The Man Who Bought London (3 page)

A bewildered man sat in a cell at Vine Street, his aching head between his large, grimy hands. He was trying, in his dull brutish way, to piece together the events of the previous night and of that morning. He remembered that he had met a man on the Thames Embankment. A gentleman who had spoken coldly, whose words had cut like a steel knife, and yet who had all the outward evidence of benevolence. And then that this man had struck him, and there had come another, a smooth-faced, young-looking man, who had taken him to a house and given him a drink.

The stranger had led him to a place, and told him to watch, and they had followed this grey-haired man through streets in a taxi-cab.

Horace Baggin had never ridden in a motor car of any description before, and he remembered this. He remembered all that had happened through a thin alcoholic haze. They had gone to South London and then they had come back, and the man had left him at a tube station with a pistol. Presently the grey-haired man had made his appearance, and Baggin, mad with artificial rage, unthinking, unreasoning, had stepped forward and shot wildly, and then the police had come. That was all.

Suddenly a thought struck him, and he started up with an oath. He was wanted for that other affair in Wiltshire. Would they recognize him? He pressed a little electric bell, which was placed in the wall of the cell, and the turnkey came and surveyed him gravely through the grating.

‘What is the charge?’ Baggin asked eagerly.

‘You know what the charge is,’ said the other; ‘it was read over to you in the charge-room.’

‘But I have forgotten,’ said the man sullenly. ‘It won’t hurt you to tell me what I am charged with, will it?’

The officer hesitated. Then –

‘You are charged with attempted murder and with manslaughter.’

‘What manslaughter?’ asked Baggin quickly.

‘Oh, an old affair, you know, Baggin!’

‘Baggin!’

So they knew his name.

Well, there was one gleam of hope, one chance for him. This rich stranger who had lured him out to shoot the grey-haired man, he could help. He was a toff, he was; he lived in a grand house.

What was his name?

Baggin paced his cell for some quarter of an hour, racking his aching brain for the name which eluded him. Yes, curiously enough, he had seen the name, though the other might not have suspected the fact. In the hallway of the house to which the stranger took him was a tiny stand with glass and silver things, fragile and dainty, on which, as they had entered, Baggin had seen some letters addressed to the man, and he, naturally curious, and gifted moreover with the ability to read handwriting, had deciphered the name as – as – Zeberlieff!

That was the name, ‘Zeberlieff’, and Park Lane, too – the house was in Park Lane. He remembered it now. He was elated at the result of his thought, a little exhausted too.

He called the gaoler again, and the weary official obeyed, not without resentment.

‘What do you want now?’ he asked bitterly.

‘Can you let me have a sheet of paper, an envelope and a pencil?’

‘I can,’ said the gaoler. ‘Who do you want to write to – a lawyer?’

‘That’s it,’ said Baggin. ‘He is my own private lawyer,’ he said proudly. ‘A regular “nut” he is, too; he won’t half put it across you people if you don’t behave properly.’

‘Not so much lip!’ said the gaoler, and went away, to return in a few moments with the necessary vehicles of communication.

He passed them through the open grating in the door, and Horace sat down to the unaccustomed task of composing a letter, which was not incriminating to his employer, but which conveyed to him a sense of his responsibility, and the danger in which he stood if he did not offer the succour which was required of him.

‘
Honoured Sir
,’ the letter ran (it would serve no useful purpose to faithfully expose the liberties he took with the English language), ‘
some time ago I did a job of work for you. I am now in great trouble having shot the gentleman, and I should be very much obliged if you would assist me to the best of your ability
.’

It was a noteworthy contribution to the literature of artfulness. Horace Baggin had been inspired to remember Zeberlieff as an old employer in the mythical period when Horace Baggin preferred hard work to the illicit calling which had ended so disastrously for him.

‘Zeberlieff,’ said the gaoler as he read the address and scanned the letter; ‘why, that’s an American millionaire, ain’t it?’

‘That’s so,’ said Horace Baggin complacently; ‘he’s been a good friend of mine. I used to be his’ – he hesitated – ‘his gamekeeper,’ he said. ‘He had an estate down our way,’ he went on grimly. ‘Very good shot, too.’

‘I will send it down if you like,’ said the gaoler; ‘though he will probably only give you the cold shoulder. You know when a man
gets into trouble he can’t expect his old master to come prancing round getting him out. Not in these days, anyway.’

Nevertheless, he sent it on at Baggin’s request.

After that effort of thought and diplomacy Horace Baggin felt at peace with the world. In the afternoon he was called before the magistrate. Formal evidence was taken, and he was remanded for one day and removed back to the cell; that meant another day at the police court.

Well, he was prepared to face it. It was not the first time he had been in trouble, but it was the first time he had been in a position where, in spite of the enormity of the crime, hope had extended so rosy a vista of possibilities. He had received news that his letter had been delivered, and waited hopefully for his partner in crime to make a move. It was fine, he thought, to have such a pal. The prospect of succour had almost entirely eclipsed the seriousness of the charges which the man had to face.

Morning found Baggin more sober and more bitter. So this sweet pal of his had gone back on him, had made no attempt to answer his call of distress, even though the imprisoned man had made it apparent that no immediate danger threatened the confederate. Well, there was another way out of it, another way in which he might excuse his conduct and find himself the centre of a sensational case. He waited till the gaoler passed, and then –

‘I want to see the inspector in charge of this case,’ he said. ‘I have got a statement to make.’

‘Right-o!’ said the gaoler. ‘You had better have your breakfast first. You will be one of the first to go into court, you know.’

Baggin nodded.

‘Coffee and toast have been sent in for you.’

‘Who by?’ asked Baggin, with some show of interest.

‘One of your pals,’ said the gaoler, and vouchsafed no further information.

So Zeberlieff had moved, had he?

Baggin had no pals, save the pal for whom he was waiting, and in whom he had placed his faith. His spirits rose again. He remembered that it would be as well not to be too emphatic. There might come a time when it would be necessary to admit the existence of the other man.

‘Here is your breakfast,’ said a detective, as the door swung open again, and he was accompanied by a warder with a little tray, carrying a steaming jug of coffee and a plate of toast. ‘Now, just think it out, and let me know how you feel before you go into court. It might make all the difference in the world to you. Why should you stand the racket for another man’s crime?’ the detective asked.

Baggin was not to be cajoled, but no sooner had the door closed behind the detective than he moved mechanically across to where the writing pad lay and picked it up. He would give the stranger a chance; in the meantime he was hungry.

He took a draught of the coffee, at the same time wondering how his newfound pal would get him out of the scrape.

Five minutes later a detective and the gaoler strolled down to his cell.

‘I will have a talk with him,’ said the detective, and the gaoler, without troubling to look through the grating, inserted the key and pulled the door open.

The detective uttered an exclamation and sprang into the cell. Baggin lay in a huddled heap amongst a litter of broken china and spilt coffee. The detective lifted him up bodily and turned him over.

‘My God!’ he said, ‘he’s dead! He has been poisoned! There is the scent of cyanide of potassium in this cell.’

‘Poisoned?’ asked the startled gaoler. ‘Who did it? How did he get it?’

‘It was in the coffee,’ replied the detective slowly, ‘and the man that sent it in was the man who employed Baggin to do his dirty work.’

Before the lunch hour arrived at Tack and Brighten’s, there came to Elsie Marion, through the medium of the senior shop-walker, an invitation to attend upon Mr Tack. It was couched in such elegant language, and delivered with grace that no doubt could exist in the mind of any intelligent being that message and messenger had been most carefully rehearsed.

At five minutes to one Elsie presented herself at the partners’ office. Mr Tack was not alone; his partner sat bunched up in a chair, biting his knuckles and scowling furiously.

The firm of Tack and Brighten was not distinguished by the fact that one member of the firm whose name appeared upon the facade had no incorporate existence. There may have been a Brighten in the old days, but nobody had ever seen him or met him. He was a business legend. The dominant partner of the firm was James Leete.

He was a stout man, stouter than the fiery Mr Tack. He walked with a waddle, and his face was not pleasant. It was creased and puffed into a score of unhealthy rolls and crevices; his nose was red and bulbous and to accentuate and emphasize his unloveliness, he wore a black-rimmed monocle. Immensely rich, he fawned a way through life, for he sought inclusion in ducal house parties and was happiest in the society of rank.

‘This is the girl?’ he asked.

He had a thick, husky voice, naturally coarse, through which ran with grotesque insistence a tone of mock culture which he had acquired by conscientious imitation of his models.

‘This is Miss Marion,’ said Tack gloomily.

Leete leered up at him.

‘Pretty girl! I suppose you know it, Miss What’s-your-name?’

Elsie made no reply, though the colour came to her cheek at the undisguised insolence of the man.

‘Now, look here!’ – Leete swung his gross shape round on the revolving chair till he faced her and wagged a fat finger in her direction – ‘you’ve got to be very careful what you say to my friend King Kerry: everything you tell him he’ll repeat to me, and if you tell one solitary, single lie about this business I can have you clapped into gaol for criminal libel.’

The girl smiled in spite of herself.

‘You can grin!’ growled Leete; ‘but I mean it – see? Not that you know anything that we mind you saying. You’re not exactly in the confidence of the firm – and if you were,’ he added quickly, ‘you’d know no more to our detriment than you do.’

‘Don’t worry!’ answered the girl coolly. ‘I shall tell him nothing except that you have said you are a friend of his.’

‘It’s not necessary to tell him that,’ said Leete hastily.

‘I think it is only fair to him to know what awful things people are saying about him,’ said Elsie sweetly. She was in her ‘sheep and lamb’ mood, and she was very hungry. Later she was to marvel at her courage and her impertinence, but just at the moment she was conscious of nothing so much as a terrible sense of absence in the region of her little diaphragm.

‘My girl,’ said Leete slowly, ‘I don’t enquire as to how you got to know my friend Kerry, and I won’t enquire, and I won’t hint –’

‘You’d jolly well better not!’ flared the girl, her eyes shining angrily; ‘because as I’m feeling just now I’d throw this inkstand at your head for two pins!’

Mr Leete pushed his chair back in alarm as the girl lifted the inkwell from the table and gripped it suggestively.

‘Don’t misunderstand me!’ he begged with a warding arm raised. ‘I’m only talking to you for your good. I want to see you get on. I’ll tell you what I’ve suggested, Miss Marion: we keep you on, we double your salary, and we put you in charge of the checking department.’

For one moment only the magnificence of the offer overcame her. A larger room – the little luxuries which on her old salary were impossible –

‘And,’ added Mr Leete impressively, ‘a bonus of a hundred pounds the day this business is transferred to its new proprietor.’

‘A hundred pounds!’ she repeated.

She put down the inkwell: it was out of place under the circumstances.

‘And what would you ask me to do for this?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing,’ put in Tack, a silent spectator till now.

‘You shut up, Tack!’ snarled the partner. ‘Yes, of course, we want something: we want you to tell Mr Kerry all the good you can about the firm.’

She understood now.

‘That will take me exactly half a second,’ said Elsie.

Her duty was clear. They were binding her to lie. She had not taken Gillett’s message seriously. She had not even grasped the elementary fact that the grey-haired stranger in the tube was the great King Kerry, multi-millionaire and controller of billions. Her head was whirling with the happenings of the day – she was intoxicated by novelty, and only the natural and buoyant healthy outlook of the girl kept her any way near to normal.

Leete took stock of her and wondered he had not noticed her before. She was a beautiful girl with her fine grey eyes, and the mass of hair that half-framed her face in a cloud of russet gold.
The hands were small and shapely, the figure slender and straight. Even the unattractive uniform which Messrs Tack and Brighten insisted upon their girls wearing did not detract from her beauty. Now, with faint shadows which an insufficiency of sleep and a lack of food had painted beneath her eyes, she was ethereal and rather adorable. So thought Mr Leete, no mean judge, and he stroked his bristly grey-black moustache reflectively.

She half turned to the door.

‘You will not require me any more?’ she asked.

‘Remember!’ Again Leete was shaking his ridiculous finger at her. ‘Criminal libel means imprisonment.’

‘I don’t feel like laughing this morning,’ said Elsie Marion; ‘but you are tempting me awfully.’

She closed the door behind her before Mr Leete had time to express his wishes about her eyes, her soul, and her obscure relations. For Mr Leete had no respect for anybody whose name was not in Burke’s
Landed Gentry
.

She turned up to the dressing-room and found herself besieged by an admiring crowd of girls, for the news that Miss Marion had ‘cheeked’ Tack and lived to tell the tale was common property.

She repressed a natural and human inclination to reveal the fact that she was lunching at the Savoy, and fled from the building before she betrayed her great secret.

Mr Kerry was waiting in the entrance hall of the hotel alone. It seemed to the girl that every eye in the great vestibule was focused on him and in this surmise she was probably right, for a billionaire is something out of the ordinary; but a billionaire who had escaped assassination at the hands of a former ‘friend’, and whose name, in consequence, was on every evening newspaper placard in London, was most wonderful of all.

Throughout the meal, taken at a table overlooking the river, they talked on a variety of subjects. He was an especially well-read man, with a penchant for the Persian poets, and was a delighted and unconventionally demonstrative man – leaning across the table to stroke her hand – when she capped a couplet from Hafiz with a verse from Sadi –

‘Though we are straws laid down to warm the sod, We once were flowers in the eyes of God.’

‘Excellent! splendid!’ he cried. ‘I don’t remember that rendering of the poem.’

‘It is a rendering I made myself,’ she confessed. She had seen a translation and had improved upon it.

They meandered through the most delicious lunch Elsie had eaten since the extravagant days of Aunt Martha. He encouraged her to talk of that relative. ‘A fine woman,’ he called her enthusiastically. ‘I love these people who spend all their money.’

She shook her head laughingly.

‘That is not your creed, Mr Kerry,’ she challenged.

‘It is – it is!’ he said eagerly; ‘here is my parable of finance. Money is water. The sea is the wealth of the nations. It is evaporated and drawn up to the sky and is sprinkled upon the earth. For some of us it runs in deep channels, and if we are skilful we can dam it for our use. Some of us dam it deeply, and some shallowly. With some it just filters away and is swallowed up, only to reappear in somebody else’s dam.’

She nodded. It was a new imagery, and the conceit pleased her.

‘If you keep it stagnant it is no use,’ he went on, as eager as a boy. ‘You must let it pass along, always keeping a reserve; it shouldn’t run out faster than it runs in. I have a big dam – high up on the hills it stands; a great and mighty reservoir always filling,
always running off. Farther down the hill hundreds of other men are collecting the waste from my overflow; farther down smaller men with smaller dams, and so on – till it runs away to the sea, as it must in time, to the great ocean of world-wealth which collects everything and gives back everything.’

She looked at him in amazement, this man who had escaped death by an inch and was so absorbed in his philosophy of wealth that he had forgotten how near he had stood to the brink of eternity, and her heart warmed to this courageous man.

He came to earth quickly, fished in his inside pocket and produced a fat little book with a soiled leather cover. He placed it tenderly on the table and opened it. It was a book which had been in use for years. Some of the pages were covered with minute writings, some had become detached and had been carefully fastened in again.

‘I owe you an explanation,’ he said, and sorted from a few loose papers a photograph. He looked at it for a moment and laid it on the table for the girl to see.

She gave a gasp.

‘Why, that is me!’ she said, and looked at him in amazement.

‘It is rather like you, isn’t it?’ He replaced the photograph, his lips pressed tight together. ‘As a matter of fact it isn’t you; some time you shall know who it is – that is,’ he smiled again, ‘if I am not the victim of an imitator of the late Horace –’

‘Late?’ she repeated.

The other nodded gravely.

‘He took cyanide of potassium in his cell at Marlborough Street,’ he said, ‘leaving his good work for his employer to carry on. What time have you to be back?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Two o’clock,’ she said in a sudden panic, for no great reason.

‘It’s now three,’ he said. ‘You need not go back till four.’

‘But, Mr Tack –’

‘I am the head of the firm,’ he smiled. ‘I have bought Tack and Brighten’s – closed the deal on the phone just before you arrived. I have taken the liberty of raising your wages to fifteen pounds a week. Shall I order you another coffee?’

Elsie opened her mouth to say ‘yes’, but no sound came. For the first time in her life she was at a loss for words.