The Thirty-Nine Steps
The upshot was that about half-past nine I made up my mind to go to
Queen Anne’s Gate. Very likely I would not be admitted, but it would
ease my conscience to try.
I walked down Jermyn Street, and at the corner of Duke Street passed a
group of young men. They were in evening dress, had been dining
somewhere, and were going on to a music-hall. One of them was Mr
Marmaduke Jopley.
He saw me and stopped short.
“By God, the murderer!” he cried. “Here, you fellows, hold him! That’s
Hannay, the man who did the Portland Place murder!” He gripped me by
the arm, and the others crowded round. I wasn’t looking for any
trouble, but my ill-temper made me play the fool. A policeman came up,
and I should have told him the truth, and, if he didn’t believe it,
demanded to be taken to Scotland Yard, or for that matter to the
nearest police station. But a delay at that moment seemed to me
unendurable, and the sight of Marmie’s imbecile face was more than I
could bear. I let out with my left, and had the satisfaction of seeing
him measure his length in the gutter.
Then began an unholy row. They were all on me at once, and the
policeman took me in the rear. I got in one or two good blows, for I
think, with fair play, I could have licked the lot of them, but the
policeman pinned me behind, and one of them got his fingers on my
throat.
Through a black cloud of rage I heard the officer of the law asking
what was the matter, and Marmie, between his broken teeth, declaring
that I was Hannay the murderer.
“Oh, damn it all,” I cried, “make the fellow shut up. I advise you to
leave me alone, constable. Scotland Yard knows all about me, and you’ll
get a proper wigging if you interfere with me.”
“You’ve got to come along of me, young man,” said the policeman. “I saw
you strike that gentleman crool ’ard. You began it too, for he wasn’t
doing nothing. I seen you. Best go quietly or I’ll have to fix you up.”
Exasperation and an overwhelming sense that at no cost must I delay
gave me the strength of a bull elephant. I fairly wrenched the
constable off his feet, floored the man who was gripping my collar, and
set off at my best pace down Duke Street. I heard a whistle being
blown, and the rush of men behind me.
I have a very fair turn of speed, and that night I had wings. In a
jiffy I was in Pall Mall and had turned down towards St James’s Park. I
dodged the policeman at the Palace gates, dived through a press of
carriages at the entrance to the Mall, and was making for the bridge
before my pursuers had crossed the roadway. In the open ways of the
Park I put on a spurt. Happily there were few people about and no one
tried to stop me. I was staking all on getting to Queen Anne’s Gate.
When I entered that quiet thoroughfare it seemed deserted. Sir Walter’s
house was in the narrow part, and outside it three or four motor-cars
were drawn up. I slackened speed some yards off and walked briskly up
to the door. If the butler refused me admission, or if he even delayed
to open the door, I was done.
He didn’t delay. I had scarcely rung before the door opened.
“I must see Sir Walter,” I panted. “My business is desperately
important.”
That butler was a great man. Without moving a muscle he held the door
open, and then shut it behind me. “Sir Walter is engaged, sir, and I
have orders to admit no one. Perhaps you will wait.”
The house was of the old-fashioned kind, with a wide hall and rooms on
both sides of it. At the far end was an alcove with a telephone and a
couple of chairs, and there the butler offered me a seat.
“See here,” I whispered. “There’s trouble about and I’m in it. But Sir
Walter knows, and I’m working for him. If anyone comes and asks if I am
here, tell him a lie.”
He nodded, and presently there was a noise of voices in the street, and
a furious ringing at the bell. I never admired a man more than that
butler. He opened the door, and with a face like a graven image waited
to be questioned. Then he gave them it. He told them whose house it
was, and what his orders were, and simply froze them off the doorstep.
I could see it all from my alcove, and it was better than any play.
I hadn’t waited long till there came another ring at the bell. The
butler made no bones about admitting this new visitor.
While he was taking off his coat I saw who it was. You couldn’t open a
newspaper or a magazine without seeing that face—the grey beard cut
like a spade, the firm fighting mouth, the blunt square nose, and the
keen blue eyes. I recognized the First Sea Lord, the man, they say,
that made the new British Navy.
He passed my alcove and was ushered into a room at the back of the
hall. As the door opened I could hear the sound of low voices. It shut,
and I was left alone again.
For twenty minutes I sat there, wondering what I was to do next. I was
still perfectly convinced that I was wanted, but when or how I had no
notion. I kept looking at my watch, and as the time crept on to
half-past ten I began to think that the conference must soon end. In a
quarter of an hour Royer should be speeding along the road to
Portsmouth....
Then I heard a bell ring, and the butler appeared. The door of the back
room opened, and the First Sea Lord came out. He walked past me, and in
passing he glanced in my direction, and for a second we looked each
other in the face.
Only for a second, but it was enough to make my heart jump. I had never
seen the great man before, and he had never seen me. But in that
fraction of time something sprang into his eyes, and that something was
recognition. You can’t mistake it. It is a flicker, a spark of light, a
minute shade of difference which means one thing and one thing only. It
came involuntarily, for in a moment it died, and he passed on. In a
maze of wild fancies I heard the street door close behind him.
I picked up the telephone book and looked up the number of his house.
We were connected at once, and I heard a servant’s voice.
“Is his Lordship at home?” I asked.
“His Lordship returned half an hour ago,” said the voice, “and has gone
to bed. He is not very well tonight. Will you leave a message, sir?”
I rang off and almost tumbled into a chair. My part in this business
was not yet ended. It had been a close shave, but I had been in time.
Not a moment could be lost, so I marched boldly to the door of that
back room and entered without knocking.
Five surprised faces looked up from a round table. There was Sir
Walter, and Drew the War Minister, whom I knew from his photographs.
There was a slim elderly man, who was probably Whittaker, the Admiralty
official, and there was General Winstanley, conspicuous from the long
scar on his forehead. Lastly, there was a short stout man with an
iron-grey moustache and bushy eyebrows, who had been arrested in the
middle of a sentence.
Sir Walter’s face showed surprise and annoyance.
“This is Mr Hannay, of whom I have spoken to you,” he said
apologetically to the company. “I’m afraid, Hannay, this visit is
ill-timed.”
I was getting back my coolness. “That remains to be seen, sir,” I said;
“but I think it may be in the nick of time. For God’s sake, gentlemen,
tell me who went out a minute ago?”
“Lord Alloa,” Sir Walter said, reddening with anger.
“It was not,” I cried; “it was his living image, but it was not Lord
Alloa. It was someone who recognized me, someone I have seen in the
last month. He had scarcely left the doorstep when I rang up Lord
Alloa’s house and was told he had come in half an hour before and had
gone to bed.”
“Who—who—” someone stammered.
“The Black Stone,” I cried, and I sat down in the chair so recently
vacated and looked round at five badly scared gentlemen.
Chapter IX.
The Thirty-Nine Steps
“Nonsense!” said the official from the Admiralty.
Sir Walter got up and left the room while we looked blankly at the
table. He came back in ten minutes with a long face. “I have spoken to
Alloa,” he said. “Had him out of bed—very grumpy. He went straight home
after Mulross’s dinner.”
“But it’s madness,” broke in General Winstanley. “Do you mean to tell
me that that man came here and sat beside me for the best part of half
an hour and that I didn’t detect the imposture? Alloa must be out of
his mind.”
“Don’t you see the cleverness of it?” I said. “You were too interested
in other things to have any eyes. You took Lord Alloa for granted. If
it had been anybody else you might have looked more closely, but it was
natural for him to be here, and that put you all to sleep.”
Then the Frenchman spoke, very slowly and in good English.
“The young man is right. His psychology is good. Our enemies have not
been foolish!”
He bent his wise brows on the assembly.
“I will tell you a tale,” he said. “It happened many years ago in
Senegal. I was quartered in a remote station, and to pass the time used
to go fishing for big barbel in the river. A little Arab mare used to
carry my luncheon basket—one of the salted dun breed you got at
Timbuctoo in the old days. Well, one morning I had good sport, and the
mare was unaccountably restless. I could hear her whinnying and
squealing and stamping her feet, and I kept soothing her with my voice
while my mind was intent on fish. I could see her all the time, as I
thought, out of a corner of my eye, tethered to a tree twenty yards
away. After a couple of hours I began to think of food. I collected my
fish in a tarpaulin bag, and moved down the stream towards the mare,
trolling my line. When I got up to her I flung the tarpaulin on her
back—”
He paused and looked round.
“It was the smell that gave me warning. I turned my head and found
myself looking at a lion three feet off.... An old man-eater, that was
the terror of the village.... What was left of the mare, a mass of
blood and bones and hide, was behind him.”
“What happened?” I asked. I was enough of a hunter to know a true yarn
when I heard it.
“I stuffed my fishing-rod into his jaws, and I had a pistol. Also my
servants came presently with rifles. But he left his mark on me.” He
held up a hand which lacked three fingers.
“Consider,” he said. “The mare had been dead more than an hour, and the
brute had been patiently watching me ever since. I never saw the kill,
for I was accustomed to the mare’s fretting, and I never marked her
absence, for my consciousness of her was only of something tawny, and
the lion filled that part. If I could blunder thus, gentlemen, in a
land where men’s senses are keen, why should we busy preoccupied urban
folk not err also?”
Sir Walter nodded. No one was ready to gainsay him.
“But I don’t see,” went on Winstanley. “Their object was to get these
dispositions without our knowing it. Now it only required one of us to
mention to Alloa our meeting tonight for the whole fraud to be
exposed.”
Sir Walter laughed dryly. “The selection of Alloa shows their acumen.
Which of us was likely to speak to him about tonight? Or was he likely
to open the subject?”
I remembered the First Sea Lord’s reputation for taciturnity and
shortness of temper.
“The one thing that puzzles me,” said the General, “is what good his
visit here would do that spy fellow? He could not carry away several
pages of figures and strange names in his head.”
“That is not difficult,” the Frenchman replied. “A good spy is trained
to have a photographic memory. Like your own Macaulay. You noticed he
said nothing, but went through these papers again and again. I think we
may assume that he has every detail stamped on his mind. When I was
younger I could do the same trick.”
“Well, I suppose there is nothing for it but to change the plans,” said
Sir Walter ruefully.
Whittaker was looking very glum. “Did you tell Lord Alloa what has