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

a nickname which was for the use of a privileged few, distressed him.

"And," said the swaying man by the door, peering through the half-darkness: "Is it not Detective-Sergeant Peterson and Constable Fairbank? Welcome to this home of virtue."

The detective-sergeant smiled but said nothing. The doctor fingered his beard indecisively, but Mr. White essayed to stride past, his chin in the air, ignoring the greeting, but Mr. Beale was too quick for him. He lurched forward, caught the lapels of the other's immaculate frock-coat and held himself erect thereby.

"My dear old Whitey," he said.

"I don't know you, sir," cried Mr. White, "will you please unhand me?"

"Don't know me, Whitey? Why you astonishing old thing!"

He slipped his arm over the other's shoulder in an attitude of affectionate regard. "Don't know old Beale?"

"I never met you before," said Mr. White, struggling to escape.

"Bless my life and soul," said Mr. Beale, stepping back, shocked and hurt, "I call you to witnesh, Detective-Sergeant Peterson and amiable Constable Fairbank and learned Dr. van Heerden, that he has denied me. And it has come to this," he said bitterly, and leaning his head against the door-post he howled like a dog.

"I say, stop your fooling, Beale," said the doctor angrily, "there's been very serious business here, and I should thank you not to interfere."

Mr. Beale wiped imaginary tears from his eyes, grasped Mr. White's unwilling hand and shook it vigorously, staggered back to his flat and slammed the door behind him.

"Do you know that man?" asked the doctor, turning to the detective.

"I seem to remember his face," said the sergeant. "Come on, Fred. Good morning, gentlemen."

They waited till the officers were downstairs and out of sight, and then the doctor turned to the other and in a different tone from any he had employed, said:

"Come into my room for a moment, White," and Mr. White followed him obediently.

They shut the door and passed into the study, with its rows of heavily bound books, its long table covered with test-tubes and the paraphernalia of medical research.

"Well," said White, dropping into a chair, "what happened?"

"That is what I want to know," said the doctor.

He took a cigarette from a box on the table and lit it and the two men looked at one another without speaking.

"Do you think she had the letters and hid them?"

"Impossible," replied the doctor briefly.

White grunted, took a cigar from a long leather case, bit off the end savagely and reached out his hand for a match.

"'The best-laid schemes of mice and men!'" he quoted.

"Oh, shut up," said the doctor savagely.

He was pacing the study with long strides. He stopped at one end of the room staring moodily through the window, his hands thrust in his pockets.

"I wonder what happened," he said again. "Well, that can wait. Now just tell me exactly how matters stand in regard to you and Punsonby's."

"I have all the figures here," said Mr. White, as he thrust his hand into the inside pocket of his frock-coat, "I can raise L40,000 by debentures and--hello, what's this?"

He drew from his pocket a white packet, fastened about by a rubber band. This he slipped off and gasped, for in his hands were three registered letters, and they were addressed to Messrs. Punsonby, and each had been slit open.


CHAPTER V

THE MAN WITH THE BIG HEAD


No. 342, Lothbury, is a block of business offices somewhat unpretentious in their approach but of surprising depth and importance when explored. Oliva Cresswell stood for awhile in the great lobby, inspecting the names of the occupants, which were inscribed on porcelain slips in two big frames on each wall of the vestibule.

After a lengthy search she discovered the name of the Beale Agency under the heading "fourth floor" and made her way to the elevator.

Mr. Beale's office was at the end of a seemingly interminable corridor and consisted, as she was to find, of an outer and an inner chamber. The outer was simply furnished with a table, two chairs and a railed fence bisected with a little wooden gateway.

A boy sat at one table, engaged in laborious exercise on a typewriter with one finger of one hand.

He jumped up as she came through the door.

"Miss Cresswell?" he asked. "Mr. Beale will see you."

He opened the wicket-gate and led the way to a door marked "Private."

It was Beale who opened the door in response to the knock.

"Come in, Miss Cresswell," he said cheerily, "I didn't expect you for half an hour."

"I thought I'd start well," she smiled.

She had had many misgivings that morning, and had spent a restless night debating the wisdom of engaging herself to an employer whose known weakness had made his name a by-word. But a promise was a promise and, after all, she told herself, her promise was fulfilled when she had given the new work a trial.

"Here is your desk," he said, indicating a large office table in the centre of the room, "and here is my little library. You will note that it mainly consists of agricultural returns and reports--do you read French?" She nodded. "Good, and Spanish--that's rather too much to expect, isn't it?"

"I speak and read Spanish very well," she said. "When I was a little girl I lived around in Paris, Lyons, and Barcelona--my first regular work--the first I was paid for--was in the Anglo-Spanish Cable office in Barcelona."

"That's lucky," he said, apparently relieved, "though I could have taught you the few words that it is necessary you should know to understand the Argentine reports. What I particularly want you to discover--and you will find two or three hundred local guide-books on that shelf at the far end of the room, and these will help you a great deal--is the exact locations of all the big wheat-growing districts, the number of hectares under cultivation in normal times, the method by which the wheat areas are divided--by fences, roads, etc.--the average size of the unbroken blocks of wheatland and, if possible, the width of the roads or paths which divide them."

"Gracious!" she cried in dismay.

"It sounds a monumental business, but I think you will find it simple. The Agricultural Department of the United States Government, for instance, tabulate all those facts. For example, they compel farmers in certain districts to keep a clear space between each lot so that in case of the crops being fired, the fire may be isolated. Canada, the Argentine and Australia have other methods."

She had seated herself at the desk and was jotting down a note of her duties.

"Anything more?" she asked.

"Yes--I want the names of the towns in the centre of the wheat-growing areas, a list of the hotels in those towns. The guide-books you will find up to date, and these will inform you on this subject. Particularly do I want hotels noted where automobiles can be hired, the address of the local bank and the name of the manager and, where the information is available, the name of the chief constable, sheriff or chef d'gendarmerie in each district."

She looked up at him, her pencil poised.

"Are you serious--of course, I'll do all this, but somehow it reminds me of a story I once read----"

"I know it," said Beale promptly, "it is 'The Case of the Red-Haired Man,' one of Doyle's stories about a man who, to keep him away from his shop, was employed on the useless task of copying the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_--no, I am asking you to do serious work, Miss Cresswell--work which I do not want spoken about."

He sat on the edge of the table, looking down at her, and if his eyes were smiling it was because that was their natural expression. She had never seen them when they did not hold the ghost of some joke inwardly enjoyed.

But her instinct told her that he was very much in earnest and that the task he had set her was one which had reason behind it.

"Take the districts first and work up the hotels, et cetera," he suggested, "you will find it more interesting than a novel. Those little books," he pointed to the crowded shelf by the window, "will carry you to stations and ranches and farms all over the world. You shall be wafted through Manitoba, and cross the United States from New England to California. You will know Sydney and Melbourne and the great cornland at the back of beyond. And you'll sit in cool patios and sip iced drinks with Senor Don Perfecto de Cuba who has ridden in from his rancio to inquire the price of May wheat, or maybe you'll just amble through India on an elephant, sleeping in bungalows, listening to the howling of tigers, mosquitoes----"

"Now I know you're laughing at me," she smiled.

"Not altogether," he said quietly; then: "Is there any question you'd like to ask me? By the way, the key of the office is in the right-hand drawer; go to lunch when you like and stay away as long as you like. Your cheque will be paid you every Friday morning."

"But where----?" She looked round the room. "Where do you work?"

"I don't work," he said promptly, "you do the work and I get the honour and glory. When I come in I will sit on the edge of your desk, which is not graceful but it is very comfortable. There is one question I meant to ask you. You said you were in a cable office--do you add to your accomplishments a working knowledge of the Morse Code?"

She nodded.

"I can see you being useful. If you need me"--he jerked his head toward a telephone on a small table--"call 8761 Gerrard."

"And where is that?" she asked.

"If I thought you were anything but a very sane young lady, I should tell you that it is the number of my favourite bar," he said gravely. "I will not, however, practise that harmless deception upon you."

Again she saw the dancing light of mischief in his eyes.

"You're a queer man," she said, "and I will not make myself ridiculous by speaking to you for your good."

She heard his soft laughter as the door closed behind him and, gathering an armful of the guide-books, she settled down for a morning's work which proved even more fascinating than his fanciful pictures had suggested. She found herself wondering to what use all this information she extracted could be put. Was Mr. Beale really a buyer or was he interested in the sale of agricultural machinery? Why should he want to know that Jonas Scobbs was the proprietor of Scobbs' Hotel and General Emporium in the town of Red Horse Valley, Alberta, and what significance attached to the fact that he had an automobile for hire or that he ran a coach every Wednesday to Regina?

Then she fell to speculating upon the identity and appearance of this man who bore this weird name of Scobbs. She pictured him an elderly man with chin whiskers who wore his pants thrust into top-boots. And why was Red Horse Valley so called? These unexpected and, to her, hitherto unknown names of places and people set in train most interesting processions of thought that slid through the noisy jangle of traffic, and coloured the drab walls of all that was visible