There was a note of anxiety, of deep feeling in Hanaud’s voice which troubled everyone in that room. He was setting no trap now to parade his cleverness. He looked from face to face, eager for a convincing interpretation other than the only one he discovered for himself.
“Can you, Monsieur le Commissaire?”
“No.”
“Come, Moreau! You!”
“No, Monsieur Hanaud.”
“And you, Mr. Ricardo, I hardly ask, since it was you who first of all of us detected the significance of this manufactured disorder.”
He turned sombrely away from the bed and then swooped upon a writing table which stood in front of the window, but a little way back from it. A leather blotting book lay closed upon it. Hanaud opened it and at once half a sheet of the blotting paper fluttered down to the floor. He picked it up. Its inner edge was jagged. Hanaud compared it with the other sheets.
“Half of this has been torn away,” he said, “but we shall not find it.”
There was a wastepaper basket beside the table, but it was empty. There was a drawer in the table. It held no torn sheet of blotting paper, but on the other hand it did hold a jumble of letters opened and pushed back into their envelopes. Hanaud sat down in the chair in front of the table and with his face to the window and his back to the room set himself quickly to read them.
“Aha! She has friends, this young lady,” he said more to himself than to any of those behind him. And after another moment or two, “Who is a certain Bryce Carter?”
Mr. Ricardo started as he heard the name, and without so much as turning his head Hanaud exclaimed:
“So you know him, my friend.”
“No. I know a little of him,” Mr. Ricardo returned. “He was at one time engaged to Diana Tasborough,” and Hanaud swung round in his chair.
“What is this you tell me?” he said slowly with a letter open in his hand.
Mr. Ricardo remembered very clearly the information which Joyce Whipple had given to him about this young man, in London, but he remembered still more clearly the confusion with which she had given it.
“Bryce Carter is a young man who was in the Foreign Office, but he left it to go to the City and make money, since he did not wish to be the poor husband of a rich wife. But a few months ago he crashed.”
Ricardo remembered the graphic word and reproduced it.
“Crashed?” Hanaud repeated. “Crashed? That is an idiom,” and he was utterly surprised that here was an idiom with which he was unacquainted.
“I mean that Diana Tasborough broke off her engagement.”
“Oho!”
Hanaud turned back to the drawer. He searched amongst the litter of envelopes and found another of the same handwriting and then another; and he read them all through. He looked over his shoulder at Ricardo with a grin.
“I make you a prophecy. That young man will make money in the City. He wastes no time, the scamp,” and with a little mimicry of burnt fingers he dropped the letter he was holding and took it up again gingerly. “They are live coals, these letters of Bryce Carter. Oh, oh, they boil”—he put his fingers ridiculously into his mouth and blew upon them—and suddenly all his playacting ceased. Some quite new thought had smitten him, and he sat, his body arrested, a man changed into stone.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Yes,” and now very soberly he continued his examination of the drawer.
For a little while he found nothing to interest him, and then he leaned back in his chair staring at a sheet of paper.
“It is not easy to read, this signature. Do you know a name Brever?”
Ricardo shook his head.
“There is a name Brewer.”
“Yes? Then that is it. Brever. Henry Brever, and he has a pharmacological laboratory at Leeds.”
“Oh!”
Mr. Ricardo jumped.
“You know him?” asked Hanaud.
“Again, I know of him. Sir Henry Brewer. He is a renowned physician devoted to research.”
“A curious friend for a young lady of fashion,” said Hanaud.
Mr. Ricardo as a citizen of the world was in a position to put his friend right in matters of the social order.
“We don’t live in our categories and departments as much as you do in France,” Ricardo explained with a trifle of condescension. “No, we have the habit of a wider life. Our actresses dine in high company and eminent physicians run around with the girls.”
Hanaud bowed his head meekly.
“It must be very pleasant for the eminent physicians,” he said. Mr. Ricardo, curious as to the character of the letter, drew nearer to the table. But before he could get so much as a glimpse of it, Hanaud folded it, replaced it in its envelope, and put the envelope in his pocket. It was to the credit of science that he didn’t have to blow upon his fingers to cool them, afterwards. He rose up from the table and as he closed the drawer he said:
“I keep this one letter, and I beg of you that no one shall mention it. We forget the name of Brever! So!” He closed his eyes for a moment and opened them again. “It is done. And there is no Leeds. So!” He repeated his performance with his eyelids and to Mr. Ricardo who was staring at him with a certain disfavour. “Ah! I am a comical, eh? Yes, but I do not always live in my category and department, either. In that I am like—the one I have forgotten. Let us go!”
He took a final glance about the room. The dressing table stood against the same wall as the wardrobe opposite to the bed. The window and the writing table were between. A cluster of light globes was fixed in the centre of the ceiling. There was a standard lamp by the bed, two upon the dressing
