It was not a long wait, for in a few minutes there arrived the new lodger. He was a burly man with a heavy black beard, clipped short, and the fact that he was somewhat taciturn and short of speech rather enhanced his value as a lodger than otherwise.
Wallis took farewell of the old man and his granddaughter, and accompanied by the man, whose name was given somewhat unpromisingly as Smith, he walked to the end of the street.
He had something to say, and that something was important.
“I have got you this place, Smithy,” he said, as they walked slowly towards Hoxton High Street, “because it is quiet and fairly safe. The people are respected, and nobody will bother you.”
“They are not likely to worry me in any way, are they?” said the man addressed as Smith.
“Not at present,” replied the other, “but I do not know exactly how things are going to develop. I am worried.”
“What are you worried about?”
George Wallis laughed a little helplessly.
“Why do you ask such stupid questions?” he said with good-natured irritation. “Don’t you realise what has happened? Somebody knows our game.”
“Well, why not drop it?” asked the other quietly.
“How can we drop it? My dear good chap, though in twelve months we have accumulated a store of movable property sufficiently valuable to enable us all to retire upon, there is not one of us who is willing at this moment to cut out—it would take us twelve months to get rid of the loot,” he said thoughtfully.
“I do not exactly know where it is,” said Smith with a little smile.
“Nobody knows that but me,” replied Wallis with a little frown, “that is the worrying part of it. I feel the whole responsibility upon me. Smithy, we are being really watched.”
The other smiled.
“That isn’t unusual,” he said. But Wallis was very serious.
“Whom do you suspect?” he asked.
The other did not answer for a moment.
“I do not suspect, I know,” he said. “A few months ago, when Calli and I were doing a job in Hatton Garden we were interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious gentleman, who watched me open the safe and disappeared immediately afterwards. At that time he did not seem to be particularly hostile or have any ulterior motive in view. Now, for some reason which is best known to himself, he is working against us. That is the man we have got to find.”
“But how?”
“Put an advertisement in the paper,” said the other sarcastically: “Will the gentleman who dogs Mr. Wallis kindly reveal his identity, and no further action will be taken.”
“But seriously!” said the other.
“We have got to discover who he is, there must be some way of trapping him; but the only thing to do, and I must do it for my own protection, is to get you all together and share out. We had better meet.”
Smith nodded.
“When?”
“Tonight,” said Wallis. “Meet me at the. …”
He mentioned the name of a restaurant near Regent Street.
It was, curiously enough, the very restaurant where Gilbert Standerton invariably dined alone.
X
The Necklace
Mrs. Cathcart was considerably surprised to receive an invitation to the dinner. She had that morning sent her daughter a cheque for three hundred pounds which she had received from her broker, but as their letters had crossed, one event had no connection with the other.
She did not immediately decide to accept the invitation, she was not sure as to the terms on which she desired to remain with her new son-in-law.
She was, however (whatever might be her faults), a good strategist, and there was nothing to be gained by declining the invitation, and there might be some advantage in accepting.
She was surprised to meet Mr. Warrell, surprised and a little embarrassed; but now that her daughter knew everything there was no reason in the world why she should feel uncomfortable.
She took him in charge, as was her wont, from the moment she met him in the little drawing-room at the St. John’s Wood house.
It was a pleasant dinner. Gilbert made a perfect host, he seemed to have revived within himself something of the old gay spirit. Warrell, remembering all that Mrs. Cathcart had told him, was on the qui vive to discover some evidence of dissension between husband and wife, the more anxious, perhaps, since he was before everything a professional man, to find justification for Mrs. Cathcart’s suggestion, that all was not going well with Gilbert.
Leslie Frankfort, a member of the party, had been questioned by his partner without the elder man eliciting any information which might help to dispel the doubt that was in Warrell’s mind.
Leslie Frankfort, that cheerful youth, was as much in the dark as his partner. It gave him some satisfaction to discover that at any rate there was no immediate prospect of ruin in his friend’s ménage.
The dinner was perfect, the food rare and chosen by an epicure, which indeed it was, as Gilbert had assisted his wife to prepare the menu.
The talk drifted idly, as talk does, at such a dinner party, around the topics which men and women were discussing at a thousand other dinner tables in England, and in the natural course of events it turned upon the startling series of burglaries that had been committed recently in London. That the talk should take this drift was more natural, perhaps, because Mrs. Cathcart had very boldly introduced the subject with reference to the burglary at Warrell’s.
“No, indeed,” said Mr. Warrell, shaking his head, “I regret to say we have no clue. The police have the matter in hand, but I’m afraid we shall never find the man, or men, who perpetrated the crime.”
“I don’t suppose they would be of much service to you if you found them,” said Gilbert quietly.
“I don’t know,” demurred the other. “We might possibly get the jewels back.”
Gilbert Standerton laughed, but stopped in the middle of it.
“Jewels?” he said.
“Don’t you remember, Gilbert?”
