Читать книгу The Terrible People - Edgar Wallace - Страница 8

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MISS REVELSTOKE was a lady of great age and with few observable fads. She garnished neither her parlour with long-haired dogs of diminutive proportions, nor her person with cameo brooches. She preferred radio concerts to solitaire, and never bought a car until the demonstrator had proved to her satisfaction that the machine could hold the road at sixty-five. A tall woman with a lineless yellow face and black, inscrutable eyes, she had, so far as Nora Sanders knew, no objectionable characteristics, which is remarkable in any lady of wealth who employs a companion-secretary.

The big house in Colville Gardens was from every point of view a perfect setting for such a jewel of a woman. Externally it symbolized Victorianism at its stodgiest phase, for there was a sunken area to it and a stolid stucco porch and step that led up to a highly polished black door. The liver-coloured curtains, the flower boxes in the window sills, the two tubs of well-trimmed box-bush that flanked the doorway—all these things fitted the external view of Miss Revelstoke.

The superficial observer imagined horsehair couches of elegant design and gilt pier glasses and rosy-patterned carpets beyond and behind the baffling curtains. Intimately, Miss Revelstoke belonged to the age in which she lived. Even Nora's room was artistically and tastefully furnished, which was also an unusual experience for a companion-secretary who had slept under garret roofs and had once shared a room with a sentimental housemaid.

One day in midsummer, Miss Revelstoke sat at her little writing table and penned an address in her neat hand, damped the small label with a sponge, and fixed it carefully on the oblong parcel.

"You will find Mr. Monkford a very amusing person," she said, in her precise way; "he has the facetiousness which is peculiar to men of his stature. Stout men are invariably humorous. Even as a branch manager, he erred on the side of flippancy, which, as a rule, is not an asset in a banker. The parcel is rather heavy for you?"

Nora lifted the package. It was lighter in weight than she had expected.

"He will probably ask you to stay to tea. I dine at nine, half an hour later. Mr. Henry is coming to dinner, and I feel sure he will never forgive me if you are not here."

The girl laughed at this. It was a tradition, the nearest to a jest that Miss Revelstoke could approach, that Nora was the reason, whatever might be his excuse, for frequent calls of Miss Revelstoke's good-looking young lawyer.

"Tell Monkford that he need not write—he is very welcome to this horrid negress. I shall be seeing him at 'Little Heartsease' next week. You booked the suite?"

A taxicab carried Nora to Paddington and to the beginning of a new and an amazing experience. Life began when she bought a third-class return for Marlow-on-Thames, since, at the end of the line, and within the confines of that sleepy Georgian town, began her acquaintance with the Terrible People and Betcher Long, that unusual detective.

For her part, "terrible people" would have been illustrated in her mind by a picture of uncouth folks who ate with their knives, or that impossible family she had met on a trip to the fjords, or at worst the bookmaker and his lady wife (one hopes) who lived at No. 705 and came home noisily every morning at three and argued thickly with the cabman.

For the Terrible People were as yet in the stage of secrecy; they were mentioned in confidential minutes, as between the Secretary of State and the Chief Commissioner of the Police. Only Betcher Long spoke of them freely, even cheerfully, just as a man might speak of a plague which happened to be in another country. He gave them their title; though in the guarded minutes that went criss-crossing between Whitehall and Scotland Yard were heard "Very Secret and Confidential. Re a Supposed Illegal Organization Operating to Defeat the Ends of Justice."

Betcher called them plainly the "Terrible People." Sometimes he added adjectives of force and colour.

With no other emotion than one of joy at the prospect of a day in the out-of-doors, Nora came to Marlow.

Harry, the boatman at Meakes, straightened his back, wiped his forehead with a bare brown arm, and regarded the inquirer with the respectful interest which all boatmen assume so naturally toward all folks who are not equipped or costumed for the river.

"Mr. Monkford's house?"

He shaded his eyes from the reflected glare of the sun and pointed up river. Here the stream turns abruptly toward Temple Lock. In the one bank the meadows stretch to the long woods; behind the trees on the other, the tower of Bisham Church shows grayly. It was toward Bisham that the boatman looked.

"You can't see the house from here," he said, with an air of disappointment which suggested that for the first time in his life he realized and regretted the invisibility of Bendham Manor. "It's old—you can see the place if you walk up the path. A red house with twisting chimneys."

He looked at her doubtingly. There were twelve punts to be baled and a four-oared skiff to be made ready for a picnic party almost due. She was very pretty. It was lady-prettiness, fragile and dainty and white. Red lips and gray eyes that held the ghost of a smile. She wore a little black felt hat without ornamentation and a blue costume that was nearly black, severe, and straight, yet for some reason peculiarly feminine. Also there was a suppleness and grace in the slim lady who had arrested his eye as she walked toward him along the towpath, long before he had seen her face.

"It's a long way round by road," he said, emphasizing in his fashion the service he was about to offer. "You cross the bridge and take the second lane to your right where the war memorial is—a long way. I'd better row you across, ma'am."

"You're very good," she said.

She had a nice voice, sweet and rich. Some gentleman's wife, he thought, for she was not a flapper. There was a maturity in her manner, a self-assurance in the decision she revealed. Nora Sanders was in truth an old woman of twenty-two and reconciled to her great age and exceedingly blank prospects. Her years troubled her not at all, though the terrible thirties lay over the brow of the hill; nor did her emphatic singleness, for she had met no man whose quality of mind and heart set her dreaming in the quiet dusk. But it was very dreadful to be companion-secretary to a woman of sixty and to absorb from day to day her acrid philosophies. She had gone halfway to meet middle age (this was her pet illusion), and there was no way out. Marriage was only a jump from one rut to another and maybe a worse. Such dreams as she had were curiously temperate. If she gave a brevet to her fancies, they moved soberly to posts that a woman might hold in some great business organization, where the salary was large and the possibilities of promotion at least encouraging.

As Harry went to find oars, her eyes roved up and down the river. The roar of the weir was pleasant and soothing, the clang of the clock in old Marlow Church as it struck three belonged to the harmonies of the place and the time. A racing four came swinging round the bend of the river; the rhythmic thud of oars against steel outriggers was a concert in the melody of that drowsy summer afternoon.

Harry brought the boat to the side of the towpath, and she stepped in.

He was inclined to be informative as he set the nose of the boat upstream.

"...there's a trout in that hole, the biggest in the river. Some say he's thirty years old an' more. Lots of young gentlemen have tried to get him, but he just laffs at 'um! Got away with more tackle than any fish that ever lived. You'll see him to-night; he feeds at a quarter of eight."

She murmured a polite interest. The "hole" must be imagined as a deep depression in the river's bed beneath the placid and unbroken water. Harry's tit-bit was to come.

"That's Shelton's boat." He jerked his head sideways to a weather-beaten craft moored to the lawn of an empty house. A whale-decked power boat that had once been brave and white and was now water-rusted and uninviting. She wondered who Shelton was, and, even as she wondered, he supplied a startling scrap of biography.

"Shelton was hung for killing a copper—policeman. Biggest forger in the world, so the newspapers say—not that you can believe newspapers. They said Marlow was flooded in the spring an' the water hardly came over the path!"

She was looking at him in open-eyed wonder, and from him she turned back to scrutinize the tragic craft.

"Hanged?"

Harry nodded. He seemed to take credit himself for the operations of justice.

"You wouldn't believe it if you read it in a book; Shelton's boat there and Mr. Monkford's home just round the corner!"

"Is that a coincidence?" she asked.

Evidently it was. All Marlow had been talking about it. Shelton once had a little bungalow beyond Temple where he lived alone. That power boat of his had held a small printing press, and some of the famous letters of credit which had alarmed the financiers of two continents had been created in the cabin of the Northward.

"There's nothing in it, though—the coincidence, I mean." Harry was explicit on this point. "After Shelton was hung, his bungalow and boat was sold up. A man named Finney bought the boat, and he sold it to another gentleman."

He explained the vicissitudes and fortunes of the Northward in detail.

"But where does Mr. Monkford come into all this?" Nora was interested to ask.

"He hung Shelton," said Harry solemnly, "him and Mr. Long, the celebrated detective, he's over there now. I saw him rowing about in the dinghy this afternoon."

She knew that Joseph Monkford was a prominent member of the Bankers' Association. It was the only subject on which Miss Revelstoke grew voluble. The old woman had known Monkford when he was the branch manager of the Southern Bank—she had her account with him. And Mr. Monkford had risen, by sheer native genius, to the position of general manager of the Southern and to the chairmanship of the board of directors of the Bankers' Association.

"Him and Betcher Long," said Harry, with relish, "hung Shelton. Long found him an' was goin' to pinch him when Shelton pulled a gun and killed an officer named Lacy, who was with Long. You don't mean to tell me you never heard about it, ma'am? Why, it was only a year ago."

Nora shook her head. She never read horrors of any kind. It was a grievance with people she met at Miss Revelstoke's that she knew nothing of topical events, and had no view as to whether He was to blame or She was to blame in the current cause célèbre.

The house was in sight now. A rambling Elizabethan mansion of dull red brick. It stood back amidst the poplars, a wide green lawn separating the building from the river.

Harry pulled vigorously at one oar, and the boat shot through the small landing stage. Here the stream shallowed; the sandy bottom was free of weeds, and she saw a school of roach pass leisurely under the boat across the sunlit bed. Two men were fishing from the lawn—one at either end. They looked up as the boat came to the bank, and surveyed her absently. Then they returned to the contemplation of their red floats. Gathering up the parcel she was carrying, Nora reached out her gloved hand and caught the edge of the pier.

"No, thank you, ma'am."

She had opened her bag and was searching for her purse, as she stood on the stage, but Harry pushed off the boat and signalled his farewell.

"Mr. Monkford will have you brought back, ma'am," he shouted.

She gave him a little smile which he valued, though he was a married man, and made a way across the close-cut lawn.