Читать книгу The Devil Man - Edgar Wallace - Страница 8

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While Alan was shaving next morning, he sent Dixon round to find the police officer, but Baldy was out on one of those mysterious missions which made up his life. He would see him later in the day, when he brought Jane Garden back; and here a new train of thought started. Jane Garden was a problem which had to be solved, and the solution of this particular difficulty did not immediately present itself.

This ugly burglar Peace had excited his curiosity and interest, and these were big enough to overcome the natural revulsion he felt towards the man. He was something of a humanist, and had all the detachment of the scientific observer. He could regard the little man as foul beyond tolerance, and yet could find the same interest in him as he discovered in the obscure diseases which came under his notice at rare intervals.

Alan, despite his youth, had retained and enlarged the practice of the old doctor from whose executors he had acquired it. In the main it was an upper middle-class clientele, and none of these could be expected to give a first-hand impression of the little nondescript. It was not until he began his charity calls in the poorer suburbs that he learned that Peace was quite a well-known character, had a reputation none too savoury, but on the whole was reluctantly admired by his law-abiding friends and neighbours.

Peace himself lived in a poor class district, and was by all accounts a great lover of animals: his canaries and parrots were famous in the neighbourhood. He was believed to be a man of superior education, and was credited with gifts to which, to Alan personally, he had made no claim.

If these poor people looked askance at him at all, their distrust was based on other causes than his anti-social activities. There were mothers of daughters who did not call his name blessed; but if he was hated in such quarters as these he was also feared. Alan confirmed the stories of his extraordinary strength. He was a frequent attraction at local sing-songs, and was believed to have not only written his own lyrics but composed the music.

Nobody loved him; nobody even liked him; the most that could be said of him was that he was respected. Hereabouts his boastfulness was not regarded as such, but rather as a statement of fact offered by the only person who could be an authority.

By a coincidence, Alan came upon some of his handiwork: a wooden crucifix, carved from cedar, and, despite certain crudities, a beautiful piece of work. In another house the mention of the man's name produced an ingenious mechanical toy, which he had made for a child. Alan had a chat with a doctor who did most of his work amongst this particular class.

"A terrible little beast," said the other medico, and, speaking as doctor to doctor, he explained why. "He's done time, too, but his neighbours don't know that."

"Would it make any difference?" asked Alan, and to his surprise the other doctor was emphatic.

"Good heavens, yes! The respectable poor are terribly proper, and would have nothing to do with a man who'd been in the jug, as they call it."

Alan was again to hear of Peace, for when he got back from his afternoon calls, which he did on foot, since he had lent the cob and the trap to Baldy, he found that gentleman waiting for him.

"I've brought the young lady. She's gone upstairs to her room—is she staying here?"

"For a little while." Alan had made this eleventh-hour arrangement with his housekeeper, and had scrawled a hurried note to the girl telling her his plans.

"A very nice young person," said Baldy. "Very nice. That Madame What's-her-name wasn't too pleased to see me, doctor, although she seemed to be expecting me."

Alan started guiltily, "Good heavens, yes! I'd forgotten that I half threatened her with you—at least, I said I'd probably send you out to bring back Nurse Garden. The spirit of prophecy was on me, Baldy!"

Sergeant Eltham closed his eyes in resignation. "Don't call me Baldy," he murmured.

"Sorry. She wasn't pleased to see you, eh? What do you think of her?"

Baldy pursed his bearded lips. "She may be, and she may not be," he said cryptically. "I'm not sure. She must have been a fine woman when she was young, but, of course, she's a foreigner, and that makes all the difference. She's got a rough side to her tongue, doctor; when I started inquiring about the missing men she let me have it in French, German, Russian, Eyetalian, Spanish and Chinese—at least, that's what it sounded like. When she got back to English she started to tell me what she was going to do when she saw my superintendent. Naturally, I shook in my shoes: I always do when I'm threatened."

"Whom did you see?" asked Alan curiously. "Baumgarten?"

"I wouldn't remember the names even if I'd heard 'em," confessed Baldy. "I saw a couple of menservants, and tough-looking customers they were. And, of course, I saw the lady and the nurse, but I didn't see her till I was going. And I saw three or four rough-looking loafers walking about the grounds. They might have been gardeners, but they didn't look like it. Well, the long and the short of it is, doctor, she knows nothing about the missing men, and has never employed them. She said Mr What's-his- name of the Silver Steel Company was a thief and a dull man and other abusive epitaphs—"

"Epithets," suggested Alan.

"Well, whatever it is. Rum-looking woman, not my idea of something to come home to. I saw that other woman this morning—the farmer's wife, Mrs How-d'you-call-him—the woman who saw the fight the day the man disappeared. She said one of the men who was talking to this young feller on the night that he disappeared was a little man with an ugly face. Recognize the description?"

"You mean Peace?" Baldy nodded.

"I'm taking her round tonight to see if she can identify him. Of course, Peace will swear he wasn't anywhere near the spot—he's the man who invented alibis. He's poisonous." He took his leave soon after to go in search of the farmer's wife. Mrs Haggerty, the housekeeper, had laid tea and had brought in the pot and the muffin dish when Jane Garden came down the narrow staircase through the hall and into the little study.

Alan looked at her and gasped. She wore a dark, closely-fitting taffeta dress, with a little white lace collar, and her deep gold hair was uncovered. Beauty sometimes owes some of its quality to the frame in which it is set. Alan always said that a nurse who was not pretty in uniform must be very plain without; but the radiant beauty of this girl was enhanced by the severity of her 'civilian' attire.

There was a new light in her eyes; her face was transformed. The haggard fear which had sat on her on the previous night had departed, and there was now an assurance in her poise and a radiance in the smile that parted her red lips.

"Well, doctor, you certainly got me away! What are you going to do with me?" she said almost gaily.

"You're not going back to Madame Stahm's?"

She shook her head. "Never," she said emphatically. "I may return to London; I expect the institution that sent me will be very angry that I left Madame in a hurry, but I must risk that. Is there no place in Yorkshire where I could find work?"

"Must you work?" he asked.

She nodded. "Yes," she said quietly. "I have to earn my living, and it's the only way I know." She sat down and, at his invitation, began pouring out the tea.

"What was the trouble at Brinley Hall?" he asked.

She did not reply immediately. She handed him his cup, sliced a muffin upon his plate, and then."

"Everything," she said. "The atmosphere was terrible—sinister. That's a dramatic word, but I can't think of anything better. And all those dreadful men—"

"Are there many there?"

She hesitated. "About ten, I think," she said, to his surprise. "Madame Stahm has a private laboratory in the grounds. Some of them work, some of them are servants; one is always meeting them in the house, and they're rather—well, embarrassing."

"Baumgarten—what of him?" She dropped her eyes quickly.

"I don't know. He's not very nice—rather friendly—too friendly—and he's absolutely all-powerful there; he rules the house and rules Madame Stahm, although he pretends all the time that he's a sort of upper servant. Actually he is her secretary. I don't know what correspondence she has, but he seems to be with her all the time, except when that horrid little man Peace is there—"

"Does he come often?" asked Alan quickly.

"Very often. He's an amazing little creature, isn't he? I confess that the sight of him makes me sick here"—she laid her hand on her diaphragm. "He's the only man in the world I couldn't be alone with without screaming. But Madame Stahm is never tired of him, says he's a genius—'God-gifted' is her word. What makes him more terrible is the delusion he seems to hold that he is irresistible to all women." She gave a little shiver, and her pretty face puckered into a grimace. "He must belong to absolutely the lowest grade of mankind. I've seen the type in hospitals, but never quite so bad as he. His face in itself is extraordinary. He can make it change so that you would never recognize it—from hideous to more hideous!" And then her sense of humour overcame her disgust, and she laughed softly. "He asked if he might take me out one afternoon."

"Asked whom?" demanded Alan, aghast.

"Madame Stahm—and she gave permission! Not immediately, but in future. She told me it was one of the rewards she was holding out to the little man, and practically commanded me to grant his request. I told her I would sooner go walking with a large family of snakes, but that only seemed to amuse her."

"He goes there very often, does he?" said Alan thoughtfully. "That will be news to Baldy."

"Who is Baldy? Oh, you mean Sergeant Eltham? Isn't he wonderful? He must have pointed out fifty people or places on the way back, and didn't know the name of any! Am I staying here tonight?"

"Yes. It's quite proper," said Alan hastily. "My housekeeper sleeps on the premises—"

"Don't be silly," she interrupted. "I'm supposed to be a trained nurse, and I've been alone in a house all night with a lunatic!"

Usually Alan Mainford took his time when he made his evening calls, but this night he found himself hurrying one after the other, skipping unimportant cases where ordinarily he would have called if only to gossip, and he was back in the house within an hour, and found, to his disappointment, that she was just going to bed.

"And I'll sleep well tonight. No screams—"

"Screams?" he said quickly. "What do you mean?"

She was annoyed with herself. "I shouldn't have said that. But there were screams—hideous noises sometimes. I thought it was Madame Stahm shouting in her sleep, but once I heard it when I was talking with her, and she was so agitated that I knew she had heard the sound before."

"What did she do?" asked Alan.

"She sent for Baumgarten and talked to him vigorously in Russian; and when I say 'vigorously' I mean—vigorously! The night you left—you heard it?"

He nodded. "It was dreadful, wasn't it? It made my blood run cold." She was looking a little white and peaked again, and Alan summarily ordered her off to bed. He sat for a long time turning in his mind the problem of Madame Stahm, weaving about her the most fantastic theories, none of which was perhaps as fantastic as the truth.

Thought passed quickly to dream. Alan jerked up his head with a start, and was conscious of coldness. The fire was out; the clock on the mantelpiece pointed to half-past two. With a yawn he walked upstairs, opened the door of his room, and stepped in. A soft voice from the darkness said: "Is this your room, doctor? I'm so sorry." With an incoherent apology he shut the door and went into the back room that his housekeeper had prepared for him.

He carried his embarrassment into his dreams.