The Complete Four Just Men (100 page)

‘You will stay here and keep quiet, and you need not be afraid that anybody will be alarmed by your disappearance.’

‘But . . . my daughter!’ stammered Levingrou in terror.

‘Your daughter? Your daughter leaves for the Argentine with a Mr Gordon tomorrow morning – as other men’s daughters have left.’

Levingrou stared, took one step forward and fell fainting to the floor.

* * *

Sixteen days passed; sixteen days of unadulterated hell for the shrieking, half-demented man who paced the length of his cell for hours on end till, exhausted, he dropped almost lifeless on his bed. And every morning came a masked man to tell him of plans that had been made, to describe in detail the establishment in Antofagasta which was to be the destination of Valerie Levingrou; of a certain piestro . . . they showed him his photograph . . . who was the master of that hell broth.

‘You devils! You devils!’ shrieked Levingrou, striking wildly out, but the other caught him and flung him back on the bed.

‘You mustn’t blame Gordon,’ he mocked. ‘He has his living to earn . . . he is merely the agent of the man who owns the cabaret.’

Then one morning, the eighteenth, they came and told him, three masked men, that Valerie had arrived and was being initiated into her duties as a dancing girl . . .

Jules Levingrou spent the night shivering in a corner of his cell. They came to him at three in the morning and pricked him with a hypodermic needle. When he woke, he thought he was dreaming, for he was sitting in his own saloon, where these masked men had carried him in the dead of night.

A footman came in, and dropped the tray at the sight of him.

‘Good God, sir!’ he gasped. ‘Where did you come from?’

Levingrou could not speak: he could only shake his head.

‘We thought you was in Germany, sir.’

And then, clearing his dry throat, Jules asked harshly: ‘Is there any news . . . Miss Valerie . . . ?’

‘Miss Valerie, sir?’ The footman was astonished. ‘Why, yes sir, she’s upstairs asleep. She was a bit worried the night she came back and found you weren’t here, and then of course she got your letter saying you’d been called abroad.’

The footman was staring at him, an uncomfortable wonder in his gaze. Something peculiar had happened. Jules rose unsteadily to his feet and caught a glance of his face in the mirror. His hair and his beard were white.

He staggered rather than walked to his writing-table, jerked open a drawer and took out an overseas cable form. ‘Ring for a messenger.’ His voice was hoarse and quavering. ‘I want to send fourteen cablegrams to South America.’

The Share Pusher

The man whom Raymond Poiccart ushered into the presence of Manfred was to all appearances a smart, military looking gentleman
approaching the sixties. He was faultlessly dressed and had the carriage and presence of a soldier. A retired general, thought
Manfred; but he saw something more than the outward personation of manner revealed. This man was broken. There was a certain imponderable expression in his face, a tense anguish which this, the shrewdest of the Three Just Men, instantly interpreted.

‘My name is Fole – Major-General Sir Charles Fole,’ said the visitor, as Poiccart placed a chair for him and discreetly withdrew.

‘And you have come to see me about Mr Bonsor True,’ said Manfred instantly, and when the other started nervously he laughed. ‘No, I am not being very clever,’ said Manfred gently. ‘So many people have seen me about Mr Bonsor True. And I think I can anticipate your story. You have been investing in one of his oil concerns and you have lost a considerable sum of money. Was it oil?’

‘Tin,’ said the other. ‘Inter-Nigerian Tin. You have heard about my misfortune?’

Manfred shook his head.

‘I have heard about the misfortunes of so many people who have trusted Mr True. How much have you lost?’

The old man drew a long breath.

‘Twenty-five thousand pounds,’ he said, ‘every penny I possess. I have consulted the police, but they say there is nothing they can do. The tin mine actually existed, and no misrepresentation was made by True in any letter he sent to me.’

Manfred nodded.

Yours is a typical case, General,’ he said. ‘True never brings himself within the reach of the law. All his misrepresentations are made over a luncheon table, when there is no other witness, and I presume that in his letters to you he pointed out the speculative nature of your investment and warned you that you were not putting your money into gilt-edged securities.’

‘It was at dinner,’ said the General. ‘I had some doubt on the matter and he asked me to dine with him at the Walkley Hôtel. He told me that immense quantities of tin were in sight, and that while he could not, in justice to his partners, broadcast the exact amount of profit the company would make, he assured me that my money would be doubled in six months. I wouldn’t mind so much,’ the old man went on, as he raised his trembling hand to his lips, ‘but, Mr Manfred, I have a daughter, a brilliant young girl who has, in my opinion, a wonderful future. If she had been a man she would have been a strategist. I hoped to have left her amply provided for, but this means ruin – ruin! Can nothing be done to bring this criminal to justice?’

Manfred did not reply immediately.

‘I wonder if you realize. General, that you are the twelfth person who has come to us in the past three months. Mr True is so well protected by the law and by his letters that it is almost impossible to catch him. There was a time’ – he smiled faintly – ‘when my friends and I would have taken the most dramatic steps to deal with the gentleman, and I think our method would have been effective; but now’ – he shrugged his shoulders – ‘we are a little restricted. Who introduced you to this gentleman?’

‘Mrs Calford Creen. I met the lady at a dinner of a mutual friend, and she asked me to dine with her at her flat in Hanover Mansions.’

Manfred nodded again. He was not at all surprised by this intelligence.

‘I am afraid I can promise you very little,’ he said. ‘The only thing I would ask is that you should keep in touch with me. Where are you living?’

His visitor was at the moment living in a little house near Truro. Manfred noted the address, and a few minutes later was standing by the window watching the weary old man walking slowly down Curzon Street.

Poiccart came in.

‘I know nothing of this gentleman’s business,’ he said, ‘but I have a feeling that it concerns our friend True. George, we ought to be able to catch that man. Leon was saying at breakfast this morning that there is a deep pond in the New Forest, where a man suitably anchored by chains and weights might lie without discovery for a hundred years. Personally, I am never in favour of drowning – ’

George Manfred laughed.

‘
’Ware the law, my good friend,’ he said. ‘There will be no killing, though a man who has systematically robbed the new poor deserves something with boiling lead in it.’

Nor could Leon Gonsalez offer any solution when he was consulted that afternoon.

‘The curious thing is that True has no monies in this country. He runs two bank accounts and is generally overdrawn on both. I should not be surprised if he had a cache somewhere, in which case the matter would be simple – I’ve been watching him for the greater part of a year, and he never goes abroad, and I have searched his modest Westminster flat so often that I could go blindfolded to the place where he keeps his dress ties.’

* * *

All this had occurred in the previous year and no further complaints came about this fraudulent share pusher. The Three were no nearer to a solution of their problem when came the rather remarkable disappearance of Margaret Lein.

Margaret Lein was not a very important person: she was by all social standards as unimportant a person as one would be likely to meet in a stroll through the West End of London. She occupied the position of maid to the Hon. Mrs Calford Creen, and she had gone out one evening to the chemist to buy a bottle of smelling salts for her mistress, and had never come back.

She was pretty; her age was nineteen; she had no friends in London, being – so she said – an orphan; and, so far as was known, she had no attachments in the accepted sense of the word. But, as the police pointed out, it was extremely unlikely that a rather pretty maid, well spoken and with charming manners, in addition to her physical perfections, could spend a year in London without having acquired something in the shape of a ‘follower’.

Mrs Calford Creen, not satisfied with the police inquiries, had called the Three Just Men to her aid. It was a week after the disappearance of Margaret Lein that a well-known lawyer crossed the polished dancing floor of the Leiter Club to greet the man who sat aloof and alone at a very small table near the floor’s edge.

‘Why, Mr Gonsalez!’ he beamed. ‘This is the last place in the world I should have expected to find you! In Limehouse, yes, prowling in the haunts of the underworld, yes, but at Leiter’s Club . . . Really, I have mistaken your character.’

Leon smiled faintly, poured a little more Rhine wine into his long-stemmed glass and sipped it.

‘My dear Mr Thurles,’ he drawled, ‘this is my underworld. That fat gentleman puffing gallantly with that stout lady is Bill Sikes. It is true he does not break into houses nor carry a life-preserver, but he sells dud shares to thrifty and gullible widows, and has grown fat on the proceeds. Some day I shall take that gentleman and break his heart.’

The red-faced Thurles chuckled as he sat down by the other’s side.

‘That will be difficult. Mr Bonsor True is too rich a man to pull down, however much a blackguard he may be.’

Leon fixed a cigarette in a long amber tube and seemed wholly absorbed in the operation, which he performed with great care.

‘Perhaps I oughtn’t to have made that horrific threat,’ he said. ‘True is a friend of your client’s, isn’t he?’

‘Mrs Creen?’ Thurles was genuinely surprised. ‘I wasn’t aware of the fact.’

‘I must have been mistaken,’ said Leon, and changed the subject.

He knew right well that he was not mistaken. That stout share plugger had been the
tête-a-tête
guest of Mrs Creen on the night Margaret Lein had disappeared from human ken; and the curious circumstance was that neither to the police nor to the Triangle had Mrs Creen mentioned this interesting fact.

She lived in a modest flat near Hanover Court: a rather pretty, hard-faced young widow, whose source of income was believed to be a legacy left by her late husband. Leon, a very inquisitive man, had made the most careful inquiries without discovering either that she had had a husband or that he had died. All he knew of her was that she took frequent trips abroad, sometimes to out-of-the-way places like Roumania; that she was invariably accompanied by the missing Margaret; that she spent money, not freely but lavishly, gave magnificent entertainments in Paris, Rome, and once in Brussels, and seemed quite content to return from a life which must have cost her at least seven hundred and fifty pounds a week to the modest establishment near Hanover Court where her rent was seven hundred and fifty pounds per annum and her household bills did not exceed twenty pounds a week.

Leon watched the dancing for a little longer, beckoned a waiter and paid his bill. The lawyer had gone back to his party. He saw Mr Bonsor True, the centre of a gay table, and smiled to himself, and wondered whether the share plugger would be as cheerful if he knew that in the right hand inside pocket of Leon Gonsalez’ coat was a copy of a marriage certificate that he had dug out that morning.

It had been an inspiration that had led Leon Gonsalez to Somerset House.

He glanced at his watch: late as the hour was, there was still a hope of finding Mrs Creen. His car was waiting in the park in Wellington Place, and ten minutes later he had stopped before the doors of Hanover Mansions. A lift carried him to the third floor. He pressed the bell of No 109. A light showed in the fanlight, and it was Mrs Creen herself who opened the door to him. Evidently she expected somebody else, for she was momentarily taken back.

‘Oh, Mr Gonsalez!’ And then, quickly: ‘Have you had news of Margaret?’

‘I am not quite sure whether I have or not,’ said Leon. ‘May I see you for a few minutes?’

Something in his tone must have warned her.

‘It’s rather late, isn’t it?’

‘It will save me a journey in the morning,’ he almost pleaded and with some reluctance she admitted him.

It was not the first visit he had paid to her flat, and he had duly noted that, although her method of living was fairly humble, the flat itself was furnished regardless of expense.

She offered him a whisky and soda, which he accepted but did not drink.

‘I want to ask you,’ he said, when she had settled down, ‘how long you have had Margaret in your employ?’

‘Over a year,’ she replied.

‘A nice girl?’

‘Very. But I told you about her. It has been a great shock to me.’

‘Would you call her accomplished? Did she speak any foreign languages?’

Mrs Creen nodded.

‘French and German perfectly – that was why she was such a treasure. She had been brought up with a family in Alsace, and was, I believe, half French.’

‘Why did you send her out to the chemist for smelling salts?’

The woman moved impatiently.

‘I have already told you, as I told the police, that I had a very bad headache, and Margaret herself suggested she should go to the chemist.’

‘For no other reason? Couldn’t Mr True have gone?’

She nearly jumped at this.

‘Mr True? I don’t know what you mean.’

‘True was with you that night; you had been dining
tête-a-tête
. In fact, you were dining as one would expect a husband and wife to dine.’

The woman went white, was momentarily bereft of speech.

‘I don’t know why you’re making such a mystery of your marriage, Mrs Creen, but I know that for five years past you have not only been married to True, but you have been his partner, in the sense that you have assisted him in his – er – financial operations. Now, Mrs True, I want you to put your cards on the table. When you went abroad you took this girl with you?’

She nodded dumbly.

‘What was your object in going to Paris, Rome and Brussels? Had you any other object than to enjoy yourself? Was there any business reason for your move?’

He saw her lick her dry lips, but she did not reply.

‘Let me put it more plainly. Have you in any of those cities a private safe at any of the banking corporations or safe deposits?’

She sprang to her feet, her mouth open in surprise.

‘Who told you?’ she asked quickly. ‘What business is that of yours, anyway?’

As she spoke, came the gentle tinkle of a bell, and she half turned.

‘Let me open it for you,’ said Leon, and before she could move he was down the passage and had flung open the door.

An astonished financier was standing on the doormat. At the sight of Leon he gaped.

‘Come inside, Mr True,’ said Leon gently. ‘I think I have some interesting news for you.’

‘Who – who are you?’ stammered the older man, peering at the visitor, and then of a sudden he recognized him. ‘My God! One of the Four Just Men, eh? Well, have you found that girl?’

He realized at that moment that the question in itself was a blunder. He was not supposed to be interested in the missing maid.

‘I haven’t found her, and I think she’s going to be rather difficult for any of us to find,’ said Leon.

By this time Mrs Creen had recovered her self-possession.

‘I’m awfully glad you came, Mr True. This gentleman has been making the most extraordinary statements about us. He is under the impression we are married. Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous?’

Leon did not attempt to refute the absurdity of his suggestion until they were back in the little drawing-room.

‘Now, sir,’ said Mr Bonsor True, his pompous self, ‘whatever do you mean by making – ’

Leon cut him short.

‘I will tell you briefly what I have already told your wife,’ he said; ‘and as to your marriage, that is so indisputable a fact that I will not attempt to show you the marriage certificate which is in my pocket. I’m not here to reproach you, True, or this lady. The question of your treatment of the unfortunate people who have invested money with you is a matter for your own conscience. What I do wish to know is, whether it is a fact that in certain continental cities you have safes or deposits where you keep your wealth?’

The significance of the question was not lost upon the stout Mr True.

‘There are certain deposits of mine on the Continent,’ he said, ‘but I don’t quite understand – ’