Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns (13 page)

He examined the keys under a powerful magnifying glass, and the conclusion he reached was that probably they had never been used. At the bottom of the box, and almost overlooked because it lay under a black card that covered the bottom, he found a sheet of paper torn from a small notebook. Its contents were in a copperplate hand; certain words were underlined in red ink, carefully ruled. It consisted of a column of street names, and against each was a time. Mr Reeder observed that the times ranged from ten in the morning till four o’clock in the afternoon, and that the streets (he knew London very well) were side streets adjacent to main thoroughfares. Against certain of the times and places a colour was indicated: red, yellow, white, pink; but these had been struck out in pencil, and in the same medium the word “yellow” had been written against all of them.

“What do you make of those, Mr Reeder?”

Reeder looked through the list again carefully.

“I rather imagine,” he said, “that it’s a list of rendezvous. At this place and at this time there was a car ready to pick him up. Originally it was intended to have four cars, but for some reason or other this was impracticable. I take it that the colour means a flower or a badge of some kind by which Reigate could distinguish the car that was picking him up.”

Later at Scotland Yard he elaborated his theory to an interested circle.

“What is clear now, if it wasn’t clear before,” he said, “is that there is an organisation working in England against the banks. It is more dangerous than I imagined, for obviously the man or men behind it will stop at nothing to save themselves if matters ever come to a pinch. They killed Reigate because they thought – and rightly – that he was coming to betray them.”

Mr Reeder claimed that he had a criminal mind. That night, in his spacious study at Brockley, he became a criminal. He organised bank robberies; he worked out systems of defalcations; he visualised all the difficulties that the brain of such an organisation would have to contend against. The principal problem was to get out of England men who were known and whose descriptions had been circulated as being wanted by the police. Every port and every airport was watched; there was a detective staff at every aerodrome; Ostend, Calais, Boulogne, Flushing, the Hook of Holland, Havre and Dieppe were staffed by keen observers. No Atlantic liner sailed but it carried an officer whose business it was to identify questionable passengers.

For hours Mr Reeder wallowed in his wickedness. Scheme succeeded scheme; possibility and probability were rubbed against one another and cancelled themselves out.

What was the organiser’s chief difficulty? To avoid a close inspection of his protégés, and to keep them in a place where they would not be recognised.

The case of Reigate was a simple one. He was a man with a conscience, and though apparently he was heading for safety, that still, small voice of his had grown louder and he had decided to make a clean breast of everything. Having reached this decision, he had escaped from wherever he was confined and had made his way to Reeder’s house – his sister had told the detective that the young man knew his address.

At midnight Mr Reeder rose from his desk, lit his thirtieth cigarette, and stood for a long time with his back to the fireplace, the cigarette drooping limply from his mouth, his head on one side like a cockatoo, and cogitated upon his criminal past.

He went to bed that night with a sense that he was groping through a fog towards a certain door, and that when that door was opened the extraordinary happenings of the past few months would be susceptible of a very simple explanation.

On the following morning Mr Reeder was in his office, and those who are not acquainted with his methods would have been amazed to find that he was engaged in reading a fairy story. He read it furtively, hiding it away in the drawer of his desk whenever there was the slightest suggestion of somebody entering. He loved fairy stories about wonderful little ladies who appeared mysteriously out of nowhere, and rendered marvellous assistance to poor but beautiful daughters of woodcutters, transforming them with a wave of their wands into no less lovely princesses, and by a similar wave turned wicked men and women into trees and rabbits and black cats. There were so many men and women in the world whom he would have turned into trees and rabbits and black cats.

He was reading the latest of his finds (
Fairy Twinklefeet and the Twelve Genii
) when he heard a heavy cough outside his door and the confident rap of the commissionaire’s knuckles. He put away the book, closed the drawer, and said:

“Come in.”

“Dr Carl Jansen, sir.”

Mr Reeder leaned back in his chair.

“Show him in, please,” he said.

Dr Jansen was tall, rather stout, very genial. He spoke with the slightest of foreign accents.

“May I sit, please?” He beamed and drew his chair up to the desk almost before Mr Reeder had murmured his invitation. “It was in my mind to see you, Mr Reeder, to ask you to undertake a small commission for me, but I understand you are no longer private detective but official, eh?”

Reeder bowed. His fingertips were together. He was looking at the newcomer from under his shaggy brows.

“I am in a very peculiar position,” said Dr Jansen. “I conduct here a small clinic for diseases of the ’eart, for various things. I am a generous man; I cannot ’elp it.” He waved an extravagant hand. “I give, I lend, I do not ask for security, and I am – what is the word? – swindled. Now a great misfortune has come to me. I loaned a man a thousand pounds.” He leaned confidentially across the table. “He has got into trouble – you have seen the case in the papers – Mr Hallaty, the banker.”

He waved his agitated hands again.

“He has gone out of the country without saying a word, without paying a penny, and now he writes to me to ask me for a prescription for the ’eart.”

Mr Reeder leaned back in his chair.

“He’s written from where?” he asked.

“From ’Olland. I come from ’Olland; it is my ’ome.”

“Have you got the letter?”

The man fished out a pocketbook and from this extracted a sheet of notepaper. The moment Reeder saw it he recognised Hallaty’s handwriting. It was very brief.

“Dear Doctor,

I must have the prescription for my heart. I have lost it. I cannot give you my address. Will you please advertise it in the agony column of
The Times
?”

It was signed “H.”

If Dr Jansen could have looked under those shaggy eyebrows he would have seen Mr Reeder’s eyes light up.

“May I keep this letter?” he asked.

The big man shrugged.

“Why, surely. I am glad that you should, because this gentleman seems to be in trouble with the police, and I do not want to be mixed up in it, except that I would like to get my thousand pounds. The prescription I will advertise because it is humanity.”

Dr Jansen took his departure after giving his address, which was a small flat in Pimlico. He was hardly out of the building before Mr Reeder had verified his name and his qualifications from a work of reference. The letter he carried to Scotland Yard and to the Chief Constable.

“Smell it,” he said.

The Chief sniffed.

“Camphor – and not exactly camphor. It’s the same as we found in young Reigate’s dressing gown. I’ve sent it down to the laboratory; they say it’s camphorlactine, a very powerful disinfectant and antiseptic, sometimes used in cases of infectious diseases.”

He heard a smack as Mr Reeder’s hands came together, and looked up in astonishment.

“Dear, dear me!” said Mr Reeder.

He almost purred the words.

When he got back to his office in Whitehall the commissionaire told him that a lady was waiting to see him. Mr Reeder frowned.

“All right, show her in,” he said.

He pushed up the most comfortable chair for her.

“Mr Reeder” – she spoke quickly and nervously – “I have found a notebook of my brother’s and the full amounts that he took–”

“I have those,” said Reeder. “It is not a very large amount, certainly not such an amount as would have justified the trouble and pains they took to get him out on bail.”

“And in the notebook was this.” She put a little cutting on the table.

Mr Reeder adjusted his glasses and read:

“In your dire necessity write to the Brothers of Benevolence, 297 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Professional men who are short of money, and in urgent need of it will receive help without usury. Repayment spread over years. No security but our faith in you.”

Mr Reeder read it three times, his lips spelling the words; then he put the cutting down on the table.

“That is quite new to me,” he said, with a suggestion of shamefacedness which made the girl want to laugh. “I’ll have a search made of the newspapers and see how often this has appeared,” he said. “Do you know when your brother applied for a loan?”

She shook her head.

“I remember the morning he cut it out. That was months ago. And then one night, when he had a friend here, I brought him in some coffee and I heard Mr Hallaty say something about his brotherhood–”

“Mr Hallaty?” Reeder almost squeaked the words. “Did your brother know Hallaty?”

She hesitated.

“Ye-es, he knew him. I told you there was a man who I thought had a bad influence on Johnny.”

He saw a faint flush come to her face, and realised how pretty a girl she was.

“I was introduced to him at the dance of the United Banks, but he was rather a difficult man to – to get rid of.”

Reeder’s eyes twinkled.

“Did you ever tell him to go away? It’s a very rude but simple process.”

She smiled.

“Yes, I did once. He came home one night when my brother wasn’t in, and he was so objectionable that I asked him not to come again. I don’t know how he met my brother, but he often came to the flat, and the curious thing was that after the time I spoke of–”

“When he was unpleasant to you?”

She nodded.

“…He made no attempt to see me, apparently he was no longer interested.”

“Did you know Hallaty had disappeared after robbing the bank of a quarter of a million?”

She nodded.

“It very much upset Johnny; he couldn’t talk about anything else. He was so nervous and worried, and I know he didn’t sleep – I could hear him walking up and down in his room all night. He bought every edition of the papers to find out what had happened to Mr Hallaty.”

Mr Reeder sat for a long time, pinching his upper lip.

“Does anybody know you found this book and this cutting?”

To his surprise she answered in the affirmative.

“It was the caretaker of the flat. He was helping me to turn out one of the cupboards and he found it,” she said. “In fact he brought it to me. I think it must have fallen out of one of my brother’s pockets. He used to hang some of his clothes there.”

It was late in the afternoon when Mr Reeder turned into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, found No. 297, and climbed to the fourth floor, where a small board affixed to the wall indicated the office of this most benevolent institution.

He knocked, and a voice asked who was there. It was a husky, foreign voice. Presently the door was unlocked and opened a few inches.

Reeder saw a man of sixty, his face blotched and swollen, his white hair spread untidily over his forehead. He was meanly dressed and not too clean.

“What you want?” he asked, in a thick, guttural voice.

“I’ve come to inquire about the Brotherhood–”

“You write, please.”

He tried to shut the door, but Mr Reeder’s square-toed shoe was inside. He pushed the door open and went in. It was a disorderly little office, grimy and cheerless. Though the day was warm, a small gas fire burnt on the hearth. The dingy windows looked as if they had never been opened.

“Where do you keep all your vast wealth?” asked Mr Reeder pleasantly.

The old man blinked at him.

Reeder had evidence, apart from a bottle on the table, that this gentleman took a kindly interest in raw spirits. There was more than a suggestion that he slept in this foul room, for an old couch had the appearance of considerable use.

“You write here – we are agents. We are not to see callers.”

“May I ask whom I have the pleasure of addressing?”

The old man glowered at him.

“My name is Jones,” he said. “That is for you sufficient.”

There were one or two objects in the room which interested Reeder. On the window sill was a small wooden stand containing three test tubes, and nearby half a dozen bottles of various sizes.

“You do a lot of writing?” said Reeder.

The little desk was covered with manuscript, and the man’s grimy hands were smothered with ink stains.

“Yes, I do writing,” said Mr Jones sourly. “We do much correspondence; we never see people who call. We are agents only.”

“For whom?” asked Reeder.

“For the Brotherhood. They live in France – in the south of France.”

He spoke quickly and glibly.

“They do not desire that their benevolence shall be publicised. All letters are answered secretly. They are very rich men. That is all I can tell you, mister.”

As he went down the stairs Mr Reeder was whistling softly to himself – and that was a practice in which he did not often indulge – although all his questions and all his cajoling had not produced the address of these Brothers of Benevolence, who lived in the south of France and did good by stealth.

It was too late for afternoon tea and too early to go home. Mr Reeder called a cab and drove back to Whitehall. He was crossing Trafalgar Square when he saw a car pass his, and had a glimpse of its occupant. Dr Jansen was looking the other way, his attention distracted by an accident which had overtaken a cyclist. Mr Reeder slid back the partition.

“Follow that car,” he said to the taxi driver, “and keep it in sight. I will see that the police do not stop you.”

The car went leisurely through the Mall, up Birdcage Walk and, circling the war memorial, turned left into Belgravia. Reeder saw it stop before a pretentious-looking building, and told the cabman to drive on. Through the rear window he saw Dr Jansen alight and, when he was out of sight, stopped the cab, paid him off and walked slowly back.