Читать книгу The Flying Squad - Edgar Wallace - Страница 8

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MARK McGill was like a man paralysed: he neither moved nor spoke. At last:

"You saw him—Li Yoseph?" His voice was thick. "You saw Li Yoseph in—in Cavendish Square? You're mad—phew!"

He shook himself as if he were throwing off the burden she had suddenly imposed upon him.

"Where—tell me?"

She told him of the man she had seen standing on the kerb by the waiting cab, and, running to the window, he wrenched back the curtains, threw up the window and stepped out on to the balcony.

"Where?"

She had followed him and pointed.

"He was there—at that comer."

The cab was no longer in sight, nor the man.

"Rubbish—God! you gave me a—a turn! Of course, I understand. There's a fellow lives at the corner house, a Russian prince or something of the sort. He often has visitors, Russians and people of that sort... "

The hand that went up to his lips was trembling; she had never seen him like that before, and could only wonder at the agitation into which the very possibility of Li Yoseph's existence had thrown him. "He is dead —I know that he is dead—what the hell—?"

He spun round with the snarl of a frightened beast as Mr. Tiser came into the room. Mr. Tiser was dressed in his tidy black. He wore frock- coats that were a little too long for him and a ready—to—wear black tie, and his linen was always spotless. He had large rabbit teeth, which he showed in a perpetual smile. Mr. Tiser was a very happy man. He was happy that he was alive (and he had good reason for this), happy that he had the opportunity of helping his fellow creatures, mostly happy always to welcome any distinguished visitor to the Rest House. He was happy now as he danced into the room.

"Goodness gracious, my dear friends, I seem to have startled you! I really must knock in the future. Did I come at an inconvenient moment?"

His voice, his manner, the lift of his eyebrows stood for archness. Ann did not actively dislike him, but she found it difficult at times to offer the admiration for his disinterested services to humanity which they deserved. Being human, she discounted the virtues and resented the perfections which were too apparent in Mr. Tiser.

"My good fellow, you look ill. Positively! Do you agree. Miss Ann? I am concerned. Perhaps I observe these signs because I live, move, and have my being in an atmosphere of rude health? Take old Sedeman, for example —my old man of the sea—wicked but well. Ha, ha! Ha, ha!"

He laughed mechanically at his own witticisms.

All the time he was speaking he was employing himself usefully. There was a lacquered cabinet in an alcove, and from this he had taken a bottle and a tumbler.

"Look not thou upon the wine when it is red: when it giveth its colour aright, eh? But when it is yellow and tawny and smelleth of peat, eh? Another matter, I think."

He sipped the whisky; his pale blue eyes were smiling approval.

"All is well at the Rest House—"

"Ann thought she saw Li Yoseph to-day."

Mr. Tiser's face contorted painfully.

"For God's sake don't be comic!" he said shrilly. "Li Yoseph... pleasant subject to talk about, eh? Let the dead rest, old boy. Li Yoseph —ugh!" He shivered and put down his glass.

There was perspiration on his face; little beads appeared under his eyes; all his jauntiness had left him. The shock of the announcement threw him off his balance, and Ann realised for the first time how near the edge this suave missioner lived.

"Li Yoseph... do you remember, Mark? All those bogeys and ghosts of his? By heavens, he used to make my flesh creep! And now he's a ghost himself—most amusing!"

He chuckled foolishly, filled the glass again and drank the raw spirit eagerly.

"Li Yoseph is dead, as far as we know." Mark forced his voice to a calm he did not feel.

Mr. Tiser stared at him, his mouth working foolishly.

"You bet he's dead! Very good thing for everybody. Do you remember how he used to see things, Mark... talked to them... it made my blood run cold!"

He shivered, and the hand that held the glass trembled violently. He was looking into vacancy as though he himself saw something. In his terror he was oblivious of his audience. Ann heard him as a man who was speaking his thoughts aloud.

"It was horrible... confoundedly so. I wouldn't go through that again. Can't you see him as he stood grinning at us and saying—he —he'd come back—hey?"

Mark was at his side, gripped him by the arm and swung him round.

"Wake up, will you?" he said harshly. "And shut up! Can't you see you're worrying Ann?"

"Sorry, sorry!" mumbled the quivering Mr. Tiser. "Before a lady, too! Most awfully bad form."

Mark caught the girl's eyes and signalled. She needed no encouragement. Picking up her hat and her handbag, she went quickly out of the room. From the passage she heard Tiser's shrill voice.

"Li Yoseph—Li Yoseph... men aren't immortal. Mark, you know he's dead!... Ten paces, old boy, what... ?"

She was glad to close the door on the sound of his whining voice. Tiser stood for the ugly aspect of the game. He was always drunk, always talking wildly; his unctuousness and hypocrisy were alike unpleasant. Ann very rarely spoke to him: she could count their conversations in the past year on the fingers of one hand.

She crossed the landing and opened the door of her own flat, a smaller apartment. Her daily maid had left her a cold dinner waiting and the table laid. She was not very hungry, and she delayed the meal until she had had a bath and changed.

Ronnie had been done to death over a year now. She tried to recover from the past something of her blind, insensate hatred of this suave officer of the law, something of the bitter contempt, something of the old schemes of vengeance she had hugged to her heart, and which had made imperative the cunning re-introduction which Mark had manoeuvred. She had a portrait of Brad cut from a newspaper, and that her bitterness should not die of inertia she had placed it in a double frame, so that they looked at one another: Ronnie, with his clear-cut profile and the youthful smile in his eyes; Brad, his murderer, sombre, cynical, hateful. She had set out to make this man like her, and Mark had not only approved her plan, but given it encouragement. It had been a heart-breaking task; all the time she had to fight down the memory of that ghastly thing she had seen, and which they told her was Ronald Perryman; but she had schooled herself so well that she could sit vis-a-vis his slayer, and smile in his eyes as she tapped her ash into the saucer of the coffee cup.

He liked her very well, she knew that that bitter day when she heard about Ronnie; but he went no further than liking. He was interested in her, seemed genuinely sympathetic in her sorrow. Not until that very night had he ever mentioned Mark McGill, though he had often spoken of Ronnie.

"He got into pretty bad hands, that boy," he had once said. "I could see him drifting deeper and deeper, and I did my best to save him. If he'd only told me just how far he was committed I might have done it."

As she dressed she set the photo frame squarely on her dressing- table. There was a little frown on her forehead as she brushed back her shingled hair. Had she been as clever as she had thought? She had learned nothing, was no nearer to his confidence than ever she had been. Mark used to ask her, when she came back from these meetings, what he had said —she could tell him nothing more about his work and himself than Mark already knew.

Bradley was not of the gentle class: his father had been a country wheelwright whose hobby had been the study of bird life; his mother was a labourer's daughter.

The labourer's ancestry was, in the days of his childhood, a subject for whispering gossips. The lad started life as a stable-boy; he graduated to the police through a variety of employments, all of which contributed something to his knowledge of life.

To learn had been his absorbing passion. He might be imagined parading his midnight beat, muttering strangely as he murdered the French irregular verbs, or spending hours of leisure reading such elementary textbooks on law as were intelligible to him.

At twenty-two he was a sergeant, at twenty-three a war captain. He came back to Scotland Yard from Mesopotamia with a knowledge of Arabic, written and spoken, a small and uncleanly library of Oriental works, which he confessed he had scrounged, and two new methods of lock-picking that he had learnt from a shameless Arabian burglar who called himself Alt Ibn Assuallah. He might have held an important post in Bagdad: he preferred the sergeant's rank, which was grudgingly restored.

Ann had finished her meal and was brewing coffee when Mark telephoned through to her.

"I don't know what is the matter with Tiser—it looks to me like a nervous breakdown. He has been overworking at the Rest House and I don't think the company has too good an effect on him. I hope it hasn't worried you?"

He heard her laugh and was relieved.

"I haven't thought of it since. I don't like him very much. He drinks, and I don't like people who drink."

Mark said something about "over-strain" and added that he had sent him back to the Rest House. He made no further reference to Li Yoseph.

There were so many things about Mark that were altogether admirable. Who but he would have devoted some of his illicit gains to the moral uplift of less fortunate breakers of the law? Viewed calmly, there was something grotesque, something Gilbcrtian, in the idea, and yet the Rest House was an accomplished scheme. Mark had bought an old public-house that had lost its licence, and had furnished the hostel at a considerable cost for the use of old convicts. Here, for a minimum sum, the old lag could find a bed and food.

"My amusing hobby," Mark described it; and though it cost him five thousand a year he regarded the money as being well spent.

She thought it was wonderful of him, and would have given up one night a week to the work, but he would not sanction this.

"I don't want your name associated with mine," he said. "One of these days I may fall, and I'd like to keep you out of it."

That was so like Mark—her heart glowed towards him.

"Bring your coffee with you—I want to talk," he suggested when she told him what she was doing.

He was waiting at the open door to take the cup from her.

"Tiser's getting more and more impossible—with the drink he takes he ought to be dead," he said. "We'll have to look around for another superintendent."

"I don't like him," she confessed.

"I'm glad you don't. I had a devil of a time with him after you left. He's got a new craze—the Flying Squad! Every car he sees in the streets he thinks is a police car. He wants to go out of the game, and I'm inclined to let him."

This was an opportunity.

"I realise that you must have all sorts and conditions of agents —I've met a lot of queer ones who didn't seem like saccharine Merchants!—but I've never bothered my head about that side of it —the fetching and carrying is the fun! But I always thought Mr. Tiser was—a sort of good man—I don't like him, but I'm so curiously perverse that good people aren't very interesting to me."

He was taken aback by her surprise.

"He's a good fellow all right," he said hastily, "but even the best people are ready to cheat the Customs. I've never regarded myself as a great sinner, and I don't suppose he does, either. Which reminds me that I shall want you to go down to Oxford to-night with a little parcel. I'll give you a plan of the road and show you where they'll be waiting for you."

"In spite of the Flying Squad!" she bantered.

But he did not smile.

"I'm hoping great things from your friendship with Brad. He'll never have the nerve to arrest you, and if he did—well, I trust you, Ann. There would be quite a lot of people who would go to prison if you talked."

She smiled contemptuously.

"If I talked! Mark, you have the Flying Squad complex too!"

The drawing-room was in half darkness except for two soft, shaded lamps, one of which stood on Mark's writing-table, the other on a cabinet near the door. The night was chilly, and the red glow of the tire was very welcome. She sat down on a low stool and stretched her hand to the warmth. For a long time she looked at the red coal thoughtfully.

"Isn't it strange that every time one mentions Li Yoseph—"

"Li Yoseph seems to be growing into an obsession," he said, and changed the subject, but only for a while. Again they came back to the old Jew who owned Lady's Stairs and to that tumbledown house.

"Are you sure Li Yoseph is really dead?"

He fetched a long breath. Nobody knew better than he that Li Yoseph was dead.