Jim very reluctantly did. He had longed to see Hanaud dealing with Waberski in the most outrageous of his moods, pouncing and tearing and trampling with the gibes of a schoolboy and the improprieties of the gutter. Hanaud indeed had promised him as much. But he found him now all for restraint and sobriety and more concerned apparently with the authorship of the anonymous letters than with the righting of Betty Harlowe. Jim felt that he had been defrauded.
“But I am to meet this man,” he said. “That must not be forgotten.”
“And it shall not be,” Hanaud assured him. He led him over to the door in the inner wall close to the observation window and opened it.
“See! If you will please to wait in here,” and as the disappointment deepened on Jim’s face, he added, “Oh, I do not ask you to shut the door. No. Bring up a chair to it—so! And keep the door ajar so! Then you will see and hear and yet not be seen. You are content? Not very. You would prefer to be on the stage the whole time like an actor. Yes, we all do. But, at all events, you do not throw up your part,” and with a friendly grin he turned back to the table.
A shuffling step which merged into the next step with a curiously slovenly sound rose from the courtyard.
“It was time we made our little arrangements,” said Hanaud in an undertone. “For here comes our hero from the Steppes.”
Jim popped his head through the doorway.
“Monsieur Hanaud!” he whispered excitedly. “Monsieur Hanaud! It cannot be wise to leave those windows open on the courtyard. For if we can hear a footstep so loudly in this room, anything said in this room will be easily overheard in the court.”
“But how true that is!” Hanaud replied in the same voice and struck his forehead with his fist in anger at his folly. “But what are we to do? The day is so hot. This room will be an oven. The ladies and Waberski will all faint. Besides, I have an officer in plain clothes already stationed in the court to see that it is kept empty. Yes, we will risk it.”
Jim drew back.
“That man doesn’t welcome advice from anyone,” he said indignantly, but he said it only to himself; and almost before he had finished, the bell rang. A few seconds afterwards Gaston entered.
“Monsieur Boris,” he said.
“Yes,” said Hanaud with a nod. “And will you tell the ladies that we are ready?”
Boris Waberski, a long, round-shouldered man with bent knees and clumsy feet, dressed in black and holding a soft black felt hat in his hand, shambled quickly into the room and stopped dead at the sight of Hanaud. Hanaud bowed and Waberski returned the bow; and then the two men stood looking at one another—Hanaud all geniality and smiles, Waberski a rather grotesque figure of uneasiness like one of those many grim caricatures carved by the imagination of the Middle Ages on the columns of the churches of Dijon. He blinked in perplexity at the detective and with his long, tobacco-stained fingers tortured his grey moustache.
“Will you be seated?” said Hanaud politely. “I think that the ladies will not keep us waiting.”
He pointed towards a chair in front of the writing-table but on his left hand and opposite to the door.
“I don’t understand,” said Waberski doubtfully. “I received a message. I understood that the Examining Magistrate had sent for me.”
“I am his agent,” said Hanaud. “I am—” and he stopped. “Yes?”
Boris Waberski stared.
“I said nothing.”
“I beg your pardon. I am—Hanaud.”
He shot the name out quickly, but he was answered by no start, nor by any sign of recognition.
“Hanaud?” Waberski shook his head. “That no doubt should be sufficient to enlighten me,” he said with a smile, “but it is better to be frank—it doesn’t.”
“Hanaud of the Sûrété of Paris.”
And upon Waberski’s face there came slowly a look of utter consternation.
“Oh!” he said, and again “Oh!” with a lamentable look towards the door as if he was in two minds whether to make a bolt of it. Hanaud pointed again to the chair, and Waberski murmured, “Yes—to be sure,” and made a little run to it and sank down.
Jim Frobisher, watching from his secret place, was certain of one thing. Boris Waberski had not written the anonymous letter to Betty nor had he contributed the information about Hanaud to the writer. He might well have been thought to have been acting ignorance of Hanaud’s name, up to the moment when Hanaud explained who Hanaud was. But no longer. His consternation then was too genuine.
“You will understand, of course, that an accusation so serious as the one you have brought against Mademoiselle Harlowe demands the closest inquiry,” Hanaud continued without any trace of irony, “and the Examining Magistrate in charge of the case honoured us in Paris with a request for help.”
“Yes, it is very difficult,” replied Boris Waberski, twisting about as if he was a martyr on red-hot plates.
But the difficulty was Waberski’s, as Jim, with that distressed man in full view, was now able to appreciate. Waberski had rushed to the Prefecture when no answer came from Messrs. Frobisher & Haslitt to his letter of threats, and had brought his charge in a spirit of disappointment and rancour, with a hope no doubt that some offer of cash would be made to him and that he could withdraw it. Now he found the trained detective service of France upon his heels,
