Elk 04 White Face (18 page)

“‘You’re either going to murder or you’re not going to murder,’ said Walter. ‘If you’re going out to rob, a dummy pistol’s as good as any. It’s its persuasive power and its frightening power that are important.’

“He was a man of extraordinary principles, and held very strong views on criminals who used firearms.

“‘It’s the job of a bank official to defend his property, and if you kill him you’re a coward,’ he said. ‘It’s the job of a copper to arrest you, and if you shoot at him you’re a blackguard.’

“But he had no especial affection for the police; no faith in them; and before we went out, he had insisted on my having all my pockets sewn up with strong packthread.

“‘You only want a handkerchief, and you can carry that in your sleeve,’ he said.

“I didn’t see why he took this precaution, until he explained that it was not unusual, if the police caught a prisoner, to slip a gun into his pocket in order to get him a longer sentence. I don’t know whether this was true. It may be one of the yarns that crooks invent and believe in.

“We carried our dummy pistols in a belt under our waistcoats. You’ll find all the particulars of the raid we made upon the branch bank, in a little scrap-book in my bedroom. It was successful. At the appointed minute we entered the bank with white masks on our faces; I held up the cashier and his assistant with my dummy pistol whilst Walter passed round the counter, pulled the safe open—it was already unfastened—and took out three bundles of notes. We were out of the town before the police had wakened up from their midday sleep.

“We came back to Melbourne by a circuitous route, and I’ll swear there was nobody in the town who would have recognised us or who could have identified us in any way That evening the Melbourne papers were full of the robbery, and announced that the Bank of Australasia were offering five thousand pounds for the arrest of the robbers, and this was supplemented by a statement issued on behalf of the Government, through the police, that a free pardon would be granted to any person, other than one of the perpetrators, or any accomplice, who might turn King’s Evidence. Walter was worried about this notice. He knew Donald Bateman better than I.

“‘If he gets the reward as well as the pardon, we’re cooked,’ he said, and when he put through a telephone inquiry to the newspaper office and heard that the reward was to go to anybody, accomplice or not, he went white.

“‘Go and find your wife, Tommy,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to slip out of this town quick! There’s a boat leaving for San Francisco this afternoon. We might both go on that. I’ll see the purser and we can travel in different classes.’

“I went to the hotel, but Lorna was out; the porter told me she had gone with Mr. Bateman to the races, and I returned to Walter and told him.

“‘Maybe he won’t see the offer until after the races are over. That is our only chance,” he said. ‘You’d better leave her a note and some money, tell her you’ll let her know where she can join you.’

“Returning to the hotel, I packed a few things and wrote the note. When I walked out of the elevator into the vestibule, the first person I saw was Big Jock Riley, Chief of the Melbourne Detective Service. I only knew him because he’d been pointed out to me as a man to avoid. I’ll say this about him—he’s dead now, poor chap!—that he was a decent fellow. I knew what was going to happen when he came towards me and took the suit-case out of my hand and gave it to another man.

“‘You’d better pay your bill, Tommy,’ he said. ‘It will save everybody a lot of bother.’

“He went with me to the cashier, and I paid the bill, and then he took me to a taxi and we drove to the police station. The first person I saw when I got in was Walter. They’d taken him soon after I had left, and I learnt that I had been followed to the hotel, and they had only waited until I had collected my kit before they arrested me. That was one of Riley’s peculiarities, that he made all crooks pay their hotel bills before he arrested them. They said that his wife owned three hotels in Melbourne, but that is probably another invention.

“The police found most of the money—not all, for Walter had planted four thousand pounds, and had paid two thousand to Bateman, which Bateman returned when he found he was going to get the five thousand reward.

“Bateman was the informer, of course. He hadn’t gone to the races: he was sitting in another room at the police office when we were brought in, and he came out to identify us. Walter said nothing; he didn’t look at him. I think he must have had a premonition that this had been his last day of freedom, he was so utterly broken and dejected. But I met Bateman’s eyes, and he knew that if ever he and I met, there would be a reckoning. Is that melodramatic? I’m afraid it is.

“There’s very little to tell about the court proceedings. The prosecution was fair, and we were sentenced, Walter to eight years and I to three. I never saw Walter after we left the cells until I was taken to the prison hospital where he was dying. He was too far gone to recognise me. Riley was there; he’d come to see if he could get any information about the four thousand that was cached. He told me, while I was waiting to be taken back, that if I would tell him he would get me a year’s remission of my sentence. I was so utterly miserable that I was on the point of telling him, but I thought better of it, and told him only half the truth.

“There was two thousand planted in one place and two thousand in another. I needn’t tell you where, but one was a respectable bank. I told him the hardest, and I believe he went away and recovered it, because within a week I had my order of release. Riley never broke a promise.

“I hung around Melbourne for a month. I didn’t have to look for Lorna: I knew she’d gone—you get news in prison—and that Bateman had gone with her. That didn’t worry me at all. I was certain that Bateman and I would meet sooner or later. It’s curious how Walter’s warning always stayed with me. I have never owned a pistol in my life, and even in my most revengeful mood I never dreamt of buying one.

“The police left me alone when I came out. Riley may have suspected that there was more money to collect, but probably he wasn’t bothering his head about that. I had had all my English letters sent to a certain address in Melbourne, and when I went to this place I found a dozen old bills, receipts, letters from hospital friends, and a long envelope.

“Sometimes when I was in prison I used to wonder what had been the result of those examinations, but after a time I ceased to take any interest in them. It seemed that whatever honest career I had had was finished. I should be struck off the Medical Register on conviction, and that was the end of my doctoring. I didn’t realise that the Australian authorities knew nothing of ‘Marford’—knew only Tommy Furse—and it was only when I opened the envelope and took out the stiff parchment certificate that the truth dawned on me. In England I was Dr. Marford, a duly and properly qualified medical man. I could begin practice at once. A new and wonderful vista was opened, for I was terribly keen on my work, and had determined to specialise in the diseases of childhood.

“I collected the two thousand, and after a reasonable interval left Australia for England, travelling third class as far as Colombo and transferring to first class from that port. It was a little too sultry in the steerage, and I could afford better accommodation. I stopped off in Egypt; I wanted to break completely all association with Australia, to snap the links of acquaintanceship formed on the ship which might extend to somebody who knew me and my record. In Cairo I presented my credentials to the British Minister, obtained a new passport in place of one which I said I’d lost, and travelled overland through Italy and Switzerland, arriving in London at the end of September.

“My intentions were to buy a small practice, and I had no sooner arrived in London than I called on an agent, who promised me very considerable help, said he had the very thing for me, but who proved to be worse than useless, submitting propositions which I could not afford to buy or country practices which I knew I could not keep. Country people are very conservative where doctors are concerned, and do not trust any medical man until he has grown a white beard or lost his eyesight.”

“I decided to build up a practice of my own in London. I had fifteen hundred pounds left of my money, and by a system of strict economy I knew I could live for five years without a patient—three years if I carried out my big plan, which was to establish a sunlight clinic for babies. I have always had a natural enthusiasm for work amongst children. I love children, and if I had not been interrupted by Donald Bateman and my wife, I should within a few years have opened a great institution, which would have cost twenty thousand pounds to build and ten thousand a year to maintain. That was my ambition.

“It is common knowledge that I opened a surgery in Endley Street and started my practice as cheaply as any practice has ever been founded. From the first I was successful in obtaining patients. They were of the cheapest kind, and required nineteen shillings back for every pound they spent, but it was interesting work, and in a burst of enthusiasm I arranged to open my first clinic at the farther end of Endley Street. I reckoned that by the practice of the strictest economy I could live on the earnings from my practice, and that the money I had so carefully hoarded could keep the clinic running for two years.

“And then one day a thunderbolt fell. A woman walked into my consulting-room. At the time I was at my desk, writing a prescription for a patient who had seen me a few minutes before. I saw her sit down without looking at her; and then, as I asked, ‘What can I do for you?’ I looked up—into the eyes of Lorna Marford, my wife!

“I had forgotten her. That is no exaggeration. Literally she had passed out of my life and out of my memory. I had half forgotten Donald Bateman. For a moment I did not recognise her, and then she smiled, and my heart felt like a piece of lead.

“‘What do you want?’ I asked.

“She was very poorly dressed and shabby-looking, and was lodging at that time with a Mrs. Albert. She was, she told me, three or four weeks behind with her rent.

“‘I want money,’ she said coolly.

“‘Isn’t there a man called Bateman?’ I asked.

“She laughed at this and made a little gesture. I knew from that that she was still fond of him, and that he’d left her.

“‘Bateman’s gone. He and I have not seen each other for over two years,’ she said.

“She told me the kind of life she had been living, how she had been forced into a slum by sheer poverty. I felt sorry for her—I find it very easy to be sorry for women. But I remembered also that she had taken her share of the blood money, and had probably helped in our betrayal. There were a lot of little happenings that I remembered afterwards in prison which gave colour to this view. And I remembered Walter, dying in a prison hospital, so friendless, so lonely, so heartbroken.

“‘You’ll get no money from me,” I said. “You had your share of the reward, I suppose?”

“‘I had a bit of it,’ she answered coolly. Not so much as I deserved. The police would never have found your white masks but for me.’

“Her coolness took my breath away. I got up from the table and opened the door.

“‘You can go,’ I said, but she did not stir.

“‘I want a hundred pounds,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of living in poverty.’

“I could only look at her; I was speechless.

“‘Why should I give you a hundred pounds, supposing I had it?’

“‘Because,’ she answered slowly, ‘if you don’t give me a hundred pounds I shall tell somebody that you are an ex-convict. And then where will you be—doctor?’

“From that day onwards she blackmailed me. Within three months I had only half the money that I had put aside for the clinic, and I had committed myself to twice as much: ordered lamps, beds, structural alterations, and had practically placed myself under an obligation to buy the premises in five years’ time.

“If I could have got her to leave the neighbourhood I might have had some respite; but though I was giving her a big sum every week, and she could have lived in comfort in the West End, she insisted, when she changed her lodgings, upon taking rooms locally, and upon these she spent a sum equivalent to my yearly income.

“Why she refused to live somewhere else I did not know. It puzzled me, until one day there flashed upon me the solution. She believed that sooner or later I should meet Donald Bateman—she wanted to be on hand to watch every movement of mine, so that she might save her lover. She may have had a premonition. That phenomenon is outside the ambit of my knowledge. I am a physiologist; mental and psychic phenomena I know nothing about.

“It seemed there was not one chance in a million that I should ever see Donald Bateman again. Suppose he came to London, what likelihood was there that he should come to such an out-of-the—way spot as Tidal Basin? And yet I had met with some odd coincidences. The very first doctor I met, when I came to the place, was Dr. Rudd—and I had heard Bateman speak of Rudd. Rudd had been prison doctor at a county jail where Bateman had served two years’ hard labour! I remembered the name and the description the moment I saw him. It is quite possible that he also saw the doctor in London, but of that I know nothing. He hated Rudd, who had been the cause of his getting extra punishment for malingering whilst he was in prison, and he often described him—unflatteringly, but, I must say, faithfully.

“The demands from the clinic increased with the growth of my ambition. I was desperately hard pressed for money. On the one hand, by the legitimate expansion of my experiment, on the other by the increasing demands from Lorna.