The gunner's voice almost concealed what Hoare was sure was a degree of pride. If so, it was well deserved.
'An' wot 'ud you be wantin', this time of night?' said the shadow in a rough voice. 'Move along, you.'
'You're guarding the Ambler premises?' Hoare whispered.
'An' wot 'ud you care, cully?'
Hoare threw back his boat cloak to display his uniform and the solitary epaulet that decorated his left shoulder.
'Commander Bartholomew Hoare, my man. Open the door, if you please.'
'An' if I don't please, cully?'
'Then you will answer to Mr. Lestrade. Or to Sir Hugh Abercrombie, if you prefer.'
Hoare did not know which name impressed the shadow the more. It made no difference, for he unlocked the door with a grind and, now revealed in the dim light of a lamp just within as a leathery man in quasi-uniform, turned obsequious.
'Never mind, Kinchin' Ned Weatherwax,' Thoday said in his most patronizing voice. 'I won't peach on you-not tonight.'
'Jesus, Mr. Thoday,' said Weatherwax. 'Which I thought you'd gone to sea.'
'Which I done, Weatherwax,' Thoday said in the same vernacular. 'Now, give us a glim up to Mr. Ambler's doss-down, there's a nifty cove.'
Weatherwax, now embarrassingly eager to please, lit them up the stairs to the first-floor apartment. Hoare had been expecting the place to be noisome, but stairway and upstairs passageway were noticeably clean in appearance and odor. Stopping at a heavy door with two keyholes, the guard painstakingly inserted keys into both locks, and swung the door open. He lit the candles in several sconces before turning, doffing his cap, and standing bareheaded and upside down, expectant.
'That'll be all, Ned,' Thoday said.
'Wot, no vail for me work?' Weatherwax whined.
'Yer job, Ned. No vails. Back to yer post, and close the door behind ye.'
The guard's heavy steps clumped back down the stairs.
The room, one of several en suite, was clean, and its occupant had spent freely on its furnishings. Tonight, it was in great disarray. Every drawer in the sideboard had been pulled out and its contents dumped helter-skelter across the waxed and carpeted floor. A heavy chair stood upside down in the middle of the mess, its Russia leather upholstery ripped apart and the stuffing lying about like the remains of a sheep shearing. Several of the framed paintings on the walls had been pulled down, while others hung askew. To Hoare's mind, the searcher- Lestrade in all likelihood-had applied the proverbial fine-tooth comb to his task of ransacking.
Titus Thoday, however, seemed less impressed. He cast a casual eye over the hurrah's-nest in the middle of the room and, lighting a candle at one of the sconces, walked into the bedroom that lay beyond. Hoare followed him.
The bedroom could have been that of a prosperous professional. But the four-poster bed's comfortable quilts, curtains, and blankets had been pulled down and discarded in the corners of the room, the bedside convenience overturned and the chamber pot lying forlorn and empty beside its owner's bed. The armoire and cupboards were likewise turned out. Someone had humped his way under the bed-not, Hoare supposed, in search of the statutory monsters. Thoday shrugged, left the bedroom as it was, and proceeded to the small kitchen via the parlor.
The kitchen looked like a china shop after the bull had left. Someone-Sir Hugh's superlative searcher Lestrade, presumably, if not his predecessor-had shattered every breakable object in the room. Slivers of glass had embedded themselves in the woodwork. In spots, the perpetrator had stamped the shards of Mr. Ambler's chinaware into the flooring; on the wide boards his footprints stood out sharply as if the man had walked through a field of gritty snow.
'Somebody found he could no longer suppress his rage,' Thoday said musingly. 'I believe he failed to find the papers he had come to find.
'No food,' he added. Indeed, the larder was empty.
'He dined out, I suppose,' Hoare observed sagely.
'Odd, don't you think, sir?' Thoday said. 'Not in keeping with the man's description.'
'Not at all,' said Hoare, without any notion of what his man was referring to.
Thoday had kept Ambler's likeness. Now he withdrew it and looked at it again, searchingly, in the candlelight.
'Would you repeat for me the description Sir Hugh gave you of the man's habits and personality?' he asked. Hoare obliged.
'Yes,' Thoday said. 'I thought I…' He returned to the drawing room, where he began sorting through the heap of Ambler's belongings.
'Yes,' he said again. His lean face was impassive, but his voice oozed triumph. He held a figurine in his hand. A well-made bronze, after the Italian quattrocento style, it depicted a falcon, its hood opened to leave the eyes clear, glaring at the intruders over its prey, a lifelike hare. It would have stood a good eighteen inches high-life size, more or less, Hoare guessed. He had seen a similar figurine before, somewhere in the Med, in ninety-one or thereabouts-in Malta, if memory served him correctly.
'Hmm,' Thoday said. He inverted the figure. With a fleam withdrawn from a sheath in the skirt of his sober coat, he pried the base from the bronze and peered into the deep cavity it disclosed. With some effort, he extracted a tightly rolled cylinder, which he placed on the kitchen table and unrolled with care. It crinkled as he did so.
Thoday's discovery comprised four closely written pages of calligraphy on fine linen, headed by an engraved coat of arms unfamiliar to Hoare and ending with several impressive signatures and two seals. The language was nothing Hoare could read; looking at Thoday, he knew that the gunner's mate, too, was baffled. Even more triumphant, nonetheless.
'The missing papers, I believe, sir,' he said, handing them to Hoare. His face, normally pallid, was slightly flushed, as if with pride. 'I regret to admit I cannot read the language in which they are written, but from the coat of arms, I would judge it to be Swedish.'
'I believe you are right,' Hoare whispered. 'Perhaps it's as well that neither of us knows Swedish. It will be a relief to the government to know that we, at least, are not privy to this particular secret, whatever it may be.'
'It is irksome,' Thoday declared, 'to have to admit one's ignorance of such a simple thing as the Swedish language.'
'Well done, Thoday, just the same,' Hoare said. 'Now it only remains to find Mr. Octavius Ambler.' He began to blow out the candles.
'That is of lesser importance, I have been given to understand,' said Thoday. 'May I suggest, sir, that you instruct me to put to use my familiarity with the London underworld to see what I can do in that direction, while you return the papers to their proper place?'
'An excellent idea, Thoday. Make it so,' Hoare whispered as they descended the stairs. 'Again, well done. But I have an admission to make. I am a thief.'
'Sir?' As Hoare had hoped he would, Thoday sounded puzzled.
'I don't think Mr. Ambler, or his heirs, if he has any, will be in any position to object to my having abstracted a little memento of our mission here.'
He handed his companion the bronzen image of the hawk. He was glad to be shut of it-it was quite heavy and very cumbersome.
Chapter VI
'Fire, Sir! Fire in our cellars!'
Roused from a happy dream in which, at last, he and his tribe were receiving their due, the heavy man grunted. Then, as the message sank into his torporous brain, he roared. Without more than shoving his tender flat feet into a pair of old slippers, he took the candle from beside his bed, rushed to the door, and unlocked it. The acrid smell of smoke affronted his nostrils.
'This way, sir! This way! I have the men forming a bucket brigade from the kitchen. The house is out of
