Mr. Jackson Hyane was one of those oldish-looking young men to whom the
description of "man about town" most naturally applied. He was always
well-dressed and correctly dressed. You saw him at first nights. He
was to be seen in the paddock at Ascot--it was a shock to discover that
he had not the Royal Enclosure badge on the lapel of his coat--and he
was to be met with at most of the social functions, attendance at which
did not necessarily imply an intimate acquaintance with the leaders of
Society, yet left the impression that the attendant was, at any rate,
in the swim, and might very well be one of the principal swimmers.
He lived off Albemarle Street in a tiny flat, and did no work of any
kind whatever. His friends, especially his new friends, thought he
"had a little money," and knew, since he told them, that he had
expectations. He did not tell them that his expectations were largely
bound up in their credulity and faith in his integrity. Some of them
discovered that later, but the majority drifted out of his circle
poorer without being wiser, for Mr. Hyane played a wonderful game of
piquet, and seemed to be no more than abnormally lucky.
His mother had been a Miss Whitland, his father was the notorious
Colonel Hyane, who boasted that his library was papered with High Court
writs, and who had had the distinction of being escorted from Monte
Carlo by the police of the Principality.
Mr. Jackson Hyane was a student of men and affairs. Very little
escaped his keen observation, and he had a trick of pigeon-holing
possibilities of profit, and forgetting them until the moment seemed
ripe for their exploitation. He was tall and handsome, with a smile
which was worth at least five thousand pounds a year to him, for it
advertised his boyish innocence and enthusiasm--he who had never been
either a boy or enthusiastic.
One grey October day he put away his pass-book into a drawer and locked
it, and took from a mental pigeon-hole the materials of an immature
scheme. He dressed himself soberly and well, strolled down into
Piccadilly, and calling a cab, drove to the block of City buildings
which housed the flourishing business of Tibbetts and Hamilton, Limited.
The preliminaries to this invasion had been very carefully settled. He
had met Miss Marguerite Whitland by "accident" a week before, had
called at her lodgings with an old photograph of her father, which he
had providentially discovered, and had secured from her a somewhat
reluctant acceptance of an invitation to lunch.
Bones looked up from his desk as the debonair young man strolled in.
"You don't know me, Mr. Tibbetts," said Jackson Hyane, flashing his
famous smile. "My name is Hyane."
It was his first meeting with Bones, but by no means the first time
that Jackson had seen him.