Elk 01 The Fellowship of the Frog Read online

  Johnson shook his head.

  “No, sir, he deals only in real estate. He has properties in this country and in the South of France and in America. He has done a little business in exchanges; in fact, we did a very large exchange business until the mark broke.”

  “What are you going to do now, Mr. Johnson?” asked Dick.

  The other made a gesture of helplessness.

  “What can I do, sir?” he asked. “I am nearly fifty; I’ve spent most of my working life in one job, and it is very unlikely that I can get another. Fortunately for me, I’ve not only saved money, but I have had one or two lucky investments, and for those I must be grateful to the old man. I don’t think he was particularly pleased when he found that I’d followed his advice, but that’s beside the question. I do owe him that. I’ve just about enough money to keep me for the rest of my life if I go quietly and do riot engage in any extraordinary speculations. Why I came to see you was to ask you, Captain Gordon, if you had any kind of opening. I should like a little spare time work, and I’d be most happy to work with you.”

  Dick was rather embarrassed, because the opportunities for employing Mr. Johnson were few and far between. Nevertheless, he was anxious to help the man.

  “Let me give the matter a day or two’s thought,” he said. “What is Maitland doing for a secretary?”

  “I don’t know. That is my chief worry. I saw a letter lying on his desk, addressed to Miss Ella Bennett, and I have got an idea that he intends offering her the job.”

  Dick could hardly believe his ears.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t know, sir, only once or twice the old man has inquired whether Ray has a sister. He took quite an interest in her for two or three days. and then let the matter drop. It is as astonishing as anything he has ever done.”

  Elk for some reason felt immensely sorry for the man. He as so obviously and patently unfitted for the rough and humble of competition. And the opportunities which awaited a man of fifty worn to one groove were practically non-existent.

  “I don’t know that! can help you either, Mr. Johnson,” he said. “As far as Miss Bennett is concerned, I imagine that there is no possibility of her accepting any such offer, supposing Maitland made it. I’ll have your address in case I want to communicate with you.”

  “431, Fitzroy Square,” replied Johnson, and produced a somewhat soiled card with an apology. “I haven’t much use for cards,” he said.

  He walked to the door and hesitated with his hand on its edge.

  “I’m—I’m very fond of Miss Bennett,” he said, “and I’d like her to know that Maitland isn’t as bad as he looks. I’ve got to be fair to him!”

  “Poor devil!” said Elk, watching the man through the window as he walked dejectedly along Harley Terrace. “It’s tough on him. You nearly told him about seeing Maitland this morning! I saw that, and was ready to jump in. It’s the young lady’s secret.”

  “I wish to heaven it wasn’t,” said Dick sincerely, and remembered that he had asked Johnson to stay to breakfast.

  XXI - MR. JOHNSON’S VISITOR

  There is a certain murky likeness between the houses in Fitzroy Square, London, and Gramercy Park, New York. Fitzroy Square belongs to the Georgian days, when Soho was a fashionable suburb, and St. Martins-in-the-Fields was really in the fields, and was not tucked away between a Vaudeville house and a picture gallery.

  No. 431 had been subdivided by its owner into three self-contained flats, Johnson’s being situated on the ground floor. There was a fourth basement flat, which was occupied by a man and his wife who acted for the owners, and, incidentally, were responsible, in the case of Johnson, for keeping his apartments clean and supplying him with the very few meals that he had on the premises.

  It was nearly ten o’clock when philosopher Johnson arrived home that evening, and he was a very tired man. He had spent the greater part of the day in making a series of calls upon financial and real estate houses. To his inevitable inquiries he received an inevitable answer. There were no vacancies, and certainly no openings for a stoutish man of fifty, who looked, to the discerning eyes of the merchants concerned or their managing clerks, past his best years of work. Patient Mr. Johnson accepted each rebuff and moved on to another field, only to find his experience repeated.

  He let himself in with a latchkey, walked wearily into a little sitting-room, and dropped with a sigh to the Chesterfield, for he was not given to violent exercise.

  The room in which he sat was prettily, but not expensively furnished. A large green carpet covered the floor; the walls were hidden by book-shelves; and there was about the place a certain cosiness which money cannot buy. Rising after some little time, he walked to his book-shelf, took down a volume and spent the next two hours in reading. It was nearly midnight when he turned out the light and went to bed.

  His bedroom was at the farther end of the short corridor, and in five minutes he was undressed and asleep.

  Mr. Johnson was usually a light but consistent sleeper, but to-night he had not been asleep an hour before he was awake again. And wider awake than he had been at any portion of the day. Softly he got out of bed, put on his slippers and pulled a dressing-gown round him; then, taking something from a drawer in his bureau, he opened the door and crept softly along the carpeted passage toward his sitting-room.

  He had heard no sound; it was sheer premonition of a pressing danger which had wakened him. His hand was on the door-knob, and he had turned it, when he heard a faint click. It was the sound of a light being turned off, and the sound came from the sitting-room.

  With a quick jerk he threw open the door and reached out his hand for the switch; and then, from the blackness of the room, came a warning voice.

  “Touch that light and you die! I’ve got you covered. Put your gun on the floor at your feet—quick!”

  Johnson stooped and laid down the revolver he had taken from his bureau.

  “Now step inside, and step lively,” said the voice.

  “Who are you?” asked Johnson steadily.

  He strained his eyes to pierce the darkness, and saw the figure now. It was standing by his desk, and the shine of something in its hand warned him that the threat was no idle one.

  “Never met me?” There was a chuckle of laughter in the voice of the Unknown. “I’ll bet you haven’t! Friend—meet the Frog!”

  “The Frog?” Johnson repeated the words mechanically. “One name’s as good as another. That will do for mine,” said the stranger. “Throw over the key of your desk.”

  There was a silence.

  “I haven’t my key here,” said Johnson. “It is in the bedroom.”

  “Stay where you are,” warned the voice.

  Johnson had kicked off his slippers softly, and was feeling with his feet for the pistol he had laid so obediently on the floor in the first shock of surprise. Presently he found it and drew it toward him with his bare toes.

  “What do you want?” he asked, temporizing.

  “I want to see your office papers—all the papers you’ve brought from Maitlands.”

  “There is nothing here of any value,” said Johnson.

  The revolver was now at his feet and a little ahead of him. He kept his toes upon the butt, ready to drop just as soon as he could locate with any certainty the position of the burglar. But now, though his eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness, he could no longer see the owner of the voice.

  “Come nearer,” said the stranger, “and hold out your hands.”

  Johnson made as though to obey, but dropped suddenly to his knees. The explosion deafened him. He heard a cry, saw, in the flash of his pistol, a dark figure, and then something struck him.

  He came to consciousness ten minutes later, to find the room empty. Staggering to his feet, he put on the light and walked unsteadily back to his bedroom, to examine the extent of his injuries. He felt the bump on his head gingerly, and grinned. Somebody was knocking at the outer door, a perem
ptory, authoritative knocking. With a wet towel to his injured head he went out into the passage and opened the front door. He found two policemen at the step and a small crowd gathered on the pavement.

  “Has there been shooting here?”

  “Yes, constable,” said Johnson, “I did a little shooting, but I don’t think I hit anything.”

  “Have you been hurt, sir? Was it burglars?”

  “I can’t tell you. Come in,” said Johnson, and led the way back to the disordered library.

  The blind was flapping in the draught, for the window, which looked out upon a side street, was open.

  “Have you missed anything?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Johnson. “I think it was rather more important than an ordinary burglary. I am going to call Inspector Elk of Scotland Yard, and I think you had better leave the room as it is until he arrives.”

  Elk was in his office, laboriously preparing a report on the escape of Hagn, when the call came through. He listened attentively, and then:

  “I’ll come down, Johnson. Tell the constable to leave things—ask him to speak to me.”

  By the time Elk had arrived, the philosopher was dressed. “He gave you a pretty hefty one,” said Elk, examining the contusion with a professional eye.

  “I wasn’t prepared for it. I expected him to shoot, and he must have struck at me as I fired.”

  “You say it was the Frog himself?” said the sceptical Elk. “I doubt it. The Frog has never undertaken a job on his own, so far as I can remember.”

  “It was either the Frog or one of his trusted emissaries,” said Johnson with a good-humoured smile. “Look at this.”

  On the centre of his pink blotting-pad was stamped the inevitable Frog. It appeared also on the panel of the door.

  “That is supposed to be a warning, isn’t it?” said Johnson. “Well, I hadn’t time to get acquainted with the warning before I got mine!”

  “There are worse things than a clubbing,” said Elk cheerfully. “You’ve missed nothing?”

  Johnson shook his head.

  “No, nothing.”

  Elk’s inspection of the room was short but thorough. It was near the open window, blown by the breeze into the folds of the curtain, that he found the parcel-room ticket. It was a green slip acknowledging the reception of a handbag, and it was issued at the terminus of the Great Northern Railway.

  “Is this yours?” he asked.

  Johnson took the slip from him, examined it and shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “I’ve never seen it before.”

  “Anybody else in your flat likely to have left a bag at King’s Cross station?”

  Again Johnson shook his head and smiled.

  “There is nobody else in this flat,” he said, “except myself.”

  Elk took the paper under the light and scrutinized the date-stamp. The luggage had been deposited a fortnight before, and, as is usual in such tickets, the name of the depositor was not given.

  “It may have blown in from the garden,” he said. “There is a stiff breeze to-night, but I should not imagine that anybody who had got an important piece of luggage would leave the ticket to fly around. I’ll investigate this,” he said, and put the ticket carefully away in his pocket-book. “You didn’t see the man?”

  “I caught a glimpse of him as I fired, and I am under the impression that he was masked.”

  “Did you recognize his voice?”

  “No,” said Johnson, shaking his head.

  Elk examined the window. The catch had been cleverly forced—“cleverly” because it was a new type of patent fastening familiar to him, and which he did not remember ever having seen forced from the outside before. Instinctively his mind went back to the burglary at Lord Farmley’s, to that beautifully cut handle and blown lock; and though, by no stretch of imagination, could the two jobs be compared, yet there was a similarity in finish and workmanship which immediately struck him.

  What made this burglary all the more remarkable was that, for the first time, there had appeared somebody who claimed to be the Frog himself. Never before had the Frog given tangible proof of his existence. He understood the organization well enough to know that none of the Frog’s willing slaves would have dared to use his name. And why did he consider that Johnson was worthy of his personal attention?

  “No,” said Johnson in answer to his question, “there are no documents here of the slightest value. I used to bring home a great deal of work from Maitlands; in fact, I have often worked into the middle of the night. That is why my dismissal is such a scandalous piece of ingratitude.”

  “You have never had any private papers of Maitland’s here, which perhaps you might have forgotten to return?” asked Elk thoughtfully, and Johnson’s ready smile and twinkling eyes supplied an answer.

  “That’s rather a graceful way of putting the matter,” he said. “No, I have none of Maitland’s documents here. If you care, you can see the contents of all my cupboards, drawers and boxes, but I can assure you that I’m a very methodical man; I know practically every paper in my possession.”

  Walking home, Elk reviewed the matter of this surprising appearance. If the truth be told, he was very glad to have some additional problem to keep his mind off the very unpleasant interview which was promised for the morning. Captain Dick Gordon would assume all responsibility, and probably the Commissioners would exonerate Elk from any blame; but to the detective, the “people upstairs” were almost as formidable as the Frog himself.

  XXII - THE INQUIRY

  He intended making an early call at King’s Cross to examine the contents of the bag, but awoke the next morning, his mind filled with the coming inquiry to the exclusion of all other matters; and although he entered Johnson’s burglary in his report book very carefully, and locked away the cloakroom ticket in his safe, he was much too absorbed and worried to make immediate inquiries.

  Dick arrived for the inquiry, and his assistant gave him a brief sketch of the burglary in Fitzroy Square.

  “Let me see that ticket,” he asked.

  Elk, unlocking the safe, produced the green slip.

  “The ticket has been attached to something,” said Dick, carrying the slip to the window. “There is the mark of a paper-fastener, and the mark is recent. This may produce a little information,” he said as he handed it back.

  “It’s very unlikely,” said Elk despondently as he kicked the door of the safe. “Those people upstairs are going to give us hell.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dick. “I tell you, our friends above are so tickled to death at recovering the Treaty that they’re not going to worry much about Hagn.”

  It was a remarkable prophecy, remarkably fulfilled. Elk was gratified and surprised when he was called into the presence of the great—every Commissioner and Chief Constable sat round the green board of judgment—to discover that the attitude of his superiors was rather one of benevolent interest than of disapproval.

  “With an organization of this character we are prepared for very unexpected developments,” said the Chief Commissioner. “In ordinary circumstances, the escape of Hagn would be a matter calling for severe measures against those responsible. But I really cannot apportion the blame in this particular case. Balder seems to have behaved with perfect propriety; I quite approve of your having put him into the cell with Hagn; and I do not see what I can do with the gaoler. The truth is, that the Frogs are immensely powerful—more powerful than the agents of an enemy Government, because they are working with inside knowledge, and in addition, of course, they are our own people. You think it is possible, Captain Gordon, to round up the Frogs?—I know it will be a tremendous business. Is it worth while?”

  Dick shook his head.

  “No, sir,” he replied. “They are too numerous, and the really dangerous men are going to be difficult to identify. It has come to our knowledge that the chiefs of this organization—at least, some of them—are not so marked.”

  Not all the me
mbers of the Board of Inquiry were as pleasant as the Chief Commissioner.

  “It comes to this,” said a white-haired Chief Constable, “that in the space of a week we have had two prisoners killed under the eyes of the police, and one who has practically walked out of the cell in which he was guarded by a police officer, without being arrested or any clue being furnished as to the method the Frogs employed.” He shook his head. “That’s bad, Captain Gordon.”

  “Perhaps you would like to take charge of the inquiry, sir,” said Dick. “This is not the ordinary petty larceny type, of crime, and I seem to remember having dealt with a case of yours whilst I was in the Prosecutor’s Department, presenting less complicated features, in which you were no more successful than I and my officers have been in dealing with the Frogs. You must allow me the greatest latitude and exercise patience beyond the ordinary. I know the Frog,” he said simply.

  For some time they did not realize what he had said.

  “You know him?” asked the Chief Commissioner incredulously.

  Dick nodded.

  “If I were to tell you who it was,” he said, “you would probably laugh at me. And obviously, whilst it is quite possible for me to secure an arrest this morning, it is not as easy a matter to produce overwhelming evidence that will convict. You must give me rope if I am to succeed.”

  “But how did you discover him, Captain Gordon?” asked the Chief, and Elk, who had listened, dumbfounded, to this claim of his superior, waited breathlessly for the reply.

  “It was clear to me,” said Dick, speaking slowly and deliberately, “when I learnt from Mr. Johnson, who was Maitland’s secretary, that somewhere concealed in the old man’s house was a mysterious child.” He smiled as he looked at the blank faces of the Board. “That doesn’t sound very convincing, I’m afraid,” he said, “but nevertheless, you will learn in due course why, when I discovered this, I was perfectly satisfied that I could take the Frog whenever I wished. It is not necessary to say that, knowing as I do, or as I am convinced I do, the identity of this individual, events from now on will take a more interesting and a more satisfactory course. I do not profess to be able to explain how Hagn came to make his escape. I have a suspicion—it is no more than a suspicion—but even that event is soluble if my other theory is right, as I am sure it is.”