The Complete Four Just Men Page 52

  She looked at Gonsalez in bewilderment. She was in no mood for a lecture on the physiology of expression and even had she known that Leon Gonsalez was the author of three large books which ranked with the best that Lombroso or Mantegazza had given to the world, she would have been no more willing to listen.

  ‘The truth is, Mrs Storr,’ said Manfred, interpreting her new distress, ‘we think that we can free your husband and prove his innocence. But we want as many facts about the case as we can get.’

  She hesitated only a moment.

  ‘I have some furnished lodgings in Gray’s Inn Road,’ she said, ‘perhaps you will be good enough to come with me.

  ‘My lawyer does not think there is any use in appealing against the sentence,’ she went on as they fell in one on either side of her. Manfred shook his head.

  ‘The Appeal Court would uphold the sentence,’ he said quietly, ‘with the evidence you have there is no possibility of your husband being released.’

  She looked round at him in dismay and now he saw that she was very near to tears.

  ‘I thought . . . you said . . . ?’ she began a little shakily.

  Manfred nodded.

  ‘We know Stedland,’ he said, ‘and – ’

  ‘The curious thing about blackmailers, is that the occiput is hardly observable,’ interrupted Gonsalez thoughtfully. ‘I examined sixty-two heads in the Spanish prisons and in every case the occipital protuberance was little more than a bony ridge. Now in homicidal heads the occiput sticks out like a pigeon’s egg.’

  ‘My friend is rather an authority upon the structure of the head,’ smiled Manfred. ‘Yes, we know Stedland. His operations have been reported to us from time to time. You remember the Wellingford case, Leon?’

  Gonsalez nodded.

  ‘Then you are detectives?’ asked the girl.

  Manfred laughed softly.

  ‘No, we are not detectives – we are interested in crime. I think we have the best and most thorough record of the unconvicted criminal class of any in the world.’

  They walked on in silence for some time.

  ‘Stedland is a bad man,’ nodded Gonsalez as though the conviction had suddenly dawned upon him. ‘Did you observe his ears? They are unusually long and the outer margins are pointed – the Darwinian tubercle, Manfred. And did you remark, my dear friend, that the root of the helix divides the concha into two distinct cavities and that the lobule was adherent? A truly criminal ear. The man has committed murder. It is impossible to possess such an ear and not to murder.’

  The flat to which she admitted them was small and wretchedly furnished. Glancing round the tiny dining-room, Manfred noted the essential appointments which accompany a ‘furnished’ flat.

  The girl, who had disappeared into her room to take off her coat, now returned, and sat by the table at which, at her invitation, they had seated themselves.

  ‘I realise that I am being indiscreet,’ she said with the faintest of smiles; ‘but I feel that you really want to help me, and I have the curious sense that you can! The police have not been unkind or unfair to me and poor Jeff. On the contrary, they have been most helpful. I fancy that they suspected Mr Stedland of being a blackmailer, and they were hoping that we could supply some evidence. When that evidence failed, there was nothing for them to do but to press forward the charge. Now, what can I tell you?’

  ‘The story which was not told in court,’ replied Manfred.

  She was silent for a time. ‘I will tell you,’ she said at last. ‘Only my husband’s lawyer knows, and I have an idea that he was sceptical as to the truth of what I am now telling you. And if he is sceptical,’ she said in despair, ‘how can I expect to convince you?’

  The eager eyes of Gonsalez were fixed on hers, and it was he who answered.

  ‘We are already convinced, Mrs Storr,’ and Manfred nodded.

  Again there was a pause. She was evidently reluctant to begin a narrative which, Manfred guessed, might not be creditable to her; and this proved to be the case.

  ‘When I was a girl,’ she began simply, ‘I was at school in Sussex – a big girls’ school; I think there were over two hundred pupils. I am not going to excuse anything I did,’ she went on quickly. ‘I fell in love with a boy – well, he was a butcher’s boy! That sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? But you understand I was a child, a very impressionable child – oh, it sounds horrible, I know; but I used to meet him in the garden leading out from the prep. room after prayers; he climbed over the wall to those meetings, and we talked and talked, sometimes for an hour. There was no more in it than a boy and girl love affair, and I can’t explain just why I committed such a folly.’

  ‘Mantegazza explains the matter very comfortably in his Study of Attraction,’ murmured Leon Gonsalez. ‘But forgive me, I interrupted you.’

  ‘As I say, it was a boy and girl friendship, a kind of hero worship on my part, for I thought he was wonderful. He must have been the nicest of butcher boys,’ she smiled again, ‘because he never offended me by so much as a word. The friendship burnt itself out in a month or two, and there the matter might have ended, but for the fact that I had been foolish enough to write letters. They were very ordinary, stupid love-letters, and perfectly innocent – or at least they seemed so to me at the time. Today, when I read them in the light of a greater knowledge they take my breath away.’

  ‘You have them, then?’ said Manfred.

  She shook her head.

  ‘When I said “them” I meant one, and I only have a copy of that, supplied me by Mr Stedland. The one letter that was not destroyed fell into the hands of the boy’s mother, who took it to the headmistress, and there was an awful row. She threatened to write to my parents who were in India, but on my solemn promise that the acquaintance should be dropped, the affair was allowed to blow over. How the letter came into Stedland’s hands I do not know; in fact, I had never heard of the man until a week before my marriage with Jeff. Jeff had saved about two thousand pounds, and we were looking forward to our marriage day when this blow fell. A letter from a perfectly unknown man, asking me to see him at his office, gave me my first introduction to this villain. I had to take the letter with me, and I went in some curiosity, wondering why I had been sent for. I was not to wonder very long. He had a little office off Regent Street, and after he had very carefully taken away the letter he had sent me, he explained, fully and frankly, just what his summons had meant.’

  Manfred nodded.

  ‘He wanted to sell you the letter,’ he said, ‘for how much?’

  ‘For two thousand pounds. That was the diabolical wickedness of it,’ said the girl vehemently. ‘He knew almost to a penny how much Jeff had saved.’

  ‘Did he show you the letter?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No, he showed me a photographic reproduction and as I read it and recalled what construction might be put upon this perfectly innocent note, my blood went cold. There was nothing to do but to tell Jeff, because the man had threatened to send facsimiles to all our friends and to Jeffrey’s uncle, who had made Jeffrey his sole heir. I had already told Jeffrey about what happened at school, thank heaven, and so I had no need to fear his suspicion. Jeffrey called on Mr Stedland, and I believe there was a stormy scene; but Stedland is a big, powerful man in spite of his age, and in the struggle which ensued poor Jeffrey got a little the worst of it. The upshot of the matter was, Jeffrey agreed to buy the letter for two thousand pounds, on condition that Stedland signed a receipt, written on a blank page of the letter itself. It meant the losing of his life savings; it meant the possible postponement of our wedding; but Jeffrey would not take any other course. Mr Stedland lives in a big house near Clapham Common – ’

  ‘184 Park View West,’ interrupted Manfred.

  ‘You know?’ she said in surprise. ‘Well, it was at this house Jeffrey had to
call to complete the bargain. Mr Stedland lives alone except for a manservant, and opening the door himself, he conducted Jeffrey up to the first floor, where he had his study. My husband, realising the futility of argument, paid over the money, as he had been directed by Stedland, in American bills – ’

  ‘Which are more difficult to trace, of course,’ said Manfred.

  ‘When he had paid him, Stedland produced the letter, wrote the receipt on the blank page, blotted it and placed it in an envelope, which he gave to my husband. When Jeffrey returned home and opened the envelope, he found it contained nothing more than a blank sheet of paper.’

  ‘He had rung the changes,’ said Manfred.

  ‘That was the expression that Jeffrey used,’ said the girl. ‘Then it was that Jeffrey decided to commit this mad act. You have heard of the Four Just Men?’

  ‘I have heard of them,’ replied Manfred gravely.

  ‘My husband is a great believer in their methods, and a great admirer of them too,’ she said. ‘I think he read everything that has ever been written about them. One night, two days after we were married – I had insisted upon marrying him at once when I discovered the situation – he came to me.

  ‘ “Grace,” he said, “I am going to apply the methods of the Four to this devil Stedland.”

  ‘He outlined his plans. He had apparently been watching the house, and knew that except for the servant the man slept in the house alone, and he had formed a plan for getting in. Poor dear, he was an indifferent burglar; but you heard today how he succeeded in reaching Stedland’s room. I think he hoped to frighten the man with his revolver.’

  Manfred shook his head.

  ‘Stedland graduated as a gun-fighter in South Africa,’ he said quietly. ‘He is the quickest man on the draw I know, and a deadly shot. Of course, he had your husband covered before he could as much as reach his pocket.’

  She nodded.

  ‘That is the story,’ she said quietly. ‘If you can help Jeff, I shall pray for you all my life.’

  Manfred rose slowly.

  ‘It was a mad attempt,’ he said. ‘In the first place Stedland would not keep a compromising document like that in his house, which he leaves for six hours a day. It might even have been destroyed, though that is unlikely. He would keep the letter for future use. Blackmailers are keen students of humanity, and he knows that money may still be made, from that letter of yours. But if it is in existence – ’

  ‘If it is in existence,’ she repeated – and now the reaction had come and her lips were trembling –

  ‘I will place it in your hands within a week,’ said Manfred, and with this promise left her.

  Mr Noah Stedland had left the Courts of Justice that afternoon with no particular sense of satisfaction save that he was leaving it by the public entrance. He was not a man who was easily scared, but he was sensitive to impressions; and it seemed to him that the Judge’s carefully chosen words had implied, less in their substance than in their tone, a veiled rebuke to himself. Beyond registering this fact, his sensitiveness did not go. He was a man of comfortable fortune, and that fortune had been got together in scraps – sometimes the scraps were unusually large – by the exercise of qualities which were not handicapped by such imponderable factors as conscience or remorse. Life to this tall, broad-shouldered, grey-faced man was a game, and Jeffrey Storr, against whom he harboured no resentment, was a loser.

  He could think dispassionately of Storr in his convict clothes, wearing out the years of agony in a convict prison, and at the mental picture could experience no other emotion than that of the successful gambler who can watch his rival’s ruin with equanimity.

  He let himself into his narrow-fronted house, closed and double-locked the door behind him, and went up the shabbily carpeted stairs to his study. The ghosts of the lives he had wrecked should have crowded the room; but Mr Stedland did not believe in ghosts. He rubbed his finger along a mahogany table and noted that it was dusty, and the ghost of a well-paid charlady took shape from that moment.

  As he sprawled back in his chair, a big cigar between his gold-spotted teeth, he tried to analyse the queer sensation he had experienced in court. It was not the Judge, it was not the attitude of the defending counsel, it was not even the possibility that the world might censure him, which was responsible for his mental perturbation. It was certainly not the prisoner and his possible fate, or the white-faced wife. And yet there had been a something or a somebody which had set him glancing uneasily over his shoulder.

  He sat smoking for half an hour, and then a bell clanged and he went down the stairs and opened the front door. The man who was waiting with an apologetic smile on his face, a jackal of his, was butler and tout and general errand-boy to the hard-faced man.

  ‘Come in, Jope,’ he said, closing the door behind the visitor. ‘Go down to the cellar and get me a bottle of whisky?’

  ‘How was my evidence, guv’nor?’ asked the sycophant, smirking expectantly.

  ‘Rotten,’ growled Stedland. ‘What did you mean by saying you heard me call for help?’

  ‘Well, guv’nor, I thought I’d make it a little worse for him,’ said Jope humbly.

  ‘Help!’ sneered Mr Stedland. ‘Do you think I’d call on a guy like you for help? A damned lot of use you would be in a rough house! Get that whisky!’

  When the man came up with a bottle and a syphon, Mr Stedland was gazing moodily out of the window which looked upon a short, untidy garden terminating in a high wall. Behind that was a space on which a building had been in course of erection when the armistice put an end to Government work. It was designed as a small factory for the making of fuses, and was an eyesore to Mr Stedland, since he owned the ground on which it was built.

  ‘Jope,’ he said, turning suddenly, ‘was there anybody in court we know?’

  ‘No, Mr Stedland,’ said the man, pausing in surprise. ‘Not that I know, except Inspector – ’

  ‘Never mind about the Inspector,’ answered Mr Stedland impatiently. ‘I know all the splits who were there. Was there anybody else – anybody who has a grudge against us?’

  ‘No, Mr Stedland. What does it matter if there was?’ asked the valorous Jope. ‘I think we’re a match for any of ’em.’

  ‘How long have we been in partnership?’ asked Stedland unpleasantly, as he poured himself out a tot of whisky.

  The man’s face twisted in an ingratiating smile.

  ‘Well, we’ve been together some time now, Mr Stedland,’ he said.

  Stedland smacked his lips and looked out of the window again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said after a while, ‘we’ve been together a long time now. In fact, you would almost have finished your sentence, if I had told the police what I knew about you seven years ago – ’

  The man winced, and changed the subject. He might have realised, had he thought, that the sentence of seven years had been commuted by Stedland to a sentence of life servitude, but Mr Jope was no thinker.

  ‘Anything for the Bank today, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Stedland. ‘The Bank closed at three. Now, Jope,’ he turned on the other, ‘in future you sleep in the kitchen.’

  ‘In the kitchen, sir?’ said the astonished servant, and Stedland nodded.

  ‘I’m taking no more risks of a night visitor,’ he said. ‘That fellow was on me before I knew where I was, and if I hadn’t had a gun handy he would have beaten me. The kitchen is the only way you can break into this house from the outside, and I’ve got a feeling at the back of my mind that something might happen.’

  ‘But he’s gone to gaol.’

  ‘I’m not talking about him,’ snarled Stedland. ‘Do you understand, take your bed to the kitchen.’

  ‘It’s a bit draughty – ’ began Jope.

  ‘Take your bed to the kitchen,’ roare
d Stedland, glaring at the man.

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ said Jope with alacrity.

  When his servant had gone, Stedland took off his coat and put on one of stained alpaca, unlocked the safe, and took out a book. It was a pass-book from his bank, and its study was very gratifying. Mr Stedland dreamed dreams of a South American ranch and a life of ease and quiet. Twelve years’ strenuous work in London had made him a comparatively rich man. He had worked cautiously and patiently and had pursued the business of blackmail in a businesslike manner. His cash balance was with one of the best-known of the private bankers. Sir William Molbury & Co., Ltd. Molbury’s Bank had a reputation in the City for the privacy and even mystery which enveloped the business of its clients – a circumstance which suited Mr Stedland admirably. It was, too, one of those old-fashioned banks which maintain a huge reserve of money in its vaults; and this was also a recommendation to Mr Stedland, who might wish to gather in his fluid assets in the shortest possible space of time.

  The evening and the night passed without any untoward incident, except as was revealed when Mr Jope brought his master’s tea in the morning, and told, somewhat hoarsely, of a cold and unpleasant night. ‘Get more bedclothes,’ said Stedland curtly. He went off to his city office after breakfast, and left Mr Jope to superintend the operations of the charwoman and to impress upon her a number of facts, including the high rate at which she was paid, the glut of good charwomen on the market and the consequences which would overtake her if she left Mr Stedland’s study undusted.

  At eleven o’clock that morning came a respectable and somewhat elderly looking gentleman in a silk hat, and him Mr Jope interviewed on the door-mat.

  ‘I’ve come from the Safe Deposit,’ said the visitor.

  ‘What Safe Deposit?’ asked the suspicious Mr Jope.

  ‘The Fetter Lane Deposit,’ replied the other. ‘We want to know if you left your keys behind the last time you came?’

  Jope shook his head. ‘We haven’t any Safe Deposit,’ he said with assurance, ‘and the governor’s hardly likely to leave his keys behind.’