The Joker

Mr Ellenbury was not startled. He bowed his head slowly. ‘She was the woman taken out of the Regent’s Canal some weeks ago; I remember the inquest,’ he said.

‘Her mother, Louise Gibbins, had been drawing a quarterly pension of thirteen pounds, which, I understand, was sent by you?’

It was a bluff designed to startle the man into betraying himself but, to Jim Carlton’s astonishment, Mr Ellenbury lowered his head again.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is perfectly true. I knew her mother, a very excellent old lady who was for some time in my employ. She was very good to my dear wife, who is an invalid, and I have made her an allowance for many years. I did not know she was dead until the case of the drowned charwoman came into court and caused me to make inquiries.’

‘The allowance was stopped before these facts wire made public,’ challenged Jim Carlton, and again he was dumbfounded when the lawyer agreed.

‘It was delayed—not stopped,’ he said, ‘and it was only by accident that the money was not sent at the usual time. Fortunately or unfortunately, I happened to be rather ill when the allowance should have been sent off. The day I returned to the office and dispatched the money I learnt of Mrs Gibbins’s death. It is clear that the woman, instead of informing me of her mother’s death, suppressed the fact in order that she might benefit financially. If she had lived and it had come to my notice, I should naturally have prosecuted her for embezzlement.’

Carlton knew that his visit had been anticipated, and the story cut and dried in advance. To press any further questions would be to make Harlow’s suspicion a certainty. He could round off his inquiry plausibly enough, and this he did.

‘I think that is my final question in the case,’ he said with a smile. ‘I am sorry to have bothered you, Mr Ellenbury. You never met Miss Annie Gibbins?’

‘Never,’ replied Ellenbury, with such emphasis that Jim knew he was speaking the truth. ‘I assure you I had no idea of her existence.’

From one lawyer to another was a natural step: more natural since Mr Stebbings’ office was in the vicinity, and this interview at least held one pleasant possibility—he might see Aileen.

She was a little staggered when he entered her room.

‘Mr Stebbings!—why on earth—?’ And then penitently: ‘I’m so sorry! I am not as inquisitive as I appear!’

Mr Stebbings, who was surprised at nothing, saw him at once and listened without comment to the detective’s business.

‘I never saw Mr Marling except once,’ he said. ‘He was a wild, rather erratic individual, and as far as I know, went to the Argentine and did not return.’

‘You’re sure that he went abroad?’ asked Jim.

Mr Stebbings, being a lawyer, was too cautious a man to be sure of anything. ‘He took his ticket and presumably sailed; his name was on the passenger list. Miss Alice Harlow caused inquiries to be made; I think she was most anxious that Marling’s association with Mr Harlow should be definitely broken. That, I am afraid, is all I can tell you.’

‘What kind of man was Marling? Yes, I know he was wild and a little erratic, but was he the type of man who could be dominated by Harlow?’

A very rare smile flitted across the massive face of the lawyer.

‘Is there anybody in the world who would not be dominated by Mr Harlow?’ he asked dryly. ‘I know very little of what is happening outside my own profession, but from such knowledge as I have acquired I understand that Mr Harlow is rather a tyrant. I use the word in its original and historic sense,’ he hastened to add.

Jim made a gentle effort to hear more about Mr Harlow and his earlier life. He was particularly interested in the will, a copy of which he had evidently seen at Somerset House, but here the lawyer was adamant. He hinted that, if the police procured an order from a judge in chambers, or if they went through some obscure process of law, he would have no alternative but to reveal all that he knew about his former client; otherwise—

Aileen was not in her room when he passed through, and he lingered awhile, hoping to see her, but apparently she was engaged (to her annoyance, it must be confessed) with the junior partner; he left Bloomsbury with a feeling that he had not extracted the completest satisfaction from his visits.

At the corner of Bedford Place a blue Rolls was drawn up by the sidewalk, and so deep was he in thought that lie would have passed, had not the man who was sitting at the wheel removed the long cigar from his white teeth and called him by name. Jim turned with a start. The last person he expected to meet at this hour of the morning in the prosaic environment of Theobald’s Road.

‘I thought it was you.’ Mr Harlow’s voice was cheerful, his manner a pattern of geniality. ‘This is a fortunate meeting.’

‘For which of us?’ smiled Jim, leaning his elbow on the window opening and looking into the face of the man.

‘For both, I hope. Come inside, and I’ll drive you anywhere you’re going. I have an invitation to offer and a suggestion to make.’

Jim opened the door and stepped in. Harlow was a skilful driver. He slipped in and out of the traffic into Bedford Square, and then: ‘Do you mind if I drive you to my house? Perhaps you can spare the time?’

Jim nodded, wondering what was the proposition. But throughout the drive Mr Harlow kept up a flow of unimportant small talk, and he said nothing important until he showed his visitor into the beautiful library. Mr Harlow threw his heavy coat and cap on to one of the red settees, twisted a chair round, so that it revolved like a teetotum, and set it down near his visitor.

‘Somebody followed you here,’ he said. ‘I saw him out of the tail of my eye. A Scotland Yard man! My dear man, you are very precious to the law.’ He chuckled at this. ‘But I bear you no malice that you do not trust me! My theory is that it is much better for a dozen innocent men to come under police surveillance than for a guilty man to escape detection. Only it is sometimes a little unnerving, the knowledge that I am being watched. I could stop it at once, of course. The Courier is in the market—I could buy a newspaper and make your lives very unpleasant indeed. I could raise a dozen men up in Parliament to ask what the devil you meant by it. In fact, my dear Carlton, there are so many ways of breaking you and your immediate superior that I cannot carry them in my head!’

And Jim had an uncomfortable feeling that this was no vain boast.

‘I really don’t mind,’ Harlow went on; ‘it annoys me a little, but amuses me more. I am almost above the law! How stupid that sounds!’ He slapped his knee and his rich laughter filled the room. ‘Of course I am; you know that! Unless I do something very stupid and so trivial that even the police can understand that I am breaking the law, you can never touch me!’

He waited for some comment here, but Jim was content to let his host do most of the talking. A footman came in at that moment pushing a basket trolley, and, to Jim’s surprise, it contained a silver tea-service, in addition to a bottle of whisky, siphon and glasses.

‘I never drink,’ explained Harlow. ‘When I say “never,” it would be better if I said “rarely.” Tea-drinking is a pernicious habit which I acquired in my early youth.’ He lifted the bottle. ‘For you—?’

‘Tea also,’ said Jim, and Mr Harlow inclined his head.

‘I thought that was possible,’ he said; and when the servant had gone he carried his tea back to the writing-table and sat down.

‘You’re a very clever young man,’ he said abruptly, and Jim showed his teeth in a sceptical smile. ‘I could almost wish you would admit your genius. I hate that form of modesty which is expressed in self-depreciation. You’re clever. I have watched your career and have interested myself in your beginning. If you were an ordinary police officer I should not bother with you; but you are something different.’

Again he paused, as though he expected a protest, but neither by word nor gesture did Jim Carlton approve or deny his right to this distinction.

‘As for me, I am a rich man,’ Harlow went on. ‘Yet I need the very help you can give to me. You are not well off, Mr Carlton? I believe you have an income of four hundred a year or thereabouts, apart from your salary, and that is very little for one who sooner or later must feel the need of a home of his own, a wife and a family—’

Again he paused suggestively, and this time Jim spoke.

‘What do you suggest to remedy this state of affairs? he asked.

Mr Harlow smiled.

‘You are being sarcastic. There is sarcasm in your voice! You feel that you are superior to the question of money. You can afford to laugh at it. But, my friend, money is a very serious thing. I offer you five thousand pounds a year.’

He rose to his feet the better to emphasize the offer, Jim thought.

‘And my duties?’ he said quietly.

Harlow shrugged his big shoulders; and put his hands deep into his trousers pockets.

‘To watch my interests.’ He almost snapped the words. ‘To employ that clever brain of yours in furthering my cause, in protecting me when I go—joking! I love a joke—a practical joke. To see the right man squirming makes me laugh. Five thousand a year, and all your expenses paid to the utmost limit. You like play-going? I’ll show you a play that will set you rolling with joy! What do you say?’

‘No,’ said Jim simply; ‘I’m not keen on jokes.’

‘You’re not?’ Harlow made a little grimace. ‘What a pity! There might be a million in it for you. I am not trying to induce you to do something against your principles, but it is a pity.’ It seemed to Jim’s sensitive ear that there was genuine regret in Harlow’s tone, but he went on quickly: ‘I appreciate your standpoint. You have no desire to enter my service. You are, let us say, antipathetic towards me?’

‘I prefer my own work,’ said Jim.

Harlow’s smile was broad and benevolent. ‘There remains only one suggestion: I want you to come to the dinner and reception I am giving to the Middle East delegates next Thursday. Regard that as an olive branch!’

Jim smiled. ‘I will gladly accept your invitation, Mr Harlow,’ he said and then, with scarcely a pause: ‘Where can I find Marling?’

The words were hardly out of his lips before he cursed himself for his folly. He had not the slightest intention of asking such a fool question, and he could have kicked himself for the stupid impulse which, in one fraction of a second, had thrown out of gear the delicate machinery of investigation.

Not a muscle of Stratford Harlow’s face moved.

‘Marling?’ he repeated. His black brows met in a frown; the pale eyes surveyed the detective blankly.. ‘Marling?’ he said again. ‘Now where have I heard that name? You don’t mean the fellow who was my tutor? Good God! what a question to ask! I have never heard of him from the day he left for South Africa or somewhere.’

‘The Argentine?’ suggested Jim.

‘Was it the Argentine? I’m not sure. Yes, I am-Pernambuco—cholera—he died there!’

The underlip came thrusting out. Harlow was passing to the aggressive.

‘The truth is, Marling and I were not very good friends. He treated me rather as though I were a child, and I cannot think of him without resentment. Marling! How that word brings back the most uncomfortable memories! The succession of wretched cottages, of prim, neat gardens, of his abominable Greek and Latin verses—differential calculi, the whole horrible gauntlet of so-called education through which a timid youth must run—and be flayed. Why do you ask?’

Jim had his excuse all ready. He might not recover the ground he had lost, but he could at least consolidate himself against further retirement.

‘I have had an inquiry from one of his former associates.’ He mentioned a name, and here he was on safe ground, for it was the name of a man who had been a contemporary of Marling’s and who was in the same college. Not a difficult achievement for Jim, who had spent that morning looking up old university lists. Evidently it had no significance to Harlow.

‘I seem t remember Marling talking about him.’ he said. ‘But twenty-odd years is a very long time to cast one’s memory! And very probably I am an unconscious liar! So far as I know’—he shook his head—‘Marling is dead. I have no absolute proof of this, but if you wish I will have inquiries made. The Argentine Government will do almost anything I wish.’

‘You’re a lucky man.’ Jim held out his hand with a laugh.

‘I wonder if I am?’ Harlow looked at him steadfastly. ‘I wonder! And I wonder if you are, Mr Carlton,’ he added slowly. ‘Or will be!’

Jim Carlton was not in a position to supply an answer. His foot was on the doorstep when Harlow called him back. ‘I owe you an apology,’ he said.

Jim supposed that he was talking about the offer he had made, but this was not the case.

‘It was a crude and degrading business, Mr Carlton—but I have a passion for experiment. Such methods were efficacious in the days of our forefathers, and I argued that human nature has not greatly changed.’

Carlton was listening in bewilderment.

‘I don’t quite follow you—’

Mr Harlow showed his teeth in a smile and for a moment his pale eyes lit up with glee.

‘This was not a case of your following me—but of my following you. A crude business. I am heartily ashamed of myself!’

Jim was halfway to Scotland Yard before the solution of this mysterious apology occurred to him. Stratford Harlow was expressing his regret for the attack that had been delivered by his agents in Long Acre.

Jim stopped to scratch his head.

That man worries me!’ he said aloud.

CHAPTER 15

THE NEWS that Mr Stratford Harlow was entertaining the Middle East delegates at his house in Park Lane was not of such vital importance that it deserved any great attention from the London press. A three-line paragraph at the foot of a column confirmed the date and die hour. For Jim this proved to be unnecessary, since a reminder came by the second post on the following day, requesting the pleasure of his company at the reception.

‘They might have asked me to the dinner,’ said Elk. ‘Especially as it’s free. I’ll bet that bird keeps a good brand of cigar.’

‘Write and ask for a box; you’ll get it,’ said Jim, and Elk sniffed.

‘That’d be against the best interests of the service,’ he said virtuously. ‘Do you think I’d get ‘em if I mentioned your name?’

‘You’d get the whole Havana crop,’ said Jim. ‘I’ve got a pick. Anyway, there’ll be plenty of cigars for you on the night of the reception.’

‘Me?’ Elk brightened visibly. ‘He didn’t send me an invite.’

‘Nevertheless you are going,’ said Jim definitely. ‘I’m anxious to know just what this reception is all about. I suppose it’s a wonderful thing to stop these brigands from shooting at one another, but I can’t see the excuse for a full-scale London party.’

‘Maybe he’s got a girl he wants to show off,’ suggested Elk helpfully.

‘You’ve got a deplorable mind,’ was Jim’s only comment.

He was not the only hard-worked man in London that week. Every night he walked with Elk and stood opposite the new Rata building in Moorgate Street. Each room was brilliantly illuminated; messengers came and went; and he learnt from one of the extra staff whom he had put into the building, that even Ellenbury, who usually did not allow himself to be identified publicly with the business, was working till three o’clock every morning.

Scotland Yard has many agencies throughout the world, and from these the full extent of Rata’s activities began dimly to be seen.

‘They’ve sold nothing, but they’re going to sell’, reported Jim to his chief at the Yard; ‘and it’s going to be the biggest bear movement that we have seen in our generation.’

His chief was a natural enemy to the superlatives of youth.

‘If it were an offence to “bear” the market I should have no neighbours,’ he said icily. ‘Almost every stockbroker I know has taken a flutter at some time or other. My information is that the market is firm and healthy. If Harlow is really behind this coup, then he looks like losing money. Why don’t you see him and ask him plainly what is the big idea?’

Jim made a face.

‘I shall see him tonight at the party,’ he said, ‘but I doubt very much whether I shall have a chance of worming my way into his confidence!’

Elk was not a society man. It was his dismal claim, that not in any rank of the Metropolitan Police Force was there a man with less education than himself. Year after year, with painful regularity, he had failed to pass the examination which was necessary for promotion to the rank of inspector.

History floored him; dates of royal accessions and expedient assassinations drove him to despair. Sheer merit eventually secured him the rank which his lack of book learning denied him.

‘How’ll I do?’

He had come up to Jim’s room arrayed for the reception, and now he turned solemnly on his feet to reveal the unusual splendour of evening dress. The tail coat was creased, the trousers had been treated by an amateur cleaner, for they reeked of petrol, and the shirt was soft and yellow with age. ‘It’s the white weskit that worries me,’ he complained. ‘They tell me you only wear white weskits for weddin’s. But I’m sure the party’s goin’ to be a fancy one. You wearin’ a white weskit?’

‘I shall probably wear one,’ said Jim soothingly. ‘And you look a peach, Elk!’

‘They’ll take me for a waiter, but I’m used to that,’ said Elk. ‘Last time I went to a party they made me serve the drinks. Quite a lot never got by!’

‘I want you to fix a place where I can find you,’ said Jim, struggling with his tail coat. ‘That may be very necessary.’

‘The bar,’ said Elk laconically. ‘If it’s called a buf-fit, then I’ll be at the buf-fit!’

There was a small crowd gathered before the door of Harlow’s house. They left a clear lane to the striped awning beneath which the guests passed into the flower-decked vestibule. For the first time Jim saw the millionaire’s full domestic staff. A man took his card and did not question the presence of Elk, who strolled nonchalantly past the guardian.

‘White weskits!’ he hissed. ‘I knew it would be fancy!’

The wide doors of the library were thrown open and here Mr Harlow was receiving his guests. Dinner was over and the privileged guests were standing in a half-circle about him.

‘White weskit,’ murmured Elk, ‘and the bar’s in the corner of the room.’

Harlow had already seen them; and although Mr Elk was an uninvited guest, he greeted him with warmth. To his companion he gave a warm and hearty hand.

‘Have you seen Sir Joseph?’ he asked.

Jim had seen the Foreign Secretary that afternoon to learn whether he had made any fresh plans, but had found that Sir Joseph was adhering to his original intention of attending the reception only. He was telling Harlow this when there was a stir at the door and, looking around, he saw the Foreign Secretary enter the room and stop to shake hands with a friend at the door. He wore his black velvet jacket, his long black he straggled artistically over his white shirt front. Sir Joseph had been pilloried as the worst-dressed man in London and yet, for all his slovenliness of attire, he had the distinctive air of a grand gentleman.

He fixed his horn-rims and favoured Jim with a friendly smile as he made his way to his host. ‘I was afraid I could not come,’ he said in his husky voice. ‘The truth is, some foolish newspaper had been giving prominence to a ridiculous story that went the rounds a few weeks ago; and I had to be in my place to answer a question.’

‘Rather late for question time, Sir Joseph,’ smiled Harlow. ‘I always thought they were taken before the real business of Parliament began.’

Sir Joseph nodded in his jerky way.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, a little testily, ‘but when questions of policy arise, and a member gives me private notice of his intention of asking such a question, it can be put at any period.’

He swept Parliament and vexatious questioners out of existence with a gesture of his hand.

Jim watched the two men talking together. They were in a deep and earnest conversation, and he gathered from Sir Joseph’s gesticulations that the Minister was feeling very strongly on the subject under discussion. Presently they strolled through the crowded library into the vestibule, and after a decent interval Jim went on their trail. He signalled his companion from the buffet and Mr Elk, wiping his moustache hurriedly, joined him as he reached the door.

The guests were still arriving; the vestibule was crowded and progress was slow. Presently a side door in the hall opened, and over the heads of the crush he saw Sir Joseph and Mr Harlow come out and make for the street. Harlow turned back and met the detectives.

‘A short visit,’ he said, ‘but worth while!’ Jim reached the steps in time to see the Foreign Minister’s car moving into Park Lane and he had a glimpse of Sir Joseph as he waved his hand in farewell…

‘He stayed long enough to justify a paragraph in the evening newspaper—and the uncharitable will believe that this was all I wanted! You’re not going?’

It was Harlow speaking.

‘I am sorry, I also have an engagement—in the House! said Jim good-humouredly; and Mr Harlow laughed.

‘I see. You were here on duty as well, eh? Well, that’s a very wise precaution. I now realise that not only are you a lucky but you are a short-sighted young man!’

‘Why?’ asked Jim, so sharply that Harlow laughed.

‘I will tell you one of these days,’ he said.

The two detectives waited until a taxicab had been hailed; they drove into Palace Yard at the moment Sir Joseph’s car was moving back to the rank.

‘I don’t see why you pulled me away from that party, Carlton,’ grumbled Elk. ‘Look on this picture and look on that! Look at gay Park Lane and dirty old Westminster!’ And then, when his companion did not reply, he asked anxiously: ‘Something wrong?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve only a sort of feeling that we’re going to see an earthquake—that’s all,’ said Jim emphatically, as they passed into the lobby.

Sir Joseph was in his room and could not be disturbed, a messenger told them. Jim had signed tickets and they passed into the chamber and took a seat under the gallery.

The house was well filled, except the Government benches, which save for the presence of an under-secretary deeply immersed in the contents of his dispatch box, were untenanted. Evidently some motion had been put to the House and the result announced just before the two visitors arrived, for the clerk was reading the terms of an interminable amendment to a Water and Power Bill when Sir Joseph strode in from behind the Speaker’s chair, dropped heavily on the bench and, putting on his glasses began to read a sheaf of notes which he carried.

At that moment somebody rose on the Opposition front bench.

‘Mr Speaker, I rise to ask the right honourable gentleman a question of which I have given him private notice. The question is: Has the right honourable gentleman seen a statement published in the Daily Megaphone to the effect that relationships between His Majesty’s Government and the Government of France are strained as the result of the Bonn incident? And will he tell the House whether such a statement was issued, as is hinted in the newspaper account, with the knowledge and approval of the Foreign Office?’

Sir Joseph rose slowly to his feet, took off his horn-rims and replaced them again, nervously gripped the lapels of his coat, and leaning forward over the dispatch box, spoke:

‘The right honourable gentleman is rightly informed,’ he began, and a hush fell on the House.

Members looked at one another in amazement and consternation.

‘There does exist between His Britannic Majesty’s Government and the Government of France a tension which I can only describe as serious. So serious, in fact, that I have felt it necessary to advise the Prime Minister that a state of emergency be declared, all Christmas leave for the Armed Forces be cancelled and that all reserves shall be immediately mobilised.’

A moment of deadly silence. Then a roar of protest.

There was hurled at the Government benches a hurricane of indignant questions. Presently the Speaker secured silence; and Sir Joseph went on, in his grave, husky tone: ‘I am not prepared to answer any further questions tonight, and I must ask honourable members to defer their judgement until Monday, when I hope to make a statement on behalf of His Majesty’s Government.’

And with that, unheeding the calls, he turned and walked behind the Speaker’s chair and out of sight.

‘Good God!’ Jim was white to the lips. ‘That means war!’

Elk, who had fallen into a doze, woke with a start, in time to see his companion dashing out of the House. He followed him along the corridor to Sir Joseph’s room and knocked at the door. There was no answer. Jim turned the handle and walked in.

The room was in darkness and empty. Rushing out into the passage, he waylaid a messenger.

‘No, sir, I’ve not seen Sir Joseph. He went into the House a few minutes ago.’

By the time he got back Jim found the lobby crowded with excited members. The Prime Minister was in the West of England; the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary for War had left that afternoon to address a series of public meetings in the North; and already the telephones were busy seeking the other members of the Cabinet. He found nobody who had seen Sir Joseph after he left the House, until he came upon a policeman who thought he had recognised the Foreign Minister walking out into Palace Yard. Jim followed this clue and had it confirmed. Sir Joseph had come out into the Yard and taken a taxi (though his car was waiting), a few minutes before. The detectives almost ran to Whitehall Gardens; and here they had a further shock. The Minister had not arrived at his home.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Jim incredulously, thinking the butler had orders to rebuff all callers.

‘Positive, sir. Why, is anything the matter?’ asked the man in alarm.

Jim did not wait to reply. They found a cab in Whitehall and went beyond legal speed to Park Lane. There was just a chance that the Foreign Minister had returned to Harlow’s.

When they reached Greenhart House there came to them the strains of an orchestra; dancing was in full swing, both in the library and in the large drawing-room overlooking Park Lane. They found Harlow, after a search, and he seemed the most astonished man of all.

‘Of course he hasn’t come back here. He told me he was going to the House and then home to bed. What has happened?’

‘You’ll see it in the newspapers in the morning,’ said Jim curtly and drove back to Parliament in time to find the members streaming out of the House, which had been adjourned.

Whilst he was talking with a member he knew, a car drove up and the man who alighted was instantly hailed. It was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a broad-shouldered man, with a stoop, the most brilliant member of the Cabinet.

‘Yes, I’ve heard all about it,’ he said, in his thin, rasping voice. ‘Where is Sir Joseph?’

He beckoned Jim, who was known to him and, pushing his way through the crowd of members, went back with him along the corridor to his room.

‘Were you in the House when Sir Joseph spoke?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jim.

‘Just tell me what happened.’

Briefly, almost word for word, Jim Carlton repeated the astonishing speech.

‘He must be mad,’ said the Chancellor emphatically. ‘There is not a word of truth in the whole story, unless—well, something may have happened since I saw him last.’

‘Can’t you issue a denial?’

Mr Kirknoll bit his lip. ‘In the absence of the Prime Minister, I suppose I should, but I can’t do that until I have seen Sir Joseph.’

A thought struck Jim. ‘He is not what one would describe as a neurotic man, is he?’

‘No man less so,’ said the Chancellor emphatically. ‘He is the sanest person I’ve ever met. Is his secretary in the House?’

He rang a bell and sent a messenger in search, whilst he endeavoured to telephone the absent Ministers.

The secretariat of Downing Street were evidently engaged in a similar quest, with the result that until one in the morning neither had managed to communicate with the head of the Government.

‘We can’t stop this getting into the newspapers, I suppose?’

‘It is in,’ said the Chancellor laconically. ‘I’ve just had a copy of the first editions. Why he did it, heaven only knows! He has certainly smashed the Government. What other result will follow I dare not think about.’

‘What do you think will be the first result of Sir Joseph’s speech?’

The Minister spread out his hands. ‘The markets of course will go to blazes, but that doesn’t interest us so much as the feeling it may create in France. Unhappily, the French Ambassador is in Paris on a short visit.’

Jim left him talking volubly on the Paris line and at three o’clock in the morning was reading a verbatim report of Sir Joseph Layton’s remarkable lapse. The later editions carried eight lines in heavy type:

‘We are informed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer that the Bonn incident has never been before the Cabinet for discussion, and it is not regarded as being of the slightest importance. The Chancellor informs us that he cannot account for Sir Joseph Layton’s extraordinary statement in the House of Commons.’

All night long Jim literally sat on the doorstep of Whitehall Gardens, waiting without any great hope for Sir Joseph’s return. He learnt that the Prime Minister was returning from the West by special train; and that a statement had already been issued repudiating that of the Foreign Minister.

The opening of the Stock Exchange that morning was witnessed by scenes which had no parallel since the outbreak of the War. Stocks declined to an incredible extent, and even the banks reacted to the panic. It was too early to learn what had happened in New York, the British being five hours in advance of Eastern American time, and only at four o’clock that afternoon was the position on Wall Street revealed. Heavy selling—all gilt-edged stocks depreciated; the failure of a big broking house, were the first consequences observable in the press. In France the Bourse had been closed at noon, but there was heavy street selling; and one famous South African stock, which was the barometer in the market, had dropped to its lowest level.

At five o’clock that evening a statement was issued to the press over the signatures of the Prime Ministers of Britain and France.

‘There is no truth whatever in the statement that a state of tension exists between our two countries. The Bonn incident has been from first to last regarded as trivial, and the speech of the British Foreign Minister can only have been made in a moment of regrettable mental aberration.’

For Jim the day’s interest had nothing whatever to do with stock exchanges or the fall of shares; nor yet the fortune which he knew was being gathered, with every minute that passed, by Harlow and his agents. His interest was solely devoted to the mystery of Sir Joseph Layton’s disappearance.

There had been present at Harlow’s reception a very large number of notable people, many of whom were personal friends of the missing Minister. They were emphatic in declaring that he had not returned to Park Lane; and they were as certain that Harlow had not left the house after Sir Joseph’s departure. More than this, there were two policemen on duty at the door; and they were equally certain that Sir Joseph had not returned. The suggestion was made that the Minister had gone to his country house in Cheshire, but when inquiry was set on foot it was learned that the house and the shooting had been rented by a rich American.

Immediately he had returned to London the Prime Minister flew to Paris. When he got back Jim saw him, and the chief officer of state was a greatly worried as well as a very tired man.

‘Sir Joseph Layton has to be found!’ he said, thumping his table. ‘I tell you this, Carlton, as I have told your superiors, that it was, impossible, unless Sir Joseph went mad, that he should have stood up in the House of Commons and said something which he knew to be absolutely untrue, and which he himself would repudiate! Have you seen this man Harlow?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jim.

‘Did he tell you what was discussed by any chance? Was it the so-called Bonn incident?’

‘Harlow says that they just talked about the Middle East and nothing else during the few minutes the Foreign Minister vas in his house. And really, sir, I don’t see how they could have had any very lengthy discussion; they were not together more than a few minutes. Apparently Sir Joseph went into a little room which Harlow uses for his more confidential interviews and drank a glass of wine. They then talked about the reception and Sir Joseph congratulated him on bringing the warring elements together. It seems to have been, according to Harlow’s account, the most uninteresting talk.’

The Prime Minister walked up and down the room with long strides, his chin on his chest.

‘I can’t understand it, I can’t understand it!’ he muttered. And then, abruptly: ‘Find Sir Joseph Layton.’ That terminated the interview for Jim.

He was rattled, badly rattled, and in his distraction he could think of only one sedative. He rang up Aileen Rivers at her office and asked her to come to tea with him at the Automobile Club.

Aileen realised from the first that Jim was directly occupied by a mystery that was puzzling not only the country but the whole of the civilised world. But she understood also the reason he had sent for her, and the thought that she as being of use to him was a very pleasant one.

As soon as he met her he plunged straight into the story of his trouble.

‘He may have been kidnapped, of course, and I should say it was very likely, though the distance between Palace Yard and Whitehall Gardens is very short; and Whitehall so full of police that it hardly seems possible. We have advertised for the taximan who drove him away from the House, but so far have had no reply.’

‘Perhaps the taximan was also kidnapped?’ she suggested.

‘Perhaps so,’ he admitted. ‘I do wish Foreign Ministers weren’t so godlike that they have to travel alone! If he’d only waited a few minutes I would have joined him.’ And then, with a smile: ‘I’m laying my burdens upon you and you’re wilting visibly.’

‘I’m not,’ she affirmed.

She considered a moment before she asked:

‘Could I not help you?’

He stared at her in amused wonder.

‘How on earth could you help me? I’m being rude I know, but I can’t exactly see—’

She was annoyed rather than hurt by his scepticism.

‘It may be a very presumptuous thing to offer assistance to the police,’ she said with a faint hint of sarcasm, ‘but I think what may be wrong with you now is that you want—what is the expression?—a new angle?’

‘I certainly want several new angles,’ he confessed ruefully.

‘Then I’ll start in to give you one. Have you seen my uncle?’

His jaw dropped. He had forgotten all about Arthur Ingle; and never once had he associated him with the Minister’s disappearance.

‘What a fool I am!’ he gasped.

She examined his face steadily, as though she were considering whether or not to agree. In reality her mind was very far away.

‘I only suggest my uncle because he called upon me this morning,’ she said. ‘At least, he was waiting for me when I came out to lunch. It is the first time I have seen him since the night he came back from Devonshire.’

‘What did he want to see you about?’

She laughed softly.

‘He came with a most extraordinary offer, that I should keep house for him. And really, he offered me considerably more than the salary I am getting from Stebbings, and said he had no objection to my working in the daytime.’

‘You refused, of course?’

‘I refused, of course,’ she repeated, ‘but he wasn’t at all put out. I’ve never seen him in such an amiable frame of mind.’

‘How does he look?’ asked Jim, remembering the unshaven face he had seen through the window.

‘Very smart,’ was the surprising reply. ‘He told me he had been amusing himself with some of the big films that had appeared since he went to prison. He had hired them and bought a small projector. He really was fond of the pictures, as I know,’ the girl went on, ‘but it seems a queer thing to I have shut oneself up for days just to watch films! And he asked after you.’ She nodded. ‘Why should he ask after you, you are going to say, and that is the question that occurred to me. But he seems to have taken for granted that I am a very close friend of yours. He asked who had introduced me, and I told him your wretched little car on the Thames Embankment!’

‘Speak well of the dead,’ said Jim soberly. ‘Lizzie has cracked a cylinder.’

‘And now,’ she said, ‘prepare for a great shock.’

‘I brace myself,’ said Jim.

‘He asked,’ the girl went on, a twinkle in her eyes, ‘whether I thought you would object to seeing him. I think he must have taken a sudden liking to you.’

‘I’ve never met the gentleman,’ said Jim, ‘but that is an omission which shall be rectified without delay. We’ll go round together! He will naturally jump at the conclusion that we’re an engaged couple, but if you can stand that slur on your intelligence—’

‘I will be brave,’ said Aileen.

Mr Arthur Ingle was only momentarily disconcerted by the appearance of his niece and the man who had filled his mind all that afternoon. Jim had met him once before, but only for a few seconds, when he had called to make an inquiry about Mrs Gibbins. Now he was almost jovial.

‘Where’s friend Elk?’ he asked, with a smile. ‘I understood you never moved without one another in these perilous times, when lunatic ministers are wandering about the country, and no man knows the hour or the day when he will be called up for active service! So you are Mr James Carlton!’

He opened a silver cigar-box and pushed it across to Jim, who made a careful selection.

‘Aileen told you I wanted to see you, I suppose? Well, I do. I’m a bit of a theorist, Mr Carlton, and I have an idea that my theory is right. I wonder if you would be interested to know what it is?’

He pointedly ignored the presence of the girl except to put a chair for her.

‘I’ve been making inquiries,’ said this surprising ex-convict, ‘and I’ve discovered that Sir Joseph is in all sorts of financial difficulties. This is unknown to the Prime Minister or even to his closest friend, but I have had a hint that he was very short of ready money and that his estates in Cheshire were heavily mortgaged. Now, Mr Carlton, do you conceive it as possible that the speech in the House was made with the deliberate intention of slumping the market and that Sir Joseph was paid handsomely for the part he played?’

As he was speaking, he clasped his hands before him, his fingers intertwined; he emphasised every point with a little jerk of his clasped hands and, watching him, the mist rolled from Jim Carlton’s brain, and he instantly solved the mystery of those private film shows which had kept Mr Ingle locked up in his flat for a week. And to solve that was to solve every mystery save the present whereabouts of Sir Joseph Layton.

He listened in silence whilst Ingle went on to expound and elaborate his theory and when the man had finished: ‘I will bring your suggestion to the notice of my superiors,’ he said conventionally.

It was evidently not the speech that Mr Ingle expected. For a moment he looked uncomfortable, and then, with a laugh: ‘I suppose you think it strange that I should be on the side of law and order—and the governing classes! I felt a little sore when I came out of prison. Elk probably told you of the exhibition I made of myself in the train. But I’ve been thinking things over, Carlton, and it has occurred to me that my extremism is not profitable either to my pocket or my mind.’

‘In fact,’ smiled Jim, ‘you’re going to become a reformed character and a member of the good old Tory party?’

‘I don’t know that I shall go as far as that,’ demurred the other, amused, ‘but I have decided to settle down. I am not exactly a poor man, and all that I have got I have paid for—in Dartmoor.’

Only for a second were the old harsh cadences audible in his voice. He nodded towards Aileen Rivers.

‘You’ll persuade this girl to give me a chance, Mr Carlton? I can well understand her hesitation to keep house for a man liable at any moment to be whisked off to durance, and I fear she does not quite believe in my reformation.’

He smiled blandly at the girl, and then turned his eyes upon Jim.

‘Could you not persuade her?’

‘If I could persuade her to any course,’ said Jim deliberately, ‘it would not be the one you suggest.’

‘Why?’ challenged the other.

‘Because,’ said Jim, ‘you are altogether wrong when you say that there is no longer any danger of your being whisked off to durance. The danger was never more pressing.’

Ingle did not reply to this. Once his lips trembled as though he were about to ask a question, and then with a laugh he walked to the table and took a cigar from the box.

‘I guess I won’t detain you,’ he said. ‘But you’re wrong, Carlton. The police have nothing on me! They may frame something to catch me, but you’ll have to be clever to do even that.’

As they passed out of the building:

‘I seem to spend my days giving warnings to the last people in the world who ought to be warned,’ said Jim bitterly. ‘Aileen, maybe you’ll knit me a muzzle in your spare moments? That will help considerably!’

The outstanding feature of this little speech from the girl’s point of view was that he had called her by her name for the first time. Later, when they were nearing her boarding house, she asked: ‘Do you think you will find Sir Joseph?’

He shook his head.

‘I doubt very much if he is alive,’ he said gravely.

But his doubts were to be dispelled, and in the most surprising manner. That night a drunken black-faced comedian hit a policeman over the head with a banjo, and that vulgar incident had an amazing sequel.

CHAPTER 16

THERE is a class of entertainer which devotes its talents to amusing the queues that wait at the doors of the cheaper entrances of London’s theatres. Here is generally to be found a man who can tear paper into fantastic shapes, a ballad singer or two, a performer on the bones and the inevitable black-faced minstrel.

It was eleven o’clock at night, and snow was lightly falling, when a policeman on point duty at the end of Evory Street saw a figure staggering along the middle of the road, in imminent danger from the returning theatre traffic. The man had obviously taken more drink than vas good for him, for he was howling at the top of his voice the song of the moment; and making a clumsy attempt to accompany himself on the banjo which was slung around his neck.

The London police are patient and long-suffering people, and had the reeling figure been less vocal he might have passed on to his destination without interference. For drunkenness in itself is not a crime according to the law; a man must be incapable or create a disturbance, or obstruct the police in the execution of their duty, before he offends. The policeman had no intention of arresting the noisy wayfarer.

He walked into the middle of the road to intercept and quieten him; and then discovered that the reveller was a black-faced comedian with extravagant white lips, a ridiculous Eton collar and a shell coat. On his head was a college cap, and this completed his outfit with the exception of the banjo, with which he was making horrid sounds.

‘Hi, hi!’ said the policeman gently. ‘A little less noise, young fellow!’

Such an admonition would have been sufficient in most cases to have reduced a midnight song-bird to apology, but this street waif stood defiantly in the middle of the road, his legs apart, and invited the officer to go to a warmer climate, and, not satisfied with this, he swung his banjo, and brought it down with a crash on the policeman’s helmet.

‘You’ve asked for it!’ said the officer of the law and took his lawful prey in a grip of iron.

By a coincidence, Jim Carlton was at Evory Street Station when the man was brought in, singing not unmusically, and so obviously drunk that Jim hardly turned his head or interrupted the conversation he was having with the inspector on duty, to look at the charge. They made a rapid search of the man, he resisting violently and at last, when they had extracted a name (he refused his address) he was hustled between a policeman and a jailer into the long corridor off which the cells are placed.

The door of Cell No. 7 was opened and into this he was pushed, struggling to the last to maintain his banjo.

‘And,’ said the jailer when he came back to the charge-room, wiping his perspiring brow, ‘the language that bud is using would turn a soldier pale!’

The reason for Jim’s presence was to arrange a local supervision of Greenhart House and to obtain certain assistance in the execution of a plan which was running through his mind; and that task would have been completed when the black-faced man was brought in, but that the officer he had called to see was away. Jim lingered a little while, talking police shop, before he paid his last visit to Sir Joseph’s house. He had the inevitable reply: No News had reached Whitehall Gardens of the Foreign Minister.

The man he came to see at Evory Street was due to appear at the police court in the role of prosecutor and Jim strolled down to the court next morning, arriving soon after the magistrate had taken his seat. There he met the inspector from Evory Street. Before Jim could broach the subject which had brought him, the inspector asked:

‘Were you at the station when that black-faced fellow was pulled in last night?’

‘Yes, I remember the noisy gentleman,’ said Jim. ‘Why?’

The inspector shook his head, puzzled. ‘I can’t understand where he got it from. The sergeant searched him carefully, but he must have had it concealed in some place.’

‘What is the matter with him?’ asked Jim, only half interested.

‘Dope,’ said the other. ‘When the jailer went and called him this morning it was as much as he could do to wake him up. In fact, he thought of sending for the divisional surgeon. You never saw a sicker-looking man in your life! Can’t get a word out of him. All he did was to sit on his bed with his head in his hands, moaning. We had to shake him to get him into the prison van.’

The first two cases were disposed of rapidly, and then a policeman called: ‘John Smith,’ and there tottered into court the black-faced comedian, a miserable object, so weak of knee that he had to be guided up the steps into the steel-railed dock. Gone was the exhilaration of the night before, and Jim had an unusual feeling of pity for the poor wretch in his absurd clothes and black, shining face.

The magistrate looked over his glasses.

‘Why wasn’t this man allowed to wash his face before he came before me?’ he asked.

‘Couldn’t get him to do anything, sir,’ said the jailer, ‘and we haven’t got the stuff to take off this make-up.’

The magistrate grumbled something, and the assaulted policeman stepped into the box and took his oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. He gave his stereotyped evidence and again the magistrate looked at the drooping figure in the dock.

‘What have you to say, Smith?’ he asked.

The man did not raise his head.

‘Is anything known about him? I notice that his address is not on the charge sheet.’

‘He refused his address, your Worship,’ said the inspector.

‘Remanded for inquiries!’

The jailer touched the prisoner’s arm and he looked up at him suddenly; stared wildly round the court, and then:

‘May I ask what I am doing here?’ he asked in a husky voice, and Jim’s jaw dropped.

For the black-faced man was Sir Joseph Layton!

CHAPTER 17

EVEN THE magistrate was startled, though he did not recognise the voice. He was about to give an order for the removal of the man when Jim pushed his way to his desk and whispered a few words.

‘Who?’ asked the magistrate. ‘Impossible!’

‘May I ask’—it was the prisoner speaking again—‘what is all this about—I really do not understand.’

And then he swayed and would have fallen, but the jailer caught him in his arms.

‘Take him out into my room.’ The magistrate was on his feet. ‘The court stands adjourned for ten minutes,’ he said; and disappeared behind the curtains into his office.

A few seconds later they brought in the limp figure of the prisoner and laid him on a sofa.

‘Are you sure? You must be mistaken, Mr Carlton!’

‘I am perfectly sure—even though his moustache has been shaved off,’ said Jim, looking into the face of the unconscious man. ‘This is Sir Joseph Layton, the Foreign Minister. I could not make a mistake. I know him so well.’

The magistrate peered closer.

‘I almost think you are right,’ he said, ‘but how on earth—’

He did not complete his sentence; and soon after he went out to carry on the business of the court. Jim had sent an officer to a neighbouring chemist for a pot of cold cream; and by the time the divisional surgeon arrived all doubt as to the identity of the black-faced man had been removed with his make-up. His white hair was stained, his moustache removed, and so far as they could see, not one stitch of his clothing bore any mark which would have identified him.

The doctor pulled up the sleeve and examined the forearm.

‘He has been doped very considerably,’ he said, pointing to a number of small punctures. ‘I don’t exactly know what drug was used, but there was hyoscine in it, I’ll swear.’

Leaving Sir Joseph to the care of the surgeon, Jim hurried out to the telephone and in a few minutes was in communication with the Prime Minister.

‘I’ll come along in a few minutes,’ said that astonished gentleman. ‘Be careful that nothing about this gets into the papers—will you please ask the magistrate, as a special favour to me, to make no reference in court?’

Fortunately, only one police-court reporter had been present, he had seen nothing that aroused his suspicion and his curiosity as to why the prisoner had been carried to the magistrate’s room was easily satisfied.

Sir Joseph was still unconscious when the Premier arrived. An ambulance had been summoned and was already in the little courtyard, and after a vain attempt to get him to speak, the Foreign Secretary was smuggled out into the yard, wrapped in a blanket and dispatched to a nursing home.

‘I confess I’m floored,’ said the Prime Minister in despair. A nigger minstrel…assaulting the police! It is incredible! You say you were at the police station when he was brought in; didn’t you recognise him then?’

‘No, sir,’ said Jim truthfully, ‘I was not greatly interested—he seemed just an ordinary drunk to me. But one thing I will swear; he was not under the influence of any drug when he was brought into the station. The inspector said he reeked of whisky, and he certainly found no difficulty in giving expression to his mind!’

The Premier threw out despairing hands.

‘It is beyond me; I cannot understand what has happened. The whole thing is monstrously incredible. I feel I must be dreaming.’

As soon as the Premier had gone, Jim drove to the nursing home to which the unfortunate Minister had been taken. The Evory Street inspector had gone with the ambulance, and had an astonishing story to tell.

‘What do you think we found in his pocket?’ he asked.

‘You can’t startle me,’ said Jim recklessly. ‘What was it—the Treaty of Versailles?’

The inspector opened his pocket-book and took out a small blank visiting card, blank, that is, except for a number of scratches, probably made by some blunt instrument, but the writer had attempted to get too much on so small a space, for Jim saw that it was writing when he examined the card carefully. Two words were decipherable, ‘Marling’ and ‘Harlow’ and these had been printed in capitals. He took a lead pencil, scraped the point upon the card, and sifted the fine dust over the scratches until they became more definite.

The writing was still indecipherable even with such an aid to legibility as the lead powder. Apparently the message had been written with a pin, for in two places the card was perforated.

‘The first word is “whosoever”,’ said Jim suddenly. ‘“Whosoever…please” is the fourth word and that seems to be underlined…’

He studied the card for a long time and then shook his head.

‘“Harlow” is clear and “Marling” is clear. What do you make of it, inspector?’

The officer took the card from his hand and examined it with a blank expression. ‘I don’t know anything about the writing or what it means,’ he said. ‘The thing I am trying to work out is how did that card come in his pocket—it was not there last night when the sergeant searched him—he takes his oath on it!’

CHAPTER 18

A BRIEF paragraph appeared in the morning newspapers.

‘Sir Joseph Layton, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, is seriously ill in a nursing home.’

It would take more than this simple paragraph to restore the markets of the world to the level they had been when the threat of war had sent them tumbling like a house of cards. The principal item of news remained this world panic, which the Foreign Secretary’s speech had initiated. A great economist computed that the depreciation in gilt-edged securities represented over Ł100,000,000 sterling and whilst the downward tendency at least to some stocks was recovering, a month or more must pass before the majority reached the pre-scare level. One newspaper, innocent of the suspicion under which the financier lay in certain quarters, interviewed Mr Harlow.

‘I think,’ said Mr Stratford Harlow, ‘that the effect of the slump has been greatly exaggerated. In many ways, such a panic has ultimately a beneficial result. It finds out all the feeble spots in the structure of finance, breaks down the weak links, so that in tile end the fabric is stronger and more wholesome than it was before the dump occurred.’

‘Is it possible that the slump was engineered by a group of market-riggers?’

‘Mr Harlow scoffed at the idea.

‘How could it have been engineered without the connivance or assistance of the Foreign Secretary, whose speech alone was responsible?’ he asked. ‘It is certainly an amazing statement for a responsible Minister to make. Apparently Sir John was a very sick man when he addressed the House of Commons. It is suggested that he was suffering from overwork, but whatever may have been the cause, he, and he alone, brought about this slump.’

‘You knew Sir John?’

‘Mr Harlow agreed.

‘He was in my house, in this very room, less than a quarter of an hour before the speech was made,’ he said, ‘and I can only say that he appeared in every way normal. If he was ill, he certainly did not show it.’

‘Reverting to the question of world-wide depreciation of stock values, Mr Harlow went on to say…’

Jim read the interview with a wry smile. Harlow had said many things, but he had omitted many more. He did not speak of the feverish activity of Rata, Limited, whose every window had been blazing throughout a week of nights—not one word had he suggested that he himself would benefit to an enormous extent through the tragedy of that unhappy speech.

The man puzzled him. If he was, as Jim was convinced, behind the scare, if his clever brain had devised, and by some mysterious means had brought about the financial panic, what end had he in view? He had been already one of the three richest men in England. He had not the excuse that he had a mammoth industry to benefit. He had no imperial project to bring to fruition. Had he been dreaming of new empires created out of the wilds; were he a great philanthropist who had some gigantic enterprise to advance for the benefit of mankind, this passionate desire for gold might be understood if it could not be excused.

But Harlow had no other objective than the accumulation of money. He had shown a vicarious interest in the public weal when he had presented his model police station to the country; he had certainly subscribed liberally to hospital appeals; but none of these gifts belonged to a system of charity or public spirit. He was a man without social gifts—the joys or suffering of his fellows struck no sympathetic chord in his nature. If he gave, he gave cold-bloodedly, and yet without ostentation.

True, he had offered to build, on the highest point of the Chiltern Hills, an exact replica of the Parthenon as a national war memorial, but the offer had been rejected because of the inaccessibility of the chosen spot. There was a certain freakishness in his projects; and Jim suspected that they were not wholly disinterested. The man baffled him: he could get no thread that would lead him to the soul and the mind behind those cold blue eyes.

For six hours that night he sat by the bedside of the unconscious Foreign Minister. What strange story could he tell, Jim wondered. How came he to be perambulating the streets in the guise of a drunken mountebank, whose wanderings were to end in a vulgar brawl, with a policeman and the cheerless lodgings of a prison cell? Had he some secret weakness which Harlow had learnt and exploited? Did he live a double life? Jim thought only to reject the idea. Sir Joseph’s life was more or less an open book; his movements for years past could be traced day by day from the information supplied by the diaries of his secretary, from the knowledge of his own colleagues.

Whilst Jim kept his vigil he made another attempt to decipher the writing on the card, but he got no farther. He was taking turns with Inspector Wilton of Evory Street in watching beside the bedside. The doctor had said that at any moment the Minister might recover consciousness; and though he took the gravest view of the ultimate result of the drugging, his prognosis did not exclude the chance of a complete recovery. It was at a quarter after three in the morning that the sick man, who had been tossing from side to side, muttering disjointed words which had no meaning to the listener, turned upon his back and, opening his eyes, blinked round the dimly lighted room. Jim, who had been studying the card in the light of a shaded lamp, put it into his pocket and came to the side of the bed.

Sir Joseph looked at him wonderingly, his wide brows knit in an effort of memory.

‘Hullo!’ he said faintly. ‘What happened…? Did the car smash up?’

‘Nothing serious has happened. Sir Joseph,’ said Jim gently.

Again the wondering eyes wandered around the bare walls of the room, and then they fell upon a temperature chart hanging against the wall. ‘This is a hospital, isn’t it?’

‘A nursing home,’ said Jim.

There was a long silence before the sick man spoke. ‘My head aches infernally. Can you give me a drink, or isn’t that allowed?’

Jim poured out a glass of water and, supporting the shoulders of the Minister, put the glass to his lips. He drank the contents greedily and sank back with a sigh upon the pillow.

‘I suppose I am a little light-headed, but I could swear that your name was Carlton,’ he said.

‘That is my name, sir,’ said Jim, and the Minister pondered this for a little time.

‘Anything broken?’ he asked. ‘It was the car, I suppose? I told that stupid chauffeur of mine to be careful. The road was like glass.’

He moved first one leg and then the other gingerly, and then his arms.

‘Nothing is broken at all, Sir Joseph,’ said Jim. ‘You have had a shock.’ He had already rung for the doctor, who was sleeping in a room below.

‘Shock, eh?…I don’t remember…And Harlow!’ His eyebrows lowered again. ‘A decent fellow but rather over-dressed. I went to his house tonight, didn’t I…? Yes, yes, I remember. How long ago was it?’ Jim would not tell him that the visit to Harlow’s had happened days before. ‘Yes, yes, I remember now. Where did I go after that…to the House, I suppose? My mind is like a whirling ball of wool!’

The doctor came in, a dressing-gown over his pyjamas, and the Minister’s mind was sufficiently clear to guess his profession. ‘I’m all in, doctor. What was it, a stroke?’

‘No Sir Joseph,’ said the doctor. He was feeling his patient’s pulse and seemed satisfied.

‘Sir Joseph thinks he might have been in a car collision,’ suggested Jim with a significant glance at the doctor.

The man was terribly weak, but the brightness of his intellect was undimmed. ‘What is the matter with me?’ he asked irritably as the medical man put the stethoscope to his heart.

‘I’m wondering whether you have ever taken drugs in your life?’

‘Drugs!’ snorted the old man. ‘Good God! What a question! I don’t even take medicine! When I feel ill I go to my osteopath and he puts me right.’

The doctor grinned, as all properly constituted doctors grin when an osteopath is mentioned, for the medical profession is the most conservative and the most suspicious of any.

‘Then I shan’t give you drugs.’ He had a nimble turn of mind to cover up an awkward question. ‘Your heart is good and your pulse is good. And all you want now is a little sleep.’

‘And a little food,’ growled Sir Joseph. ‘I am as hungry as a starved weasel!’

They brought him some chicken broth, hot and strong, and in half an hour he had fallen into a gentle sleep. The doctor beckoned Jim outside the room.

‘I think it is safe for you to leave him,’ he said. ‘He is making a better recovery than I dreamt was possible. I suppose he has said nothing about his adventures?’

‘Nothing,’ said Jim, and the man of medicine realised that, even if Sir Joseph had explained the strange circumstances of his arrest and appearance in the police court, it was very unlikely that he would be told.

Early the next morning Jim called at Downing Street and saw the Prime Minister.

‘He is under the impression that he was in a car accident after leaving Park Lane. He remembers nothing about the speech in the House; the doctors will not allow him to be told until he is strong again. I have very grave doubt on one point, sir, which I want to clear up. And to clear it up it may be necessary to go outside the law.’

‘I don’t care very much where you go,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘but we must have the truth! Until the facts are known, not only Sir Joseph but the whole Cabinet is under a cloud. I will give instructions that you are to have carte blanche, and I will support you in any action you may take.’

With this confident assurance Jim went on to Scotland Yard to prove the truth ‘of a theory which had slowly evolved in the dark hours of the night; a theory so fantastical that he could hardly bring himself to its serious contemplation.

CHAPTER 19

FOUR HUNDRED and fifteen cablegrams were put on the wire in one morning and they were all framed in identical terms:

Remit by cable through Lombard Bank Carr Street Branch all profits taken in Rata Transaction 17 to receipt of this instruction. Acknowledge. Rata.

This message was dispatched at three o’clock in the morning from the GPO.

The Foreign Department manager of the Lombard Bank was an old friend of Mr Ellenbury, and had done business with him before. Mr Ellenbury drove to the bank the following afternoon and saw the head of the Foreign Department.

‘I am ejecting some very extensive cable remittances through the Lombard,’ he said, ‘and I shall want cash.’

The sour-looking manager looked even more sour.

‘Rata’s, I suppose? I’m surprised that you are mixed up with these people, Mr Ellenbury. I don’t think you can know what folks are saying in the City…’

He was a friend and was frank. Mr Ellenbury listened meekly.

‘One cannot pick and choose,’ he said. ‘The war made a great deal of difference to me; I must live.’

The war is an unfailing argument to explain changed conditions and can be employed as well to account for adaptable standards of morality. The manager accepted the other’s viewpoint with reservations. ‘How much has Harlow made out of this swindle?’ he asked, again exercising the privilege of friendship.

‘Someday I will tell you,’ said the lawyer cryptically. ‘The point is, I expect very large sums.’

‘Sterling or what?’

‘Any currency that is stable,’ said Mr Ellenbury.

That evening came the first advice—from Johannesburg.

The sum remitted was not colossal, but it was large. New Orleans arrived in the night and was delivered to Mr Ellenbury with Chicago, New York, Toronto and Sydney.

The cable advices accumulated; Mr Ellenbury took no steps to draw the money that was piling up at the Lombard Bank until the second day.

On the morning of that day he walked round his bedraggled demesne before going to the City. He had grown attached to Royalton House, he discovered, and almost wished he could take it with him. It was ugly and dreary and depressing. Even the vegetable garden seemed decayed.

Pale ghosts of cabbages drooped like aged and mourning men amidst the skeleton stalks of their departed fellows.

Across the desolation came the gardener, his shoulders protected from the drizzle by a sack.

‘I’ve got a load of stuff to fill the pit,’ he said. ‘Came yesterday.’

The pit was an eyesore and had been for thirty years. It was a deep depression at the edge of the kitchen garden and Mr Ellenbury had sited many dreams upon it. An ornamental pond, surrounded by banked rhododendrons. A swimming pool with a white-tiled bed and marble seats, where, hidden from the vulgar eye by trellised roses, a bather might sit and bask in the sun. Now it was the end of dreams—a pit to be filled. He stood on the edge of it. An unlovely hole in the ground, the bottom covered with water, the rusty corner of a petrol tin showing just above the surface. By the side was a heap of rubbish, aged bricks and portions of brick, sand gravel, sheer ashpit emptyings.

‘I will fill it in—I have promised myself that exercise,’ said Mr Ellenbury, forgetting for the moment that by tomorrow he would be filling in nothing more substantial than time.

The slimy hole held his eyes. If he could put Harlow there and see his big white face staring up from the mud—that would be a good filling! He felt his face and neck go red, his limbs tingling. Presently he tore himself away and walked back to the house.

The car that Rata’s hired for him was waiting—the driver bade him a civil good morning and said the weather was the worst he had ever known. Mr Ellenbury went in to breakfast without replying. The sight of the car was suggestive.

There was another garage known to Mr Ellenbury where a car could be hired and no inconvenient questions asked. Stated more clearly, there are many people in London engaged in peculiar professions, to whom money was not an important consideration. They could not buy loyalty, but they were willing to pay for discretion.

Nova’s Garage had a tariff that was considerably higher than any other, but the extra cost was money well spent. For when the police came to Nova’s to learn who was the foreign-looking gentleman who had driven away from a West End jeweller’s with the diamond ring he had bought and the row of pearls that had disappeared with him. Nova’s were blandly ignorant. Nor could they recognise the lady who had driven the rich Bradford merchant to Marlow and left him drugged and penniless in the long grass of the meadows.

In the afternoon the car came; the chauffeur was a burly man with a black moustache who chewed gum and had no interest in anybody’s business but his own. In this Mr Ellenbury drove to the bank, taking his two suitcases; and went into the manager’s room and checked the cable advices.

‘Immense!’ said the manager soberly. He referred to the total. ‘And more to come, I suppose? It is so big that it almost breaks loose from the standards.’

‘Standards?’ Mr Ellenbury did not know what he was talking about.

‘Right and wrong…like taking a foot-rule to measure St Paul’s.’

Ellenbury, something of a dialectician, could not resist the challenge. ‘Moral conduct isn’t a matter of arithmetic, but a matter of proportion. You can’t measure it with a yard-stick, but by its angle. Ten degrees out of the perpendicular is as much a fault in a gate-post as in the leaning Tower of Pisa…I make this American total a hundred and twelve thousand.’

‘And ten,’ added the manager. ‘The exchange is against us.’

Mr Ellenbury made five bundles of the notes and fitted them into the suitcase.

‘Now we will take the South African remittances,’ said the manager, painfully patient, a sigh in his every sentence, disapproval in every wag of his pen. ‘I suppose you’re right, but it does seem to me that a man’s offence against society is in inverse ratio to the amount of money he pouches.’

‘Pouches!’ murmured Mr Ellenbury in protest.

‘Pockets, then. When you reach the million mark you’ve got to a point beyond the comprehension of a jury. They look at the man and they look at the money, and they say “not guilty” automatically. There ought to be a new set of laws dealing with property—starting with penalties for pinching a million; and working up to the place where you can indict a government for wasting nine figures. And the jury should be made up of accountants and novelists, who’ve never seen real money but think in millions—eighty-seven thousand nine hundred I make it.’

Mr Ellenbury performed a rapid calculation, consulting a little ready reckoner.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘You have strangely perverted principles, my friend. Whether a man steals ten cents or five million dollars—’

‘Bank of Yokohama’—the manager sorted his papers. ‘The yen is at 179, that’s a drop. Curious! Way down in the bowels of the earth a ledge of rock slips over, a superheated packet of steam blows up, and the effect on the money market is disastrous! There is a lot of earthquake in Harlow: he has got into the Acts of God class—I’m giving you dollars for this—US dollars.’

‘Quite OK,’ said Mr Ellenbury, checking the bundles that were handed to him.

It was growing dark when he carried out his suitcases and placed them inside the car. They were very heavy. It was strange how heavy paper money could be—and how bulky.

He drove to his office in Theobald’s Road and was glad that many years before, when offered the choice between a small suite on the ground floor and a larger one on the first floor, he had chosen the former.

He had sent his clerk home early. It was a Friday and the man had been given a fortnight’s holiday and had had his salary in advance. Opening the outer door with his key, he tugged the two suitcases into his private room. Here was a brand-new trunk and a passport. A few weeks before, Harlow had ordered him to procure a passport for a ‘Mr Jackson,’ whose other name was Ingle. Ellenbury had a distaste for the petty frauds of life, but as usual he had obeyed and duplicated the offence by applying for a second passport, forwarding a photograph of himself taken twenty years before and applying in a name which had not the faintest resemblance to his own.

He sat down with the two bulging grips before him and with a feeling of growing unease. Not that his conscience was troubling him. The bedridden Mrs Ellenbury never once entered his mind; the injustice he was doing to his employer, if it occurred to him at all, was a relief to his distress.

The weight and the bulk of the paper money…

The Customs would search his suitcase at Calais or Havre, and the money would attract attention. He might put it at the bottom of the trunk and register it through. But the thefts of baggage on the French railways were notoriously frequent. He might, of course, travel by the Simplon Express or by the Blue Train—hand baggage was subject to a perfunctory examination on the train, and if he were bound for Monte Carlo the carriage of such wealth might be regarded as an act of madness by the Customs officials and excite no other comment.

But both the Simplon and the Riviera Express are booked up at this season of the year and a compartment could not be secured by any influence. He might fly but he feared that the Airport scrutiny would be even more severe.

There remained only one alternative. To carry half the money in his trunk, distribute as much as he could amongst I his pockets and’ post the rest to himself at various hotels throughout France and Spain. And this would be a long and tedious job. He went into the outer office and brought back a packet of stout envelopes. He must not register them—these Latin post offices made the collection of a registered letter a fussy business.

CHAPTER 20

WITH A Bradshaw by his side, he began his task. He exhausted the envelopes and went in search of another packet, but could find none of the requisite stoutness. Extinguishing the lights, he went out to a neighbouring store, replenished his stock and came back. Halfway through the second packet, with the table piled with bulging envelopes, he was writing:

Hotel Riena Christina, Algeciras—

When there was a tap on the green baize door and he nearly screamed with fright.

Two grave eyes were watching him through the oval of glass that gave a view into the office. Leaping to hi feet, his teeth set in a grin of fear, he dragged open the door.

A girl stood on the threshold. She wore a long blue coat; there were beads of rain on the shoulders and on the head scarf. In her hand was a streaming umbrella. Mr Ellenbury had not noticed it was raining. She was staring at the open suitcases, at the bundles of notes, the heaped envelopes. Aileen Rivers had never seen so much money.

‘Well!’ Ellenbury’s voice was a harsh squeak.

‘I tried to find your clerk,’ she said. ‘The door was open—’

Open? In his haste to continue his work Ellenbury had not closed the outer door—had not even shut the door beyond the baize.

He recognized her.

‘You’re Stebbings’s girl,’ he said breathlessly. ‘What do you want!’

She took from her bag a folded envelope. Some leases of the late Miss Alice Harlow had fallen in; and by some oversight, as Mr. Stebbings had found, they had not been included in the legacy. He tried to read the letter; tried hard to put out of his mind the all-important, the vital happening…two grey eyes watching through a glass oval…watching bundles of money in suitcases, in envelopes…

‘Oh!’ he said blankly. ‘I see…something about leases. I’ll attend to that tomorrow.’

‘Mr Harlow knows,’ she said. ‘We telephoned to him early this afternoon and he asked us to notify you and bring the particulars to his house tonight.’

At this he jerked up his head. ‘You’re going to Harlow—now?’ he stammered.

It was rather remarkable that she had been looking forward to the visit all afternoon—very remarkable. The desire might seem incredible (and was) to the man who loved her.

Yet, when Mr Stebbings had said in his incomplete way, ‘I wonder if you would mind—’ she had said promptly, ‘No’;—too promptly, she thought.

Reduced to its ignoble elements, the lure of Stratford Harlow was a perversity that could never be satisfied; the lure that brought timid people to the edge of a volcano to shudder and wonder at the molten pool that hissed and bubbled below. And something more than that, for he was less terrible than terribly human.

‘Yes, I am going to Park Lane, now,’ she said.

The mind of Mr Ellenbury was numb; he could not direct its working; it was without momentum, static. ‘You are going to him now.’

Harlow had gone out of his way to meet this girl at Princetown; had made inquiries about her—where she lived, where she worked. He gave, as an excuse, his interest in her uncle. Ellenbury could, from common experience, find another. Those kinds of friendship develop very quickly.

People who pass as strangers on the Monday may be planning a mutual future on the Saturday. A very pretty girl…the wheels of Mr Ellenbury’s mind began to revolve, were whirling madly.

The first thing she would tell Harlow.

‘Did you see Mr Ellenbury?’

‘Yes; he had an enormous quantity of money in two suitcases on his desk…’

He could imagine the swift conclusions that would follow.

‘My wife is very ill’—the wheels creaked a little—‘very ill. She hasn’t been out of bed for twenty years.’ His weak mouth drooped pathetically. ‘It is strange…your coming like this. She asked about you this morning.’

‘About me?’ Aileen could hardly believe her ears. ‘But I don’t know her!’

‘She knows you—knew you when you were a child—knew your mother or your father, I’m not sure which.’ He was on safe ground here, though he was not sure of this. ‘Curious…I intended calling at Stebbings’s to ask you…the car would bring you back.’

‘To see Mrs Ellenbury—tonight?’ She was incredulous. Mr Ellenbury nodded his head. ‘But—I’ve promised to go to Mr Harlow’s house.’

‘There will be time—it is an old man’s request; unreasonable—I realise that.’ He looked very old and mean and unhappy.

‘Is it far?’

He told her the exact position of this house—described the nearest route. What would happen after, he did not know. There would be time to consider that. Something dreadful. To keep her away from Harlow—her lover perhaps. That was the first consideration. His seats were booked, the cabin reserved; he left in the morning by the early train. Why not by Ostend? These by-thoughts insisted on confusing him.

‘Could I telephone to Mr Stebbings?’

‘I’ll do that.’ He was almost jovial. ‘What you can do, young lady, is to help me pack these two cases. A lot of money, eh? All Harlow’s, all Harlow’s! A clever man!’

She nodded as she gathered up the bundles of bills.

‘Yes—very clever.’

‘A good fellow?’

She wasn’t sure of this; he thought she was dissembling a new affection. Obviously she was fond of Harlow. Otherwise, since she was a known friend of Jim Carlton she must express her abhorrence. He had escaped a very real danger.

She had forgotten that he had promised to telephone until the car, waiting all this time in the soaking rain, was moving down Kingsway. ‘I have a phone at my house,’ he said.

It is true that he had a telephone—a private wire into Mr Harlow’s library. But he was hardly likely to use it. Crouched up in a corner of the car, the suitcases at his feet, knocking at his knees as the machine slowed or accelerated, he talked about his wife, but he thought of the girl by his side. And he reached this conclusion: she was the one person in the world who could betray him. The one person in the world who knew that he had two large suitcases filled with money. It was necessary that he should forget bank managers and Harlow and certain members of the Rata’s staff, and so he forgot them. A bit of a girl to stand between him and a wonderful future. Picture galleries, sunlight on striped awnings, great masses of flowers blooming under blue skies, what time fog and rain clouds palled this filthy city and liquid mud splashed at the windows of the hired car.

They were nearing the house when he dropped the window and leaned out on the driver’s side.

‘The house is the fourth from the next side road. Stop before the gates; don’t go into the drive and wait for a few minutes before you drive away.’

He pushed three notes into the man’s hand: the gum-chewing driver examined them by the light on his instrument board and seemed satisfied.

‘Do you mind if we stop at the gate? It is only a little walk up the drive—my wife is so nervous; starts at every sound.’

Aileen did not object. When they alighted in the muddy road, she offered to carry one of the cases and he consented. It was heavier than she expected.

‘Harlow’s, all Harlow’s!’ he muttered as he walked through the ugly gates and bent his head to the drive of rain. ‘One of his “jokes”.

‘What do you mean by “joke”?’ she asked.

‘Harlow’s jokes…difficult…explain.’ The wind tore words out of his speech. She could see the house; square, lifeless. ‘To the left—we go in at the back.’

They were following a cinder-path that ran snakily through the bare stems of rose bushes. Ahead of her she saw a squat building of some sort. It was the furnace house of the greenhouses, he told her.

‘There are two steps down.’

Why on earth were they going into a hot-house at this time of night? He answered the question she had not put.

‘Safe…lock away…cases,’ he shouted.

The wind had freshened to a gale. A flicker of lightning startled her: lightning in December was a phenomenon outside her knowledge. Ellenbury put down the cases and pulled at a rusty padlock; a door groaned open.

‘Here,’ he said, and she went in after him.

He struck a match and lit an inch of candle in a grimy little storm-lantern and she could take stock of the place. It was a brick pit, windowless. The floor was littered with cinders and broken flower-pots. On a wooden bench was a heap of mould from which the green shoots of weed were sprouting. There was a rusting furnace door open and showing more ashes and cinders and garden rubbish.

‘Just wait: I’ll bring the bags.’

His heart was beating so violently that he could hardly breathe—fortunately for her peace of mind, she could not see his face. He staggered out and slammed the door, threw the rusty lamp on to the staple and, groping at his feet, found the padlock and fixed it. Then he stumbled up the two steps and ran towards the house.

He had to sit on the steps for a long time before he was sufficiently calm to go in. Listening at the door before he opened it, he crept into the hall, closed the door without a sound and tiptoed to his study. He was wet through and shivering. The suitcases were shining like patent leather.

He took off his drenched overcoat and rang the bell. The maid who presently appeared was surprised to see him.

‘I thought, sir—’ she began, but he cut her short.

‘Go up to my room—don’t make a noise—and bring me down a complete change. You may tell your mistress that I shall not be up for some time.’

Poking the meagre fire, he warmed his hands at the blaze.

The girl came back with a bundle of clothes, announced her intention of making him a cup of tea and discreetly retired.

Mr Ellenbury started to change when a thought occurred to him. He might have to change again. His trousers were not very wet. And round about the pit was very muddy. He had thought of the pit in the car. Fate was working for him.

He put on his dressing-gown and took down from a shelf two volumes which he had often read. The Chronicles of Crime they were called—a record of drab evil told in the stilted style of their Early Victorian editor. They were each ‘embellished with fifty-two illustrations by “Phiz”.’

He opened a volume at random.

‘…when a female, young, beautiful and innocent, is the victim of oppression, there is no man with common feelings who would not risk his life to snatch her from despair and misery…’

This little bit of moralising was the sentence he read. He turned the page, unconscious of its irony.

Maria Marten—shot in a barn. There was another woman killed with a sword. He turned the leaves impatiently; regretted at that moment so little acquaintance with the criminal bar. There was a large axe—where? Outside the kitchen door. He went down the kitchen stairs, passing the maid on her way up. Just outside the kitchen door, in the very place where he had seen it that morning, he found the axe. He brought it upstairs under his dressing-gown.

‘You may go to bed,’ he said to the maid. He drank his tea and then heard the ring of the telephone in the hall. He hesitated, then hastened to answer it.

‘Yes this is Ellenbury,’ he strove to keep his voice calm, ‘Miss Rivers? Yes she called at my office soon after six with a letter from Mr Stebbings—no, I haven’t seen her since…’

He heaved on his wet overcoat and went out into the storm.

How very unpleasant!…why couldn’t they let him go away quietly…an old man—white-haired, with only a few years to live? Tears rolled down his cheeks at the injustice of his treatment. It was Harlow! Damn Harlow! This poor girl, who had done nobody any harm—a beautiful creature who must die because of Harlow!

He dashed the weak tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, lilted off the padlock and threw open the door.

The candle had burnt down to its last flicker of life, but in that fraction of light, before the wick sank bluely into oblivion, he saw the white face of the girl as she stood, frozen with horror. Ellenbury swung his axe with a sob.

CHAPTER 21

WHEN Mr Elk went into the office of his friend that afternoon, he found Jim engrossed in a large street plan that was spread out on the table. It had evidently been specially drawn or copied for his purpose, for there was a smudge of green ink where his sleeve had brushed.

‘Buying house property?’ asked Elk.

Jim rolled up the plan carefully and put it into his drawer.

‘The real estate business,’ Elk went on, ‘is the easiest way of getting money I know. You can’t be pinched for it, and there’s no come-back. Friend of mine bought a cow field at Finchley and built a lot of ready-to-wear villas on it—he drives his own Jaguar nowadays. I know another man—’

‘Would you like to assist me in a little burglary tonight?’ interrupted Jim.

‘Burglary is my long suit,’ said Elk. ‘I remember once—’

‘There was a time,’ mused Jim, ‘when I could climb like a cat, though I’ve not seen a cat go up the side of a house, and I’ve never quite understood how “cat burglar” can be an apposite description.’

‘Short for caterpillar,’ suggested Elk. ‘They can walk up glass owing to the suckers on their big feet. That’s natural history, the same as flies. Where’s the “bust”?’

‘Park Lane, no less,’ replied Jim. ‘My scheme is to inspect one of the stately homes of England—the ancestral castle of Baron Harlow.’

‘He ain’t been knighted, has he?’ asked Elk, who had the very haziest ideas about the peerage. ‘Though I don’t see why he shouldn’t be; if—’ he mentioned an illustrious political figure—‘was in office, Harlow would have been a duke by now, or an earl, or somethin’.’

Jim looked out of the window at the Thames Embankment, crowded at this rush hour with homeward-bound workers. It was raining heavily, and half a gale was blowing. Certainly the fog which had been predicted by the Weather Bureau showed no sign of appearance.

‘The Weather people are letting me down,’ he said; ‘unless there’s a fog we shall have to postpone operations till tomorrow night.’

Elk, who had certain views on the Weather Bureau, expressed them at length. But he had also something encouraging to say.

‘Fog is no more use to a burglar than a bandaged eye. Rain that keeps policemen in doorways and stops amacher snoopin’ is weather from heaven for the burglar.’

Rain was falling in sheets on the Thames Embankment when the police car, which Jim Carlton drove, came through the arched gateway, and at the corner of Birdcage Walk he met a wind that almost overturned the car. He was blown across to Hyde Park Corner.

No. 704, Park Lane was one of the few houses in that thoroughfare which was not only detached from other houses but was surrounded by a wall. It could boast that beyond the library annexe was a small garden, in which a cherry tree flourished. A police sergeant detailed for the service appeared out of the murk and took charge of the car. In two minutes they were over the wall, dragging after them the hook ladders which had been borrowed during the afternoon from fire headquarters.

The domed skylight of the library was in darkness, and they gained its roof with little trouble. Here Jim left Elk as an advanced post. He had no illusions as to the difficulty of his task. All the upper windows were barred or secured by shutters; but he had managed to secure an aerial photograph which showed a little brick building on the roof, which was probably a stair cover and held a door that gave entrance to the floors below.

Jim drew himself up to the level of the first window, the bars of which made climbing a comparatively easy matter, and, detaching the hook of the ladder, he reached up and gripped the bars of the window above. Fortunately he was on the lee side of Greenhart House and the wind that shrieked about its corners did not greatly hamper him.

In ten minutes he was on the flat roof of the house, walking with difficulty in his felt-soled shoes towards the square brick shed. Now he caught the full force of the gale and was glad of the shelter which the parapet afforded.

As he had expected, in the brick superstructure there was a stout door, fastened by a patent lock. Probably it was bolted as well. He listened, but could hear nothing above the howl of the wind, and then continued his search of the roof, keeping the rays of his torch within a few inches of the ground. There was nothing to be discovered here, and he turned to the stairway. From his pocket he took a leather case of tools, fitted a small auger into a bit, and pushed it in the thickness of the door. He had not gone far before the point of the bit ground against something hard. The door was steel-lined. Replacing the tool, he pulled himself up to the roof of the shed, and he had to grip the edge to prevent being blown off.

The roof was of solid concrete, and it would need a sledge-hammer and unlimited time to break through.

Possibly there was an unguarded window, though he did not remember having seen any. He leaned across the parapet and looked down into the side street that connected Park Lane with the thoroughfare where he had left his car. As he did so, he saw a man walk briskly up to the door, open it and enter. The sound of the slamming door came up to him. It was obviously Harlow; no other man had that peculiar swing of shoulders in his walk. What had he been doing out on such a night? Then it occurred to Jim that he had come from the direction of his garage.

He heard a clock strike eleven. What should he do? It seemed that there was no other course but to return to the waiting Elk and confess his failure; and he had decided to take this action when he heard above the wind the snap of a lock being turned; and then the voice of Harlow. The man was coming up to the roof, and Jim crouched down in the shadow of the shed.

‘…yes, it is raining, of course it is raining, my dear man. It is always raining in London. But I have been out in it and you haven’t! Gosh, how it rained!’

Though the words themselves had a querulous tone, Mr Harlow’s voice was good-humoured; it was as though he were speaking to a child.

‘Have you got your scarf? That’s right. And button your overcoat. You have no gloves, either. What a lad you are!’

‘I really don’t want gloves,’ said another voice. ‘I am not a bit cold. And, Harlow, may I ask you again…’

The voice became indistinct. They were walking away from the listener, and he guessed they were promenading by the side of the parapet. Unless Harlow carried a light he would not see the ladder. Jim went stealthily to the back of the shed and peered round the corner. Presently he discerned the figures of the two men: they were walking slowly towards him, their heads bent against the wind.

Quickly he drew back again.

‘…you can’t have it. You are reading top much and I won’t have your mind overtaxed by writing too much! Be reasonable, my dear Marling…’

Marling! Jim held his breath. They were so near to him now that by taking a step and stretching out his hand he could have touched the nearest man.

The lights in the street below gave him a sky-line against the parapet, and he saw that Harlow’s companion was almost as tall as himself, save for a stoop. He caught a glimpse of a beard blown all ways by the gale…The voices came to him again as they returned; and then a sudden scraping sound and an exclamation from the financier.

‘What the devil was that?’

From far below came a faint crash. Jim’s heart sank.

Harlow must have brushed against the hook ladder and knocked it from the parapet.

‘You pushed something over,’ said the stranger’s voice.

‘Felt like a hook,’ said Harlow, and Jim could imagine him peering down over the parapet. ‘What was it?’ he said again.

This was Jim Carlton’s opportunity. He could steal round the side of the building, slip through the door which he guessed was open, and make his escape. Noiselessly he crept along, and then saw a band of light coming from the open doorway. Against such a light he must be inevitably detected unless he chose a moment when their backs were turned.

But they showed no inclination to move, and stood there for a time discussing the thing which Harlow had knocked from the stone coping.

‘It’s very curious’—the big man was talking—‘I don’t remember there was anything when we came here this morning. Let us go down again.’

The opportunity was lost. Even as Jim stood there listening he heard the feet of the men descending the stairs, the crash of the door as it was closed. He was left on the roof without any means of making his way to solid earth.

To communicate with Elk was impossible without inviting discovery. He took a notebook from his pocket, wrote a hurried message and, tearing out the sheet, wrapped in it a copper coin. He dropped it as near as he could guess in the vicinity of the place where Elk would be, for he heard the tinkle of the copper as it struck the ground. A quarter of an hour he waited, but there was no sign from below. He tried the door again, without even hoping that it would afford him an exit. To his amazement, when he turned the handle the door opened. Had Harlow, in his hurried departure, forgotten to lock it? That was not like Harlow.

Jim pushed the door farther open and looked down. A dim light was burning in the room below, and he had a glimpse of a corner of the secretaire and a stretch of red carpet. Noiselessly he descended the stout stairs, which did not creak under his weight, and after a while, coming to the bottom, he peered round the lintel.

The room was apparently empty. A big desk stood near the curtained window; there was an empty lacquer bed in one corner, and, before him, a door which was ajar. The only light in the apartment came from the reading lamp on the desk—he crossed the room and, pressing the lamp switch, put the room in darkness.

A light on the landing outside was now visible round the edge of the door. He peeped out and could see no sign of life. Before him was a stairway which led down to the lower floors of the house. Something told him that his presence in the house was known. On the left of the landing was another door, and the first thing he noticed was that the key was in the lock. Whoever had opened and entered that loom had gone in such haste that the key had not been removed. Jim saw his opportunity and in a flash, he leant over, gripped the key and snapped the lock tight. As he did so he heard a smothered exclamation from the room and grinned as he tiptoed down the stairs.

The lower landing was in darkness, and he could guide himself by his torch, testing every step he took, until he came into the dimly lighted vestibule, which, only a few days before, had been crowded with men and women, whose names were household words. He could heat nothing, and, walking swiftly to the door, grasped the handle. In another second he was flung back as though he had been struck by some huge invisible force.

He lay on the ground, breathless, paralysed with the shock. Then he heard the opening of a door upstairs, and somebody whispering. To touch that door handle, heavily charged with electric current, might mean death. The power which made the door a death trap for any burglar who succeeded in entering Harlow’s house, must come off an existing connection, he thought. He saw the two white buttons jutting out of the wall, though only one light was visible in the hall. He pressed the top button back, but the hall light was not extinguished. This must be the connection.

He tried the door handle again, touching it gingerly with his finger-tip. The current was off. In the briefest time he was in the street; and he advertised his escape by closing the door with a crash that shook the house.

Hurrying back to his car, he found Elk astride of the wall, in earnest parley with the police sergeant.

‘I was just going round to the back to see what had happened to you,’ said Elk, vaulting on to the sidewalk.

‘Did you get my message?’

‘What was it? I heard something fall, and thought you must have dropped the ladder. I couldn’t locate it anyway.’

It was long past midnight when the driver stepped on his brake before the entrance to Scotland Yard. And the first man Jim saw as he walked into the hall was Brown and his heart sank.

‘Anything wrong?’ he asked.

‘Miss Rivers has not returned to the house,’ said the detective. ‘I’ve been on the phone to Stebbings. He tells me that she left at six o’clock to deliver two letters, one to Ellenbury and the other to Harlow. I got through to Ellenbury; he said his letter was handed to him by Miss Rivers soon after six and that he hadn’t seen her since.’

Jim Carlton thought quickly.

‘Just before eleven!’ exclaimed Elk. ‘Gosh! I’d forgotten that!’

‘What?’

‘That’s the time he passed us and went into his garage—I could see the car from the top of the library—it wasn’t his own and I didn’t know it was Harlow until he turned into the gate at the end of the courtyard. And he was a long time in the garage too! I’ll bet—’

It needed this clue, slight as it was, to spur Jim Carlton into instant action. At two o’clock in the morning, when Mr Harlow was finishing his last cigar, Jim Carlton and Elk arrived with the backing of a search warrant…

‘How amusing!’ said Mr Harlow sombrely, as he rose from the table and handed back the warrant to Jim. ‘Do you mind letting me have a copy of that interesting document one of these days. I should like it for my autobiography!’

‘You can save your breath, Harlow,’ said Jim roughly. ‘The present visit is nothing more than a little inconvenience for you. I’m not arresting you for the outrage on Sir Joseph Layton; I am not taking you for the murder of Mrs Gibbins!’

‘Merciful as you are strong!’ murmured Harlow. ‘Murder is an unpleasant word.’

His face was rather pale and seemed to have developed new lines and furrows since Jim saw him last.

‘What’s this talk of murder?’

At the sound of the harsh voice the inspector spun round. Standing in the doorway was the hard-faced Mrs Edwins. It was the first time he had seen her, but he could recognise instantly from Aileen’s description. Stiffly erect, her arms folded before her, she stood waiting, her hard black eyes blazing with malignity. She was a more menacing figure then Harlow himself.

‘What is this talk of murder? Who has been murdered, I should like to know?’ she demanded.

But Harlow pointed past her.

‘“Murder” was not your cue, Lucy Edwins,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Your sense of the dramatic will be your ruin!’

For a moment it seemed that the woman would disobey that imperious gesture. She blinked at him resentfully, almost with hate, and then turned, stiff as a ramrod, and disappeared.

‘Now, Mr Carlton, let us be our calm selves. What do you expect to find in this house? I imagine it is something very important.’

‘Imagine!’ said Jim sternly. ‘Harlow, I’m going to put my cards on the table and tell you just what I want to find. First and foremost, I want Aileen Rivers, who came here earlier in the evening with a letter from her employer. She has not been seen since.’

Mr Harlow did not smile.

‘Really? Not been seen by you, I suppose you mean—’

‘Wait, I haven’t finished. A car was seen to drive away from Ellenbury’s office in Theobald’s Road at half-past five. Miss Rivers was in that car—where is she now?’

Harlow looked at him steadily. ‘I will not say that I don’t know—unnecessary lies are stupid.’

He opened a drawer of his desk with great deliberation, and, taking out a bunch of keys, dropped them on his blotting-pad.

‘You may search every room in the house,’ he said. ‘And then tell me if you are as wise as I!’

The library itself needed no prolonged inspection. Jim went up the stairs, followed by Elk, and came at last to the top floor, to find Harlow waiting for him at the door of the little elevator.

‘That is my housekeeper’s room’—he pointed. ‘You will recognise the door as the one which you locked a few hours ago.’

‘And this?’ asked Jim.

Harlow turned the handle and threw the other door wide open. The room was as Jim had seen it on the previous night, and was untenanted.

‘We will start with the roof,’ said Carlton, and went up the narrow flight of stairs, opened the door and stepped out onto the flat roof. This time he carried a powerful torch, but here also he drew blank. He made a circuit of the parapet and came back to where Harlow was waiting at the open door.

‘Have you found a secret stairway?’ Harlow was innocence itself. ‘They are quite common in Park Lane, but still a novelty in Pimlico. You can touch a spring, something goes click, and there is a narrow winding stair leading to a still more secret room!’

Jim made no answer to this sarcasm, but went downstairs.

From room to room he passed, but there was no sign of the girl or of the bearded man and at last he reached the ground floor.

‘You have cellars? I should like to see them.’

Harlow opened a small door in the panelling of the vestibule. They were in a rather high, flagged passage, at the end of which was the kitchen and servants’ hall. From an open archway in one of the walls a flight of stone stairs descended to the basement. This was made up of three cellars, two of which were used for the storage of wine.

‘This is not the whole extent of the cellar space,’ said Jim suspiciously, when he had finished his inspection.

‘There are no other cellars,’ replied Harlow, with a weary sigh. ‘My good man, how very suspicious you are! Would you like to see the garage?’

Jim followed him up the steps, through the hall. He was being played with—Jim Carlton knew that, and yet for some reason was not rattled.

‘Harlow, where is Miss Rivers? You suggested you knew.’

Harlow inclined his head graciously. ‘If you will allow me to drive you a very little journey, I can promise that I will put an end to all your present doubts.’

They faced one another—Harlow towards the bright light that streamed from the garage.

‘I’ll call your bluff,’ said Jim at last.

A slow smile dawned on Harlow’s face. ‘So many people have done that,’ he said, ‘and yet here I am, with a royal flush permanently in hand! And all who have called—where are their chips?’

He opened the car door and after a second’s hesitation Jim entered, Mr Elk following. The big man shut the door.

‘I have a high opinion of the police,’ he said, ‘and I realise that I am making you look rather foolish: I am sorry! This story of Harlow’s penultimate joke shall go no farther than me.’

He moved away from the car and then very leisurely he walked to the wall, put up his hand, and the garage was in darkness.

Jim saw the manoeuvre and leapt to the door, but it was locked; and even as he struggled to lower the window, there was a whine of machinery and the car began to sink slowly through the floor. Down, down it went upon its platform and then, when the roof was a little below the level of the floor, the platform tilted forward, and the car slid gently onto an unseen track and thudded against rubber buffers and stopped.

Jim had got the window down and was half through when the hydraulic pillars beneath the platform shot up and closed the aperture with a gentle thud. In another second Elk was free. Wrenching open the driver’s door, Jim switched on the powerful head lamps and illuminated the chamber to which the car had sunk.

There were two more machines there; one in particular attracted his attention—an old hire car grey with mud which was still wet. Evidently the place was a very ordinary type of underground garage, though he had never seen such expensive equipment as a hydraulic lift in a private establishment. The walls were of dressed stone; at one end was a low iron door, not locked, so far as he could see, but fastened with two steel bolts. It was probably a petrol store, he thought, and the position under the courtyard before the garage confirmed this guess.

He looked at Elk.

‘How foolish do you feel?’ he asked bitterly.

Elk shook his head.

‘Nothin’ makes me feel foolish,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but I certainly didn’t expect to see the end so soon.’

‘End?’

Elk nodded.

‘Not mine—not yours: Harlow’s. He’s through—what’s penultimate mean, anyway?’

And when it was explained, Elk’s face brightened.

‘He’s got one big line to finish on? I’ll bet it is the biggest joke that’s ever made the police stop laffin. And I’ll tell you—’

He stopped; both heads went round towards the little iron door. Somebody was knocking feebly and Jim’s heart almost stopped beating.

‘Somebody behind that door,’ said Elk. ‘I never thought old man Harlow ran a dungeon.’

Jim ran to the place, slipped back the bolts and flung the iron door open—there staggered into the light the wild and dishevelled figure of an elderly man. For a moment Jim did not recognise him. He was coatless, his crumpled collar was unfastened, but it was the look in his face that transfixed the astonished men.

‘Ellenbury!’ breathed Jim.

The lawyer it was, but the change in him since Jim had seen him last was startling. The wide opened eyes glared from one to the other and then he raised his trembling hand to his mouth.

‘Where is she?’ he whispered fiercely. ‘What did he do with her?’

Jim’s heart turned to lead.

‘Who—Miss Rivers?’

Ellenbury peered at him as though he remembered his voice but could not identify him.

‘Stebbings’s girl!’ he croaked. ‘He took this axe—Harlow!’ The old man swung an imaginary axe. ‘Ugh!…killed her!’

Jim Carlton’s hand was thrust to the wall for support.

His face was colourless—he could not speak and it was Elk who took up the questioning of this apparition.

‘Killed her?’

Ellenbury nodded.

‘Where—?’

‘On the edge of the kitchen garden…there’s a pit. You could put somebody there and nobody would guess. He knew all about the pit. I didn’t know he was the chauffeur—he had a little black moustache and he’d been driving me all day.’

Elk laid his hand gently on the little man’s shoulder and he shrank back with a sound of weeping.

‘Listen, Mr Ellenbury, you must tell us all you know and try to be calm. Nobody will hurt you. Did he kill Miss Rivers?’

The man nodded violently.

‘With an axe—my axe…I saw her lying there on the furnace-room floor. She was very beautiful and white and I saw that he had killed her and went back to the house for I did not wish—I did not wish…’ he shuddered, his face in his hands, ‘to see her in that pit, with the water…green water…ugh…ugh!’

He was fighting back the vision, his long fingers working like a piano player’s.

‘Yes…you saw her again?’ asked Jim huskily. He had. ‘Where?’

‘In the back of the car—where the suitcases were—all huddled up on the floor with a blanket thrown over her. I sat beside the devil and he talked! So softly! God! You’d have thought he had never murdered anybody! He said he was going to take me for a holiday—where I’d get well. But I knew he was lying—I knew the devil was lying and that he was forging new links in my chain. He put me in there!’

He almost screamed the words as his wavering finger pointed to the open door of his prison.

‘Ellenbury, for God’s sake try to think—is Aileen Rivers alive?’

The old man shook his head.

‘Dead!’ he nodded with every repetition of the word, ‘dead, dead, dead! My axe…it was outside the kitchen door…I saw her lying there and there was blood…’

‘Listen, Carlton,’ it was Elk’s harsh voice. ‘I’m not believing this! This bird’s mad—’

‘Mad! Am I mad!’ Ellenbury struck his thin chest. ‘She’s upstairs—I saw him carry her up—and the woman with the yellow face, and the man with a beard…they made me come with them…left me here in the dark for a long time and then made me come with them—look!’

He dragged Elk into the little prison house. There was a bed and a wardrobe; carpet covered the floor. It was a self-contained little suite, in the depth of the cellar.

Fumbling on the wall he found a light switch and the room was flooded with a rose-coloured glow that came from concealed lights in the angle of a stone cornice.

‘Look—look!’

The lawyer dragged open the door of the wardrobe. At the bottom was a heap of clothes—men’s clothes. A crumpled dress shirt, a velvet dress-jacket—

‘Sir Joseph’s clothes!’ gasped Elk.

CHAPTER 22

‘THEY KEPT him here,’ whispered Ellenbury. He seemed afraid of the sound of his own voice.

Jim saw another steel door at the farther end of the room; it had no bolt—only a tiny keyhole. And then his attention was diverted.

‘Look!’ called Ellenbury.

Exercising all his strength, the little man pulled at the wardrobe and it swung out like a gate on a hinge. Behind was an oblong door. ‘There…I came that way. The elevator…’

As Elk listened, he heard the distant whine of the elevator in motion.

‘To what room did he take her?’ asked Jim huskily. ‘We searched everywhere.’

‘Mrs Edwins’. There is a cupboard, but the back is a false one. There is a small room behind…why didn’t they put her in the pit and hide her? It would have been better…’

‘We’ve got to get out of here, and quick,’ said Elk, and looked round for the means of escape. ‘Penultimate joke hasn’t raised a laugh yet—looks like the penultimate joke’s goin’ to put my relations in mournin’!’

He tried to climb one of the greasy hydraulic cylinders, but although, with the assistance of Jim, he managed to touch the platform, he could derive little comfort from his achievement. The platform was of steel and concrete.

Neither knew anything of the mechanism of an hydraulic lift, and indeed the controls were out of reach under a locked steel grating.

The door behind the wardrobe was the only possible means of egress. Elk searched the car, and the tool chest beneath.

‘We’re safe for a bit—he’d be scared of using any kind of gas for fear there was a blow-up and he hasn’t the means of manufacturing something quick and sudden. Carlton, did you notice anything in the house!’

‘I noticed many things. To which do you refer?’

‘Notice that we never saw Mrs Edwins or Edwards, or whatever her name was, after the old man said “get”!’

That fact had not occurred to Jim; though they had searched the house from roof to basement, he had not seen the hard-faced woman again.

‘Where she is,’ said Elk, ‘the other feller can be—what’s ‘is name—Marling? And I know pretty well where that was—in the little elevator!’

It was true! Jim had seen the elevator when Harlow waited upon the top floor, but after that it had disappeared. It was the easiest thing in the world to slip from floor to floor, missing the search party.

The door was immovable; he could secure no leverage, and even if he had, it was unlikely that it would yield. They must attack the concrete-covered brickwork. This was the only section of the wall that was not built of stone.

Fortunately for them, there were tool chests in all the cars, and moreover in one of the machines was a big car jack, the steel lever of which they disconnected and used as a crowbar.

The work was an anodyne to Jim Carlton’s jangled nerves, set further on edge every time he saw the white face of Ellenbury.

The lawyer crouched by the bed watching them and muttering all the time under his breath. Once, in a pause, Jim heard him say: ‘You can’t measure principles with a yard stick; such a beautiful girl! And very young!’ And then he started weeping softly.

‘Don’t notice him,’ snarled Elk; ‘get on with the work!’

To move only an inch of concrete was an arduous and difficult business, and not without its danger if the sound were heard by the master of the house. But after an hour’s work they cleared a square foot of the hard plaster and revealed the brick lining beneath. Using screwdrivers for chisels, they managed to dislodge the first brick in the course and enlarge the hole. The second brick course was easier; but now the necessity for caution was brought home to them dramatically.

Jim was fitting the jagged edge of his driver into a small hole in the mortar, when a muffled voice almost at his elbow said: ‘Leave them alone: they can wait until tomorrow.’

It was Harlow, and Jim almost jumped.

But the phenomenon had a simple explanation. His voice had been carried down the shaft of the lift. They heard a gate slam, again came the whine of the motor and the lift stopped just above them, the gate was fastened again, and by a trick of acoustics Jim could hear the man’s foot tapping on the tiled floor of the vestibule.

They had till the morning; that was a comfort. Working and listening at intervals, they dislodged the inner brick, drew it out, a second followed, and in half an hour there was a jagged hole through which a lean man might wriggle.

Jim was that lean man. He found himself in the greasy pit of the elevator shaft, stumbling over beams and pulleys in a darkness which was unrelieved by a single ray from above.

He reached back into the room for his torch and made an inspection. The bottom of the lift was at least twelve feet above where he stood and hanging from it were two thick electric cables. Reaching up, he could just touch the lowest of the loops. He told Elk the position, and all the car cushions that could be gathered were thrust through the hole and piled by Jim, one on top of the other.

Balancing himself on these, he took a steady grip of the cable and rested his weight. The wires held. Pulling himself up, hand over hand, he managed to reach a thick steel bar which connected with the safety brake, and began to push the elevator floor, hoping to find a trap door. But evidently this little lift was too small for a mechanic’s trap, the floor did not yield under his pressure, and he was debating whether he should drop on to the cushions when he heard a quick step in the vestibule, a heavy foot stepped into the lift and the door slammed to. In another second he was mounting rapidly. On the top floor the lift stopped with a jerk which almost loosened his hold, though he had braced his feet upon the dangling cables below.

The upper floors were not as deep as the two lower. As he hung, his knee was on a level with the top of the elevator entrance to the second floor. There was a footledge there, and if he could reach it, it would be a simple matter to climb over the tiny grille. It was worth trying. Gently he slid down the cable until, swinging his feet, he could just touch the six inches of floor space between the pit and the grille.

Then, concentrating all his strength, he leapt forward, snatching at the breast-high gate—his feet slipping from under him. He recovered in a second, and was over the top.

He crept noiselessly up the stairs and was almost detected by the tall woman who was standing on the landing, her ear to the closed door of the room in which, he suspected, Aileen was a prisoner. From where he stood, concealed by a turn of the stairs, he could hear Harlow’s voice raised in complaint.

‘It was so vulgarly theatrical! I’m not annoyed, I’m hurt! To write messages on a card was stupid…and with a pin. If I had known…’

There was an agitated, murmured reply, and then unexpectedly Harlow laughed.

‘Well, well, you’re a foolish fellow; that is all I have to say to you. And you must never do such a thing again. Luckily the police couldn’t read your writing.’

Jim had almost forgotten the existence of the bearded man. He heard the door open and went quickly down the stairs until he was in the vestibule. The hands of the little silver clock over the marble mantelpiece pointed to five.

The lift was coming down again, and crouching back into a recess, Jim saw the big man pass into the library. The door shut behind him. In a second the detective was in the elevator and had pressed the top button.

If Aileen were there, he would find her; he dare not allow himself even to debate the sanity of the little man he had left in the garage.

Was she here?…dead? He closed his eyes to shut out the dreadful picture that the lawyer had drawn…the axe…the pit…

Just as the elevator reached the top floor something happened. For a few seconds Carlton did not grasp the explanation.

The two lights in the roof of the lift went out, and down below something flashed bluely—Jim saw the lightning flicker of it.

He pushed at the grille which, on the top floor alone, reached from ceiling to floor. It did not budge. He kicked at the gates, but they were of hammered steel.

Trapped for a second time in three hours, Jim swore softly through his teeth. He heard the street door close below and silence.

‘Elk!’ From a distance came Elk’s hollow answer. ‘He has cut out a fuse—can you climb to the hall?’

‘I’ll try.’

Facing where he stood, caged and impotent, was the door of Mrs Edwins’ room and as he looked he saw the handle turning slowly…slowly.

Mrs Edwins? She had been left behind then…The door opened a little…a little more, and then Aileen Rivers walked out.

‘Aileen!’ he cried hoarsely.

She looked at him, gripping the gate, his haggard face against the bars. ‘The philandering constable,’ she said, bravely flippant; and then, ‘please—take me home!’

‘Who brought you here?’ he asked, hardly believing the evidence of his senses.

‘I came of my own free will—oh, Jim he’s such a darling!’

‘Oh, God!’ groaned the man in the cage, ‘and I never noticed it!’

CHAPTER 23

NEARLY TWELVE hours before that poignant moment a gum-chewing chauffeur had found himself in an awkward position.

‘A lunatic and a fainting female!’ mused the chauffeur. ‘This is most embarrassing!’

Stooping, he lifted the girl and laid her limply over his shoulder. With his disengaged hand he dragged the dazed old lawyer to his feet.

‘You hit me!’ whimpered Ellenbury.

‘You are alive,’ said the chauffeur loftily, ‘which is proof that I did not hit you.’

‘You choked me!’

The chauffeur uttered a tut of impatience. ‘Go ahead, Bluebeard!’ he said.

Apparently one hundred and forty pounds of femininity was not too great a tax on the chauffeur’s strength, for as he walked behind the weeping little man, one hand on the scruff of his collar, he was whistling softly to himself.

Up the stone steps he walked and into the hall. The ancient maid came peeping round the corner, and almost fell down the kitchen stairs in her excitement, for something was happening at Royalton House—where nothing had happened before.

The chauffeur lowered the girl into a little armchair. Her eyes were open; she was feeling deathly ill.

‘There is nothing in the world like a cup of tea,’ suggested the chauffeur, and called in the maid, so imperiously that she never even glanced at her master. He seemed dwindled in stature. In his hand he still held the wet haft of the axe.

He was rather a pathetic little man.

‘I think you had better put that axe away,’ said the chauffeur gently.

Aileen only then became aware of his presence. He had a funny moustache, walrus-like and black, and as he spoke it waggled up and down. She wanted to laugh, but she knew that laughter was halfway to hysteria. Her eyes wandered to the axe; a cruel-looking axe—the handle was all wet and slippery. With a shiver she returned her attention to the chauffeur; he was holding forth in an oracular manner that reminded her of somebody. She discovered that he was watching her too, and this made her uneasy.

‘You’ve got to help me, young lady,’ said the man gravely.

She nodded. She was quite willing to help him, realising that she would not be alive at that moment but for him.

The chauffeur rolled his eyes round to Ellenbury.

‘O, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!’ he said reproachfully; and stripped his black moustache with a grimace of pain.

‘Thank God that’s gone!’ he said, and pulled up a chair to the fire. ‘I was once very useful to Nova—Nova has this day paid his debt and lost a client. Why don’t you take off your overcoat? It’s steaming.’

He glanced at the axe, its wet haft leaning against the fireplace and then, reaching out his hand, took it on to his knees and felt its edge.

‘Not very sharp, but horribly efficient,’ he said, and laid his hand on the shoulder of the shrinking man. ‘Ellenbury, my man, you’ve been dreaming!’ Ellenbury said nothing. ‘Nasty dreams, eh? My fault. I had you tensed up—I should have let you down months ago.’

Now Ellenbury spoke in a whisper.

‘You’re Harlow?’

‘I’m Harlow, yes.’ He scarcely gave any attention to the two suitcases; one glance, and he did not look at them again. ‘Harlow the Splendid. The Robber Baron of Park Lane. There’s a good title for you if you ever write that biography of mine!’

Mr Harlow glanced round at the girl and smiled; it was a very friendly smile.

Ellenbury offered no resistance when the big man relieved him of his wet coat and held up the dressing-gown invitingly. ‘Take off your shoes.’ The old man obeyed; he always obeyed Harlow. ‘When are you leaving?’

‘Tomorrow,’ The admission was wrung from him. He had no resistance.

‘One suitcase full of money is enough for any man,’ said Harlow. ‘I’ll take a chance—you shall have first pick.’

‘It’s yours!’ Ellenbury almost shouted the words.

‘No—anybody’s. Money belongs to the man who has it. That is my pernicious doctrine-you will go to Switzerland, get as high up the mountains as you can. St Moritz is a good place. Very likely you’re mad. I think you are. But madness cannot be cured by daily association with other madmen. It would be stupid to hide you up in an asylum—stupid and wicked. And if you will not think of killing people any more, Ellenbury. You—are—not—to—think—about—killing!’

‘No!’ The old man was weeping foolishly.

‘Our friend Ingle leaves for the Continent tomorrow—join him. If he starts talking politics, pull the alarm cord and have him arrested. I don’t know where he is going—anywhere but Russia, I guess…’

All the time he was talking, Aileen sensed his anxiety. Just then the maid brought in the tea and the big fellow relaxed.

‘Drink that hot,’ he ordered, and when the servant had gone he moved nearer to the girl and lowered his voice. ‘He doesn’t respond. You noticed that? No reflexes, I’m certain. I dare not try; he’d think I was assaulting him. It was my own fault. I kept him too tense—too keyed up. If I had let him down…umph!’ He shook his head; the thick lips pursed and drooped. Presently he spoke again. ‘I’ll have to bring you both away—you can be very helpful. If you insist upon going to Carlton and telling him about…this’—he nodded to the unconscious man by the fire—‘I shan’t stop you. This is the finish, anyway.’

‘Of what?’ she asked.

‘Harlow the Joker,’ he said. ‘Don’t you see that? Here’s a man who tried to murder you—a madman. Why? Because he thought you knew he was bolting. Here’s Harlow the magnificent masquerading like a fiction detective with a comic moustache! Why? Imagine the police asking all these questions. And Ellenbury of course would tell them quite a lot of things—some silly, some sane. The police are rather clever—not very, but rather. They’d smell—all sorts of jokes. I want a day if I can get it. Would you come to Park Lane for a day?’

‘Willingly!’ she said; and he went red.

‘That is a million-pound compliment,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to sit on the floor with a rug over you; you mustn’t be seen. As it is, if you are missed, your impetuous lover—did you speak?’

‘I didn’t,’ she said emphatically.

‘If he learns that you have disappeared, my twenty-four hours will be shortened.’

She glanced at Ellenbury. ‘What shall you do with…him?’ she asked.

‘He sits by my side; I dare not leave him here.’ He lifted up one of the suitcases and weighed it in his hand. ‘Would you like half a million?’ he asked pleasantly.

Aileen shook her head. ‘I don’t think there is much happiness in that money,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘Forgive me! I’ve got a little joke at the back of my mind—maybe I’ll tell you all about it!’

CHAPTER 24

SHE TOLD Jim all about this as he drove her back to her rooms after she had brought a policeman to release him.

‘He IS rather a darling,’ she repeated, and when he frowned she pressed his arm and laughed. ‘Somehow I don’t think you will arrest him,’ she said. ‘But if you do, hold him very tight!’

And she thought of Mr Harlow’s joke.

When, an hour later, a strong force of plain-clothes policemen descended upon 704 Park Lane, they found only Mrs Edwins, erect and intractable as ever, her hands folded over her waist.

‘Mr Harlow left for the country this morning,’ she said, and when they searched the house they discovered neither the Splendid Harlow nor the golden-bearded man called Marling.

‘Arrest me!’ she sneered. ‘It takes a clever policeman to arrest an old woman. But you’ll not take Lemuel.’

‘Lemuel?’

She realised her mistake.

‘I called him Lemuel when he was a child, and I call him Lemuel now,’ she said defiantly. ‘He’ll ruin every one of you—mark my words!’

She was still muttering threats when two detectives found her coat and hat and led her, protesting, to the police station.

Mr Harlow’s landed possessions were not limited to his pied-a-terre in Park Lane. He had a large estate in Hampshire, which he seldom visited, though he retained a considerable staff for its upkeep. It was known that he owned a luxurious flat in Brighton; and it was generally believed that somewhere in London he kept another extensive suite of apartments.

Stratford Harlow was a far-thinker. He saw not only tomorrow but the day after. For over twenty years he had lived in the knowledge that he was a reprehensible jester, and that there was always a possibility, if not a probability, that his supreme ‘joke’ would be detected.

He was at the mercy of many men, for only the mean thief may work single-handed. He had perforce to employ people who must be taken—a little—into his confidence.

But only one person knew the big truth.

His chauffeur, who knew so much, never dreamt the whole; to Ellenbury he had been a crooked market-rigger; to Ingle he had been an admirable enemy of society. To himself, what was he? That ‘joke’ idea persisted; almost the description fitted his every action. When he had locked the grille on Jim he knew that the ‘joke’ was on him. The machinery of the law had begun to move, and there was nothing to be gained by dodging from one hiding place to another. It was a case of night or nothing.

He went to the foot of the stairs and whistled; and soon Mrs Edwins came into view with the tall, bearded man.

‘Marling, I am going to take you for a little drive,’ said Stratford Harlow pleasantly. ‘You are at once a problem and a straw. You have almost broken my neck and I am grasping at you.’ He laughed gently. ‘That’s a mixed illustration, isn’t it?’

‘Where are you going?’ asked Mrs Edwins.

He fixed her with his cold eyes.

‘You are very inquisitive and very stupid,’ he said. ‘What is worse, you lack self-control, and that has nearly been my undoing. Not that I blame you.’ A gesture of his white hand absolved her from responsibility. ‘Telephone to Reiss to bring the car. Possibly he will telephone in reply that he is unable to bring the car. You may even hear the strange and authoritative voice of a policeman.’

Her jaw dropped.

‘You don’t mean?’ she asked quickly.

‘Please telephone.’

He was very patient and cheerful. He did not look at her; his eyes, lit with a glint of humour, focused upon the uncomfortable man who faced him.

‘I hope I’ve done nothing—’ began Marling.

‘Nothing at all—nothing!’ said Mr Harlow with the greatest heartiness. ‘I have told you before, and I tell you again, you have nothing to fear from me. You are a victim of circumstances, incapable of a wrong action. I would sooner die than that you suffered so much as a hurt! Injustice pains me. That variety of justice which is usually called “poetical” fills me with a deep and abiding peace of soul. Well?’ He snapped the question at the woman in the doorway.

‘What am I to do with that girl?’ she asked.

‘Leave her alone,’ said the big man testily, ‘and at the earliest opportunity restore her to her friends. Help Mr Marling on with his coat; it is a cold night. And a scarf for his throat…Good!’

He peered through the ground-glass window.

‘Reiss has brought the car. Trustworthy fellow,’ he said, and beckoned Marling to him. Together they left the house and were driven rapidly away. For nearly a quarter of an hour Mrs Edwins stood in the deserted vestibule, very upright, very forbidding, her gnarled hands folded, staring at the door through which they had passed.

The car drove through Mayfair, turned into a side street and stopped. It was a corner block, the lower floor occupied by a bank. There was a side door, which Mr Harlow opened and stood courteously aside to allow his companion to pass.

They went up a long flight of stairs to another door, which Harlow unlocked.

‘Here we are, my dear fellow,’ he said, closing the door gently. ‘This is what is called a labour-saving flat; one of the modern creations designed by expensive architects for the service of wealthy tenants who are so confoundedly mean that they weigh out their servants’ food! Here we shall live in comparative quiet for a week or two.’

‘What has happened?’ asked Marling.

The big man shrugged his shoulders.

‘I do not know—I rather imagine that I recognise the inevitable, but I am not quite sure. Your room is here, at the back of the house. Do you mind?’

Marling saw that it was a more luxurious apartment than that which he had left. Books there were in plenty. The only drawback was that the windows were covered with a thin coating of white paint which made them opaque.

‘I prepared this place for you two, nay, three years ago,’ said Harlow. ‘For a week or two, until we can make arrangements, I am afraid we shall have to do our own housework.’

He patted the other on the shoulder.

‘You’re a good fellow,’ he said. ‘There are times when I would like to change places with you. Vivit post funera virtus! I, alas! have no virtues, but a consuming desire to make wheels turn.’

He pursed his thick lips and then said, apropos of nothing: ‘She is really a very nice girl indeed!…And she has a sense of humour. How rare a quality in a woman!’

‘Of whom are you talking?’ asked the bearded man, a little bewildered.

‘The might-have-been,’ was the flippant reply. ‘Even the wicked cannot be denied their dreams. Would you call me a sentimentalist, Marling?’ Marling shook his head, and Mr Harlow laughed not unkindly. ‘You’re the most appallingly honest man I’ve ever met,’ he said, in admiration; ‘and I think you’re the only human being in the world for whom I have a genuine affection.’

His companion stared at him with wide-open eyes. And Mr Harlow met the gaze without faltering. He was speaking the truth. His one nightmare in the past twenty years was that this simple soul should fall ill; for if that catastrophe had occurred, Stratford Harlow would have risked ruin and suffering to win him back to health. Marling was the only joke in life that he took seriously.

Every morning for three years, two newspapers had been thrust under the door of Harlow’s flat and had been disposed of by the hired servant who came to keep the place in order. Every morning a large bottle of milk had been deposited on the mat and had been similarly cleared away by the servant, who would come no more, for she had received a letter dispensing with her services on the morning Harlow and his companion arrived. The letter was not signed ‘Stratford Harlow,’ but bore the name by which she knew her employer.

The first day was a dull one. Harlow had nothing to do and inactivity exasperated him. He was down early the next morning to take in milk and newspapers; and for a long time sat at his ease, a thin cigar between his teeth, a cup of cooling coffee by his side, reading of his disappearance. The ports were watched; detectives were on duty at the termini of all airways. The flying squad was scouring London. The phrase seemed familiar. The flying squad from police headquarters spend their lives scouring London, and London seems none the cleaner for it.

There was his portrait across three columns, headed ‘The Splendid Harlow,’ and only hinting at the charge which would be laid against him. He learnt, without regret or sorrow, of the arrest of Mrs Edwins—he had a lifelong grudge against Mrs Edwins, who had a lifelong grudge against him. She was wholly incapable of understanding his attitude to life. She had wondered why he did not live abroad in the most luxurious and exotic atmosphere. She would have excused a seraglio; she could not forgive his industry and continence.

She had made no statement, the newspapers said, and he suspected her of making many of a vituperative character.

There was a hint of Marling in the paragraph:

‘The police are particularly desirous of getting into touch with the man who left the Park Lane house at the same time as Harlow. He is described as tall, rather pale, with a long yellow beard. None of the servants of the house has ever seen him. It may be explained that Mr Harlow’s domestic arrangements were of an unusual character. All the servants slept out in a house which Harlow had hired…’

Mr Harlow turned over the page to see the sporting cartoon. The humour of Tom Webster never failed to amuse him. Then he turned back to the Stock Exchange news.

Markets were recovering rapidly. He made a calculation on the margin of the paper and purred at his profits.

He could feel a glow of satisfaction though he was a fugitive from justice; though all sorts of horrid possibilities were looming before him; though it seemed nothing could prevent his going the dreary way-Brixton Prison, Pentonville, Wormwood Scrubs, Dartmoor…if not worse. If not worse.

He took out his cigar and looked at it complacently. Mrs Gibbins had died a natural death, though that would take some proving. It was a most amazingly simple accident. Her muddy shoes had slipped on the polished floor of his library; and when he had picked her up she was dead. That was the truth and nothing but the truth. And Miss Mercy Harlow had died naturally; and the little green bottle that Marling had seen had contained nothing more noxious than the restorative with which the doctor had entrusted him against the heart attack from which she succumbed.

He rose and stretched himself, drank the cold coffee with a wry face, and shuffled along leisurely in his slippered feet to call Saul Marling. He knocked at the door, but there was no answer. Turning the handle, he went in. The room was empty. So, too, was the bathroom.

Mr Harlow walked along the passage to the door leading down to the street. It was open. So also was the street door. He stood for a while at the head of the stairs, his hands in his pockets, the dead cigar between his teeth. Then he descended, closed the door and, walking back to the sitting-room, threw the cigar into the fireplace, lit another and sat down to consider matters; his forehead wrinkled painfully.

Presently he gave utterance to die thought which filled his mind.

‘I do hope that poor fellow is careful how he crosses the road—he isn’t used to traffic!’

But there were policemen who would help a timid, bearded man across the busy streets, and it was rather early for heavy traffic.

That thought comforted him. He took up the newspaper and in a second was absorbed in the Welbury divorce case which occupied the greater part of the page.

CHAPTER 25

AILEEN RIVERS might well have excused herself from attending her office, but she hated the fuss which her absence would occasion; and she felt remarkably well when she woke at noon.

Mr Stebbings greeted her as though she had not been absent until lunch-time, to his great inconvenience; and one might not imagine, from his matter-of-fact attitude, that he had been badgered by telephone messages and police visitations during the twelve hours which preceded her arrival.

He made no reference to her adventure until late in the afternoon, when she brought in some letters for him to sign. He put his careful signature to each sheet and then looked up. ‘James Carlton comes of a very good family. I knew his father rather well.’

She went suddenly red at this and was for the moment so thrown off her balance that she could not ask him what James Carlton’s parentage had to do with a prosaic and involved letter on the subject of leases.

‘He was most anxious about you, naturally,’ Mr Stebbings rambled on aimlessly. ‘I was in bed when he called me up—I have never heard a man who sounded so worried. It is curious that one does not associate the police force with those human emotions which are common in us all, and I confess it was a great surprise—in a sense a gratifying surprise! I have seen him once; quite a good looking young man; and although the emoluments of his office are not great, he appeals to me as one who has the capacity of making any woman happy.’ He paused. ‘If women can be made happy,’ he added, the misogynist in him coming to the surface.

‘I really don’t know what you mean, Mr Stebbings,’ she said, very hot, a little incoherent, but not altogether distressed.

‘Will you take this letter?’ said Mr Stebbings, dismissing distracted detectives and hot-faced girls from his mind; and immediately she was plunged into the technology of an obscure trusteeship which the firm of Stebbings was engaged in contesting.

As Aileen grew calmer, the shock of the discovery grew in poignancy. A girl who finds herself to be in love experiences a queer sense of desolation and loneliness. It is an emotion which seems unshareable; and the more she thought of Jim Carlton, the more she was satisfied that the affection was one-sided; that she was wasting her time and thought on a man who did not care for her any more than he cared for every other girl he met; and that love was a disease which was best cured by fasting and self-repression.

She was in this frame of mind when there came a gentle tap at her door. She called ‘Come in!’—the handle turned and a man walked nervously into the room. A tall man, hatless, collarless, and inadequately clad. An overcoat many times too broad for him was buttoned up to the neck, and although he wore shoes he was sockless and his legs were covered by a pair of dark-blue pyjamas. He stroked his long beard nervously and looked at the girl in doubt.

‘Excuse me, madam,’ he said, ‘is this the office of Stebbings, Field and Farrow?’

She had risen in amazement. ‘Yes. Do you wish to see Mr Stebbings?’

He nodded, looked nervously round at the door and dosed it behind him.

‘If you please,’ he said.

‘What name?’ she asked.

He drew a long breath.

‘Will you tell him that Mr Stratford Harlow wishes to see him?’

Her mouth opened in amazement.

‘Stratford Harlow? Is he here?’

He nodded. ‘I am Stratford Harlow,’ he said simply.

The gentleman who for twenty-three years had borne the name of Stratford Harlow was drinking a cup of China tea when the bell rang. He finished the tea, and wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief. Again the bell shrilled. Mr Harlow rose with a smile, dusted the crumbs from his coat and, pausing in the passage to take down an overcoat and a hat from their pegs, walked down the stairs and threw open the door.

Jim Carlton was standing on the sidewalk, and with him three gentlemen who were unmistakably detectives.

‘I want you, Harlow,’ he said.

‘I thought you might,’ said Mr Harlow pleasantly. ‘Is that your car?’ He patted his pockets. ‘I think I have everything necessary to a prisoner of state. You may handcuff me if you wish, though I would prefer that you did not. I do not carry arms. I regard any man who resists arrest by the use of weapons as a cowardly barbarian! For the police have their duties—very painful duties sometimes, pleasant duties at others—I am not quite sure in which category yours will fall.’

Elk opened the car door and Mr Harlow stepped in, settled himself comfortably in the corner and asked: ‘May I smoke?’

He produced a cigar from his coat pocket and Elk held the light as the car moved towards Evory Street.

‘There is one thing I would like to ask you, Carlton,’ he said, half-turning his head towards his captor, who sat by his side. ‘I read in the newspapers that the ports and airports were being watched and all sorts of extraordinary precautions were being taken against my leaving the country. I presume that the news of my arrest will be made known immediately to these watchful gentlemen? I should hate to feel that they were tramping up and down in the cold, looking for a man who was already in custody. That would spoil my night’s sleep.’

Jim humoured his mood. ‘They will be notified,’ he said.

‘You found Marling, of course? He has suffered no injury? I am very relieved. It is difficult to conceive the confusion which must arise in the mind of a man who has been out of the world for some twenty years and returns to find the streets so crowded with death-dealing automobiles, driven usually at a pace beyond the legal limit.’

‘Yes, Mr Harlow is in good hands.’

‘Call him Marling,’ said the other. ‘And Marling he must remain until my duplicity is proved beyond any question. I will make the matter easy for you by admitting that he is Stratford Selwyn Mortimer Harlow.’

He went off at a tangent, a trick of his.

‘I should have gone away a long time ago and defied you to bring home to me any offence against the law. But I am intensely curious—if my dearest wish were realised, I would be suspended in a condition of disembodied consciousness to watch the progress of the world through the next two hundred thousand years! I would like to see what new nations arise, what new powers overspread the earth, what new continents will be pushed up from the sea and old continents submerged! Two hundred thousand years. There will be a new Rome, a new barbarian Britain, a new continent of America populated by indescribable beings! New Ptolemys and Pharaohs getting themselves embalmed; and never dreaming that their magnificent tombs shall be buried under sand and forgotten until they are dug out to be gaped at by tourists, who will pay two piastres a peep!’

He sighed, flicked the ash of his cigar onto the floor of the car. ‘Well, here I am at the end. I’ve seen it out. I know now into which compartment the little whirling ball of fate has fallen. It is extremely interesting.’

They hurried him into the charge-room and put him in the steel pen; and he beamed round the room.

In an undertone to Jim he said: ‘Can anything be done to prevent the newspapers with one accord describing what they will call the “irony” of my appearance in a police station which I presented to the nation? Almost I am tempted to present a million pounds to the journal which refrains from this obvious comment!’

He listened in silence to the charge which Elk read, interrupting only once.

‘Suspected of causing the death of Mrs Gibbins? How perfectly absurd! However, that is a matter for the lawyers to thrash out.’

With the jailer’s hand on his arm he disappeared to the cells.

‘And that’s that!’ said Jim, with a heartfelt sigh of relief.

‘Where’s the real fellow?’ asked Elk.

‘At the house in Park Lane. He’s got the whole story for us. I’ve arranged to have a police stenographer at nine o’clock tonight.’

At nine o’clock the bearded man sat in Mr Harlow’s library; and began in hesitant tones to tell his amazing story.

CHAPTER 26

‘MY NAME is Stratford Selwyn Mortimer Harlow and as a child I lived as you know with my aunt, Miss Mercy Harlow, a very rich and eccentric lady, who assumed full charge of me and quarrelled with my other aunts over the question of my care. I do not remember very distinctly the early days of my life. I have an idea, which Marling confirms, that I was a backward child—backward mentally, that is to say—and that my condition caused the greatest anxiety to Miss Mercy, who lived in terror lest I became feeble-minded and she was in some way held responsible by her sisters. This fear became an obsession with her, and I was kept out of the way whenever visitors called at the house, and practically saw nobody but Miss Mercy, her maid Mrs Edwins, and her maid’s son Lemuel, who on two occasions was, I believe, substituted for me—he being a very healthy child.

‘I know nothing about the circumstances of his birth, but it is a fact that he was never called by the name of Edwins, except by Miss Mercy, and she continued to call him this even after the time came for him to go to school and the production of his birth certificate made it necessary that he should bear the name of his father, Marling.

‘He was my only playmate; and I think that he was genuinely fond of me and that he pitied what he believed to be my weakness of intellect. Mrs Edwins’ ambition for her son was unbounded; she strived and scraped to send him to a public school, and when he got a little older (as he told me himself) she prevailed upon Miss Mercy to give her the money to send him to the university.

‘Let me say here that I owe most of my information on the subject to Marling himself—it seems strange to call him by a name which I have borne so long! At that time my mind was undoubtedly clouded. He has described me as a morose, timid boy, who spent day after day in a brooding silence, and I should say that that description was an accurate one.

‘The fear that her relatives might discover my condition of mind was a daily torment to Miss Mercy. She shut up her house and went to live at a smaller house in the country; and whenever her sisters showed the slightest inclination to visit her, she would move to a distant town. For three years I saw very little of Marling, and then one day Miss Mercy told me that she was engaging a tutor for me. I disliked the idea, but when she said it was Marling I was overjoyed. He came to Bournemouth to see us and I should not have known him, for he had grown a long golden beard, of which he was very proud. We had long talks together and he told me of some of his adventures and of the scrapes he had got into.

‘I was the only person in whom he confided, and I know the full story of Mrs Gibbins as she was called. He had met her when she was a pretty housemaid in the service of the senior proctor. The courtship followed a tumultuous course, and then one day there arrived at Oxford the girl’s mother, who threatened that unless Marling married her daughter, she would inform the senior proctor. This threat, if it were carried out meant ruin to him, the end of Miss Mercy’s patronage, the destruction of all his mother’s hopes; and it was not surprising that he took the easiest course. They were married secretly at Cheltenham and lived together in a little village just outside the city of Oxford.

‘Of course the marriage was disastrous for Marling. He did not love the girl; she hated him with all the malignity that a common and ignorant person can have for one whose education emphasised her own uncouthness. The upshot of it was that he left her. Three years later he learnt from her mother that she was dead. In point of fact that was not true. She had contracted a bigamous marriage with a man named Smith, who was eventually killed in the war. You have told me, Mr Carlton, that you found no marriage certificate in her handbag.

‘By this time, owing to circumstances which I will explain, Marling had the handling of great wealth. He was oddly generous, but the pound a week which he allowed his wife’s mother was, I suspect, in the nature of a thanksgiving for freedom. The money came regularly to her every quarter and while she suspected who the sender was, she had no proof and was content to go on enjoying her allowance. Later this was improperly diverted to her daughter, who, on the death of her mother, assumed her maiden name.

‘Marling came to be my tutor, and I honestly think that in his care—I would almost say affectionate guidance—I had improved in health, though I was far from well, when Miss Mercy had her seizure. In my crazy despair I remember I accused Marling of killing her, for I saw him pour the contents of a green bottle into a glass and force it between Miss Mercy’s pale lips. I am convinced that I did him a grave injustice, though he never ceased to remind me of that green bottle. I think it was part of his treatment to keep my illusion before my eyes until I recognised my error.

‘On the death of Miss Mercy I was so ill that I had to be locked in my room, and it was then, I think, that Mrs Edwins proposed the plan which was afterwards adopted, namely, the substitution of Marling for myself. You will be surprised and incredulous when I tell you that Marling never forgave the woman for inducing him to take that step. He told me once that she had put him into greater bondage than that in which I was held. From his point of view I think he was sincere. I was hurried away to a cottage in Berkshire; and I knew nothing of the substitution until months afterwards, when I was brought to Park Lane. It was then that he told me my name was Marling and that his was Harlow. He used to repeat this almost like a lesson, until I became used to the change.

‘I don’t think I cared very much; I had a growing interest in books and he was tireless in his efforts to interest me. He claimed, with truth, that whatever imprisonment I suffered, he saved me from imbecility. The quiet of the life, the carefree nature of it, the comfort and mental satisfaction which it gave me, was the finest treatment I could have possibly had. He made me acquainted with the pathological side of my case, read me books that explained just why I was living the very best possible life—again I say, he was sincere.

‘Gradually the cloud seemed to dissipate from my mind. I could think logically and in sequence; I could understand what I was reading. More and more the extent of the wrong he had done me became apparent. He never disguised the fact, if the truth be told. Indeed, he disguised nothing! He took me completely into his confidence. I knew every coup he engineered in every detail.

‘One night he returned to the house terribly agitated, and told me that he had heard the voice of his wife! He had been to the flat of a man called Ingle; and whilst he was there a charwoman had come in and he had recognised her voice.

‘He was engaged at that time with Ingle in manoeuvring an amazing swindle. It was none other than the impersonation of the Foreign Minister by Ingle, who was a brilliant actor. The plot was to get the Minister to Park Lane, where he would be drugged and his place taken by Ingle, who, to make himself perfect in the part, had spent a week examining films of Sir Joseph Layton. In this way he had familiarised himself with Sir Joseph’s mannerisms; and he had paid one stealthy visit to a public meeting which Sir Joseph had addressed, in order to study his voice. The plan worked. Sir Joseph went into a room with Marling, drank a glass of wine and was immediately knocked out—I think that is the expression. Ingle waited behind the door all ready made up; and Marling told me he bore a striking resemblance to the Minister. He went out from the house, drove to the House of Commons and delivered a war speech which brought the markets tumbling down.

‘But before this happened there was a tragedy at 704, Park Lane. Apparently, when Marling approached Ingle the actor-convict had been in some doubt as to whether he should go to meet him. Ingle at first suspected a trap and wrote a letter declining to meet. Afterwards he changed his mind, but left the letter on his writing desk and the charwoman, Mrs Gibbins, seeing the envelope was marked “Urgent, By Hand,” came to the conclusion that her master had gone out and forgotten the letter; and with a desire to oblige, she herself brought it to Park Lane. Marling opened the door to her and had the shock of his life, for immediately he recognised her. He invited her into the library and there she slipped on the parquet floor and fell, cutting her head again the corner of the desk. They made every effort to restore her: that I can vouch for. They even brought me down to help, but she was dead, and there arose the question of disposing of the body.

‘Marling never ceased to blame himself that he did not call in the police immediately and tell them the truth, but he was afraid to have his name mentioned in connection with a man who had recently been discharged from prison; and in the end he and Mrs Edwins took the body to Hyde Park and dropped it in the water. You tell me there were signs of a struggle, but that is not so. The footprints were Mrs Edwins’ and not the dead woman’s.

‘Marling never saw the letter which the woman brought, it must have fallen from her pocket when they were carrying her down the slope towards the canal. He told me all about it afterwards; and I know he spoke the truth.’

(Here Mr Harlow’s narrative was interrupted for two hours as he showed some signs of fatigue. It was resumed at his own request just before midnight.)

‘Marling regarded his crimes as jokes, and always referred o them as such. It is, I believe, a common expression amongst the criminal classes and one which took his fancy. The great “joke” about Sir Joseph was the plan to restore him to his friends. I think it was partly Ingle’s idea, and was as follows. Two nigger minstrel suits were procured, exactly alike, and it was arranged that Ingle, at a certain hour, should get himself locked up and conveyed to what Marling invariably called “the lifeboat”—’

‘Lifeboat?’ interrupted Jim quickly. ‘Why did he call it that?’

‘I will tell you,’ resumed Mr Harlow. ‘You will remember that he presented a police station which he had built only about fifty yards from this house; he made this presentation with only one idea in his mind: if he were arrested it was to that police station that he would be taken!

‘Sir Joseph lay under the influence of drugs in the room off the underground garage until the moment arrived, when he was stripped, his upper lip shaved and his face covered with the black make-up of a minstrel. He was then taken through the little door, which you say you have seen, along a locked passage to one of the stairways beneath the cells, and the substitution was an easy matter. Every bed in every cell lilts up, if you know the secret, like the lid of a box; beneath each bed is a flight of steps leading to the passage and to the garage—’

Jim ran into Evory Street station.

‘I want to sec Harlow quick!’ he said breathlessly.

‘He’s all right; he was asleep the last time I saw him,’ said the inspector on duty.

‘Let me see him,’ said Jim impatiently; and followed the jailer down the corridor till they stopped outside Cell No 9.

The jailor squinted through the peep-hole. Suddenly he uttered an exclamation and turned the lock. The cell was empty!

When they visited the garage, the dark blue car was gone; and though this was found later abandoned on the Harwich road, the Splendid Harlow had vanished as though the earth had opened; nor was he ever seen again, though sometimes there came news from the continent of gigantic operations engineered through Spanish banks by an unknown plutocrat.

The Splendid Harlow had cached most of his money in Spain, but though Jim visited that country, he pursued no inquiries. People on their honeymoon have very little time for criminal investigation.

‘If I had only known about that infernal police station!’ he said once, as they were loafing through the Puerta del Sol.

Aileen changed the subject at the earliest possible moment.

For she had known about the plank beds which were doors to freedom.

It was too good a joke for Harlow to keep to himself. And in telling her he ran very little risk. He was an excellent judge of human nature.

THE END