"Of course," I said. I was by that time used to those confidential conversations, and I walked along the corridor and joined Lola.

"I'm very troubled, Mr. Hargreave," the girl suddenly exclaimed in a low, timid voice after we had been chatting a short time. "I overheard father whispering something to Madame Duperre to-day."

"Whispering something!" I echoed. "What was that?"

"Something about Mr. Martyn, that American gentleman he met in Edinburgh," she replied. "Father was chuckling to himself, saying that he had taken good precautions to prevent him proving an alibi. Father seemed filled with the fiercest anger against him. I'm sure he's an awfully nice man, though we hardly know him. What can it mean?"

An alibi? I reflected. I replied that it was as mysterious to me as to her. Like herself I lived in a clouded atmosphere of rapidly changing circ.u.mstances, mysterious plots and unknown evil deeds--truly a world of fear and bewilderment.

Some days later I had driven up to London in the Rolls with Duperre, leaving Rayne and Lola at home, Duperre's wife being away somewhere on a visit. We took up our quarters at Rayne's chambers, and next day idled about London together. Just before we went out to dinner Martyn called, and after taking a drink Duperre went out with him, remarking to me that he would be in soon after eleven. Hence I went to the theater, and on returning at midnight awaited him.

I sat reading by the fire and dozed till just past two o'clock, when he returned dressed in unfamiliar clothes: a rough suit of tweeds in which he presented the appearance of a respectable artisan. His left hand was bound roughly with a colored handkerchief, and he appeared very exhausted. Before speaking he poured himself out a liqueur gla.s.s of neat brandy which he swallowed at a single gulp.

"I've had a rather nasty accident, George," he said. "I've cut my hand pretty badly. Only not a soul must know about it--you understand?"

I nodded, and then at his request I a.s.sisted him to wash the wound and rebandage it.

"What's been the matter?" I asked with curiosity.

"Nothing very much," was his hard reply. "You'll probably know all about it to-morrow. The papers will be full of it. But mind and keep your mouth shut very tightly."

And with that he drew from his pockets a pair of thin surgical rubber gloves, both of which were blood-stained, and hurriedly threw them into the fire.

On the following evening about six o'clock I was alone in Rayne's chambers when the evening newspaper was, as usual, pushed through the letter-box. I rose, and taking it up glanced casually at the front page, when I was confronted by a startling report.

It appeared that just after midnight on the previous night the watchman on duty at the Chartered Bank of Liberia, in Lombard Street, had been murderously attacked by some unknown person who apparently battered his head with an iron bar, and left him unconscious and so seriously injured that he was now in Guy's Hospital without hope of recovery. The bank robbers had apparently used a most up-to-date oxyacetylene plant for cutting steel, and from the strong-room in the bas.e.m.e.nt--believed to be impregnable and which could only be opened by a time-clock, and, moreover, could be flooded at will--they had cut out the door as b.u.t.ter could be cut with a hot knife. From the safe they had abstracted negotiable bonds with English, French and Italian notes to the value of over eighty thousand pounds, with which the thieves had got clear away.

The bank robbery was the greatest sensation of the moment. The thieves had cleverly effected an entrance by one of them having secreted himself in a safe in the bank when it had closed. In the morning at nine o'clock when the first clerk, a lady accountant, had arrived, she could get no entrance, so she waited till one of her male colleagues arrived. Then they called a constable, and after half an hour the sensational fact of the unconscious watchman and the rifled strong-room became revealed.

The newspaper report concluded with the following sentences:

"It is evident that one of the thieves cut his hand badly, for we understand that the detectives of the City police have found blood-stained finger-prints of four distinct fingers upon the door and in other parts of the strong-room. These, of course, have already been photographed, and in due course will be investigated by that department of Scotland Yard which deals with the finger-prints of known criminals."

With the knowledge of the injury to Duperre's hand I felt confident that the great _coup_ was due to him. And I was not mistaken.

The bank thieves had got clear away, it was true, but they had left those tell-tale finger-prints behind! As everyone knows, the ridges and whorls upon the hands of no two men are alike, therefore it seemed clear that Scotland Yard, now aroused, would very quickly--owing to its marvelous cla.s.sification of the finger-prints of every criminal who has pa.s.sed through the hands of the police during the past quarter of a century--fix upon the person who had laid his hands upon the steel safe door.

An hour after I had read the report in the paper, Duperre rang me up.

"I'm going to Overstow by the nine-thirty from King's Cross to-night,"

he said. "If you can join me, do. The air is better in Yorkshire than in London, don't you think so, old chap?"

"Right-oh!" I replied. "I'll travel up with you."

We met, and early next morning we were back at Overstow. Yet I managed to suppress any untoward curiosity.

It was only when about a week later I read in the paper of the result of the discovery of Scotland Yard finger-print department and of a consequent arrest that I sat aghast.

A notorious jewel-thief named Hersleton, alias Hugh Martyn, an American, had been arrested at a hotel at Brighton, and had been charged at Bow Street with the murderous attack upon the night watchman at the Chartered Bank of Liberia, his finger-prints, taken some years before, coinciding exactly with those left at the bank. He had violently protested his innocence, but had been committed for trial.

At the Old Bailey six weeks later, the night watchman having fortunately recovered from his injuries, Hugh Martyn was brought before Mr. Justice Harland, and though very ably defended by his counsel, he was quite unable to account for his movements on the night in question.

"I was never there!" the prisoner shrieked across the court to the judge as I sat in the public gallery watching the scene. "I know nothing of the affair--nothing whatever. I am innocent."

"It is undeniable that the prisoner's finger-prints were left there,"

remarked the eminent counsel for the Treasury, rising very calmly. "We have them here before us--enlarged photographs which the jury have just seen. Gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that the prisoner is the man who a.s.sisted in this dastardly crime!"

The jury, after a short retirement, found Hugh Martyn guilty, and the judge, after hearing his previous convictions, sentenced him to fifteen years' penal servitude.

But Mr. Justice Harland has never known, until perhaps he may read these lines, that by the ingenious machinations of the super-criminal Rudolph Rayne, Hugh Martyn, who was one of his a.s.sociates who had quarrelled with him over his share of a bank robbery in Madrid, and had tried to betray me to Benton on Clifton Bridge, had been the victim of a most dastardly treachery, though he was quite unaware of it and believed Rayne to be his friend.

Only many months later I learned, by piecing together certain facts, that old Morley Tarrant was an expert photographer and maker of printer's "blocks." Slowly it became plain that Rayne, having been betrayed by the astute American crook, had met him in Edinburgh and with devilish malice aforethought, had contrived to get him to handle the gla.s.s cube which served as a paper-weight, and which I had quite innocently conveyed to the old hunchback, who had succeeded in taking the finger-prints and by photography transferring them upon the surgical rubber glove, thin as paper--really a false skin--which Duperre had worn over his hands when he and his a.s.sociates made an attack upon the bank.

By that means Martyn's finger-prints were left upon the safe door.

Duperre had previously taken out Martyn, whom one of his friends, a woman, had drugged, so that he lay in that furnished house near Maldon for two days unconscious. Hence he was unable to give any accurate account of his movements on the night in question, or prove an alibi, and was, in consequence, convicted.

Rayne, the man with the abnormal criminal brain, had, by that ingenious _coup_, not only contrived to spirit away to the Continent a sum of eighty thousand pounds in negotiable securities, but had also sent to a long term of penal servitude the man who had attempted to betray him.

CHAPTER V

CONCERNS MR. BLUMENFELD

The pleasant high road between Leamington and Coventry runs straight over the hills to Kenilworth, but a few miles farther on there are cross-roads, the right leading into Stoneleigh and the left to Kirby Corner and over Westwood Heath into a crooked maze of by-roads by which one can reach Berkswell or Barston.

It was over that left-hand road that I was driving Rayne and Lola in the Rolls in the grey twilight of a wintry evening. We had driven from London, and both Rayne and the girl I so admired were cramped and tired.

"Look!" shouted Lola suddenly as we took a turn in the road. "There's the lodge! On the left there. That's Bradbourne Hall!"

"Yes, that's it, Hargreave!" said Rudolph, and a few moments later I turned the car through the high wrought-iron gates which stood open for us, and we sped up the long avenue of leafless trees which led to the fine country mansion at which we were to be guests.

Bradbourne Hall was a great old-world Georgian house, half covered with ivy, and the appearance of the grave, white-haired butler who opened the door showed it to be the residence of a man of wealth and discernment.

That Edward Blumenfeld, its owner, was fabulously wealthy everyone in the City of London knew, for his name was one to conjure with in high finance, and though the dingy offices of Blumenfeld and Hannan in Old Broad Street were the reverse of imposing, yet the financial influence of the great house often made itself felt upon the Bourses of Paris, Brussels and Rome.

I met the millionaire at dinner two hours later, a tall, loose-built, sallow-faced man of rather brusque manners and decidedly cosmopolitan, both in gesture and in speech. With him was his wife, a pleasant woman of about fifty-five who seemed extremely affable to Lola. Mr.

Blumenfeld's sister, a Mrs. Perceval, was also present.

It appeared that a year before Rayne had met old Mr. Blumenfeld and his wife in an hotel at Varenna, on the Lake of Como, and a casual acquaintance had ripened into friendship and culminated in the invitation to spend a few days at Bradbourne. Hence our journey.

As we sat gossiping over our port after the ladies had left the table, I began to wonder why the grey-eyed master-crook, whom not a soul suspected, was so eager to ingratiate himself with Edward Blumenfeld.

The motive was, however, not far to seek. Most men who are personal friends of millionaires manage to extract some little point of knowledge which, if used in the right way and with discretion, will often result in considerable financial gain. Indeed, I have often thought that around a millionaire there is spread a halo of prosperity which invests all those who enter it and brings to them good fortune.

It was evident that the great financier regarded Rudolph Rayne as his friend, for he promised to pay us a visit at Overstow in return.