The front door of the house being stout and the ground-floor window barred, the easiest way in was by the upper window. Raffles must now be dealing with its catch. And now he must be cautiously raising the window. And by now, surely, he must be ducking into the room there.
Not a sound could I hear. All was still.
From here at the Finch Court entry, I peered out into Southampton Row. To left and to right the streetlamps, in twin lines, burned wanly in dim, diminishing perspective. Nothing else was to be seen. The throb of the pulse in my ears measured the passing minutes — until, at long last, Raffles joined me, and we walked away from there.
All he told me, as I began to breathe normally again, was that George H. Jay had not departed for foreign climes.
“Anything but,” said Raffles.
Something seemed to be amusing him as we walked on. Near the British Museum a late-cruising hansom took us up. Raffles paid off the cabbie in Chelsea. We walked along the King’s Road to Ivor Kern’s antiques shop. Raffles jerked our signal on the bellpull. Pale of face, Kern opened the door to us. He was in his nightshirt and dressing-gown, with a candlestick in his hand. We went upstairs to his sitting-room, where he checked that the window blinds were down before he lighted the gas, pinched out the candle, turned inquiringly to Raffles.
Raffles said, “When Diana handed Jay the envelope containing her £5000, Jay checked the contents, marked the envelope Rivenhurst, gave her a receipt, and put the envelope into his safe. With my envelope, which he marked Mr. Raffles, he followed the same procedure. Diana said she had some other business to discuss with Mr. Jay, so I left them to it. When I opened that safe tonight, both envelopes were there.”
“Thank God for that!” Kern and I said, together.
“But while one envelope had retained its thickness,” said Raffles, “the other was unaccountably thin.”
“Which?” Kern said hoarsely.
“Diana’s was the thin one,” said Raffles. “I looked in it to see why. It contained only the receipt Jay had given her. She wouldn’t have surrendered that receipt unless, after I had left, she had received her money back from Jay. In short, she doesn’t trust him with her money.” A wicked vivacity danced in Raffles’ eyes. “My prudent Diana! She’d drawn that £5000 out of her bank account, and I’ve no doubt that, immediately the money had served her purpose, she put it back into her bank account again.”
“But what about my money?” Kern croaked.
“In the circumstances, Ivor,” said Raffles, “I felt I’d be justified in following Diana’s example. She’d taken prudent steps to safeguard her money, so I took similar steps to safeguard yours.” Raffles laid a fat envelope on the table. “There’s your money, Ivor — intact. And I’m now out of your debt, right?”
“Right!”
“And I’m also, of course,” said A. J. Raffles pleasantly, “still in possession of Mr. George Jay’s receipt for £5000 which I entrusted to him for safekeeping.”
Just before ten, next morning, as I was finishing breakfast in my Mount Street flat, Raffles walked in on me.
“’Morning, Bunny,” he said, helping himself to a cup of coffee. “I’ve just had another note from Kern, enclosing a telegram from his snoop, who followed George H. Jay to Newhaven. Jay spent the night at a country mansion near Newhaven and caught the 9:30 train back to London this morning. He should be arriving within an hour or so, and will probably take a cab to his office.”
“When he opens his safe,” I said uneasily, “he’ll send for the police!”
“That’s the one thing he certainly won’t do, Bunny. He’s a highly fee’d, confidential agent to the aristocracy. There are many documents, no doubt extremely private, in his safe. If his aristocratic clients were to read in the newspapers that Mr. George H. Jay’s safe has been robbed, there’d be a number of cerebral strokes suffered by the landed gentry — and Mr. Jay would never be trusted again. Now, come on,” said Raffles. “You’ve been a great help in this matter, so far. You might as well see it through. If Mr. Jay doesn’t have a stroke himself when he opens his safe presently, I imagine he’ll rush to the Cavendish Hotel to report to his client, Diana. Then either he, or perhaps both of them, will come to the Albany to break the shattering news to me that my £5000 has been stolen. Then it’ll be my turn to have a stroke. Come on!”
With quivering nerves, I walked round with Raffles, through Berkeley Square, to Piccadilly and the Albany. In his living-room, I could not keep my eyes from wandering repeatedly to the clock on his mantelpiece. The hands seemed to me to move with a glacierlike deliberation. When at last a knock sounded on the door, I almost dropped the bound volume of Punch I was pretending to look at.
“Come in,” called Raffles, who was pouring us each a glass of sherry.
It was the hall porter who opened the door, announcing, “Mrs. Diana Rivenhurst and Mr. George H. Jay to see you, Mr. Raffles.”
“Thank you, Bellairs,” said Raffles. “Why, Diana, this is a happy surprise! And Mr. Jay, too? May I introduce Mr. Manders, an old friend and schoolfellow of mine? Do sit down. We were about to have a sherry. You’ll join us, of course.”
“The matter my client and I have come about, Mr. Raffles,” said Jay, tall and commanding of presence, but redder than usual in the face, “is — well, private.”
“Oh, Bunny Manders is the soul of discretion,” said Raffles. “Diana, you like your sherry medium dry — I remember that, from Winchcombe Glebe. And you, Mr. Jay?”
“Immaterial,” said the ex-Hussar. He fingered his close-clipped, slightly greying moustache. “Mr. Raffles, I had occasion yesterday to visit a client at his country home in Sussex. We dined, discussed our business, I spent the night at his home, and returned to London this morning. On going to my office, I discovered that my safe had been rifled. As you know, there were in it two envelopes belonging, respectively, to Mrs. Rivenhurst and yourself, and entrusted to my safekeeping, for a period of seven days, in connection with a — a joint arrangement, of a — highly personal nature between the two of you. Mr. Raffles, I have to tell you, with profound regret, that one of those envelopes has vanished.”
“One?” said Raffles.
“Arthur,” Diana murmured, her eyes downcast to her gloves as she removed them, plucking at one finger at a time, “the intruder — somehow — quite overlooked my envelope. Isn’t that so, Mr. Jay?”
“That is so,” muttered the agent to the aristocracy, going very red indeed — so red, in fact, that I realised he was unaccustomed to lying and had forced himself to do so only because his interest in his client, Diana, was a deeply personal one, as I had suspected all along.
He was covering up for her. He swallowed hard.
“Arthur,” Diana said to Raffles, “this has been a terrible shock to me. How much more so it must be to you!”
Raffles drew in his breath, deeply.
“It’s a bit of a shock, certainly,” he admitted. “Still, I’m relieved to hear that you’ve suffered no loss, Diana. As for my five thousand — well, I imagine it’s covered by Mr. Jay’s insurance. Which reminds me, Mr. Jay — your insurance company will probably want to see the receipt you gave me.” Raffles opened a drawer of his writing-table. “I think I put it—”
“Mr. Raffles,” George H. Jay said heavily, “I carry normal insurance on 5 Finch Court, of course, but the policy, like the policies of most insurance companies, insures everything — except money.”