Читать книгу The Twister - Edgar Wallace - Страница 8

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Mr. Rex Guelder did not leave the office till an hour after his chief. He had the evening newspapers brought in and examined them at leisure. He made certain notes in a black pocketbook that he carried in his inside pocket, the existence of which Julian did not even suspect, and at the end of his notings and his calculations he went out into the street with a smile of satisfaction on his round face, for the fates had been good to him. Though he intended making his way homeward he did not, in point of fact, leave the West End, to which district he proceeded until two hours later.

He lived, for some extraordinary reason, as far afield as Greenwich in a side street that runs parallel with the river. Wedged between two ancient factories, one of them derelict, was an old and dilapidated house, showing a high, blank wall pierced grudgingly with three small windows that looked out upon this mean street. The ground floor had once been a storehouse of sorts and was now used as a garage and boathouse, which Mr. Guelder had fitted up himself. Here he stored a rather ugly-shaped sports car, begrimed with the mud and the dust he had accumulated in a month's travel.

Every four weeks the car was cleaned; scarcely a night passed that Mr. Guelder did not go over the engine with a loving care. This machine was used for his week-end journeying to Newbury, from which he derived a peculiar interest.

It was not an ideal garage: the walls ran with moisture and he had to keep his oil cans locked away in a steel bin because of the big rats whose nightly squeaks he had almost ceased to notice. They came up from the river foreshore in legions some nights; he had once found the leather seat of his car in ribbons.

Then he bought his three white cats and so trained them that every night one slept in the car: a monstrous ghost of a thing with great green eyes whose slightest squeal brought his two white brethren hurtling into the cellar.

On the floor above was his living suite: three big gaunt rooms, plainly furnished, overlooking the river. If you opened the big window of the dining room you looked out upon a wreck of a wharf, supported on weed-green timbers that had staggered to odd angles under the weight they no longer bore. Beneath the rotting and broken flooring of the wharf was Thames mud at low tide and the swirling brown river at high. Opposite his window, big German cargo boats used to anchor, and great tugs slept in line; and farther down, to weather-board, high-masted barges with furled brown sails and their house pennants flying made a most gallant sight for those who loved the sea and the broad commercial waters as Rex Guelder loved them.

He had a servant, a squat Dutch woman of a great age. From year's end to year's end they lived in the same house but did not speak to one another any more than was necessary. No longer even did they say "good-morning." Every month Mr. Guelder paid the old woman in English money, and that same day she would waddle down to the post office and despatch it all except a few pence to her grandson at Utrecht.

The sitting room, which was also his study and library, was a long apartment running from the front to the back of the house and was blessed with one of those grudging windows looking out on to the street. It was painted in bright orange, and all the doors, including the steel door which led to the factory, were scarlet. The bright carpet square in the centre of the room, the polished oak panelling, and a few Rembrandt prints on the wall gave the apartment something of gaiety. There was a blue china bowl filled with roses and half a dozen shallow papier-mâché receptacles from which bloomed gorgeous-hued tulips. The tulips bloomed perennially, for they were artificial and so cunningly fashioned that only those who touched them realized that the glowing petals were made of glass.

On the carpet square was a big black oak writing table, and at this he sat. For a long time he was engrossed in the contemplation of two very common objects that he had acquired during his two hours' visit to the West End.

And as he looked at them through a powerful reading glass his irregular white teeth showed in a grin of pure delight. After a while he folded them away and locked them into a dingy-looking safe that stood in one corner of the room. For a long time he mused, and then he took out a portfolio from one of the drawers, untied the tape fastening it, and placed the contents where they could be best inspected. They were photographs, secured with great labour by Mr. Rex Guelder, and they represented something that was more than a hobby of his.

Julian Reef would have been staggered; Ursula Frensham might have believed she was taking leave of her senses if she had seen these photographs of herself, so reverently handled, so carefully placed.

He sprawled back in his plush chair, looking from one to the other, his hands clasped on the desk before him, a look of exaltation in his small round eyes. Freda, the maid, pushed in a little dinner wagon, saw the pictures, and her old lips curled.

"There is the biggest madness of all," she said, breaking the almost uninterrupted silence of a fortnight. "When I see you like that, mynheer, I feel ill in the heart. Is there no such city as Amsterdam in your mind?" she asked significantly. "And no land of Batavia?"

He did not lift his eyes from the photographs.

"They were clods, those girls, Freda. The amusement of a great scientist. Would you deny him his happiness, old vrow?"

Freda drew up a chair to the little table and sniffed.

"In Batavia they called it murder, but nobody knows who drowned her. In Amsterdam it was suicide till the doctor spoke to the police and showed them the thin little cord about her neck."

Mr. Guelder smiled as though he were being complimented.

"Ach! What an unpleasant memory you have, Freda!"

An impartial observer might have noticed that he was not wholly displeased, certainly unagitated by his servant's reminder. Nor had he any need to be, for no arrests were made; there had been no public scandal. The rector of the university where he had taught chemistry and electricity had merely sent for him to come to his study and had told him that his presence in the university would be no longer required. But then, this principal was German of origin, stout and sentimental, who had only seen how pretty a girl, even in death, Maria was, and had not realized how great a nuisance she might have been.

As to the Batavian adventure Mr. Guelder was a little shocked that anybody should remember this against him.

The old woman was unusually loquacious to-night. He thought she had been drinking. Only when schnapps was in her did she talk so much.

"All this fooling, all these wheels and big jars and electric sparks—how will they end, Mynheer Rex? You will find nothing. You never find anything. Always you are going to. And if you did, and plenty of money came to you, it would go into the pockets of the betting men. Ach! You are foolish, and I am foolish, too!"

"You are drunk," said Rex calmly. "I give you food and house and money to send to your good-for-nothing student, and if it were not for me you would be starving in the poorhouse."

She grumbled something about his late arrival home to-night and went out. He knew that she would be silent now for a month. He liked old Freda to talk sometimes; nobody ever spoke in Dutch to him except Freda. There were hundreds and thousands of Dutchmen in London, but Rex never met them for fear they would look at him suspiciously and talk about Maria, who was found dead in the canal with a wax cord about her throat, which, as he said at the time, she might very well have put there herself.

He gathered the pictures with a tender hand, replaced them in the portfolio, and locked it up. In her present mood Freda was quite capable of burning them. He finished his frugal dinner before he turned the key in the lock and passed through the red iron door into the factory.

It was a long room with a crazy, uneven floor that sloped down to one side and humped up at the end. Above, when he switched on the light, you could see the rafters and the nether side of the red tiles. There were lights enough here, for he had power to operate the many little and big machines with which the factory was equipped. The lesser of these were on a bench that ran down on the river side of the room—queer apparatus familiar enough to the electrician and the physicist—revolving wheels, green-corded coils, spiral glass tubes charged with mercury that had the appearance of enormous barometers. At the far end of the room on a low, strongly built platform was a machine that none would understand without examination. Here were strange condensers, coils, queer glass tubes which on the pressure of a button glowed rose-coloured and blue; and under one wedge-shaped pointer, connected by heavy wires to various parts of the apparatus, a square bed of black agate, in the centre of which was a tiny saucer-shaped depression.

He pulled a chair to his bench, clicked over numerous switches; and while the machine buzzed and pulsated he drew a cigarette from his pocket, lit it, and, fixing his thick glasses more firmly to his nose, he renewed for the hundredth time his great experiment. On the object he fitted into the agate depressions began to flow a thin stream of crackling sparks. He touched another switch; a pale green light shot from an almost invisible slit in a steel disc and fell athwart the agate.

He smoked and smoked till the room was foggy blue; and every now and again he would turn off his switches and, picking up the object with a pair of tweezers, would examine it carefully under a powerful eyeglass. It was nearly midnight when he stretched himself and, rising, saw two green eyes surveying him from the dark end of the factory. He whistled, and a great white cat came toward him to be fondled and stroked. When he got back to his room her companion was curled up in his chair.

He took a long drink of water and went to bed, and through the night the two white cats slept on the foot of his bed and opened their luminous green eyes at the faintest squeak or scurry behind the rotting panels of the room.