Pretty Sinister

Contents

Tue House or Intusion ~. .

Tur Great Passace

Tue Packet or CIGARETTES Tue ConripentTiaL TaxIMAN .

Chapter I The House Of Illusion

Mr. Donald Sterling was aggrieved. The road was bad. The car was worse. And worst of all was the weather.

But it was no use losing one’s temper. In the good old days before the war in Russia, when things had gone wrong, there had always been some one who could be made to suffer for it. But he was in England now, and the only way in which it ever seemed possible to relieve one’s feelings in England was to swear.

He swore carefully and with a neat, clipped accent; in English, of course, for now he was an Englishman. He must not forget that—a British subject of King George, and a very useful thing to be, as he had found on more than one occasion since his naturalization six years ago in 1922. But it was difficult. He could talk like an Englishman, ride and shoot better than most. But blood was thicker than water, and he would never really be one of them.

Not that he regretted his decision. What else could he have done? There was little use in being Count Dmitri Soubiroff, of the Russian Imperial Guard, when there was no guard and no emperor, and no Russia, as he conceived it, left. So he had pulled strings and become Mr. Donald Sterling, an Englishman.

The aged Morris bumped and bucketed over the long road, The country was getting wilder every minute and the light less. Had he perhaps lost his way? There was no remedy, if he had. He was alone in a land without a habitation; and the world must have looked like this when Noah felt it was time to be closing the ark.

He was tired and that was scarcely to be wondered at. From Bergen to Hull in half a gale was no joke for so devoted a landsman. His brain was still reeling like interminable gray seas. And then, on the top of it, had come this tiresome motor drive, quite unexpected and very disagreeable. He had meant to take the train in an ordinary civilized manner, but at Hull a telegram, from Doctor Shorthouse of course, had been handed to him as he staggered across the gangway, still queasy and shaken. It had named a garage and had told him to pick up the car and bring it over the moors to Sham Castle. So, after a hasty meal and a couple of stiff brandies, without too much soda, he had got the car and started. He had felt rebellious, but thought it wiser to obey. It had not, in fact occurred to him to do otherwise; the doctor was usually obeyed. Even Jenkins had discovered that.

Dmitri’s lips twisted at the thought of Jenkins. Where on earth had the doctor picked him up? A little London cockney, with a bad record, and not even a very stout heart. Well, that was the doctor’s affair, he supposed. At the moment it was his job to push the car along for all it was worth, and reach his destination before nightfall.

He might miss the place altogether in the dark, for he had nothing to go upon except the doctor’s description. Heaven send that the place was really habitable and that the doctor had got hold of some decent servants and laid in some tolerable food and wine. But comfort was probably the last thing Shorthouse was ever likely to worry about. That man was scarcely human in some ways. Anyhow, he would be seeing them all again pretty soon, Shorthouse and Jenkins and Goldenberg, who must have arrived there with Irma Brezhoff at least two days ago.

Irma Brezhoff—that started a new train of © thought. Very handsome she had looked in her boy’s clothes—not much life or spirit in her for the moment, of course, but the doctor would see to that. The doctor had doubtless got to work already, and she would soon be well again. It had gone against the hair of his disposition to leave her with Goldenberg at Geneva, but he could scarcely have avoided that.

The rain was still streaming down. It had been hot all day, and in the late afternoon the storm had burst in great thunder over the moors. At one moment so deadly had it been that Dmitri had been forced to stop altogether and run the car into a little spinney of twisted fir trees, naked and broken by their struggle with the Pole-begotten winds of the

North. Then the thunder and lashing rain had given place to a steady vertical downpour, and he had pushed on again.

He was now on a high stretch of country with a great dale lying to the right. The heather was still dark. The moors, as he saw them through the rain, looked like couchant beasts with paws folded beneath them in the valley. It was a desolate land where nothing grew. He had not seen a soul for the last ten miles—except for a gamekeeper caught by the storm and crouching behind a grouse butt. His mind went back instinctively to the great plains, where the house of his father had stood, and the winding Volga —the endless wheat and the patient peasants, stupid as their oxen. The land, it was true, was frozen in the winter and often they had been snowbound for weeks together, But in the great castle it had been warm enough, and there had been plenty of servants and drink, and those Polish dancers that he and his brother had got from Warsaw. They had cost a mint of money, especially the dark one with the little mole above her right breast. But they had been worth it, well worth it. . . . Ah, the good old days.

It was getting darker and the rain was abating. Time it did. The side curtains were badly torn and the whole of his right elbow and sleeve were soaked.

But there at last was the house, the first he had seen since he had left Kirbymoorside some seven miles or so behind him.

Dmitri strained his eyes through the blurred wind, screen and at the same moment a watery gleam of sunshine was spilled from the edge of an angry cloud. Yes, that was the house all right, and now he had barely half a mile to go. Clever of him to find it so easily, for he had known only its general position and its name.

So that was Sham Castle. The man who built it must have been mad, he thought, as he jammed on the accelerator and hustled the car down the last three or four hundred yards of open road.

Seen from a distance it looked like a Victorian illustration of the Morte d’Arthur, or the Seven Champions of Christendom. It had one large and several small turrets, rising from a castellated roof, and there were outbuildings which bore a faint resemblance to the outer bailey, or barbican of a medieval fortress. When you were near it, however, the resemblance ceased, or rather took on a new form. The entrance was by way of a ridiculous portico, with small crenellated knobs upon it—you could not properly call them machicolations. The whole thing was only a brick thick. A short drive led from the portico to a Gothic doorway, meant to be imposing, but looking only silly, with lancet windows on either side and a modern drainpipe running down the wall, gurgling at the moment like a drinker trying to satisfy an unquenchable thirst.

Dmitri swung the car to the left under the portico and pulled it up with a jerk before the Gothic door. He climbed stiffly from the seat, dragging his suit case after him. Then he stood for a moment, looking round,

There was a narrow open window in the wall above his head, and just as he was about to pull the bell his eye was caught by a flutter of white. Glancing up, he saw a head thrust out, and a pair of glittering eyes surveyed him. They belonged to an old woman with gray hair and a mouth set in a grim line. On her head was a soiled cap which had once been white. Her mouth tightened further as. she stared at him, and her expression was menacing.

“One of the servants,” thought Dmitri. “I hope it isn’t the cook.”

The door in front of him creaked and swung open, and Dmitri sighed with relief as he saw the tall, thin form of Doctor Shorthouse.

The doctor made an incongruous figure, standing in front of that ridiculous portico, miles from anywhere, with the unfriendly moor all about him. He was dressed as for a London consultation—in a short black coat with a butterfly collar and black tie with a pin in it containing a single rose diamond, striped trousers and patent leather boots.

Dmitri, however, did not smile. One did not smile at the doctor. He might be incongruous but he was anything but absurd. Your attention was at once diverted from the formal clothes to the lean face, with its tall forehead, jutting well over the dark eyes, and the flexible, thin mouth, with its suggestion of intelligence and power.

“At last,” said the doctor abruptly. “I was beginning to wonder when we should see you again.”

He spoke with a curious, cold indifference which was the more unpleasant as Dmitri felt that he had intended to say not when but if we should see you again. The tone would in any case have been the same. A cold fish, the doctor. If you were suddenly to drop dead on the carpet, he would ring the bell and ask to have you removed,

Dmitri glanced at him resentfully, as between them they lifted his suit case, which was of heavy leather, across the threshold.

“I know I’m late, Doctor,” he replied, “but I was determined not to take any risks. You wouldn’t have been too pleased to see me if I’d turned up a day sooner with Stolin at my heels.”

They were standing now in the main hall, and the doctor had closed the door. The hall was large and shadowy.

“Good God,” said Dmitri suddenly. “What is that?”

Down the corridor to the left, which branched off from the main hall they had now entered, came a sudden crash, and Dmitri clutched the doctor nervously by the arm. From the direction of the crash he could hear the voice of a woman uplifted in expostulation.

“Get out of my kitchen,” it said. “I’ve said I won’t ’ave it, and I won’t. You nasty ’ulking black man. Get out of it, I say.”

There was another crash, followed by a splintering of broken crockery. Then a door opened somewhere down the corridor, and a moment later the figure of an old woman appeared.

Dmitri recognized her at once. It was the woman who had stared at him from the window a short time before. She was dressed in the traditional black of the working housekeeper, and her hands were folded primly in front of her.

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” she said, “but I’ve ’ad a misfortune.”

Doctor Shorthouse looked at her reprovingly.

“Thats the second time to-day,” he said. “What’s the matter with you, Mrs. Murdoch?”

‘Don’t you go suggestin’ that there’s anything the matter with me, Doctor. It’s that nasty black man again. Comes into my kitchen, ’e does. And I won’t be ’aunted by an ’eathen savage, though my late ’usband did die in foreign parts. And if it’s the blue china sauceboat you’re thinking of, ll match it myself next time I go to York, and pay for it too, out of my wages, which is due next Saturday.”

Dmitri looked in astonishment at the doctor. The latter did not seem at all surprised by this oration, but heard the old woman quietly to an end. Then he indicated Dmitri.

“Mrs. Murdoch,” he said, “this is Count Dmitri Soubiroff. He will be staying here for some time, and you will do your best to make him comfortable.”

Mrs. Murdoch turned to Dmitri and, with her features softening to an expression of respect, gave him a little old-fashioned curtsey.

“Pleased to do anything I can for the Count, to be sure,” she said. “And I think I may say that I know how to treat a gentleman born, having seen service with the nobility and landed gentry. But it’s not easy to keep everything as it should be in this house. Something has to go. If it’s not the rooms it’s the cooking, and if it’s not the cooking . . .”

*That’s all right, Mrs. Murdoch,” said the doctor, interrupting her with a grim smile, “but please don’t let it be the cooking. We should like to have supper, if you can manage it, in half an hour.”

“Very well, Doctor.”

“And no more misfortunes, please. Not this evening, at any rate.”

Mrs. Murdoch drew herself up.

“That, Doctor, is not for me to say. They comes by providence. And if I did give the Count a nasty look when he came to the door he will quite understand that there’s no ill-feeling. I’m not partial to strangers, unless I knows exactly who they are.”

She smiled a little vacantly upon the two men and then quite suddenly withdrew.

Dmitri moved to the empty hearth. He was shivering slightly.

“That’s a nice cheerful sort of body servant,” he said. “Where on earth did you pick her up?”

Doctor Shorthouse walked to a table in the corner of the hall, poured out a whisky and soda and handed it to Dmitri.

“Drink this,” he said. “You can’t afford tc take cold.”

“Not if I’m going to be nursed by Mrs. Murdoch,” responded Dmitri, as he drained the whisky.

“You needn’t worry about her,” said the doctor. “She’s been with me for over thirty years and she ' will suit us very well, as it happens. She doesn’t like strangers for one thing, as she told you herself.”

“But who’s this black man who won’t keep out of the kitchen? Is he going to do my valeting?”

“There isn’t a black man,” said the doctor.

‘What do you mean?”

“The black man, I am glad to say, is a pure delusion. The poor old woman has had it for some time—ever since her husband was killed by the Rehoboths in Southwest Africa. And now sit down a moment, and tell me why you’re late.”

“Didn’t Goldenberg explain?”

“You thought you were being followed?”

“I’m pretty sure we were followed from Warsaw.”

“Stolin, I suppose?”

“He was certainly one of them. At Breslau I thought we had thrown him off the scent, but I couldn’t be certain of it, and I was determined not to take any risks. From Breslau we went to Geneva, and there I was worried again. We put up at a hotel near the station, and of course we kept Irma in her room the whole time. On the evening of my arrival I went out to get some exercise, and, when I got back, I had a look through the papers in my despatch case, and I got rather a nasty shock. I found that they were in the wrong order. I knew exactly how I had left them and I could swear that somebody had been through them in my absence.”

“Was the case locked?”

“Of course.”

“What were the papers?”

“Only my passport and a few of your letters— ° nothing vital. But, as I said, they were in the wrong order. Goldenberg, who had remained with the girl swore he hadn’t touched them. So I thought it was just possible that some one was still trailing me, and I decided to give him a good run for his money. I told Goldenberg to slip off with Irma direct via Paris to London, while I departed openly by the early morning train to Bale. From Bale I went to Berlin, from Berlin to Sasnitz; from Sasnitz I crossed to Tralborg in Sweden, and from Tralborg to Oslo. And not a sleeper to be had for love or money all the way. From Oslo I went to Bergen and then by boat to Hull—the North Sea, if you please, . and your English summer at its worst. All I can say is that if Stolin is still on my tracks he has a better stomach than I have, and I hope he’s feeling as bad.”

The doctor looked at his friend without emotion.

“Well, my dear Count,” he said, “here you are, at all events.”

“Thank God for that,” said Dmitri, and leaning back, he lighted a cigarette and gazed thoughtfully around the room.

It was a curious place—a high stone hall, paneled for two thirds of its height. The paneling was of pine wood, and above, on the rough stonework, were hung numerous stags’ heads and antlers, but they looked, somehow, as though they had never adorned any living animal. A broad staircase, also of pine wood, occupied the whole of one side of the hall, and led to a gallery which ran at right angles along the whole length of the wall at the back. Beneath the gallery in this wall was a huge Gothic window, reaching to the ground, and furnished incongruously enough with French windows and sun blinds, The interior of Sham Castle was such as might have been expected from what he had seen of the battlements— a Victorian parody of medieval romance such as might have been conceived and executed by a constant reader of the novels of G. P. R. James.

Dmitri smiled. The whisky was beginning to work, and a grateful warmth spread through his tired limbs.

“T don’t think much of your ancestral home, Doctor,” he said, after a pause.

“J don’t defend it,” said the doctor dryly. “But it will serve its turn. I bought it for a song ten years ago. I had no idea that I should ever find it so convenient.”

Dmitri helped himself to another whisky and soda.

“Well, Doctor,” he said. “It’s your turn now. What have you done with Irma?”

“Irma is upstairs in her room.”

“Is she . . . well?”

“As well as can be expected. But I don’t advise you to see her yet. Her condition is . . . peculiar, and it may be some time before I can achieve any result.”

“She didn’t give us any trouble on the way. She came away from Warsaw like a lamb.”

“Very possibly,” said the doctor dryly. “But the next step will be rather more . . . complicated, and you must leave that entirely to me.”

“Very well, Doctor. But what is it to be for the moment—boy or girl?”

“Miss Irma Brezhoff, if you don’t mind. I’ve removed her boy’s clothes. They were quite useful during the journey, but they would be fatal now. Mrs. Murdoch bought her some things in Kirbymoorside, not very fashionable, ’m afraid, but she won’t mind that very much for some time.”

Dmitri rose and surveyed himself in the mirror over the hearth.

“Don’t you think I might see her, Doctor? One never knows. It might help things on a bit.”

Doctor Shorthouse looked unresponsively at his friend.

“You flatter yourself, Dmitri,” he said. “I must ask you, if you don’t mind, to refrain from trying the effect of your fascinations on Irma Brezhoff. Later on, perhaps. . .”

“Very well, Doctor. I shall be ready when you are. Meanwhile, what’s become of little Albert and the trusty squire? Why aren’t they here to welcome me? It was the least they could do.”

“Goldenberg left two days ago for London. I sent him via Hull, and he left the car there for you. Jenkins went off to London this afternoon to join him—as soon as we got your wireless from the boat, telling us to expect you this evening.”

Dmitri looked resentfully at the doctor. He had expected a word of commendation. He hadn’t done so badly, come to think of it.

“Well, Doctor,” he said at last, “aren’t you going to congratulate me?”

“Time for that,” replied the doctor smoothly, “when the work is done. It’s early yet to begin admiring ourselves. We can do that later, for the rest of our lives, in fact, if we succeed.”

“Well, I’ve done my share,” said Dmitri. “Have you considered what would have happened if they’d caught me in Warsaw?”

“It hardly required much consideration, my dear Count.”

Doctor Shorthouse smiled and put a friendly hand on Dmitri’s shoulder.

“You may take it from me, Dmitri, ’m very glad, and I may say, not a little surprised, to see you.”

“Well, Doctor, it’s up to you now—you and Jenkins.”

“It is, as you say, up to me and Jenkins,” replied the doctor, “And perhaps I ought to tell you, though it’s not of much importance, that Jenkins is worried.”

“He always is,” said Dmitri peevishly. “I can’t think why you let him into this show at all. He hasn’t the pluck or the brains of a rabbit.”

“Jenkins, for the moment, is necessary. Irma’s papers are vital, and only Jenkins can get them. We’re only amateurs, and this is work for a professional. However, I’ve sent Goldenberg with him to London, and Goldenberg will keep an eye on him and see that he doesn’t panic. For Jenkins, as I said, is worried, distinctly worried.”

The doctor paused and took a turn up the room and back again.

“Ever heard of a man called Rupert Ahrens?” he asked.

“T have not.”

“J thought perhaps you might. It seems he’s a Russian.”

“There are still quite a lot of Russians,” said Dmitri.

The doctor moved across the room and began to play with a brass candlestick on the mantelpiece by the empty hearth.

“Anyhow,” he continued, “that’s the man who is worrying Jenkins. It seems that Ahrens has left Russia and that Jenkins is extremely anxious not to meet him again. Jenkins is not very coherent on the subject, but I infer that they had dealings with each other in the past. I also gather that the frequent allusions of Jenkins to his old acquaintance as Red Rupert have special reference to the color of his beard. So if you do happen to see a gentleman with red hair you will draw your own conclusions.”

Dmitri fidgeted in his chair. What had all this got to do with Irma and her papers and the work for which he had risked his distinguished life in the

18 PRETTY SINISTER wilds of Poland? Why couldn’t Jenkins keep his mind on the business in hand?

“The papers, Doctor,” he said impatiently. “Are you quite sure they’re in London still?”

“Quite sure,” said the doctor smoothly. “I doubt if they have ever left the country. Irma’s father was a wise man. Unlike some of your Russian aristocratic friends, he had no very strong belief in the Czarist régime and he invested every penny of his money outside Russia, and deposited all his family papers in England. We know where they are, and now, as you say, it’s up to Jenkins. I don’t think we have any cause to be anxious. Fortunately for us, Jenkins is quite at the top of his profession.”

There was a sound of hurried footsteps in the corridor. The door leading to it was burst open, and Mrs. Murdoch appeared on the threshold.

“Doctor,” she began at once. “I beg pardon for coming on you like this, but anybody else in my place would feel the same. There’s things I can stand, but when it comes to faces...”

“Faces!” said the doctor sharply. “What do you mean?”

“A nasty ’uman face,” said Mrs. Murdoch, “pressed against the winder pane. I was just eating up the soup, when it ’appened.”

“Then continue to heat up the soup, please, unless that black man of yours has made away with it

“It isn’t the black man, Doctor. I’m used to having "im about the place—almost ’omely, as you might say. But this was different. As white as a sheet ’e was, and if you don’t believe me, I can show you his marks on the winder.”

“All right, Mrs. Murdoch,” said the doctor. “I'll come and see for myself.”

Mrs. Murdoch turned and went doubtfully back to the corridor from which she had emerged.

The doctor looked at Dmitri, who, much disturbed by the sudden appearance of Mrs. Murdoch and her strange intelligence, was pouring himself out a third whisky and soda with a hand that shook.

“This may be genuine,” said the doctor. “I'll go and see if there are any traces of a visitor. You seem quite upset, Dmitri.”

“Of course I’m upset. Haven’t I been running about Europe for the last three days just to avoid this sort of thing? It may be Stolin, for all we know.”

“Tt may, as you say, be Stolin.”

“That would be awkward. I don’t want to meet him again.”

“Tt would be awkward,” the doctor agreed, “and if you ever should meet him again, I advise you, for your own sake, to remember . . .”

The doctor paused, a tall, thin shadow in the failing light.

“Well,” Dmitri asked, “what is it that I am to remember ?”

“Stolin is not immortal,” said the doctor.

Chapter II The Great Passage

Colonel Alistair Granby, D.S.O. of the Intelligence, was seated at the open window of the Bar Cintra, situated in one of the rues basses of the city of Geneva. Immediately opposite him was a swing door, giving access to the street. To his left ran a long low room. The tables were imitation barrels and the walls were lined with great wooden casks with cordial inscriptions, Amontillado, Salero, Porto Vieux and the like, that spoke of the warm South, the serried vines stretching to the sun-drenched plains and the swarthy dwellers in Iberia. Before him was a glass of the golden sherry for which the bar is justly famed.

He appeared to be reading one of the local newspapers, but now and then he would glance quickly through the open window into the street, where the passers-by moved in and out of his vision, scarcely a yard away. Any one who had stood directly behind him could have seen that he was reading not the newspaper in his left hand, but a letter held in front of the printed sheet. But, then, no one could have stood behind him, for his chair was against the wall.

That was a habit of his—to sit with his back to the wall, and it was a habit with a history.

He frowned slightly as he read the letter, but his eyes were smiling. It was written in bad French on cheap notepaper, and for his own amusement he translated it quite literally from the foreign tongue.

And this was what he read:

210 RUE DU RHONE.

To Monsieur: the Chief of the Intelligence.

I have the advantage to bring you information for all useful ends, which I hope may be beneficial, as is my habit.

Yesterday evening I saw enter my tobacco arcade Monsieur Stolin. Monsieur Stolin perceived that I was alone, since my wife was out and my shop boy on an errand. He therefore charged me to say that he was gravely preoccupied with what might have happened to a young lady, but when he was going to tell me the name (of the young lady) and the reason for which he preoccupied himself with her, behold another gentleman entered my shop who was large, and he had a moustache, with some gray hairs in it and spectacles of a somber tint, and a scar on his left cheek and fingers long and flat, with one that lacked—the little one on the left. Monsieur Stolin looked at this gentleman with discretion and then he leaned himself over the glass case of cigarettes and with an Eversharp pencil during that moment he rapidly inscribed on a beautiful packet of Three Castles American Cigarettes of the value of 4.70 francs, a design, and then some signs, and he indicated the packet, and I threw over it a copy of the Tribune de Genéve (this is a newspaper of Geneva). Then Monsieur

Stolin left and, as the second gentleman approached himself, I placed the packet in a drawer, and I guard it for you. Monsieur Stolin did not change his face when the other gentleman came into the shop, but I could perceive that within himself he was overturned.

Then the second gentleman asked me for a box of tobacco with a Jewish accent, and he left very quickly, going the same route as Monsieur Stolin.

I have the advantage of confirming that the design is very difficult to understand, but that your service will comprehend it, and I hold at your disposition the packet of Three Castles, of which the value is 4.70 francs, plus the cost of despatch, in regard to which I hope you will earnestly wish to recognize my devotion, Rendering to yourself an account of the derangement and cost of despatch and the risk of the message, which is very important, you will understand that this packet has a minimum value of £25. sterling. Waiting for which sum I have the honor, Monsieur the Chief of the Intelligence, to present to you my warm salutations, and an assurance of my perpetual devotion,

Jean Dubois.

Granby thrust the letter back into his pocket. The tobacco merchant was a stupid little man but moderately honest and his store had been used for years by the Service as a pillar box.

Granby then glanced at his watch. There was no hurry. It was only just after five o’clock; the sherry was excellent, and he needed it. He would need a great deal of it if he stayed very long in Geneva, which heaven forbid.