Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns Read online

  He had very few visitors and practically no friends. In Brockley Road opinion was divided on his occupation. There was one school of thought that believed he was “retired”, and this was by far the largest section of public opinion, for everything about him suggested retirement from bygone and respectable activities.

  No neighbour dropped in on him for a quiet smoke and a chat. He had been invited to sedate family parties during the festive season, but had declined. And the method of his refusal was responsible for the legend that he had once been in love and had suffered; for invariably his letter contained references to a painful anniversary which he wished to keep alone. It didn’t matter what date was chosen for the party, Mr Reeder had invariably a painful anniversary which he wished to celebrate in solitude.

  He sat at his large desk with a huge cup of tea and a large dish full of hot and succulent muffins before him, and went over and over every phase of these bank cases without securing a single inspiration which would lead him to that unknown force which was not only co-ordinating and organising a series of future frauds and robberies but had already robbed the banks of close on a million pounds.

  Lewisham High Road at that hour was a busy thoroughfare, and nobody saw the extraordinary apparition until a taxi driver, swerving violently, missed him. It was the figure of a man in a dressing gown and pyjamas, darting from one side of the road to the other. His feet and his head were bare, and he ran with incredible speed up the hill and darted into Brockley Road. Nobody saw where he came from. A policeman made a grab at him as he passed, and missed him. In another second he was speeding along Brockley Road.

  He hesitated before Mr Reeder’s house, looked up at the lighted window of his study, then, dragging open the gate, flew up the stone steps. Mr Reeder heard the shouts, went to the window and looked out. He saw somebody run up the flagged pathway to the door, and immediately afterwards a motorcyclist speeding up the road ahead of a small crowd. The motorcyclist slowed before the door, and stopped for a second. At first Mr Reeder thought that the explosions he heard were the backfire of the machine. Then he saw the flame of the third and fourth shots. They came from the driver’s hand, and instantly the motorcycle moved on, gathering speed, and went roaring out of his line of vision.

  Reeder ran down the stairs and pulled open the door as a policeman came through the gate. A man was lying on the top step. He wore a red silk dressing gown and pyjamas.

  They bore him into the passage, and Mr Reeder switched on all the lights. One glance at the white face told him the staggering story.

  The policeman pushed back the crowd, shut the door and went down on his knees by the side of the prostrate figure.

  “I’m afraid he’s dead,” said Mr Reeder, as he unbuttoned the pyjama jacket with deft fingers and saw the ugliness of a violent dissolution.

  “I think he was shot by the motorcyclist.”

  “I saw him,” said the policeman breathlessly. “He fired four shots.”

  Reeder made another and more careful examination of the man. He judged his age to be about thirty. His hair was dark, almost raven black; he was clean-shaven, and a peculiar feature which Reeder noticed was that he had no eyebrows.

  The policeman looked and frowned, put his hand in his pocket and took out his notebook. He examined something that was written inside and shook his head.

  “I thought he might be that fellow they’re looking for tonight.”

  “Reigate?” asked Mr Reeder.

  “No, it can’t be him,” said the policeman. “He was a fair man with bushy eyebrows.”

  The dressing gown was new, the pyjamas were of the finest silk. They made a quick examination of the pockets and the policeman produced a sealed envelope.

  “I think I ought to hand this to the inspector, sir–” he began.

  Without a word Mr Reeder took it from his hand, and, to the constable’s horror, broke the seal and took out the contents. They were fifty bills each for a hundred dollars.

  “H’m!” said Mr Reeder.

  Where had he come from? How had he appeared suddenly in the heart of the traffic? The next hour Mr Reeder spent making personal inquiries, without, however, finding a solution to the mystery.

  A newsboy had seen him running on the sidewalk, and thought he had come out of Malpas Road, a thoroughfare which runs parallel with Brockley Road. A point-duty constable had seen him run along the middle of the road, dodging the traffic, and the driver of a delivery van was equally certain he had seen him on the opposite side of the road to that where he had been observed by the newspaper boy, running not up the hill but down. The motorcyclist seemed to have escaped observation altogether.

  At ten o’clock that night the chief officers of Scotland Yard met in Reeder’s room. The dead man’s fingerprints had been sent to the Yard for inspection, but had not been identified. The only distinguishing feature of the body was a small strawberry mark below the left elbow.

  The Chief Constable scratched his head in bewilderment.

  “I’ve never had a case like this before. The local police have called at every house in the neighbourhood where this fellow might have come from, and nobody is missing. What do you make of it, Mr Reeder? You’ve had another look at the body, haven’t you?”

  Mr Reeder nodded. He had had that gruesome experience and had made a much more thorough examination than had been possible in the passage.

  “And what do you think?”

  Mr Reeder hesitated.

  “I have sent a car for the young lady.”

  “Which young lady?”

  “Miss – er – Reigate, the sister of our young friend.”

  He heard the ring of the bell and himself went down to open the door. It was the girl he had sent for. He took her into a small room on the ground floor.

  “I’m going to ask you a question, Miss Reigate, which I’ll be glad if you can answer. Had your brother any distinguishing marks on his body that you would be able to recognise?”

  She nodded without hesitation.

  “Yes,” she said, a little breathlessly. “He had a small strawberry mark on his forearm, just below the elbow.”

  “The left forearm?” asked Mr Reeder quickly.

  “Yes, the left forearm. Why? Has he been found?”

  “I’m afraid he has,” said Mr Reeder gently.

  He told her his suspicion and left her with his housekeeper whilst he went up to explain to the men from the Yard just what he had discovered.

  “It was very clear to me,” he said, “that the hair had been dyed and the eyebrows shaved.”

  “Reigate?” said the Chief Constable incredulously. “If that’s Reigate I’m a Dutchman. I’ve got a photograph of him. He’s fair, almost a light blonde.”

  “The hair is dyed, very cleverly and by an expert.” Reeder pointed to the dollar bills lying on the table. “The money was part of the system, the disguise was part of the system. Did you notice anything about the clothes?”

  “I noticed they smelt strongly of camphor,” said one of the detectives. “I’ve just been remarking to the Chief Constable that it almost seems as if the pyjamas and dressing gown had been kept packed away from moths. My theory is that he must have had an outfit stowed away all ready for his getaway.”

  Mr Reeder shook his head.

  “Not exactly that,” he said; “but the camphor smell is a very important clue. I can’t tell you why, gentlemen, because I am naturally secretive.”

  The body was identified beyond any question by the distressed and weeping girl. It was that of Jonathan Reigate, sometime Assistant Manager of the Wembley branch of the London and Northern Banking Corporation. He had been killed by four shots fired from a .38 automatic pistol, and any three of the four shots would have been fatal. As for the motorcyclist, there was no one who could identify him or give the least
clue.

  At nine o’clock the next morning Reeder, accompanied by a detective-sergeant, made a minute search of the Reigate flat. It was a small, comfortably furnished apartment consisting of four rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom.

  Reigate had occupied the larger of the two bedrooms, and in one corner was a small roll-top writing desk which was locked when they arrived.

  The dead man was evidently very methodical. The pigeon-holes were crammed with methodical memoranda, mainly dealing with the properties he had bought and sold. These the two men inspected item by item before they made a search of the drawers.

  In the last drawer they found a small steel box which, after very considerable difficulty, they succeeded in opening. Inside were two insurance policies, a small memorandum book, in which apparently Reigate had kept a very full record of his family accounts and, in a small pay envelope, sealed down, they discovered two Yale keys. They were quite new and were fastened together by a flat steel ring. An inspection of these showed Reeder that they were intended for different locks, one being slightly larger than the other. There was no name on them and no indication whatever as to their purpose.

  He examined the keys under a powerful magnifying glass, and the conclusion he reached was that probably they had never been used. At the bottom of the box, and almost overlooked because it lay under a black card that covered the bottom, he found a sheet of paper torn from a small notebook. Its contents were in a copperplate hand; certain words were underlined in red ink, carefully ruled. It consisted of a column of street names, and against each was a time. Mr Reeder observed that the times ranged from ten in the morning till four o’clock in the afternoon, and that the streets (he knew London very well) were side streets adjacent to main thoroughfares. Against certain of the times and places a colour was indicated: red, yellow, white, pink; but these had been struck out in pencil, and in the same medium the word “yellow” had been written against all of them.

  “What do you make of those, Mr Reeder?”

  Reeder looked through the list again carefully.

  “I rather imagine,” he said, “that it’s a list of rendezvous. At this place and at this time there was a car ready to pick him up. Originally it was intended to have four cars, but for some reason or other this was impracticable. I take it that the colour means a flower or a badge of some kind by which Reigate could distinguish the car that was picking him up.”

  Later at Scotland Yard he elaborated his theory to an interested circle.

  “What is clear now, if it wasn’t clear before,” he said, “is that there is an organisation working in England against the banks. It is more dangerous than I imagined, for obviously the man or men behind it will stop at nothing to save themselves if matters ever come to a pinch. They killed Reigate because they thought – and rightly – that he was coming to betray them.”

  5

  Mr Reeder claimed that he had a criminal mind. That night, in his spacious study at Brockley, he became a criminal. He organised bank robberies; he worked out systems of defalcations; he visualised all the difficulties that the brain of such an organisation would have to contend against. The principal problem was to get out of England men who were known and whose descriptions had been circulated as being wanted by the police. Every port and every airport was watched; there was a detective staff at every aerodrome; Ostend, Calais, Boulogne, Flushing, the Hook of Holland, Havre and Dieppe were staffed by keen observers. No Atlantic liner sailed but it carried an officer whose business it was to identify questionable passengers.

  For hours Mr Reeder wallowed in his wickedness. Scheme succeeded scheme; possibility and probability were rubbed against one another and cancelled themselves out.

  What was the organiser’s chief difficulty? To avoid a close inspection of his protégés, and to keep them in a place where they would not be recognised.

  The case of Reigate was a simple one. He was a man with a conscience, and though apparently he was heading for safety, that still, small voice of his had grown louder and he had decided to make a clean breast of everything. Having reached this decision, he had escaped from wherever he was confined and had made his way to Reeder’s house – his sister had told the detective that the young man knew his address.

  At midnight Mr Reeder rose from his desk, lit his thirtieth cigarette, and stood for a long time with his back to the fireplace, the cigarette drooping limply from his mouth, his head on one side like a cockatoo, and cogitated upon his criminal past.

  He went to bed that night with a sense that he was groping through a fog towards a certain door, and that when that door was opened the extraordinary happenings of the past few months would be susceptible of a very simple explanation.

  On the following morning Mr Reeder was in his office, and those who are not acquainted with his methods would have been amazed to find that he was engaged in reading a fairy story. He read it furtively, hiding it away in the drawer of his desk whenever there was the slightest suggestion of somebody entering. He loved fairy stories about wonderful little ladies who appeared mysteriously out of nowhere, and rendered marvellous assistance to poor but beautiful daughters of woodcutters, transforming them with a wave of their wands into no less lovely princesses, and by a similar wave turned wicked men and women into trees and rabbits and black cats. There were so many men and women in the world whom he would have turned into trees and rabbits and black cats.

  He was reading the latest of his finds (Fairy Twinklefeet and the Twelve Genii) when he heard a heavy cough outside his door and the confident rap of the commissionaire’s knuckles. He put away the book, closed the drawer, and said:

  “Come in.”

  “Dr Carl Jansen, sir.”

  Mr Reeder leaned back in his chair.

  “Show him in, please,” he said.

  Dr Jansen was tall, rather stout, very genial. He spoke with the slightest of foreign accents.

  “May I sit, please?” He beamed and drew his chair up to the desk almost before Mr Reeder had murmured his invitation. “It was in my mind to see you, Mr Reeder, to ask you to undertake a small commission for me, but I understand you are no longer private detective but official, eh?”

  Reeder bowed. His fingertips were together. He was looking at the newcomer from under his shaggy brows.

  “I am in a very peculiar position,” said Dr Jansen. “I conduct here a small clinic for diseases of the ’eart, for various things. I am a generous man; I cannot ’elp it.” He waved an extravagant hand. “I give, I lend, I do not ask for security, and I am – what is the word? – swindled. Now a great misfortune has come to me. I loaned a man a thousand pounds.” He leaned confidentially across the table. “He has got into trouble – you have seen the case in the papers – Mr Hallaty, the banker.”

  He waved his agitated hands again.

  “He has gone out of the country without saying a word, without paying a penny, and now he writes to me to ask me for a prescription for the ’eart.”

  Mr Reeder leaned back in his chair.

  “He’s written from where?” he asked.

  “From ’Olland. I come from ’Olland; it is my ’ome.”

  “Have you got the letter?”

  The man fished out a pocketbook and from this extracted a sheet of notepaper. The moment Reeder saw it he recognised Hallaty’s handwriting. It was very brief.

  “Dear Doctor,

  I must have the prescription for my heart. I have lost it. I cannot give you my address. Will you please advertise it in the agony column of The Times?”

  It was signed “H.”

  If Dr Jansen could have looked under those shaggy eyebrows he would have seen Mr Reeder’s eyes light up.

  “May I keep this letter?” he asked.

  The big man shrugged.

  “Why, surely. I am glad that you should, because this gentleman seems to be in
trouble with the police, and I do not want to be mixed up in it, except that I would like to get my thousand pounds. The prescription I will advertise because it is humanity.”

  Dr Jansen took his departure after giving his address, which was a small flat in Pimlico. He was hardly out of the building before Mr Reeder had verified his name and his qualifications from a work of reference. The letter he carried to Scotland Yard and to the Chief Constable.

  “Smell it,” he said.

  The Chief sniffed.

  “Camphor – and not exactly camphor. It’s the same as we found in young Reigate’s dressing gown. I’ve sent it down to the laboratory; they say it’s camphorlactine, a very powerful disinfectant and antiseptic, sometimes used in cases of infectious diseases.”

  He heard a smack as Mr Reeder’s hands came together, and looked up in astonishment.

  “Dear, dear me!” said Mr Reeder.

  He almost purred the words.

  When he got back to his office in Whitehall the commissionaire told him that a lady was waiting to see him. Mr Reeder frowned.

  “All right, show her in,” he said.

  He pushed up the most comfortable chair for her.

  “Mr Reeder” – she spoke quickly and nervously – “I have found a notebook of my brother’s and the full amounts that he took–”

  “I have those,” said Reeder. “It is not a very large amount, certainly not such an amount as would have justified the trouble and pains they took to get him out on bail.”

  “And in the notebook was this.” She put a little cutting on the table.

  Mr Reeder adjusted his glasses and read:

  “In your dire necessity write to the Brothers of Benevolence, 297 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Professional men who are short of money, and in urgent need of it will receive help without usury. Repayment spread over years. No security but our faith in you.”

  Mr Reeder read it three times, his lips spelling the words; then he put the cutting down on the table.