The Joker, Edgar Wallace [books you have to read TXT] 📗

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.