The Pawns CountOppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
General
The Pawns Count
Oppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
Detective and mystery stories
"I reached the lavatory all right--you were with me then, weren't you?"
Graham said reflectively. "I hung up my coat while I washed, but there
was no one else in the room. Then you went downstairs and I brushed my
hair and just stopped to light a cigarette. You know that on the
right-hand side of the landing there is a room where the musicians
change. Joseph, that black devil, was standing in the doorway. He
grinned as I came into sight. 'Lady wants to speak to you for a moment,
Captain Graham,' he said. Well, you know how harmless the fellow
looks--just a good-natured, smiling nigger. I never dreamed of anything
wrong. As a matter of fact, I thought that Peggy Vincent--that's a
young lady I often go to Henry's with--wanted to have a word with me
before I joined our party. I stepped inside the room, and that's just
about all I can remember. It must have been jolly quick. His arm shot
round my neck, the door was closed, and that other brute--Hassan, I
think it was--held something over my face."
"But that room was searched," Lutchester reminded him.
"Well I came to just a little," Graham explained, "I found that I was
in a sort of cupboard place, behind the lockers these fellows have for
their clothes. It opens with a spring lock, and you'd never notice it,
searching the room."
"Who was the first person you saw when you recovered consciousness?"
Graham's forehead was wrinkled in the effort to remember.
"I can't quite get hold of it," he confessed, "but I have a sort of
fancy I can't altogether get rid of that there was a woman about."
Lutchester looked at the end of the cigarette he had just lit.
"A woman?" he repeated. "That's queer."
"I can't remember anything definitely until I woke up in that chapel,"
Graham continued, "but when they searched me and found that the
pocketbook had gone, Fischer, the big American, muttered some woman's
name. I was queer just at the moment, but it sounded very much to me
like Miss Van Teyl's. He rang her up on the telephone."
"Did they suspect Miss Van Teyl, then, of having taken your
pocketbook?"
Graham shook his head.
"I lost the drift of things just then," he admitted. "She couldn't have
done, in any case. Forgive me, but aren't we wasting time, Mr.
Lutchester? We must do something. Couldn't you ring up Scotland Yard
now?"
"I certainly could," Lutchester assented, "but, as I told you just now,
I don't think that I will."
Graham stared at him.
"But why not?"
"For certain very definite reasons with which you needn't trouble
yourself just now," Lutchester pronounced. "The formula has gone,
without a doubt, but it certainly isn't in the hands of any of the
people at Henry's."
"But there's that American fellow--Fischer!" Graham exclaimed. "He was
the ringleader!"
"Just so," Lutchester murmured thoughtfully. "However, he hasn't got
the formula."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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