(1929) The Three Just Men (3 page)

“I take it that what you want us to find Miss Leicester?”

The man nodded energetically.

“Have you the slightest idea as to where she is to be found? Has she any relations in England?”

“I don’t know,” interrupted the man. “All I know is that she lives here somewhere, and that her father died three years ago, on the twenty-ninth of May—make a note of that: he died in England on the twenty-ninth of May.”

That was an important piece of information, and it made the search easy, thought Manfred.

“And you’re going to tell me about the fort, aren’t you?” he said, as he looked up from his notes.

Barberton hesitated.

“I was,” he admitted, “but I’m not so sure that I will now, until I’ve found this young lady. And don’t forget,”—he rapped the table to emphasize his words—“that crowd is hot!”

“Which crowd?” asked Manfred good-humouredly. He knew many “crowds,” and wondered if it was about one which was in his mind that the caller was speaking.

“The crowd I’m talking about,” said Mr. Barberton, who spoke with great deliberation and was evidently weighing every word he uttered for fear that he should involuntarily betray his secret.

That seemed to be an end of his requirements, for he rose and stood a little awkwardly, fumbling in his inside pocket.

“There is nothing to pay,” said Manfred, guessing his intention. “Perhaps, when we have located your Miss Mirabelle Leicester, we shall ask you to refund our out-of-pocket expenses.”

“I can afford to pay—” began the man.

“And we can afford to wait.” Again the gleam of amusement in the deep eyes.

Still Mr. Barberton did not move.

“There’s another thing I meant to ask you. You know all that’s happening in this country?”

“Not quite everything,” said the other with perfect gravity.

“Have you ever heard of the Four Just Men?”

It was a surprising question. Manfred bent forward as though he had not heard aright.

“The Four—?”

“The Four Just Men—three, as a matter of fact. I’d like to get in touch with those birds.”

Manfred nodded.

“I think I have heard of them,” he said.

“They’re in England now somewhere. They’ve got a pardon: I saw that in the Cape Times—the bit I tore the advertisement from.”

“The last I heard of them, they were in Spain,” said Manfred, and walked round the table and opened the door. “Why do you wish to get in touch with them?”

“Because,” said Mr. Barberton impressively, “the crowd are scared of ‘em—that’s why.”

Manfred walked with his visitor to the landing.

“You have omitted one important piece of information,” he said with a smile, “but I did not intend your going until you told me. What is your address?”

“Petworth Hotel, Norfolk Street.”

Barberton went down the stairs; the butler was waiting in the hall to show him out, and Mr. Barberton, having a vague idea that something of the sort was usual in the houses of the aristocracy, slipped a silver coin in his hand. The dark-faced man murmured his thanks: his bow was perhaps a little lower, his attitude just a trifle more deferential.

He closed and locked the front door and went slowly up the stairs to the office room. Manfred was sitting on the empire table, lighting a cigarette. The chauffeur-valet had come through the grey curtains to take the chair which had been vacated by Mr. Barberton.

“He gave me half a crown—generous fellow,” said Poiccart, the butler. “I like him, George.”

“I wish I could have seen his feet,” said the chauffeur, whose veritable name was Leon Gonsalez. He spoke with regret. “He comes from West Sussex, and there is insanity in his family. The left parietal is slightly recessed and the face is asymmetrical.”

“Poor soul!” murmured Manfred, blowing a cloud of smoke to the ceiling. “It’s a great trial introducing one’s friends to you, Leon.”

“Fortunately, you have no friends,” said Leon, reaching out and taking a cigarette from the open gold case on the table. “Well, what do you think of our Mr. Barberton’s mystery?”

George Manfred shook his head.

“He was vague, and, in his desire to be diplomatic, incoherent. What about your own mystery, Leon? You have been out all day…have you found a solution?”

Gonsalez nodded.

“Barberton is afraid of something,” said Poiccart, a slow and sure analyst. “He carried a gun between his trousers and his waistcoat—you saw that?” George nodded.

“The question is, who or which is the crowd? Question two is, where and who is Miss Mirabelle Leicester? Question three is, why did they burn Barberton’s feet?…and I think that is all.”

The keen face of Gonsalez was thrust forward through a cloud of smoke.

“I will answer most of them and propound two more,” he said. “Mirabelle Leicester took a job to-day at Oberzohn’s—laboratory secretary!”

George Manfred frowned.

“Laboratory? I didn’t know that he had one.”

“He hadn’t till three days ago—it was fitted in seventy-two hours by experts who worked day and night; the cost of its installation was sixteen hundred pounds—and it came into existence to give Oberzohn an excuse for engaging Mirabelle Leicester. You sent me out to clear up that queer advertisement which puzzled us all on Monday—I have cleared it up. It was designed to bring our Miss Leicester into the Oberzohn establishment. We all agreed when we discovered who was the advertiser, that Oberzohn was working for something—I watched his office for two days, and she was the only applicant for the job—hers the only letter they answered. Oberzohn lunched with her at the Ritz-Carlton—she sleeps to-night in Chester Square.”

There was a silence which was broken by Poiccart.

“And what is the question you have to propound?” he asked mildly.

“I think I know,” said Manfred, and nodded. “The question is: how long has Mr. Samuel Barberton to live?”

“Exactly,” said Gonsalez with satisfaction. “You are beginning to understand the mentality of Oberzohn!”

CHAPTER THREE - THE VENDETTA

THE man who that morning walked without announcement into Dr. Oberzohn’s office might have stepped from the pages of a catalogue of men’s fashions. He was, to the initiated eye, painfully new. His lemon gloves, his dazzling shoes, the splendour of his silk hat, the very correctness of his handkerchief display, would have been remarkable even in the Ascot paddock on Cup day. He was good-looking, smooth, if a trifle plump, of face, and he wore a tawny little moustache and a monocle. People who did not like Captain Monty Newton—and their names were many—said of him that he aimed at achieving the housemaid’s conception of a guardsman. They did not say this openly, because he was a man to be propitiated rather than offended. He had money, a place in the country, a house in Chester Square, and an assortment of cars. He was a member of several good clubs, the committees of which never discussed him without offering the excuse of wartime courtesies for his election. Nobody knew how he made his money, or, if it were inherited, whose heir he was. He gave extravagant parties, played cards well, and enjoyed exceptional luck, especially when he was the host and held the bank after one of the splendid dinners he gave in his Chester Square mansion.

“Good morning, Oberzohn—how is Smitts?” It was his favourite jest, for there was no Smitts, and had been no Smitts in the firm since ‘96.

The doctor, peering down at the telegram he was writing, looked up.

“Good morning, Captain Newton,” he said precisely. Newton passed to the back of him and read the message he was writing. It was addressed to “Miss Alma Goddard, Heavytree Farm, Daynham, Gloucester,” and the wire ran:

“Have got the fine situation. Cannot expeditiously return to-night. I am sleeping at our pretty flat in Doughty Court. Do not come up until I send for you.—Miss MIRABELLE LEICESTER.”

“She’s here, is she?” Captain Newton glanced at the laboratory door. “You’re not going to send that wire? ‘Miss Mirabelle Leicester!’ ‘Expeditiously return!’ She’d tumble it in a minute. Who is Alma Goddard?”

“The aunt,” said Oberzohn. “I did not intend the dispatching until you had seen it. My English is too correct.”

He made way for Captain Newton, who, having taken a sheet of paper from the rack on which to deposit with great care his silk hat, and having stripped his gloves and deposited them in his hat, sat down in the chair from which the older man had risen, pulled up the knees of his immaculate trousers, tore off the top telegraph form, and wrote under the address:

“Have got the job. Hooray! Don’t bother to come up, darling, until I am settled. Shall sleep at the flat as usual. Too busy to write. Keep my letters.—MIRABELLE.”

“That’s real,” said Captain Newton, surveying his work with satisfaction. “Push it off.”

He got up and straddled his legs before the fire.

“The hard part of the job may be to persuade the lady to come to Chester Square,” he said.

“My own little house—” began Oberzohn.

“Would scare her to death,” said Newton with a loud laugh. “That dog-kennel! No, it is Chester Square or nothing. I’ll get Joan or one of the girls to drop in this afternoon and chum up with her. When does the Benguella arrive?”

“This afternoon: the person has booked rooms by radio at the Petworth Hotel.”

“Norfolk Street…humph! One of your men can pick him up and keep an eye on him. Lisa? So much the better. That kind of trash will talk for a woman. I don’t suppose he has seen a white woman in years. You ought to fire Villa—crude beast! Naturally the man is on his guard now.”

“Villa is the best of my men on the coast,” barked Oberzohn fiercely. Nothing so quickly touched the raw places of his amazing vanity as a reflection upon his organizing qualities.

“How is trade?” Captain Newton took a long ebony holder from his tail pocket, flicked out a thin platinum case and lit a cigarette in one uninterrupted motion.

“Bat!” When Dr. Oberzohn was annoyed the purity of his pronunciation suffered. “There is nothing but expense!”

Oberzohn & Smitts had once made an enormous income from the sale of synthetic alcohol. They were, amongst other things, coast traders. They bought rubber and ivory, paving in cloth and liquor. They sold arms secretly, organized tribal wars for their greater profit, and had financed at least two Portuguese revolutions nearer at home. And with the growth of their fortune, the activities of the firm had extended. Guns and more guns went out of Belgian and French workshops. To Kurdish insurrectionaries, to ambitious Chinese generals, to South American politicians, planning, to carry their convictions into more active fields. There was no country in the world that did not act as host to an O. & S. agent—and agents can be very expensive. Just now the world was alarmingly peaceful. A revolution had failed most dismally in Venezuela, and Oberzohn & Smitts had not been paid for two ship-loads of lethal weapons ordered by a general who, two days after the armaments were landed, had been placed against an adobe wall and incontinently shot to rags by the soldiers of the Government against which he was in rebellion. “But that shall not matter.” Oberzohn waved bad trade from the considerable factors of life. “This shall succeed: and then I shall be free to well punish—”

“To punish well,” corrected the purist, stroking his moustache. “Don’t split your infinitives, Eruc—it’s silly. You’re thinking of Manfred and Gonsalez and Poiccart? Leave them alone. They are nothing!”

“Nothing!” roared the doctor, his sallow face instantly distorted with fury. “To leave them alone, is it? Of my brother what? Of my brother in heaven, sainted martyr…!”

He spun round, gripped the silken tassel of the cord above the fireplace, and pulled down, not a map, but a picture. It had been painted from a photograph by an artist who specialized in the gaudy banners which hang before every booth at every country fair. In this setting the daub was a shrieking incongruity; yet to Dr. Oberzohn it surpassed in beauty the masterpieces of the Prado. A full-length portrait of a man in a frock-coat. He leaned on a pedestal in the attitude which cheap photographers believe is the acme of grace. His big face, idealized as it was by the artist, was brutal and stupid. The carmine lips were parted in a simper. In one hand he held a scroll of paper, in the other a Derby hat which was considerably out of drawing.

“My brother!” Dr. Oberzohn choked. “My sainted Adolph…murdered! By the so-called Three Just Men…my brother!”

“Very interesting,” murmured Captain Newton, who had not even troubled to look up. He flicked the ash from his cigarette into the fireplace and said no more. Adolph Oberzohn had certainly been shot dead by Leon Gonsalez: there was no disputing the fact. That Adolph, at the moment of his death, was attempting to earn the generous profits which come to those who engage in a certain obnoxious trade between Europe and the South American states, was less open to question. There was a girl in it: Leon followed his man to Porto Rico, and in the Cafe of the Seven Virtues they had met. Adolph was by training a gunman and drew first—and died first. That was the story of Adolph Oberzohn: the story of a girl whom Leon Gonsalez smuggled back to Europe belongs elsewhere. She fell in love with her rescuer and frightened him sick.

Dr. Oberzohn let the portrait roll up with a snap, blew his nose vigorously, and blinked the tears from his pale eyes.