“Sime is right,” Price decided. “I shall take four.”
Sime? Cheyne thought perplexedly that the man who had run the motor on the Enid had been introduced to him as Lewisham. Sime, was it? Then it occurred to him that probably each one of the four had met him under an assumed name, and he listened even more intently in the hope of finding this out.
“I wonder if that ass Cheyne put the cops on to us,” went on Sime to the company generally. “James talked to him like a father and he seemed to swallow it all down as sweet as milk. Lordy! But you should have heard old James spouting. He rattled off his patter like a good ’un. Fresh absurdities each time and all that. Didn’t you, James?”
“He didn’t give much trouble,” Price replied. “I shouldn’t have believed anyone would have given in as soft as he did. I pitched him a yarn about yours truly being heir to the barony of Hull that wouldn’t have deceived an oyster, and he sucked it in like a sponge. But it wasn’t that that worked. It was keeping him without water that did the trick. When I offered him another day to think it over he collapsed like a pricked bubble.”
“So would you if you had been in his shoes,” Susan declared. “I’d like to see you standing out for anything against your own comfort.”
“You wouldn’t have seen me get into his shoes,” Price retorted, fitting a dark slide into the camera. “Now, Sime, if you’re ready.”
Price pressed the bulb uncovering the lens and at the same time Sime burned a length of magnesium wire before the document on the door, while Cheyne writhed with impotent rage at the discovery that he had been duped in still another particular.
“We’ve done uncommonly well,” Parkes remarked when the photograph had been taken, “but we’re not by any means out of the wood yet. In fact, the real work is only beginning. We don’t even yet know the size of the problem we’re up against. We’ve got to find that out and then we’ve got to make a plan and put it through, and all the time we’ve got to lie low in case that infernal ass has reported us to the police.”
“We’ve got to get these photographs taken and then we’ve got to get our supper,” retorted Price. “For goodness sake let’s have one thing at a time, Blessington. If you’d lend a hand instead of standing there preaching, it would be more to the point.”
Here was another alias. Parkes’s real name was Blessington. Cheyne was beginning to wonder what Price and Susan were really called, when the next remark satisfied his curiosity.
Parkes—or Blessington—took Price’s remark easily.
“Now that’s where you make the mistake, Mr. James Dangle,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “Miss Dangle and I do the real work in this joint: don’t we, Miss Dangle? We supply the brains, you and Sime only rise to the muscles. Eh, Miss Dangle?”
But Miss Dangle was not in a mood for pleasantries.
“We shall want all the brains that you can supply and more,” she answered irritably, and then turning lazily to the others demanded if they weren’t ever going to be done messing with the darned camera.
At last Cheyne thought he had got the four fixed in his mind. The man on the rug—the man who had drugged him in the Plymouth hotel—was Blessington. The man who had introduced himself as Lamson and afterwards said his name was Price bore neither of these appellations: his name was Dangle. Susan was “Miss Dangle” and almost certainly sister to James. Lewisham, the motorman of the Enid, was Sime.
Dangle, Sime, and Blessington! Why, there was something sinister in the very names, and as Cheyne peeped guardedly in beneath the blind, he felt there was something even more sinister in their owners. Dangle, with his hard-bitten features and without his veneer of polish, looked a crafty scoundrel. There was a nasty gleam in his foxy eyes. He looked a man who would sell his best friend for a shilling. Perhaps Cheyne’s imagination had by this time run away with him, but Sime now struck him as a murderous-looking ruffian, and Blessington’s smug features seemed but to cloak an evil and cruel nature. He was smiling, but there was nothing mirthful about his smile. Rather was it the expression that a wolf might be supposed to wear when he sees a sheep helpless before his attack. Cheyne did not know if Susan was dangerous, but he had always suspected she could be vindictive and bad-tempered. A nice crew, he thought, and he shivered in spite of himself as he pictured his fate were some accident to lead to his discovery.
And what inventive genius they had shown! They had now told him three yarns, all convincing, well-thought-out statements, and all entirely false. There was first of all Blessington’s dissertation of his, Cheyne’s, literary efforts, told to get him off his guard so that a drug might be administered to him and his pockets be searched. Then there was the account of the position indicator for ships, detailed and plausible, a bait to lure him voluntarily aboard the Enid. Lastly there was the story of the Hull succession, including the interesting episode of the attempted rescue of the uncle St. John Price, undoubtedly related with the object of reducing Cheyne’s scruples in handing over the letter. These people were certainly past masters in the art of decorative lying, and once again he marveled at the trouble which had been taken in making each story watertight so as to assure its success. It was for no small reward that this had been done.
Cheyne was getting stiff with cold on the ladder. Though keenly interested in what he saw, he wished his enemies would make some move so that he might advance or, if necessary, retreat. But they appeared in no special hurry, proceeding
