Читать книгу The Dark Eyes of London - Edgar Wallace - Страница 9

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DIANA WARD was looking at her chief with a new interest in her fine eyes.

“Braille,” he said in a low voice. “That is the written language of the blind, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

“Yes, there are books and newspapers printed in that type,” she said. “It is a sort of embossed character made of a number of small dots, the relation of one with the other producing the letter.”

She took up the paper again.

“When blind people write, they use a small instrument and a guide, but this has been written in a hurry by somebody who worked without any guide. I can feel how irregularly it is done, and the illegibility of the words which I cannot read is due almost as much to bad writing as to the action of the water.”

He took this curious clue into his hands and examined it.

“Could Stuart have done it with his pencil?”

She shook her head, and then asked quickly:

“Have you found the pencil?”

“No,” said Larry grimly, “but I’ve found what the pencil was used for.”

He opened the parcel he had brought in and showed the shirt and its tragic message written inside the front.

“Why inside?” he said thoughtfully. “It’s written on the left too.”

Diana understood.

“It would necessarily be written on the left side if he used his right hand,” she said.

“But why on the inside?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know. It would have been much simpler to——”

“I have it!” cried Larry triumphantly. “He wrote this will where it would not be seen by somebody or other. If it had been written outside, it would have been seen, and probably destroyed.”

She shivered a little.

“I’m not quite hardened yet,” she said with a smile. “There is something terrible about this, isn’t there? I think you are right; and if we go on that assumption, that he wrote this will in such a manner in order to keep it from the eyes of a third person, we must suppose that that third person existed. In other words, there was somebody of whom he was afraid—or, if you like, at whose hands he feared death—and the murder was premeditated, for he must have been in the custody of that somebody for some time before he met his dreadful end.”

She stopped suddenly, for Larry’s eyes were fixed on her, and she dropped her own and flushed.

“You’re rather wonderful,” he said softly; “and if I’m not jolly careful I’m going to lose my job.”

He saw a look of doubt in her eyes and laughed.

“Now, Miss Ward,” he said banteringly, “we are going to start fair, and you must acquit me of any professional jealousy.”

“Jealousy!” she scoffed. “That would be absurd.”

“Not so absurd,” said Larry. “I’ve known men to be jealous of women for less reason. And now”—he glanced at his watch—“I think you had better go home. I’ll get a taxi. Have you far to go?”

“Only to the Charing Cross Road,” she said.

“Then I’ll take you home,” said Larry. “It’s nearly one o’clock.”

She had already started putting on her coat and her hat.

“Thank you, I’ll go alone,” she said. “It isn’t far. Really, Mr. Holt, I don’t want you to get into the habit of taking me home every time I’m late. I’m quite used to being out by myself, and I won’t have a taxi.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Larry. He was writing rapidly on a cable form. “If I can get this cable through in time, it ought to reach the Chief of Police in Calgary by tea-time yesterday!”

“Yesterday?” she said in surprise. “Oh, of course; they are nine hours late on Greenwich time,” and Larry groaned.

“I’ll have to try some new ones on you,” he said.

They walked home together, but as it happened, the girl’s tiny apartment lay in the direction that he had to take. Larry reached Regent’s Park, where his own flat was situated, and found the patient Sunny laying out his pyjamas.

“Sunny,” said Larry, as, clad in these garments and his flowered dressing-gown, he sipped a cup of chocolate, “somewhere in this city is a very unpleasant gentleman, name unknown.”

“I expect there are many like that, sir,” said Sunny.

“And somewhere in England is a man who is known as the Public Executioner, and it’s my job in life to bring them together!”

He was at Scotland Yard at half-past eight the following morning, and to his surprise the girl was before him, and the departmental memoranda and the various documents which come to every head of Scotland Yard were neatly arranged on his blotting-pad.

“A cablegram has just come in,” said the girl. “I didn’t open it. You must tell me what you want done about cables and telegrams.”

“Open ’em all,” said Larry. “I have no private business—and the only scented notes which come to me can be read without bringing a blush to the youngest cheek.”

She came across the room with the cablegram in her hand, and he took it.

“Calgary,” he said, looking at the address. “That’s pretty quick work.” And then his mouth opened in amazement, for the telegram read:

“Stuart had no child. He was not married.”

He looked at the girl.

“Check Number One,” he said.

She took the telegram from him and examined the hour at which it was dispatched.

“This is a common-knowledge telegram,” she said.

“What do you mean by common knowledge?” asked Larry good-humouredly.

“Well, it must have been answered just as soon as it arrived, and the man who sent this wrote from what is common knowledge. In other words, he didn’t attempt to make any investigations, but took the fact for granted; probably he asked somebody in the office, ‘Is Stuart married or a bachelor?’ and when they said he was a bachelor, he dispatched the reply.”

Larry folded the wire and put it away in his desk.

“If it is common knowledge that Stuart was not married, it merely complicates a situation which is not exactly clear. Here is a man who dies and is obviously murdered, and in a few moments preceding his death writes his will secretly on the inside of his shirt. It is possible, by the way, that he may have done this in the presence of his murderers without their being aware of the fact, and I should think that is most likely.”

“I thought that,” she agreed.

“He was murdered, and writes his will on the stiff breast of his shirt, leaving the whole of his property to his daughter. Now, a sane man—and there is no reason to suppose that he was anything but sane—does not invent a daughter on the spur of the moment; so it is obvious that the Chief of the Calgary Police is wrong.”

“It is equally certain that if he was married it was not in Calgary or even in Canada, where the fact would be known,” said the girl. “Secret marriages are possible in a great city, but in small places, amongst very prominent people—and apparently he lived not in a town but on a ranch—the fact that he was married could not escape knowledge.”

On the way home the previous evening Larry had told the girl almost all that the Commissioner had told him. It was not usual for him to make confidantes so quickly, but there was something very appealing about Diana Ward, and his confidence, usually a matter of slow growth, had come to maturity in a flash.

The girl was looking thoughtfully down at her desk.

“If he was married secretly,” she said slowly, “would it not be—in——”

“In London, of course,” said Larry, nodding. “Send a cable to the Chief of the Calgary Police, asking him particulars about Stuart’s known movements, when he was in London last before his present visit.”