Chapter III: Strangers in London

In one of the luxurious pale blue and white sitting-rooms in the Hotel Ritz in Piccadilly, Peter Sundt, the millionaire of stock-fish, lounged lazily by the fire, smoking an expensive cigar.

His well-cut frock coat, smart fancy vest, carefully-trimmed moustache, and hair arranged with care, gave him a somewhat gentlemanly appearance, though his red and rather pimply face was coarse, his hands rough, and his manner betrayed his plebeian birth and the struggles of his fisher days.

The man for whom thousands were at that moment netting those cold, dark icy seas, whose nauseous-smelling boileries supplied three parts of the whole world’s produce of that boon to the consumptive, cod-liver oil, whose fishing fleets were spread all across the Arctic seas, and whose influence in Norway was almost equal to that of the Prime Minister himself, sat regarding his visitor with narrowed brows.

Upon the hand holding his cigar a fine diamond flashed in the firelight, and removing his gaze from the pale, drawn face of the man seated opposite him, he thoughtfully contemplated the ash, waiting for a reply to his question.

His visitor was the grey-bearded, bluff old sailor, Jorgen Berentsen.

Outside in Piccadilly the short, grey, January afternoon was drawing to a close. The great arc lamps were already lit, though it was not yet dark, and the roar of the traffic reached the two men, notwithstanding the double windows. One window of the room looked away across the Green Park towards Buckingham Palace, the other upon the life and movement of Piccadilly itself.

“Well?” asked Sundt at last, speaking in Norwegian. “I invited you to come here because I want to know the truth, Jorgen. You know it. Come, tell me.”

“I have already replied. I do not know the truth.”

“You mean that you refuse to tell me!” cried the red-faced man, his dark eyes flashing angrily. “Do you recollect what I told you in your own house up at Vardo?”

“I do—perfectly,” replied the other in a strained voice quite unusual to him.

“Then why have you not heeded? If you had taken my advice long ago you could have become a rich man, left your wretched northern tomb, and lived away in the south in the sunshine and flowers, as I do.”

“Thank you,” replied the old sailor. “I am perfectly happy as I am. Thyra is returning with me—to live as we lived before.”

“You’re mad, man. Do you actually intend to take the girl back to the rough Arctic life in that most dismal hole on all our coast?”

“She wishes it.”

Sundt shrugged his shoulders in impatience, and drew heavily at his cigar.

“Then all I have to say, Jorgen, is that you are very foolish. She would be far better in Christiania, or even in Paris. You have a sister living there. I remember her when I was a boy.”

“My child wishes to go north with me. Therefore I shall agree. Surely her married life was brief enough, and fraught with sufficient ill-fortune.”

“Yes,” sighed the cod-liver oil manufacturer. “It was a most painful and mysterious affair. I was at Havre at the time, and didn’t hear of it until nearly a week later. The French papers are somehow always slow in reporting events in Norway. As soon as I read about it I telegraphed to you, and to her, my condolences.”

“We received them,” replied the old harbour-master quietly.

“My yacht took me from Vardo on the morning following my call upon you, and I was fortunate in catching the mail boat south from Hammerfest. Otherwise I suppose I should have travelled down by the _Mercur_ with you all. But it must have been a most painful affair!” he declared with a sigh. “Poor girl! she has no doubt felt it terribly—after only a few hours of marriage.”

“The mystery of it all is most puzzling,” declared the elder man. “You read the details afterwards, I expect, in the Norwegian papers.”

“I did. It was most extraordinary. Every feature of the case seemed mysterious. Even Thyra did not, on that fatal afternoon, pay the visit she was supposed to have made; or, at least, that is what one of the papers, which assisted the police in their inquiries, declared.”

“That fact is, I fear, correct,” answered Berentsen with a sigh.

“And has your daughter ever told you the true story of her movements on that fatal afternoon?” inquired the red-faced man with a curious look in his searching eyes.

“Unfortunately, she refuses. It is her own affair, she says. She resents any inquisitiveness as to where she went during her absence from her husband.”

“Has it not struck you, my dear Jorgen, as somewhat curious that she should, on the very first day of her marriage, make an excuse to her husband, and go forth to keep some clandestine appointment—for that it was, without a doubt?”

“Whatever her movements were, they were in no way dishonourable, Peter,” replied the bluff old man. “Thyra would never deceive the man she loved.”

“But, my dear friend, she did deceive him. Even you, her father, must acknowledge that. She made an excuse to meet somebody. And she has kept her secret from the police, and from everybody.”

“You speak as though her secret, as you call it, were a guilty one!” cried her father, reddening with anger.

“My dear Jorgen, please do not misunderstand me! I have viewed the whole of the tragic and mysterious circumstances from every standpoint, and have arrived at one conclusion—the only one possible in the circumstances—that Paul Grinevitch was murdered through jealousy. And the man loved Thyra—still loves her, without a doubt. That man is the assassin, depend upon it. The natural theory is that she consented to meet him for the last time in Christiania that afternoon, to bid adieu. They met. Then the lover, seized by a paroxysm of hatred towards the bridegroom, hastened to the hotel, before she could reach it, and struck him down.”

“But the visitor—that woman in black! The sending of the blank message to Nystrom, and the sudden decision to cross to London. Did they have no connection whatever with the crime?”

“None, I think,” Sundt replied slowly, twisting the diamond ring around his finger. “The crime was undoubtedly committed by some man who was passionately in love with your daughter, and who believed, by ridding her of Grinevitch, he might eventually take the dead man’s place.”

“No man will ever take Paul Grinevitch’s place in my child’s heart,” declared the old harbour-master vehemently, as he sat staring straight before him. “It is all so cruel and bitter! As though my poor girl had not sufficient to bear, the gossips in Christiania spoke all sorts of hard things of her, hinting at some love affair while she was still at school there, and declaring, as you have just declared, that she had a secret lover, by whose hand her husband had been struck down. Ah!” he cried. “It is cruel—too cruel! Christiania is the most gossiping place in all Europe. Why, some evil-natured person actually made an allegation that my poor child was privy to her husband’s death—that she went out purposely while the dastardly deed was accomplished!”

“Yes, Jorgen, I, too, heard that same report,” remarked the great man slowly. “Scandalous though it was to invent such a theory, yet——”

“Yet what?” asked the grey-bearded man quickly.

“Well, there are so many unsolved mysteries connected with the young man’s death, that one does not know really where to commence. I think I’m correct in saying that not a single one of those mysteries has yet been elucidated—not even the identity of the young lady in mourning.”

“The police bungled the inquiry from the very beginning. The intelligence of our police of Norway cannot be compared with that of even Denmark.”

“To me it is very curious that a woman could have gone boldly to the room of a man just married during his wife’s absence, remain there in consultation for a considerable period, and be seen to the lift, and then leave the hotel, and disappear completely off the face of the earth,” declared the man with the pimply face. “It seems utterly incredible. Either the Christiania police are utter blockheads, or else the whole affair was a most marvellous conspiracy.”

“The latter, I’m inclined to think, Peter. My own opinion is that jealousy had nothing whatever to do with the death of Paul Grinevitch.”

Peter Sundt smiled incredulously, blew some particles of tobacco ash from his coat sleeve, and raised his eyes to the man before him.

“Tell me, Jorgen,” he demanded at last. “What did you know about young Grinevitch? What did he explain to you concerning himself?”

The grey-bearded old sailor regarded his questioner uneasily. Then, after some hesitation, he answered:

“Well, the fact is, he told me very little, except what I had already discovered. When he asked for my daughter’s hand, he explained that his family was a highly influential and respected one in Moscow, that his father’s estates were in the Government of Tula, that his mother was dead, and that he had one sister living, married to the Governor in Kiev.”

Peter Sundt nodded with evident satisfaction.

“But as regards his means?”

“Beyond his pay as a lieutenant in the Imperial Guard, he had an allowance from his father of twenty thousand kroners a year.”

“H’m! A little over a thousand a year in English money,” remarked Peter. “They might have lived comfortably upon that. Was there no other source of income?”

Old Jorgen started quickly, and looked the stock-fish millionaire straight in the face.

“What—what do you mean?” he inquired.

“Paul Grinevitch told you the truth, I suppose? He surely would not deceive the father of the woman he was about to make his wife.”

“I have no reason to disbelieve anything that he told me.”

“Then he explained to you something in confidence, eh?”

“Well, he did,” admitted the elder man.

“And yet you allowed him to marry Thyra,” observed the other reproachfully.

“They loved each other.”

“Bosh! The fellow’s good looks attracted her. That was all. He was her first love.”

“Then you apparently know more of Grinevitch than you’ve ever admitted, Peter,” Jorgen remarked at last.

A dead silence fell. From without came the dull roar of the London traffic in Piccadilly, with the occasional “honk” of the horns of taxi-cabs. But within the luxurious room the two men sat on either side of the fire, each knowing that the other was his bitterest enemy.

Jorgen Berentsen had not forgotten the hard meaning words which Peter Sundt had uttered on the last occasion when he had come to see him at Vardo. Neither had Sundt forgotten the harbour-master’s open defiance.

“Paul Grinevitch was not exactly what he represented himself to be, eh?” Sundt declared decisively.

“How do you know?”

“Because I took the trouble to institute some inquiries in Russia. You have told me that Thyra loved him. Well, if she did, then she may, after all, congratulate herself upon her freedom.”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“Then let me speak a little plainer, shall I? Let me point out one fact which you, and everyone else, have overlooked; a fact that is patent, and may possibly lead to a clue to the assassin.”

“What is that?”

“You will remember that on your journey south you had as fellow-passengers two Englishmen—one a doctor named Odd, and the other a man named Jervoise.”

“Perfectly. Very pleasant young fellows.”

“Both were very friendly with Thyra, were they not?”

“I believe so. She used to chatter with them in English, and, moreover, they came to the marriage feast, invited by Grinevitch.”

“I am aware of that,” said the other. “I am aware, too, that they travelled to Christiania by the same train as the pair, and that Richard Jervoise was greatly attracted by Thyra. That Englishman loved your daughter, Jorgen.”

“And what of that? She is very beautiful, as you yourself have many times acknowledged. Many men in various walks of life have been attracted by her.”

“None more so than this Richard Jervoise,” was the red-faced man’s hard reply. “And there are certain facts which are, in themselves, very remarkable.”

“What facts?”

“The two Englishmen were in Christiania together on the day of Paul’s death,” Sundt said. “Well, yesterday I called upon Doctor Odd at his surgery, and after some careful questioning, established the fact that all the afternoon of the tragic affair Jervoise was absent from the Grand Hotel.”

“Well?”

“Thyra was absent from her husband, and——”

“What!” cried the old man, starting up angrily. “What, you insinuate something against my daughter’s good name. You, who——”

“I insinuate nothing, my dear Jorgen,” replied the man who supplied the world with its cod-liver oil. “I merely point out two facts which are indisputable. And I would add two others—namely, that it happens to be within my own personal knowledge that Paul Grinevitch was not at all the person he represented himself to be, and, secondly——”

He paused, without concluding his sentence.

“And secondly what?” demanded the old harbour-master with a frown.

“Secondly, Richard Jervoise and Paul Grinevitch met several years ago, and they were the bitterest of enemies. This man Jervoise found the young Russian on the eve of marriage with the girl with whom he had so suddenly fallen desperately in love. And—and,” he added. “Well, I leave you, Jorgen, to form your own conclusions.”

The old harbour-master sank back in his silken chair, as though he had been smitten a staggering blow.