The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [14]
For Charles is a business man himself, and can appreciate business capacity in others.
How Colonel Clay came to know about that necklet, and to appropriate two of the stones, we only discovered much later. I will not here anticipate that disclosure. One thing at a time is a good rule in life. For the moment he succeeded in baffling us altogether.
However, we followed him on to Paris, telegraphing beforehand to the Bank of France to stop the notes. It was all in vain. They had been cashed within half an hour of my paying them. The curate and his wife, we found, quitted the Hôtel des Deux Mondes for parts unknown that same afternoon. And, as usual with Colonel Clay, they vanished into space, leaving no clue behind them. In other words, they changed their disguise, no doubt, and reappeared somewhere else that night in altered characters. At any rate, no such person as the Reverend Richard Peploe Brabazon was ever afterwards heard of—and, for the matter of that, no such village exists as Empingham, Northumberland.
We communicated the matter to the Parisian police. They were most unsympathetic. “It is no doubt Colonel Clay,” said the official whom we saw; “but you seem to have little just ground of complaint against him. As far as I can see, messieurs, there is not much to choose between you. You, Monsieur le Chevalier, desired to buy diamonds at the price of paste. You, madame, feared you had bought paste at the price of diamonds. You, monsieur the secretary, tried to get the stones from an unsuspecting person for half their value. He took you all in, that brave Colonel Caoutchouc—it was diamond cut diamond.”
Which was true, no doubt, but by no means consoling.
We returned to the Grand Hotel. Charles was fuming with indignation. “This is really too much,” he exclaimed. “What an audacious rascal! But he will never again take me in, my dear Sey. I only hope he’ll try it on. I should love to catch him. I’d know him another time, I’m sure, in spite of his disguises. It’s absurd my being tricked twice running like this. But never again while I live! Never again, I declare to you!”
“Jamais de la vie!” a courier in the hall close by murmured responsive. We stood under the verandah of the Grand Hotel, in the big glass courtyard. And I verily believe that courier was really Colonel Clay himself in one of his disguises.
But perhaps we were beginning to suspect him everywhere.
GUY BOOTHBY
Guy Boothby’s character Simon Carne was the first memorable “gentleman thief,” a title for which Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay was not born in the right circumstances to qualify. Carne is well bred, independently wealthy, and on equal footing with aristocrats and international diplomats. His peers fall prey to his charm, for he is both con artist and burglar—as well as, of course, a master of disguise. Carne might have dined with other such characters in this volume, including Arnold Bennett’s millionaire Cecil Thorold, but he would never have crossed paths with, say, O. Henry’s rustic con men.
Like Grant Allen, Guy Newell Boothby immigrated from the colonies to make his mark in England. The grandson of a judge and the son of an assemblyman, he was born in Adelaide, on Australia’s southern coast. One of his earliest jobs was serving as secretary to the mayor of the city. In 1890, while in his early twenties, he joined with musician Cecil James Sharp, who was later renowned as a music folklorist, and wrote the libretto for a comic opera. He also performed opera himself. Over the next few years he traveled across the island continent with his brother, including a journey