The Complete Four Just Men (58 page)

Miss Lilah Hacker was amazed when she boarded the
Braganza
at Boulogne to discover that she had as fellow passenger the polite stranger who had lectured so entertainingly on the geography of South America.

To the girl her prospect was rosy and bright. She was looking forward to a land of promise, her hopes for the future were at zenith, and if she was disappointed a little that the agreeable Gonsalez did not keep her company on the voyage, but seemed for ever preoccupied, that was a very unimportant matter.

It was exactly a month from the day she put foot on the
Braganza
that her hope and not a little of her faith in humanity were blasted by a stout Irishman whose name was Rafferty, but who had been born in the Argentine. He was the proprietor of a dance hall called ‘La Plaza’ in a cattle town in the interior. She had been sent there with two other girls wiser than she, to entertain the half-breed vaqueros who thronged the town at night, and for whom ‘La Plaza’ was the principal attraction.

‘You’ve got to get out of them ways of yours,’ said Rafferty, twisting his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘When Señor Santiago wanted you to sit on his knee last night, you made a fuss, I’m told.’

‘Of course, I did,’ said the girl indignantly. ‘Why, he’s coloured!’

‘Now see here,’ said Mr Rafferty, ‘there ain’t no coloured people in this country. Do you get that? Mr Santiago is a gentleman and he’s got stacks of money, and the next time he pays you a little attention, you’ve got to be pleasant, see?’

‘I’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said the girl, pale and shaking, ‘and I’m going straight back to Buenos Aires tonight.’

‘Oh you are, are you?’ Rafferty smiled broadly. ‘That’s an idea you can get out of your head, too.’

Suddenly he gripped her by the arm.

‘You’re going up to your room, now,’ he said, ‘and you’re going to stay there till I bring you out tonight to do your show, and if you give me any of your nonsense – you’ll be sorry!’

He pushed her through the rough unpainted door of the little cell which was termed bedroom, and he paused in the doorway to convey information (and there was a threat in the course of it) which left her white and staring.

She came down that night and did her performance and to her surprise and relief did not excite even the notice of the wealthy Mr Santiago, a half-bred Spaniard with a yellow face, who did not so much as look at her.

Mr Rafferty was also unusually bland and polite.

She went to her room that night feeling more comfortable. Then she discovered that her key was gone, and she sat up until one o’clock in the morning waiting for she knew not what. At that hour came a soft footfall in the passage; somebody tried the handle of her door, but she had braced a chair under the handle.

They pushed and the rickety chair creaked; then there was a sound like a stick striking a cushion, and she thought she heard somebody sliding against the wooden outer wall of the room. A tap came to her door.

‘Miss Hacker,’ the voice said. She recognised it immediately. ‘Open the door quickly. I want to get you away.’

With a trembling hand she removed the chair, and the few little articles of furniture she had piled against the door, and opened it. By the light of the candle which was burning in her room she recognised the man who had been her fellow passenger on the
Braganza
.

‘Come quietly,’ he said. ‘There is a back stair to the compound. Have you a cloak? Bring it, because you have a sixty-mile motor journey before we come to the railway . . . ’

As she came through the door she saw the upturned toes of somebody who was lying in the passage, and with a shudder she realised that was the thumping sound she had heard.

They reached the big yard behind the ‘Plaza’ crowded with the dusty motor-cars of ranchers and their foremen, who had come into town for the evening, and passed out through the doorway. A big car was standing in the middle of the road, and to this he guided her. She threw one glance back at Rafferty’s bar. The windows blazed with light, the sound of the orchestra came faintly through the still night air, then she dropped her head on her hands and wept.

Leon Gonsalez had a momentary pang of contrition, for he might have saved her all this.

* * *

It was two months exactly from the day he had left London, when he came running up the stairs of the Jermyn Street flat and burst in upon Manfred.

‘You’re looking fit and fine, Leon,’ said George, jumping up and gripping his hand. ‘You didn’t write and I never expected that you would. I only got back from Spain two days ago.’

He gave the news from Seville and then: ‘You proved the case?’

‘To our satisfaction,’ said Leon grimly. ‘Though you would not satisfy the law that Lynne was guilty. It is, however, a perfectly clear case. I visited his agent when I was in Buenos Aires, and took the liberty of rifling his desk in his absence. I found several letters from Lynne and by their tone there can be no doubt whatever that Lynne is consciously engaged in this traffic.’

They looked at one another.

‘The rest is simple,’ said Manfred, ‘and I will leave you to work out the details, my dear Leon, with every confidence that Mr Homer Lynne will be very sorry indeed that he departed from the safe and narrow way.’

There was no more painstaking, thorough or conscientious workman that Leon Gonsalez. The creation of punishment was to him a work of love. No General ever designed the battle with a more punctilious regard to the minutest detail than Leon.

Before the day was over he had combed the neighbourhood in which Mr Lynne lived of every vital fact. It was then that he learnt of Mr Lynne’s passion for music. The cab which took Leon back to Jermyn Street did not go fast enough: he literally leapt into the sitting-room, chortling his joy.

‘The impossible is possible, my dear George,’ he cried, pacing about the apartment like a man demented. ‘I thought I should never be able to carry my scheme into effect, but he loves music, George! He adores the tuneful phonograph!’

‘A little ice water, I think,’ suggested Manfred gently.

‘No, no.’ said Leon, ‘I am not hot, I am cool: I am ice itself! And who would expect such good luck? Tonight we will drive to Hampstead and we will hear his concert.’

It was a long time before he gave a coherent account of what he had learnt. Mr Lynne was extremely unpopular in the neighbourhood, and Leon explained why.

Manfred understood better that night, when the silence of the sedate road in which Mr Lynne’s detached house was situated was broken by the shrill sound of trumpets, and the rolling of drums, the clanging of bells, the simulated boom of cannon – all the barbarian musical interjection which has made ‘1812’ so popular with unmusical people.

‘It sounds like a real band,’ said Manfred in surprise.

A policeman strolled along, and seeing the car standing before the house, turned his head with a laugh.

‘It’s an awful row, isn’t it?’

‘I wonder it doesn’t wake everybody up,’ suggested Manfred.

‘It does,’ replied the policeman, ‘or it did until they got used to it. It’s the loudest gramophone in the world, I should think: like one of those things you have at the bottom of the tube stairs, to tell the people to move on. A stentaphone, isn’t it?’

‘How long does this go on? All night?’ asked Manfred.

‘For about an hour, I believe,’ said the policeman. ‘The gentleman who lives in that house can’t go to sleep without music. He’s a bit artistic, I think.’

‘He is,’ said Leon grimly.

The next day he found out that four servants were kept in the establishment, three of whom slept on the premises. Mr Lynne was in the habit of returning home every evening at about ten o’clock, except on Fridays when he went out of Town.

Wednesday evening was the cook’s night out, and it was also the night when Mr Lynne’s butler and general factotum was allowed an evening off. There remained the housemaid, and even she presented no difficulty. The real trouble was that all these people would return to the house or the neighbourhood at eleven o’clock. Leon decided to make his appointment with Mr Lynne for Friday night, on which day he usually went to Brighton. He watched the genial man leave Victoria, and then he called up Lynne’s house.

‘Is that Masters?’ he asked, and a man’s voice answered him.

‘Yes, sir,’ was the reply.

‘It is Mr Mandez here,’ said Leon, imitating the curious broken English of Lynne’s Mexican assistant. ‘Mr Lynne is returning to the house tonight on very important business, and he does not want any of the servants to be there.’

‘Indeed, sir,’ said Masters and showed no surprise. Evidently these instructions had been given before. Leon had expected some difficulty here, and had prepared a very elaborate explanation which it was not necessary to give.

‘He wouldn’t like me to stay, sir?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Leon. ‘Mr Lynne particularly said that nobody was to be in the house. He wants the side door and the kitchen door left unlocked,’ he added as an afterthought. It was a brilliant afterthought if it came off, and apparently it did.

‘Very good, sir,’ said Masters.

Leon went straight from the telephone call-box, where he had sent the message, to the counter and wrote out a wire, addressed to Lynne, Hôtel Ritz, Brighton. The message ran –

The girl Goldstein has been discovered at Santa Fé. Terrible row. Police have been making enquiries. Have very important information for you. I am waiting for you at your house.

He signed it Mandez.

‘He will get the wire at eight. There is a train back at nine. That should bring him to Hampstead by half past ten,’ said Leon when he had rejoined Manfred who was waiting for him outside the post office. ‘We will be there an hour earlier: that is as soon as it is dark.’

They entered the house without the slightest difficulty. Manfred left his two-seater outside a doctor’s house, a place where an unattended car would not be noticed, and went on foot to Lynne’s residence. It was a large detached house, expensively furnished, and as Leon had expected, the servants had gone. He located Lynne’s room, a big apartment at the front of the house.

‘There is his noise box,’ said Leon pointing to a handsome cabinet near the window. ‘Electrical, too. Where does that wire lead?’

He followed the flex to a point above the head of the bed, where it terminated in what looked like a hanging bell push.

Leon was momentarily puzzled and then a light dawned upon him.

‘Of course, if he has this infernal noise to make him go to sleep, the bell push switches off the music and saves him getting out of bed.’

He opened the lid of the gramophone cabinet and examined the record.

‘1812,’ he chuckled. He lifted the needle from the disc, turned the switch and the green table revolved. Then he walked to the head of the bed and pushed the knob of the bell push. Instantly the revolutions stopped.

‘That is it,’ he nodded, and turned over the soundbox, letting the needle rest upon the edge of the record.

‘That,’ he pointed to a bronze rod which ran from the centre to the side of the disc and fitted to some adjustment in the sound-box, ‘is the repeater. It is an American invention which I saw in Buenos Aires, but I haven’t seen many on this side. When the record is finished the rod automatically transfers the needle to the beginning of the record.’

‘So that it can go on and on and on,’ said Manfred interested. ‘I don’t wonder our friend is unpopular.’

Leon was looking round the room for something and at last he found what he was seeking. It was a brass clothes peg fastened to a door which led to a dressing-room. He put all his weight on the peg but it held firm.

‘Excellent,’ he said, and opened his bag. From this he took a length of stout cord and skilfully knotted one end to the clothes hook. He tested it but it did not move. From the bag he took a pair of handcuffs, unlocked and opened them and laid them on the bed. Then he took out what looked to be a Field-Marshal’s baton. It was about fourteen inches long, and fastened around were two broad strips of felt; tied neatly to the baton were nine pieces of cord which were fastened at one end to the cylinder. The cords were twice the length of the handle and were doubled over neatly and temporarily fastened to the handle by pieces of twine.

Leon looked at one end of the baton and Manfred saw a red seal.

‘What on earth is that, Leon?’

Leon
showed
him
the
seal,
and
Manfred
read:
‘Prison Commission.’

‘That,’ said Leon, ‘is what is colloquially known as the “cat”. In other words, the “cat of nine tails”. It is an authentic instrument which I secured with some difficulty.’

He cut the twine that held the cords to the handle and let the nine thongs fall straight. Manfred took them into his hands and examined them curiously. The cords were a little thinner than ordinary window line, but more closely woven: at the end of each thong there was a binding of yellow silk for about half an inch.

Leon took the weapon in his hands and sent the cords whistling round his head.

‘Made in Pentonville Gaol,’ he explained, ‘and I’m afraid I’m not as expert as the gentleman who usually wields it.’

The dusk grew to darkness. The two men made their way downstairs and waited in the room leading from the hall.

At half past ten exactly they heard a key turn in the lock and the door close.

‘Are you there, Mandez?’ called the voice of Mr Lynne, and it sounded anxious.

He took three steps towards the door and then Gonsalez stepped out.

‘Good evening, Mr Lynne,’ he said.

The man switched on the light.

He saw before him a figure plainly dressed, but who it was he could not guess, for the intruder’s face was covered by a white semi-diaphanous veil.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ gasped Lynne.

‘I want you,’ said Leon shortly. ‘Before we go any further, I will tell you this, Mr Lynne, that if you make an outcry, if you attempt to attract attention from outside, it will be the last sound you ever make.’

‘What do you want of me?’ asked the stout man shakily, and then his eyes fell upon Manfred similarly veiled and he collapsed into the hall chair.