Читать книгу The Lion and the Lamb - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 7

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CANNON BALL LEM stood at the window and scowled down into the street. The girl, with a cigarette between her lips, joined him. They watched David's unhurried departure.

"A chauffeur—in livery!" the former exclaimed, turning aside to spit into his Chief's spittoon.

"Don't do that," the girl ordered, in a tone of repugnance. "Makes me sick."

Lem growled.

"Swanking about in his own motor car and wearing toff's clothes!"

"If you ask me," the girl observed, "I think that he is a toff. He behaves as though he had been used to that sort of thing all his life."

"Where did Ned Rattigan bring in word that he was staying?" Tottie Green demanded.

"One of these swanky hotels," Lem replied—"the Milan Court, up west. What I should like to know, Guv'nor," he went on earnestly, "is where did he get the money from? He hadn't got the price of a pint of beer when he joined up."

"Maybe he's on a confidence lay," Tottie Green suggested.

The girl shook her head.

"David isn't clever enough for that," she declared. "It would need some nerve too, just out of prison. You can take my word for it, I'm right. Joined us because he was a toff down on his luck. Why, you can tell from the way he talks and wears his clothes. If any of you buy a new suit, even Reuben, you look like gawks for the first few days."

"Gentleman David, eh?" Tottie Green murmured.

"Maybe you're right, girl. What I should like to know is, where does the money come from? It seems to me that some of it ought to belong to us."

"You should have left him to me to deal with," the girl remarked, throwing herself upon the couch. "Some of it probably would have done then. The last person who ought to have been here is Lem. That made him mad to start with— Who's this?"

They listened to the flying footsteps mounting the stairs, and wondered. They heard them without anxiety, for, in what was coming, there was nothing akin to the slow, ponderous footfall of authority.

"Some one in a hurry," the girl drawled.

The door was swiftly but silently opened and closed. The young man Reuben entered. He stood on the threshold for a minute, sobbing for lack of breath, glancing eagerly around. Then he closed the door behind him and came farther into the room—a lean, cadaverous-looking young man, with smoothly brushed, glossy black hair, sombrely but carefully dressed.

"Has he been?" he demanded, almost fiercely.

"Has who been?" Tottie Green enquired.

"Dave—blast him!"

"Yes, he's been," the other acknowledged, his watery, bulbous eyes fixed curiously upon the newcomer, searching his expression as though seeking to read his thoughts.

"Dave's been. What about it, Reuben? What's wrong?"

The young man sank into a chair. He was coughing a little now, and there were drops of sweat breaking through the unhealthy pallor of his forehead.

"Togged out like a duke," Lem grumbled. "Came in a motor car, if you please, with a chauffeur in livery. Turned up his nose at his hundred and seventy-five pounds. Wants to give us the go-by. I reckon the boss will see to that."

A spasm of anger enabled the visitor to recover himself.

"Togged out like a duke, eh?" he repeated. "Wouldn't have his share of the Frankley cash. Not likely! He's done better than that."

"Come into money or something?" the girl enquired lazily.

"Come into fiddlesticks," was the fierce reply. "Gawd, if I'd got here half an hour earlier! He's done us—that's what's happened—he's done us in the eye. Done you, Daddy Green! Done me! Done Lem here! Came like a duke, eh? Motor car, clothes, and all! Well, you'll never see him again."

There was a hushed atmosphere in the tawdry, smokehung room. Reuben's disjointed sentences were pregnant with some vital emotion, which became instantly communicated to his auditors. Even the girl leaned forward. No one spoke. They could sense the words framing on his lips.

"I'll tell you. He's got the Frankley Blue Diamond, the Virgin's Tear."

No one spoke. Tottie Green's huge stomach began to rise and fall. The colour mounted to his forehead. He looked like a man whose blood pressure needed serious attention. Cannon Ball Lem stood with his mouth open crookedly, unbelieving, his senses resisting those few, commonplace words. The girl swung herself off the couch and sat leaning forward, her chin upon her two clenched hands, a glorious, but terrible light in her eyes. It was she who spoke.

"You're mad, Reuben," she declared. He wiped his forehead. With the mingled agony and evil joy of his disclosure, he had become the coolest of the quartette.

"Am I mad?" he rejoined. "I have been, ever since that night, not to have suspected. You were mad too, Lem, to bustle me off and leave him behind. We got him fixed wrong that way, and he took his chance."

"Speak plain, you fool," Lem demanded.

"What do you mean by saying he's got the Virgin's Tear?" Belle insisted.

"It's perfectly plain," Reuben continued. "That old lady in the bedroom was cunning, but not cunning enough for Gentleman Dave. She gave us the keys of the safe because she was tied up and had to, but the Virgin's Tear was never there. That's why he stayed behind and got left. He'd tumbled to it. We were the mugs. The Virgin's Tear was where it always had been kept—in a small casket, at the back of the dressing table. He'd tumbled to it somehow. That's why he fought so hard. That's why he was so far behind us."

Tottie Green was still speechless. His cunning brain was at work. He was thinking, and thinking very hard. The natural savagery of the girl was shining out of her face. She, too, was trying to piece together the story, and her first impulse was to reject it.

"You're talking like the villain of a dime novelette, Reuben," she sneered. "How can you tell what took place in the room after the girl came down? How do you know he found the diamond, much more had nerve enough to pinch it? And supposing he did, supposing he was cleverer than you two blundering fools, what did he do with it—He was caught within twenty yards of the room. Do you suppose he swallowed it?"

Reuben was himself again now, and the Reuben of everyday life was a very self-composed, cynical and precise young person.

"During that twenty or thirty yards," he pointed out, "there may have presented itself through the window, or in the corridor or room through which he passed, a possible hiding place."

"Quit this and get on to facts," Tottie Green growled.

"You must have more reasons than this. Tell us why you're sure he's got the Blue Diamond. Let's have the facts, lad."

"You shall have them, all right," was the quick reply.

"I'll tell you why it's a cert. For one thing, Moss and Nathan, the fake jewellers, have an order in hand at the present moment from Lady Frankley to make up for her an imitation of the Virgin's Tear, and they had to work on specifications. She hadn't the stone even to show them."

"No proof," Tottie Green grunted. "Go on."

"Very well, then, listen to this," Reuben continued.

"Last week, the Insurance Company settled up with her ladyship. They paid her ninety-two thousand pounds, and fifty thousand pounds of that was for the Virgin's Tear."

"You're talking through your hat, Reuben," Lem declared.

"I am not talking through my hat, as you'll realise if you'll allow me to finish. The j ewels were insured with the Mutual, and the young woman who typed out the final agreement and typed the body of the cheque was Mollie Padmore."

Tottie Green wiped the sweat from his forehead and groaned.

"Jesus!" he muttered.

"The Virgin's Tear," Reuben went on, his voice becoming lower, his eyes shining like black points of light, "was amongst the stolen jewels that night, and the Insurance Company have paid for it. Did Lem here get it, or even see it? No. Did I? No. It's your Gentleman David who did us in. He hid it, or threw it out of the window, somewhere between her ladyship's room and the door which we had to lock, where he was trapped. He got word somehow to a pal, and he's touched. Rolled up in his motor car, did he? Dressed like a duke! Got a grudge against us for leaving him, eh—That's a cunning piece of bluff. He stayed behind to get the Virgin's Tear, and damned well worth while it was too."

"Been threatening us," Lem put in. "He's been down here, threatening us. Called us cowards, because we left him behind. Says he's breaking away from us. Blast him!"

"Breaking away from us, eh?" Reuben repeated. "I should think the boss might have something to say about that."

"Oh, Christ!" Lem muttered to himself in agony. "If they'd only let me give him what he deserved, he'd have been lying here now, and us waiting for him to come to, to give him some more."

There was another silence—an ominous, menacing silence. The roar of traffic in the streets below found its way in broken patches through the fast- closed windows, but in the room itself one heard nothing but the heavy breathing of the grotesque and evil figure upon the chair. He it was who first moved. He turned wheezily to one side, took up a block of memorandum paper, searched for and found with difficulty the stubby end of a pencil in his capacious waistcoat pocket. With painful effort he wrote. They all watched him. They knew what it meant when Daddy Green wrote with that particular pencil on that particular block of paper.