The Crime Club

by Frank Froest

  ‘Put that point aside for a moment,’ said Dalgaren. ‘What I think, I tell you frankly, is that you are asking us too much. We’re putting up the money, and the contract you want us to sign agrees that for services rendered you are to receive not less than one-fourth of the ordinary shares when we go to allotment.’

  ‘That’s it,’ agreed Palton. ‘It’s too much. You agree with us, don’t you, Dainton?’

  Coyne leaned back in his chair. He was too old a hand to make the mistake of lowering his terms. ‘I think we might perhaps drop the discussion.’ he said amiably. ‘You know how it stands. One hundred thousand to be paid to me here and the concession to be signed directly I cable that it’s done. I take one-fourth of the ordinary shares or nothing.’

  ‘You’re a hard man, Arthur,’ sighed Palton. ‘Have you got the contract?’

  ‘I’m a business man—that’s all. I’ve got four copies all made out, and we’ll sign ’em presently. You can pay the money over to my bank in the morning.’

  A waiter placed a card in front of him. He looked at it frowningly for a moment and then nodded. ‘Show him into my sitting-room in five minutes.’ He held the card in his hand as the servant left, and turned with a smile to his guests. ‘This happens rather opportunely. I don’t suppose any of you can tell me the etiquette of the occasion. It’s a little matter of blackmail.’

  ‘Someone ferreted out the black pages of your past, Arthur?’ said Dalgaren. ‘Or is it a woman?’

  ‘Neither,’ said Coyne. ‘It is a gentleman who apparently holds an official position here.’ He read from the card: ‘Detective-Inspector J. C. Ansoll, Criminal Investigation Department.’

  Dainton whistled. Palton readjusted his eye-glasses. ‘Do you really mean that this police officer is trying to blackmail you?’

  The ‘con’ man nodded. ‘He’s got wind of this concession business somehow—just enough to make him believe there’s something fishy. He came to see me this morning, and threatened to tell you all the horrid details, Palton. It was an awkward fix, because, though I didn’t mind him going to you, I did not want the scheme talked about till everything was watertight. Publicity might have killed it. So I temporised—told him to come back some other time and we’d talk it over.’ He spoke with just the right air of amused irritability.

  ‘I say, this is serious,’ said Dainton. ‘A detective officer levying blackmail. We’ll have to do something you know. The Home Secretary—’

  ‘Do what you like after we’ve got the concession,’ said Coyne. ‘We can’t do anything till then—though we might give him a scare—what? Look here, if you three conceal yourselves, it would be a good idea to have him in here. When he learns that there have been witnesses to his attempt—’

  ‘We can shut him up till the deal goes through,’ said Dalgaren. ‘I think that’s the right idea. What about those portières for you, Dainton? Palton, you might take the window—and the screen will do me.’

  ‘That’s splendid,’ agreed Coyne. ‘I hadn’t arranged this little entertainment for you folk, but it ought to amuse you. Now, green lights. Enter the villain—or, rather, I’ll go and fetch him.’

  No one of the three concealed gentlemen could have supposed that their host was filled with contemptuous amusement as he left the room. He chuckled as he received the waiting inspector.

  ‘Gad, Freddie, you’re a wonder. If I didn’t know, I’d think you were the real thing. Come along.’

  Ansoll obeyed with docility. As they passed into the dining-room he straightened his shoulders.

  ‘You’ll guess what I’ve come about,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve a sort of idea,’ said Coyne imperturbably. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong man. However,’—he thrust his hands in his trousers pockets,—‘what’s your price?’

  There was nothing forced about Ansoll’s grin. He had caught a movement beneath one of the portière curtains. ‘I fancy you are making a little mistake,’ he said pleasantly. ‘You can’t buy me off. I am a police-officer, as you know, and it is my duty to tell you that unless you can give a satisfactory explanation of certain facts that have come to my knowledge, I shall take you into custody on a charge for attempted fraud. You understand that you are not obliged to answer any questions.’

  Three lines bit vertically into Coyne’s forehead. He regretted there had not been a more complete rehearsal of the scene they were now playing. Somehow it was running off the lines.

  ‘Fire ahead,’ he said.

  ‘You claim to be able to obtain a concession to build a railway across certain districts of Chile, but that, prior to obtaining the necessary signatures, a deposit of £100,000 must be paid to you.’

  ‘That is right.’

  ‘You have practically induced three gentlemen to entrust you with that deposit?’

  ‘Well?’ Coyne meditatively surveyed a well-fitting dress shoe.

  ‘I have today received information that it is not and never has been contemplated to grant a concession—that the Chilean authorities know nothing about it.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Coyne, ‘that all this beating about the bush is for a purpose. You want me to pay to keep your mouth shut. Would you like me to write a cheque?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ laughed Ansoll. ‘I would like you to prove to me that this is no fraud. Otherwise—’

  ‘Otherwise?’

  Ansoll stepped to the door. ‘Jimmie,’ he called softly. And then to Coyne: ‘I think, Wolf, if you tell these gentlemen who are so interested in our little conversation to come out, we can drop the curtain on this farce. You see, Freddie has let you down.’

  Not often in his career had Wolf Coyne been taken at a loss. It took him a full second to realise that it was Ansoll in reality and not Flash Freddie. He stared unbelievingly at the detective.

  ‘Hell!’ he muttered. ‘Hell!’

  Then he was galvanised into action. With a couple of strides he cleared the room, jerked the amazed Palton from his hiding-place, and turned the handle of the inner door. But Jimmie Cotterill and Ansoll moved as quickly. They flung themselves upon him and pulled him back. Both were powerful men, but Coyne was no less so, and he was driven desperate. They surged, a tangled mass of humanity, over the soft carpet, the two officers in grim silence, the ‘con’ man cursing fearfully.

  Dainton flung himself into the fray, and received a kick in the face that sent him half-stunned into the fireplace. Ansoll spat out a tooth and took a fresh grip on the place where the collar of Coyne’s dress-coat had been. Cotterill, with his knee momentarily on the ‘con’ man’s chest, succeeded in adjusting one cuff of the handcuffs. A second later the flying other end caught him in the mouth.

  ‘Aw,’ he gurgled, and clenched a fist.

  ‘None of that, Jimmie,’ ordered Ansoll sharply, and the sergeant, who had lost sight of the tradition of the Metropolitan Police, stayed his blow. Two minutes later he got the prisoner’s wrists together and the handcuffs clicked again.

  Ansoll stood up, breathing heavily. ‘I’m not so young as I was,’ he sighed. ‘In the old days I’d have enjoyed a scrap like that.’ He wiped the blood from his lip. ‘Now, gentlemen, if you’ll follow us on to King Street police station I shall be grateful. You can reckon that this job has saved you at least £100,000.’

  To three disillusionised men Ansoll vouchsafed explanations in his office. ‘You gentlemen,’ he said, ‘don’t think yourselves in the same class as a countryman who buys a pawn-ticket for a gold watch outside Waterloo Station. Yet, except that it was a concession instead of a pawn-ticket, it’s just the same old game that this crook down below has played on you. They say it’s better to be born lucky than rich.

  ‘We had Wolf Coyne tipped off to us when he came across. Now, he’s a free-born American citizen, and there’s no law that we could use against him, though we were pretty sure he had something up his sleeve. He just laughed at me when I warned him off.

  ‘Of course we kept a pretty strict eye on him. We couldn’t do anything t
ill he overstepped the law, but we were just watching for a chance. The awkward thing was that we didn’t know in just what direction his talents would break out. We could only wait and watch, and the longer we waited the more evident it was that it was a big thing.

  ‘Now, though we could learn nothing of the stunt—all of you took pretty good care to keep that secret—we worried Wolf. He knew that we were right on his heels, and it got on his nerves. You see he was alarmed lest we should get a hint to put you wise before he got his hooks on the money. He actually stood in Bond Street this, morning and threatened me with a pistol. When he found that didn’t work he tried something else.

  ‘He sent for a man named Mullins—Flash Fred—who was an actor before he took to drink and went on the cross. That gave us our first hold. When Freddie left the hotel we followed him, caught him up after awhile, and made him drunk. There was very little Sherlock Holmes work in this, I can tell you.

  ‘Well, first we made him drunk and then we got his goat. It all came out like drawing a cork from a bottle. The scheme had all the marks of Coyne’s genius. First of all, he wanted to increase your confidence in him. And secondly, lest I should get a line on him, he was to destroy your faith in me. Freddie was to make up to resemble me and then to put up a blackmail show with you three gentlemen in unimpeachable positions as witnesses. Clever, wasn’t it? Supposing I’d found out afterwards, and come to you with a story that Coyne was cheating you, would you have believed me? To make the blackmail convincing he had to entrust Freddie with rough points of the scheme, and that gave us enough to work on.

  ‘We cabled the chief of police at Valparaiso, and got in touch with the Chilean Ministry here—’

  ‘But,’ interrupted Dainton, ‘he told us that for reasons of secrecy this matter of the concession was being conducted direct from headquarters. There was a matter of a—er—bonus.’

  ‘Bribery, in plain English. The old “con” stuff. When you buy a brass ring you have to keep quiet because it’s been stolen from Streeters. Anyway, that stopped you making inconvenient inquiries here. As I was saying, there was never any idea of a concession. A week after you’d made over cheques, you’d have looked in vain for your Mr Arthur. He’d got a pal in Valparaiso who sent the cables that kept you keen, and his other papers are forgeries.

  ‘Well, that’s all. We rearranged things a little and I took the principal part instead of Freddie.’

  ‘I wish, Mr Ansoll,’ said Palton dryly, ‘you had chosen some other method. For men in the public positions of ourselves it will be a little—ah—humilating to have to confess how we were duped.’

  ‘Why,’ smiled Ansoll, ‘that’s exactly why I did it. Wolf has had too long a run to escape again because—forgive me—three suckers hate to tell how close they came to being stung.’

  XIII

  CROSSED TRAILS

  ‘THE fact is,’ said Mr Harold Saxon, cheerfully, brushing a speck of cigar ash from his white waistcoat with two fingers, ‘somebody’s trying to murder me.’

  Both tone and manner were so casual that the assertion was robbed of any appearance of melodrama. Chief Detective Inspector Yerk was too old a hand to be startled. He almost suspected a joke. He checked a smile, and his eyes travelled over Saxon from his spats to the big diamond pin that sparkled in his tie, and thence to the genial white-moustached face with the twinkling blue eyes.

  ‘You don’t say so,’ he murmured noncommittally. ‘Who is it?’

  Saxon’s brows contracted a trifle. ‘Just what I’d like you to find out. I’d hate to be killed without knowing the reason. That’s why I sent to Scotland Yard for somebody to sit in in the game.’ He pressed a bell on his desk, and a small page boy darted noiselessly to his side. ‘Ask Miss Jukes if she’d mind seeing me a moment, sonny.’

  It was a slender good-looking woman, somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty, who moved into the room in response to the summons. She was carrying two or three typewritten documents and halted, irresolutely, as she saw Yerk.

  ‘I want you to know Mr Yerk—from Scotland Yard,’ said Saxon. ‘Miss Jukes’ he explained to the detective, ‘has been my secretary for seven years, and she knows more about me and my affairs than I sometimes do myself—all except the present business, which I’ve rather kept to myself. Say, Miss Jukes, have you ever seen any marked symptoms of insanity in me—anything more than usual in a theatrical producer? I want you to assure Mr Yerk that I’m not suffering from hallucinations.’

  She smiled a little uncertainly. ‘I think most people would describe you as a very practical man.’

  ‘Thank you. And you’ve never heard of anyone who wants to murder me?’

  The papers fluttered to the floor, and the girl stared in wide-eyed astonishment at her employer. ‘I—you’re joking, of course?’

  ‘I assure you I’m not. I’m mighty serious. It’s no joke for me.’

  ‘Well,’ she said emphatically, a slight stress of surprise still in her voice, ‘I don’t believe you’ve an enemy in the world.’

  ‘Nor did I think so. I fancied Mr Yerk might like something beyond my word. Thank you, Miss Jukes. You needn’t talk of this, you know.’

  There were many people who would have endorsed the girl’s opinion. Saxon was a popular man and he had not himself believed that there was a person in existence who hated him sufficiently to wish to push him violently off the earth. The wide variety of nicknames which had been affixed to him was, in itself, a confirmation of his popularity. In his clubs he was ‘Pa’. Among the chorus, if you were exceedingly annoyed with him, you called him ‘guv’nor’; otherwise, he was ‘the old duck’. If you ranked a little higher in the theatrical hierarchy, he was ‘Uncle Harold’. Only if you were a servant, or a stranger, did you venture the formality of a ‘Mr Saxon.’ Actors and actresses, of a cynical cast of mind, sometimes wondered how so likeable a man had achieved control of a dozen theatres.

  ‘It beats me, my boy,’ he remarked, as Miss Jukes disappeared. ‘It really does.’

  Yerk was scrutinising him with narrow screwed-up eyes. He was unused to white-haired theatrical magnates who called him ‘my boy’ on a matter of five minutes’ acquaintance.

  ‘Suppose you give me the facts,’ he observed. ‘I’m a little in the dark just now.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Saxon seemed distressed. ‘Here, have a cigar, Mr Yerk. Care for a drink? Well, perhaps it is a wee bit early. I guess you had suspicions that I am suffering from softening of the brain—senile decay and all that, eh? That’s why I called Miss Jukes as evidence.’ He chuckled. ‘Yes, I’m alive as ever I was—so far. Three times I’ve been lucky, and I mean to hang on—what? The cinema hero isn’t a circumstance to me in coming up smiling. Know the coast of the Bristol Channel at all—round about Weston-super-Mare?’

  ‘Slightly,’ admitted the detective.

  ‘Well, that’s where the curtain went up. I had motored over from Bristol and walked out alone to Brean Down—that’s where all the visitors to Weston picnic in the summer, but at this time of the year it’s pretty deserted. It’s a promontory jutting out into the channel for a mile or so, and you reach the point over mud-flats and marshes. I was near the old fort on the headland about dusk. There’s a bit of a drop from the rocks at one point—only a few yards, but quite precipitous enough to prevent a swimmer landing. That’s where my unknown friend got me first. I was standing on the edge looking out to sea when someone pushed me from behind. Had I hit the rocks and been disabled, I should have been drowned. As it was, I fell into deep water.’

  Yerk nodded. ‘Sure you didn’t over-balance yourself?’ he asked. ‘Did you see or hear anyone near you?’

  ‘I saw or heard nothing. I’m sure it was a push now, though at the time, I felt I was probably mistaken. Luckily, I haven’t forgotten how to swim and I managed to get round the point and yell. Someone at the old fort—it’s a restaurant now—heard me and fished me in at the end of a rope.

  ‘Now I might have taken no more notice o
f that, but the day before yesterday I was walking on the darkened stage at the Regal when a trap gave way underneath me, and it was only by luck that I got off without a broken neck. That might have been an accident, too. But listen to this morning’s limit. The end of the steering rod in my car broke off sharp while rounding a corner off the Strand, and it’s a miracle to me now that we weren’t smashed to pieces. And, believe me, my boy, that rod had been filed so that any sudden strain would snap it.’ He replaced his cigar jerkily in the corner of his mouth. ‘I walked here and sent for you.’

  The inspector shrugged his shoulders. ‘First of all we’ve got to put a finger on a motive. You say you’ve got no enemies—that’s a bit loose, of course, because everyone’s got enemies. But rule revenge out if you like and you come to self-interest. Who would benefit by your death?’

  ‘The hospitals and theatrical charities mainly. I haven’t a relative in the world that I know of.’

  Yerk’s bushy eyebrows came closer together. Unless Saxon was concealing something—and a glance at his ruddy open face made that difficult to believe—the case was going to be less open and shut, as he would have phrased it, than at first he had expected. If some cunning madman was seeking the theatrical magnate’s life—and that was the only alternative theory—he would have to seek at large among the immense number of people who, at any time, had any association with Saxon. The detective of actuality bases his work on the fact that, to the ordinary human being, two and two make four. But on a person seeking another’s life, from a lunatic caprice, no normal reasoning can bear. He grunted something in his throat.

  ‘I’ll take that steering rod away with me if you have it here,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have an expert’s opinion on it. Meanwhile, I guess you want an extra assistant—a male secretary to be in close touch with you. You’d better advertise for one.’