“A peppermint frappé? “he asked, and added, rather proud of what he thought to be a humorous phrase, “Can do?”
“I should think nothing is more unlikely,” Ricardo returned as he rang the bell. “Thompson, could yon manage a peppermint frappé at this hour?”
Thompson came as near to a smile as his code of manners permitted.
“Monsieur asked for one once some years ago and caught us at a disadvantage. A few moments, monsieur.”
So Hanaud sipped his peppermint frappé and smoked his black cigarettes, whilst Ricardo reflected on the oddities of friendship.
Suddenly Hanaud smiled: “You shall tell me what you saw when you were kind enough to search for the diary I had not left in my topcoat.”
Ricardo made a grimace. “It was not pleasant.”
“The Miss Agatha, then?”
“Yes.”
Ricardo described her shuddering in horror with the broken drawer open at her side and the torn pieces of a card upon her lap.
“She swept them into the wastepaper basket,” he continued, “and after I was in the hall she turned out the lights and went up to bed.”
“Dropped them—just like that—in the wastepaper basket? “ Hanaud mused, “and turned out the lights.”
“But that didn’t baffle me,” cried Mr. Ricardo triumphantly. “I knew Miss Agatha might perhaps hear the snap of the switch if I turned the lights on, so I didn’t touch it. I knew she might wonder if a chair or a table were overturned, so I slipped like an eel between them”; and Mr. Ricardo, to make this piece of sleuthing as admirable and vivid to Hanaud as it was to himself, twisted and slid towards the table; and undoubtedly Hanaud did admire—little cries of admiration broke from him. He had hands raised ready to applaud. Mr. Ricardo loved that moment, and to complete the movement with a most dramatic finish, he plunged his hand into his trouser pocket and flung the two pieces of pasteboard below Hanaud’s eyes upon the table.
Well, where were the words of praise? Or, if not of praise, of thanks, for a most difficult example of the detective’s art? Mr. Ricardo opened his eyes. He had closed them as he had flung the pasteboard fragments—and he saw Hanaud staring at those fragments in consternation.
“You picked them out of the tub?” he said quietly.
“Of course. Wasn’t I right?”
“No, my friend.”
“But there was a word written on the card.”
“I read it when Septimus jerked open the drawer.”
“I am sorry if I did wrong,” said Mr. Ricardo tartly. Hanaud was swift to reassure his friend. It was not that Mr. Ricardo had done wrong. No, no! On the contrary! He had done too much right. Miss Agatha’s agitations, they were suggestive, and described with a particularity only to be found in a master—and with an economy, too—it is so rare to use few words when many would do. It did not really matter so much that he had removed the two pieces of card.
“In any case the servants would have emptied them into the dustbin in the morning,” said Ricardo, once more smiling.
“No, no.”
The contradiction came like a slap in the face.
“Why no, no?”
“Because,” said Hanaud sweetly, “at this moment, perhaps, or perhaps in an hour or in two hours, Agatha will wake uneasy. And in a little while she will understand why she is uneasy. That torn card—it should be burnt. She will creep down in the dark, with a torch, perhaps—and the pieces—they have gone! Oh, in the long run it does not matter. Very likely she will, think, ‘Oh, it is that inquisitive one from France, he was at the elbow of Septimus,’ and she will be more discreet. But . . . ”
“But what?” Mr Ricardo demanded impatiently
Hanaud finished his peppermint and stubbed out his cigarette. “I should not be quick to destroy those two pieces of card,” he replied slowly. “It is for you, of course, to say. . . . For me, I wait upon the exquisite Madame Horbury to-morrow morning and in the afternoon I return to Paris. But, my friend, if I were you, I should lock them up. One never knows.”
He stood up and, with a complete change of tone, added: “We go to bed, no, yes? We will not lose the sleep? We meet at the luncheon, when I say to you farewell. What I owe to you!” and Hanaud betook himself upstairs.
Mr. Ricardo took the ashtray on which Hanaud’s cigarette still smouldered and emptied it into the fire-place. As he replaced it on the table, he saw the torn pieces of the card; and it flashed across his thoughts that he had never read the word written across them.
He fitted them together. It was a word, of course, but it was more—a name. And as Mr. Ricardo read the name he was seized with a discomfort, the same sort of discomfort as had seized upon Hanaud in the motor car. Fear, in other words. The fear a man might have as he looked down into a pit. For the name written upon the card was—Horbury—with an initial in front of it—D—yes, of course, D. Mr. Ricardo was half inclined to let those two pieces of card follow the cigarette ash into the fire. But in his mind’s eye he saw Hanaud’s face again, serious and alarmed. He locked the pieces safely in a drawer of his private desk.