“Waterloo?” frowned Tuppence.
“Why, yes. Didn’t he tell you?”
“I haven’t seen him either,” replied Tuppence impatiently. “Go on about
Waterloo. What were you doing there?”
“He gave me a call. Over the phone. Told me to get a move on, and hustle.
Said he was trailing two crooks.”
“Oh!” said Tuppence, her eyes opening. “I see. Go on.”
“I hurried along right away. Beresford was there. He pointed out the
crooks. The big one was mine, the guy you bluffed. Tommy shoved a ticket into
my hand and told me to get aboard the cars. He was going to sleuth the other
crook.” Julius paused. “I thought for sure you’d know all this.”
“Julius,” said Tuppence firmly, “stop walking up and down. It makes me
giddy. Sit down in that armchair, and tell me the whole story with as few fancy
turns of speech as possible.”
Mr. Hersheimmer obeyed.
“Sure,” he said. “Where shall I begin?”
“Where you left off. At Waterloo.”
“Well,” began Julius, “I got into one of your dear old-fashioned
first-class British compartments. The train was just off. First thing I knew a
guard came along and informed me mighty politely that I wasn’t in a
smoking-carriage. I handed him out half a dollar, and that settled that. I did a
bit of prospecting along the corridor to the next coach. Whittington was there
right enough. When I saw the skunk, with his big sleek fat face, and thought of
poor little Jane in his clutches, I felt real mad that I hadn’t got a gun with
me. I’d have tickled him up some.
“We got to Bournemouth all right. Whittington took a cab and gave the name
of an hotel. I did likewise, and we drove up within three minutes of each
other. He hired a room, and I hired one too. So far it was all plain sailing.
He hadn’t the remotest notion that anyone was on to him. Well, he just sat
around in the hotel lounge, reading the papers and so on, till it was time for
dinner. He didn’t hurry any over that either.
“I began to think that there was nothing doing, that he’d just come on the
trip for his health, but I remembered that he hadn’t changed for dinner, though
it was by way of being a slap-up hotel, so it seemed likely enough that he’d be
going out on his real business afterwards.
“Sure enough, about nine o’clock, so he did. Took a car across the
town–mighty pretty place by the way, I guess I’ll take Jane there for a spell
when I find her–and then paid it off and struck out along those pine-woods on
the top of the cliff. I was there too, you understand. We walked, maybe, for
half an hour. There’s a lot of villas all the way along, but by degrees they
seemed to get more and more thinned out, and in the end we got to one that
seemed the last of the bunch. Big house it was, with a lot of piny grounds
around it.
“It was a pretty black night, and the carriage drive up to the house was
dark as pitch. I could hear him ahead, though I couldn’t see him. I had to walk
carefully in case he might get on to it that he was being followed. I turned a
curve and I was just in time to see him ring the bell and get admitted to the
house. I just stopped where I was. It was beginning to rain, and I was soon
pretty near soaked through. Also, it was almighty cold.
“Whittington didn’t come out again, and by and by I got kind of restive,
and began to mouch around. All the ground floor windows were shuttered tight,
but upstairs, on the first floor (it was a two-storied house) I noticed a window
with a light burning and the curtains not drawn.
“Now, just opposite to that window, there was a tree growing. It was about
thirty foot away from the house, maybe, and I sort of got it into my head that,
if I climbed up that tree, I’d very likely be able to see into that room. Of