DETECTIVE HAMILTON CLEEK: 8 Thriller Classics in One Premium Edition. Thomas W. Hanshew
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the shape of the scrawl upon which it rested. Pardon? How did I know through that scrawl that I was really on the track, and that it was the Bareva Reef that was at the bottom of the whole game? My dear Mr. Narkom, I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining that. All you have to do is to turn that tracing upside down and look through it—or at it in a mirror—and you’ll have the answer for yourself. What’s that? The parcel the girl gave Edgburn to carry out on the pretext of taking it to an orphanage? Oh, that was how they were slowly getting rid of the victims’ clothes. Cutting them up into little pieces and throwing them into the river, I suppose, or if not——”
He stopped suddenly, his ear caught by a warning sound; then turned in his seat and glanced through the little window at the back of the limousine.
“I thought as much,” he said, half aloud; then leaned forward, caught up the pipe of the speaking tube, and signalled Lennard. “Look sharp—taxi following us!” he said. “Put on a sudden spurt—that chap will increase speed to keep pace with us—then pull up sharp and let the other fellow’s impetus carry him by before he can help himself. Out with the light, Mr. Narkom—out with it quick!”
Both Lennard and his master followed instructions. Of a sudden the lights flicked out, the car leapt forward with a bound, then pulled up with a jerk that shook it from end to end. In that moment the taxi in the rear whizzed by them, and Narkom, leaning forward to look as it flashed past, saw seated within it the figure of Count Waldemar of Mauravania.
“By James! Did you see that, Cleek?” he cried, and switched round and made a grab for Cleek’s arm.
But Cleek was not there. His seat was empty, and the door beside it was swinging ajar.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” exclaimed the superintendent, fairly carried out of himself—for, even in his old Vanishing Cracksman’s days, when he had slipped the leash and eluded the police so often, the man had not made a more adroit, more silent, more successful getaway than this. “Of all the astonishing——! Gad, an eel’s a fool to him for slipping out of tight places. When did he go, I wonder, and where?”
Never very strong on matters of detail, here curiosity tricked him into absolute indiscretion. Sliding along the seat to the swinging door he thrust it open and leaned out into the darkness, for a purpose so evident that he who ran might read. That one who ran did, he had good reason to understand in the next instant, for, of a sudden, the taxi in advance checked its wild flight, swung round with a noisy scroo-op, and pelted back until the two vehicles stood cheek by jowl, so to speak, and the glare of its headlights was pouring full force upon Mr. Narkom and into the interior of the red limousine.
“Here! Dash your infernal impudence,” began he, blinking up at the driver through a glare which prevented him seeing that the taxicab’s leather blinds had been discreetly pulled down, and its interior rendered quite invisible; but before he could add so much as another word to his protest the chauffeur’s voice broke in with a blandness and an accent which told its own story.
“Dix mille pardons, m’sieur,” it commenced, then pulled itself up as if the owner of it had suddenly recollected himself—and added abruptly in a farcical attempt to imitate the jargon of the fast-disappearing London cabby. “Keep of the ’air on, ole coq! Only wantin’ to arsk of the question civile. Lost my bloomin’ way. Put a cove on to the short cut to the ’Igh Street will yer, like a blessed Christian? I dunno where I are.”
Mr. Narkom was not suffered to make reply. Before he had more than grasped the fact that the speaker was undeniably a Frenchman, Lennard—out of the range of that dazzling light—had made the discovery that he was yet more undeniably a Frenchman of that class from which the Apaches are recruited, and stepped into the breach with astonishing adroitness.
“Oh, that’s the trouble, is it?” he interposed. “My hat! Why, of course we’ll put you on the way. Wot’s more, we’ll take you along and show you—won’t we, guv’ner, eh?—so as you won’t go astray till you gets there. ’Eads in and door shut, Superintendent,” bringing the limousine around until it pointed in the same direction as the taxicab. “Now then, straight ahead, and foller yer nose, Jules; we’ll be rubbin’ shoulders with you the whole blessed way. And as the Dook of Wellington said to Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘None of your larks, you blighter—you’re a-comin’ along with me!’”
That he was, was a condition of affairs so inevitable that the chauffeur made no attempt to evade it; merely put on speed and headed straight for the distant High Street for the purpose of getting rid of his escort as soon as possible; and Lennard, putting on speed, likewise, and keeping pace with him, ran him neck and neck, until the heath was left far and away behind, the darkness gave place to a glitter of street lamps, the lonely roads to populous thoroughfares, and the way was left clear for Cleek to get off unfollowed and unmolested.
CHAPTER VI
Screened by that darkness, and close sheltered by the matted gorse which fringed and dotted the expanse of the nearby heath, he had been an interested witness to the entire proceeding.
“Played, my lad, played!” he commented, putting his thoughts into mumbled words of laughing approval, as Lennard, taking the taxicab under guard, escorted it and its occupants out of the immediate neighbourhood; then, excessive caution prompting him to quell even this little ebullition, he shut up like an oyster and neither spoke, nor moved, nor made any sound until the two vehicles were represented by nothing but a purring noise dwindling away into the distance.
When that time came, however, he rose, and facing the heath, forged out across its mist-wrapped breadth with that long, swinging, soldierly stride peculiar unto him, his forehead puckered with troubled thought, his jaw clamped, and his lips compressed until his mouth seemed nothing more than a bleak slit gashed in a gray, unpleasant-looking mask.
But after a while the night and the time and the place worked their own spell, and the troubled look dropped away; the dull eyes lighted, the grim features softened, and the curious crooked smile that was Nature’s birth-gift to him broke down the rigid lines of the “bleak slit” and looped up one corner of his mouth.
It was magic ground, this heath—a place thick set as the Caves of Manheur with the Sapphires of Memory—and to a nature such as his these things could not but appeal.
Here Dollops had come into his life—a starveling, an outcast; derelict even in the very morning time of youth—a bit of human wreckage that another ten minutes would have seen stranded forever upon the reefs of crime.
Here, too—on that selfsame night, when the devil had been cheated, and the boy had gone, and they two stood alone together in the mist and darkness—he had first laid aside the mask of respectability and told Ailsa Lorne the truth about himself! Of his Apache times—of his Vanishing Cracksman’s days—and, in the telling, had watched the light die out of her dear eyes and dread of him darken them, when she knew.
But not for always, thank God! For, in later days—when Time had lessened the shock, when she came to know him better, when the threads of their two lives had become more closely woven, and the hope had grown to be something more than a mere possibility....
He laughed aloud, remembering, and with a sudden rush of animal spirits twitched off his hat, flung it up and caught it as it fell, after the manner of a happy boy.
God, what a world—what a glorious, glorious world! All things were possible in it if a man but walked straight and knew how to wait.
Well, please God, a part, at least, of his long waiting would be over in another month. She would be back in England then—her long visit to the Hawksleys ended and nothing before her now but the pleasant excitement of trousseau days. For the coming autumn would see the final act of restitution made, the last Vanishing Cracksman debt paid, to the uttermost farthing; and when that time came.... He flung up his hat again and shouted from sheer excess of joy, and forged on through the mist and darkness