Читать книгу The Flying Squad - Edgar Wallace - Страница 6

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ANN PERRYMAN scarcely knew during that ride to town that she was being subjected to a cross-examination, so skilfully was it conducted. They passed many cab stands, but not once did the tender check its pace.

At the corner of Westminster Bridge and the Embankment it stopped.

"I will get you a cab. Miss Perryman," said Bradley.

In the little saloon attached to her bedroom she had an interview with Bradley on the following morning; he had 'phoned asking for this. By the time he came she had collected her thoughts, and w coldly normal. He noticed that she did not take her eyes from his all the time he was speaking, and in their clear depths he read an abysmal loathing of him and his profession.

"There is no trace of Li Yoseph," he said, "but think he will be found, unless he has been got away. He used to keep a small boat fastened to a pile beneath the house: that we found in the Thames, but empty."

She was examining him cold-bloodedly. Ordinarily she would have thought him rather a nice-looking man. He had the face of an intellectual: large, deep set eves, and a trick of peering through half-closed lids. The trick of laughter, too; his lips twitched on when he was talking of the people who lived in the squalid neighbourhood where Li Yoseph had his house. He was refreshingly clean-looking; he had the shoulders and waist of an athlete, large, capable hands, outspread on the table over which he leaned she did not ask him to sit. And her hatred of him grew in inverse ratio to the appreciation of his attractive values. So might one bereaved by the operations of Caesar Borgia have grown revolted at the sight of his handsome face.

She had been silent during most of the interview—suddenly she dropped a bombshell.

"I don't think you need bother to invent theories, Mr. Bradley;" she said quietly. "Li Yoseph was probably killed by the police—as they killed Ronnie!"

The suggestion was so ludicrous that for a moment the quick-witted Bradley had no answer for her.

"He was beaten up—I think that is the expression—because he would not tell you what you wanted to know. Why should Li Yoseph escape? He was a witness to the crime."

The eyes were narrowed now to the thinnest slits.

"I see," he said. And then: "Do you know what your brother was doing before his death, or why he had this association with Li Yoseph?"

She did not answer this.

"I'd like to help you." He leaned farther over the table and his voice dropped to a softness which, in any other circumstances, would have appealed to her.

"You're teaching at a school in Paris, I understand, and I am hoping that you are going back to Paris and that you'll try to forget this awful business. I liked your brother: in a sense he was a friend of mine. I must have been the last person who spoke to him."

He saw her lips curl and hook his head.

"It must be because you're not quite normal that you are thinking as you do. Why should the police hurt him? Why should I, of all people in the world? I would have gone a long way to give him help. I know his past, every bit of it. I know just how unstable he was—"

"I think we can spare ourselves this discussion," she said. "Whether I go back to Paris or not is entirely my own affair. I know you hated him —I believe you killed him. There isn't a man or woman who lives in that neighbourhood who doesn't believe that Ronnie was killed by the police. I don't say they intended murdering him, but they did."

He threw out his hands in despair.

"May I talk to you when you're not feeling the strain?"

And then she flared out at him.

"I never want to see you again. I hate you and men like you! You are all so smug and suave and so patently dishonest! You are liars, every one of you! You cover up your villainies with perjury and your mistakes with persecution. It is a beastly trade you're following. You live on human misery and you build up your reputations on the hearts you break and the lives you ruin—that is all I want to say to you."

He opened his lips to speak, but thought better of it and, smiling faintly, he took up his hat and went out of the room.

She repented of her outburst later, and despised herself for her repentance. Ronnie had been killed by that man...

She was not singular in her belief. The Meadows and the folk of Stock Gardens had their own views, supported by the evidence of their eyes. They knew Ronnie was in the habit of visiting Lady's Stairs, they knew that the police staged a raid upon the place and that a car-load of detectives had descended upon Li Yoseph's house at one o'clock in the morning, and that Brad of the Flying Squad had been heard to say: "I'll get the truth out of this boy if I have to beat his head off!"

This was overheard by Harry the Cosh, who was up and about when the tender of the Flying Squad came on the scene.

"Take it from me," said Cosh—so called because he had been twice convicted for using a life-preserver on policemen—"they caught him and coshed him, and when they found they'd done him in, they dropped him in the mud—I know the police. Why, they bashed me something awful the last time they took me."

Nobody suggested that old Li had been the murderer. Not even the police. They simply said that he had disappeared. It leaked out that the night he went a big Dutch steamer had slipped down the river on the tide and it was believed that he had sailed on her.

Li Yoseph's house was shut up and the keys deposited with an agent. He had a banking account at Woolwich, and it happened that, because of his ignorance of forms, he had authorised his banker to pay rates and taxes, so that, his house being a freehold, his theoretical occupation was not disturbed.

"Brad said: 'I'll get the truth out of that boy if I have to beat his head off!'"

Cosh repeated the story to many people—to Mark McGill, sombre and silent, to Mr. Tiser of the Rest House, to Ann Perryman, dry-eyed, her heart hot with hate at the vision of Ronnie's end.

An hour after Bradley left her at the hotel came Mark McGill. He was very frank and open. He did not know then how much Bradley had told her, of what secrets she was the repository. He only knew that she was surprisingly beautiful and might possibly be the most useful recruit to his organisation.

"I'm not hiding anything from you, Miss Perryman. Ronnie and I and Tiser are smugglers. I've been in the game for years, and Ronnie was my best pal. You see, I can only trust Tiser up to a point—he drinks. He's—well, he's erratic. I'm not pretending that I'm a saint, but you know what the law is—it's death on the man who offends against property. A brute can kick his wife half to death and get away with three months; let him take a few shillings out of the till or rob a capitalist of a few hundred pounds, and he's lucky to get away with six."

It did not seem so terribly sinful to Ann; there was romance in it. He watched her as he spoke and saw resolve kindle.

There were lots of articles that paid heavy duties—saccharine, for example, was three and ninepence an ounce. He—and Ronnie, of course—had got as much as ten thousand ounces over in a week: nearly a thousand pounds profit at the rate they sold. And there were other articles—one or two sidelines—about these he was vague. Ronnie had told her all this before—she was reconciled to the "crime."

It was a clean method of lawbreaking: nobody was hurt but the Government. The common people were in point of fact benefited: they could buy cheaply. "Naturally I'm not going to let poor Ronnie's death interfere with your position. If you've changed your mind about joining us—"

She shook her head emphatically; there was a light in her eyes that he could interpret, for she had told him how Bradley had so coolly returned her to Paris.

"I have not changed my mind," she said.

"Bradley will tell you that we're doing things—smuggling dope and all that sort of rubbish. Naturally he wants to paint us—and Ronnie—as black as he can. Dope! I'd rather cut off my right hand!"

She interrupted him.

"Does it really matter what Bradley says?" she asked.

That day she became a member of McGill's organisation.

It was curious that she thought no more of Li Yoseph and did not speculate upon the mystery of his disappearance. But Bradley was thinking a great deal, and day after day men sat in boats on the muddy waters of the creek and drew their grappling hooks through the mud, seeking the old man who loved to sit at the open window of his den and play Tosti's "Adieu."