Читать книгу The Squealer - Edgar Wallace - Страница 7

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MR. JOSHUA COLLIE came into the office of the Post-Courier and seated himself with a weary sigh at the desk of the news editor. He was sixty and bald: a placid, cherubic-looking man, who wore a straw hat summer and winter, and had an irritating trick of inserting the buttons, of his fawn-coloured raincoat in their wrong holes. He had the appearance of a retired and benevolent butler; the most eminent judge of physiognomy would have speculated in a wide circle and never reached Mr. Collie’s avocation. For there was no crime reporter in London with a more comprehensive knowledge of human ferocities than this angelic man.

He hooked his umbrella on the news editor’s basket (to Mr. Field’s intense annoyance), felt vaguely from pocket to pocket, until he produced a wilting cigarette, which he lit.

“It was a murder,” he said soberly.

The gray-haired Field scowled from under his bushy eyebrows, and his white moustache bristled.

“Did you think it was a wedding?” he demanded.

But Joshua was impervious to sarcasm.

“He was shot twice at close range with an automatic pistol, possibly fitted with a silencer,” he continued, unperturbed. “His name is, or was, Larry Graeme, and he was released from Dartmoor last Monday week.”

He lit the cigarette for the second time. The news editor was interested.

“Graeme?” he said. “I remember that fellow. He did the Van Rissik burglary.”

Joshua nodded, so gravely that it might be thought he was accepting credit for Larry Graeme’s achievement.

“And Barrabal thinks he’s been squealered,” he said.

“Squealered?” Field looked up sharply. “You saw Barrabal? That’s a story in itself.”

Joshua shook his head.

“I have not seen Barrabal; I have spoken to him on the ’phone. He has given me a hint or two which may be very useful——”

“But what do you mean by ‘squealered’? You mean that the man they call The Squealer has done this?”

Again Joshua nodded.

“The man I call The Squealer,” he corrected gently. “He is not yet a public character.”

He looked very thoughtfully past the news editor and pursed his lips as though he were about to whistle. Looking at him, Mr. Field thought he had never in his life met a man whose appearance was so deceptive. There was something almost childlike about Joshua Collie. You felt, when you saw him standing undecidedly on the edge of the sidewalk, that it was your business to hold him gently by the hand and lead him through the baffling traffic. He was the sort of uncle whom any wholesome boy or girl would have chosen if they had had the range of humanity to pick from. He might even have been an ineffective secretary of a Band of Hope. But in his wildest imaginings no man would dream that at that moment Mr. Collie’s mind was picking daintily between three theories as to the reason for a mysterious murder.

“Barrabal is a peculiar man,” he said, and shook his head as though in reproof. “He is mysterious, which is against all the traditions of Scotland Yard. They usually tell you all they know, which isn’t much, and suppress all they suspect, which isn’t worth considering—that is almost an epigram. I find with increasing years my wits grow keener. As David Garrick once remarked to Sir Joshua Reynolds——”

“Let us keep to living criminals,” said Mr. Field wearily. “What did Barrabal tell you? Why is he peculiar?”

Joshua felt in his many waistcoat pockets—there were six in all—and found a slip of paper on which he had scrawled a name and address.

“Mr. Barrabal suggested I should interview this gentleman. He also gave me a few interesting facts about him.”

Field fixed his glasses and read:

“ ‘Captain John Leslie.’ Who is he?”

Joshua took back the slip of paper, folded it, and replaced it in the pocket from which he had taken it, before he answered.

“That is a mystery which it is my earnest desire to solve,” he said.

He lit his cigarette for the third time.

“There’s a big story going, and I’m scared to death that the Megaphone will get it. I have an idea they put their smartest man on to this job three weeks ago. You will remember, Mr. Field, I suggested——”

Mr. Field did not wish to be reminded of any failing on his part.

“There isn’t a man on The Street to whom you couldn’t give three weeks’ start, Joshua,” he said encouragingly, and Joshua Collie brightened visibly, for he was susceptible to flattery.

The murder itself, despite its pathetic circumstances, offered, curiously enough, very little scope to a crime reporter. A man, a notorious burglar and international thief, had been shot down in the fog, and it was just as natural that the newspapers should suggest that the crime was the result of some feud, as it was that a fight of East End roughs should be described as “a race-gang riot.” Near where the body was found was that peculiar neighbourhood which lies between Tottenham Court Road and Charlotte Street: a quarter favoured by foreigners and not wholly free from undesirable characters. Here are innumerable little clubs, official and unofficial, where peculiar citizens have their dives, and garrets. There were a score of known anarchists living here, and already Scotland Yard had interviewed a dozen desperadoes who had already been in the hands of the police for crimes of violence.

It was a remarkable fact that neither of the two clerks with whom Graeme had made acquaintance had come forward with stories of the search for the broken nail. In all probability they did not associate the victim of the murder with the affable stranger who had been their host.

In such crimes as this, the police very easily reach a dead end. There were no witnesses to the murder, and although two people had heard the muffled explosions which sounded as one, they had not come nearer to investigate. The murderer had walked away unchallenged in the fog, and there was not even the inevitable witness who saw “a tall, dark man” on the scene of the outrage.

“It must have been awfully near your office, Frank.”

Beryl looked up from the newspaper which she was reading at the library table.

Frank nodded.

“Practically on the corner of the building,” he said; “and it must have happened soon after I left. The timekeeper says he heard the shot a few seconds after Leslie had gone out of the door.”

Lew Friedman, who was sitting in a deep armchair on the opposite side of the fire, jerked up his head at this.

“After Leslie had gone?” he asked quickly.

“The timekeeper was not quite sure whether it was Leslie or the new man Tillman. They left within a few seconds of each other. I myself couldn’t have been more than a block away when the shot was fired—I stopped to talk to a man on the stairs—but I heard nothing.”

Lew Friedman pursed his thick lips.

“Larry Graeme—the name sounds familiar, but I suppose these fellows take a new one every week. Does anybody in the office know him?”

Frank shook his head.

“Poor devil!” went on Lew, with gruff sympathy. “Very likely he got in bad with one of the gangs and they put him out.”

The long library of Hillford, his beautiful house on Wimbledon Common, was a pleasant room to dream in. It was a place of soft lights and panelled walls, for, unlike many self-made men who had come to fortunes, Lew had a nice taste, and he had made Hillford rather a home than a museum for rare furniture and costly gewgaws.

Beryl folded the paper with a little sigh and leaned back in her chair.

“It must be a horrible life,” she said, and as Lew’s eyebrows rose in an inquiring arch: “I mean, being a burglar—a thief, and all that sort of thing. The risks they take, the horrible dangers they run——”

“Burglary’s clean.” Lew’s voice was almost sharp, and, as though realizing his overemphasis, he laughed, a little sheepishly. “I mean, it’s clean compared with other kinds of graft. I was hearing the other day about a fellow who’s made a business out of bigamy—a well-educated man, who has worked every country in the world. A fellow I knew in Pretoria told me all about him; said he’d seen him in Pretoria Central—that’s the name of the jail.”

“How perfectly horrible!” said Beryl, with a grimace.

“Well—perhaps it isn’t as bad as you think.” Lew flicked the ash from his cigar into the fire. “This fellow’s modus operandi—is that the expression?—is to get acquainted with some rich Colonial girl, and, posing as a son of one of the big English houses, proposes marriage, gets all he can lay his hands on, and skips on the wedding day. They say he’s a pretty fascinating fellow, and that he never goes after a girl until she’s already engaged——”

“Sounds like friend John,” said Frank lazily; and, seeing the look in the girl’s eyes, he laughed. “I really didn’t mean that,” he said, “though you’ll admit that Leslie is a fascinating beggar.”

“Do you suggest he has fascinated me?”

“Now, you two!” growled Lew Friedman, and glanced up at the clock over the mantelpiece. “Time you were gone, young man. Really, for two engaged people, you’re the most uninteresting folk I’ve ever met with!”

He walked with Frank to the door, and under the wide portico, waiting for Sutton’s car to arrive, he offered a word of advice.

“I shouldn’t make those kind of jokes if I were you, Frank—my little girl is sensitive to certain styles of humour.”

“But I swear——” began Frank in protest. Lew patted him on the shoulder.

“Of course you didn’t mean it. But don’t joke that way. I understand women better than you, my boy, and the one thing a lover should never do is to give a girl another man to defend.”

He waited till the car was gone, then walked back to the library. Beryl was standing before the fireplace, her hands behind her, looking down at the red coals.

“There’s nothing to be hurt about, darling,” he said, filling the pipe the smoking of which marked the end of his day.

“Frank is crude at times, isn’t he?”

“He is a little, but he’s decent—and honest.” She turned her head at this.

“What do you mean by that? Who isn’t honest?”

He paused before he replied, and when he did he spoke slowly.

“John Leslie for one,” he said. “I think you ought to know that Leslie served three terms of imprisonment for receiving stolen property.”