Elk 02 The Joker (3 page)

Elk sighed heavily as he took out the long leather case, and, selecting a cigar, lit it.

‘Seegars are not what they was when I was a boy,’ he said, gazing at the weed disparagingly. ‘For sixpence you could get a real Havana. Over in New York everybody smokes cigars. But then, they pay the police a livin’ wage; they can afford it.’

Mr Carlton looked over his towel. ‘I’ve never known you to buy a cigar in your life,’ he said deliberately. ‘You can’t get them cheaper than for nothing!’

Inspector Elk was not offended. ‘I’ve smoked some good cigars in my time,’ he said. ‘Over in the Public Prosecutor’s office in Mr Gordon’s days - he was the fellow that smashed the Frogs - him and me, that is to say,’ he corrected himself carefully.

‘The Frogs? Oh, yes, I remember. Mr Gordon had good cigars, did he?’

‘Pretty good,’ said Elk cautiously. ‘I wouldn’t say yours was worse, but it’s not better.’ And then, without a change of voice: ‘Have you pinched Stratford Harlow?’

Jim Carlton made a grimace of disgust. ‘Tell me something I can pinch him for,’ he invited.

‘He’s worth fifteen millions according to accounts,’ said Elk. ‘No man ever got fifteen million honest.’

Jim Carlton turned a white, wet face to his companion. ‘He inherited three from his father, two from one aunt, one from another. The Harlows have always been a rich family, and in the last decade they’ve graded down to maiden aunts. He had a brother in America who left him eight million dollars.’

Elk sighed and scratched his thin nose.

‘He’s in Ratas too,’ he said complainingly.

‘Of course he’s in Ratas!’ scoffed Jim. ‘Ellenbury hides him, but even if he didn’t, there’s nothing criminal in Ratas. And supposing he was openly in it, that would be no offence.

‘Oh!’ said Elk, and by that ‘Oh!’ indicated his tentative disagreement.

There was nothing furtive or underhand about the Rata Syndicate. It was registered as a public company, and had its offices in Westshire House, Old Broad Street, in the City of London, and its New York office on Wall Street. The Rata Syndicate published a balance sheet and employed a staff of ten clerks, three of whom gained further emoluments by acting as directors of the company, under the chairmanship of a retired colonel of infantry. The capital was a curiously small one, but the resources of the syndicate were enormous. When Rata cornered rubber, cheques amounting to five millions sterling passed outward through its banking accounts; in fact every cent involved in that great transaction appeared in the books except the fifty thousand dollars that somebody paid to Lee Hertz and his two friends.

Lee arrived from New York on a Friday afternoon. On the Sunday morning the United Continental Rubber Company’s stores went up in smoke. Nearly eighteen thousand tons of rubber were destroyed in that well-organised conflagration, and rubber jumped 80 per cent in twenty-four hours and 200 per cent in a week. For the big reserves that kept the market steady had been wiped out in the twinkling of an eye, to the profit of Rata Incorporated.

Said the New York Headquarters to Scotland Yard: Lee Hertz, Jo Klein and Philip Serrett well known fire bugs believed to be in London stop See record NY 9514 mailed you October 7 for description stop Possibility you may connect them United Continental fire.

By the time Scotland Yard located Lee he was in Paris in his well-known role of American Gentleman Seeing the Sights.

‘It doesn’t look right to me,’ said Elk, puffing luxuriously at the cigar. ‘Here’s Rata, buys rubber with not a ghost of a chance of its rising. And suddenly, biff! A quarter of the reserve stock in this country is burnt out, and naturally prices and shares rise. Rata’s been buying ‘em for months. Did they know that the United was going west?’

‘I thought it might have been an accident,’ said Jim, who had never thought anything of the sort.

‘Accident my grandmother’s right foot!’ said Elk, without heat. ‘The stores were lit up in three places - the salvage people located the petrol. A man answering the description of Jo Klein was drinking with the night watchman the day before, and that watchman swears he never saw this Jo bird again, but he’s probably lying. The lower classes lie easier than they drink. Ten millions, and if Harlow’s behind Rata, he made more than that on the rubber deal. Buying orders everywhere! Toronto, Rio, Calcutta - every loose bit of rubber lifted off the market. Then comes the fire, and up she goes! All I got to say is - ’

The telephone bell rang shrilly at that second, and Jim Carlton picked up the receiver.

‘Somebody wants you, Inspector,’ said the exchange clerk.

There was a click, an interval of silence, and then a troubled voice asked:

‘Can I speak to Mr Carlton?’

‘Yes, Miss Rivers.’

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ There was a nattering relief in the voice. ‘I wonder if you would come to Fotheringay Mansions, No. 63?’

‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked quickly.

‘I don’t know, but one of the bedroom doors is locked, and I’m sure there’s nobody in there.’

THE GIRL was standing in the open doorway of the flat as the two men stepped from the elevator. She seemed a little disconcerted at the sight of Inspector Elk, but Jim Carlton introduced him as a friend and obliterated him as a factor with one comprehensive gesture.

‘I suppose I ought to have sent for the local police, only there are - well, there are certain reasons why I shouldn’t,’ she said.

Somehow Jim had never thought she could be so agitated. The discovery had evidently thrown her off her balance, and she was hardly lucid when she explained.

‘I come here to collect my uncle’s letters,’ she said. ‘He’s abroad…his name is Jackson,’ she said breathlessly. ‘And every Thursday I have a woman in to clean up the fiat. I can’t afford the time; I’m working in an office.’

They had left Elk staring at an engraving in the corridor, and it was an opportunity to make matters a little easier, if at first a little more uncomfortable, for her.

‘Miss Rivers, your uncle is Arthur Ingle,’ said Jim kindly, and she went very red. ‘It is quite understandable that you shouldn’t wish to advertise the fact, but I thought I’d tell you I knew, just to save you a great deal of unnecessary - ’ He stopped and seemed at a loss.

‘“Lying” is the word you want,’ she said frankly. ‘Yes, Arthur Ingle lived here, but he lived here in the name of Jackson. Did you know that?’ she asked anxiously.

He nodded.

‘That’s the door.’ She pointed.

The flat was of an unusual construction. There was a very large dining-room with a low-timbered roof and panelled walls, from which led three doors - one to the kitchenette, the other two, she explained, to Arthur Ingle’s bedroom and a spare apartment which he used as a lumber room. It was the door of the lumber room which she indicated.

Jim tried the handle; the door was fast. Stooping down he peered through the keyhole and had a glimpse of an open window through which the yellow fog showed.

‘Are these doors usually left open?’

‘Always,’ she said emphatically. ‘Sometimes the cleaning woman comes before I return. Tonight she is late and I’m rather early.’

‘Where does that door lead?’

‘To the kitchen.’

She went in front of him into the tiny room. It was spotlessly clean and had one window, flush with that which he had seen through the keyhole of the next room. He looked down into a bottomless void, but just beneath was a narrow parapet. He swung one leg across the sill, only to find his arm held in a frenzied grip by the girl.

‘You mustn’t go, you’ll be killed!’ she gasped and he laughed at her, not ill pleased, for the risk was practically nil.

‘I’ve got a pretty high regard for me,’ he said, and in another instant he had swung clear, gripped the lower sash of the second window and had pulled himself into the room.

He could see nothing except the dim outlines of three trunks stacked one on top of the other. He switched on the light and turned to survey the confusion. Old boxes and trunks which, he guessed, had been piled in some order, were dragged into the centre of the room to allow the free operation of the vanished burglar. Recessed into the wall, thus cleared, was a safe the door of which was open. On the floor beneath was a rough circle of metal burnt from the door - it was still hot when he touched it - by the small blowlamp that the burglar had left behind him.

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?’

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.