Inspector Roberts, shutting up his notebook, ruminated on this.
“Well, sir—” he began hesitantly.
“Yes, yes; go on!”
“Well, sir, the point seems to be this. Either Mr. Hale disappeared of his own free will, or else he didn’t. It looks to me as though he didn’t.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“The personal effects,” said Roberts. “The watch and the notecase and the rest of it. If you were going to do a bunk somewhere, wouldn’t those be the very things you’d take with you? It isn’t as though he were trying to stage a fake suicide, or anything like that. One minute he’s comfortably in that office, with the young lady in his lap” — Roberts coughed, and looked swiftly away from their guest — “and the next he’s gone. That’s the part I don’t like.”
Colonel March grunted.
“And yet,” pursued Roberts, “if that pair have managed to make away with him, I can’t for the life of me see how or why. It’s like something out of Edgar Allan Poe.”
He broke off, for a curious expression crossed Colonel March’s face: it was as though he had been hit across the back of the head with a club.
“Good lord!” he muttered, in a hollow voice like a ghost. “I wonder if that could be it?”
“If it could be what?” demanded Lady Patricia.
“The name,” argued Colonel March, half to himself, “might be a coincidence. On the other hand, it might be most infernally apt: the seal of Wilson.” He turned to Lady Patricia. “Tell me. Can Francis Hale hold his liquor?”
She stared back at him.
“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about!”
“Yes, you do.” The colonel was irritable. “You told me a while ago that Hale, in one of his fits of being fed up — ahem! — in one of his more erratic moments, got tight at a Corporation banquet. What did he drink?”
His visitor set her jaw.
“Everything,” she said. “Beginning with cocktails and going all the way through to brandy. He simply sloshed it down. My father was frantic.”
“And how did it affect him? Hale, I mean?”
“They said he never made a better speech. He mixed up the pages in reading it; and, to anybody who really knew what the speech was about, it sounded horrible. But nobody noticed anything. They even seemed to like it: which was a mercy, because—”
Colonel March rubbed his hands together. He was utterly pleased and absorbed, with a smile which threatened to dislodge the pipe from his mouth. Then he went over and patted his guest on the shoulder.
“Go home,” he said. “Go home, take an aspirin, and stop worrying. Inspector Roberts and I are going to call on the Wilsons. I have every reason to believe I see a way out of the difficulty. In fact, I think I can promise it, now that I am able to guess—”
“Guess what?” demanded Lady Patricia, lifting the dog and shaking it at him.
“The racket of William Wilson,” said Colonel March.
A smooth-slipping lift took them up to the fourth floor of number 250A Piccadilly. A holy calm, as of a temple, pervaded these marble premises. The names William and Wilhelmina Wilson were printed on the ground-glass door in black lettering as discreet as a visiting-card. Motioning Inspector Roberts to precede him, Colonel March opened the door.
The waiting-room inside was softly lighted and carpeted. Magazines were scattered on a centre table for the convenience of those who waited; the point which racked Inspector Roberts’s wits was what in blazes they were supposed to be waiting for. And behind the reception-desk at the far end sat a small, sleek, trim young lady with red hair. She was glancing through a copy of a fashionable weekly.
“Miss Wilson?” said Colonel March.
“Yes?” said Miss Wilson with polite briskness.
“I should like to see your uncle.”
Colonel March laid his official card on the desk.
For a few seconds Miss Wilson looked at it gravely, and then raised her head. If the notoriously frigid Francis Hale had fallen for Miss Wilson, Inspector Roberts for one did not blame him; she had blue eyes of a deceptive demureness, and a mouth of the sort called generous.
But if Roberts expected to see any sign of guilt or even nervousness, he was disappointed. What flashed across her face was a smile of almost unholy glee, which she instantly corrected.
“My uncle has been rather expecting you,” she admitted. “Will you walk into our parlour?”
She led them through the secretary’s office — with its famous desk and swivel-chair — to a third office overlooking Piccadilly. Here, behind another flat-topped desk, sat a stout old gentleman with the manners of a cardinal. His glossy bald head was set off by a fringe of white hair which curved down to the back of his collar. He wore pince-nez, through which he was studying a pile of large photographs. He welcomed his visitors courteously.
“As my niece says,” he told them, “I have been rather expecting you.” His mouth tightened. “Please sit down. You had better remain too, Wilhelmina, my dear.”
“In that case,” said Colonel March, “I’ll come straight to the point. Of course, your name isn’t really Wilson?”
Mr. Wilson looked pained.
“Naturally not. It is a trade name. A” — he waved his hand — “a flight of poetic fancy, if you like.”
“Yes,” said Colonel March. “That’s what I thought, as soon as I guessed what your racket was.”
Now Mr. Wilson seemed more than pained; he seemed hurt.
“Racket!” he protested. “My dear sir! No, no, no, no! That is too much. Profession, if you like. Business, if you insist. Yes: say a business, and on a large scale. After all, I am a modern man who has simply seen a modern need for those who can afford it. I supply that need. And there you are.”
“Aren’t you afraid I’ll give you away?”
Mr. Wilson permitted himself a slight smile.
“Hardly. If you were to look in there” — he indicated a row of filing-cases along one wall — “and see the names of some of my more illustrious clients, I hardly think you would talk of exposure. There is one client, for instance... but we must not be indiscreet.” He returned to an old grievance. “Profession, yes. Business, yes. But racket? Really, now! On the contrary, I flatter myself that I am something of a public benefactor.”
Inspector Roberts was a patient man. As Colonel March’s assistant, he had to be. But there are limits to the human curiosity of even the best-trained subordinate.
“Sir,” he suddenly cried, “I can’t stand any more of this. Before I go completely off my chump, will you tell me what this is all about? What’s going on here? What is the fellow’s racket? And why should he call himself Wilson?”
All three of them looked at him— Mr. Wilson with a reproving cluck of the tongue, Miss Wilson with a smile, and Colonel March with blandness.
“He calls himself William Wilson,” replied Colonel March, “after the story of the same name. That story was written by Edgar Allan Poe, as you so helpfully suggested. You don’t remember the story?”
“No, sir, I can’t say I do.”
“William Wilson,” said Colonel March, “met himself.”
Roberts blinked.
“Met himself?”
“He met his own image,” explained Colonel March, settling back comfortably. “I rather admire Mr. Wilson here. He is the proprietor of a unique Agency. He provides doubles for eminent men and women in their unimportant public appearances, so that the real men can stop at home and get on with their work.”
Mr. Wilson leaned across the desk and spoke earnestly.
“You would be surprised,” he said, “at the call there is for our services. Consider the life of a public man I While he should be at work, custom demands that he make endless public appearances, none of them in the least an iota of good. He makes interminable tours of inspection; he lays corner-stones; he addresses mothers’ meetings. Few if any of the people he meets have ever seen him before, or will ever see him again. And a good double—!”