Parker Pyne Investigates. Agatha Christie

was wishing for something to happen–anything! Oh, I don’t like adventures.’

      ‘Tell me how it happened.’

      ‘Well, to tell you properly I shall have to talk a lot about myself, I’m afraid.’

      ‘An excellent subject,’ said Wilbraham, with a bow.

      ‘I am an orphan. My father–he was a sea captain–died when I was eight. My mother died three years ago. I work in the city. I am with the Vacuum Gas Company–a clerk. One evening last week I found a gentleman waiting to see me when I returned to my lodgings. He was a lawyer, a Mr Reid from Melbourne.

      ‘He was very polite and asked me several questions about my family. He explained that he had known my father many years ago. In fact, he had transacted some legal business for him. Then he told me the object of his visit. “Miss Clegg,” he said, “I have reason to suppose that you might benefit as the result of a financial transaction entered into by your father several years before he died.” I was very much surprised, of course.

      ‘“It is unlikely that you would ever have heard anything of the matter,” he explained. “John Clegg never took the affair seriously, I fancy. However, it has materialized unexpectedly, but I am afraid any claim you might put in would depend on your ownership of certain papers. These papers would be part of your father’s estate, and of course it is possible that they have been destroyed as worthless. Have you kept any of your father’s papers?”

      ‘I explained that my mother had kept various things of my father’s in an old sea chest. I had looked through it cursorily, but had discovered nothing of interest.

      ‘“You would hardly be likely to recognize the importance of these documents, perhaps,” he said, smiling.

      ‘Well, I went to the chest, took out the few papers it contained and brought them to him. He looked at them, but said it was impossible to say off-hand what might or might not be connected with the matter in question. He would take them away with him and would communicate with me if anything turned up.

      ‘By the last post on Saturday I received a letter from him in which he suggested that I come to his house to discuss the matter. He gave me the address: Whitefriars, Friars Lane, Hampstead. I was to be there at a quarter to eleven this morning.

      ‘I was a little late finding the place. I hurried through the gate and up towards the house, when suddenly those two dreadful men sprang at me from the bushes. I hadn’t time to cry out. One man put his hand over my mouth. I wrenched my head free and screamed for help. Luckily you heard me. If it hadn’t been for you–’ She stopped. Her looks were more eloquent than further words.

      ‘Very glad I happened to be on the spot. By Gad, I’d like to get hold of those two brutes. You’d never seen them before, I suppose?’

      She shook her head. ‘What do you think it means?’

      ‘Difficult to say. But one thing seems pretty sure. There’s something someone wants among your father’s papers. This man Reid told you a cock-and-bull story so as to get the opportunity of looking through them. Evidently what he wanted wasn’t there.’

      ‘Oh!’ said Freda. ‘I wonder. When I got home on Saturday I thought my things had been tampered with. To tell you the truth, I suspected my landlady of having pried about in my room out of curiosity. But now–’

      ‘Depend upon it, that’s it. Someone gained admission to your room and searched it, without finding what he was after. He suspected that you knew the value of this paper, whatever it was, and that you carried it about on your person. So he planned this ambush. If you had it with you, it would have been taken from you. If not, you would have been held prisoner while he tried to make you tell where it was hidden.’

      ‘But what can it possibly be?’ cried Freda.

      ‘I don’t know. But it must be something pretty good for him to go to this length.’

      ‘It doesn’t seem possible.’

      ‘Oh, I don’t know. Your father was a sailor. He went to out-of-the-way places. He might have come across something the value of which he never knew.’

      ‘Do you really think so?’ A pink flush of excitement showed in the girl’s pale cheeks.

      ‘I do indeed. The question is, what shall we do next? You don’t want to go to the police, I suppose?’

      ‘Oh, no, please.’

      ‘I’m glad you say that. I don’t see what good the police could do, and it would only mean unpleasantness for you. Now I suggest that you allow me to give you lunch somewhere and that I then accompany you back to your lodgings, so as to be sure you reach them safely. And then, we might have a look for the paper. Because, you know, it must be somewhere.’

      ‘Father may have destroyed it himself.’

      ‘He may, of course, but the other side evidently doesn’t think so, and that looks hopeful for us.’

      ‘What do you think it can be? Hidden treasure?’

      ‘By jove, it might be!’ exclaimed Major Wilbraham, all the boy in him rising joyfully to the suggestion. ‘But now, Miss Clegg, lunch!’

      They had a pleasant meal together. Wilbraham told Freda all about his life in East Africa. He described elephant hunts, and the girl was thrilled. When they had finished, he insisted on taking her home in a taxi.

      Her lodgings were near Notting Hill Gate. On arriving there, Freda had a brief conversation with her landlady. She returned to Wilbraham and took him up to the second floor, where she had a tiny bedroom and sitting-room.

      ‘It’s exactly as we thought,’ she said. ‘A man came on Saturday morning to see about laying a new electric cable; he told her there was a fault in the wiring in my room. He was there some time.’

      ‘Show me this chest of your father’s,’ said Wilbraham.

      Freda showed him a brass-bound box. ‘You see,’ she said, raising the lid, ‘it’s empty.’

      The soldier nodded thoughtfully. ‘And there are no papers anywhere else?’

      ‘I’m sure there aren’t. Mother kept everything in here.’

      Wilbraham examined the inside of the chest. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation. ‘Here’s a slit in the lining.’ Carefully he inserted his hand, feeling about. A slight crackle rewarded him. ‘Something’s slipped down behind.’

      In another minute he had drawn out his find. A piece of dirty paper folded several times. He smoothed it out on the table; Freda was looking over his shoulder. She uttered an exclamation of disappointment.

      ‘It’s just a lot of queer marks.’

      ‘Why, the thing’s in Swahili. Swahili, of all things!’ cried Major Wilbraham. ‘East African native dialect, you know.’

      ‘How extraordinary!’ said Freda. ‘Can you read it, then?’

      ‘Rather. But what an amazing thing.’ He took the paper to the window.

      ‘Is it anything?’ asked Freda tremulously. Wilbraham read the thing through twice, and then came back to the girl. ‘Well,’ he said, with a chuckle, ‘here’s your hidden treasure, all right.’

      ‘Hidden treasure? Not really? You mean Spanish gold–a sunken galleon–that sort of thing?’

      ‘Not quite so romantic as that, perhaps. But it comes to the same thing. This paper gives the hiding-place of a cache of ivory.’

      ‘Ivory?’ said the girl, astonished.

      ‘Yes. Elephants, you know. There’s a law about the number you’re allowed to shoot. Some hunter got away with breaking that law on a grand scale. They were on his trail and he cached the stuff. There’s a thundering lot of it–and this gives fairly clear directions how to find it. Look here, we’ll have