The Joker ds(e-3

by Edgar Wallace

  He unlocked the door of the room and admitted Elk and the girl.

  ‘That’s good work,’ said Elk, whose detached admiration for the genius of law-breakers was at least sincere. ‘Safe’s empty! Not so much as a cigarette card left behind. Good work! Toby Haggitt or Lew Yakobi—they’re the only two men in London that could have done it.’

  The girl was gazing wide-eyed at the ‘good work’. She was very pale, Jim noticed, and misread the cause.

  ‘What was in the safe?’ he asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know—I didn’t even know that there was a safe in the room. He will be terrible about this!’

  Carlton knew the ‘he’ was the absent Ingle. ‘He won’t know for some time, anyway—’ he began, but she broke in upon his reassurance.

  ‘Next week,’ she said; ‘he is being released on Wednesday.’

  Elk scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Somebody knew that,’ he said; ‘he hadn’t a partner either.’

  Arthur Ingle was indeed a solitary worker. His frauds had been unsuspected even by such friends as he had in his acting days—for they had covered a period of twelve years before his arrest and conviction. To the members of his company he was known as a bad paymaster and an unscrupulous manager; none imagined that this clever player of character parts was ‘Lobber & Syne, Manufacturing Jewellers, of Clerkenwell,’ and other aliases that produced him such golden harvests.

  ‘It was no fault of yours,’ said Jim Carlton; and she submitted to a gentle pat on the shoulder. ‘There’s no sense in worrying about it.’

  Elk was examining the blowlamp under the electric light.

  ‘Bet it’s Toby,’ he said, and walked to the window.

  ‘That’s his graft. He’d make a cat burglar look like a wool-eatin’ kitten! Parapets are like the Great West Road to Toby—he’d stop to manicure his nails on three inches of rotten sandstone.’

  The identity of the burglar worried Jim less than it did the girl. He had the brain of a lightning calculator. A hundred aspects of the crime, a hundred possibilities and explanations flickered through his mind and none completely satisfied him. Unless—

  The Splendid Harlow was on the way to becoming an obsession. There was no immense sum of money to be made from discovering the secrets of a convicted swindler.

  That there was money in the safe he did not for one moment believe. Ingle was not the type of criminal which hid its wealth in safes. He credited him with a dozen banking accounts in fictitious names, and each holding money on deposit.

  They went back into the panelled dining-room. The apartment interested Jim, for here was every evidence of luxury and refinement. The flat must have cost thousands of pounds to furnish. And then he remembered that Arthur Ingle had been convicted on three charges. Evidence in a number of others, which must have produced enormous profits, was either missing or of too shaky a character to produce. This apartment represented coups more successful than those for which Arthur Ingle had been convicted.

  ‘Do you know your uncle very well?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I knew him better many years ago,’ she said, ‘when he was an actor, before he—well, before he got rich! I am his only living relation.’ She raised her head, listening.

  Somebody had knocked at the outer door.

  ‘It may be the charwoman,’ she said, and went along the passage to open the door.

  A man was standing on the mat outside, tall, commanding, magnificent in his well-cut evening clothes. His snowy linen blazed and twinkled with diamonds; the buttons on his white waistcoat were aglitter.

  It was part of the primitive in the man, so that she saw nothing vulgar in the display. But something within her shrank under his pale gaze. She had a strange and inexplicable sensation of being in the presence of a power beyond earthly control. She was crushed by the sense of his immense superiority. So she might have felt had she found herself confronted by a tiger.

  ‘My name is Harlow—we met on Dartmoor,’ he said, and showed a line of even teeth in a smile. ‘May I come in?’

  She could not speak in her astonishment, but somebody answered for her.

  ‘Come in, Harlow,’ drawled Jim Carlton’s voice. ‘I’d love to have your first impression of Dartmoor; is it really as snappy as people think?’

  CHAPTER 4

  MR. HARLOW’S attitude towards this impertinent man struck the girl as remarkable. It was mild, almost benevolent; he seemed to regard James Carlton as a good joke. And he was the great Harlow! She had learnt that at Princetown.

  You could not work in the City without hearing of Harlow, his coups and successes. Important bankers spoke of him with bated breath. His money was too liquid for safety: it flowed here and there in floods that were more often than not destructive. Sometimes it would disappear into subterranean caverns, only to gush forth in greater and more devastating volume to cut new channels through old cultivations and presently to recede, leaving havoc and ruin behind.

  And of course she had heard of the police station. When Mr Harlow interested himself in the public weal he did so thoroughly and unconventionally. His letters to the press on the subject of penology were the best of their kind that have appeared in print. He pestered Ministers and commissioners with his plans for a model police station, and when his enthusiasm was rebuffed he did what no philanthropist, however public-minded, has ever done before.

  He bought a freehold plot in Evory Street (which is not a stone’s throw from Park Lane), built his model police headquarters at the cost of two hundred thousand pounds, and presented the building to the police commissioners. It was a model police office in every respect. The men’s quarters above the station were the finest of their kind in the world. Even the cells had the quality of comfort, though they contained the regulation plank bed. This gift was a nine days’ wonder. Topical revues had their jokes about it; the cartoonists flung their gibes at the Government upon the happening.

  The City had ceased to think of him as eccentric, they called him ‘sharp’ and contrasted him unfavourably with his father. They were a little afraid of him. His money was too fluid for stability.

  He nodded smilingly at Jim Carlton, fixed the unhappy Elk with a glance, and then: ‘I did not know that you and my friend Carlton were acquainted.’ And then, in a changed tone: ‘I hope I am not de trop.’

  His voice, his attitude said as plainly as words could express: ‘I presume this is a police visitation due to the notorious character of your uncle?’ The girl thought this. Jim knew it.

  ‘There has been a burglary here and Miss Rivers called us in,’ he said.

  Harlow murmured his regrets and sympathy. ‘I congratulate you upon having secured the shrewdest officer in the police force.’ He addressed the girl blandly.

  ‘And I congratulate the police force’—he looked at Jim—‘upon detaching you from the Foreign Office—you were wasted there, Mr Carlton, if I may be so impertinent as to express an opinion.’

  ‘I am still in the Foreign Office,’ said Jim. ‘This is spare-time work. Even policemen are entitled to their amusements. And how did you like Dartmoor?’

  The Splendid Harlow smiled sadly. ‘Very impressive, very tragic,’ he said. ‘I am referring of course to Princetown, where I spent a couple of nights.’

  Aileen was waiting to hear the reason for the call; even though her distress and foreboding she was curious to learn what whim had brought this super-magnate to the home of a convict.

  He looked slowly from her to the men and again Jim interpreted his wishes; he glanced at Elk and walked with him into the lumber room.

  ‘It occurred to me,’ said Mr Harlow, ‘that I might be in a position to afford you some little help. My name may not be wholly unknown to you; I am Mr Stratford Harlow.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I knew that,’ she said.

  ‘They told you at the Duchy, did they?’ It seemed that he was relieved that she had identified him.

  �
��Mine is rather a delicate errand, but it struck me—I have found myself thinking about you many times since we met—that possibly…I might be able to find a good position for you. Your situation, if you will forgive my saying as much, is a little tragic. Association with—er—criminals or people with criminal records has a drugging effect even upon the finest nature.’

  She smiled. ‘In other words, Mr Harlow,’ she said quietly, ‘you’re under the impression I’m rather badly off and that you would like to make life easier for me?’

  He beamed at this. ‘Exactly,’ he said.

  ‘It is very kind of you—most kind,’ she said, and meant it. ‘But I have a very good job in a lawyer’s office.’ He inclined his head graciously. ‘Mr Stebbings has been very good to me—’

  ‘Mr –-?’ His head jerked on one side. ‘Stebbings—of Stebbings, Field & Farrow—surely not! They were my lawyers until a few years ago.’

  She knew this also.

  ‘Quite good people, though a little old-fashioned,’ he said. ‘Then of course you have heard Mr Stebbings speak of me?’

  ‘Only once,’ she confessed. ‘He is a very reticent man and never talks about his clients.’

  Harlow bit his lip in thought. ‘An excellent fellow! I have often wondered whether I was wrong in taking my affairs from him. I wish you would mention that to him when you see him. I understood you were working in the office of the New Library Syndicate?’

  She smiled at this. ‘It’s curious you should say that; their offices are in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, but next door.’

  ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I see how the mistake arose,’ and added quickly: ‘A friend of mine who knows you saw you going into—er—an office; and obviously made a mistake.’

  He did not tell her who was their mutual friend, and she was not sufficiently interested to inquire.

  This time the knock at the door was more pronounced.

  ‘Will you excuse me?’ she said. ‘That is my cleaner, and she is rather inclined to tell me her troubles. I may keep you waiting a little while.’

  She left him and he heard the sounds of a door opening, as Jim Carlton and Elk came back into the dining-room.

  ‘A very charming young lady that,’ said Mr Harlow.

  ‘Very,’ said Jim shortly.

  ‘Women do not interest me greatly’—the Splendid Harlow picked a tiny thread of cotton from his immaculate coat and dropped it on the floor. ‘They think along lines which I find it difficult to follow. They are emotional, too—swayed by momentary fears and scruples…’

  The sound of voices in the passage, one high-pitched and complaining:

  ‘…what with the fog and everything, miss, it’s lucky I’m here at all…’

  A shabby figure passed the open door, followed by Aileen.

  ‘I suppose you don’t know Ingle, Mr Harlow?’ Jim was examining the photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘A long-firm swindler; clever, but with a kink even in his kinkiness! Believes in revolution and all that sort of thing…blood and guillotines and tumbrils; the whole box of tricks—’

  Something made him look round.

  Mr Stratford Harlow was standing in the centre of the room, gripping the edge of a small table to keep him upright.

  His face was white and haggard and drawn; and in his pale eyes was a look of horror such as Jim Carlton had never seen in the face of a man. Elk sprang forward and caught him as he swayed and led him to a big settee. Into this Stratford Harlow sank and leaning forward, covered his face with his hands.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ he said as he rocked slowly from side to side and fell in a heap on the ground.

  The colossus had fainted.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘A LITTLE heart trouble,’ said Mr Harlow, smiling as he set down the glass of water. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have given you so much trouble, Miss Rivers. I haven’t had an attack in years.’

  He was still pale, but such was his extraordinary self-control that the hand that put down the glass was without a tremor.

  ‘Phew!’ He dabbed his forehead with a silk handkerchief and rose steadily to his feet.

  Elk was engaged in the prosaic task of brushing the dust stains from his knees and looked up.

  ‘You’d better let me take you home, Mr Harlow,’ he said.

  Stratford Harlow shook his head.

  ‘That is quite unnecessary—quite,’ he said. ‘I have my car at the door and a remedy for all such mental disturbances as these! And it is not a drug!’ he smiled.

  Nevertheless, Elk went with him to the car.

  ‘Will you tell my chauffeur to drive to the Charing Cross power station?’ was the surprising request; and long after the car had moved off in the fog Elk stood on the sidewalk, wondering what business took this multi-millionaire to such a venue.

  They evidently knew Mr Harlow at the power station and they at any rate saw nothing remarkable in his visit.

  The engineer, who was smoking at the door, stood back to let him walk into the great machinery hall, and placed a stool for him. And there for half an hour he sat, and the droning of the dynamos and the whirr and thud of the great engines were sedatives and anodynes to his troubled mind.

  Here he had come before, to think out great schemes, which developed best in this atmosphere. The power and majesty of big wheels, the rhythm of the driving belts as they sagged and rose, the shaded lights above the marble switchboards, the noisy quiet of it all, stimulated him as nothing else could. Here he found the illusion of irresistibility that attuned so perfectly to his own mood; the inevitable effects of the inevitable causes. The sense that he was standing near the very heart of power was an inspiration. This lofty hall was a very home of the gods to him.

  Half an hour, an hour, passed, and then he rose with a catch of his breath, and a slow smile lit the big face. ‘Thank you, Harry, thank you.’

  He shook the attendant’s hand and left something that crinkled in the hard palm of the workman. A few minutes later he drove through brilliantly illuminated Piccadilly Circus and could offer a friendly nod to the flickering and flashing lights whose birth he had seen and whose very brilliance was a homage to the steel godhead.

  To be thoroughly understood, Mr Stratford Harlow must be known.

  There had been five members of the Harlow family when Stratford Selwyn Mortimer Harlow was born, and they were all immensely rich. His mother died a week later, his father when he was aged three, leaving the infant child to the care of his Aunt Mercy, a spinster who was accounted, even by her charitable relatives, as ‘strange’. The boy was never sent to school, for his health was none of the best and he had his education at the hands of his aunt. An enormously rich woman with no interest in life, she guarded her charge jealously. Family interference drove her to a frenzy. The one call that her two sisters paid her, when the boy was seven, ended in a scene on which Miss Alice, the younger, based most of her conversation for years afterwards.

  The main result of the quarrel between Miss Mercy and her maiden sisters was that she shut up Kravelly Hall and removed, with her maid Mrs Edwins, to a little cottage at Teignmouth. Here she lived unmolested by her relatives for seven years. She then went to Scarborough for three years and thence to Bournemouth. Regularly every month she wrote to her two sisters and her bachelor brother in New York; and the terminology of the letters did not vary by so much as a comma:

  “Miss Mercy Harlow presents her compliments and begs to state that The Boy is in Good Health and is receiving adequate tuition in the essential subjects together with a sound instruction in the tenets of the Protestant Faith.”

  She had engaged a tutor, a bearded young man from Oxford University (she deigned to mention this fact to her brother, with whom she had not quarrelled), whose name was Marling. There came to the ears of Aunt Alice a story which called into question the fitness of Mr Marling to mould the plastic mind of youth. A mild scandal at Oxford. Miss Alice felt it her duty to write, and after a long interval had a reply:

  “Miss Mercy Harlow begs t
o thank Miss Alice Harlow for her communication and in reply begs to state that she has conducted a very thorough and searching enquiry into the charges preferred against Mr Saul Marling (B.A. Oxon) and is satisfied that Mr Marling acted in the most honourable manner, and has done nothing with which he may reproach himself or which renders him unfit to direct the studies of The Boy.”

  This happened a year before Miss Mercy’s death. When nature took its toll and she passed to her Maker, Miss Alice hastened to Bournemouth and in a small and secluded cottage near Christchurch found a big and solemn young man of twenty-three, dressed a little gawkily in black. He was tearless; and indeed, his aunt suspected, almost cheerful, at the prospect of being freed from Miss Mercy’s drastic management.

  The bearded tutor had left (Mrs Edwins, the maid, tearfully explained) a fortnight before the passing of Miss Mercy.

  ‘And if he hadn’t gone,’ said Miss Alice with tight lips, ‘I should have made short work of him. The Boy has been suppressed! He hasn’t a word to say for himself!’

  A council was held, including the family lawyer, who was making his first acquaintance with Stratford. It was agreed that The Boy should have a flat in Park Lane and the companionship of an elder man who combined a knowledge of the world with a leaning towards piety. Such was found in the Rev. John Barthurst, M.A., an ex-naval chaplain.

  Miss Edwins was pensioned off and the beginning of Stratford’s independent life was celebrated with a dinner and a visit to Charley’s Aunt, through which roaring farce he sat with a stony face.

  The tutelage lasted the best part of a year; and then the quiet young man suddenly came to life, dismissed his worldly and pious companion with a cheque for a thousand pounds, summoned Mrs Edwins to be his housekeeper; and bought and reconstructed the Duke of Greenhart’s house in Park Lane.

  And thenceforward Mr Harlow’s name began to appear in the records of important transactions. Family fortunes dropped into his lap. Miss Mercy had been fabulously rich. She had left him every penny of her fortune, with the exception of Ł100 to Lucy Edwins in recognition of her faithful service, realising that she will not regard this sum as inadequate in view of the great service I rendered to her.’ Then Miss Henrietta died; and when the death duties were paid there was the greater part of two millions. Miss Alice left more. The bachelor uncle in New York died a comparative pauper, leaving a beggarly six hundred thousand.