by Frank Froest
Ling started. Then his features relaxed, and he laughed.
‘Good bluff,’ he said. ‘You nearly had me stampeded that time. But it’s no go. You’ve sent out no message since you came in, and if you’d given it before, the splits would have been here by now.’ He spat on the boarded floor. ‘Say, Mr Hallett,’ he went on, with the air of a man laying down a tentative business proposal, ‘I’ve got you now, cold. Suppose we came to terms? I’m willing to overlook the compromising circumstances of your little jaunt with my wife tonight—’
‘That’s enough!’ ordered Hallett coldly. ‘If you insult this lady again, gun or no gun, I’ll smash your lying tongue down your throat!’
‘Tut tut!’ The green eyes gleamed amusedly on the young man. ‘I must be careful. I didn’t mean to get your goat. We’ll call off, then. What I’m aiming at is this. There’s no sense in making things more uncomfortable than we’ve got to. If you put me to it, I’ve got to see that you keep out of mischief. Give me your word that you’ll take the first boat back to New York and never say anything about what you may know, and I’ll take it. That’s fair, and it isn’t everyone who would do it.’
‘You want to get me out of the way?’
‘That’s so. Stay out of England for a year and keep your mouth shut.’
Jimmie stroked his upper lip.
‘That’s very obliging of you, Ling. I feel flattered at your supposition that I should keep my word. I seem to be an embarrassment, though I don’t know why.’
‘You bet you’re right. You are an embarrassment.’
‘Why?’ repeated Jimmie artlessly.
He had one hand behind his back, and was signalling to Peggy. He hoped fervently that she would understand what it meant, and pass the pistol. Once he regained that, he could close the conversation when he liked.
‘Cut it out,’ retorted Ling. ‘You don’t need telling. I’m making you a fair offer. Will you take it or leave it?’
Hallett’s concealed hand waved fractically. Would she never understand?
‘My dear young friend,’ he said airily, ‘can’t you see I’m trying to make up my mind. I haven’t your faculty of quick decision. My wits move so slowly. If you’d only tell me why. You’ll forgive me, but I don’t quite see where you come in. I could understand why some people should wish me—er—disposed of, but, although I dislike your appearance and your ways, there’s nothing I could do would hurt you. Why can’t you live and let live?’
Ling eyed him doubtfully.
‘This is funny business, isn’t it? I’m not going to stay here all night. I’ve sent for some people who won’t be disposed to argue with you. You’d better hurry, and make up your mind.’
It was evident that the girl would never understand the meaning of that signalling hand. Jimmie shrugged his shoulders, and remained in an attitude of thought. A querulous voice came from the outer room.
‘Peggy! Gone away again!’ The voice was like that of a plaintive child, except that an unchildlike oath slipped out. ‘And she calls herself a sister—leaving me here like this, alone with the old man—all alone with the old man. I tell you I didn’t—I couldn’t! He’s a liar. Peggy, come and take him off! Those long fingers—long, lean, scraggy fingers! He’ll strangle me! Blast it, why don’t you come and take him off?’
The high-pitched voice rang out in shrill alarm. Ling had taken a pace back into the other room, but he was too cautious to take his eyes off Hallett.
‘It’s Errol!’ he laughed. ‘Gave me a start for a minute. Makes you feel as if someone’s walking over your grave.’
‘He’s delirious,’ cried Peggy; ‘I must go to him.’ She raised her voice, ‘All right, I’m coming!’
‘Not by a jugful, you don’t!’ said Ling. ‘He won’t hurt for five minutes. I don’t allow anyone to get behind me till Mr Hallett here’s made up his mind—not even you, Peggy.’
The voice inside moaned, and then burst into a series of insane chuckles.
‘He’s going now. He thinks he’s going to get away, but he won’t. It’s no good your hiding; I can see you. I’ll get you this time.’
Through the open door Jimmie could now see him. He had pulled himself off the pallet, and, lamp in hand, was advancing stealthily towards Ling, crouching as he moved, and still chuckling. Jimmie’s hand fell calmly on the back of the chair in which he had been sitting. Things were coming his way.
The changing shadows caused by the lamplight told Ling, too, something of what was happening. His head shifted to look over his shoulder for the fraction of a second—just long enough for Jimmie to lift the chair and bring it down with crushing force. Ling crumpled limply, and went down.
‘Ha, ha!’ shrieked Errol. ‘That’s got the old devil! Now we’ll burn him; we’ll make sure this time!’
Before either of them could anticipate his purpose, he had swung the lamp downwards on to the stunned man. There was a smashing of glass and a bolt of flame shot upwards. Peggy Greye-Stratton sprang forward with a horrified cry, but already Jimmie had his coat off and spread over the flames, which had begun to lick at Ling’s body. Luckily the reservoir of the lamp was of metal, and little of the oil had escaped. In a few minutes he had got the flames under control.
He stood up, breathing hard. The girl was coaxing her brother back to bed, and he was still weakly shouting in his delirium. Hallett went to her aid, but he found his help unnecessary. Errol was as weak as a kitten. He lay on his mattress, panting.
‘I can manage now,’ she said. ‘You had better go, Mr Hallett. He said he had sent for help. Go—go quick!’
‘I don’t know about that. It’s impossible to leave you here alone now.’
Errol, exhausted, had fallen asleep once more. She came over to Jimmie.
‘It’s no worse for me now than it was before. Besides, what can you do? You will be sacrificing yourself for no reason at all.’ She literally pushed him towards the door. ‘Please, please!’ she entreated.
A little thrill of delight passed through him as he recognised that all her alarm was for him. There was reason in her persuasions, too. Any danger that she was in was not likely to be either increased by what had happened or diminished by his further presence. He would only be exposing himself to the needless risk of being cut off by Ling’s friends.
‘I suppose I’d better,’ he said reluctantly; ‘but first I’ll have a look at Ling. I didn’t hit him as hard as I might, but it would be as well to make sure.’
She permitted him to return to examine Ling, and as soon as he had reassured himself that the man was only stunned, he contemplated his work with some satisfaction. Here and there the blazing oil had scorched his clothes, but had done no further damage.
‘Hurry!’ said the girl. ‘Oh, do hurry!’
‘Just one moment.’ He hastily ran his hands through the unconscious man’s pockets. A few papers from the breast-pocket he stuffed into his own. In the right-hand jacket pocket he found a pistol, which he also took possession of. He stood up.
‘There, that’s done.’,
‘You are going now?’
‘Yes, I’m going.’ He caught both her hands in his impulsively. ‘If things had been different, Peggy! If—if—’
She released herself, flushing hotly.
‘You mustn’t—you mustn’t!’ she cried. ‘Oh, why don’t you go?’
‘Good-bye!’ he said abruptly, and swung out on to the dark stairs.
As he fumbled for the latch of the front door it was pushed open from without. He came face to face with a woman on the step. He recognised the slattern who had admitted Peggy and himself. She gave a short ejaculation of surprise, and then brushed by him.
He moved thoughtfully out into the open street. Something there was about her that seemed familiar—it might have been the eyes, the walk, or her voice. He had gone a hundred yards when he came to a sudden halt.
‘I’d bet a thousand dollars to a cent that that woman’s Gwennie Lyne.’
The discove
ry half inclined him to return. The dark figures of two men brushed by him, and he walked quickly on, turning as the sound of their feet died away. He moved back till he was opposite the house, and watched, irresolute. No sound came from it, and he turned away again. It seemed hours before he had got clear of those desolate streets into a main road and encountered the comforting blue uniform of a constable. To him he addressed a question.
‘Taxi?’ repeated the man, studying him with speculation. ‘Lord bless your heart, you won’t get a taxi here at this time of the night. Where do you want to go?’
His eyes opened wider as Jimmie named his hotel. But he made no comment.
‘Keep straight on till you get into the City,’ he said. ‘Then you might get a cab.’
It was three o’clock in the morning before Jimmie, wearied in body and mind, dropped thankfully into bed.
CHAPTER XX
THE chief-inspector hurled himself blindly across the room. When a man is shooting at short range it is advisable to get at him as quickly as possible. But Ling had no intention of waiting. His plans had miscarried somehow—it was of no immediate importance how. The chief thing was to get away.
He took the stairs three steps at a time, and flung up the landing window and cocked one leg through. The back of the house looked sheer on to a builder’s yard twenty feet below. He poised himself, swore as he found a portion of his clothing had become entangled in a nail in the window, and turned momentarily. Menzies saw his silhouette outlined against the window for a second, and the pistol flamed again.
‘The back door, Royal,’ he roared, as he apprehended the pursued man’s purpose. ‘Get to the back door.’
Then Ling leapt. It was a desperate feat in the darkness, but the crook’s luck held. He fell heavily on his feet and hands, straightened himself, and waived a hand lightly in the direction of the window.
‘Sorry I can’t stop,’ he cried. ‘Give my love to Cincinnati.’ And disappeared at a dog trot behind piles of bricks and stacks of drain pipes.
Weir Menzies drew a long breath. There were passages in the comminatory service which occurred to him as doing justice to the occasion, but he maintained an eloquent silence. Words were too feeble. He could hear Royal striking matches and muttering softly to himself, and the sound made him feel better. He descended slowly.
‘All right,’ he said, as he met his breathless subordinate. ‘I know. There isn’t any back way, of course. You can’t think of these things when you’re in a hurry. The tradesmen’s entrance is in the basement in front. He wouldn’t have risked his neck had there been any other way.’
‘He got away then?’ said the sergeant.
Menzies remembered that he always had considered one of Royal’s shortcomings a lack of tact. He answered shortly.
‘Jumped six or seven yards. Don’t look at me like that. If I’d been a light-weight I might have followed him, but I’m getting too old for such foolishness. Who is that at the door?’
‘I blew my whistle, sir, I expect it’s the uniform man. He can’t have got far. We might run a cordon round the neighbourhood.’
‘Oh, talk sense,’ retorted Menzies sharply. ‘He may be a couple of miles away before we can get the men. Hello, what’s this?’
He held up his left hand. It was dripping with blood. He walked closer to the light, and examined it with dispassionate curiosity.
‘That’s funny!’ he commented. ‘I must have got a rap across the knuckles with a bullet.’ He wrapped his handkerchief around the injured hand. ‘Go and open the door, or those fools’ll have it down. I’m going to have a talk with Cincinnati.’
The peril of capture in which Ling had been placed had not been due entirely to luck. His fertile resource had conceived a plan for a strategic retreat, and was intended to combine business with pleasure—business in that Cincinnati was to keep the attention of the detective while allowing him comparatively ample time to confound the active pursuit, and pleasure so far that he had turned the tool of the police against themselves.
There was only one flaw in this scheme, and that flaw had all but proved fatal—the supposition that the detectives would have implicit confidence in the good faith of the ‘con’ man. To one unprejudiced or not tensely strung up by an emergency it might have seemed an unlikely hypothesis. Weir Menzies might use a crook, but he never made the mistake of trusting one.
A doubt had crept into his mind at the very moment he arrived at Le Petite Savoye, and observed that Hallett was no longer with the ‘con’ man. How nearly he had been to acting then, in spite of Cincinnati’s dictated note, no one but Royal knew. Against his instincts he had waited, but he had made up his mind to afford little rope to Ling. So it was that he wasted no time when they had entered the house. The latter part of Ling’s stage management had been entirely wasted. For once in a while the chief-inspector had let intuition carry him on.
Able now for the first time to see Cincinnati’s predicament, he gave a grave nod of comprehension. Some of the methods which Ling had employed became clear to him. He cut the cords and slit away the sodden dress coat at the shoulder. As deftly and gently as a woman he examined it.
‘A clean flesh wound,’ he murmured. ‘Nothing much to hurt there. An inch or two lower and there would have been no need to hunt for evidence to hang Ling.’
Royal had admitted a uniformed sergeant.
‘I haven’t troubled about the cordon, sir. It seems that builder’s yard runs into a street backing on this. I have sent a couple of men round there.
‘Right you are. It might as well be done as a matter of form. They’ll not see anything of Ling, though. He’d got this all cut and dried, and if we’d been a little later getting in we’d not have had a ghost of a notion which way he’d gone at all. If you’ve got a spare man out there, sergeant, you might send for a doctor. This chap’s caught it.’
Cincinnati Red opened his eyes and smiled uncertainly.
‘Thought Ling was a better shot,’ he muttered.
‘Hallo, you’ve come round, have you?’ said Menzies. ‘Sorry for you Cincinnati, though I’d rather you got it than me. How he came to miss me at that distance is more than I can fathom. I’m big enough.’
The ‘con’ man’s smile broadened into a smile.
‘Say, you don’t know Ling, do you? He wasn’t shooting at you, he meant it for me all right.’ He winced with pain as he moved slightly. ‘He always pays his scores, does Ling—or tries to. I guess I’ll have something to say next time we meet. If only your people hadn’t taken my gun away. He had me covered from the moment he saw me.’
‘I suspected that,’ said Menzies. ‘How’d you slip Mr Hallett?’
‘Me? Slip Hallett?’ repeated Cincinnati.
‘That’s what I said!’
‘He slipped me, you mean!’ retorted the other querously. ‘That’s how it was that the whole thing started. There was a girl with Ling. Hallett knew her, and carted her away, high-handed, to a side door just before you came in. I thought it was part of the programme.’
Menzies lifted his hat and scratched his hair with the brim all the while he regarded Cincinnati with a steady stare. Jimmie Hallett had spoilt things again. There was some excuse for the bitterness with which his thoughts dwelt on that young man who seemed to have the faculty of making himself a continual stumbling-block to the investigation. Menzies had something of a taste for romance—in fiction. He even had no objection to it in real life as a general rule. But he hated it when it became entangled in his business—as it often did. One can as little be certain of what a woman will do as of what a man infatuated with a woman will do.
The expression of chagrin on the chief-inspector’s face faded as quickly as it had arisen.
‘Well, not exactly,’ he said, with nonchalance. ‘He didn’t do exactly what I wanted him to. Still, never mind. Here’s something else I wanted to ask you.’ He pulled a photograph from his pocket—the inevitable official full and side face. ‘Do you recognise this man?’
>
Cincinnati surveyed the photograph.
‘Sure,’ he answered. ‘That’s Dago Sam that I told you about—he’s in Ling’s lot.’
‘Thanks!’ The detective put the photograph back in his pocket. ‘I won’t worry you any more now. I’ll leave you to look after things here a bit, Royal. I’ve got several things I want to do, and I mean to have a night’s rest for once.’
Yet, in spite of his intentions, it was well after midnight before he sought the repose afforded by Magersfontein Road, Upper Tooting. His way lay first to the residence of a well-known coroner who lived in so inaccessible a portion of North London that even a taxi-driver had difficulty in locating his residence. Mr Fynne-Racton was a white-haired, ruddy-cheeked little man, whose calling in no way corresponded to his appearance. Although his name was well known to the general public, his chief capacities were known most fully in a more select circle—the Microscopical Society.
He peered over his spectacle at the tiny fragment of cloth and the single thread which Weir Menzies took from an envelope.
‘Certainly, certainly, Mr Menzies,’ he said. ‘I’ll do my best and let you know. I wish you’d come to me earlier. Of course, I can guess that these things are concerned in the case we’re all talking about. I won’t ask questions though—eh?’
‘I might want you as an expert witness,’ explained the detective.
‘And I might be asked if you gave me any suggestion?’ said Fynne-Racton. ‘Yes, yes, I understand! I’ll do my best, Mr Menzies; I hope it will be satisfactory. Good-night—good-night.’
Menzies spent half an hour and a little longer at Scotland Yard, and so home to bed and slumbers that did credit to his nerves. At breakfast the next morning one result of his labours stared him in the face as he opened his favourite morning paper. A double-column portrait of ‘William Smith’ appeared on the splash page, and big letters in the text propounded the query: