Edgar Wallace - The Joker

One was a warder, and the other a thin man in an ill-fitting blue suit. The warder disappeared into the booking-office and came back with a ticket, which he handed to the other.

‘So long, Ingle!’ said the officer, and held out his hand, which the ex-convict took grudgingly.

Ingle stepped into the carriage and was turning to shut the door when Elk followed him and the recognition was immediate. Into the keen eyes of Arthur Ingle came a look of deep suspicion.

‘Hallo! What do you want?’ he asked harshly.

‘Why, bless my life, if it isn’t Ingle!’ said Elk with a gasp. ‘Well, well, well! It doesn’t seem five years ago—’

‘What do you want?’ asked Ingle again.

‘Me? Nothing! I’ve been up to the prison making a few inquiries about a friend of one of those mocking birds, but you know what they are—it was love’s labour lost, so to speak,’ said Elk, lighting a cigar and offering the case to his companion.

Ingle took the brown cylinder, smelt it and, biting off the end savagely, accepted the light which the detective held for him. By this time the train was moving and they were free from any possibility of interruption.

‘Let me see: I heard something about you the other day…What was it?’ Mr Elk held his forehead, a picture of perplexity. ‘I’ve got it!’ he said. ‘There was a burglary at your flat.’

The cigar dropped from the man’s hand.

‘A burglary?’ he said shrilly. ‘What was stolen?’

‘Somebody opened the safe in your locker room—’

Ingle sprang to his feet, his teeth bared, his eyes glaring. ‘The safe!’ He almost screamed the words. ‘Opened the safe—damn them! They’re not satisfied with sending me to five years of this hell, but they want to catch me again, do they…?’

Elk let him rave on until, in his rage, the man’s voice sank to a hoarse rattle of sound.

‘I hope you didn’t lose any money?’

‘Money!’ snarled the man. ‘Do you think I’m the kind who puts money in a safe? You know what I lost!’ He pointed an accusing finger at the detective. ‘You fellows did it! So that’s why you’re here, eh? A prison gate arrest, is it?’

‘My dear, good man!’ Elk was pained. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about! You’re no more under arrest than I am. You could walk out of that door as free as the air, if the train wasn’t moving.’ And then he asked: ‘What did they pinch?’

It was a long time before the man recovered himself. ‘If you don’t know I’m not going to tell you,’ he said. ‘Some day—’ He ground his teeth and in his eyes glared; the fires of fanaticism. ‘You, and the like of you, call me a thief!’ His voice rose again as he talked rapidly. ‘You branded me and put me into prison—segregated me from my kind…a pariah, a leper! For what? For skimming off a little of the stolen cream! For taking a little of the money wrested from sweating bodies and breaking hearts! It was mine—mine!’ He struck his chest with a bony fist, his eyes blazing. ‘The money belonged to me—to my fellows, to those men there!’ He pointed back to where, beyond the brow of a rise, lay the grim prison building. ‘I took it from those fat and greasy men and I’m glad of it! One jewel less for their horrible women; one motor-car fewer for their slaves to clean!’

‘Great idea,’ murmured Elk sympathetically.

‘You! What are you? The lackey of a class,’ sneered Ingle. ‘The hired torturer—the prison-feeder!’

‘Quite right,’ murmured Elk, listening with closed eyes.

‘If they found those papers they’ve something to think about—do you hear?—something to spoil their night’s sleep! And if there is sedition in them I’m willing to go back to Princetown.’

Elk opened his eyes quickly. ‘Oh, was that what it was?’ he asked, disappointed. ‘Revolution stuff?’

The man nodded curtly.

‘I thought it was something worth while!’ said Elk, annoyed. ‘Silly idea though, isn’t it. Ingle?’

‘To you, yes. To me, no,’ snapped the other. ‘I hate England! I hate the English! I hate all middle-class people, the smirking self-satisfied swine! I hated them when I was a starving actor and they sat in their stalls with a sneer on their overfed faces…’ He choked.

‘There’s a lot to be said for fat people,’ mused Elk. ‘Now take Harlow-though you wouldn’t call him a fat man.’

‘Harlow!’ scoffed the other. ‘Another of your moneyed gods!’ Evidently he remembered something, for he stopped suddenly.

‘Moneyed gods—?’ suggested Elk.

‘I don’t know.’ The man shook his head. ‘He may not be what he seems. In there’—he jerked his head backwards—‘they say he’s crook to his back teeth! But he doesn’t rob the poor. He takes it in large slabs from the fat men.’

‘If that’s so, I’ve nothing to say. He’s on the side of law and order,’ said Elk gently. ‘A man who hands out police stations as Christmas presents can’t be wholly bad!’

By the time the train pulled into Plymouth station, Detective-Inspector Elk was perfectly satisfied that there was nothing further to be learnt from the man. He went to the post office and sent a telegram to Jim which was short and expressive.

‘Revolution stuff. Nothing important.’

He was on the same train that carried Mr Ingle to London, but he did not occupy the same compartment, except for half an hour after the train flashed through Bath, when he strolled into the carriage and sat down by the man’s side; and apparently he was welcome, for Ingle started talking.

‘Have you seen anything of my niece? Docs she know about the burglary? I think you told me, but I was so angry that I can’t remember.’ And, when Elk had given him the fullest particulars: ‘Harlow! Why did he come? He met Aileen at Dartmoor, you say?’ He frowned and suddenly slapped his knee. ‘I remember the fellow. He was sprawling in his car by the side of the road when we came back from the field that day. So that was Harlow! Does he know Aileen?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘They met at Dartmoor; that’s all I know.’ Ingle gave one of his characteristic shrugs.

‘I suppose he’s running after her? She’s a pretty sort of girl. With that type of man, money’s no object. She’s old enough to look after herself without my assistance.’ So this Utopian left Aileen Rivers to her fate.

CHAPTER 7

HE HAD wired from Plymouth asking her to call at the flat that night, and she arrived just as he had finished a dinner he had cooked for himself.

‘Yes, I’ve heard about the burglary,’ he said, cutting short her question. ‘They’ve got nothing that was worth a shilling to them, thank God! Why did you call in the police?’

And then he had a shock.

‘Who else should I have called in—a doctor?’ she asked.

It was the first time he had met her in a period of freedom. She had had her instructions to look after the flat, smuggled out of prison by a discharged convict; and their talks during the brief visiting hours had been mainly on business.

‘What does one usually do when a burglary is discovered?’ she asked. ‘I sent for the police—of course I sent!’

He stared at her fiercely, but she did not flinch. It was his eyes which dropped first.

‘I suppose it’s all right,’ he said, and then: ‘You know Harlow, don’t you?’

‘I met him at Dartmoor, yes.’

‘A friend of yours?’

‘No more than you are,’ she said; and he had his second shock. ‘I’m not going to quarrel with you, and I don’t see why you should want to be rude to me,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve been useful, but I’ve not been ungenerous. Harlow is a friend of yours—’

‘He called here on the night of the burglary to offer me a job,’ she replied, without any visible evidence other rising anger. ‘I met him at Princetown and he seemed to think that because of my relationship with you, I should find it rather difficult to get employment.’