‘Raffles and the Dangerous Game’ 
BARRY PEROWNE

NAME: A. J. Raffles, Gentleman Cracksman 
PLACE: London 
TIME: circa 1910

CASES: ‘The Amateur Cracksman’ (1899), ‘A Thief in the Night’ (1905), ‘Raffles in Pursuit’ (1934), ‘Raffles Revisited’ (1974) etc.

DOSSIER: The handsome and debonair A. J. Raffles has been described as the first and greatest of the crime anti-heroes. Introduced initially as the most accomplished cracksman in Victorian England who lives a totally hedonistic existence and survives solely by his remarkable skill as a robber, he had by the time of the Edwardian era become more socially aware, committing crimes to right injustice and with little thought for personal profit. A figure of great charm and wit, Raffles first turned to crime as a penniless and desperate young man, and soon discovered that burglary gave him a tremendous thrill. By day a social butterfly and outstanding cricketer, the cracksman uses his personality to gain entrance to the world of high society and there plans the many audacious thefts and robberies which he carries out with great coolness and without attracting the slightest suspicion. His facade as a pillar of society is reinforced by living in The Albany, one of the most exclusive addresses in London, where he maintains a luxurious lifestyle aided by Bunny Manders, a former schoolfriend he rescued from penury and who is privy to his secret life. Following the death of Raffles’s creator in 1921, he was revived by another writer, now a reformed character and more of a two-fisted adventurer. His lifestyle and manners are still the same, however, as is his relish for danger.

CREATOR: Ernest William Hornung (1866-1921) was the brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and in the wake of the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories, dreamed up Raffles as the antithesis of the great detective. So popular did the cracksman become, that after Hornung’s premature death his executors gave permission for the British mystery novelist Philip Atkey (b. 1908), writing as Barry Perowne, to continue his exploits in The Thriller and subsequently in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The Raffles legend has, of course, also been enhanced by a number of very successful stage plays, films and TV adaptations, where he has been played by John Barrymore, Ronald Colman and David Niven amongst others. Perowne is regarded by critics as one of the few writers to have continued the adventures of a famous literary figure as successfully as the original author. ‘Raffles and the Dangerous Game’ was published in 1979 and finds him in Edwardian London facing an encounter with one of his most sinister adversaries, the Tarantula...

THE STORY:

All of a sudden, in the fog that blanketed London one midwinter evening, the tall figure of a policeman loomed up at a street corner and, waving a red lantern, brought a hansom jingling to a standstill.
‘Sorry, gentlemen,’ he told the passengers, who happened to be A. J. Raffles and myself, Bunny Manders, ‘this street is closed.’
I had spent the past couple of hours watching Raffles win his match in a tennis tournament in progress at Lord’s Cricket Ground, where the building which houses the court for the gentlemanly game of ‘real’ tennis, or jeu-de-paume, is for a spectator about the chilliest place in town.
So, being anxious to thaw myself out with a rum toddy or two at my flat, where Raffles would drop me off on the way to his own bachelor chambers in The Albany, I protested to the bobbie.
‘But look here,’ I said to him, ‘this is Mount Street. I live in this street.’
‘Well, sir,’ he replied, ‘there’s been a gas explosion in a house along there on the left.’
‘You describe, more or less,’ I said, startled, ‘the area where I live! Raffles, if you’ll excuse me-‘
Leaving him to pay off the cabbie, I sprang out of the hansom and, breaking into a run along Mount Street, saw above the roof of some house ahead a dull red glow pulsing in the fog. The glow faded out as I arrived upon the scene, but the gabled roof from which clouds of smoke and steam were now billowing up was that of the very house in which I had my domicile.
I stopped dead, incredulous. The windows of the flat on the top floor, the fourth, and of my own flat on the third floor, were shattered, and a brass-helmeted, thigh-booted fireman was in the act of clambering from a ladder into my living-room.
‘Mr Manders!’ a voice called to me.
I looked round. Firemen’s lanterns and the lamps of three Fire Brigade vehicles, one of them of the new horseless type, pallidly mitigated the fog, and I saw that the man who had called to me was Hobday, the hall porter of the house. He was talking to three of the residents.
‘Who would have thought it?’ said Hobday, as I went over to him. ‘A gas explosion in Mount Street, sir! In the top flat, it was Major Torrington’s, just above yours, Mr Manders. The Major was out at the time-still is.’
‘Luckily for him,’ said Charles Chastayne, who occupied the other flat on my floor. A typical man-about-town, who played cards in the best clubs and probably, I suspected, derived his income from it, he was in evening dress, his cape and silk hat blotched with some sort of white stuff. ‘I’d only just come in, Manders,’ he told me, ‘when the big bang shook the whole house.’
‘Anyone hurt?’ asked Raffles, who had joined us.
‘No, sir,’ said Hobday. ‘I had my hands full getting Lady Davencourt an’ her marmosets out of her first-floor flat, into a cab an’ off to her sister’s. But, my word, I was worried about Miss Van Heysst here, who’s unfamiliar with the premises as yet. It was lucky a few lights stayed on for a minute or two, or she mightn’t ‘ave found her way out, plunged in the dark, an’ come over panicky, bein’ foreign.’
‘I do not at all panic in the least, Mr Hobday-though foreign,’ said Miss Marika Van Heysst, whose accent was as charming as her person and who had moved recently into the flat below mine. ‘Only, see now how it is with us! We have run out safely, yes, but the firemen say we cannot go back in. We say, for how long? They only shake their heads. So we are become refugees in the fog, and your London fog is so cooold!’
She drew more closely about her a cloak like Red Riding Hood’s, but Miss Van Heysst’s cloak, its hood framing her enchanting young face and flaxen hair, was as blue as her forlorn, appealing eyes.
‘You make a sensible point, Miss Van Heysst,’ agreed the man who occupied the other flat on her floor. A handsome naval officer with a staff job at the Admiralty, he was in uniform, his cap and greatcoat marred here and there with white smears. ‘Since we’re not allowed back in the house,’ he said, ‘there’s no point in our standing here in the cold. Miss Van Heysst, may I suggest that I seek a cab for you and escort you to a hotel I know of?’
‘Oh, Commander Rigby, that would be kind, for if I am lost in the fog alone and meet with your Jack the Ripper, then yes, I panic very much-being foreign,’ said Miss Van Heysst, with a flash of her lovely eyes at Hobday as she accepted Clifford Rigby’s proffered arm and went off with him into the fog.
‘You can trust the Navy with a pretty young woman,’ said Chastayne, the cardplayer. ‘Or can you?’ He shrugged cynically. ‘No business of mine. I must go and find somewhere to pig it temporarily myself. Good night, Manders.’
Only then, as Chastayne left us, did it dawn on me that the white smears on his evening cape and on Rigby’s greatcoat must have been caused by ceiling plaster falling when the explosion shook the house-and a sudden thought threw my mind into a cerebral commotion.
‘Raffles,’ I blurted, ‘I’ll just pop up to my flat-see the damage.’
He gripped my arm, restraining me. ‘Nonsense, Bunny, you won’t be allowed in. You can have my spare room in The Albany. I take it your goods and chattels are insured, so you’ve nothing to worry about.’
But I knew otherwise-knew it so damnably well that I did not sleep a wink in his spare room and, while still the lamps were dim yellow blurs in the murk of what passed for dawn, I inserted my key into the front-door lock of the now silent house in Mount Street.
In the dark hall I stood listening. All was still. I struck a match. The light quivered on the walls of the water-drenched, chaotic hall. On a coffer stood a candelabrum with three unused candles in it. Their wicks spluttered wetly but finally lit and, my heart thumping, I stole up the stairs.
The sodden carpet was blotched with plaster-white bootprints all the way up to the second floor, where my candles showed the landing littered with chunks, still wet, of lath-and-plaster. The ceiling must have come down at the moment of the explosion, and down with the ceiling must have come a package of mine-a package so private that, under a sawn section of floorboard in a corner of my living-room immediately above this landing, I had kept the package hidden on the laths between the floor-beams. I peered up, holding my candles higher, and their light showed me the exposed floor-beams and, dangling down from a hole between them, a corner of my water-soaked carpet.
My package must have fallen, with the lath-and-plaster, on to this second-floor landing. I searched vainly through the debris lying here, then crept on up to my living-room, which was a shambles, and checked the hole from above. But there was no possible doubt about it. My package was gone.
I slunk out of the house. I had rather have blown out my brains than tell Raffles what I had now to tell him, but I forced myself to walk back to The Albany, where I found him at breakfast in his chambers.
The lights were on, a coal fire burned cheerfully in the grate, and Raffles, immaculate in tweeds, a pearl in his cravat, his keen face tanned, his dark hair crisp, looked up from The Times propped against the coffee pot.
‘Chafing-dishes on the sideboard, Bunny. Ring for more toast.’
‘I don’t want any,’ I said. I sat down. ‘Raffles, I’ve had a shock. Due to that damned explosion last night, some private papers of mine have-gone astray. They were wrapped in a yellow silk muffler patterned with red fleurs-de-lys, the package tied with cord, the knot sealed with red wax.’
‘A colourful package, Bunny, and valuable-looking. Some fireman at work in your flat has probably spotted the package and taken charge of it for you. What are these papers-or are they so private you’d rather not tell me?’
‘I’d rather not tell you,’ I said, ‘but I must. Raffles, you know that ever since we were at school together I’ve had a sort of-well, a compulsion to write? If one has that sort of compulsion, one naturally writes about things that have made a strong impression on one’s mind. Somehow, writing them down is the only way one can get them off one’s mind-especially if they’re things it would be suicide to talk about to other people. So these private writings of mine are accounts, no names, or details changed or omitted, of some-recent experiences of ours.’
‘Ours!’
‘Raffles,’ I muttered, ‘that package contains full accounts of six of our-criminal adventures.’
Silence. Only the rustle of the fire in the grate, the quiet ticking of the clock above it. Then I heard Raffles cross to the fireplace. I thought it was to get the poker, and my scalp tingled in anticipation of a terminal impact upon it. But he was only lighting a cigarette with a spill. I sensed him standing there on the hearthrug, his grey eyes looking down at me, studying me with a clinical detachment. At last he spoke, his tone even.
‘I now know, Bunny,’ he observed, ‘why it’s said, of people with the strange compulsion to write, that they’ve been “bitten by the tarantula”.’
He asked me then for further details, and I explained that the package, which did not have my name on the outside, must have been found on the second-floor landing.
‘Raffles,’ I said, ‘your cricket’s made your name very well known. If whoever’s found that package opens it to see whom it belongs to, and sees your name in a criminal context on every page of those manuscripts, the finder may hand them to the police!’
‘Who, if they once start inquiries,’ Raffles said, ‘could be a bit awkward.’
‘We must get out of the country-immediately!’
‘And, not knowing whether the police have or have not got that package, have to spend the rest of our lives in Callao?’
‘Why Callao, Raffles?’
‘Because, as the famous rhyme says, Bunny: “Under no condition is extradition allowed from Callao”! No, we’ve got to try to trace your package. It may be unopened. We’d better not make overt inquiries in person. I’ll get Ivor Kern, our invaluable “fence”, to put some of his snoops on to this. Take a room at your club, Bunny. A red light glows for us in the fog. If the light should glow redder still, I’ll get word to you. Meantime, keep a suitcase packed handy for instant travel.’
All the things in my flat had been ruined by water from firehouses. I had to buy a suitcase and new togs. And towards the end of a week of torturing suspense, I returned to my club after a fitting at my tailor’s and was told that Raffles was waiting for me in the Hastings Room.
I hared up the handsome marble staircase and found Raffles, alone except for a whisky and soda, sitting in a saddlebag chair under a dismal great painting, The Trial of Warren Hastings.
‘Well, Bunny,’ Raffles greeted me, ‘we’ve had a communication.’
‘From the police?’
‘No,’ said Raffles. ‘From the Tarantula.’
He handed me a large envelope, which had been opened, and with shaking hands I drew out the contents-about forty pages of my own handwriting, held together with a paper clip.
‘One of your six manuscripts,’ Raffles said. ‘Came in my mail this morning. No message with it. None needed. The sender holds five more of your writings. This one, obviously, is to serve notice on us.’
‘Notice?’
‘Of the Bite To Come,’ Raffles said.
It came three agonising days later. It was another of my manuscripts. Raffles showed it to me in the Hastings Room. Attached to the manuscript was a typewritten message: To A. J. Raffles, Esq: There now remain in the hands of the present writer four further manuscripts from the pen of your confederate, the ineffable Manders.
‘To hand these manuscripts to Scotland Yard, and so end the career of an individual who, little suspected of being a criminal, frequents high social and sporting circles, would be less to the purpose of the present writer than to exchange the manuscripts in return for services rendered.
‘Here, Mr Raffles, is the particular service required of you:
‘Sir Roderick Naismith, a pillar of the British Treasury, frequently has with him, when he leaves his office in the evening, a small dispatch case. Invariably is this so on Friday evenings, when no doubt his dispatch case contains matter for study in his Hampstead home over the weekend.
‘In winter, however, Sir Roderick does not go directly home, but proceeds in a cab to Lord’s Cricket Ground, where, at six-thirty on Friday evenings, he exercises himself at the aristocratic game of “real” tennis.
‘To you, Mr Raffles, a familiar of that exclusive haunt of the nobility and squirearchy, the building which houses the “real” tennis court at Lord’s, an opportunity to acquire Sir Roderick’s dispatch case should readily present itself.
‘On Friday evening, therefore, you will obtain that dispatch case. You will then return to your chambers in The Albany, where, it has been ascertained, the window of your chambers at the rear of the building overlooks Vigo Street. You will place in that window of yours, as a signal that the service has been duly rendered, a reading-lamp with a green shade. You will then receive, by second post the following day, instructions regarding arrangements for the exchange of Sir Roderick’s dispatch case in return for your confederate’s manuscripts.
‘Failure on your part to carry out the specified service will result in the delivery of your partner’s manuscripts to Scotland Yard.’
‘Oh, dear God!’ I said.
‘Sir Roderick Naismith’s match at Lord’s on Friday evening,’ Raffles said, ‘is one in the intermediate stages of the tennis tournament. He’ll be playing against a distinguished soldier, a Field Marshal-Kitchener of Khartoum.’ Raffles’s eyes glittered. ‘Bunny, the Tarantula-so to call that unknown person-has made a significant slip in this missive, a slip that may well indicate a curious element in this whole situation. The ball’s now in my court-and I intend to play it.’
‘How?’
‘By doing, more or less, as the Tarantula demands,’ Raffles said. ‘But, Bunny, I think you’d do well to keep out of this from here on.’
‘I got you into the situation,’ I said, ‘and I damned well intend to see it through with you-come what may.’
He raised his glass to me.
So the following evening, Friday, found us arriving together, in one of those taximeter-cabs currently challenging the supremacy of London’s hansoms and ‘growlers’, at Lord’s, the headquarters of world cricket.
The stands and terraces, gaily stippled in summer with the confetti hues of men’s blazers and ladies’ parasols, loomed now deserted, spectral in the persistent fog. Only from the tennis-court building, in its secluded corner of the famous demesne, did gleams of gaslight faintly mitigate the dank, muffling vapour.
Capped and ulstered, we entered the building. Just inside the entrance stood a glass case. In this was housed the token trophy of the tournament-token only, as it was one of the priceless treasures at Lord’s and never left the ground. Warped, time blackened, worm eaten, the long-handled, curved, stringless old racquet in the glass case was a reminder of that long-ago day when a monarch of France had presented to a monarch of England, as they met in conclave among the pennoned pavilions and glittering shields and lances of the armoured chivalry of both nations, on a French meadow, a gift of tennis balls.
Now, from the unseen court to our left, sounded hollow thuds and bangs, and from the changing-room, to our right, emerged a wiry man carrying a huge basket loaded to the brim with tennis balls of a type little changed since that far-off day of the two monarchs.
‘Evening, Mole,’ said Raffles.
‘Good evening, Mr Raffles,’ said Mole, the resident professional. ‘Come to see the match? Lord Kitchener and Sir Roderick Naismith are in the court now, warming up. I’m just going in to mark for them.’
He went off with his heavy basket, and Raffles strolled over to the door of the changing-room, glanced in casually, then returned to me.
‘Just three men in there, Bunny,’ he murmured. ‘Let’s hope they decide presently to watch the match. Meantime, we’ll watch it ourselves.’
Gripping my arm, he opened a door to the left, closed it behind us, and in the almost total darkness of the restricted space for spectators, steered me to the rearmost of a half-dozen spartan benches. Through the interstices of a protective net I saw the reflector-shaded, wire-caged gaslights which from aloft shed down their brilliance solely on to the court proper, a stylised version of a barnyard of some ancient abbey in the Avignon of Pope Joan, or Cahors of the turreted bridge, or grey-walled Carcassonne of the many candlesnuffer towers.
But whereas medieval monks, banging balls at each other across a net slung between the monastery cow byre and the barn wall, had played this tennis stripped to their hairshirts, the two gentlemen now in the court here-one of the only eight such courts in England, including Henry VIII’s at Hampton Court-were in white flannels and sweaters.
‘In these troubled times, Bunny,’ Raffles murmured, ‘when a European monarch’s keeping half of the world nervous by his rapid expansion of his High Seas Fleet, it’s good to see Kitchener looking fit.’
I nodded, my gaze on the powerful figure, granite jaw, heavy moustache, and challenging steel-blue eyes of the great soldier, with whom the distinguished senior civil servant, gaunt, grey-haired, shrewd-faced Sir Roderick Naismith of the Treasury, markedly contrasted.
From the marker’s niche to the left of the court, where a section of penthouse roof simulated the eaves of a cow byre, Mole appeared, carrying his basket of tennis balls, which he emptied into a trough that already contained hundreds. And the match now began, but here in the dark I was trying to discern how many shadowy figures were spaced about on the benches in front of Raffles and myself. There were, as far as I could make out, only about half a dozen spectators-members here, of course-but presently I became aware of three more men quietly entering. Closing the door behind them, they groped their way to the front bench.
Raffles breathed in my ear, ‘The three from the changing-room. Sit tight!’
Silent as a ghost, he was gone from my side. I forced myself to keep my eyes on the game. Sir Roderick was serving, sending the ball, struck underhand, sliding along the penthouse roof. The ball, falling at the far end, was emphatically struck back across the centre net by Lord Kitchener. Sir Roderick’s return went high, the ball banging hollowly against a piece of wood-shaped like a Gothic arch and simulating a monastery pigeon-cote-on the wall behind Kitchener.
‘Fifteen thirty,’ chanted Mole, the marker, as the players changed ends. ‘Thirty fifteen-chase four.’
The game continued, the players changing ends as service was won or lost. Twanging of racquets, thudding of balls, thumping of plimsolled feet echoed hollowly in the court.
‘Better than three,’ rang the voice of Mole. ‘Deuce!’
Vicariously, I was with Raffles, breaking now into Sir Roderick’s locker in the changing-room. Or surprised red-handed at the job? I did not know. Crypt-cold as it was here in the dark, my gloved hands were clammy with sweat. Because I could not keep a pen out of them, Raffles now risked total ruin-and the grim lines of Omar Khayyam rang in my ears: The Moving Finger writes, and having writ-‘
‘Vantage,’ chanted Mole. ‘Game! Game and set to Lord Kitchener!’
The players met in mid-court to mop their faces with towels proffered to them by Mole from his marker’s niche between the netted apertures which represented the window-openings of a monastery cow byre. Sir Roderick’s pale face looked as cool as ever, but the hero of Khartoum was considerably ruddier as he dried his brow and his heavy great moustache.
‘Have at you again, Naismith,’ I heard him growl.
‘Good-oh, Field Marshal,’ said Sir Roderick.
Halfway through the second set, I became aware, with a start, of a shadow at my side. Raffles was back.
Neither of us said a word until the match was over, with victory to Kitchener, and we made our way out from the tennis-court building into the fog shrouding the cricket ground, when I ventured to ask Raffles how he had got on.
‘I’ll tell you when I’ve thought it over,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if we can find a cab of some sort. I’m hoping there may be a message for me at The Albany.’
When we reached his chambers and with a match he popped the gas-globe alight, we saw an envelope lying on the doormat. He tore the envelope open, read the message enclosed, thrust it into his ulster pocket.
‘From Ivor Kern,’ he said. ‘Come on, we’ve a call to make.’
‘On Ivor?’
‘No, Bunny. On the Tarantula!’
He turned out the gas, hurried me out of the building by the front entrance to Albany Courtyard and Piccadilly, where we were fortunate enough to get a cab, a four-wheeler. Telling the cabbie to drop us at the corner of Church Walk, Kensington, Raffles thrust me into the dark, cold interior of the cab and, as the horse jingled us off westward, gave me a cigarette.
‘Now, Bunny,’ he said. ‘Consider your lost package. On the night of the explosion in the Mount Street house, just three people passed along the second-floor landing in making their hasty exits from the house. Any one of those three could have spotted and snatched up your valuable-looking package-and, oddly enough, when we had our brief conversation with them in the street each of them was wearing a garment which could have concealed the package. Charles Chastayne was in evening-dress-with cape. Miss Van Heysst had thrown on a hooded cloak-as blue as her eyes. Commander Rigby was in uniform, with a deep-pocketed Navy greatcoat.’
A match flared. We dipped our cigarettes to the flame Raffles held in his cupped hands.
‘I had Ivor Kern,’ he went on, ‘set his snoops to find out where those three persons had taken up their respective temporary abodes-and keep an eye on them. Then came the Tarantula’s missive-with its significant slip, the reference to the ‘the British Treasury’. Any English person would say, simply, ‘the Treasury’. So here was a hint that the writer of the Tarantula missive was a foreigner-and one of our three suspects is a foreigner.’
‘Miss Van Heysst!’
‘Yes, but she couldn’t have written the letter, Bunny. Her English is charming, but if she’d written that letter there’d have been more slips, more foreign locutions. No, if it were she who snatched up your package, she must have shown it to someone-the person, a foreigner fluent in English and well informed on English ways and values, who wrote the Tarantula letter. So who-and what-is this person with the very sharp bite?’
Our cab was jingling past the muffled gaslamps and flickering fog-flare braziers of Hyde Park Corner.
‘And just what,’ Raffles said, ‘is the youthful, seductive Miss Van Heysst? A new resident, she moves into a flat adjoining that of Commander Clifford Rigby. A gas explosion puts them on the street. At whom, Bunny, was Miss Van Heysst’s forlorn plea of fearing to meet Jack the Ripper in the fog subtly directed, and who takes it up with the gallantry to be expected of the Navy and promptly tucks Little Blue Riding Hood under his wing? Commander Rigby. And what, in these times when the clang of shipbuilders’ hammers is resounding threateningly to us across the North Sea, is Rigby? He’s a naval officer-with a staff job at the Admiralty.’
‘Oh, dear God!’I said.
‘What an adroit little opportunist,’ said Raffles, ‘is Miss Van Heysst! But, Bunny, though it seemed to me that a curious element was beginning to creep into this matter of your lost manuscripts, it struck me as odd that the Tarantula was anxious to view the documents in a dispatch case of a senior civil servant at the Treasury. If the Tarantula is what I was beginning to suspect, it would have been more understandable if the documents he wanted stolen belonged to, say, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener. Why those of a senior civil servant at the Treasury? I decided to have a look at Sir Roderick’s documents, in the changing-room at Lord’s this evening, and find out.’
‘And you did?’
‘I did,’ said Raffles. ‘Naturally, I left the documents intact and Sir Roderick’s dispatch case and locker relocked. What the Tarantula, as a foreigner, doesn’t realise is that a member at Lord’s does not, however dire his need, rob another member. It’s simply not done. But a brief skim through Sir Roderick’s documents made all plain to me. He’s an impostor.’
‘Sir Roderick Naismith an impostor? Raffles, that’s incredible!’
‘But true, Bunny. He’s a senior civil servant, but not at the Treasury. That ostensible occupation of Sir Roderick’s is a mask for his real one. He’s the head of our Secret Security Service.’
‘I never knew we had such a thing!’
‘How could you?’ said Raffles. ‘It’s secret.’ He peered out into the fog. ‘We’ll be arriving any minute now,’ he said, and he went on, ‘I’ve no doubt now that the Tarantula is a spymaster. He’s evidently learned Sir Roderick’s real occupation. And what the Tarantula is anxious to find out is whether any of the agents whose activities in this country he directs and controls are under suspicion. And, significantly enough, Bunny, in Sir Roderick’s dispatch case there’s a pencilled list of five names, each with some personal particulars noted against them. The list is headed: “For expulsion from England subject to Firm Evidence of Espionage Activity.” Among the names is that of Miss Van Heysst of Mount Street. But not the name of the Tarantula.’
‘You know his name, then?’
‘It’s in the note I had just now from Ivor Kern,’ Raffles said. ‘One of his snoops, who’d traced Miss Van Heysst to a respectable hotel, Garland’s, near the Haymarket Theatre, was keeping an eye on her. It seems that this afternoon she went, by a circuitous route, to Richmond Park, a place usually deserted on a foggy afternoon. She met a man at the Priory Lane gate, had a brief talk with him. As I’d instructed, any person she met with was to be followed. So Ivor’s snoop followed the man. He lives on the first floor of number eight, Church Walk, Kensington. So we’re now about to visit him in his spidery lair,’ Raffles said, ‘and return his Tarantula bite!’
We were, as always, unarmed, and I was taut with apprehension as Raffles paid off our cab at the corner of Church Walk and we walked along that silent side-street. Here and there, dim light from curtained windows faintly blurred the fog.
‘Here we are, Bunny,’ Raffles said, ‘that house with the number barely visible on the front-door fanlight. He’s probably in that first floor where faint edges of light show around the window-curtains. No doubt he’s waiting impatiently for word from whatever minion he has skulking in Vigo Street, at the back of The Albany, that a green-shaded reading-lamp has appeared at the window of my chambers. H’m! Now, how’re we to trap this hairy Tarantula?’ Raffles thought for a moment. Tell you what, Bunny. We’ll get him worried. Got plenty of small change in your pocket?’
‘A fair amount, Raffles.’
‘Good. Now, I’m going to try that front door. It’ll probably be locked, but may not be bolted-in which case the little implement I used on Sir Roderick’s locker at Lord’s should serve our purpose. If I can get into the house, you keep well back in the fog and toss coins up at that first-floor window. The man’s almost certainly armed, so my prudent course will be to steal in on him from behind when his back’s turned as he peers out of the window.’
Instantly grasping Raffles’ strategy, I whipped off my gloves, took a handful of small change from my pocket as he moved silently up the two steps to the door under the dim fanlight. As I watched his shadowy figure at work on the door, a vertical line of light suddenly appeared there-and vanished instantly as Raffles, entering, soundlessly closed the door.
Drawing back into the fog, I tossed up a coin at the first-floor window. I heard a tinkle against the glass, a second tinkle as the coin dropped down into the railed basement area. No movement of the curtains ensued, so I tossed up another coin-another-and another. Suddenly, the faint lines of light that edged the window-curtains vanished. Drawing back further into the fog, I sensed, my heart thumping, that the curtains had been parted a little and that some evil, spider-like creature, crouching there at the window of the now dark room, was glaring out balefully into the fog.
Listening intently, I heard no sound from within the room, but I saw the light go on again. For a second Raffles showed himself to me between the curtains, then he closed them. I waited, swallowing with a parched throat. It seemed a long wait before the front door of the house silently opened and closed, and Raffles rejoined me.
We picked up a cab in Kensington High Street, and Raffles gave the cabbie an address in Hampstead.
‘I’m afraid, Bunny,’ he said, ‘I had to violate a rule of ours and use a modicum of violence. I banged the Tarantula’s head hard against his floor, to stun him while I relit the gaslight he’d turned out. Still, he was beginning to come round as I left. He’ll find he’s lost your four manuscripts. They were on his desk. Here they are, still loosely wrapped in your yellow silk muffler.
‘There was a locked drawer in his desk. The lock presented no problem. So we’re richer by about one thousand pounds-spies’ wages, I imagine. I also abstracted from the drawer a batch of the Tarantula’s papers-which provide, I fancy, all the “firm evidence” Sir Roderick Naismith needs to justify some expulsions from this country. I noticed Sir Roderick’s Hampstead address on letters in his document case, at Lord’s, so we’ll drop these papers he needs through the letterbox, then drive to Piccadilly Circus and see if we can buy a few flowers.’
I was at a loss to divine why he should want flowers at this hour. However, late as it was when we got back from our Hampstead errand and paid off our cab in Piccadilly Circus, we found this hub of London an oasis of activity in the blanketing fog. The theatres and music halls were disgorging their second-house audiences, the gin palaces their inebriates, into the blurred glow from gaslights and the naked flicker of naphtha fog-flares.
Police whistles shrilled above the clip-clop of hoofbeats, harness-jingle of hansoms, fourwheelers, and rumbling omnibuses, and mingled with the honking of occasional taximeter-cabs and the raucous cries of the Piccadilly flower women sitting beside their big baskets at their usual receipt of custom on the steps of the Eros statue.
‘Oy, misters, you gents there!’ A cheeky-looking wench, much shawled and petticoated, with a feather boa, huge hat bedecked with ostrich plumes, and high-heeled button boots, brandished a great bunch of chrysanthemums at Raffles and myself. ‘Out lyte, you are! Bin on the spree, you two ‘ave! You’d best tyke a few flowers ‘ome-beautiful chrysanths, fresh as a dysy-to sweeten yer little bit o’ trouble-an’-strife!’
‘On behalf of my friend here,’ said Raffles, ‘I’ll give you a sovereign for that fine bunch of chrysanthemums, and if you’d care for an extra half-bar, you can deliver them for him at your leisure. The place is not far. It’s just off the Haymarket there-a hotel called Garland’s. Hand the flowers in at the desk and say they’re for Miss Van Heysst, as a bon voyage gift from A Gentleman of Mount Street. Are you on?’
‘Mister, for an extra ‘arf-bar, the w’y tryde’s bin tonight in this bleedin’ fog,’ said the wench, ‘I’d walk as far as Seven Dials for yer wiv me whole bloody basket!’
So Raffles gave her the extra half-sovereign and, raising our caps to the wench, we walked across the misty Circus towards the nearby Albany.
There are games, Bunny, and games,’ Raffles remarked thoughtfully. ‘”Real” tennis is an old one, but espionage is an older one still-and much more dangerous. As far as women are concerned, only a brave woman would play it. It’s to be hoped that Miss Van Heysst doesn’t continue her activities in the pay of the Wilhelmstrasse, or-in the troubled state of Europe today-she may come to a bad end. That would be a pity, because she’s not only an exceptionally attractive and very young woman, but also a brave one.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘So, I think, Bunny,’ Raffles said, ‘although she was a fellow resident of yours in Mount Street for only a short while, it would be nice for her to have a small tribute of flowers from you, to take with her when Sir Roderick Naismith has her escorted aboard the Harwich-to-Hook-of-Holland boat tomorrow. I wish we’d seen more of her. She’s a most interesting person. According to some particulars against her name in Sir Roderick’s list, her real surname is Zeller-and she’s believed to use aliases other than Van Heysst.’
‘Other aliases?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘One of them, noted against our Little Blue Riding Hood in Sir Roderick’s list, is rather striking,’ Raffles said. ‘Mata Hari.’