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“Perfect lighting for a restful impression—the gentle flickering light gives a sense of peace without any solemn rigidity. You see, the smiles seem almost to play. We flatter ourselves on our smiles and feel they deserve the best of lighting to bring them out. Anything set would be worse than a droop. We aim at a quiet playfulness and I am sure you will agree that we have hit it. When the loved one returns home, permanently”—the word was stressed—“we always arrange the homecoming. We have planned a series of ‘settings' to suit every purse, from the simplest ‘cosy-corner' just for one inmate to the family wing to be built on to mansions. We have just completed quite an ambitious design—the old family butler is seated in a small back room looking contentedly at some perfect rustless-steel replicas of the family silver, with his polishing cloth still in his hand. In the front room are the grandparents each side of the fire, with a few spare chairs for relations who drop in for a few moments—or come for good. Upstairs, at the piano, is their daughter, the charming consumptive, and turning her music, the young man who when she became permanent, for a while went quite to pieces, but now is perfectly recollected, composed. Keats would have found his Grecian Urn surpassed—‘For ever will he love and she be fair.' In the room above is the nursery, presided over, as it should be, by the dear old family nurse brooding over the little angel in his crib and the two-year-old gazing with childish solemnity at the fire.”

“I'm not the Press,” I got out at last.

“Oh, I'm so sorry.” Mr. Montalba's style changed in a twinkling. “Forgive me. We've only opened lately in this new mansion and of course we have roused much intelligent curiosity, I thought you were from a woman's magazine. But,” and he already had my fingers between two grey gloved hands, “you had come for an appointment? You have a dear one ready or nearly ready to be permanented? Oh, please don't start—yes, we like a little notice. Sometimes I drop around and make just a study or two from life—get the pose, you know. Many people make all arrangements with me—in advance. Then I can—how may I put it—avoid any awkward little hiatus.”

At last I broke through this millrace of commercialized Lethe.

“Mr. Montalba,” I said, “I have called to ask if you have received the—the remains of a Mr. Sibon?”

“Remains!” He breathed out the word as a smoker resists at the first whiff a base tobacco. “Please, please, quite the unhappiest of words. ‘Relics' even have about them a quite unnecessary flavor of abandonment. ‘Form' is the word. Everything we say and do is in good form, indeed the best. We receive the Form—an obsequious touch or two and ‘Not marble's self nor the gilded monuments of princes can compare for lasting quality'.”

I stuck my ground.

“Have you the Form of Mr. Sibon?”

“A relation?” He cooed.

“No, no, only an acquaintance.”

“Well,” he became confidential, “of course it's really very unprofessional, Mr.… Mr.?”

“Mr. Silchester.”

“Mr. Silchester, we have to have our rules. I'm sure you'll understand. Next of kin have their rights, though I'm glad to say we so win confidence that they nearly always waive them. For all others—yes, even for blood relations—nothing till the opening day. Still, I will make an exception on your behalf. I don't mind telling you that from the moment I saw you, I saw you might have—I like the ecclesiastical word; our professions so neatly parallel—a vocation. Yes, Mr. Sibon is here, resting.”

“He's alive then?” I'm afraid I blurted.

Mr. Montalba became arch, “‘Resting', I said,” he corrected me. “Life is such a rush now. Always keeping up and keeping up appearances. And now he will be kept up. The upkeep is practically nominal. We include a ten year guarantee and inspection service with the initial costs.”

“When did he die?” I shot in.

“Again I'm being so very unprofessional. My heart over my head, you know. But why shouldn't I? You're not the Press. And, I can't help it, I love a fellow enthusiast, as I see you are. Mr. Sibon was among the first of my clients to avail himself of our ‘advance service'; when he felt that he was, as we put it, losing form, he sent for me. So I was able to be at his apartment when he—again a phrase we have put into circulation—handed over. So advisable for the transformation to have, as I have said, no hiatus. No, he hadn't been indisposed long. Just a little palpitation. It makes the calm all the more appreciated, by everyone, when the heart has been altogether a little too febrile.”

He paused and then put his fat grey glove on my shoulder. It settled there like a heavy hot pigeon and then gave me a gentle push. His other hand pressed the panel of the big apartment's third wall. It swung back and he pushed me through. In my ear he whispered, “You are privileged. You shall see a newcomer before he has been actually fitted with his setting.” The door closed behind us. We were in a dim passage with faint pink lights in the ceiling. Out of it another door opened. A light switched on. The room, its apricot glow lit up, was small but painted a cheerful rose. It contained only one article of furniture—a chair. But that was a comfortable one. And so the occupant seemed to find it. Dosing easily in it was—I knew at once from my previous visit to him—Sibon. I stepped up quickly and touched him on the shoulder.

“Oh, you shouldn't, you shouldn't!” Without looking round I could sense the smile in Mr. Montalba's whisper. “But you couldn't resist, could you? And I couldn't resist either, just letting you. We're fellow enthusiasts. I knew it.”

For I had started back more quickly than I'd sprung forward. The shoulder I had touched was as hard and stiff as wood.

“Didn't you understand? Of course I can't help being pleased. It's His Master's Voice, isn't it, all over again. But this time it's the eye that's completely taken in, not the ear. Still I do hope you haven't been shocked. I did try, you will own, to save you
any
shock.”

My mind was in an unpleasant whirl. I must sort out my impressions. First, this beastly taxidermist was, I could have no doubt, an enthusiast. He didn't care a straw for the living. It was corpses he loved. A modern “resurrection man,” a civilized—not head-hunter but whole-body snatcher. Secondly, Sibon was dead—not a doubt of it. That horribly firm contact spoke volumes on the ultimate silence. The disgusting preservative had already turned him into a solid block. I remembered that in the short interview we had had before his death, he still had found time to complain of his heart and indeed seemed in some trouble with it.

Well, all that remained was to thank Mr. Montalba, Obsequist, and to report back. I turned. He was regarding me with an easy complacency.

“Are Mr. Sibon's relations coming to fetch him?” I asked.

“I'm afraid he had none.”

“Then …?” I paused.

“Well, again in confidence, I can tell you he bought himself a seat.”

“A seat?”

“Yes, just before you go, please one more glance at our range of services.” He ushered me out of the room and switched off the light. We went down the rose-lit passage. At the end was a large door. Mr. Montalba threw it open. That movement evidently set an organ playing. We were looking down quite a large choir. Stalls rose on either hand. Some were vacant but many were occupied by a congregation, some kneeling, others sitting.

“A number of clients, especially when the home atmosphere hasn't been completely cooperative, prefer to take to a more specifically ecclesiastical air. Home is surely sacred but here we have an alternative sanctity.”

It certainly was. Incense for the nose. Electric candles and stained glass for the eyes. Subdued Gregorian chanting for the ear.

I retreated. Here was complete closure. Across the ultimate mystery Mr. Montalba had drawn the thickest tapestry of sham man had ever woven. And here Sibon—or all that the Law could look for—the body of Sibon, would stay secure (“Immaculate” would have been Mr. Montalba's word) in the heaviest odor of sanctity. What a getaway for the cleverest of international crooks, just as a convict's garb, if not a hempen cravat, was being got ready for him!

Mr. Montalba waved to me from the door. “Come again, and of course whenever you feel need of service you will remember ours is—I don't boast, I know—incomparable.”

I hailed a taxi and drove back to our hotel. In his usual way, Mr. Mycroft showed no surprise as I gave him my surely unusual story. As he made no comment, and that's always a little galling, I added as a colophon, “Well, the mission you sent me on has closed the case.”

“Why?” he asked with a sort of irritating innocence.

“Well, I've seen Sibon and, unpleasant but convincing fact, actually touched him.”

“Does that prove he's got away?”

“Well, when you took me along to see him, I was as close to him as I'm to you now; and I was as close as this, this afternoon, to what's left of him now.”

“Yes, yes, but he knew why we had come. If the game wasn't closing I wouldn't have taken you. It gave a second witness and prevented him—he's Gascon and so impulsive—from giving way to any melodramatic action which, while of course fatal to his chances, might have been even more fatal to my expectations.”

“But he
was
ill.”

“Possibly, possibly: though you recall, after his valet had gone to tell him we'd called, though he kept us waiting a little while, he then came to the door himself.”

“But I don't see.…”

“Did I say I expected that of you?”

“But I have seen the corpse and you haven't!”

“If I allow your conclusion, perhaps I may be permitted to doubt your initial premise.”

When Mr. Mycroft is like that I've learned to leave him alone. I venture to believe that being right as often as he has—and so often when people thought him wrong—has slightly affected his judgment. So I simply asked, “Why did you send me to see, then, and not go yourself?” But of course that was a mistake—I saw that the moment I'd said it. And Mr. Mycroft's quiet check-mate, “Because I thought Mr. Montalba and you would get on better than he and I,” left me no opening but to leave the room. As I was leaving, however, as usual, the old master relented:

“Please remember that you did something I couldn't have done. I am not going to say you weren't
taken
in. I really don't know. But I am going to allow that you
got
in so far as to bring back much more than I had hoped. Now, Mr. Silchester, if you will use your other great gift by ordering one of your excellently planned dinners to be sent up to this small sitting-room of ours—while you plan that strategy, I'll go over this other game and see whether it is as closed as it seems.
Au revoir
for an hour.”

I left the old bird quite gay. After all, as he'd more than once remarked, we were complementary—quite a compliment from him.

Certainly whatever Mr. Mycroft thought of me as a messenger, he left me in no unpleasant doubts as to his opinion of my gift as a
maître d' hôtel
. The hotel in which we stayed during this affair was one of bungalows served from a central and excellent kitchen. There, with a fine chief-of-staff, I planned something that even during the planning took the taste of preservative out of my mouth. When the attack was deployed, Mr. Mycroft executed dignified justice on some decapitated prawns which had absorbed into their systems a white wine sauce and awaited sentence on anchovy toast. He stirred the cream into his Borscht, watching the white and crimson maze with a professional eye. With a neat surgical touch he disclosed the truffles and chestnuts which the roast pheasant was concealing on her person. The structure of the
bombe glacé
he demonstrated with technical ease. The angels-on-horseback that brought up the rear, he dismounted with a chivalrous lance.

As we sat over our coffee he said: “I wonder whether I can answer this little mortician mystery anything like as well as you have today solved the perennial problem of the menu! We must remember precisely where we are. If you see precisely where you are, you can generally see considerably further than you think.”

Yes, that was a typical prologue and promised well. I made a sound which I'd discovered was the perfect antiphon—a kind a
Humph
—half “hear, hear” and half “Howdymean?”

“First, there's Sibon himself getting on in years. Real crooks never carry their years well. Sibon is of course the ‘grand manner' crook, seldom stooping to anything under the 50,000 figure and of course in his heyday he would never have been so
outré
as to go armed. His name will always have its niche in the annals of crime because we may say that he really opened up that large neglected mine, the Indian Rajahs' palaces. Till his date crooks took such tropical fish as swam into their northern nets, as an occasional purloining of a really fine stone, a bit of none too pretty blackmail about some all too pretty white female. But Sibon had the pioneer's pluck to go out and open up that rich field. He is said to have had some equally odd adventures. If you're caught in those preserves you are not so much held as parted. The Rajah usually holds a piece of your anatomy as a pledge against your return. Sibon is evidently still fairly intact—if you leave out that problematical heart. But he has extradition proceedings closing round him. He's old, yes, and may be ill, and he is certainly ready, very ready to be forgotten. But that is not quite the same as saying that he is prepared to go to where all things are forgotten? Sibon's wish—we want his wish to know his possible whereabouts—is to disappear.

“Secondly, there's myself. I want Sibon because his range of past activities awakes my professional curiosity. I'm ready to catch him now. I went with you to see him a couple of days ago because I wanted him to stand his ground and I judged he would if he knew I was nearly ready to pounce. All went well, you recall. He kept his head when he saw us. And when he keeps his head I'd gladly exchange mine for his. He saw at once I wouldn't go to see him if I had
all
my clues ready, but I would go when I was nearly ready, just to see how the land lay. He was no doubt ill. But his illness was also charmingly apposite. I repeat, really bad heart cases don't dismiss their valet and come themselves to welcome uninvited guests. This morning we learn that he'd had a fatal attack in the night and, in accord with modern hygiene, the most fashionable mortician—I beg Mr. Montalba's pardon, obsequist—took over the Form. Yes, I like that word. Mr. Sibon may have been out of condition but he was certainly in form.