Edgar Wallace: The Joker

By the time Scotland Yard located Lee he was in Paris in his well-known role of American Gentleman Seeing the Sights.

‘It doesn’t look right to me,’ said Elk, puffing luxuriously at the cigar. ‘Here’s Rata, buys rubber with not a ghost of a chance of its rising. And suddenly, biff! A quarter of the reserve stock in this country is burnt out, and naturally prices and shares rise. Rata’s been buying ‘em for months. Did they know that the United was going west?’

‘I thought it might have been an accident,’ said Jim, who had never thought anything of the sort.

‘Accident my grandmother’s right foot!’ said Elk, without heat. ‘The stores were lit up in three places—the salvage people located the petrol. A man answering the description of Jo Klein was drinking with the night watchman the day before, and that watchman swears he never saw this Jo bird again, but he’s probably lying. The lower classes lie easier than they drink. Ten millions, and if Harlow’s behind Rata, he made more than that on the rubber deal. Buying orders everywhere! Toronto, Rio, Calcutta—every loose bit of rubber lifted off the market. Then comes the fire, and up she goes! All I got to say is—’

The telephone bell rang shrilly at that second, and Jim Carlton picked up the receiver.

‘Somebody wants you, Inspector,’ said the exchange clerk.

There was a click, an interval of silence, and then a troubled voice asked:

‘Can I speak to Mr Carlton?’

‘Yes, Miss Rivers.’

‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ There was a nattering relief in the voice. ‘I wonder if you would come to Fotheringay Mansions, No. 63?’

‘Is anything wrong?’ he asked quickly.

‘I don’t know, but one of the bedroom doors is locked, and I’m sure there’s nobody in there.’

CHAPTER 3

THE GIRL was standing in the open doorway of the flat as the two men stepped from the elevator. She seemed a little disconcerted at the sight of Inspector Elk, but Jim Carlton introduced him as a friend and obliterated him as a factor with one comprehensive gesture.

‘I suppose I ought to have sent for the local police, only there are—well, there are certain reasons why I shouldn’t,’ she said.

Somehow Jim had never thought she could be so agitated. The discovery had evidently thrown her off her balance, and she was hardly lucid when she explained.

‘I come here to collect my uncle’s letters,’ she said. ‘He’s abroad…his name is Jackson,’ she said breathlessly. ‘And every Thursday I have a woman in to clean up the fiat. I can’t afford the time; I’m working in an office.’

They had left Elk staring at an engraving in the corridor, and it was an opportunity to make matters a little easier, if at first a little more uncomfortable, for her.

‘Miss Rivers, your uncle is Arthur Ingle,’ said Jim kindly, and she went very red. ‘It is quite understandable that you shouldn’t wish to advertise the fact, but I thought I’d tell you I knew, just to save you a great deal of unnecessary—’ He stopped and seemed at a loss.

‘“Lying” is the word you want,’ she said frankly. ‘Yes, Arthur Ingle lived here, but he lived here in the name of Jackson. Did you know that?’ she asked anxiously.

He nodded.

‘That’s the door.’ She pointed.

The flat was of an unusual construction. There was a very large dining-room with a low-timbered roof and panelled walls, from which led three doors—one to the kitchenette, the other two, she explained, to Arthur Ingle’s bedroom and a spare apartment which he used as a lumber room. It was the door of the lumber room which she indicated.

Jim tried the handle; the door was fast. Stooping down he peered through the keyhole and had a glimpse of an open window through which the yellow fog showed.

‘Are these doors usually left open?’

‘Always,’ she said emphatically. ‘Sometimes the cleaning woman comes before I return. Tonight she is late and I’m rather early.’

‘Where does that door lead?’

‘To the kitchen.’

She went in front of him into the tiny room. It was spotlessly clean and had one window, flush with that which he had seen through the keyhole of the next room. He looked down into a bottomless void, but just beneath was a narrow parapet. He swung one leg across the sill, only to find his arm held in a frenzied grip by the girl.

‘You mustn’t go, you’ll be killed!’ she gasped and he laughed at her, not ill pleased, for the risk was practically nil.

‘I’ve got a pretty high regard for me,’ he said, and in another instant he had swung clear, gripped the lower sash of the second window and had pulled himself into the room.

He could see nothing except the dim outlines of three trunks stacked one on top of the other. He switched on the light and turned to survey the confusion. Old boxes and trunks which, he guessed, had been piled in some order, were dragged into the centre of the room to allow the free operation of the vanished burglar. Recessed into the wall, thus cleared, was a safe the door of which was open. On the floor beneath was a rough circle of metal burnt from the door—it was still hot when he touched it—by the small blowlamp that the burglar had left behind him.

He unlocked the door of the room and admitted Elk and the girl.

‘That’s good work,’ said Elk, whose detached admiration for the genius of law-breakers was at least sincere. ‘Safe’s empty! Not so much as a cigarette card left behind. Good work! Toby Haggitt or Lew Yakobi—they’re the only two men in London that could have done it.’

The girl was gazing wide-eyed at the ‘good work’. She was very pale, Jim noticed, and misread the cause.

‘What was in the safe?’ he asked.

She shook her head.

‘I don’t know—I didn’t even know that there was a safe in the room. He will be terrible about this!’

Carlton knew the ‘he’ was the absent Ingle. ‘He won’t know for some time, anyway—’ he began, but she broke in upon his reassurance.

‘Next week,’ she said; ‘he is being released on Wednesday.’

Elk scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Somebody knew that,’ he said; ‘he hadn’t a partner either.’

Arthur Ingle was indeed a solitary worker. His frauds had been unsuspected even by such friends as he had in his acting days—for they had covered a period of twelve years before his arrest and conviction. To the members of his company he was known as a bad paymaster and an unscrupulous manager; none imagined that this clever player of character parts was ‘Lobber & Syne, Manufacturing Jewellers, of Clerkenwell,’ and other aliases that produced him such golden harvests.

‘It was no fault of yours,’ said Jim Carlton; and she submitted to a gentle pat on the shoulder. ‘There’s no sense in worrying about it.’

Elk was examining the blowlamp under the electric light.

‘Bet it’s Toby,’ he said, and walked to the window.

‘That’s his graft. He’d make a cat burglar look like a wool-eatin’ kitten! Parapets are like the Great West Road to Toby—he’d stop to manicure his nails on three inches of rotten sandstone.’

The identity of the burglar worried Jim less than it did the girl. He had the brain of a lightning calculator. A hundred aspects of the crime, a hundred possibilities and explanations flickered through his mind and none completely satisfied him. Unless—

The Splendid Harlow was on the way to becoming an obsession. There was no immense sum of money to be made from discovering the secrets of a convicted swindler.

That there was money in the safe he did not for one moment believe. Ingle was not the type of criminal which hid its wealth in safes. He credited him with a dozen banking accounts in fictitious names, and each holding money on deposit.