Kitabı oku: «The Crime Doctor», sayfa 3

This speech had not come quite so fluently as might be supposed, though Dollar had only interrupted it to send for a taxicab. It had interrupted itself when Lady Vera Moyle was betrayed into speaking of poor Lady Armagh, whose heart-felt disapproval of her daughter's escapades was public property. Dollar had heard from Topham Vinson – that very day at lunch – that the last one had made her seriously ill; then what indeed of impending resolutions, and the nine days' tragic scandal which was the very least that could come of them unless —

"Unless!"

In the doctor's mind so many broken sentences began with that will-o'-the-wisp among words, that others really spoken fell upon stony ears, and he knew as little what he said in reply. In a dream he saw a small hand wave as the taxicab vanished round the corner to the right; in a dream he sprang up-stairs, hiding under his coat the weapon with which that little hand had dealt out death; and awoke in his wintriest clothes, his greatest coat, to find himself called upon to top the lot with another of unkempt fur sent with the car.

That aluminum clipper – a fifteen-horse-power Invincible Talboys – was indeed at the door in incredibly quick time. Twin headlights lit long wedges of London mud; two pairs of goblin goggles mounted up behind them – one sent with the coat and a message that was more than law. The dapper chauffeur huddled down behind the wheel; the passenger sat bolt upright at his side; the Barton family, his faithful creatures, carried out an impromptu tableau in the background. Mother and son – those unpresentable features of a former occasion – now appeared as immaculate cook and page at the top of the area steps and on the lighted threshold respectively. Barton himself leaned out of an upper window, still in his white suit – it was the typically muggy Christmas of a degenerate young century – but with all the black cares of the strange establishment quite apparent on his snowy shoulders. The dapper driver gave his horn a spiteful pinch. And then they were off, only to be held up in Oxford Street by the Christmas traffic, but doing better in the Edgware Road, and soon on the way to Edgware itself, and Elstree and St. Albans, and all the lighted towns and pitch-dark roads that lie by night between the capital of England and her smallest county.

"Least trem-lines this wye," said the dapper one, a mile or two out; and said no more for another fifty. But he drove like a little genius, and the car responded to his cunning hands as a horse that knows its master. She proved to be a sound roadster whose only drawback was a lack of racing speed; the lad had her in prime condition, and the good road ran from under her like silk from a silent loom.

Dollar sat beside him, in the shelter of a wind-screen that glazed and framed a continuous study in nocturnal values. Now the fine shades would be broken by a cluster of lights, soon to scatter and go out like sparks from a pipe; now only by the acetylene lamps that kept the foreground in a blaze between villages. Often a ghostly portent appeared hovering over the road ahead; but this was only the doctor's own anxious face, seen dimly in the screen.

And yet he was not really anxious for those first fifty miles. At the start he was too thankful to be under way, and the road was never empty of exciting and diverting possibilities. But at Bedford they stopped for supper: it was Dollar's sudden idea, the hour being now between eight and nine; but the treasure at the wheel professed his readiness to push on, and it would have been better for Dollar to have taken him at his word. The break in the run also broke up the dreamy lull induced by the keen air and the low smooth hum of the car. In the warm hotel, all holly and Christmas cheer, he came back to real life with a thud, and its most immediate problem beset him all the rest of the way.

Hitherto his one anxiety had been to get at the Home Secretary that night; henceforth he was having the interview over and over again, with a different result every time. He knew, indeed, what he meant to say himself; he had known that before he said good-by to Lady Vera Moyle. But what would the Home Secretary say? Was it conceivable that the blood-stained life-preserver would be enough for him? It would be supported by the sworn statement of a man whom he had learned to trust. But was such utterly indirect evidence in the least likely to upset a decision already taken, if not already communicated to the man in the condemned cell?

The very thought of that hapless wretch was fraught with definite and vivid horror. The crime doctor had once seen the inside of a condemned cell; he could see it still. The door was open, the pitiful occupant at exercise in an adjacent yard. He had looked in. The cell was not so gloomy as it should have been. Texts on the walls, sunlight through the bars, and on the fixed flap of clean worn wood, a big open book.

Dollar recalled every detail with morbid fidelity. He had gone in to look at the book, and found it a bound volume of Good Words, open at a laudable serial by a lady then in vogue with the virtuous. Yet that particular reader had cut a woman's throat over a quarrel about a shilling, and Dollar had seen him striding jauntily up and down the narrow yard, cracking some joke with the attendant warders, a smile on his scrubby lips and in his bold blue eyes. He could see the fellow as he had seen him for ten seconds years ago. Yet his pity for one in the same awful case, for a crime he had not committed, was as nothing to his infinite sorrow and compassion for her who had committed it unawares, comparatively light as the punishment for such a deed was bound to be.

But was it? Not for Lady Vera Moyle, at all events! Either she would go scot-free, or her punishment might well be worse than death. It might easily kill her mother; then the tragedy would be a double tragedy after all, and Lady Vera would still be its author. Supposing she had not discovered her own crime! Croucher would have been no loss to the community; life-long criminals like Croucher were best out of the way, murderers or no murderers. The crime doctor was convinced of that. They were the incurables; extermination was the only thing for them.

"I would shut up my penitentiaries, but enlarge my lethal chamber," he sometimes said, and would be quite serious about it. Yet not for a moment could he have carried his ideas to their logical conclusion in the concrete case of Alfred Croucher and Lady Vera Moyle. He could have let a man of that stamp go technically innocent to the gallows – or he thought he could just then. But he could not have allowed the greatest monster to suffer for Lady Vera's sins – and that he felt in his bones. It was the personal equation as supplied by her that made the thing impossible. Such a load on such a soul! Better any punishment than that!

At Kettering a right-hand turn led up-hill and down-dale into little Rutland, and Dollar ceased glaring at his own ghost in the wind-screen; a healthily immediate anxiety kept him peering at his watch instead. But now they were skirting one of the longest and stumpiest stone walls in feudal England, and all of a sudden it parted in twin turrets joined by triple gates. Over the central arch heraldic monsters pawed the stars; underneath an arc lamp hung resplendent; all three gates were open, and the drive beyond was a perspective of guiding lights. It was evidently a case of Christmas festivities on a suitable scale at Stockersham Hall.

Miles up the drive, a semicircle of motor-cars fringed a country edition of the Horseguards Parade, dominated by an escaped hotel; and the car that really was from London had becoming palpitations in the zone of light. Before a comparatively simple portico a superlatively splendid menial looked askance at the doctor's borrowed furs, but was not unimpressed by a curt inquiry for Mr. Topham Vinson, and consented to inquire in his turn.

"Be quick and quiet, and give him this card," said the doctor, slipping half-a-sovereign underneath it. "I want to see Mr. Vinson – no one else – on urgent business from the Home Office."

Yet the next minute merely brought forth an imposing personage whom the dapper driver did not fail to salute; even Dollar was not positive whether it was the Duke or his butler until summoned indoors with the subtle condescension of the supreme servitor. He went as he was, in hirsute coat and goggles, the butler stalking at arm's length, with an air of personal repudiation happily not lost upon the little London lynx in charge of the car.

That artist would have been an endless joy to eyes not turned within. His silent endurance and efficiency, his phlegmatic zest in an adventure which might have a professional interest for him, but obviously did not engage his curiosity, were qualities which even the tormented Dollar had appreciated at intervals on the road. But now he missed a treat. The little Cockney ran his engine till the first flunkey returned and said things through the noise. Then he looked under his bonnet, as a monkey into its offspring's head. But the climax arrived with sandwiches on a lordly tray, when a glass of beer was sent back, and one of champagne brought instead to this choice specimen of a contemporary type. It was scarcely down before the passenger reappeared, accompanied by another swollen figure in motoring disguise, as well as by my Lord Duke, who saw them off himself, and did look less ducal than the butler after all.

The many lights of Stockersham dwindled and disappeared into the night and one long wave of incandescence flowed back as it had come, by finespun hedge and wirework thicket, through dead villages and sleeping towns, like phosphorescent foam before a vessel's bows. And in the torpedo body of the Invincible Talboys, where Dollar now sat behind his companion of the outward trip, and the Home Secretary of England behind a fat cigar, there was a strained silence through two entire counties, but something like an explosion on the confines of the third.

"Do you still refuse to give her name?" demanded Topham Vinson, exactly as though they had been talking all the time. The stump of his second cigar was so short that angry light and angry mouth were one.

"I must," said Dollar, in a muffled voice, and he pointed to the hunched shoulders within a yard of their noses.

"In that case we have no secrets," replied the Home Secretary with a sneer. "But why must you, Dollar? She seems to have made no reservations with you, yet you would make this enormous one with me."

"It's a secret of the consulting-room, Mr. Vinson; those of the confessional are not more sacred, as you know perfectly well."

"And you expect me to eat my decision on the strength of a hearsay anonymous confession?"

"I do – in the first instance," said Dollar decidedly. "An immediate respite would commit you to nothing, but I don't ask even for that on the unsupported strength of what I told you at Stockersham. You know what you've got in your overcoat pocket. Hand it over to your own analyst; have an exhumation, if you like, and see if the weapon doesn't actually fit the wound; if it doesn't, hang your man."

"I'm much obliged for your valuable advice. But it's got to be one thing or the other, once for all; the poor devil has been on tenter-hooks quite long enough."

"And have you forgotten how nearly you decided in his favor, Mr. Vinson, without all this to turn the scale?"

It was perhaps an ominous feature of their mushroom intimacy that the younger man had not yet been invited to drop the formal prefix in addressing his senior by a short decade. But this would not have been the moment even for a familiarity encouraged in happier circumstances. And yet Dollar dared to pat the great man's arm as he spoke; and the gesture was as the button on the foil; it prevented a shrewd thrust from drawing blood, and if anything it improved Topham Vinson's temper.

"It's no good, my dear fellow!" he exclaimed in friendly settlement of the general question. "I must have the lady's name, unless she's determined to defeat her own ends."

"Do you mean to say that it's her name or Croucher's life?"

Topham Vinson had not meant to say any such thing – in so many words – and it was annoying to have them put into his mouth. But he had decided not to be annoyed any more. It did not pay with this fellow Dollar; at least, it had not paid on that occasion; but anybody might be at a disadvantage after a heavy political strain, a lengthy journey, an excellent dinner, and a development as untimely as it was embarrassing. Mr. Vinson relapsed into silence and an attitude unconsciously modeled on that of the gallant little driver. His body sank deep into the rugs, his head as deep between his shoulders. It was almost Hertfordshire before he spoke again.

"Vera Moyle was one of the Oxford Street division," he remarked at last. "I know all about her movements on the night of battle; otherwise I should want to know about them now. If I thought she was the woman – "

"What's that?" said Dollar lethargically. "I was almost asleep."

The remarks did not gain weight by repetition, but the broken sentence was finished with some effect: "I'd let her drain the cup."

"I don't wonder," rejoined Dollar, sympathetically.

"Yet you would have me risk my political existence for one of her kidney!"

"I don't follow."

"You would reprieve the apparent murderer, and let the real one continue militant here on earth?"

"I believe she has had her fill of militancy."

"Not she!"

"I'll go bail for her if you like. It was an accident She is heart-broken about it – and you don't know her – I do! I'd back her not to run the risk of such another accident!"

"And what if she rounded on me? However such a thing came out, it would be my ruin, Dollar."

"It wouldn't come out through her!"

A certain fervor crept into the doctor's voice. It was obviously unconscious, and Topham Vinson was far too astute a person to engender consciousness and caution by so much as a rallying syllable. But he did hazard a leading question, subtly introduced as nothing of the sort.

"I'm not trying to get at what I want in a roundabout way," he had the nerve to state. "I've given up trying to pump you, Dollar; but – would it make a very great scandal if we had to fix this thing on this particular young lady?"

"I can't answer about scandals," replied the still not unwary doctor. "It would break hearts – probably cause death – make her a double murderer in her own eyes, and God knows what else as a result! And it wouldn't do anybody the least bit of good, because you would still have to give Croucher a suitable term for his authentic offense."

It was three o'clock on Christmas morning when they saw the lights of London from the top of Brockley Hill; a minute later they were on the tram-lines at the foot, and almost immediately in the purlieus of the town.

The trip did not end without a telling taste of Mr. Vinson's very individual quality. In Maida Vale he suddenly announced his intention of having the life-preserver identified in those very small hours by the pawnbroker who had sold it on the morning of the autumn raid. The crime doctor was terrified; for aught he knew the man might be well aware that he had sold it to Lady Vera Moyle. She was notorious enough, in all conscience; his only hope lay in the fact that he himself had not known her by sight before that day. In vain he raised various objections; they were well met by his own previous arguments for the immediate reprieve of Alfred Croucher, and he feared to press them. He knew only the name of the pawnbroker's street, but here Cockney sharpness came in again, and they were pounding on the right shutters by half past three. An up-stairs window flew alight, up went a sash, and out came an angry head.

"My name is Topham Vinson," said one of the swaddled men in a sepulchral voice. "I'm the Home Secretary, but I can't force you to come down and speak to me because of that. I can only make it more or less worth your while."

He was fishing for his sovereign-case as he spoke. In another minute the private door had shut behind him and Doctor Dollar, and an obsequious sack of humanity shuffled before them into a sanctum still redolent of a somewhat highly-seasoned meal.

"I remember 'aving it in the thop," said the unkempt head protruding from the sack. "But I can't thay 'ow it came here – that I can thwear in a court of juthtith, my lord! It'th a narthy, beathly thing, but I thwear it wath here when I took over the bithneth."

"I don't care how or when it came here," said Topham Vinson, counting the sovereigns in the gold case attached to the watch-chain of other memories. "I want to know if you remember selling this life-preserver?"

"Yeth, I do!"

"When?"

"It would be – let me thee – thome time lartht October or November."

"Do you remember who bought it?"

"Yeth – a young lady!"

Dollar breathed again. The man did not know her name; at first he was extremely shaky on the point of personal appearance. But the doctor assisted him by unscrupulously suggesting a number of marked characteristics which Lady Vera Moyle did not happen to possess. The man fell straight into the trap, recalled every imaginary feature, and finally earned big gold by quite convincingly connecting the sale of the life-preserver with the date of the great women's raid. Mr. Vinson looked very stern as he led the way out into the street; and it was he who sharply woke the little chauffeur, who was snoring heartily over his wheel.

"I like that lad," he muttered in the car. "He does nothing by halves. No more do I! Do you mind dropping me first at Portman Square?"

Dollar gave the order, and they slid through the empty streets as though man and car were fresh from the garage. There was not a soul in Portman Square, or a light in any of the houses except the Home Secretary's. They had telephoned through from Stockersham after his departure, and the door opened as he emptied his remaining sovereigns into the chauffeur's hand, before taking Dollar's with no lack of warmth.

"I can't ask you in this time," said Topham Vinson, smiling. "Apart from the hour, I've got to go straight to the telephone, get through to Pentonville, and spoil the Governor's night!"

"Reprieved?" gasped the doctor. It was the one word that would come.

The Home Secretary nodded rather grimly, but was smiling as he shut the door almost on the hand with which John Dollar would have seized his once more. There was a shooting of bolts inside.

Dollar turned slowly round, wondering if at last he could tell the little driver something about the night's enterprise in which he had played so heroic a part. There was no need. The driver had kept eyes and ears wide open – and collapsed once more over the wheel. This time it was not in sleep, but in a dead faint; and the driving goggles were all awry, the driver's hat had tumbled off, the driver's hair had broken bounds.

It was a girl's hair, and the girl was Lady Vera Moyle.

III
A HOPELESS CASE

Alfred Croucher had the refreshing attribute of looking almost as great a ruffian as he really was. His eyes swelled with a vulgar cunning, his mouth was coarse and pitiless; no pedestal of fine raiment could have corrected so low a cast of countenance, or enabled its possessor to pass for a moment as a gentleman or a decent liver. But he had often looked a worse imitation than on the morning of his triumphant exit from the jail, his bullet head diminished in a borrowed cap, his formidable physique tempered by a Burberry all too sober for his taste.

Nor was that all the change in Mr. Croucher at this agreeable crisis of his career. The bulging eyes were glazed with a wonder which quite eclipsed the light of triumph; and they were fixed, in unwilling fascination, upon the tall figure to which the borrowed plumes belonged, whom he had never beheld before that hour, but at whose heels he trotted from the bowels of the prison to the motor-car flashing in the sun beyond the precincts.

"'Alf a mo'!" cried Croucher, making a belated stand instead of jumping in as he was bid. "I didn't rightly catch your name inside, let alone wot you got to do with me an' my affairs. If you come from my s'lic'tor, I should like to know why; if you're on the religious lay, 'ere's your 'at an' coat, and I won't trouble you for a lift."

"My name is Dollar," replied the motorist. "My business is neither legal nor religious, and it need not necessarily be medical, though I do happen to be a doctor. I came at the request of a friend of yours, in that friend's car, to see if there's nothing we can do to make up to you for all you've been through."

"A friend of mine!" ejaculated Croucher, with engaging incredulity.

The doctor smiled, but dryly, as he had spoken. "It's one of the many unknown friends you have gained lately, Mr. Croucher. And I should like to make one more, if only to the extent of a little spin and some breakfast at my house. There is more sympathy for you than you seem to realize, and one or two of us are ready to show it in any way you will permit. But I wouldn't stand here, unless you want a public demonstration first."

Mr. Croucher decided to disregard the suspicions that a kindness always excited in his mind, and took his place in the car without further argument or a second look at the handful of the curious already collecting on the pavement. In a moment he was wondering why he had been such a fool as to hesitate at all. The car slid out of the shadow of the prison into the sunlight of a bright spring morning, over a sparkling Thames, and through the early traffic without let or hitch. And the gentleman in the car knew how to hold his tongue, and to submit himself to sidelong inspection as a gentleman should. But little had Croucher made of him by Welbeck Street, except that he looked too knowing to be a crank, and not half soft enough for his notion of the good Samaritan.

Breakfast removed any lingering misgivings, but might have created them in a more sophisticated mind. It was an English breakfast fit for a foreign potentate; there were soles, kidneys, eggs and bacon, hot rolls, and lashings of such coffee as made Mr. Croucher forget a previous craving for alcohol. He thought it funny that so generous a repast should be served on a black old table without a cloth, and he did not fancy the leathern chairs with the great big nails, more fit for a museum than a private gentleman's house. But a subsequent cigar, in which the private gentleman did not join him, was up to the visitor's highest standard, and the subject of a more articulate appreciation than all that had gone before.

"You shall smoke the box if you care to stay with me," said Doctor Dollar, with a warmer smile.

"Stay with you!" exclaimed Croucher, suffering a return of his worst suspicions. "Why should I stay with you?"

"Because there are worse places, Croucher, and one of them has left you a bit of a wreck."

"A bit of one!" cried the other, in a sudden snarling whine. "They've just about done me in, doctor, if you want to know. Two munfs' 'ard, that I was never ordered, on top of one in the condemned cell for what I never done! That's 'ow they've tret me – somefink crool – wuss than wot you'd treat a dawg wot give you 'ydrophobia. And wot 'ad I done? 'Elped meself when the stuff was under my nose, an' me starvin', an' the jooler's winder ready broke for a cove by them as never 'ad his temptitions. I don't say it was right, mind you; but that much I did do, and not what they said I 'ad an' couldn't prove. They couldn't prove it, because I never done it; they couldn't 'ang me, because they didn't dare; but they made me sweat an' shiver just the same. They took ten years off of me life; they give me such a time as I shan't forget till my dying day. And as if that wasn't thick enough, they give me two munfs' 'ard on their own – no judge or jury for that little lot – an' turn me out wot you calls a bit of a wreck, but I calls a creepin' corpse!"

And the animated remains wiped a forehead wet already with the throes of deglutition, and eyes that were not wet at all, before applying a flickering light to his neglected Upmann.

"What you say is perfectly fair," observed the doctor, in a sadly unimpassioned tone; "but it is also fair to remember that others have been saying it for you for some time past, and that you are free this morning as the result. I confess I feared they might keep you longer; but I evidently had not your grasp of the niceties of your actual offense. As to your mental and bodily sufferings, I can see some of the effects for myself, and those at least I could undo. That was the idea in meeting you, and perhaps I ought to say at once that it was not my idea. It was that of the unknown friend of whom I have already spoken; but I am prepared to carry it out. I run a kind of nursing home, here in my house, and there's a bed ready for you if you care to occupy it."

"A nursing 'ome!" said Croucher, shrinking from a vision of lint and ligatures. "There's nuffunk so much the matter with me that I want to go into an 'ome."

"Nothing that rest could not cure – rest and diet – I agree," said the doctor, with an eye on the empty dishes.

"But won't it cost a lot?" inquired Croucher, thinking of the kidneys especially. "I'm stony-broke, you see," he explained with increased bitterness.

"Our friend insists on paying the bill," said the doctor, grimly.

"And who is our wonderful friend, doctor, when 'e or she's at 'ome?"

Doctor Dollar laughed as he pushed back his chair. "That's the one thing you mustn't ask me; but come up and see the room before you make up your mind against it."

It was at the top and back of the house, less lofty than those into which the Home Secretary had peeped on a previous occasion, but similarly appointed, and more attractive in the morning light and that of a fire already crackling in the grate. By the fireside stood a white wicker chair and a glass table strewn with the newest and lightest of monthly and weekly literature; ash-trays and match-boxes were in comfortable evidence; a bed of vestal purity was turned down in readiness, and a suit of gay pajamas airing with a bathgown on a set of bright brass pipes.

"The bathroom is next door," explained the doctor; "you would have it practically to yourself, but your room would be your castle."

And he pointed out an efficient bolt upon the door.

"You wouldn't lock me in on the other side?" suggested Croucher suspiciously.

"Certainly not; you may have the key; but I should expect you to keep to your own floor, and, of course, to the house. You would not be a prisoner in any sense; but if you went out, Croucher, I'm afraid you would have to stay out. Otherwise my treatment would not have a fair chance; what you require, in the first instance, is absolute rest and no more truck with the outside world than you had where you have been."

"An' good 'olesome grub?" suggested Croucher with another slant of his goggle eyes.

"And plenty of square meals. Perhaps not so square as this morning's, because you won't have any exercise; but that sort of thing."

"A little drop of anythin' to drink, doctor?"

"With your meals, and in moderation, by all means; but don't ask me for nightcaps, and don't try to smuggle anything in."

"I wouldn't do such a thing!" exclaimed Croucher, with virtuous decision. "Doctor, I'm your man, and ready to turn in as soon as ever you like."

And a shabby waistcoat hung unbuttoned at the swoop of a horned thumb.

"One moment," said the doctor. "If you are really coming to me, and coming to stay, I am to telephone to my tailor, who will take some little time getting here."

"Your tailor!" cried Croucher. "Where the dooce does 'e come in?"

"You may well ask!" replied Dollar with involuntary candor. "That friend in need, who was the first to assert your innocence, and to whom you owe more than you will ever know, is anxious to give you a fresh start in life, and an entire new outfit in which to make it."

"Well! I call that 'andsome," declared Alfred Croucher, for once without reserve. "I won't arst 'oo it is no more, but I shall live in 'opes o' findin' out an' sayin' thanky like a man. Not but wot it's right," he added after all, "for them as is rich to 'old out an 'elpin' 'and to them as is pore and 'ave been tret like I've been, through no fault o' their own. But it ain't everybody as sees it like that, an' it makes you think better o' the world when you strike them as does."

"I agree," said the doctor, in a tone entirely lost on his expansive patient.

"I'm griteful to 'im," that worthy went so far as to assert, "and to you too, sir, if it comes to that."

Doctor Dollar took the opportunity of being no less explicit in his turn.

"There's no reason why it should come to that, Croucher, I assure you. I can not too strongly impress on you that anything I do for you is by business arrangement with the friend who takes this extraordinary interest in your career."

In this statement, but especially in its relative clause, there was a note of sheer resentment which recalled other notes and other clauses to the retentive memory of Mr. Croucher. In a flash the lot had fused in his suspicious mind, and so visibly that Dollar was relieved to find himself the object of suspicion.

"You talk as if it went against your grain," said Croucher, with a growl and a show of growler's teeth. "I 'ope you don't think I went an' done it all the time, do yer?"

"I don't follow you, Croucher."

"I mean the big job – the first job – the one I very near swung for!" muttered the fellow, hoarse and hot with evident emotion.

"No; indeed I don't," responded the doctor, in an unexpected voice; and he sighed, as though to think that his sentiments toward his patient should have been so misunderstood.

Such at least was the patient's final interpretation of all that was unsatisfactory in the doctor's manner; and if a doubt still rankled in his mind, it was but the crumpled petal in what was almost literally a bed of roses. Bed and room alike were the most luxurious in which Alfred Croucher had ever lain; after prison they were as the seventh heaven after the most excruciating circle of Dante's Inferno. He stretched his great limbs in peace ineffable, fell asleep dreaming of the fine flash suits for which they had been duly measured, and was never decently awake until the evening.