“My dear man, don’t I know it?” said Mr. Campion peevishly, indicating the state of his shoulders. “Even better than you do, I should think,” he said dryly.
“Now look here,” said Abbershaw, whose animosity could not but be mollified by this extraordinary naivete, “you know something about this business, Campion—that is your name, I suppose?”
“Well—er—no,” said the irrepressible young man. “But,” he added, dropping his voice a tone, “my own is rather aristocratic, and I never use it in business. Campion will do quite well.”
Abbershaw smiled in spite of himself.
“Very well, then, Mr. Campion,” he said, “as I remarked before, you know something about this business, and you’re going to tell us here and now. But my dear lad, consider,” he went on as the other hesitated, “we’re all in the same boat. You, I presume, are as anxious to get away as anyone. And whereas I am intensely interested in bringing Dawlish and his confederates to justice, there is no other delinquency that I am concerned with. I am not a policeman.”
Mr. Campion beamed. “Is that so?” he inquired.
“Certainly it is,” said Abbershaw. “I am a consultant only as far as the Yard is concerned.”
Mr. Campion looked vastly relieved.
“That’s rather cheered me up,” he said. “I liked you. When I saw you pottering with your car I thought, ‘There’s a little joss who might be quite good fun if he once got off the lead,’ and when you mentioned Scotland Yard just now all that good impression just faded away.”
He paused, and Abbershaw cut in quickly.
“This doesn’t get us very far,” he said quietly, “does it? You know the explanation of this extraordinary outrage. Let’s have it.”
Mr. Campion regarded him frankly.
“You may not believe me,” he said, “but I don’t know quite what they’re driving at even now. But there’s something pretty serious afoot, I can tell you that.”
It was obvious that he was telling the truth, but Abbershaw was not satisfied.
“Well, anyway, you know one thing,” he said. “Why are you here? You just admitted yourself it was on business.”
“Oh, it was,” agreed Campion, “most decidedly. But not my business. Let me explain.”
“I wish to God you would,” said Prenderby, who was utterly out of his depth.
“Well then, chicks, Uncle Albert speaking.” Campion leant forward, his expression more serious than his words. “Perhaps I ought to give you some little idea of my profession. I live, like all intelligent people, by my wits, and although I have often done things that mother wouldn’t like, I have remembered her parting words and have never been vulgar. To cut it short, in fact, I do almost anything within reason—for a reasonable sum, but nothing sordid or vulgar—quite definitely nothing vulgar.”
He glanced at Abbershaw, who nodded, and then went on.
“In this particular case,” he said, “I was approached in London last week by a man who offered me a very decent sum to get myself included as unobtrusively as possible into the house-party this weekend and then to seize the first opportunity I could get to speaking to my host, the Colonel, alone. I was to make sure that we were alone. Then I was to go up to him, murmur a password in his ear, and receive from him a package which I was to bring to London immediately—unopened. I was warned, of course,” he continued, looking up at Abbershaw. “They told me I was up against men who would have no compunction in killing me to prevent me getting away with the package, but I had no idea who the birds were going to be or I shouldn’t have come for any money. In fact when I saw them at dinner on the first night I nearly cut the whole job right out and bunked back to town.”
“Why? Who are they?” said Abbershaw.
Mr. Campion looked surprised.
“Good Lord, don’t you know?” he demanded. “And little George a Scotland Yard expert, too. Jesse Gideon calls himself a solicitor. As a matter of fact he’s rather a clever fence. And the Hun is no one else but Eberhard von Faber himself.”
Prenderby still looked blank, but Abbershaw started.
“The ‘Trois Pays’ man?” he said quickly.
“And ‘Der Schwarzbund.’ And ‘The Chicago Junker,’ and now our own little ‘0072’ at the Yard,” said Mr. Campion, and there was no facetiousness in his tone.
“This means nothing to me,” said Prenderby.
Mr. Campion opened his mouth to speak, but Abbershaw was before him.
“It means, Michael,” he said, with an inflection in his voice which betrayed the gravity in which he viewed the situation, “that this man controls organized gangs of crooks all over Europe and America, and he has the reputation of being utterly ruthless and diabolically clever. It means we are up against the most dangerous and notorious criminal of modern times.”
XII
“Furthermore …” Said Mr. Campion
After the little silence that followed Abbershaw’s announcement, Prenderby spoke.
“What’s in this mysterious package they’ve lost?” he said.
Abbershaw looked at Mr. Campion inquiringly.
“Perhaps you could tell us that,” he said pointedly.
Albert Campion’s vacuous face became even more blank than usual.
“I don’t know much about it,” he said. “My client didn’t go into all that, naturally. But I can tell you this much, it’s something sewn in the lining of a red leather wallet. It felt to me like paper—might have been a couple of fivers, of course—but I shouldn’t think so.”
“How do you know?” said Prenderby quietly.
Mr. Campion turned to him cheerfully.
“Oh, I collected the doings all right,” he said, “and I should have got away with them if little George here hadn’t been a car fiend.”
Abbershaw frowned.
“I think you’d better explain,” he said.
“Explain?” said Mr. Campion. “My dear chicks, there was nothing in it. As soon as I saw old Uncle Ben and his friends at the table my idea was to get the package and then beat it, manners or no manners, so when the story of the
