The Complete Four Just Men (49 page)

The Law of the Four Just Men

The Man who lived at Clapham

‘The jury cannot accept the unsupported suggestion – unsupported even by the prisoner’s testimony since he has not gone into the box – that Mr Noah Stedland is a blackmailer and that he obtained a large sum of money from the prisoner by this practice. That is a defence which is rather suggested by the cross-examination than by the production of evidence. The defence does not even tell us the nature of the threat which Stedland employed . . . ’

The remainder of the summing up was creditable to the best traditions of the Bar, and the jury, without retiring, returned a verdict of ‘Guilty’.

There was a rustle of movement in the court and a thin babble of whispered talk as the Judge fixed his pince-nez and began to write.

The man in the big oaken pen looked down at the pale drawn face
of a girl turned to him from the well of the court and smiled encouragingly. For his part, he did not blanch and his grave eyes went back to the figure on the Bench – the puce-gowned, white-headed figure that was writing so industriously. What did a Judge write on these occasions, he wondered? Surely not a précis of the crime. He was impatient now to have done with it all; this airy court, these blurred rows of pink faces in the gloom of the public gallery, the indifferent counsel and particularly with the two men who had sat near the lawyer’s pews watching him intently.

He wondered who they were, what interest they had in the proceedings. Perhaps they were foreign authors, securing first-hand impressions. They had the appearance of foreigners. One was very tall (he had seen him rise to his feet once), the other was slight and gave an impression of boyishness, though his hair was grey. They were both clean-shaven and both were dressed in black and balanced on their knees broad-brimmed hats of soft black felt.

A cough from the Judge brought his attention back to the Bench.

‘Jeffrey Storr,’ said his lordship, ‘I entirely agree with the verdict of the jury. Your defence that Stedland robbed you of your savings and that you broke into his house for the purpose of taking the law
into your own hands and securing the money and a document, the character of which you do not specify but which you allege proved his guilt, could not be considered seriously by any Court of Justice. Your story sounds as though you had read of that famous, or infamous, association called the Four Just Men, which existed some years ago, but which is now happily dispersed. Those men set themselves to punish where the law failed. It is a monstrous assumption that the law ever fails! You have committed a very serious offence, and the fact that you were at the moment of your arrest and capture in possession of a loaded revolver, serves very gravely to aggravate your crime. You will be kept in penal servitude for seven years.’

Jeffrey Storr bowed and without so much as a glance at the girl in the court, turned and descended the steps leading to the cells.

The two foreign-looking men who had excited the prisoner’s interest and resentment were the first to leave the court.

Once in the street the taller of the two stopped.

‘I think we will wait for the girl,’ he said.

‘Is she the wife?’ asked the slight man.

‘Married the week he made his unfortunate investment,’ replied the tall man, then, ‘It was a curious coincidence, that reference of the Judge’s to the Four Just Men.’

The other smiled.

‘It was in that very court that you were sentenced to death, Manfred,’ he said, and the man called Manfred nodded.

‘I wondered whether the old usher would remember me,’ he answered, ‘he has a reputation for never forgetting a face. Apparently the loss of my beard has worked a miracle, for I actually spoke to him. Here she is.’

Fortunately the girl was alone. A beautiful face, thought Gonsalez, the younger of the two men. She held her chin high and there was no sign of tears. As she walked quickly toward Newgate Street they followed her. She crossed the road into Hatton Garden and then it was that Manfred spoke.

‘Pardon me, Mrs Storr,’ he said, and she turned and stared at the foreign-looking man suspiciously.

‘If you are a reporter – ’ she began.

‘I’m not,’ smiled Manfred, ‘nor am I a friend of your husband’s, though I thought of lying to you in that respect in order to find an excuse for talking to you.’

His frankness procured her interest.

‘I do not wish to talk about poor Jeffrey’s terrible trouble,’ she said. ‘I just want to be alone.’

Manfred nodded.

‘I understand that,’ he said sympathetically, ‘but I wish to be a friend of your husband’s and perhaps I can help him. The story he told in the box was true – you thought that too, Leon?’

Gonsalez nodded.

‘Obviously true,’ he said, ‘I particularly noticed his eyelids. When a man lies he blinks at every repetition of the lie. Have you observed, my dear George, that men cannot tell lies when their hands are clenched and that when women lie they clasp their hands together?’

She looked at Gonsalez in bewilderment. She was in no mood for a lecture on the physiology of expression and even had she known that Leon Gonsalez was the author of three large books which ranked with the best that Lombroso or Mantegazza had given to the world, she would have been no more willing to listen.

‘The truth is, Mrs Storr,’ said Manfred, interpreting her new distress, ‘we think that we can free your husband and prove his innocence. But we want as many facts about the case as we can get.’

She hesitated only a moment.

‘I have some furnished lodgings in Gray’s Inn Road,’ she said, ‘perhaps you will be good enough to come with me.

‘My lawyer does not think there is any use in appealing against the sentence,’ she went on as they fell in one on either side of her. Manfred shook his head.

‘The Appeal Court would uphold the sentence,’ he said quietly, ‘with the evidence you have there is no possibility of your husband being released.’

She looked round at him in dismay and now he saw that she was very near to tears.

‘I thought . . . you said . . . ?’ she began a little shakily.

Manfred nodded.

‘We know Stedland,’ he said, ‘and – ’

‘The curious thing about blackmailers, is that the occiput is hardly observable,’ interrupted Gonsalez thoughtfully. ‘I examined sixty-two heads in the Spanish prisons and in every case the occipital protuberance was little more than a bony ridge. Now in homicidal heads the occiput sticks out like a pigeon’s egg.’

‘My friend is rather an authority upon the structure of the head,’ smiled Manfred. ‘Yes, we know Stedland. His operations have been reported to us from time to time. You remember the Wellingford case, Leon?’

Gonsalez nodded.

‘Then you are detectives?’ asked the girl.

Manfred laughed softly.

‘No, we are not detectives – we are interested in crime. I think we have the best and most thorough record of the unconvicted criminal class of any in the world.’

They walked on in silence for some time.

‘Stedland is a bad man,’ nodded Gonsalez as though the conviction had suddenly dawned upon him. ‘Did you observe his ears? They are unusually long and the outer margins are pointed – the Darwinian tubercle, Manfred. And did you remark, my dear friend, that the root of the helix divides the concha into two distinct cavities and that the lobule was adherent? A truly criminal ear. The man has committed murder. It is impossible to possess such an ear and not to murder.’

The flat to which she admitted them was small and wretchedly furnished. Glancing round the tiny dining-room, Manfred noted the essential appointments which accompany a ‘furnished’ flat.

The girl, who had disappeared into her room to take off her coat, now returned, and sat by the table at which, at her invitation, they had seated themselves.

‘I realise that I am being indiscreet,’ she said with the faintest of smiles; ‘but I feel that you really want to help me, and I have the curious sense that you can! The police have not been unkind or unfair to me and poor Jeff. On the contrary, they have been most helpful. I fancy that they suspected Mr Stedland of being a blackmailer, and they were hoping that we could supply some evidence. When that evidence failed, there was nothing for them to do but to press forward the charge. Now, what can I tell you?’

‘The story which was not told in court,’ replied Manfred.

She was silent for a time. ‘I will tell you,’ she said at last. ‘Only my husband’s lawyer knows, and I have an idea that he was sceptical as to the truth of what I am now telling you. And if he is sceptical,’ she said in despair, ‘how can I expect to convince you?’

The eager eyes of Gonsalez were fixed on hers, and it was he who answered.

‘We are already convinced, Mrs Storr,’ and Manfred nodded.

Again there was a pause. She was evidently reluctant to begin a narrative which, Manfred guessed, might not be creditable to her; and this proved to be the case.

‘When I was a girl,’ she began simply, ‘I was at school in Sussex – a big girls’ school; I think there were over two hundred pupils. I am not going to excuse anything I did,’ she went on quickly. ‘I fell in love with a boy – well, he was a butcher’s boy! That sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? But you understand I was a child, a very impressionable child – oh, it sounds horrible, I know; but I used to meet him in the garden leading out from the prep. room after prayers; he climbed over the wall to those meetings, and we talked and talked, sometimes for an hour. There was no more in it than a boy and girl love affair, and I can’t explain just why I committed such a folly.’

‘Mantegazza explains the matter very comfortably in his
Study of Attraction
,’ murmured Leon Gonsalez. ‘But forgive me, I interrupted you.’

‘As I say, it was a boy and girl friendship, a kind of hero worship on my part, for I thought he was wonderful. He must have been the nicest of butcher boys,’ she smiled again, ‘because he never offended me by so much as a word. The friendship burnt itself out in a month or two, and there the matter might have ended, but for the fact that I had been foolish enough to write letters. They were very ordinary, stupid love-letters, and perfectly innocent – or at least they seemed so to me at the time. Today, when I read them in the light of a greater knowledge they take my breath away.’

‘You have them, then?’ said Manfred.

She shook her head.

‘When I said “them” I meant one, and I only have a copy of that, supplied me by Mr Stedland. The one letter that was not destroyed fell into the hands of the boy’s mother, who took it to the headmistress, and there was an awful row. She threatened to write to my parents who were in India, but on my solemn promise that the acquaintance should be dropped, the affair was allowed to blow over. How the letter came into Stedland’s hands I do not know; in fact, I had never heard of the man until a week before my marriage with Jeff. Jeff had saved about two thousand pounds, and we were looking forward to our marriage day when this blow fell. A letter from a perfectly unknown man, asking me to see him at his office, gave me my first introduction to this villain. I had to take the letter with me, and I went in some curiosity, wondering why I had been sent for. I was not to wonder very long. He had a little office off Regent Street, and after he had very carefully taken away the letter he had sent me, he explained, fully and frankly, just what his summons had meant.’

Manfred nodded.

‘He wanted to sell you the letter,’ he said, ‘for how much?’

‘For two thousand pounds. That was the diabolical wickedness of it,’ said the girl vehemently. ‘He knew almost to a penny how much Jeff had saved.’

‘Did he show you the letter?’

She shook her head.

‘No, he showed me a photographic reproduction and as I read it and recalled what construction might be put upon this perfectly innocent note, my blood went cold. There was nothing to do but to tell Jeff, because the man had threatened to send facsimiles to all our friends and to Jeffrey’s uncle, who had made Jeffrey his sole heir. I had already told Jeffrey about what happened at school, thank heaven, and so I had no need to fear his suspicion. Jeffrey called on Mr Stedland, and I believe there was a stormy scene; but Stedland is a big, powerful man in spite of his age, and in the struggle which ensued poor Jeffrey got a little the worst of it. The upshot of the matter was, Jeffrey agreed to buy the letter for two thousand pounds, on condition that Stedland signed a receipt, written on a blank page of the letter itself. It meant the losing of his life savings; it meant the possible postponement of our wedding; but Jeffrey would not take any other course. Mr Stedland lives in a big house near Clapham Common – ’

‘184 Park View West,’ interrupted Manfred.

‘You know?’ she said in surprise. ‘Well, it was at this house Jeffrey had to call to complete the bargain. Mr Stedland lives alone except for a manservant, and opening the door himself, he conducted Jeffrey up to the first floor, where he had his study. My husband, realising the futility of argument, paid over the money, as he had been directed by Stedland, in American bills – ’

‘Which are more difficult to trace, of course,’ said Manfred.

‘When he had paid him, Stedland produced the letter, wrote the receipt on the blank page, blotted it and placed it in an envelope, which he gave to my husband. When Jeffrey returned home and opened the envelope, he found it contained nothing more than a blank sheet of paper.’

‘He had rung the changes,’ said Manfred.

‘That was the expression that Jeffrey used,’ said the girl. ‘Then it was that Jeffrey decided to commit this mad act. You have heard of the Four Just Men?’

‘I have heard of them,’ replied Manfred gravely.

‘My husband is a great believer in their methods, and a great admirer of them too,’ she said. ‘I think he read everything that has ever been written about them. One night, two days after we were married – I had insisted upon marrying him at once when I discovered the situation – he came to me.

‘ “Grace,” he said, “I am going to apply the methods of the Four to this devil Stedland.”

‘He outlined his plans. He had apparently been watching the house, and knew that except for the servant the man slept in the house alone, and he had formed a plan for getting in. Poor dear, he was an indifferent burglar; but you heard today how he succeeded in reaching Stedland’s room. I think he hoped to frighten the man with his revolver.’