The Baron Again

by John Creasey

  Copyright & Information

  The Baron Again

  First published in 1938

  © John Creasey Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1938-2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of John Creasey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2014 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755135229 9780755135226 Print

  0755138562 9780755138562 Kindle

  0755136888 9780755136889 Epub

  0755145399 9780755145393 Epdf

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Creasey – Master Storyteller - was born in Surrey, England in 1908 into a poor family in which there were nine children, John Creasey grew up to be a true master story teller and international sensation. His more than 600 crime, mystery and thriller titles have now sold 80 million copies in 25 languages. These include many popular series such as Gideon of Scotland Yard, The Toff, Dr Palfrey and The Baron.

  Creasey wrote under many pseudonyms, explaining that booksellers had complained he totally dominated the ‘C’ section in stores. They included:

  Gordon Ashe, M E Cooke, Norman Deane, Robert Caine Frazer, Patrick Gill, Michael Halliday, Charles Hogarth, Brian Hope, Colin Hughes, Kyle Hunt, Abel Mann, Peter Manton, J J Marric, Richard Martin, Rodney Mattheson, Anthony Morton and Jeremy York.

  Never one to sit still, Creasey had a strong social conscience, and stood for Parliament several times, along with founding the One Party Alliance which promoted the idea of government by a coalition of the best minds from across the political spectrum.

  He also founded the British Crime Writers’ Association, which to this day celebrates outstanding crime writing. The Mystery Writers of America bestowed upon him the Edgar Award for best novel and then in 1969 the ultimate Grand Master Award. John Creasey’s stories are as compelling today as ever.

  Chapter One

  Agony Column

  Chief Inspector Bristow, of Scotland Yard, walked briskly from the police car towards the shining doors of the Elan Hotel. None of the several hundred people who must have glimpsed him as he crossed the wide stretch of Piccadilly pavement in front of the hotel realised that he was a policeman. Bristow, who was alone, looked the type of man who might be expected to spend an evening in the Elan, and September’s late sun shone warmly on the fresh and fragrant gardenia in his button-hole. The sun also picked out the yellow stain of nicotine at his greying, close-clipped moustache.

  A stolid commissionaire, more acquainted than the average pedestrian with the officers of the law, saluted smartly.

  “Good evening, sir. Mr. Gannet would like you to go straight to his office.”

  “Thanks,” said Bristow, and pushed his way through the imposing revolving doors.

  The clatter and roar of traffic and of hurrying feet on hot pavements dropped away into a distant murmur. Two or three shaded lights were burning, but the foyer of the Elan was more in the shadows than usual. It was practically empty. In one deep easy chair of dark brown plush a fair-haired young man was leaning back with a magazine held negligently in his left hand. His eyes turned hopefully towards the newcomer; he sighed a little, and then began to read the magazine again. An elderly woman, of majestic appearance, was waiting with obvious impatience on a settee. The peke in the lap of another woman snuffled and licked its lips. A small group of middle-aged men was gathered about a glass-topped table, and a hum of subdued conversation came from them.

  “Big business or risqué stories,” Bristow thought as he turned right towards the café. He had to cross it to reach the manager’s office.

  Bristow smiled a little, smoothing his moustache; there was a military precision in all his movements. A page-boy opened the café door, and Bristow stepped through.

  At seven o’clock the café was as empty as the foyer. Two or three couples were playing with long soft drinks, and a little bunch was gathered round a cocktail bar at the far end. It was brilliantly lighted, and a dozen different colours glowed, warm and inviting. Only one couple sat between Bristow and the green-painted door marked, in small chromium letters, ‘Manager.’

  Bristow saw the couple, and for the first time the smile at his lips disappeared. His grey eyes narrowed, lines coming suddenly to the corners.

  The woman was dressed in a flowered frock, and was obviously not prepared for dinner at the Elan. She was dark, her brows and lashes a little too well-marked for real beauty, but her features were regular and smooth. A smile was lurking in her eyes, as if at a joke she could not share.

  The man pushed his chair back and stood up. White teeth flashed for a second, emphasising the tan of his face. He would have been too handsome but for the lines of humour at his mouth and eyes, the latter hazel and wide-set. His dark hair was a little untidy, as though he had been out in a wind and combed it through hastily.

  “Hallo, Bristow, on the prowl so early?” He offered his hand. Bristow hesitated a fraction of a second, bowed to the woman, and responded. The grip was firm.

  “Good evening, Miss Fauntley. I thought you were abroad, Mannering. Have you been back long?”

  “Since Monday,” said Mannering, and his smile deepened. “You’ve that old suspicious look, Bristow, but can you join us?”

  “Thanks, I’m here on business,” Bristow said a little stiffly. “You’ve heard about it, I suppose?”

  “We’ve only been in ten minutes.”

  “Hmm.” Bristow succeeded in creating an impression that he was not convinced that was the truth. “The house detective caught a man in one of the bedrooms. Fallon’s suite,” he added as though that explained a great deal. “There’s some stuff gone, and they can’t find it. I hope Mannering—”

  Mannering smiled faintly.

  “No, it’s all right, Bill, I’m sure you won’t find a ghost of evidence that the Baron’s been busy.”

  “I hope not,” said Bristow, still stiffly. He bowed again to Mannering and Lorna Fauntley, and stepped to the manager’s door. He looked worried, as if the encounter with Mannering had been a severe jolt.

  To Bristow, John Mannering and that cracksman extraordinary, the Baron, were one and the same. Although Bristow had never succeeded in securing evidence to put Mannering in dock, he believed that it existed.

  For nearly six months there had been no word from the Baron, and little talk about him. When the Baron was busy there was always talk, and Bristow was content to let sleeping dogs lie. To have word, however, of a jewel robbery from Henry Fallon’s suite, to know that some of that American jewel-collector’s finer gems had disappeared, and then to find the most accomplished jewel-thief in London on the scene gave Bristow food for thought, although he knew that a man had already been detained.

  It was unlike the Baron to work with an accomplice. In fact, if anyone had suggested the Elan burglary was the Baron’s work, and then offered proof that two
people had been engaged on it, Bristow would probably discount the suggestion.

  He tapped on the office door, opened it and went through. Mannering and Lorna Fauntley were looking at each other amusedly. They did not catch a glimpse of the three men inside the office.

  “Poor Bill,” said Lorna, and Mannering shrugged.

  “He hasn’t much to grumble about, but he’s losing his fire. He didn’t make an open accusation—”

  “He never has been a fool,” Lorna said, and frowned a little. That brought a groove between her brows, and made her look sullen, almost forbidding. She tapped the ash from her cigarette impatiently. “I wish—” she began, and then stopped abruptly.

  “Go on,” said Mannering.

  The light laugh which followed did him good.

  “Sorry, John; I shouldn’t have started talking.”

  “No,” Mannering responded dryly, “but you can think a lot. You wish, in fact, that it was possible to see a policeman without wondering whether he’ll invite me to go with him to the nearest lock-up. It was rather a blow, seeing Bristow on our third day back in London.”

  “That’s the trouble.” Lorna was half-frowning. “In London we can’t get away from it. I suppose I ought to be inured to it by now, but—”

  “Once a cracksman always a cracksman,” said Mannering, raising an eyebrow. “If three or four years passed and I lived a blameless life we’d always experience the same nausea in London. Bristow knows as well as several others at the Yard. Probably a dozen people, at the most, know or suspect that I’m the Baron—and practically every day we manage to meet one of them. I get a kick out of it,” he confessed, slowly, “but it’s not so good for you. All things considered, wouldn’t it be wiser if we separated for—well, six months?” Lorna’s eyes mocked him.

  “A glorious idea! You’d probably say the same if we were married. No. And don’t take me too seriously, John, it was just meeting Bristow and seeing that look in his eyes—that’s right, laugh!”

  “I wonder if Bill realises what a sensation he causes every time he looks at you?” asked Mannering. “Seriously, it would be a different proposition if we were married. We can’t canter off together for too long as things are, for decency’s sake.” His face was set, now, and he played with a match. “That accursed husband of yours—”

  “Still in prison.”

  “What grand people you get to know,” said Mannering with a touch of bitterness. “Sorry, remark withdrawn! I suppose one of these fine days you’ll really try to get a divorce?” Lorna did not answer directly.

  “You’re the Baron and that’s always with us,” she said. “I’m married to a rogue and we can’t get away from that either. No wonder I hated the idea of coming back to London. John—”

  “Easy, my sweet,” said Mannering, but she did not seem to hear him as she went on: “I’ve never had illusions about Rennigan, and there are grounds enough for divorce, but we’ve been over the ground so often. It would break both my mother and father. I’ve been worked up a dozen times to the point of telling them, but something always prevents me. It’s damnably unfair to you, and—well, I often think you’d be happier with someone who doesn’t know you as the Baron, who will get a kick out of marrying the renowned John Mannering. It would help you to put the Baron behind you, too. I’m a constant reminder of it, and while things remain as they are, you get bitter—and bitterness is likely to encourage the Baron. The surest way of burying the Baron for good is to marry someone who—”

  “Would nib their hands in anticipation of an orgy of spending, wonder how many diamonds I really possess, and babble and chatter inanities. She would doubtless present me with three or four children and pray they’d be like me—and serve,” he added, softly, “to remind me every minute what a damned fool I had been not to tell your father and mother just why we haven’t married, make you face up to a scandal that wouldn’t worry you a tinker’s curse, but might shock them for half an hour, and lose us some of our more righteous acquaintances. Stalemate, darling, and the subject of divorce is barred for another six months. I hereby promise to preserve your secret, too. Agreed?”

  “You’re not getting younger, John. You’re thirty-seven. If you forgot about me you would have your first real chance of putting the Baron behind you.”

  “I’ve been the Baron for just over three years,” said Mannering, slowly, “and he’s been inactive for six months. There being more than enough of my ill-gotten gains to provide a reasonable income, short of war, earthquakes or the complete collapse of the economic system, the Baron is likely to remain inactive for ever, to the delight of Bristow, you, and a few others. The only folk who might regret it,” added John Mannering with a smile, “are the daily papers. They’ll miss him. They’ve whitewashed me until I’m more Robin Hood than the bold, bad Baron.”

  Lorna did not look amused.

  “If they knew the whole truth you’d be a public hero,” she assured him. “Do you know, John, that’s a thing that helps me more than anything else. You’ve helped others far more than you’ve helped yourself. I—”

  “More in that strain,” said Mannering, lightly, “and you’ll start me blushing. Hallo, here comes the prisoner.”

  The manager’s door opened. Bristow came out first; Raoul Gannet, the Elan’s manager, bowed him out of the office. Next came a middle-aged, thick-set man in ill-cut, ready-made clothes. He looked thoroughly dejected, and from beneath bushy, black brows his glance shifted in all directions. Tilford, the hotel detective at the Elan, followed.

  Bristow and Tilford nodded to Mannering, who watched the little party disappear.

  “That prisoner’s not much like the Baron,” Mannering said. “Well, after a day in the country, what’s on for the evening? A dutiful daughter at home? A show? The studio? Or my flat?”

  “Mother’s dining alone, and I’d like to be with her,” Lorna said. “Will you come round later?”

  “Gladly. I’ll run you home first.”

  His Lagonda was parked in a side street near the Regal, and ten minutes later he pulled up outside the Portland Terrace home of Lord Fauntley, who spent a great deal of his time wondering, in his ignorance, why his daughter and Mannering delayed getting married. It would be a good match; they had been unofficially engaged too long, he thought, and more than once he had heard people talking.

  One of the banes of Fauntley’s life was ‘people talking.’

  Lucy, his wife, appeared to care for nothing, rumours or facts. As Mannering handed Lorna out of the car he wondered why she was convinced that the prospects of a divorce (and the play that the dailies would undoubtedly make of it) would be a severe blow to her mother.

  His problem, however, was probably far simpler than many; better to remain unmarried than to make a hash of it. The situation was damnable for Lorna, nevertheless. He should not keep worrying her about divorce.

  At the corner of Portland Place and Regent Street he bought an Evening Wire, without glancing at it until he had garaged the Lagonda in a mews conveniently situated for his Clarges Street flat. He was feeling pleasantly tired, and looking forward to a bath.

  They had been as far as the South Downs, spent three or four of the midday hours walking – but for an hour spent at a village inn, where Lorna had demanded bread-and-cheese and shandy rather than the one-and-sixpenny luncheon – and driven back at their leisure. Mannering hardly knew even now why they had chosen to go to the Elan. The roads had been dusty, London seemed to reek more than usual with petrol fumes, and he had suggested a long drink; that had led to the meeting with Bristow.

  Then the old trouble had cropped up.

  He was the Baron, and he could never again know complete freedom from anxiety; there were moments when he would have given every penny he possessed to cancel out the three years of the Baron’s existence.

  He had started the jewel thefts cold-bloodedly enough, and afterwards the excitement had got into him – that of constantly pitting his wits against the police. If he
had a real consolation now, it was that opportunities had occurred for helping others, opportunities which would never have been presented had he been simply John Mannering, and not the Baron. Moreover, he had never knowingly robbed a man who would suffer greatly from the loss.

  Mannering, whistling a little, stood by the table and opened the Evening Wire.

  His eyes grew suddenly hard and wary.

  The foreign news that had been the staple diet of the evening papers since the finish of the Test Matches with Australia, had for once been displaced from the headlines. A well-known racing motorist had just failed to beat the existing record at Daytona. A woman’s body had been found in the New Forest, and foul play was suspected. Centred so as to catch the eye immediately, however, were the headlines:

  APPEAL TO “THE BARON” Agony Column Request to Notorious Cracksman

  Mannering read through the paragraphs quickly, only his eyes moving to and fro. He had said half-jokingly to Lorna that the Press would regret his retirement; here was all the proof he needed of his news value.

  The advertisement had appeared in the personal columns of the morning papers, and the Evening Wire made all possible capital out of it. “Behind this appeal,” it ran, “lies a poignant story which the public will probably never know. But in the past the Baron has responded to the call of sentiment, a characteristic that has made him vitally different from the ordinary jewel-thief. Will he refuse this time? Or—”

  The ‘agony advertisement’ was reproduced in the centre of the letter-press, and ringed round like a memorial card. It was simple and direct, and had Mannering glanced down the personal columns that morning he must have seen it.

  “To the Baron. On Friday last, when you visited the Maycourt Hotel, a small diamond ring valued at £50 was with the other jewels taken. To you it is valueless. Sentimentally it is priceless to me. Please return to Alder & Claythorne, Solicitors, Ardley Place, S.W.I.”