The Man Who Bought London (8 page)

Four men had been invited to dinner at 410, Park Lane, but only three had so far arrived. Worse than that, Vera, whom Hermann had particularly asked to grace the board with her presence, had pleaded the usual headache and had most emphatically refused to come down.

‘You are trying to make me look a fool before these people,’ he stormed. He interviewed her in her little den, and she was palpably unprepared for social functions of any description, being in her dressing-gown.

‘My dear Hermann,’ she said, ‘don’t rave! I have a headache – it is a woman’s privilege.’

‘You always have headaches when I want you,’ he said sulkily.

She did not look any too well. He wondered –

‘No,’ she answered his unspoken thought. ‘I noticed that the gas was turned on at the stove and off at the main, so I just turned it off at the stove, too.’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked roughly.

She smiled.

‘I have always appreciated your gift – a stove in Sèvres ware must have cost a lot of money. When I lay down this afternoon the main was turned off – that I’ll swear. When I woke up, it was on, though why anybody should turn on the gas on a warm July afternoon, I can’t think.’

‘Martin –’ he began.

‘Martin didn’t touch it,’ she said. ‘I have asked him. Fortunately, no harm was done, because I had noticed the little tap was turned before I began to sleep. I am getting frightened, Hermann.’

His face was ghastly pale, but he forced a smile.

‘Frightened, Vera – why?’ he asked in his friendliest tone.

She shook her head at him slowly, her eyes never leaving his face.

‘It is getting so near the time,’ she said, ‘and I feel somehow that I cannot bear up against the strain of always fighting for my life.’

‘Rubbish!’ he cried genially. ‘Come along and see my people. Leete is one, Hubbard, one of the Federation directors, is another. Bolscombe hasn’t turned up. Why don’t you get rid of the worry of your money?’ he said with a show of solicitude. ‘Pool it with mine, as I suggested months ago. You’ll go mad if you don’t.’ He stopped short and eyed her curiously. ‘I think you’re a little mad now,’ he said slowly, and she shook her distress off and laughed.

‘Hermann, you’re the most versatile man I know,’ she said; ‘but so horribly unoriginal.’

‘Are you going out tonight?’

He paused at the door to ask the question, and she nodded.

‘With your headache?’ he sneered.

‘To get rid of it,’ she replied.

He went downstairs to his guests.

‘My sister is not very well,’ he said. ‘She’s rather depressed lately –?’

Then occurred the devilish idea: that flash of inspiration to villainy which has sent men to the gallows and has tenanted Broadmoor with horrible gibing things that once were human. Ten days! said the brain of Hermann Zeberlieff. Do it now!

With scarcely a pause he went on –

‘We’re all friends here, and I don’t mind telling you that she is worrying me – she has distinctly suicidal tendencies.’

There was a murmur of commiseration.

‘I’ll just see how she is,’ he said; ‘and then we’ll start dinner.’

‘I thought I saw your sister standing at her window,’ said Leete, and added with a smirk: ‘I rather flattered myself that she was waving her hand to me.’

Hermann looked at him in frank surprise. He knew that Vera hated Leete as intensely as a woman with fine instincts could hate a man. It would be an unsuspected weakness in her if she endeavoured to make friends with his associates; but it bore out all that the girl had said. She was frightened, was clutching at straws, even so unsavoury a straw as Leete.

He walked carelessly from the room and mounted the stairs. He had in his heart neither fear nor remorse for the dreadful deed he contemplated. He did not go straight to where she was, but slipped into her bedroom, which communicated with the sitting room.

He stepped stealthily, silently.

By the side of the window was a long curtain-cord of silk. He drew a chair, stepped noiselessly upon it and severed the cord high up. He stepped down as noiselessly. He had three minutes to do the work. In three minutes’ time he would be with his guests smiling apologetically for his sister’s absence, by what time this beautiful creature of ‘suicidal tendencies’ would be hanging limply from –

He looked round for a suitable hook and found a peg behind the door which bore his weight.

That would be the place. Rapidly he made a noose at one end of the rope and held it in his hand behind him.

He turned the handle of the door and walked into the dressing-room. She was sitting by the window and rose, startled.

‘What were you doing in my room?’ she demanded.

‘Stealing your jewels,’ he said with humour. But she was not appeased by his simulated playfulness.

‘How dare you go into my room?’ she cried. The fear of death was upon her, through her brain ran a criss-cross of plans for escape.

‘I want to talk things over,’ he said and reached out his hand to touch her. She shrank back.

‘What have you got behind your back?’ she asked in a terrified whisper.

He sprang at her, flinging one arm about her so that he pinioned both arms. Then she saw his design as his other hand rose to close over her mouth. The coils slipped down on his arm and he shifted his left hand up to silence her.

‘Mercy!’ she gasped.

He smiled in her face. He found the noose and slipped it over her head. Then –

‘Kerry knows – Kerry knows!’ said her muffled voice. ‘I wrote to him. There is a detective watching this house day and night – ah!’

The loop had touched her neck.

‘You wrote?’

‘Told him – murder – me – I signal every half-hour – due in five minutes –’

Very gently he released her, laughing the while. He had moved her to where he could see through the window. A man stood with his back to the railings of the Park, smoking a short cigar. He was watching the house for the half-hour signal.

‘You never thought I was such a good actor,’ said Hermann with his set smile.

She staggered to the window and sank in a chair.

‘I didn’t frighten you, did I?’ he asked with a certain resemblance of tenderness.

She was shaking from head to foot. ‘Go out!’ she said. ‘Go away! I know your secret now!’

With a little shrug he left her, taking the silk cord with him, for that evidence was too damning to leave behind. She waited till she heard him speaking in the hall below, then she fled to her room and locked the door. With shaking hands she made her preparations. She dressed as quickly as she had dressed in her life and descended the stairs. In the hall she saw Martin, and paused. ‘Get me a walking-stick – any one will do – quickly!’

The man went away and, returning with the ivory-headed cane of her brother, found her by the open door.

She looked at her watch. It wanted twenty minutes to nine.

A taxi-cab carried her to Vigo Street, and the nearer she came to the man who she knew loved her, and to the freedom which was ahead the higher rose her spirits.

Gordon Bray was waiting. She paid the cab and dismissed it. ‘I knew you would be here!’ she said impulsively, and took his arm. ‘Gordon,’ she said breathlessly – it is strange how two people that day had been thrilled by the utterance of a Christian name – ‘you have known me for three years.’

‘And twenty-five days, Miss Zeberlieff,’ said the young man. ‘I count the days.’

The eyes turned to him were bright with a light he had never seen.

‘Call me Vera,’ she said softly. ‘Please don’t think I’m bold – but I just want you to – you love me, don’t you?’

The street lights went round and round in a giddy whirl before the man. ‘I worship you!’ he said hoarsely.

‘Then bear with me for a little while,’ she said tenderly; ‘and if I do things which you do not approve –?’

‘You couldn’t do that,’ he said.

There in Regent Street, before all the hurrying world, shocked, amused or interested, according to its several temperaments, she raised her lips to his and he kissed her.

‘Now,’ she said, and thrust him away, her eyes dancing, ‘show me the new shop that King Kerry bought.’

‘This is it’ – he pointed along the block – ‘the art fabric people. It was in all the papers.’

She ran along the pavement till she came to the darkened windows of the store. Then, without a warning, she raised her stick and sent the ivory head smashing through the plate glass.

A policeman seized her.

‘My God!’ said Gordon Bray. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘Votes for Women!’ cried Vera and laughed. She was laughing still when they took her away in a cab to Marlborough Street, and laughing the next morning when she was sentenced to three weeks in the second division.

King Kerry, sitting at the solicitors’ table with Bray, was not unamused. In three weeks Vera would be entitled to her share of her father’s fortune, and her brother’s machinations would be in vain. She would come out of prison a free woman in every sense of the word.

As for Bray, though he watched that delicate figure anxiously, he understood. It would be three weeks of hell for him with only the memory of those fragrant lips to help him bear the parting.

‘I couldn’t get back to the office last night,’ said Elsie, ‘and I tried to get you on the phone, but you weren’t anywhere you ought to have been.’ Her voice was a little reproachful, for she had really wanted to see him to communicate a wonderful piece of news.

‘I suppose I wasn’t,’ admitted King Kerry, smoothing his grey hair. There was something almost childlike about the millionaire when he was penitent, and Elsie’s heart was very tender to him in such moments as these.

‘A young friend of mine smashed one of my windows in Regent Street,’ he said in extenuation. ‘Really, I’m never out of these infernal police stations,’ he added ruefully.

‘A suffragette?’

‘I guess so,’ nodded Kerry, biting off the end of a cigar. ‘Anyway, she’s gaoled!’

‘Oh!’ protested the girl in horror. ‘You didn’t allow her to go to gaol?’

‘I surely did,’ admitted King Kerry with his brightest smile, ‘and instructed a lawyer to press for it.’

He saw the troubled look on the girl’s face and waited.

‘It isn’t like you, somehow,’ she said, with a note of reproach in her voice. ‘You’re so kind and so tender to people in trouble – I just hate the thought of you being anything else than what I think you are.’

‘Everybody is different to what people think they are,’ he said mournfully. ‘I guess you’ve never read what some of the New York papers said about my big railroad combine. I thought not,’ as she shook her head. ‘One of these days I’ll hunt up the
cuttings for you, and you’ll see how black it is possible for a man to be – and escape gaoling.’

‘You’ll not convince me,’ she said with decision. ‘I’m not even satisfied that you did what you said this morning.’

He nodded vigorously.

‘Sure,’ he said; ‘but I might as well tell you right here that the lady was a friend of mine, and she was most anxious to go to gaol – and I was obliged to help her.’

‘She is really a suffragette?’

King Kerry considered before he made a reply, drawing thoughtfully at his cigar.

‘No, she isn’t,’ he said. ‘She’s had enough to make her. If I were she, I guess I’d burn the whole of Regent Street. You’ll read about it in the papers, anyway,’ he said.

She opened a drawer and took out a copy of the
Evening Herald
.

‘Read about it in your own paper,’ she said proudly, and handed him the early edition.

He whistled. ‘I’d almost forgotten that,’ he said. ‘So you bought it!’

She nodded. She made a pretty picture standing there with her hands behind her back, her cheeks flushed and her lovely eyes bright with excitement. She stood like a child who had deserved commendation and was waiting expectantly for her due.

‘What did you give?’ he asked.

‘Guess?’ she countered.

‘Sixty thousand?’ he suggested.

She shook her head.

‘Fifty?’ with raised eyebrows.

Again she shook her head.

‘I’ll tell you the whole story,’ she said. ‘When I got to the office of the
Evening Herald
I found the staff had gone home, but the editor, the manager, and the proprietor were in the board room, and I found out afterwards that there had been a most unholy row.’

‘There always is when those three gentlemen meet,’ said King Kerry with knowledge. ‘If the publisher had been there too, you would have been obliged to ring for the ambulance.’

‘Well,’ she went on with a smile, ‘I sent in your name and was admitted at once.’

‘Such is the magic of a name,’ murmured the millionaire.

‘They were awfully surprised to see me, and the proprietor, Mr Bolscombe, started to “my girl” me, but he didn’t continue when I put it to him straight away that I had called to buy the paper.’

‘Did he faint?’ asked Kerry, anxiously.

She smiled.

‘Not exactly; but he asked sixty thousand pounds, whereupon I did all the fainting necessary. The paper is a young one – you know that?’ – King Kerry nodded – ‘and is just on the point of paying –’

‘That’s the editor’s view,’ suggested Kerry, and the girl nodded.

‘Especially if the policy was changed a little –’

‘Do I hear the manager speaking?’ asked Kerry, looking up at the ceiling.

‘Yes – but on the other hand it may not, and there was a doubt as to whether it was wise to throw good money after bad.’

Kerry laughed uproariously for him.

‘That is the proprietor,’ he said. ‘I know what he’d say because I’ve seen him once or twice.’

‘So we talked and we talked, and the end of it was I got the paper for forty thousand pounds,’ she said triumphantly.

He rose and patted her on the shoulder.

‘Excellent, child!’ he said. ‘I shall put that in my red book.’

He had a locked ledger in which from time to time he made entries, the nature of which was unknown save to the writer.

‘I’ve something else to say,’ said the girl. ‘After I’d given the cheque and got the receipt I went home, and Mr Bolscombe, who was dining with – you’ll never guess whom?’ she challenged.

‘Hermann Zeberlieff – yes?’ retorted Kerry. ‘Go on!’

She was a little disappointed that her baby bomb had not so much as fizzed.

‘I went back to my flat. Three hours later Mr Bolscombe called, though how he got the address –’

‘From Zeberlieff.’

‘Of course – how absurd of me to forget. He called and offered to buy back the paper for seventy thousand pounds!’

‘Excellent!’ laughed King Kerry.

‘He wanted to say that it wasn’t a proper sale, but I made him include all the considerations in the receipt – was I right?’

‘Child,’ said the admiring Kerry solemnly, ‘I shall take you into partnership one of these days. What was the end?’

She handed him the receipt. She had something more to say.

‘The editor is rather a clever young man,’ she said, hesitatingly; ‘and the manager seems pretty capable. I told them that you would make no immediate changes.’

‘Right again,’ said Kerry heartily. ‘A new man isn’t always the best man, and the old man isn’t necessarily a fool. Never change for change’s sake – except your dress.’

He stood by his desk meditatively.

‘This deserves more than the ordinary recognition,’ he said with mock solemnity. ‘Nothing less than a dinner can celebrate our first joint victory over the enemy.’

She looked at him with laughing eyes too near to tears for her complete satisfaction. That she had pleased the ‘grey man’, as she called him in her heart, was enough.

She had seen two handsome men in the past twenty-four hours – she puzzled her head to remember who the other was.

But it had not been the type that this man represented, the healthy skin and the laughing eyes, and that masterful chin – and the other had most certainly not been the owner of the greyest hair she had ever seen in a young man. She wondered why he was so grey. She had often wished to ask him, but something which was not the fear of impertinence (they had progressed too far in friendship for that fear to weigh with her) had prevented her.

‘Dinner at eight at the Sweizerhof,’ he said; ‘and if you feel incapable of coming without a chaperon, bring somebody nice.’

‘I don’t know anybody nice enough,’ she smiled, ‘so you must bear with me alone.’

She had a day’s work before her, and she tackled it with an energy which the prospect of an evening’s enjoyment increased. In the middle of the morning she stopped.

‘I know!’ she said suddenly.

He looked up.

‘What do you know?’

‘The name of the other man – I mean,’ she said hastily, ‘the man who came with Mr Bolscombe to the flat. It was Mr Martin Hubbard.’

‘Oh!’ he said dubiously, ‘The Beauty?’

‘Is that what they call him? I can understand it. He’s good-looking in a way, but –’ She hesitated.

‘There are lots of “buts” about Martin,’ said Kerry quietly. ‘I met him in New York. He’s some dollar chaser.’

He stared meditatively at the wall ahead of him.

‘A man who marries for money,’ he said, ‘is like a dog that climbs a steeple for a bone. He gets his meal, but there isn’t any comfortable place to sleep it off.’

He made no further reference to Martin, and was busy for the rest of the day.

For he was drafting the advertisement which was to shake the drapery world to its foundations.