Читать книгу The Avenger - Edgar Wallace - Страница 7

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“What is wrong?” asked Adele, seeing the young man’s grave face.

“Where did this come from?”

He showed her the sheet of typewritten script.

“I don’t know: it was with the other sheets. I knew, of course, that it didn’t belong to ‘Roselle.’ ”

“Is that the play you’re acting in?” he asked quickly. And then: “Who would know?”

“Mr. Knebworth.”

“Where shall I find him?”

“You go through that door,” she said, “and you will find him on the studio floor.”

Without a word, he walked quickly into the building. Instinctively he knew which of the party was the man he sought. Jack Knebworth looked up under lowering brows at the sight of the stranger, for he was a stickler for privacy in business hours; but before he could demand an explanation, Michael was up to him.

“Are you Mr. Knebworth?”

Jack nodded.

“I surely am,” he said.

“May I speak to you for two minutes?”

“I can’t speak to anybody for one minute,” growled Jack. “Who are you, anyway, and who let you in?”

“I am a detective from the Foreign Office,” said Michael, lowering his voice, and Jack’s manner changed.

“Anything wrong?” he asked, as he accompanied the detective into his sanctum.

Jack laid down the sheet of paper with its typed characters on the table.

“Who wrote that?” he asked.

Jack Knebworth looked at the manuscript and shook his head.

“I’ve never seen it before. What is it all about?”

“You’ve never seen this manuscript at all?”

“No, I’ll swear to that, but I dare say my scenario man will know all about it. I’ll send for him.”

He touched a bell, and, to the clerk who came:

“Ask Mr. Lawley Foss to come quickly,” he said.

“The reading of books, plots and material for picture plays is entirely in the hands of my scenario manager,” he said. “I never see a manuscript until he considers it’s worth producing; and even then, of course, the picture isn’t always made. If the story happens to be a bad one, I don’t see it at all. I’m not so sure that I haven’t lost some good stories, because Foss”—he hesitated a second—“well, he and I don’t see exactly eye to eye. Now, Mr. Brixan, what is the trouble?”

In a few words Michael explained the grave significance of the typewritten sheet.

“The Head-Hunter!” Jack whistled.

There came a knock at the door, and Lawley Foss slipped into the room. He was a thinnish man, dark and saturnine of face, shifty of eye. His face was heavily lined as though he suffered from some chronic disease. But the real disease which preyed on Lawley Foss was the bitterness of mind that comes to a man at war with the world. There had been a time in his early life when he thought that same world was at his feet. He had written two plays that had been produced and had run a few nights. Thereafter, he had trudged from theatre to theatre in vain, for the taint of failure was on him, and no manager would so much as open the brown-covered manuscripts he brought to them. Like many another man, he had sought easy ways to wealth, but the Stock Exchange and the race track had impoverished him still further.

He glanced suspiciously at Michael as he entered.

“I want to see you, Foss, about a sheet of script that’s got amongst the ‘Roselle’ script,” said Jack Knebworth. “May I tell Mr. Foss what you have told me?”

Michael hesitated for a second. Some cautioning voice warned him to keep the question of the Head-Hunter a secret. Against his better judgment he nodded.

Lawley Foss listened with an expressionless face whilst the old director explained the significance of the interpolated sheet, then he took the page from Jack Knebworth’s hand and examined it. Not by a twitch of his face or a droop of his eyelid did he betray his thoughts.

“I get a lot of stuff in,” he said, “and I can’t immediately place this particular play; but if you’ll let me take it to my office, I will look up my books.”

Again Michael considered. He did not wish that piece of evidence to pass out of his hands; and yet without confirmation and examination, it was fairly valueless. He reluctantly agreed.

“What do you make of that fellow?” asked Jack Knebworth when the door had closed upon the writer.

“I don’t like him,” said Michael bluntly. “In fact, my first impressions are distinctly unfavourable, though I am probably doing the poor gentleman a very great injustice.”

Jack Knebworth sighed. Foss was one of his biggest troubles, sometimes bulking larger than the temperamental Mendoza.

“He certainly is a queer chap,” he said, “though he’s diabolically clever. I never knew a man who could take a plot and twist it as Lawley Foss can—but he’s—difficult.”

“I should imagine so,” said Michael dryly.

They passed out into the studio, and Michael sought the troubled girl to explain his crudeness. There were tears of vexation in her eyes when he approached her, for his startling disappearance with a page of the script had put all thoughts of the play from her mind.

“I am sorry,” he said penitently. “I almost wish I hadn’t come.”

“And I quite wish it,” she said, smiling in spite of herself. “What was the matter with that page you took—you are a detective, aren’t you?”

“I admit it,” said Michael recklessly.

“Did you speak the truth when you said that my uncle——” she stopped, at a loss for words.

“No, I did not,” replied Michael quietly. “You uncle is dead, Miss Leamington.”

“Dead!” she gasped.

He nodded.

“He was murdered, in extraordinary circumstances.”

Suddenly her face went white.

“He wasn’t the man whose head was found at Esher?”

“How did you know?” he asked sharply.

“It was in this morning’s newspaper,” she said, and inwardly he cursed the sleuth-hound of a reporter who had got on to the track of this latest tragedy.

She had to know sooner or later: he satisfied himself with that thought.

The return of Foss relieved him of further explanations. The man spoke for a while with Jack Knebworth in a low voice, and then the director beckoned Michael across.

“Foss can’t trace this manuscript,” he said, handing back the sheet. “It may have been a sample page sent in by a contributor, or it may have been a legacy from our predecessors. I took over a whole lot of manuscript with the studio from a bankrupt production company.”

He looked impatiently at his watch.

“Now, Mr. Brixan, if it’s possible I should be glad if you would excuse me. I’ve got some scenes to shoot ten miles away, with a leading lady from whose little head you’ve scared every idea that will be of the slightest value to me.”

Michael acted upon an impulse.

“Would you mind my coming out with you to shoot—that means to photograph, doesn’t it? I promise you I won’t be in the way.”

Old Jack nodded curtly, and ten minutes later Michael Brixan was sitting side by side with the girl in a char-à-banc which was carrying them to the location. That he should be riding with the artistes at all was a tribute to his nerve rather than to his modesty.