Chapter Twenty-Three FURTHER EVENTS IN THE CELLAR
‘WELL, Father,’ Nella greeted her astounded parent. ‘You should make sure that you have got hold of the right person before you use all that terrible muscular force of yours. I do believe you have broken my shoulder bone.’ She rubbed her shoulder with a comical expression of pain, and then stood up before the two men. The skirt of her dark grey dress was torn and dirty, and the usually trim Nella looked as though she had been shot down a canvas fire-escape. Mechanically she smoothed her frock, and gave a straightening touch to her hair.
‘Good evening, Miss Racksole,’ said Felix Babylon, bowing formally. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure.’ Felix’s drawing-room manners never deserted him upon any occasion whatever.
‘May I inquire what you are doing in my wine cellar, Nella Racksole?’ said the millionaire a little stiffly He was certainly somewhat annoyed at having mistaken his daughter for a criminal; moreover, he hated to be surprised, and upon this occasion he had been surprised beyond any ordinary surprise; lastly, he was not at all pleased that Nella should be observed in that strange predicament by a stranger.
‘I will tell you,’ said Nella. ‘I had been reading rather late in my room—the night was so close. I heard Big Ben strike half-past twelve, and then I put the book down, and went out on to the balcony of my window for a little fresh air before going to bed. I leaned over the balcony very quietly—you will remember that I am on the third floor now—and looked down below into the little sunk yard which separates the wall of the hotel from Salisbury Lane. I was rather astonished to see a figure creeping across the yard. I knew there was no entrance into the hotel from that yard, and besides, it is fifteen or twenty feet below the level of the street. So I watched. The figure went close up against the wall, and disappeared from my view. I leaned over the balcony as far as I dared, but I couldn’t see him. I could hear him, however.’
‘What could you hear?’ questioned Racksole sharply.
‘It sounded like a sawing noise,’ said Nella; ‘and it went on for quite a long time—nearly a quarter of an hour, I should think—a rasping sort of noise.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you come and warn me or someone else in the hotel?’ asked Racksole.
‘Oh, I don’t know, Dad,’ she replied sweetly. ‘I had got interested in it, and I thought I would see it out myself. Well, as I was saying, Mr. Babylon,’ she continued, addressing her remarks to Felix, with a dazzling smile, ‘that noise went on for quite a long time. At last it stopped, and the figure reappeared from under the wall, crossed the yard, climbed up the opposite wall by some means or other, and so over the railings into Salisbury Lane. I felt rather relieved then, because I knew he hadn’t actually broken into the hotel. He walked down Salisbury Lane very slowly. A policeman was just coming up. “Goodnight, officer,” I heard him say to the policeman, and he asked him for a match. The policeman supplied the match, and the other man lighted a cigarette, and proceeded further down the lane. By cricking your neck from my window, Mr Babylon, you can get a glimpse of the Embankment and the river. I saw the man cross the Embankment, and lean over the river wall, where he seemed to be talking to some one. He then walked along the Embankment to Westminster and that was the last I saw of him. I waited a minute or two for him to come back, but he didn’t come back, and so I thought it was about time I began to make inquiries into the affair. I went downstairs instantly, and out of the hotel, through the quadrangle, into Salisbury Lane, and I looked over those railings. There was a ladder on the other side, by which it was perfectly easy—once you had got over the railings—to climb down into the yard. I was horribly afraid lest someone might walk up Salisbury Lane and catch me in the act of negotiating those railings, but no one did, and I surmounted them, with no worse damage than a torn skirt. I crossed the yard on tiptoe, and I found that in the wall, close to the ground and almost exactly under my window, there was an iron grating, about one foot by fourteen inches. I suspected, as there was no other ironwork near, that the mysterious visitor must have been sawing at this grating for private purposes of his own. I gave it a good shake, and I was not at all surprised that a good part of it came off in my hand, leaving just enough room for a person to creep through. I decided that I would creep through, and now wish I hadn’t. I don’t know, Mr Babylon, whether you have ever tried to creep through a small hole with a skirt on. Have you?’
‘I have not had that pleasure,’ said little Felix, bowing again, and absently taking up a bottle which lay to his hand.
‘Well, you are fortunate,’ the imperturbable Nella resumed. ‘For quite three minutes I thought I should perish in that grating, Dad, with my shoulder inside and the rest of me outside. However, at last, by the most amazing and agonizing efforts, I pulled myself through and fell into this extraordinary cellar more dead than alive. Then I wondered what I should do next. Should I wait for the mysterious visitor to return, and stab him with my pocket scissors if he tried to enter, or should I raise an alarm? First of all I replaced the broken grating, then I struck a match, and I saw that I had got landed in a wilderness of bottles. The match went out, and I hadn’t another one. So I sat down in the corner to think. I had just decided to wait and see if the visitor returned, when I heard footsteps, and then voices; and then you came in. I must say I was rather taken aback, especially as I recognized the voice of Mr Babylon. You see, I didn’t want to frighten you.
If I had bobbed up from behind the bottles and said “Booh!” you would have had a serious shock. I wanted to think of a way of breaking my presence gently to you. But you saved me the trouble, Dad. Was I really breathing so loudly that you could hear me?’
The girl ended her strange recital, and there was a moment’s silence in the cellar. Racksole merely nodded an affirmative to her concluding question.
‘Well, Nell, my girl,’ said the millionaire at length, ‘we are much obliged for your gymnastic efforts—very much obliged. But now, I think you had better go off to bed. There is going to be some serious trouble here, I’ll lay my last dollar on that?’
‘But if there is to be a burglary I should so like to see it, Dad,’ Nella pleaded. ‘I’ve never seen a burglar caught red-handed.’
‘This isn’t a burglary, my dear. I calculate it’s something far worse than a burglary.’
‘What?’ she cried. ‘Murder? Arson? Dynamite plot? How perfectly splendid!’
‘Mr Babylon informs me that Jules is in London,’ said Racksole quietly.
‘Jules!’ she exclaimed under her breath, and her tone changed instantly to the utmost seriousness. ‘Switch off the light, quick!’ Springing to the switch, she put the cellar in darkness.
‘What’s that for?’ said her father.
‘If he comes back he would see the light, and be frightened away,’ said Nella. ‘That wouldn’t do at all.’
‘It wouldn’t, Miss Racksole,’ said Babylon, and there was in his voice a note of admiration for the girl’s sagacity which Racksole heard with high paternal pride.
‘Listen, Nella,’ said the latter, drawing his daughter to him in the profound gloom of the cellar. ‘We fancy that Jules may be trying to tamper with a certain bottle of wine—a bottle which might possibly be drunk by Prince Eugen. Now do you think that the man you saw might have been Jules?’
‘I hadn’t previously thought of him as being Jules, but immediately you mentioned the name I somehow knew that he was. Yes, I am sure it was Jules.’
‘Well, just hear what I have to say. There is no time to lose. If he is coming at all he will be here very soon—and you can help.’ Racksole explained what he thought Jules’ tactics might be. He proposed that if the man returned he should not be interfered with, but merely watched from the other side of the glass door.
‘You want, as it were, to catch Mr Jules alive?’ said Babylon, who seemed rather taken aback at this novel method of dealing with criminals. ‘Surely,’ he added, ‘it would be simpler and easier to inform the police of your suspicion, and to leave everything to them.’
‘My dear fellow,’ said Racksole, ‘we have already gone much too far without the police to make it advisable for us to call them in at this somewhat advanced stage of the proceedings. Besides, if you must know it, I have a particular desire to capture the scoundrel myself. I will leave you and Nella here, since Nella insists on seeing everything, and I will arrange things so that once he has entered the cellar Jules will not get out of it again—at any rate through the grating. You had better place yourselves on the other side of the glass door, in the big cellar; you will be in a position to observe from there, I will skip off at once. All you have to do is to take note of what the fellow does. If he has any accomplices within the hotel we shall probably be able by that means to discover who the accomplice is.’
Lighting a match and shading it with his hands, Racksole showed them both out of the little cellar. ‘Now if you lock this glass door on the outside he can’t escape this way: the panes of glass are too small, and the woodwork too stout. So, if he comes into the trap, you two will have the pleasure of actually seeing him frantically writhe therein, without any personal danger; but perhaps you’d better not show yourselves.’
In another moment Felix Babylon and Nella were left to themselves in the darkness of the cellar, listening to the receding footfalls of Theodore Racksole. But the sound of these footfalls had not died away before another sound greeted their ears—the grating of the small cellar was being removed.
‘I hope your father will be in time,’ whispered Felix
‘Hush!’ the girl warned him, and they stooped side by side in tense silence.
A man cautiously but very neatly wormed his body through the aperture of the grating. The watchers could only see his form indistinctly in the darkness.
Then, being fairly within the cellar, he walked without the least hesitation to the electric switch and turned on the light. It was unmistakably Jules, and he knew the geography of the cellar very well. Babylon could with difficulty repress a start as he saw this bold and unscrupulous ex-waiter moving with such an air of assurance and determination about the precious cellar. Jules went directly to a small bin which was numbered 17, and took there from the topmost bottle.
‘The Romanee-Conti—Prince Eugen’s wine!’ Babylon exclaimed under his breath.
Jules neatly and quickly removed the seal with an instrument which he had clearly brought for the purpose. He then took a little flat box from his pocket, which seemed to contain a sort of black salve. Rubbing his finger in this, he smeared the top of the neck of the bottle with it, just where the cork came against the glass. In another instant he had deftly replaced the seal and restored the bottle to its position. He then turned off the light, and made for the aperture. When he was half-way through Nella exclaimed, ‘He will escape, after all. Dad has not had time—we must stop him.’
But Babylon, that embodiment of caution, forcibly, but nevertheless politely, restrained this Yankee girl, whom he deemed so rash and imprudent, and before she could free herself the lithe form of Jules had disappeared.
Chapter Twenty-Four THE BOTTLE OF WINE
AS regards Theodore Racksole, who was to have caught his man from the outside of the cellar, he made his way as rapidly as possible from the wine-cellars, up to the ground floor, out of the hotel by the quadrangle, through the quadrangle, and out into the top of Salisbury Lane. Now, owing to the vastness of the structure of the Grand Babylon, the mere distance thus to be traversed amounted to a little short of a quarter of a mile, and, as it included a number of stairs, about two dozen turnings, and several passages which at that time of night were in darkness more or less complete, Racksole could not have been expected to accomplish the journey in less than five minutes. As a matter of fact, six minutes had elapsed before he reached the top of Salisbury Lane, because he had been delayed nearly a minute by some questions addressed to him by a muddled and whisky-laden guest who had got lost in the corridors. As everybody knows, there is a sharp short bend in Salisbury Lane near the top. Racksole ran round this at good racing speed, but he was unfortunate enough to run straight up against the very policeman who had not long before so courteously supplied Jules with a match. The policeman seemed to be scarcely in so pliant a mood just then.
‘Hullo!’ he said, his naturally suspicious nature being doubtless aroused by the spectacle of a bareheaded man in evening dress running violently down the lane. ‘What’s this? Where are you for in such a hurry?’ and he forcibly detained Theodore Racksole for a moment and scrutinized his face.
‘Now, officer,’ said Racksole quietly, ‘none of your larks, if you please.
I’ve no time to lose.’
‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ the policeman remarked, though hesitatingly and not quite with good temper, and Racksole was allowed to proceed on his way. The millionaire’s scheme for trapping Jules was to get down into the little sunk yard by means of the ladder, and then to secrete himself behind some convenient abutment of brickwork until Mr Tom Jackson should have got into the cellar. He therefore nimbly surmounted the railings—the railings of his own hotel—and was gingerly descending the ladder, when lo! a rough hand seized him by the coat-collar and with a ferocious jerk urged him backwards. The fact was, Theodore Racksole had counted without the policeman. That guardian of the peace, mistrusting Racksole’s manner, quietly followed him down the lane. The sight of the millionaire climbing the railings had put him on his mettle, and the result was the ignominious capture of Racksole. In vain Theodore expostulated, explained, anathematized. Only one thing would satisfy the stolid policeman—namely, that Racksole should return with him to the hotel and there establish his identity. If Racksole then proved to be Racksole, owner of the Grand Babylon, well and good—the policeman promised to apologize. So Theodore had no alternative but to accept the suggestion. To prove his identity was, of course, the work of only a few minutes, after which Racksole, annoyed, but cool as ever, returned to his railings, while the policeman went off to another part of his beat, where he would be likely to meet a comrade and have a chat.
In the meantime, our friend Jules, sublimely unconscious of the altercation going on outside, and of the special risk which he ran, was of course actually in the cellar, which he had reached before Racksole got to the railings for the first time. It was, indeed, a happy chance for Jules that his exit from the cellar coincided with the period during which Racksole was absent from the railings. As Racksole came down the lane for the second time, he saw a figure walking about fifty yards in front of him towards the Embankment. Instantly he divined that it was Jules, and that the policeman had thrown him just too late. He ran, and Jules, hearing the noise of pursuit, ran also. The ex-waiter was fleet; he made direct for a certain spot in the Embankment wall, and, to the intense astonishment of Racksole, jumped clean over the wall, as it seemed, into the river. ‘Is he so desperate as to commit suicide?’ Racksole exclaimed as he ran, but a second later the puff and snort of a steam launch told him that Jules was not quite driven to suicide. As the millionaire crossed the Embankment roadway he saw the funnel of the launch move out from under the river-wall. It swerved into midstream and headed towards London Bridge. There was a silent mist over the river. Racksole was helpless....
Although Racksole had now been twice worsted in a contest of wits within the precincts of the Grand Babylon, once by Rocco and once by Jules, he could not fairly blame himself for the present miscarriage of his plans—a miscarriage due to the meddlesomeness of an extraneous person, combined with pure ill-fortune. He did not, therefore, permit the accident to interfere with his sleep that night.
On the following day he sought out Prince Aribert, between whom and himself there now existed a feeling of unmistakable, frank friendship, and disclosed to him the happenings of the previous night, and particularly the tampering with the bottle of Romanée-Conti.
‘I believe you dined with Prince Eugen last night?’
‘I did. And curiously enough we had a bottle of Romanée-Conti, an admirable wine, of which Eugen is passionately fond.’
‘And you will dine with him to-night?’
‘Most probably. To-day will, I fear, be our last day here. Eugen wishes to return to Posen early to-morrow.’
‘Has it struck you, Prince,’ said Racksole, ‘that if Jules had succeeded in poisoning your nephew, he would probably have succeeded also in poisoning you?’
‘I had not thought of it,’ laughed Aribert, ‘but it would seem so. It appears that so long as he brings down his particular quarry, Jules is careless of anything else that may be accidentally involved in the destruction. However, we need have no fear on that score now. You know the bottle, and you can destroy it at once.’
‘But I do not propose to destroy it,’ said Racksole calmly. ‘If Prince Eugen asks for Romanée-Conti to be served to-night, as he probably will, I propose that that precise bottle shall be served to him—and to you.’
‘Then you would poison us in spite of ourselves?’
‘Scarcely,’ Racksole smiled. ‘My notion is to discover the accomplices within the hotel. I have already inquired as to the wine-clerk, Hubbard. Now does it not occur to you as extraordinary that on this particular day Mr Hubbard should be ill in bed? Hubbard, I am informed, is suffering from an attack of stomach poisoning, which has supervened during the night. He says that he does not know what can have caused it. His place in the wine cellars will be taken to-day by his assistant, a mere youth, but to all appearances a fairly smart youth. I need not say that we shall keep an eye on that youth.’
‘One moment,’ Prince Aribert interrupted. ‘I do not quite understand how you think the poisoning was to have been effected.’
‘The bottle is now under examination by an expert, who has instructions to remove as little as possible of the stuff which Jules put on the rim of the mouth of it. It will be secretly replaced in its bin during the day. My idea is that by the mere action of pouring out the wine takes up some of the poison, which I deem to be very strong, and thus becomes fatal as it enters the glass.’
‘But surely the servant in attendance would wipe the mouth of the bottle?’
‘Very carelessly, perhaps. And moreover he would be extremely unlikely to wipe off all the stuff; some of it has been ingeniously placed just on the inside edge of the rim. Besides, suppose he forgot to wipe the bottle?’
‘Prince Eugen is always served at dinner by Hans. It is an honour which the faithful old fellow reserves for himself.’
‘But suppose Hans—’ Racksole stopped.
‘Hans an accomplice! My dear Racksole, the suggestion is wildly impossible.’
That night Prince Aribert dined with his august nephew in the superb dining-room of the Royal apartments. Hans served, the dishes being brought to the door by other servants. Aribert found his nephew despondent and taciturn. On the previous day, when, after the futile interview with Sampson Levi, Prince Eugen had despairingly threatened to commit suicide, in such a manner as to make it ‘look like an accident’, Aribert had compelled him to give his word of honour not to do so.
‘What wine will your Royal Highness take?’ asked old Hans in his soothing tones, when the soup was served.
‘Sherry,’ was Prince Eugen’s curt order.
‘And Romanée-Conti afterwards?’ said Hans. Aribert looked up quickly.
‘No, not to-night. I’ll try Sillery to-night,’ said Prince Eugen.
‘I think I’ll have Romanée-Conti, Hans, after all,’ he said. ‘It suits me better than champagne.’
The famous and unsurpassable Burgundy was served with the roast. Old Hans brought it tenderly in its wicker cradle, inserted the corkscrew with mathematical precision, and drew the cork, which he offered for his master’s inspection. Eugen nodded, and told him to put it down. Aribert watched with intense interest. He could not for an instant believe that Hans was not the very soul of fidelity, and yet, despite himself, Racksole’s words had caused him a certain uneasiness. At that moment Prince Eugen murmured across the table:
‘Aribert, I withdraw my promise. Observe that, I withdraw it.’ Aribert shook his head emphatically, without removing his gaze from Hans. The white-haired servant perfunctorily dusted his napkin round the neck of the bottle of Romanée-Conti, and poured out a glass. Aribert trembled from head to foot.
Eugen took up the glass and held it to the light.
‘Don’t drink it,’ said Aribert very quietly. ‘It is poisoned.’
‘Poisoned!’ exclaimed Prince Eugen.
‘Poisoned, sire!’ exclaimed old Hans, with an air of profound amazement and concern, and he seized the glass. ‘Impossible, sire. I myself opened the bottle. No one else has touched it, and the cork was perfect.’
‘I tell you it is poisoned,’ Aribert repeated.
‘Your Highness will pardon an old man,’ said Hans, ‘but to say that this wine is poison is to say that I am a murderer. I will prove to you that it is not poisoned. I will drink it.’ And he raised the glass to his trembling lips. In that moment Aribert saw that old Hans, at any rate, was not an accomplice of Jules. Springing up from his seat, he knocked the glass from the aged servitor’s hands, and the fragments of it fell with a light tinkling crash partly on the table and partly on the floor. The Prince and the servant gazed at one another in a distressing and terrible silence.
There was a slight noise, and Aribert looked aside. He saw that Eugen’s body had slipped forward limply over the left arm of his chair; the Prince’s arms hung straight and lifeless; his eyes were closed; he was unconscious.
‘Hans!’ murmured Aribert. ‘Hans! What is this?’
Chapter Twenty-Five THE STEAM LAUNCH
MR TOM JACKSON’s notion of making good his escape from the hotel by means of a steam launch was an excellent one, so far as it went, but Theodore Racksole, for his part, did not consider that it went quite far enough.
Theodore Racksole opined, with peculiar glee, that he now had a tangible and definite clue for the catching of the Grand Babylon’s ex-waiter. He knew nothing of the Port of London, but he happened to know a good deal of the far more complicated, though somewhat smaller, Port of New York, and he was sure there ought to be no extraordinary difficulty in getting hold of Jules’ steam launch. To those who are not thoroughly familiar with it the River Thames and its docks, from London Bridge to Gravesend, seems a vast and uncharted wilderness of craft—a wilderness in which it would be perfectly easy to hide even a three-master successfully. To such people the idea of looking for a steam launch on the river would be about equivalent to the idea of looking for a needle in a bundle of hay. But the fact is, there are hundreds of men between St Katherine’s Wharf and Blackwall who literally know the Thames as the suburban householder knows his back-garden—who can recognize thousands of ships and put a name to them at a distance of half a mile, who are informed as to every movement of vessels on the great stream, who know all the captains, all the engineers, all the lightermen, all the pilots, all the licensed watermen, and all the unlicensed scoundrels from the Tower to Gravesend, and a lot further. By these experts of the Thames the slightest unusual event on the water is noticed and discussed—a wherry cannot change hands but they will guess shrewdly upon the price paid and the intentions of the new owner with regard to it. They have a habit of watching the river for the mere interest of the sight, and they talk about everything like housewives gathered of an evening round the cottage door. If the first mate of a Castle Liner gets the sack they will be able to tell you what he said to the captain, what the old man said to him, and what both said to the Board, and having finished off that affair they will cheerfully turn to discussing whether Bill Stevens sank his barge outside the West Indian No.2 by accident or on purpose.
Theodore Racksole had no satisfactory means of identifying the steam launch which carried away Mr Tom Jackson. The sky had clouded over soon after midnight, and there was also a slight mist, and he had only been able to make out that it was a low craft, about sixty feet long, probably painted black. He had personally kept a watch all through the night on vessels going upstream, and during the next morning he had a man to take his place who warned him whenever a steam launch went towards Westminster. At noon, after his conversation with Prince Aribert, he went down the river in a hired row-boat as far as the Custom House, and poked about everywhere, in search of any vessel which could by any possibility be the one he was in search of.
But he found nothing. He was, therefore, tolerably sure that the mysterious launch lay somewhere below the Custom House. At the Custom House stairs, he landed, and asked for a very high official—an official inferior only to a Commissioner—whom he had entertained once in New York, and who had met him in London on business at Lloyd’s. In the large but dingy office of this great man a long conversation took place—a conversation in which Racksole had to exercise a certain amount of persuasive power, and which ultimately ended in the high official ringing his bell.
‘Desire Mr Hazell—room No. 332—to speak to me,’ said the official to the boy who answered the summons, and then, turning to Racksole: ‘I need hardly repeat, my dear Mr Racksole, that this is strictly unofficial.’
‘Agreed, of course,’ said Racksole.
Mr Hazell entered. He was a young man of about thirty, dressed in blue serge, with a pale, keen face, a brown moustache and a rather handsome brown beard.
‘Mr Hazell,’ said the high official, ‘let me introduce you to Mr Theodore Racksole—you will doubtless be familiar with his name. Mr Hazell,’ he went on to Racksole, ‘is one of our outdoor staff—what we call an examining officer. Just now he is doing night duty. He has a boat on the river and a couple of men, and the right to board and examine any craft whatever. What Mr Hazell and his crew don’t know about the Thames between here and Gravesend isn’t knowledge.’
‘Glad to meet you, sir,’ said Racksole simply, and they shook hands.
Racksole observed with satisfaction that Mr Hazell was entirely at his ease.
‘Now, Hazell,’ the high official continued, ‘Mr Racksole wants you to help in a little private expedition on the river to-night. I will give you a night’s leave. I sent for you partly because I thought you would enjoy the affair and partly because I think I can rely on you to regard it as entirely unofficial and not to talk about it. You understand? I dare say you will have no cause to regret having obliged Mr Racksole.’
‘I think I grasp the situation,’ said Hazell, with a slight smile.
‘And, by the way,’ added the high official, ‘although the business is unofficial, it might be well if you wore your official overcoat. See?’
‘Decidedly,’ said Hazell; ‘I should have done so in any case.’
‘And now, Mr Hazell,’ said Racksole, ‘will you do me the pleasure of lunching with me? If you agree, I should like to lunch at the place you usually frequent.’
So it came to pass that Theodore Racksole and George Hazell, outdoor clerk in the Customs, lunched together at ‘Thomas’s Chop-House’, in the city of London, upon mutton-chops and coffee. The millionaire soon discovered that he had got hold of a keen-witted man and a person of much insight.
‘Tell me,’ said Hazell, when they had reached the cigarette stage, ‘are the magazine writers anything like correct?’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Racksole, mystified.
‘Well, you’re a millionaire—“one of the best”, I believe. One often sees articles on and interviews with millionaires, which describe their private railroad cars, their steam yachts on the Hudson, their marble stables, and so on, and so on. Do you happen to have those things?’
‘I have a private car on the New York Central, and I have a two thousand ton schooner-yacht—though it isn’t on the Hudson. It happens just now to be on East River. And I am bound to admit that the stables of my uptown place are fitted with marble.’ Racksole laughed.
‘Ah!’ said Hazell. ‘Now I can believe that I am lunching with a millionaire.
It’s strange how facts like those—unimportant in themselves—appeal to the imagination. You seem to me a real millionaire now. You’ve given me some personal information; I’ll give you some in return. I earn three hundred a year, and perhaps sixty pounds a year extra for overtime. I live by myself in two rooms in Muscovy Court. I’ve as much money as I need, and I always do exactly what I like outside office. As regards the office, I do as little work as I can, on principle—it’s a fight between us and the Commissioners who shall get the best. They try to do us down, and we try to do them down—it’s pretty even on the whole. All’s fair in war, you know, and there ain’t no ten commandments in a Government office.’
Racksole laughed. ‘Can you get off this afternoon?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ said Hazell; ‘I’ll get one of my pals to sign on for me, and then I shall be free.’
‘Well,’ said Racksole, ‘I should like you to come down with me to the Grand Babylon. Then we can talk over my little affair at length. And may we go on your boat? I want to meet your crew.’
‘That will be all right,’ Hazell remarked. ‘My two men are the idlest, most soul-less chaps you ever saw. They eat too much, and they have an enormous appetite for beer; but they know the river, and they know their business, and they will do anything within the fair game if they are paid for it, and aren’t asked to hurry.’
That night, just after dark, Theodore Racksole embarked with his new friend George Hazell in one of the black-painted Customs wherries, manned by a crew of two men—both the later freemen of the river, a distinction which carries with it certain privileges unfamiliar to the mere landsman. It was a cloudy and oppressive evening, not a star showing to illumine the slow tide, now just past its flood. The vast forms of steamers at anchor—chiefly those of the General Steam Navigation and the Aberdeen Line—heaved themselves high out of the water, straining sluggishly at their mooring buoys. On either side the naked walls of warehouses rose like grey precipices from the stream, holding forth quaint arms of steam-cranes. To the west the Tower Bridge spanned the river with its formidable arch, and above that its suspended footpath—a hundred and fifty feet from earth.
Down towards the east and the Pool of London a forest of funnels and masts was dimly outlined against the sinister sky. Huge barges, each steered by a single man at the end of a pair of giant oars, lumbered and swirled down-stream at all angles. Occasionally a tug snorted busily past, flashing its red and green signals and dragging an unwieldy tail of barges in its wake. Then a Margate passenger steamer, its electric lights gleaming from every porthole, swerved round to anchor, with its load of two thousand fatigued excursionists. Over everything brooded an air of mystery—a spirit and feeling of strangeness, remoteness, and the inexplicable. As the broad flat little boat bobbed its way under the shadow of enormous hulks, beneath stretched hawsers, and past buoys covered with green slime, Racksole could scarcely believe that he was in the very heart of London—the most prosaic city in the world. He had a queer idea that almost anything might happen in this seeming waste of waters at this weird hour of ten o’clock. It appeared incredible to him that only a mile or two away people were sitting in theatres applauding farces, and that at Cannon Street Station, a few yards off, other people were calmly taking the train to various highly respectable suburbs whose names he was gradually learning. He had the uplifting sensation of being in another world which comes to us sometimes amid surroundings violently different from our usual surroundings. The most ordinary noises—of men calling, of a chain running through a slot, of a distant siren—translated themselves to his ears into terrible and haunting sounds, full of portentous significance. He looked over the side of the boat into the brown water, and asked himself what frightful secrets lay hidden in its depth. Then he put his hand into his hip-pocket and touched the stock of his Colt revolver—that familiar substance comforted him.
The oarsmen had instructions to drop slowly down to the Pool, as the wide reach below the Tower is called. These two men had not been previously informed of the precise object of the expedition, but now that they were safely afloat Hazell judged it expedient to give them some notion of it. ‘We expect to come across a rather suspicious steam launch,’ he said. ‘My friend here is very anxious to get a sight of her, and until he has seen her nothing definite can be done.’
‘What sort of a craft is she, sir?’ asked the stroke oar, a fat-faced man who seemed absolutely incapable of any serious exertion.
‘I don’t know,’ Racksole replied; ‘but as near as I can judge, she’s about sixty feet in length, and painted black. I fancy I shall recognize her when I see her.’
‘Not much to go by, that,’ exclaimed the other man curtly. But he said no more. He, as well as his mate, had received from Theodore Racksole one English sovereign as a kind of preliminary fee, and an English sovereign will do a lot towards silencing the natural sarcastic tendencies and free speech of a Thames waterman.
‘There’s one thing I noticed,’ said Racksole suddenly, ‘and I forgot to tell you of it, Mr Hazell. Her screw seemed to move with a rather irregular, lame sort of beat.’
Both watermen burst into a laugh.
‘Oh,’ said the fat rower, ‘I know what you’re after, sir—it’s Jack Everett’s launch, commonly called “Squirm”. She’s got a four-bladed propeller, and one blade is broken off short.’
‘Ay, that’s it, sure enough,’ agreed the man in the bows. ‘And if it’s her you want, I seed her lying up against Cherry Gardens Pier this very morning.’
‘Let us go to Cherry Gardens Pier by all means, as soon as possible,’
Racksole said, and the boat swung across stream and then began to creep down by the right bank, feeling its way past wharves, many of which, even at that hour, were still busy with their cranes, that descended empty into the bellies of ships and came up full. As the two watermen gingerly manoeuvred the boat on the ebbing tide, Hazell explained to the millionaire that the ‘Squirm’ was one of the most notorious craft on the river. It appeared that when anyone had a nefarious or underhand scheme afoot which necessitated river work Everett’s launch was always available for a suitable monetary consideration. The ‘Squirm’ had got itself into a thousand scrapes, and out of those scrapes again with safety, if not precisely with honour. The river police kept a watchful eye on it, and the chief marvel about the whole thing was that old Everett, the owner, had never yet been seriously compromised in any illegal escapade. Not once had the officer of the law been able to prove anything definite against the proprietor of the ‘Squirm’, though several of its quondam hirers were at that very moment in various of Her Majesty’s prisons throughout the country. Latterly, however, the launch, with its damaged propeller, which Everett consistently refused to have repaired, had acquired an evil reputation, even among evil-doers, and this fraternity had gradually come to abandon it for less easily recognizable craft.
‘Your friend, Mr Tom Jackson,’ said Hazell to Racksole, ‘committed an error of discretion when he hired the “Squirm”. A scoundrel of his experience and calibre ought certainly to have known better than that. You cannot fail to get a clue now.’
By this time the boat was approaching Cherry Gardens Pier, but unfortunately a thin night-fog had swept over the river, and objects could not be discerned with any clearness beyond a distance of thirty yards. As the Customs boat scraped down past the pier all its occupants strained eyes for a glimpse of the mysterious launch, but nothing could be seen of it. The boat continued to float idly down-stream, the men resting on their oars.
Then they narrowly escaped bumping a large Norwegian sailing vessel at anchor with her stem pointing down-stream. This ship they passed on the port side. Just as they got clear of her bowsprit the fat man cried out excitedly, ‘There’s her nose!’ and he put the boat about and began to pull back against the tide. And surely the missing ‘Squirm’ was comfortably anchored on the starboard quarter of the Norwegian ship, hidden neatly between the ship and the shore. The men pulled very quietly alongside.
Chapter Twenty-Six THE NIGHT CHASE AND THE MUDLARK
‘I’LL board her to start with,’ said Hazell, whispering to Racksole. ‘I’ll make out that I suspect they’ve got dutiable goods on board, and that will give me a chance to have a good look at her.’
Dressed in his official overcoat and peaked cap, he stepped, rather jauntily as Racksole thought, on to the low deck of the launch. ‘Anyone aboard?’
Racksole heard him cry out, and a woman’s voice answered. ‘I’m a Customs examining officer, and I want to search the launch,’ Hazell shouted, and then disappeared down into the little saloon amidships, and Racksole heard no more. It seemed to the millionaire that Hazell had been gone hours, but at length he returned.
‘Can’t find anything,’ he said, as he jumped into the boat, and then privately to Racksole: ‘There’s a woman on board. Looks as if she might coincide with your description of Miss Spencer. Steam’s up, but there’s no engineer. I asked where the engineer was, and she inquired what business that was of mine, and requested me to get through with my own business and clear off. Seems rather a smart sort. I poked my nose into everything, but I saw no sign of any one else. Perhaps we’d better pull away and lie near for a bit, just to see if anything queer occurs.’
‘You’re quite sure he isn’t on board?’ Racksole asked.
‘Quite,’ said Hazell positively: ‘I know how to search a vessel. See this,’ and he handed to Racksole a sort of steel skewer, about two feet long, with a wooden handle. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is one of the Customs’ aids to searching.’
‘I suppose it wouldn’t do to go on board and carry off the lady?’ Racksole suggested doubtfully.
‘Well,’ Hazell began, with equal doubtfulness, ‘as for that—’
‘Where’s ‘e orf?’ It was the man in the bows who interrupted Hazell.
Following the direction of the man’s finger, both Hazell and Racksole saw with more or less distinctness a dinghy slip away from the forefoot of the Norwegian vessel and disappear downstream into the mist.
‘It’s Jules, I’ll swear,’ cried Racksole. ‘After him, men. Ten pounds apiece if we overtake him!’
‘Lay down to it now, boys!’ said Hazell, and the heavy Customs boat shot out in pursuit.
‘This is going to be a lark,’ Racksole remarked.
‘Depends on what you call a lark,’ said Hazell; ‘it’s not much of a lark tearing down midstream like this in a fog. You never know when you mayn’t be in kingdom come with all these barges knocking around. I expect that chap hid in the dinghy when he first caught sight of us, and then slipped his painter as soon as I’d gone.’
The boat was moving at a rapid pace with the tide. Steering was a matter of luck and instinct more than anything else. Every now and then Hazell, who held the lines, was obliged to jerk the boat’s head sharply round to avoid a barge or an anchored vessel. It seemed to Racksole that vessels were anchored all over the stream. He looked about him anxiously, but for a long time he could see nothing but mist and vague nautical forms. Then suddenly he said, quietly enough, ‘We’re on the right road; I can see him ahead.
We’re gaining on him.’ In another minute the dinghy was plainly visible, not twenty yards away, and the sculler—sculling frantically now—was unmistakably Jules—Jules in a light tweed suit and a bowler hat.
‘You were right,’ Hazell said; ‘this is a lark. I believe I’m getting quite excited. It’s more exciting than playing the trombone in an orchestra. I’ll run him down, eh?—and then we can drag the chap in from the water.’
Racksole nodded, but at that moment a barge, with her red sails set, stood out of the fog clean across the bows of the Customs boat, which narrowly escaped instant destruction. When they got clear, and the usual interchange of calm, nonchalant swearing was over, the dinghy was barely to be discerned in the mist, and the fat man was breathing in such a manner that his sighs might almost have been heard on the banks. Racksole wanted violently to do something, but there was nothing to do; he could only sit supine by Hazell’s side in the stern-sheets. Gradually they began again to overtake the dinghy, whose one-man crew was evidently tiring. As they came up, hand over fist, the dinghy’s nose swerved aside, and the tiny craft passed down a water-lane between two anchored mineral barges, which lay black and deserted about fifty yards from the Surrey shore. ‘To starboard,’ said Racksole. ‘No, man!’
Hazell replied; ‘we can’t get through there. He’s bound to come out below; it’s only a feint. I’ll keep our nose straight ahead.’
And they went on, the fat man pounding away, with a face which glistened even in the thick gloom. It was an empty dinghy which emerged from between the two barges and went drifting and revolving down towards Greenwich.
The fat man gasped a word to his comrade, and the Customs boat stopped dead.
‘’E’s all right,’ said the man in the bows. ‘If it’s ‘im you want, ‘e’s on one o’ them barges, so you’ve only got to step on and take ‘im orf.’
‘That’s all,’ said a voice out of the depths of the nearest barge, and it was the voice of Jules, otherwise known as Mr Tom Jackson.
‘’Ear ‘im?’ said the fat man smiling. ‘’E’s a good ‘un, ‘e is. But if I was you, Mr Hazell, or you, sir, I shouldn’t step on to that barge so quick as all that.’
They backed the boat under the stem of the nearest barge and gazed upwards.
‘It’s all right,’ said Racksole to Hazell; ‘I’ve got a revolver. How can I clamber up there?’
‘Yes, I dare say you’ve got a revolver all right,’ Hazell replied sharply.
‘But you mustn’t use it. There mustn’t be any noise. We should have the river police down on us in a twinkling if there was a revolver shot, and it would be the ruin of me. If an inquiry was held the Commissioners wouldn’t take any official notice of the fact that my superior officer had put me on to this job, and I should be requested to leave the service.’
‘Have no fear on that score,’ said Racksole. ‘I shall, of course, take all responsibility.’
‘It wouldn’t matter how much responsibility you took,’ Hazell retorted; ‘you wouldn’t put me back into the service, and my career would be at an end.’
‘But there are other careers,’ said Racksole, who was really anxious to lame his ex-waiter by means of a judiciously-aimed bullet. ‘There are other careers.’
‘The Customs is my career,’ said Hazell, ‘so let’s have no shooting. We’ll wait about a bit; he can’t escape. You can have my skewer if you like’—and he gave Racksole his searching instrument. ‘And you can do what you please, provided you do it neatly and don’t make a row over it.’
For a few moments the four men were passive in the boat, surrounded by swirling mist, with black water beneath them, and towering above them a half-loaded barge with a desperate and resourceful man on board. Suddenly the mist parted and shrivelled away in patches, as though before the breath of some monster. The sky was visible; it was a clear sky, and the moon was shining. The transformation was just one of those meteorological quick-changes which happen most frequently on a great river.
‘That’s a sight better,’ said the fat man. At the same moment a head appeared over the edge of the barge. It was Jules’ face—dark, sinister and leering.
‘Is it Mr Racksole in that boat?’ he inquired calmly; ‘because if so, let Mr Racksole step up. Mr Racksole has caught me, and he can have me for the asking. Here I am.’ He stood up to his full height on the barge, tall against the night sky, and all the occupants of the boat could see that he held firmly clasped in his right hand a short dagger. ‘Now, Mr Racksole, you’ve been after me for a long time,’ he continued; ‘here I am. Why don’t you step up? If you haven’t got the pluck yourself, persuade someone else to step up in your place ... the same fair treatment will be accorded to all.’ And Jules laughed a low, penetrating laugh.
He was in the midst of this laugh when he lurched suddenly forward.
‘What’r’ you doing of aboard my barge? Off you goes!’ It was a boy’s small shrill voice that sounded in the night. A ragged boy’s small form had appeared silently behind Jules, and two small arms with a vicious shove precipitated him into the water. He fell with a fine gurgling splash. It was at once obvious that swimming was not among Jules’ accomplishments. He floundered wildly and sank. When he reappeared he was dragged into the Customs boat. Rope was produced, and in a minute or two the man lay ignominiously bound in the bottom of the boat. With the aid of a mudlark—a mere barge boy, who probably had no more right on the barge than Jules himself—Racksole had won his game. For the first time for several weeks the millionaire experienced a sensation of equanimity and satisfaction. He leaned over the prostrate form of Jules, Hazell’s professional skewer in his hand.
‘What are you going to do with him now?’ asked Hazell.
‘We’ll row up to the landing steps in front of the Grand Babylon. He shall be well lodged at my hotel, I promise him.’
Jules spoke no word.
Before Racksole parted company with the Customs man that night Jules had been safely transported into the Grand Babylon Hôtel and the two watermen had received their £10 apiece.
‘You will sleep here?’ said the millionaire to Mr George Hazell. ‘It is late.’
‘With pleasure,’ said Hazell. The next morning he found a sumptuous breakfast awaiting him, and in his table-napkin was a Bank of England note for a hundred pounds. But, though he did not hear of them till much later, many things had happened before Hazell consumed that sumptuous breakfast.