Free The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy by San Cassimally Page A

other. Algie took out a handkerchief and began wiping his face although it was dry and pasty. I knew that no progress had been made. Armande came back with a laden tray and we served ourselves.
    ‘Tell me baby Alice is now safely in her mother’s arms,’ said Armande with forced gaiety. Clarihoe said nothing but shook his head violently as tears streaked down his cheeks.
    Armande’s reaction was the sort of thing I’ve only seen on the stage before. She let her prized Denbigh cup drop on the floor and smash to smithereens, jumped up like a jack-in-the-box and, throwing up her hands in the air she gave a fearsome scream.
    ‘Now twelve-year-olds are not enough for zose... zose
dégénérées
! Now they nidd bebbies to satisfy zeir animul leust!
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, c’est pas possible. C’est des cochons...’
    ‘Maybe it’s a kidnapping for ransom,’ I suggested, not that I believed it.
    ‘But you ’av monnaie,’ Armande challenged Lord Clarihoe, ‘
we
can get monnnaie’. He shook his head wearily.
    ‘We’ll send Anatole to Deauville and he’ll win us a fortune, he’s been dying to test his new skim,’ suggested the Frenchwoman.
    ‘Tell us exactly how it happened,’ I asked.
    Lord Clarihoe had rushed back to Festing Road the moment he left Water Lane and had found everybody there in a state of shock. Emilia was speechless with sadness but Aunt Cordelia was able to give him an account of the abduction.
    Every afternoon when the baby wakes up from her afternoon nap and had had her feed, Tess takes her out for some fresh air on the bank of the Thames in Putney.
    ‘Who is Tess?’ I asked. Clarihoe blushed as he told us that he had urged the young couple to employ a nursemaid for the child.
    ‘And if I know anysing about anysing, it’s
ce cher
Aljèrnonne himself who pez her wedges out of ’is own pocket,’ chipped in Armande.
    This young lady, a vicar’s daughter, Theresa, or Tess as they called her, regularly took the child out for a walk near the riverside at Putney in Leader’s Gardens. On Thursday she came back home minus the perambulator, distraught, unable to speak for the state of shock she was in. Amid sobs she told of how earlier on, she had spotted two men who seemed to be following her. One was short and dumpy and the other tall and well-built but with a hardly perceptible limp, making an incongruous pair. At first she had told herself off for being silly. Who would follow a frail, ungainly frump like herself walking a baby, but when she noticed that every time she turned a corner, the men did the same, she began to fear that something sinister was afoot. She thought the best thing would be to make for the less secluded river bank as the woods in the Gardens would make it easier for the malfeasants to carry out their mischief if that was their intention. Before she was able to reach the embankment the two men had swooped upon her from behind. The smaller one took her by the waist with one hand and put the other on her mouth to stop her screaming whilst the other grabbed her arm in a deathly grip.Suddenly she noticed that the perambulator which she had been forced to relinquish was beginning to roll away. With the thug’s hand on her mouth stopping her from breathing let alone making any sound, she was unable to scream or do anything except watch in horror as it made its descent towards the river. In alarm, the man with his hand on her mouth shouted, ‘the thsing ith ssliding towardth the river!’ He let go of her and flung himself at it, saving it from taking the plunge just in time. Then he came back, said, ‘thorry misth, I don’t like hitting a lady—’ and smote her in the face. She reeled and fell on her back, stunned, and before she realised what was happening, her two attackers had disappeared into the bushes with Alice in the pram.
    The first thing that Algernon had done was to go see Assistant Commissioner Labalmondière who assured him that the Metropolitan was doing