Edgar Wallace - The Joker

‘That is my housekeeper’s room’—he pointed. ‘You will recognise the door as the one which you locked a few hours ago.’

‘And this?’ asked Jim.

Harlow turned the handle and threw the other door wide open. The room was as Jim had seen it on the previous night, and was untenanted.

‘We will start with the roof,’ said Carlton, and went up the narrow flight of stairs, opened the door and stepped out onto the flat roof. This time he carried a powerful torch, but here also he drew blank. He made a circuit of the parapet and came back to where Harlow was waiting at the open door.

‘Have you found a secret stairway?’ Harlow was innocence itself. ‘They are quite common in Park Lane, but still a novelty in Pimlico. You can touch a spring, something goes click, and there is a narrow winding stair leading to a still more secret room!’

Jim made no answer to this sarcasm, but went downstairs.

From room to room he passed, but there was no sign of the girl or of the bearded man and at last he reached the ground floor.

‘You have cellars? I should like to see them.’

Harlow opened a small door in the panelling of the vestibule. They were in a rather high, flagged passage, at the end of which was the kitchen and servants’ hall. From an open archway in one of the walls a flight of stone stairs descended to the basement. This was made up of three cellars, two of which were used for the storage of wine.

‘This is not the whole extent of the cellar space,’ said Jim suspiciously, when he had finished his inspection.

‘There are no other cellars,’ replied Harlow, with a weary sigh. ‘My good man, how very suspicious you are! Would you like to see the garage?’

Jim followed him up the steps, through the hall. He was being played with—Jim Carlton knew that, and yet for some reason was not rattled.

‘Harlow, where is Miss Rivers? You suggested you knew.’

Harlow inclined his head graciously. ‘If you will allow me to drive you a very little journey, I can promise that I will put an end to all your present doubts.’

They faced one another—Harlow towards the bright light that streamed from the garage.

‘I’ll call your bluff,’ said Jim at last.

A slow smile dawned on Harlow’s face. ‘So many people have done that,’ he said, ‘and yet here I am, with a royal flush permanently in hand! And all who have called—where are their chips?’

He opened the car door and after a second’s hesitation Jim entered, Mr Elk following. The big man shut the door.

‘I have a high opinion of the police,’ he said, ‘and I realise that I am making you look rather foolish: I am sorry! This story of Harlow’s penultimate joke shall go no farther than me.’

He moved away from the car and then very leisurely he walked to the wall, put up his hand, and the garage was in darkness.

Jim saw the manoeuvre and leapt to the door, but it was locked; and even as he struggled to lower the window, there was a whine of machinery and the car began to sink slowly through the floor. Down, down it went upon its platform and then, when the roof was a little below the level of the floor, the platform tilted forward, and the car slid gently onto an unseen track and thudded against rubber buffers and stopped.

Jim had got the window down and was half through when the hydraulic pillars beneath the platform shot up and closed the aperture with a gentle thud. In another second Elk was free. Wrenching open the driver’s door, Jim switched on the powerful head lamps and illuminated the chamber to which the car had sunk.

There were two more machines there; one in particular attracted his attention—an old hire car grey with mud which was still wet. Evidently the place was a very ordinary type of underground garage, though he had never seen such expensive equipment as a hydraulic lift in a private establishment. The walls were of dressed stone; at one end was a low iron door, not locked, so far as he could see, but fastened with two steel bolts. It was probably a petrol store, he thought, and the position under the courtyard before the garage confirmed this guess.

He looked at Elk.

‘How foolish do you feel?’ he asked bitterly.

Elk shook his head.

‘Nothin’ makes me feel foolish,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but I certainly didn’t expect to see the end so soon.’

‘End?’

Elk nodded.

‘Not mine—not yours: Harlow’s. He’s through—what’s penultimate mean, anyway?’

And when it was explained, Elk’s face brightened.

‘He’s got one big line to finish on? I’ll bet it is the biggest joke that’s ever made the police stop laffin. And I’ll tell you—’

He stopped; both heads went round towards the little iron door. Somebody was knocking feebly and Jim’s heart almost stopped beating.

‘Somebody behind that door,’ said Elk. ‘I never thought old man Harlow ran a dungeon.’

Jim ran to the place, slipped back the bolts and flung the iron door open—there staggered into the light the wild and dishevelled figure of an elderly man. For a moment Jim did not recognise him. He was coatless, his crumpled collar was unfastened, but it was the look in his face that transfixed the astonished men.

‘Ellenbury!’ breathed Jim.

The lawyer it was, but the change in him since Jim had seen him last was startling. The wide opened eyes glared from one to the other and then he raised his trembling hand to his mouth.

‘Where is she?’ he whispered fiercely. ‘What did he do with her?’

Jim’s heart turned to lead.

‘Who—Miss Rivers?’

Ellenbury peered at him as though he remembered his voice but could not identify him.

‘Stebbings’s girl!’ he croaked. ‘He took this axe—Harlow!’ The old man swung an imaginary axe. ‘Ugh!…killed her!’

Jim Carlton’s hand was thrust to the wall for support.

His face was colourless—he could not speak and it was Elk who took up the questioning of this apparition.

‘Killed her?’

Ellenbury nodded.

‘Where—?’

‘On the edge of the kitchen garden…there’s a pit. You could put somebody there and nobody would guess. He knew all about the pit. I didn’t know he was the chauffeur—he had a little black moustache and he’d been driving me all day.’

Elk laid his hand gently on the little man’s shoulder and he shrank back with a sound of weeping.

‘Listen, Mr Ellenbury, you must tell us all you know and try to be calm. Nobody will hurt you. Did he kill Miss Rivers?’

The man nodded violently.

‘With an axe—my axe…I saw her lying there on the furnace-room floor. She was very beautiful and white and I saw that he had killed her and went back to the house for I did not wish—I did not wish…’ he shuddered, his face in his hands, ‘to see her in that pit, with the water…green water…ugh…ugh!’

He was fighting back the vision, his long fingers working like a piano player’s.

‘Yes…you saw her again?’ asked Jim huskily. He had. ‘Where?’

‘In the back of the car—where the suitcases were—all huddled up on the floor with a blanket thrown over her. I sat beside the devil and he talked! So softly! God! You’d have thought he had never murdered anybody! He said he was going to take me for a holiday—where I’d get well. But I knew he was lying—I knew the devil was lying and that he was forging new links in my chain. He put me in there!’

He almost screamed the words as his wavering finger pointed to the open door of his prison.

‘Ellenbury, for God’s sake try to think—is Aileen Rivers alive?’

The old man shook his head.

‘Dead!’ he nodded with every repetition of the word, ‘dead, dead, dead! My axe…it was outside the kitchen door…I saw her lying there and there was blood…’