The Joker by Edgar Wallace (books to read in your 20s .TXT) 📖
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- Author: Edgar Wallace
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and one night their stores illuminated the shipping of the Mersey.
That was a very good joke indeed. Mr Harlow chuckled for days, not
because he had made an enormous fortune—the joke had to be there or the
money had no value.
‘I don’t like your jokes,’ said Marling gravely.
‘I shouldn’t tell you about them,’ said Mr Harlow, suppressing a yawn;
‘but I have no secrets from you, Saul Marling. And I love testing them
against your magnificent honesty. If you laughed at them as I laugh, I’d
be worried sick. Come along to the roof for your walk and I’ll tell you
the greatest joke of all. It starts with a dinner-party given in this
house and ends with somebody making twenty millions and living happily
ever after!’
It required a perceptible effort in Aileen to produce the paper she had
found in the grate of Mr Harlow’s library.
She had the unhappy knowledge that whilst this big man had put her in her
place, she hadn’t stayed there. She had gone down into deplorable depths.
He might be anything that Jim believed, but on his own plane he had a
claim to greatness.
When she reached that conclusion she felt that it was time to hand the
paper to her companion.
‘I’m not going to excuse myself,’ she said frankly. ‘It was an abominable
thing to do, and I won’t even say that I had you in my mind. It was just
vulgar curiosity made me do it.’
They stopped under a street lamp and he opened the paper and read the
message.
‘Marling!’ he gasped. ‘Good God!’
‘What is it?’
The effect of those scribbled words upon her companion astounded her.
Presently he folded the paper very carefully and put it in his pocket.
‘Marling, Ingle, Mrs Gibbins,’ he said, in his old bantering mood. ‘Put
me together the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle; and connect if you can the
note of this Mr Marling, who wishes to retain his writing materials; your
disreputable uncle who has developed a craze for film projecting; fit in
the piece which stands for Mrs Gibbins and her beloved William Smith;
explain a certain letter that was never posted and never delivered, yet
was found in a frozen puddle—I nearly said puzzle!—and make of all
these one intelligible picture.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she asked helplessly.
He shook his head.
‘You don’t know! Elk doesn’t know. I’m not so sure that I know, but I
wish the next ten days were through!’
FOR SOME reason which she could not explain to herself, Aileen was
irritated.
‘Do you realise how horribly mysterious you are?’ she asked, almost
tartly. ‘I always thought that the mystery of detectives was an illusion
fostered by sensational writers.’
‘All mystery is illusion,’ he said grandly.
They had reached Oxford Street.
‘Have you ever been to the House of Commons?’ he asked her suddenly.
She shook her head.
‘No.’
‘Then come along. You’ll see something more entertaining than a film or a
play, but you will hear very little that hasn’t been said better
elsewhere.’
The House was in session, though she was only dimly aware of this, for
she belonged to the large majority of people to whom the workings of
Parliament were a closed book. Jim, on the contrary, was extraordinarily
well informed in political affairs and favoured her with a brief
dissertation on the subject. The old hard and fast party spirit was
moribund, he said. The electorate had grown too flexible for any machine
to control. There had been surprising results in recent by-elections to
illustrate a fact so disconcerting to party organizers. The present
Government, she learnt, despite its large majority, was on its last legs.
There was dissension within the Cabinet, and rebel caves honey-combed the
Government party.
In truth she was only faintly interested. But the approach to the Commons
was impressive. The lofty hall, the broad stairway, the echoing lobby
with its hurrying figures, and the mystery of what lay behind the door at
one end, brought her a new thrill.
Jim disappeared and returned with a ticket. They passed up a flight of
stairs and presently she was admitted to one of the galleries.
Her first impression was one of disappointment. The House was so much
smaller than she had expected. Somebody was talking; a pale bald man, who
rocked and swayed slowly as he delivered himself of a monotonous and
complaining tirade on the failure of the Government to do something or
other about the Basingstoke Canal. There were only a few dozen members in
the House, and mainly they were engaged in talking or listening to one
another, and apparently taking no notice of the speaker. On the front
bench three elderly men sat, head to head, in consultation.
Mr Speaker in his canopied chair seemed the only person who was taking a
keen interest in the member’s oration.
Even as she looked, the House began to fill. A ceaseless procession of
men trooped in and took their places on the benches, stopping as they
passed to exchange a word with somebody already seated. The orator still
droned on; and then Jim pressed her arm and nodded.
From behind the Speaker’s chair had come a man whom she instantly
recognised as Sir Joseph Layton, the Foreign Minister. He was in evening
dress except that he wore, instead of the conventional dinner jacket, one
of black velvet.
He sat down on the front bench, fingered his tiny white moustache with a
characteristic gesture, and then the member who had been speaking sat
down. Somebody rose from one of the front benches and asked a question
which did not reach the girl. Sir Joseph jerked to his feet, his hands
gripping the lapels of his velvet coat, his head on one side like an
inquisitive sparrow, and she listened without hearing to his reply. His
voice was husky; he had a dozen odd mannerisms of speech and gesture that
fascinated her. And then Jim’s hand touched her.
‘I’m going down to see him. Will you wait for me in the lobby?’ he
whispered and she nodded.
It was ten minutes before the Foreign Minister came out of the House,
greeted the detective with a wave of his hand and put his arm in Jim’s.
‘Well, what is the news?’ he asked, when they reached his private room.
‘Harlow again, eh? Something dark and sinister going on in international
circles of diplomacy?’
He chuckled at the joke as he sat down at his big table and filled his
pipe from a tin of tobacco that stood at his elbow.
‘Harlow, Harlow!’ he said, with good-humoured impatience. ‘Everybody is
telling me about Harlow! I’m going to have a talk with the fellow. He is
giving a dinner-party on Tuesday and I’ve promised to look in before I
come to the House.’
‘What is the excuse for the dinner?’ asked Jim, interested.
The Minister laughed.
‘He is a secret diplomatist, if you like. He has fixed up a very
unpleasant little quarrel which might have developed in the Middle
East—really it amounted to a row between two bloodthirsty brigands!—and
he is giving a sort of olive-branch dinner to the ambassadors of the two
states concerned. I can’t go to the dinner, but I shall go to the
reception afterwards. Well,’ he asked abruptly, ‘what is your news?’
‘I came here to get news, not to give it, Sir Joseph,’ said Jim. ‘That
well-known cloud is not developing?’
‘Pshaw!’ said the Minister impatiently. ‘Cloud!’
‘The Bonn incident?’ suggested Jim, and Sir Joseph exploded.
‘There was no incident! It was a vulgar slanging match between an elderly
and pompous staff colonel and an impudent puppy of a French
sous-officier! The young man has been disciplined by the French; and the
colonel has been relieved of his post by the War Office. And that is the
end of a so-called incident.’
Jim rejoined the girl soon after and learnt that Parliament had not
greatly impressed her. Perhaps her mood was to blame that she found him a
rather dull companion; for the rest of the evening, whilst she was with
him, she did most of the talking, and he replied either in monosyllables
or not at all. She understood him well enough to suspect that something
unusual must have happened and did not banter him on his long silence.
At the door other boarding-house he asked: ‘You won’t object to Brown
staying on?’
‘I intended speaking about him,’ she said. ‘Why am I under
observation—that is the term, isn’t it?’
‘But do you mind?’
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It is rather funny.’
‘A sense of humour is a great thing,’ he replied, and that was his
farewell.
Elk was not at Scotland Yard. He went up to the Great Eastern Road, where
the inspector had rooms; and he was distinctly piqued to learn that Elk
knew all about the Harlow dinner.
‘I only got to know this afternoon, though,’ said Elk. ‘If you’d been at
the Yard I could have told you—the thing was only organised yesterday.
We shouldn’t have heard anything about it, but Harlow applied for two
policemen to be on duty outside the house. Swift worker, Harlow.’ His
small eyes surveyed Jim Carlton gravely. ‘Tell you something else, son:
Ratas have bought up a new office building in Moorgate Street. I forget
the name of the fellow who bought it. Anyway, Ellenbury took over
yesterday-got in double staff. He is a fellow you might see.’
‘He is a fellow I intend seeing,’ said Jim. ‘What is he now—lawyer or
financier?’
‘A lawyer. But he knows as much about finance as law. I’ve got an idea
he’s on the crook. We’ve never had a complaint against him, though there
was a whisper once about his financial position. In the old days he used
to act for some mighty queer people; and I think he lost money on the
Stock Exchange.’
‘He’s the man who lives at Norwood?’
Elk nodded.
‘Norwood,’ he said deliberately; ‘the place where the letters were posted
to Mrs Gibbins. I wondered you hadn’t seen him before—no, I haven’t,
though.’ He reconsidered.
‘You didn’t want to make Harlow think that you are on to that Gibbins
business.’ He stroked his nose thoughtfully.
‘Yuh, that’s it. He doesn’t know you. You might call on him on some
excuse, but you’ll have to be careful.’
‘How does he get from Norwood to the City?’
Elk shook his head.
‘He’s not the kind of fellow you can pick up in the train, he said. ‘He
runs a hired car which Ratas pay for. Royalton House is his address. It’s
an old brick box near the Crystal Palace. He lives there with his
wife—an invalid. He hasn’t any vices that I know of, unless being a
friend of Harlow’s puts him on the list. And he’s not approachable any
other way. He doesn’t work in Norwood, but has a little office in
Theobald’s Road; and if you call his clerk will see you and tell you that
he is very sorry but Mr Ellenbury can’t give you an appointment for the
next ten years. But Ellenbury might tell something, if you could get at
him.’
‘You are certain that Ellenbury is working with Harlow?’
‘Working with him?’ Elk spat contemptuously but unerringly into the fire.
‘I should say he was! They’re like brothers—up to a point. Do you
remember the police station old man Harlow presented
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