at all. They seemed to show no interest in the box, but were chattering
and talking and laughing to one another. Not once did their eyes come up
to his level, and after a while he gained in confidence, though he was
glad enough when the play was resumed.
There were two scenes in the act: the first was a police station, the
second the lawyer’s room. The man was drunk, and the detective had come
to warn him that The Ringer was after him. And then suddenly the lights
on the stage were extinguished and the whole house was in the dark. It
was part of the plot. In this darkness, and in the very presence of the
police, the threatened man was to be murdered. They listened in tense
silence, the girl craning her head forward, trying to pierce the dark,
listening to the lines of intense dialogue that were coming from the
blackness of the stage. Somebody was in the room—a woman, and they had
found her. She slipped from the stage detective’s grasp and vanished,
and when the lights went up she was gone.
“What has happened, Monty?” she whispered.
He did not answer.
“Do you think——”
She looked round at him. His head was resting on the plush-covered ledge
of the box. His face, turned towards her, was grey; the eyes were
closed, and his teeth showed in a hideous grin.
She screamed.
“Monty! Monty!”
She shook him. Again her scream rang through the house. At first the
audience thought that it was a woman driven hysterical by the tenseness
of the stage situation, and then one or two people rose from their
stalls and looked up.
“Monty! Speak to me! He’s dead, he’s dead!”
Three seats in the front row had emptied. The screams of the hysterical
girl made it impossible for the scene to proceed, and the curtain came
down quickly.
The house was seething with excitement. Every face was turned towards
the box where she knelt by the side of the dead man, clasping him in her
arms, and the shrill agony in her voice was unnerving.
The door of the box swung open, and Manfred dashed in. One glance he
gave at Monty Newton, and he needed no other.
“Get the girl out,” he said curtly.
Leon tried to draw her from the box, but she was a shrieking fury.
“You did it, you did it! . . . Let me go to him!”
Leon lifted her from her feet, and, clawing wildly at his face, she was
carried from the box.
The manager was running along the passage, and Leon sent him on with a
jerk of his head. And then a woman in evening dress came from somewhere.
“May I take her?” she said, and the exhausted girl collapsed into her
arms.
Gonsalez flew back to the box. The man was lying on the floor, and the
manager, standing at the edge of the box, was addressing the audience.
“The gentleman has fainted, and I’m afraid his friend has become a
little hysterical. I must apologize to you, ladies and gentlemen, for
this interruption. If you will allow us a minute to clear the box, the
play will be resumed. If there is a doctor in the house, I should be
glad if he would come.”
There were two doctors within reach, and in the passage, which was now
guarded by a commissionaire, a hasty examination was made. They examined
the punctured wound at the back of the neck and then looked at one
another.
“This is The Snake,” said one.
“The house mustn’t know,” said Manfred. “He’s dead, of course?”
The doctor nodded.
Out in the passage was a big emergency exit door, and this the manager
pushed open, and, running out into the street, found a cab, into which
all that was mortal of Monty Newton was lifted.
Whilst this was being done, Poiccart returned.
“His car has just driven off,” he said. “I saw the number-plate as it
turned into Lisle Street.”
“How long ago?” asked Gonsalez quickly.
“At this very moment.”
Leon pinched his lip thoughtfully.
“Why didn’t he wait, I wonder?”
He went back through the emergency door, which was being closed, and
passed up the passage towards the entrance. The box was on the
dress-circle level, and the end of a short passage brought him into the
circle itself.
And then the thought of the lame man occurred to him, and his eyes
sought the first seat in the front row, which was also the seat nearest
to the boxes. The man had gone.
As he made this discovery, George emerged from the passage.
“Gurther!” said Leon. “What a fool I am! But how clever!”
“Gurther?” said Manfred in amazement. “Do you mean the man with the club
foot?”
Leon nodded.
“He was not alone, of course,” said Gonsalez. “There must have been two
or three of the gang here, men and women—Oberzohn works these schemes
out with the care and thoroughness of a general. I wonder where the
management have taken the girl?”
He found the manager discussing the tragedy with two other men, one of
whom was obviously associated with the production, and he signalled him
aside.
“The lady? I suppose she’s gone home. She’s left the theatre.”
“Which way did she go?” asked Gonsalez, in a sudden panic.
The manager called a linkman, who had seen a middle-aged woman come out
of the theatre with a weeping girl, and they had gone down the
side-street towards the little square at the back of the playhouse.
“She may have taken her home to Chester Square,” said Manfred. His voice
belied the assumption of confidence.
Leon had not brought his own machine, and they drove to Chester Square
in a taxi. Fred, the footman, had neither heard nor seen the girl, and
nearly fainted when he learned of the tragic ending to his master’s
career.
“Oh, my God!” he groaned. “And he only left here this afternoon . . .
dead, you say?”
Gonsalez nodded.
“Not—not The Snake?” faltered the man.
“What do you know about the snake?” demanded Manfred sternly.
“Nothing, except—well, the snake made him nervous, I know. He told me
to-day that he hoped he’d get through the week without a snake-bite.”
He was questioned closely, but although it was clear that he knew
something of his master’s illicit transactions, and that he was
connected in business with Oberzohn, the footman had no connection with
the doctor’s gang. He drew a large wage and a percentage of profits from
the gaming side of the business, and confessed that it was part of his
duties to prepare stacks of cards and pass them to his master under
cover of bringing in the drinks. But of anything more sinister he knew
nothing.
“The woman, of course, was a confederate, who had been planted to take
charge of the girl the moment the snake struck. I was in such a state of
mind,” confessed Leon, “that I do not even remember what she looked
like. I am a fool—a double-distilled idiot! I think I must be getting
old. There’s only one thing for us to do, and that is to get back to
Curzon Street—something may have turned up.”
“Did you leave anybody in the house?”
Leon nodded.
“Yes, I left one of our men, to take any ’phone messages that came
through.”
They paid off the taxi before the house, and Leon sprinted to the garage
to get the car. The man who opened the door to them was he who had been
tied up by the pedlar at Heavytree Farm, and his first words came as a
shock to Manfred:
“Digby’s here, sir.”
“Digby?” said the other in surprise. “I thought he was on duty?”
“He’s been here since just after you left, sir. If I’d known where you
had gone, I’d have sent him to you.”
Digby came out of the waiting-room at that moment, ready to apologize.
“I had to see you, sir, and I’m sorry I’m away from my post.”
“You may not be missing much,” said Manfred unsmilingly. “Come upstairs
and tell me all about it.”
Digby’s story was a strange one. He had gone down that afternoon to the
canal bank to make a reconnaissance of ground which was new to him.
“I’m glad I did too, because the walls have got broken glass on top. I
went up into the Old Kent Road and bought a garden hoe, and prised the
mortar loose, so that if I wanted, I could get over. And then I climbed
round the water-gate and had a look at that barge of his. There was
nobody about, though I think they spotted me afterwards. It is a fairly
big barge, and, of course, in a terrible state, but the hold is full of
cargo—you know that, sir?”
“You mean there is something in the barge?”
Digby nodded.
“Yes, it has a load of some kind. The after part, where the bargee’s
sleeping quarters are, is full of rats and water, but the fore part of
the vessel is water-tight, and it holds something heavy too. That is why
the barge is down by its head in the mud. I was in the Thames police and
I know a lot about river craft.”
“Is that what you came to tell me?”
“No, sir, it was something queerer than that. After I’d given the barge
a look over and tried to pull up some of the boards—which I didn’t
manage to do—I went along and had a look at the factory. It’s not so
easy to get in, because the entrance faces the house, but to get to it
you have to go half round the building, and that gives you a certain
amount of cover. There was nothing I could see in the factory itself. It
was in a terrible mess, full of old iron and burnt-out boxes. I was
coming round the back of the building,” he went on impressively, “when I
smelt a peculiar scent.”
“A perfume?”
“Yes, sir, it was perfume, but stronger—more like incense. I thought at
first it might be an old bale of stuff that had been thrown out, or else
I was deceiving myself. I began poking about in the rubbish heaps—but
_they_ didn’t smell of scent! Then I went back into the building again,
but there was no smell at all. It was very strong when I returned to the
back of the factory, and then I saw a little waft of smoke come out of a
ventilator close to the ground. My first idea was that the place was on
fire, but when I knelt down, it was this scent.”
“Joss-sticks?” said Poiccart quickly.
“That’s what it was!” said the detective. “Like incense, yet not like
it. I knelt down and listened at the grating, and I’ll swear that I
heard voices. They were very faint.”
“Men’s?”
“No, women’s.”
“Could you see anything?”
“No, sir, it was a blind ventilator; there was probably a shaft
there—in fact, I’m sure there was, because I pushed a stone through one
of the holes and heard it drop some distance down.”
“There may be an underground room there,” said Poiccart, “and somebody’s
burnt joss-sticks to sweeten the atmosphere.”
“Under the factory? It’s not in the plans of the building. I’ve had them
from the surveyor’s office and examined them,” said George, “although
surveyors’ plans aren’t infallible. A man like Oberzohn would not
hesitate to break so unimportant a thing as a building law!”
Leon came in at that moment, heard the story and was in complete
agreement with Poiccart’s theory.
“I wondered at the time we saw the plans whether we ought to accept that
as conclusive,” he said. “The store was built at the end of 1914, when
architects and builders took great liberties and pleaded the exigencies
of the war.”
Digby went on with his story.
“I was going back to the barge to get past the water-gate, but I saw the
old man coming down the steps of the house, so I climbed the wall, and
very glad I was that I’d shifted that broken glass, or I should never
have got over.”
Manfred pulled his watch from his pocket with a frown. They had lost
nearly an hour of precious time with their inquiries in Chester Square.
“I hope we’re not too late,” he said ominously. “Now, Leon . . .”
But Leon had gone down the stairs in three strides.
_Chapter XXX_ _Joan a Prisoner_
DAZED with grief, not knowing, not seeing, not caring, not daring to
think, Joan suffered herself to be led quickly into the obscurity of the
side-street, and did not even realize that Oberzohn’s big limousine had
drawn up by the sidewalk.
“Get in,” said the woman harshly.
Joan was pushed through the door and guided to a seat by somebody who
was already in the machine.
She collapsed in a corner moaning as the door slammed and the car began
to move.
“Where are we going? Let me get back to him!”
“The gracious lady will please restrain her grief,” said a hateful
voice, and she swung round and stared unseeingly to the place whence the
voice had come.
The curtains of the car had been drawn; the interior was as black as
pitch.
“You—you beast!” she gasped. “It’s you, is it? . . . Gurther! You
murdering beast!”
She struck at him feebly, but he caught her wrist.
“The gracious lady will most kindly restrain her grief,” he said
suavely. “The Herr Newton is not dead. It was a little trick in order to
baffle certain interferers.”
“You’re lying, you’re lying!” she screamed, struggling to escape from
those hands of steel. “He’s dead! You know he’s dead, and you killed
him! You snake-man!”
“The gracious lady must believe me,” said Gurther earnestly. They were
passing through a public part of the town and at any moment a policeman
might hear her shrieks. “If Herr Newton had not pretended to be hurt, he
would have been arrested . . . he follows in the next car.”
“You’re trying to quieten me,” she said, “but I won’t be quiet.”
And then a hand came over her mouth and pressed her head back against
the cushions. She struggled desperately, but two fingers slid up her
face and compressed her nostrils. She was being suffocated. She
struggled to free herself from the tentacle hold of him, and then
slipped into unconsciousness. Gurther felt the straining figure go limp
and removed his hands. She did not feel the prick of the needle on her
wrist, though the drugging was clumsily performed in the darkness and in
a car that was swaying from side to side. He felt her pulse, his long
fingers pressed her throat and felt the throb of the carotid artery;
propping her so that she could not fall, Herr Gurther sank back
luxuriously into a corner of the limousine and lit a cigar.
The journey was soon over. In a very short time they were bumping down
Hangman’s Lane and turned so abruptly into the factory grounds that one
of the mudguards buckled to the impact of the gate-post.
* * * * *
It must have been two hours after the departure of her companion, when
Mirabelle, lying on her bed, half dozing, was wakened by her book
slipping to the floor, and sat up quickly to meet the apprising stare of
the man whom, of all men in the world, she disliked most cordially. Dr.
Oberzohn had come noiselessly into the room and under his arm was a pile
of books.
“I have brought these for you,” he said, in his booming voice, and
stacked them neatly on the table.
She did not answer.
“Novels of a frivolous kind, such as you will enjoy,” he said,
unconscious of offence. “I desired the seller of the books to pick them
for me. Fiction stories of adventure and of amorous exchanges. These
will occupy your mind, though to me they would be the merest rubbish and
nonsense.”
She stood silently, her hands clasped behind her, watching him. He was
neater than usual, had resumed the frock-coat he wore the day she had
first met him—how long ago that seemed!—his collar was stiffly white,
and if his cravat was more gorgeous than is usually seen in a man
correctly arrayed, it had the complementary value of being new.
He held in his hand a small bouquet of flowers tightly packed, their
stems enclosed in silver foil, a white paper frill supplying an
additional expression of gentility.
“These are for you.” He jerked out his hand towards her.
Mirabelle looked at the flowers, but did not take them. He seemed in no
way disconcerted, either by her silence, or by the antagonism which her
attitude implied, but, laying the flowers on top of the books, he
clasped his hands before him and addressed her. He was nervous, for some
reason; the skin of his forehead was furrowing and smoothing with
grotesque rapidity. She watched the contortions, fascinated.
“To every man,” he began, “there comes a moment of domestic allurement.
Even to the scientific mind, absorbed in its colossal problems, there is
this desire for family life and for the haven of rest which is called
marriage.”
He paused, as though he expected her to offer some comment upon his
platitude.
“Man alone,” he went on, when she did not speak, “has established an
artificial and unnatural convention that, at a certain age, a man should
marry a woman of that same age. Yet it has been proved by history that
happy marriages are often between a man who is in the eyes of the world
old, and a lady who is youthful.”
She was gazing at him in dismay. Was he proposing to her? The idea was
incredible, almost revolting. He must have read in her face the thoughts
that were uppermost in her mind, the loathing, the sense of repulsion
which filled her, yet he went on, unabashed:
“I am a man of great riches. You are a girl of considerable poverty. But
because I saw you one day in your poor house, looking, gracious lady,
like a lily growing amidst foul weeds, my heart went out to you, and for
this reason I brought you to London, spending many thousands of pounds
in order to give myself the pleasure of your company.”
“I don’t think you need go any farther, Dr. Oberzohn,” she said quietly,
“if you’re proposing marriage, as I think you are.”
He nodded emphatically.
“Such is my honourable intention,” he said.
“I would never marry you in any circumstances,” she said. “Not even if I
had met you under the happiest conditions. The question of your
age”—she nearly added “and of your appearance,” but her natural
kindness prevented that cruel thrust, though it would not have hurt him
in the slightest degree—“has nothing whatever to do with my decision. I
do not even like you, and have never liked you, Mr. Oberzohn.”
“Doctor,” he corrected, and in spite of her woeful plight she could have
laughed at this insistence upon the ceremonial title.
“Young miss, I cannot woo you in the way of my dear and sainted brother,
who was all for ladies and had a beautiful manner.”
She was amazed to hear that he had a brother at all—and it was almost a
relief to know that he was dead.
“Martyred, at the hands of wicked and cunning murderers, slain in his
prime by the assassin’s pistol . . .” His voice trembled and broke. “For
that sainted life I will some day take vengeance.”
It was not wholly curiosity that impelled her to ask who killed him.
“Leon Gonsalez.” The words in his lips became the grating of a file.
“Killed . . . murdered! And even his beautiful picture destroyed in that
terrible fire. Had he saved that, my heart would have been soft towards
him.” He checked himself, evidently realizing that he was getting away
from the object of his call. “Think over this matter, young lady. Read
the romantic books and the amorous books, and then perhaps you will not
think it is so terrible a fate to drift at moonlight through the canals
of Venice, with the moon above and the gondoliers.”
He wagged his head sentimentally.
“There is no book which will change my view, doctor,” she said. “I
cannot understand why you propose such an extraordinary course, but I
would rather die than marry you.”
His cold eyes filled her with a quick terror.
“There are worse things than death, which is but sleep—many worse
things, young miss. To-morrow I shall come for you, and we will go into
the country, where you will say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ according to my desire. I
have many—what is the word?—certificates for marriage, for I am too
clever a man to leave myself without alternatives.”
(This was true; he had residential qualifications in at least four
counties, and at each he had given legal notice of his intended
marriage.)
“Not to-morrow or any other day. Nothing would induce me.”
His eyebrows went almost to the top of his head.
“So!” he said, with such significance that her blood ran cold. “There
are worse men than the Herr Doktor,”—he raised a long finger
warningly,—“terrible men with terrible minds. You have met Gurther?”
She did not answer this.
“Yes, yes, you danced with him. A nice man, is he not, to ladies? Yet
this same Gurther . . . I will tell you something.”
He seated himself on a corner of the table and began talking, until she
covered her ears with her hands and hid her white face from him.
“They would have killed him for that,” he said, when her hands came
down, “but Gurther was too clever, and the poor German peasants too
stupid. You shall remember that, shall you not?”
He did not wait for her answer. With a stiff bow he strutted out of the
room and up the stairs. There came the thud of the trap falling and the
inevitable rumble of the concrete barrel.
He had some work to do, heavy work for a man who found himself panting
when he climbed stairs. And though four of his best and most desperate
men were waiting in his parlour drinking his whisky and filling the
little room with their rank cigar smoke, he preferred to tackle this
task which he had already begun as soon as night fell, without their
assistance or knowledge.
On the edge of the deep hole in his grounds, where the wild convolvulus
grew amidst the rusty corners of discarded tins and oil barrels, was a
patch of earth that yielded easily to the spade. When the factory had
been built, the depression had been bigger, but the builders had filled
in half the hole with the light soil that they had dug out of the
factory’s foundations.
He took his spade, which he had left in the factory, and, skirting the
saucer-shaped depression, he reached a spot where a long trench had
already been dug. Taking off his fine coat and waistcoat, unfastening
cravat and collar and carefully depositing them upon the folded coat, he
continued his work, stopping now and again to wipe his streaming brow.
He had to labour in the dark, but this was no disadvantage; he could
feel the edges of the pit. In an hour the top of the trench was level
with his chin, and, stooping to clear the bottom of loose soil, he
climbed up with greater difficulty than he had anticipated, and it was
only after the third attempt that he managed to reach the top, out of
breath and short of temper.
He dressed again, and with his electric torch surveyed the pit he had
made and grunted his satisfaction.
He was keenly sensitive to certain atmospheres, and needed no
information about the change which had come over his subordinates. In
their last consultation Gurther had been less obsequious, had even
smoked in his presence without permission—absent-mindedly, perhaps, but
the offence was there. And Dr. Oberzohn, on the point of smacking his
face for his insolence, heard a warning voice within himself which had
made his hand drop back at his side. Or was it the look he saw on
Gurther’s face? The man was beyond the point where he could discipline
him in the old Junker way. For although Dr. Oberzohn contemned all
things Teutonic, he had a sneaking reverence for the military caste of
that nation.
He left the spade sticking in a heap of turned earth. He would need that
again, and shortly. Unless Gurther failed. Somehow he did not anticipate
a failure in this instance. Mr. Monty Newton had not yet grown
suspicious, would not be on his guard. His easy acceptance of the
theatre ticket showed his mind in this respect.
The four men in his room rose respectfully as he came in. The air was
blue with smoke, and Lew Cuccini offered a rough apology. He had been
released that morning from detention, for Meadows had found it difficult
to frame a charge which did not expose the full activities of the
police, and the part they were playing in relation to Mirabelle
Leicester. Evidently Cuccini had been reproaching, in his own peculiar
way and in his own unprincipled language, the cowardice of his three
companions, for the atmosphere seemed tense when the doctor returned.
Yet, as was subsequently proved, the appearance of discord was
deceptive; might indeed have been staged for their host’s benefit.
“I’ve just been telling these birds——” began Cuccini.
“Oh, shut up, Lew!” growled one of his friends. “If that crazy man
hadn’t been shouting your name, we should not have gone back! He’d have
wakened the dead. And our orders were to retire at the first serious
sign of an alarm. That’s right, doctor, isn’t it?”
“Sure it’s right,” said the doctor blandly. “Never be caught—that is a
good motto. Cuccini was caught.”
“And I’d give a year of my life to meet that Dago again,” said Cuccini,
between his teeth.
He was delightfully inconsistent, for he came into the category, having
been born in Milan, and had had his early education in the Italian
quarter of Hartford, Connecticut.
“He’d have tortured me too . . . he was going to put lighted wax matches
between my fingers——”
“And then you spilled it!” accused one of the three hotly. “You talk
about us bolting!”
“Silence!” roared the doctor. “This is unseemly! I have forgiven
everything. That shall be enough for you all. I will hear no other
word.”
“Where is Gurther?” Cuccini asked the question.