Elk 04 White Face

by Edgar Wallace

  Mason got up and walked out to the entrance of the station. A dim blue light painted his bronzed cheek a sickly hue. The street was deserted. Rain was falling steadily; every window of every house that faced the station was black and menacing.

  Why he shivered he did not know. He was too serious a police officer to be influenced by atmosphere. And yet the unfriendliness of this area, all its possibilities of evil, penetrated his armour of indifference.

  A queer, boozy lot of people…A thought struck him, and he slapped the palm of his hand. There were three C.I.D. men in the charge-room; he called them and gave them instructions.

  “Take a couple of guns,” he said. “You may need them.”

  After he had seen them depart, he sent an urgent phone message to Scotland Yard. Then he went across to where Dr. Marford was standing, talking to the station clerk.

  “What about this man with the white mask? You know everything that happens in this pitch. Is it a yarn, or is there any foundation for it? There used to be a man up west—had some sort of accident that upset his features—he used to wear that kind of thing.”

  The doctor nodded slowly.

  “I think that is the man I have met,” he said.

  “You’ve met him?” asked Mason in surprise.

  “Yes. Why he wore the mask I have never been able to understand, because there was really very little wrong with his face, except a large red scar. He wasn’t exactly good to look at—but you can say that of a lot of people who don’t wear masks. I’ve seen thousands looking worse.”

  Mason scowled and pursed his lips.

  “I remember the West End man. I see that some of the newspapers are recalling the fact that he was seen years ago. If I remember rightly, he lived in a top flat in Jermyn Street. He had permission from the Commissioner to go out with this thing on his face. I haven’t seen him for years, but I remember him well. What was his name—West something—not Weston?”

  The doctor shrugged.

  “I never knew his name. He came to me about three years ago and asked for ray treatment. He was stupidly sensitive and only came after he had fixed the interview up by telephone. He’s been several times since, round about midnight, and he invariably pays me a pound.”

  Mason thought for a while, then went to the telephone and called a central police station off Regent Street. The sergeant in charge remembered the man at once, but was not sure of his name.

  “He hasn’t been seen round the West End for years,” he said. “The Yard has been arguing about him—wondering if he was White Face.”

  “Was his name Weston?” suggested Mason, but the sergeant was without information.

  Mason came back to the doctor.

  “Does this man live in the neighbourhood?”

  But here Dr. Marford could tell him nothing. The first time he had met his queer patient he had undoubtedly lived in the region of Piccadilly; thereafter he had only appeared at irregular intervals.

  “Do you think he’s our devil?” asked Mason bluntly, and the lean man chuckled.

  “Devil! It’s queer how normal people attribute devilry to any man or woman who is afflicted—the hunchback and the misshapen, the cross-eyed and the lame. You’re almost medieval, Mr. Mason.”

  He could say very little that might assist the police, except that he no longer received warning when the man with the mask made his appearance. Invariably he came through the little yard that ran by the side of the surgery into the passage which Dr. Marford’s patients used when they queued up for their medicine.

  “I never have the side door locked—I mean the door that goes into the yard.” Marford explained that he was a very heavy sleeper, and it was not unusual for his clients to come right into the house to wake him, and the first intimation of their needs was a knock on his bedroom door.

  “I’ve nothing to lose except a few instruments and a few bottles of poison; and to do these fellows justice, I’ve never had a thing stolen from me since I’ve been in the neighbourhood. I treat these people like friends, and so long as they’re reasonably wholesome I don’t mind their wandering about the house.”

  Mr. Mason made a little grimace.

  “How can you live here? You’re a gentleman, you have education. How can you meet them every day, listen to their miseries, see their dirt—ugh!”

  Dr. Marford sighed and looked at his watch.

  “If that child’s normal he’s born,” he said, and at that moment the sergeant called him across to the telephone at the desk.

  The child had been normal and had made his appearance into the world without the doctor’s assistance. The male parent, a careful man, was already disputing the right of the doctor to any fee. Dr. Marford had had previous experience of a similar character, and knew that for the fact that the baby arrived before the doctor came the mother would claim and receive the fullest credit.

  “Half fee, as usual,” he told the district nurse and hung up the receiver.

  “I used to charge half fees, but double visiting fees if I was called in afterwards. That didn’t work, because the mother was usually dead before they risked the expense of calling me in. The economy of these people is excessive.”

  The ambulance was ready. He and Rudd saw the woman placed in charge of a uniformed nurse, and Sergeant Elk appointed a detective officer to accompany the patient to the infirmary.

  Elk was silent, and his eyes were preternaturally bright when he lounged into the inspector’s room.

  “This is a case which ought to get me promotion,” he said, a shameless thing to say in the presence of a man who expected most of the kudos. “Here I’ve been working for years, and this is the first real mystery I’ve struck. More like a book than a police case. Quigley’s nosing round the neighbourhood—I shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t turn in a new devil. It’s a good story for him.”

  Mr. Mason indicated a chair.

  “Sit down, my poor fellow,” he said with spurious sympathy. “What are the features of this murder which have separated it from an ordinary case of knifing?”

  Elk’s long arm went out, and he pointed in a direction which Mr. Mason, not wholly acquainted with the geography of the station, decided was the matron’s room.

  “She’s it!” said Elk. His voice shook. “What happened tonight, Mr. Mason? An unknown man has a fight with another unknown man, who bolts. The first fellow walks along and meets a police officer and tells him all about it. He’s alive and well; obviously he’s not stabbed; yet within a few seconds after the officer moves on, this fellow drops in his track like a man shot. A cheap crook comes over and dips him, and is seen by Hartford, who tackles the man. They then discover that the fellow on the ground is stabbed. Nobody saw the blow struck. Yet there he is dead—knifed, and the knife’s well away and can’t be found.”

  Mason leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  “End of the first reel; the second reel will follow immediately,” he murmured, but Elk was undisturbed. That bright light in his eye was now a steely glitter. He was agitated as he had never been seen before in all the years of his service.

  “Out of nowhere comes Mrs. Weston. She’d warned this man he was going to be killed. She wants to be sure that it is him.”

  “He,” murmured Mason gently.

  “Never mind about grammar.” Elk was frankly insubordinate in his vehemence. “She takes a look at the man on the ground and drops.”

  He laid his hand almost violently upon the superintendent’s arm and shook it.

  “I was watching her. I knew the woman, though I didn’t recognise her at first. She drops—and what do we find? She’s a needler—a dope. Does that mean anything to you, sir?”

  “I’m glad you said ‘sir,’” said Mason. “I was wondering how I’d bring you back to a sense of discipline. Yes, it means a lot to me. Now I’m going to ask you a question: does the can of beer which Mrs. Albert was carrying mean anything to you, and does that can of beer associate itself in your active and intellig
ent mind with the disappearance of Mr. Louis Landor—if that’s the name of the man who fought with the dead one?”

  Elk was frankly bewildered.

  “You’re trying to pull my leg.”

  “Heaven forbid!” said the patient Mason. “Bring in Mrs. Albert. She’s waited long enough to get three kinds of panic—I want her to have the kind where she’ll tell the truth.”

  Mrs. Albert came, a rather pale woman, sensible of her disgraceful surroundings, conscious, too, of her responsibility for four children, only three of which, Mason learned, were yet born. She still clutched in her hand the tell-tale can of beer. The liquid was now flat and uninviting and some of it had spilt in her agitation, so that she brought with her to the inspector’s room a faint aroma of synthetic hops. She was quivering, more or less speechless. Mason gave her no opportunity for recovering her self-possession or her volubility.

  “Sorry I’ve had to keep you so long, Mrs. Albert,” he said. “Your husband’s the night watchman at the Eastern Trading Company, isn’t he?”

  She nodded mutely.

  “The Eastern Trading Company do not allow their night watchman to have beer?”

  Mrs. Albert found her voice.

  “No, sir,” she piped. “The last night watchman got the sack for drinking when he was on duty.”

  “Exactly,” said Mason, at his most brusque. “But your husband likes a drop of beer, and it’s fairly easy to pass the beer through the wicket gate, isn’t it?”

  She could only blink at him pathetically.

  “And he’s in the habit of leaving the wicket gate undone every night about eleven o’clock, and you’re in the habit of putting that can inside the gate?”

  Her pathos grew. She could only suspect a base informer, and was undecided as to which of her five neighbours had filled that despicable role.

  She was not unpretty, Mason noticed in his critical way, despite the three children—or four, if her worst fears were realised.

  The superintendent turned to his subordinate.

  “There’s the connection,” he said, “and that is where Mr. Louis Landor went—through the wicket gate. Oh, you needn’t bother: I’ve sent some men to search the yard. But if I am any judge, Mr. Landor has gone. I’ve already circulated his description.”

  Mrs. Albert, the wife of the night watchman, drooped guiltily in her chair, her agonised dark eyes fixed on Mr. Mason. Here was tragedy for her, more poignant than the death of unknown men struck down by unseen forces; the tragedy of a husband dismissed from the only job he had held in five years, of the resumption of that daily struggle for life, of aimless wanderings for employment on his part—she could always go out as a hired help for a few shillings a day.

  “He’ll get the sack,” she managed to breathe.

  Mason looked at her and shook his head.

  “I’m not reporting to the Eastern Trading Company, though you might have helped a little bit if you hadn’t hidden up the truth when I asked you about the beer. I blame myself for not realising that you had something to hide, and what it was. It might have made a big difference.”

  “You’re not reporting it, mister?” she asked tremulously, and was on the verge of tears. “I’ve had a very hard time. That poor woman could tell you how hard it was: she used to live with me till she came into money.”

  “Which poor woman is this?” asked Mason quickly.

  “Mrs. Weston.”

  She had lost some of her fear in the face of his interest.

  “She lodged with you?”

  Elk had left the room. Mason motioned her to the chair which the sergeant had vacated and which was nearer to him.

  “Come along and let’s hear all about it,” he said genially.

  A bald man, with a round, amused face and a ready smile, removed all her natural suspicions.

  “Oh, yes, sir, she used to lodge with me, till she got this money.”

  “Where did she get the money from?”

  “Gawd knows,” said Mrs. Albert piously. “I never ask questions. She paid me all that she owed me, that’s all I know. I’ve been wondering, sir”—she leaned forward confidentially—“was it her husband or her young man who was killed?”

  “Her young man was killed,” said Mason without hesitation. “You knew them?”

  She shook her head.

  “You knew the husband, at any rate?”

  “I’ve seen photographs of him in her room. They were taken in Australia—her and the two. When I say I’ve seen them,” she corrected herself, “I was just going to take a look at ‘em when she come in the room and snatched the frame out of my hand—which was funny, because it had always been on the mantelshelf before, but I never took any notice of it till she said one day it was her husband and a great friend. It was on the following day I took up the picture to have a look.”

  “And she snatched it out of your hand? How long ago was this?”

  She thought.

  “Two years last July.”

  Mason nodded.

  “And soon after that she came into money, almost immediately after?”

  Mrs. Albert was not surprised at his perspicuity. She had the impression that she had given him that information.

  “Yes, sir, she left me the next day, or two days after. I haven’t spoken to her since. She lives in the grand part of Tidal Basin now. I always say that when people are well off—”

  “I’m perfectly sure I can guess what you always say.” He was not unkind but he was very firm. “Now, what sort of a frame would this be in—leather?”

  Yes, she thought rather that it was leather—or wood, covered with leather.

  “I know she put it in her box because I saw her do it—a little black box she used to keep under her bed.”

  He questioned her and cross-checked her answers, eliminating in the process all possibility that her narrative might be embroidered by imagination. Into the lives of the poor comes no other romance than that of their own creation.

  He grew suddenly vague; she could not understand the questions he put to her. They seemed to have no foundation in reason. And then suddenly he touched a high note of romance. Had she ever seen a man with a piece of white cloth on his face? She shuddered pleasurably.

  “The Devil…I’ve heard of him, but never seen him, thank God! It was him that done it—everybody was saying so in the crowd.” “Have you ever seen him?” She shook her head vigorously.

  “No, an’ I don’t want to in my state. But I know people who have…in the middle of the night.”

  “When they’ve been dreaming,” suggested Mason, but she would not have this.

  The Devil was a possession of Tidal Basin; not willingly would she surrender the legend. When he showed into the charge-room a woman made tearfully grateful by the knowledge that she could go to her home and her three children. Marford was waiting to say good night. Dr. Rudd had already left.

  “If you want me tonight, I shall be at my surgery. I hope I may be allowed to sleep.”

  Mason had three things he wished to do at the same time—three errands on which he could trust nobody but himself. He decided to perform his first task single-handed and call back for Elk to assist him with the second.

  CHAPTER IX

  Michael Quigley was coming up the steps of the police station as Mason appeared in the doorway. “Carrion,” said Mason pleasantly, “the body has been removed.”

  “Who is it, Mason?”

  Mr. Mason shook his head.

  “There was once,” he said jovially, “a medical student who was asked how many teeth Adam was born with, and he replied, very properly, ‘God knows.’”

  “Unknown, eh? A swell, they tell me?”

  “He’s well dressed,” said Mason in his noncommittal way. “Go along and have a look at him. You know all the toughs in the West End.”

  Michael shook his head.

  “That can wait. What is this murder—a little joke of White Face?”

  “Why White Face?” deman
ded Mason. “Listen, Quigley, you’ve got a bug in your brain. White Face doesn’t belong to Tidal Basin any more than your devil.”

  “He’s been seen here,” insisted the reporter, and Mason sighed.

  “A man who wore a lump of lint over his face has been seen here. Dr. Marford, in a weak-minded moment, told you. You’d see the same in the neighbourhood of any hospital.”

  Michael Quigley was unusually silent.

  “Oh…where are you going?”

  No other reporter dared ask such a question, but Mason knew this young man rather well.

  “You’ll get me hung, Michael, but I’ll let you come along with me. I’m going to see a green door and have a little independent search. Your encouragement and help will be welcome. How is Miss Harman?”

  Mike almost showed his teeth.

  “You can collect gossip, even if you can’t collect murderers!” he snarled. “Miss Harman is a very good friend of mine who is going to marry somebody else.”

  “I congratulate her,” said Mason as they stepped out towards Endley Street. “It must be a terribly un-romantic life being married to a reporter.”

  “There is no question of my being married to anybody,” said Michael savagely, “and you’re getting under my skin, Mason.”

  “Fine,” said Mason. “Some day I’ll go shooting elephants.”

  They trudged side by side, cold anger in the heart of one and an idea that was growing into shape in the mind of Mr. Mason. He whistled softly as he walked under the high wall of the Eastern Trading Company.

  “Do you mind,” asked Michael with sour politeness, “choosing some other tune than the Wedding March?”

  “Was I whistling that?” asked the other in surprise. “Ever noticed how like a funeral march it is? Change the time and you’re there.”

  It was a beast of a night; a wind had risen, with the cold of the Eastern steppes.

  “Policemen and reporters,” said Mason, “get their living out of other people’s misfortunes. Has that ever struck you? Here they are!”

  The “they” were three men walking abreast towards them. They slackened their pace when Mason came into view and halted to receive them.