As Alan Gilmour set out for a long tramp through the streets, he was in two minds whether to drop a brief line to the detective withdrawing his agreement to help him in the Marquise Hotel, and asking for his promise of silence to be cancelled as far as Elizabeth Marlowe was concerned. And yet, if his relations with Tripp remained intimate, he realized that he might find himself in a position to give her the help she so obviously needed. . . . Yes, better let matters stand.
When Gilmour got back to the hotel a page-boy hurried across the foyer to him from the bureau with a telegram in his hand.
‘Mr. Alan Gilmour, sir?’
Thanking the boy, Gilmour took the wire and ripped open the orange-coloured envelope.
At first he thought there must be some mistake. The text of the message consisted of two words only—a man’s name:
And then he remembered. Though there was no signature, he knew the wire must be from Inspector Tripp. The police suspected that Lord John himself was living at the Marquise Hotel, and the name on this telegram could mean one thing only. Something had brought Paul Stainer to the notice of Scotland Yard, and Tripp was anxious to know Gilmour’s impression of the man.
With the waiter who attended to him at dinner he established friendly terms, and presently found that he couldn’t have hit upon a more suitable guide to the Marquise Hotel and those who frequented it. This waiter, a little chubby pink-faced man, had been with the ‘Marquise’ since it had opened its modernist doors of polished steel eighteen months before. And when Gilmour casually mentioned the name Stainer he knew it at once. The description that followed was almost voluble.
Mr. Paul Stainer was an old man, an American with business interests on the Continent, though nobody was quite certain what these interests were, and he appeared at the ‘Marquise’ every few weeks, seldom stopping for more than a night. He seemed to be well off, continued the waiter confidentially, for he always engaged a suite and brought his own valet. This valet was a queer, reserved man, kept himself strictly to himself, and didn’t seem to be of the usual manservant class. They had arrived from the Continent that day.
So much Gilmour learned between courses. And then the waiter nudged his arm. Mr. Stainer himself was coming into the restaurant, and Gilmour’s eyes went in curiosity to the door.
A bent old man, with a parchment-white face, was walking slowly forward with the aid of an ebony stick. He went to a table in a distant corner, and the head-waiter seemed to spring from nowhere and stand in attendance at his chair. Evidently, thought Gilmour, Mr. Stainer’s tips were in ratio with his reputation for wealth. At long range, he watched the old man with interest, and then inquired of the communicative waiter what kind of friends Mr. Stainer seemed to have round him in London—American perhaps?
‘Nobody, sir,’ replied the waiter. ‘I’ve never known him to speak to any one in this hotel. He isn’t what you might call an affable sort.’
This didn’t sound very promising; but after dinner Gilmour contrived to drop into a chair beside him in the lounge, and pick up the ebony stick which had fallen to the floor.
The old man gave an agreeable enough grunt of thanks, but the eyes below the shaggy white brows were forbidding. He grumbled about the temperature of the coffee and ordered a new supply, and while it was being brought Alan Gilmour leant over and politely offered him an evening paper.
‘Seen all I want of it, thanks,’ he jerked out in his thin voice, opening a book on recent excavations in the Tigris valley. He showed only the faintest trace of having an American accent. ‘Nothing but a lot of claptrap about sport and crime.’
‘They’re both rather prevalent, sir, these days,’ Gilmour pointed out. ‘As for crime, as Lord John is at liberty——’
‘Lord Fiddlesticks!’ exclaimed Mr. Stainer testily, adjusting his thick eyeglasses. ‘You can’t believe a word these newspapers say. Nothing but sensation-mongering. It’s demoralizing to the masses. Don’t you agree, sir?’
Without waiting for a reply, Mr. Stainer buried himself in his book, and Gilmour opened the despised evening newspaper.
As he cast an occasional glance at the old man round the edge of it, noting the white head that shook very slightly with some nervous affection, and the lined pale face and white parched hands, he was forced to the conclusion that Inspector Tripp had been mistaken. Mr. Stainer was eccentric, certainly, wrapped up in himself and his own narrow world; but how he could be even remotely connected with anything criminal was more than Gilmour could understand.
A page-boy approached with a message scribbled on a piece of paper. Laying down his book, the old man peered at it through his thick glasses and nodded.
As he reached out for his ebony stick, Gilmour could not help getting a glimpse of the writing on the paper. It was a telephone number, and the old man departed with his slow shuffling walk, evidently with the object of putting through a call.
The phone number stuck in Gilmour’s mind—Grafton 979—and an idea occurred to him. Rising to his feet, he sauntered across the lounge and made for the corridor where the concealed telephone-boxes stood. He instructed the exchange to put him through to ‘Inquiries,’ then gave the number Grafton 979, and asked to be furnished with the name and address of the subscriber.
Presently the answer came over the wire to him, and he hung up the receiver.
‘Now where the devil did I hear that name before?’ he asked himself, and then gave a low whistle of surprise. He had been outside the house that very morning with Inspector Tripp.
The person Mr. Paul Stainer had gone to ring up was Mrs. Prideaux of 37 Carbery Square.
CHAPTER XI
THE GREEN LANTERN
Hastily Alan Gilmour fumbled in his pocket-book for the note of Inspector Tripp’s private address, which the detective had given him, and then rang up his flat near the Houses of Parliament. Tripp was out, but was expected back any moment; and since the person who answered the telephone described herself as his housekeeper, Gilmour dictated a brief message telling of his contact with Mr. Paul Stainer and its rather unexpected outcome, adding that he would get in touch with the detective later on in the evening.
Even stranger coincidences happen in real life than in fiction, he told himself, and the fact that Mr. Stainer happened to be an acquaintance of Mrs. Prideaux might be one of them. But somehow he thought that there was some stronger link in it than mere chance could have forged. Tripp would not have sent him the telegram without good reason, and he walked back to the lounge with his interest in Paul Stainer considerably stimulated.
But though he waited for nearly an hour the old American did not return, and Gilmour wondered if it would be a good idea to ring up Tripp again. He went up to his bedroom for a pipe and tobacco, deciding to make the call from the telephone instrument there. But upstairs a thing happened which drove Tripp and Paul Stainer from his thoughts. Putting his hand into the pocket of the jacket he had worn that day, he pulled out the letter Elizabeth Marlowe had asked him to send off for her.