The Black Gang

by Sapper

  “This is the place to wait,” he heard the Italian say. “You go on, Franz, to the corner, and when it’s ready flash your torch. You’ll have to stand on the running-board, Bill, and steer till he’s round the corner into the straight. Then jump off – no one will see you behind the headlights. I’m going back to Maybrick Tower.”

  And then he heard a sentence which drove him impotent with fury, and again set him struggling madly to move.

  “The girl’s there. We’ll get orders about her in the morning.”

  There was silence for a while; then he heard Bill’s voice.

  “Let’s get on with it. There’s Franz signalling. We’ll have to prop him up on the steering-wheel somehow.”

  They pulled Drummond out of the back of the car, and put him in the driver’s seat.

  “Doesn’t matter if he does fall over at the last moment. It will look as if he’d fainted, and make the accident more probable,” said the Italian, and Bill grunted.

  “Seems a crime,” he muttered, “to smash up this peach of a car.” He started the engine and switched on the headlights; then he slipped her straight into third speed and started. He was on the running-board beside the wheel, steering with one hand and holding on to Drummond with the other. As they rounded the corner he straightened the car up and opened the throttle. Then he jumped off, and Drummond realised the game at last.

  A river was in front – a river spanned by a bridge which swung open to let boats go through. And it was open now. He had a dim vision of a man waving wildly; he heard the crash as the car took the guarding gate, and then he saw the bonnet dip suddenly; there was a rending, scraping noise underneath him as the framework hit the edge; an appalling splash – and silence.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In which Hugh Drummond Arrives at Maybrick Hall

  Two things saved Drummond from what was practically certain death – the heavy coat he was wearing, and the fact that he rolled sideways clear of the steering-wheel as soon as the man let go of him with his hand. Had he remained behind the wheel he must infallibly have gone to the bottom with the car, and at that point where the river narrowed to come through the piers of the bridge the water was over twenty feet deep. He had sufficient presence of mind to take a deep breath as the car shot downwards; then he felt the water close over his head. And if before his struggles to move had been fierce – now that the end seemed at hand they became desperate. The desire to get clear – to give one kick with his legs and come to the surface roused him to one superhuman effort. He felt as if the huge heave he gave with his legs against the floorboards must send him flying to the top; afterwards he realised that this vast effort had been purely mental – the actual physical result had been practically negligible. But not quite, it had done something, and the coat did the rest.

  With that one last supreme throw for his life his mind had overcome the effects of the poison to the extent of forcing his legs to give one spasmodic little kick. He floated clear of the car, and slowly – how slowly only his bursting lungs could testify – the big coat brought him to the surface. For a moment or two he could do nothing save draw in deep gulps of air; then he realised that the danger was not yet past. For he couldn’t shout, he could do nothing save float and drift, and the current had carried him clear of the bridge out of sight of those on top. And his mind was quite clear enough to realise that the coat which had saved him, once it became sodden would just as surely drown him.

  He could see men with lanterns on the bridge; he could hear them shouting and talking. And then he saw a boat come back from the ship that had passed through just before he went over the edge in his car. Surely they’d pull downstream to look for him, he thought in an agony of futile anger; surely they couldn’t be such fools as to go on pulling about just by the bridge when it was obvious he wasn’t there. But since they thought that he was at the bottom in his car, and blasphemous language was already being wafted at them by the skipper of the vessel for the useless delay, with a sinking heart Drummond saw the boat turn round and disappear upstream into the darkness. Men with lanterns still stood on the bridge, but he was far beyond the range of their lights, and he was drifting farther every minute. It was just a question of time now – and it couldn’t be very long either. He could see that his legs had gone down well below the surface, and only the air that still remained in the buttoned-up part of his overcoat kept his head out and his shoulders near the top. And when that was gone – the end. He had done all he could; there was nothing for it now but to wait for the inevitable finish. And though he had been credibly informed that under such circumstances the whole of a man’s life passes in rapid review before him, his sole and only thought was an intense desire to get his hands on Peterson again.

  For a while he pictured the scene with a wealth of pleasant detail, until a sudden change in his immediate surroundings began to take place. At first he could not realise what had happened; then little by little it began to dawn on him what had occurred. Up to date the water in which he floated had seemed motionless to him; he had been drifting in it at exactly the same velocity as the current. And now, suddenly, he saw that the water was going past him. For a moment or two he failed to understand the significance of the fact; then wild hope surged up in his mind. For a time he stared fixedly at the bridge, and the hope became a certainty. He was not drifting any farther from it; he was stationary; he was aground. He could feel nothing; he could see nothing – but the one stupendous fact remained that he was aground. Life took on another lease – anything might happen now. If only he could remain there till the morning they would see him from the bridge, and there seemed no reason why he shouldn’t. The water still flowed sluggishly past him, broken with the faintest ripple close to his head. So he reasoned that it must be very shallow where he was, and being an incurable optimist, he resumed, with even fuller details, his next meeting with Peterson.

  But not for long. Starting from his waist and spreading downwards to his feet and outwards through his shoulders to his hands there slowly began to creep the most agonising cramp. The torture was indescribable, and the sweat dripped off his forehead into his eyes. And gradually it dawned on him that the effects of the poison were wearing off. Sensation was returning to his limbs; even through his agony he could feel that he was resting against something under the water. Then he heard a strange noise, and realised that was he himself groaning with the pain. The use of his voice had come back. He spoke a sentence aloud, and made certain.

  And then Drummond deliberately decided on doing one of those things which Peterson had always failed to legislate for in the past. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have shouted themselves hoarse under such circumstances; not so Drummond. Had he done so a message would have reached Peterson in just so long as it took a trunk call to get through; the man called Franz was still assiduously helping the gate-keeper on the bridge. And the Reverend Theodosius Longmoor and his little Janet would have vanished into the night, leaving no traces behind them.

  Which all flashed through Drummond’s mind as the cramp took and racked him, and the impulse to shout grew stronger and stronger. Twice he opened his mouth to hail the men he could see not three hundred yards away – to give a cry that would bring a boat post-haste to his rescue; twice he stopped himself with the shout unuttered. A more powerful force was at work within him than mere pain – a cold, bitter resolve to get even with Carl Peterson. And it required no great effort of brain to see that that would be more easily done if Peterson believed he had succeeded. Moreover if he shouted there would be questions asked. The police would inevitably come into the matter, demanding to know why he adopted such peculiar forms of amusement as going into twenty feet of water in a perfectly good motor-car. And all that would mean delay, which was the last thing he wanted. He felt tolerably certain that, for all his apparent confidence, Peterson was not going to stop one minute longer in the country than was absolutely necessary.

/>   So he stayed where he was, in silence – and gradually the cramp passed away. He could turn his head now, and with eyes that had grown accustomed to the darkness he saw what had happened. On each side of him the river flowed past smoothly, and he realised that by a wonderful stroke of luck he had struck a small shoal. Had he missed it – had he floated by on either side – well, Peterson’s plan would have succeeded.

  “Following the extraordinary motor accident reported in our previous issue, we are now informed that the body of the unfortunate driver has been discovered some three miles from the scene of the tragedy. He was drowned, and had evidently been dead some hours.”

  Drummond smiled grimly to himself as he imagined the paragraphs in the papers. His nerves were far too hardened to let his narrow escape worry him for an instant, and he felt an unholy satisfaction in thinking of Peterson searching the early specials and the late extras for that little item of news.

  “I’d hate you to be disappointed, my friend,” he muttered to himself, “but you’ll have to be content with the coat and hat. The body has doubtless drifted farther on and will be recovered later.”

  He took off his hat, and let it drift away; he unbuttoned his overcoat and sent it after the hat. Then letting himself down into the deep water, he swam noiselessly towards the bank.

  A little to his surprise he found that his legs and arms felt perfectly normal – a trifle stiff perhaps, but beyond that the effects of the poison seemed to have worn off completely. Beyond being very wet he appeared to have suffered no evil results at all, and after he’d done “knees up” on the bank for five minutes to restore his circulation he sat down to consider his plan of action.

  First, Phyllis at Maybrick Hall. He must get at her somehow, and, even if he couldn’t get her away, he must let her know that she would be all right. After that things must look after themselves; everything would depend on circumstances. Always provided that those circumstances led to the one great goal – Peterson. Once Phyllis was safe, everything was subservient to that.

  A church clock nearby began to toll the hour, and Drummond counted the strokes. Eleven o’clock – not two hours since he had gone over the bridge – and it felt like six. So much the better; it gave him so many more hours of darkness, and he wanted darkness for his explorations at Maybrick Hall. And it suddenly dawned on him that he hadn’t the faintest idea where the house was.

  It might have deterred some men; it merely made Drummond laugh. If he didn’t know, he’d find out – even if it became necessary to pull someone out of bed and ask. The first thing to do was to get back to the spot where the car had halted, and to do that he must go across country. Activity was diminishing on the bridge, but he could still see lanterns dancing about, and the sudden appearance of a very wet man might lead to awkward questions. So he struck off in the direction he judged to be right – moving with that strange, cat-like silence which was a never-ceasing source of wonderment even to those who knew him best.

  No man ever heard Drummond coming, and very few ever saw him until it was too late, if he didn’t intend that they should. And now, in utterly unknown country, with he knew not how many undesirable gentlemen about, he was taking no risks. Mercifully for him it was a dark night – just such a night in fact as he would have chosen, and as he passed like a huge shadow from tree to tree, only to vanish silently behind a hedge, and reappear two hundred yards farther on, he began to feel that life was good. The joy of action was in his veins; he was going to get his hands on somebody soon, preferably the Italian or the man who called himself Franz. For Bill he had a sneaking regard; Bill at any rate could appreciate a good car when he saw one. The only trouble was that he was unarmed, and an unarmed man can’t afford to stop and admire the view in a mix up. Not that the point deterred him for a moment, it only made him doubly cautious. He must see without being seen; he must act without being heard. Afterwards would be a different matter.

  Suddenly he stiffened and crouched motionless behind a bush. He had heard voices and the sound of footsteps crunching on the gravel.

  “No good waiting any more,” said the man whom he recognised as Franz. “He’s dead for a certainty, and they can’t pull him out till tomorrow. Couldn’t have gone better. He swayed right over just as the car took the gates, and the bridge-keeper saw it. Think he fainted–”

  Their voices died away in the distance, and Drummond came out from behind the bush. He stepped forward cautiously and found himself confronted with a high wire fence. Through it he could see a road along which the two men must have been walking. And then through a gap in the trees he saw a light in the window of a house. So his first difficulty was solved. The man called Franz and his companion could have but one destination in all probability – Maybrick Hall. And that must be the house he could see through the trees, while the road on the other side of the fence was the drive leading up to it.

  He gave them half a minute or so; then he climbed through the fence. It was a fence with horizontal strands of thick wire, about a foot apart, and the top strand was two feet above Drummond’s head. An expensive fence, he reflected; an unusual fence to put round any property of such a sort. An admirable fence for cattle in a corral because of its strength, but for a house and grounds – peculiar, to say the least. It was not a thing of beauty; it afforded no concealment, and it was perfectly simple to climb through. And because Drummond had been trained in the school which notices details, even apparently trivial ones, he stood for a moment or two staring at the fence, after he had clambered through. It was the expense of the thing more than anything else that puzzled him. It was new – that was obvious, and after a while he proceeded to walk along it for a short way. And another peculiar thing struck him when he came to the first upright. It was an iron T-shaped post, and each strand of wire passed through a hole in the bottom part of the T. A perfectly simple and sound arrangement, and, but for one little point, just the type of upright one would have expected to find in such a fence. Round every hole was a small white collar, through which each strand of wire passed, so that the wires rested on the collars, and not on the holes in the iron uprights. Truly a most remarkable fence, he reflected again – in fact, a thoroughly eccentric fence. But he got no farther than that in his thoughts; the knowledge which would have supplied him with the one clue necessary to account for that fence’s eccentricity of appearance was not his. The facts he could notice; the reason for the facts was beyond him. And after a further examination he shrugged his shoulders and gave it up. There were bigger things ahead of him than a mere question of fencing, and, keeping in the shadow of the shrubs which fringed each side of the drive, he crept silently towards the house.

  It was a low, rambling type of building covered as far as he could see with ivy and creepers. There were only two stories, and Hugh nodded his satisfaction. It made things simpler when outside work was more than likely. For a long time he stood in the shadow of a big rhododendron bush, carefully surveying every possible line of approach and flight, and it was while he was balancing up chances that he gradually became aware of a peculiar noise proceeding from the house. It sounded like the very faint hum of an aeroplane in the far distance, except that every two or three seconds there came a slight thud. It was quite regular, and during the four or five minutes whilst he stood there listening there was no variation in the monotonous rhythm. Thud: thud thud – faint, but very distinct; and all the time the gentle whirring of some smooth-running, powerful engine.

  The house was in darkness save for one room on the ground floor, from which the light was streaming. It was empty, and appeared to be an ordinary sitting-room. And, as a last resort, Hugh decided he would go in that way, if outside methods failed. But to start with he had no intention of entering the house; it struck him that the odds against him were unnecessarily large.

  He retreated still farther into the shadow, and then quite clear and distinct the hoot of an owl was heard in the silent ga
rden. He knew that Phyllis would recognise the call if she heard it; he knew that she would give him some sign if she could. And so he stood and waited, eagerly watching the house for any sign of movement. But none came, and after a pause of half a minute he hooted again. Of course it was possible that she was in a room facing the other way, and he had already planned his line of advance round to the back of the house. And then, just as he was preparing to skirt round and investigate he saw the curtains of one of the upper rooms shake and open slightly. Very faintly he repeated the call, and to his joy he saw a head poked through between them. But he was taking no chances, and it was impossible to tell to whom the head belonged. It might be Phyllis, and on the other hand it might not. So once again he repeated the call, barely above his breath, and then he waited for some answer.

  It came almost at once; his own name called very gently, and he hesitated no more. He was across the lawn in a flash and standing under her window, and once again he heard her voice tense with anxiety.

  “Is that you, Hugh?”

  “Yes, darling, it’s me right enough,” he whispered back. “But there’s no time to talk now. I want you to jump on to the flower bed. It’s soft landing, and it won’t hurt you.”

  “But I can’t, old man,” she said, with a little catch in her breath. “They’ve got me lashed up with a steel chain.”

  “They’ve got you lashed up with a steel chain,” repeated Hugh stupidly. “The devil they have; the devil they have!”

  And his voice was shaking a little with cold, concentrated fury. “All right, kid,” he went on after a moment; “if you can’t come to me, I must come to you. We’ll soon deal with that chain.”