Elk 02 The Joker (4 page)

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.

‘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 to 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 PS100 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.

Mr Harlow’s house was a rather ugly three-storey building which occupied a small island site, possibly the most valuable in Park Lane, though the actual entrance was not in that exclusive thoroughfare, but in the side street. He opened the door with a key and walked into the hall. The door to the library faced him. There were some letters on the table, which he scanned through rapidly, opening only one. It was from Ellenbury; and just then Mr Harlow was annoyed with Ellenbury; he had supplied erroneous information about Aileen Rivers, and had made him look a fool.

He read the letter carefully, and then dropped it in the fire and watched it turn black.

‘A useful man, but a thought too anxious. It was a mistake perhaps to keep him so taut. He must be let down,’ Mr Harlow decided. A little of his own confidence must be infused into his helper. Too great a desire to please, too present a fear of failure: those were Ellenbury’s weaknesses.

He pressed an ivory bell on his desk, sat down, reached to the wall, slid back a panel and took out a small black bottle, a siphon and a glass. He poured out barely more whisky than was enough to cover the bottom of the tumbler, and filled it to the top with soda-water. The glass was half-empty when Mrs Edwins, his housekeeper, came in without knocking. A tall, yellow-faced woman, with burning black eyes, she showed nothing of the slowness or decrepitude that might have been expected in a woman near seventy.

‘You rang?’

Miss Mercy’s maid of other days had a voice as sharp and clear as a bugle note. She stood before the desk, her hands behind her, her eyes fixed on his.