The Crime Club

by Frank Froest

  Horand ventured no further comment. By the time they had reached the infirmary and stood by Rufe’s bed he had become bluffly genial. He had his private opinion that they were on a wild-goose chase, but that would not prevent him from loyally carrying out any steps that Almack might initiate.

  ‘How do, Rufe? You remember me? My name’s Horand. Heard you’d been banging yourself about and thought I’d give you a look in. Friend of mine—Mr Almack.’ He seated himself with the familiarity of an old friend on the bed.

  The crook glared at him resentfully. ‘You ain’t troubling about my health,’ he said suspiciously. ‘I’m about sick of you blokes pushing your noses into my private affairs.’ He ostentatiously turned his back, and tried an ineffective snore.

  ‘Slip along to High Cliff Mansions and see whether you can pick up anything there,’ whispered Almack. ‘Now Devlin,’—his voice was tinged with incisive authority—‘listen to me.’

  ‘Oh, blazes,’ said Rufe wearily, and turned over again. ‘You rozzers don’t give anyone a chanst.’ Ever since a couple of constables had picked him up and brought him on an ambulance to the infirmary he had been parrying questions and wondering why his assailant of the flat had not handed him over straight away to the police.

  ‘How did you manage to get that?’ Almack jerked his head to the bandage that encircled the crook’s head.

  ‘Blind to the world,’ ejaculated Rufe crisply. ‘Must have tumbled over something and smashed myself on the pavement. You know how it is, guv’nor, when—’ He broke off as he encountered Almack’s disbelieving smile.

  ‘So you said when you were picked up. Do you know what the doctor here says? He says you couldn’t have done that by a fall. Somebody hit you—eh?’

  Rufe expressed the opinion that the doctor was a condemned fool.

  ‘Now see here, Mr Devlin’—Almack’s tones were honeyed—‘I want to know what really did happen. Perhaps I can help you to get one back on the man that sacked you.’

  ‘I reckon not,’ said Rufe doggedly. ‘There ain’t no man.’

  Since by some miracle his exploit in the small hours had not been brought to the notice of the police, he considered that he would be a fool to disclose it himself. And Almack began to feel that there was something solid behind his ‘hunch.’ The crook would not be so clumsily secretive if his injuries had not come about while he was engaged in some illegal business. He idly watched Rufe’s face as he sprung his next question.

  ‘Then it wasn’t Goat O’Brien?’

  Rufe sat sharply up in bed, his green eyes glittering with interest. He knew of the Goat, naturally, and an explanation of the recent events in which he had been concerned hit him like a blow with the detective’s casual question. It restored something of his self-esteem to realise that he had been worsted by a master of the profession although he remained none the less bitter against the other. But the police were dangerous men to confide in, and he slipped back into a recumbent position and shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen the Goat.’

  But Almack was satisfied so far. An unqualified assent could not have carried greater conviction. He leaned sideways towards Rufe and, though he was smiling, his voice had an indefinable menace.

  ‘Listen here, Rufe,’—he judged the time was right to drop the Mister Devlin,—‘you’ve got a rotten record, haven’t you? Our people pick you up at three this morning in a street of residential flats. That looks bad, you know.’ He shook his head solemnly.

  He was within the letter but outside the spirit of the law. It is absolutely illegal to intimidate a man into incriminating himself. But for his eagerness to run the Goat down he would never have hinted—as he had done—at the possibility of arresting Rufe as a suspected person. The shot told.

  ‘You wouldn’t do that, guv’nor!’ exclaimed Rufe in alarm, shifting himself to allow for a better view of the stern, clean-cut face. ‘You wouldn’t do that?’

  ‘I’m not saying what I shall do,’ said Almack with careful vagueness.

  Rufe hesitated a second. Either of the two alternatives by which he was confronted seemed to lead directly to the dock—but if he spoke the police would probably deal with him gently. He took the plunge. Aided by a shrewd question now and again the whole story came out. He held his clenched fist out of bed as he finished, and shook it vindictively … ‘And if it was Goat O’Brien, as you say, guv’nor, strike me …’

  ‘Just so,’ said Almack. ‘You say it was a malacca cane he used. You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Dead sure,’ said Rufe. ‘Didn’t I hold him up for Lord knows how long. It was a light yellow malacca cane.’

  For a staid divisional detective-inspector Almack felt uncommonly youthful as he passed out of the grimy courtyard of the infirmary. He felt like doing a step-dance on the pavement.

  ‘Luck—incredible luck,’ he murmured joyfully. ‘I can’t be wrong—I simply can’t be wrong.’

  And then the burly figure of Horand came in sight. The sergeant accosted his chief with an ‘I knew it’ air.

  ‘Nothing doing yonder,’ he reported. ‘No one knows anything about this business. The Goat leaves for Paris by the two-twenty.’

  ‘Horand,’ said Almack expansively, ‘I’m going to buy you a drink. By the Lord High Muck-a-Muck I’d make you drunk if I didn’t want you on duty. Then you go and keep your eye on O’Brien until I send a relief. See?’

  Horand paused in the act of lighting his pipe and shot a quick inquiring glance at his chief.

  ‘I see,’ he muttered slowly. ‘Do you mean to say you’ve actually got a tip from that yob?’

  ‘Do you think,’ said Almack, ‘that a little snipe like the Goat could lay a man like Big Rufe out with a malacca cane?’

  The lighted match burnt the sergeant’s fingers. He dropped it hastily and wrinkled perplexed brows. ‘What’s the point?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing. I’d just got an idea, that’s all. Come and have that drink. I don’t want to leave the Goat alone too long.’

  After he left Horand, Almack swung cheerfully back to his division. He was young enough to feel tempted to ring up Scotland Yard and expound his idea, but he resisted the temptation. He had very little that was tangible to go on, and there was always the possibility that he was wrong. He decided to wait.

  He pulled down a much-thumbed copy of Whitaker’s Almanack from a shelf, propped it open at a certain page, and with the aid of a pad of paper became absorbed in a series of calculations.

  Presently he lay back in the chair and surveyed the result of his labours discontentedly. ‘That would take months,’ he grumbled, ‘months and months and months. I’m dashed if I can see where I’m wrong.’ He stood up and strode up and down the narrow office, hands thrust deep in his trousers pockets. ‘I’ll see it through,’ he said resolutely. And then a new train of thought occurred to him. He literally jumped to the telephone, and his fingers played an impatient tattoo while he waited for a reply.

  He was satisfied, when at quarter-to-two that afternoon he arrived at Charing Cross Station, that every precaution had been taken. He felt a premonition of success, and he chuckled grimly to himself as he loitered near the bookstall in a position which commanded an unostentatious view of the barrier for the Continental train. Somewhere among the throng which congregated the station were three men he knew he could rely on. It only remained for the Goat to walk into the trap.

  O’Brien was punctual. As a business man he knew the virtue of always being in time. He and George descended from a cab outside the station just five seconds before another cab that carried Horand and a colleague.

  ‘We’re barking up the wrong tree,’ proclaimed the sergeant to his companion. ‘We’ll not get the Goat this trip. The gov’nor’s got some wild idea in his head, but I bet you it don’t come off. They haven’t got the goods on ’em, anyway. All their luggage is those two kit-bags—come on.’

  He strolled off in the wake of the other pair as they moved towards the barrier. Then he saw Almack st
ep out smilingly and greet the old man.

  ‘Why, Goat, you’re never leaving London. Who’d have expected to see you here?’

  ‘Hello, Mr Almack. This is good of you. You’ve come to see me off, haven’t you? There’s a couple of your men been tracking us here in a taxi. We’ve been quite a procession.’

  Almack laughed. ‘You’re not losing your eye-sight, Goat. Let’s go along and have a stirrup-cup. You too, George,’—they were becoming the centre of a little group of uninterested men,—‘we’ll just take a peep inside those bags of yours, if you don’t mind.’

  The Goat smiled his humble smile. ‘Why, sure.’ he ejaculated. ‘You’re an active young man, Mr Almack. You ought to get on. Fancy springing this on us.’

  ‘I’ve had a waiting-room kept empty,’ said Almack, hooking his arm into O’Brien’s, while someone performed a like kindly office for George. ‘We won’t be long.’

  ‘I hope not,’ said the Goat easily. ‘I don’t want to miss that boat train.’ He took the holdup quite as a matter of course.

  In the waiting-room he surrendered his keys docilely, and waited while Almack rummaged the bags perfunctorily. The inspector relocked them and made a half-bow as he handed the keys back.

  ‘Just one minute,’ he exclaimed, and made a snatch at the thick malacca stick the Goat was carrying. Even the alert O’Brien was taken unawares and for the moment his nonchalance deserted him. He made a wild spring at the inspector, but big Horand caught him in mid-air and swung him back.

  ‘No wonder poor Rufe was knocked out,’ said Almack, balancing the stick in his hand. ‘It’s as heavy as a bar of lead.’ He swung the stick by the ferrule twice against the solid fender. At the second blow the silver knob gave way and a quantity of yellowish pellets trickled like hail on the floor. ‘I think, Goat, we’ll have to trouble you to put off that trip for quite a while.’

  ‘It was Big Rufe gave me the idea,’ said Almack, making a verbal report to the superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Department. ‘He was so certain that he’d been knocked out by a malacca cane—and there was only one supposition—that the cane must have been loaded. As a fact, when we’d made a search the previous day we’d noticed a collection of sticks, and I’d picked up one or two about which there was nothing apparently abnormal. We find that most of the sticks were honest enough, and even if we’d hit on one of the prepared ones there was nothing to give it away before it was filled up. These sticks just had a hollow steel lining, and those we took away from the Goat and George held just over three pounds of gold apiece—worth in all getting on for £300.

  ‘As you know, sir, the Goat hasn’t often received any bulky stuff, and that confirmed my impression about the walking-sticks. But I’ll admit it puzzled me as to how he could have stowed away three thousand ounces of gold. That would have needed a whole armoury of sticks. Then it occured to me to make sure if he often went to Paris. I rang up, and had the word passed to Horand to make inquiries. He found that either the Goat or George—mostly George—was away from the flat every weekend. I guessed that meant Continental trips, and that they probably intended to get the stuff over piecemeal.

  ‘That was all there was to it, except when we went over the flat again today we knew for sure that the stuff was somewhere and it wasn’t where we had looked before. Of course we had tapped for secret panels and all that sort of thing, but it occurred to me that the one place that neither we nor anyone else had ever looked at was the windows. As a matter of fact, most of the woodwork of the windows was just a thin veneer over steel boxes and tubes—all made to open and all full of gold. They had remelted it to the most handy shape for their purposes. That’s all there is to the business, sir.’

  ‘I really think’—the superintendent beamed at the divisional officer—‘that we may get a conviction this time.’

  ‘There seems to be a probability, sir,’ agreed Almack dryly.

  X

  PINK-EDGED NOTEPAPER

  ROCKWARD’S hand was shaking, and his strong, heavy face was quivering as he finished. Yet he was held by common repute a man completely beyond human emotion—a man whose soul was wrapped in the collection of millions.

  ‘If it is blackmail, why haven’t they demanded money in the letter? I’d have paid anything—anything rather than the girl should run the risk. Here’s three days gone since she vanished.’ He was working himself into a petulant anger, unusual for a man of his temperament. ‘If your people had taken it in hand at the first you might have done something. As it is, I’ve employed two confounded agencies, and we’re not an inch nearer finding her.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Rockward,’ said Barraclough. ‘If we had known when you first reported it that your daughter had been abducted we might have handled it. You see,’ he went on soothingly, ‘more than ten thousand people are reported missing to the police every year. Very few of them have committed any criminal offence, and in the majority of cases there is some perfectly natural explanation of why they went away. There’d be no end of trouble if the department went chasing after each one. All that can be done is to circulate a description and have men keep their eyes open. But you can rely that now we have something to go upon in Miss Rockward’s case she will turn up safe and well in the end.’

  The millionaire proffered his cigar-case.

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Barraclough, I’m a little over-strained. I know you will do your utmost, and if you want money, call upon me—never mind for how much.’

  Detective-Inspector Barraclough did not often smoke half-crown Havanas, and he took one now with gratitude. He could understand the millionaire’s feeling in the circumstances and make allowances. But in spite of his professional optimism—a detective, like a doctor, is bound to have a surface optimism in dealing with outsiders—it was with a perplexed mind that he made his way back to headquarters to lay the matter before his chief.

  ‘It’s a bit out of the ordinary run, sir,’ he said in the privacy of the superintendent’s room. ‘Rockward’s half off his head, and I don’t wonder. Miss Elsie Rockward’s a young girl—she’ll be nineteen next June—and the old man would have spoilt her if he could. That’s nothing to the point, though. As a matter of fact, she went out, according to the servants, at eleven o’clock on Monday morning—three days ago. She was believed to have been going to Regent Street. Anyhow, she’s not been seen since. This morning Mr Rockward had a letter. This is what it says.’ He produced it from his pocket, and read:

  ‘“SIR,—This is to inform you that your daughter is safe and well. She will be permitted to return to you unharmed in probably less than a week from today, provided you comply with a certain request which may be made to you, and which will cost you nothing. This is not blackmail. You will be wise to remain quiet and not approach the police.”

  ‘The letter is unsigned and in palpably disguised handwriting. It was posted at Winchmore Hill, and is postmarked midnight yesterday. That, of course, only means that the one place we’re certain the writer will not be found is Winchmore Hill.’

  ‘There’s more than one kind of blackmail,’ commented the chief. ‘In some City deals, for instance, if Rockward could be induced to throw his weight one way or the other it would tip the balance.’

  ‘Yes.’ Barraclough sucked in his lower lip. ‘Of course, I’ve not lost sight of that. I suppose I have a free hand?’

  ‘Entirely. Go ahead and good luck to you.’

  Barraclough went away to begin pulling the obvious wires necessary to an investigation. There was the already circulated description of Miss Rockward to be gone over, to see that nothing was omitted, from the colour of her eyes to the texture of her stockings. Two photographs of the lady he sent down to have sufficient copies made to supply every divisional section of the Criminal Investigation Department, to say nothing of the more important provincial police forces.

  In their little studio on the second story the staff photographers were busy with the letter that had been sent to Rockward. One of the shirt
-sleeved assistants came to tell Barraclough that all was ready. He followed the man up to a windowless room, at one end of which stood a square white screen. The photographer touched a switch and the screen alone remained illuminated. Then he inserted a slide in the magic-lantern, and the letter, magnified enormously, leaped into being.

  Very carefully Barraclough examined the enlargement, word by word and letter by letter. He had had the thing thrown on the screen, not because he had any definite idea as to what he was to look for, but on the general principle that it should be submitted to the minutest possible examination. At last he came to the final word and drew back.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t help much, but that isn’t your fault. By the way, have you got the focus right? The edges of the letter seem to be in the shade.’

  The photographer switched on the light.

  ‘That’s not the focus, sir. That’s on the letter itself. There’s a kind of pinkish shade on the margin.’

  ‘Oh, yes! I was forgetting,’ said Barraclough.

  The tint around the margin of the letter had not escaped his notice, but it had not impressed him particularly. He went back to his own room and considered the original closely. There was a decided, uneven pink border, shading off irregularly into the cream colour of the paper itself. Moreover, the envelope showed the same peculiarity.

  He called Cranley, the first-class detective sergeant who was his invariable assistant in his investigations, and handed the sheet to him.

  ‘Notepaper good—vellum, very best quality, I should say,’ commented Cranley. ‘It’s an educated writing, though it’s disguised. No fingerprints, sir? That’s a pity. I imagine whoever wrote this is not an ordinary crook. Maybe one of Rockward’s friends in the City.’