Читать книгу A Debt Discharged - Edgar Wallace - Страница 6

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AT eleven o'clock that night Wentworth Gold walked into Victoria Station and took a first-class return ticket to Peckham Rye. He was smoking a cigar, and might have been a middle-aged doctor returning from an evening's jaunt in town.

He walked slowly along the platform to where the electric train was waiting, opened a first-class carriage door, and got in. After he had closed the door he leant out of the open window, watching the passengers as they came along. He did not expect any further trouble that night, but he took no chances.

The train moved out of the station, whining and purring; and the lights of the carriage dimmed and brightened as the connecting rods lost or found the trolley wires above.

The carriage was empty, for it was a little before the hour that the suburbanite returns from the theatre; and he had time to read again a letter which had come to him before he left his flat that evening. He read it carefully twice; by that time he knew its contents by heart, and he tore the letter into a hundred little pieces, dropping them a few at a time from the open window.

The attack on him did not disturb him greatly, though he had been worried as to why the man who had promised to meet him in the park had not kept his appointment.

He reached his destination, descended the long gloomy flight of stairs which led to the busy street, turned sharply, crossed to the right, and skirting the open expanse of Peckham Rye came to Crystal Palace Road. A few doors along he stopped before a respectable villa residence. The house was in darkness, but he knew he was expected. He went to the door and knocked softly, and in less than a minute it was opened to him by a girl.

"Is that Mr Gold?" asked a low sweet voice.

"That is the second time I have been asked that question tonight," said Gold, with a little chuckle. "I trust that my confession that it is indeed me will not provoke you to give me a similar response to that I have already received."

The girl closed the door behind him and helped him off with his coat.

"What is the matter?" she asked, and there was a hint of anxiety in her voice.

"Oh, nothing!" said Gold. "At least nothing more than I deserved. How is your uncle?"

She made no reply. In the darkness he heard a little sigh of weariness, and shook his head. Maple was a genius, he thought, and realized that genius is a half-way house to madness.

She led the way along a dark passage to a little back kitchen. A man sat at the table—a tall man, loosely formed, unshaven, and with a face of unhealthy whiteness. He sprawled limply on the chair by the table, his hands in his pockets, gazing vacantly before him. The table was littered with test tubes, microscopes, and scientific apparatus, with the uses of which Wentworth Gold was not acquainted.

At the sound of the door clicking he looked up with a startled frown. He shivered, as though the noise, slight as it was, distressed him, and raised a trembling hand, not over clean, to his mouth.

"Come in," he said, and rose unsteadily to his feet.

Gold looked at him reproachfully.

"Maple," he said. "I thought you promised me—" Then he remembered the girl was present.

"Get a chair, my dear," said Maple, not unkindly.

The girl obeyed. She was wonderfully pretty. Gold had never seen her before, though he had heard a great deal of Thomas Maple's niece. She was gracefully moulded and dressed in a quiet, well-fitting tailor-made. Her face had that curious pallor which is possessed by some fair women; though her hair was burnished gold, the thin line of eyebrow was so black that carelessly seeing her you would have thought it had been painted.

The shape of her face fascinated Gold. He was a connoisseur in some things. He had read about girls with perfect oval faces; he had met some of the acknowledged beauties of London; but there was in this girl's face something ethereal, something spiritual, which he had never seen before. The big grey-blue eyes gave her the appearance of sadness; the lines of her generous mouth were firm; her chin was delicately fashioned. She flushed a little under his scrutiny.

"I am sorry," he said, as if in answer to her unspoken thought, "but I have heard so much of you from your uncle."

"I am afraid my uncle talks a great deal more about me than people care to hear," she said with a little smile. "He does not know how easily one can be bored with other people's ecstasies."

Her voice was soft and perfectly attuned.

"This girl has had an education," Gold said to himself.

He turned to meet the vague smile of the man. There was a challenge and a question in the haggard face, worn and scarred by self-indulgence. This girl who had recently come into his life, the daughter of an elder brother, and his only relative in the world, was the brightest and best influence he had ever known, and it was almost pathetic to see the entreaty in his dull eyes. Gold nodded reassuringly.

"Now, Maple," he said, drawing his chair to the table, "I suppose your niece is in your confidence in this matter of ours?"

"Yes, I tell her all the things that nearly concern me," said the other, "and you can trust her, Mr Gold." His voice had the quality which distinguishes a man who has known a public school.

There was a little wallet on the table. This he opened with his shaking hand and from it extracted a bundle of oblong notes. They were five-dollar currency bills, issued by the United States of America, and distinguished only from those familiar objects by the fact that each note was mottled green, purple, and yellow, as though somebody had been light-heartedly experimenting upon them. He spread them out on the table; there were twenty in all.

Gold looked at them resentfully.

"And you say they are all forgeries?" he asked.

The other nodded.

"Every one of them. You know the Treasury sign—the only sign that the camera cannot photograph—that is not there."

He was on a favourite topic now; he was interested, and the weariness and the languor of his manner dropped from him as a cloak. He spoke without the slurred speech which had marked the earlier stage of the conversation.

"That I know," said Gold. "What of the inks?"

"Perfect," said Maple, in a tone of admiration, "absolutely perfect. I have applied every test known to your people, and they might have been printed with ink supplied by your Government."

"The water-mark?" asked Gold.

"That, too, is beyond criticism. I have here an instrument that can measure the depth of the printing and I can assure you that they are exactly printed. Moreover, I will tell you this; it will probably astonish you."

He tapped the note which was before him.

"The man who forged this did not have recourse to photography. Every one of these notes is engraven. I know because—well, never mind—I know. They have been printed on a press which has been specially made for the purpose, and the paper is identical with that which is supplied by the Government printers in Washington."

He looked at the notes one by one, shook them into a little bundle, and replaced them in the wallet.

"All my life," he said, "banknote forgeries and banknote engraving has been a favourite study of mine."

He stopped, and his mouth twitched pathetically. Then with an effort he pulled himself together.

"I worked in the French and in the German mints—I should be working in France still," he said with a grimace, "but for—" Again he stopped. "I tell you, Mr Gold," he went on, "that a man can pass this note with impunity and not only this bill, but the hundred-dollar notes I have examined."

"And there is no way of detecting them?" asked Gold.

Maple shook his head. "None whatever. Until these return to the Treasury, where they would be immediately detected, there is no possibility of their being stopped."

Gold pushed his chair back from the table, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his head sunk on his breast. He was thinking deeply, and the girl from her seat by the fireside glanced from him to her uncle.

Presently Gold looked up.

"Happily the forgers are not so confident as you," he said. "I had arranged to meet one of my men tonight in the Green Park, and in some way they got to know. They enticed him away on some pretext or other, and—"

"And?" asked Maple after a little while.

"And I have not seen him since," said Gold diplomatically.

He was worried. He had hoped that this man, acknowledged by the underworld to be the best exponent of this peculiar science, would have discovered some simple test by which the flood of forged bills might be averted; some simple means by which the forgeries might be detected. He realized now in his growing sense of disappointment how much he had depended on Maple.

There were thousands of these bills in circulation, hundreds of thousands possibly, all for small amounts, all so insignificant that the average man handling them would not trouble to question their genuineness.

"It can't be helped," he said, and rose.

He shook hands with Maple, and took a smiling farewell of the girl.

His foot was in the passage when Maple suddenly said:

"Oh, I had forgotten something I wanted to say to you, Mr. Gold. Do you know a Mr Cornelius Helder?"

"Yes," said Gold, considerably interested.

"I thought you would, he's a compatriot of yours," said Maple, and then half to himself, "I must have met him somewhere."

"He's a very well-known man," said Gold.

"My niece has had an offer from him," Maple went on.

"An offer? Indeed, what kind of an offer?"

"A secretaryship," said Maple

Gold frowned. It was an involuntary frown, but both the girl and her uncle detected it. Maple's hand went to his mouth with the nervous gesture with is the unlovely characteristic of the drunkard.

"Isn't he all right?" asked Maple anxiously: "he has offered her a very good salary."

"How did he come to know that she wanted that position?" asked Gold.

Maple pulled up the chair. The old weariness was asserting itself again. Every word was an effort.

"Sit down for a moment, won't you, and I'll tell you. It's rather a curious string of coincidences. My niece was secretary to old Lord Dellborough, who, you know, died the other day, and she did not intend taking another post because I earn quite enough to render any effort on her part unnecessary. But last week she had a letter from an agency, although Verity has never put her name on their books, saying that the post was going."

"I fail to see the coincidence," said Gold dryly.

"Well, was it not rather a coincidence that at the moment she dropped out of a billet she should have one offered her from an agency she had never heard of, to act as secretary to a man who is, I believe I may say, a friend of yours?"

Now Mr Wentworth Gold had no faith whatever in that eccentric individual, the Angel of the Odd. He made no allowance for coincidence, especially when he could discern without any great mental effort the manner in which such a coincidence could be made possible.

He looked at the girl; perhaps it would be known in certain circles who Lord Dellborough's secretary had been. There would be no difficulty in giving a commission to an agency to approach her. She was beautiful, he thought. Helder had a reputation in London amongst the people who spoke of such things behind their hands in the smoking-rooms. That was one explanation.

He thought of another almost immediately; and it struck him as being the more likely of the two.

He studied her keenly; for a moment noted the clear depths of her eyes and the firm line of her beautifully moulded chin.

"She has character," he thought; "Helder's secretary—who knew?"

"I should advise you to take the post," he said. He took a note-book from his pocket and scribbled something on a card.

"That's my telephone number. There is always somebody to answer it, day and night," he said to the girl as he handed her the little pasteboard. "You had better not tell Helder that you know me—and you had better tell me when you know Helder."

With which cryptic utterance he left them.