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Updated: June 15, 2025
Mackwayte thought how singularly graceful she looked as she stood, very slim, looking at him whimsically across the dinner-table, the receiver in her hand. Then a strange thing happened. Barbara quickly put the receiver down on the desk and clasped her hands together, her eyes opened wide in amazement. "Daddy," she cried, "it's the Palaceum... the manager's office... they want you urgently!
And that was what Desmond Okewood thought as a few hours later he found himself with Maurice Strangwise in the stalls of the vast Palaceum auditorium. In the unwonted luxury of evening clothes he felt clean and comfortable, and the cigar he way smoking was the climax of one of Julien's most esoteric efforts. The cards on either side of the proscenium opening bore the words: "Deputy Turn."
Nur-el-Din had introduced them, Desmond remembered, on that fateful night when he had accompanied Strangwise to the Palaceum. Strange, how he was beginning to encounter the man Strangwise at every turn in this sinister affair. And then, with a shock that struck him like a blow in the face, Desmond recalled Barbara's parting words to him in the taxi.
Mackwayte would require for the sketches he would play that evening. In the middle of it all the throbbing of a car echoed down the quiet road outside. Then there came a ring at the front door. At half-past nine that night, Barbara found herself standing beside her father in the wings of the vast Palaceum stage. Just at her back was the little screened-off recess where Mr.
If Mortimer and Strangwise were both staying at the Dyke Inn, then they were probably acquainted. Strangwise knew Nur-el-Din, too, knew her well; for Desmond remembered how familiarly they had conversed together that night in the dancer's dressing-room at the Palaceum. Strangwise knew Barbara Mackwayte also.
He remembered how she had told him of seeing Nur-el-Din's face in the mirror as the dancer was talking to Strangwise that night at the Palaceum, and of the look of terror in the girl's eyes.
"The only pleasant memory I shall preserve of the Palaceum," she said in French, "is my meeting with an old comrade of my youth. Imagine, I had not seen him for nearly twenty years. Monsieur Mackwayte, his name is, we used to call him Monsieur Arthur in the old days when I was the child acrobat of the Dupont Troupe. Such a charming fellow; and not a bit changed!
He was doing a deputy turn at the Palaceum on the last night I appeared there! And he introduced me to his daughter! Une belle Anglaise! I shall hope to see my old friend again when I go back to London!" Desmond stared at her. If this were acting, the most hardened criminal could not have carried it off better. He searched the girl's face. It was frank and innocent.
Now that he was away from Nur-el-Din with her pleading eyes and pretty gestures, Desmond's thoughts turned again to Barbara Mackwayte. As he walked along Piccadilly, he found himself contrasting the two women as he had contrasted them that night he had met them in Nur-el-Din's dressing room at the Palaceum.
"What time did you part from the Mackwaytes at the theatre last night?" Desmond was dumbfounded. How on earth did the Chief know about his visit to the Palaceum? Still, he was used to the omniscience of the British Intelligence, so he answered promptly: "It was latish, sir; about midnight, I think!" "They went home to Seven Kings alone!" "Yes, sir, in a taxi!" Desmond replied.
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