The Joker by Edgar Wallace (books to read in your 20s .TXT) 📖
- Author: Edgar Wallace
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nation? It was Ellenbury who bought the ground and gave the orders to the
builders. Nobody knew it was a police station until it was up. After
they’d put in the foundations and got the walls breast-high, there was a
sort of strike because foreign labour was employed, and all the workmen
had to be sent back to Italy or Germany, or wherever they came from.
That’s where Ellenbury’s connection came under notice, though we weren’t
aware that he was working for Harlow till a year later.’
Jim decided upon taking the bolder course, but the lawyer was prepared
for the visitation.
MR ELLENBURY had his home in a large, gaunt house between Norwood and
Anerley. It had been ugly even in the days when square, box-shaped
dwellings testified to the strange mentality of the Victorian architects
and stucco was regarded as an effective and artistic method of covering
bad brickwork. It was in shape a cube, from the low centre of which, on
the side facing the road, ran a long flight of stone steps confined
within a plaster balustrade. It had oblong windows set at regular
intervals on three sides, and was a mansion to which even Venetian blinds
lent an air of distinction.
Royalton House stood squarely in the centre of two acres of land, and
could boast a rosary, a croquet lawn, a kitchen garden, a rustic
summer-house and a dribbling fountain.
Scattered about the grounds there were a number of indelicate statues
representing famous figures of mythology—these had been purchased
cheaply from a local exhibition many years before at a great weeding-out
of those gods chiselled with such anatomical faithfulness that they
constituted an offence to the eye of the Young Person.
In such moments of leisure as his activities allowed, Mr Ellenbury
occupied a room gloomily papered, which was variously styled ‘The Study’,
and ‘The Master’s Room’ by his wife and his domestic staff. It was a high
and ill-proportioned apartment, cold and cheerless in the winter, and was
overcrowded with furniture that did not fit. Round tables and top-heavy
secretaires; a horsehair sofa that ran askew across one corner of the
room, where it could only be reached by removing a heavy card-table;
there was space for Mr Ellenbury to sit and little more.
On this December evening he sat at his roll-top desk, biting his nails
thoughtfully, a look of deep concern on his pinched face. He was a man
who had grown prematurely old in a lifelong struggle to make his
resources keep pace with ambition. He was a lover of horses; not other
people’s horses that show themselves occasionally on a race track, but
horses to keep in one’s own stable, horses that looked over the half-door
at the sound of a familiar voice; horses that might be decked in shiny
harness shoulder to shoulder and draw a glittering phaeton along a
country road.
All men have their dreams; for forty years Mr Ellenbury’s pet dream had
been to drive into the arena of a horse show behind two spanking bays
with nodding heads and high knee action, and to drive out again amidst
the plaudits of the multitude with the ribbons of the first prize
streaming from the bridles of his team. Many a man has dreamt less
worthily.
He had had bad luck with his horses, bad luck with his family. Mrs
Ellenbury was an invalid. No doctor had ever discovered the nature of her
illness. One West End specialist seen her and had advised the calling in
of another. The second specialist had suggested that it would be
advisable to see a third. The third had come and asked questions. Had any
other parents suffered from illusions? Were they hysterical? Didn’t Mrs
Ellenbury think that if she made an effort she could get up from her bed
for, say, half an hour a day?
The truth was that Mrs Ellenbury, having during her life experienced most
of the sensations which are peculiar to womankind, having walked and
worked, directed servants, given little parties, made calls, visited the
theatre, played croquet and tennis, had decided some twenty years ago
that there was nothing quite as comfortable as staying in bed.
So she became an invalid, had a treble subscription at a library and
acquired a very considerable acquaintance with the rottenness of society,
as depicted by authors who were authorities on misunderstood wives.
In a sense Mr Ellenbury was quite content that this condition of affairs
should be as it was. Once he was satisfied that his wife, in whom he had
the most friendly interest, was suffering no pain, he was satisfied to
return to the bachelor life. Every morning and every night (when he
returned home at a reasonable hour) he went into her room and asked: ‘How
are we today?’
‘About the same—certainly no worse.’
‘That’s fine! Is there anything you want?’
‘No, thank you—I have everything.’
This exchange varied slightly from day to day, but generally it followed
on those lines.
Ellenbury had come back late from Ratas after a tiring day. Usually he
directed the Rata Syndicate from his own office; indeed, he had never
before appeared visibly in the operations of the company. But this new
coup of Harlow’s was on so gigantic a scale that he must appear in the
daylight; and his connection with a concern suspected by every reputable
firm in the City must be public property. And that hurt him. He, who had
secretly robbed his clients, who is had engaged in systematic embezzlement
and might now, but for the intervention and help of Mr Stratford Harlow,
have been an inmate of Dartmoor, walked with shame under the stigma of
his known connection with a firm which was openly described as unsavoury.
He was a creature of Harlow, his slave. This sore place in his
self-esteem had never healed. It was his recreation to brood upon the
ignominy of his lot. He hated Harlow with a malignity that none, seeing
his mild, worn face, would suspect.
To him Stratford Harlow was the very incarnation of evil, a devil on
earth who had bound his soul in fetters of brass. And of late he had
embarked upon a novel course of dreaming. It was the confused middle of a
dream, having neither beginning nor end, but it was all about a
humiliated Harlow; Harlow being dragged in chains through the Awful Arch;
Harlow robbed at the apotheosis of his triumph. And always Ellenbury was
there, leering, chuckling, pointing a derisive finger at the man he had
ruined, or else he was flitting by midnight across the Channel with a
suitcase packed with fabulous sums of money that he had filched from his
master.
Mr Ellenbury bit his nails.
Soon money would be flowing into Ratas—he would spend days endorsing
cheques, clearing drafts… drafts…
You may pass a draft into a bank and it becomes a number of figures in a
pass-book. On the other hand, you may hand it across the counter and
receive real money.
Sometimes Harlow preferred that method—dollars into sterling, sterling
into Swiss francs, Swiss francs into florins, until the identity of the
original payment was beyond recognition.
Drafts…
In the room above his head his wife was lying immersed in the
self-revelations of a fictional countess. Mrs Ellenbury had little money
of her own. The house was her property. He could augment her income by
judicious remittances.
Drafts…
Mauve and blue and red. ‘Pay to the order of—’ so many thousand dollars,
or rupees, or yen.
Harlow never interfered. He gave exact instructions as to how the money
was to be dealt with, into which accounts it must be paid and that was
all. At the end of a transaction he threw a thousand or two at his
assistant, as a bone to a dog.
Ellenbury had never been so rich in his life as he was now.
He could meet his bank manager without a sinking feeling in the pit of
his stomach—no longer did the sight of a strange man walking up the
drive to the house fill him with a sense of foreboding. Yet once he had
seen the sheriff’s officer in every stranger.
But he had grown accustomed to prosperity; it had become a normal
condition of life and freed his mind to hate the source of his affluence.
A slave—at best a freedman. If Harlow crooked his finger he must run to
him; if Harlow on a motoring tour wired ‘Meet me at—’ any inaccessible
spot, he must drop his work and hurry there. He, Franklin Ellenbury, an
officer of the High Court of Justice, a graduate of a great university, a
man of sensibility and genius.
No wonder Mr Ellenbury bit at his nails and thought of drafts and sunny
cafes and picture galleries which he had long desired to visit; and
perhaps, after he was sated with the novelty of travel, a villa near
Florence with orange groves and masses of bougainvillaea clustering
between white walls and jade-green jalousies.
‘A gentleman to see you, sir.’
He aroused himself from his dreams with a painful start.
‘To see me?’ The clock on his desk said fifteen minutes after eleven. All
the house save the weary maid was asleep. ‘But at this hour? Who is he?
What does he want?’
‘He’s outside, in a big car.’
Automatically he sprang to his feet and ran out of the room. Harlow! How
like the swine, not condescending to alight, but summoning his Thing to
his chariot wheels! ‘Is that you, Ellenbury?’ The voice that spoke from.
the darkness of the car was his.
‘Yes, Mr Harlow.’
‘You’ll be getting inquiries about the Gibbins woman—probably tomorrow.
Carlton is certain to call—he has found that the letters were posted
from Norwood. Why didn’t you post them in town?’
‘I thought—er—well, I wanted to keep the business away from my office.’
‘You could still have posted them in town. Don’t try to hide up the fact
that you sent those letters. Mrs Gibbins was an old family servant of
yours. You told me once that you had a woman with a similar name in your
employ—’
‘She’s dead—’ began Ellenbury.
‘So much the easier for you to lie!’ was the answer. ‘Is everything going
smoothly at Ratas?’
‘Everything, Mr Harlow.’
‘Good!’
The lawyer stood at the foot of the steps watching the carmine rear light
of the car until it vanished on the road.
That was Harlow! Requesting nothing—just ordering. Saying ‘Let this be
done,’ and never doubting that it would be done.
He went slowly back to his study, dismissed the servant to bed; and until
the early hours of the morning was studying a continental
timetable—Madrid, Munich, Cordova, Bucharest—delightful places all.
As he passed his wife’s bedroom she called him and he went in.
‘I’m not at all well tonight,’ she said fretfully. ‘I can’t sleep.’
He comforted her with words, knowing that at ten o’clock that night she
had eaten a supper that would have satisfied an agricultural labourer.
MR HARLOW had timed his warning well. He had the general’s gift of
foretelling his enemy’s movements.
Jim called the next morning at the lawyer’s office in Theobald’s Road;
and when the dour clerk denied him an interview, he produced his card.
‘Take that to Mr Ellenbury. I think he will see me,’ he said.
The clerk returned in a few seconds and ushered him into a cupboard of a
place which could not have been more than seven feet square. Mr Ellenbury
rose nervously from behind
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