Battle, Superintendent (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories; Police -- England -- Fiction
“For the English honour I much respect have,” he announced. “We must
another way try. I wish you good morning.”
He drew his heels together, clicked, bowed and marched out of the room,
holding himself stiffly erect.
“Now I wonder what he meant by that,” mused Anthony. “Was it a threat?
Not that I’m in the least afraid of old Lollipop. Rather a good name
for him, that, by the way. I shall call him Baron Lollipop.”
He took a turn or two up and down the room, undecided on his next
course of action. The date stipulated upon for delivering the
manuscript was a little over a week ahead. To-day was the 5th of
October. Anthony had no intention of handing it over before the last
moment. Truth to tell, he was by now feverishly anxious to read
these Memoirs. He had meant to do so on the boat coming over, but
had been laid low with a touch of fever, and not at all in the mood
for deciphering crabbed and illegible handwriting, for none of the
manuscript was typed. He was now more than ever determined to see what
all the fuss was about.
There was the other job too.
On an impulse, he picked up the telephone book and looked up the name
of Revel. There were six Revels in the book: Edward Henry Revel,
surgeon, of Harley Street; James Revel & Co., saddlers; Lennox Revel
of Abbotbury Mansions, Hampstead; Miss Mary Revel with an address in
Ealing; Hon. Mrs. Timothy Revel of 487, Pont Street; and Mrs. Willis
Revel of 42, Cadogan Square. Eliminating the saddlers and Miss Mary
Revel, that gave him four names to investigate—and there was no reason
to suppose that the lady lived in London at all! He shut up the book
with a short shake of the head.
“For the moment I’ll leave it to chance,” he said. “Something usually
turns up.”
The luck of the Anthony Cades of this world is perhaps in some measure
due to their own belief in it. Anthony found what he was after not half
an hour later, when he was turning over the pages of an illustrated
paper. It was a representation of some tableau organized by the Duchess
of Perth. Below the central figure, a woman in Eastern dress, was the
inscription:
“The Hon. Mrs. Timothy Revel as Cleopatra. Before her marriage, Mrs.
Revel was the Hon. Virginia Cawthron, a daughter of Lord Edgbaston.”
Anthony looked at the picture some time, slowly pursing up his lips, as
though to whistle. Then he tore out the whole page, folded it up and
put it in his pocket. He went upstairs again, unlocked his suit-case
and took out the packet of letters. He took out the folded page from
his pocket and slipped it under the string that held them together.
Then, at a sudden sound behind him, he wheeled round sharply. A
man was standing in the doorway, the kind of man whom Anthony had
fondly imagined existed only in the chorus of a Comic Opera. A
sinister-looking figure, with a squat brutal head and lips drawn back
in an evil grin.
“What the devil are you doing here?” asked Anthony. “And who let you
come up?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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