Читать книгу The Face in the Night - Edgar Wallace - Страница 9

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Big Bill was no sentimentalist, but in the thing that passed for a soul there was a certain elementary code, the rudiments of what had once been a sense of honour and decent judgment.

"Your sister! Suffering snakes, you couldn't allow a kid like that to take such a risk?"

Dora's smile was her answer. Her husband was biting his nails nervously.

"There may be no risk," he said, "and if there is, isn't it ours, too?"

Standford stirred uneasily. "That's so. But we're in this for the profit—and the risk. Suppose they caught her and she squealed?"

"That is the only real risk," said Dora, "and it isn't a big one."

The big man looked thoughtfully at the carpet.

"That stuff has to get out of this house and out of the country —quick!" he said. "It is too big to hold and break up here, and I never pass a newspaper boy but I don't hear the squeal that the papers are putting up. Lock the door, girl."

She obeyed. On the mantelpiece was a beautiful gilt and enamelled clock, surmounted by a statuette of a fawn.

Gripping the statuette firmly, he lifted out the greater portion of the clock's interior, without in any way affecting the functions of the timepiece, which ticked on. Pressing the spring, one side of the bronze box opened and showed a tightly fitting package of silver paper. This he laid on the baize cloth and unrolled. Instantly there came from the table such a flicker of leaping fires, blue and green and purest white, that Dora's mouth opened in wonder and awe.

"There's seventy thousand pounds there," said Stanford, and thrust out his lower lip thoughtfully. "And there's also ten years for somebody —seven years for the theft and three years for outraged majesty. You cannot rob a visiting queen without putting something on to the sentence."

The dapper man shivered. "Don't talk about sentences, my dear fellow," he said petulantly. "If Pierre does his part—-—"

"Pierre will do his part. He'll be waiting at Charing Cross station at nine-fifteen. The question is, who's going to take the stuff?"

There was a silence.

"Audrey will take it," said Dora at last. "I was a fool not to think of it when I saw her. Nobody knows her, and nobody will suspect her. Pierre is easy to recognize. And then, Bunny, out of this business for good." She nodded emphatically. "There's a little old story about a pitcher and a well; and there's 'Daisy Emming's Life in Prison', published in the Sunday Globe—taking them in conjunction I read a Warning to Girls."

"Perhaps Mr. Lacy Marshalt will give Martin a directorship," sneered the big man. "When you people get next to what looks like good, easy, honest money, it's surprising how quickly you reform."

"I scarcely know the man," said Dora sharply. "I told you about him. Bunny. He's the man I met at the Denshores' dance. He's a South African and rich, but you couldn't pry loose a red nickel without dynamite."

Martin Elton looked at her suspiciously.

"I didn't know you knew him—" he began.

"Get back to this stuff," snapped Stanford. "There's one thing I want to know—suppose she's caught?"

Another long and painful silence.

"Why not keep it here till the squeal dies down?" asked Elton. "There's no ghost of a suspicion that they connect us with the job."

Stanford looked him straight in the eye.

"Twelve months ago," he said slowly, "when Leyland Hall was cleaned up, you got most of the stuff out of the country through a receiver at Bognor. He gave you a little trouble, didn't he?"

"Yes," said the other shortly; "that is why I hadn't thought of him in connection with this job."

"And you're wise," said Bill, nodding. "Dick Shannon has been spending the greater part of the day with your friend at Bognor!"

Martin Elton's pale face went a shade paler.

"He wouldn't squeal," he said unsteadily.

"I don't know. If a man would squeal to anybody, he'd squeal to Shannon. The English detective service has gone to blue blazes since they introduced gentlemen. I like police whom you can reason with." He jiggled the loose coins in his pocket suggestively. "That's why I say that you can't keep the stuff at this house. Bennett may not have squeaked. On the other hand, he may have emitted squeak-like noises. What do you say, Dora?"

She nodded. "The stuff ought to go: I've recognized that all along," she said. "Make a parcel of it, Martin."

They watched the man as, wrapping the necklace again in cotton-wool, he packed it in an old cigarette-box and tied it about with brown paper, and then Stanford asked: "If it comes to squealing, what about your sister?"

Dora considered before she replied.

"I am sure of her," she said.

"Let us see her," said Stanford when the parcel had been firmly tied and hidden under a sofa cushion, and the top of the clock replaced.

Audrey was sitting in a deep, low chair before the gas-fire, pondering her strange welcome, when she heard Dora's footsteps on the stairs.

"You can come down now."

She looked at her sister and made a little face, and, for all her subtlety, could not hide the disparagement in the glance.

"You're a human scarecrow, Audrey! I shall have to buy you some clothes straight away."

Audrey followed her down to the floor below and into the big drawing- room that ran the width of the house. A tall, broad-shouldered man stood with his back to the fire, and on him Audrey's eyes first rested. He was a man of fifty, whose hair was cropped so close that at first she thought he was bald. His deep, forbidding eyes fixed and held her as she entered.

"This is Mr. Stanford," introduced Dora. "And this is my little sister."

He held out a huge hand and took hers in a grip that made her wince.

The second man in the room was slight and dapper, and his unusual pallor was emphasized by the small, black moustache and the jet-black eyebrows. Good-looking, she thought, almost pretty. So this was the great Martin about whom she had heard so many rhapsodies.

"Glad to meet you, Audrey," he said, his admiring eyes never leaving her face. "She's a peach, Dora."

"She's prettier than she was," said Dora indifferently, "but her clothes are terrible."

It was not like Audrey to feel uncomfortable. She was so superior to the trials of poverty that ordinarily she would have laughed good- naturedly at the crude comment. But now, for some reason, she felt embarrassed. It was the unwavering stare of the big man by the fire-place, the cold appraisement of his gaze.

Stanford looked at his watch.

"I'll be going," he said. "I'm glad to have met you, miss. Perhaps I'll be seeing you again."

She hoped sincerely that he would not.