The Joker

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Title: The Joker (1926) Author: Edgar Wallace

CHAPTER 1

MR STRATFORD HARLOW was a gentleman with no particular call to hurry. By every standard he was a member of the leisured classes, and to his opportunities for lingering, he added the desire of one who was pertinently curious.

The most commonplace phenomena interested Mr Harlow. He had all the requisite qualities of an observer; his enjoyment was without the handicap of sentimentality, a weakness which is fatal to accurate judgement.

Leonardo da Vinci could stand by the scaffold using the dreadful floor as his desk; and sketch the agonies of malefactors given to the torture. Mr Harlow, no great lover of painters, thought well of Leonardo. He too could stop to look at sights which sent the average man shuddering and hurrying past; he could stop (even when he was really in a hurry) to analyse the colour scheme in an autumn sunset, not to rhapsodise poetically, but to mark down for his own information the quantities of beauty.

He was a large man of forty-eight, fair and slightly bald. His clean-shaven face was unlined, his skin without blemish. Pale blue eyes are not accounted beautiful and the pallor of Mr Harlow’s eyes was such that, seeing him for the first time, many sensitive people experienced a shock, thinking he was sightless. His nose was big and long, and of the same width from forehead to tip. He had very red, thick lips that seemed to be pouting even when they were in repose. A rounded chin with a dimple in the centre and unusually small cars, completes the description.

His powerful car was drawn up by the side of the road, its two near wheels on the green verge, and Mr Harlow sat, one hand on the wheel, watching the marshalling of the men in a field. In such moments of contemplative reveries as these, splendid ideas were born in Stratford Harlow’s mind, great schemes loomed out of the nowhere which is beyond vision. And, curiously enough, prisons invariably had this inspirational effect.

They were trudging now across the field, led by a lank warder, cheerful, sunburnt men in prison uniform.

Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!

The convicts had reached the hard road and were coming towards him. The leading warder glanced suspiciously at the well-dressed stranger, but the gang were neither abashed nor distressed by this witness of their shame. Rather, they carried themselves with a new perkiness as though conscious of their value as an unusual spectacle. The first two files glanced sideways and grinned in a friendly manner, half the third file followed suit, but the second man looked neither left nor right. He had a scowl on his face, a sneer on his thin lips and he lifted one shoulder in a shrug of contemptuous defiance, delivered, as the watcher realised, not so much towards the curious sightseer, but the world of free men which Mr Harlow represented.

Twisting round in his seat, he watched the little column filing through the Arch of Despair and out of sight through the gun-metal gates which he could not see.

The motorist stepped on the starter and brought the car round in a half-circle. Patiently he manoeuvred the long chassis until it headed back towards Princetown. Tavistock and Ellenbury could wait a day—a week if necessary. For here was a great thought to be shaped and exploited.

His car stopped noiselessly before the Duchy Hotel, and the porter came running down the steps.

‘Anything wrong, sir?’

‘No. I thought I’d stay another day. Can I have the suite? If not, any room will do.’

The suite was not let, he learnt, and he had his case carried upstairs.

It was then that he decided that Ellenbury, being within driving distance, might come across the moor and save him the tedium of a day spent in Tavistock. He picked up the telephone and in minutes Ellenbury’s anxious voice answered him.

‘Come over to Princetown. I’m staying at the Duchy. Don’t let people see that you know me. We will get acquainted in the smoke-room after lunch.’

Mr Harlow was eating his frugal lunch at a table overlooking the untidy square in front of the Duchy, when he saw Ellenbury arrive: a small, thin, nervous man, with white hair. Soon after the visitor came down to the big dining-room, gazed quickly round, located Mr Harlow with a start, and sat himself at the nearest table.

The dining-room was sparsely occupied. Two parties that had driven up from Torquay ate talkatively in opposite corners of the room. An elderly man and his stout wife sat at another table, and at a fourth, conveying a curious sense of aloofness, a girl. Women interested Mr Harlow only in so far as they were factors in a problem or the elements of an experiment; but since he must classify all things he saw, he noticed, in his cold-blooded fashion, that she was pretty and therefore unusual; for to him the bulk of humanity bore a marked resemblance to the cheap little suburban streets in which they lived, and the drab centres of commerce where they found their livelihood.

He had once stood at the corner of a busy street in the Midlands and had taken a twelve-hour census of beauty. In that period, though thousands upon thousands hurried past, he had seen one passably pretty girl and two that were not ill-favoured. It was unusual that this girl, who sat sidefaced to him, should be pretty; but she was unusually pretty.

Though he could not see her eyes, her visible features were perfect and her complexion was without flaw. Her hair was a gleaming chestnut and he liked the way she used her hands. He believed in the test of hands as a revelation of the mind. Her figure—what was the word? Mr Harlow pursed his lips. His was a cold and exact vocabulary, lacking in floweriness. ‘Gracious,’ perhaps. He pursed his lips again. Yes, gracious—though why it should be gracious…He found himself wandering down into the roots of language, and even as he speculated she raised her head slightly and looked at him. In profile she was pleasing enough, but now—

‘She is beautiful,’ agreed Stratford Harlow with himself, ‘but in all probability she has a voice that would drive a man insane.’

Nevertheless, he determined to risk disillusionment. His interest in her was impersonal. Two women, one young, one old, had played important parts in his life; but he could think of women unprejudiced by his experience. He neither liked nor disliked them, any more than he liked or disliked the Farnese vase, which could be admired but had no special utility.

Presently the waiter came to take away his plate. ‘Miss Rivers,’ said the waiter in a low voice, in answer to his query. ‘The young lady came this morning and she’s going back to Plymouth by the last train. She’s here to see somebody.’ He glanced significantly at Mr Harlow, who raised his bushy eyebrows.

‘Inside?’ he asked, in a low voice.

The waiter nodded. ‘Her uncle—Arthur Ingle, the actor chap.’

Mr Harlow nodded. The name was dimly familiar. Ingle?…Nosegay with a flower drooping out…and a judge with a cold in his head.

He began to reconstruct from his association of ideas.

He had been in court at the Old Bailey and seen the nosegay which every judge carries—a practice which had its beginning in olden times, when a bunch of herbs was supposed to shield his lordship from the taint of Newgate fever. As the judge had laid the nosegay on the ledge three little pimpernels in the centre had fallen on to the head of the clerk. Now he remembered! Ingle! An ascetic face distorted with fury. Ingle, the actor, who had forged and swindled, and had at last been caught. Mr Stratford Harlow laughed softly; he not only remembered the name but the man, and he had seen him that morning, scowling, and shrugging one shoulder as he slouched past in the field gang So that was Ingle! And he was an actor.

Mr Harlow had come back especially to Princetown to find out who he was. As he looked up he saw the girl walking quickly from the room and, rising, he strolled out after her, to find the lounge empty. Selecting the most secluded corner, he rang for his coffee and lit a cigar.

Presently Ellenbury came in, but for the moment Mr Harlow had other interests. Through the window he saw Miss Rivers walking across the square in the direction of the post office and, rising, he strolled out of the hotel and followed. She was buying stamps when he entered, and it was pleasing to discover that her voice had all the qualities he could desire.

Forty-eight has certain privileges; and can find the openings which would lead to twenty-eight’s eternal confusion.

‘Good morning, young lady. You’re a fellow guest of ours, aren’t you?’

He said this with a smile which could be construed as fatherly. She shot a glance at him and her lips twitched. She was too ready to smile, he thought, for this visitation of hers to be wholly sorrowful.

‘I lunched at the Duchy, yes, but I’m not staying here. It is a dreadful little town!’

‘It has its beauty,’ protested Mr Harlow.

He dropped sixpence on the counter, took up a local timetable, waited while the girl’s change was counted and fell in beside her as they came out of the office.

‘And romance,’ he added. ‘Take the Feathers Inn. There’s a building put up by the labour of French prisoners of war.’

From where they stood only the top of one of the high chimneys of the prison was visible.

She saw him glance in that direction and shake his head.

‘The other place, of course, is dreadful-dreadful! I’ve been trying to work up my courage to go inside, but somehow I can’t.’

‘Have you—’ She did not finish the question.

‘A friend—yes. A very dear friend he was, many years ago, but the poor fellow couldn’t go straight. I half promised to visit him, but I dreaded the experience.’

Mr Harlow had no friend in any prison.

She looked at him thoughtfully.

‘It isn’t really so dreadful. I’ve been before,’ she said, without the slightest embarrassment. ‘My uncle is there.’

‘Really?’ His voice had just the right quantity of sympathy and understanding.

‘This is my second visit in four years. I hate it, of course, and I’ll be glad when it’s over. It is usually rather—trying.’

They were pacing slowly towards the hotel now.

‘Naturally it is very dreadful for you. You feel so sorry for the poor fellows—’

She was smiling; he was almost shocked.

‘That doesn’t distress me very much. I suppose it’s a brutal thing to say, but it doesn’t. There is no’—she hesitated—‘there is no affection between my uncle and myself, but I’m his only relative and I look after his affairs’—again she seemed at a loss as to how she would explain—‘and whatever money he has. And he’s rather difficult to please.’

Mr Harlow was intensely interested; this was an aspect of the visit which he could not have imagined.

‘It would be dreadful if I liked him, or if he was fond of me,’ she went on, stopping at the foot of the hotel steps. ‘As it is, we have a business talk and that is all.’

With a friendly nod she passed into the hotel ahead of him. Mr Harlow stood for a long time in the doorway, looking at nothing, his mind very busy, and then he strolled back to his cooling coffee; and presently fell into discussion; about the weather and the crops with the nervous little man who awaited his coming.

They were quite alone now. The car parties had vanished in noisy confusion; the old gentleman and the stout old lady were leaving the hotel on a walking excursion as he had come in.

‘Is everything all right, Ellenbury?’

‘Yes, Mr Harlow,’ said the little man eagerly. ‘Everything is in perfect shape and trim. I have settled the action that the French underwriters were bringing against the Rata Company, and—’

Suddenly he was stricken to silence. Following the direction of his staring eyes, Mr Harlow also looked out of the window. Eight convicts were walking down the street in the direction of the railway station; Mr Harlow looked and pointed.

‘Not a very pleasant or an agreeable sight,’ he said. In his oracular moments his voice was very rich and pleasant. ‘Yet one, I think, to which the callous people of Princetown are quite accustomed. These men are being transferred to another prison, I imagine. Do you ever realise what your feelings would be if you had been, say, the leader of that gang, they used to be chained like wild beasts—’

‘For God’s sake, stop!’ said the little man hoarsely. ‘Don’t talk about it, don’t talk about it!’ His trembling hands covered his eyes. ‘I had a horror of coming here,’ he said, in a voice that was scarcely audible. ‘I’ve never been before…the car passed that terrible archway and I nearly fainted!’

Mr Harlow, one eye on the door, smiled indulgently. ‘You have nothing to fear, my dear Ellenbury,’ he said in a paternal voice. ‘I have in a sense condoned your felony. In a sense,’ he emphasised carefully. ‘Whether a judge would take the same view, I do not know. You understand the law better than I. This much is certain; you are free, your debts are paid, the money you stole from your clients has been made good and you have, I think, an income which is, shall we say, satisfactory.’

The little man nodded and swallowed something. He was white to the lips, and when he tried to lift a glass of water his hand shook so that he had to put it down again. ‘I’m very grateful,’ he said. ‘Very—very grateful…I’m sorry-it was rather upsetting.’

‘Naturally,’ murmured Mr Harlow.

He took a notebook from his pocket, opened it with the greatest deliberation and wrote for five minutes, the little lawyer watching him. When he had finished he tore out the sheet and passed it across the table.

‘I want to know all about this man Arthur Ingle,’ he said. ‘When his sentence expires, where he lives in London or elsewhere, his means and especially his grudge against life. I don’t know what it is, but I rather suspect that it is a pretty big one. I should also like to know where his niece is employed. Her name you will find on the paper, with a query mark attached. I want to know who are her friends, what are her amusements, her financial position is very important.’

‘I understand.’ Ellenbury put the paper carefully in a worn pocket-book. And then, with one of his habitual starts: ‘I had forgotten one thing, Mr Harlow,’ he said. ‘On Monday last I had a visit at my office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields from the police.’

He said the last two words apologetically as though he were in some way responsible for the character of his caller. Mr Harlow turned his pale eyes upon his companion, made a long scrutiny of his face before he asked: ‘in what connection?’

‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Ellenbury, who had a trick of reproducing at a second’s notice all the emotions he described. ‘It was rather puzzling.’ He screwed up his face into an expression of bewilderment. ‘You see, Mr Carlton did not come to any point.’

‘Carlton?’ demanded Harlow, quickly for him. ‘That’s the man at the Foreign Office, isn’t it?’

Ellenbury nodded.

‘It was about the rubber fire. You remember the fire at the United International factory? He wanted to know if Rata had any insurance on the stock that was burnt and of course I told him that as far as I knew, we hadn’t.’

‘Don’t say “we,”’ said Mr Harlow gently. ‘Say the Rata Syndicate hadn’t. You are a lawyer acting for undisclosed principals. Well?’

‘That was all,’ said Ellenbury. ‘He was very vague.’

‘He always is vague,’ interrupted Harlow with a faint smile, ‘and he’s always unscrupulous—remember that, Ellenbury. Sub-Inspector James Carlton is the most unscrupulous man that Scotland Yard has ever employed. Some day he will be irretrievably ruined or irretrievably promoted. I have a great admiration for him. I know of no man in the world I rate higher in point of intelligence, acumen and—unscrupulousness! He has a theory which is both admirable and baffling. Which means that he has the right theory. For rectitude is the most baffling of all human qualities, because you never know, if a man is doing right, what he will do next. I think that is almost an epigram, Ellenbury: you had best jot it down, so that if ever you are called upon to write my biography you may have material to lighten its pages.’ He looked at his watch. I shall be at Park Lane at eleven o’clock on Friday night, and I can give you ten minutes,’ he said.

Ellenbury twiddled his fingers unhappily.

‘Isn’t there a risk—to you, I mean?’ he blurted. ‘Perhaps I’m stupid, but I can’t see why you do…well, why you take chances. With all your money—’

Mr Harlow leaned back in the cushioned seat, amusement faintly visible in his pale eyes.

‘If you had millions what would you do? Retire, of course. Build or buy a beautiful house—and then?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the older man vaguely. ‘One could travel…’

‘The English people have two ideas of happiness: one comes from travel, one from staying still! Rushing or rusting! I might marry but I don’t wish to marry. I might have a great stable of race-horses, but I detest racing. I might yacht—I loathe the sea. Suppose I want a thrill? I do! The art of living is the art of victory. Make a note of that. Where is happiness in cards, horses, golf, women-anything you like? I’ll tell you: in beating the best man to it! That’s An Americanism. Where is the joy of mountain climbing, of exploration, of scientific discovery? To do better than somebody else—to go farther, to put your foot on the head of the next best.’

He blew a cloud of smoke through the open window and waited until the breeze had torn the misty gossamer into shreds and nothingness.

‘When you’re a millionaire you either get inside yourself and become a beast, or get outside of yourself and become a nuisance to your fellows. If you’re a Napoleon you will play the game of power, if you’re a Leonardo you’ll play for knowledge—the stakes hardly matter; it’s the game that counts. Accomplishment has its thrill, whether it is hitting a golf ball farther than the next fellow, or strewing the battle fields with the bodies of your enemies. My thrill is harder to get than most people’s. I’m a millionaire. Sterling and dollars are my soldiers—I am entitled to frame my own rules of war, conduct my forays in my own way. Don’t ask any further questions!’

He waved his hand towards the door and Mr Ellenbury was dismissed; and shortly afterwards his hired car rattled loudly up the hill and past the gates of the jail. Mr Ellenbury studiously turned his face in the opposite direction.

CHAPTER 2

SOME EIGHT months later there was an accident on the Thames Embankment. The girl in the yellow raincoat and the man in the black beret were of one accord—they were anxious, for different reasons, to cross the most dangerous stretch of the Embankment in the quickest possible space of time. There was a slight fog which gave promise of being just plain fog before the evening was far advanced. And through the fog percolated an unpleasant drizzle which turned the polished surface of the road into an insurance risk which no self-respecting company would have accepted.

The mudguard of the ancient Ford caught Aileen Rivers just below the left elbow, and she found herself performing a series of unrehearsed pirouettes. Then her nose struck a shining button and she slid romantically to her knees at the feet of a resentful policeman. He lifted her, looked at her, put her aside with great firmness and crossed to where the radiator of the car was staring pathetically up a bent lamp-post.

‘What’s the idea?’ he asked sternly, and groped for his notebook.

The young man in the beret wiped his soiled face with the back of his hand, a gesture which resulted in the further spread of his griminess.

‘Was the girl hurt?’ he asked quickly.

‘Never mind about the girl; let’s have a look at your licence.’

Unheeding his authoritative demand, the young man stalked across to where Aileen, embarrassed by the crowd which gathered, was assuring several old ladies that she wasn’t hurt. She was standing on her two feet to prove it.

‘Waggle your toes about,’ suggested a hoarse-voiced woman. ‘If they won’t move, your back’s broke!’

The experiment was not made, for at that moment the tall young man pushed his way to the centre of the curious throng.

‘Not hurt, are you?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I’m awfully sorry—really! Didn’t see you till the car was right on top of you.’

A voice from the crowd offered advice and admonition.

‘You orter be careful, mister! You might ‘a’ killed somebody.’

‘Tell me your name, won’t you?’

He dived into his pocket, found an old envelope and paused.

‘Really it isn’t necessary, I’m quite unhurt,’ she insisted, but he was also insistent.

He jotted down name and address and he had finished writing when the outraged constable melted through the crowd.

‘Here!’ he said, in a tone in which fierceness and reproach were mingled. ‘You can’t go running away when I’m talking to you, my friend! Just you stand still and show me that licence of yours.’

‘Did you see the blue Rolls?’ demanded the young man. ‘It was just ahead of me when I hit the lamp-post.’

‘Never mind about blue Rolls’s,’ said the officer in cold exasperation. ‘Let me have a look at your licence.’

The young man slipped something out of his pocket and held it in the palm of his hand. It was not unlike a driver’s licence and yet it was something else.

‘What’s the idea?’ asked the policeman testily.

He snatched the little canvas-backed booklet and opened it, turning his torch on the written words.

‘Humph!’ he said. ‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Not at all,’ said Sub-Inspector James Carlton of Scotland Yard. ‘I’ll send somebody down to clear away the mess. Did you see the Rolls?’

‘Yes sir, just in front of you. Petrol tank dented.’

Carlton chuckled. ‘Saw that too? I’ll remember you, constable. You had better send the girl home in a taxi—no, I’ll take her myself.’

Aileen heard the proposal without enthusiasm. ‘I much prefer to walk,’ she said definitely.

He led her aside from the crowd now being dispersed, authoritatively. And in such privacy as could be obtained momentarily, he revealed himself.

‘I am, in fact, a policeman,’ he said; and she opened her eyes in wonder.

He did not look like a policeman, even in the fog which plays so many tricks. He had the appearance of a motor mechanic, and not a prosperous one. On his head was a black beret that had seen better days; he wore an old mack reaching to his knees; and the gloves he carried under his arm were black with grease.

‘Nevertheless,’ he said firmly, as though she had given oral expression to her surprise, ‘I am a policeman. But no ordinary policeman. I am an inspector at Scotland Yard—a sub-inspector, it is true, but I have a position to uphold.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’

‘He had already hailed a taxi and now he opened the door. ‘You might object to the escort of an ordinary policeman,’ he said airily, ‘but my rank is so exalted that you do not need a chaperon.’

She entered the cab between laughter and tears, for her elbow really did hurt more than she was ready to confess.

‘Rivers—Aileen Rivers,’ he mused, as the cab went cautiously along the Embankment. ‘I’ve got you on the tip of my tongue and at the back of my mind, but I can’t place you.’

‘Perhaps if you look up my record at Scotland Yard?’ she suggested, with a certain anger at his impertinence.

‘I thought of doing that,’ he replied calmly; ‘but Aileen Rivers?’ He shook his head. ‘No, I can’t place you.’ And of course he had placed her. He knew her as the niece of Arthur Ingle, sometime Shakespearean actor and now serving five years for an ingenious system of fraud and forgery. But then, he was unscrupulous, as Mr Harlow had said. He had a power of invention which carried him far beyond the creative line, but he was not averse to stooping on the way to the most petty deceptions. And this in spite of the fact that he had been well educated and immense sums had been spent on the development of his mind, so that lie might distinguish between right and wrong.

‘Fotheringay Mansions.’ He fingered his grimy chin. ‘How positively exclusive!’

She turned on him in sudden anger. ‘I’ve accepted your escort, Mr—’ She paused insultingly.

‘Carlton,’ he murmured; ‘half-brother to the hotel but no relation to the club. And this is fame! You were saying?’

‘I was going to say that I wished you would not talk. You have done your best to kill me this evening; you might at least let me die in peace.’

He peered through the fog-shrouded windows. ‘There’s an old woman selling chrysanthemums near Westminster Bridge; we might stop and buy you some flowers.’ And then, quickly: ‘I’m terribly sorry, I won’t ask you any questions at all or make any comments upon your plutocratic residence.’

‘I don’t live there,’ she said in self-defence. ‘I go there sometimes to see the place is kept in order. It belongs to a-a-relation of mine who is abroad.’

‘Monte Carlo?’ he murmured. ‘And a jolly nice place too! Rien ne va plus! Faites vos jeux, monsieurs et mesdames! Personally I prefer San Remo. Blue sky, blue sea, green hills, white houses—everything like a railway poster.’ And then he went off at a tangent. ‘And talking of blueness, you were lucky not to be hit by the blue Rolls; it was going faster than me, but it has better brakes. I rammed his petrol tank in the fog, but even that didn’t make him stop.’

Her lips curled in the darkness. ‘A criminal escaping from justice, one thinks? How terribly romantic!’

The young man chuckled.

‘One thinks wrong. It was a millionaire on his way to a City banquet. And the only criminal charge I can bring home to him is that he wears large diamond studs in his shirt, which offence is more against my aesthetic taste than the laws of my country, God bless it!’

The cab was slowing, the driver leaning sideways seeking to identify the locality.

‘We’re here,’ said Mr Carlton; opened the door of the taxi while it was still in motion and jumped out.

The machine stopped before the portals of Fotheringay Mansions.

‘Thank you very much for bringing me home,’ said Aileen primly and politely, and added not without malice: ‘I’ve enjoyed your conversation.’

‘You should hear my aunt,’ said the young man. ‘Her line of talk is sheer poetry!’

He watched her until she was swallowed in the gloom, and returned to the cab.

‘Scotland Yard,’ he said laconically; ‘and take a bit of a risk, O son of Nimshi.’

The cabman took the necessary risk and arrived without hurt at the gloomy entrance of police headquarters. Jim Carlton waved a brotherly greeting to the sergeant at the desk, took the stairs two at a time, and came to his own little room. As a rule he was not particularly interested in his personal appearance, but now, glancing at the small mirror which decorated the upturned top of a washstand, he uttered a groan.

He was busy getting the grease from his face when the melancholy face of Inspector Elk appeared in the doorway.

‘Going to a party?’ he asked gloomily.

‘No,’ said Jim through the lather; ‘I often wash.’

Elk sniffed, seated himself on the edge of a hard chair, searched his pockets slowly and thoroughly.

‘It’s in the inside pocket of my jacket,’ spluttered Carlton. ‘Take one; I’ve counted ‘em.’

Elk sighed heavily as he took out the long leather case, and, selecting a cigar, lit it.

‘Seegars are not what they was when I was a boy,’ he said, gazing at the weed disparagingly. ‘For sixpence you could get a real Havana. Over in New York everybody smokes cigars. But then, they pay the police a livin’ wage; they can afford it.’

Mr Carlton looked over his towel. ‘I’ve never known you to buy a cigar in your life,’ he said deliberately. ‘You can’t get them cheaper than for nothing!’

Inspector Elk was not offended. ‘I’ve smoked some good cigars in my time,’ he said. ‘Over in the Public Prosecutor’s office in Mr Gordon’s days—he was the fellow that smashed the Frogs—him and me, that is to say,’ he corrected himself carefully.

‘The Frogs? Oh, yes, I remember. Mr Gordon had good cigars, did he?’

‘Pretty good,’ said Elk cautiously. ‘I wouldn’t say yours was worse, but it’s not better.’ And then, without a change of voice: ‘Have you pinched Stratford Harlow?’

Jim Carlton made a grimace of disgust. ‘Tell me something I can pinch him for,’ he invited.

‘He’s worth fifteen millions according to accounts,’ said Elk. ‘No man ever got fifteen million honest.’

Jim Carlton turned a white, wet face to his companion. ‘He inherited three from his father, two from one aunt, one from another. The Harlows have always been a rich family, and in the last decade they’ve graded down to maiden aunts. He had a brother in America who left him eight million dollars.’

Elk sighed and scratched his thin nose.

‘He’s in Ratas too,’ he said complainingly.

‘Of course he’s in Ratas!’ scoffed Jim. ‘Ellenbury hides him, but even if he didn’t, there’s nothing criminal in Ratas. And supposing he was openly in it, that would be no offence.

‘Oh!’ said Elk, and by that ‘Oh!’ indicated his tentative disagreement.

There was nothing furtive or underhand about the Rata Syndicate. It was registered as a public company, and had its offices in Westshire House, Old Broad Street, in the City of London, and its New York office on Wall Street. The Rata Syndicate published a balance sheet and employed a staff of ten clerks, three of whom gained further emoluments by acting as directors of the company, under the chairmanship of a retired colonel of infantry. The capital was a curiously small one, but the resources of the syndicate were enormous. When Rata cornered rubber, cheques amounting to five millions sterling passed outward through its banking accounts; in fact every cent involved in that great transaction appeared in the books except the fifty thousand dollars that somebody paid to Lee Hertz and his two friends.

Lee arrived from New York on a Friday afternoon. On the Sunday morning the United Continental Rubber Company’s stores went up in smoke. Nearly eighteen thousand tons of rubber were destroyed in that well-organised conflagration, and rubber jumped 80 per cent in twenty-four hours and 200 per cent in a week. For the big reserves that kept the market steady had been wiped out in the twinkling of an eye, to the profit of Rata Incorporated.

Said the New York Headquarters to Scotland Yard: Lee Hertz, Jo Klein and Philip Serrett well known fire bugs believed to be in London stop See record NY 9514 mailed you October 7 for description stop Possibility you may connect them United Continental fire.

By the time Scotland Yard located Lee he was in Paris in his well-known role of American Gentleman Seeing the Sights.

‘It doesn’t look right to me,’ said Elk, puffing luxuriously at the cigar. ‘Here’s Rata, buys rubber with not a ghost of a chance of its rising. And suddenly, biff! A quarter of the reserve stock in this country is burnt out, and naturally prices and shares rise. Rata’s been buying ‘em for months. Did they know that the United was going west?’

‘I thought it might have been an accident,’ said Jim, who had never thought anything of the sort.

‘Accident my grandmother’s right foot!’ said Elk, without heat. ‘The stores were lit up in three places—the salvage people located the petrol. A man answering the description of Jo Klein was drinking with the night watchman the day before, and that watchman swears he never saw this Jo bird again, but he’s probably lying. The lower classes lie easier than they drink. Ten millions, and if Harlow’s behind Rata, he made more than that on the rubber deal. Buying orders everywhere! Toronto, Rio, Calcutta—every loose bit of rubber lifted off the market. Then comes the fire, and up she goes! All I got to say is—’

The telephone bell rang shrilly at that second, and Jim Carlton picked up the receiver.

‘Somebody wants you, Inspector,’ said the exchange clerk.

There was a click, an interval of silence, and then a troubled voice asked:

‘Can I speak to Mr Carlton?’

‘Yes, Miss Rivers.’

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ There was a nattering relief in the voice. ‘I wonder if you would come to Fotheringay Mansions, No. 63?’

‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked quickly.

‘I don’t know, but one of the bedroom doors is locked, and I’m sure there’s nobody in there.’

CHAPTER 3

THE GIRL was standing in the open doorway of the flat as the two men stepped from the elevator. She seemed a little disconcerted at the sight of Inspector Elk, but Jim Carlton introduced him as a friend and obliterated him as a factor with one comprehensive gesture.

‘I suppose I ought to have sent for the local police, only there are—well, there are certain reasons why I shouldn’t,’ she said.

Somehow Jim had never thought she could be so agitated. The discovery had evidently thrown her off her balance, and she was hardly lucid when she explained.

‘I come here to collect my uncle’s letters,’ she said. ‘He’s abroad…his name is Jackson,’ she said breathlessly. ‘And every Thursday I have a woman in to clean up the fiat. I can’t afford the time; I’m working in an office.’

They had left Elk staring at an engraving in the corridor, and it was an opportunity to make matters a little easier, if at first a little more uncomfortable, for her.

‘Miss Rivers, your uncle is Arthur Ingle,’ said Jim kindly, and she went very red. ‘It is quite understandable that you shouldn’t wish to advertise the fact, but I thought I’d tell you I knew, just to save you a great deal of unnecessary—’ He stopped and seemed at a loss.

‘“Lying” is the word you want,’ she said frankly. ‘Yes, Arthur Ingle lived here, but he lived here in the name of Jackson. Did you know that?’ she asked anxiously.

He nodded.

‘That’s the door.’ She pointed.

The flat was of an unusual construction. There was a very large dining-room with a low-timbered roof and panelled walls, from which led three doors—one to the kitchenette, the other two, she explained, to Arthur Ingle’s bedroom and a spare apartment which he used as a lumber room. It was the door of the lumber room which she indicated.

Jim tried the handle; the door was fast. Stooping down he peered through the keyhole and had a glimpse of an open window through which the yellow fog showed.

‘Are these doors usually left open?’

‘Always,’ she said emphatically. ‘Sometimes the cleaning woman comes before I return. Tonight she is late and I’m rather early.’

‘Where does that door lead?’

‘To the kitchen.’

She went in front of him into the tiny room. It was spotlessly clean and had one window, flush with that which he had seen through the keyhole of the next room. He looked down into a bottomless void, but just beneath was a narrow parapet. He swung one leg across the sill, only to find his arm held in a frenzied grip by the girl.

‘You mustn’t go, you’ll be killed!’ she gasped and he laughed at her, not ill pleased, for the risk was practically nil.

‘I’ve got a pretty high regard for me,’ he said, and in another instant he had swung clear, gripped the lower sash of the second window and had pulled himself into the room.

He could see nothing except the dim outlines of three trunks stacked one on top of the other. He switched on the light and turned to survey the confusion. Old boxes and trunks which, he guessed, had been piled in some order, were dragged into the centre of the room to allow the free operation of the vanished burglar. Recessed into the wall, thus cleared, was a safe the door of which was open. On the floor beneath was a rough circle of metal burnt from the door—it was still hot when he touched it—by the small blowlamp that the burglar had left behind him.

He unlocked the door of the room and admitted Elk and the girl.

‘That’s good work,’ said Elk, whose detached admiration for the genius of law-breakers was at least sincere. ‘Safe’s empty! Not so much as a cigarette card left behind. Good work! Toby Haggitt or Lew Yakobi—they’re the only two men in London that could have done it.’

The girl was gazing wide-eyed at the ‘good work’. She was very pale, Jim noticed, and misread the cause.

‘What was in the safe?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘I don’t know—I didn’t even know that there was a safe in the room. He will be terrible about this!’

Carlton knew the ‘he’ was the absent Ingle. ‘He won’t know for some time, anyway—’ he began, but she broke in upon his reassurance.

‘Next week,’ she said; ‘he is being released on Wednesday.’

Elk scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Somebody knew that,’ he said; ‘he hadn’t a partner either.’

Arthur Ingle was indeed a solitary worker. His frauds had been unsuspected even by such friends as he had in his acting days—for they had covered a period of twelve years before his arrest and conviction. To the members of his company he was known as a bad paymaster and an unscrupulous manager; none imagined that this clever player of character parts was ‘Lobber & Syne, Manufacturing Jewellers, of Clerkenwell,’ and other aliases that produced him such golden harvests.

‘It was no fault of yours,’ said Jim Carlton; and she submitted to a gentle pat on the shoulder. ‘There’s no sense in worrying about it.’

Elk was examining the blowlamp under the electric light.

‘Bet it’s Toby,’ he said, and walked to the window.

‘That’s his graft. He’d make a cat burglar look like a wool-eatin’ kitten! Parapets are like the Great West Road to Toby—he’d stop to manicure his nails on three inches of rotten sandstone.’

The identity of the burglar worried Jim less than it did the girl. He had the brain of a lightning calculator. A hundred aspects of the crime, a hundred possibilities and explanations flickered through his mind and none completely satisfied him. Unless—

The Splendid Harlow was on the way to becoming an obsession. There was no immense sum of money to be made from discovering the secrets of a convicted swindler.

That there was money in the safe he did not for one moment believe. Ingle was not the type of criminal which hid its wealth in safes. He credited him with a dozen banking accounts in fictitious names, and each holding money on deposit.

They went back into the panelled dining-room. The apartment interested Jim, for here was every evidence of luxury and refinement. The flat must have cost thousands of pounds to furnish. And then he remembered that Arthur Ingle had been convicted on three charges. Evidence in a number of others, which must have produced enormous profits, was either missing or of too shaky a character to produce. This apartment represented coups more successful than those for which Arthur Ingle had been convicted.

‘Do you know your uncle very well?’

She shook her head.

‘I knew him better many years ago,’ she said, ‘when he was an actor, before he—well, before he got rich! I am his only living relation.’ She raised her head, listening.

Somebody had knocked at the outer door.

‘It may be the charwoman,’ she said, and went along the passage to open the door.

A man was standing on the mat outside, tall, commanding, magnificent in his well-cut evening clothes. His snowy linen blazed and twinkled with diamonds; the buttons on his white waistcoat were aglitter.

It was part of the primitive in the man, so that she saw nothing vulgar in the display. But something within her shrank under his pale gaze. She had a strange and inexplicable sensation of being in the presence of a power beyond earthly control. She was crushed by the sense of his immense superiority. So she might have felt had she found herself confronted by a tiger.

‘My name is Harlow—we met on Dartmoor,’ he said, and showed a line of even teeth in a smile. ‘May I come in?’

She could not speak in her astonishment, but somebody answered for her.

‘Come in, Harlow,’ drawled Jim Carlton’s voice. ‘I’d love to have your first impression of Dartmoor; is it really as snappy as people think?’

CHAPTER 4

MR. HARLOW’S attitude towards this impertinent man struck the girl as remarkable. It was mild, almost benevolent; he seemed to regard James Carlton as a good joke. And he was the great Harlow! She had learnt that at Princetown.

You could not work in the City without hearing of Harlow, his coups and successes. Important bankers spoke of him with bated breath. His money was too liquid for safety: it flowed here and there in floods that were more often than not destructive. Sometimes it would disappear into subterranean caverns, only to gush forth in greater and more devastating volume to cut new channels through old cultivations and presently to recede, leaving havoc and ruin behind.

And of course she had heard of the police station. When Mr Harlow interested himself in the public weal he did so thoroughly and unconventionally. His letters to the press on the subject of penology were the best of their kind that have appeared in print. He pestered Ministers and commissioners with his plans for a model police station, and when his enthusiasm was rebuffed he did what no philanthropist, however public-minded, has ever done before.

He bought a freehold plot in Evory Street (which is not a stone’s throw from Park Lane), built his model police headquarters at the cost of two hundred thousand pounds, and presented the building to the police commissioners. It was a model police office in every respect. The men’s quarters above the station were the finest of their kind in the world. Even the cells had the quality of comfort, though they contained the regulation plank bed. This gift was a nine days’ wonder. Topical revues had their jokes about it; the cartoonists flung their gibes at the Government upon the happening.

The City had ceased to think of him as eccentric, they called him ‘sharp’ and contrasted him unfavourably with his father. They were a little afraid of him. His money was too fluid for stability.

He nodded smilingly at Jim Carlton, fixed the unhappy Elk with a glance, and then: ‘I did not know that you and my friend Carlton were acquainted.’ And then, in a changed tone: ‘I hope I am not de trop.’

His voice, his attitude said as plainly as words could express: ‘I presume this is a police visitation due to the notorious character of your uncle?’ The girl thought this. Jim knew it.

‘There has been a burglary here and Miss Rivers called us in,’ he said.

Harlow murmured his regrets and sympathy. ‘I congratulate you upon having secured the shrewdest officer in the police force.’ He addressed the girl blandly.

‘And I congratulate the police force’—he looked at Jim—‘upon detaching you from the Foreign Office—you were wasted there, Mr Carlton, if I may be so impertinent as to express an opinion.’

‘I am still in the Foreign Office,’ said Jim. ‘This is spare-time work. Even policemen are entitled to their amusements. And how did you like Dartmoor?’

The Splendid Harlow smiled sadly. ‘Very impressive, very tragic,’ he said. ‘I am referring of course to Princetown, where I spent a couple of nights.’

Aileen was waiting to hear the reason for the call; even though her distress and foreboding she was curious to learn what whim had brought this super-magnate to the home of a convict.

He looked slowly from her to the men and again Jim interpreted his wishes; he glanced at Elk and walked with him into the lumber room.

‘It occurred to me,’ said Mr Harlow, ‘that I might be in a position to afford you some little help. My name may not be wholly unknown to you; I am Mr Stratford Harlow.’

She nodded.

‘I knew that,’ she said.

‘They told you at the Duchy, did they?’ It seemed that he was relieved that she had identified him.

‘Mine is rather a delicate errand, but it struck me—I have found myself thinking about you many times since we met—that possibly…I might be able to find a good position for you. Your situation, if you will forgive my saying as much, is a little tragic. Association with—er—criminals or people with criminal records has a drugging effect even upon the finest nature.’

She smiled. ‘In other words, Mr Harlow,’ she said quietly, ‘you’re under the impression I’m rather badly off and that you would like to make life easier for me?’

He beamed at this. ‘Exactly,’ he said.

‘It is very kind of you—most kind,’ she said, and meant it. ‘But I have a very good job in a lawyer’s office.’ He inclined his head graciously. ‘Mr Stebbings has been very good to me—’

‘Mr –-?’ His head jerked on one side. ‘Stebbings—of Stebbings, Field & Farrow—surely not! They were my lawyers until a few years ago.’

She knew this also.

‘Quite good people, though a little old-fashioned,’ he said. ‘Then of course you have heard Mr Stebbings speak of me?’

‘Only once,’ she confessed. ‘He is a very reticent man and never talks about his clients.’

Harlow bit his lip in thought. ‘An excellent fellow! I have often wondered whether I was wrong in taking my affairs from him. I wish you would mention that to him when you see him. I understood you were working in the office of the New Library Syndicate?’

She smiled at this. ‘It’s curious you should say that; their offices are in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but next door.’

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I see how the mistake arose,’ and added quickly: ‘A friend of mine who knows you saw you going into—er—an office; and obviously made a mistake.’

He did not tell her who was their mutual friend, and she was not sufficiently interested to inquire.

This time the knock at the door was more pronounced.

‘Will you excuse me?’ she said. ‘That is my cleaner, and she is rather inclined to tell me her troubles. I may keep you waiting a little while.’

She left him and he heard the sounds of a door opening, as Jim Carlton and Elk came back into the dining-room.

‘A very charming young lady that,’ said Mr Harlow.

‘Very,’ said Jim shortly.

‘Women do not interest me greatly’—the Splendid Harlow picked a tiny thread of cotton from his immaculate coat and dropped it on the floor. ‘They think along lines which I find it difficult to follow. They are emotional, too—swayed by momentary fears and scruples…’

The sound of voices in the passage, one high-pitched and complaining:

‘…what with the fog and everything, miss, it’s lucky I’m here at all…’

A shabby figure passed the open door, followed by Aileen.

‘I suppose you don’t know Ingle, Mr Harlow?’ Jim was examining the photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘A long-firm swindler; clever, but with a kink even in his kinkiness! Believes in revolution and all that sort of thing…blood and guillotines and tumbrils; the whole box of tricks—’

Something made him look round.

Mr Stratford Harlow was standing in the centre of the room, gripping the edge of a small table to keep him upright.

His face was white and haggard and drawn; and in his pale eyes was a look of horror such as Jim Carlton had never seen in the face of a man. Elk sprang forward and caught him as he swayed and led him to a big settee. Into this Stratford Harlow sank and leaning forward, covered his face with his hands.

‘Oh, my God!’ he said as he rocked slowly from side to side and fell in a heap on the ground.

The colossus had fainted.

CHAPTER 5

‘A LITTLE heart trouble,’ said Mr Harlow, smiling as he set down the glass of water. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have given you so much trouble, Miss Rivers. I haven’t had an attack in years.’

He was still pale, but such was his extraordinary self-control that the hand that put down the glass was without a tremor.

‘Phew!’ He dabbed his forehead with a silk handkerchief and rose steadily to his feet.

Elk was engaged in the prosaic task of brushing the dust stains from his knees and looked up.

‘You’d better let me take you home, Mr Harlow,’ he said.

Stratford Harlow shook his head.

‘That is quite unnecessary—quite,’ he said. ‘I have my car at the door and a remedy for all such mental disturbances as these! And it is not a drug!’ he smiled.

Nevertheless, Elk went with him to the car.

‘Will you tell my chauffeur to drive to the Charing Cross power station?’ was the surprising request; and long after the car had moved off in the fog Elk stood on the sidewalk, wondering what business took this multi-millionaire to such a venue.

They evidently knew Mr Harlow at the power station and they at any rate saw nothing remarkable in his visit.

The engineer, who was smoking at the door, stood back to let him walk into the great machinery hall, and placed a stool for him. And there for half an hour he sat, and the droning of the dynamos and the whirr and thud of the great engines were sedatives and anodynes to his troubled mind.

Here he had come before, to think out great schemes, which developed best in this atmosphere. The power and majesty of big wheels, the rhythm of the driving belts as they sagged and rose, the shaded lights above the marble switchboards, the noisy quiet of it all, stimulated him as nothing else could. Here he found the illusion of irresistibility that attuned so perfectly to his own mood; the inevitable effects of the inevitable causes. The sense that he was standing near the very heart of power was an inspiration. This lofty hall was a very home of the gods to him.

Half an hour, an hour, passed, and then he rose with a catch of his breath, and a slow smile lit the big face. ‘Thank you, Harry, thank you.’

He shook the attendant’s hand and left something that crinkled in the hard palm of the workman. A few minutes later he drove through brilliantly illuminated Piccadilly Circus and could offer a friendly nod to the flickering and flashing lights whose birth he had seen and whose very brilliance was a homage to the steel godhead.

To be thoroughly understood, Mr Stratford Harlow must be known.

There had been five members of the Harlow family when Stratford Selwyn Mortimer Harlow was born, and they were all immensely rich. His mother died a week later, his father when he was aged three, leaving the infant child to the care of his Aunt Mercy, a spinster who was accounted, even by her charitable relatives, as ‘strange’. The boy was never sent to school, for his health was none of the best and he had his education at the hands of his aunt. An enormously rich woman with no interest in life, she guarded her charge jealously. Family interference drove her to a frenzy. The one call that her two sisters paid her, when the boy was seven, ended in a scene on which Miss Alice, the younger, based most of her conversation for years afterwards.

The main result of the quarrel between Miss Mercy and her maiden sisters was that she shut up Kravelly Hall and removed, with her maid Mrs Edwins, to a little cottage at Teignmouth. Here she lived unmolested by her relatives for seven years. She then went to Scarborough for three years and thence to Bournemouth. Regularly every month she wrote to her two sisters and her bachelor brother in New York; and the terminology of the letters did not vary by so much as a comma:

“Miss Mercy Harlow presents her compliments and begs to state that The Boy is in Good Health and is receiving adequate tuition in the essential subjects together with a sound instruction in the tenets of the Protestant Faith.”

She had engaged a tutor, a bearded young man from Oxford University (she deigned to mention this fact to her brother, with whom she had not quarrelled), whose name was Marling. There came to the ears of Aunt Alice a story which called into question the fitness of Mr Marling to mould the plastic mind of youth. A mild scandal at Oxford. Miss Alice felt it her duty to write, and after a long interval had a reply:

“Miss Mercy Harlow begs to thank Miss Alice Harlow for her communication and in reply begs to state that she has conducted a very thorough and searching enquiry into the charges preferred against Mr Saul Marling (B.A. Oxon) and is satisfied that Mr Marling acted in the most honourable manner, and has done nothing with which he may reproach himself or which renders him unfit to direct the studies of The Boy.”

This happened a year before Miss Mercy’s death. When nature took its toll and she passed to her Maker, Miss Alice hastened to Bournemouth and in a small and secluded cottage near Christchurch found a big and solemn young man of twenty-three, dressed a little gawkily in black. He was tearless; and indeed, his aunt suspected, almost cheerful, at the prospect of being freed from Miss Mercy’s drastic management.

The bearded tutor had left (Mrs Edwins, the maid, tearfully explained) a fortnight before the passing of Miss Mercy.

‘And if he hadn’t gone,’ said Miss Alice with tight lips, ‘I should have made short work of him. The Boy has been suppressed! He hasn’t a word to say for himself!’

A council was held, including the family lawyer, who was making his first acquaintance with Stratford. It was agreed that The Boy should have a flat in Park Lane and the companionship of an elder man who combined a knowledge of the world with a leaning towards piety. Such was found in the Rev. John Barthurst, M.A., an ex-naval chaplain.

Miss Edwins was pensioned off and the beginning of Stratford’s independent life was celebrated with a dinner and a visit to Charley’s Aunt, through which roaring farce he sat with a stony face.

The tutelage lasted the best part of a year; and then the quiet young man suddenly came to life, dismissed his worldly and pious companion with a cheque for a thousand pounds, summoned Mrs Edwins to be his housekeeper; and bought and reconstructed the Duke of Greenhart’s house in Park Lane.

And thenceforward Mr Harlow’s name began to appear in the records of important transactions. Family fortunes dropped into his lap. Miss Mercy had been fabulously rich. She had left him every penny of her fortune, with the exception of Ł100 to Lucy Edwins in recognition of her faithful service, realising that she will not regard this sum as inadequate in view of the great service I rendered to her.’ Then Miss Henrietta died; and when the death duties were paid there was the greater part of two millions. Miss Alice left more. The bachelor uncle in New York died a comparative pauper, leaving a beggarly six hundred thousand.

Mr Harlow’s house was a rather ugly three-storey building which occupied a small island site, possibly the most valuable in Park Lane, though the actual entrance was not in that exclusive thoroughfare, but in the side street. He opened the door with a key and walked into the hall. The door to the library faced him. There were some letters on the table, which he scanned through rapidly, opening only one. It was from Ellenbury; and just then Mr Harlow was annoyed with Ellenbury; he had supplied erroneous information about Aileen Rivers, and had made him look a fool.

He read the letter carefully, and then dropped it in the fire and watched it turn black.

‘A useful man, but a thought too anxious. It was a mistake perhaps to keep him so taut. He must be let down,’ Mr Harlow decided. A little of his own confidence must be infused into his helper. Too great a desire to please, too present a fear of failure: those were Ellenbury’s weaknesses.

He pressed an ivory bell on his desk, sat down, reached to the wall, slid back a panel and took out a small black bottle, a siphon and a glass. He poured out barely more whisky than was enough to cover the bottom of the tumbler, and filled it to the top with soda-water. The glass was half-empty when Mrs Edwins, his housekeeper, came in without knocking. A tall, yellow-faced woman, with burning black eyes, she showed nothing of the slowness or decrepitude that might have been expected in a woman near seventy.

‘You rang?’

Miss Mercy’s maid of other days had a voice as sharp and clear as a bugle note. She stood before the desk, her hands behind her, her eyes fixed on his.

‘Yes,’ he said, turning over his letters once more. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Everything.’

Like a bugle note and with some of a bugle’s stridency.

‘Couldn’t we keep a servant in the house?’ she asked. ‘The hours are a little too long for me. I didn’t get to bed until one o’clock yesterday, and I had to be up at seven to let them in.’

It was a curious fact that no servants slept at No. 704, Park Lane. There was not a house of its size, or an establishment of such pretensions, in all the country where every servant slept out. Mr Harlow’s excuse to his friends was that the room space was too valuable for servants, but he denied this by hiring an expensive house in Charles Street for their accommodation.

‘No, I don’t think it is necessary,’ he said, pursing his lips. ‘I thought you understood that.’

‘I might die, or be taken ill in the night,’ said Mrs Edwins dispassionately, ‘and then where would you be?’

He smiled. ‘It would be rather a case of where would you be, I think.’ he said in excellent humour. ‘Nothing has happened?’

She considered her answer before she replied. ‘Somebody called, that was all,’ she said, ‘but I’ll tell you about that afterwards.’

He was amused. ‘A good many people call. Very well—be mysterious!’

He got up from his chair and walked out of the room, and she followed. There was a tiny elevator in the hall, big enough for two, but she declined this conveyance.

‘I’ll walk,’ she said, and he laughed softly.

‘You were complaining about feeling tired just now,’ he retorted as he closed the grille before the little lift.

He pressed the top button, the elevator moved swiftly and noiselessly upwards and came at last to a stop on the third floor, where he stepped out to a square-carpeted landing from which led two doors. Here he waited, humming softly to himself, until the woman came in sight round the bend of the stairs.

‘You’re an athlete,’ he said pleasantly and, jerking out a pocket-chain, selected a small key and opened the door on the left.

It was a big and artistically furnished apartment, lit from the cornice by concealed light and from the floor by two red-shaded lamps. In one corner of the room was an ornate wooden bed of red lacquer decorated with Chinese paintings in gold. At a small Empire desk near one of the windows, which were heavily curtained, sat a man. He was almost as tall as Stratford Harlow; and the features which would have arrested the attention of a stranger were his big, dome-shaped forehead and the long golden-yellow beard which, in spite of his age—and he must have been as old as Harlow himself—was untinged with grey.

He was reading, one thin hand on his cheek, his eyes fixed upon the book that lay or the desk, and not until Mr Harlow spoke did he look up.

‘Hallo, Marling!’ said Stratford Harlow gently.

The man leaned back in his chair, closed the book, mechanically marking his place with a thin tortoise-shell paper-knife.

‘Good evening,’ he said simply.

‘Time you had your walk, isn’t it?’

There was a second door in the room and towards this Mr Harlow glanced.

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ said the man, and rose.

He wore a short dressing-jacket of dark blue velvet; his feet were encased in red morocco slippers. His glance strayed back to the closed book as though he were reluctant to have his reading interrupted.

‘The Odes of Horace,’ he said; ‘an English translation, but full of errors.’

‘Yes, yes,’ smiled Mr Harlow. ‘It’s rather late for Horace.’

The woman was standing by the door, stiffly erect, her hands folded in front of her, her dark eyes on her master.

‘Do you know who you are, my friend?’ he asked.

The bearded man put his white hand to his forehead.

‘I am Saul Marling, a graduate of Balliol,’ he said.

Mr Harlow nodded.

‘And—anything eke?’ he asked.

Again the hand went up to the dome-shaped forehead.

‘I forget…how absurd! It was something I saw, wasn’t it?’ he asked anxiously.

‘Something you saw,’ agreed Mr Harlow, ‘just before Miss Mercy died.’

The other heaved a sigh.

‘She died very suddenly. She was very kind to me in all my little troubles. Awfully suddenly! She used to sit on the chair talking to you, and then one night after dinner she fell down.’

‘On the floor,’ nodded Mr Harlow, almost cheerfully. ‘But you saw something, didn’t you?’ he encouraged. ‘A little bottle and some blue stuff. Wake up, Marling! You remember the little bottle and the blue stuff?’

The man shook his head.

‘Not clearly…that was before you and Mrs Edwins took me away. I drank the white powders—they fizzed like a seidlitz powder—and then…’

‘To the country,’ smiled Harlow. ‘You were ill, my poor old fellow, and we had to prescribe something to quieten you. You’re all right?’

‘My head is a little confused—’ began the man, but Harlow laughed, caught him almost affectionately by the arm and, opening the narrow door, led his companion up a flight of steep stairs. At the top of this was another door, which Mr Harlow unlocked. They were on the roof of Greenhart House, a wide, flat expanse of asphalt confined within a breast-high parapet. For half an hour they walked up and down arm-in-arm, the bigger man talking all the time. The fog was thick, the street lamps showed themselves below as patches of dull yellow luminosity.

‘Cold? I told you to put on your scarf, you stupid chap!’ Mr Harlow was good-humoured even in his annoyance.

‘Conic along, we’ll go down.’

In the room below he fastened the door and gazed approvingly round the comfortable apartment. He took up one of the eight volumes that lay on a table. They still wore the publishers’ wrappers and had arrived that day.

‘Reading maketh a full man—you will find the Augustan histories a little heavy even for a graduate of Oxford, eh? Good night. Marling—sleep well.’

He locked the door and went out on to the landing with Mrs Edwins. Her hard eyes were fixed on his face, and until he spoke she was silent.

‘He’s quite all right,’ he said.

‘Is he?’ Her harsh voice was disagreeable. ‘How can he be all right if he’s reading and writing?’

‘Writing?’ he asked quickly. ‘What?’

‘Oh, just stuff about the Romans, but it reads sensible.’

Mr Harlow considered this frowningly. ‘That means nothing. He gives no trouble.’

‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘I get worried,’ she went on, ‘but he’s quiet. Who is Mr Carlton?’

Harlow drew a quick breath. ‘Has he been here?’

She nodded. ‘Yes—this afternoon. He asked me if I was Miss Mercy’s old maid—she must have died soon after he was born.’

‘He’s older than that—well?’

‘I thought it was queer, but he said he’d been asked to trace Mr Saul Marling.’

‘By whom?’

She confessed her ignorance with a look. ‘I don’t know; but it was a proper inquiry. He showed me the papers. They were from Eastbourne. I told him Marling was dead. “Where?” he said. “In South America,” I told him.’

‘Pernambuco,’ emphasised Mr Harlow, ‘in the plague epidemic. Humph! Clever…and unscrupulous. Thank you.’

She watched him pass into the elevator and drop out of sight, then she went into the second room that opened from the landing. This too, was pleasantly furnished. Turning on the lights she sat down and opened a big chintz bag.

From this she took an unfinished stocking and adjusted her knitting needles. And as her nimble fingers moved, so did her lips.

‘Pernambuco-in the plague epidemic,’ she was saying.

CHAPTER 6

AILEEN RIVERS lived in Bloomsbury, which had the advantage of being near her work. She had spent a restless night, and the day that followed had been full of vexation. Mr Stebbings, her immediate chief, was away nursing a cold; and his junior partner, with whom she was constantly brought into contact that day, was a tetchy and disagreeable man, with a habit of mislaying important documents and blaming the person who happened to be most handy for their disappearance.

At six o’clock in the evening she locked up her desk with a sigh of thankfulness, looking forward to a light dinner and an early bedtime. Through her window she had seen the car drawn up by the kerb, and at first had thought it was waiting for a client, so that she was a little surprised, and by no means pleased, when, as she came down the steps of the old-fashioned house where the office was situate, a young man crossed the broad sidewalk towards her and lifted his hat.

‘Oh, you!’ she said in some dismay,

‘Me, or I, as the case may be; I’m not quite certain which,’ said Jim Carlton. ‘And your tone is offensive,’ he said sternly. ‘By rights Elk or I should have been interviewing you at all sorts of odd hours during the day.’

‘But what on earth can I tell you?’ she asked, exasperated. You know everything about the burglary—I suppose that is what you mean?’

‘That is what I mean,’ said Jim. ‘It is very evident that you know nothing about policemen. You imagine, I suppose, that Scotland Yard says “Hallo, there’s been a burglary in Victoria. How interesting! Nobody knows, anything about it, so we’ll let the matter drop.” You’re wrong!’

‘I’m much too hungry to talk.’

‘So I guessed,’ he said. ‘There is an unpretentious restaurant at King’s Cross, where the sole bonne femme is worthy only of the pure of heart.’

She hesitated. ‘Very well,’ she said a little ungraciously. ‘Is that your car? How funny!’

‘There’s nothing funny about my car,’ he said with dignity, ‘and it is not my car. I borrowed it.’

It was a clear night of stars and there was a touch of frost in the air and, although she would not have admitted as much for untold wealth, she enjoyed the short run that brought them to the side entrance of a large restaurant filled with people in varying stages of gastronomic enjoyment.

‘I have booked a table,’ he said, piloting her through an avenue of working jaws to a secluded corner of the annexe.

The atmosphere of the place was very satisfying. The pink table-lamps had a soothing effect, and she could examine him at her leisure. In truth it had been one of the sources of irritation of that very unhappy day that she could not quite remember what he looked like. She knew that he was not repulsive, and had a misty idea that he was rather good-looking, but that his nose was too short. It proved on inspection to be of a reasonable length. His eyes were blue and he was a little older than she had thought. Half her disrespect was based on the illusion of his youth.

‘Now ask all your horrid questions,’ she said as she took off her gloves.

‘Number one,’ he began. ‘What did Harlow offer you when I so discreetly withdrew last night?’

‘That has nothing to do with the burglary,’ she answered promptly. ‘But as it wasn’t very important, I will tell you. He offered me a position.’

‘Where?’ he asked quickly.

She shook her head.

‘I don’t know. We didn’t get as far as that; I told him I was perfectly happy with Mr Stebbings—who, by the way, used to be the lawyer of the Harlow family.’

‘Did you tell him that?’ He thrust his head forward eagerly.

‘Why, no—he told me, though of course I knew,’ she said. ‘He knew, the moment I mentioned Stebbings’s name.’

‘Was he impressed?’ he asked after a pause and she laughed.

‘How ridiculous you are! Seriously, Mr—‘she paused insultingly.

‘Carlton,’ he murmured; ‘half-brother to the hotel but no relation to the club.’

‘You worked that one last night,’ she said.

‘And I shall work it every night you pretend to forget my name! Anyway, it is a confession of crass ignorance which no modern young woman can afford to make. I am one of the most famous men in London.’

‘I think I’ve heard you say that before,’ she said mendaciously. ‘Now tell me seriously, Mr Carlton—’

‘Got it!’ he murmured.

‘What do you want to know about the burglary?’

‘Nothing,’ was the shameless reply. ‘As a matter of fact, I have saved you a great deal of trouble by supplying headquarters with all the details they need. Your uncle emerges tomorrow; do you know that?’

‘Tomorrow?’ she said, with a pang of apprehension.

‘And Elk is going to meet him and take some of the sting out of his anger. I suppose he will be very angry?’

‘He’ll be furious,’ said the girl, troubled. And then, with a quick sigh, ‘I’ll be awfully glad when he has “emerged,” as you call it. He allows me two pounds a week for my trouble, but I can well spare that.’

‘Arthur Ingle ought to be ashamed of himself to drag you into the light which shines so brightly upon the unjust,’ he said. ‘There is only one thing I want to know about him, and perhaps you can tell me—was your uncle a great speculator?’

‘I don’t think so. But really I don’t know. He never spoke to me about any investments. Is that what you mean?’

‘That is just what I mean,’ said Jim. He found it difficult to put the question without offence. ‘You’ve had interviews with him and I dare say you’ve discussed his business to some extent. I shouldn’t ask you to betray his confidence and I don’t suppose for one minute you will. Did he ever talk about foreign gilt-edged investments?’

She was shaking her head before he finished the question.

‘Never,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he knows much about them. I remember the first time I saw him at Dartmoor he told me he didn’t believe in putting money in shares. Of course, I’m well aware he has money, but you know that, too, and I suppose it is stolen money that he’s—’

‘Cached—yes,’ said Jim.

He was very serious. It was the first time she had seen him in that mood and she rather liked it.

‘Only one more question. You don’t know that he is in any way connected with a firm called Rata?’

And, when she confessed that she had never heard of such a firm, his seriousness was at an end.

‘And that’s the whole of the questionnaire, back page and everything!’

He leaned back to allow the burly waiter to place the dish on the table. ‘Sole bonne femme is good for the tired business girl. Will you have wine, or just the Lord’s good water?’

After this he became his old flippant self. He made no further allusion to her uncle; and if he talked a great deal about himself, it was interesting, for he talked shop, and Scotland Yard shop is the second most interesting in the world. He lived at his club.

‘I’d better give you the telephone number in case you ever want me.’ He scrawled the address on the back of the menu and tore off the corner.

‘Why should I want you?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve just got a feeling that you might. I’m a hunch merchant—do you know what a hunch merchant is?’

She could guess.

‘Premonitions are my long suit, telepathy my sixth sense, and I’ve got a hunch…perhaps I’m wrong. I hope I am.’

Once or twice he had looked at his watch, a little furtively, she thought, yet it seemed that he was prepared to break any appointment he had made, for he lingered over his coffee until she brought a happy evening to an abrupt close by putting on her gloves. As they were driving back to her rooms: ‘I haven’t asked you very much about yourself. That is the kind of impertinence which really scares me,’ he said, ‘but I gather that you’re unmarried—and unengaged?’ he asked.

‘I have no followers,’ she said without embarrassment, ‘and I hope that confession will offer no encouragement to the philandering constabulary!’

He chuckled for fully a minute.

‘That’s good,’ he said at last.’ “Philandering constabulary” is taken into use for special occasions. You’re the first woman—’

‘Don’t!’ she warned him.

‘—I’ve ever met with a real sense of humour,’ he concluded. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’

‘I wasn’t disappointed. I expected something banal,’ she said. ‘My house is the third on the left…thank you.’

She got down without assistance and offered her hand, and as he looked past her towards the door of the house:

‘The number is 163,’ she said, ‘but you needn’t write unless you’ve something very policey to write about. Good night!’

Jim Carlton was smiling all the way to Whitehall Gardens and his sense of amusement still held when he followed the footman into Sir Joseph Layton’s study.

The words ‘Joseph Layton’ are familiar to all who carry passports, for he was the Foreign Secretary, a man of slight figure and ascetic face; and possibly the most cartooned politician in Britain.

He looked up over his big horn-rimmed glasses as Jim came in. ‘Sit down, Carlton.’ He blotted the letter he had been writing, inserted it with punctilious care into an envelope, and addressed it with a flourish before he spoke. ‘I’ve just come back from the House. Did you call before?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Humph!’ He settled himself more easily in his padded chair, put the tips of his fingers together, and again scrutinised the detective over his glasses. ‘Well, what are the developments?’ he asked, and added: ‘I’ve seen the cables you sent me. Curious—very curious indeed. You intercepted them?’

‘Some of them, sir,’ said Jim. ‘A great deal of the correspondence of the Rata Syndicate goes through other channels. But there’s enough to show that Rata is there preparing for a big killing. I should imagine that every big broking house in the world has received similar instructions.’

Sir Joseph unlocked a drawer of his desk and, pulling it open, took out a number of sheets of paper fastened together by a big brass clip. He turned the leaves slowly.

‘I suppose this one is typical,’ he said.

It was a message addressed to Rata Syndicate, Wall Street: ‘Be ready to sell for 15 per cent. drop undermentioned securities.’

Here followed a long list that covered two pages of writing, and against each stock was the number to be sold.

‘Yes,’ said Sir Joseph, stroking his little white moustache thoughtfully. ‘Very peculiar, very remarkable! As you said in your letter, these are the very stocks which would be instantly affected by the threat of war. But who on earth are we going to fight? The International situation was never easier. The Moroccan question has been settled. You read my speech in the House last night?’ Jim nodded. ‘Upon my word,’ said Sir Joseph, ‘I think I was very careful to avoid anything like unjustifiable optimism, but, searching the world from East to West, I can see no single cloud on the horizon.’

Jim Carlton reached out, took the papers and read them through carefully.

‘I think,’ said the Foreign Minister with a twinkle in his eye, ‘you have at the back of your mind the vision of some diabolical conspiracy to embroil the world in war. Am I right? Secret agents, traffic in secret plans, cellar meetings with masked and highly-placed diplomats?’

‘Nothing so romantic,’ smiled Jim. ‘No; I wasn’t brought up in that school. I know how wars are made. They grow as storms grow—out of the mists that gather on marshlands and meadows. Label them “the rising clouds of national prejudice,” and you’ve got a rough illustration.’

‘Come now, Mr Carlton, who is your ideal conspirator? I’m sure I know. You think Harlow is behind Rata; and that he has some diabolical scheme for stirring up the nations?’

‘I think Harlow is behind most of the big disturbances,’ said Jim slowly. ‘He’s got too much money; can’t you get some of it away from him?’

‘We do our best,’ said the Foreign Minister dryly; ‘but he is one of the few people in England who can look the sur-tax collector in the eye and never quail!’

Jim went back to Scotland Yard expecting to find Elk, but learned that that intelligent officer had left earlier in the evening for Devonshire. He was to meet Ingle on his release from prison and accompany him to town. And Inspector Elk’s mission was certainly not on Aileen’s behalf, nor had he any humanitarian idea of preparing the convict for news of the burglary.

The first idea (and this proved to be wrong) was that there was a reason and a mind behind this crime. Something had been taken of such value as justified the risk.

The sudden appearance of Harlow in the flat immediately after the crime had been committed had convinced Carlton that his visit was associated with the safe robbery. Harlow should have been at a City banquet—Jim had been trailing him all that day, and had known his destination. Indeed, his name had appeared in the morning newspapers as having been present at the dinner. And yet, within an hour of the accident on the Embankment, Harlow had turned up at Fotheringay Mansions, and had not deigned to offer an excuse for his absence from the dinner, although Jim was sure he knew that he had been trailed.

The early morning found Inspector Elk shivering on the wind-swept platform of Princetown. There were very few people in the waiting train at that hour; a workman or two on their way to an intermediate station, a commercial traveller who had been detained overnight and was probably looking forward to the comforts of Plymouth, comprised the list. It was within a minute of starting time, and he was beginning to think that he had wasted his time getting up so early, when he saw two men walk on to the platform.

One was a warder, and the other a thin man in an ill-fitting blue suit. The warder disappeared into the booking-office and came back with a ticket, which he handed to the other.

‘So long, Ingle!’ said the officer, and held out his hand, which the ex-convict took grudgingly.

Ingle stepped into the carriage and was turning to shut the door when Elk followed him and the recognition was immediate. Into the keen eyes of Arthur Ingle came a look of deep suspicion.

‘Hallo! What do you want?’ he asked harshly.

‘Why, bless my life, if it isn’t Ingle!’ said Elk with a gasp. ‘Well, well, well! It doesn’t seem five years ago—’

‘What do you want?’ asked Ingle again.

‘Me? Nothing! I’ve been up to the prison making a few inquiries about a friend of one of those mocking birds, but you know what they are—it was love’s labour lost, so to speak,’ said Elk, lighting a cigar and offering the case to his companion.

Ingle took the brown cylinder, smelt it and, biting off the end savagely, accepted the light which the detective held for him. By this time the train was moving and they were free from any possibility of interruption.

‘Let me see: I heard something about you the other day…What was it?’ Mr Elk held his forehead, a picture of perplexity. ‘I’ve got it!’ he said. ‘There was a burglary at your flat.’

The cigar dropped from the man’s hand.

‘A burglary?’ he said shrilly. ‘What was stolen?’

‘Somebody opened the safe in your locker room—’

Ingle sprang to his feet, his teeth bared, his eyes glaring. ‘The safe!’ He almost screamed the words. ‘Opened the safe—damn them! They’re not satisfied with sending me to five years of this hell, but they want to catch me again, do they…?’

Elk let him rave on until, in his rage, the man’s voice sank to a hoarse rattle of sound.

‘I hope you didn’t lose any money?’

‘Money!’ snarled the man. ‘Do you think I’m the kind who puts money in a safe? You know what I lost!’ He pointed an accusing finger at the detective. ‘You fellows did it! So that’s why you’re here, eh? A prison gate arrest, is it?’

‘My dear, good man!’ Elk was pained. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about! You’re no more under arrest than I am. You could walk out of that door as free as the air, if the train wasn’t moving.’ And then he asked: ‘What did they pinch?’

It was a long time before the man recovered himself. ‘If you don’t know I’m not going to tell you,’ he said. ‘Some day—’ He ground his teeth and in his eyes glared; the fires of fanaticism. ‘You, and the like of you, call me a thief!’ His voice rose again as he talked rapidly. ‘You branded me and put me into prison—segregated me from my kind…a pariah, a leper! For what? For skimming off a little of the stolen cream! For taking a little of the money wrested from sweating bodies and breaking hearts! It was mine—mine!’ He struck his chest with a bony fist, his eyes blazing. ‘The money belonged to me—to my fellows, to those men there!’ He pointed back to where, beyond the brow of a rise, lay the grim prison building. ‘I took it from those fat and greasy men and I’m glad of it! One jewel less for their horrible women; one motor-car fewer for their slaves to clean!’

‘Great idea,’ murmured Elk sympathetically.

‘You! What are you? The lackey of a class,’ sneered Ingle. ‘The hired torturer—the prison-feeder!’

‘Quite right,’ murmured Elk, listening with closed eyes.

‘If they found those papers they’ve something to think about—do you hear?—something to spoil their night’s sleep! And if there is sedition in them I’m willing to go back to Princetown.’

Elk opened his eyes quickly. ‘Oh, was that what it was?’ he asked, disappointed. ‘Revolution stuff?’

The man nodded curtly.

‘I thought it was something worth while!’ said Elk, annoyed. ‘Silly idea though, isn’t it. Ingle?’

‘To you, yes. To me, no,’ snapped the other. ‘I hate England! I hate the English! I hate all middle-class people, the smirking self-satisfied swine! I hated them when I was a starving actor and they sat in their stalls with a sneer on their overfed faces…’ He choked.

‘There’s a lot to be said for fat people,’ mused Elk. ‘Now take Harlow-though you wouldn’t call him a fat man.’

‘Harlow!’ scoffed the other. ‘Another of your moneyed gods!’ Evidently he remembered something, for he stopped suddenly.

‘Moneyed gods—?’ suggested Elk.

‘I don’t know.’ The man shook his head. ‘He may not be what he seems. In there’—he jerked his head backwards—‘they say he’s crook to his back teeth! But he doesn’t rob the poor. He takes it in large slabs from the fat men.’

‘If that’s so, I’ve nothing to say. He’s on the side of law and order,’ said Elk gently. ‘A man who hands out police stations as Christmas presents can’t be wholly bad!’

By the time the train pulled into Plymouth station, Detective-Inspector Elk was perfectly satisfied that there was nothing further to be learnt from the man. He went to the post office and sent a telegram to Jim which was short and expressive.

‘Revolution stuff. Nothing important.’

He was on the same train that carried Mr Ingle to London, but he did not occupy the same compartment, except for half an hour after the train flashed through Bath, when he strolled into the carriage and sat down by the man’s side; and apparently he was welcome, for Ingle started talking.

‘Have you seen anything of my niece? Docs she know about the burglary? I think you told me, but I was so angry that I can’t remember.’ And, when Elk had given him the fullest particulars: ‘Harlow! Why did he come? He met Aileen at Dartmoor, you say?’ He frowned and suddenly slapped his knee. ‘I remember the fellow. He was sprawling in his car by the side of the road when we came back from the field that day. So that was Harlow! Does he know Aileen?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘They met at Dartmoor; that’s all I know.’ Ingle gave one of his characteristic shrugs.

‘I suppose he’s running after her? She’s a pretty sort of girl. With that type of man, money’s no object. She’s old enough to look after herself without my assistance.’ So this Utopian left Aileen Rivers to her fate.

CHAPTER 7

HE HAD wired from Plymouth asking her to call at the flat that night, and she arrived just as he had finished a dinner he had cooked for himself.

‘Yes, I’ve heard about the burglary,’ he said, cutting short her question. ‘They’ve got nothing that was worth a shilling to them, thank God! Why did you call in the police?’

And then he had a shock.

‘Who else should I have called in—a doctor?’ she asked.

It was the first time he had met her in a period of freedom. She had had her instructions to look after the flat, smuggled out of prison by a discharged convict; and their talks during the brief visiting hours had been mainly on business.

‘What does one usually do when a burglary is discovered?’ she asked. ‘I sent for the police—of course I sent!’

He stared at her fiercely, but she did not flinch. It was his eyes which dropped first.

‘I suppose it’s all right,’ he said, and then: ‘You know Harlow, don’t you?’

‘I met him at Dartmoor, yes.’

‘A friend of yours?’

‘No more than you are,’ she said; and he had his second shock. ‘I’m not going to quarrel with you, and I don’t see why you should want to be rude to me,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve been useful, but I’ve not been ungenerous. Harlow is a friend of yours—’

‘He called here on the night of the burglary to offer me a job,’ she replied, without any visible evidence other rising anger. ‘I met him at Princetown and he seemed to think that because of my relationship with you, I should find it rather difficult to get employment.’

He muttered something under his breath which she did not catch and it occurred to her that she had cowed this bullying little man, though she had had no such intention.

‘I shall not want you any more.’ He took out his pocket-book, opened it and extracted a banknote. ‘This is in the nature of a bonus,’ he said. ‘I do not intend continuing your allowance.’

He expected her to refuse the money and he was not wrong.

‘Is that all?’ she asked. She did not attempt to take the note.

‘That is all.’

With a nod she turned and walked to the door. ‘The charwoman is coming tonight to clean up,’ she said. ‘You had better make arrangements for her to stay on—but I suppose you’ve already made your plans.’

Before he could reply, she was gone. He heard the street door slam after her, took up the money and put it back in his case; and he was without regret for, if the truth be told, Mr Arthur Ingle, despite the largeness of his political views, was exceedingly mean.

There was a great deal for him to do: old boxes to open and sort, papers and memoranda to retrieve from strange hiding-places. The seat of the big settee on which Aileen had sat so often waiting for the cleaner to finish her work, opened like a lid and here he had documents and, in a steel box, books that might not have come to light even if the police had been aware of the flat at the time of his arrest, an had made their usual search.

Ingle was a man of wide political activities. No party man in the sense that he found a party to match his own views; rather, he was one of those violent and compelling thinkers who are unconsciously the nucleus of a movement. His grudge against the world was a sincere one. He saw injustice in the simplest consequences of cause and effect. His opinions had not made him a thief; they had merely justified him in his disregard for the law and his obligation to society.

Imprisonment had made him neither better nor worse, had merely confirmed him in certain theories. Inconsistently, he loathed his prison associates, men who had been unsupported by his high motives in their felonies. The company of them was contamination. He hated the chaplain; and only one inmate of that terrible place touched what in him still remained tender. That was the old, blind horse who had his stable in the prison, and whose sight seemed to have been destroyed by Providence that he might not witness the degradation of the superior mammals that tramped the exercise ring, or went trudging and shuffling up the hill and through the gates.

He was the one man in the prison who was thankful when the cell door closed on him and the key turned in the lock.

The foulness of these old lags, their talk, their boasts, the horrible things that may not be written about…he could not think back without feeling physically sick. In truth he would not have stretched out his hand if, by so doing, he could have opened those cell doors and released to the world the social sweepings whom it was his professed mission to salve.

His work finished, he lit a cigarette, fitted it carefully into an amber holder and, adjusting the cushions, lay down on the settee and smoked and thought till the telephone bell roused him and he got up.

The voice that spoke to him was quite unfamiliar. ‘Is that Mr Ingle?’

‘Yes,’ he said shortly.

‘Will you make a sacrifice of your principles?’ was the astonishing request, and the man smiled sourly.

‘What I have left, yes. What do you wish?’

It might be an old friend in need of money, in which case the conversation would be short. For Arthur Ingle had no foolish ideas about charity.

‘Could you meet me tonight on the sidewalk immediately opposite Horse Guards Parade?’

‘In the park, you mean?’ asked Ingle, astonished. ‘Who are you? I’ll tell you before you go any further that I’m not inclined to go out of my way to meet strangers. I’m a pretty tired man tonight.’

‘My name is—’ a pause—‘Harlow.’

Involuntarily, Ingle uttered an exclamation.

‘Stratford Harlow?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Yes, Stratford Harlow.’

There was a long pause before Arthur Ingle spoke. ‘It’s rather an extraordinary request, but I realise that it isn’t an idle one. How do I know you’re Harlow?’

‘Call me up in ten minutes at my house and ask for me,’ said the voice. ‘Will you come?’

Again Mr Ingle hesitated. ‘Yes, I’ll come,’ he said. ‘At what time?’

‘At ten o’clock exactly. I won’t keep you hanging about this cold night. You can get into my car and we’ll drive somewhere.’

Ingle hung up the telephone a little bewildered. He was a cautious man and after ten minutes had expired he put through the number he discovered in the phone directory, and the same voice answered him. ‘Are you satisfied?’

‘Yes, I’ll be there—ten o’clock,’ he said.

He had two hours to wait. The charwoman did not arrive till nine. He gave her instructions, made arrangements for the following day; and went back to the dining-room to think out the extraordinary request which Stratford Harlow had made of him. And the more he thought, the less inclined he as to keep the appointment. At last he turned to his writing table, took out a sheet of paper and scrawled a note.

“DEAR MR HARLOW,

“I am afraid I must disappoint you. I am in such a position, being an ex-convict, that I cannot afford to take the slightest risk. I will tell you I frankly that what I have in my mind is that this may be a frame-up organised by my friends the police, and I think that it would be, to say the least, foolish on my part to go any farther until I know your requirements, or at least have written proof that you have approached me.

“Yours sincerely,

“ARTHUR INGLE.”

He put the letter in an envelope, addressed it, and marked in the corner in bold letters ‘By hand. Urgent.’ Even now he was not satisfied. He went to the telephone to call a district messenger, but he did not lift the receiver. His curiosity was piqued. He felt he must know, with the least possible delay, just why Stratford Harlow had summoned Arthur Ingle, late of Dartmoor convict establishment. And why should the meeting be secret? A man of Harlow’s standing would not lose caste, even if he sent for him to go to his house. He came to a sudden resolve, pitched the letter on to the table, went into his bedroom and changed into a dark suit.

By the time he had climbed into his overcoat he was satisfied that he was taking the wisest course. The charwoman was in the kitchen and he opened the door to pass his last admonition. She was on her knees, scrubbing-brush in hand, and he looked down into a long, weak face over which strayed lank wisps of grey-black hair.

‘I’m going out. You needn’t wait. Finish your work and be here in the morning before eight,’ he barked and slammed the door on this inconsiderable member of the proletariat and went down the stairs in a spirit of adventure that made him feel almost young.

As the Horse Guards clock was chiming the three-quarters he came into Birdcage Walk and turned along the lonely footpath that runs parallel with the House Guards and flanks the broad parade ground. There was no hurry; he fell into a gentle stroll, fast enough to keep him warm and to avoid any suspicion of loitering within the meaning of the act.

It could not be a frame-up, he had decided. A man of Harlow’s character would hardly lend himself to such a plot; and in his heart of hearts, for all his bitter gibes at the police, he did not believe seriously in the prison legend of innocent men being trapped by cunning police plots.

He looked at his watch under a street standard; it was five minutes to ten, and he strolled back the way he had come, and stopped immediately in a line with the gates that closed the arch of the Horse Guards. As he did so a car came noiselessly along the sidewalk from the direction of Westminster.

It stopped in front of him and the door opened.

‘Will you come in, Mr Ingle?’ said a low voice; and without a word he stepped inside, pulling the door close after him and sank down on a soft seat by the side of a man who, he at once recognised, was that Splendid Harlow, whose name, even in Dartmoor, symbolised wealth beyond dreams.

The car, gathering speed, turned into the Mall, swung round towards Buckingham Palace and across the Corner into Hyde Park. It slackened speed now, and Stratford Harlow began to talk…

For an hour the car moved at a leisurely pace round the Circle. Sleet was falling. Ingle listened like a man in a dream to the amazing proposition which his companion advanced.

He, at any rate, sat in comfort. Inspector Jim Carlton, following in an aged convertible was chilled and wet, and the highly sensitive microphone which he had placed in Harlow’s car failed to transmit the talk it was so vital he should hear.

Arthur Ingle arrived home at his flat soon after eleven. The cleaner had gone and he was glad; dull clod and unimaginative as she was she yet might have read and interpreted the light that shone in his eyes or have sensed the exultation of his heart.

Brewing himself some coffee, he sat down at his desk and in to make notes. Once he rose and, entering his bedroom, turned on the light above his dressing-table and stared at himself for five minutes in the glass. The scrutiny seemed to afford him a certain amount of satisfaction, for he; smiled and returned to his notemaking.

That smile did not leave his lips; and once he laughed out loud. Evidently something had happened that afforded him the most exquisite happiness.

CHAPTER 8

‘Could you please come and see me in the lunch hour?—A.R.’

JIM CARLTON looked at the ‘A.R.’ blankly before he placed ‘A’ as indicating Aileen—he was under the impression that she spelt her name with an ‘E’. It had been delivered at Scotland Yard by a messenger half an hour before he arrived. Literally he was waiting on the mat when she came out; and she seemed very glad to see him.

‘You will probably be very angry that I’ve sent for you about such a little thing,’ she said, ‘and you’re so busy—’

‘I won’t tell you how I feel about it,’ he interrupted, ‘or you’ll think I’m not sincere.’

‘You see, you are the only policeman I know and I don’t know you very well, but I thought you wouldn’t mind. Mrs Gibbins has disappeared; she didn’t go home last night nor the night before.’

‘I’m thrilled,’ he said. ‘And her husband fears the worst?’

‘She hasn’t a husband; she’s a widow. Her landlady came in to see me this morning. She’s dreadfully upset.’

‘But who’s Mrs Gibbins?’

‘Mrs Gibbins is the charwoman at Uncle’s flat. Rather a wretched-looking lady with untidy hair. I’m rather worried about it because she’s a woman without friends. I called up my Uncle’s flat this morning and he was almost polite, and told me that she didn’t arrive yesterday morning and she hasn’t been there today.’

‘She may have met with an accident,’ was his natural suggestion.

‘I’ve telephoned to the big hospitals, but nothing has been heard of her. I want you to tell me what I can do next. It’s such a little matter that I’ll listen meekly to any rude comment you care to think up!’

He was not interested in Mrs Gibbins; the case of a lonely woman who disappears as from the face of the earth was so common a phenomenon in the life of any great city that he could hardly work up enthusiasm for the search. But Aileen was so concerned that he would have been a brute to have treated her request lightly; and after lunch, the day being his own, he went to Stanmore Rents in Lambeth, a little riverside slum and made a few inquiries at first hand.

Mrs Gibbins had lived there, the slatternly landlady told him, for five years. She was a good, sober, honest woman, never went out, had no friends, and subsisted on what she earned and a pound a week which was paid to her quarterly by some distant relation. In fact, she was due to receive the money on the following Monday. Her chief virtue was that she paid her rent every Monday morning and gave no trouble.

‘Do you mind if I search her room?’

The landlady wished that and showed him the way; it gave her a nice feeling of authority to be present during the operation.

Jim was shown into a small back room, scrupulously clean, with a bed and a sort of home-made hanging cupboard that had been fixed in one corner and was shrouded by a cheap curtain. Here was the meagre wardrobe of the missing charwoman: a skirt or two, a light summer coat that had seen its brightest days, and a best hat. He tried the chest of drawers and found one drawer locked. This he opened with the first key on his own bunch, to the awe and admiration of the landlady. Here was proof of the woman’s affluence—a post office bank-book showing Ł87 to her credit, four new Ł1 Treasury notes, and a threadbare bag with a broken catch.

Inside this were one or two proofs of the vanity of the eternal feminine—a greasy powder-puff, a cheap trinket or two, and between lining and outer cover a folded paper of some sort.

It had not got there by accident, he saw, when he carried the bag to the light, for it was carefully sewn into the lining. He took out his pocket knife and, picking the stitches, extracted what he thought was one sheet of paper, lightly folded. When he opened the paper out he found there were two sheets.

The landlady ducked her head sideways in an effort to catch a glimpse of the writing, but Jim was aware of this manoeuvre.

‘Do you mind going downstairs,’ he asked politely, ‘and seeing if you can find in your ash-can—’

‘Dustbin,’ corrected the lady.

‘Whatever it is, the envelope of any letter addressed to Mrs Gibbins?’

By the time she returned from her profitless task the papers had disappeared, and Jim Carlton was sitting on the narrow window ledge, a cigar between his teeth and he was examining the threadbare carpet with such intentness that the landlady was certain that he had discovered some blood-stains.

‘Eh?’ He woke from his dream with a start. ‘You can’t find it? I’m sorry. What was it I asked you to get? Oh, yes, an envelope. Thank you. I found it in the bag.’

He relocked the drawer, and with another glance round the apartment came down the treacherous stairs.

‘You don’t think she’s drownded herself, sir?’ asked the landlady tremulously.

‘No. Why? Did she ever threaten to commit suicide?’

‘She’s been pretty miserable for some time, poor dear!’ The woman wiped a tear from her cheek, and the fascinated Jim observed that the spot where the apron had been rubbed was perceptibly cleaner.

‘No, I don’t think she has—committed suicide,’ he said. ‘She may turn up. If she does, will you send me a telegram?’

He scribbled his name and address on a blank that he found in his pocket and gave her the money for its dispatch.

‘I know there’s something wrong,’ insisted the tearful lady. ‘Foul play or something. She bought some stuff to make up into a dress; I’ve got it in my kitchen—it only came the night before last.’

She showed him the package, which was unopened.

‘My niece was coming in yesterday morning to show her how to cut it out,’ continued the woman, ‘but, of course, Mrs Gibbins didn’t come home, and my niece lives over in Peckham, and it’s a long drag here—’

‘Yes. I suppose so,’ said Jim absently.

He walked down the noisome street, got into the car that was waiting at the end, and went slowly back across Westminster Bridge to his room.

Elk was not in and, even if he had been, Jim was not in the mood for consultation. He spread out on the table the papers he had taken from Mrs Gibbins’s bag and read them carefully, jotted down a few particulars and, refolding them, put them in his pocket-book. He passed the next hour dictating letters to the last people in the world one would have imagined would be interested in the disappearance of a charwoman.

Aileen did not expect to see him again that day and was surprised, almost pleasurably, when he walked into the outer office and sent in his name. She was on the point of leaving and the office boy, impatient to be gone, misinterpreted the colour that came to her cheeks.

‘You’ll be getting me a very bad name, Mr Carlton,’ she said as they went into the street together.

‘Did I tell you that my front name was Jim, or James, as the case may be?’ he asked. ‘Shall we try something more snappy in the restaurant line? I know a place in Soho—’

‘No, I think I’ll go home now.’

‘I wanted to talk to you about our Mrs Gibbins,’ he said flippantly, though he was not feeling at all flippant. ‘And I told our people that I can be found there if I am wanted.’

‘Have you had any news?’ she asked; and he guessed by her penitent tone that she had altogether forgotten the existence of the charwoman. At any rate she did not demur when he handed her into the car and she accepted his restaurant, dingy though it was, without protest.

They were passing from the street when Jim heard his name called and, looking round, saw a headquarters man.

‘Came through just after you left, sir.’

Jim read the hastily-written phone message.

‘I’ll be back in an hour,’ he said, and followed the girl who was waiting for him in the vestibule.

When they were seated: ‘I want to ask you: was Mrs Gibbins in the flat that night your uncle’s safe was burgled?’

She considered. ‘No, she wasn’t there; at least, she oughtn’t to have been there. She came later, you remember. I opened the door to her.’

‘Oh!’ he said, and she smiled.

‘What does “Oh!” mean?’ And then quickly: ‘You don’t think she was the burglar, do you?’

‘No, I don’t think that,’ he said; his tone was very grave—she wondered why. ‘Tell me something about her; was she well educated?’

Aileen shook her head.

‘No, she was rather illiterate. I’ve had many of her notes, and they were scarcely decipherable. The spelling was—well, very original.’

‘Oh!’ he said again, and she could have boxed his ears.

‘Well, that’s that!’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think that even your uncle, with his well-known passion for humanity, will so much as shed a silent tear. She was just nothing, nobody—a wisp of straw caught up in the wind and deposited God knows where! Stale fruit under the dustman’s broom. Horrible, isn’t it? Think of it! All the theatres will soon be crowded and people will be screaming with laughter at the antics and clowning of the comedians! There will be a State ball at the Palace and tonight happy men and women will I be dancing on a hundred floors. Who cares about Mrs Gibbins?’

He was very serious, and a minute before he had been almost gay.

‘The passing of a friendless woman is a small thing.’ He rubbed his nose irritably. ‘And now it is a big thing!’ he said, raising a warning finger and looking at her. ‘Mrs Gibbins is stirring the minds of eighteen thousand London policemen, who if need be would have the support of the whole Brigade of Guards and every one of these dancers, diners and theatregoers would move with one accord and not rest day or night till they found the man who struck her down and dropped her poor, wasted body in the waters of the Regent’s Canal!’ She half rose, but he motioned her down. ‘I’ve spoilt your dinner and I’ve spoilt my own, too,’ he said.

‘Dead?’ she whispered. He nodded. ‘Murdered?’

‘Yes…I think so. They took her out of the canal a few minutes before I left the office, and there were marks to show that she’d been bludgeoned. I had the news just before I came in. What was she doing near the Edgware Road—in Regent’s Park, let us say? Give her two days to drift as far.’

The waiter came and stood at his elbow in an attitude of expectancy. The girl shook her head. ‘I can’t eat.’

‘Omelettes,’ said Jim. ‘That isn’t eating; it’s just nourishment.’

Arthur Ingle had the discomfort of a police visitation, but he knew nothing of Mrs Gibbins, knew much less indeed than his niece.

‘I have seen the woman, but I shouldn’t recognise her.’

This accorded with the information already in their possession, and the two detectives who called had a whisky-and-soda with him and departed.

The landlady of the Rents could say no more than she had said on the previous afternoon to Sub-Inspector Carlton.

Jim went down himself to see this worthy soul; and he had a particular reason, because on that morning, ‘regular as clockwork,’ came the envelope which contained Mrs Gibbins’s quarterly allowance; and that lady was rather in a fluster, because the letter had not arrived.

‘No, sir, it was never registered, that’s why I feel so awkward about it. People might think…but you can ask the postman yourself, sir.’

‘I’ve asked him,’ smiled Jim. ‘Tell me, where were those letters posted? You must have seen the date-stamp at some time or other.’

But she swore she hadn’t; she was not inquisitive, indeed regarded inquisitiveness as one of the vices which had come into existence with reading newspapers. She did not explain the connection between the popular press and the inquiring mind, though it was there plain to be seen.

The local police inspector had cleared the wardrobe and drawers of all portable articles, including the bag.

‘I told him you found a paper in the bag, but he couldn’t see it, sir, though he searched high and low for it.’

‘There wasn’t a paper to find,’ said Jim untruthfully.

His position was a delicate one. He had withdrawn important evidence from what might perhaps be a very serious case. There was only one course to take and this he followed.

Returning to Scotland Yard, he requested an interview with the Commissioners, explained what he had done, told them frankly his suspicions and asked for the suppression of the evidence he held. The consultation was postponed for the attendance of a representative of the Public Prosecutor, but in the end he had his way, and when the inquest was held on Annie Maud Gibbins the jury returned an open verdict, which meant that they were content with the statement that the deceased woman had been ‘found dead’, and expressed no opinion as to how she met her fate—a laudable verdict, since no member of the jury, not even the coroner, nor the doctors who testified with so many reservations, had the slightest idea how the life of Mrs Gibbins, the charlady, had gone out.

CHAPTER 9

AILEEN RIVERS was annoyed, and since the object of her annoyance lived in the same room, and to use a vulgar idiom, under the same hat as herself, a highly unsatisfactory state of affairs was produced. She was annoyed because she had not seen Mr James Carlton for a week. But she was furious with herself that she was annoyed at all. Mr Stebbings, that stout lawyer, had reached an age when he was no longer susceptible to atmosphere, yet even he was conscious that his favourite employee had departed in some degree from the normal. He asked her if she was not well; and suggested that she should take a week off and go to Margate. The suggestion of Margate was purely mechanical; he invariably prescribed Margate for all disorders of body and mind, having been once in the remote past cured of the whooping cough in that delightful town. It was not Margate weather, and Aileen was not Margate-minded.

‘I remember’—Mr Stebbings unfolded several of his heavy chins to gaze meditatively at the ceiling—‘many years ago suggesting to Miss Mercy Harlow—ahem!—’

It occurred to him that the girl would not know Miss Mercy Harlow and that the name would be without significance; for the great heights to which the living Harlow had risen were outside his comprehension.

‘You used to act for the Harlows once, didn’t you; Mr Stebbings?’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Stebbings carefully. ‘It was—er—a great responsibility. I was not sorry when young Mr Stratford went elsewhere.’

He said no more than this, which was quite a lot for Mr Stebbings, but by one of those coincidences which are a daily feature of life she came again into contact with the Harlow family.

Mr Stebbings was dealing with a probate case. A will had been propounded in the court, and was being opposed by a distant relative of the legator. The question turned on whether, in the spring of a certain year the legator had advanced certain money to one of the numerous beneficiaries under the will with the object of taking him out of the country.

Aileen was sent to inspect the cash book, since it was alleged the money had been paid through the lawyers. She found the entry without a great deal of difficulty, and, running down the index to discover if she had missed any further reference, her finger stopped at the words:

‘Harlow—Mercy Mildred. Harlow-Stratford Selwyn Mortimer.’

She would not have been human if she had not turned up the pages. For a quarter of an hour she pored over the accounts of the dead and gone Miss Mercy, that stern and eccentric woman, and then she saw an item ‘To L. Edwins, Ł125.’ An entry occurred four months later: ‘To L. Edwins, Ł183 17s. 4d.’ She knew of Mrs Edwins, and had seen a copy of Miss Mercy Harlow’s will—she had looked it up after the Dartmoor meeting, being momentarily interested in the millionaire.

She turned to Stratford’s account, which was a very small one. Evidently, Mr Harlow made no payments through his lawyers. If an opportunity had occurred she would have asked Mr Stebbings for further information about the family, though she was fairly sure that such a request would have produced no satisfactory result.

Deprived of this interest, Aileen was thrown back upon the dominating occupation of life—her amazement and disapproval of Aileen Rivers in relation to Mr James Carlton.

He knew her address: she had particularly told him the number. Equally true it was that she had asked him only to write on official business. By some miracle she had not been called to give evidence at the inquest and she might, and did, trace his influence here. But even that could not be set against a week’s neglect.

‘Ridiculous’ (said the saner part other, in tones of reprobation). ‘You hardly know the man! Just because he’s been civil to you and has taken you out to dinner twice (and they were both more or less business occasions), you’re expecting him to behave as though he were engaged to you!’

The unregenerate Aileen Rivers merely tossed her head at this and was unashamed.

She could, of course, have written to him: there was excuse enough; and she actually did begin a letter, until the scandalous character of her behaviour grew apparent even to Aileen II.

Saturday passed and Sunday; she stayed at home both days in case—

He called on Sunday night, when she had given up—well, if not hope, at any rate expectation.

‘I’ve been down to the country,’ he said.

She interviewed him in the sitting room, which her landlady set aside for formal calls.

‘Couldn’t you come out somewhere? Have you dined?’

She had dined.

‘Come along and walk; it’s rather a nice night. We can have coffee somewhere.’

Her duty was to tell him that he was taking much for granted, but she didn’t. She went upstairs, got her coat and in the shortest space of time was walking with him through Bloomsbury Square.

‘I’m rather worried about you,’ he said.

‘Are you?’ Her surprise was genuine.

Yes, I am a little. Didn’t you tell me Mrs Gibbins used to confide her troubles to you?’ There was a note of anxiety in his voice.

‘She was rather confidential at times.’

‘Did she ever tell you anything about her past?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Aileen quickly. ‘It was mostly about her mother, who died about four years ago.’

‘Did she ever tell you her Christian name—her mother’s, I mean?’

‘Louisa,’ answered the girl promptly. ‘You’re awfully mysterious, Mr James Carlton. What has this to do with poor Mrs Gibbins?’

‘Nothing, except that her name was Annie Maud, and the letters containing the money, which came to her quarterly, were addressed to “Louisa,” 14 Kennet Road, Birmingham, and readdressed by the postal authorities. A letter came this morning.’

‘Poor soul!’ said the girl softly.

‘Yes.’

It was surprising how well she understood him, remembering the shortness of their acquaintance. She knew, for example, when he was thinking of something else—his voice rose half a tone.

‘Isn’t that strange? Do you remember my telling you of the eighteen thousand policemen and the Brigade of Guards, and the whole congregation of the blessed? And now they are all agitated because Mrs Gibbins’s mother was named Louisa! That discovery—I shouldn’t have asked you, because I knew it already—proved two things: first, that Mrs Gibbins committed a crime some fifteen years ago, and secondly, that this is the second time she’s been dead!’

He suddenly relaxed and laughed softly.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he warned her. ‘I know just the fictional detective whom I am imitating! The whole thing is rather complicated. Did I say coffee or dinner?’

‘You said coffee,’ she said.

The popular restaurant into which they went was just a little overcrowded and after being served they lost no time in making their escape.

They were passing along Coventry Street when a big car rolled slowly past. The man who was driving was in evening dress…they saw the sheen of his diamond studs, the red tip of his cigar.

‘Nobody on earth but the Splendid Harlow could so scintillate,’ said Jim. ‘What does he do in this part of the world at such an hour?’

The car turned to the right through Leicester Square and passed down Orange Street at a pace which was strangely majestic. It was as though it formed part of and led a magnificent procession. The same thought occurred to both of them.

‘He should really travel with a band!’

‘I was thinking that, too,’ laughed the girl. ‘He frightened me terribly the night he came to the flat. I mean, when I opened the door to him. And I’m not easily scared. He looked so big and powerful and ruthless that my soul cowered before him!’

They passed up deserted Long Acre; it was too early for the market carts to have assembled, and the street was a wilderness. Suddenly the girl found her hand held loosely in Jim Carlton’s. He was swinging it to and fro. The severer side of Miss Aileen Rivers closed its eyes and pretended not to see.

‘I’ve got a very friendly feeling for you,’ said Jim huskily. ‘I don’t know why, but I just have. And if you talk about the philandering constabulary, I will never forgive you.’

Three men had suddenly debouched from a side street; they were talking noisily and violently and were moving slowly towards them. Jim looked round: the only man in sight was walking in the opposite direction, having passed them a minute or so before.

‘I think we’ll cross the road,’ he said. He took her arm, and, quickening his step, led her to the opposite sidewalk.

The quarrelling three turned back and Jim stopped. ‘I want you to run back to the other end of Long Acre and fetch a policeman,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Will you do this for me? Run!’

Obediently she turned and fled, and as she did so one of the three came lurching towards him.

‘What’s the idea?’ he said loudly. ‘Can’t we have an argument without you butting in?’

‘Stay where you are, Donovan,’ said Jim. ‘I know you and I know just what you’re after.’

‘Get him,’ said somebody angrily, and Jim Carlton whipped out the twelve inch length of jambok that he carried in his pocket and struck at the nearest man. As the flexible hide reached its billet the man dropped like one shot. In another second his two companions had sprung at the detective; and he knew that he was fighting, if not for his life, at any rate to save himself from an injury which would incapacitate him for months.

Again the jambok reached home; a second man reeled.

And then a taxicab came flying down Long Acre with a policeman on each footboard…

‘No, not Bow Street,’ said Jim, ‘take them to Cannon Row.’

Aileen was in the taxicab, a most unheroic woman, on the verge of tears.

‘I guessed what they were after,’ said Jim, as they were driving home. ‘It is one of the oldest tricks in the world, that rehearsed street fight.’

‘But why? Why did they do it? Were they old enemies of yours?’ she asked, bewildered.

‘One,’ he said. ‘Donovan.’ He carefully avoided her second question.

The presence of Mr Harlow in his lordly car was no accident. The car which passed down Orange Street was ostensibly carrying him to Vira’s Club, but there was a short cut which brought him through St Martin’s Lane to the end of Long Acre before the two walkers could possibly reach there. What was more important was that it was very clear to Jim that he and the girl were under observation, and had been followed that night from the moment he left the club where he lived, until the attack was delivered.

The reason for the hold-up was not difficult to understand, even supposing he ruled out the very remote possibility that it was associated with Mrs Gibbins’s death. And that he must exclude, unless he gave Mr Harlow credit for supernatural powers.

He saw the girl to her boarding house and went back to Scotland Yard, to find a telegram awaiting him. It was from the detective force of Birmingham, and ran:

‘Your inquiry 793 Mrs Louisa Gibbins, deceased. Letter which came to her regularly every quarter, and which was subsequently readdressed to Mrs Gibbins, of Stanmore Rents, Lambeth, invariably had Norwood postmark. This fact verified by lodger of late Mrs Gibbins of this town. Annie Maud Gibbins’s real name, Smith. She married William Smith, a platelayer on Midland Railway. Further details follow, Hooge. Ends.’

A great deal of this information was not new to Jim Carlton. But the Norwood postmark was invaluable, for in that suburb of London lived Mr Ellenbury. Further details he would not need.

But before that clue could be followed, Jim Carlton’s attention was wholly occupied by the strange behaviour of Arthur Ingle, who suddenly turned recluse, declined all communication with the outside world and, locking himself in his flat, gave himself to the study of cinematography.

CHAPTER 10

IN THE days which followed Jim Carlton was a busy man, and only once during the week did he find time to see Aileen, and then she related one of the minor troubles of life.

A new boarder had come to the establishment where she lived, an athletic young man who occupied the room immediately beneath hers and whose apparent admiration took the form of following tier to her work every morning at a respectful distance.

‘I wouldn’t mind that, but he makes a point of being in the neighbourhood of the office when I come out for lunch, and when I go home at nights.’

‘Has he spoken to you?’ asked Jim, interested.

‘Oh, no, he’s been most correct; he doesn’t even speak at meals.’

‘Bear with him,’ said Jim, a twinkle in his eye. ‘It is one of the penalties attached to the moderately good-looking.’

Jim interviewed the girl’s new admirer.

‘As a shadow you’re a little on the heavy side, Brown,’ he said. ‘You should have found a way of watching her without her knowing.’

‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ said Detective Brown, and thereafter his espionage was less oppressive.

It was remarkable that in none of the excursions which Jim Carlton made from day to day did he once see Arthur Ingle. Deliberately he called at those restaurants and places of resort which in the old days were favoured by the man. It would not be a sense of shame or an unwillingness to meet old friends and associates of a more law-abiding life, that would keep him away. If anything, he was proud of his accomplishments, for by his fantastic twist of reasoning he had come to regard himself as a public benefactor.

Nobody had seen him; even the comrades whom it was his joy to address in frowsy Soho halls had not been honoured by speech or presence.

‘It almost looks as if he had gone over to the capitalists,’ said one.

‘I didn’t notice the flags were flying in Piccadilly,’ said Jim.

One night it happened that he found himself walking along the street at the back of Fotheringay Mansions and, looking up, noticed a bright light burning behind the green blind in an upper room. Mr Ingle’s apartment was easily located. There was a narrow parapet to identify the height; the lumber room where the light showed was four windows from the fire escape.

Elk was with him, and to that unenthusiastic man he confided his intentions.

‘He’ll start a squeal about police persecution,’ suggested Elk.

Undeterred, Jim went up in the elevator, though the man in charge discouraged him.

‘I don’t think Mr Jackson is at home,’ he said. ‘A gentleman called an hour ago and knocked twice but could get no answer.’

‘Maybe I can knock louder,’ suggested Jim.

But ring and knock as he did, he had no answer. Yet, as he listened at the letterbox aperture, to make certain that the bell was ringing, he could have sworn he heard a stealthy footstep inside. Why was Ingle hiding?

There was, of course, the possibility that the man was engaged in some new piece of roguery. But from his experience of swindlers, Jim Carlton knew that they were never furtive when they were planning a coup.

The landing was deserted and he could wait without attracting to himself the suspicion of the lift man. Again he stooped and listened; and now he heard a sound which puzzled him-a rapid whirring. He had heard that noise before somewhere, and yet he could not locate or diagnose the sound. It came very faintly as through a closed door…

He saw the ascending light of the elevator and walked to the gate. The car passed to the next floor to discharge its passenger, and then came down to his level.

‘Couldn’t make him hear, I suppose, sir?’ asked the elevator man, with the satisfaction of one whose dire prophecy has been realised. ‘He won’t see anybody these days. Why, he doesn’t even come out for his meals.’

‘He has a servant, hasn’t he?’

‘Not now,’ said the lift-man gloomily, as they sank slowly down the well. ‘Used to have, but she—’ He told the story of Mrs Gibbins. ‘Now he gets his food and stuff delivered. I think Mr Jackson is going in for something unusual,’ he added as they reached the ground floor and he pulled back the gates.

‘What do you mean by “something unusual”?’

The man scratched his head.

‘I don’t know exactly. About four days ago a man came here with a long black box—the sort of thing that they use for carrying films—’

Films! Now Jim Carlton understood. This was the sound he had heard: the whirr of a cine projector!

‘He took it up and left it. I asked him if Mr Jackson was taking on film work, but he said nothing—the man who brought it, I mean. Of course, if I knew for certain that he had any celluloid stored on the premises, I’d have to report it. Fire risk…’

Jim listened without hearing. He was dumbfounded by the discovery. Every man has his secret weakness, but though he had credited Mr Arthur Ingle with many peculiarities, he had never suspected him of a passion for the cinema.

Elk was waiting outside, the stub of a cigar between his teeth, a large unfurled umbrella in his hand, and in a few words Jim told him what he had learnt.

‘Pitchers!’ said Elk, shaking his head. ‘Never thought he would lower himself to that! Queer thing how these crooks sort of run to weakness one way or the other. I knew a man, the cleverest safe-breaker in Europe, who’d risk a lagging to get a game of ping-pong! There was another fellow named Moses who had the finest long-firm business in England—’

‘Let us go round and look at the back of the house again,’ Jim interrupted the reminiscences ruthlessly.

The bright light was showing again, clear through the dark green blinds, even as he looked it was extinguished, but when his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he could see the reflected glow of another light. It was in this room, then, that Mr Ingle was engaged in his new hobby.

Jim looked naturally at the fire-escape. There was a wall to be scaled, or easier perhaps, a door into the courtyard of the building might be opened with one of his keys. But the door needed no forcing; it was unlocked and gave easy entry to a stone-paved yard, whence a flight of iron stairs led up to the roof. An iron bar was fastened across the rails at the bottom, for what purpose was not clear, since it was possible to get either over or beneath it.

‘Maybe it’s to keep it airtight,’ suggested Elk, ‘or to trip up the fellers that are not burnt to death. Going up?’

Jim nodded, and Inspector Elk followed him from landing to landing until they came level with the floor on which Mr Ingle’s flat was situated. Without a word, Jim Carlton swung himself over the rail and, balancing precariously upon the narrow ledge of stone, felt forward and gripped the nearest window-sill. Progress in front of the windows was an easy matter to one with his nerves: it was in the intervening spaces, where he had to depend for his life upon a fine sense of balance, that the danger lay. Elk watched him anxiously as he moved nearer and nearer to the window, flattening himself against the wall and edging forward inch by inch; in this perilous fashion, he came sidling to the window from behind which came the ceaseless rattle of the projector.

The moment he reached his objective Jim knew that his effort had been in vain. Behind blind and window he could see the small projector at work, was dazzled by the flicker of the light, and Arthur Ingle showed clearly in the glow thrown back from the invisible screen. He was staring at the picture which he was projecting, and the first thing the detective noticed was that Mr Ingle was in need of a barber, for his face was covered by a ragged white stubble and his grey hair was long and unkempt.

But what was the picture he was viewing so intently? Jim screwed his head round, but on the left-hand side of the window the blind ran flush with the sash. There was nothing to but to make his way back and noiselessly he edged towards the fire ladder.

He had not gone more than halfway before he had a shock. He felt a stone yield beneath his feet, the edge broke off and fell into the courtyard below. It might be one rotten piece, he argued, but stepped more carefully. If the parapet gave under his weight while he was traversing a wall space, nothing could save him from death; but he did not allow his mind to dwell upon this aspect of the adventure.

He had reached the window nearest to the iron stairs and was feeling cautiously along with his feet when, without warning, the narrow parapet beneath him cracked. He managed to grip the wooden window; and in another second was hanging with his legs in space. He heard Elk’s agitated whisper, saw the elderly detective thrust up the crook of his umbrella, but knew that this was beyond his reach.

There was only one hope; taking off his soft felt hat, he put his hand inside and drove straight at the glass of the window. The shock of the blow almost dislodged him, but clearing off the broken edge of glass, he took a firm grip of the window-sash and drew himself up. A second pane was broken in the same way and, reaching in, with some difficulty he turned the window catch and pushed up the sash.

In another second he was in a room. He stopped to listen.

The smashing of the glass had evidently not aroused the inmates and he passed out the news to the agitated Elk.

‘I don’t know whose flat it is,’ he whispered. ‘Meet me at the front of the building.’

Tiptoeing across the room, he felt for the light and turned it on. He was in a small bedroom, which had evidently not received any attention for a very considerable time, for dust lay thick upon the furniture and upon the folded blankets at the foot of the bed. Yet the room was handsomely furnished and in a style that harmonised with the general furnishings of Ingle’s apartment. Evidently this was one of the rooms which he had not visited.

He opened the door carefully. The dining-hall was in darkness; from the lumber-room came the ceaseless clickety-click of the projector.

Should he risk being discovered and satisfy his curiosity?

It was almost worth while. As he debated the point, the telephone rang noisily in the dining-room and he drew back, pulling the door close. He heard the snap as Ingle turned on the lights…

‘Hullo!—yes, Jackson…oh, is that you? Speaking from a call-box, I hope? Good! Yes, everything is OK…Yes, I’ve heard him—but only on the radio. I shall have to go to a meeting. He’s a good speaker? Huh! So am I! A spell-binder—you can laugh! I’ve had four thousand people cheering for two minutes. Don’t worry…no, thanks, I have all the money I need.’

The receiver thudded down and presently the lights went out and the lumber-room door closed.

A spell-binder? Who was to be bound by the eloquence of Mr Arthur Ingle? He waited until he heard the projector whirring again, and then, tiptoeing across the room, reached the passage. He was sorely tempted to take one look at the film show, but obviously he could only do this with the certainty that he would be seen, and Jim had all a detective’s horror of a ‘police persecution’ charge.

He turned his flashlight on the table: there might be something there which would give him a clue. He saw a fat envelope bearing the name of the Cunard Company. This had not been opened, but he could guess its contents. Mr Ingle contemplated a visit to the United States—or Canada, perhaps.

The turning of the projector ceased. He passed quickly to the hall, opened the door and closed it quietly after him. The elevator was ascending as he went down, and he was spared an explanation of his surprising presence. He found the patient Elk flapping his hands to keep warm and puffing at the last few centimetres of his cigar.

Fortunately Jim’s club was within a quarter of an hour’s walk and as they crossed the park Elk asked:

‘You got into old man Ingle’s flat, didn’t you?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘What’s thrillin’ him?’ asked Elk. ‘I hate admittin’ it, but the cinema’s my favourite sleepin’ place. Or was he runnin’ through the cartoons?’

‘I’d give a lot to know,’ said Jim, and repeated the conversation he had overheard.

‘Never know whether Arthur’s red because he’s wild, or wild because he’s red,’ mused Elk. ‘He’s a bit of a dilly-what’s the word?-dillytanty, that’s it. There’s quite a lot of genuine Reds, but a whole lot of people who hang on in the hope that one of the comrades will break a jeweller’s window so that they can get away with the doin’s. Most people are Red if they only knew it. Take the feller that keeps beehives. He just waits for the old capitalist bee to pile up his honey reserves and then he comes down on his bank-roll…’

He philosophised thus all the way across the park.

‘I am almost at the end of my theories—what is yours, Elk?’

‘Beer,’ said Elk absently, as they mounted the steps of the club.

‘Looks like he’s gettin’ ready for a quick money stunt,’ said Elk, as they made their way to the coffee-room. ‘But, Lord, you can never follow the minds of people like Ingle!

And he’s an actor too—that makes him more skittish. As likely as not he’s goin’ to give lectures on “My Five Years of Hell”—they all do it.’

Jim shook his head helplessly.

‘I don’t know what to make of that film craze of his.’

‘Decadence,’ said Elk laconically. ‘All these birds go wrong some way or another, I tell you.’

The waiter was hovering at their elbow.

‘Beer,’ said Elk emphatically.

It was a bitterly cold night, and in spite of the briskness of their walk Jim had been glad to get into the comfort of his club. He had no intention of returning to Scotland Yard that night, and was in fact parting with Elk at the door that looks out upon Pall Mall when the club porter called him.

There was an urgent message for him and, going into the booth, he spoke to one of the chief inspectors.

‘I have been trying to get you all the evening,’ said the officer. ‘One of the park-keepers has found the place where he thinks Mrs Gibbins was thrown into the canal. I’m on the phone to him. He suggested you should meet him outside the Zoological Society’s office.’

‘Tell him that I’ll come right along,’ said Jim quickly, and returning to Elk, conveyed the gist of the message.

‘Can’t these amacher detectives find things in the Lord’s bright sunlight?’ asked Elk bitterly. ‘Half-past nine and freezing like the devil: what a time to go snooping round canals!’

Yet he insisted upon going along with his companion.

‘You might miss something,’ he grumbled as the draughty taxi moved northward. ‘You ain’t got my power of observation and deduction. Anyway, I’ll bet we’re wasting our time. They’ll show us the hole in the water where she went in most likely.’

‘The canal is frozen,’ smiled Jim. ‘In fact, it’s been frozen since the day after the body was found.’

Mr Elk growled something under his breath; whether it was an uncomplimentary reference to the weather or to the tardiness of park-keepers, Jim did not gather.

It was not a keeper but an inspector who was waiting for them outside the Zoological offices. The discovery had been made that afternoon, but the keeper had not reported the matter until late in the evening. The inspector took a seat in their taxi and under his direction they drove back some distance to the place where a bridge crosses the canal to Avenue Road. Here the Circle roadway is separated from the canal by a fifty-foot stretch of grassland and trees. This verge, in summer, affords a playing ground for children, and has, from their point of view, the attraction of dipping down in a steep slope to the banks of the canal, which, however, is separated from the park by a row of wooden palings, wired to form an unclimbable fence. The playground is reached from the road by a broad iron gate running parallel with the bridge, and this, explained the park inspector, was locked at nights.

‘Occasionally somebody forgets,’ he said, ‘and I remember having it reported to me on the night after this woman’s disappearance, that the gates were found open in the morning.’

He led the way cautiously down the steep declivity towards the fence which runs by the canal bank. Here is a rough path and along this they trudged over ground frozen hard.

‘One of our keepers had to make an inspection of the fence this afternoon,’ the officer went on, ‘and we found that the palings had been wrenched from one of the supporting posts. Afterwards somebody must have put them up again and did the job so well that we have never noticed the break.’

They had now reached the spot, and a powerful light thrown along the fence revealed the extent of the damage.

A wire strand and one of the palings had been broken, and the officer had only to push lightly at the fence to send it sagging drunkenly towards the canal. He put his foot upon it and with a creak it lay over so that he could have walked without any difficulty on to the canal bank.

‘Our man thought that the damage had been done by boys, until he saw the hat.’

‘Which hat?’ asked Jim quickly.

‘I left it here for you to see, exactly as he found it.’

The superintendent’s light travelled along a bush, and presently focused upon a crushed brown object, which had been caught between two branches of the bush. Jim loosened the pitiable relic, a brown felt hat, stained and cut about the crown. It might easily, he saw, have been dragged off in a struggle, and against the autumnal colouring of the undergrowth would have escaped notice.

‘Here is another thing,’ said the park officer. ‘Do you see that? It was the first thing I looked for, but I have no doubt that you gentlemen will understand better than I what it signifies.’

It was the impress of a heel in the frozen ground. By its side a queer, flat footmark, criss-crossed with innumerable lines.

‘Somebody who wore rubbers,’ said Elk, going down on his knees. ‘There has been a struggle here. Look at the sideways thrust of that heel! And—’

‘What is this?’ asked Jim sharply.

His lamp was concentrated upon a tiny, frozen puddle, and Elk looked but could see nothing but its grey-white surface. Kneeling, Jim took out a knife from his pocket and began to scrape the ice; and now his companion saw what had attracted his attention: a piece of paper. It was an envelope which had been crushed into the mud. When he got the frozen object into the light it was frozen to the shape of the heel that had trodden upon it. Gently he scraped away the mud and ice until two lines were legible. The first was at the top left-hand corner and was heavily underlined.

‘By hand. Urgent.’

Only one line of the address was legible, but the word ‘Harlow’ was very distinct.

They carried their find back to the superintendent’s office and before his fire thawed it out. When the letter had become a limp and steaming thing, Jim stripped the flap of the envelope and carefully withdrew its contents.

‘DEAR MR HARLOW,

‘I am afraid I must disappoint you. I am in such a position, being an ex-convict, that I cannot afford to take the slightest risk. I will tell you frankly that what I have in my mind, is that this may be a frame-p up organised by my friends the police, and I think that it would be, to say the least, foolish on my part to go any farther until I know your requirements, or at least have written proof that you have approached me.

‘Yours sincerely,

‘ARTHUR INGLE.’

The two men looked at one another.

‘That beats the band,’ said Elk. ‘What do you make of it, Carlton?’

Jim stood with his back to the fire, the letter in his hand, his brow wrinkled in a frown.

‘I don’t know…let me try now…Harlow asked Ingle to meet him: I knew that already. Ingle promised to go, changed his mind and wrote this letter, which has obviously never been opened by Harlow, and as obviously could not have been delivered to him before the interview, because, as I know—and I had a cold in the head to prove it—these two fellows met opposite the Horse Guards Parade and went joy-riding round the park for the greater part of an hour.

Supposing Harlow is concerned with the slaying of this wretched woman—and why he should kill her heaven knows!—would he carry about this unopened letter and leave it for the first flat-footed policeman to find?’

He sat down in a chair and held his head in his hands, and presently: ‘I’ve got it!’ he said, his eyes blazing with excitement. At least, if I haven’t got the whole story, I know at least one thing—poor Mrs Gibbins was very much in love with William Smith the platelayer!’

Elk stared at him.

‘You’re talking foolish,’ he said.

CHAPTER 11

AILEEN RIVERS had made one attempt to see her relative. She called up her uncle on the telephone and asked if she might call.

‘Why?’ was the uncompromising question.

Only a very pressing cause would have induced the girl to make the attempt—a fact which she conveyed to Ingle in the next sentence.

‘I’ve had a big bill sent to me for the redecoration of your flat. You remember that you wished this done. The decorators hold me responsible—’

‘Send the bill to me; I’ll settle it,’ he interrupted.

‘I’m not sure that all the items are exact,’ she began.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he broke in again. ‘Send the bill: I’ll settle it. Good morning.’

She hung up with a little smile, relieved of the necessity for another interview.

There were times when Aileen Rivers was extremely grateful that no drop of Arthur Ingle’s blood ran in her veins.

He had married her mother’s first cousin, and the avuncular relationship was largely a complimentary one. She felt the need of emphasizing this fact upon Jim Carlton when he called that night—a very welcome visit, though he made it clear to her that the pleasure of seeing her again was not his sole object.

He had come to make inquiries which were a little inconsequent, she thought, about Mrs Gibbins. He seemed particularly anxious to know something about her nature, her qualities as a worker, and her willingness to undertake tasks which are as a rule outside the duties of a charwoman.

She answered every question carefully and exactly, and when her examination had been completed: ‘I won’t ask you why you want to know all this,’ she said, because I am sure that you must have a very good reason for asking. But I thought the case was finished?’

He shook his head. ‘No murder is finished until the assassin is caught,’ he said simply.

‘It was murder?’

‘I think so—Elk doesn’t. Even the doctors at the inquest disagreed. There is just a remote possibility that it may have been an accident.’ And then blandly: ‘How is your attentive fellow-boarder?’

‘Oh, Mr Brown?’ she said with a smile. ‘I don’t know what has happened, but since I spoke to you I’ve hardly seen him. Yes, he is still staying at the house.’

His visit was disappointingly short, though in reality she should not have been disappointed, because she had brought home a lot of work from the office—Mr Stebbings was preparing his annual audit, and she had enough to keep her occupied till midnight. Yet she experienced a little twinge of unhappiness when Jim Carlton took an abrupt adieu.

Though in no mood for work, she sat at her table until one o’clock, then, putting down her pen, opened the window and leaned out, inhaling the cold night air. The sky was clear and frosty; there was not a suspicion of the fog which had been predicted by the evening newspapers; and Coram Street was singularly peaceful and soothing. From time to time there came a distant whirr of wheels as cars and taxis passed along Theobald’s Road, but this was the only jar in the harmony of silence. It was one of London’s quiet nights.

She looked up and down the street-the deserted pavement was very inviting. She was stiff and cramped through sitting too long in one position, and a quarter of an hour’s walk was not only desirable, but necessary, she decided. Putting on her coat, she opened the door other room and crept silently down the stairs, not wishing to disturb the other inmates of the house.

At the foot of the first flight of stairs she had a surprise.

The door of the attentive boarder was wide open, and when she came abreast of it she saw him sitting in an armchair, a pipe gripped between his teeth, his hands clasped unromantically across his front and he was nodding sleepily. But she made sufficient noise to rouse him, and suddenly he sat up.

‘Hullo!’ he croaked, in the manner of one awaking from slumber. ‘Are you going out?’

The impertinence of the man took her breath away.

‘I thought of going for a stroll too,’ he said, rising laboriously. ‘I’m not getting enough exercise.’

‘I’m going to post a letter, that is all,’ she said, and had the humiliation of making a pretence to drop an imaginary letter into the pillar-box under his watchful eye.

She brushed past him as he stood in the doorway, blowing great clouds of smoke from his pipe, and almost ran up the stairs, angry with herself that she could allow so insignificant a thing to irritate her.

She did not see the man at breakfast, but as she walked up the steps to the office, she happened to glance round and, to her annoyance, saw him lounging on the corner of the square, apparently interested in nothing but the architecture of the fine old Queen Anne mansion which formed the corner block.

This day was to prove for Aileen Rivers something of an emotional strain. She was clearing up her desk preparatory to leaving the office when Mr Stebbings’s bell rang. She went in with her notebook and pencil.

‘No, no, no letter; I just have a curious request,’ said Mr Stebbings, looking past her. ‘A very curious and yet a very natural request. An old client of mine…his secretary has a sore throat or something. He wanted to know if you’d go round after dinner and take a few letters.’

‘Why certainly, Mr Stebbings,’ she said, surprised that he should be so apologetic.

‘He is not a client of mine now, as I think I’ve told you before,’ the stout Mr Stebbings went on, addressing the chandelier. ‘And I don’t know that I should wish for him to be a client either. Only—’

‘Mr Harlow?’ she gasped, and he brought his gaze down to her level.

‘Yes, Mr Harlow, 704 Park Lane. Do you mind?’

She shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. She had a struggle before she could agree. ‘Why, of course I’ll go. At what time?’

‘He suggested nine. I said that was rather late, but he told me that he had a dinner engagement. He was most anxious,’ said Mr Stebbings, his eyes returning to the Adam ceiling, ‘that this matter should be kept as quiet as possible.’

‘What matter?’ she asked wonderingly.

‘I don’t know’—Mr Stebbings could be exasperatingly vague—‘I rather fancy it may have been the contents of the letter; or, on the other hand, it may have been that he did not wish anybody to know that he had a letter of such importance as would justify the calling in of a special stenographer to deal with it. Naturally I told him he might rely on your discretion…thank you, that is all.’

She went back to her little room with the disquieting thought that she was committed to spend an hour alone with a man who on his last appearance had filled her with terror. She wondered whether she ought to tell Jim Carlton, and then she saw the absurdity of notifying to him every petty circumstance of her life, every coming and going. She knew he did not like Harlow; that he even suspected that splendid man of being responsible for the attack which had been made upon him in Long Acre; and she was the last to feed his prejudices. There were times when she allowed herself the disloyalty of thinking that Jim leaned a little towards sensationalism.

So she sent him no message, and at nine o’clock was ringing at the door of Mr Harlow’s house.

She had not seen him since he came to the flat. Once he had passed her in his car, but only Jim had recognised him.

Aileen was curious to discover whether she would recover that impression of power he had conveyed on the night of his call; whether the same thrill of fear would set her pulses beating faster-or whether on second view he would shrink to the proportions of someone who was just removed from the commonplace.

She had not anticipated that it would be Harlow himself who would open the door to her. He wore a dinner jacket, a pleated silk shirt and round the waist of his well cut trousers a cummerbund of oriental brocade. He looked superb. But the old thrill?…

Without realising her action she shook her head slowly.

His was a tremendous personality, dominating, masterful, sublimely confident. But he was not godlike. Almost she felt disappointed. Yet if he had been the Harlow of her mind it is doubtful whether she would have entered the house.

‘Most good of you!’ He helped her to struggle other heavy coat. ‘And very good of Stebbings! The truth is that my secretary is down with ‘flu and I hate employing people from agencies.’

He opened the door of the library and, entering, stood waiting with the edge of the door in his hand. As she stepped into the library, her foot slipped from under her on the highly-polished floor, and she would have fallen, but he caught her in a grip that was surprisingly fierce. As she recovered, she was facing him, and she saw something like horror in his eyes—just a glimpse, swift to come and go.

‘This floor is dreadful,’ he said jerkily. ‘The men from Herrans should have been here to lay the carpet.’

She uttered an incoherent apology for her clumsiness, but he would not listen.

‘No, no—unless you are used to the trick of walking on it—’

His concern was genuine, but he made a characteristic recovery.

‘I have a very important letter to write—a most important letter. And I am the worst of writers. Dictation is a cruel habit to acquire—the dictator becomes the slave of his typist!’

His attitude might be described as being generally off-handed. It struck Aileen that he was not at all anxious to impress her. She missed the smirk and the touch of ingratiating pomposity with which the middle-aged business man seeks to establish an impression upon a new and pretty stenographer. In a sense he was brusque, though he was always pleasant. She had the feeling of being put in her place—but it was an exact grading—she was in the place she belonged, no higher, no lower.

‘You have a notebook? Good! Will you sit at my table? I belong to the peripatetic school of dictators. Comfortable? Now—’

He gave a name and an address, spelling them carefully.

The letter was to a Colonel Harry Mayburgh of 9003 Wall Street.

‘My dear Harry’, he began. The dictation went smoothly from hereon. Harlow’s diction was a little slow but distinct.

He was never once at a loss for a word, nor did he flounder in the morass of parentheses. Towards the end of the letter:

‘…the European situation remains settled and there is every promise of a revival in trade during the next few months. I, for one, will never believe that so unimportant a matter as the Bonn affair will cause the slightest friction between ourselves and the French.’

She remembered now reading of the incident. A quarrel between a sous-officier of the French army and a peppery British colonel who had gone to Bonn.

So unimportant was the incident that when a question had been raised in the House of Commons by an inquisitive member, he had been greeted by jeering laughter. It seemed surprising that a man of Harlow’s standing should think it worth while to make any reference to the incident.

He stopped here, pinching his chin and gazing down at her abstractedly. She met the pale eyes—was conscious that in some ineffable manner his appearance had undergone a change. The pale eyes were deeper set; they seemed to have receded, leaving two little wrinkles of flesh to spoil the unmarked smoothness of skin. Perhaps she was mistaken and was seeing now, in a leisurely survey, characteristics which had been overlooked in the shock of meeting him at Fotheringay Mansions…

‘Yes,’ he said slowly, answering, as it were, a question he had put to himself. ‘I think I might say that. Will you read back?’

She read the letter from her shorthand and when she had finished he smiled.

‘Splendid!’ he said quietly. ‘I envy Mr Stebbings so efficient a young lady.’

He walked to the side-table, lifted a typewriter and carried it to the desk.

‘You will find paper and carbons in the top right hand drawer,’ he said. ‘Would you mind waiting for me after you have finished? I shall not be more than twenty minutes.’

She had made the required copies of the letter within a few minutes of his departure. There were certain matters to be considered; she sat back, her hands folded lightly on her lap, her eyes roving the room.

Mr Harlow’s splendour showed inoffensively in the decorations of the room. The furniture, even the bookcases which covered the walls, were in Empire style. There was a pervading sense of richness in the room and yet it might not in truth be called over-ornate, despite the gold and crystal of the candelabras, the luxury of heavy carpets and silken damask.

So roving her eyes came to the fireplace where the red coals were dying. On the white-tiled hearth immediately before the fire a little screw of paper had been thrown which, under the influence of the heat, had opened into a crumpled ball. She saw a pencilled scrawl.

‘Marling.’

She spelt the word—thought at first it was ‘making.’ And then she did something which shocked her even in the act—she stooped and picked up the paper, smoothed it out and read quickly, as though she must satisfy her curiosity before S, her outraged sense of propriety intervened.

The handle of the door turned; she slipped the creased paper into her bag, which was open on the table, and closed it as the stony-faced Mrs Edwins came into the room.

She came to the desk where the girl sat, her big, gaunt hands folded, her disparagement conveyed rather than expressed.

‘You’re the young woman,’ she stated.

‘I’m the young woman,’ smiled Aileen, who had a soft spot for age. She grew a little uncomfortable under the silent scrutiny that followed.

‘You’re a typewriter?’

‘A typist—yes. I am Mr Stebbings’s secretary.’

‘Stebbings!’

Mrs Edwins’ voice was surprisingly harsh and loud. The sudden change which came to her face was remarkable.

Eyes and thin lips opened together in startled surprise.

‘Stebbings? The lawyer? You’ve come here from him?’

For a second the girl was too startled to reply. ‘Yes…Mr Harlow asked that I be sent; his secretary was ill—’

‘Oh—that’s it!’ Relief unmistakable.

And here it flashed on the girl that this must be Mrs Edwins—that L. Edwins to whom reference had been made in the will of the late Miss Mercy Harlow. Perhaps, her nerves on edge, the woman received the thought, for she said quickly:

‘I am Mrs Lucy Edwins—Mr Harlow’s housekeeper.’

Aileen murmured some polite commonplace and wondered what was coming next. Nothing apparently, for, with a quick glance round the room, the woman sailed out, her hands still clasped before her, leaving the girl to her penitence and self-reproach. And these distresses were inevitable. A prying maid (she told herself) who read her mistress’s letters and poked into the mysteries of locked drawers was a pattern of decorum compared with a secretary who yet must inspect the waste-paper of a chance employer. She was of a mind to throw the paper into the fire, but it was natural that she should find excuses for her conduct. And her excuse (stoutly offered and defended to herself) was Jim Carlton and the vague familiarity of ‘Marling’.

Ten minutes passed and then Mr Harlow came slowly into the room. The door closed with a click behind him and he stood before her on the very spot where Mrs Edwins had conducted her cold survey.

‘My housekeeper came in, didn’t she?’

‘Yes’. She wondered what was coming next.

‘My housekeeper’—he spoke slowly—‘is the most unbalanced female I have ever known! She is the most suspicious woman I have ever known; and the most annoying woman I am ever likely to know.’ His eyes did not leave her face. ‘I wonder if you know why I sent for you?’

The question took her aback for the moment.

‘Don’t say to write a letter,’ he smiled. ‘I really wanted no letter written! It was an excuse to get you here alone for a little talk. And the fact that you have not gone pale and that you display no visible evidence of agitation is very pleasing to me. If you had, I should have opened the door to you and bid you a polite good night.’ He waited for her to speak.

‘I don’t quite understand what you want, Mr Harlow.’

‘Really? I was afraid that you would—and understand wrongly!’

He strode up and down the library, his hands under his coat tails, his head lifted so that he seemed immediately interested in the cornice.

‘I want a view—an angle. I can’t get that from any commonplace person. You arc not commonplace. You’re not brilliant either—forgive my frankness. You’re a woman, perhaps in love—perhaps not. I don’t know, but a normal soul. You have no interest to serve.’

He stopped abruptly, looked at her, pointing to the door. ‘That door is locked,’ he said. ‘There is nobody in the house but myself and my housekeeper. The telephone near your right hand is disconnected. I am very fond of you!’

He paused and then nodded approvingly.

‘A little colour—that is annoyance. No trembling—that may come later. Will you be so good as to press the bell—you will find it…yes, that is it.’

Mechanically she had obeyed, and almost immediately the door opened and a tall manservant came in.

‘I want you to wait in the servants’ hall until this young lady has gone, Thomas—I have a letter I wish posted.’

The man bowed and went out. Mr Harlow smiled.

‘That disproves two statements I made to you—that the door was locked and that we were alone in the house. Now I think I know you! I wasn’t certain before. And of course I’m not fond of you—I like you though. If you feel inclined to call up James Carlton, the telephone is through to the exchange.’

‘Will you please tell me,’ she said quietly, ‘what all this means?’

He stood by the desk now, his white fingers beating a noiseless tattoo.

‘I know you, that is the point,’ he said. ‘I can now speak to you very plainly. Would you, for a very large financial consideration, marry a man in whom I am greatly interested?’

She shook her head and he approved even of the refusal.

‘That is splendid! You did not say I was insulting you, or that you could not marry a man for money—none of the cliches of the film or the novelette! You would have disappointed me if you had.’

Aileen made a discovery that left her doubting her own sanity. She liked this man. She believed in his sincerity. A crooked dealer he might be, but upon a plane which was beyond her comprehension. In the less lofty regions in the levels of human intercourse he was beyond suspicion. She felt curiously safe with him and was worried, as one who was in the process of changing a settled opinion in the face of a prejudiced habit of thought.

He had the face of a materialist—the blue of his eyes was (Jim had told her) common to great generals and great murderers. The thick lips and fleshy nose were repellent, Yet she lived consciously in a world of men and women—she did not look for god or hero in any man. None was wholly good; none was wholly bad, except in the most artificial of dramas.

‘I wonder if I know what you are thinking about?’

She mistrusted him now, having a sense of his uncanny power of mind-reading.

‘You are saying “I wonder if he is as great a scoundrel as people like Carlton say?” How shall you measure me? It is very difficult, not because I represent greatness, but because the canvas on which I work is immense. Miss Rivers, I hoped that you were heart-free.’

‘I think I am,’ she said.

‘Which means that you are not. I wanted you to marry somebody I love; the sweetest nature in the world. Something I have created out of confusion and chaos and shining lights and mysterious sounds. I talk like a divinity, but it is true. For years I have been looking for a wife.’ He leaned forward over the desk and his voice sank. ‘Shall I tell you something?’

And though she made no sign, he read her interest aright.

‘If you had said “yes”, my day would have been done. I am selfishly relieved that you declined. But if it had been “yes”, all this would have crumbled into dust-all the splendours of the Splendid Harlow! Dust and memories and failure!’

For a moment she thought he had been drinking and that she had not detected his condition before. But he was sober enough and very, very sane.

‘Strange, isn’t it? I like you. I like Carlton—unscrupulous but a nice man. He is waiting outside this house for you. Also a fellow-lodger of yours, a Mr Brown, who followed you here.’

She gasped at this.

‘He is a detective. Carlton is scared for you—he suspects me of harbouring the most sinister plans.’ His chuckle had a rich music in it. ‘Maybe I can help you some time. I’d love to give you a million and see what you would do with it.’

He held out his hand, and she took it without hesitation.

‘You haven’t told me whom I was to marry?’

‘A man with a golden beard,’ he laughed. ‘Forgive my little joke!’

She went out of the house bewildered and stopped on the step with a cry of wonder. Jim Carlton was standing on the sidewalk; and with him was Mr Brown, her fellow-boarder.

Mr Harlow waited until the door had closed upon his visitor and was stepping into the lift when his yellow-faced housekeeper appeared noiselessly from the direction of the servants’ hall.

‘What did that girl want?’ she asked.

‘Liberty of action,’ he replied.

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about half the time,’ she complained. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t a spy.’

‘Nothing would surprise you, my dear woman,’ he said, his hand on the grille of the elevator.

‘I don’t like the look of her.’

‘I, on the contrary, like the look of her very much.’ He was resigned to the conversation. ‘I asked her to marry.’

‘You!’ she almost screamed.

‘No.’ He jerked his head to the ceiling and broke in upon her violent comment. ‘I’m not mad. I am very clever. I can face truth—that is the cleverest thing any man can do. I’m going up to Saul Marling.’

Her shrill voice followed him up the elevator shaft.

‘Fantastical nonsense…wasting your time!’

He closed the door of Marling’s apartment behind him and sank into a deep chair with a groan of relief. The bearded man, his face shadowed by a reading shade, looked round, chin on palm.

‘She has a tantrum today,’ he said, nodding his head wisely. ‘She was quite rude when I complained about the fish.’

‘The devil she was!’ Harlow sat upright, was on the point of rising but thought better of it. ‘You must have what you wish, my dear Saul. I will raise Cain if you don’t. What are you reading?’

Marling turned over the book to assure himself of the title.

‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’ he read.

‘Freud! Chuck it in the waste-paper basket,’ scoffed Harlow.

‘I don’t understand it very well,’ admitted his companion.

‘The man who can interpret other people’s dreams can interpret other people’s thought,’ said Harlow. ‘I have been dreaming for you, Saul Marling. I dreamt a wife for you, but she would have none of it.’

‘A wife!’ said the startled Marling, his hand trembling in his agitation. ‘I don’t want a wife—you know that!’

Mr Harlow lit a cigar.

‘Yes—but she doesn’t want a husband—I know THAT. Dreams, huh?’ He laughed to himself, the other man watching him curiously.

‘Do you ever dream?’ he asked with a timidity which was almost pathetic.

‘I? Lord, yes! I dream of jokes.’

Marling could not understand this: this strong man had talked about ‘jokes’ before, and when they were elaborated they had not amused anybody but Mr Harlow.

It is a peculiar trait of the English criminal that he never describes his unlawful act or acts by grandiloquent terms. Crime of all kind, especially crime against the person, is a ‘joke’. The man who holds up a cashier has ‘had a joke with him’; the confidence swindler ‘jokes’ his victim; a warehouse theft would be modestly described in the same way.

Mr Stratford Harlow once heard the term employed and never forgot it. This cant phrase so nearly covered his own mental attitude towards his operations; a good joke would produce the same emotions of mind and body.

Once he had written to an important rubber house offering to take its entire stock at a price which would show a fair profit to the seller. The house and its affiliated concerns smelt a forced buying and the price of rubber rose artificially.

He waited three months, buying everywhere but from the united companies and one night their stores illuminated the shipping of the Mersey.

That was a very good joke indeed. Mr Harlow chuckled for days, not because he had made an enormous fortune—the joke had to be there or the money had no value.

‘I don’t like your jokes,’ said Marling gravely.

‘I shouldn’t tell you about them,’ said Mr Harlow, suppressing a yawn; ‘but I have no secrets from you, Saul Marling. And I love testing them against your magnificent honesty. If you laughed at them as I laugh, I’d be worried sick. Come along to the roof for your walk and I’ll tell you the greatest joke of all. It starts with a dinner-party given in this house and ends with somebody making twenty millions and living happily ever after!’

It required a perceptible effort in Aileen to produce the paper she had found in the grate of Mr Harlow’s library.

She had the unhappy knowledge that whilst this big man had put her in her place, she hadn’t stayed there. She had gone down into deplorable depths. He might be anything that Jim believed, but on his own plane he had a claim to greatness.

When she reached that conclusion she felt that it was time to hand the paper to her companion.

‘I’m not going to excuse myself,’ she said frankly. ‘It was an abominable thing to do, and I won’t even say that I had you in my mind. It was just vulgar curiosity made me do it.’

They stopped under a street lamp and he opened the paper and read the message.

‘Marling!’ he gasped. ‘Good God!’

‘What is it?’

The effect of those scribbled words upon her companion astounded her. Presently he folded the paper very carefully and put it in his pocket.

‘Marling, Ingle, Mrs Gibbins,’ he said, in his old bantering mood. ‘Put me together the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle; and connect if you can the note of this Mr Marling, who wishes to retain his writing materials; your disreputable uncle who has developed a craze for film projecting; fit in the piece which stands for Mrs Gibbins and her beloved William Smith; explain a certain letter that was never posted and never delivered, yet was found in a frozen puddle—I nearly said puzzle!—and make of all these one intelligible picture.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she asked helplessly.

He shook his head.

‘You don’t know! Elk doesn’t know. I’m not so sure that I know, but I wish the next ten days were through!’

CHAPTER 12

FOR SOME reason which she could not explain to herself, Aileen was irritated.

‘Do you realise how horribly mysterious you are?’ she asked, almost tartly. ‘I always thought that the mystery of detectives was an illusion fostered by sensational writers.’

‘All mystery is illusion,’ he said grandly.

They had reached Oxford Street.

‘Have you ever been to the House of Commons?’ he asked her suddenly.

She shook her head.

‘No.’

‘Then come along. You’ll see something more entertaining than a film or a play, but you will hear very little that hasn’t been said better elsewhere.’

The House was in session, though she was only dimly aware of this, for she belonged to the large majority of people to whom the workings of Parliament were a closed book. Jim, on the contrary, was extraordinarily well informed in political affairs and favoured her with a brief dissertation on the subject. The old hard and fast party spirit was moribund, he said. The electorate had grown too flexible for any machine to control. There had been surprising results in recent by-elections to illustrate a fact so disconcerting to party organizers. The present Government, she learnt, despite its large majority, was on its last legs. There was dissension within the Cabinet, and rebel caves honey-combed the Government party.

In truth she was only faintly interested. But the approach to the Commons was impressive. The lofty hall, the broad stairway, the echoing lobby with its hurrying figures, and the mystery of what lay behind the door at one end, brought her a new thrill.

Jim disappeared and returned with a ticket. They passed up a flight of stairs and presently she was admitted to one of the galleries.

Her first impression was one of disappointment. The House was so much smaller than she had expected. Somebody was talking; a pale bald man, who rocked and swayed slowly as he delivered himself of a monotonous and complaining tirade on the failure of the Government to do something or other about the Basingstoke Canal. There were only a few dozen members in the House, and mainly they were engaged in talking or listening to one another, and apparently taking no notice of the speaker. On the front bench three elderly men sat, head to head, in consultation.

Mr Speaker in his canopied chair seemed the only person who was taking a keen interest in the member’s oration.

Even as she looked, the House began to fill. A ceaseless procession of men trooped in and took their places on the benches, stopping as they passed to exchange a word with somebody already seated. The orator still droned on; and then Jim pressed her arm and nodded.

From behind the Speaker’s chair had come a man whom she instantly recognised as Sir Joseph Layton, the Foreign Minister. He was in evening dress except that he wore, instead of the conventional dinner jacket, one of black velvet.

He sat down on the front bench, fingered his tiny white moustache with a characteristic gesture, and then the member who had been speaking sat down. Somebody rose from one of the front benches and asked a question which did not reach the girl. Sir Joseph jerked to his feet, his hands gripping the lapels of his velvet coat, his head on one side like an inquisitive sparrow, and she listened without hearing to his reply. His voice was husky; he had a dozen odd mannerisms of speech and gesture that fascinated her. And then Jim’s hand touched her.

‘I’m going down to see him. Will you wait for me in the lobby?’ he whispered and she nodded.

It was ten minutes before the Foreign Minister came out of the House, greeted the detective with a wave of his hand and put his arm in Jim’s.

‘Well, what is the news?’ he asked, when they reached his private room. ‘Harlow again, eh? Something dark and sinister going on in international circles of diplomacy?’

He chuckled at the joke as he sat down at his big table and filled his pipe from a tin of tobacco that stood at his elbow.

‘Harlow, Harlow!’ he said, with good-humoured impatience. ‘Everybody is telling me about Harlow! I’m going to have a talk with the fellow. He is giving a dinner-party on Tuesday and I’ve promised to look in before I come to the House.’

‘What is the excuse for the dinner?’ asked Jim, interested.

The Minister laughed.

‘He is a secret diplomatist, if you like. He has fixed up a very unpleasant little quarrel which might have developed in the Middle East—really it amounted to a row between two bloodthirsty brigands!—and he is giving a sort of olive-branch dinner to the ambassadors of the two states concerned. I can’t go to the dinner, but I shall go to the reception afterwards. Well,’ he asked abruptly, ‘what is your news?’

‘I came here to get news, not to give it, Sir Joseph,’ said Jim. ‘That well-known cloud is not developing?’

‘Pshaw!’ said the Minister impatiently. ‘Cloud!’

‘The Bonn incident?’ suggested Jim, and Sir Joseph exploded.

‘There was no incident! It was a vulgar slanging match between an elderly and pompous staff colonel and an impudent puppy of a French sous-officier! The young man has been disciplined by the French; and the colonel has been relieved of his post by the War Office. And that is the end of a so-called incident.’

Jim rejoined the girl soon after and learnt that Parliament had not greatly impressed her. Perhaps her mood was to blame that she found him a rather dull companion; for the rest of the evening, whilst she was with him, she did most of the talking, and he replied either in monosyllables or not at all. She understood him well enough to suspect that something unusual must have happened and did not banter him on his long silence.

At the door other boarding-house he asked: ‘You won’t object to Brown staying on?’

‘I intended speaking about him,’ she said. ‘Why am I under observation—that is the term, isn’t it?’

‘But do you mind?’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It is rather funny.’

‘A sense of humour is a great thing,’ he replied, and that was his farewell.

Elk was not at Scotland Yard. He went up to the Great Eastern Road, where the inspector had rooms; and he was distinctly piqued to learn that Elk knew all about the Harlow dinner.

‘I only got to know this afternoon, though,’ said Elk. ‘If you’d been at the Yard I could have told you—the thing was only organised yesterday. We shouldn’t have heard anything about it, but Harlow applied for two policemen to be on duty outside the house. Swift worker, Harlow.’ His small eyes surveyed Jim Carlton gravely. ‘Tell you something else, son: Ratas have bought up a new office building in Moorgate Street. I forget the name of the fellow who bought it. Anyway, Ellenbury took over yesterday-got in double staff. He is a fellow you might see.’

‘He is a fellow I intend seeing,’ said Jim. ‘What is he now—lawyer or financier?’

‘A lawyer. But he knows as much about finance as law. I’ve got an idea he’s on the crook. We’ve never had a complaint against him, though there was a whisper once about his financial position. In the old days he used to act for some mighty queer people; and I think he lost money on the Stock Exchange.’

‘He’s the man who lives at Norwood?’

Elk nodded.

‘Norwood,’ he said deliberately; ‘the place where the letters were posted to Mrs Gibbins. I wondered you hadn’t seen him before—no, I haven’t, though.’ He reconsidered.

‘You didn’t want to make Harlow think that you are on to that Gibbins business.’ He stroked his nose thoughtfully.

‘Yuh, that’s it. He doesn’t know you. You might call on him on some excuse, but you’ll have to be careful.’

‘How does he get from Norwood to the City?’

Elk shook his head.

‘He’s not the kind of fellow you can pick up in the train, he said. ‘He runs a hired car which Ratas pay for. Royalton House is his address. It’s an old brick box near the Crystal Palace. He lives there with his wife—an invalid. He hasn’t any vices that I know of, unless being a friend of Harlow’s puts him on the list. And he’s not approachable any other way. He doesn’t work in Norwood, but has a little office in Theobald’s Road; and if you call his clerk will see you and tell you that he is very sorry but Mr Ellenbury can’t give you an appointment for the next ten years. But Ellenbury might tell something, if you could get at him.’

‘You are certain that Ellenbury is working with Harlow?’

‘Working with him?’ Elk spat contemptuously but unerringly into the fire. ‘I should say he was! They’re like brothers—up to a point. Do you remember the police station old man Harlow presented to a grateful nation? It was Ellenbury who bought the ground and gave the orders to the builders. Nobody knew it was a police station until it was up. After they’d put in the foundations and got the walls breast-high, there was a sort of strike because foreign labour was employed, and all the workmen had to be sent back to Italy or Germany, or wherever they came from. That’s where Ellenbury’s connection came under notice, though we weren’t aware that he was working for Harlow till a year later.’

Jim decided upon taking the bolder course, but the lawyer was prepared for the visitation.

CHAPTER 13

MR ELLENBURY had his home in a large, gaunt house between Norwood and Anerley. It had been ugly even in the days when square, box-shaped dwellings testified to the strange mentality of the Victorian architects and stucco was regarded as an effective and artistic method of covering bad brickwork. It was in shape a cube, from the low centre of which, on the side facing the road, ran a long flight of stone steps confined within a plaster balustrade. It had oblong windows set at regular intervals on three sides, and was a mansion to which even Venetian blinds lent an air of distinction.

Royalton House stood squarely in the centre of two acres of land, and could boast a rosary, a croquet lawn, a kitchen garden, a rustic summer-house and a dribbling fountain.

Scattered about the grounds there were a number of indelicate statues representing famous figures of mythology—these had been purchased cheaply from a local exhibition many years before at a great weeding-out of those gods chiselled with such anatomical faithfulness that they constituted an offence to the eye of the Young Person.

In such moments of leisure as his activities allowed, Mr Ellenbury occupied a room gloomily papered, which was variously styled ‘The Study’, and ‘The Master’s Room’ by his wife and his domestic staff. It was a high and ill-proportioned apartment, cold and cheerless in the winter, and was overcrowded with furniture that did not fit. Round tables and top-heavy secretaires; a horsehair sofa that ran askew across one corner of the room, where it could only be reached by removing a heavy card-table; there was space for Mr Ellenbury to sit and little more.

On this December evening he sat at his roll-top desk, biting his nails thoughtfully, a look of deep concern on his pinched face. He was a man who had grown prematurely old in a lifelong struggle to make his resources keep pace with ambition. He was a lover of horses; not other people’s horses that show themselves occasionally on a race track, but horses to keep in one’s own stable, horses that looked over the half-door at the sound of a familiar voice; horses that might be decked in shiny harness shoulder to shoulder and draw a glittering phaeton along a country road.

All men have their dreams; for forty years Mr Ellenbury’s pet dream had been to drive into the arena of a horse show behind two spanking bays with nodding heads and high knee action, and to drive out again amidst the plaudits of the multitude with the ribbons of the first prize streaming from the bridles of his team. Many a man has dreamt less worthily.

He had had bad luck with his horses, bad luck with his family. Mrs Ellenbury was an invalid. No doctor had ever discovered the nature of her illness. One West End specialist seen her and had advised the calling in of another. The second specialist had suggested that it would be advisable to see a third. The third had come and asked questions. Had any other parents suffered from illusions? Were they hysterical? Didn’t Mrs Ellenbury think that if she made an effort she could get up from her bed for, say, half an hour a day?

The truth was that Mrs Ellenbury, having during her life experienced most of the sensations which are peculiar to womankind, having walked and worked, directed servants, given little parties, made calls, visited the theatre, played croquet and tennis, had decided some twenty years ago that there was nothing quite as comfortable as staying in bed.

So she became an invalid, had a treble subscription at a library and acquired a very considerable acquaintance with the rottenness of society, as depicted by authors who were authorities on misunderstood wives.

In a sense Mr Ellenbury was quite content that this condition of affairs should be as it was. Once he was satisfied that his wife, in whom he had the most friendly interest, was suffering no pain, he was satisfied to return to the bachelor life. Every morning and every night (when he returned home at a reasonable hour) he went into her room and asked: ‘How are we today?’

‘About the same—certainly no worse.’

‘That’s fine! Is there anything you want?’

‘No, thank you—I have everything.’

This exchange varied slightly from day to day, but generally it followed on those lines.

Ellenbury had come back late from Ratas after a tiring day. Usually he directed the Rata Syndicate from his own office; indeed, he had never before appeared visibly in the operations of the company. But this new coup of Harlow’s was on so gigantic a scale that he must appear in the daylight; and his connection with a concern suspected by every reputable firm in the City must be public property. And that hurt him. He, who had secretly robbed his clients, who is had engaged in systematic embezzlement and might now, but for the intervention and help of Mr Stratford Harlow, have been an inmate of Dartmoor, walked with shame under the stigma of his known connection with a firm which was openly described as unsavoury.

He was a creature of Harlow, his slave. This sore place in his self-esteem had never healed. It was his recreation to brood upon the ignominy of his lot. He hated Harlow with a malignity that none, seeing his mild, worn face, would suspect.

To him Stratford Harlow was the very incarnation of evil, a devil on earth who had bound his soul in fetters of brass. And of late he had embarked upon a novel course of dreaming. It was the confused middle of a dream, having neither beginning nor end, but it was all about a humiliated Harlow; Harlow being dragged in chains through the Awful Arch; Harlow robbed at the apotheosis of his triumph. And always Ellenbury was there, leering, chuckling, pointing a derisive finger at the man he had ruined, or else he was flitting by midnight across the Channel with a suitcase packed with fabulous sums of money that he had filched from his master.

Mr Ellenbury bit his nails.

Soon money would be flowing into Ratas—he would spend days endorsing cheques, clearing drafts…drafts…

You may pass a draft into a bank and it becomes a number of figures in a pass-book. On the other hand, you may hand it across the counter and receive real money.

Sometimes Harlow preferred that method—dollars into sterling, sterling into Swiss francs, Swiss francs into florins, until the identity of the original payment was beyond recognition.

Drafts…

In the room above his head his wife was lying immersed in the self-revelations of a fictional countess. Mrs Ellenbury had little money of her own. The house was her property. He could augment her income by judicious remittances.

Drafts…

Mauve and blue and red. ‘Pay to the order of—’ so many thousand dollars, or rupees, or yen.

Harlow never interfered. He gave exact instructions as to how the money was to be dealt with, into which accounts it must be paid and that was all. At the end of a transaction he threw a thousand or two at his assistant, as a bone to a dog.

Ellenbury had never been so rich in his life as he was now.

He could meet his bank manager without a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach—no longer did the sight of a strange man walking up the drive to the house fill him with a sense of foreboding. Yet once he had seen the sheriff’s officer in every stranger.

But he had grown accustomed to prosperity; it had become a normal condition of life and freed his mind to hate the source of his affluence.

A slave—at best a freedman. If Harlow crooked his finger he must run to him; if Harlow on a motoring tour wired ‘Meet me at—’ any inaccessible spot, he must drop his work and hurry there. He, Franklin Ellenbury, an officer of the High Court of Justice, a graduate of a great university, a man of sensibility and genius.

No wonder Mr Ellenbury bit at his nails and thought of drafts and sunny cafes and picture galleries which he had long desired to visit; and perhaps, after he was sated with the novelty of travel, a villa near Florence with orange groves and masses of bougainvillaea clustering between white walls and jade-green jalousies.

‘A gentleman to see you, sir.’

He aroused himself from his dreams with a painful start.

‘To see me?’ The clock on his desk said fifteen minutes after eleven. All the house save the weary maid was asleep. ‘But at this hour? Who is he? What does he want?’

‘He’s outside, in a big car.’

Automatically he sprang to his feet and ran out of the room. Harlow! How like the swine, not condescending to alight, but summoning his Thing to his chariot wheels! ‘Is that you, Ellenbury?’ The voice that spoke from. the darkness of the car was his.

‘Yes, Mr Harlow.’

‘You’ll be getting inquiries about the Gibbins woman—probably tomorrow. Carlton is certain to call—he has found that the letters were posted from Norwood. Why didn’t you post them in town?’

‘I thought—er—well, I wanted to keep the business away from my office.’

‘You could still have posted them in town. Don’t try to hide up the fact that you sent those letters. Mrs Gibbins was an old family servant of yours. You told me once that you had a woman with a similar name in your employ—’

‘She’s dead—’ began Ellenbury.

‘So much the easier for you to lie!’ was the answer. ‘Is everything going smoothly at Ratas?’

‘Everything, Mr Harlow.’

‘Good!’

The lawyer stood at the foot of the steps watching the carmine rear light of the car until it vanished on the road.

That was Harlow! Requesting nothing—just ordering. Saying ‘Let this be done,’ and never doubting that it would be done.

He went slowly back to his study, dismissed the servant to bed; and until the early hours of the morning was studying a continental timetable—Madrid, Munich, Cordova, Bucharest—delightful places all.

As he passed his wife’s bedroom she called him and he went in.

‘I’m not at all well tonight,’ she said fretfully. ‘I can’t sleep.’

He comforted her with words, knowing that at ten o’clock that night she had eaten a supper that would have satisfied an agricultural labourer.

CHAPTER 14

MR HARLOW had timed his warning well. He had the general’s gift of foretelling his enemy’s movements.

Jim called the next morning at the lawyer’s office in Theobald’s Road; and when the dour clerk denied him an interview, he produced his card.

‘Take that to Mr Ellenbury. I think he will see me,’ he said.

The clerk returned in a few seconds and ushered him into a cupboard of a place which could not have been more than seven feet square. Mr Ellenbury rose nervously from behind his microscopic desk and offered a limp, damp hand.

‘Good morning, Inspector,’ he said. ‘We do not get many visitors from Scotland Yard. May I inquire your business?’

‘I am making inquiries regarding the death of a woman named Gibbins,’ said the visitor.