INSIDE THE LAWYER'S OFFICE
Gerald opened the letter. The flap of the envelope bore the embossed
name and address of the lawyer. The contents read:
I shall be pleased to see you if you will give me a call
to-morrow between ten and eleven o'clock, with reference to
your letter of yesterday's date.
Gerald was pleased too. He just chuckled with glee. He did not fear
obtaining the situation. And then the smile left his face.
His theory that the lawyer had the nineteen thousand pounds had received
rather a rude shock. A man with that money would not trouble about the
mere saving of a clerk's salary.
Anyway, he thought he would be in touch with the man who last dealt with
Josh Todd.
In Todd's letter to his wife, he had spoken of Loide as a "cute thief."
Was there anything in that?
There would be the letter books and office papers open to him. If he was
unable to get an answer to that question, surely it would be his own
fault.
He was in Liverpool Street between ten and eleven o'clock next morning.
Saw the lawyer and settled with him.
He was to begin his duties on Monday--three days after. The lawyer was
satisfied with his appearance, and did not ask for references.
He could not very well do so, as the man was giving him his services.
Moreover, things were fitting so tightly with Mr. Loide that anything a
clerk could filch would not be worth looking at.
When a man's income is suddenly reduced it hurts. Hurts badly.
Loide was experiencing that. At present his little luxuries were knocked
off, and in the future he foresaw a difficulty in the procuration of
even necessaries.
He had been wont to take home from the city fish shop a middle cut of
salmon. Now he took the--perhaps as toothsome but certainly
cheaper--fresh herring.
As with the fish, so with all things. His economy was of the studied
kind. It had to be.
The cutting off of the twenty pounds a week did not unfortunately mean
that sum only. Money breeds money, and Mr. Loide was an excellent
breeder--sixty pet cent. breed.
He liked to lend a man a five or ten pound note for a week, and charge
him one or two guineas for the loan. If you work that out you will find
it quite a big percentage.
Mr. Loide did not need to do so. He knew. He had done it so often. It
was a big source of revenue to him.
Indeed money lending was the profitable part of his business. He had
found it so much so, that he had neglected the more legitimate but less
profitable legal work.
The result was that that had slowly filtered away. It had not mattered a
bit so long as the thousand pounds a year was coming in. In the course
of the year his interest enabled him to double it.
So it will be seen that honesty--strictly speaking--if the best was
certainly not the most profitable policy with Mr. Loide.
Wipe that nearly forty pounds a week away from his income, and--well,
wipe the naught off the forty, and you get at about what his legal work
brought him in now.
Four pounds a week is not colossal wealth. It comes very, very hard on a
man to have to live on it who has been living on ten times as much.
Loide found it so. Cold, flinty, bed rock bottom hardness.
On Monday morning Gerald took his first step on the trail, and his seat
in Loide's office.
There was not much work to do. Gerald saw that at a glance.
There was no acting about the matter. His employer was poor. What did it
mean?
Round the walls of the outer office were black tin boxes, with--real and
imaginary--names of clients printed on the flap doors thereof in white
letters.
You turned the key and the flap fell down, enabling you to get at the
contents. One in particular had a great charm for the new clerk. He
fixed his eyes on it with an eager I-wonder-what's-inside-you sort of
glance.
It bore the name of Depew.
The locks were poor things. Evidenced by the fact that one key on the
bunch seemed to open them all.
Loide kept the bunch in his trousers pocket. If he wanted a paper from a
particular box, he would ring his bell, give the keys and ask for the
paper to be brought to him.
That seemed to take the pebbles out of Gerald's part--smoothed his
course a trifle.
Why? Because he knew it would enable him to examine the Depew papers.
The next time he was asked to get a paper, he first opened the Depew
flap, and closed it again without turning the key.
He kept the flap in position by a small wedge of paper. It was handy
that way.
Mr. Loide would go to lunch at one o'clock, and Gerald proposed devoting
that hour to an examination of the Depew papers.
He was not the kind of young man to let the grass grow to any extreme
length under his feet.
"If you are learning, you should commence at the beginning. Mount the
ladder from the lowest rung, and you will know then what the work is
like."
So spake the lawyer to Gerald. It was in connection with the letter
book.
The indexing of it was in arrear, and Gerald's business was to bring
that index up to date.
The lawyer showed him how. He had a system of his own, had Loide. In
addition to the name of the sender of the letter, the letter itself was
indexed under the name of the action or matter.
It was a good way, because when Loide made out his bills of costs, he
did not miss a single letter he could charge for.
There was perhaps no man in the City of London who could make out a
better bill of costs than Loide.
There were rivals in his profession who said that if you blew your nose
in his office, he clapped down six and eightpence, while if you wiped
your feet on his door-mat, it meant three and six.
But then rivals will say anything, won't they? And again, if there is
any reputation for truthfulness in the legal profession, it is not a
world-wide one.
Its patron saint is the father of lies.
So it was that, with the letter book in his hand, at his own desk,
Gerald turned up in the index "Depew."
There were two entries; one he found applied to a letter sent to Depew
in America, which had brought him over, and the other to a series of
letters connected with the winding up of the affair.
The letter to Depew he read, and was not a whit the wiser. Then he took
on a perusal of the others.
He started at the last, and proposed to work his way back.
He was surprised to find the last letter of so recent a date. And when
he saw it was to the governor of the Bank of England, and read in it
that Loide was stopping the numbers of the notes for nineteen thousand
pounds, he stopped himself.
Stopped right there and did nothing but look out of the window
blankly--he was so unutterably amazed.
That he had struck a tangled web he knew quite well. That when he was in
the lawyer's office he was in the meshes of that web, he guessed.
But he had not expected the spider to give him such a facer as this. He
knew--knew most certainly now that Loide did not possess the missing
money.
He was depressed, his heart sank a bit, he had been so sure--so sure.
Chicken counting before hatchment is a poor game anyway. Gerald indorsed
that.
When lunch time came, he did not even open the tin box with "Depew" on
it. It had ceased to interest him.
He knew it would not help him along a bit. He sat there all the time
thinking.
His theory of Todd's disappearance shaped differently now.
He somehow felt convinced that the lawyer had had a hand in the man's
murder, and he tried to piece things together so that he could account
for the notes being missing.
His short acquaintance with the lawyer did not favor the idea that he
was a man to lose things.
Then ideas came to him. He thought he had struck the solution.
There had been a quarrel about the division of the spoil--the nineteen
thousand pounds--between Loide and the man who was lying with his
throat cut on the boat. Or Loide had perhaps murdered him for possession
of the whole sum.
He had been disappointed to find that his victim had not the notes in
his possession, had probably given them to a friend in London to mind
till his return from America.
The moment Loide got back to London he would stop the notes.
He tallied the date of the murder and the date of the letter to the
bank. They fitted his idea.
Gerald was aware that where there had been a mere hill, there was a
mountain for him to climb now; but he was not dismayed. There was Tessie
for certain, and a possible _dot_ on the top of that mountain. Its
summit was worth reaching.
He meant getting there--he was full up to the brim with excelsior.
He was debating now whether he should keep up the farce of clerkship any
longer, or blossom forth--for surprise purposes--as a New York
detective, and see what he could frighten out of Loide.
Then he determined to wait a little longer, till he had seen the
passenger agent at Eldon Street.
That individual had been away ill, and would be at the office, it was
thought, to-morrow or the day after. Gerald decided to wait till then.