from detective fiction.
“When did you last see the dece–your cousin, I mean?”
“Never seen her,” responded Mr. Hersheimmer.
“What?” demanded Tommy, astonished.
Hersheimmer turned to him.
“No, sir. As I said before, my father and her mother were brother and
sister, just as you might be”–Tommy did not correct this view of their
relationship–“but they didn’t always get on together. And when my aunt made up
her mind to marry Amos Finn, who was a poor school teacher out West, my father
was just mad! Said if he made his pile, as he seemed in a fair way to do, she’d
never see a cent of it. Well, the upshot was that Aunt Jane went out West and
we never heard from her again.
“The old man DID pile it up. He went into oil, and he went into steel, and
he played a bit with railroads, and I can tell you he made Wall Street sit up!”
He paused. “Then he died–last fall–and I got the dollars. Well, would you
believe it, my conscience got busy! Kept knocking me up and saying: What
abour{sic} your Aunt Jane, way out West? It worried me some. You see, I figured
it out that Amos Finn would never make good. He wasn’t the sort. End of it was,
I hired a man to hunt her down. Result, she was dead, and Amos Finn was dead,
but they’d left a daughter–Jane–who’d been torpedoed in the Lusitania on her
way to Paris. She was saved all right, but they didn’t seem able to hear of her
over this side. I guessed they weren’t hustling any, so I thought I’d come along
over, and speed things up. I phoned Scotland Yard and the Admiralty first
thing. The Admiralty rather choked me off, but Scotland Yard were very
civil–said they would make inquiries, even sent a man round this morning to get
her photograph. I’m off to Paris to-morrow, just to see what the Prefecture is
doing. I guess if I go to and fro hustling them, they ought to get busy!”
The energy of Mr. Hersheimmer was tremendous. They bowed before it.
“But say now,” he ended, “you’re not after her for anything? Contempt of
court, or something British? A proud-spirited young American girl might find
your rules and regulations in war time rather irksome, and get up against it.
If that’s the case, and there’s such a thing as graft in this country, I’ll buy
her off.”
Tuppence reassured him.
“That’s good. Then we can work together. What about some lunch? Shall we
have it up here, or go down to the restaurant?”
Tuppence expressed a preference for the latter, and Julius bowed to her
decision.
Oysters had just given place to Sole Colbert when a card was brought to
Hersheimmer.
“Inspector Japp, C.I.D. Scotland Yard again. Another man this time. What
does he expect I can tell him that I didn’t tell the first chap? I hope they
haven’t lost that photograph. That Western photographer’s place was burned down
and all his negatives destroyed–this is the only copy in existence. I got it
from the principal of the college there.”
An unformulated dread swept over Tuppence.
“You–you don’t know the name of the man who came this morning?”
“Yes, I do. No, I don’t. Half a second. It was on his card. Oh, I know!
Inspector Brown. Quiet, unassuming sort of chap.”
CHAPTER VI
A PLAN OF CAMPAIGN
A veil might with profit be drawn over the events of the next half-hour.
Suffice it to say that no such person as “Inspector Brown” was known to Scotland
Yard. The photograph of Jane Finn, which would have been of the utmost value to
the police in tracing her, was lost beyond recovery. Once again “Mr. Brown” had
triumphed.
The immediate result of this set back was to effect a rapprochement between
Julius Hersheimmer and the Young Adventurers. All barriers went down with a
crash, and Tommy and Tuppence felt they had known the young American all their
lives. They abandoned the discreet reticence of “private inquiry agents,” and
revealed to him the whole history of the joint venture, whereat the young man
declared himself “tickled to death.”