The Rogues' Syndicate

by Frank Froest

  Foyle kicked the coals again, and the action seemed to afford him some relief.

  ‘And Ling admitted it. The chap was so proud of what he’d done that he took a note of the conversation.’

  ‘I don’t see what we can do,’ said Menzies slowly. ‘We can’t put the constable in the box. The only thing to do is to let it slide. If we don’t use it the defence won’t make a point of it.’

  ‘What I’m wondering about,’ said the superintendent, ‘is if your evidence is watertight as it stands? You see, even if Ling should make a voluntary admission now, it’s tainted. He’s been seeing the shyster Lexton, and I wouldn’t wonder if all this wasn’t a carefully put up trap.’

  Weir Menzies drew his brows together, and began eating his moustache. ‘There might be something in that,’ he agreed. ‘Lexton’s a good lawyer, and it’s like him.’

  ‘See.’ Foyle demonstrated with a forefinger. ‘If we could be tempted into putting an officer in the box to say that Ling had confessed, he’d have us by the short hair. We’d have to admit that at least one of our men had questioned him, and’—he snapped his fingers—‘there you are. The whole police evidence tainted. We’re so anxious for a conviction that we’ve applied third degree methods in England. Why, he’d be acquitted if he’d committed as many murders as Herod.’

  ‘I quite understand, sir.’ Menzies was a little peevish at having the i’s dotted. ‘If he makes a thousand confessions we won’t use them.’

  ‘I only wanted to put you wise,’ said Foyle almost apologetically. ‘You’ve got to rely on a straightforward case. Got it mapped out?’

  ‘I think so. There’s the direct case against him. There’s plenty of evidence to indicate Gwennie Lyne’s association, and we’ve got Miss Greye-Stratton’s story. Big Rufe was caught, so to speak, red-handed, and I rather fancy when he sees how deep he’s in he’ll turn King’s evidence. We don’t want that, though, if we can help it’.

  ‘No. I should think not,’ said the superintendent quickly. He had all the prejudice of the trained man against calling the assistance of one guilty person to convict others. King’s evidence is never suggested by Scotland Yard officers except as a last resource.’

  ‘The weak point,’ said Menzies, ‘is Dago Sam. Except his threatening Hallett, and what Cincinnati Red can tell us about him, we’ve got little to connect him up.’

  ‘Well, see what the lawyers say,’ said Foyle. ‘After all it’s their funeral now.’

  Menzies nevertheless had a doubt rankling in his mind, and before he left for the consultation with the legal lights he had put into motion again all the machinery which he could bring to bear to find out whether any part of the case as affecting Dago Sam had been overlooked. He held no animus. He would have cheerfully volunteered any statement in favour of a prisoner, but equally he had that stern sense of duty that impelled him to make sure he had every accessible fact.

  Many difficulties had been brushed away since all the main persons of the drama were in his hands, and it not infrequently happens that evidence of vast import is picked up after arrests have been effected. It is then possible to go over the ground more at leisure, and with an undetached mind.

  Congreve, with a big Gladstone bag and an air of jubilation, was awaiting him when he returned from Whitehall. He had been assisting in the search of the opium house, and though he suppressed it well, it was plain to the inspector’s keen eyes that he was labouring under some excitement.

  ‘Having a birthday, Congreve?’ he said. ‘You look happy.’

  The other was diving into the bag. He stood up with something wrapped in tissue paper in his arms.

  ‘We went over that place as you said, sir. Mostly old pipes and lamps, and all the old junk that you’d expect. I left it in charge of Hugh. There was one room though that had apparently been lived in by a European, proper bed and washstand and everything. The mattress looked rather uneven, so we undid it. Found this suit of clothes stuffed in it. Shouldn’t wonder if we found that they fit Ling. Here’s the packet. Look at the stain on the left sleeve and breast.

  ‘Don’t be in a hurry to jump to conclusions, Congreve,’ said Menzies, calmly. ‘Let me have a look at it. It may not be Ling’s, it may be that the stain is not blood, it may be that if it is it has nothing to do with the case.’

  ‘It’s blood all right, sir,’ asserted Congreve, confidently. ‘Look.’ He pointed as Menzies spread the jacket carefully over the desk. ‘You’ll remember how the dead man was lying—on his left side with his face towards the fireplace. Anyone approaching the body would naturally come from behind, and use the left arm to support the head. If the wound was bleeding freely then the jacket would be soaked exactly like this.’

  Menzies opened a penknife, and removed a hair from the breast of the coat. ‘Go and see if you can get me two small pieces of glass,’ he said. ‘You’ll probably get them in the photographers’ room.’

  He placed the hair between the glass slabs which Congreve had secured, and tied a piece of tape round them. His lips were pressed together tightly.

  ‘Does it strike you, Congreve,’ he said, quietly, ‘that if you’re right, and this is the suit that was worn by the murderer, it queers my theory? I was relying on the thread of cloth I found to show that it was Ling. Now this material isn’t in the slightest respect like that. It means that we’ve got an entirely new angle to look into.’

  ‘Yes, but—?’

  ‘Never mind about anything else for the minute. Take the coat round to Professor Harding’s, and make sure that it is human blood. Before you do that ’phone through to Mr Fynne-Racton, and ask him if he’ll oblige by coming on here as quick as a motor can bring him. Tell him to bring an instrument. It’s very urgent, or I wouldn’t trouble him.’

  He opened the breast pocket of the coat, wrote a few words on an envelope, and passed out carrying the hair in its glass shield.

  He held a brief conversation with Foyle in the latter’s room, and left the hair with him. Thence he walked to the Home Office, from there took the tube to Kensington, and thence returned to a certain tailoring firm in the Strand. From the Strand he took a taxi to Brixton Prison.

  He had entirely forgotten his appointment with Jimmie Hallett, and that young man’s reproachful face peering out of the waiting-room was one of the first sights that he encountered on his return to the Yard.

  ‘Hullo Hallett, old man. Sorry. Hope I haven’t kept you waiting long?’

  ‘Only a matter of a couple of hours,’ said Jimmie. ‘Don’t apologise.’

  ‘Lucky you’re a man of leisure,’ grinned the detective. ‘Another ten minutes won’t hurt.’ He swung into the superintendent’s room.

  It was nearer another sixty than another ten minutes before he emerged and carried the impatient Jimmie to the electric cars opposite the Houses of Parliament. ‘That’s another good day’s work done,’ he said thankfully. ‘I clean forgot all about you, Hallett, or I’d have left a message. I’ve had a hundred things to think about.’

  ‘And I,’ mourned Jimmie, ‘have only had one. By the way, how is Miss Greye-Stratton?’

  ‘As fit as could be expected, all things considered. Ninety-nine girls out of a hundred who had gone through what she has would have been knocked right up. I told her I should probably be bringing you home to dinner.’

  ‘Things been all right today? No hitches of any kind?’

  ‘One or two little points,’ admitted the chief-inspector. ‘I’m expecting a telephone call when I get home. Perhaps I’ll tell you then.’

  They had the top of the car to themselves. Jimmie laughed. ‘Still as cautious as ever. I’ll begin to have doubts soon, whether you’re as wise as you seem.’

  ‘I’ve begun to have doubts myself. We’re none of us infallible. If I was I should be on the Stock Exchange, not in the C.I.D.’

  Although Menzies lived in Magersfontein Road, Upper Tooting, the dinner that had been arranged smacked little of the suburbs. Jimmie felt that he had eate
n many worse at Princes and Delmonico’s. Perhaps a difference was made by the slim black figure that sat opposite to him. Some of the melancholy had gone from the blue eyes, though she was still sober and subdued. Mrs Menzies, discreet and tactful, watched her closely, and Jimmie noticed that the conversation was never allowed to flag.

  ‘I don’t know how many years we’ve been married Hallett,’ said Menzies, reflectively, as he poured out a glass of claret, ‘but this is the first time I’ve ever taken my wife into my confidence on a professional subject—and the first time she’s ever asked me.’

  Jimmie’s eyes dwelt on the smiling, genial face of his hostess. ‘Effect and cause,’ he murmured. ‘If Mrs Menzies ever wanted to know a thing you’d have to capitulate.’

  ‘Don’t you believe that, Mr Hallett,’ interrupted Mrs Menzies. ‘He’s like a bit of stone sometimes—a most aggravating man to get on with. Don’t you ever marry a detective, Miss Greye-Stratton.’

  ‘She won’t,’ said Jimmie promptly, and watched the rich flood of colour that surged into the girl’s cheeks.

  ‘One minute,’ said Menzies, standing. ‘Fill your glasses. I’m going to propose a toast. Oh, da—bless the telephone.’ With an apology he hurried to the instrument.

  ‘Yes … yes. This is Menzies speaking … That you, Mr Foyle? Oh, yes, yes … I see, that clears everything up … Yes, I’ll be along early in the morning. Good-night.’

  He returned to the dining-room. ‘To break another professional rule,’ he said, quietly. ‘I don’t mind telling you that my mind is perfectly at ease for the first time since Mr Greye-Stratton was killed.’

  CHAPTER XXXV

  JIMMIE presented a French roll sternly at Menzies, pistol wise.

  ‘You don’t get away with it like that,’ he warned. ‘Look at him. Cold-blooded isn’t the word. He’s got a perfectly clear mind, and he can sit down and eat and drink in our presence as though we didn’t matter. If you think to practise official reticence at this stage, my son, you’re mistaken. You’ve gone too far to get away with it. We don’t matter, I suppose?’

  The chief-inspector brushed his moustache with his serviette. ‘Plenty of time,’ he murmured. ‘Let’s have some coffee in my room, my dear.’ His eyes twinkled at his wife. ‘I must try to satisfy this insatiable young man even if I get broken for betraying official secrets.’

  ‘If you betray any secrets to Mr Hallett you betray them to us,’ assented Mrs Menzies, definitely.

  ‘But my dear’—a series of humorous wrinkles formed around the corners of his eyes—‘you know you don’t like smoke in the drawing-room. How can I talk—’

  Jimmie had to close his eyes to convince himself that this homely rotund person who was laying a snare to avoid the domestic discipline that forbade contamination of the drawing- room curtains with smoke was the ruthless determined man who had smashed a great conspiracy, and run four criminals to earth. That fierce struggle in the opium den seemed very far away.

  ‘Oh, very well.’ Mrs Menzies spoke in laughing resignation. ‘You may smoke there—but not a pipe. Mind, I totally forbid a pipe.’

  Menzies winked at Jimmie. ‘It shall be my very Sunday best cigars,’ he said. ‘Come along.’

  In the drawing-room he took up his favourite posture with one arm on the mantelpiece and a foot on the fender. He lit his cigar with deliberation, and drew silently at it for a second or two.

  ‘You know pretty well as much as I do about this business up to last night,’ he said to Jimmie. ‘If you had to guess who would you say was the actual murderer?’

  ‘Ling?’ said Jimmie, promptly. ‘Why, you told, us yourself—’

  ‘That’s what comes of talking before a case is complete,’ said the chief inspector, oracularly. ‘If I’d kept my mouth shut and said nothing you wouldn’t have been able to convict me in my own house of being a liar. I was too quick with the cockadoodledo act, though,’ he added, quickly. ‘I was right in my main facts. Ling is certainly a murderer—legally all of the gang are murderers, and I don’t doubt that they’ll all receive the same punishment. But even so, there’s something more than an intellectual satisfaction in clearing up the last fragments of doubt. Ling is not the murderer. He was present in the house when the shot was fired, he was the man who, posing as a doctor, knocked you out, but the real assassin is Mr William Smith—otherwise Dago Sam.’

  ‘The gentleman who wanted to persuade me not to say anything?’

  ‘That same gentleman. Funny, isn’t it, that he should have been under lock and key all this while, and we never dreamt of considering him anything but a subordinate—which, in point of fact, he is, although he killed Greye-Stratton. That’s one of the advantages by the way of organised detective work. No single man would ever get time to cope with all the ramifications which have to be followed in the investigations of the most great crimes.

  ‘In one way or another we’ve now got roughly the life of the five persons involved in the conspiracy since its inception in the brain of Gwennie Lyne. Pinkerton’s and the New York police have helped us a lot on that. I won’t burden you with a lot of detail about that. Big Rufe was brought into it by Gwennie because she didn’t want Ling to boss the show, and Rufe, though he’s got no brains, is a handy man in a row. Dago Sam was the man who originally knew Errol, and he seems to have slid into the scheme because he wouldn’t be left out.

  ‘Now about the murder. Mr Greye-Stratton did not seem in any hurry to die naturally, and the gang, of course, found expenses running up. There was every probability that Errol was right, and that he had left his fortune to you, Miss Greye-Stratton, but there was no certainty—only Errol’s word. Now, Dago Sam was an expert burglar. Does that suggest anything to you?’

  ‘I get a glimmering of what you’re driving at,’ said Jimmie. ‘Get along.’

  ‘There wasn’t one among them who objected to the idea of making certain. Errol had spoken of the safe. The chances were that if the old man had made a will he would not have confided it to his lawyers—I am assuming their line of argument—but would keep it in his own safe, under his own eye. If it was in Miss Greye-Stratton’s favour well and good, if it was not the scheme was that it should be destroyed, and a dummy substituted. Then she would automatically inherit.’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ interrupted Jimmie. ‘Is this a hypothesis or—?’

  ‘It’s concrete fact. I’ll tell you how we got at it in a moment. Very well. Dago Sam was delegated to do the burglary on the first convenient night. It so happened that when the fog came down he decided that his chance had arrived, and set off without confiding in anybody but Errol. That was the night Miss Greye-Stratton that you gained the cheques.

  ‘After missing you in the fog Ling went on to La Petite Savoye, where he met Errol, who spoke about Sam’s decision. Now Ling it seems wasn’t quite certain that Sam hadn’t some game of his own to play. Crooks rarely trust one another entirely—and what must he do but start off to Linstone Terrace Gardens himself to keep an eye on things. He must have acted just on general principles, because, unless by accident, he hadn’t a ghost’s chance of getting into the house. You see, he’s no burglar.

  ‘The accident happened. While he was kicking his heels outside, the door opened softly, and old Greye-Stratton, a pistol in his hand, looked out. To a man of Ling’s acuteness it was obvious what had happened. He walked casually by, and was, of course, stopped. “There’s a burglar in here,” says Greye-Stratton. “Will you fetch a constable?” “It’s not much of a night to find one,” said Ling. “I’ll come in if you like. The two of us ought to manage him.”

  ‘They went in—Ling taking the pistol, and—it proves what his nerves were like—putting up a play of holding up Dago Sam who was hiding behind a curtain.

  ‘“Bring him into the other room,” said the old man. “There’s a telephone there. I can send for the police.”

  ‘That took them both aback for the minute. It is to be supposed that the old man had not telephoned in the first
place, because he was afraid the sound of his voice might alarm the burglar. He crossed the dining-room, leaving Ling to look after Sam, and that was how it happened. Sam impulsively pulled the weapon out of Ling’s hand, and fired. Possibly if Ling had realised what was going to happen he would have stopped it. However, he had no chance, and he must have realised instantly that as it was done he had to sink or swim with Dago Sam. He took the revolver away, and put it in his pocket. Sam went round the table to inspect the shot man. It was at that moment that you, Mr Hallett, knocked at the door.

  ‘Now, whatever may be against Ling, he never lacked courage or resource. Your knock must have staggered the pair of ’em. It might simply be a casual caller, though that was unlikely, seeing what sort of a man Mr Greye-Stratton was, or it might be someone who had heard the shot. When your second knock came they had either to open the door or risk the responsibility of an alarm being raised. Ling had taken the precaution to switch off the hall light when they came through. He started for the front door. Sam quietly called him back, and passed him a small sandbag. He had that spiel about being a doctor all ready to loose out on you. If the caller had happened to be an acquaintance of Greye-Stratton’s it would explain what he, a stranger, was doing there. You fell for it, were lured inside, and laid out, and the cheques taken from you. Then you were locked in. It occurred to Ling that something might be traced home to them if any trace of the forgery was left. That was why they cleared out all those bank-books and things. It only seems to have occurrred to them next day, after they had had a sleep on it, that you might have seen Ling, and be able to recognise him again. So Dago Sam was put on that fool idea of trying to terrify you.’