by Molly Thynne
Constantine laughed.
“Nonsense, my dear fellow,” he exclaimed. “As Arkwright says, the porter won’t give us away, and, without him, Civita will never trace the things to this flat. In addition to that, they won’t be here if he does trace them. In half an hour’s time they’ll be on their way to the Yard. Meanwhile, a thousand thanks to you and your friend for the help you’ve given us to-day. If Arkwright here had any sense he’d go to you for some lessons!”
“Very glad to see him at any time,” smiled Nakano as the two Japanese bowed their way out.
“We can rely on their discretion, I suppose?” said Arkwright when they had gone.
“Absolutely,” was Constantine’s answer. “Nakano’s one of the best little fellows in the world, and I’ve a strong suspicion that he doesn’t like Civita. But I agree with him that you’ll do well to act quickly.”
“You’re right there. Before I go, here’s something that may interest you. I’ve been through Meger’s effects and I’ve found a key. It was in the inner compartment of his purse, and, from the look of it, it belongs to a safe-deposit. If the deposit’s in England we’ll soon trace it, though, of course, it may belong to some Belgian firm. There’s just a chance that we may find further evidence relating to the drug business if we do.”
“There’s also a chance he may have put what he knew about Civita into writing,” suggested Constantine. “It would strengthen his hold against him. There’s no doubt in my mind now that Meger impersonated Anthony and afterwards ransacked his room, and I think we may take it that he got out of hand in some way and became a menace to Civita. Either he became dangerously garrulous in his cups, or he deliberately threatened him. In any case, Civita’s motive for getting rid of him is clear enough now.”
“And his motive for the Anthony murder,” added Arkwright. “Anthony’s daughter must have known all about the traffic in drugs, and she, no doubt, told her father that he had changed his name and was carrying it on in London. If the old man had exposed him it would have meant the end of everything for Civita.”
Constantine nodded.
“And from what one knows of Anthony,” he said, “his first impulse on reaching London would be to see Civita and threaten him with exposure. That is the only thing that puzzles me. Why he waited so long after his daughter’s death before taking action. He must have returned from Brighton determined to put an end to the man’s activities once for all. Why did he delay until now?”
“I think I can explain that,” said Arkwright. “We’ve been looking up Civita’s movements for the past year, in the hope of tracing his agents over here. So far as I can remember, he was in Italy from the middle of January to somewhere about the twentieth of February. Anthony, if he had tried to see him on his return from Brighton, would have found him away. He may not have learned that he was back until about a couple of weeks ago.”
He began to pack up his exhibits.
“I’ll take these with me,” he concluded, “and see about the warrant. I’ll let you know our plans, but we’ll arrest him to-night, and at his flat if we can. You deserve a box seat for this, sir.”
Constantine shook his head.
“This is where I make my bow,” he said firmly. “Good luck to you. Come and see me when it’s over, and, above all, be careful of Civita. He’ll keep his wits about him till the bitter end, and he’ll stick at nothing now.”
Arkwright grinned as he made for the door.
“He’ll find his activities severely curtailed in future,” he retorted.
CHAPTER XV
CONSTANTINE, left alone, felt himself drifting slowly but inevitably into that mood of depression that invariably overcame him when the excitement of the pursuit was over and the capture assured. Now, as usual, he recoiled at the thought of the end he had himself helped to bring about. He was filled with an utter distaste for the whole business, and felt nothing but disgust with himself for the part he had taken in it.
The whole thing was over, he told himself, as far as he was concerned, and he wanted only to forget it.
With that end in view he pulled a table in front of the fire and got out the chessmen he had neglected since his return from abroad. There were a dozen people, chess maniacs like himself, from whom he could take his choice and who would come gladly in response to the telephone, but when Manners came in bearing the tea-tray he found his master idly fingering the pieces, his eyes fixed on the dying fire.
“It’s turned very chilly, sir,” he said with a hint of reproach in his voice as he stirred the coals into life again.
Constantine roused himself.
“Did I let it go out, Manners?” he apologized. “I’m sorry. I suppose the inspector told you that he was getting a warrant for Mr. Civita’s arrest?”
No one, looking at Manners, would have suspected that he was consumed with an almost unbearable curiosity as to the turn events were taking, but Constantine knew that only a life’s training prevented him from asking the question that was trembling on his lips.
“He did say that he was arresting Mr. Anthony’s murderer to-night, sir,” he admitted.
“Didn’t he tell you his name?”
“He omitted to mention it, sir,” said Manners demurely.
“And you didn’t ask?”
Manners’s back stiffened slightly.
“It wasn’t my place, sir.”
Constantine pulled himself upright in his chair and stared at him.
“You’re a marvel, Manners,” he said. “After all, you did your share and you’re entitled to hear the whole story.”
He told him briefly what was taking place.
“You were right about Binns, I think,” he concluded. “There’s no reason to doubt that he was speaking the truth. Either Civita or Meger must have dropped that key in the stalls some time on the Saturday, though why either of them should have gone to the Parthenon I fail to see.”
“A very incriminating thing to have about one, sir, a key like that,” suggested Manners, “and not easy to get rid of. A dark cinema would be as convenient a place as any.”
“But why the Parthenon?”
“Seeing that he’d staged the murder there, as it were, to begin with, the key would act as another link if it was found. It’s very much what I should do myself, sir, in his place,” said Manners, his rigidly respectable features lit up with a faint glow, possibly indicative of latent criminal tendencies.
Constantine regarded him with interest.
“Would you, now?” he remarked. “No doubt you’re right.”
Then, suddenly making up his mind:
“Stoke up the fire well. I’m going out.”
Manners opened his mouth, shut it again, hesitated, then blurted out:
“You’re not going to the Trastevere, sir?”
Constantine glanced at him quizzically.
“Putting yourself in Civita’s place, do you consider the Trastevere dangerous?” he asked.
But Manners took the question in all seriousness.
“I shouldn’t allow myself to be taken alive,” he announced decisively, “and, if I had a revolver, I should use it. I shouldn’t care to be in the inspector’s shoes to-night, sir.”
The amusement faded from Constantine’s face. Manners had voiced his own misgivings.
“You needn’t worry, Manners,” he said. “Now that I know the use the place has been put to I don’t propose to put a foot inside it again.”
Manners said nothing, but his relief was evident as he adjusted the silver tray more conveniently at his master’s elbow and noiselessly withdrew.
Constantine poured himself out a cup of tea and renewed his contemplation of the fire. Civita, bland and tactful, the perfect host, luxuriating in his own success, he had known, and, in a way, admired, but Civita, cornered, he could only imagine, and he had a very shrewd idea of what he would be like. There had always been a disquieting suggestion of latent power behind the man’s suave manner, and he knew him now to be ruth
less. Until he heard Arkwright’s voice on the telephone he would be unable to rest, and he realized that inaction would only serve to increase his anxiety. There could be no news for at least a couple of hours, and he made up his mind to spend them at his club, where he would be within call if he were needed.
The telephone shrilled loudly in the hall, and he heard the deliberate tread of Manners as he went to answer it.
It was inconceivable that Arkwright should have any news for him yet, but with the inconsistency bred of nervousness, he rose expectantly to his feet and went to the door.
Manners, in the act of putting down the receiver, turned as he opened it.
“A police officer, speaking for Inspector Arkwright, sir,” he announced. “There has been a hitch. Will you meet the inspector outside Mr. Civita’s flat at seven o’clock?”
Constantine glanced at his watch. It was almost six-thirty.
“Say I will be there,” he said.
Manners turned once more to the telephone.
“A police car will call for you at six-thirty, sir,” he reported, when he had given the message.
Constantine nodded absently and went back into his room to fill his cigarette-case, his mind at work on Arkwright’s rather cryptic message. Why this appointment outside the flat when he had made it clear that he did not wish to be present when Arkwright served his warrant? Had Civita taken the law into his own hands and staged yet another tragedy in his rooms? This possibility had been at the back of Constantine’s mind all the evening. Civita, once he realized the seriousness of the charge against him, was not of the type to allow himself to be taken alive. He shrugged his shoulders. He would know soon enough, but he wished this abominable evening were over.
He stepped out of his front door into a gentle drizzle. The sky was black overhead and the street shrouded in darkness. He could make out the shadowy body of the police car behind the dazzling swath of light cut by its headlights.
The driver leaned outwards from his seat and opened the door. Constantine stepped in. The car leaped forward and swung round the corner.
He leaned back and lighted a cigarette, too absorbed in his thoughts to notice more than the inevitable delay as the car was held up in Victoria Street, and he was taken by surprise when it drew up smoothly beside the kerb. The driver climbed out of his seat and opened the door. As he did so Constantine noticed that the cigarette he had been smoking was not yet half consumed, and realized that the car must have travelled at a terrific pace to have reached Civita’s flat in the time. There was some advantage to be gained by travelling with the police, he reflected idly, as he gathered himself together and prepared to alight.
“Is the inspector there?” he asked, as he rose to his feet.
Bent almost double to clear the low doorway, he was caught utterly at a disadvantage. Before he could even cry out his wrists had been seized, one arm twisted agonizingly behind him, and he found himself on his knees on the floor of the car, his face rammed suffocatingly into the seat.
He tried to raise his head, only to have it thrust down again with a force that brought his helplessness home to him, and for the next minute or so his whole energy was concentrated on the effort of breathing. By working his head sideways he managed to get a little air into his lungs, but by the time his assailant had finished tying his hands and turned him roughly on to his back his ears were singing and he was in no condition to struggle against the folded handkerchief that was jammed into his mouth and kept in place by scarf tied behind his head.
His eyes, at least, were free and though in the darkness of the interior of the car he could catch no glimpse of the man’s face, he could see, through the open door, the bushes and railings of a square faintly illuminated by the light of the nearest street lamp.
The door slammed and the driver climbed back into his seat.
“A pretty neat job for a man working single-handed,” Constantine reflected bitterly as the car started once more with a jerk that threw his weight on to his trussed hands and caused him acute agony until he was able to adjust himself to the motion. He managed to work himself forward and peer out of the window. The driver was keeping to the side streets, and it was difficult in the darkness to recognize the rows of small shops and houses as they flashed by, but the Brompton Road, as they crossed it, was unmistakable, and when they drew up at last before the door of a small garage he knew he was in a mews and not far from Civita’s flat.
The driver switched off the lights of the car and rolled back the garage door, then he returned to the car, lifted Constantine as easily as though he were a baby and carried him into the garage.
Dumping him on the floor, he tied his ankles securely together with a thin cord, bent over him for a couple of minutes, then departed, leaving him lying in the empty garage, the door closed, listening to the purr of the retreating car.
Constantine’s first instinct was to get his hands free, but he soon discovered that his assailant, though swift, was very thorough. Finding that his efforts to reach his ankles only increased the pain in his wrists, he desisted and gave his mind to the problem of working off the scarf round his mouth. But here again he was baffled, and, realizing at last that his struggles only increased, rather than lessened, the tightness of his bonds, he gave up his efforts and confined himself to rolling painfully across the dirty floor until he had reached a position in which he could prop his back against the wall and get what little comfort was possible.
His arms ached atrociously, and the discomfort of the gag in his mouth made thinking difficult, but as his anger abated his mind became clearer, and slowly the absurdity of the situation began to dawn on him. For a moment he derived a certain bitter amusement from the contemplation of himself, trussed like a chicken, in a building probably barely a stone’s throw from the man who had been detailed to watch his captor. That his assailant was Civita himself he had little doubt, though he had barely set eyes on him, so quickly and neatly had he done his job. He knew that he was in the neighbourhood of Civita’s flat, and inferred that this was the lock-up garage in which he knew he housed his car. It seemed fairly obvious that he intended him no serious harm, since, had he done so, an easier and far safer way to have attained his purpose would have been to have knocked him out or even killed him. What that purpose was remained a mystery. Before leaving the garage he had run his hands through his victim’s pockets, but whether he had taken anything Constantine was not in a position to find out.
He shifted uneasily, trying to find a way to ease the increasing agony of the cramp in his arms, and became aware of a tearing draught coming from underneath the ill-fitting door of the garage, adding his permanent bugbear, the dread of rheumatism, to his already gloomy thoughts. Silently he cursed the inefficiency of the detective who had the Italian under observation. If this was Civita’s doing, he must have given the man the slip in some way, and it was beginning to look now as if Arkwright was going to lose his man.
A long shiver ran through his body. The draught from the door had increased wickedly and was now blowing on his unprotected head. Puzzled, he raised his eyes, and for the first time noticed the faint grey oblong of a skylight in the roof of the garage. The draught, he realized, must be coming from this.
As he stared at it a shaft of light shot suddenly from above, blinding him for a second as it rested on his face, then swept the floor of the garage before vanishing as abruptly as it had come. A voice, low and sibilant, reached him from the skylight.
“Doctor Constantine!”
He raised himself as best he could and strained his eyes, but the night outside was too dark for him to see more than a faint shadow against the sky. The light materialized once more, hovered over him, and was switched off.
“It is all right. I am coming,” sounded softly from above, followed by a gentle thud on the floor of the garage. The torch shone again, revealing a coil of thin rope, down which a small, thick-set figure slid with the swiftness and neatness of a trained gymnast. It advanced on Consta
ntine, the light of the torch, operated from above, following it unerringly.
Constantine’s eyes haggard and staring above the tightly bound scarf, lit up with recognition.
“I will untie these first,” said the little man gently.
He bent over Constantine’s feet, while their owner, suffering tortures of unassuaged curiosity, watched him in enforced silence. The gag at last removed, he burst into speech.
“Nakano!” he exclaimed. “Bless you for this! But how did you get here?”
Mr. Nakano’s lips parted in the inevitable smile.
“The police inspector said that he was going to arrest Mr. Civita to-night. Mr. Civita is a very clever man, cleverer than the inspector thinks. We discuss, my friend and I, and say, supposing Mr. Civita finds that these curtains that were so important have gone and learns that Mr. Constantine has taken them? What will he do? Just for protection I think I will watch till this arrest is over. So I wait to-night outside Doctor Constantine’s house.”
With the help of the Japanese, Constantine struggled to his feet. He held out his hand.
“I don’t know how to thank you, Nakano,” he said. “But why on earth didn’t you come into the flat?”
Nakano shook his head.
“Should I be here now,” he queried, “if I had been with you in your room? It was more useful outside. You must excuse that I was so long in coming, but I could not open the door and had to telephone for Naito and a ladder.”
Constantine stared at him in amazement. Nakano caught his eye and answered with a gleam of white teeth:
“It is very simple. Naito was waiting, in case I need him, and he lodges with a builder. He brought the ladder in his car.”
As he spoke the ladder made its rather wavering entrance on the scene, lowered by the other Japanese through the skylight. Nakano received it and steadied it. A few minutes later Constantine, stiff and aching, but otherwise none the worse for this adventure, was standing on the flat roof of the garage.
“We descend now,” whispered Nakano. “Wait, I will see.”
