The Man Who Bought London

by Edgar Wallace

  She offered her hand, and he took it. She raised it higher and higher, and for a moment he did not understand. Then he bent and kissed it.

  She had taken off her glove in the car with that idea.

  CHAPTER XIII

  King Kerry reread a letter which had arrived by the morning post, and, contrary to his custom, placed it in the inside pocket of his coat. His secretary watched the proceedings with apprehension, as marking a return to the bad old days; but he smiled and shook his head. He had a habit of reading her thoughts which was at once uncanny and embarrassing.

  ‘This is a “really” letter,’ he said, referring to a passage at arms they had had whether a letter was ‘really private’ or just ‘private’ – she had opened a score bearing the latter inscription, only to find that they were of the really begging-letter variety. Henceforth he passed the private letters under review, and judged only by the handwriting or the crest whether it was a confidential communication within the meaning of the Act.

  Kerry sat for a long time at his desk, thinking; then, by and by, he took out the letter again and reread it. Whatever were its contents, they worried him, and presently he called a number on the phone which she recognized as being a firm of detectives allied to Pinkerton’s. ‘Send a man to me for instructions!’ he said, and hung up the receiver.

  For a long time he was writing furiously, and when the detective was announced, he had still a few more pages to write. He finished at last and handed the papers to the waiting man. ‘This paper is to be carefully read, digested, and destroyed,’ he said. ‘The instructions are to be carried out without reservation, and you are to tell your chief to draw upon me to any extent in the execution of my orders.’

  When the man had gone, he turned to the girl. ‘It is a very hard world for women,’ he said sadly, and that was all the reference he made to the letter or its sequel.

  On the wall of the office hung a remarkable map. It was a large scale map of London, which had been especially prepared for ‘The King’ (the Press called him ironically ‘The King of London’). Scarcely a day passed but an employee of the maker called to mark some little square, representing a shop or house, with green watercolour paint, King Kerry standing by and directing precisely where the colour patches were to be placed. The green was growing in the map. The Trust was buying up land and house property north, south, and west. Baling, Forest Hill, Brockley and Greenwich were almost all green. Kennington, Southwark, Wandsworth, Brixton, Clapham, and Tooting were well patched; but the object of the Trust was, apparently, to put a green belt around a centre represented by a spot midway between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly. Inside this circle, representing a mile radius, lay the immediate problem of the Trust.

  The girl was looking across at the map, noting that the three new green patches which had been added that morning were almost dry, when she caught King Kerry’s amused eyes fixed upon her. ‘How would you like to pay a visit to the scene of your servitude?’ he asked good-humouredly.

  ‘Tack’s?’ she asked in wonder.

  He nodded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she demurred. ‘I should feel rather shy, I think.’

  ‘You must get over that,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Besides, you will find very few people in the same positions in which you left them.’

  A few moments later the car came round, and she took her place by his side.

  ‘People are asking what I am going to do,’ he said, as if reading her thoughts, ‘and this old town is just shaking its hoary head at me. Tack’s sold a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of goods last year – they will sell half a million pounds’ worth next year.’

  She smiled, as at a good joke.

  ‘You doubt it?’ he asked, with a suggestion of that affectionate amusement which so often sent the colour to her cheeks.

  ‘Do you know anything about a drapery store?’ she asked, answering one question with another.

  He shook his head; the word ‘drapery’ puzzled him.

  ‘Drapery? – we call them soft goods,’ he said. ‘No, I know no more than I know about boots or railway trucks. People who learn in compartments – there are hundreds of proud fathers who boast their sons are learning their business from office boy to manager; but my opinion is that they usually pass their true vocation halfway between top and bottom. You needn’t start life as a junior clerk to discover that you’re an excellent salesman, and because you’re an excellent salesman you needn’t necessarily be a heaven-born president – you call them managing directors.’

  She loved to listen to him when he was in this mood. It was a pity that Tack’s was so near, but a block in the Regent Street traffic gave him time to expound his philosophy of business. ‘The man who watches the window to see the articles that are sold will learn a lot if he has patience and plenty of time; but he will get cold feet. You’ve got to go to the manufacturing end to judge sales, and you have got to go to the man who pulls money out of manufacturing to learn that Mrs So-and-So prefers four buttons on her kid gloves to three. It all comes back to the money behind the manufacturer. There are very few bank managers in Manchester who did not know when beads ceased to be a fashionable attire in the Fiji Islands.’

  He went back to Tack’s and its future.

  ‘Half a million pounds’ worth of goods!’ he laughed quietly, ‘and all to be sold in a year at a little store that never had a bigger turnover than a hundred thousand – it means selling sixteen hundred pounds’ worth of goods a day; it means many other things. My child, you are going to witness some sale!’

  She laughed in sheer glee.

  There was a considerable change in the appearance of Tack’s even in the short space of time she had been away. The building was a fairly modern one. King Kerry was already reshaping it, and a small army of workmen was engaged day and night in effecting alterations which he had planned.

  There had been a tiny little ‘annexe’, too small to dignify with the name. It had owed its existence to the discovery, after the building had been erected, that a piece of land, some twenty feet by twenty, which had been used by Goulding’s as a temporary dumping ground for old packing-cases, and for some extraordinary reason had not been built upon, was part of this freehold. Mr Leete had run up a tiny building on the site (this was before he had acquired a controlling interest in Goulding’s), and the place had been used as auxiliary storerooms. Workmen were engaged in removing the floors from the roof to the ground.

  ‘I am having two large lifts put in there,’ explained Kerry. ‘They will be about the same size as tube lifts, only they will be much faster.’

  Tack had always set his face against the elevator system, adopting the viewpoint that, as it was, people did not get sufficient exercise, and that he had no intention of encouraging laziness.

  ‘But won’t they be very large?’ asked the girl. ‘I mean too large?’

  Kerry shook his head. ‘Sixteen hundred pounds a day means about sixteen thousand purchasers a day, or a little under a thousand an hour.’

  She thought she detected a flaw in his arithmetic, but did not correct him; he was surely calculating upon a twenty-four hour day!

  Other re-arrangements included new dressing-rooms on the roof. Some of the counters had been taken away, and the broad window spaces upon which so much depended in the old days had been reduced by seventy-five per cent and the additional space afforded had been utilized for the erection of large flat trays. In place of the old window display, electricians were fitting long, endless belts of black velvet running the whole width of each window, upon which the lighter goods were to be displayed.

  ‘Each article will have a big number attached and the price in plain figures: there will be a sample-room on the ground floor, where all the customer has to do is to ask to see the number she wants to purchase. When she has decided what she wants, she goes upstairs to the first floor and it is handed to her ready wrapped. There will be no waiting. Every sample clerk will have a little phone in front of her. She will be
in constant communication with the packing-room. She will signal the purchases, and the customer has only to go to the counter, or one of the counters, bearing her initial, mention her name, and take the parcel.’

  The girl looked at him in amazement. It seemed remarkable to her that he had thought all this out and that she was unaware of the fact.

  ‘You are preparing for a rush?’ she asked, and she said it in such a tone that he laughed.

  ‘You don’t think we shall be so busy, eh? Well, nous verrons!’

  Elsie caught many envious glances cast in her direction. Old acquaintances have a trick of remembering friendships which never existed – especially with those who have been fortunate in life. She had had no close friends in the business, but there were many who now regarded her as a sometime bosom confidante, and were prepared to harbour a grievance against her if she did not hold them in like regard. Some called her ‘Elsie’, who had never before taken that liberty, doubtless with the desire to establish their intimacy before she advanced too far along the golden road. This is the way of the world. But Elsie was too warm-hearted to be cynical, and responded readily to their overtures of friendship.

  Their salaries had been substantially raised, so ‘Fluff’, a pretty little girl in the ‘White’ department, told her. ‘All the rotters have been sacked, three of the shop-walkers, and the manager of the “ready-mades”,’ said the girl enthusiastically. ‘Oh, Miss Marion, it was splendid to see that beast Tack walk out for the last time.’

  ‘Things are awfully comfortable,’ said another – Elsie had an opportunity for gossiping whilst King Kerry interviewed the new manager – ‘but there is going to be an awful rush, and those awful fines have been abolished. Oh! and they’re taking on an awful number of girls, though where they’re going to put ’em all heaven knows – we shall be awfully crowded!’

  The girl bore the nickname of ‘Awful Agnes’, not without reason.

  King Kerry rejoined Elsie, and they drove back to the office together. ‘Had to take a big warehouse to stock our goods,’ he explained. ‘We shall sell a few! Every other shop in the street for two hundred yards in each direction is engaged in the same business as us. I have offered to buy the lot, but I guess they’ve got an exaggerated idea of the value of things.’

  Whether they had or not, there were some who were prepared to fight the ‘Big L’.

  That same night there appeared in all the London evening papers the announcement that ‘The Federal Trades of London’ had been incorporated as a limited company. The list of the firms in the new combine included every store in Oxford Street engaged in the same business as Tack and Brighten’s.

  ‘The object of the Federation’ (said the announcement) ‘is to afford mutual protection against unfair competition. Each firm concerned will act independently so far as its finances are concerned, and the shareholders’ interests will remain undisturbed. By means of this combine it is hoped that the pernicious operations of a certain American Trust will be successfully checked.’

  The list of directors included Hermann Zeberlieff, Esq. (independent gentleman), and John Leete (managing director of Goulding’s, Limited).

  ‘Pernicious operations!’ repeated King Kerry. ‘Say, this paper doesn’t like us!’ He turned over the sheets of the Evening Herald. ‘A bright little paper,’ he mused. Then he took out his cheque book and signed his name in the bottom right-hand corner.

  He blotted the signature, and passed the slip across to the girl.

  ‘Elsie,’ he said, and the girl flushed, for he had never before called her by her first name. ‘The Evening Herald is on the market. They want sixty thousand pounds for the concern; they may take less. Here’s a blank cheque. Go down and buy that durned paper.’

  ‘Buy?’ the girl gasped. ‘I – but I don’t – I can’t – I’m not a business woman!’

  ‘It’s for sale – go and buy it; tell them you’re King Kerry’s partner.’ He smiled encouragingly and laid his hand on hers. ‘My partner,’ he said softly. ‘My dear little partner!’

  CHAPTER XIV

  Four men had been invited to dinner at 410, Park Lane, but only three had so far arrived. Worse than that, Vera, whom Hermann had particularly asked to grace the board with her presence, had pleaded the usual headache and had most emphatically refused to come down.

  ‘You are trying to make me look a fool before these people,’ he stormed. He interviewed her in her little den, and she was palpably unprepared for social functions of any description, being in her dressing-gown.

  ‘My dear Hermann,’ she said, ‘don’t rave! I have a headache – it is a woman’s privilege.’

  ‘You always have headaches when I want you,’ he said sulkily.

  She did not look any too well. He wondered –

  ‘No,’ she answered his unspoken thought. ‘I noticed that the gas was turned on at the stove and off at the main, so I just turned it off at the stove, too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked roughly.

  She smiled.

  ‘I have always appreciated your gift – a stove in Sèvres ware must have cost a lot of money. When I lay down this afternoon the main was turned off – that I’ll swear. When I woke up, it was on, though why anybody should turn on the gas on a warm July afternoon, I can’t think.’

  ‘Martin –’ he began.

  ‘Martin didn’t touch it,’ she said. ‘I have asked him. Fortunately, no harm was done, because I had noticed the little tap was turned before I began to sleep. I am getting frightened, Hermann.’

  His face was ghastly pale, but he forced a smile.

  ‘Frightened, Vera – why?’ he asked in his friendliest tone.

  She shook her head at him slowly, her eyes never leaving his face.

  ‘It is getting so near the time,’ she said, ‘and I feel somehow that I cannot bear up against the strain of always fighting for my life.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ he cried genially. ‘Come along and see my people. Leete is one, Hubbard, one of the Federation directors, is another. Bolscombe hasn’t turned up. Why don’t you get rid of the worry of your money?’ he said with a show of solicitude. ‘Pool it with mine, as I suggested months ago. You’ll go mad if you don’t.’ He stopped short and eyed her curiously. ‘I think you’re a little mad now,’ he said slowly, and she shook her distress off and laughed.

  ‘Hermann, you’re the most versatile man I know,’ she said; ‘but so horribly unoriginal.’

  ‘Are you going out tonight?’

  He paused at the door to ask the question, and she nodded.

  ‘With your headache?’ he sneered.

  ‘To get rid of it,’ she replied.

  He went downstairs to his guests.

  ‘My sister is not very well,’ he said. ‘She’s rather depressed lately –?’

  Then occurred the devilish idea: that flash of inspiration to villainy which has sent men to the gallows and has tenanted Broadmoor with horrible gibing things that once were human. Ten days! said the brain of Hermann Zeberlieff. Do it now!

  With scarcely a pause he went on –

  ‘We’re all friends here, and I don’t mind telling you that she is worrying me – she has distinctly suicidal tendencies.’

  There was a murmur of commiseration.

  ‘I’ll just see how she is,’ he said; ‘and then we’ll start dinner.’

  ‘I thought I saw your sister standing at her window,’ said Leete, and added with a smirk: ‘I rather flattered myself that she was waving her hand to me.’

  Hermann looked at him in frank surprise. He knew that Vera hated Leete as intensely as a woman with fine instincts could hate a man. It would be an unsuspected weakness in her if she endeavoured to make friends with his associates; but it bore out all that the girl had said. She was frightened, was clutching at straws, even so unsavoury a straw as Leete.

  He walked carelessly from the room and mounted the stairs. He had in his heart neither fear nor remorse for the dreadful deed he contemplated. He did n
ot go straight to where she was, but slipped into her bedroom, which communicated with the sitting room.

  He stepped stealthily, silently.

  By the side of the window was a long curtain-cord of silk. He drew a chair, stepped noiselessly upon it and severed the cord high up. He stepped down as noiselessly. He had three minutes to do the work. In three minutes’ time he would be with his guests smiling apologetically for his sister’s absence, by what time this beautiful creature of ‘suicidal tendencies’ would be hanging limply from –

  He looked round for a suitable hook and found a peg behind the door which bore his weight.

  That would be the place. Rapidly he made a noose at one end of the rope and held it in his hand behind him.

  He turned the handle of the door and walked into the dressing-room. She was sitting by the window and rose, startled.

  ‘What were you doing in my room?’ she demanded.

  ‘Stealing your jewels,’ he said with humour. But she was not appeased by his simulated playfulness.

  ‘How dare you go into my room?’ she cried. The fear of death was upon her, through her brain ran a criss-cross of plans for escape.

  ‘I want to talk things over,’ he said and reached out his hand to touch her. She shrank back.

  ‘What have you got behind your back?’ she asked in a terrified whisper.

  He sprang at her, flinging one arm about her so that he pinioned both arms. Then she saw his design as his other hand rose to close over her mouth. The coils slipped down on his arm and he shifted his left hand up to silence her.

  ‘Mercy!’ she gasped.

  He smiled in her face. He found the noose and slipped it over her head. Then –

  ‘Kerry knows – Kerry knows!’ said her muffled voice. ‘I wrote to him. There is a detective watching this house day and night – ah!’

  The loop had touched her neck.