“I should call you Fabe, I suppose? It’s a perfectly lovely name. As I was saying, I don’t want to throw myself at any man’s head.”

“Let us go down tonight.”

Her face changed.

“To the abbey – tonight?”

He nodded.

“My car will get us down in an hour and a half, and we can wait till it’s dark; and unless there’s a lot of digging to be done–”

“There is no digging,” she said. “But tonight?”

“Why not?” he demanded. “My cottage is less than a mile from the abbey. If the gold is there and reachable, we could get away with enough to make us rich for life.”

She pondered this, and then:

“I know you’ll think it horrid of me, Mr Gilder – Fabe – that does sound familiar, doesn’t it? – but I would like something in black and white.”

There and then Mr Fabrian Gilder produced a document that was enough, as he observed jocularly, to hang him, and, reading it, even Mary Wenner, with her keen instinct for safeguards, was impressed. He wrote the agreement with his own fountain pen, on paper which he provided, and he had brought along that pen in his pocket with a view to such a contingency. It was a new pen, filled with an ink that he had purchased at a novelty store in Wardour Street, and which was guaranteed to fade within six hours of writing.

Miss Wenner read it through, folded it and put it into her bag, and disappeared into her bedroom. She came back with the bag, but he guessed that the agreement was disposed in some safe place.

“Now, Fabe, what time do you want to start?”

“At nine-thirty?” he suggested, and she nodded.

“And don’t trouble to bring a crowbar,” she said a little viciously, as she remembered Arthur Gine’s rank treachery. “I’ll carry all the tools we want in my bag.”

29

The weather had changed that afternoon. Big black clouds had come up from the west; a steady drizzle of rain had set in when Fabrian Gilder brought his car to the rendezvous in Marylebone Road. He had pulled up the hood, and, as a matter of precaution, he had cleared out every portable thing from the tonneau. If there was gold he must find room for it, and he made a careful calculation as to the weight he could carry on each journey.

He was surprised at himself that he had accepted as a fact so readily that there was gold to be taken. From the girl he learned for the first time the extent of the treasure. He had inquired casually of his garage man the amount of strain the back axle would stand. That was unnecessary, for he had once driven four fairly heavy men a considerable journey. Supposing they weighed 170 pounds, that would be the equivalent of twenty bars of gold.