***
It was sheer impertinence on the part of X.K. to threaten the Home Secretary himself, for the Home Secretary was a poor man. In any case, even had he been rich enough to pay the exorbitant ransom demanded by X.K. as the price of sparing his life, the Ministerial head of law and order in England could hardly knuckle under to a criminal, however gifted that criminal might be.
Gifted X.K. certainly was. Ten times he had threatened. Seven victims had paid without demur. Three had refused.
Three were dead.
Death came to one of the three in the form of a heavy object falling from an attic, found on search by the police, three minutes later, to be empty.
The second man had died from the noiseless puff of a silenced pistol, fired, as it afterwards turned out, from an ambulance that was no ambulance, but a fake.
The third had been incautious enough to think that whisky from a sealed and branded bottle was safe. He died, after about two hours’ suffering.
X.K. had by now enough ransom money to satisfy the most extravagant criminal, for each of the seven timorous men had been millionaires, and he had soaked them unmercifully.
***
One might have expected X.K. to have ceased his deplorable activities and become an honest and respectable citizen, perhaps giving generously to hospitals, and in due course attaining a knighthood and an honoured grave. But this course did not appeal to him. Or else the detailed and widespread investigations of the police were irritating him. Or else he was actuated by an artist’s pride in creation. Or by a spirit of impish mischief. Or by a personal dislike of the Home Secretary—Sir Richard Jauntley.
All these theories were advanced by individual police heads when an excited Home Secretary, trying hard to disguise the nervous quiver in his voice, summoned them to his office by telephone, and showed them the following message, written with the usual X.K. typewriter:
‘£20,000 or you die at 8.30 a.m. G.M.T. on November 13 next. Answer yes (if willing) in The Times personal column, signing yourself “Sweetheart.” Any attempt to mark the money, or to deviate in any way from the instructions I shall give you for handing it to me, will entail exactly the same penalty as refusal—X.K.’
Like all X.K.’s letters, this, by some sublimely impudent trick, was written on Government notepaper and sent, post free, in an O.H.M.S. envelope.
At another time Gooch, who did not get on with his temporary head, might have laughed at X.K.’s nerve. Jauntley was nobody’s sweetheart, not at the tautest stretch of an overheated imagination.
Jauntley pulled angrily at a ragged white moustache and turned to Paule, Gooch’s colleague.
‘Damned inefficiency! There’s no other word for it. Here’s this man. Laughs at us! Threatens me! Me!’
‘And he’s always done what he’s threatened, hitherto,’ said Hamerton, the third member of the conference and of the so-called ‘Triumvirate’ which ruled the re-organised C.I.D.
Jauntley paled again at this reminder the nature of the menace. ‘What do you suggest?’ he asked irritably. ‘That we should give in to him?’
‘Good heavens, no, sir!’ said Hamerton, his almost Oriental face, with its melancholy whiskers, showing a faint trace of amusement at his Chief’s jumpiness. ‘I think he’s gone too far this time. He’s given a date; an exact time. He’s never done that before. The thing is for you, sir, to be put at that time in an obvious sort of place, a tempting place, where X.K. can get in, but can’t get out again. A trap, in fact.
‘I mean metaphorically, of course,’ he added, seeing that his remark might otherwise suggest some monster patent mouse-trap with Sir Richard as the dangling and helpless bait.
And indeed it did evoke some such image in his hearer, for Jauntley snorted.
‘Oh, I’m to be the tethered goat for the tiger, am I? No, thank you! X.K. says I’m to be killed at a certain date and time. Right, I survive it. Public confidence rises! Our job’s done! Instead of this nonsense of putting me where he can get at me, make me absolutely inaccessible.’
***
Paule had up till now ventured no suggestion. Now he spoke, his young, student’s face thoughtful behind the thick-lensed spectacles. ‘Supposing this exact time business is all a bluff? It may be intended only to put us off our guard before and after the time mentioned.’
‘That has to be considered,’ admitted Gooch. ‘So from this moment Sir Richard must be strictly guarded.
‘And I must ask you, sir,’ he added, turning his huge red moon-face to the Chief, ‘not to touch any food or drink without consulting the expert we shall put at your disposal. None the less, my personal opinion still is that X.K. will strain every nerve to fulfil his promise to the letter.’
‘An aeroplane,’ suddenly exclaimed Sir Richard, whose mind, neglecting unimportant details, had been working at high pressure on X.K.-proof refuges.
Hamerton shook his head mournfully. ‘Very risky. He might tamper with the structure. Or go up in another aeroplane with a machine gun. No, you stay on the ground, sir, where we can keep an eye on you!’
‘A submarine,’ suggested Sir Richard, with less confidence.
Gooch made a clicking noise. ‘Dreadfully vulnerable! He’d just torpedo you. Or send down a diver. Remember the fellow’s ingenuity.’
The discussion proceeded for some time on these lines. The three police officials had suffered a good deal of unmerited criticism during their conduct of the X.K. investigation in the past; and they could not help getting a certain malicious pleasure now from their superior’s evident funk, nor even refrain from augmenting it by pointing out flaws in his desperate expedients. Even his scheme of having a hole cut in a cliff face and being walled up in it for a day had objections.
‘A whiff of poison gas through a tube,’ suggested Hamerton, casually running a lean brown hand through his drooping whiskers; and Sir Richard went pale.
‘Or he might slip in the hiding-place just before you did,’ said Gooch, with a barely perceptible wink at Paule, and the Home Secretary found this prospect even more distressing. Alone with X.K. for a day!
***
It must not, however, be supposed that three high police officials were unequal to the task of guarding Sir Richard Jauntley against the most far-fetched machinations of X.K. When he had exhausted his fantastic expedients, and was prepared to listen to sense, they put their heads together and worked out a satisfying plan.
The vaults of the Bank of England were put at their disposal. In a central vault were arranged three chairs, in which would sit Gooch, Paule and Hamerton—and no one else. Each was to be armed. In the middle of the vault, their chairs ranged round it, they placed a structure which had been specially completed for the occasion. It consisted of a cell of thick bullet-proof glass, locked according to a combination known fully only to Sir Richard Jauntley.
Gooch, Hamerton and Paule each knew two letters of the six-cipher combination, and, therefore, their united knowledge was necessary to open it. It will be seen from this fact that the men involved had not even flinched from the possibility that one among them might be X.K., a circumstance that had some justification in X.K.’s surprising inside knowledge.
The Home Secretary was to sit inside this glass cube, a revolver in his hand. Mindful of Hamerton’s suggestion of poison gas, the cell was ventilated into the vault by a filtering apparatus, so that even if the whole vault were filled with poison gas, Sir Richard would still escape.
***
The events on the fatal day were as follows. At 6 a.m. six police experts, assisted by architects, inspected the central vault and all communicating and adjacent rooms and passages. They searched the bare massive structure for concealed weapons, unexplained pipes or wires, or any other body unaccounted for. In view of the guard normally stationed at the Bank, and the precautions always taken in connection with the vaults, the existence of any sinister
apparatus was in the highest degree unlikely, and none was, in fact, found.
Having been given the ‘all-clear,’ three cordons were formed round the vault. The two inner cordons were men from the Yard, aided by picked Bank officials. The outer cordon was formed by armed Guardsmen.
Each cordon could only pass visitors through a door having a lock set for the occasion to a combination known in whole only to Sir Richard Jauntley, but divided among Paule, Hamerton and Gooch, and also among the three senior officers in each cordon.
At eight o’clock on the morning of November 13th, an armoured car pulled up at the Bank. No whisper of the threat to the Home Secretary had been allowed to reach the public, and so its arrival was hardly noticed.
Sir Richard and his three companions passed slowly through the cordons. In each case they were not only carefully scrutinised by the three senior officials of each cordon, but their finger prints were compared with a chart to make sure there was no impersonation. All these precautions gave a reassuring sense of security to the Home Secretary, who had, up till then, felt unpleasantly like a condemned murderer awaiting a doubtful reprieve.
***
The last massive door clanged to behind them. Sir Richard got into his glass cube and sat there awkwardly, feeling ridiculously like a fish in an aquarium. The three police heads sat round him, silent, each with a revolver on his knees. Sir Richard picked up his, looked at it, and put it down again. Then he looked at his watch. It was 8.10. Twenty minutes to go.
A cough from Gooch echoed hollowly. Except for the chairs and the glass cube, the vault was bare, and lit only by the steady glow from the naked light bulbs, set in the roof, behind metal guards.
The four men were buried deep in the soil. It was utterly impossible for any visitor from the outside world to reach them. A flood, a revolution, or another Fire of London, would all pass unnoticed over their heads. Anyone trying to sap his way to them would encounter cement, iron plates, granite, and even water.
All four men began to feel a little foolish. What a massive defence they had devised to ward off the feeble powers of a pseudonymous brigand!
At 8.29 Sir Richard Jauntley glanced at his wrist watch and smiled. He made some gesture of contempt, and his lips moved, but of course they could not hear him through the glass. Quite suddenly his smile changed to a grimace of pain; his whole face contorted. He got up, flung out his arms wildly, and writhed on the floor. He twitched violently twice, and then was still.
When they got to him he was stone dead.
***
Well, there it was. X.K. had succeeded beyond all hope. And presently, as the three men knew, the Press would be carrying a message of terror which would make every future exaction of X.K. easy. So easy that his victims would be afraid even to report the matter to the police, afraid to do anything but pay up at once.
There was no sign of anything lethal in the glass cube. They could not associate the symptoms with any known poison—no drifting odour of almonds, such as is left by hydrocyanic acid, none of the acute agonies and foam-flecked lips of strychnine.
There was no wound upon him.
Their examination was made hurriedly. The police surgeon could go into the details.
‘Well, we’re beaten, for the moment,’ said Hamerton grimly. ‘We must have Sir Charles Martell for the post-mortem.’
Gooch was looking several years older.
‘Poor old Jauntley,’ he said, his moon-face pale. ‘To think I laughed at him for being in a funk! Only an hour or two ago.’
‘Pull yourself together, old chap!’ replied Hamerton, with the coldness of the expert who sees nothing but his job. ‘Here’s a problem. Don’t think of anything else. It’s a tough problem, but we must solve it.’
‘Well, I must leave that to you for the moment. I shall be spending the next twenty-four hours being badgered by Cabinet committees,’ said Gooch.
Paule took off his glasses and polished them thoughtfully. It was the first really big problem, as he understood it, that he had been called upon to face. He was only thirty-two, and his rise in the C.I.D. had been meteoric. He had been pitchforked into it by old Lord Goolmouth, with no qualifications except a University degree and a telling analysis of a much-reported crime which he had made casually at dinner at a house party of Lord Goolmouth’s. The point was that the police had happened to be wrong, and Paule’s analysis, pointing to an apparently innocent witness as the murderer, had happened to be right. Everyone had thought at first that Goolmouth was in his dotage. But Paule had risen like a comet. His talent for organisation, oddly enough, and not any brilliant solutions, had been the main cause of his progress. His keen analytic mind certainly had been useful from time to time, but in seven years it had never once been presented with a really first-class problem.
Now it had, and he wondered if, in the lapse of years spent in routine, it had grown a little rusty. He replaced his glasses with a sigh. Impossible to do anything until the surgeon had done his work.
***
Late that afternoon Paule accompanied Hamerton into the room in which Sir Charles was busy over his gruesome task. The naked body on the slab, with its pathetic heap of clothes and neatly-ranged personal effects nearby, was too familiar to cause either of them much uneasiness.
Sir Charles hummed gently to himself, as was his wont during post-mortems, and there was an occasional clink and splash of an instrument dropped in a glass beaker. The air was heavy with the pungent aroma of formalin.
‘Found anything, Sir Charles?’
‘Oh, yes, simple enough! I spotted it at once. He’s been killed with my poison!’
‘Your poison!’ exclaimed Hamerton, his hand dropping from his whiskers.
Sir Charles rubbed his chin with a quizzical smile. ‘Yes, mine. Mind you, I hardly regarded it as a poison when I discovered it. It is a medicine. T.T.1, I christened it in the article I wrote on it, but my colleagues insist on calling it Martelline. Well, well, I suppose it might have a worse name! And to think poor old Jauntley succumbed to it. Why only yesterday in the Athenaeum—’ Sir Charles’ garrulousness was his only fault, and Paule interrupted him.
‘How do you mean it’s a medicine?’
‘It is a stimulant to the heart and the central nervous system. But of course if the heart is over-stimulated—whoosh! Complete and instant collapse. That’s what happened here.’
‘And what is a fatal dose?’
‘Well, there is the pure extract, such as I experimented with, and the highly dilute form in which it would be supplied for hospital use.’
‘I mean in the pure extract?’
‘An ox was killed,’ said Sir Charles slowly, ‘with a dose which consisted of one cubic millimetre of water, in which the pure extract was dilute in the proportion of 10,000 parts to one.’
‘Sounds a lot,’ said Hamerton vaguely. Paule, whose mathematical training grasped precisely at this figure, stared. ‘But, good heavens! Such a dose would be almost invisible.’
‘Exactly,’ replied Sir Charles affably.
‘But—is it possible?’
Sir Charles smiled. ‘I see you are unfamiliar with the literature of the endocrine glands. Pure extracts of their basic secretions—such as pituitrin—act violently on the system even in microscopic doses. Martelline is an extract from the pineal gland—an organ hidden by the convolutions of the cerebrum.’
‘But how could this devil have got hold of it!’ exclaimed Hamerton.
‘Unfortunately I described its preparation, which is reasonably simple, in the columns of Nature,’ admitted Sir Charles. ‘I did not, of course, appreciate the possibility of its use as a poison. Our friend is evidently a well-read man. The odd thing is, I believe I am the only man who could have guessed that Jauntley did not die from natural causes. The symptoms of Martelline poisoning are absolutely undistinguishable from those of collapse due to sy
ncope, except that the Martelline also stimulates the suprarenal glands, which discharge a quantity of adrenalin into the bloodstream. I did not mention this fact in my article, and in the ordinary way no pathologist would think of testing the bloodstream of a syncope victim for excess adrenalin. In spite of his cleverness, therefore, your man never guessed that the one man who could detect his crime would examine the body. That at least shows he is liable to error.’
‘Wasn’t the article signed with your name?’
Sir Charles shook his head. ‘No. With my pseudonym Hormone. I have contributed to the medical press so often under that pseudonym that any medical man would know who Hormone was, but a mere layman would probably not associate it with the Home Office pathologist.’
***
Paule was pacing up and down the room, lost in thought. His moods of abstraction, frequent enough, marked him as a dreamer, even if a successful dreamer. His absent-mindedness had sometimes caused inconvenience, but his colleagues had grown resigned to these fits of reverie, and waited only for the flashing glimpses of intuition which sometimes—not always—lightened them.
‘How would it be administered, Sir Charles?’ went on Hamerton.
The surgeon stirred a beaker of boiling water reflectively. ‘By the mouth. Or intravenous injection. The injection would be more rapid in its effects.’
‘But how could it be done?’ asked Hamerton helplessly, ‘so that he would die at a fixed time. How long does the stuff take to act?’
‘Ten seconds, say, if administered by the mouth. Practically at once if given intravenously.’
Miraculous Mysteries Page 22