Читать книгу The Gallows of Chance - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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The return of the Right Honourable Sir Humphrey Rossiter to public life, after an absence of nearly two months, was a gratifying tribute to his personal popularity. Newspapers commented with satisfaction upon his convalescence. He received an ovation from both sides of the House when he took his seat in Parliament. The sympathy of society had all the time been with him during the very trying position in which he had been placed, owing to his well-known friendship with the wife of the man whose death sentence he had been compelled to sign. He had comported himself, it was felt, with dignity and propriety under very trying circumstances, and had never given cause for the slightest suspicion of scandal. Katherine Brandt who, during the last few years, had made such rapid strides in her profession that she was now one of the most popular actresses upon the stage, had been at school with his wife, and before the latter’s death they had been frequent companions. Her marriage had cut her off from a great many of her former friends. Her husband, Cecil Brandt, was rather a puzzle to every one. He was good-looking, evidently enormously wealthy, a good all-round athlete and an undoubted sportsman. She had met him on a voyage back from Australia, become engaged upon the boat and married immediately on her arrival in England. It had been a surprise to all her friends and a disappointment to many of her admirers. No one succeeded in really liking him. Brandt took a shoot in Hampshire and hunted in Leicestershire. He did most of the things men do exceedingly well, his manners were excellent and, although he seldom referred to the fact, it soon transpired that he had come over from Australia in one of the earlier units to serve in the war. His few connections spoke of him vaguely—Cecil had always been a rolling stone, they said. They had heard of him occasionally as engaged in various enterprises—most of them, it appeared, successful—in various quarters of the world. He was a silent man, however, who seldom spoke of his affairs, and men rather disliked him because they failed to understand him. Every one acknowledged his devotion to his wife, but that was discounted to some extent by his almost insane jealousy with regard to her. Rossiter, however, had never hesitated in his loyalty to both of them. He was an inevitable visitor at Katherine’s first nights and they were his frequent guests, both at his official residence and at the house in Chestow Square, which he had chiefly inhabited since his wife’s death. The position in which he was placed by Brandt’s crime was viewed everywhere with sympathy. Like many men who are without intimate friends, Rossiter was perhaps all the more popular on that account amongst society in general....

The first day of his reappearance was a keen pleasure to him. He spent a couple of hours at the Home Office, lunched at his club, where he was received with the utmost enthusiasm, took his seat in the House for two hours, and afterwards called at a florist’s and sent a box of roses to the Savoy Court. None of these activities, however, interfered with his original purpose. At half-past six he was seated in the private apartment of General Sir Harold Moore, the Chief Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard.

“This is a great honour, Sir Humphrey,” the latter observed, as he himself wheeled up an armchair for his distinguished visitor, poked the fire and pushed a box of cigarettes to the corner of his desk. “You ought to have sent for me, though. I could have come round to Whitehall at any time.”

“Quite so,” Sir Humphrey replied. “You are very kind, General, but I had a wish to see you here in the centre of your activities, and I think it would be just as well if you sent for Matterson. As a matter of fact, I am going to tell you a rather strange story, and I fancy that the dealing with it will come under his administration.”

“Criminal work, eh?” the Chief Commissioner remarked, as he took the receiver off his telephone instrument.

“Criminal work, without a doubt,” Rossiter assented.

Colonel Matterson, who occupied the position of Subcommissioner, obeyed his Chief’s summons promptly. He was a tall, thin man with a worn, thoughtful face, an almost immovable monocle and a pronounced habitude of silence. He greeted the visitor with interest and sank into a chair opposite to him.

“Sir Humphrey has something to tell us,” his Chief explained, “which might come under your jurisdiction. I sent for you to come up at his suggestion.”

“Very glad if I can be of any use,” Colonel Matterson murmured, with a curious glance across at the Home Secretary. He knew, as all the world knew, that the latter, during the last few months, had been in touch with the drama of life.

“You are used to strange stories, I expect, General,” Sir Humphrey began. “Here, I think, is one of the strangest you will have ever heard, and one upon which I require immediate action. I have asked myself over and over again,” he went on impressively, “whether it was possible that the whole thing might not have been one of those delusions heralding the nervous breakdown and brain fever from which I subsequently suffered. A flat and positive negation is the reply to myself and to either of you two gentlemen who might conceive the same idea. What I am going to tell you actually happened to me on the night of the nineteenth of December, on my way up from a few days’ shooting with Lord Edward Keynsham at Keynsham Hall near Fakenham.”

The two men composed themselves to listen, full of polite interest but without any idea of the shock in store for them. Sir Humphrey, in a still, precise tone which seemed nevertheless to convey all the time a thrill of the drama underneath, told his story. When he had finished, the Chief Commissioner had let his cigarette burn out unnoticed in the ash tray, and was staring at his visitor, his mouth a little open, in very undignified fashion. For several seconds he remained without speaking a word. Then he was very British and unofficial.

“Well, I’m damned!” he exclaimed.

“I very nearly was,” was Sir Humphrey’s ironic comment.

The Chief Commissioner touched his bell and, in accordance with his instructions to the uniformed orderly who answered it, Chief Inspector Smithers, a tall, melancholy-looking man with a slight, black moustache, sallow complexion and deep-set eyes, made prompt appearance. He had been writing a report, his fingers were ink-smudged and his hair tousled. The Subcommissioner, in obedience to a nod from his Chief, took up the questioning.

“Smithers,” he asked, “has there been any trouble down in Norfolk lately?”

The man shook his head.

“Not that I am aware of, sir,” he replied. “They are not very fond of applying for outside help in any of those eastern counties, but I must say they don’t often have occasion. Simpson and I were down on the Cawston business a few months ago, but that’s all fixed up now. There’s been nothing stirring there that I know about since the Holmes murder in Norwich. They found the man themselves and hanged him.”

“No rumour of any band of criminals roving about the place?”

“Not that I’ve heard of, sir.”

Colonel Matterson changed his line of enquiry.

“Have you had any report or information from any district of a gang of burglars or criminals who have adopted a white mask as a means of disguise?”

The Inspector shook his head with a somewhat superior smile.

“Never heard of anything of the sort, sir. Sounds more like these gentlemen who write the detective stories about us.”

“There are one or two ugly gangs working, as you know, Smithers,” the Subcommissioner went on. “One of them has been operating up Leeds way and another in the Manchester district. Is there any possibility of one of them having been in Norwich or thereabouts on December the nineteenth?”

The Inspector scarcely paused to reflect.

“Not the slightest, sir. Norfolk would be no county for them. There are no large manufacturing towns and no concentrated money. So far as we are concerned, Norfolk is one of our most peaceful counties.”

Matterson conferred for a minute or two with his Chief in undertones, then he turned around and once more addressed the Inspector.

“Smithers,” he instructed, “you had better return in half an hour and bring me up two men upon whom you can thoroughly rely—Simpson, I should think, for one. The choice of the other I leave to you. The three of you will have to go down to Norwich to-night upon a special mission which I will explain to you later. Make your preparations at once, if you please.”

The Inspector, who was to have been a very important fourth at a rubber of bridge that evening, and whose wife was expecting to be met at the theatre, saluted without change of countenance and withdrew. The Subcommissioner turned towards Rossiter.

“Smithers is one of the best men we have here,” he confided. “He has an unfailing memory and though he has had some tough cases to deal with, he seldom makes a mistake.”

“Seems an intelligent fellow,” Sir Humphrey commented. “Now, tell me, both of you, what do you think of my story?”

“I think it is one of the most amazing I ever heard outside the pages of fiction,” the Subcommissioner replied.

“If you had not been the narrator, Sir Humphrey,” his Chief observed, “I should have gone even further; I should have called it incredible.”

“Of course,” Colonel Matterson pointed out, “what happened, Sir Humphrey, as I daresay you have decided for yourself, is easy enough to grasp in its broad details. This fellow Brandt, although he made a very presentable appearance, was in with a queer crowd. We have had his name brought before us half a dozen times, for instance, in connection with Baccarat Club raids, and although he never absolutely found trouble, he had one or two narrow escapes. He was just the man who might have had friends and sympathisers amongst the criminal classes.”

“I do not believe,” Sir Humphrey declared, “that the men who got hold of me—the leaders, at any rate—belonged to the criminal classes at all. That is why I think you ought to be able to get hold of them without much difficulty. I know an educated voice when I hear it and I could swear that the man who appeared to be their leader was public school and Oxford. What puzzles me, when I allow myself to think of it at all, is where they got their details from. Everything was horribly accurate.”

“They must have got hold of a big house too,” the Chief Commissioner pointed out. “You don’t happen to know Norfolk well geographically, Sir Humphrey?”

“Unfortunately I don’t,” the latter regretted. “Keynsham Hall, as you will see by the map, is not far from Fakenham. When we left in the car, which was hired by telephone—your man will find out all about that, of course—we seemed to be going in the right direction, and that’s all I can say about it.”

“Was it a clear night?” Colonel Matterson enquired.

“There was a gale of wind blowing and the rain started before we had gone a mile,” Sir Humphrey replied. “I was pleasantly tired—Keynsham never overworks his guns, but we certainly had had a long day—so I buttoned up my coat, put my feet up on the opposite seat, leaned back and dozed. I had the impression that it was a large house to which I was taken, but I was blindfolded when I arrived at it and blindfolded when I left.”

“How long do you think you had been in the car?”

“Roughly I should say about three quarters of an hour.”

“After you got away,” the Subcommissioner continued, “how did they deal with you? Did you remain blindfolded?”

“They removed my bandage,” Rossiter answered, “just after we had passed through Royston, and from Royston to Barnet—where they bundled me out into the road about a hundred yards away from a taxicab stand—I sat with a revolver jabbed into my ribs and the arm of a very strong man through mine. They chose a quiet corner for getting rid of me. The bags and gun cases were taken out first, then they hustled me on to the path, and the car was gone like a flash.”

“Proof, if any were needed,” Matterson meditated, “that the chauffeur was on the job, anyway. Did you try to see the number?”

“I did, but it was one of those temporary plates. I happened to notice that because there has been so much fuss about them lately. There was another thing that struck me too. The car to all appearance was like a sort of limousine taxicab, but it must have had a wonderful engine. It went off at something like thirty miles an hour.”

“There should be no difficulty about tracing the car,” Matterson mused. “Smithers had better start from Keynsham and work from there. There is nothing more you can tell us that is likely to be useful.”

“Not a thing,” Sir Humphrey assured them, rising to his feet. “I shall always be within touch, if there are any questions you want to ask me. I’ll be getting along now, if you don’t mind. It has been a pretty long day for me.”

“You have told us the most remarkable story I have ever listened to,” General Moore confessed, as he walked with his visitor to the door. “I don’t want to appear too sanguine, but it seems to me that it should not be at all impossible of solution. What do you think of it, Matterson?”

“There may be legal difficulties about the indictment,” the latter replied, “but I think we ought to be able to get hold of the men within a week. I agree with Sir Humphrey—I do not think that we shall find they belong to the criminal classes at all. They were people of imagination, I’m sure of that. No one but people of our own class would have thought of attacking your nerves in that way. Of course, our difficulty may be that they may own up frankly, declare that they never meant to go to extremes, and insist upon it that it was simply a desperate effort to save a friend. In that case, I don’t know what class of assault the affair would come under.”

“My mind and body were both assaulted,” the Home Secretary declared, with a faint grimace of unpleasant reminiscence. “I will look up my old law books and see what we can do to them. For the moment—find me the miscreants. That is all I ask.”

“I shall feel that I ought to lose my stripes if I cannot do that,” the Subcommissioner replied rashly.