Elk 01 The Fellowship of the Frog (3 page)

“Wouldn’t he know it was being surrounded before he came in? He knows everything, does the Frog.” He looked down at the other’s hand.

“It won’t hurt,” he said, “and it’s worth it if it does! You’ll never be without a friend again, Harry. If you get into trouble, there’s always the best lawyer to defend you. And you’re the kind of chap we’re looking for—there is plenty of trash. Poor fools that want to get in for the sake of the pickings. But you’ll get big work, and if you do a special job for him, there’s hundreds and hundreds of money for you If you’re hungry or ill, the Frogs will find you out and help you. That’s pretty good, ain’t it?”

Genter said nothing. They were within a dozen yards of the hut now, a strong structure built of stout timber bulks, with one door and a shuttered window.

Motioning Genter to remain where he was, the man called Carlo went forward arid tapped on the door. Genter heard a voice, and then he saw the man step to the window, and the shutter open an inch. There followed a long conversation in an undertone, and then Carlo came back.

“He says he has a job for you that will bring in a thousand—you’re lucky! Do you know Rochmore?”

Genter nodded. He knew that aristocratic suburb.

“There’s a man there that has got to be coshed. He comes home from his club every night by the eleven-five. Walks to his house. It is up a dark road, and a fellow could get him with a club without trouble. Just one smack and he’s finished. It’s not killing, you understand.”

“Why does he want me to do it?” asked the tall tramp curiously.

The explanation was logical.

“All new fellows have to do something to show their pluck and straightness. What do you say?”

Genter had not hesitated. “I’ll do it,” he said.

Carlo returned to the window, and presently he called his companion.

“Stand here and put your left arm through the window,” he ordered.

Genter pulled back the cuff of his soddened coat and thrust his bare arm through the opening. His hand was caught in a firm grip, and immediately he felt something soft and wet pressed against his wrist. A rubber stamp, he noted mentally, and braced himself for the pain which would follow. It came, the rapid pricking of a thousand needles, and he winced. Then the grip on his hand relaxed and he withdrew it, to look wonderingly on the blurred design of ink and blood that the tattooer had left.

“Don’t wipe it,” said a muffled voice from the darkness of the hut. “Now you may come in.”

The shutter closed and was bolted. Then came the snick of a lock turning and the door opened. Genter went into the pitch-black darkness of the hut and heard the door locked by the unseen occupant.

“Your number is K 971,” said the hollow voice. “When you see that in the personal column of The Times, you report here, wherever you are. Take that…”

Genter put out his hand and an envelope was placed in his outstretched palm. It was as though the mysterious Frog could see, even in that blackness.

“There is journey money and a map of the district. If you spend the journey money, or if you fail to come when you are wanted, you will be killed. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“You will find other money—that you can use for your expenses. Now listen. At Rochmore, 17 Park Avenue, lives Hallwell Jones, the banker—”

He must have sensed the start of surprise which the recruit gave.

“You know him?”

“Yes—worked for him years ago,” said Genter. Stealthily, he drew his Browning from his pocket and thumbed down the safety catch.

“Between now and Friday he has to be clubbed. You need not kill him. If you do, it doesn’t matter. I expect his head’s too hard—”

Genter located the man now, and, growing accustomed to the darkness, guessed rather than saw the bulk of him. Suddenly his hand shot out and grasped the arm of the Frog.

“I’ve got a gun and I’ll shoot,” he said between his teeth. “I want you, Frog! I am Inspector Genter from police headquarters, and if you resist I’ll kill you!”

For a second there was a deathly silence. Then Genter felt his pistol wrist seized in a vice-like grip. He struck out with his other hand, but the man stooped and the blow fell in the air, and then with a wrench the pistol was forced out of the big man’s hand and he closed with his prisoner. So doing, his face touched the Frog’s. Was it a mask he was wearing?…The cold mica goggles came against his cheek. That accounted for the muffled voice…

Powerful as he was, he could not break away from the arms which encircled him, and they struggled backward and forward in the darkness.

Suddenly the Frog lifted his foot, and Genter, anticipating the kick, swerved round. There was a crash of broken glass, and then something came to the detective—a faint but pungent odour. He tried to breathe, but found himself strangling, and his arms fell feebly by his side.

The Frog held him for a minute, and then let the limp figure fall with a thud to the ground. In the morning a London police patrol found the body of Inspector Genter lying in the garden of an empty house, and rang for an ambulance. But a man who has been gassed by the concentrated fumes of hydrocyanic acid dies very quickly, and Genter had been dead ten seconds after the Frog smashed the thin glass cylinder which he kept in the hut for such emergencies as these.

There was no detective in the world who looked less like a police officer, and a clever police officer, than Elk. He was tall and thin, and a slight stoop accentuated his weediness. His clothes seemed ill-fitting, and hung upon rather than fitted him. His dark, cadaverous face was set permanently in an expression of the deepest gloom, and few had ever seen him smile. His superiors found him generally a depressing influence, for his outlook on life was prejudiced and apparently embittered by his failure to secure promotion. Faulty education stood in his way here. Ten times he had come up for examination, and ten times he had failed, invariably in the same subject—history.

Dick, who knew him better than his immediate chiefs, guessed that these failures did not worry Mr. Elk as much as people thought. Indeed, he often detected a glum pride in his inability to remember historical dates, and once, in a moment of astonishing confidence, Elk had confessed that promotion would be an embarrassment to a man of his limited educational attainments. For Elk’s everyday English was one of his weaknesses.

“There’s no rest for the wicked, Mr. Gordon,” he sighed as he sat down. “I thought I’d get a holiday after my trip to the U.S.A.”

“I want to know all about Lola Bassano—who are her friends, why she has suddenly attached herself to Raymond Bennett, a clerk in the employ of Maitlands Consolidated. Particularly why she picked him up at the corner of St. James’s Square and drove him to Horsham last night. I saw them by accident as I was coming out of my club, and followed. They sat in her coupe for the greater part of two hours within a hundred yards of Bennett’s house, and they were talking. I know, because I stood in the rain behind the car, listening. If he had been making love to her I should have understood—a little. But they were talking, and talking money. I heard certain sums mentioned. At four o’clock he got out of the car and went into his house, and Lola drove off.”

Elk, puffing, sadly shook his head.

“Lola wouldn’t talk about anything but money anyway,” he said. “She’s like Queen What’s-her-name who died in 1077, or maybe it was 1573. She married King Henry, or it may have been Charles, because she wanted a gold snuff-box he had. I’m not sure whether it was a gold snuff-box or a silver bed. Anyway, she got it an’ was be’eaded in…I don’t remember the date.”

“Thank you for the parallel,” smiled Dick. “But Lola is not after snuff-boxes of gold or silver. Young Bennett hasn’t twopence of his own. There is something particularly interesting to me about this acquaintance.”

Elk smoked thoughtfully, watching the smoke rings rise to the ceiling.

“Bennett’s got a sister,” he said, to the other’s amazement. “Pretty, as far as looks go. Old man Bennett’s a crook of some kind. Doesn’t do any regular work, but goes away for days at a time and comes back looking ill.”

“You know them?”

Elk nodded.

“Old man Bennett attracted me. Somebody reported his movements as suspicious—the local police. They’ve got nothing to do except guard chickens, and naturally they look on anybody who doesn’t keep chickens as bein’ a suspicious character. I kept old Bennett under observation, but I never got to the bottom of his movements. He has run lots of queer stunts. He wrote a play once and put it on. It went dead on the fourth night. Then he took to playing the races on a system. That nearly broke him. Then he started a correspondence school at Horsham—’ How to write good English’—and he lost money. Now he’s taking pictures.”

“How long has he been trying those methods of getting a living?”

“Years. I traced a typewriting agency to him seventeen years ago. They haven’t all been failures. He made money out of some. But I’d give my head to know what his regular game is. Once a month regular, sometimes twice, sometimes more often, he disappears and you can’t find him or trail him. I’ve sounded every crook in town, but they’re as much puzzled as I am. Lew Brady—that’s the big sporting fellow who worked with Lola—he’s interested too. He hates Bennett. Years ago he tackled the old man and tried to bully him into telling him what his lay was, and Bennett handled him rough.”

“The old man?” asked Dick incredulously.

“The old man. He’s as strong as an ox. Don’t forget it. I’ll see Lola. She’s not a bad girl—up to a point. Personally, vamps never appeal to me. Genter’s dead, they tell me? The Frog’s in that too?”

“There’s no doubt about it,” said Dick, rising. “And here, Elk, is one of the men who killed him.”

He walked to the window and looked out, Elk behind him. The man who had stood on the sidewalk had disappeared. “Where?” asked Elk.

“He’s gone now!”

At that moment the window shattered inward, and splinters of glass stung his face. Another second, and Elk was dragged violently to cover.

“From the roof of Onslow Gardens,” said Richard Gordon calmly. “I wondered where the devils would shoot from—that’s twice they’ve tried to get me since daylight.”

A spent cartridge on the flat roof of 94, Onslow Gardens, and the print of feet, were all the evidence that the assassin left behind. No. 94 was empty except for a caretaker, who admitted that he was in the habit of going out every morning to buy provisions for the day. Admission had been gained by the front door; there was a tradesman who saw a man let himself into the house, carrying what looked to be a fishing-rod under his arm, but which undoubtedly was a rifle in a cloth case.

“Very simple,” said Dick; “and, of course, from the Frog’s point of view, effective. The shooter had half-a-dozen ways, of escape, including the fire-escape.”

Elk was silent and glum. Dick Gordon as silent, but cheerful, until the two men were back in his office.

“It was my inquiry at the garage that annoyed them,” he said, “and I’ll give them this credit, that they are rapid! I was returning to my house when the first attempt was made. The most ingenious effort to run me down with a light car—the darned thing even mounted the pavement after me.

“Number?”

“XL.19741,” said Dick, “but fake. There is no such number on the register. The driver was gone before I could stop him.”

Elk scratched his chin, surveying the youthful Public Prosecutor with a dubious eye.

“Almost sounds interesting to me,” he said. “Of course I’ve heard of the Frogs, but I didn’t give much attention. Nowadays secret societies are so common that every time a man shakes hands with me, he looks sort of disappointed if I don’t pull my ear or flap my feet. And gang work on a large scale I’ve always looked upon as something you only hear about in exciting novels by my old friend Shylock—”

“Sherlock—and he didn’t write them,” murmured Dick.

Again Elk fingered his cheek.

“I don’t believe in it, anyway,” he said after thought. “It’s not natural that tramps should do anything systematic. It’s too much like work. I’ll bet there’s nothing in it, only a lot of wild coincidences stickin’ together. I’ll bet that the Frogs are just a silly society without any plan or reason. And I’ll bet that Lola knows all about ‘em,” he added inconsistently.

Elk walked back to “The Yard” by the most circuitous route. With his furled and ancient umbrella hanging on his arm, he had the appearance of an out-of-work clerk. His steel-rimmed spectacles, clipped at a groggy angle, assisted the illusion. Winter and summer he wore a soiled fawn topcoat, which was invariably unbuttoned, and he had worn the same yellowish-brown suit for as long as anybody could remember. The rain came down, not in any great quantities, but incessantly. His hard derby hat glistened with moisture, but he did not put up his umbrella. Nobody had ever seen that article opened.

He walked to Trafalgar Square and then stopped, stood in thought for some time, and retraced his steps. Opposite the Public Prosecutor’s office stood a tall street-seller with a little tray of matches, key-rings, pencils and the odds and ends that such men sell. His wares, for the moment, were covered by a shining oil-cloth. Elk had not noticed him before, and wondered why the man had taken up so unfavourable a stand, for the end of Onslow Gardens, the windiest and least comfortable position in Whitehall, is not a place where the hurrying pedestrian would stop to buy, even on a fine day. The hawker was dressed in a shabby raincoat that reached to his heels; a soft felt hat was pulled down over his eyes, but Elk saw the hawk-like face and stopped.

“Busy?”

“Naw.”

Elk was immediately interested. This man was American, and was trying to disguise his voice so that it appeared Cockney—the most impossible task that any American had ever undertaken, for the whine and intonation of the Cockney are inimitable.