But about lunch time Mr. Fortune received a curt summons from the Hon. Sidney Lomas and instantly obeyed it. “Well, you know, I thought I should be hearing from you,” he smiled. “I felt, as it were, you couldn’t live without me long.”
“Did you, by Jove!” said Lomas bitterly. “I’ve been wishing all the morning you had been dead some time. Look at that!” He tossed across the table a marked copy of “The Daily Post.”
“Yes, I was enjoying that at breakfast. A noble institution, the British Press, Lomas. A great power. If you know how to use it.”
“I wish to God you wouldn’t spoof reporters. It’s a low taste. And it’s a damned nuisance. I can’t contradict the rag and----”
“No, you can’t contradict it. I banked on that,” Reggie chuckled.
“Did you indeed? And pray what the devil are you at? I have had Osbert here raving mad----”
“Yes, I thought it would stir up Osbert. What’s his line?”
“Wants the papers, of course. And as you very well know, confound you, they’re all at the Foreign Office, the cream of them, and likely to be. He says we’ve no right to keep them after this. Nonsense, of course, but devilish inconvenient to answer. And at last the old man was quite pathetic, says it isn’t fair to him to give out we haven’t touched the papers. No more it is. He was begging me to contradict it officially. I could hardly get rid of him.”
“Damme, I have been at it all the morning. Old Ludlow Blenkinhorn turned up, too.”
“I have clicked, haven’t I?” Reggie chuckled.
“Confound you. He says he has a client with claims on the estate and is informed by the executor that all papers have been taken by us. Now he has read your damned article and he wants to know if the executor is lying.”
“That is a conundrum, isn’t it? And who is Mr. Ludlow Blenkinhorn’s client?”
“What a surprise. And your fellows watching his office, do they say?”
Lomas took up a scrap of paper. “They have sent us something. A man of foreign or mulatto appearance called on him first thing this morning. Was followed to a Bayswater lodging-house. Is known there as Sherif. Mr. A. Sherif. Thought to be an Egyptian.”
“The negro or Hamitic heel!” Reggie murmured. “Do you remember, Lomas old thing?”
“Good Gad!” Lomas dropped his eyeglass. “But what the devil can we do?”