Читать книгу A King by Night - Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace - Страница 28

Selby was no weakling. A trained athlete, he knew the value of reserving his strength. In that moment of danger, he noted one peculiar fact. About his assailant's wrist were broad steel bracelets, attached to which a big link dangled. Gripping the encircling arm with all his strength, he swung his foot back with a quick motion until it struck the heel of his assailant. Then, with a wrench of his body, he jerked backward. It was an old jiu-jitsu trick, and his life depended upon its success. He heard the Terror say something in a language which he did not understand; it was a note of alarm and wrath. He tried to save himself, but already the point of balance had been lost and the two men fell with a crash on the hard pathway, Juma underneath. The skull of any other man would have been fractured; as it was, he was only momentarily stunned, and Selby heaved himself to his feet just in time to miss the grip of those huge paws.

With a roar of rage the Terror sprang upon his prey, his great arms whirling, his wide, bestial mouth open to show two lines of white tusks. He was more of an animal than a man, and for a second Selby was appalled by the gross spectacle. Then his right fist shot out. For his enemy's stomach he drove, that most vulnerable spot. The blow got home and the rush for a second was checked. It was that second of time that Selby wanted. His Browning was out as the man turned and dived into the bushes. Once, twice he fired, and the reports came back with deafening contrast to the stillness of the night.

He waited for a second for another view, and, hearing a rustle of bushes, fired in that direction. Presently the rustling came again. His quarry had escaped, and to go after him now was madness. Still he waited, and then he heard the sound he had expected. It came from the direction of the high road beyond the cottages—the soft purr of a motor-car.... He caught one glimpse of its headlights as it flashed past out of view.

For ten minutes Selby sat on a fallen tree, recovering some of the breath he had lost. The onslaught had been so sudden, the exertions he had made so terrific, that it was fully that time before he was normal.

Then he heard voices shouting from the direction of the house, and, thinking that the Judge might have become alarmed, he walked quickly toward the person who was calling. He heard somebody say: "Is that Judge Warren?"

"No, it is Mr. Lowe," shouted Selby.

He came up with the man, and found he was a gamekeeper.

"The Judge is expecting you, sir," said the man. "He said he'd walk half-way to meet you. Did you see him?"

Selby's heart sank.

"Good God! He walked to meet me—are you sure?"

"Absolutely sure, sir. He passed me about a quarter of an hour ago. He said he was going to walk to the station."

"Get lanterns and men," said Selby quickly.

"You don't think anything has happened——?"

"Do as I tell you—hurry!"

In a little time he saw the dim lights of lanterns coming across the field from the plantation at the back of the Judge's house, and was joined by three men—the gamekeeper, a cottager who lived on the estate, and Judge Warren's valet. In silence they went back along the path.

"Go carefully through the undergrowth on the forest side," said Selby.

Their search was a short one. Presently he heard a cry from one of the men and, plunging through the thicket, joined him. In the rays of the lantern he saw the battered, upturned face, the sightless eyes staring blankly to the moonlit heavens. There was no need to ask any questions. Judge Warren was dead!

Whilst one of the men went to telephone the police, Selby made a search of the ground. There were signs of a struggle. The Judge's hat was found under a bush; his cigar, still alight, lay a short distance off. Selby knelt down and examined the body. The neck had been broken, but the cause of death must have been those terrible wounds in the head. Judge Warren had never known what had struck him.

An inspection of his clothes revealed the fact that his pockets had been rifled. His watch and chain, his pocketbook, even his keys, were gone.

The arrival of the police released Selby, and accompanied by local inspector, he made a search of the house, and found that no attempt by the murderer had been made to enter, although the French windows that led from the library to the lawn were wide open.

One discovery, however, Selby was to make. The Judge was obviously a methodical man, and the big shelves in the library were filled with press cutting books, uniformly bound, and relating, as he learnt, to the cases in which he had figured as an Australian lawyer. What drew Lowe's attention to this was the fact that on the library table one of these books was open. Evidently the Judge had been refreshing his memory, for by the side of the book was a sheet of paper, covered with pencilled notes. Switching on the table lamp, Selby made a quick scrutiny of the paper. Some of the words were indecipherable. All the notes referred to a "Kinton" and "Clarke," and, glancing at the open pages of the press book, he saw that the cutting referred to the trial of two men so named. A scrawled pencil note, less indistinct than the others, caught his eye.

"Kinton wore a cameo ring. The man in the park also wore cameo ring."

A cameo ring? Selby frowned. Who wore a cameo ring? He had heard of somebody who had that habit. A little farther down the paper he read:

"Kinton also had scar under chin. Is this coincidence?"

And later:

"Curious coincidence. No reason why Kinton should not have got on in life, own a car, etc."

The poor Judge was evidently a man who could think best with a pencil in his hands, and had scribbled down his errant thoughts as they had occurred to him. Selby turned to the press cuttings. They dealt with the trial and conviction of two young men who had been guilty of a particularly daring burglary. A rich squatter had been beaten and left for dead; his home had been ransacked, and the culprits had been tracked through the instrumentality of one of the station hands, who saw them driving away in a buggy. The prosecution had obviously been conducted by Warren, whose name figured largely in the examination.

Selby turned page after page and followed the history of the trial. The men had received twenty years' penal servitude, and their "brazen callousness," to quote the local reporter, upon receiving sentence, was remarked upon by that journalist. The last cutting ran:

"Kinton and Clarke, the two men who escaped from the chain gang on the way to Ballarat, are still at large."

So they had escaped? The press cutting giving particulars was not in the book.

Kinton and Clarke! Selby took out his notebook and wrote down in his queer shorthand a brief summary of the case. The notes told him nothing, except that Kinton had been recognized, presumably in London, by the Judge. The references to the man's means were interesting as they were important. Selby wrote in his little book "Scar under chin. Wears cameo ring," for his future guidance. What association had the escaped convict with this brutal murder?

He read the account of the burglary more thoroughly. Apparently Kinton had a passion for cameo rings, for it was remarked upon that, when he was arrested, six of these interesting and unusual articles of jewellery had been found in his possession.

"I can't understand why the Judge was diving into these old cases," said the local inspector.

"Probably it is due to the inquiry I made," said Selby. "After the appearance of the Terror at his window, I asked him if he had any enemies, and in all probability he was going through the list of the people whose conviction he had secured, with the object of helping me."

"Do you think they came here deliberately to kill him?"

Selby shook his head.

"No, that was a chance murder. They were waiting for me, though how they knew I was coming here I can't guess. They couldn't have guessed it; they must have known. The Terror was in London last night, and he was brought here specially to catch me. He killed the Judge, because the poor fellow walked into the trap."

Selby was dead tired; he had spent the previous night sitting on the stairs of the house in Curzon Street, and had hardly lain down on the bed which had been prepared for him by the Judge's orders, when he was asleep. When he woke, he learnt that the Chief Constable had been, but had not disturbed him. Scotland Yard had been notified, and the officers had arrived a few minutes before he had awakened.

A cold bath freshened him, and he went down to meet the two men from the Yard, to learn that no fresh discoveries had been made except that the car had been seen on the Guildford Road. Therefrom it had not been traced. The only clue the police had was that it was heading westward.

He had no doubt in his mind that the Western Railroad, to which Oscar Trevors had referred in his cryptogram letter, was the Great Western Railway. But the Great Western Railway stretched for three hundred miles, and passed through many big towns, and to search every house within view of the railroad was a task beyond human power.

He got back to Curzon Street late in the afternoon, and found that Bill and the girl were out. Timms, however, was waiting for him in the sitting-room.

"Here is the bill, Mr. Lowe," he said, spreading out a big sheet, closely covered with printing. "The chief says he will take your word that this is the wanted man."

Selby opened the sheet and read:

"£5,000 reward. WANTED FOR MURDER. Juma N'kema, a native of the Belgian Congo, of the village of Bonginda. Height 72 inches, chest measurement probably 50; powerfully built; skin yellow. His face is that of a man of low mentality; big mouth, squat nose, bull neck. Usually wears two iron bracelets, one on each wrist. This man is wanted for the murder of His Honour Judge Henry Warren of Taddington Close in the county of Berkshire. Information should be lodged at the nearest police station or at Scotland Yard.

"Note: This man is dangerous and should not be approached except by armed men."

Selby nodded.

"That will do," he said. "We'll have the country covered with these placards. And, by the way, I'd like you to work my name somewhere if it is possible."

"Of course, we'll give you all the credit we can——" began the dense Timms, and Selby laughed in spite of his irritation.

"My dear old top, I don't want credit, I want danger! I'm one of those johnnies who revel in it. I've used Miss Guildford as a bait; I'd like to use myself for a change. I suggest you put a line in here: 'Information may be given to Detective Inspector Selby, Department 7, Foreign Office.' Tell the chief: I think he will agree."

Bill and the girl not having returned, he went out. He was the type of man who thought best when he was moving fastest, and he was swinging through Hyde Park at a tremendous rate when he overtook a man the sight of whom made him halt and turn.

"I may be doing you an injustice," he said, "but I think your name is Locks."

Goldy Locks smiled sweetly and looked at him over his spectacles with that paternal and almost benevolent expression which proved his identity beyond doubt.

"Yes, Mr. Lowe, I am Locks. I was walking along, meditating upon the beauties of nature, and when I see the children gambolling, if I might use the expression, on the green sward, I got a feeling that something was going to happen, and lo, you did!"

"Sit down here, Locks. I want to have a word with you."

Mr. Locks obeyed without enthusiasm, for this was the one man in the police force (Mr. Locks was not quite certain that he was in the police force) that he least enjoyed meeting. You could never be amusing at Selby Lowe's expense without getting a swift return that stung where it hit and smarted for a long time afterwards.

"I'm very glad to see you got away with your life last night," said Goldy Locks conversationally. "When I read in this afternoon's paper—which I bought, I admit, to see the result of the three o'clock race at Brighton—when I read that you'd been in that Terror's hands, my flesh crept."

"Now it can walk," said Selby, inhibiting further complimentary remarks. "Locks, you're a thief and an associate of thieves, and I don't suppose there's a 'wrong one' in London that you don't know. And that look of innocent amazement doesn't become you. You know the crooks as I know the fingers of the right hand."

"And as you know them," said Locks emphatically. "I can't tell you any more than you know, Mr. Lowe. And anyway, I'm too old to turn policeman."

"I'm not asking you to turn policeman," said Selby Lowe. "I want to know something which perhaps you can tell me. Is there a crook amongst your acquaintances who wears a cameo ring?"

"A what?" asked the puzzled Locks, who was not well acquainted with the technique of bijoutry.

"A cameo—a little, oval-shaped——"

"I've got you," interrupted the other. "Like a lot of landladies wear as brooches. The bigger the cameo, the weaker the soup. I've got you, Mr. Lowe! No, I can't say I know anybody who wears that kind of decoration or ornament. My own idea is that people who deck their bodies with jewellery and lay up their treasures on earth are intellectually inferior. As Dr. Johnson once said to Boswell on a notorious occasion——"

"I wish they'd keep those books away from you when you're in prison," said Selby patiently.

"The Library at Parkhurst is very good," murmured Mr. Locks, "but Johnson was always a favourite hero of mine. What is the fellow's name you're looking for?"

"I don't know what he calls himself. Perhaps it is Kinton."

The man shook his head.

"Never heard of a Kinton. I know a Winton, a gentleman in the cattle-stealing business. Met him in Exeter Prison. A very nice man, but socially impossible. He's only got two ideas in his head, and one is beer. And I know another gentleman named Mincing, an American gentleman, who was in for knocking off jewellery——"

"Kinton is the man."

Locks shook his head.

"He's a mystery to me, sir. Never heard of him, don't know him. And as to camera rings—what do you call them, cameo?—I've never seen such a thing. Are they worth anything? I ask you," he added apologetically, "professionally, because, if I ever found a ring that looked like a landlady's brooch, I should chuck it away, and I might be doing in good stuff."

For a long time after Selby had gone on, Mr. Locks sat sideways on the park bench, his knees crossed, a far-away expression on his face. For Mr. Goldy Locks not only knew what a cameo ring was, but he knew the man who wore one.