The Complete Four Just Men (65 page)

On the second day of his incarceration the Governor of Baxeter Gaol received a message.

Six star men transferred to you will arrive at Baxeter Station 10.15. Arrange for prison van to meet.

It was signed ‘Imprison’, which is the telegraphic address of the Prison Commissioner.

It happened that just about then there had been a mutiny in one of the London prisons, and the deputy governor, beyond expressing his surprise as to the lateness of the hour, arranged for the prison van to be at Baxeter station yard to meet the batch of transfers.

The 10.15 from London drew into the station, and the warders waiting on the platform walked slowly down the train looking for a carriage with drawn blinds But there were no prisoners on the train, and there was no other train due until four o’clock in the morning.

‘They must have missed it,’ said one of the warders. ‘All right, Jerry,’ this to the driver. He slammed the door of the Black Maria which had been left open, and the van lumbered out of the station yard.

Slowly up the slope and through the black prison gates: the van turned through another gate to the left, a gate set at right angles to the first, and stopped before the open doors of a brick shed isolated from the prison.

The driver grumbled as he descended and unharnessed his horses.

‘I shan’t put the van in the shed tonight,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ll get some of the prisoners to do it tomorrow.’

‘That will be all right,’ said the warder, anxious to get away.

The horses went clopping from the place of servitude, there was a snap of locks as the gates were closed, and then silence.

So far all was well from one man’s point of view. A roaring south-wester was blowing down from Dartmoor round the angles of the prison, and wailing through the dark, deserted yard.

Suddenly there was a gentle crack, and the door of the Black Maria opened. Leon had discovered that his key could not open yet another door. He had slipped into the prison van when the warders were searching the train, and had found some difficulty in getting out again. No men were coming from London, as he knew, but he was desperately in need of that Black Maria. It had piloted him to the very spot he wished to go. He listened. There was no sound save the wind, and he walked cautiously to a little glass-covered building, and plied his master key. The lock turned, and he was inside a small recess where the prisoners were photographed. Through another door and he was in a store-room. Beyond that lay the prison wards. He had questioned wisely and knew where the remand cells were to be found.

A patrol would pass soon, he thought, looking at his watch, and he waited till he heard footsteps go by the door. The patrol would now be traversing a wing at right angles to the ward, and he opened the door and stepped into the deserted hall. He heard the feet of the patrol man receding and went softly up a flight of iron stairs to the floor above and along the cell doors. Presently he saw the man he wanted. His key went noiselessly into the cell door and turned. Doctor Twenden blinked up at him from his wooden bed.

‘Get up,’ whispered Gonsalez, ‘and turn round.’

Numbly the doctor obeyed.

Leon strapped his hands behind him and took him by the arm, stopping to lock the cell door. Out through the store-room into the little glass place, then before the doctor knew what had happened, he slipped a large silk handkerchief over his mouth.

‘Can you hear me?’

The man nodded.

‘Can you feel that?’

‘That’ was a something sharp that stabbed his left arm. He tried to wriggle his arm away.

‘You will recognise the value of a hypodermic syringe, you better than any,’ said the voice of Gonsalez in his ear. ‘You murdered an innocent woman, and you evaded the law. A few days ago you spoke of the Four Just Men. I am one of them!’

The man stared into the darkness at a face he could not see.

‘The law missed you, but we have not missed you. Can you understand?’

The head nodded more slowly now.

Leon released his grip of the man’s arm, and felt him slipping to the floor. There he lay whilst Gonsalez went into the shed, pulled up the two traps that hung straightly in the pit until they clicked together, and slipped the end of the rope he had worn round his waist over the beam . . .

Then he went back to the unconscious man.

In the morning when the warders came to the coach house, which was also the execution shed, they saw a taut rope. The track was open, and a man was at the end of the rope, very still. A man who had escaped the gallows of the law, but had died at the hands of justice.

THE END

The Three Just Men

Chapter 1

The firm of Oberzohn

‘£520 p.a. Wanted at once, Laboratory Secretary (lady). Young; no previous experience required, but must have passed recognized examination which included physics and inorganic (elementary) chemistry. Preference will be given to one whose family has some record in the world of science. Apply by letter, Box 9754,
Daily Megaphone
. If applicant is asked to interview advertiser, fare will be paid from any station within a hundred and fifty miles of London.’

A good friend sent one of the issues containing this advertisement to Heavytree Farm and circled the announcement with a blue pencil.

Mirabelle Leicester found the newspaper on the hall settee when she came in from feeding the chickens, and thought that it had been sent by the Alington land agent who was so constantly calling her attention to the advertisers who wished to buy cheap farms. It was a practice of his. She had the feeling that he resented her presence in the country, and was anxious to replace her with a proprietor less poverty-stricken.

Splitting the wrapper with a dusty thumb, she turned naturally to the advertisement pages, having the agent in mind. Her eyes went rapidly down the ‘Wanted to Buy’ column. There were several ‘gentlemen requiring small farm in good district’, but none that made any appeal to her, and she was wondering why the parsimonious man had spent tuppence-ha’penny on postage and paper when the circled paragraph caught her eye.

‘Glory!’ said Mirabelle, her red lips parted in excited wonder.

Aunt Alma looked up from her press-cutting book, startled as Mirabelle dashed in.

‘Me!’ she said dramatically, and pointed a finger at the advertisement. ‘I am young – I have no experience – I have my higher certificate – and daddy was something in the world of science. And, Alma, we are exactly a hundred and forty miles from London town!’

‘Dear me!’ said Aunt Alma, a lady whose gaunt and terrifying appearance was the terror of tradesmen and farm hands, although a milder woman never knitted stockings.

‘Isn’t it wonderful? This solves all our problems. We leave the farm to Mark, open the flat in Bloomsbury . . . we can afford one or even two theatres a week . . . ’

Alma read the announcement for the second time.

‘It seems good,’ she said with conventional caution, ‘though I don’t like the idea of your working, my dear. Your dear father . . . ’

‘Would have whisked me up to town and I should have had the job by tonight,’ said Mirabelle definitely.

But Alma wasn’t sure. London was full of pitfalls and villainy untold lurked in its alleys and dark passages. She herself never went to London except under protest.

‘I was there years ago when those horrible Four Just Men were about, my dear,’ she said, and Mirabelle, who loved her, listened to the oft-told story. ‘They terrorized London. One couldn’t go out at night with the certainty that one would come back again alive . . . and to think that they have had a free pardon! It is simply encouraging crime.’

‘My dear,’ said Mirabelle (and this was her inevitable rejoinder), ‘they weren’t criminals at all. They were very rich men who gave up their lives to punishing those whom the law let slip through its greasy old fingers. And they were pardoned for the intelligence work they did in the war – one worked for three months in the German War Office – and there aren’t four at all: there are only three. I’d love to meet them – they must be dears!’

When Aunt Alma made a grimace, she was hideous. Mirabelle averted her eyes.

‘Anyway, they are not in London now, darling,’ she said, ‘and you will be able to sleep soundly at nights.’

‘What about the snake?’ asked Miss Alma Goddard ominously.

Now if there was one thing which no person contemplating a visit to London wished to be reminded about, it was the snake.

Six million people rose from their beds every morning, opened their newspapers and looked for news of the snake. Eighteen daily newspapers never passed a day without telling their readers that the scare was childish and a shocking commentary on the neurotic tendencies of the
age;
they
also published,
at regular intervals,
intimate particulars of the black mamba, its habits and its peculiar deadliness, and maintained quite a large staff of earnest reporters to ‘work on the story’.

The black mamba, most deadly of all the African snakes, had escaped from the Zoo one cold and foggy night in March. And there should have been the end of him – a three-line paragraph, followed the next day by another three-line paragraph detailing how the snake was found dead on the frozen ground – no mamba could live under a temperature of 75 Fahrenheit. But the second paragraph never appeared. On the 2nd of April a policeman found a man huddled up in a doorway in Orme Place. He proved to be a well-known and apparently wealthy stockbroker, named Emmett. He was dead. In his swollen face were found two tiny punctured wounds, and the eminent scientist who was called into consultation gave his opinion that the man had died from snake-bite: an especially deadly snake. The night was chilly; the man had been to a theatre alone. His chauffeur stated that he had left his master in the best of spirits on the doorstep. The key found in the dead man’s hand showed that he was struck before the car had turned. When his affairs were investigated he was found to be hopelessly insolvent. Huge sums drawn from his bank six months before had disappeared.

London had scarcely recovered from this shocking surprise when the snake struck again. This time in the crowded street, and choosing a humble victim, though by no means a blameless one. An ex-convict named Sirk, a homeless down-and-out, was seen to fall by a park-keeper near the Achilles statue in Hyde Park. By the time the keeper reached him he was dead. There was no sign of a snake – nobody was near him. This time the snake had made his mark on the wrist – two little punctured wounds near together.

A month later the third man fell a victim. He was a clerk of the Bank of England, a reputable man who was seen to fall forward in a subway train, and, on being removed to hospital, was discovered to have died – again from snake-bite.

So that the snake became a daily figure of fear, and its sinister fame spread even so far afield as Heavytree Farm.

‘Stuff!’ said Mirabelle, yet with a shiver. ‘Alma, I wish you wouldn’t keep these horrors in your scrapbook.’

‘They are Life,’ said Alma soberly, and then: ‘When d’you take up your appointment?’ she asked, and the girl laughed.

‘We will make a beginning right away – by applying for the job,’ she said practically. ‘And you needn’t start packing your boxes for a very long time!’

An hour later she intercepted the village postman and handed him a letter.

And that was the beginning of the adventure which involved so many lives and fortunes, which brought the Three Just men to the verge of dissolution, and one day was to turn the heart of London into a battlefield.

Two days after the letter was dispatched came the answer, typewritten, surprisingly personal, and in places curiously worded. There was an excuse for that, for the heading on the note-paper was

O
BERZOHN &
S
MITTS

Merchants and Exporters

On the third day Mirabelle Leicester stepped down from a ’bus in the City Road and entered the unimposing door of Romance, and an inquisitive chauffeur who saw her enter followed and overtook her in the lobby.

‘Excuse me, madame – are you Mrs Carter?’

Mirabelle did not look like Mrs Anybody.

‘No,’ she said, and gave her name.

‘But you’re the lady from Hereford . . . you live with your mother at Telford Park . . . ?’

The man was so agitated that she was not annoyed by his insistence. Evidently he had instructions to meet a stranger and was fearful of missing her.

‘You have made a mistake – I live at Heavytree Farm, Daynham – with my aunt.’

‘Is she called Carter?’

She laughed.

‘Miss Alma Goddard – now are you satisfied?’

‘Then you’re not the lady, miss; I’m waiting to pick her up.’

The chauffeur withdrew apologetically.

The girl waited in the ornate ante-room for ten minutes before the pale youth with the stiff, upstanding hair and the huge rimless spectacles returned. His face was large, expressionless, unhealthy. Mirabelle had noted as a curious circumstance that every man she had seen in the office was of the same type. Big heavy men who gave the impression that they had been called away from some very urgent work to deal with the triviality of her inquiries. They were speechless men who glared solemnly at her through thick lenses and nodded or shook their heads according to the requirements of the moment. She expected to meet foreigners in the offices of Oberzohn & Smitts; German, she imagined, and was surprised later to discover that both principals and staff were in the main Swedish.

The pale youth, true to the traditions of the house, said nothing: he beckoned her with a little jerk of his head, and she went into a larger room, where half a dozen men were sitting at half a dozen desks and writing furiously, their noses glued short-sightedly to the books and papers which engaged their attention. Nobody looked up as she passed through the waist-high gate which separated the caller from the staff. Hanging upon the wall between two windows was a map of Africa with great green patches. In one corner of the room were stacked a dozen massive ivory tusks, each bearing a hanging label. There was the model of a steamship in a case on a window-ledge, and on another a crudely carved wooden idol of native origin.

The youth stopped before a heavy rosewood door and knocked. When a deep voice answered, he pushed open the door and stood aside to let her pass. It was a gigantic room – that was the word which occurred to her as most fitting, and the vast space of it was emphasized by the almost complete lack of furniture. A very small ebony writing-table, two very small chairs and a long and narrow black cupboard fitted into a recess were all the furnishings she could see. The high walls were covered with a golden paper. Four bright-red rafters ran across the black ceiling – the floor was completely covered with a deep purple carpet. It seemed that there was a rolled map above the fireplace – a long thin cord came down from the cornice and ended in a tassel within reach.

The room, with its lack of appointments, was so unexpected a vision that the girl stood staring from walls to roof, until she observed her guide making urgent signs, and then she advanced towards the man who stood with his back to the tiny fire that burnt in the silver fireplace.

He was tall and grey; her first impression was of an enormously high forehead. The sallow face was long, and nearer at hand, she saw, covered by innumerable lines and furrows. She judged him to be about fifty until he spoke, and then she realized that he was much older.

‘Miss Mirabelle Leicester?’

His English was not altogether perfect; the delivery was queerly deliberate and he lisped slightly.

‘Pray be seated. I am Dr Eruc Oberzohn. I am not German. I admire the Germans, but I am Swedish. You are convinced?’

She laughed, and when Mirabelle Leicester laughed, less susceptible men than Dr Eruc Oberzohn had forgotten all other business. She was not very tall – her slimness and her symmetrical figure made her appear so. She had in her face and in her clear grey eyes something of the countryside; she belonged to the orchards where the apple-blossom lay like heavy snow upon the bare branches; to the cold brooks that ran noisily under hawthorn hedges. The April sunlight was in her eyes and the springy velvet of meadows everlastingly under her feet.

To Dr Oberzohn she was a girl in a blue tailor-made costume. He saw that she wore a little hat with a straight brim that framed her face just above the lift of her curved eyebrows. A German would have seen these things, being a hopeless sentimentalist. The doctor was not German; he loathed their sentimentality.

‘Will you be seated? You have a scientific training?’

Mirabelle shook tier head.

‘I haven’t,’ she confessed ruefully, ‘but I’ve passed in the subjects you mentioned in your advertisement.’

‘But your father – he was a scientist?’

She nodded gravely.

‘But not a great scientist,’ he stated. ‘England and America do not produce such men. Ah, tell me not of your Kelvins, Edisons, and Newtons! They were incomplete, dull men, ponderous men – the fire was not there.’

She was somewhat taken aback, but she was amused as well. His calm dismissal of men who were honoured in the scientific world was so obviously sincere.

‘Now talk to me of yourself.’ He seated himself in the hard, straight-backed chair by the little desk.

‘I’m afraid there is very little I can tell you, Dr Oberzohn. I live with my aunt at Heavytree Farm in Gloucester, and we have a flat in Doughty Court. My aunt and I have a small income – and I think that is all.’

‘Go on, please,’ he commanded. ‘Tell me of your sensations when you had my letter – I desire to know your mind. That is how I form all opinions; that is how I made my immense fortune. By the analysis of the mind.’

She had expected many tests; an examination in elementary science; a typewriting test possibly (she dreaded this most); but she never for one moment dreamt that the flowery letter asking her to call at the City Road offices of Oberzohn & Smitts would lead to an experiment in psycho-analysis.

‘I can only tell you that I was surprised,’ she said, and the tightening line of her mouth would have told him a great deal if he were the student of human nature he claimed to be. ‘Naturally the salary appeals to me – ten pounds a week is such a high rate of pay that I cannot think I am qualified – ’

‘You are qualified.’ His harsh voice grew more strident as he impressed this upon her. ‘I need a laboratory secretary. You are qualified’ – he hesitated, and then went on – ‘by reason of distinguished parentage. Also – ’ he hesitated again for a fraction of a second – ‘also because of general education. Your duties shall commence soon!’ He waved a long, thin hand to the door in the corner of the room. ‘You will take your position at once,’ he said.