The Green Rust, Edgar Wallace [top fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

in his harness.

"I suppose you have everything ready?"

"My staff work is always good," he murmured, "marriage licence, parson, even the place where you will spend your solitary honeymoon after signing a few documents."

She turned toward him slowly. Against the window of the big limousine his head was faintly outlined and she imagined the smile which was on his face at that moment.

"So that is it!" she said. "I must sign a few documents saying that I married you of my own free will!"

"No, madam," he said, "the circumstances under which you marry me require no justification and that doesn't worry me in the slightest."

"What documents have I to sign?" she asked.

"You will discover in time," said he. "Here is the house, unless my eyesight has gone wrong."

The car turned from the road, seemed to plunge into a high hedge, though in reality, as the girl saw for a second as the lamps caught the stone gate-posts, it was the entrance to a drive, and presently came to a stop before a big rambling house. Van Heerden jumped down and assisted her to alight. The house was in darkness, but as they reached the door it was opened.

"Go in," said van Heerden, and pushed her ahead.

She found herself in an old-fashioned hall, the walls panelled of oak, the floor made of closely mortised stone flags. She recognized the man who had admitted them as one of those she had seen in her flat that same night. He was a cadaverous man with high cheekbones and short, bristly black hair and a tiny black moustache.

"I won't introduce you," said the doctor, "but you may call this man Gregory. It is not his name, but it is good enough."

The man smiled furtively and eyed her furtively, took up the candle and led the way to a room which opened off the hall at the farther end.

"This is the dining-room," said van Heerden. "It is chiefly interesting to you as the place where the ceremony will be performed. Your room is immediately above. I am sorry I did not engage a maid for you, but I cannot afford to observe the proprieties or consider your reputation. The fact is, I know no woman I could trust to perform that duty, and you will have to look after yourself."

He led the way upstairs, unlocked a door and passed in. There was one window which was heavily curtained. He saw her glance and nodded.

"You will find the windows barred," he said. "This was evidently the nursery and is admirably suited to my purpose. In addition, I might tell you that the house is a very old one and that it is impossible to walk about the room without the door creaking and, as I spend most of my time in the dining-room below, you will find it extremely difficult even to make preparations for escape without my being aware of the fact."

The room was comfortably furnished. A small fire was alight in the tiny grate and a table had been laid, on which were displayed sandwiches, a thermos flask and a small silver basket of confectionery.

There was a door by the big four-poster bed.

"You may consider yourself fortunate in having the only room in the house with a bath-room attached," he said. "You English people are rather particular about that kind of thing."

"And you German people aren't," she said coolly.

"German?" he laughed. "So you guessed that, did you?"

"Guessed it?"--it was her turn to laugh scornfully. "Isn't the fact self-evident? Who but a Hun----"

His face went a dull red.

"That is a word you must not use to me," he said roughly--"hang your arrogance! Huns! We, who gave the world its kultur, who lead in every department of science, art and literature!"

She stared at him in amazement.

"You are joking, of course," she said, forgetting her danger for the moment in face of this extraordinary phenomenon. "If you are a German, and I suppose you are, and an educated German at that, you don't for a moment imagine you gave the world anything. Why, the Germans have never been anything but exploiters of other men's brains."

From dull red, his face had gone white, his lip was trembling with passion and when he spoke he could scarcely control his voice.

"We were of all people ordained by God to save the world through the German spirit."

So far he got when she burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. It was so like all the caricatures of German character she had read or seen depicted. He looked at her, his face distorted with rage, and before she had realized what had happened he had raised his hand and struck her across the mouth.

She staggered back, speechless. To her had happened the most incredible thing in the world, more incredible than her abduction, more incredible than all the villainies known or suspected, in this man.

He stood there glowering at her, unrepentant, half-tempted, it seemed, to repeat the blow. He had struck a woman and was not overwhelmed by shame. All her views of men and things, all her conceptions of the codes which govern mankind in their dealings one with the other, crumbled away. If he had fallen on his knees and asked her pardon, if he had shown any contrition, any fear, any shame, she might have gone back to her old standards.

"You swine cat!" he said in German, "Herr Gott, but I will punish you if you laugh at me!"

She was staring at him in intense curiosity. Her lip was bleeding a little, the red mark of his fingers showed against her white face, but she seemed to have forgotten the pain or the shock of the actual blow and was wholly concerned in this new revelation.

"A Hun," she said, but she seemed to be speaking to herself, "of course he's a Hun. They do that sort of thing, but I never believed it before."

He took a step toward her, but she did not flinch, and he turned and walked quickly from the room, locking the door behind him.


CHAPTER XII

INTRODUCING PARSON HOMO


When Beale left Krooman Mansions with his two companions he had only the haziest idea as to where he should begin his search. Perhaps the personal interest he had in his client, an interest revealed by the momentary panic into which her disappearance had thrown this usually collected young man, clouded his better judgment.

A vague discomfort possessed him and he paused irresolutely at the corner of the street. There was a chance that she might still be concealed in the building, but a greater chance that if he followed one of the three plans which were rapidly forming in his mind he might save the girl from whatever danger threatened her.

"You are perfectly sure you heard her voice?"

"Certain," replied Beale shortly, "just as I am sure that I smelt the ether."

"She may have been using it for some other purpose. Women put these drugs to all sorts of weird purposes, like cleaning gloves, and----"

"That may be," interrupted Beale, "but I wasn't mistaken about her voice. I am not subject to illusions of that kind."

He whistled. A man who had been lurking in the shadow of a building on the opposite side of the road crossed to him.

"Fenson," said Beale, "watch these flats. If you see a car drive up just go along and stand in front of the door. Don't let anybody enter that car or carry any bundle into that car until you are sure that Miss Cresswell is not one of the party or the bundle. If necessary you can pull a gun--I know it isn't done in law-abiding London," he smiled at Superintendent McNorton, "but I guess you've got to let me do a little law-breaking."

"Go all the way," said the superintendent easily.

"That will do, Fenson. You know Miss Cresswell?"

"Sure, sir," said the man, and melted back into the shadows.

"Where are you going now?" asked Kitson.

"I am going to interview a gentleman who will probably give me a great deal of information about van Heerden's other residences."

"Has he many?" asked Kitson, in surprise.

Beale nodded.

"He has been hiring buildings and houses for the past three months," he said quietly, "and he has been so clever that I will defy you to trace one of them. All his hiring has been done through various lawyers he has employed, and they are all taken in fictitious names."

"Do you know any of them?"

"Not one," said Beale, with a baffled little laugh, "didn't I tell you he's mighty clever? I got track of two of them but they were the only two where the sale didn't go through."

"What does he want houses for?"

"We shall learn one of these days," said Beale cryptically. "I can tell you something else, gentlemen, and this is more of a suspicion than a certainty, that there is not a crank scientist who has ever gone under through drink or crime in the whole of this country, aye, and America and France, too, that isn't working for him. And now, gentlemen, if you will excuse me----"

"You don't want any assistance?" asked the superintendent.

"I guess not," said Beale, with a smile, "I guess I can manage the Herr Professor."

* * * * *

On the south side of the River Thames is a congested and thickly populated area lying between the Waterloo and the Blackfriars Roads. Here old houses, which are gauntly picturesque because of their age, stand cheek-by-jowl with great blocks of model dwellings, which make up in utility all that they lack in beauty. Such dwelling-places have a double advantage. Their rent is low and they are close to the centre of London. Few of the houses are occupied by one family, and indeed it is the exception that one family rents in its entirety so much as a floor.

In a basement room in one of those houses sat two men as unlike one another as it is possible to conceive. The room itself was strangely tidy and bare of anything but the necessary furniture. A camp bed was under the window in such a position as to give its occupant a view of the ankles of those people who trod the pavement of the little street.

A faded cretonne curtain hid an inner and probably a smaller room where the elder of the men slept. They sat on either side of a table, a kerosene lamp placed exactly in the centre supplying light for their various occupations.

The elder of the two was bent forward over a microscope, his big hands adjusting the focus screw. Presently he would break off his work of observation and jot down a few notes in crabbed German characters. His big head, his squat body, his long ungainly arms, his pale face with its little wisp of beard, would have been recognized by Oliva Cresswell, for this was Professor Heyler--"the Herr Professor," as Beale called him.

The man sitting opposite was cast in a different mould. He was tall, spare, almost aesthetic. The clean-shaven face, the well-moulded nose and chin hinted at a refinement