Читать книгу The Squealer - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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IT WAS two years and six months after Larry Graeme had made his grateful bow to the judge—he had certainly expected more than three years’ penal servitude for his offence—and the leaves of the Park trees were assuming their autumnal tints when two people walked slowly along the gravelled path that skirts the road between Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner. They walked much more slowly than was necessary; for, despite the brightness of the day, the unclouded sky, and the golden sunlight, the wind was in the east and there was a nip of coming winter in the air.

The man was something over forty, just above middle height, and sturdily built. There were long streaks of gray in his black hair, which corrected the first impression given by his smooth, boyish face that he was still in the twenties.

“One has to live,” he was saying. “But jobs are not as plentiful as they were before the war. Besides, it’s a pretty good position.”

Beryl Stedman shook her head.

“It’s not the position you should be occupying, Captain Leslie,” she said. She hesitated, and went on quickly: “There’s one thing that rather puzzles me that I can’t understand. I wonder if you’ll be hurt if I tell you?”

“Nothing hurts me,” he said. “Fire ahead!”

But she found some difficulty in framing the words.

“Frank says you’re very unpopular at the office, and I can’t understand that—you won’t tell him I said so, will you? I know I’m betraying a confidence, but——”

He nodded.

“I am unpopular—dashed unpopular,” he said. “In a sense, Miss Stedman, I am an admirable foil to your engaging fiancé.”

Though the words were sour, there was no bitterness in his tone, no sneer, no implied self-pity.

“Frank Sutton has a knack of making himself adored. It is rather amusing to watch the almost genuflections with which he is greeted when he arrives every morning——”

“You’re not being nice, are you?” she asked.

“I’m not being intentionally unpleasant,” he answered quickly. “It is amusing—instructive is a better word. If Frank Sutton asked the staff to work all night for a week on end, I honestly believe they’d pay for the privilege! If I asked them to stay five minutes over their allotted time, there would be a riot!”

He laughed softly to himself.

“There is only one member of the staff who approves of me—a fellow named Tillman, a new clerk we took on a fortnight ago—and I’m not so sure that he is a disinterested admirer. And then there’s——”

He stopped suddenly.

“You haven’t discovered another admirer?” she asked ironically, and he smiled.

“I don’t know. Sutton’s secretary is quite pleasant to me—I would almost describe her as friendly. Perhaps she’s been so long in the service of the admirable Frank that his sweetness has begun to cloy.”

“You’re being rather horrid now.”

“I know I am,” and he was so cheerful about it that she was amused.

Somewhere in the world for every woman is a man whom to meet is to understand and to be understood. There is no need for long acquaintance or patient discovery between these two. The act of meeting is the ultimate intimacy; all others are incidental. It is as though two long-sundered parts are reunited.

When John Leslie first met the fiancée of his employer, he had a sense of relief, a vague, relaxing comfort, as though something for which his subconscious self had been seeking was found at long last.

She was very pretty, he was glad to know; rather petite than commanding. Hers was the beauty of violets rather than the boisterous loveliness of wind-tossed daffodils. A quiet beauty with a figure which seemed to him to be most gracious. A gray-eyed girl whose sensitive lips twitched readily in a half smile. He was a little shocked to learn that she was engaged to be married.

A floridly handsome young man, immensely energetic and with the reputation of being something of a live wire, Frank Sutton was both prosperous and personable. His suite in Calford Chambers, if it did not buzz like an industrial hive, was a busy place, for he was an exporter who despised no commission, however small.

Successful men with Sutton’s driving force are seldom popular with their employees. Frank Sutton was adored by his staff. It was his cheery smile, the quick chuckle of delight that greeted success and failure alike. It was a tonic even to see the laughter lines creasing about the half-closed eyes, and the grip of his hand transferred a little of his immense vitality to the man who was so greeted.

“Yes ... he is a very interesting man,” said John Leslie. The acknowledgment of Mr. Sutton’s virtue was hardly whole-hearted, but Beryl saw nothing in this but a reflection of her own attitude of mind.

“I wish he wasn’t quite so perfect,” she said, and half sighed.

And then she asked unexpectedly:

“Do you know a man named Barrabal, a police officer at Scotland Yard?”

John Leslie nodded.

“I don’t know him—nobody knows him very well, but I’ve heard of him, yes. His name appeared in a case a few weeks ago. Why?”

“Frank was talking about him last night,” said Beryl. “He was asking Mr. Friedman if he knew him. Frank has an idea that——” She hesitated, though only for a second, but the hurry with which she continued told him that she had impinged upon a forbidden topic. “One or two parcels have gone astray from the office. But you know that ... Frank thought of calling in Mr. Barrabal. But you know, don’t you?”

“I didn’t know,” said John Leslie carelessly, “but it doesn’t strike me as being likely that Barrabal would respond to the call. He’s not the kind of man who wastes his time in tracing petty larcenies. He doesn’t strike me as being a man who would act as Nemesis to the petty larcenist—talking of Nemesis, here is somebody who is going to be rather annoyed with me.”

Directly ahead and walking toward them were two men, both tall, though Lew Friedman’s constitutional stoop took away from his inches. A harsh-faced man, with a big nose, a straight, wide mouth and a stubborn jaw, he looked what he was, a battler who had won out. The man by his side, fair-haired, blue-eyed, showed his white teeth in a smile as he caught sight of the two people strolling toward him, but his cheerfulness was in no way reflected on the face of his companion. Lew Friedman’s hard brown eyes looked from the girl to her escort.

“I thought you were lunching with Mrs. Morden, Beryl,” he said in his gruff way.

“I met Captain Leslie in Oxford Street,” she hastened to explain.

“By accident, eh? Good.”

It was anything but “good,” if his scowl had significance.

“You’re not overworked, are you, Leslie?”

“Not very,” was the cool reply.

“We overwork nobody in my office,” smiled Frank Sutton, who seemed in no wise perturbed to meet his fiancée tête-à-tête with his general manager. “Anybody who wants to go for a stroll can jolly well go—eh, Leslie?”

His smiling eyes fixed the girl’s.

“And don’t you allow old Lew to bully you, Beryl! Lew’s romantic: he always imagines that people are trying to run away with his little treasure—eh, Lew?” He nudged the older man with his elbow and laughed.

Lew Friedman was not amused. There was an awkward pause here, until Sutton took his manager by the arm.

“You won’t want me any more, Lew, and I’m darned sure you don’t want Leslie.”

Leslie was trying to catch the girl’s eyes, but for some reason she was embarrassed. A few seconds later, he found himself pacing back the way he had come, with a loquacious and altogether cheerful Mr. Sutton laying down the law on the stupidity of old men’s prejudices.

“The rum thing is that Lew Friedman likes you—when you’re entirely by yourself. But he seems to have an idea that you’re a gay Lothario, my boy! I don’t even resent the reflection on Beryl, for Friedman has reached the period of suspicion. You can’t combat the eccentricities of age.”

Leslie had taken a cigarette from a silver case and was pinching it into shape; a little smile trembled at the corner of his rather sensitive mouth.

“You yourself have no objection to my meeting Miss Stedman occasionally?”

It was noticeable that he made no attempt to excuse himself or to insist upon the harmlessness of such meetings, nor did he protest a disinterested regard for the girl who was to be his employer’s wife.

Frank Sutton shrugged.

“Good Lord, no!” he said. “I figure it this way: in the past ten years, owing to unfortunate circumstances, you have had very few opportunities of meeting nice women, and I think it will be all for your good. You don’t mind my being frank?”

Leslie shook his head.

“You are an experiment—I am always making experiments, and most of them have turned out unfortunate for me. I want to cure you—I won’t say ‘reform’ you, because that sounds priggish. Half measures never appeal to me: I believe in the whole-hog method.”

Not even the most sensitive ear could detect any hint of patronage in his tone. He had eliminated all affectation from his enthusiasm.

“Beryl is a nice girl,” he went on. “Naturally, I think so; but even if one could stand outside one’s self, that is the opinion one would form. I am no pasha who thinks that women should go veiled in the presence of men. A girl can’t know too many, as I told Lew, but he’s an old-fashioned devil....”

He did most of the talking till they reached Oxford Street, where his car was waiting, and all the way back to the office he was enlarging on his theory.

The offices of Frank Sutton & Company occupied three floors on a corner block near the Middlesex Hospital. It was not a fashionable neighbourhood, but it was a particularly busy one, running, as the thoroughfare did, parallel with Oxford Street. Mr. Sutton, who had established himself in quite a small way six years before, had now a most prosperous export business. He had branches all over the world, a shipping warehouse near the East India Docks, and, unlike most exporters, who confine themselves exclusively to dealing in one product or department of industry, Frank Sutton accounted no business too small or strange.

He was expatiating upon the catholicity of his operations as they paced down the broad corridor out of which led doors leading to the various departments he controlled.

“There’s a big chance for you here, Leslie, if you only put spirit into the business——”

And then his tone changed suddenly and he faced the other squarely.

“But you’ve got to be straight with me, Leslie!”

John Leslie met the blue eyes without any visible embarrassment.

“I don’t quite get you,” he said.

“I don’t quite get you!” said Frank quietly. “I’d like to know something more about you than I do. Where you spend your nights, what other little job you’re doing besides mine. I’m taking big risks with you. Lew Friedman doesn’t know that. You’re keeping something from me, and I’d like to know what it is.”

Leslie did not answer. For a moment his eyes fell, and then, with a little laugh:

“I thought you knew enough,” he drawled: “but as you’re so darned curious, I’ll tell you my interesting hobby. I buy things cheap and I sell them dear, and I fill in my spare time with a little profitable squealing!”