Nude in Mink by Sax Rohmer (top reads .TXT) 📕
There was a semi-circular recess, like a shrine, approached by three marble steps and veiled by silk curtains of rosy pink.
The existence of this singular apartment was destined to arouse keen curiosity in certain quarters (and before long) and to provoke equally keen incredulity in others.
A high, sweet note, that of a bell or of a silver gong, split the hushed silence, hitherto unbroken except for faint stirrings of lily leaves in the pool when one of several large golden orfe swimming there disturbed them.
Almost noiselessly, a bronze door was opened at the head of a short flight of marble steps. The handrail also was bronze, terminating in a newel post representing a sphinx. A man came down, slowly. He was a man of slight and graceful build. His leisurely move
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She hurried on and out of sight. Steel Maitland snapped his fingers irritably.
“This is some damned trick, Locker! It’s a trick!”
Locker scratched his chin.
“If she’s still upstairs, I don’t see what she hopes to gain by it, anyway. You don’t suppose that girl’s in it, do you, sir?”
“The nurse? Possibly not. But one never knows. I imagine the scheme involved a sort of inner organisation, of the existence of which the rest of the staff were ignorant… Hell! Where the devil is Ives?”
“I can’t believe,” Locker declared, “that anybody could impersonate the Baroness Rikter for years and not be—”
“There was no impersonation!” Maitland rapped. “This woman is the Baroness Rikter! That’s why we’ve been all at sea! Who else she is we have yet to find out… Hullo! is this Ives, at last! Run and see, Locker—”
4
It was almost at this moment, as far as, afterwards, could be ascertained, that Mark Donovan, staring dejectedly out of his window into Bruton Street, where dusk was falling, heard the phone bell. He crossed and lifted the receiver.
“Hullo! Yes—this is Mark Donovan… What?”
He found himself to be clutching the instrument with quivering fingers.
“I called you just to say good-bye, Mr. Donovan…”
He spoke in a whisper.
“Sumuru!”
“Herself! I had hopes, at one time, that you would recognise the truth, and consent to work for it But—for the present—I fear I must leave you in your ignorance, leave you in your own ugly world—”
Donovan thought she was gone. His heart throbbed madly.
“Stop! Stop! Claudette!…”
He heard the soft laughter. There was a pause.
“For her, too, I had dreamed ambitious dreams. But it was not to be—yet. And so. I have an order for you—”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Go at once,” the golden, imperious voice continued—_”at once_ to Lorimer House. You will find your friend, Steel Maitland, there. Give him this message from Sumuru:— ‘My Lady never forgets.’ You understand? ‘My Lady never forgets’ …”
IN the Arab Court at Lorimer House an altercation was being waged, the nursing sister stubbornly disputing Inspector Ives’s right to interview Baroness Rikter. With every moment that passed in this way, Maitland was becoming more and more resigned to defeat.
“It rests with you, Ives. Officially, at the present moment, I am helpless. I am plain Mr. Sandford!”
Ives was growing angry.
“You have my card. Sister, and you know that I am a police officer—”
“Certainly, Inspector. But I cannot imagine what you are doing here, and I cannot consent, without—”
“I am here,” Ives interrupted her, “to question a dangerous criminal whom I have good reason to believe to be on these premises—”
“But how can this possibly concern Baroness Rikter?”
The girl, unruffled, was calmly determined.
“That I must find out. Therefore—I must see the baroness, at once.”
“But I have tried to explain to you that she has been taken ill. Dr. Arlington is with her, now. Unless he consents, I can do nothing. Surely, you see?”
Ives’s endeavours to restrain himself became more and more obvious.
“Yes—I see … Is this Dr. Arlington the baroness’s usual medical adviser?”
The girl shook her head emphatically.
“No. She called him, I understand, because he has a first class reputation and was near-by.”
Locker exchanged glances with Maitland, and then:
“Who else is with the patient, miss?” he asked.
“One of our nurses—Sister Clair—who often assists the baroness in her private apartments. She was with her when the baroness was taken ill.”
A disturbance, subdued but persistent, proclaimed itself. The sounds seemed to come from the entrance lobby.
“What the devil’s happening now?” growled Ives, suspiciously…
“But I say he is here! And I must see him!” a distant voice asserted.
“There is no Dr. Maitland here, sir—”
This, in a woman’s tones.
Then I must see the Baroness Rikter …”
“Ives!” said Maitland urgently, “am I dreaming, or is that Donovan?”
That he did not dream was made clear almost immediately —as Donovan burst into the Arab Court…
“Maitland!”
“Good God! Donovan! What are you doing here? And why do you bawl my name—”
The nurse looked from face to face in growing bewilderment. Another sister ran in from the lobby.
“Maitland! Maitland!” Donovan went out—_”She_—Sumuru —called me on the phone, and—”
“What do you say?” Ives shouted.
“What!”
The exclamation came from Maitland’s lips like a pistol shot.
“She told me you were here and to come along at once—”
“How long ago?” Ives demanded. “How long ago?”
“Less than ten minutes. I—”
Maitland turned swiftly, and grasped the nurse’s arm in a firm but kindly grip.
“Sister! Be good enough to lead the way to the baroness’s room! My name is Maitland—Dr. Steel Maitland—and I will take full responsibility. Come on, Ives!”
The second nurse had joined them, and now looked on,
“But, really—Mr. Sandford—or—Dr. Maitland!…”
“Lead the way!” snapped Ives peremptorily. “Or you’ll be obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duty—”
2
The bedroom of Baroness Rikter was approached through a charmingly feminine little apartment evidently used as a boudoir. But it seemed to Maitland, looking around, that the place held nothing revealing, nothing intimate. Further inspection enabled him to account for this impression. His forebodings grew blacker.
It has been partly stripped. Of this fact he detected several items of evidence.
The nursing sister now quite composed again, crossed to a door beyond. She had accepted an inexplicable situation.
“If you will wait for a moment, gentlemen, I will speak to Dr. Arlington.”
She rapped on the closed door.
“Come in.”
The voice was high-pitched, irascible. The nurse went in.
“I’m laying ten to one against us!” Maitland murmured.
The nurse stepped out again.
“Please come in.” She spoke in hushed tones. “But don’t make a noise.”
Maitland signalled to Donovan and Locker to remain. He went in with Ives—and was confronted by a grey-haired, choleric man who glared uncompromisingly.
“Dr Arlington?” he said quietly. “My name is Steel Maitland—a brother practitioner. Your patient?”
But Dr. Arlington continued to glare.
“I don’t recall asking for a second opinion, Dr. Maitland—much less a third—”
The bedroom struck that same note of incompleteness. The divan bed, a dainty thing of cane and lacquer, stood remote from the door, a heavily shaded lamp alight beside it. Dr. Arlington persistently obstructed any direct view of its occupant.
Suddenly, Ives spoke.
“Where is this Sister Clair, Doctor?”
“If you refer to the nurse who was here when I arrived, sir, she left me some time ago on an errand to the nearest chemist, and I regret to say has not returned. Why? Are you also a medical man?”
“No, Doctor, I’m not! I’m a police officer!”
“A police officer!”
But Maitland’s patience was nearing breaking point.
“It is rather gloomy by the bed, Dr. Arlington,” he said coldly. “And I am anxious to examine the baroness. Please forgive me. I know it must seem like a vulgar intrusion. But I am, in fact, acting for the Foreign Office.”
“The Foreign Office!” Dr. Arlington echoed again. “What the devil has the Foreign Office—”
“It is all most regrettable.” Maitland pushed past him to the bed. “May I ask: Are you well acquainted with Baroness Rikter?”
“I had never previously met her, sir.”
“Perhaps you would be good enough to tilt the lamp shade—so that the light shines on the patient’s features—”
“My patient is suffering from an indiscreet use of sleeping tablets, Dr. Maitland. Sister Clair, her regular attendant, informed me that insomnia—”
But Maitland, bending over the bed, apparently did not hear him. He was so absorbed indeed that he did not straighten up until a cry came from Ives.
“That woman’s wearing a wig!”
“I was already aware of the fact that my patient wore a wig, sir—”
That Dr. Arlington was in any way implicated in this extraordinary matter would not have crossed the mind of one in a thousand. Not until later, in fact, did it cross the mind of Steel Maitland…
“And it doesn’t fit, either!” Ives added.
Maitland looked at him steadily, expressionlessly.
“Because it wasn’t made for her!… This is not the Baroness Rikter—”
“What do you say, sir?” Dr. Arlington demanded. “What do you say?”
“I say, Dr. Arlington, that this is not the Baroness Rikter! You have been tricked. We have all been tricked.” He spoke bitterly now, and raising his voice, called, “Donovan!”
Donovan came in from the outer room.
“Yes, Maitland! What is it?”
“See for yourself!”
A moment later, Donovan was on his knees beside the bed, a man transfigured.
“Claudette! Claudette! Maitland—it’s Claudette!”
Maitland was holding himself tightly in hand.
“So I had observed, Donovan,” he replied tonelessly…
“What is the meaning of all this?” Dr. Arlington cried.
“Claudette, darling! Claudette … Oh! she’s not—”
At which moment Claudette opened her eyes. Her pupils dilated and contracted queerly; but with the sigh of a contented child she placed her arms around Mark Donovan and drew his head down beside her own on the pillow. Then, she fell asleep again…
“I repeat. Dr. Maitland—what is the meaning of all this?”
Dr. Arlington was very red in the face.
“The meaning is, Dr. Arlington, that Sumuru—whom you may not know—has slipped out of the net again. This lady is Miss Claudette Duquesne.”
“Well, I’m damned!” said Ives.
Claudette, without opening her eyes, murmured dreamily:
“Listen! Listen! Don’t you hear… that tapping…”
3
When, at last, Steel Maitland stood once more in the famous marble studio where half the notabilities of Victoria’s reign had been entertained, he looked about him with a grimly bleak expression.
He was a man disillusioned—a man disappointed in himself. There was the recess, approached by three steps, where she had reclined, like a pagan empress. There was the lily pond. He looked around at the beautiful Oriental pillars which supported the painted ceiling—at the bronze sphinx guarding the staircase. He turned to Ives.
“What blind fools we have been,” he said.
“WE are two short at this strictly informal conference, Dr. Maitland,” said Colonel Stayton briskly.
He had the lean figure of a horseman and those light blue eyes which suggest that they have been bleached by an Indian sun. His office, with its book-lined walls and homely appointments, large windows commanding a view of the Thames, signally lacked the austerity which marked that allotted to Chief Inspector Ives in the same building. Perhaps Ives was considering the point; for he was there, if somewhat subdued by the presence of the Assistant Commissioner and a Superintendent.
“Yes, Colonel Stayton.” Maitland stood up. “But I think I hear them, now.”
There was a rap on the door and a man announced:
“Miss Claudette Duquesne and Mr. Mark Donovan, sir.”
The door closed behind them as they entered. Donovan looked like a man who had secured long leave of absence from hell. Claudette was pale, but lovely.
“Ah, Claudette!” Maitland greeted her—“This is the Assistant Commissioner, Colonel Stayton—”
The colonel shook hands.
“Welcome to Scotland Yard, Miss Duquesne!”
“Ominous words!” said Maitland laughingly. “Mr. Donovan represents the Alliance Press of New York.”
“Let me remind you, sir, that whatever takes place in this office is off the record!”
“Sure, Colonel!” Donovan replied, glancing aside at Claudette—and there was a new gaiety in voice and manner.
Inspector Ives was known to all, so that when Superintendent Mason had been introduced, the party was ready for business.
Colonel Stayton cleared his throat, adjusted reading glasses, and glanced over a page of typed notes. He looked up.
“Now—1 believe that every one of you has something to add to
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