The Council of Justice, Edgar Wallace [english novels to read .txt] 📗

twitched a

little, and his restless hands were even more agitated as he replied

slowly:

 

‘If anybody can tell me exactly what the Four Just Men—what their

particular line of business is, I could reply to that.’

 

It was the old man sipping his gin in silence who spoke for the

first time.

 

‘D’ye remember Billy Marks?’ he asked.

 

His voice was harsh, as is that of a man who uses his voice at rare

intervals.

 

‘Billy Marks is dead,’ he continued, ‘deader than a door-nail. He

knew the Four Just Men; pinched the watch an’ the notebook of one an’

nearly pinched them.’

 

There was a man who sat next to Falk who had been regarding Charles

with furtive attention.

 

Now he turned to Jessen and spoke to the point. ‘Don’t get any idea

in your head that the likes of us will ever have anything to do with

the Four,’ he said. ‘Why, Mr. Long,’ he went on, ‘the Four Just Men are

as likely to come to you as to us; bein’ as you are a government

official, it’s very likely indeed.’

 

Again Jessen and Charles exchanged a swift glance, and in the eyes

of the journalist was a strange light.

 

Suppose they came to Jessen! It was not unlikely. Once before, in

pursuing their vengeance in a South American State, they had come to

such a man as Jessen. It was a thought, and one worth following.

 

Turning the possibilities over in his mind Charles stood deep in

thought as Jessen, still speaking, was helped into his overcoat by

one of the men.

 

Then as they left the hall together, passing the custodian of the

place at the foot of the stairs, the journalist turned to his

companion.

 

‘Should they come to you—?’

 

Jessen shook his head.

 

‘That is unlikely,’ he said; ‘they hardly require outside help.’

 

They walked the rest of the way in silence.

 

Charles shook hands at the door of Jessen’s house.

 

‘If by any chance they should come—’ he said.

 

Jessen laughed.

 

‘I will let you know,’ he said a little ironically.

 

Then he entered his house, and Charles heard again the snap of the

lock as the strange man closed the door behind him.

 

Within twenty-four hours the newspapers recorded the mysterious

disappearance of a Mr. J. Long, of Presley Street. Such a disappearance

would have been without interest, but for a note that was found on his

table. It ran:

 

Mr. Long being necessary for our purpose, we have taken him.

 

THE FOUR JUST MEN

 

That the affair had connection with the Four was sufficient to give

it an extraordinary news value. That the press was confounded goes

without saying. For Mr. Long was a fairly unimportant man with some

self-education and a craze for reforming the criminal classes. But the

Home Office, which knew Mr. Long as ‘Mr. Jessen’, was greatly

perturbed, and the genius of Scotland Yard was employed to discover his

whereabouts.

 

CHAPTER IV. The Red Bean

 

The Inner Council sent out an urgent call to the men who administer

the affairs of the Red Hundred.

 

Starque came, Francois, the Frenchman, came, Hollom, the Italian,

Paul Mirtisky, George Grabe, the American, and Lauder Bartholomew, the

ex-captain of Irregular Cavalry, came also. Bartholomew was the best

dressed of the men who gathered about the green table in Greek Street,

for he had held the King’s commission, which is of itself a sartorial

education. People who met him vaguely remembered his name and frowned.

They had a dim idea that there was ‘something against him’, but were

not quite sure what it was. It had to do with the South African War and

a surrender—not an ordinary surrender, but an arrangement with the

enemy on a cash basis, and the transference of stores. There was a

court martial, and a cashiering, and afterwards Bartholomew came to

England and bombarded first the War Office and then the press with a

sheaf of type-written grievances. Afterwards he went into the

theatrical line of business and appeared in music-hall sketches as

‘Captain Lauder Bartholomew—the Hero of Dopfontein’.

 

There were other chapters which made good reading, for he figured in

a divorce case, ran a society newspaper, owned a few selling platers,

and achieved the distinction of appearing in the Racing Calendar

in a paragraph which solemnly and officially forbade his presence on

Newmarket Heath.

 

That he should figure on the Inner Council of the Red Hundred is

remarkable only in so far as it demonstrates how much out of touch with

British sentiments and conditions is the average continental

politician. For Bartholomew’s secret application to be enrolled a

member of the Red Hundred had been received with acclamation and his

promotion to the Inner Council had been rapid. Was he not an English

officer—an aristocrat? A member of the most exclusive circle of

English society? Thus argued the Red Hundred, to whom a subaltern in a

scallywag corps did not differ perceptibly from a Commander of the

Household Cavalry.

 

Bartholomew lied his way to the circle, because he found, as he had

all along suspected, that there was a strong business end to terrorism.

There were grants for secret service work, and with his fertile

imagination it was not difficult to find excuses and reasons for

approaching the financial executive of the Red Hundred at frequent

intervals. He claimed intimacy with royal personages. He not only

stated as a fact that he was in their confidence, but he suggested

family ties which reflected little credit upon his progenitors.

 

The Red Hundred was a paying speculation; membership of the Inner

Council was handsomely profitable. He had drawn a bow at a venture when

under distress—literally it was a distress warrant issued at the

instance of an importunate landlord—he had indited a letter to a

revolutionary offering to act as London agent for an organization which

was then known as The Friends of the People, but which has since been

absorbed into the body corporate of the Red Hundred. It is necessary to

deal fully with the antecedents of this man because he played a part in

the events that are chronicled in the Council of Justice that had

effects further reaching than Bartholomew, the mercenary of anarchism,

could in his wildest moments have imagined.

 

He was one of the seven that gathered in the dingy drawing-room of a

Greek Street boarding-house, and it was worthy of note that five of his

fellows greeted him with a deference amounting to humility. The

exception was Starque, who, arriving late, found an admiring circle

hanging upon the words of this young man with the shifty eyes, and he

frowned his displeasure.

 

Bartholomew looked up as Starque entered and nodded carelessly.

 

Starque took his place at the head of the table, and motioned

impatiently to the others to be seated. One, whose duty it was, rose

from his chair and locked the door. The windows were shuttered, but he

inspected the fastenings; then, taking from his pocket two packs of

cards, he scattered them in a confused heap upon the table. Every man

produced a handful of money and placed it before him.

 

Starque was an ingenious man and had learnt many things in Russia.

Men who gather round a green baize-covered table with locked doors are

apt to be dealt with summarily if no adequate excuse for their presence

is evident, and it is more satisfactory to be fined a hundred roubles

for gambling than to be dragged off at a moment’s notice to an

indefinite period of labour in the mines on suspicion of being

concerned in a revolutionary plot.

 

Starque now initiated the business of the evening. If the truth be

told, there was little in the earlier proceedings that differed from

the procedure of the typical committee.

 

There were monies to be voted. Bartholomew needed supplies for a

trip to Paris, where, as the guest of an Illustrious Personage, he

hoped to secure information of vital importance to the Hundred.

 

‘This is the fourth vote in two months, comrade,’ said Starque

testily, ‘last time it was for information from your Foreign Office,

which proved to be inaccurate.’

 

Bartholomew shrugged his shoulders with an assumption of

carelessness.

 

‘If you doubt the wisdom of voting the money, let it pass,’ he said;

‘my men fly high—I am not bribing policemen or sous-officiers

of diplomacy.’

 

‘It is not a question of money,’ said Starque sullenly, ‘it is a

question of results. Money we have in plenty, but the success of our

glorious demonstration depends upon the reliability of our

information.’

 

The vote was passed, and with its passing came a grim element into

the council.

 

Starque leant forward and lowered his voice.

 

There are matters that need your immediate attention,’ he said. He

took a paper from his pocket, and smoothed it open in front of him. ‘We

have been so long inactive that the tyrants to whom the name of Red

Hundred is full of terror, have come to regard themselves as immune

from danger. Yet,’ his voice sank lower, ‘yet we are on the eve of the

greatest of our achievements, when the oppressors of the people shall

be moved at one blow! And we will strike a blow at kingship as shall be

remembered in the history of the world aye, when the victories of

Caesar and Alexander are forgotten and when the scenes of our acts are

overlaid with the dust and debris of a thousand years. But that great

day is not yet—first we must remove the lesser men that the blow may

fall surer; first the servant, then the master.’ He stabbed the list

before him with a thick forefinger.

 

‘Fritz von Hedlitz,’ he read, ‘Chancellor to the Duchy of

Hamburg-Altoona.’

 

He looked round the board and smiled.

 

‘A man of some initiative, comrades—he foiled our attempt on his

master with some cunning—do I interpret your desire when I

say—death?’

 

‘Death!’

 

It was a low murmured chorus.

 

Bartholomew, renegade and adventurer, said it mechanically. It was

nothing to him a brave gentleman should die for no other reason than

that he had served his master faithfully.

 

‘Marquis de Santo-Strato, private secretary to the Prince of the

Escorial,’ read Starque.

 

‘Death!’ Again the murmured sentence.

 

One by one, Starque read the names, stopping now and again to

emphasize some enormity of the man under review.

 

‘Here is Hendrik Houssmann,’ he said, tapping the paper, ‘of the

Berlin Secret Police: an interfering man and a dangerous one. He has

already secured the arrest and punishment of one of our comrades.’

 

‘Death,’ murmured the council mechanically.

 

The list took half an hour to dispose of.

 

‘There is another matter,’ said Starque.

 

The council moved uneasily, for that other matter was uppermost in

every mind.

 

‘By some means we have been betrayed,’ the chairman went on, and his

voice lacked that confidence which characterized his earlier speech;

‘there is an organization—an organization of reaction—which has set

itself to thwart us. That organization has discovered our identity.’ He

paused a little.

 

‘This morning I received a letter which named me president of the

Inner Council and threatened me.’ Again he hesitated.

 

‘It was signed “The Four Just Men”.’

 

His statement was received in dead silence—a silence that perplexed

him, for his compensation for the shock he had received had been the

anticipation of the sensation his announcement would make.

 

He was soon enlightened as to the cause of the silence.

 

‘I also have received a letter,’ said Francois quietly.

 

‘And I.’

 

‘And I.’

 

‘And I.’

 

Only