The Joker, Edgar Wallace [books you have to read TXT] 📗
- Author: Edgar Wallace
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evidently thrown her off her balance, and she was hardly lucid when she
explained.
‘I come here to collect my uncle’s letters,’ she said. ‘He’s abroad… his
name is Jackson,’ she said breathlessly. ‘And every Thursday I have a
woman in to clean up the fiat. I can’t afford the time; I’m working in an
office.’
They had left Elk staring at an engraving in the corridor, and it was an
opportunity to make matters a little easier, if at first a little more
uncomfortable, for her.
‘Miss Rivers, your uncle is Arthur Ingle,’ said Jim kindly, and she went
very red. ‘It is quite understandable that you shouldn’t wish to
advertise the fact, but I thought I’d tell you I knew, just to save you a
great deal of unnecessary—’ He stopped and seemed at a loss.
‘“Lying” is the word you want,’ she said frankly. ‘Yes, Arthur Ingle
lived here, but he lived here in the name of Jackson. Did you know that?’
she asked anxiously.
He nodded.
‘That’s the door.’ She pointed.
The flat was of an unusual construction. There was a very large
dining-room with a low-timbered roof and panelled walls, from which led
three doors—one to the kitchenette, the other two, she explained, to
Arthur Ingle’s bedroom and a spare apartment which he used as a lumber
room. It was the door of the lumber room which she indicated.
Jim tried the handle; the door was fast. Stooping down he peered through
the keyhole and had a glimpse of an open window through which the yellow
fog showed.
‘Are these doors usually left open?’
‘Always,’ she said emphatically. ‘Sometimes the cleaning woman comes
before I return. Tonight she is late and I’m rather early.’
‘Where does that door lead?’
‘To the kitchen.’
She went in front of him into the tiny room. It was spotlessly clean and
had one window, flush with that which he had seen through the keyhole of
the next room. He looked down into a bottomless void, but just beneath
was a narrow parapet. He swung one leg across the sill, only to find his
arm held in a frenzied grip by the girl.
‘You mustn’t go, you’ll be killed!’ she gasped and he laughed at her, not
ill pleased, for the risk was practically nil.
‘I’ve got a pretty high regard for me,’ he said, and in another instant
he had swung clear, gripped the lower sash of the second window and had
pulled himself into the room.
He could see nothing except the dim outlines of three trunks stacked one
on top of the other. He switched on the light and turned to survey the
confusion. Old boxes and trunks which, he guessed, had been piled in some
order, were dragged into the centre of the room to allow the free
operation of the vanished burglar. Recessed into the wall, thus cleared,
was a safe the door of which was open. On the floor beneath was a rough
circle of metal burnt from the door—it was still hot when he touched
it—by the small blowlamp that the burglar had left behind him.
He unlocked the door of the room and admitted Elk and the girl.
‘That’s good work,’ said Elk, whose detached admiration for the genius of
law-breakers was at least sincere. ‘Safe’s empty! Not so much as a
cigarette card left behind. Good work! Toby Haggitt or Lew
Yakobi—they’re the only two men in London that could have done it.’
The girl was gazing wide-eyed at the ‘good work’. She was very pale, Jim
noticed, and misread the cause.
‘What was in the safe?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘I don’t know—I didn’t even know that there was a safe in the room. He
will be terrible about this!’
Carlton knew the ‘he’ was the absent Ingle. ‘He won’t know for some time,
anyway—’ he began, but she broke in upon his reassurance.
‘Next week,’ she said; ‘he is being released on Wednesday.’
Elk scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Somebody knew that,’ he said; ‘he
hadn’t a partner either.’
Arthur Ingle was indeed a solitary worker. His frauds had been
unsuspected even by such friends as he had in his acting days—for they
had covered a period of twelve years before his arrest and conviction. To
the members of his company he was known as a bad paymaster and an
unscrupulous manager; none imagined that this clever player of character
parts was ‘Lobber & Syne, Manufacturing Jewellers, of Clerkenwell,’ and
other aliases that produced him such golden harvests.
‘It was no fault of yours,’ said Jim Carlton; and she submitted to a
gentle pat on the shoulder. ‘There’s no sense in worrying about it.’
Elk was examining the blowlamp under the electric light.
‘Bet it’s Toby,’ he said, and walked to the window.
‘That’s his graft. He’d make a cat burglar look like a wool-eatin’
kitten! Parapets are like the Great West Road to Toby—he’d stop to
manicure his nails on three inches of rotten sandstone.’
The identity of the burglar worried Jim less than it did the girl. He had
the brain of a lightning calculator. A hundred aspects of the crime, a
hundred possibilities and explanations flickered through his mind and
none completely satisfied him. Unless—
The Splendid Harlow was on the way to becoming an obsession. There was no
immense sum of money to be made from discovering the secrets of a
convicted swindler.
That there was money in the safe he did not for one moment believe. Ingle
was not the type of criminal which hid its wealth in safes. He credited
him with a dozen banking accounts in fictitious names, and each holding
money on deposit.
They went back into the panelled dining-room. The apartment interested
Jim, for here was every evidence of luxury and refinement. The flat must
have cost thousands of pounds to furnish. And then he remembered that
Arthur Ingle had been convicted on three charges. Evidence in a number of
others, which must have produced enormous profits, was either missing or
of too shaky a character to produce. This apartment represented coups
more successful than those for which Arthur Ingle had been convicted.
‘Do you know your uncle very well?’
She shook her head.
‘I knew him better many years ago,’ she said, ‘when he was an actor,
before he—well, before he got rich! I am his only living relation.’ She
raised her head, listening.
Somebody had knocked at the outer door.
‘It may be the charwoman,’ she said, and went along the passage to open
the door.
A man was standing on the mat outside, tall, commanding, magnificent in
his well-cut evening clothes. His snowy linen blazed and twinkled with
diamonds; the buttons on his white waistcoat were aglitter.
It was part of the primitive in the man, so that she saw nothing vulgar
in the display. But something within her shrank under his pale gaze. She
had a strange and inexplicable sensation of being in the presence of a
power beyond earthly control. She was crushed by the sense of his immense
superiority. So she might have felt had she found herself confronted by a
tiger.
‘My name is Harlow—we met on Dartmoor,’ he said, and showed a line of
even teeth in a smile. ‘May I come in?’
She could not speak in her astonishment, but somebody answered for her.
‘Come in, Harlow,’ drawled Jim Carlton’s voice. ‘I’d love to have your
first impression of Dartmoor; is it really as snappy as people think?’
MR. HARLOW’S attitude towards this impertinent man struck the girl as
remarkable. It was mild, almost benevolent; he seemed to regard James
Carlton as a good joke. And he was the great Harlow! She had learnt that
at Princetown.
You could not work in the City without hearing of Harlow, his coups and
successes. Important bankers spoke of him with bated breath. His money
was too liquid for safety: it flowed here and there in floods that were
more often than not destructive. Sometimes it would disappear into
subterranean caverns, only to gush forth in greater and more devastating
volume to cut new channels through old cultivations and presently to
recede, leaving havoc and ruin behind.
And of course she had heard of the police station. When Mr Harlow
interested himself in the public weal he did so thoroughly and
unconventionally. His letters to the press on the subject of penology
were the best of their kind that have appeared in print. He pestered
Ministers and commissioners with his plans for a model police station,
and when his enthusiasm was rebuffed he did what no philanthropist,
however public-minded, has ever done before.
He bought a freehold plot in Evory Street (which is not a stone’s throw
from Park Lane), built his model police headquarters at the cost of two
hundred thousand pounds, and presented the building to the police
commissioners. It was a model police office in every respect. The men’s
quarters above the station were the finest of their kind in the world.
Even the cells had the quality of comfort, though they contained the
regulation plank bed. This gift was a nine days’ wonder. Topical revues
had their jokes about it; the cartoonists flung their gibes at the
Government upon the happening.
The City had ceased to think of him as eccentric, they called him ‘sharp’
and contrasted him unfavourably with his father. They were a little
afraid of him. His money was too fluid for stability.
He nodded smilingly at Jim Carlton, fixed the unhappy Elk with a glance,
and then: ‘I did not know that you and my friend Carlton were
acquainted.’ And then, in a changed tone: ‘I hope I am not de trop.’
His voice, his attitude said as plainly as words could express: ‘I
presume this is a police visitation due to the notorious character of
your uncle?’ The girl thought this. Jim knew it.
‘There has been a burglary here and Miss Rivers called us in,’ he said.
Harlow murmured his regrets and sympathy. ‘I congratulate you upon having
secured the shrewdest officer in the police force.’ He addressed the girl
blandly.
‘And I congratulate the police force’—he looked at Jim—‘upon detaching
you from the Foreign Office—you were wasted there, Mr Carlton, if I may
be so impertinent as to express an opinion.’
‘I am still in the Foreign Office,’ said Jim. ‘This is spare-time work.
Even policemen are entitled to their amusements. And how did you like
Dartmoor?’
The Splendid Harlow smiled sadly. ‘Very impressive, very tragic,’ he
said. ‘I am referring of course to Princetown, where I spent a couple of
nights.’
Aileen was waiting to hear the reason for the call; even though her
distress and foreboding she was curious to learn what whim had brought
this super-magnate to the home of a convict.
He looked slowly from her to the men and again Jim interpreted his
wishes; he glanced at Elk and walked with him into the lumber room.
‘It occurred to me,’ said Mr Harlow, ‘that I might be in a position to
afford you some little help. My name may not be wholly unknown to you; I
am Mr Stratford Harlow.’
She nodded.
‘I knew that,’ she said.
‘They told you at the Duchy, did they?’ It seemed that he was relieved
that she had identified him.
‘Mine is rather a delicate errand, but it struck me—I have found myself
thinking about you many times since we met—that possibly… I might
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