it been sent by someone who also knew that an envelope delivered among all the others coming to the club would slip through without notice more easily than one addressed to 221b Baker Street? That suggested a friend. But was it from friend or foe? Was it simply a reminder that I was safe nowhere, not even in my own club?
I was determined that before I left the shelter of the Army and Navy I would know what this was all about. At least I could then write a message “to whom it might concern” and leave it in the trustworthy care of Roebuck at his desk, to be held in case I should suffer some unaccountable “accident.”
I looked at those five words again. Why were they not explained? With sudden unease, I wondered whether they had been written in desperate haste by someone like Colonel Pulleine or Joshua Sellon, someone who had no time to explain them. Someone who knew that he—or she—would be dead in a minute more. A killer might search the place of his murder but would hardly bother with an appointment card on a mantelpiece.
I felt cold in that comfortable sunlit room with its leather arm-chairs and mahogany shelves of books. I thought of Moran again. Perhaps the card was from a killer rather than a corpse. A taunt or an invitation.
I was determined to have the truth of this. To begin with, I tried to remember who the Comtesse de Flandre might be. I had certainly heard—or read—that name. An old-fashioned club library was one of the best places to identify her. A few minutes with European aristocracy in the current volume of the Almanach de Gotha informed me that Marie Luise, Comtesse de Flandre, was a Prussian princess, forty-four years old. She was married to Prince Philippe, Comte de Flandre. He in turn was brother of the childless and dissolute King Leopold II of Belgium. The Comte and Comtesse de Flandre had five children, of whom the young Prince Baudouin was now heir to the Belgian throne.
But what could there be in all this? Anyone who read such sensational London newspapers as the Pall Mall Gazette knew of King Leopold II as a man of unsavoury reputation. His correspondence with Mrs. Mary Jefferies, the so-called White Slave Widow of recent infamy, had lately been read out at the Middlesex Sessions during her trial for keeping a house of ill repute. His character was even more widely known for the brutal treatment meted out to the tribes of his vast and newly acquired Congo Free State. It was the blameless Comtesse de Flandre herself who famously described this royal brother-in-law as the only man who could survive without such an organ as a heart in his body.
What on earth had she to do with our case? From what I could now make out, thanks to the Almanach and the bound volumes of The Times, the Comtesse de Flandre was a figure of domestic virtue and public philanthropy. King Leopold’s sister-in-law would be as revolted as anyone by the stories of his Congolese tribesmen suffering amputation of a hand for returning without a full quota of harvested rubber. This unhappy land, dubbed “The Heart of Darkness,” was also the centre of an arms trade to the Transvaal and elsewhere, the destination of Colonel Moran’s Krupp field-guns and the heavy howitzers.
By now I was scanning the newspaper columns for any clue that might connect such a worthy lady with the hateful underworld of Rawdon Moran and his cronies. She was born a princess of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, sister of the present King of Rumania and of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Her father had been Prime Minister of Prussia.
The Comtesse’s visits to England were reserved for such anniversaries as our own Queen’s birthday or the military ceremonial of the Trooping of the Colour in St. James’s Park. On their arrival at Victoria Station from the channel ferry and during their residence at Claridge’s hotel, she and her husband were visited by foreign ambassadors and British statesmen from Benjamin Disraeli to Lord Salisbury, as well as by the most enlightened of our aristocracy. In her own country, she had been in the Royal Opera Box for the visit of the Shah of Persia and had been radiant at the opening of the Brussels Exhibition.
But what could this amiable lady have to do with the nightmare world of Moran? From what Henry Putney-Wilson had been able to tell us, a network