“You’re a little bit difficult yourself that way, sometimes, Mallinson. Happen to remember that road between Aldershot and Camberley?”
“Shut up!” was the terse reply.
“Look here,” Cheshire said, “we’ve got to put our heads together. You know that firm of shipping merchants we’ve had our eyes on for some time—Brown, Shipman & Co.?”
The other nodded.
“I was looking through my reports on them the other day,” he said. “Apparently they do a colossal business.”
“There is a mysterious sort of fellow connected with the firm,” Cheshire went on. “Florestan is his name. They keep him altogether in the background, pretend he just buys and sells for them here and there, but I believe he is one of the principal figures in the whole organization. He is as clever as they make ’em, too. Although,” Cheshire added meditatively, “he makes mistakes sometimes.”
“As for instance?”
“Well, he and a confederate left me last night tied up and chloroformed in a cellar. Asinine thing to do. He’d much better have made a clean job of it. Of course the usual young lady came and cut the cords and opened the window and here I am! Even then, I got away from his mouldy suburban house with difficulty.”
“Pleasant sort of chap to have anything to do with,” the General grunted.
“I also believe,” Cheshire continued, “that this same house is a blind and that he has a suite on the other side of the Milan Hotel leading out onto the Embankment, where he lives like a prince. However, here’s the point. I’ve got him already in two places. I’ve got him on last night’s little affair and although there’s still some mystery about that I feel convinced that he was at the back of the attack upon Meldicott. The motor car outside the hospital was his, anyway, and I don’t for a moment believe his story that it was stolen in the street whilst he was paying a call.”
“Bright fellow, aren’t you?” Mallinson declared with a smile.
“Forget it,” the Admiral snapped. “I’m not touching Florestan for the moment. It’s my belief there are bigger things behind that man than anything we have run up against yet. There is no doubt that he is enormously involved with one of the European countries with whom we are in difficulties. He is working on a scheme which, if only we can get the hang of it, might put XYZ on the top of the world.”
“When are you bringing him in?”
“That’s the point. I don’t want to bring him in just yet. His confederate was guarding the house where I was last night. By a fluke I got the best of him and I took him to the Police Station. I am going down there this afternoon to put him through it. I want to find out exactly where Florestan is, without putting the wind up. I want him to go on with his schemes, whatever they may be. I hope to be in a position to put my hands on him to-night, if necessary. If he has left the country he is clever. I don’t think he will try to get away. His job is here and he is the sort of man to stick to it until the end.”
“Well, you are top-dog in this,” the General sighed. “You take a damn’ lot of risks, though, Cheshire. I am afraid I should hand over the tracking down of this fellow Florestan to Melville. It’s his job, anyway.”
“I have gone so far with it that I don’t feel like quitting, myself, altogether,” Cheshire declared. “I have only seen him once in my life but I have got him summed up. The whole of this business connected with him is clear enough to me except why he left Meldicott alive and how he got hold of Ryson as he did, which is a matter I won’t discuss with you, even, at the moment, and certain details about this scheme he is at work upon. I am sending a dozen men to follow particular trails. That is being done through Melville, of course. They are going to watch the rooms I suspect he has under the name of Henry Copeland in the Milan. They are going to watch for Mrs. Florestan, who is in it, too. They are going to lay a network round all his haunts, but leave him alone until I give the word.”
“Risky, risky!”
“Well, anyhow, you know the position now,” Cheshire wound up. “The next thing I have to tell you is that I have sent for either Florestan or one of the partners in Brown, Shipman & Co. to come up here to-day. Florestan won’t come, of course, but I am hoping to get a clue as to the larger business from the person who does come up. I would like you to stay here when he arrives. I am going to meet the Deputy Commissioner at the club for lunch, afterwards. I shall have to have him working with us. Then one of us must go round to Downing Street. I don’t want to outstrip my authority but we must get even more latitude from the Chief. I don’t want Florestan or his wife or his accomplice of last night—in fact, anyone connected with him—brought into the Police Court for the moment, even if they collect enough evidence to bring the Meldicott affair home to him.”
“Aren’t you putting rather a heavy burden upon the shoulders of XYZ?” Mallinson asked seriously.
“Maybe,” Cheshire assented. “I have to do it. Have you seen any of the reports this morning from the Foreign Office? I had them at my rooms. You had them, too, I suppose?”
“Pretty dreary,” Mallinson acknowledged.
“The conversations are being continued with the greatest difficulty, we are told from both centres. There is no real earnestness in the suggestions put forward. One or two of them are utterly unreasonable.”
“I know,” the General acquiesced anxiously. “No progress has been made at all. Dunkerley, in his code message, says plainly that the smell of war is in the air. There were fifty thousand people outside the great man’s quarters last night shouting for him. Conversations! They’ve had enough of them, Cheshire. They’re getting ready for a move. The frontiers are already more difficult. There’s a cordon of guards twenty miles in circumference round their great flying base.”
“I quite agree with you,” Cheshire acknowledged. “At the present moment they mean war, and, Mallinson, we may as well face the truth, it’s chiefly our doing. We started on certain lines, though, and we’ve got to go through with it. That’s why I am taking risks. There’s one more thunderbolt they’re forging for us which I want to get the hang of and there’s one more final chapter in our scheme of the last three months to be let loose on them. Afterwards, we hand over to Fakenham and let the Press do their bit.”
“You’re a wonderful chap, Cheshire,” the General said. “It’s the timing, though, that is the terrible difficulty. If you’re a day late, if there’s a single hitch—”
“Cataclysm!” Cheshire interrupted. “Débâcle! Anything you like to call it. The flames of hell blackening the face of Europe. But I shan’t be a day late.”
One of the telephones upon the desk buzzed out a gentle summons. The Admiral took up the receiver.
“A representative of Brown, Shipman & Co. is here, sir,” his typist-secretary announced.
“You can send him in at once,” Cheshire replied.
CHAPTER XIV
Table of Contents
Mr. Leonard Shipman, a jaunty young man in tweeds, was presently announced and shown into the bureau. Cheshire greeted him with marked affability, presented him to Mallinson and saw that he was installed in a chair.
“Very kind of you to come round, Mr. Shipman,” he began. “We have had some business transactions with your firm which have been quite satisfactory.”
“Glad to hear that, sir,” the visitor replied, setting down his hat by the side of the chair and leaning a little forward. “We like Government business when we can get it. The money is good and naturally we are interested in doing our best for the country.”
“A very pleasant spirit,” Cheshire observed. “Tell me, you have a buyer in your firm, a very shrewd man, I should think—a Mr. Florestan?”
“Florestan is a wonderful chap,” Shipman confided enthusiastically. “He’s like quicksilver, too. It takes any of the others about a week to make up their minds before they start off on a business trip. Florestan is in Hamburg to-day, Newcastle the day after, and on his way to the States at an hour’s notice. He doesn’t care where
he goes. He’s an expensive fellow, but he makes profits.”
“Where is he, I wonder, just at the present moment?”
“Couldn’t say, I’m sure. He was in Newcastle sometime yesterday. We put in a tender for a large quantity of steel plates for the two new battleships they’re building there. He went up to try and get a recommendation to purchase.”
“Wonderfully enterprising fellow,” Cheshire remarked. “I should like to meet him some day.”
“He would come in and see you, I’m sure,” Shipman declared with a slight air of condescension. “He’s terribly busy but he would rather do business with the Navy than anyone. Mr.—let me see, what was the name?”
“Cheshire,” was the smiling reply. “My friend’s name is Mallinson.”
“Both sailors?”
“I might venture to call myself that,” Cheshire acknowledged. “My friend is—er—a semi-retired Army man.”
“Gives you something to do when there’s talk of war in the air, I imagine,” the visitor observed.
“Keeps us busy, of course,” the Admiral assented. “All the same, there’s not going to be any war.”
The young man looked very wise. He pulled the Daily Mail from his pocket but put it back again.
“I daresay you have seen the papers,” he remarked. “These conversations we were going to have with the two Dictators don’t seem to be getting much further.”
“Slow work, diplomacy,” Cheshire sighed. “Now, supposing we had another contract to offer Mr. Florestan, how long do you think it would be before we could get hold of him?”
“Hard to say,” he reflected. “If you will give me some particulars I could speak to him about it when he rings up. Florestan, you know, is a man of very strange habits. He telephones from the most unexpected places but he very seldom leaves an address.”
Cheshire was thoughtful for a moment.
“I should like to ask you a question confidentially, Mr. Shipman,” he said.
“Go ahead,” was the generous invitation.
“I take it that in view of the fact that the Admiralty have placed some very large contracts in your hands, you are not doing business just now with any foreign country?”
The young man shook his head.
“Not a ha’p’orth,” he assured his questioner. “Florestan saw to that. I won’t say we’ve not had offers, because we have. We are known as one of the largest dealers in metals in the world and naturally we are constantly being asked for tenders. Nothing doing, except with England and the Colonies. We are holding almost the largest stock of nickel of anyone in the United Kingdom to-day. That was Florestan’s idea. We have been buying steadily for six months.”
“A great man, your representative,” Mallinson remarked. “I really must meet him.”
“He would be pleased to come and see you, I’m sure,” the other declared, “as soon as this rush is over.”
“Is he an Englishman?” Cheshire asked curiously.
“For anything I know to the contrary. He has a British passport. He’s been with us for over twenty-five years. Of course, he’s travelled so much on the Continent and he speaks all the languages so well that you might take him for almost anything.”
“He has a house in London, I suppose?”
“He’s not very communicative about his private affairs,” was the dubious reply. “He lives somewhere down in Kensington, I think, and I believe he is married. Not that his wife can see much of him. He’s flying round the world all the time.”
“Is he a member of the firm?” Mallinson asked.
“We are incorporated,” Shipman answered. “Last year the directors voted him ten thousand pounds’ worth of shares as a recognition of his services. This year I think it will be twenty thousand—especially if you gentlemen come along with another contract or two.”
“It looks as though we shall have to,” Cheshire admitted. “That nickel is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about.”
“I couldn’t sign an offer in his absence.”
“When could you bring him here, then, do you think? The contract would be worth having, you know. It would be worth your while trying to find out exactly where he is. I expect his wife would know.”
“She seems to be away,” Shipman confided. “There are half a dozen things we wanted to ask him about but there’s been no reply from his house, although we’ve telephoned three or four times.”
“He seems to be quite a mystery man,” Mallinson said drily.
“He does the business, anyhow,” the young man pointed out. “He’s been buying stocks of metals for two years now. We have several millions of money lying dead.”
“So if there were no war—” Cheshire began.
The visitor forgot himself.
“Of course there will be war,” he interrupted. “Why, I could tell you fellows something. I could tell the man who wrote this leader in the Daily Mail something about that. You know it yourselves, though. These conversations are just a piffling waste of time. You mark my words, it won’t be many weeks or many days either before you hear the hum of the big planes over London again.”
“As soon as that?” Cheshire exclaimed with every demonstration of uneasiness.
“I’ve got a little place myself in Surrey,” Shipman continued. “It’s right away from any factories—stands in a park of its own. All the same, I have had a shelter built there, a gas-proof one, too, large enough for the whole family and staff. The first time I hear that buzzing in the air I’m off.”
Mallinson coughed.
“How old are you, if it’s not a rude question, Mr. Shipman?”
“It doesn’t matter how old I am,” was the somewhat truculent reply. “I’m a principal in one of the largest firms of metal dealers in England. I won’t say the firm couldn’t get on without me but they don’t have to. I’m immune. So is Florestan, although he’s getting very near the age limit, anyhow.”
The Admiral sighed.
“Well, I congratulate you, Mr. Shipman. It seems as though this war would mean another great fortune for your firm.”
“We hope so.”
“If,” Cheshire went on, leaning a little forward, “you could possibly bring Mr. Florestan into this office within the next few days, I think I could get a contract signed for you for a large, a very large amount. We want nickel.”
The young man looked thoughtfully at the toes of his shoes.
“Florestan doesn’t like any of us others interfering with his business,” he confessed. “I doubt whether he would come even with me. Of course, I’ll try, if you like, as soon as we hear from him.”
Cheshire frowned for a moment or two in thoughtful silence.
“What would happen to your business, Mr. Shipman,” he asked abruptly, “if this wonderful representative of yours were not to return from one of these mysterious journeys?”
The visitor was taken aback.
“Not return?” he repeated. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“If he were to meet with an accident or some foreigner were to get hold of him and realise that he had become a very important feature in a portion of our rearmament scheme. Strange things in that way have happened, you know.”
The young man was visibly disturbed.
“You have not heard anything about him yourselves?” he asked suspiciously. “There has not been any trouble we don’t know about?”
“Not exactly trouble,” Cheshire reflected. “No, I cannot say that. Still, I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Shipman, it would be a great satisfaction to me to have five minutes’ conversation with Florestan.”
“About the nickel?”
“Yes, and also another matter altogether.”
“Won’t I do? I am a director of the firm, which, up to the present, Florestan is not.”
The Admiral shook his head.
“Your being a director of the firm, I am afraid, would not help in this matter. You see, Mr. Shipman, a rather queer thing has happened which came to my
knowledge by accident, and which seems to suggest that Florestan had concerns outside the business of Brown, Shipman & Co.”
The young man met Cheshire’s keen gaze without any signs of embarrassment.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he declared. “Frankly, I don’t. Seems to me you have got hold of a mare’s nest. If there’s a busier man in this world than Florestan, looking after the affairs of the firm, buying and selling, and studying metallurgy as he does night and day, I never met him. What time has he got to poke his nose into other concerns, I’d like to know? You’ve got him wrong. That’s a certainty.”
Cheshire stroked his chin thoughtfully.
“You may have read in the paper yesterday,” he said, “about a somewhat singular happening. A man was discovered in a dying state in a motor car outside St. George’s Hospital.”
“I read that all right,” Shipman admitted, “and Mr. Brown was saying something about it this morning. One paper hinted that the person in a dying state was someone of importance.”
Cheshire nodded.
“Well, the car, although there were some false numbers upon it, belonged to Florestan.”
There was no longer any doubt whatever but that the visitor was as innocent as he appeared. There was nothing feigned about his laugh of derision.
“Rubbish!” he exclaimed. “Florestan had his first afternoon off for weeks on Saturday and when he’s at home on Sunday he always plays golf near where he lives. You are not going to try and kid me that he is one of these gangster fellows?”
“It does seem ridiculous, doesn’t it?” Cheshire remarked. “But this much, at any rate, is the truth, Mr. Shipman. Florestan left his home in Kensington that night after having received a telephone call, took out the car without telling his wife or family, and disappeared. Now, have you seen him since Sunday night?”
“There was no need for me to see him. He left word that he would be going to Newcastle.”
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