The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [89]
I must say that Number 17 has got quite a remarkably sound “nerve” on him.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” he said; “but I’d lost my cigarette holder. I knew I’d had it in my fingers when I tumbled against you this morning, and I thought I might have dropped it then.”
He held it out to me, between his finger and thumb.
“I found it lying on the deck here,” he explained. “A mercy it was not trodden on. I’m thankful much; for I prize it.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Aglae,” I said, and hid the smile his tricky little foreign flavour of speech rose in me. As a matter of fact, if what I’ve heard is correct, the man is Scotch, bred and born and reared. It shows what even a Scotchman can come down to!
After he had gone, with one of his dinky little bows, I overhauled the hen-coop; but in a casual sort of way, so that no one, looking on, could suspect I was doing more than making one of my usual bi-daily visits to my chuck-chucks, and feeding them with bread-crumbs.
If I had not read the cypher message, I should certainly not have discovered the marks that Mr. Aglae had made on the coop; they were merely three small dots, in a triangle, like this ∴, with a tiny 17 in the centre. The thing had just been jotted down on one of the legs of the coops with a piece of sharp-pointed chalk, and it could have been covered with a ha’penny.
I grinned to myself and went to the carpenter’s shop for a piece of chalk. I made Chips sharpen it to a fine point with a chisel; then I put it in my pocket and continued my afternoon stroll round the decks.
I wanted first to place Mr. Aglae; for it would spoil part of the amusingness of my plot, if he were on the spy, and saw what I was going to do. I found him, away aft in the upper-deck smoke-room, reading Le Petit Journal, and looking most subtly foreign and most convincingly innocent.
“You little devil!” I thought; and went right away to the well-deck. Here, in an unobtrusive way, I copied Mr. Aglae’s private signature, faithfully, on to the hen-coop above the one in which I was carrying my brother’s black ring-necks. The coop was occupied for the voyage by the bulk of Mr. Brown’s confounded pigeons, which, I had insisted, must not be brought again into the saloon.
After I had re-duplicated the mark, I lifted out four of my ring-necks from the bottom coop, and put them into the top one, among Mr. Brown’s pigeons. My argument was that, when the searchers boarded us with the pilot, they would find both these coops marked, and both with hens in them, and would act accordingly. They would have to open the upper coop to remove the four hens, and there would be a general exodus of Mr. Brown’s pigeons, which would re-double the confusion and general glad devilment of my little plot.
Mr. Brown would be enormously angry and enormously vociferous. I could picture him thundering: “I never heard of such a thing! Confound you, Sir! I shall write to The Times about this.”
And then, it seemed to me, Number 17 would have to come and make some kind of semi-public explanation, of what he could never properly explain; and ever after, his value as a diamond spy would be decreased something like twenty-five per cent.; for quite a lot of people aboard (maybe some of them in the Diamond-Running business) would be able to get a good square look at the famous Number 17, and for all time afterwards, in whatever way he might try to veil his charming personality, he would run chances of being recognised at some awkward and premature moment; at least, from his point of view!
But, of course, at first, Mr. Aglae (Number 17) would be only partly involved in my cheerful little net of difficulties. He would know, all the time, that these curious complications were only trifling; for had he not made the greatest capture of years. Let Mr. Brown be apologized to; even compensated, if such compensation were legally his right. The great thing would be to reduce the black ring-necks to poultry, as speedily as possible, and then to pick his Triumph from their