Richardson Scores Again (14 page)

“Where is he now is what I want to know.”

“So do we. I've still got the balance of his gratuity in this drawer. As to
where
he is, I can tell you the place where you
won't
find him, and that's Liverpool, the place where he was convicted. The police up there know him too well by sight after he posed as one of their detectives. He wouldn't think Liverpool a healthy town for him.”

“Could he have gone abroad, do you think?”

“If he could steal some other man's passport he might, but I rang up the Passport Office some days ago to put them wise about him in case he applied for one.”

Richardson dined frugally and quickly before taking the Tube again for Hampstead. He calculated that Eccles would be dining with his uncle and that he might catch him before he went out. He was right. He was shown into the library as before. Two minutes later Eccles came in, with a shade of annoyance and surprise on his face.

“I'm sorry to have to trouble you again, sir, but the matter is rather urgent. I have a photograph to show you and I should be glad if you would look at it carefully before committing yourself to an opinion.” He handed him the portrait of Hathaway.

Eccles reddened as he examined it and his breath came quicker.

“By the Lord, sergeant, you've got him! That's the blighter who said he was a detective and got me into this mess.”

“We haven't arrested him yet, sir. When we do, we shall have to ask you to come down and pick him out from a dozen other men.”

“I'll come down all right, but I won't promise to keep my hands off him when I do identify him.”

S
ERGEANT
R
ICHARDSON
arrived at the door which gave access to the platform of the Albert Hall a quarter of an hour before the advertised time, and sought the steward who had charge of the privileged seats on the platform. He found that the seat reserved for him was placed at the back.

“I thought that you would not wish to be too much in evidence,” the official explained, “but of course you can sit wherever you think it would be most useful for your purpose.”

“I should not get a good view of the audience from the back,” said Richardson. “If it is all the same to you, I should prefer to sit here.” He pointed to the end of the second row of chairs.

“I hope that you have no reason to fear any disturbance?” The poor steward was evidently on tenterhooks.

“Indeed I hope not, but it is always well to be prepared in these big public meetings. Do you expect a large audience?”

“In the body of the hall, yes. Practically every seat has been booked. One cannot tell beforehand about the gallery.”

Richardson glanced at his watch.

“Yes,” said the steward, “I think that we had better be moving. The platform people ought to be at the door in five minutes.”

Richardson's first concern on passing out of the building was to satisfy himself that no suspicious-looking person was waiting for the arrivals. He nodded to a detective from F Division who was, as he knew, present on the same quest. Then he strolled over to the uniformed constable on duty and made himself known as a comrade in plain clothes.

“Expecting a dust-up in the hall, are you?” asked the constable.

“Not a big disturbance, but there may be an attempt at assaulting the speaker, and if there is, I may have to call you in to lend me a hand inside.”

“Right oh, I'll stand by, but look here, if anyone is going to start spoiling the manly beauty of ‘Love's Young Dream,' why not let them fight it out? It would do the young gentleman a world of good.”

“It might, but if he starts on the job with a revolver…”

“Oh, that's the game? Right oh!”

The constable might have said more, but at that moment a car drew up at the door and stewards crowded round to greet the occupant—a well-known politician who had a weakness for presiding at public meetings. Richardson heard him ask whether “our speaker” had arrived. Two ladies, the Chairman's wife and daughter, were helped out of the car; they were ushered into the waiting-room. The car moved on.

Two minutes later another car discharged its occupants—a Member of Parliament, accompanied by three ladies—and then came a humble taxi with a single occupant—a young man of about thirty. This was the man they were all waiting for—Mr. Ralph Lewis—the hero of the evening. He was ushered in, with Richardson in his wake. It was three minutes to eight.

The Chairman welcomed him cordially, though Richardson, who was watching his reception through the open doorway, doubted whether he had ever seen him before. Presentations to the other platform people having been made, the Chairman looked at his watch and pronounced it to be time to move to the platform. Richardson attached himself to the tail of the procession.

A burst of applause from the hall was borne to his ears as the Chairman and the speaker reached their chairs. He went unobserved to his seat and found himself gazing at a sea of faces, mostly feminine. As his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw that there were men as well as women, but that whereas the women's faces were alive with curiosity and interest, the men who had been dragged to the meeting as their escort, looked dull, bored and contemptuous. As the steward had predicted, every seat on the floor of the vast building seemed to be occupied, but in the galleries the audience was restricted to a sparsely filled row or two in the front.

The Chairman was on his feet, booming platitudes in a voice trained to reach the farthest recesses of the hall. He was giving the audience a life-sketch of the speaker who was to follow him, founded, no doubt, on the ample material furnished by the gentleman himself to the editors of
Who's Who
; but no one appeared to be listening to him, and when he sat down after delivering a very sanguine prediction about the after-career of political distinction which was awaiting Mr. Ralph Lewis, there was a stir of relief in the hall.

Then Ralph Lewis rose to his feet and there was a silence that could be felt. He was tall, slim and very good-looking, with dark hair, which he had allowed to grow too long, and well-marked eyebrows which would become bushy when he grew older, and white and regular teeth. His claim to hold audiences rested in his voice—the voice of a man who might have become a great singer—melodious, vibrant and cultivated. He seemed to be entirely at his ease as he began his speech in a low tone which carried, nevertheless, to the farthest limits of the great building. He had the trick of happy phrasing, of raising a laugh by a clever epigram, of striking an appropriate note of pathos as he described the unhappy state of his less fortunate fellow-countrymen who were tramping day after day to the Labour Exchanges in search of work through no fault of their own. The unemployed are, as has been observed, a godsend to the rising politician, because in championing their cause it is not necessary to attack anybody but the World Economic Crisis, which, having no soul to save or body to kick, cannot hit back.

Richardson's attention began to wander from the speech while his eye travelled along the rows of seats in search of a familiar face, but the music of the voice, as it rose and fell, continued to exercise its magnetic influence on him. The first row below the platform was occupied by reporters, either writing or gazing with indifference at the speaker. It was not until his eye was sweeping the fifth row that it caught a face that he knew—the barrister who was to defend Lieutenant Eccles, Mr. Meredith, whose statement he had taken a few hours before. In contrast with the face of the lady sitting beside him, his expression was critical and cold: clearly the magnetic voice was powerless to move him, but that might have been said of many of the males among the audience.

The speaker had been on his feet for nearly half an hour before Richardson began to realize that if he had been called upon for a condensed report on the subject of his speech, he would not know what to say. There were plenty of fireworks; the speaker seemed to be in deadly earnest; clearly he had captured his audience, since every gem of oratory was interrupted by spontaneous applause. He had all the tricks of the trained orator, waiting with poised hand until the applause died down, picking up the thread of his discourse without a check. He spoke without notes, even scribbled on his shirt-cuff, and he never repeated himself. But though he held up many of our cherished institutions to scorn, though he deplored the lack of leadership in the nation that was needed to bring her out of the difficulties, as far as Richardson was able to judge, he made no practical suggestion as to the policy that such a leader should adopt if he could be found. It was a magnificent oratorical effort, but it left all those questions in the air.

He had tossed his mane in a stirring passage and had paused before sinking his wonderful voice almost to a whisper, and was proceeding to draw a picture of England as he would have her, when quite suddenly there was a change. His voice failed him in the middle of a sentence; he clutched at the back of his chair to steady himself; he had turned as white as paper. Following the direction of his eyes, Richardson saw that they were fixed upon a man in the third row who had half risen from his seat and was staring fixedly at the speaker.

He was not the only person in the vast audience who had risen. The Chairman was up and had thrown an arm round Lewis's shoulders; a little man came hurrying along the gangway to the platform and was heard to call out, “I am a doctor. Can I be of any use?” The Chairman beckoned to him and he ran up the steps to the platform and quickly took charge of the proceedings. Ralph Lewis was half led, half carried into the waiting-room, and the Chairman briefly announced in an appropriate tone that, owing to sudden illness, the distinguished speaker had been forbidden on medical advice to conclude his magnificent speech. The audience began to disperse in a confused babble of conversation.

Richardson's first impulse was to jump from the platform and head off the man who, as he now felt sure, had caused the speaker to break down, but he found it impossible to break through the solid mass of humanity that blocked the gangway: the people could not make way for him if they would. Feeling certain that he could recognize the man, he slipped out behind the platform and ran round to the main entrance, only to discover that the audience was streaming out from several exit doors, and that, in the feeble light from the street lamps, it would be impossible, except by a miracle, to recognize any individual in the crowd. There was nothing for it but to get back to the waiting-room and have speech with Ralph Lewis if he could. He was not too late. He found the sick man reclining in an armchair, drinking some potion administered by the doctor, from a tumbler brought from the platform, while the Chairman was playing the heavy father, and his womenkind were fluttering in the background. He drew the doctor aside, explained who he was, and asked his permission to see his patient home. The doctor said that he understood that the Chairman intended to drive him home in his car.

“Is he seriously ill?” asked Richardson.

“I don't think so,” replied the doctor. “His heart is a little jumpy, but I can discover nothing organically wrong with him. If I didn't know who he was, I should have said that he was suffering from nothing worse than a bad shock or a fright, but of course in his case that's absurd. Like all these public speakers, he lives on his nerves. If he goes quietly to bed and isn't worried in any way, he'll be all right in the morning.”

After this medical warning, Richardson understood that he could not, in decency, force his conversation on the patient, and he set off to walk home. He was rehearsing in his mind the personal description of the man whose look alone had been sufficient to cause this facile speaker to break down. “About five feet eleven inches in height—slim in body, but rather broad about the shoulders—sunburnt complexion—hair black, but beginning to turn grey—features regular—eyes large and piercing—clean-shaved—dressed like a gentleman in a blue serge suit, probably cut by a London tailor—no special marks.” That, he decided, was a fair description of the impression made upon him: it was not much to go upon. He returned to the office and wrote a short report of what had happened at the meeting, knowing that the incident would be reported in the morning papers and that he would acquire merit if he left his report on Superintendent Foster's table overnight. He was not proud of his performance at the meeting. It was sure to be said that he ought at all hazards to have followed the mysterious man home and have ascertained his address. He concluded his report by asking covering authority for calling upon Mr. Ralph Lewis in the morning and asking him whether he had ever been threatened or blackmailed.

The night was so fine that Patricia Carey proposed that instead of wasting time by searching for a taxi in Kensington, they should return home on foot.

“Well,” she said, “tell me frankly what you thought of the speech.”

“I was sorry he broke down,” replied Dick Meredith. “It was the heat or the excitement, I suppose.”

“Yes, poor man, but you heard enough of his speech to be able to give me your frank opinion of him.”

“I did. Certainly he has the gift of the gab, like so many of his Welsh fellow-countrymen.”

Patricia made a gesture of impatience. “Really, you men seem to be all alike. You don't seem able to recognize real genius in a person of your own sex. I suppose that you'll be saying next that he has no future before him as a leader in this country.”

“Not at all. According to the immutable law of modern democracy, it is always the talkers who get to the top.” Then, seeing that his remark had wounded her, he hastened to add, “I admit his eloquence and his extraordinary grip of his audience, but tell me frankly whether there was anything more. I was listening for some concrete suggestion of policy to get us out of our difficulties, and there was none. He wrung our hearts over his picture of the unemployed, but he gave no hint about what should be done for them.”