The Joker - Edgar Wallace (good book club books TXT) 📗
- Author: Edgar Wallace
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Book online «The Joker - Edgar Wallace (good book club books TXT) 📗». Author Edgar Wallace
commercial traveller who had been detained overnight and was probably
looking forward to the comforts of Plymouth, comprised the list. It was
within a minute of starting time, and he was beginning to think that he
had wasted his time getting up so early, when he saw two men walk on to
the platform.
One was a warder, and the other a thin man in an ill-fitting blue suit.
The warder disappeared into the booking-office and came back with a
ticket, which he handed to the other.
‘So long, Ingle!’ said the officer, and held out his hand, which the
ex-convict took grudgingly.
Ingle stepped into the carriage and was turning to shut the door when Elk
followed him and the recognition was immediate. Into the keen eyes of
Arthur Ingle came a look of deep suspicion.
‘Hallo! What do you want?’ he asked harshly.
‘Why, bless my life, if it isn’t Ingle!’ said Elk with a gasp. ‘Well,
well, well! It doesn’t seem five years ago—’
‘What do you want?’ asked Ingle again.
‘Me? Nothing! I’ve been up to the prison making a few inquiries about a
friend of one of those mocking birds, but you know what they are—it was
love’s labour lost, so to speak,’ said Elk, lighting a cigar and offering
the case to his companion.
Ingle took the brown cylinder, smelt it and, biting off the end savagely,
accepted the light which the detective held for him. By this time the
train was moving and they were free from any possibility of interruption.
‘Let me see: I heard something about you the other day… What was it?’ Mr
Elk held his forehead, a picture of perplexity. ‘I’ve got it!’ he said.
‘There was a burglary at your flat.’
The cigar dropped from the man’s hand.
‘A burglary?’ he said shrilly. ‘What was stolen?’
‘Somebody opened the safe in your locker room—’
Ingle sprang to his feet, his teeth bared, his eyes glaring. ‘The safe!’
He almost screamed the words. ‘Opened the safe—damn them! They’re not
satisfied with sending me to five years of this hell, but they want to
catch me again, do they… ?’
Elk let him rave on until, in his rage, the man’s voice sank to a hoarse
rattle of sound.
‘I hope you didn’t lose any money?’
‘Money!’ snarled the man. ‘Do you think I’m the kind who puts money in a
safe? You know what I lost!’ He pointed an accusing finger at the
detective. ‘You fellows did it! So that’s why you’re here, eh? A prison
gate arrest, is it?’
‘My dear, good man!’ Elk was pained. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking
about! You’re no more under arrest than I am. You could walk out of that
door as free as the air, if the train wasn’t moving.’ And then he asked:
‘What did they pinch?’
It was a long time before the man recovered himself. ‘If you don’t know
I’m not going to tell you,’ he said. ‘Some day—’ He ground his teeth and
in his eyes glared; the fires of fanaticism. ‘You, and the like of you,
call me a thief!’ His voice rose again as he talked rapidly. ‘You branded
me and put me into prison—segregated me from my kind… a pariah, a
leper! For what? For skimming off a little of the stolen cream! For
taking a little of the money wrested from sweating bodies and breaking
hearts! It was mine—mine!’ He struck his chest with a bony fist, his
eyes blazing. ‘The money belonged to me—to my fellows, to those men
there!’ He pointed back to where, beyond the brow of a rise, lay the grim
prison building. ‘I took it from those fat and greasy men and I’m glad of
it! One jewel less for their horrible women; one motor-car fewer for
their slaves to clean!’
‘Great idea,’ murmured Elk sympathetically.
‘You! What are you? The lackey of a class,’ sneered Ingle. ‘The hired
torturer—the prison-feeder!’
‘Quite right,’ murmured Elk, listening with closed eyes.
‘If they found those papers they’ve something to think about—do you
hear?—something to spoil their night’s sleep! And if there is sedition
in them I’m willing to go back to Princetown.’
Elk opened his eyes quickly. ‘Oh, was that what it was?’ he asked,
disappointed. ‘Revolution stuff?’
The man nodded curtly.
‘I thought it was something worth while!’ said Elk, annoyed. ‘Silly idea
though, isn’t it. Ingle?’
‘To you, yes. To me, no,’ snapped the other. ‘I hate England! I hate the
English! I hate all middle-class people, the smirking self-satisfied
swine! I hated them when I was a starving actor and they sat in their
stalls with a sneer on their overfed faces… ‘ He choked.
‘There’s a lot to be said for fat people,’ mused Elk. ‘Now take
Harlow-though you wouldn’t call him a fat man.’
‘Harlow!’ scoffed the other. ‘Another of your moneyed gods!’ Evidently he
remembered something, for he stopped suddenly.
‘Moneyed gods—?’ suggested Elk.
‘I don’t know.’ The man shook his head. ‘He may not be what he seems. In
there’—he jerked his head backwards—‘they say he’s crook to his back
teeth! But he doesn’t rob the poor. He takes it in large slabs from the
fat men.’
‘If that’s so, I’ve nothing to say. He’s on the side of law and order,’
said Elk gently. ‘A man who hands out police stations as Christmas
presents can’t be wholly bad!’
By the time the train pulled into Plymouth station, Detective-Inspector
Elk was perfectly satisfied that there was nothing further to be learnt
from the man. He went to the post office and sent a telegram to Jim which
was short and expressive.
‘Revolution stuff. Nothing important.’
He was on the same train that carried Mr Ingle to London, but he did not
occupy the same compartment, except for half an hour after the train
flashed through Bath, when he strolled into the carriage and sat down by
the man’s side; and apparently he was welcome, for Ingle started talking.
‘Have you seen anything of my niece? Docs she know about the burglary? I
think you told me, but I was so angry that I can’t remember.’ And, when
Elk had given him the fullest particulars: ‘Harlow! Why did he come? He
met Aileen at Dartmoor, you say?’ He frowned and suddenly slapped his
knee. ‘I remember the fellow. He was sprawling in his car by the side of
the road when we came back from the field that day. So that was Harlow!
Does he know Aileen?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘They met at Dartmoor; that’s all I know.’ Ingle gave one of his
characteristic shrugs.
‘I suppose he’s running after her? She’s a pretty sort of girl. With that
type of man, money’s no object. She’s old enough to look after herself
without my assistance.’ So this Utopian left Aileen Rivers to her fate.
HE HAD wired from Plymouth asking her to call at the flat that night, and
she arrived just as he had finished a dinner he had cooked for himself.
‘Yes, I’ve heard about the burglary,’ he said, cutting short her
question. ‘They’ve got nothing that was worth a shilling to them, thank
God! Why did you call in the police?’
And then he had a shock.
‘Who else should I have called in—a doctor?’ she asked.
It was the first time he had met her in a period of freedom. She had had
her instructions to look after the flat, smuggled out of prison by a
discharged convict; and their talks during the brief visiting hours had
been mainly on business.
‘What does one usually do when a burglary is discovered?’ she asked. ‘I
sent for the police—of course I sent!’
He stared at her fiercely, but she did not flinch. It was his eyes which
dropped first.
‘I suppose it’s all right,’ he said, and then: ‘You know Harlow, don’t
you?’
‘I met him at Dartmoor, yes.’
‘A friend of yours?’
‘No more than you are,’ she said; and he had his second shock. ‘I’m not
going to quarrel with you, and I don’t see why you should want to be rude
to me,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve been useful, but I’ve not been ungenerous.
Harlow is a friend of yours—’
‘He called here on the night of the burglary to offer me a job,’ she
replied, without any visible evidence other rising anger. ‘I met him at
Princetown and he seemed to think that because of my relationship with
you, I should find it rather difficult to get employment.’
He muttered something under his breath which she did not catch and it
occurred to her that she had cowed this bullying little man, though she
had had no such intention.
‘I shall not want you any more.’ He took out his pocket-book, opened it
and extracted a banknote. ‘This is in the nature of a bonus,’ he said. ‘I
do not intend continuing your allowance.’
He expected her to refuse the money and he was not wrong.
‘Is that all?’ she asked. She did not attempt to take the note.
‘That is all.’
With a nod she turned and walked to the door. ‘The charwoman is coming
tonight to clean up,’ she said. ‘You had better make arrangements for her
to stay on—but I suppose you’ve already made your plans.’
Before he could reply, she was gone. He heard the street door slam after
her, took up the money and put it back in his case; and he was without
regret for, if the truth be told, Mr Arthur Ingle, despite the largeness
of his political views, was exceedingly mean.
There was a great deal for him to do: old boxes to open and sort, papers
and memoranda to retrieve from strange hiding-places. The seat of the big
settee on which Aileen had sat so often waiting for the cleaner to finish
her work, opened like a lid and here he had documents and, in a steel
box, books that might not have come to light even if the police had been
aware of the flat at the time of his arrest, an had made their usual
search.
Ingle was a man of wide political activities. No party man in the sense
that he found a party to match his own views; rather, he was one of those
violent and compelling thinkers who are unconsciously the nucleus of a
movement. His grudge against the world was a sincere one. He saw
injustice in the simplest consequences of cause and effect. His opinions
had not made him a thief; they had merely justified him in his disregard
for the law and his obligation to society.
Imprisonment had made him neither better nor worse, had merely confirmed
him in certain theories. Inconsistently, he loathed his prison
associates, men who had been unsupported by his high motives in their
felonies. The company of them was contamination. He hated the chaplain;
and only one inmate of that terrible place touched what in him still
remained tender. That was the old, blind horse who had his stable in the
prison, and whose sight seemed to have been destroyed by Providence that
he might not witness the degradation of the superior mammals that tramped
the exercise ring, or went trudging and shuffling up the hill and through
the gates.
He was the one man in the prison who was thankful when the cell door
closed on him and the key turned in the lock.
The foulness of these old lags, their talk, their boasts,
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