Send for Paul Temple

He led the way into the comfortable lounge where he had entertained Dr. Milton and Diana Thornley two days before. Unconsciously, he bowed his strange visitor into a comfortable armchair and produced Turkish and Virginia cigarettes for her to smoke. Miss Trent took one of the latter, lit it and smiled happily at him.

‘He’s very determined, isn’t he,’ she said, referring to Pryce.

Temple, normally the most self-possessed of men, was taken aback.

‘Yes—er—yes, very.’ Then suddenly he remembered that even though his charming visitor was certainly more good-looking than Pryce had led him to expect, she had literally broken into his house.

‘I say, look here,’ he expostulated, ‘you can’t come bursting into people’s houses like this!’

‘I’m sorry,’ she started without seeming to display any great depths of misery, ‘but—’ And her voice tailed away as if she had other and far weightier topics to think about and discuss.

‘You are Paul Temple, aren’t you?’ she asked, almost abruptly.

‘Yes,’ said Temple quietly.

Miss Trent had a knack of putting herself so completely in the right that Temple began to feel almost as if he were the offender.

‘I tried to see you yesterday, but your man said you were out.’

‘Well—er—what is it you wanted to see me about?’

Steve Trent looked up at the man she had forced to be her host, and her face gradually became very serious.

‘Do you think Superintendent Harvey committed suicide?’ she asked.

Temple looked at this pretty girl sitting before him with sudden interest. She was certainly a very earnest reporter.

‘My dear Miss Trent, I don’t see that it makes a great deal of difference what I think,’ he said non-committally.

But Miss Trent was not so easily evaded.

‘Please! Please, answer my question. Do you think Superintendent Harvey committed suicide?’

The words came with a rush. There was deep emotion in her voice.

Temple stared at her with surprise in his eyes. ‘By Timothy, you are a remarkable young woman! First of all you insult my…’

Miss Trent interrupted him.

‘You haven’t answered my question!’ she said firmly.

Temple had encountered many reporters in the course of his career, but this girl was something new in his experience. That she was extremely pretty, Temple had seen as soon as he set foot in the hall during Pryce’s severe efforts to restrain her. But then many girl reporters are pretty. And like the beautiful, glamorous women spies of popular fiction, they can often use that beauty with great advantage, both while extracting information from unwilling victims and coping with recalcitrant editors!

But there was something about Steve Trent that distinguished her from other women reporters in Fleet Street. Her eyes shone clear and bright, with no hard sophistication to mar them. Yet they spoke of experience, of difficulties, even dangers encountered. They were dark-blue eyes, one curiously lighter than the other, and they sparkled with the vivacity of her nature.

She was now wearing an elegant costume of dark-green tweed under which the lustrous silk stockings that emphasized the contours of two admirable legs looked slightly incongruous. A rather shapeless deerstalker type of hat crowned her luxuriant blonde hair. In every respect, as Temple and everyone else who met her thought, she was an eminently attractive young woman, in dress, appearance and character. The sort of woman for whom Elizabethan poets would have torn their hair out searching for epithets sufficiently far-fetched.

Temple took it all in, as he sat on the settee opposite her, wondering exactly what to make of this lovely young criminologist. At length he answered her question.

‘No!’ he said quietly. ‘I think Superintendent Harvey was murdered.’

‘I knew it! I knew it!’ exclaimed Steve Trent, her voice raising to a high pitch in sudden, unwonted excitement. ‘I knew they’d get him!’

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Paul Temple with surprise.

‘Gerald Harvey was…a…friend of mine,’ said Steve Trent slowly.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘My man told me that you were a reporter and…’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ she interrupted. ‘I’m on the staff of The Evening Post, but that’s not why I wanted to see you.’

Again Temple looked at her queerly.

‘Why did you want to see me?’ he asked at length.

Steve Trent appeared to think for a moment.

‘Because I need your help,’ she answered suddenly, ‘because I need your help more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life before.’

Temple was obviously impressed by the urgency in her voice.

‘Was Harvey a great friend of yours?’ he asked.

Steve nodded. ‘He was my brother,’ she said softly.

‘Your brother!’ exclaimed Temple, then: ‘When I suggested that your brother might have been murdered, you said: “I knew it! I knew it! I knew they’d get him!” What did you mean by “I knew they’d get him?”’

Steve Trent, alias Louise Harvey, paused a moment, then asked him a question in return.

‘Why do you think my brother came to see you, Mr. Temple, the night he was murdered?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘I’m not at all certain that he had any particular reason.’

‘He had,’ she answered, ‘a very good reason.’

‘Well?’

‘My brother was investigating the mysterious robberies which have been occurring. He had a theory about these robberies which I believe he wanted to discuss with you.’

‘A theory?’ queried Paul Temple.

Slowly at first, then gradually gaining confidence, Steve Trent proceeded to tell him her story. It was the life history of herself and of Superintendent Gerald Harvey, the police chief. She had come to see Paul Temple, the novelist and criminologist, not as a reporter after a ‘story’, but to ask his help.

‘About eight years ago,’ she explained, ‘my brother was attached to what was then called the Service B.Y. It was a special branch of the Cape Town Constabulary. At this particular time, a very daring and successful gang of criminals were carrying out a series of raids on various jewellers within a certain area known as the Cape Town–Simonstown area. My brother and another officer, whose name I forget at the moment, were in charge of the case. After months of investigation, they discovered that the leader of the organization was a man who called himself the Knave of Diamonds, but whose real name was Max Lorraine.

‘Lorraine apparently was a well-educated man who at one time had occupied an important position at Columbia University. Eventually the organization was smashed – but the Knave had laid his plans carefully and he escaped. Two months later, the officer who had assisted my brother in the investigation was murdered. It was not a pleasant murder. This was followed almost immediately by two attempts on my brother’s life.’

She paused. Paul Temple could see the look of horror in her eyes as the recollection of those terrible days came back to her.