The Blue Cross

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of human-like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous — nor did he wish to be. There was nothing notable about him, except a slight contrast between the holiday gaiety of his clothes and the official gravity of his outlook. His clothes included a pale grey jacket, a white waistcoat, and a silver straw hat with a grey-blue ribbon. His lean face was dark by contrast, and ended in a short black beard that looked Spanish and suggested an Elizabethan collar. He was smoking a cigarette with the deliberateness of an idler. There was nothing about him to indicate the fact that the grey jacket covered a loaded revolver, that the white waistcoat covered a police card, or that the straw hat hid one of the most powerful intellects in Europe. For this was Valentin himself, the head of the Paris police and the most famous investigator in the world; and he was coming from Brussels to London to make the greatest arrest of the century.

Flambeau was in England. The police of three countries had tracked the notorious criminal at last from Ghent to Brussels, from Brussels to the Hook of Holland; and it was conjectured that he would take some advantage of the unfamiliarity and confusion of the Eucharistic Congress then taking place in London. Probably he would travel as some minor clerk or secretary connected with it; but, of course, Valentin could not be certain; nobody could be certain about Flambeau.

It is many years now since this colossus of crime suddenly ceased keeping the world in a turmoil; and when he ceased, as they said after the death of the French military leader Roland, there was a great silence upon the earth. But in his best days (I mean, of course, his worst), Flambeau was a figure as statuesque and international as the Kaiser, leader of Germany. Almost every morning the daily newspaper announced that he had escaped the consequences of one extraordinary crime by committing another. He was from Gascony in France and of gigantic stature and bodily daring; and the wildest tales were told of his outbursts of athletic humor; how he turned the judge of inquiry upside down and stood him on his head, "to clear his mind"; how he ran down the Rue de Rivoli with a policeman under each arm. He would say that his fantastic physical strength was generally employed in such bloodless though undignified scenes; his real crimes were chiefly those of ingenious and large scale robbery. But each of his thefts was almost a new venture in evil, and would make a story in itself.

It was he who ran the great Tyrolean Dairy Company in London, with no dairies, cows, carts, nor milk, but with around a thousand subscribers. These he served by the simple operation of moving the little milk cans outside people's doors to the doors of his own customers. It was he who had kept up an unaccountable and close correspondence with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope. A sweeping simplicity marked many of his experiments in ill-doing. It is said that he once repainted all the numbers in a street in the dead of night merely to divert one traveler into a trap. It is quite certain that he invented a portable pillar-box, which he put up at corners in quiet suburbs on the chance of strangers dropping postal orders into it. Lastly, he was known to be a startling acrobat; despite his huge figure, he could leap like a grasshopper and melt into the treetops like a monkey. Hence the great Valentin, when he set out to find the great Flambeau, was perfectly aware that his adventures would not end by merely finding him.

But how was he to find him? On this the great Valentin's ideas were still in process of settlement.

There was one thing which Flambeau, with all his dexterity of disguise, could not cover, and that was his singular height. If Valentin's quick eye had caught a tall apple-woman, a tall grenadier, or even a tolerably tall duchess, he might have arrested them on the spot. But all along his train there was nobody that could be a disguised Flambeau, any more than a cat could be a disguised giraffe. He had already satisfied himself about the people on the boat; and the people picked up at Harwich or on the journey limited themselves with certainty to six. There was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short vegetable gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village.

When it came to the last case, Valentin gave it up and almost laughed. The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flatlands; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown-paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of holding together. The Eucharistic Congress had doubtless sucked out many such creatures from their local stagnation, blind and helpless, like dug-up moles. Valentin was a skeptic in the severe style of France, and could have no love for priests. But he could have pity for them, and this one might have provoked pity in anybody. He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had to be careful, because he had something made of real silver "with blue stones" in one of his brown-paper parcels. His quaint blending of Essex flatness with saintly simplicity continuously amused the Frenchman till the priest arrived (somehow) at Tottenham station with all his parcels, and came back for his umbrella. When he did the last, Valentin even had the good nature to warn him not to protect the silver by telling everybody about it. But to whomever he talked, Valentin kept his eye open for someone else; he looked out steadily for anyone, rich or poor, male or female, who was well up to six feet; for Flambeau was four inches above it.

He landed at Liverpool Street, however, quite conscientiously convinced that he had not missed the criminal so far. He then went to Scotland Yard to confirm his position and arrange for help in case of need; he then lit another cigarette and went for a long stroll in the streets of London. As he was walking in the streets and squares beyond Victoria, he paused suddenly and stood. It was a quaint, quiet square, very typical of London, full of an accidental stillness. The tall, flat houses looked at once prosperous and uninhabited; the square of shrubbery in the center looked as deserted as a green Pacific island. One of the four sides was much higher than the rest, like a dais; and the line of one side was broken by one of London's admirable accidents — a restaurant that looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an unreasonably attractive edifice, with dwarf plants in pots and long, striped blinds of lemon yellow and white. It stood conspicuously high above the street, and in the usual patchwork way of London, a flight of steps from the street ran up to meet the front door almost as a fire escape might run up to a first-floor window. Valentin stood and smoked in front of the yellow-white blinds and considered them a long while.

The most...