The Place of Dragons: A Mystery

CHAPTER XXVI

HOT-FOOT ACROSS EUROPE

By Lola's attitude I became more than ever mystified. I tried to induce her to tell me the exact position of affairs, but she seemed far too nervous and unstrung. The fact that Craig had found out her hiding-place seemed to cause her the most breathless anxiety.

That he knew some guilty secret of hers seemed plain.

It was eleven o'clock before I rose to go, after begging her many times in vain to tell me the truth. I felt confident that she could reveal the strange mystery of Cromer, yet she steadfastly refused.

"You surely see, Lola, that we are both in serious peril," I said, standing before the chair upon which she had sunk in deep dejection. "These daring, unscrupulous people must, sooner or later, make a fatal attack upon us, if we do not deliver our blow against them. To invoke the aid or protection of the police is useless. They set all authority at defiance, for they are wealthy, and the ramifications of their society extend all over Europe."

"I know," she admitted. "Vernon has agents in every country. I have met many of them – quite unsuspicious persons. My uncle has introduced me to people at whose apparent honesty and respectability I have been amazed."

"Then you must surely realize how insecure is the present position of both of us," I said.

"I do. But disaster cannot be averted," was her sorrowful response.

"Unless you unite with me in avenging the attack made upon us at Spring Grove."

"What is the use?" she queried. "They have all left London."

"What?" I exclaimed quickly. "You know that?"

"Yes," she replied. "I know they have."

"How?"

"By an advertisement I saw in the paper three days ago," she answered. "They use a certain column of a certain paper on a certain day to distribute general information to all those interested."

"In a code?"

"In a secret cipher – known only to the friends of M'sieur Vernon," she said. "They always look for his orders or his warnings on the eighteenth of each month. My uncle is back at Algiers."

"Where is Vernon?"

"Ah! I do not know. Perhaps he is with my uncle."

"But the young man, Craig. Why is he watching you? It can only be with evil intent."

She drew a long breath, but said nothing. And to all my further questions she remained dumb, so that when I bent over her outstretched hand and left, I felt annoyed at her resolute secrecy – a secrecy which must, I felt, result fatally.

And yet by her manner I was confident that she was still prevented by fear from revealing everything to me. Yes, after all, I pitied her deeply.

At the Grand I found Rayner awaiting me. He had already learnt from the police that the car in which Craig had driven away belonged to a garage in Bournemouth.

On going there he had found the car had just returned. It had been hired for the evening by Craig himself, who had first driven out to Boscombe and was afterwards driven to Christchurch, where he had caught the express for London.

He had, therefore, gone.

This news I scribbled in a note to Lola, and before midnight Rayner had delivered it at Mr. Featherstone's house.

Then I retired to rest full of strange thoughts and serious apprehensions. The revelations of that night had indeed been astounding. Craig was alive, and his intentions were, undoubtedly, sinister ones.

But who was the man who had met with such a mysterious death and had been buried as "Mr. Gregory's nephew?"

At eleven o'clock next morning I took the tram along to Boscombe and rang at the door of the house where my delightful little friend was living.

The neat maid who answered amazed me by saying —

"Mademoiselle left for London by the eight o'clock train this morning, sir. She packed all her things after you left last night, and ordered a cab by telephone."

"Didn't she leave me any message?" I asked Mrs. Featherstone, when I saw her a few moments later.

"No, none, Mr. Vidal," replied the old lady. "After you had gone, and she received your note, she became suddenly very terrified, why, I don't know. Then she packed, and though we tried to persuade her to stay till you called, she declined. All she said, besides thanking us, was that she would write to you."

"Most extraordinary!" I exclaimed. "I wonder what caused her such sudden fear?"

Could it have been that she had discovered any one else watching the house? Strange, I thought, that she had not sent me word of her intended departure. She could so easily have spoken to me on the telephone.

Well, two hours later, I followed her to London, and began an inquiry of hotels where I knew she had stayed on previous occasions – the Cecil, the Savoy, the Carlton, the Metropole, the Grand, and so forth. But though I spent a couple of hours on the telephone, speaking with various reception clerks, I could get no news of Mademoiselle Sorel.

Yet, was it surprising? She would hardly, in the circumstances, stay in London in her own name.

Ten days went by. By each post I expected news of Lola, but none came, and I felt confident that she had gone abroad.

I wired and wrote to Mademoiselle Elise Leblanc, at the Poste Restante at Versailles. But I obtained no reply. At last I went down to Cromer and remained at the Hôtel de Paris for nearly a week, carefully going over all the details of the mystery with Mr. Day and Inspector Treeton, who were, of course, both as much puzzled as I was myself.

The autumn weather was perfect. The holiday crowd had left, and Cromer looked her brightest and best in the glorious sunshine and golden tints of the declining year. On the links I played one or two most enjoyable rounds, and once or twice I sat outside the Golf Club and smoked and chatted with men I knew in London.

Daily I wondered what had become of Lola.

Time after time I visited that green-painted seat near which the dead man had been found and where I had discovered the imprint of Lola's shoe. But, beyond what I have already recorded in the foregoing pages, I could discover absolutely nothing. The identity of the man who had masqueraded in the clothes of the master-criminal was entirely enshrouded in mystery.

The law had buried Edward Craig, and in the cemetery, on the road to Holt was a plain head-stone bearing his name and the date of his death.

How could I have been mistaken in his identity? That was the chief fact which held me puzzled and confused. I had looked upon his face, as others had done, and all had agreed that the man who died was actually Craig.

I told Treeton nothing of my discovery, but one day, as I stood at the window of the hotel gazing across the sea, I made a sudden resolve, and that evening I found myself back again in my rooms in London, with Rayner packing my traps for a trip across the Channel.

My one most deadly fear was that Lola might, already, have fallen into one or other of the pitfalls which were, no doubt, spread open for her. The crafty, unscrupulous gang, with Vernon at their head, were determined that we both should die.

On the morning of my arrival from Cromer I left Charing Cross by the boat-train, and that same evening entered the long, dusty wagon-lit of the night rapide for Marseilles.

Marseilles! How many times in my life had I trod the broad Cannebière, drank cocktails at the Louvre et Paix, ate my boullibuisse at the little underground café, where the best in the world is served, or sauntered along the double row of booths placed under the trees of the boulevard – shops where one can buy anything from a toothpick to a kitchen-stove. Yes, even to the blasé cosmopolitan, Marseilles is always interesting, and as I drove along from the station up the Cannebière, I found the place full of life and movement, with the masts of shipping and glimpses of huge docks showing at the end of the broad, handsome thoroughfare.

From the station I drove direct to the big black mail-boat of the French Transatlantic Company, and by noon we had swung out of the harbour past the historic Château d'If, our bows set due south, for Algiers. Lola had told me that Jeanjean had fled to his hiding-place. And I intended to seek him and face him.

There were few passengers on board – one or two French officers on their way to join their regiments, a few commercial men; while in the third class I saw more than one squatting, brown-faced Arab, picturesque in his white burnouse and turban, placidly smoking, with his belongings tied in bundles arranged around him on the deck. The sea in the Gulf of Lyons was rough, as it usually is, yet the bright autumn weather on land had seemed perfect. As soon, however, as we were away from the gulf and in the open sea, following for hours in the wake of an Orient liner on her way to Australia, the weather abated and the voyage became most enjoyable.

As a student of men, I found the passengers in the steerage far more interesting than those in the saloon. Among the former was a knot of young, active-looking men of various nationalities, who leaned over the side watching the crimson sunset, and smoking and chattering, sometimes trying to make each other understand. I saw they were in charge of a military officer, and one of them being a smart, rather gentlemanly young Englishman – the only other Englishman on board, as far as I could gather – I spoke to him.

"Yes," he laughed, "my comrades here are rather a queer lot. We've all of us come to grief in one way or another. Bad luck, that's it. I speak for myself. I had a commission in the Hussars, but the gambling fever bit me hard, and I went a little too often to Dick Seddon's snug little place in Knightsbridge. Then I came a cropper, the governor cut up rough, and there was only one thing left to do – to hand in my papers, go to Paris, and join the French Foreign Legion. So, here I am, drafted to Algeria as a private with my friends, who are all in the same glorious predicament. See that fair-bearded chap over there?" he added, pointing to a well-set-up man of thirty-five who was just lighting a cigarette. "He's a German Baron, captain of one of the crack regiments in Saxony – quite a decent chap – a woman, I think, is at the bottom of his trouble."

And so, while the Arabs knelt towards Mecca, and touched the decks with their foreheads, we chatted on, he telling me what he knew concerning each of his hard-up companions who, under names not their own, were now on their way to serve France, as privates, in the "Legion of the Lost Ones," and start their careers afresh.

At last, after a couple of days, the blue coast of Africa could be discerned straight ahead, and gradually, as I stood leaning upon the rail and watching, the long white front of Algiers, with its breakwater, its white domes of mosques, and high minarets, and its heights crowned by white villas, came into view.

The city, dazzling white against the intense blue of the Mediterranean, presented a picture like the illustration to a fairy tale, and I stood watching, the sunny strip of African shore until at last we dropped anchor in the shelter of the bay, and presently went ashore in a boat.

I followed my traps across the sun-baked promenade to the nearest hotel – the old-fashioned Régence, in The Place – and after a wash, and a marzagran at the café outside, I inquired my way to the Prefecture of Police, where, on presenting an open letter, which Henri Jonet, of the Sûreté, had given me a couple of years before, and which had often served as an introduction, I was received very cordially.

To the French detective-inspector I said —

"I am making an inquiry, and I want, M'sieur, to ask you to allow me to have one of your men. I am meeting an individual who may prove desperate."

"There is danger – eh? Why, of course, M'sieur, a man shall accompany you." And he shouted through the open window to one of his underlings who was seated on a bench in the inner courtyard.

I made no mention of the name of Jules Jeanjean. Had I done so the effect would, I know, have been electrical.

But when I got outside with the dark-eyed, sunburnt little man in a shabby straw hat and rather frayed suit, I exclaimed in French —

"There is a villa somewhere outside the town where some experiments in wireless telegraphy are being conducted. Do you happen to know the place?"

"Ah! M'sieur means the Villa Beni Hassan, out near the Jardin d'Essai. There are two high masts in the grounds with four long wires suspended between them."

"Who lives there?"

"The Comte Paul d'Esneux."

"Is he French?" I asked, at the same time inquiring his description.

From the latter, as the detective gave it to me, I at once knew that the Comte d'Esneux and Jules Jeanjean were one and the same.

"Non, Monsieur," replied the man. "He is a great Belgian financier. He comes here at frequent intervals, and carries on his experiments with wireless telegraphy. It is said that he has made several discoveries in wireless telephony, hence the Government have given him permission to establish a station with as great a power as that at Oran."

"And he is often experimenting?"

"Constantly. It is said that he can actually transmit messages to Paris and England. Last year, when the station at Oran was injured by fire, the Government operators came here, took his instruments over and worked them. The installation is, I believe, most up-to-date."

"Bien!" I said. "Then let us go up there, and see this Comte d'Esneux."

And together we entered a ramshackle fiacre in The Place, and drove away out by the city gate to the white, dusty high-road, along which many white-robed Arabs and a few Europeans were trudging in the burning glare of the African sun.

When I had mentioned the Count as the person whom I wished to see, I noticed that the detective hesitated, and, with a strange look, regarded me with some apprehension.

Did he suspect? Was he suspicious of the truth concerning the actual identity of the wealthy Belgian financier who dabbled in wireless?

Were rumours already afloat, I wondered?

Had the ever-active Jonet at last succeeded in establishing the secret hiding-place of the notorious Jules Jeanjean – the prince of European jewel-thieves?

CHAPTER XXVII

OPENS A DEATH-TRAP

The Villa Beni Hassan, a great red-and-white house of Moorish architecture, with three large domes, and many minarets, and long-arched windows of stained glass, I found standing high up, facing the azure sea, amid a wonderful tropical garden full of tall, feathery palms, dark oleanders, fiery pointsettias, and a perfect tangle of aloes, roses, giant geraniums and other brilliant flowers.

A high white wall hid it from the dusty highway, its position being between the road and the sea with spacious, well-kept grounds sloping away down to the golden beach. Truly it was a princely residence, one of the finest in the picturesque suburbs of Algiers. That afternoon beneath the blazing African sun, shining like burnished copper, all was still in the fiery heat, which, after the coolness of autumn in England, seemed overpowering.