Читать книгу The India-Rubber Men - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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THREE nights later...

The engineer, who was also the steersman of the police launch, remarked mechanically that it was cold, even for that time of the year; and John Wade, to whom the remark was not altogether unfamiliar, answered sardonically.

He often referred to himself as an old man; he was, in point of fact, thirty-five, which is not a great age, and indeed is rather young in an inspector of Thames police.

"I've often thought, sir—" began the engineer sentimentally, as the launch shot under Blackfriars Bridge and edged towards the Embankment.

"I doubt it," said Mr. Wade. "I very much doubt it, sergeant. Maybe when you're off duty—"

"I've often thought," continued the unperturbed sergeant, "that life is very much like a river—"

"If you feel mawkish, sergeant, restrain yourself until we tie up. I am not in a sentimental mood to-night."

"It will come," said the sergeant, unabashed, "when you've met the girl of your heart. Bachelors don't know what sentiment is. Take babies— "

Wade did not listen. The launch was running close to the Embankment side of the river. It was a night of stars, and there was no sign of the thin fog which was to descend on London the following night. He had spent the most annoying evening, searching evil-smelling barges. That afternoon he had removed a dead body from the river. The morning had been occupied at the Thames Police Court, prosecuting a drunken tug skipper, who, in a moment of delirium, had laid out his little crew and would have laid out the tug too—for it was headed straight for a granite-faced wharf—if a police-boat had not ranged alongside, and Wade, with his own hands and a rubber truncheon, put the drunken skipper to sleep, and spun the wheel only just in time to avert disaster.

Now, on top of these minor disasters, he had been stopped on his way to a comfortable bed with instructions to report at Scotland Yard; and he was perfectly sure what was the reason for that call—the India-Rubber Men. As a reader of crime reports in which he had no particular part, he was interested in the India-Rubber Men; as a police officer he carried out certain inquiries concerning them; and for the past week they had become something of a nuisance. It was perhaps a fatal error to advance a theory— he had done this and was now to suffer for meddling.

They called these marauders the India-Rubber Men because there was no other name that fitted them. They were certainly elastic in their plans and in their movements; but the nickname developed after the one and only glimpse which brief authority had had of the ruthless bank smashers. They wore rubber gas-masks and rubber gloves and crepe rubber shoes. Each man, when seen, carried a long automatic in his belt, and three dangling cylinders which the experts described as gas-bombs. This latter was probably their principal armament.

They had been seen the night they cleared out Colley & Moore, the Bond Street jewellers; and that week-end when they opened the vault of the Northern and Southern Bank and left behind them a night watchman, who was dead before the police arrived. The reason for his death was apparent; in his clasped hand was a portion of a rubber gas-mask, which he had torn from one of the robbers. He had seen the face of the rubber man and had been killed for his enterprise.

"I shouldn't be surprised," said the sergeant steersman, bringing the launch a little nearer the Embankment's edge, "if the Wapping lot weren't in this India-Rubber business. That gang wouldn't think twice—"

Wade, looking ahead, had seen indistinctly something which might be human leaning over the parapet of the Embankment. The launch was not twenty yards away when he saw the bulk of the figure increase, and realised that whoever it was was standing on the parapet. In another second it had disappeared, and he saw a splash of white where it had fallen into the water.

The steersman had seen it too. The little boat shuddered as the engines went astern.

"On your right, sir. You'll reach him with your hands."

Wade was on his knees now, leaning over the edge of the boat, the steersman throwing his weight on the opposite side of the boat and bracing himself to keep it balanced.

For a second the tiny black thing on the water vanished. It reappeared right under the gunwale of the launch, and, reaching down, John Wade gripped an upflung arm and dragged the whimpering thing into the boat. It was a woman.

"Must you commit suicide, my good wench, when I'm on my way to an important conference?" he demanded savagely. "Give a light here, sergeant!"

A lantern flashed. He looked down into a pair of wild eyes. A grey-haired woman, whose face was terribly thin and lined, and in whose wide-open eyes glared an unearthly fire.

"You mustn't have it...I must take it with me!" she gasped.

She was clutching something tight to her bosom. It looked like a piece of sodden paper.

"I'm not going to take anything from you," he said soothingly.

The sergeant passed him a brandy flask, and he forced the neck between the woman's teeth. She struggled and choked.

"Don't...give me that...I want to go to my baby...The colonel said— "

"Never mind what the soldier said," snarled the inspector. "Get this hooch into you—it killed auntie, but why shouldn't it make you dance?"

He pulled a blanket from a locker and threw it over her, and in doing so he caught a glimpse of the thing that she held. It was the photograph of a child's face. He only saw it for a second in the light of his lantern, bat never after did he forget that picture. Until that moment he had thought all children were alike; but there was something very distinctive, something very unusual, in that portrait of round-eyed childhood. And then he recognised the photograph and gasped.

"Lord help us! Who is that?"

He saw the likeness now—distinct, beyond question. It was. Lila Smith! A baby's face, but Lila Smith.

"Who is this?" he repeated.

"You shan't have it! You shan't have it!" She struggled feebly. "You wicked man..."

Her voice sank to a murmur, and then the tired fingers relaxed.

"Rush for the pier, Toller. I think she's gone."

When he tried to take the photograph from the clenched hand, it squeezed up into an indistinguishable mass.

As to the identity of this unknown woman he did not even speculate. Such cases as these were common. Sometimes the police launch was not in time, and there were nights spent manipulating long drag-ropes. Strange things come up from the bed of old Thames: once they had hooked the wheel of a Roman chariot; once they brought to light what remained of a man chained from head to foot, and bearing unmistakable evidence of murder. The live ones appeared at the police court and were conventionally penitent; the dead ones filled unknown graves, and occupied half an hour of a busy coroner's time.

Lila Smith? He tried to restore the photograph to a recognisable form, but it was too far gone.

The launch ran under the pier, and a Thames policeman caught the painter scientifically and tied it up. Another policeman vanished in the gloom and brought back a wheeled hand ambulance, and into this the woman was lifted, and whisked away to Westminster Hospital.

Wade was still frowning when he came into the superintendent's room and found the Big Four in conference.

"I'm sorry I'm late, sir," he said. "A lady decided to end her life right under my nose, and that held me up."

The Chief Constable sat back in his chair and yawned. He had been working since six o'clock that morning.

"What is this yarn of yours of the Rubber Men?" he asked briefly. He took a paper from a dossier and opened it. "Here's your report. You say there's a racing boat been seen working up and down the river—about the time of these robberies. Who has seen it distinctly?"

John Wade shook his head.

"Nobody, sir—it has not been seen, except at a distance. I have an idea it is painted black; it certainly carries no lights, and there's no question at all that it goes at a devil of a speed. The first clue we had that it was working was when bargemen complained of the wash it made. It's been heard, of course; but even here, whoever is running it has used mufflers, which is very unusual in a motor-boat."

"She carries no lights?"

"No, sir. The only two men who've ever had a close view of her are a river thief named Donovan, whom I took for breaking cargo two months ago, and another. He said that he and another man were in a small boat one night, and they were crossing the river—innocently, he claims, but I should imagine to get aboard a lighter—when this launch came out of the blue and they had a very narrow escape from being run down. If the boat hadn't been moving at a terrific speed and hadn't turned off in its own length, Mr. Donovan would have been stoking sulphur! As far as I could End out, he could give no description of the boat, except that he said it was very short and hadn't the lines of a motor-boat at all. I have checked up the appearance of this craft as well as I can, and it has generally coincided with one of the robberies."

"Where has it been seen?" asked the Chief Constable. He was a long-faced man who had the appearance of being half asleep and never was.

"As far west as Chelsea Bridge," said Wade. "It was seen there by the second man, who is also a river thief in a mild way, but is more likely to be a receiver. He has a sort of warehouse in Hammersmith, which we raided a little time ago—his name is Gridlesohn. I'm fairly sure he's a receiver because he's so ready to squeak—apparently he resents these land thieves taking to the river, because it means extra vigilance and extra danger to his own 'rats'. In that respect he has my sympathy. I've caught three of them in the last month."

Jennings, one of the big chiefs, blew a cloud of smoke up to the ceiling and shook his head. "Why should the Rubber Men take to the river? That's what I want to know. There are twenty ways out of London, and the river's the slowest. You can go from Scotland Yard to any part of the town in a taxi, and not one policeman in a thousand would I dream of taking the slightest notice of it. My own opinion is that after their last big job the Rubber Men are not going to operate again for years."

A third member of the party, a studious-looking man of fifty who was in control of the Foreign Branch, interrupted here.

"This is certainly the work of an international crowd. The New York police have had rubber men working there; and in France the Bank of Marseilles was smashed and the cashier killed, in exactly similar circumstances to the busting of the Northern and Southern Bank. As to their being finished in London—"

The telephone buzzer sounded. The Chief Constable took up the phone and listened.

"When?" he asked. A long pause, and then: "I'll come right away."

"The constable on point duty reports that the lights have gone out in the manager's office of Frisby's Bank. He put his lamp on to the side of the window and thought he saw a man in the room. He has had the intelligence to phone through to his divisional inspector—mark that constable's name for promotion, will you, Lane?"

Two of the four were already out of the room. By the time Wade got to the courtyard, three police tenders were drawn up by the kerb and detectives were still climbing aboard when the cars moved off.

Frisby's Bank was in the lower end of St. Giles's Street; it was one of the few private banks that had branches in the West End. It was a small, modern building, connected by a bridge across a courtyard with an older house, and stood on the corner of a block, practically under the eye of a constable on point duty—it was he who had phoned.

By the time they reached the place the street was alive with police officers and a cordon had already been established round the bank. The manager's office faced a side street, and here was the general safe of the office. Two lights burnt day and night, and the safe was visible from the point where the policeman controlled the traffic.

The constable's story was quickly told. He was standing on the corner of the street, waiting for his relief, and Big Ben was striking the last note of twelve, when he saw the two lights go out. He ran across the road, tried the door and hammered with his fist on the panel. He then went back to the cashier's office, and, climbing on to the railings which surrounded that side of the bank and protected a small area, he turned the light of his electric lamp on to the window. It was then that he saw, or thought he saw, a man move quickly into the shadow of the safe.

A big crowd had assembled, attracted by the cordon even at the late hour; traffic had been diverted, and the streets within fifty yards of the bank had been cleared. While the constable had been telling what had happened, the bank manager, who had been telephoned for, arrived with the keys. There was, he said, a night watchman on duty, and the fact that he had not answered the repeated knockings was ominous. Detectives had already entered buildings to the left and right of the bank, and were stationed on the roof.

The premises were in a sense unique; there was a courtyard guarded by two big gates at the side of the building, and this separated the modern premises from an old Georgian house, also the property of the bank, in which, was housed the staff. The top floor was in the occupation of the night watchman, a widower of fifty, and his daughter, who controlled the office cleaners. The only value of the courtyard, explained the manager, was that it gave a certain privacy to the bank's collecting van, and it also served to park his own and his assistants' cars during the daytime.

All these explanations were given very hurriedly, the while he was fitting, with a trembling hand, the key in the door—for he was pardonably nervous, though, as the Chief Constable explained, there was no need, for he would not be asked to enter the bank after it was opened.

At last the door swung back.

"You had better take charge of the search, Wade—give Mr. Wade a gun."

Somebody thrust an automatic into his hand, and he entered the dark outer office. The door leading to the manager's room was fastened; the key had been turned on the other side; but the Flying Squad had brought the necessary tools, and in a few minutes the lock was smashed and the manager's office was open to them.

Wade stepped quickly in, a gun in one hand and an electric torch in the other. The room was empty, but a second door, leading, he gathered, in the direction of the courtyard, was ajar. He pushed this open, stopped...

Bang!

A bullet went past him, smashed into the surface of the wall and covered his face with powdered plaster. He kicked the door open farther. The second shot came nearer. He thrust his hand round the jamb of the door and sprayed the interior with ten shots. He did not hear the answering fire, and would not have known that the burglars had replied if he had not found his sleeve ripped to rags.

In a whisper he demanded a pistol from the detective who had crept to his side, passing his own back. As he did so, he heard the sound of quickly moving footsteps, and a door slam. Again he put his pistol inside and fired two shots; this time there was no answer, and when he pushed in the lamp to draw the fire, the provocation was unrewarded.

It might be a trap, but he must take the risk. In a moment he was in the room, his lamp flashing quickly from left to right. It was a small office below the level of the manager's: a plain room, lined with steel shelves on which were a number of boxes. In one corner was a steel door; behind that he could hear the soft purr of a motorcar. He tried the door; it yielded a little. He had the sensation that it was being held by somebody on the other side, and tugged. It opened suddenly—he had a glimpse of a car moving swiftly towards the gates, and then:

Rat-tat-tat-tat!

It was the quick stammer of a machine gun. A big black car swept into the street, and from its interior came the staccato rattle of automatic rifles. The police, taken by surprise, fell back; the crowd behind the cordon scattered, and the long car flew forward, venomously spitting fire from the back seat. The bullets whistled and smacked against the building; glass crashed; there was a wild scurry of people to cover. Before they could realise what had happened, the car had disappeared into St. James's Park.