The Crime Club

by Frank Froest

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Hewitt formally.

  By what means Garton’s instructions were carried out he never knew nor did he trouble to inquire. It was wisest to take for granted that they were lawful. Anyway Hewitt had produced from somewhere a list of two letters which had gone out and of one that had been received. The out-going letters had been addressed—one to ‘John Quex, Esq., 5 Spanish Grove, Balham’, the other to ‘Mrs Boswell, 33 Hodson’s Lane, Leytonstone’.

  ‘Girl’s name’s Boswell’ observed Hewitt. ‘There was only one letter for her by the first post. I left Wren there to pick up anything else.’

  ‘John Quex!’ repeated Garton thoughtfully. ‘Know the name, Hewitt? I don’t.’

  ‘No, sir. There was a play or something with a name like it once.’

  ‘If I’m right he should be a useful man to know more about. In this kind of case, Hewitt, where there’s nothing tangible to go on, we can only jump to conclusions and be thankful for any fact that they lead us to. We’ll have a man go down to Spanish Grove and I’ll come along later myself if things seem all right.’

  There is always a certain amount of routine work that has to be dealt with by a divisional chief of detectives whatever major investigation he has in hand, and for an hour Garton put the pearl case out of his mind. Though the report of the wounded man found at an East End gambling house, whose companions told a cock and bull story of an accident, came under his official notice, he failed to connect it with the pearl ease. What interested him more was a special communication from headquarters.

  ‘The pearl you have sent on for expert examination corresponds to the description of one stolen by a trick from the establishment of a M. Rouget at Amsterdam three weeks ago, of which no report had hitherto been received. It is valued at £5,000. It was sent to an hotel in charge of an assistant to be viewed by a man calling himself Alfred Rockerbilt, who posed as an American millionaire. The assistant was stunned, gagged and left in a bedroom while his assailants decamped. Amsterdam authorities believed assistant’s story a bogus one and have him under arrest. No descriptions of supposed robbers to hand yet. Have cabled for further particulars.’

  Garton chuckled softly to himself. ‘That puts that point in order. I think I can begin to see something like daylight.’ He poked his head into the adjoining room used by his staff. ‘Say, one of you boys cut down to the Green Dragon. There’s a barmaid there named Boswell. I want her brought up here right away.’

  It was an unwilling and somewhat frightened girl who presently entered Garton’s dingy little office. She looked startled as she beheld in the divisional chief the man who, on the previous evening, she had thought to be a slightly fresh business man. His cold keen face was stern as he nodded towards a chair.

  ‘Sit down, my girl. You didn’t expect to see me again so soon.’

  She gingerly took the edge of the chair. Her fingers fluttered nervously. ‘No—no, sir.’

  ‘Now don’t get frightened. There’s nothing at all to be alarmed about. I just want to ask you one or two questions. You know a gentleman named Mr Quex, don’t you?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Her voice was bolder now though her eyes avoided his.

  ‘You don’t, eh? Then how was it you sent him a letter this morning? Come, my girl, don’t play with me.’

  She shrugged her shoulders a little impudently. Her self-possession was coming back to her. ‘Very well. If you knew, what did you ask me for?’

  ‘I know a great deal. You’ll be wise if you believe me. He gave you that diamond ring you’re wearing, didn’t he?’

  His manner dissipated any vague idea the girl might have formed of defying him. ‘Yes, sir,’ she agreed.

  ‘I see. Now how long ago was it that you first met him?’

  ‘About four months. He came into the saloon and—’

  ‘He’s told you what he is?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Besides, you know. You said so last night. He’s a jewel merchant and he’s going to marry me when—in a month or two.’

  ‘H’m. Had you arranged to meet him yesterday?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. He’s away from home a lot and he drops in at the Dragon sometimes when he gets back.’

  ‘You’ve got a photograph of him, of course?’

  She hesitated. His fingers drummed impatiently on his desk. ‘I—I’m not sure—that is, I believe I have,’ she admitted unwillingly.

  ‘Ah, good. Now Miss Boswell, I’ll send someone with you and you’ll let us have it.’ He crossed over and dropped a hand gently on her shoulder. ‘And see here, there’s no reason for you to worry. If this man’s what I think you’ve had a narrow escape. That’ll do for now. I’ll have another talk some other time.’

  ‘So Mr Quex is a jewel merchant, eh?’ he muttered aloud as she went out. ‘Well, jewel merchants may fall in love with pretty barmaids and they may give ’em diamond rings that cost £200 if they cost a penny, but—’ He ran a hand through his thick black hair. ‘However, we’ll wait till we see that photograph.’

  Twenty minutes later he was surveying with elation the portrait in profile of a handsome man with iron-grey hair and a firm jaw. He carried it triumphantly to the outer office and laid it in front of Hewitt.

  ‘Have I got to send that up to the Criminal Record Office or can you tell me who that is?’

  Hewitt made a prolonged, steady scrutiny of the photograph. His memory had been trained to recall faces over long years. ‘Why,’ he said slowly, ‘it reminds me uncommonly of that chap—it’s five years since I saw him and I forget his right moniker—Slim Jack, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you say so,’ grinned Garton. ‘Only the name he’s known by in respectable circles nowadays is—Mr John Quex. Now, Hewitt, we’ve got to get busy. You’ll have to go down to the Yard.’

  The simplicity with which the hatchety-faced detective hero of fiction is apt to lay the guilty person by the heels once he has been identified is quite a different thing to the care with which the most humdrum Scotland Yard man makes sure of his prey before springing a trap. Garton wanted not only Quex but his confederates. The methods by which they were to be disclosed involved a certain degree of co-operative work familiar to every detective bureau in the world but no special mental brilliance. He sent another man down to Balham to aid in keeping an eye on the main quarry, and Hewitt boarded a car for Scotland Yard.

  There, in the Criminal Record Office, was a dossier that told all available facts, gained over many years in many quarters of the world, of Quex’s activities. It was embellished by full and side face photographs and the key number to his finger-prints. In that record now lay the germ of the investigation, for upon it were based inquiries by word of mouth, by telephone, by letter. It would have been wonderful if among the hundred closely organised detectives of London, Quex and his associates had entirely escaped notice.

  Then it was that a telephone call from Hewitt had sent Garton on a flying visit to Brixton Prison where three prisoners remanded that morning in connection with an East End gambling house case were due to arrive. Somewhere in the prison he spent two active hours—hours that would have caused John Quex considerable uneasiness if he had known of them.

  But John Quex for all his experience did not know. He was sitting in bed a mile or two away smoking a cigarette and reading the morning paper. He wasn’t sure whether he had killed a man overnight but he hoped he had. He had all the philosophy of the veteran professional. Today was a new day. He had taught Mike Alford that he was a man not to be interfered with with impunity. If he had failed and they still held up the pearl he could still show them that he was a live wire.

  So he read the paper placidly, his conscience easy, his nerves unwrung. It was midday and a savoury smell of cooking from below heralded breakfast. He slipped languidly out of bed, strolled to the window and raised the blind. His eyebrows contracted as he peered out.

  ‘Hell!’ he muttered viciously.

  Yet the casual observer would have noticed nothing to warrant t
he expletive. It was an ordinary suburban street like thousands of other streets in London—that was why Quex had pitched his tent there. A baker’s cart was ambling along the roadway, and a maid was cleaning the steps of one of the houses opposite. At an oblique angle to Quex some distance away on the far pavement two men were talking. These it was who interested the crook.

  He drew back, his brow furrowed, and hurriedly began to dress. If those two idlers were really detectives—and he had small doubt of it—someone at the gambling house must—as he would have put it—have ‘squealed’. Possibly he had after all killed Mike or Alford. There was that much satisfaction in the situation anyway.

  As he adjusted his tie a sound caught his ear—a sound so trivial that at any other time with senses less alert he would have failed to hear it. He dropped into a chair, and placing something in his lap picked up the discarded newspaper.

  He raised his eyes in mild astonishment as the door was pushed swiftly open. One hand grasped the thing under the paper.

  ‘Well,’ he demanded irritably. ‘Who are you? What do you mean by bursting in on a man like this?’ And then his tone suddenly changed. ‘Ah, keep off, will you.’ The newspaper dropped and an automatic flew to a level.

  Neither Garton nor Hewitt were novices in this kind of thing. They knew the type of man with whom they had to deal and wasted no time in parley. They had spread out to either side as they entered and it was with the recognition that they meant business that Quex’s opening bluff had changed to defiance.

  Garton stood stock still. The muzzle of the pistol was near enough to him to make sudden death a certainty should the crook’s finger compress on the trigger. He was as brave as most men but he was not foolish. Besides, their tactics had carried Hewitt out of the line of fire.

  Quex became aware of the sergeant’s rush just half a second too late. He swerved in his chair and the pistol exploded harmlessly as Hewitt’s muscular arms sought his throat. He was borne backwards and as he fell someone kicked the pistol out of his hand.

  Three minutes later he was on his feet again with handcuffs encircling his wrists and Garton was dusting the knees of his trousers.

  ‘You’ve got no sense, Jack,’ complained Hewitt peevishly. ‘You might have killed someone with that gun of yours.’

  Quex grinned. Now that it was all over he was without malice. ‘You guys would have stood a fat chance if I’d known you were after me earlier. I’d like to know what I’m pinched for anyway?’

  ‘You will be charged with the attempted murder of a man named Alford,’ said Garton.

  ‘That all? I hoped I had croaked one of those ginks.’

  ‘Also,’ went on the inspector, ‘there is an application from the Dutch police for your extradition for stealing a pearl.’

  ‘No!’ Quex’s jaw dropped. ‘I suppose Alford snitched on that too. Did he say that Mike and he have got that pearl laid up?’

  Garton’s face never changed. ‘No,’ he declared. ‘It wouldn’t be likely, would it? But what’s the use of all this talk? You know anything you say may be used as evidence against you.’

  ‘I reckon I can’t do myself much more harm. If that little snipe can uncork so can I. Listen here.’

  Over dinner that night with a colleague of the C.I.D. Garton talked with pardonable triumph. ‘If some of those writer chaps put this in a yarn it mightn’t sound much,’ he confessed, ‘but believe me, it’s the longest shot I ever pulled off. You should have seen Jack’s face when I told him that he had lost the pearl in the rough and tumble and that his pals hadn’t had it at all.

  ‘Of course it was a bad start when at first we couldn’t tell where the thing had come from. I’d have bet my next six month’s salary that the thing had been stolen but it looked like a dead end, especially as none of the descriptions we got of the three men who had been fighting corresponded. It was one of those off-chance ideas that took Hewitt and me to the Green Dragon where I surmised that one or the other of the men concerned might have been during the evening. When I noticed that the barmaid was wearing a ring that must have been worth a couple of hundred, I began to think things. That the pearl should have been picked up at hand and that she should have such costly trinkets and that neither of the events should be connected was too much of a coincidence to swallow.

  ‘Still I didn’t know and I didn’t want to commit myself till I was dead sure that a robbery had taken place somewhere. She was a pretty girl and I played with her a bit on a theory I manufactured for the occasion. It was clear that she had a lover who could afford expensive presents—and I managed to get his name and address without her knowing. You don’t want to ask me how I did it.

  ‘From then on things were like clockwork. In the morning came the news of this Dutch robbery which put me on safer ground. I dug a photograph out of the girl and of course recognised Slim Jack. It began to look like a clean-up. A little inquiry showed that he had been seen about with Big Mike and Jim Alford, and that the three of ’em were absent from London when the Amsterdam affair was pulled off. I don’t need to tell you that that was no evidence against ’em in a court of law, but as a moral certainty it was good enough for us.

  ‘Then it seems Mike and Jimmie were collared in a gambling joint where somebody had shot the little man up. That didn’t need a Sherlock, did it? It was as plain as paint that there’d been a quarrel over the pearl. The other two knew that Jack was mushy on the barmaid and hung about to get a chance at him. They had a rough and tumble in the roadway and were interrupted. None of ’em was too anxious to stop and answer questions, and Jack, who spilled the pearl in the gutter somehow, thought the others had it. That was how he came to invite himself to a little shooting party—see!

  ‘Of course I was on to Mike like a bird. Both he and Alford were sore with Jack but they were cautious. They didn’t tell me very much that I didn’t already know and I wasn’t too sure that the Dutch police would be able to send over witnesses to identify them. But I had got an idea.

  ‘When we went to get Jack we didn’t take any chances with the rough stuff. He was ready to eat out of my hand by the time we’d got the handcuffs on. I flashed the extradition charge on him suddenly and he fell for it. He didn’t know that we had the pearl and he dropped into the error of thinking his pals had talked. When a crook like that gets in that frame of mind practically everything is over.

  ‘He told me how the job was pulled off on the other side and that the three made a getaway in different directions. To avoid risks in case they were suspected the pearl was posted to Jack’s address. He had some idea of taking it over to the States to get rid of it; the others wanted to sell it here. They didn’t trust him too much. Well, it seems he told them that he’d got the thing and he was going to do as he darned well pleased. I suppose they thought that to leave it to him would make their chances of getting a bit mighty small in the end. That started the whole thing.’

  ‘A good case, old man,’ commented his friend.

  ‘I believe you,’ said Garton.

  THE END

  THE CRIME CLUB

  ‘THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB is a clearing house for the best detective and mystery stories chosen for you by a select committee of experts. Only the most ingenious crime stories will be published under the THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB imprint. A special distinguishing stamp appears on the wrapper and title page of every THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB book—the Man with the Gun. Always look for the Man with the Gun when buying a Crime book.’

  Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1929

  Now the Man with the Gun is back in this series of COLLINS CRIME CLUB reprints, and with him the chance to experience the classic books that influenced the Golden Age of crime fiction.

  THE DETECTIVE STORY CLUB

  LIST OF TITLES

  THE MAYFAIR MYSTERY • FRANK RICHARDSON

  THE PERFECT CRIME • ISRAEL ZANGWILL

  CALLED BACK • HUGH CONWAY

  THE MYSTERY OF THE SKELETON KEY • BERNARD CAPES

  T
HE GRELL MYSTERY • FRANK FROËST

  DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE • R. L. STEVENSON

  THE RASP • PHILIP MACDONALD

  THE HOUSE OPPOSITE • J. JEFFERSON FARJEON

  THE PONSON CASE • FREEMAN WILLS CROFTS

  THE TERROR • EDGAR WALLACE

  THE MYSTERY AT STOWE • VERNON LODER

  THE BLACKMAILERS • ÉMILE GABORIAU

  THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD • AGATHA CHRISTIE

  THE NOOSE • PHILIP MACDONALD

  FURTHER TITLES IN PREPARATION

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