.a.a. Congratulations fast work a.a.a. told you to elope didn’t I a.a.a. present follows a.a.a. sincerest good wishes.”
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