Читать книгу The Guv'nor and Other Stories - Edgar Wallace - Страница 13

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MR. REEDER was very heavily engaged, but found time to call at Kressholm's hotel.

"I'd have come to you—" began Bob.

"I'd rather you didn't." J.G. could be offensive on occasions. "I have already a—um—bad name in Brockley."

Kressholm swallowed this with a grin.

"I noticed in the newspapers that you were working on a case, and I wondered if I could help you," he said. "I'd like to do you a turn if I could."

"I'm so sure of that," murmured Mr. Reeder. "It is a great joy to know that one's efforts are appreciated by the—um—unconvicted classes."

Without further preliminary Kressholm told him of what he had learnt from the girl, and J.G. Reeder listened without apparent interest. Yet, if this story were true, here was a big link in the chain he was piecing together with such difficulty.

"Are you sure that this story isn't suggested by the foolish paragraph you read in the newspapers?" he asked.

"If I die this minute—" began Kressholm.

"You would go straight to hell," said Mr. Reeder gravely. He was one of those old-fashioned people who believed in hell.

"No, this is straight, Mr. Reeder," protested Kressholm. "I thought that you ought to know this. I'm not telling you this because I am scared of Joe, so that I want to get him out of the way. I am telling you—well, because I feel that you ought to know."

Mr. Reeder nodded slowly.

"In the interest of justice, of course," he said. "Very—um— commendable. Where is this—er—entertainment park at the present moment?"

"They will be near Barnet next Monday," said Kressholm; then, anxiously: "What is the law on the subject, Mr. Reeder?"

J.G. pursed his lips thoughtfully.

"I'm not a lawyer," he said. "But, of course, it is very, very wrong to —um—be in possession of the instruments of forgery. And this assistant, you say, is still carrying on the—er—bad work?"

"So she—so I understand," Kressholm corrected himself hastily.

He offered a suggestion which was received without comment: Joe's caravan was invariably parked on the outside edge of the camp, and could be approached without observation. The night watchman who patrolled the fair-ground rarely went as far.

"I will undertake to get you the key of the van. As a matter of fact, I am staying the night on Monday. I suppose you could get a search warrant and that sort of thing; but I am asking you as a personal favour to make sure I'm right before you get a warrant. I do not want to be brought into this."

"You don't want to be brought into anything, Mr. Kressholm," said Reeder unpleasantly. "Hitherto you have been very successful. Is the young lady a friend of yours now?"

If he had stopped to think Bob Kressholm would have realised that no young lady's name had been mentioned.

"We have always been good friends," he said, and then realised his mistake. "I suppose you mean Miss Haddin I don't know what she's got to do with it."

"A nice young lady, but rather—impetuous," said Mr. Reeder. "She thought I was responsible for Joe's arrest, when really it was you. She probably thinks I was responsible for Danny Brady's death, when it was —um—you know, I think, who it was. It is all very interesting."

Mr. Reeder had something to think about. Nobody credited so staid and matter-of-fact a man with such an insatiable sense of curiosity as he possessed. All that night until he retired to his chaste bedroom he pondered the information Bob Kressholm had offered. His acquaintance with the law told him that the re-arrest of Red Joe would be followed by an acquittal. The man had served imprisonment for an act of forgery and if some other act, which had occurred concurrently, was revealed, the law would take a lenient view.

The mysterious assistant was another matter. Mr. Reeder had not heard of an assistant, but then there was quite a number of happenings about which he knew nothing.

It was a coincidence that he had been occupied for two or three days with the matter of forged letters of credit. There was no secret about this. The fact that the forged letters had been cashed and that Mr. J.G. Reeder, "the well-known forgery expert," had been in consultation with certain bank managers in Brighton had been published in the morning newspaper, and had been read by Kressholm. The man who was passing the letters had also negotiated some bearer bonds of a spurious character. That fact, too, was public property.

And yet all the evidence he had accumulated pointed to a certain hochstapler in Berlin, about whom the Berlin Criminal Police were pursuing close inquiries. There was a German end to it beyond any doubt, but that did not mean that the letters had not been forged in England. A search warrant would be easy to secure, and as easy to execute. Yet he hesitated to make the necessary application. If the truth be told, Mr. Reeder had a sneaking sympathy with Red Joe.

The police thought they had removed every kind of plate and press from the van. It was quite possible that the press had been renewed and was being employed to print from the plates which only Joe could have made. He consulted Gaylor on the subject, but the inspector was not enthusiastic. It was one of those frequently recurring periods when the police were unpopular because they had failed to secure two important convictions, and the usual questions were being asked in the House of Commons.

"It's the German crowd, I should think. Where did you get the information from? I'm sorry."

That was a question that police officers did not ask Mr. Reeder; he either volunteered the source or refused it, for he was very jealous about betraying the confidence of the least worthy of men. There was reason in this, because such revelations frequently compromised other and more important "squeaks."

Reviewing all the possibilities, J.G. Reeder decided not to pay a nocturnal visit to the Haddin menage, and when Mr. Kressholm rang him up at his home, he cut short the elaboration of that gentleman's instructions.

It was a disappointed man who travelled to Barnet on the Monday afternoon, though his discomfort was short lived.

He had re-established contact with Wenna Haddin—an amazing accomplishment, all the more remarkable because he had recovered all the old fascination she had exercised. Ten years is a very long time; men and women change in that period, especially women.

But time had stood still for Wenna; the slim beauty of her went to his head like wine, and when she gave him a cold welcome at the door of the big caravan which old Lew had built for her, he could have shut his eyes and believed that it was only yesterday that their acquaintance had ended dramatically in that little plantation near the Exeter fair ground.

"Lew is away," she said. "He has gone to Liverpool to see a shipment of wild beasts that have arrived from Africa. You will sleep in his van."

He glanced at her sleeping bunk, covered now with a gaily coloured cloth. Above the head of the bed was a framed photograph of Danny Brady—the only picture in the van.

"Poor old Dan!" he said. "I feel responsible." She looked at him steadily.

"Why?" she asked.

Kressholm shrugged his shoulders.

"I should have given him a better training. Honestly, I tried to keep him out of the crooked game, Wenna."

She smiled faintly.

"He was too useful for you to keep him out," she said. "Let us be sincere with one another as far as we can be."

She had the disconcerting habit of directness—nobody made Bob Kressholm feel so foolish as she did.

"You're 'the Governor,' aren't you? I've heard about you, of course," she went on. "We have all sorts of queer people working for us—old gaol birds and people who should be if they had everything that was coming to them. Were you in London when Danny was arrested?"

He shook his head.

"I rarely leave Paris." And then, feeling that the occasion called for a little frankness: "I'll tell you the truth, Wenna. I knew that Danny was doing this job. He was one of my best men. He was impetuous and undisciplined. The last thing I said to him before he left Paris was 'For God's sake don't carry a gun.' He promised me he wouldn't."

She was looking past him out of the curtained window, and she sighed.

"Reeder, of course, knew as much about the business as I did—I'll hand it to that old bird; he's got the best information bureau in the world."

She looked round at him.

"And yet he's never caught you," she said. "That's queer, isn't it?"

Bob Kressholm chuckled.

"The man who catches me has got to be up very early in the morning," he said complacently.