Elk 01 The Fellowship of the Frog (11 page)

Dick Gordon, who was also something of an organizer, watched the fight from the top of an omnibus, which, laden with policemen, had shadowed the van. He joined Elk after the excitement had subsided.

“Have you arrested anybody of importance?” he asked.

“It’s too early to say,” said Elk. “They look like ordinary tadpoles to me. I guess Litnov is in Wandsworth by now—I sent him in a closed police car before the van left.”

Arrived at Scotland Yard, he paraded the Frogs in two open ranks, watched, at a distance, by the curious crowd which packed both entrances. One by one he examined their wrists, and in every case the tattoo mark was present.

He finished his scrutiny at last, and his captives were herded into an inner yard under an armed guard.

“One man wants to speak to you, sir.”

The last file had disappeared when the officer in charge reported, and Elk exchanged a glance with his chief.

“See him,” said Dick. “We can’t afford to miss any information.”

A policeman brought the Frog to them—a tall man with a week’s growth of beard, poorly dressed and grimy. His battered hat was pulled down over his eyes, his powerful wrists visible beneath the sleeves of a jacket that was made for a smaller man.

“Well, Frog?” said Elk, glowering at him. “What’s your croak?”

“Croak is a good word,” said the man, and at the sound of his voice Elk stared. “You don’t think that old police car of yours is going to reach Wandsworth, do you?”

“Who are you?” asked Elk, peering forward.

“They want Litnov badly,” said the Frog. “They want to settle with him, and if the poor fish thinks it’s brotherly love that makes old man Frog go to all this trouble, he’s reserved a big jar for himself.”

“Broad! What…!”

The American licked his finger and wiped away the frog from his wrist.

“I’ll explain after, Mr. Elk, but take a friend’s advice and call up Wandsworth.”

Elk’s telephone was buzzing furiously when he reached his office.

It was Wandsworth station calling.

“Your police car was held up on the Common, two of your men were wounded, and the prisoner was shot dead,” was the report.

“Thank you!” said Elk bitterly.

Detained under police supervision, Mr. Broad did not seem in any way surprised or disconcerted. Dick Gordon and his assistant reached Wandsworth Common ten minutes after the news came through, and found the wreckage of the police car surrounded by a large crowd, kept at a distance by police.

The dead prisoner had been taken into the prison, together with one of the attackers, who had been captured by a party of warders, returning to the gaol after their luncheon hour.

A brief examination of Litnov told them no more than they knew. He had been shot through the heart, and death must have been instantaneous.

The prisoner, brought from a cell, was a man of thirty and better educated than the average run of Frogs. No weapon had been found upon him and he protested his innocence of any complicity in the plot. According to his story, he was an out-of-work clerk who had been strolling across the Common when the ambush occurred. He had seen the fight, seen the second motorcar which carried the attackers away, and had been arrested whilst running in pursuit of the murderers.

His captors told a different story. The warder responsible for his arrest said that the man was on the point of boarding the car when the officer had thrown his truncheon at him and brought him down. The car was moving at the time, and the remainder of the party had not dared to stop and pick up their comrade. Most damning evidence of all was the tattoo mark on his wrist.

“Frog, you’re a dead man,” said Elk in his most sepulchral voice. “Where did you live when you were alive?” The captive confessed that his home was in North London. “North Londoners don’t come to Wandsworth to walk on the Common,” said Elk.

He had a conference with the chief warder, and, taking the prisoner into the courtyard, Elk spoke his mind.

“What happens to you if you spill the beans, Frog?” he asked.

The man showed his teeth in an unpleasant smile.

“The beans aren’t grown that I can spill,” he said.

Elk looked around. The courtyard was a small, stone-paved quadrangle, surrounded by high, discoloured walls. Against one of these was a little shed with grey sliding doors.

“Come here,” said Elk.

He took the key that the chief warder had given him, unlocked the doors and slid them back. They were looking into a bare, clean apartment with whitewashed walls. Across the ceiling ran two stout oak beams, and between them three stubby steel bars.

The prisoner frowned as Elk walked to a long steel lever near one of the walls.

“Watch, Frog!” he said.

He pulled at the lever, and the centre of the floor divided and fell with a crash, revealing a deep, brick-lined pit.

“See that trap…see that ‘T’ mark in chalk? That’s where a man puts his feet when the hangman straps his legs. The rope hangs from that beam, Frog!”

The man’s face was livid as he shrank back.

“You…can’t…hang—me,” he breathed. “I’ve done nothing!”

“You’ve killed a man,” said Elk as he pulled the doors to and locked them. “You’re the only fellow we’ve got, and you’ll have to suffer for the lot. Are them beans growin’?”

The prisoner raised his shaking hand to his lips.

“I’ll tell you all I know,” he said huskily.

Elk led him back to his cell.

An hour later, Dick was speeding back to his headquarters with considerable information. His first act was to send for Joshua Broad, and the eagle-faced “tramp” came cheerfully.

“Now, Mr. Broad, I’ll have your story,” said Dick, and motioned the other to be seated.

Joshua seated himself slowly.

“There’s nothing much to tell,” he said. “For a week I’ve been getting acquainted with the Frogs. I guessed that it was unlikely that the bulk of them would be unknown to one another, and I just froze on to the first I found. Met him in a Deptford lodging-house. Then I heard there was a hurry-up call for a big job to-day and joined. The Frogs knew that the real attack might be somewhere else, and on the way to Scotland Yard I heard that a party had been told off to watch for Litnov at Wandsworth.”

“Did you see any of the big men?”

Broad shook his head.

“They looked all alike, but undoubtedly there were two or three section leaders in charge. There was never any question of rescuing. They were out to kill. They knew that Litnov had told all that he knew, and he was doomed—they got him, I suppose?”

“Yes—they got him!” said Dick, and then: “What is your interest in the Frogs?”

“Purely adventitious,” replied the other lazily. “I’m a rich man with a whole lot of time on my hands, and I have a big interest in criminology. A few years ago I heard about the Frogs, and they seized on my imagination. Since then I’ve been trailing them.”

His gaze did not waver under Dick Gordon’s scrutiny.

“Now will you tell me,” said Dick quietly, “how you became a rich man? In the latter days of the war you arrived in this country on a cattle boat—with about twenty dollars in your pocket. You told Elk you had arrived by that method, and you spoke the truth. I’ve been almost as much interested in you as you have been in the Frogs,” he said with a half smile, “and I have been putting through a few inquiries. You came to England 1917 and deserted your ship. In May, 1917, you negotiated for the hire of an old tumbledown shack near Eastleigh, Hampshire. There you lived, patching up this crazy cottage and living, so far as I can discover, on the few dollars you brought from the ship. Then suddenly you disappeared, and were next seen in Pans on Christmas Eve of that year. You were conspicuous in rescuing a family that had been buried in a house bombed in an air raid, and your name was taken by the police with the idea of giving you some reward. The French police report is that you were ‘very poorly dressed’—they thought you might be a deserter from the American Army. Yet in February you were staying at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, with plenty of money and an extensive wardrobe—”

Joshua Broad sat through the recital unmoved, except for the ghost of a smile which showed at the corner of his unshaven mouth.

“Surely, Captain, Monte Carlo is the place where a man
would
have money?”

“If he brought it there,” said Dick, and went on: “I’m not suggesting that you are a bad character, or that your money came in any other way than honestly. I merely state the facts that your sudden rise from poverty to riches was, to say the least, remarkable.”

“It surely was,” agreed the other; “and, judging by appearances, my change from riches to poverty is as sudden.”

Dick looked at the dirty-looking tramp who sat on the other side of the table and laughed silently.

“You mean, if it is possible for you to masquerade now, it was possible then, and that, even though you were apparently broke in 5917, you might very well have been a rich man?”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Joshua Broad.

Gordon was serious again.

“I would prefer that you remained your more presentable self,” he said. “I hate telling an American that I may have to deport him, because that sounds as if it is a punishment to return to the United States. But I may find myself with no other alternative.”

Joshua Broad rose.

“That, Captain Gordon, is too broad for a hint and too kindly for a threat—henceforth, Joshua Broad is a respectable member of society. Maybe I’ll take the Prince of Caux’s house and entertain bims and be a modern Harun al Raschid. I’ve got to meet them somehow.”

At the mention of that show house that had cost a king’s ransom to build and a queen’s dowry to furnish, Dick smiled.

“It isn’t necessary you should advertise your respectability that way,” he said. But Broad was not smiling.

“The only thing I ask is that you do not advise the police to withdraw my permits,” he said.

Dick’s eyebrows rose.

“Permits?”

“I carry two guns, and the time is coming when two won’t be enough,” said Mr. Broad. “And it is coming soon.”

There was a concert that night at the Queen’s Hall, and the spacious auditorium was crowded to hear the summer recital of a great violinist. Dick Gordon, in the midst of an evening’s work, remembered that he had reserved a seat. He felt fagged, baffled, inclined to hopelessness. A note from Lord Farmley had come to him, urging instant action to recover the lost commercial treaty. It was such a letter as a man, himself worried, would write without realizing that in so doing he was passing on his panic to those who it was very necessary should not be stampeded into precipitate action. It was a human letter, but not statesmanlike. Dick decided upon the concert.

He had finished dressing when he remembered that it was more than likely that the omniscient Frogs would know of his reservation. He must take the risk, if risk there was. He ‘phoned to the garage where his own machine was housed and hired a closed car, and in ten minutes was one of two thousand people who were listening, entranced, to the master. In the interval he strolled out to the lobby to smoke, and almost, the first person he saw was a Central Office man who avoided his eye. Another detective stood by the stairway leading to the bar, a third was smoking on the steps of the hall outside. But the sensation of the evening was not this evidence of Elk’s foresight. The warning bell had sounded, and Dick was in the act of throwing away his cigarette, when a magnificent limousine drew up before the building, a smart footman alighted to open the door, and there stepped heavily to the pavement—Mr. Ezra Maitland.

Dick heard a gasp behind him, and turned his head to see Elk in the one and only dress suit he had ever possessed.

“Mother of Moses!” he said in an awed voice.

And there was reason for his astonishment. Not only was Mr. Maitland’s equipage worthy of a reigning monarch, with its silver fittings, lacquered body and expensively uniformed servants, but the old man was wearing a dress suit of the latest fashion. His beard had been shortened a few inches, and across the spotless white waistcoat was stretched a heavy gold chain. On his hand many rings blazed and flashed in the light of the street standard. There was a camellia in his perfect lapel, and on his head the glossiest of silk hats. Leaning on a stick of ebony and ivory, he strutted across the pavement.

“Silk socks…patent leather shoes. My God! Look at his
rings
,” hissed Elk.

His profanity was almost excusable. The vision of splendour passed through the doors into the hall.

“He’s gone gay!” said Elk hollowly, and followed like a man in a dream.

From where he was placed, Dick had a good view of the millionaire. He sat throughout the second part of the programme with closed eyes, and so slow was he to start applauding after each item, that Dick was certain that he had been asleep and the clapping had awakened him.

Once he detected the old man stifling a yawn in the very midst of the second movement of Elgar’s violin concerto, which held the audience spellbound by its delicate beauty. With his big hands, now enshrined in white kid gloves, crossed on his stomach, the head of Mr. Maitland nodded and jerked.

When at last the concert was over, he looked round fearfully, as though to make absolutely certain that it was over, then rose and made his way out of the hall, his silk hat held clumsily in his hand.

A manager came in haste to meet him.

“I hope, Mr. Maitland, you enjoyed yourself?” Dick heard him say.

“Very pooty—very pooty,” replied Maitland hoarsely. “That fiddler ought to play a few toons, though—nothing like a hornpipe on a fiddle.”