Chapter Thirty One. I am again Perplexed.

As we spoke, Antonio entered, and handed his master a note, which, on reading, he handed in turn to Kirk.

“You’ll go, I suppose?” he asked the Professor.

“I think so,” was Greer’s reply. “I’ll cross to-night. But if I go, I must first run into the City to see Meyrick,” and he glanced at his watch, exclaiming, “By Jove! I must be off!” Then, turning to Antonio, he ordered a taxi.

“I hope, Mr Holford,” he said, turning to me, “I hope that I’ve now convinced you that I’m no impostor, and that I am actually Professor Ernest Greer in the flesh.”

“You have,” I admitted; “there are, however, several points which are not yet clear to me.”

“My good friend Kirk, here, will make them clear, I’m sure,” he said. “The only service I beg of you is that of complete and absolute silence. It was the German’s life or mine. He attacked me murderously with a knife, and what I did was—God knows!—only in self-defence. Yet—yet the public must know nothing. It is for fear of you, that you might learn the truth and expose the affair to the Press, that I have lived in perpetual anxiety, travelling constantly from place to place, in the hope that you would still regard me as the impostor. While you believed that, I had nothing to fear. My daughter has, indeed, threatened to commit suicide if the public are told that I killed the man who tried to steal my secret. To her, your silence means love and life!”

“Yes, Mr Holford,” declared the girl anxiously; “Leonard does not know the truth. If he did, he would surely discard me as the daughter of a murderer. Indeed, I could never again hold up my head. I believe implicitly in my dear father’s version of the affair—yet his enemies surely would not! Will you, at least, give me your promise?” she implored.

I hesitated. I was not altogether clear upon many points.

“When I have seen my wife and consulted with her I will give you an answer, Miss Greer,” I said. “I admit that what I have learnt to-day has held me in surprise and removed many doubts from my mind.”

Kirk was explaining how the tiny golden doll, the little charm which had been discovered after the tragedy, had been traced through the well-known jeweller in Bond Street who made it, to the Professor as purchaser; and how Greer had admitted buying it for the purpose of giving to Ethelwynn to hang upon her bracelet. But he had lost it on the previous day. Therefore it was not a clue to the assassin, as we had at first suspected.

Just then the grave-eyed Antonio reopened the door, bowing, and announcing to his master that the motor-cab was at the door.

Thereupon Professor Greer shook my hand, with a parting appeal to me to preserve silence.

“You will, no doubt, meet your wife ere long, and she will explain much which is to you still a mystery. Remember that her devotion to you was the cause of her absence. She believed that you were in danger. That story was told her to keep her away from you, and thus draw you off the inquiry in which we feared you might be only too successful. Adieu, Mr Holford! When I return, in a week’s time, I hope you will come and have a further chat with me. In the meantime, I can only beg you to forgive me for being the unwilling means of causing you either horror, annoyance, or anxiety.”

And, with a hurried good-bye to the others, he turned and left the room.

“A point upon which I require elucidation,” I said, turning to Kirk, “is the reason why you and those other men were so inquisitive regarding the new Eckhardt tyre.”

“Why I called to see the tyre was simple enough,” he said. “Max Leftwich was posing as the inventor of the tyre in question, and thereby trying to disguise his real profession of German secret agent. But as I had come across him in Berlin three years before in the guise of a small money-lender, I doubted his inventive genius. I came to you in order to examine the Eckhardt tyre, and I satisfied myself that Leftwich’s tyre was a mere worthless imitation. My assistants also came to your garage for the same purpose, just as I predicted they would. Leftwich had opened a depot in Charing Cross Road for the sale of motor accessories, and the ‘improved Eckhardt tyre’ was one of the inventions he claimed to be his.”

“But you also had a further motive?” I suggested.

“Certainly, Holford,” was his quick reply. “I confess that I had watched you for a year, and I felt that I could rely upon you. I wished to enlist your services as one of my assistants, and to initiate you into work for which the Government would pay well. It would assuredly have been worth your while to leave your business to the care of your manager, Mr Pelham, and take service in the department of which I hold control. But, remember, when I asked you to come here, even I was deceived. I believed that my friend Greer, with whom I had had a slight quarrel a few weeks before, was dead. When I found what had really occurred, I saw that the only danger lay in your discovering the truth. Hence all that tangled chain of subterfuges.”

“But surely the Professor might, even now, be charged with murder—or at least with manslaughter!” I remarked.

“My father may, Mr Holford, if you do not preserve his terrible secret!” cried Ethelwynn. “Upon you alone depends all the future!”

Once again I demanded the truth concerning Mabel and news of her whereabouts, but all Kirk would tell me was what Greer had already said—only a promise that we should meet, and that when we did she would make full and ample explanation.

I returned to Bath Road utterly bewildered, and, seated with Gwen, related to her the whole facts from the first, just as I have here recounted them.

She sat staring at me open-mouthed.

“But where is Mabel?” she cried in alarm. “The Professor and the others have returned from abroad, yet she is still absent. Will they accord you no satisfaction?”

“None!” I replied with a weary sigh. “I don’t know, after all, whether to accept what has been related to me, or whether to disbelieve it.”

“The fact that the police refused to inquire into your story, Harry, seems sufficient proof that this man Kirk is a powerful and influential person. Indeed, does it not tend to confirm the story that the Professor did not die, and that he really killed the German in self-defence?”

I admitted that it did. And then I made up my mind that, as Kirk would give me no satisfaction concerning Mabel, I, on my part, would decline to enter into any bond of secrecy.

My wife was worth far more to me than any international complication. What was Germany’s wrath at being foiled in her dastardly attempt to obtain the secret of the new steel, to Mabel’s honour and her love?

Two lagging days had gone by.

Kershaw Kirk had called in the evening about seven o’clock, but I refused to see him. I sent word by Annie that I was out driving a car.

“Tell Mr Holford to come in and see me the instant he returns. I must speak to him at the earliest possible moment,” he had said. And this was the message which the maid had brought to me when the astute official of the British Government had left.

Just before ten I entered Kirk’s close little den. He was seated in his bead slippers and old velvet coat, while behind him stood the grey parrot, which screeched loudly as Miss Kirk opened the door to admit me.

Seated opposite him, near the fire, was Leonard Langton, pale-faced and grave.

“Ah, Holford!” cried Kirk, springing from his chair, sharp-eyed and alert. “I called on you some time ago. I wanted to—to make an announcement to you,” he added, with a slight catch in his voice, I thought.

“Of what?”

He took from his table a long telegram. I recognised that it was from the Continent by the fact that it was on green “tape” pasted upon a form. Attached to it was a square, dark red label, bearing the words, “Government telegram: with priority.”

“Read that!” he said simply.