The India-Rubber Men E-Book

Edgar Wallace

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

In the murk of a foggy morning a row-boat moved steadily down stream. Two pairs of oars moved as one, for the rowers were skilled watermen. They kept to the Surrey shore, following the slightly irregular course imposed by the vital necessity of keeping to the unrevealing background formed by moored barges.
Somewhere in the east the sun was rising, but the skies were dark and thick; lamps burnt on river and shore. Billingsgate Market was radiant with light, and over the wharves where cargo boats were at anchor white arc lights stared like stars.
The river was waking; the “chuff-chuff” of donkey engines, the rattle and squeak of swaying derricks, the faint roar of chains running through came to the men in the skiff.
They were clear of a long barge line, and the nose of the boat was turned to the northern shore, when on the dark background grew a darker object. The stroke rower jerked round his head and saw the lines of the launch which lay across his course, and dropped his oars.
“Wade!” he grunted.
Out of the blackness came a cheerful hail.

Leseprobe

The India-Rubber Men

Edgar Wallace

© 2024 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385747572

The India-Rubber Men

CHAPTER I

In the murk of a foggy morning a row-boat moved steadily down stream. Two pairs of oars moved as one, for the rowers were skilled watermen. They kept to the Surrey shore, following the slightly irregular course imposed by the vital necessity of keeping to the unrevealing background formed by moored barges.

Somewhere in the east the sun was rising, but the skies were dark and thick; lamps burnt on river and shore. Billingsgate Market was radiant with light, and over the wharves where cargo boats were at anchor white arc lights stared like stars.

The river was waking; the “chuff-chuff” of donkey engines, the rattle and squeak of swaying derricks, the faint roar of chains running through came to the men in the skiff.

They were clear of a long barge line, and the nose of the boat was turned to the northern shore, when on the dark background grew a darker object. The stroke rower jerked round his head and saw the lines of the launch which lay across his course, and dropped his oars.

“Wade!” he grunted.

Out of the blackness came a cheerful hail.

“Hallo, sweetheart! Whither away?”

The police launch, skilfully manœuvred, edged alongside the skiff. Somebody caught the gunwale with a boat-hook.

“It’s only me, Mr. Wade. We was takin’ the skiff down to Dorlin’s to lay it up,” said the bow oarsman. He had a high falsetto voice and punctuated his speech with involuntary sniffs.

“Not Mr. Offer?” The voice in the police boat was charged with extravagant surprise. “Not Sniffy Offer? Why, sweetheart, what are you doing at this hour? A raw morning, when the young and the ailing should be tucked up in their little beds. Let me have a look at you.”

A powerful light was switched on and flooded the interior of the skiff with devastating thoroughness. The two men sitting, oars in hand, blinked painfully.

“Little case of something here,” said the hateful voice of Inspector John Wade. “Looks like a case of whisky—and, bless my life, if there isn’t another one!”

“We found ’em floating in the river,” pleaded the man called Sniffy. “Me an’ Harry fished ’em out.”

“Been fishing? I’ll bet you have! Make fast your boat and step into the launch—and step lively, sweetheart!”

The two river thieves said nothing until they were on the launch and headed for the riverside police station.

“You don’t have to be clever to catch us, Wade, do you? Here’s London full of undiscovered murders an’ robberies, an’ all you can do is to pull a coupla river hooks! Look at that woman found in Cranston Gardens with her throat cut—look at the Inja-Rubber Men——”

“Shut up!” growled his companion.

“Proceed, Sniffy,” said Mr. Wade gently. “I am not at all sensitive. You were talking of the India-Rubber Men? You were reproaching me—you were trying to make me and the Metropolitan Police Force feel exceedingly small. Go right ahead, Sniffy. Whip me with scorpions.”

“Shut up, Sniffy!” warned the second prisoner again, and Sniffy was silent through all the gibes and taunts and provocative irony which assailed him.

“Now, where was this whisky going—tell me that? The destination of whisky, cases of whisky—stolen cases of whisky—interests me, Sniffy. I am in training for a bootlegger. Spill the truth, Sniffy, and I’ll keep it locked in my bosom.”

There was no other answer than a succession of indignant sniffs.

“Come, sweetheart, tell papa.” They could not see the grin on the dark, lean face of John Wade, but they could hear the chuckle in his voice. “Was it to gladden the hearts of poor sailormen at the ‘Mecca’? That would be almost an admirable act. Poor fellows who sail the seas are entitled to their comforts. Now was it for dear old Golly——”

The worm turned.

“You ain’t entitled to ask these questions under the Ac’, Wade, you know that! I could have your coat off your back for questionin’ me. An’ castin’ asper——” He boggled at the word.

“Asparagus!” suggested Wade helpfully.

“Committin’ libel, that’s what you’re doin’.”

The launch pulled up beside a heaving float and was hauled tight. Somebody in the darkness asked a question.

“Only two young fishermen, Sergeant,” said Wade.

“Put ’em on ice!”

That day Wade made a call at the Mecca Club, and on its manager, Mrs. Annabel Oaks.

Mrs. Oaks had been compelled by an interfering constabulary to register her “club” as a common lodging-house, a disadvantage of which was that it was subject to police supervision. At any hour of the day or night it was competent for an inspector of police to walk in and look round, which could be, and on many occasions was, extremely inconvenient.

She complained savagely to her guests.

“Nice thing, eh? A club for officers, and any flat footed copper can walk in and look you over!”

It might be conceived that Mrs. Oaks was indiscreet in publishing a truth that might scare away a percentage of her boarders. But the “Mecca” was conveniently placed for under-officers of the Mercantile Marine. Here men were near to the dock offices of various steamship lines, and the living, if plain, was cheap, while many of the clients who patronised her establishment found the “club” convenient in another respect. Suppose one got a ship out of London, it was possible to owe the money due for keep until the debtor returned from his voyage.

“Mum” Oaks was very obliging, especially if the men were likeable. He was likeable if he did not give himself airs and sound his “h’s” too punctiliously, or if he took his drop of drink like a man and didn’t raise hell and want to fight Golly or anybody else who happened to be around.

The Marine Officers’ Club and Recreation Rooms had not always been a club. Because of its initials it had come to be known as the “Moccer,” and from “Moccer” to “Mecca” was an easy transition. Not, as Mum said virtuously, that they’d ever take in a seagoing gentleman who was not white, and if, as by all accounts was the case, Mecca was a foreign country inhabited by niggers, well, any so-called Mecca people who came to the club for lodgings would get a pretty saucy answer—either from herself or Golly!

Golly seemed wholly incapable of giving anybody a saucy answer. He was a mild little man, rather spare of frame and short. A reddish moustache drooped over an unmasterful chin. He had once been a ship’s steward; in moments of inebriation his claims rose as high as a purser, and once, on a terrific occasion, he stated that he had been the captain of an Atlantic liner; but he was very ill after that.

He sang sentimental ballads in a high falsetto voice, and it was his weakness that he found a resemblance in himself to the popular idols of the screen; and, in moments when he was free from observation, he did a little quiet and dignified acting, following the instructions of “Ten Steps to Stardom,” by a Well Known Screen Favourite of Hollywood—so well known that it was not necessary to put his name to this interesting work.

Mr. Oaks had aspirations to opera as well as to the screen. The tenants of Mecca often threw up their windows and commented upon Golly’s voice—for he sang best when he was chopping wood, and he seemed always to be chopping wood.

Mum was hardly as motherly as her name. She was spare, not to say thin. Her greying hair was bobbed, which did not add to her attractiveness, for the face which the lank hair framed was hard, almost repulsive. A section of her guests called her (behind her back) Old Mother Iron Face, but mostly she was Mum to a hundred junior officers of cargo ships which moved up and down the seas of the world.

The premises of “Mecca” were half wooden and half brick. The brick portion had been the malt-house of a forgotten brewery, and was by far the more comfortable. Before the club was a strip of wharfage, covered with rank grass and embellished with two garden seats. Every year Golly sowed flower seeds in a foot-wide border under the house, and every year nothing happened. It was almost as ineffectual as his fishing.

The wharf edge was warped and rotten; the ancient baulks of timber that supported what Mum called “the front” split and crumbled. There was some talk of building a stone wall for patrons to lean against, but nothing came of it.

The view was always fine, for here the Pool was broad and the river crowded with shipping. There was generally a cable boat tied at Fenny’s on the Surrey side, and the German ships had their moorings near by. You could see scores of seagoing barges moored abreast, with their house pennants fluttering at the tops of tall masts, and at the wharves up and down the river there were generally one or two cargo boats.

Lila Smith used to stand, fascinated, at the big window of the dining-room and watch the slow moving steamers come cautiously up river. She had seen the lights of the eel boats and the G.T.C. fish-carriers and the orange ships from Spain, and got to know them by their peculiar lines. She knew the tugs, too, the big Johnny O and Tommy O, and the John and Mary and Sarah Lane and the Fairway—those lords of the river—and she could tell them even at nights.

Club lodgers who had returned from long voyages remarked that Lila was no longer a child. She had never lacked dignity; now there was a charm which none had observed before, and which it was difficult to label. She had always been pretty in a round-faced, big-eyed way. But the prettiness had grown definite; nature had given the face of the child new values.

She often stood at the window, a shabby figure in a rusty black dress and down-at-heel shoes, gazing thoughtfully at the river pageant: the sound of a deep siren brought her there, the impatient toot-toot of a tugboat, the rattle and roar of anchor chains.

“That new feller in seven wants some tea, Lila—don’t stand mooning there like a stuck pig; get your wits about you, will you?”

Thus Mum, who came into the room and caught the girl at her favourite occupation.

“Yes, Auntie.”

Lila Smith flew to the kitchen. That rasping, complaining voice terrified her—had always terrified her. She wished sometimes for another kind of life; had a vague idea that she knew just what that life was like. It had trees in it, and great spaces like Greenwich Park, and people who were most deferential. More often than not she was dreaming of this when she was watching the ships go up and down the river.

She was dreaming now, as she poured out the tea and sent the slatternly maid into No. 7 with the thick cup and the thicker slabs of bread and butter.

The small square window which brought air into the stuffy kitchen was wide open. Outside the morning was cold, but the primrose sun laced the river with waggling streaks of pale gold. Suddenly she looked up.

A man was looking at her from the wharf: a tall man, with a brown, attractive face. He was bare-headed, and his close-cropped brown hair had a curl in it.

“Good morning, princess!”

She smiled in her frightened way—a smile that dawned and faded, leaving her face a little more serious.

“Good morning, Mr. Wade!”

She was a little breathless. He was the one being in the world who had this effect upon her. It was not because she was frightened, though she was well aware of his disgraceful profession—Mum always said that policemen were crooks who hadn’t the pluck to thieve—nor yet because of the furtive character of these rare meetings.

He had a tremendous significance for her, but the reason for his importance was confusingly obscure. For a long time she had regarded him as an old man, as old as Golly; and then one day she grew old herself and found him a contemporary.

He never asked her awkward questions, nor sought information on domestic affairs, and Mum’s fierce cross-examinations which followed every interview produced no cause for disquiet in the Oaks household.

“Why do they call you ‘busy,’ Mr. Wade?”

She asked the question on the impulse of the moment and was frightened before the words were out.

“Because I am busy, princess,” he said gravely—she never quite knew when he was being serious and when he was laughing at her when he used that tone and inflection of voice. “I am so busy that I am an offence in the eyes of all loafers. Industry is my weakness.”

He paused and looked at her oddly.

“Now as to that experience?” he suggested.

She was instantly agitated.

“I wish you’d forget I ever said it,” she said, with a quick fearful look at the door. “It was silly of me. . . I—I wasn’t telling the truth, Mr. Wade. I was just trying to make a sensation——”

“You couldn’t tell a lie,” he interrupted calmly. “You’re trying to tell one now, but you can’t. When you said: ‘Don’t think I have a bad time—sometimes I have a wonderful experience,’ you meant it.” He raised his hand with a lordly gesture. “We’ll not discuss it. How are you keeping in these days?”

She, too, had heard Mum’s heavy footfall and drew back a pace. She was gazing past him and was conscious of her deceitfulness when Mum came scowling into the room.

“Hallo, Mr. Wade—got nothing better to do than keep my gel gossiping?”

Her voice was high and venomously vibrant. Of all hateful faces, John Wade’s was the most loathsome in her eyes.

With a gesture she sent Lila from the room and slammed the door behind the girl.

“Don’t come here cross-questioning children. Be a man and knock at the front door.”

“You haven’t got a front door,” said Mr. Wade reproachfully. “And why so angry, child? I came in the friendliest spirit to interview Golly——”

“He’s on the wharf—an’ don’t call me ‘child’!” snapped the woman savagely.

Mr. Wade, whose weakness was the employment of endearing epithets, shrugged his shoulders.

“I go,” he said simply.

Golly he had seen, and was well aware that Golly had seen him. The little man was chopping wood, and, as the detective approached, he put down his hatchet and rose with a painful expression, which deepened when he heard the detective’s drawling inquiry.

“Whisky? What do I know about whisky? . . . Yes, I know Sniffy. A common longshore loafer that I wouldn’t have in this here club. A low man with low companions.” He spoke very rapidly. “The Good Book says: ‘As a bird is known by his note, so is a man by the company he keeps’——”

“I don’t believe it,” said Mr. Wade. “Heard anything about the India-Rubber Men lately.”

Mr. Oaks spread out his arms in a gesture of patient weariness.

“I don’t know no more about the Inja-Rubber Men than what the organs of public opinion, to wit, the newspapers, talk about. We got the police; we pay ’em rates ’n’ taxes, we feed ’em——”

“And well fed they are,” agreed John Wade, his eyes twinkling. “I never see a fat policeman without thinking of you, Golly.”

But Golly was not to be turned aside.

“Inja-Rubber Men! Burglars ’n’ bank robbers! Would I know ’um? Am I a bank? Am I a safe deposit? Am I rollin’ in millions?”

“Unanswerable,” murmured Mr. Wade, and went back to the question of stolen whisky, and, when Mr. Golly Oaks closed his eyes and delivered an oration on the probity of all associated with the Mecca Club, this brown-faced, young-looking man listened in silence, staring at the orator as an owl might stare if owls had big, blue eyes.

“Encore!” he said when Golly reached the end of his apologia. “You ought to be in Parliament, angel-face. Gosh! I’d like to hear you on the subject of Prohibition.”

With a nod, he turned and went back to the police launch, hidden under the crazy face of the wharf.

CHAPTER II

Three nights later. . . .

The engineer, who was also the steersman of the police launch, remarked mechanically that it was cold, even for that time of the year; and John Wade, to whom the remark was not altogether unfamiliar, answered sardonically.

He often referred to himself as an old man; he was, in point of fact, thirty-five, which is not a great age, and indeed is rather young in an inspector of Thames police.

“I’ve often thought, sir——” began the engineer sentimentally, as the launch shot under Blackfriars Bridge and edged towards the Embankment.

“I doubt it,” said Mr. Wade. “I very much doubt it, sergeant. Maybe when you’re off duty——”

“I’ve often thought,” continued the unperturbed sergeant, “that life is very much like a river——”

“If you feel mawkish, sergeant, restrain yourself until we tie up. I am not in a sentimental mood to-night.”

“It will come,” said the sergeant unabashed, “when you’ve met the girl of your heart. Bachelors don’t know what sentiment is. Take babies——”

Wade did not listen. The launch was running close to the Embankment side of the river. It was a night of stars, and there was no sign of the thin fog which was to descend on London the following night. He had spent the most annoying evening, searching evil-smelling barges. That afternoon he had removed a dead body from the river. The morning had been occupied at the Thames Police Court, prosecuting a drunken tug skipper, who, in a moment of delirium, had laid out his little crew and would have laid out the tug too—for it was headed straight for a granite-faced wharf—if a police boat had not ranged alongside, and Wade, with his own hands and a rubber truncheon, put the drunken skipper to sleep, and spun the wheel only just in time to avert disaster.

Now, on top of these minor disasters, he had been stopped on his way to a comfortable bed with instructions to report at Scotland Yard; and he was perfectly sure what was the reason for that call—the India-Rubber Men. As a reader of crime reports in which he had no particular part, he was interested in the India-Rubber Men; as a police officer he carried out certain inquiries concerning them; and for the past week they had become something of a nuisance. It was perhaps a fatal error to advance a theory—he had done this and was now to suffer for meddling.

They called these marauders the India-Rubber Men because there was no other name that fitted them. They were certainly elastic in their plans and in their movements; but the nickname developed after the one and only glimpse which brief authority had had of the ruthless bank smashers. They wore rubber gas-masks and rubber gloves and crêpe rubber shoes. Each man, when seen, carried a long automatic in his belt, and three dangling cylinders which the experts described as gas bombs. This latter was probably their principal armament.

They had been seen the night they cleared out Colley & Moore, the Bond Street jewellers; and that week-end when they opened the vault of the Northern and Southern Bank and left behind them a night watchman, who was dead before the police arrived. The reason for his death was apparent; in his clasped hand was a portion of a rubber gas-mask, which he had torn from one of the robbers. He had seen the face of the rubber man and had been killed for his enterprise.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said the sergeant steersman, bringing the launch a little nearer the Embankment’s edge, “if the Wapping lot weren’t in this india-rubber business. That gang wouldn’t think twice——”

Wade, looking ahead, had seen indistinctly something which might be human leaning over the parapet of the Embankment. The launch was not twenty yards away when he saw the bulk of the figure increase, and realised that whoever it was was standing on the parapet. In another second it had disappeared, and he saw a splash of white where it had fallen into the water.

The steersman had seen it too. The little boat shuddered as the engines went astern.

“On your right, sir. You’ll reach him with your hands.”

Wade was on his knees now, leaning over the edge of the boat, the steersman throwing his weight on the opposite side of the boat and bracing himself to keep it balanced.

For a second the tiny black thing on the water vanished. It reappeared right under the gunwale of the launch, and, reaching down, John Wade gripped an upflung arm and dragged the whimpering thing into the boat. It was a woman.

“Must you commit suicide, my good wench, when I’m on my way to an important conference?” he demanded savagely. “Give a light here, sergeant!”

A lantern flashed. He looked down into a pair of wild eyes. A grey-haired woman, whose face was terribly thin and lined, and in whose wide-open eyes glared an unearthly fire.

“You mustn’t have it. . . . I must take it with me!” she gasped.

She was clutching something tight to her bosom. It looked like a piece of sodden paper.

“I’m not going to take anything from you,” he said soothingly.

The sergeant passed him a brandy flask, and he forced the neck between the woman’s teeth. She struggled and choked.

“Don’t . . . give me that. . . . I want to go to my baby. . . . The colonel said——”

“Never mind what the soldier said,” snarled the inspector. “Get this hooch into you—it killed auntie, but why shouldn’t it make you dance?”

He pulled a blanket from a locker and threw it over her, and in doing so he caught a glimpse of the thing that she held. It was the photograph of a child’s face. He only saw it for a second in the light of his lantern, but never after did he forget that picture. Until that moment he had thought all children were alike; but there was something very distinctive, something very unusual, in that portrait of round-eyed childhood. And then he recognised the photograph and gasped.

“Lord help us! Who is that?”

He saw the likeness now—distinct, beyond question. It was Lila Smith! A baby’s face, but Lila Smith.

“Who is this?” he repeated.

“You shan’t have it! You shan’t have it!” She struggled feebly. “You wicked man . . .”

Her voice sank to a murmur, and then the tired fingers relaxed.

“Rush for the pier, Toller. I think she’s gone.”

When he tried to take the photograph from the clenched hand, it squeezed up into an indistinguishable mass.

As to the identity of this unknown woman he did not even speculate. Such cases as these were common. Sometimes the police launch was not in time, and there were nights spent manipulating long drag ropes. Strange things come up from the bed of old Thames: once they had hooked the wheel of a Roman chariot; once they brought to light what remained of a man chained from head to foot, and bearing unmistakable evidence of murder. The live ones appeared at the police court and were conventionally penitent; the dead ones filled unknown graves, and occupied half an hour of a busy coroner’s time.

Lila Smith? He tried to restore the photograph to a recognisable form, but it was too far gone.

The launch ran under the pier, and a Thames policeman caught the painter scientifically and tied it up. Another policeman vanished in the gloom and brought back a wheeled hand ambulance, and into this the woman was lifted, and whisked away to Westminster Hospital.

Wade was still frowning when he came into the superintendent’s room and found the Big Four in conference.

“I’m sorry I’m late, sir,” he said. “A lady decided to end her life right under my nose, and that held me up.”

The Chief Constable sat back in his chair and yawned. He had been working since six o’clock that morning.

“What is this yarn of yours of the Rubber Men?” he asked briefly. He took a paper from a dossier and opened it. “Here’s your report. You say there’s a racing boat been seen working up and down the river—about the time of these robberies. Who has seen it distinctly?”

John Wade shook his head.

“Nobody, sir—it has not been seen, except at a distance. I have an idea it is painted black; it certainly carries no lights, and there’s no question at all that it goes at a devil of a speed. The first clue we had that it was working was when bargemen complained of the wash it made. It’s been heard, of course; but even here, whoever is running it has used mufflers, which is very unusual in a motor-boat.”

“She carries no lights?”

“No, sir. The only two men who have ever had a close view of her is a river thief named Donovan, whom I took for breaking cargo two months ago, and another. He said that he and another man were in a small boat one night, and they were crossing the river—innocently, he claims, but I should imagine to get aboard a lighter—when this launch came out of the blue and they had a very narrow escape from being run down. If the boat hadn’t been moving at a terrific speed and hadn’t turned off in its own length, Mr. Donovan would have been stoking sulphur! As far as I could find out, he could give no description of the boat, except that he said it was very short and hadn’t the lines of a motor-boat at all. I have checked up the appearance of this craft as well as I can, and it has generally coincided with one of the robberies.”

“Where has it been seen?” asked the Chief Constable.

He was a long-faced man who had the appearance of being half asleep and never was.

“As far west as Chelsea Bridge,” said Wade. “It was seen there by the second man, who is also a river thief in a mild way, but is more likely to be a receiver. He has a sort of warehouse in Hammersmith, which we raided a little time ago—his name is Gridlesohn. I’m fairly sure he’s a receiver because he’s so ready to squeak—apparently he resents these land thieves taking to the river, because it means extra vigilance and extra danger to his own ‘rats.’ In that respect he has my sympathy. I’ve caught three of them in the last month.”

Jennings, one of the big chiefs, blew a cloud of smoke up to the ceiling and shook his head.

“Why should the Rubber Men take to the river? That’s what I want to know. There are twenty ways out of London, and the river’s the slowest. You can go from Scotland Yard to any part of the town in a taxi, and not one policeman in a thousand would dream of taking the slightest notice of it. My own opinion is that after their last big job the Rubber Men are not going to operate again for years.”

A third member of the party, a studious-looking man of fifty who was in control of the Foreign Branch, interrupted here.

“This is certainly the work of an international crowd. The New York police have had rubber men working there; and in France the Bank of Marseilles was smashed and the cashier killed, in exactly similar circumstances to the busting of the Northern and Southern Bank. As to their being finished in London——”

The telephone buzzer sounded. The Chief Constable took up the phone and listened.

“When?” he asked. A long pause, and then: “I’ll come right away.”

He hung up the phone and rose from his chair.

“The constable on point duty reports that the lights have gone out in the manager’s office of Frisby’s Bank. He put his lamp on to the side of the window and thought he saw a man in the room. He has had the intelligence to phone through to his divisional inspector—mark that constable’s name for promotion, will you, Lane?”

Two of the four were already out of the room. By the time Wade got to the courtyard, three police tenders were drawn up by the kerb and detectives were still climbing aboard when the cars moved off.

Frisby’s Bank was in the lower end of St. Giles’s Street: it was one of the few private banks that had branches in the West End. It was a small, modern building, connected by a bridge across a courtyard with an older house, and stood on the corner of a block, practically under the eye of a constable on point duty—it was he who phoned.

By the time they reached the place the street was alive with police officers and a cordon had already been established round the bank. The manager’s office faced a side street, and here was the general safe of the office. Two lights burnt day and night, and the safe was visible from the point where the policeman controlled the traffic.

The constable’s story was quickly told. He was standing on the corner of the street, waiting for his relief, and Big Ben was striking the last note of twelve, when he saw the two lights go out. He ran across the road, tried the door and hammered with his fist on the panel. He then went back to the cashier’s office, and, climbing on to the railings which surrounded that side of the bank and protected a small area, he turned the light of his electric lamp on to the window. It was then that he saw, or thought he saw, a man move quickly into the shadow of the safe.

A big crowd had assembled, attracted by the cordon even at the late hour; traffic had been diverted, and the streets within fifty yards of the bank had been cleared. While the constable had been telling what had happened, the bank manager, who had been telephoned for, arrived with the keys. There was, he said, a night watchman on duty, and the fact that he had not answered the repeated knockings was ominous. Detectives had already entered buildings to the left and right of the bank, and were stationed on the roof.

The premises were in a sense unique; there was a courtyard guarded by two big gates at the side of the building, and this separated the modern premises from an old Georgian house, also the property of the bank, in which was housed the staff. The top floor was in the occupation of the night watchman, a widower of fifty, and his daughter, who controlled the office cleaners. The only value of the courtyard, explained the manager, was that it gave a certain privacy to the bank’s collecting van, and it also served to park his own and his assistants’ cars during the daytime.

All these explanations were given very hurriedly, the while he was fitting, with a trembling hand, the key in the door—for he was pardonably nervous, though, as the Chief Constable explained, there was no need, for he would not be asked to enter the bank after it was opened.

At last the door swung back.

“You had better take charge of the search, Wade—give Mr. Wade a gun.”

Somebody thrust an automatic into his hand, and he entered the dark outer office. The door leading to the manager’s room was fastened; the key had been turned on the other side; but the Flying Squad had brought the necessary tools, and in a few minutes the lock was smashed and the manager’s office was open to them.

Wade stepped quickly in, a gun in one hand and an electric torch in the other. The room was empty, but a second door, leading, he gathered, in the direction of the courtyard, was ajar. He pushed this open, stopped . . .

Bang!

A bullet went past him, smashed into the surface of the wall and covered his face with powdered plaster. He kicked the door open farther. The second shot came nearer. He thrust his hand round the jamb of the door and sprayed the interior with ten shots. He did not hear the answering fire, and would not have known that the burglars had replied if he had not found his sleeve ripped to rags.

In a whisper he demanded a pistol from the detective who had crept to his side, passing his own back. As he did so he heard the sound of quickly moving footsteps, and a door slam. Again he put his pistol inside and fired two shots; this time there was no answer, and when he pushed in the lamp to draw the fire, the provocation was unrewarded.

It might be a trap, but he must take the risk. In a moment he was in the room, his lamp flashing quickly from left to right. It was a small office below the level of the manager’s: a plain room, lined with steel shelves on which were a number of boxes. In one corner was a steel door; behind that he could hear the soft purr of a motor-car. He tried the door; it yielded a little. He had the sensation that it was being held by somebody on the other side, and tugged. It opened suddenly—he had a glimpse of a car moving swiftly towards the gates, and then:

Rat-tat-tat-tat!

It was the quick stammer of a machine gun. A big black car swept into the street, and from its interior came the staccato rattle of automatic rifles. The police, taken by surprise, fell back; the crowd behind the cordon scattered, and the long car flew forward, venomously spitting fire from the back seat. The bullets whistled and smacked against the building; glass crashed; there was a wild scurry of people to cover. Before they could realise what had happened, the car had disappeared into St. James’s Park.

CHAPTER III

It was not until the next morning that Wade remembered the would-be suicide and her photograph. Business took him to Scotland Yard, and he went on to the nearby hospital to make inquiries. To his amazement he found that the woman had left. By a mistake, which might have been the sergeant’s, no charge had been preferred against her, and when she had demanded that she should be allowed to leave, no obstacle was offered.

“A creature of the most amazing vitality,” said the house surgeon. “I thought she was dead when she came in, but in twenty-four hours she had walked out on her own two feet. . . . attempted suicide, was it? Well, we had no intimation. The policeman who brought her here thought she had fallen into the water by accident. By the way, she was frantic about a photograph she had lost. In fact, she got so hysterical that I nearly detained her.”

“Did she give any name?”

The young surgeon shook his head.

“Anna. She didn’t tell us her surname. My own opinion is that she’s slightly demented—not so bad, of course, that one would certify her, even if one could.”

John Wade was mildly puzzled. He was not very interested in this unknown drab, and, but for the photograph, she would have slipped from his mind instantly.

Conference followed conference at Scotland Yard. The India-Rubber Men had become a leading feature in quite a number of newspapers. There were the inevitable questions in Parliament and the as inevitable suggestion for a commission to inquire into the operations of the Criminal Investigation Department.

The bank’s loss was not so heavy as it might have been, for the men had been disturbed in their work, but the robbery which followed was serious enough. A small factory, the property of a group of jewellers, was burgled; a safe, set in a concrete wall, was forced, and manufactured jewellery to the value of between eighty and a hundred thousand pounds vanished.

The first intimation the police had was a telephone message, evidently from one of the members of the gang, saying that the night watchman might need attention. A police tender was rushed to the factory, and the man was discovered unconscious on the ground. He could give no account of what had happened; he had seen nobody, he remembered nothing, and the police were left without a clue, for on this occasion the India-Rubber Men left not so much as a chisel behind them.

John Wade could read the account of this new crime without discomfort. He belonged to the river, and only by accident had been in the earlier hold-up. The usual inquiry had been put through, but the river police could contribute no information. Nevertheless, he was called in to the interminable conferences, and had little time to satisfy his own curiosity.

If the mysterious Anna passed quickly from his mind, the incident of the photograph recurred again and again. It was not until a week after the jewel theft that he was able to spare time to call at “Mecca.”

Mum was out when he climbed up to the crazy wharf and made his way to the open window. From the woodshed came the howl of Golly’s melancholy voice and the clump-clump of his hatchet. John Wade found the serving-room empty, and waited patiently, quite prepared to see Mum’s disapproving face at any moment.

“Hallo, Lady Jane!”

Lila came into the room so quickly, noiselessly and unexpectedly, that he had the illusion that she had materialised out of nothing.

“Mrs. Oaks is out.” She volunteered the information. “And please don’t stay long, Mr. Wade. Auntie doesn’t like you coming here, and really you were very unkind about Golly. He wouldn’t dream of buying stolen goods——”

John Wade smiled.

“ ‘If you see that man Wade, you tell him that your uncle is a good, honest citizen,’ ” he mocked, and by her quick flush knew that he had hit truly.

Then, while she was still embarrassed, he asked:

“Who is Anna?”

She turned her head and stared at him.

“Anna?” she said slowly. “I don’t know—I told you I didn’t know a long time ago, didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t.”

John Wade had a very excellent memory, and he was fairly certain that the name of Anna had never occurred between them.

The wonder he had glimpsed in her face was more apparent now; she was looking past him at a small tugboat thrusting its way against the falling stream.

“I’m often puzzled who Anna was. . . . I don’t know anybody by that name. Yet I know it so well. Isn’t it curious?” Her sensitive lips twitched in the faintest smile. “She’s a dream, I suppose.”

“Like the experience?” he bantered her, and saw her mouth open in consternation.

“No, that isn’t a dream,” she said hastily. “It was silly of me to tell you about it. . . . I really mustn’t.”

It seemed to her that she had spoken of “the experience” many times to him; in reality, she had only made two references to the occasional adventure in which she was the central figure. She did not know that the first time she had mentioned it he had been amused, and not very greatly interested. He had thought she was exaggerating some little jaunt, setting a commonplace happening in a shrine of romance. The second time he was arrested by a note in her voice and had made a blunt inquiry. The more unwilling she was to tell him, the keener he was to know.

He was too experienced a cross-examiner to pursue his questions, and when she asked him gravely whether he was very busy, he accepted the turn of the subject.

“I don’t think you are busy,” she said. “It seems a terribly lazy life. You do nothing but ride up and down the river—I often see you. What do the Thames police do?”

“Ride up and down the river and lead a lazy life.”

“But truly?” she insisted. “People say there are thieves on the river, but I’ve never seen one. Nobody’s ever stolen anything from ‘Mecca.’ I suppose there’s nothing of value here——”

He laughed at this, and that laugh was an extravagant compliment.

Such occasional visits as he paid to “Mecca” were invariably spoilt for her by a sense of apprehension that Mum would make an unwelcome and embarrassing appearance, and usually she was secretly praying that he would leave almost as soon as he had come. On this occasion, when it seemed there was no reason why he should go, he made an early departure, leaving her with a feeling of disappointment, which changed very quickly to relief, for he had not been gone for ten minutes when she heard Mum’s voice.

Mum had been to the City and had returned with a visitor—the one man whom Lila Smith actively disliked. Mr. Raggit Lane very rarely came to “Mecca.” A tall, spare man, with a thin, ascetic face, he would have been good-looking but for the lift of one corner of his lip that produced the illusion of a permanent sneer. He was always well dressed, finickingly so. He wore none of the ostentation of ephemeral wealth which was expressed by other habitués of the home in scarf-pins and rings and heavy gold watch-guards. Lila’s dislike of him was based upon his use of perfume. Nobody had ever told her that it was bad form in a man to scent himself: Mum rather approved the practice.

Mr. Lane’s hands were always well manicured, his black hair brilliantly polished. He wore a small signet ring upon one finger, but no other form of jewellery whatever.

Mum was very vague about his profession, but Lila gathered that he followed the sea; she gathered this because Mr. Lane, with remarkable condescension, had once given her a small embroidered shawl which he had picked up in China.

Almost as soon as Mrs. Oaks arrived, Lila was summoned to the sitting-room. Mum’s sitting-room was the holy of holies, into which only very privileged people entered. It was a large room with two long, opaque windows. The walls were painted, the floor covered with parquet.

Lila came in, drying her hands on her apron, and met the long scrutiny of Raggit Lane’s glass eye.

“Hallo!” He looked at her with unfeigned admiration. He had not seen the girl for a year, and in that year a remarkable change had occurred in her. “She’s got pretty, Oaks.”

He always called Mum “Oaks,” and she never showed the least resentment.

“Let’s have a look at you.”

He caught her by the shoulder to swing her round to the light. A sudden anger shook the girl, and she disengaged herself violently.

“Don’t touch me. How dare you touch me!”

Her voice had a new note. Mum gaped at her, amazed.

“Why, Lila——” she began.

“The girl’s right. I’m sorry, Lila. Forgot you were grown up.”

But Lila seemed not to hear. She turned and walked quickly from the room. It was her first demonstration of independence that Mum had witnessed, and she was speechless with astonishment.

“What’s the matter with the girl?” she demanded shrilly. “I’ve never seen her like that before! If she starts giving herself airs with me she’ll know all about it!”

Raggit Lane chuckled, took a cigarette from a thin gold case and lit it.

“She isn’t a kid any more, that’s all—there’s nothing to make a fuss about. I didn’t believe you when you said she’d got pretty, but she’s all that.”

“The last time you were here, I said: ‘Come and have a look at her,’ but you wouldn’t believe me,” said Mum, with the satisfaction of one whose predictions had been justified.

Mr. Lane blew a cloud of smoke to the ceiling.

“The last time I was in London there were many reasons why I shouldn’t come,” he said slowly.

There was an awkward pause.

“Where have you come from now?” she asked.

“The Black Sea—Constantia.”

He was evidently thinking of something else, and answered her questions mechanically.

“How is the old man?” she asked after a long silence.

“Eh? The old man? Oh, he’s all right.” And then, bringing all his attention to her: “I don’t want him to know I’ve been to-day.”

Mum smiled.

“You don’t want him to know you’ve been at all, do you? You can trust me, Mr. Lane—I never discuss anything with him except Lila; and I don’t see him more than an hour every year.”

The smooth brows of Mr. Lane met in a deep frown.

“He’s getting touchy, very difficult. Of course I could always say that I came here by accident. It’s an officers’ club. But I don’t want to use that excuse until it’s necessary. Where’s Golly?”

She listened.

“Chopping wood,” she said.

Another long silence. Then:

“Who is this Lila girl?”

Mrs. Oaks would do much for her good-looking visitor, but he had asked her a question which she could not with safety answer.

“The thing that worries me about Lila is this fellow Wade. He’s always hanging around the house. I don’t know whether it’s because he’s after the girl or what. You never know what a copper’s doing.”

“Inspector Wade?” Mr. Lane fingered his chin thoughtfully. “He’s a pretty clever man, isn’t he?”

Mum smiled derisively.

“Ain’t they all clever by their own account? From what I hear, they nearly got him the other day, these India-Rubber people. I wish they had!”

Lane laughed softly.

“The India-Rubber Men seem to be rather busy,” he said. “Who are they?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know anything about ’em,” she said decisively. “I keep myself to myself and mind my own business. It’s hard enough to get your own living without troubling about how other people get theirs. Half of it’s newspaper lies—they’ll say anything for a sensation.”

“Now what about a trade, Oaks?”

She got up from the chair in which she was sitting.

“I’ll see what the girl’s doing,” she said, and left the room.

She was back in a few minutes, closed and locked the door behind her and, going to the fire-place, rolled back the hearth-rug. With a bodkin she pried up an irregular section of the parquet floor. Beneath was a patch of felt, which she lifted, disclosing a steel trapdoor set in the floor. It was less than a foot square and was fastened with a patent lock. Inserting a key, she turned it, and with some difficulty raised the heavy steel door. The receptacle beneath was evidently much larger than the opening and, groping, she brought to light half a dozen little canvas bags, which she handed to the man one by one. He placed these on a table beneath the opaque glass window, and opened them carefully.

“That’s a cheap lot,” she said, as he unrolled the strip of cloth and disclosed a variety of articles that ranged between cheap ear-rings and big, flamboyant brooches of low-grade gold. “The one with the red ribbon’s the best.”

He looked at the stuff disparagingly until he came to the package tied with red ribbon. There were several good pieces here: a ten-carat emerald, a cushion-shaped diamond ring, a necklace, a pendant, and five fairly large-sized pearls. He looked at these curiously.

“I suppose the string broke when they snatched?”

She shook her head, her thin lips set in a straight line.

“I don’t ask any questions. I don’t know where they come from. If I’m offered a bargain I buy it. I always say, if you ask no questions you hear no lies.”

He was examining one of the pearls through a small magnifying-glass.

“That one you’d better throw in the fire,” he said, handing the gem to her. “It is marked and would be recognised anywhere.”

Obediently she threw the pearl, which must have been worth six or seven hundred pounds, into the fire. She never argued with Mr. Raggit Lane, having learned by experience the futility of questioning his judgment.

He made his choice, dropped the selected articles into his pocket, and returned the remainder to the woman.

“The gold isn’t worth much—it is hardly worth boiling,” he said. “I should drop these things into the river.”

Mrs. Oaks sighed.