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

him look a fool.

 

He read the letter carefully, and then dropped it in the fire and watched

it turn black.

 

‘A useful man, but a thought too anxious. It was a mistake perhaps to

keep him so taut. He must be let down,’ Mr Harlow decided. A little of

his own confidence must be infused into his helper. Too great a desire to

please, too present a fear of failure: those were Ellenbury’s weaknesses.

 

He pressed an ivory bell on his desk, sat down, reached to the wall, slid

back a panel and took out a small black bottle, a siphon and a glass. He

poured out barely more whisky than was enough to cover the bottom of the

tumbler, and filled it to the top with soda-water. The glass was

half-empty when Mrs Edwins, his housekeeper, came in without knocking. A

tall, yellow-faced woman, with burning black eyes, she showed nothing of

the slowness or decrepitude that might have been expected in a woman near

seventy.

 

‘You rang?’

 

Miss Mercy’s maid of other days had a voice as sharp and clear as a bugle

note. She stood before the desk, her hands behind her, her eyes fixed on

his.

 

‘Yes,’ he said, turning over his letters once more. ‘Is everything all

right?’

 

‘Everything.’

 

Like a bugle note and with some of a bugle’s stridency.

 

‘Couldn’t we keep a servant in the house?’ she asked. ‘The hours are a

little too long for me. I didn’t get to bed until one o’clock yesterday,

and I had to be up at seven to let them in.’

 

It was a curious fact that no servants slept at No. 704, Park Lane. There

was not a house of its size, or an establishment of such pretensions, in

all the country where every servant slept out. Mr Harlow’s excuse to his

friends was that the room space was too valuable for servants, but he

denied this by hiring an expensive house in Charles Street for their

accommodation.

 

‘No, I don’t think it is necessary,’ he said, pursing his lips. ‘I

thought you understood that.’

 

‘I might die, or be taken ill in the night,’ said Mrs Edwins

dispassionately, ‘and then where would you be?’

 

He smiled. ‘It would be rather a case of where would you be, I think.’ he

said in excellent humour. ‘Nothing has happened?’

 

She considered her answer before she replied. ‘Somebody called, that was

all,’ she said, ‘but I’ll tell you about that afterwards.’

 

He was amused. ‘A good many people call. Very well—be mysterious!’

 

He got up from his chair and walked out of the room, and she followed.

There was a tiny elevator in the hall, big enough for two, but she

declined this conveyance.

 

‘I’ll walk,’ she said, and he laughed softly.

 

‘You were complaining about feeling tired just now,’ he retorted as he

closed the grille before the little lift.

 

He pressed the top button, the elevator moved swiftly and noiselessly

upwards and came at last to a stop on the third floor, where he stepped

out to a square-carpeted landing from which led two doors. Here he

waited, humming softly to himself, until the woman came in sight round

the bend of the stairs.

 

‘You’re an athlete,’ he said pleasantly and, jerking out a pocket-chain,

selected a small key and opened the door on the left.

 

It was a big and artistically furnished apartment, lit from the cornice

by concealed light and from the floor by two red-shaded lamps. In one

corner of the room was an ornate wooden bed of red lacquer decorated with

Chinese paintings in gold. At a small Empire desk near one of the

windows, which were heavily curtained, sat a man. He was almost as tall

as Stratford Harlow; and the features which would have arrested the

attention of a stranger were his big, dome-shaped forehead and the long

golden-yellow beard which, in spite of his age—and he must have been as

old as Harlow himself—was untinged with grey.

 

He was reading, one thin hand on his cheek, his eyes fixed upon the book

that lay or the desk, and not until Mr Harlow spoke did he look up.

 

‘Hallo, Marling!’ said Stratford Harlow gently.

 

The man leaned back in his chair, closed the book, mechanically marking

his place with a thin tortoise-shell paper-knife.

 

‘Good evening,’ he said simply.

 

‘Time you had your walk, isn’t it?’

 

There was a second door in the room and towards this Mr Harlow glanced.

 

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ said the man, and rose.

 

He wore a short dressing-jacket of dark blue velvet; his feet were

encased in red morocco slippers. His glance strayed back to the closed

book as though he were reluctant to have his reading interrupted.

 

‘The Odes of Horace,’ he said; ‘an English translation, but full of

errors.’

 

‘Yes, yes,’ smiled Mr Harlow. ‘It’s rather late for Horace.’

 

The woman was standing by the door, stiffly erect, her hands folded in

front of her, her dark eyes on her master.

 

‘Do you know who you are, my friend?’ he asked.

 

The bearded man put his white hand to his forehead.

 

‘I am Saul Marling, a graduate of Balliol,’ he said.

 

Mr Harlow nodded.

 

‘And—anything eke?’ he asked.

 

Again the hand went up to the dome-shaped forehead.

 

‘I forget… how absurd! It was something I saw, wasn’t it?’ he asked

anxiously.

 

‘Something you saw,’ agreed Mr Harlow, ‘just before Miss Mercy died.’

 

The other heaved a sigh.

 

‘She died very suddenly. She was very kind to me in all my little

troubles. Awfully suddenly! She used to sit on the chair talking to you,

and then one night after dinner she fell down.’

 

‘On the floor,’ nodded Mr Harlow, almost cheerfully. ‘But you saw

something, didn’t you?’ he encouraged. ‘A little bottle and some blue

stuff. Wake up, Marling! You remember the little bottle and the blue

stuff?’

 

The man shook his head.

 

‘Not clearly… that was before you and Mrs Edwins took me away. I drank

the white powders—they fizzed like a seidlitz powder—and then… ‘

 

‘To the country,’ smiled Harlow. ‘You were ill, my poor old fellow, and

we had to prescribe something to quieten you. You’re all right?’

 

‘My head is a little confused—’ began the man, but Harlow laughed,

caught him almost affectionately by the arm and, opening the narrow door,

led his companion up a flight of steep stairs. At the top of this was

another door, which Mr Harlow unlocked. They were on the roof of

Greenhart House, a wide, flat expanse of asphalt confined within a

breast-high parapet. For half an hour they walked up and down arm-in-arm,

the bigger man talking all the time. The fog was thick, the street lamps

showed themselves below as patches of dull yellow luminosity.

 

‘Cold? I told you to put on your scarf, you stupid chap!’ Mr Harlow was

good-humoured even in his annoyance.

 

‘Conic along, we’ll go down.’

 

In the room below he fastened the door and gazed approvingly round the

comfortable apartment. He took up one of the eight volumes that lay on a

table. They still wore the publishers’ wrappers and had arrived that day.

 

‘Reading maketh a full man—you will find the Augustan histories a little

heavy even for a graduate of Oxford, eh? Good night. Marling—sleep

well.’

 

He locked the door and went out on to the landing with Mrs Edwins. Her

hard eyes were fixed on his face, and until he spoke she was silent.

 

‘He’s quite all right,’ he said.

 

‘Is he?’ Her harsh voice was disagreeable. ‘How can he be all right if

he’s reading and writing?’

 

‘Writing?’ he asked quickly. ‘What?’

 

‘Oh, just stuff about the Romans, but it reads sensible.’

 

Mr Harlow considered this frowningly. ‘That means nothing. He gives no

trouble.’

 

‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘I get worried,’ she went on, ‘but he’s quiet.

Who is Mr Carlton?’

 

Harlow drew a quick breath. ‘Has he been here?’

 

She nodded. ‘Yes—this afternoon. He asked me if I was Miss Mercy’s old

maid—she must have died soon after he was born.’

 

‘He’s older than that—well?’

 

‘I thought it was queer, but he said he’d been asked to trace Mr Saul

Marling.’

 

‘By whom?’

 

She confessed her ignorance with a look. ‘I don’t know; but it was a

proper inquiry. He showed me the papers. They were from Eastbourne. I

told him Marling was dead. “Where?” he said. “In South America,” I told

him.’

 

‘Pernambuco,’ emphasised Mr Harlow, ‘in the plague epidemic. Humph!

Clever… and unscrupulous. Thank you.’

 

She watched him pass into the elevator and drop out of sight, then she

went into the second room that opened from the landing. This too, was

pleasantly furnished. Turning on the lights she sat down and opened a big

chintz bag.

 

From this she took an unfinished stocking and adjusted her knitting

needles. And as her nimble fingers moved, so did her lips.

 

‘Pernambuco-in the plague epidemic,’ she was saying.