Читать книгу Number 70, Berlin: A Story of Britain's Peril - Le Queux William - Страница 6

Three days had passed.

The coroner’s inquiry had been duly held into the death of Dr Jerome Jerrold, and medical evidence, including that of the deceased’s friend, Sir Houston Bird, had been called. This evidence showed conclusively that Sir Houston had been right in his conjecture, from the convulsed appearance of the body and other signs, that poor Jerrold had died of poisoning by strychnine. Therefore the proceedings were brief, and a verdict was returned of “Suicide while temporarily insane.”

No mention was made of the sealed letter left with Mr Trustram, for in a case of that distressing nature the coroner is always ready to make the inquiry as short as possible.

Jack Sainsbury, who had been granted leave by Mr Charlesworth, the managing-director, to attend the inquest upon his friend, returned to the City in a very perturbed state of mind.

He sat at his desk on that grey December afternoon, unable to attend to the correspondence before him, unable to fix his mind upon business, unable to understand the subtle ramifications of the cleverly conceived and dastardly plot, the key of which he had discovered by those few words he had overheard between the Chairman of the Board and his close friend, the great Lewin Rodwell.

He was wondering whether his dead friend’s allegation that Rodwell was none other than Ludwig Heitzman was really the truth. Sir Houston Bird had promised to institute inquiry at the Alien department of the Home Office, yet, only that day he had heard that the official of whom inquiry must be made actually bore a German name. The taint of the Teuton seemed, alas! over everything, notwithstanding the public resentment apparent up and down the whole country, and the formation of leagues and unions to combat the activity of the enemy in our midst.

Jack Sainsbury disagreed with the verdict of suicide. Jerome Jerrold was surely not the man to take his own life by swallowing strychnine. Yet why had he left behind that puzzling and mysterious message which Charles Trustram, having given his word of honour to his friend, refused to be opened for another year?

The will had been found deposited with his solicitor – a will which left the sum of eighteen-odd thousand pounds to “my friend and assistant in many confidential matters, Mr John Sainsbury, of Heath Street, Hampstead.”

As far as it went that was gratifying to Jack. It rendered him independent of the Ochrida Copper Corporation, and the strenuous “driving-power,” as it is termed in the City, of Charlesworth, the sycophant of Sir Boyle Huntley and his fellow directors. The whole office knew that Huntley and Rodwell, brought in during days of peace “to reorganise the Company upon a sound financial basis,” were gradually getting all the power into their own hands, as they had done in other companies. The lives of that pair were one huge money-getting adventure.

In the office strange things were whispered. But Jack alone knew the truth.

The most irritating fact to him was that Jerome Jerrold, just as he had discovered Rodwell’s birth and masquerading, had died.