Читать книгу A King by Night - Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace - Страница 24

The detective had left the house before the girl sought an explanation of Selby Lowe's strange words.

"I'll tell you, Miss Guildford," said Selby. "I don't see any advantage in keeping you in the dark. I am perfectly convinced that Oscar Trevors is alive. In certain eventualities, I am equally convinced that he will be killed."

"In what eventualities?" she asked.

"I don't know. I haven't formed a very definite theory. If I did, the mystery of Trevors' disappearance and all that followed would be solved both here and now. Theories are like the steps of a ladder: they lead, one from the other, to more substantial foothold. At present we are very far from that secure place where we can drop bricks on the heads of the rogues and murderers who are behind his disappearance."

The evening brought a visitor in the shape of Dr. Eversham, who stopped on the way from making a professional call to inquire after the girl. Selby knew him slightly, and found, on acquaintance, that the flattering picture Gwendda had drawn of her first friend in London was not exaggerated.

"The Trust Buildings are getting a bad name," he said. "So much so that I am seriously thinking of moving my office, and I shall unless the proprietors give Fleet notice to quit."

"They are hardly likely to do that," said Selby drily. "If my information is accurate, Marcus Fleet is the Trust! I suppose you've heard about the little raid that the police carried out on his office?"

The doctor nodded.

"He's a queer person. I haven't spoken with him more than half a dozen times in my life, and I've only met him once. He had a fainting fit, and I was called in to attend to him—he sent me, as a fee, five shillings!"

They laughed.

"Fleet is a tight wad," said Bill, "and he's certainly got the finest espionage system of any private individual in the world. There's nothing that fellow doesn't know about the tenants. One day I was rather short of money—a cheque due to me had not arrived—and I casually mentioned the fact to somebody who had called. Incidentally, my office rent had not been paid. That same day, he served a notice on me, demanding the rent within twenty-four hours, failing which he intended to turn me out."

The doctor stayed for an hour, when he was called away by telephone, and a few minutes after he had left, a call came through for Selby. It was from the Foreign Office. The diplomatic mail-bags had been stolen between Dover and London, and he was ordered to report instantly.

"What a blessed invention is the telephone!" he said as he came back into the room. "I leave Bill to amuse you, Miss Guildford—by the way, his name is Bill. Parents who play such jokes on their children should be severely punished."

The girl detected in Lowe's manner a subtle change. He had gone out to the telephone one man and come back another. He had a trick of dropping his drawling tone, his lazy, almost insolent, manner, but now he was brusque, almost bad-mannered, and left without saving good-night. She heard the slam of the door and turned her laughing eyes to the young man.

"Do you realize I haven't been out all day, Mr. Joyner?"

"What do you think of Selby?"

"I don't know what to think of him. He is rather fascinating, isn't he? Is he typical?"

Bill shook his head.

"No, Selby is a type by himself."

"I can't bring myself to believe that he's a detective."

"He's hardly a detective," said Bill, ready to defend his friend from any suggestion of disparagement. "He's a secret service man—there's a subtle difference."

She sighed.

"There is a less subtle difference between success and failure, and I have a feeling my journey is going to end in failure, Mr. Joyner," she said. "It has certainly begun very unpromisingly. I've wasted the whole of this day. There are so many people I have to see, and I really ought to be leaving for France to-morrow—of course," she added, "I shall leave if I want. It is absurd.... That is the telephone, isn't it?"

Shrilly the bell came to him, and he went out into the hall where the telephone was kept. A voice greeted him urgently.

"Is that you, Joyner? ... Will you come at once to the office of the Morning Star? They've got your story all mixed up. The assistant editor's away on vacation, and you must come and straighten things out."

Bill cursed the man under his breath. It was not the first time such a contretemps had occurred, and he hurried back to the girl.

"I shan't be gone twenty minutes," he said. "If you want anything, will you ring for Jennings? You don't mind being left alone?"

She smiled.

"No, I feel particularly secure," she said. "In fact, I think you and Mr. Selby are making too great a fuss. It may have been the drunken man, after all."

"Yes, perhaps it was," lied Bill, who himself had no doubt on the matter.

As his taxi took him along Curzon Street, he saw a small, closed coupé standing at the corner. He noticed this idly, without attaching any importance to the fact. Ten minutes later, he was in the office of the editor of the Morning Star.

Gwendda Guildford was sufficiently normal to be glad that she was left alone to puzzle out her problem. She had cabled the news of her arrival, and now she seated herself at Selby's little desk and began a letter to Sacramento, explaining what had happened to her. It was a hard letter to write, much more difficult than she had imagined her first letter home would be. She had hoped to tell the story of some accomplishment, that she would have been able to pick up some promising thread that might eventually lead her to the missing man. But now there was nothing she could write which would not read like a very bad attack of hysterics.

"Dear Mr. Malling," the letter began, but beyond that she made no progress. She could have written sheets about Bill Joyner, but that must come in its proper place. A letter all about Mr. Malling's favourite nephew might please him as a man, but be wholly unsatisfactory to him as an editor. What had she learnt? Only that, in the opinion of two people, one the doctor who had attended him, and the other a British official with some vague position at the Foreign Office, Oscar Trevors was still alive. The doctor thought him insane, and although the reference to the King of Bonginda had all the evidence of a good newspaper story, it began and ended only with coincidence.

She could not be sure, even, that she was the objective of this mystery Terror, that silent horror that crept at night, defiant of all police efforts to capture him. She heaved a long sigh. At any rate she was here, in Curzon Street, and not at the hotel. She was in the centre of a human society, and she found a peculiar comfort in the thought that these two men, strangers to her until to-day, were practically pledged to her protection.

Moving her hand, the pen rolled from the table, and, in the exasperating way of pens, stuck, nib downward, in the polished floor. When she pulled it out, the nib was ruined. She looked about for another. Her search was unsuccessful, and, leaning over, she pressed the bell by the side of the fireplace, and heard a faint tinkle somewhere below. Three minutes passed and brought no answer. She rang the bell again. Bill had explained the interior economy of the house. The Jenningses had a sitting-room at the end of the passage on the ground floor, where they were usually to be found. She walked along the passage, knocked on the door. There was no answer, and she opened it a little way. The room was in darkness. Her nerves were still on edge, and she went to the head of the kitchen stairs and called Jennings by name but only the echo of her voice came back to her. She returned to the sitting-room, puzzled and a little frightened. Leaving the door ajar, she went back to the desk, determined to write her letter in pencil. She had written two words when she heard a faint creak. Somebody was coming down the stairs, and her heart nearly stopped beating. There was nobody in the house; the woman lodger on the third floor was away on her vacation, had gone an hour after the girl had arrived. The servants were day helps: Jennings had not sufficient rooms to accommodate them, and they had left after dinner.

Again she heard the creak, and, rising, walked quickly to the door, and then, acting on an impulse, slammed it and pushed home the bolt. As she did so, she heard a gentle thud in the passage, as if somebody had leapt half-way down the stairs. In another instant the door was shaken violently.

"Who's that?" she asked, white with fear.

For answer came a sound that curdled her blood. It was like the low snarl of a wild animal.

She held herself erect by the handle as the door shook.

"Come out!" howled a voice. "Come out, Jezebel! Thy king calls thee! Juma of Bonginda!"