Читать книгу The Road to London - Edgar Wallace - Страница 5

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JUST as there was something about Mr. George Loamer that was wholly different from and superior to all other human beings, so there was something about his office which marked it as different from and superior to all the other offices in the City of London.

Mr. George Loamer was unique in that he was not an individual obscuring his individuality behind a corporation, a company, or a syndicate. He was just himself, a name in dull gold letters on a grey stone fascia without reservation or qualifying appendage.

The building occupied a very small plot in Lombard Street. It had four floors, on which his managers, cashiers, accountants and clerks worked in luxurious surroundings—areas of polished mahogany and plate glass enclosed within marble walls. Here they kept track of his multifarious transactions, his incursions into the rubber market and the rail market and mining market. For Mr. George Loamer confessed himself good-humouredly as a gambler on the Stock Exchange, and there was such material proof of his prosperity that the word lost much of its disreputable meaning.

He was a very tall man, stout and broad-shouldered. His face was very red and good-humoured, and he smiled most of the time. His thin, sandy hair was brushed back from his high forehead, and he wore invariably a perfectly fitting frock coat; a double-breasted waistcoat, across which looped a heavy gold chain.

He was smiling one morning in late spring when a solitary sumach tree in the paved courtyard beneath his window was putting forth its new green, and his smile had the quality of benevolence. His companion was a small, shabby-looking woman in the early forties, with a lined, sad face and a nervous trick of pinching her bloodless lips. Her faded blue eyes were fixed on Mr Loamer in pathetic appeal.

She sat opposite Mr. Loamer, fiddling with the ivory handle of an umbrella, and she was obviously ill at ease.

"My dear Miss Elvington," said Mr. George Loamer in his most comforting tone, "nobody knows better than you how much I would give to learn your father was alive. May I suggest, as I have suggested year after year, that I am the last person in the world with whom he is likely to communicate."

The faded woman stirred uneasily.

"My father was a very wealthy man—" she began.

Mr. Loamer closed his eyes wearily.

"Yes, yes"—his voice was little more than a murmur—"I know—I know! And an eccentric man. I have always thought that Dr Marcus was a very eccentric man. I do not wish to hurt your feelings, but—er—I have thought that possibly his mind was a little... shall we say... affected?"

"He was strange but he wasn't mad," she said with spirit. "He drew a hundred thousand pounds from the bank—the proceeds of the sale of his properties—and was never seen again."

Mr. Loamer nodded. He was very patient. Once in every three months he had to endure such an interview as this: he was almost inured to the experience.

"I never saw him, my dear lady," he said gently. "When you reported his disappearance I was the first to inform the police. He was a client of mine. I certainly had made a little money for him, but at the time of his disappearance he owed me the best part of four thousand pounds. As I say, I should be the last person in the world he would communicate with. He told me the previous day that he was going abroad; that is all I know."

He sighed, twiddled his short thumbs and looked appealingly at the ceiling. The little woman rose, gathered up her worn bag and umbrella.

"It is rather hard living in that big house alone." she said. "The expense is terrible."

Mr. Loamer did not suggest that she should sell the house. He had offered the suggestion before, and he was anxious to cut short the interview. Presently, he thought, she would tell him that she had a small income inherited from her mother. She always told him that. To his relief she said nothing more except to bid him a timid good-bye. He opened the door for her and watched her disappear into the gilded elevator, and, going back to his desk, sat down to await the arrival of Mr. Nigel Black.

Nigel came swinging across the broad outer office on time; would have started his business then and there but for the fortuitous circumstance that, displaying the mysteries of his sanctum, Mr. Loamer drew back a small panel and revealed a window which gave him an uninterrupted view of the outer office.

"I like to feel that I can, by pressing a button as it were, bring my staff—my more intimate staff—under observation."

"By Jove!" said Mr. Nigel Black, in wonder.

It was not the mechanism or the ingenuity which surprised him. Looking over the shoulder of the young man, Mr. Loamer frowned, blinked and then smiled. If there was annoyance in the smile, he did not betray himself.

"My ward," said he, a little grandly.

Nigel Black looked through that small observation window which afforded Mr. Loamer a view of his outer office. "My ward" was standing by the desk of the cashier, and he saw at first only the graceful lines of her and the back of a biscuit-coloured toque, for her face was turned from him. A tiny diamond glittered on the white finger of the hand that rested on the desk, and he wondered, as young men wonder almost mechanically, if she was engaged and to whom. He was never quite sure which was the engagement finger. Fair... he saw the dull gold of her hair over the ears. A very gracious figure. And then she turned her head. The profile was perfect—he guessed the splendour of her eyes. In profile her lips were full and red.

"My ward," said Mr. Loamer again, and as he spoke the girl turned from the desk and went slowly out of the room.

Nigel scratched his nose thoughtfully.

"What the devil are you doing with a ward?" he demanded, and Mr. Loamer smiled complacently.

"Her mother, a widow, was a dear friend of mine, Mrs Hallaman Jones. Rich? Oh, yes. Hallaman Jones was—um—artistic—but rich. When he died his dear wife put her business in my hands. She was my best friend."

"Dead?"

Mr. Loamer nodded gravely.

"She died in my house rather suddenly. A heart attack four years ago. I was sole executor of her will."

Nigel Black was not greatly interested in the late Mrs Jones; he thought the name was rather usual. In a second she had passed from his mind. The ward in the biscuit-coloured coat and the little toque was not so easily forgotten.

"She's certainly beautiful," he said, and added: "So far as I could see her."

Here Mr. George Loamer should have invited him to meet his ward, should have explained that she was curiously named after the russet month in which she was born, and added such spice of detail as would have piqued the curiosity of his visitor. There was every reason why he should, for Nigel Black was the type of young man that guardians dream about. He was very good-looking, very wholesome, an out-of-door man, and solidly rich. But for a motive that was good and sufficient he did not excite the curiosity of his visitor.

"Now let us talk business," said Mr. Loamer gravely, a trifle pompously.

There was business to be talked, for Nigel Black had arrived two days before from New York and the voyage had been punctuated by radio messages concerning the state of the rubber market.

Nigel Black had all the virtues of clean youth and most of the advantages which come to very rich young men. He had one gentle but ineradicable vice—the desire for adventure which is so often expressed in these humdrum and peaceful times on the floor of the Stock Exchange or that space verging the green ribbon of the turf where men speculate on the erratic qualities of the racehorse.

It was his misfortune that his gambling propensities produced a profit, otherwise he might have grown bored of folly and developed an interest in those gilt-edged securities; the movements of which so seldom raise a flutter in the most susceptible bosom. It was when rubber had dropped to an incredibly low level that he met Mr. George Loamer in the grill room of the Astoria, for Mr. Loamer was on one of his periodical visits to the United States, and when introduced, as he was, by an enthusiastic friend to "one of the big men in London finance," he accepted this extravagant estimate of Mr Loamer's stability.

Mr. Loamer was not unknown on Wall Street. He was regarded as a "safe" gambler who had built a huge fortune by the exercise of an admirable judgment not usual in speculators. He was a broker who acted for quite important people in America, but it was generally understood that his operations where of the more secret kind, that he was in fact a "rigger," who could manipulate stock to the advantage of clients who desired anonymity.

Mr. Loamer talked "rubber" in his soothing way, spoke easily of production, of plantations, of reserves. Here was rubber at thirteen cents a pound. It could not fall lower. All the world's traffic was carried on rubber— he had motor-car statistics at his finger tips.

Now suppose... His gold pencil flew along the smooth white table cover—many a laundry hand had examined Mr. Loamer's pencilled calculations without understanding them.

Nigel Black was fired with the plausibility, the logic of his new friend's calculations. He gave Mr. Loamer a tentative commission then and there, and within a month found himself the richer by twenty thousand dollars.

And then Mr. George Loamer had advanced the details of a great scheme that brought the young man to London and to the greatest adventure of all.

For two hours they sat in the guarded office, and then Mr Loamer rose stiffly, and locked away his documents in the big safe.

"Lunch," he said peremptorily.

Outside in Lombard Street a man in rags was walking along the edge of the sidewalk, his eyes glued to the ground. Now and again he stooped and picked up a cigarette end from the gutter. Nigel was watching him curiously when Mr. Loamer joined him.

"Shooting snipe!"

Nigel's white teeth showed in a grin of joy.

"Makes me feel homesick to see that hobo gathering in the sheaves," he said.

Mr. Loamer's interest was of the mild and disparaging kind.

"How these beasts live I can't imagine," he said. "A friend of mine in the police department told me that some of them cover Europe, and one, he knew, walked from London to Madrid and back in a year. That of course is a lie. Without a passport it would be impossible to leave the country."

"Listen," protested Nigel Black. "You may be a whale of a financier, but human nature is a sealed book to you, Mr. Loamer."

And he proceeded to tell stories, and out of these stories grew one which Mr. Loamer invented for himself.