Читать книгу The Squealer - Edgar Wallace - Страница 6

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LARRY GRAEME was a single-handed thief, but he was not without friends. He came from Dartmoor on a raw morning in February with the comforting knowledge that the room he had hired in a Southwark lodging—there is a square not a quarter of a mile from Dover Street where very respectable and even moneyed people live—would be intact. Even the great Barrabal did not know of this pied-à-terre, or he might have guessed that in a locked box under the bed was cached a respectable sum of money.

Mr. Graeme’s landlady was used to his long absences, and since he held what was tantamount to a mortgage on the house (he was a very saving man and had a number of good investments) there was no possibility that his room had been let to another tenant.

She greeted him unemotionally, and he went up to his little apartment to find everything as he had left it. Not so much as a cigar had been taken from the cedar-wood box on the mantelpiece.

He was less concerned about the money in the box than he was about the Smith-Wesson revolver and the box of tightly packed cartridges, for he had come back with one object. Perhaps his incarceration had been unusually irksome: he was getting too old for prison. He had fretted a lot, brooded a lot, in the eighteen hours of the twenty-four when the “lock was on.” It was not like Larry to brood, for he was something of a philosopher. The gossip of the laundry had helped to keep the smouldering embers of his resentment red-hot.

There was a man in the prison laundry who had been sent down for ten years on a “squeal.” And it was “The Big Fellow” who had done the squealing. Nobody but Larry knew about the broken nail. This precious secret he kept to himself. He wished he hadn’t told Barrabal, and had spent moments of agony.

It was a rotten lagging. The “screws”^* were a sour lot—he was almost caught twice with tobacco. And all the lags except the man in the laundry were strangers to him.

*	Prison wardens.

He came to London thinking, thinking, thinking of broken nails and The Squealer and the little Smith-Wesson.

The broken nail was one clue: he had another. The Squealer was a great buyer of stolen motor cars and conducted his negotiations through intermediaries somewhere in Soho. Larry guarded Soho, but it was in a shop in Regent Street, and by the merest accident, that he found the manicurist who was acquainted with the broken finger nail and the white scar on the knuckle.

“I don’t know his name,” she said, “but I’ve seen him going into an office in Mortimer Street—I live off the Tottenham Court Road and I have to pass the place. It will be a curious coincidence if I bring you and your brother together, won’t it?”

“It will,” said Larry. The “long-lost brother” was the line on which he was working.

This observant manicurist was very vivid. Though Larry had never consciously seen The Squealer, he would have recognized him beyond doubt after she had described him.

He began to haunt the purlieus of Mortimer Street, was a keen observer of people who entered and left Mr. Frank Sutton’s office. He even made friends with a clerk or two. The last doubt in his mind was dissipated as he waited in the gathering fog that evening, a small pistol in one coat pocket, and in the other a folder full of railway and steamship tickets that would carry him to the Black Forest Hotel, where he took a rest cure when England was a little too warm to hold him.

The employees were leaving—a straggling line of men and girls came out of the service entrance and disappeared in the murky might.

Just before six, Sutton burst into John Leslie’s room, pulling on his gloves, stayed long enough to fire a dozen directions at his manager, and was gone for the night.

Leslie waited till the sound of his footsteps ceased to echo in the corridor, and took another look out of the window. The watcher was no longer visible in the gathering fog.

He unlocked a drawer of his desk, took out a small automatic pistol and slipped it into his hip pocket. Buttoning his overcoat to his chin, he stepped out and locked the door silently.

At the far end of the corridor was an office, apparently deserted, for no light showed through the transom. It had, however, an occupant—Mr. Tillman, standing on a chair, watching through a slit in the fanlight the departure of his immediate chief before he hurried out into the fog after him....

Larry Graeme had moved from his place of observation on the opposite side of the road, and was standing leaning against the façade of the building, when he saw a figure emerge from the gloom of the office buildings and pass him in the fog. Larry dropped his cigar to the ground and went in pursuit.

“Say, you!” he said, and tapped his quarry on the shoulder.

The man turned and peered forward at him.

“Oh, it’s you, is it, Graeme? I saw you——”

“You saw me, did you?”

Larry’s voice was low; there was something deadly in his tone.

“Now you’re going to hear me—while your hearing’s good! I’ve got you right, Squealer, and I’m going to put you where——”

He saw only the red stab of flame, felt for a fraction of a second an acute and exquisite agony, and went to the ground in a heap. Ten minutes later, a policeman found him.

And only Inspector Barrabal knew or guessed whose hand had sent him to his death.