Читать книгу The Joker - Edgar Wallace - Страница 7

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'A LITTLE heart trouble,' said Mr Harlow, smiling as he set down the glass of water. 'I'm terribly sorry to have given you so much trouble, Miss Rivers. I haven't had an attack in years.'

He was still pale, but such was his extraordinary self-control that the hand that put down the glass was without a tremor.

'Phew!' He dabbed his forehead with a silk handkerchief and rose steadily to his feet.

Elk was engaged in the prosaic task of brushing the dust stains from his knees and looked up.

'You'd better let me take you home, Mr Harlow,' he said.

Stratford Harlow shook his head.

'That is quite unnecessary—quite,' he said. 'I have my car at the door and a remedy for all such mental disturbances as these! And it is not a drug!' he smiled.

Nevertheless, Elk went with him to the car.

'Will you tell my chauffeur to drive to the Charing Cross power station?' was the surprising request; and long after the car had moved off in the fog Elk stood on the sidewalk, wondering what business took this multi-millionaire to such a venue.

They evidently knew Mr Harlow at the power station and they at any rate saw nothing remarkable in his visit.

The engineer, who was smoking at the door, stood back to let him walk into the great machinery hall, and placed a stool for him. And there for half an hour he sat, and the droning of the dynamos and the whirr and thud of the great engines were sedatives and anodynes to his troubled mind.

Here he had come before, to think out great schemes, which developed best in this atmosphere. The power and majesty of big wheels, the rhythm of the driving belts as they sagged and rose, the shaded lights above the marble switchboards, the noisy quiet of it all, stimulated him as nothing else could. Here he found the illusion of irresistibility that attuned so perfectly to his own mood; the inevitable effects of the inevitable causes. The sense that he was standing near the very heart of power was an inspiration. This lofty hall was a very home of the gods to him.

Half an hour, an hour, passed, and then he rose with a catch of his breath, and a slow smile lit the big face. 'Thank you, Harry, thank you.'

He shook the attendant's hand and left something that crinkled in the hard palm of the workman. A few minutes later he drove through brilliantly illuminated Piccadilly Circus and could offer a friendly nod to the flickering and flashing lights whose birth he had seen and whose very brilliance was a homage to the steel godhead.

To be thoroughly understood, Mr Stratford Harlow must be known.

There had been five members of the Harlow family when Stratford Selwyn Mortimer Harlow was born, and they were all immensely rich. His mother died a week later, his father when he was aged three, leaving the infant child to the care of his Aunt Mercy, a spinster who was accounted, even by her charitable relatives, as 'strange'. The boy was never sent to school, for his health was none of the best and he had his education at the hands of his aunt. An enormously rich woman with no interest in life, she guarded her charge jealously. Family interference drove her to a frenzy. The one call that her two sisters paid her, when the boy was seven, ended in a scene on which Miss Alice, the younger, based most of her conversation for years afterwards.

The main result of the quarrel between Miss Mercy and her maiden sisters was that she shut up Kravelly Hall and removed, with her maid Mrs Edwins, to a little cottage at Teignmouth. Here she lived unmolested by her relatives for seven years. She then went to Scarborough for three years and thence to Bournemouth. Regularly every month she wrote to her two sisters and her bachelor brother in New York; and the terminology of the letters did not vary by so much as a comma:

"Miss Mercy Harlow presents her compliments and begs to state that The Boy is in Good Health and is receiving adequate tuition in the essential subjects together with a sound instruction in the tenets of the Protestant Faith."

She had engaged a tutor, a bearded young man from Oxford University (she deigned to mention this fact to her brother, with whom she had not quarrelled), whose name was Marling. There came to the ears of Aunt Alice a story which called into question the fitness of Mr Marling to mould the plastic mind of youth. A mild scandal at Oxford. Miss Alice felt it her duty to write, and after a long interval had a reply:

"Miss Mercy Harlow begs to thank Miss Alice Harlow for her communication and in reply begs to state that she has conducted a very thorough and searching enquiry into the charges preferred against Mr Saul Marling (B.A. Oxon) and is satisfied that Mr Marling acted in the most honourable manner, and has done nothing with which he may reproach himself or which renders him unfit to direct the studies of The Boy."

This happened a year before Miss Mercy's death. When nature took its toll and she passed to her Maker, Miss Alice hastened to Bournemouth and in a small and secluded cottage near Christchurch found a big and solemn young man of twenty-three, dressed a little gawkily in black. He was tearless; and indeed, his aunt suspected, almost cheerful, at the prospect of being freed from Miss Mercy's drastic management.

The bearded tutor had left (Mrs Edwins, the maid, tearfully explained) a fortnight before the passing of Miss Mercy.

'And if he hadn't gone,' said Miss Alice with tight lips, 'I should have made short work of him. The Boy has been suppressed! He hasn't a word to say for himself!'

A council was held, including the family lawyer, who was making his first acquaintance with Stratford. It was agreed that The Boy should have a flat in Park Lane and the companionship of an elder man who combined a knowledge of the world with a leaning towards piety. Such was found in the Rev. John Barthurst, M.A., an ex-naval chaplain.

Miss Edwins was pensioned off and the beginning of Stratford's independent life was celebrated with a dinner and a visit to Charley's Aunt, through which roaring farce he sat with a stony face.

The tutelage lasted the best part of a year; and then the quiet young man suddenly came to life, dismissed his worldly and pious companion with a cheque for a thousand pounds, summoned Mrs Edwins to be his housekeeper; and bought and reconstructed the Duke of Greenhart's house in Park Lane.

And thenceforward Mr Harlow's name began to appear in the records of important transactions. Family fortunes dropped into his lap. Miss Mercy had been fabulously rich. She had left him every penny of her fortune, with the exception of £100 to Lucy Edwins in recognition of her faithful service, realising that she will not regard this sum as inadequate in view of the great service I rendered to her.' Then Miss Henrietta died; and when the death duties were paid there was the greater part of two millions. Miss Alice left more. The bachelor uncle in New York died a comparative pauper, leaving a beggarly six hundred thousand.

Mr Harlow's house was a rather ugly three-storey building which occupied a small island site, possibly the most valuable in Park Lane, though the actual entrance was not in that exclusive thoroughfare, but in the side street. He opened the door with a key and walked into the hall. The door to the library faced him. There were some letters on the table, which he scanned through rapidly, opening only one. It was from Ellenbury; and just then Mr Harlow was annoyed with Ellenbury; he had supplied erroneous information about Aileen Rivers, and had made him look a fool.

He read the letter carefully, and then dropped it in the fire and watched it turn black.

'A useful man, but a thought too anxious. It was a mistake perhaps to keep him so taut. He must be let down,' Mr Harlow decided. A little of his own confidence must be infused into his helper. Too great a desire to please, too present a fear of failure: those were Ellenbury's weaknesses.

He pressed an ivory bell on his desk, sat down, reached to the wall, slid back a panel and took out a small black bottle, a siphon and a glass. He poured out barely more whisky than was enough to cover the bottom of the tumbler, and filled it to the top with soda-water. The glass was half-empty when Mrs Edwins, his housekeeper, came in without knocking. A tall, yellow-faced woman, with burning black eyes, she showed nothing of the slowness or decrepitude that might have been expected in a woman near seventy.

'You rang?'

Miss Mercy's maid of other days had a voice as sharp and clear as a bugle note. She stood before the desk, her hands behind her, her eyes fixed on his.

'Yes,' he said, turning over his letters once more. 'Is everything all right?'

'Everything.'

Like a bugle note and with some of a bugle's stridency.

'Couldn't we keep a servant in the house?' she asked. 'The hours are a little too long for me. I didn't get to bed until one o'clock yesterday, and I had to be up at seven to let them in.'

It was a curious fact that no servants slept at No. 704, Park Lane. There was not a house of its size, or an establishment of such pretensions, in all the country where every servant slept out. Mr Harlow's excuse to his friends was that the room space was too valuable for servants, but he denied this by hiring an expensive house in Charles Street for their accommodation.

'No, I don't think it is necessary,' he said, pursing his lips. 'I thought you understood that.'

'I might die, or be taken ill in the night,' said Mrs Edwins dispassionately, 'and then where would you be?'

He smiled. 'It would be rather a case of where would you be, I think.' he said in excellent humour. 'Nothing has happened?'

She considered her answer before she replied. 'Somebody called, that was all,' she said, 'but I'll tell you about that afterwards.'

He was amused. 'A good many people call. Very well—be mysterious!'

He got up from his chair and walked out of the room, and she followed. There was a tiny elevator in the hall, big enough for two, but she declined this conveyance.

'I'll walk,' she said, and he laughed softly.

'You were complaining about feeling tired just now,' he retorted as he closed the grille before the little lift.

He pressed the top button, the elevator moved swiftly and noiselessly upwards and came at last to a stop on the third floor, where he stepped out to a square-carpeted landing from which led two doors. Here he waited, humming softly to himself, until the woman came in sight round the bend of the stairs.

'You're an athlete,' he said pleasantly and, jerking out a pocket-chain, selected a small key and opened the door on the left.

It was a big and artistically furnished apartment, lit from the cornice by concealed light and from the floor by two red-shaded lamps. In one corner of the room was an ornate wooden bed of red lacquer decorated with Chinese paintings in gold. At a small Empire desk near one of the windows, which were heavily curtained, sat a man. He was almost as tall as Stratford Harlow; and the features which would have arrested the attention of a stranger were his big, dome-shaped forehead and the long golden-yellow beard which, in spite of his age—and he must have been as old as Harlow himself—was untinged with grey.

He was reading, one thin hand on his cheek, his eyes fixed upon the book that lay or the desk, and not until Mr Harlow spoke did he look up.

'Hallo, Marling!' said Stratford Harlow gently.

The man leaned back in his chair, closed the book, mechanically marking his place with a thin tortoise-shell paper-knife.

'Good evening,' he said simply.

'Time you had your walk, isn't it?'

There was a second door in the room and towards this Mr Harlow glanced.

'Yes, I suppose it is,' said the man, and rose.

He wore a short dressing-jacket of dark blue velvet; his feet were encased in red morocco slippers. His glance strayed back to the closed book as though he were reluctant to have his reading interrupted.

'The Odes of Horace,' he said; 'an English translation, but full of errors.'

'Yes, yes,' smiled Mr Harlow. 'It's rather late for Horace.'

The woman was standing by the door, stiffly erect, her hands folded in front of her, her dark eyes on her master.

'Do you know who you are, my friend?' he asked.

The bearded man put his white hand to his forehead.

'I am Saul Marling, a graduate of Balliol,' he said.

Mr Harlow nodded.

'And—anything eke?' he asked.

Again the hand went up to the dome-shaped forehead.

'I forget...how absurd! It was something I saw, wasn't it?' he asked anxiously.

'Something you saw,' agreed Mr Harlow, 'just before Miss Mercy died.'

The other heaved a sigh.

'She died very suddenly. She was very kind to me in all my little troubles. Awfully suddenly! She used to sit on the chair talking to you, and then one night after dinner she fell down.'

'On the floor,' nodded Mr Harlow, almost cheerfully. 'But you saw something, didn't you?' he encouraged. 'A little bottle and some blue stuff. Wake up, Marling! You remember the little bottle and the blue stuff?'

The man shook his head.

'Not clearly...that was before you and Mrs Edwins took me away. I drank the white powders—they fizzed like a seidlitz powder—and then...'

'To the country,' smiled Harlow. 'You were ill, my poor old fellow, and we had to prescribe something to quieten you. You're all right?'

'My head is a little confused—' began the man, but Harlow laughed, caught him almost affectionately by the arm and, opening the narrow door, led his companion up a flight of steep stairs. At the top of this was another door, which Mr Harlow unlocked. They were on the roof of Greenhart House, a wide, flat expanse of asphalt confined within a breast-high parapet. For half an hour they walked up and down arm-in-arm, the bigger man talking all the time. The fog was thick, the street lamps showed themselves below as patches of dull yellow luminosity.

'Cold? I told you to put on your scarf, you stupid chap!' Mr Harlow was good-humoured even in his annoyance.

'Conic along, we'll go down.'

In the room below he fastened the door and gazed approvingly round the comfortable apartment. He took up one of the eight volumes that lay on a table. They still wore the publishers' wrappers and had arrived that day.

'Reading maketh a full man—you will find the Augustan histories a little heavy even for a graduate of Oxford, eh? Good night. Marling—sleep well.'

He locked the door and went out on to the landing with Mrs Edwins. Her hard eyes were fixed on his face, and until he spoke she was silent.

'He's quite all right,' he said.

'Is he?' Her harsh voice was disagreeable. 'How can he be all right if he's reading and writing?'

'Writing?' he asked quickly. 'What?'

'Oh, just stuff about the Romans, but it reads sensible.'

Mr Harlow considered this frowningly. 'That means nothing. He gives no trouble.'

'No,' she said shortly. 'I get worried,' she went on, 'but he's quiet. Who is Mr Carlton?'

Harlow drew a quick breath. 'Has he been here?'

She nodded. 'Yes—this afternoon. He asked me if I was Miss Mercy's old maid—she must have died soon after he was born.'

'He's older than that—well?'

'I thought it was queer, but he said he'd been asked to trace Mr Saul Marling.'

'By whom?'

She confessed her ignorance with a look. 'I don't know; but it was a proper inquiry. He showed me the papers. They were from Eastbourne. I told him Marling was dead. "Where?" he said. "In South America," I told him.'

'Pernambuco,' emphasised Mr Harlow, 'in the plague epidemic. Humph! Clever...and unscrupulous. Thank you.'

She watched him pass into the elevator and drop out of sight, then she went into the second room that opened from the landing. This too, was pleasantly furnished. Turning on the lights she sat down and opened a big chintz bag.

From this she took an unfinished stocking and adjusted her knitting needles. And as her nimble fingers moved, so did her lips.

'Pernambuco-in the plague epidemic,' she was saying.