Читать книгу The Man from Morocco - Edgar Wallace - Страница 19

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Colonel Carter, of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, took his cigar from his mouth in order to smile the more comfortably.

"My dear Welling, you are romantic, and because you are romantic you ought to have been a failure. Instead of which, by some mysterious dispensation of providence, you are a very successful detective officer. Romance plays no part in our work; there is nothing romantic about crime. A is a thief, with peculiar but well-known methods; B is a stolid, unimaginative police officer who, called into a case of burglary, larceny, anything you like, finds that the crime has been committed by somebody who employs the methods of A. Perhaps A makes a hobby of forcing kitchen windows, or using chance-found ladders, or is in the habit of taking a meal after the robbery is committed. Anyway, there are characteristics of A. So B arrests him, and generally he is right. You, on the other hand, would find, in the remnants of a stolen meal, proof that the robber was starving and would look for a hungry-looking, left-handed man!"

Julius Welling, Chief of the 8th Bureau, sighed. He was an elderly, white-haired man with a sad face and a trick of rubbing his nose when he was embarrassed.

"You've won through, heaven knows how," mumbled Carter through his cigar. "Maybe it is luck—maybe inspiration."

"You have omitted all the possibilities of genius," said the other gently.

In the service which he had adorned for thirty-five years they christened him "Gentle Julius." His rank was equivalent to a Chief Constable, for every promotion that could come to a successful police officer had been his, and on the rare occasions that he wore a uniform, his decorations ran in three straight rows from buttons to shoulder.

Jackson Carter and he had entered the service on the same day, the former an office man with a peculiar gift for organisation, the other so immersed in his study of men and women that he scarcely noticed the passing of the years that brought him so much honour.

"As I say, you're a romantic old dog," said Carter, on his favourite theme, which was very nearly his only recreation, the baiting of his lifelong friend. "Though I admit—and this is very handsome of me—that your dreamings have sometimes led you to queer results."

Julius Welling smiled with his eyes.

"Where will my present dream lead me to?" he asked.

"To failure," said the other seriously. "We've got The Black—there is no doubt about it. I wish somebody else than Marborne had got him, for I had sharpened the toe of my right boot for him, but there is the luck of the game; Marborne has caught him. We have all the evidence we want. Apart from the fact that he was taken in the act, the burglar's kit and gun we found on him, a whole lot of stuff has been discovered in his flat in Bond Street. A parcel of money marked with the stamp of the Home Counties Bank— —"

"I could get that by applying to the Home Counties," murmured Mr. Welling.

"A cash box buried in his garden—"

"Why should he bury a cash box in his garden?" asked the other plaintively. "Only amateur crooks do that sort of thing."

"Well, how did it get there?" asked the exasperated Carter.

Mr. Welling rubbed his nose thoughtfully.

"It may have been planted there to get a conviction," he suggested. "Marborne caught Shellman, the banknote forger, that way."

The chief stared at him.

"Do you mean it was a frame-up?" he asked, and Welling nodded.

"The particular charge on which he was convicted was faked. I've known it for some time. Shellman, of course, was a forger, too clever to be caught. The charge on which he went down for ten years was undoubtedly framed for him, and Marborne did the framing."

"That is news to me," said the other with a frown.

"As to this Morlake man," Mr. Welling advanced his views with characteristic timidity, "doesn't the story he tells sound rather fishy? He says that his servant was ill—the servant lives at Blackheath, remember. He comes to the house and is suddenly bludgeoned. Taken unawares and bludgeoned—and he is supposed to carry a gun! He comes to burgle a house and leaves his car at a corner of the street with all the lights on, when there is a lane not half-a-dozen yards away where the car could be hidden? He is supposed to have broken in at the back of the house, where there is a garden and an easy wall that would get him into open country, and yet he escapes by the front door! He 'shows fight'—how? Never forget that he has a loaded pistol, yet he 'shows fight' to such purpose that Marborne has to take his 'stick' to him. What was his gun doing all this time?"

Colonel Carter shook his head.

"The story of the telephone call is a lie—"

"On the contrary it is true," said old Julius, almost apologetically. "The New Cross exchange heard the message. They were testing junction lines because a subscriber had reported a fault, and the engineers happened to be listening in on this particular junction when the call went through."

Colonel Carter opened his eyes.

"You've been working on this case?" he said. "You're not tailing The Black?"

Gentle Julius shook his head.

"I've been tailing Marborne," he said, more gently than ever. "You see, Jack, the chief holds about the same views as you concerning the inspector, and he put me on to see that he came to no harm. And the man who called up Morlake and told him the tale about the injured servant was the inspector. I want Marborne's coat for my exhibition of ex-officers' uniforms. And, Jack, noth'n's more certain than that I'll have it!"

"And what about Morlake?" asked Carter.

Gentle Julius spread out his lined hands in a gesture of indifference.

"They may convict him or they may not," he said; "but one thing I can tell you, and it is this. James Lexington Morlake is The Black, the cleverest bank smasher we've seen in twenty years. I've proof and more than proof of that, Jack."

He pursed his lips and his white brows met in a prodigious scowl.

"Ten years ago," he said, speaking with more than his ordinary deliberation, "the Haslemere police picked up a dying sailor on the Portsmouth Road."

"What on earth are you talking about?" demanded the startled Carter.

"I'm talking about The Black," said Welling, "and why he's a burglar—get that in your mind, Jack—a dying sailor with his life hammered out of him, and not a line or a word to identify him; a dying sailor that sleeps in a little churchyard in Hindhead, without a name to the stone that is over him. Ain't that enough to turn any man burglar?"

"You love a mystery, don't you, Julius?" asked his irritated friend, when Welling rose.

"Mysteries are my specialty," said Julius gently.