Elk 02 The Joker

by Edgar Wallace

  Mr Harlow lit a cigar.

  ‘Yes - but she doesn’t want a husband - I know THAT. Dreams, huh?’ He laughed to himself, the other man watching him curiously.

  ‘Do you ever dream?’ he asked with a timidity which was almost pathetic.

  ‘I? Lord, yes! I dream of jokes.’

  Marling could not understand this: this strong man had talked about ‘jokes’ before, and when they were elaborated they had not amused anybody but Mr Harlow.

  It is a peculiar trait of the English criminal that he never describes his unlawful act or acts by grandiloquent terms. Crime of all kind, especially crime against the person, is a ‘joke’. The man who holds up a cashier has ‘had a joke with him’; the confidence swindler ‘jokes’ his victim; a warehouse theft would be modestly described in the same way.

  Mr Stratford Harlow once heard the term employed and never forgot it. This cant phrase so nearly covered his own mental attitude towards his operations; a good joke would produce the same emotions of mind and body.

  Once he had written to an important rubber house offering to take its entire stock at a price which would show a fair profit to the seller. The house and its affiliated concerns smelt a forced buying and the price of rubber rose artificially.

  He waited three months, buying everywhere but from the united companies and one night their stores illuminated the shipping of the Mersey.

  That was a very good joke indeed. Mr Harlow chuckled for days, not because he had made an enormous fortune - the joke had to be there or the money had no value.

  ‘I don’t like your jokes,’ said Marling gravely.

  ‘I shouldn’t tell you about them,’ said Mr Harlow, suppressing a yawn; ‘but I have no secrets from you, Saul Marling. And I love testing them against your magnificent honesty. If you laughed at them as I laugh, I’d be worried sick. Come along to the roof for your walk and I’ll tell you the greatest joke of all. It starts with a dinner-party given in this house and ends with somebody making twenty millions and living happily ever after!’

  It required a perceptible effort in Aileen to produce the paper she had found in the grate of Mr Harlow’s library.

  She had the unhappy knowledge that whilst this big man had put her in her place, she hadn’t stayed there. She had gone down into deplorable depths. He might be anything that Jim believed, but on his own plane he had a claim to greatness.

  When she reached that conclusion she felt that it was time to hand the paper to her companion.

  ‘I’m not going to excuse myself,’ she said frankly. ‘It was an abominable thing to do, and I won’t even say that I had you in my mind. It was just vulgar curiosity made me do it.’

  They stopped under a street lamp and he opened the paper and read the message.

  ‘Marling!’ he gasped. ‘Good God!’

  ‘What is it?’

  The effect of those scribbled words upon her companion astounded her. Presently he folded the paper very carefully and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Marling, Ingle, Mrs Gibbins,’ he said, in his old bantering mood. ‘Put me together the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle; and connect if you can the note of this Mr Marling, who wishes to retain his writing materials; your disreputable uncle who has developed a craze for film projecting; fit in the piece which stands for Mrs Gibbins and her beloved William Smith; explain a certain letter that was never posted and never delivered, yet was found in a frozen puddle - I nearly said puzzle! - and make of all these one intelligible picture.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she asked helplessly.

  He shook his head.

  ‘You don’t know! Elk doesn’t know. I’m not so sure that I know, but I wish the next ten days were through!’

  CHAPTER 12

  FOR SOME reason which she could not explain to herself, Aileen was irritated.

  ‘Do you realise how horribly mysterious you are?’ she asked, almost tartly. ‘I always thought that the mystery of detectives was an illusion fostered by sensational writers.’

  ‘All mystery is illusion,’ he said grandly.

  They had reached Oxford Street.

  ‘Have you ever been to the House of Commons?’ he asked her suddenly.

  She shook her head.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then come along. You’ll see something more entertaining than a film or a play, but you will hear very little that hasn’t been said better elsewhere.’

  The House was in session, though she was only dimly aware of this, for she belonged to the large majority of people to whom the workings of Parliament were a closed book. Jim, on the contrary, was extraordinarily well informed in political affairs and favoured her with a brief dissertation on the subject. The old hard and fast party spirit was moribund, he said. The electorate had grown too flexible for any machine to control. There had been surprising results in recent by-elections to illustrate a fact so disconcerting to party organizers. The present Government, she learnt, despite its large majority, was on its last legs. There was dissension within the Cabinet, and rebel caves honey-combed the Government party.

  In truth she was only faintly interested. But the approach to the Commons was impressive. The lofty hall, the broad stairway, the echoing lobby with its hurrying figures, and the mystery of what lay behind the door at one end, brought her a new thrill.

  Jim disappeared and returned with a ticket. They passed up a flight of stairs and presently she was admitted to one of the galleries.

  Her first impression was one of disappointment. The House was so much smaller than she had expected. Somebody was talking; a pale bald man, who rocked and swayed slowly as he delivered himself of a monotonous and complaining tirade on the failure of the Government to do something or other about the Basingstoke Canal. There were only a few dozen members in the House, and mainly they were engaged in talking or listening to one another, and apparently taking no notice of the speaker. On the front bench three elderly men sat, head to head, in consultation.

  Mr Speaker in his canopied chair seemed the only person who was taking a keen interest in the member’s oration.

  Even as she looked, the House began to fill. A ceaseless procession of men trooped in and took their places on the benches, stopping as they passed to exchange a word with somebody already seated. The orator still droned on; and then Jim pressed her arm and nodded.

  From behind the Speaker’s chair had come a man whom she instantly recognised as Sir Joseph Layton, the Foreign Minister. He was in evening dress except that he wore, instead of the conventional dinner jacket, one of black velvet.

  He sat down on the front bench, fingered his tiny white moustache with a characteristic gesture, and then the member who had been speaking sat down. Somebody rose from one of the front benches and asked a question which did not reach the girl. Sir Joseph jerked to his feet, his hands gripping the lapels of his velvet coat, his head on one side like an inquisitive sparrow, and she listened without hearing to his reply. His voice was husky; he had a dozen odd mannerisms of speech and gesture that fascinated her. And then Jim’s hand touched her.

  ‘I’m going down to see him. Will you wait for me in the lobby?’ he whispered and she nodded.

  It was ten minutes before the Foreign Minister came out of the House, greeted the detective with a wave of his hand and put his arm in Jim’s.

  ‘Well, what is the news?’ he asked, when they reached his private room. ‘Harlow again, eh? Something dark and sinister going on in international circles of diplomacy?’

  He chuckled at the joke as he sat down at his big table and filled his pipe from a tin of tobacco that stood at his elbow.

  ‘Harlow, Harlow!’ he said, with good-humoured impatience. ‘Everybody is telling me about Harlow! I’m going to have a talk with the fellow. He is giving a dinner-party on Tuesday and I’ve promised to look in before I come to the House.’

  ‘What is the excuse for the dinner?’ asked Jim, interested.

  The Minister laughed.

  ‘He
is a secret diplomatist, if you like. He has fixed up a very unpleasant little quarrel which might have developed in the Middle East - really it amounted to a row between two bloodthirsty brigands! - and he is giving a sort of olive-branch dinner to the ambassadors of the two states concerned. I can’t go to the dinner, but I shall go to the reception afterwards. Well,’ he asked abruptly, ‘what is your news?’

  ‘I came here to get news, not to give it, Sir Joseph,’ said Jim. ‘That well-known cloud is not developing?’

  ‘Pshaw!’ said the Minister impatiently. ‘Cloud!’

  ‘The Bonn incident?’ suggested Jim, and Sir Joseph exploded.

  ‘There was no incident! It was a vulgar slanging match between an elderly and pompous staff colonel and an impudent puppy of a French sous-officier! The young man has been disciplined by the French; and the colonel has been relieved of his post by the War Office. And that is the end of a so-called incident.’

  Jim rejoined the girl soon after and learnt that Parliament had not greatly impressed her. Perhaps her mood was to blame that she found him a rather dull companion; for the rest of the evening, whilst she was with him, she did most of the talking, and he replied either in monosyllables or not at all. She understood him well enough to suspect that something unusual must have happened and did not banter him on his long silence.

  At the door other boarding-house he asked: ‘You won’t object to Brown staying on?’

  ‘I intended speaking about him,’ she said. ‘Why am I under observation - that is the term, isn’t it?’

  ‘But do you mind?’

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It is rather funny.’

  ‘A sense of humour is a great thing,’ he replied, and that was his farewell.

  Elk was not at Scotland Yard. He went up to the Great Eastern Road, where the inspector had rooms; and he was distinctly piqued to learn that Elk knew all about the Harlow dinner.

  ‘I only got to know this afternoon, though,’ said Elk. ‘If you’d been at the Yard I could have told you - the thing was only organised yesterday. We shouldn’t have heard anything about it, but Harlow applied for two policemen to be on duty outside the house. Swift worker, Harlow.’ His small eyes surveyed Jim Carlton gravely. ‘Tell you something else, son: Ratas have bought up a new office building in Moorgate Street. I forget the name of the fellow who bought it. Anyway, Ellenbury took over yesterday - got in double staff. He is a fellow you might see.’

  ‘He is a fellow I intend seeing,’ said Jim. ‘What is he now - lawyer or financier?’

  ‘A lawyer. But he knows as much about finance as law. I’ve got an idea he’s on the crook. We’ve never had a complaint against him, though there was a whisper once about his financial position. In the old days he used to act for some mighty queer people; and I think he lost money on the Stock Exchange.’

  ‘He’s the man who lives at Norwood?’

  Elk nodded.

  ‘Norwood,’ he said deliberately; ‘the place where the letters were posted to Mrs Gibbins. I wondered you hadn’t seen him before - no, I haven’t, though.’ He reconsidered.

  ‘You didn’t want to make Harlow think that you are on to that Gibbins business.’ He stroked his nose thoughtfully.

  ‘Yuh, that’s it. He doesn’t know you. You might call on him on some excuse, but you’ll have to be careful.’

  ‘How does he get from Norwood to the City?’

  Elk shook his head.

  ‘He’s not the kind of fellow you can pick up in the train, he said. ‘He runs a hired car which Ratas pay for. Royalton House is his address. It’s an old brick box near the Crystal Palace. He lives there with his wife - an invalid. He hasn’t any vices that I know of, unless being a friend of Harlow’s puts him on the list. And he’s not approachable any other way. He doesn’t work in Norwood, but has a little office in Theobald’s Road; and if you call his clerk will see you and tell you that he is very sorry but Mr Ellenbury can’t give you an appointment for the next ten years. But Ellenbury might tell something, if you could get at him.’

  ‘You are certain that Ellenbury is working with Harlow?’

  ‘Working with him?’ Elk spat contemptuously but unerringly into the fire. ‘I should say he was! They’re like brothers - up to a point. Do you remember the police station old man Harlow presented to a grateful nation? It was Ellenbury who bought the ground and gave the orders to the builders. Nobody knew it was a police station until it was up. After they’d put in the foundations and got the walls breast-high, there was a sort of strike because foreign labour was employed, and all the workmen had to be sent back to Italy or Germany, or wherever they came from. That’s where Ellenbury’s connection came under notice, though we weren’t aware that he was working for Harlow till a year later.’

  Jim decided upon taking the bolder course, but the lawyer was prepared for the visitation.

  CHAPTER 13

  MR ELLENBURY had his home in a large, gaunt house between Norwood and Anerley. It had been ugly even in the days when square, box-shaped dwellings testified to the strange mentality of the Victorian architects and stucco was regarded as an effective and artistic method of covering bad brickwork. It was in shape a cube, from the low centre of which, on the side facing the road, ran a long flight of stone steps confined within a plaster balustrade. It had oblong windows set at regular intervals on three sides, and was a mansion to which even Venetian blinds lent an air of distinction.

  Royalton House stood squarely in the centre of two acres of land, and could boast a rosary, a croquet lawn, a kitchen garden, a rustic summer-house and a dribbling fountain.

  Scattered about the grounds there were a number of indelicate statues representing famous figures of mythology - these had been purchased cheaply from a local exhibition many years before at a great weeding-out of those gods chiselled with such anatomical faithfulness that they constituted an offence to the eye of the Young Person.

  In such moments of leisure as his activities allowed, Mr Ellenbury occupied a room gloomily papered, which was variously styled ‘The Study’, and ‘The Master’s Room’ by his wife and his domestic staff. It was a high and ill-proportioned apartment, cold and cheerless in the winter, and was overcrowded with furniture that did not fit. Round tables and top-heavy secretaires; a horsehair sofa that ran askew across one corner of the room, where it could only be reached by removing a heavy card-table; there was space for Mr Ellenbury to sit and little more.

  On this December evening he sat at his roll-top desk, biting his nails thoughtfully, a look of deep concern on his pinched face. He was a man who had grown prematurely old in a lifelong struggle to make his resources keep pace with ambition. He was a lover of horses; not other people’s horses that show themselves occasionally on a race track, but horses to keep in one’s own stable, horses that looked over the half-door at the sound of a familiar voice; horses that might be decked in shiny harness shoulder to shoulder and draw a glittering phaeton along a country road.

  All men have their dreams; for forty years Mr Ellenbury’s pet dream had been to drive into the arena of a horse show behind two spanking bays with nodding heads and high knee action, and to drive out again amidst the plaudits of the multitude with the ribbons of the first prize streaming from the bridles of his team. Many a man has dreamt less worthily.

  He had had bad luck with his horses, bad luck with his family. Mrs Ellenbury was an invalid. No doctor had ever discovered the nature of her illness. One West End specialist seen her and had advised the calling in of another. The second specialist had suggested that it would be advisable to see a third. The third had come and asked questions. Had any other parents suffered from illusions? Were they hysterical? Didn’t Mrs Ellenbury think that if she made an effort she could get up from her bed for, say, half an hour a day?

  The truth was that Mrs Ellenbury, having during her life experienced most of the sensations which are peculiar to womankind, having walked and worked, directed servants, given little parties, made call
s, visited the theatre, played croquet and tennis, had decided some twenty years ago that there was nothing quite as comfortable as staying in bed.

  So she became an invalid, had a treble subscription at a library and acquired a very considerable acquaintance with the rottenness of society, as depicted by authors who were authorities on misunderstood wives.

  In a sense Mr Ellenbury was quite content that this condition of affairs should be as it was. Once he was satisfied that his wife, in whom he had the most friendly interest, was suffering no pain, he was satisfied to return to the bachelor life. Every morning and every night (when he returned home at a reasonable hour) he went into her room and asked: ‘How are we today?’

  ‘About the same - certainly no worse.’

  ‘That’s fine! Is there anything you want?’

  ‘No, thank you - I have everything.’

  This exchange varied slightly from day to day, but generally it followed on those lines.

  Ellenbury had come back late from Ratas after a tiring day. Usually he directed the Rata Syndicate from his own office; indeed, he had never before appeared visibly in the operations of the company. But this new coup of Harlow’s was on so gigantic a scale that he must appear in the daylight; and his connection with a concern suspected by every reputable firm in the City must be public property. And that hurt him. He, who had secretly robbed his clients, who is had engaged in systematic embezzlement and might now, but for the intervention and help of Mr Stratford Harlow, have been an inmate of Dartmoor, walked with shame under the stigma of his known connection with a firm which was openly described as unsavoury.

  He was a creature of Harlow, his slave. This sore place in his self-esteem had never healed. It was his recreation to brood upon the ignominy of his lot. He hated Harlow with a malignity that none, seeing his mild, worn face, would suspect.

  To him Stratford Harlow was the very incarnation of evil, a devil on earth who had bound his soul in fetters of brass. And of late he had embarked upon a novel course of dreaming. It was the confused middle of a dream, having neither beginning nor end, but it was all about a humiliated Harlow; Harlow being dragged in chains through the Awful Arch; Harlow robbed at the apotheosis of his triumph. And always Ellenbury was there, leering, chuckling, pointing a derisive finger at the man he had ruined, or else he was flitting by midnight across the Channel with a suitcase packed with fabulous sums of money that he had filched from his master.