‘Brat!’ said Harris, savagely. ‘If I had my way …’
‘Your way, Mr Harris,’ said Miss Pagan, ‘is so different always from what you say it’s going to be.’
Harris subsided.
‘I must say,’ said Miss Pagan, who seemed this morning in a mood unusually loquacious, ‘that I do wonder at Mr Benedik seeing that awful man again.’
Harris muttered.
‘It does seem very odd!’ said Miss Pagan. ‘All I hope is that he doesn’t come in here.’
Harris muttered.
Miss Pagan’s hopes were realised. Captain James did not enter the outer office. Captain James was met just inside the main doors by Charles.
‘’Afternoon, sir!’ said Charles, brightly.
‘Good-afternoon, My Lord!’ said Captain James, who seemed in a mood most expansive. He smiled upon the world with his unpleasing teeth. His eyes were more notably red-rimmed even than before. The miasma was today an aggressive miasma.
‘I want …’ said Captain James, ‘to see Mr Benedik.’
‘Yes, sir. Mr Benedik’s instructions were to show you stryte along to his room. If you would come this way, sir?’ Charles, a small and strutting figure, strode down the carpeted corridor, Captain James rolling in his wake like a tanker towed by a cheeky tug.
Charles halted, behind him Captain James. Charles rapped smartly upon the door.
‘Come in!’ said Tony’s voice.
Charles opened the door. ‘Capting Jymes, sir,’ he said, and stood aside.
Captain James, preceded always by the miasma, rolled into the room; rolled up to the room’s owner with outstretched paw …
‘All right!’ said Captain James a moment later, ‘if we want to be haughty and exclusive, haughty and exclusive let’s be. It matters, I might tell you, Son, very little to me.’
Captain James still smiled. Unasked, he dropped into the big leather chair which, it seemed to Tony looking at him, he had never left since the interview of yesterday morning.
Captain James crossed his legs and leant the back of his head against the top of the chair and looked up at Tony.
Tony, standing in the middle of the room, his hands clasped behind his back, looked down at Captain James …
There was a silence. This silence—combined with Tony’s attitude, which somehow was dangerously still, and Tony’s hard, cold, steel-grey stare—might well have discommoded ninety-five men out of a hundred.
But Captain James was the ninety-sixth. Without removing his gaze he began to laugh. Not so loudly nor so raucously as yesterday but even more objectionably. Now no tin cans fell clattering down wooden companionways; rather did a toad chuckle while splashing about in a foul-smelling bog.
‘Well!’ said Captain James, ‘come to any decision, Mister?’
Tony moved. Warily the eyes of Captain James followed every action. Tony crossed to the table; twisted his chair with one hand and sat. Tony put his elbows on the table and continued to stare at Captain James. Tony said at last:
‘Oh, yes! I thought, you know, Captain, that this was going to be a very serious and difficult matter for me and my firm …’
Once more the toad chuckled and shifted its legs. ‘Thought?’ said Captain James. ‘Ought to say think, oughtn’t you? Ay mane, may deah fellah, always a fratefully good thing to get one’s grammah all rate and all that!’
‘I was using,’ said Tony, ‘the perfect tense, Captain, as that perfectly describes my perfect peace of mind over this whole matter …’
Captain James’ smile faded from his face. His lips disappeared completely. He uncrossed his legs and sat, quite rigid now, leaning forward. As well as his lips, his eyes seemed to disappear, becoming mere glittering pin points withdrawn under craggy brows.
‘The hell you say!’ said Captain James. With a movement obviously subconscious, his left hand came up and stroked with soft fingers that something which bulged a little beneath his coat and his left armpit.
‘The hell,’ said Tony, cheerfully, ‘I do say!’ He took his elbows from the table. He sat back in his chair. He smiled at Captain James. If Rickforth or Woolrich or Rickforth’s daughter had come in at that moment and looked at that figure in the chair, they would have thought for a full half minute that they were seeing a ghost. Always had the likeness between Tony and F. X. been strong. Now, for these minutes, it was something more than likeness. This Benedik said:
‘Suppose, before we go any further, you tell me how you came into possession of that letter.’
Captain James pondered, closing red-rimmed lids over the almost invisible eyes. ‘I don’t see,’ said Captain James, ‘any harm in that. That letter was given to me by a bloke who used to be in the F. M. S., name of Carruthers—Pinkey Carruthers they used to call him because he could drink more Pink Gins to the square minute than any other man even out there: and that, Sonny,’ said Captain James, who seemed to have recovered some of his good humour, ‘is drinking.’
‘Why,’ said Tony, not moving, ‘did Carruthers give you this letter?’
‘Because,’ said Captain James, with an evil leer, ‘Pinkey Carruthers was cashing in his checks. Fever, plus knife, plus, I’ve always said, chopped bamboo in his crop. I happened to drop in on Pinkey—he lived so many miles away from anywhere that the fellow must have been mad anyhow—I happened to drop in on him when he was almost on the last lap. He hadn’t got anyone he could trust, and I don’t wonder, and he gave this to me to deliver.’ Here Captain James laughed one of the toad laughs. ‘Mind you,’ said Captain James, ‘he didn’t trust me but there wasn’t anyone else nigh who could do the job for him …’
‘The job,’ said Tony, still in that flat voice, ‘being? …’
‘Your head,’ said Captain James, ‘doesn’t seem to be as clear as it was yesterday. The job being to deliver this letter to you, or, in the case of your death, to one of the partners of RYNOX.’
‘How,’ said Tony, ‘did this Pinkey Carruthers originally obtain this letter?’
‘If you have read the letter,’ said Captain James, ‘and I know you have, because I bloomin’ well sat here and watched you do it, you know. Pinkey Carruthers got this letter by the mail and with the letter there was another letter saying how Pinkey was to mail this six months from the day he got it. When I ran across Pinkey and he gave it to me, five of the months had gone … Well, seeing there was something funny about this, I did as nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand men of my acquaintance would do, I opened the letter. When I opened it I thought to myself “Ah-hah! …”’—here Captain James laughed again and this time not the toad laugh but the cans-down-the-stairs laugh.
‘And there, as you might say, Mister, we are! I’ve got the goods. You’ve got to pay. All merry. All above board. You don’t quarrel with me and I shan’t quarrel with you.’ Captain James once more lay back in his chair and once more crossed one leg over its fellow.
‘You,’ said Tony in a queer voice, ‘have the goods … Are you sure of that, Captain?’
‘Don’t,’ said Captain James, ‘make me laugh.’ More cans down more stairs and at their end a toad.
‘Have I got the goods?’ Captain James shook his head in reproach. ‘You ought, by this time, Mister, to know me well enough to know that when I say I’ve got the goods, got the goods I have.’
‘I propose,’ said Tony, ignoring both the laughter and this last speech, ‘to do this …’
Captain James, scenting business at last, uncrossed his legs and once more leaned forward, each knee supporting a fur-backed paw.
‘I propose,’ said Tony, ‘to give you a cheque, for services rendered, for the sum of one hundred and fifty pounds. This makes, with one hundred I gave you yesterday, two hundred and fifty pounds, which, for carrying a letter—especially when you’ve copied that letter and tried to make black-mailing capital out of it—is, I think, good pay.’
‘Don’t,’ said Captain James for the second time, ‘make me laugh!’ But this time no laugh f
ollowed the words. Instead some more words came. ‘Do I understand,’ said Captain James, ‘that you think, you poor, fresh-water, soft-roed young skate, that you are going to fob me off with a mere two hundred and fifty quid? Oh, don’t, please don’t make me laugh!’
Once more Tony ignored the remark of his visitor. Instead he put his hand to his breast-pocket. Immediately, with this action, Captain James’ right hand shot beneath his coat in the direction of his left armpit.
Tony watched this gesture, and brought from his own pocket a folded envelope. This he laid upon the table so that it and its superscription were easily visible to the eye of Captain James as he lolled in the big chair. It bore, this envelope, the words: Captain Inigo James.
‘And inside it,’ said Tony, ‘is the cheque for one hundred and fifty pounds which I mentioned just now. Are you going to take it, James?’
‘Am I going to what?’ said Captain James. He reached out a hand; engulfed the envelope; rammed it into the now bulging wallet. ‘I am going to take it,’ said Captain James, and as he said this he looked, though unsmiling, even more repulsive than Tony’s worst memory of him. ‘But,’ said Captain James, ‘I am going to take, Sonny, a whole hellova lot more …’
Tony interrupted. ‘And that,’ he said, ‘is just where we disagree. You are not going to take one penny more. You are going to take nothing more. There is not, if you follow me, any more for you to take, at least in that line.’ Tony was smiling now, a fierce, very fixed smile which did not touch his eyes.
‘Oh, fresh!’ said Captain James, ‘very, very fresh! And as green as the bleeding grass! What the hell do you take me for? Somebody’s Aunt Susie?’
‘I shudder to think,’ said Tony, still smiling, ‘of your being anybody’s Aunt or, for that matter, anybody’s relation at all. Any human being’s relation that is. I can, however, think of many animals to which you not only bear a resemblance but a blood kinship.’
‘Oh, fresh! very fresh!’ said Captain James again out of a lipless mouth. ‘Most smooth! But see here, Sonny, smoothness and freshness don’t go down with Glassy James. All they do is to make him laugh. I’ve got your two-fifty. If I don’t get more as I want it and when I want it, or if we don’t come to some bigger arrangement, as you might say … Well, you know … That letter—the original of that letter—gets to places where you don’t want it.’
‘Oh, no!’ said Tony, shaking his head. ‘Oh, no, Captain!’
‘What the hell do you mean “Oh no”?’ said Captain James.
‘Exactly,’ said Tony, ‘what I say. In no circumstances can the original of that letter be shown by you to anybody.’
Captain James stared. At last, with what was doubtless intended for the parody of a pitying smile, he raised his forefinger and touched his rock-like, mahogany-coloured forehead. He said, speaking as if to himself:
‘Daft! That’s what it is! Bugs! Flooey! Bats dashing themselves to death against the belfry walls …’ Captain James broke off. ‘What the hell!’ he said suddenly in a sort of hissing whisper. He stared as if pulled by some invisible force. He got to his feet, thrusting back the deep armchair. He stared, as a snake might stare who suddenly has found a rabbit better at hypnotism than he is himself, at something which Tony held between his fingers, produced like a conjurer’s Union Jack, apparently from the thin air …
‘This,’ said Tony, ‘is the original letter.’ He held the thing up between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, a thick wad of foolscap pages clipped together at the left-hand corner with a rusty brass clip; pages covered with a neat, small-charactered handwriting.
‘Look!’ said Tony, ‘that’s it, you know! No mistake! No deception! Nothing, ladies and gentlemen, up my sleeve! …’
‘How … What the hell?’ said Captain James again.
To Tony’s left rear, as he stood behind his table, was the fireplace and in it there crackled a fire of coals and logs.
‘Look!’ said Tony. Under his fingers the pile of sheets tore, ripped in half across their length, and then, in his hands, the torn sheets were crushed into a ball and the ball was tossed, before Captain James’ horrified gaze, unerringly into the fire …
A strange sound burst from Captain James. A sound which was cross between foul oaths, and prayer, and the roaring of an injured animal.
The right hand of Captain James came up and disappeared beneath the left lapel of his bulging coat …
‘Oh, no,’ said Tony, ‘you don’t!’ His right hand came up from the table, in it a heavy silver ink-stand … The hand jerked … There struck Captain James, between and across his eyes, a vicious stream of black liquid.
From Tony’s right hand the ink-pot dropped with a clatter, first on the desk top and then on the floor. His left hand came down on the desk and he vaulted. As his feet touched the floor on the desk’s other side, his right hand caught the right wrist of Captain James, now, despite the gasping splutters to which its owner was giving vent, grasping a small, stubby, brown automatic. Tony’s left hand came up to Captain James’ right elbow. There was a sudden flurry of straining bodies; a twist; a wrench … The automatic was in Tony’s hands.
‘Oh, no,’ said Tony again, ‘you don’t!’ He tossed the pistol from him, half-turning his body to do so. It slid in a brown arc through the air to smash the glass of a window and fall with a hideous clattering on to the jutting roof of the storey below. Tony stepped back from Captain James. With three movements which seemed like one, Tony took off his coat; threw it too. It lay, a grey, untidy little heap in the corner. He backed away from Captain James until he was at the door; turned, and with one swift movement, locked the door and, plucking out its key, thrust this into his hip pocket. He came away from the door again half-way towards his enemy …
‘Gord Ormighty!’ said Captain James, ‘you little blank! You festering little swine!’ He had cleared the ink from his eyes with the back of his left hand. His face was a grinning skewbald horror …
‘If it’s a rough-house you’re wanting …’ said Captain James. His voice was not pleasing to hear … He stood stock-still, his arms, tremendously long for his height, raised themselves. The broad squat fingers crooked. Suddenly, with a leap almost incredible in its size and quickness, he had abolished the space between himself and his enemy …
The door of Miss Pagan’s room opened with a crash through which hurtled a small and electrified Charles.
‘Here, cummere, quick!’ said Charles. ‘Here, cummere, quick! Here, cummere, quick!’
‘Whatever,’ said Miss Pagan, ‘is the …’
‘Here, cummere, quick!’
‘What,’ said Harris, heavily, ‘do you mean, Charles, by …’
‘Here, cummere, quick! No, not you. You’re no damn good. Miss Pygan, it’s the Guv’nor. He’s scrapping in there with that Jymes. You never ’eard such a row. Here, cummere, quick!’
Miss Pagan, for probably the first time and certainly the last in that office, not only did as she was bidden by Charles, but did it with a celerity quite shattering. Losing, for once, her determined pose of shock-proof calmness, Miss Pagan flew down the passage on small and beautifully shod feet which seemed hardly to touch the carpet. Miss Pagan leant against the wall, having vainly tried the door of the room and found it locked, and put a hand to her heart.
‘Oh, my God!’ said Miss Pagan.
‘Didjever,’ said Charles, coming up a bad second, ‘’ear anythink like it in all your life?’
‘Quick, quick!’ said Miss Pagan, clutching Charles by the shoulder and shaking him in her agitation. ‘Quick! Run out and fetch a policeman. Quickly! Oh, listen to that! Oh! my God! Go and get the other men and then send someone for a policeman. Hurry, Charles, hurry!’
Charles scratched his head but stayed where he was.
‘I’m not so sure, Miss Pygan …’ he said.
‘Oh, hurry, Charles, hurry!’
‘Now, then,’ said Charles, with kindly tolerance, ‘you take a holt of yourself, Miss Pygan. This is t
he Guvnor’s job, this is. Now, I know somethink about the Guv’nor and Jymes and I’m not so sure that the Guv’nor’d thank us for interferin’. Blimey! Listen to that!’
Miss Pagan leant against the wall again, covering her face with her hands. That last crash, a sound as if all the tables in RYNOX House had, of their own accord, suddenly taken it into their heads, simultaneously, to hurl themselves against their respective walls, still rang with its dreadful sound in her ears. And still in her ears were other, smaller sounds. Hissing breaths; grunts—awful, animal-like yet human grunts—gasps; the thudding of feet upon the soft carpet; and other thuddings, reminiscent to Miss Pagan—who had never in her well-ordered life heard fist meeting flesh—of meat and butchers’ blocks.
Along the passage, leading a charge of fellow-clerks, came Harris. In each of Harris’ hands was a heavy ruler. Harris stopped outside the door. He listened. Behind him his three adherents clustered. They looked at each other with awe-stricken and yet joyous faces. Happenings like this were, alas, far too rare in New Bond Street …
Another crash within the room. A crash which was father to all the other crashes. And then—dead, utter silence …
‘O—Oh!’ said Miss Pagan, faintly, and once more covered her face.
Harris, very pale, stepped boldly up to the door and beat upon it with his rulers. ‘Here!’ said Harris, in a tone which was meant to be deep and manly and official. ‘What’s all this? What’s all this? Are you there, Mr Benedik? Are you there, sir?’
Then, faint sounds within the room. A stirring; then a rattle of the key in the lock; the turning of the key; the door opening …
‘I am,’ said Tony, on the threshold, ‘here. But what the hell all you people are playing at, I don’t know! Buzz off back to your work. Go on. Sharp!’
Miss Pagan, looking up with joy at the sound of this voice, screamed a little scream, instantly repressed, as her eyes took in the spectacle of the voice’s owner. Tony was, in this place and at this time, fit matter for a woman’s cries. Not only was he coatless, but waistcoatless. His collar had gone and the most part of the right sleeve of his shirt. This gaped to show his chest, and down the chest were angry scratches, some of them bleeding. His mouth was a mashed blur. His left eye, darkening rapidly, was closed. His nose—the imperious Benedik nose—was ludicrously swollen like a clown’s and all over his face were replicas of the scratches upon his chest …
The Rynox Mystery Page 13
