The Complete Four Just Men

by Edgar Wallace

  He finished reading and rolled the paper – then remembered and stepped forward to the prisoners, showing them that portion of the document bearing the neat signature of the Prince.

  Then he fell back again to the other side of the fire, and there moved up to his side from the darkness about him a solid phalanx of civil guardsmen in their dark cloaks and high collars.

  The woman was stupefied; she tried to think, to place these happenings in logical sequence. The Four Just Men were the law – in Spain. Higher than the law, for they might condemn without trial and execute without hope of reprieve.

  She stood motionless whilst Gonsalez and Poiccart led the men back to the cell in the hill. They were absent longer than she expected, and when they returned Manfred rose.

  ‘We will go,’ he said.

  She did not question his right to give the order. She was for the moment wholly under his domination. She followed meekly enough the tramping soldiers as they slipped and stumbled down the steep slopes. Two of them had lighted torches, and the difficulties of the descent were greater than she had thought.

  Not until the party had halted in a clearing that commanded a view of the bluff – or would have done in daylight – did she speak.

  ‘Hush, hush!’ Von Dunop implored in a whisper. He was shaking like a jelly and his companions were in little better case. ‘They have promised us we shall go – say nothing.’

  ‘Say nothing!’

  She could have struck the poltroon. ‘Say nothing! when men who took our salt are being left to die in the darkness!’

  Manfred had learnt something of the Woman of Gratz; he knew to a second how long a weapon might with safety be left in her hand. Now, Leon, standing close at hand, caught her wrist, and wrenched the pistol from her grasp.

  ‘Later you may have it,’ he said calmly.

  She could have screamed in her fury.

  ‘Some day, some day!’ she muttered brokenly.

  ‘Silence!’ commanded a voice, and then Manfred began to speak.

  It was to her he spoke, and to the men associated with her in the work.

  ‘I have called you together that you may see. And seeing, remember. We, who are together in this work, have set ourselves the task of breaking for ever the organized power of anarchism. That we can prevent the acts of individuals privately moved to assassination by grievances existing only in their poor disordered brains, we cannot hope. That we can destroy for ever the association which exploits and directs these madmen for their profit, I am certain.’

  ‘The Red Hundred lives,’ she interrupted, tremulous with passion; ‘though I die and the men with me, the Red Hundred will live – and avenge.’

  ‘But for the fact that the Red Hundred is still powerful, I would not have brought you here,’ he said calmly; ‘but for my knowledge that your plans are complete for the continuation of your scheme of destruction in London, and that even now shipload upon shipload of material and men for the fight are pouring into England, we might dispense with your presence at this – ceremony.’ His voice rang out sternly.

  ‘There is no known faith or creed by which one may appeal to you. No better side or soft spot that ingenuity may reach. No concession with which to influence you. Blindly, insanely, uncaring, you move about your work, having no goal to pass or end to reach, filled with the lust of blood, slaying the innocent and sparing the guilty. God never provided for such aimless creatures as you – you are apart from His scheme. The fiercest hurricane brings rain to some pasture or other. The gales of the poles are breezes for the tropics; the deadly enemies of man who live in the African forests suppress other enemies – but you! Your hand is against all, your vengeance scattered broadcast, unintelligently – your very strength is a weakness pitiable and contemptible!

  ‘Yonder in the darkness,’ he went on, ‘are two men – tools of such people as you. Hired murderers, paid with gold to commit a crime so foul that the brain that planned it could only be that of an illogical unbalanced woman.

  ‘Your money is with them – ’ he turned to the Woman of Gratz – ‘my friend has converted it by chemical processes to an element that scientists know as fulminate of gold.

  ‘The terror they have inspired they now suffer, and I would not spare them a moment of their agony. The bomb they would have thrown now hangs suspended by a chain above them.’

  He lifted the terminal of a thin coil of wire that lay at her feet and she saw that the other end twisted into the bush.

  ‘Give me a truce – hold back your people,’ he said earnestly – ‘in God’s name give me your word that this bloody campaign of the Red Hundred shall end – and I will give you the lives of your servants.’

  She reached out her hand and took the tiny switchboard from him, and it lay in her palm.

  He could see the disfiguring fury of her face, and waited expectantly.

  ‘My answer,’ she cried, ‘is this!’

  With her fingers she slid back the little switch.

  And instantly the hillside a hundred yards away heaved up with a blinding flash and a roar like thunder, and the ground beneath their feet shook again.

  ‘That is my answer!’ she cried. ‘Long live Anarchy!’

  Chapter 13

  The terror and the suburbs

  ‘So far as I can gather,’ wrote Superintendent Falmouth, that admirable officer, to the Chief Commissioner, ‘the F. J. M. had prepared somewhere in the hills a sort of bombproof house. It will give you an idea of the extraordinary foresight of these men, that they took the trouble to prearrange every little detail – down so far as to the purchase of the coach and horses that were to take their prisoners to the hills. From the fact that all their subsequent actions bore the impression of being semi-officially sanctioned, I gather that they have a “pull” in Spain. Madrid is quiet. Nobody knows anything at all about either the attempt or the execution – I need hardly say my information came from the F. J. M. themselves; they sent me particulars through the post . . . I found young Billy-Boy-Billy here with a few of the “heads”, and sent him packing to Paris; but there were no English “toughs” in Madrid so far as I could discover.’

  London was full of interest for the detective when he returned, for as his subordinate informed him, ‘it had begun again’, and there was no need to ask what ‘it’ was.

  The outbreak of mysterious crime taxed the police to their utmost capacity; the importance and extent of the outrages may be judged from the fact that in one day alone the walls of Wandsworth Prison, wherein was incarcerated Jaurez, the firebrand socialist, was dynamited, a bomb was exploded in the Tate Gallery, and a determined attempt made to destroy London Bridge was only frustrated by the courage and watchfulness of the Thames Police. The outrages commenced two days after the Royal wedding in Madrid, or, to be exact, on the morning after the Woman of Gratz had made her decision in so dreadful a manner.

  What connexion was there between this resumption of activities and the urgente telegram dispatched by the woman from Valladolid may be surmised. The most terrifying feature of the new campaign was the destruction of private houses in the suburbs. Not the houses or homes of the great law-makers, not the palaces of the aristocracy, but the humble dwellings of the ‘nearly poor’, as somebody aptly described them. This new attempt was devilishly ingenious, for, from the Terrorist point of view, it possessed two advantages. It was unattended by the risk that lay waiting for the anarchist whose object was the public building, and it struck fear into the hearts of the people – those people lying down of nights in fear and trembling lest their house be chosen for demolition. There was the advantage, too, that few of these attempts were unattended by fatalities. That no more powerful enemies to anarchy died than women and little children and poor helpless nursemaids did not perturb the bloody-minded agents of the organization. Terror was their aim, and it mattered little how that terror
came. For three days they raged unchecked, and London sank to an ignoble panic. You had the spectacle of depleted offices and closed stores in the city, for merchants and clerks were also husbands and fathers, and the staid broker sat at home in his drawing-room with a shotgun across his knees, whilst his business went neglected.

  You may be sure that the police did all that was humanly possible to cope with the situation. For the first time for many years free speech in public and through the columns of the Press was rigorously denied. Hyde Park was raided when Jean Froy, standing on his red rostrum, declaimed in broken English man’s right to Revolution.

  Greek Street, the little dens in Soho and Clerkenwell, where known and suspected anarchists were in residence, were cleared, and the county gaols of England filled with men ‘under remand’, who could by any stretch of imagination be regarded as suspects. All this was done in the first two days, for Scotland Yard moved with amazing rapidity.

  The morning of the third day witnesses the blowing up of the New River Water Main and the destruction of the railway bridges that span the Grand Surrey Canal, south of London Bridge, the New Kent Road, and the bridge that is just outside Battersea Road Station. Small matters, but sufficient to effectively disorganize the continental train service. At 11 o’clock in the morning, the fish-boat Mausor of Grimsby, was sunk at her berth and the river-front of Billingsgate Market demolished by an explosion of melinite on the wharf. At 11.30, a bomb, placed by the approach of the Tower Bridge, destroyed the machinery used to raise the huge drawbridge; at 12.17 the Hop Exchange was the scene of yet another melinite outrage.

  ‘You can trace their progress,’ said the Commissioner bitterly. He was surveying the ruin at Billingsgate, when the roar of the Tower Bridge explosion deafened him, and it was from Tower Bridge that he heard the second explosion.

  At 1.35 a telephone message came through from New Cross that a bomb had been discovered under the seat of a council tramcar that had been run into the electric station during the slack time of the day, and it was followed by a message from Lewisham that a bank had been dynamited, a junior clerk and a book-keeper being killed.

  The Commissioner literally wrung his hands in despair.

  That was the last outrage of the day.

  At 5 o’clock that evening some workmen, returning home and taking a short cut through a field two miles from Catford, saw a man hanging from a tree.

  They ran across and found a fashionably dressed gentleman of foreign appearance. One of the labourers cut the rope with his knife, but the man was dead when they cut him down. Beneath the tree was a black bag, to which somebody had affixed a label bearing the warning, ‘Do not touch – this bag contains explosives: inform the police.’ More remarkable still was the luggage label tied to the lapel of the dead man’s coat. It ran: ‘This is Franz Kitsinger, convicted at Prague in 1904, for throwing a bomb: escaped from prison March 17, 1905: was one of the three men responsible for the outrages today. Executed by order of The Council of Justice.’

  The Four Just Men had returned to London.

  ‘It’s a humiliating confession,’ said the Chief Commissioner when they brought the news to him, ‘but the presence of these men takes a load off my mind.’

  But the Red Hundred were grimly persistent.

  That night a man, smoking a cigar, strolled aimlessly past the policeman on point duty at the corner of Kensington Park Gardens, and walked casually into Ladbroke Square. He strolled on, turned a corner and crossing a road, till he came to where one great garden served for a double row of middle-class houses. The backs of these houses opened on to the square. He looked round and, seeing the coast clear, he clambered over the iron railings and dropped into the big pleasure ground, holding very carefully an object that bulged in his pocket.

  He took a leisurely view of the houses before he decided on the victim. The blinds of this particular house were up and the French windows of the dining-room were open, and he could see the laughing group of young people about the table. There was a birthday party or something of the sort in progress, for there was a great parade of Parthian caps and paper sun-bonnets.

  The man was evidently satisfied with the possibilities for tragedy, and he took a pace nearer . . .

  Two strong arms were about him, arms with muscles like cords of steel.

  ‘Not that way, my friend,’ whispered a voice in his ear . . .

  The man showed his teeth in a dreadful grin.

  * * *

  The sergeant on duty at Notting Hill Gate Station received a note at the hands of a grimy urchin, who for days afterwards maintained a position of enviable notoriety.

  ‘A gentleman told me to bring this,’ he said hoarsely; little boys of his class invariably speak hoarsely.

  The sergeant looked at the small boy sternly and asked him if he ever washed his face. Then he read the letter:

  ‘The second man of the three concerned in the outrages at the Tower Bridge, the Borough and Lewisham, will be found in the garden of Maidham Crescent, under the laurel bushes, opposite No. 72.’

  It was signed ‘The Council of Justice’.

  The Commissioner was sitting over his coffee at the Ritz, when they brought him the news. Falmouth was a deferential guest, and the chief passed him the note without comment.

  ‘This is going to settle the Red Hundred,’ said Falmouth. ‘These people are fighting them with their own weapons – assassination with assassination, terror with terror. Where do we come in?’

  ‘We come in at the end,’ said the Commissioner, choosing his words with great niceness, ‘to clean up the mess, and take any scraps of credit, that are going – ’ he paused and shook his head. ‘I hope – I should be sorry – ’ he began.

  ‘So should I,’ said the detective sincerely, for he knew that his chief was concerned for the ultimate safety of the men whose arrest it was his duty to effect. The Commissioner’s brows were wrinkled thoughtfully.

  ‘The biggest job of all,’ he said presently, ‘is to prevent any more of this stuff arriving in the country. It is coming put up ready for use, that I’ll swear.’

  ‘You mean the explosives?’

  ‘Yes; we’ve tried every questionable steamer that has entered the Thames this past week, and the river police have done splendidly. It is a ticklish business, particularly when the ship’s under a foreign flag.’ He looked at the note again.

  ‘Two,’ he said musingly; ‘now, how on earth do the Four Just Men know the number in this – and how did they track them down – and who is the third? – heavens! one could go on asking questions the whole of the night!’

  On one point the Commissioner might have been informed earlier in the evening – he was not told until three o’clock the next morning.

  The third man was our friend Von Dunop, newly arrived from Spain, smarting under the contempt of the Woman of Gratz, anxious to rehabilitate himself in her favour, and in deadly fear of this woman’s caprice.

  Von Dunop, equipped for the night’s work, supremely satisfied with the result of the morning – he had returned to London a day ahead of the Four Just Men – and ignorant of the fate of his fellow-terrorists, sallied forth to complete the day notably.

  The crowd at a theatre door started a train of thought, but he rejected that outlet to ambition. It was too public, and the chance of escape was nil. These British audiences did not lose their heads so quickly; they refused to be confounded by noise and smoke, and a writhing figure here and there. Von Dunop was no exponent of the Glory of Death school. He greatly desired glory, but the smaller the risk, the greater the glory. This was his code.

  He stood for a moment outside the Hôtel Ritz. A party of diners were leaving, and motor-cars were being steered up to carry these accursed plutocrats to the theatre. One soldierly-looking gentleman, with a grey moustache, and attended by a quiet, observant, clean-shaven man,
interested the anarchist.

  He and the soldier exchanged glances.

  ‘Who the dickens was that?’ asked the Commissioner as he stepped into the taxi. ‘I seem to know his face.’

  ‘I have seen him before,’ said Falmouth. ‘I won’t go with you, sir – I’ve a little business to do in this part of the world.’

  Thereafter Von Dunop was not permitted to enjoy his walk in solitude, for, unknown to him, a man ‘picked him up’ and followed him throughout the evening. And as the hour grew later, that one man became two, at eleven o’clock he became three, and at a quarter to twelve, when Von Dunop had finally fixed upon the scene and scope of his exploit, he turned from Park Lane into Brook Street to discover, to his annoyance, quite a number of people within call. Yet he suspected nothing. He did not suspect the night wanderer mooching along the kerb with downcast eyes, seeking the gutter for the stray cigar end; nor the two loudly talking men in suits of violet check who wrangled as they walked concerning the relative merits of the favourites for the Derby; nor the commissionaire trudging home with his bag in his hand and a pipe in his mouth, nor the clean-shaven man in evening dress.

  The Home Secretary had a house in Berkeley Square. Von Dunop knew the number very well. He slackened pace to allow the man in evening dress to pass. The slow-moving taxi that was fifty yards away he must risk. This taxi had been his constant attendant during the last hour, but he did not know it.

  He dipped his hand into his overcoat pocket and drew forth the machine. It was one of Culverui’s masterpieces and, to an extent, experimental – that much the master had warned him in a letter that bore the date mark ‘Riga’. He felt with his thumb for the tiny key that ‘set’ the machine and pushed it.