Elk 02 The Joker (24 page)

‘I really don’t know what you mean, Mr Stebbings,’ she said, very hot, a little incoherent, but not altogether distressed.

‘Will you take this letter?’ said Mr Stebbings, dismissing distracted detectives and hot-faced girls from his mind; and immediately she was plunged into the technology of an obscure trusteeship which the firm of Stebbings was engaged in contesting.

As Aileen grew calmer, the shock of the discovery grew in poignancy. A girl who finds herself to be in love experiences a queer sense of desolation and loneliness. It is an emotion which seems unshareable; and the more she thought of Jim Carlton, the more she was satisfied that the affection was one-sided; that she was wasting her time and thought on a man who did not care for her any more than he cared for every other girl he met; and that love was a disease which was best cured by fasting and self-repression.

She was in this frame of mind when there came a gentle tap at her door. She called ‘Come in!’ - the handle turned and a man walked nervously into the room. A tall man, hatless, collarless, and inadequately clad. An overcoat many times too broad for him was buttoned up to the neck, and although he wore shoes he was sockless and his legs were covered by a pair of dark-blue pyjamas. He stroked his long beard nervously and looked at the girl in doubt.

‘Excuse me, madam,’ he said, ‘is this the office of Stebbings, Field and Farrow?’

She had risen in amazement. ‘Yes. Do you wish to see Mr Stebbings?’

He nodded, looked nervously round at the door and dosed it behind him.

‘If you please,’ he said.

‘What name?’ she asked.

He drew a long breath.

‘Will you tell him that Mr Stratford Harlow wishes to see him?’

Her mouth opened in amazement.

‘Stratford Harlow? Is he here?’

He nodded. ‘I am Stratford Harlow,’ he said simply.

The gentleman who for twenty-three years had borne the name of Stratford Harlow was drinking a cup of China tea when the bell rang. He finished the tea, and wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief. Again the bell shrilled. Mr Harlow rose with a smile, dusted the crumbs from his coat and, pausing in the passage to take down an overcoat and a hat from their pegs, walked down the stairs and threw open the door.

Jim Carlton was standing on the sidewalk, and with him three gentlemen who were unmistakably detectives.

‘I want you, Harlow,’ he said.

‘I thought you might,’ said Mr Harlow pleasantly. ‘Is that your car?’ He patted his pockets. ‘I think I have everything necessary to a prisoner of state. You may handcuff me if you wish, though I would prefer that you did not. I do not carry arms. I regard any man who resists arrest by the use of weapons as a cowardly barbarian! For the police have their duties - very painful duties sometimes, pleasant duties at others - I am not quite sure in which category yours will fall.’

Elk opened the car door and Mr Harlow stepped in, settled himself comfortably in the corner and asked: ‘May I smoke?’

He produced a cigar from his coat pocket and Elk held the light as the car moved towards Evory Street.

‘There is one thing I would like to ask you, Carlton,’ he said, half-turning his head towards his captor, who sat by his side. ‘I read in the newspapers that the ports and airports were being watched and all sorts of extraordinary precautions were being taken against my leaving the country. I presume that the news of my arrest will be made known immediately to these watchful gentlemen? I should hate to feel that they were tramping up and down in the cold, looking for a man who was already in custody. That would spoil my night’s sleep.’

Jim humoured his mood. ‘They will be notified,’ he said.

‘You found Marling, of course? He has suffered no injury? I am very relieved. It is difficult to conceive the confusion which must arise in the mind of a man who has been out of the world for some twenty years and returns to find the streets so crowded with death-dealing automobiles, driven usually at a pace beyond the legal limit.’

‘Yes, Mr Harlow is in good hands.’

‘Call him Marling,’ said the other. ‘And Marling he must remain until my duplicity is proved beyond any question. I will make the matter easy for you by admitting that he is Stratford Selwyn Mortimer Harlow.’

He went off at a tangent, a trick of his.

‘I should have gone away a long time ago and defied you to bring home to me any offence against the law. But I am intensely curious - if my dearest wish were realised, I would be suspended in a condition of disembodied consciousness to watch the progress of the world through the next two hundred thousand years! I would like to see what new nations arise, what new powers overspread the earth, what new continents will be pushed up from the sea and old continents submerged! Two hundred thousand years. There will be a new Rome, a new barbarian Britain, a new continent of America populated by indescribable beings! New Ptolemys and Pharaohs getting themselves embalmed; and never dreaming that their magnificent tombs shall be buried under sand and forgotten until they are dug out to be gaped at by tourists, who will pay two piastres a peep!’

He sighed, flicked the ash of his cigar onto the floor of the car. ‘Well, here I am at the end. I’ve seen it out. I know now into which compartment the little whirling ball of fate has fallen. It is extremely interesting.’

They hurried him into the charge-room and put him in the steel pen; and he beamed round the room.

In an undertone to Jim he said: ‘Can anything be done to prevent the newspapers with one accord describing what they will call the “irony” of my appearance in a police station which I presented to the nation? Almost I am tempted to present a million pounds to the journal which refrains from this obvious comment!’

He listened in silence to the charge which Elk read, interrupting only once.

‘Suspected of causing the death of Mrs Gibbins? How perfectly absurd! However, that is a matter for the lawyers to thrash out.’

With the jailer’s hand on his arm he disappeared to the cells.

‘And that’s that!’ said Jim, with a heartfelt sigh of relief.

‘Where’s the real fellow?’ asked Elk.

‘At the house in Park Lane. He’s got the whole story for us. I’ve arranged to have a police stenographer at nine o’clock tonight.’

At nine o’clock the bearded man sat in Mr Harlow’s library; and began in hesitant tones to tell his amazing story.

‘MY NAME is Stratford Selwyn Mortimer Harlow and as a child I lived as you know with my aunt, Miss Mercy Harlow, a very rich and eccentric lady, who assumed full charge of me and quarrelled with my other aunts over the question of my care. I do not remember very distinctly the early days of my life. I have an idea, which Marling confirms, that I was a backward child - backward mentally, that is to say - and that my condition caused the greatest anxiety to Miss Mercy, who lived in terror lest I became feeble-minded and she was in some way held responsible by her sisters. This fear became an obsession with her, and I was kept out of the way whenever visitors called at the house, and practically saw nobody but Miss Mercy, her maid Mrs Edwins, and her maid’s son Lemuel, who on two occasions was, I believe, substituted for me - he being a very healthy child.

‘I know nothing about the circumstances of his birth, but it is a fact that he was never called by the name of Edwins, except by Miss Mercy, and she continued to call him this even after the time came for him to go to school and the production of his birth certificate made it necessary that he should bear the name of his father, Marling.

‘He was my only playmate; and I think that he was genuinely fond of me and that he pitied what he believed to be my weakness of intellect. Mrs Edwins’ ambition for her son was unbounded; she strived and scraped to send him to a public school, and when he got a little older (as he told me himself) she prevailed upon Miss Mercy to give her the money to send him to the university.

‘Let me say here that I owe most of my information on the subject to Marling himself - it seems strange to call him by a name which I have borne so long! At that time my mind was undoubtedly clouded. He has described me as a morose, timid boy, who spent day after day in a brooding silence, and I should say that that description was an accurate one.

‘The fear that her relatives might discover my condition of mind was a daily torment to Miss Mercy. She shut up her house and went to live at a smaller house in the country; and whenever her sisters showed the slightest inclination to visit her, she would move to a distant town. For three years I saw very little of Marling, and then one day Miss Mercy told me that she was engaging a tutor for me. I disliked the idea, but when she said it was Marling I was overjoyed. He came to Bournemouth to see us and I should not have known him, for he had grown a long golden beard, of which he was very proud. We had long talks together and he told me of some of his adventures and of the scrapes he had got into.

‘I was the only person in whom he confided, and I know the full story of Mrs Gibbins as she was called. He had met her when she was a pretty housemaid in the service of the senior proctor. The courtship followed a tumultuous course, and then one day there arrived at Oxford the girl’s mother, who threatened that unless Marling married her daughter, she would inform the senior proctor. This threat, if it were carried out meant ruin to him, the end of Miss Mercy’s patronage, the destruction of all his mother’s hopes; and it was not surprising that he took the easiest course. They were married secretly at Cheltenham and lived together in a little village just outside the city of Oxford.

‘Of course the marriage was disastrous for Marling. He did not love the girl; she hated him with all the malignity that a common and ignorant person can have for one whose education emphasised her own uncouthness. The upshot of it was that he left her. Three years later he learnt from her mother that she was dead. In point of fact that was not true. She had contracted a bigamous marriage with a man named Smith, who was eventually killed in the war. You have told me, Mr Carlton, that you found no marriage certificate in her handbag.

‘By this time, owing to circumstances which I will explain, Marling had the handling of great wealth. He was oddly generous, but the pound a week which he allowed his wife’s mother was, I suspect, in the nature of a thanksgiving for freedom. The money came regularly to her every quarter and while she suspected who the sender was, she had no proof and was content to go on enjoying her allowance. Later this was improperly diverted to her daughter, who, on the death of her mother, assumed her maiden name.

‘Marling came to be my tutor, and I honestly think that in his care - I would almost say affectionate guidance - I had improved in health, though I was far from well, when Miss Mercy had her seizure. In my crazy despair I remember I accused Marling of killing her, for I saw him pour the contents of a green bottle into a glass and force it between Miss Mercy’s pale lips. I am convinced that I did him a grave injustice, though he never ceased to remind me of that green bottle. I think it was part of his treatment to keep my illusion before my eyes until I recognised my error.

‘On the death of Miss Mercy I was so ill that I had to be locked in my room, and it was then, I think, that Mrs Edwins proposed the plan which was afterwards adopted, namely, the substitution of Marling for myself. You will be surprised and incredulous when I tell you that Marling never forgave the woman for inducing him to take that step. He told me once that she had put him into greater bondage than that in which I was held. From his point of view I think he was sincere. I was hurried away to a cottage in Berkshire; and I knew nothing of the substitution until months afterwards, when I was brought to Park Lane. It was then that he told me my name was Marling and that his was Harlow. He used to repeat this almost like a lesson, until I became used to the change.

‘I don’t think I cared very much; I had a growing interest in books and he was tireless in his efforts to interest me. He claimed, with truth, that whatever imprisonment I suffered, he saved me from imbecility. The quiet of the life, the carefree nature of it, the comfort and mental satisfaction which it gave me, was the finest treatment I could have possibly had. He made me acquainted with the pathological side of my case, read me books that explained just why I was living the very best possible life - again I say, he was sincere.

‘Gradually the cloud seemed to dissipate from my mind. I could think logically and in sequence; I could understand what I was reading. More and more the extent of the wrong he had done me became apparent. He never disguised the fact, if the truth be told. Indeed, he disguised nothing! He took me completely into his confidence. I knew every coup he engineered in every detail.

‘One night he returned to the house terribly agitated, and told me that he had heard the voice of his wife! He had been to the flat of a man called Ingle; and whilst he was there a charwoman had come in and he had recognised her voice.

‘He was engaged at that time with Ingle in manoeuvring an amazing swindle. It was none other than the impersonation of the Foreign Minister by Ingle, who was a brilliant actor. The plot was to get the Minister to Park Lane, where he would be drugged and his place taken by Ingle, who, to make himself perfect in the part, had spent a week examining films of Sir Joseph Layton. In this way he had familiarised himself with Sir Joseph’s mannerisms; and he had paid one stealthy visit to a public meeting which Sir Joseph had addressed, in order to study his voice. The plan worked. Sir Joseph went into a room with Marling, drank a glass of wine and was immediately knocked out - I think that is the expression. Ingle waited behind the door all ready made up; and Marling told me he bore a striking resemblance to the Minister. He went out from the house, drove to the House of Commons and delivered a war speech which brought the markets tumbling down.