waiting to deliver up its secret. The insurance lawyer’s acidulated smile was now fattened out to a mellow tolerance. He was no longer afraid of any of Magnum’s theories. The goods manager, while still outwardly neutral, had transferred his sympathies to the side of the Empire Company.
Although it was summer, Magnum wore a pair of thick gloves. In his side-pocket a packet bulged out noticeably.
“I want every inch of the compartment swept out,” he said to the railway official. “Will you do it yourself, so as to avoid any suspicion that might arise if I were to do so?”
Tolerantly, the goods manager called for a carriage-cleaner’s broom, and proceeded to the task, sweeping around the cornices, behind the cushions, and underneath the seats, and gathering the sweepings into a small pile, while the other three watched intently from outside.
“Stop!” called Magnum suddenly, his eyes alight with unsuppressed triumph. From the sweepings he picked up a large insect, dead, and displayed it emphatically in his gloved hand in front of the insurance lawyer.
“A tsetse fly!” he stated.
“Well; and what if it is?”
“The carrier of the sleeping sickness. Deadly. One sting from it, and a man would stand a poor chance.”
“I don’t follow your argument,” objected the lawyer, with chilly impassiveness.
“That’s what drove Jonasson to his death. That one, and perhaps a dozen others. The rest probably flew out of the open door in the Sevenoaks tunnel. This one was killed by him.”
“Still, I don’t follow you. How could your dozen tsetse flies enter a closed compartment?”
“Get inside, and I’ll demonstrate!” snapped Magnum.
The lawyer, with a gesture of disbelief, entered the compartment, and the door was closed on him. Magnum immediately proceeded to the smoking compartment alongside, lit himself a cigar, and then produced from his pocket the box which was causing the bulge. It contained a dozen live wasps, angry at their long imprisonment. Magnum, standing on a seat, took out one of the buzzing insects with his heavily gloved fingers, and placed it in the tube of the alarm-chain passing from compartment to compartment. A few puffs from his cigar drove the insect to find escape through the further end of the tube. The other wasps quickly followed.
What then took place in the insurance lawyer’s compartment would have been highly comic had it not been in demonstration of a tragedy.
Fighting with the furious insects, ruffled, dishevelled, and wiped clear of cynical smiles, the lawyer made a hurried and undignified escape to the outside.
“And that,” clinched Magnum, “was how Jonasson was sent to his death.”
The murderer was never captured, and so the inner history of the tragic feud never came to light. But it became abundantly clear that the dead man had been fearing an attack by the tsetse fly; it was for that reason that he screened his bedroom window and carried in his pocket the drug which might counteract the terrible effects of the sting. No doubt the unknown murderer had threatened him with that particular form of revenge. Jonasson had insured his life heavily, either in the superstitious hope that it might avert death, or in order to leave his niece well provided for, or for both reasons.
The fact of importance which Magnum had demonstrated was the
Magnum, who did not believe in hiding his light under a bushel, sent to Stacey’s wedding-present table a neatly framed sheet of writing-paper with the wording: “To Mr and Mrs Stacey, forty thousand pounds, from Magnum.”
The Red Ring by William Le Queux
The Usborne affair, though very remarkable and presenting a number of curious features, was never made public, for reasons which will quickly become apparent.
It occurred in this way.
Just before eight o’clock one misty morning last autumn, Captain Richard Usborne, of the Royal Engineers, and myself were strolling together up and down the platform at Liverpool Street Station, awaiting the arrival of the Hook of Holland boat-train. We had our eyes well about us, for a man was coming to London in secret, and we, members of the Secret Service, were there to meet him, to examine his credentials, and to pass him on to the proper quarter to be questioned, and to receive payment-substantial payment – for his confidential information.
I had arranged the visit of the stranger through one of our secret agents who lived in Berlin, but as I had never before met the man about to arrive, we had settled that I should hold a pale green envelope half concealed in my handkerchief raised to my nose, and that he should do the same.
“By Jove, Jerningham,” Dick Usborne was saying, “this will be a splendid
I had kept my eyes well about me and was satisfied that no other secret agent was present.
A moment later the train drew into the station, and amid the crowd I quickly distinguished a short, stout, middle-aged man of essentially Teutonic appearance, with a handkerchief to his face, and in it an envelope exactly similar to my own.
Our greeting was hasty. Swiftly we put him into the taxi we had in readiness, and as we drove along he produced certain credentials, including a letter of introduction from my friend in Berlin.
Herr Gunther – which was the name by which we knew him-appeared extremely nervous lest his presence in London should be known. True, he was to receive for his information and for certain documents which he carried in his breast-pocket two thousand pounds of Secret Service money; but he seemed well aware of the ruin which would befall him if his Argus-eyed Government became aware of his association with us.
We had both witnessed such misgivings on the part of informants before. Therefore we repeated our assurances in German – for the stranger did not speak English – and at St Clement Dane’s Church, in the Strand, I stopped the taxi and alighted, for Dick Usborne was to conduct our friend to the house of our chief, General Kennedy, in Curzon Street, it not being considered judicious for Gunther to be taken to the War Office.
The German was to return by the Hook of Holland route at nine o’clock that same night, therefore he had brought no baggage. Secret visits of this character are always made swiftly. The British public are in blissful ignorance of how many foreigners come to our shores and tell us what we most desire to know – for a substantial consideration.
The Secret Service never advertises itself. Yet it never sleeps, night or day. While pessimists declare that our authorities know nothing of what is progressing in other countries, a gallant little band of men – and women too-are ever watchful and ever travelling across the face of Europe, gathering information which is conveyed to London in secret and carefully docketed in a certain room of a certain Government Department that must, of necessity, be nameless.
We, its agents, often live through exciting times, crises of which the public never dream.
