The Complete Four Just Men (54 page)

They came back to his room and again his mood changed and he became almost gay.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘by Jove, I’ll tell you! And no living soul knows this except myself, or realises or understands the extraordinary work I have been doing.’

His face lit up, his eyes sparkled and it seemed to Manfred that he grew taller in this moment of exaltation. Pulling open a drawer of a table which stood against the wall he brought out a long porcelain plate and laid it down. From a wire-netted cupboard on the wall he took two tin boxes and with an expression of disgust which he could not disguise, turned the contents upon the slab. It was apparently a box full of common garden mould and then Leon saw to his amazement a wriggling little red shape twisting and twining in its acute discomfort. The little red fellow sought to hide himself and burrowed sinuously into the mould.

‘Curse you! Curse you!’ The doctor’s voice rose until it was a howl. His face was twisted and puckered in his mad rage. ‘How I hate you!’

If ever a man’s eyes held hate and terror, they were the eyes of Dr Felix Viglow.

Manfred drew a long breath and stepped back a pace the better to observe him. Then the man calmed himself and peered down at Leon.

‘When I was a child,’ he said in a voice that shook, ‘I hated them and we had a nurse named Martha, a beastly woman, a wicked woman, who dropped one down my neck. Imagine the horror of it!’

Leon said nothing. To him the earthworm was a genus of chaetopod in the section
oligochaeta
and bore the somewhat pretentious name of
lumbricus terrestris
. And in that way, Dr Viglow, eminent naturalist and scientist, should have regarded this beneficent little fellow.

‘I have a theory,’ said the doctor. He was calmer now and was wiping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, ‘that in cycles every type of living thing on the earth becomes in turn the dominant creature. In a million years’ time man may dwindle to the size of an ant and the earthworm, by its super-intelligence, its cunning and its ferocity, may be pre-eminent in the world! I have always thought that,’ he went on when neither Leon nor Manfred offered any comment. ‘It is still my thought by day and my dream by night. I have devoted my life to the destruction of this menace.’

Now the earthworm is neither cunning nor intelligent and is moreover notoriously devoid of ambition.

The doctor again went to the cupboard and took out a wide-necked bottle filled with a greyish powder. He brought it back and held it within a few inches of Leon’s face.

‘This is the work of twelve years,’ he said simply. ‘There is no difficulty in finding a substance which will kill these pests, but this does more.’

He took a scalpel and tilting the bottle brought out a few grains of the powder on the edge of it. This he dissolved in a twenty-ounce measure which he filled with water. He stirred the colourless fluid with a glass rod, then lifting the rod he allowed three drops to fall upon the mould wherein the little creature was hidden. A few seconds passed, there was a heaving of the earth where the victim was concealed.

‘He is dead,’ said the doctor triumphantly and scraped away the earth to prove the truth of his words. ‘And he is not only dead, but that handful of earth is death to any other earthworm that touches it.’

He rang a bell and one of his attendants came in.

‘Clear away that,’ he said with a shudder and walked gloomily to his desk.

Leon did not speak all the way back to the house. He sat curled up in the corner of the car, his arms lightly folded, his chin on his breast. That night without a word of explanation he left the house, declining Manfred’s suggestion that he should walk with him and volunteering no information as to where he was going.

Gonsalez walked by the cliff road, across Babbacombe Downs and came to the doctor’s house at nine o’clock that night. The doctor had a large house and maintained a big staff of servants, but amongst his other eccentricities was the choice of a gardener’s cottage away from the house as his sleeping place at night.

It was only lately that the doctor had chosen this lonely lodging. He had been happy enough in the big old house which had been his father’s, until he had heard voices whispering to him at night and the creak of boards and had seen shapes vanishing along the dark corridors, and then in his madness he had conceived the idea that his servants were conspiring against him and that he might any night be murdered in his bed. So he had the gardener turned out of his cottage, had refurnished the little house, and there, behind locked doors, he read and thought and slept the nights away. Gonsalez had heard of this peculiarity and approached the cottage with some caution, for a frightened man is more dangerous than a wicked man. He rapped at the door and heard a step across the flagged floor.

‘Who is that?’ asked a voice.

‘It is I,’ said Gonsalez and gave the name by which he was known.

After hesitation the lock turned and the door opened.

‘Come in, come in,’ said Viglow testily and locked the door behind him. ‘You have come to congratulate me, I am sure. You must come to my wedding too, my friend. It will be a wonderful wedding, for there I shall make a speech and tell the story of my discovery. Will you have a drink? I have nothing here, but I can get it from the house. I have a telephone in my bedroom.’

Leon shook his head.

‘I have been rather puzzling out your plan, Doctor,’ he said,
accepting the proffered cigarette, ‘and I have been trying to connect those postal bags which I saw being loaded at the door of your laboratory with the discovery which you revealed this afternoon.’

Dr Viglow’s narrow eyes were gleaming with merriment and he leant back in his chair and crossed his legs, like one preparing for a pleasant recital.

‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘For months I have been in correspondence with farming associations, both here and on the Continent. I have something of a European reputation,’ he said, with that extraordinary immodesty which Leon had noticed before. ‘In fact, I think that my treatment for phylloxera did more to remove the scourge from the vineyards of Europe than any other preparation.’

Leon nodded. He knew this to be the truth.

‘So you see, my word is accepted in matters dealing with agriculture. But I found after one or two talks with our own stupid farmers that there is an unusual prejudice against destroying – ’ he did not mention the dreaded name but shivered – ‘and that of course I had to get round. Now that I am satisfied that my preparation is exact, I can release the packets in the post office. In fact, I was just about to telephone to the postmaster telling him that they could go off – they are all stamped and addressed – when you knocked at the door.’

‘To whom are they addressed?’ asked Leon steadily.

‘To various farmers – some fourteen thousand in all in various parts of the country and Europe, and each packet has printed instructions in English, French, German and Spanish. I had to tell them that it was a new kind of fertiliser or they may not have been as enthusiastic in the furtherance of my experiment as I am.’

‘And what are they going to do with these packets when they get them?’ asked Leon quietly.

‘They will dissolve them and spray a certain area of their land – I suggested ploughed land. They need only treat a limited area of earth,’ he explained. ‘I think these wretched beasts will carry infection quickly enough. I believe,’ he leant forward and spoke impressively, ‘that in six months there will not be one living in Europe or Asia.’

‘They do not know that the poison is intended to kill – earthworms?’ asked Leon.

‘No, I’ve told you,’ snapped the other. ‘Wait, I will telephone the postmaster.’

He rose quickly to his feet, but Leon was quicker and gripped his arm.

‘My dear friend,’ he said, ‘you must not do this.’

Dr Viglow tried to withdraw his arm.

‘Let me go,’ he snarled. ‘Are you one of those devils who are trying to torment me?’

In ordinary circumstances, Leon would have been strong enough to hold the man, but Viglow’s strength was extraordinary and Gonsalez found himself thrust back into the chair. Before he could spring up, the man had passed through the door and slammed and locked it behind him.

The cottage was on one floor and was divided into two rooms by a wooden partition which Viglow had erected. Over the door was a fanlight, and pulling the table forward Leon sprang on to the top and with his elbow smashed the flimsy frame.

‘Don’t touch that telephone,’ he said sternly. ‘Do you hear?’

The doctor looked round with a grin. ‘You are a friend of those devils!’ he said, and his hand was on the receiver when Leon shot him dead.

* * *

Manfred came back the next morning from his walk and found Gonsalez pacing the lawn, smoking an extra long cigar.

‘My dear Leon,’ said Manfred as he slipped his arm in the other’s. ‘You did not tell me.’

‘I thought it best to wait,’ said Leon.

‘I heard quite by accident,’ Manfred went on. ‘The story is that a burglar broke into the cottage and shot the doctor when he was telephoning for assistance. All the silverware in the outer room has been stolen. The doctor’s watch and pocket-book have disappeared.’

‘They are at this moment at the bottom of Babbacombe Bay,’ said Leon. ‘I went fishing very early this morning before you were awake.’

They paced the lawn in silence for a while and then: ‘Was it necessary?’ asked Manfred.

‘Very necessary,’ said Leon gravely. ‘You have to realise first of all that although this man was mad, he had discovered not only a poison but an infection.’

‘But, my dear fellow,’ smiled Manfred, ‘was an earthworm worth it?’

‘Worth more than his death,’ said Leon. ‘There isn’t a scientist in the world who does not agree that if the earthworm was destroyed the world would become sterile and the people of this world would be starving in seven years.’

Manfred stopped in his walk and stared down at his companion.

‘Do you really mean that?’

Leon nodded.

‘He is the one necessary creature in God’s world,’ he said soberly. ‘It fertilises the land and covers the bare rocks with earth. It is the surest friend of mankind that we know, and now I am going down to the post office with a story which I think will be sufficiently plausible to recover those worm poisoners.’

Manfred mused a while, then he said: ‘I’m glad in many ways – in every way,’ he corrected. ‘I rather liked that girl, and I’m sure that impossible person isn’t so impossible.’

The Man who died Twice

The interval between Acts 2 and 3 was an unusually long one, and the three men who sat in the stage box were in such harmony of mind that none of them felt the necessity for making conversation. The piece was a conventional crook play and each of the three had solved the ‘mystery’ of the murder before the drop fell on the first act. They had reached the same solution (and the right one) without any great mental effort.

Fare, the Police Commissioner, had dined with George Manfred and Leon Gonsalez (he addressed
them respectively
as ‘Señor Fuentes’ and ‘Señor Mandrelino’ and did not doubt that they were natives of Spain, despite their faultless English) and the party had come on to the theatre.

Mr Fare frowned as at some unpleasant memory and heard a soft laugh. Looking up, he met the dancing eyes of Leon.

‘Why do you laugh?’ he asked, half smiling in sympathy.

‘At your thoughts,’ replied the calm Gonsalez.

‘At my thoughts!’ repeated the other, startled,

‘Yes,’ Leon nodded, ‘you were thinking of the Four Just Men.’

‘Extraordinary!’ exclaimed Fare. ‘It is perfectly true. What is it, telepathy?’

Gonsalez shook his head. As to Manfred, he was gazing abstractedly into the stalls.

‘No, it was not telepathy,’ said Leon, ‘it was your facial expression.’

‘But I haven’t mentioned those rascals, how – ’

‘Facial expression,’ said Leon, revelling in his pet topic, ‘especially an expression of the emotions, comes into the category of primitive instincts – they are not “willed”. For example, when a billiard player strikes a ball he throws and twists his body after the ball – you must have seen the contortions of a player who has missed his shot by a narrow margin? A man using scissors works his jaw, a rower cmoves his lips with every stroke of the oar. These are what we call “automatisms”. Animals have these characteristics. A hungry dog approaching meat pricks his ears in the direction of his meal – ’

‘Is there a particular act of automatism produced by the thought of the Four Just Men?’ asked the Commissioner, smiling.

Leon nodded.

‘It would take long to describe, but I will not deceive you. I less read than guessed your thoughts by following them. The last line in the last act we saw was uttered by a ridiculous stage parson who says: “Justice! There is a justice beyond the law!” And I saw you frown. And then you looked across the stalls and nodded to the editor of the
Megaphone
. And I remembered that you had written an article on the Four Just Men for that journal – ’

‘A little biography on poor Falmouth who died the other day,’ corrected Fare. ‘Yes, yes, I see. You were right, of course. I was thinking of them and their pretensions to act as judges and executioners when the law fails to punish the guilty, or rather the guilty succeed in avoiding conviction.’

Manfred turned suddenly.

‘Leon,’ he spoke in Spanish, in which language the three had been conversing off and on during the evening. ‘View the cavalier with the diamond in his shirt – what do you make of him?’ The question was in English.

Leon raised his powerful opera glasses and surveyed the man whom his friend had indicated.

‘I should like to hear him speak,’ he said after a while. ‘See how delicate his face is and how powerful are his jaws – almost prognathic, for the upper maxilla is distinctly arrested. Regard him, Señor, and tell me if you do not agree that his eyes are unusually bright?’

Manfred took the glasses and looked at the unconscious man.

‘They are swollen – yes, I see they are bright.’

‘What else do you see?’

‘The lips are large and a little swollen too, I think,’ said Manfred.

Leon took the glasses and turned to the Commissioner.

‘I do not bet, but if I did I would wager a thousand pesetas that this man speaks with a harsh cracked voice.’

Fare looked from his companion to the object of their scrutiny and then back to Leon.

‘You are perfectly right,’ he said quietly. ‘His name is Ballam and his voice is extraordinarily rough and harsh. What is he?’

‘Vicious,’ replied Gonsalez. ‘My dear friend, that man is vicious, a bad man. Beware of the bright eyes and the cracked voice, Señor! They stand for evil!’

Fare rubbed his nose irritably, a trick of his.

‘If you were anybody else I should be very rude and say that you knew him or had met him,’ he said, ‘but after your extraordinary demonstration the other day I realise there must be something in physiognomy.’

He referred to a visit which Leon Gonsalez and Manfred had paid to the record department of Scotland Yard. There, with forty photographs of criminals spread upon the table before him Gonsalez, taking them in order, had enumerated the crimes with which their names were associated. He only made four errors and even they were very excusable.

‘Yes, Gregory Ballam is a pretty bad lot,’ said the Commissioner thoughtfully. ‘He has never been through our hands, but that is the luck of the game. He’s as shrewd as the devil and it hurts me to see him with a nice girl like Genee Maggiore.’

‘The girl who is sitting with him?’ asked Manfred, interested.

‘An actress,’ murmured Gonsalez. ‘You observe, my dear George, how she turns her head first to the left and then to the right at intervals, though there is no attraction in either direction. She has the habit of being seen – it is not vanity, it is merely a peculiar symptom of her profession.’

‘What is his favourite vanity?’ asked Manfred and the Commissioner smiled. ‘You know our Dickens, eh?’ he asked, for he thought of Manfred as a Spaniard. ‘Well, it would be difficult to tell you what Gregory Ballam does to earn his respectable income,’ he said more seriously. ‘I think he is connected with a moneylender’s business and runs a few profitable sidelines.’

‘Such as – ’ suggested Manfred.

Mr Fare was not, apparently, anxious to commit himself. ‘I’ll tell you in the strictest confidence,’ he said. ‘We believe, and have good cause to believe, that he has a hop joint which is frequented by wealthy people. Did you read last week about the man, John Bidworth, who shot a nursemaid in Kensington Gardens and then shot himself?’

Manfred nodded.

‘He was quite a well-connected person, wasn’t he?’ he asked.

‘He was very well connected,’ replied Fare emphatically. ‘So well connected that we did not want to bring his people into the case at all. He died the next day in hospital and the surgeons tell us that he was undoubtedly under the influence of some Indian drug and that in his few moments of consciousness he as much as told the surgeon in charge of the case that he had been on a jag the night before and had finished up in what he called an opium house, and remembered nothing further till he woke up in the hospital. He died without knowing that he had committed this atrocious crime. There is no doubt that under the maddening influence of the drug he shot the first person he saw.’

‘Was it Mr Ballam’s opium house?’ asked Gonsalez, interested.

The curtain rose at that moment and conversation went on in a whisper.

‘We don’t know – in his delirium he mentioned Ballam’s name. We have tried our best to find out. He has been watched. Places at which he has stayed any length of time have been visited, but we have found nothing to incriminate him.’

Leon Gonsalez had a favourite hour and a favourite meal at which he was at his brightest. That hour was at nine o’clock in the morning and the meal was breakfast. He put down his paper the next morning and asked:

‘What is crime?’

‘Professor,’ said Manfred solemnly, ‘I will tell you. It is the departure from the set rules which govern human society.’

‘You are conventional,’ said Gonsalez. ‘My dear George, you are always conventional at nine o’clock in the morning! Now, had I asked you at midnight you would have told me that it is any act which wilfully offends and discomforts your neighbour. If I desired to give it a narrow and what they call in this country a legal interpretation I would add, “contrary to the law”. There must be ten thousand crimes committed for every one detected. People associated crime only with those offences which are committed by a certain type of illiterate or semi-illiterate lunatic or half-lunatic, glibly dubbed a “criminal”. Now, here is a villainous crime, a monumental crime. He is a man who is destroying the souls of youth and breaking hearts ruthlessly! Here is one who is dragging down men and women from the upward road and debasing them in their own eyes, slaying ambition and all beauty of soul and mind in order that he should live in a certain comfort, wearing a clean dress shirt every evening of his life and drinking expensive and unnecessary wines with his expensive and indigestible dinner.’

‘Where is this man?’ asked Manfred.

‘He lives at 993 Jermyn Street, in fact he is a neighbour,’ said Leon.

‘You’re speaking of Mr Ballam?’

‘I’m speaking of Mr Ballam,’ said Gonsalez gravely. ‘Tonight I am going to be a foreign artist with large rolls of money in my pockets and an irresistible desire to be amused. I do not doubt that sooner or later Mr Ballam and I will gravitate together. Do I look like a detective, George?’ he asked abruptly.

‘You look more like a successful pianist,’ said George and Gonsalez sniffed.

‘You can even be offensive at nine o’clock in the morning,’ he said.

There are two risks which criminals face (with due respect to the opinions of Leon Gonsalez, this word criminal is employed by the narrator) in the pursuit of easy wealth. There is the risk of detection and punishment which applies to the big as well as to the little delinquent. There is the risk of losing large sums of money invested for the purpose of securing even larger sums. The criminal who puts money in his business runs the least risk of detection. That is why only the poor and foolish come stumbling up the stairs which lead to the dock at the Old Bailey, and that is why the big men, who would be indignant at the very suggestion that they were in the category of law-breakers, seldom or never make their little bow to the Judge.

Mr Gregory Ballam stood for and represented certain moneyed interests which had purchased at auction three houses in Montague Street, Portland Place. They were three houses which occupied an island site. The first of these was let out in offices, the ground floor being occupied by a lawyer, the first floor by a wine and spirit merchant, the second being a very plain suite, dedicated to the business hours of Mr Gregory Ballam. This gentleman also rented the cellar, which by the aid of lime-wash and distemper had been converted into, if not a pleasant, at any rate a neat and cleanly storage place. Through this cellar you could reach (amongst other places) a brand-new garage, which had been built for one of Mr Ballam’s partners, but in which Mr Ballam was not interested at all.

None but the workmen who had been employed in renovation knew that it was possible also to walk from one house to the other, either through the door in the cellar which had existed when the houses were purchased, or through a new door in Mr Ballam’s office.

The third house, that at the end of the island site, was occupied by the International Artists’ Club, and the police had never followed Mr
Ballam there because Mr Ballam had never gone there, at least not by the front door. The Artists’ Club had a ‘rest room’ and there were times when Mr Ballam had appeared, as if by magic, in that room, had met a select little party and conducted them through a well-concealed pass-door to the ground floor of the middle house. The
middle house was the most respectable looking of the three. It had neat muslin curtains at all its windows and was occupied by a venerable gentleman and his wife.

The venerable gentleman made a practice of going out to business every morning at ten o’clock, his shiny silk hat set jauntily on the side of his head, a furled umbrella under his arm and a button-hole in his coat. The police knew him by sight and local constables touched their helmets to him. In the days gone by when Mr Raymond, as he called himself, had a luxurious white beard and earned an elegant income by writing begging letters and interviewing credulous and sympathetic females, he did not have that name or the reputation which he enjoyed in Montague Street. But now he was clean-shaven and had the appearance of a retired admiral and he received £4 a week for going out of the house every morning at ten o’clock, with his silk hat set at a rakish angle, and his furled umbrella and his neat little boutonniere. He spent most of the day in the Guildhall reading-room and came back at five o’clock in the evening as jaunty as ever.

And his day’s work being ended, he and his hard-faced wife went to their little attic room and played cribbage and their language was certainly jaunty but was not venerable.

On the first floor, behind triple black velvet curtains, men and women smoked day and night. It was a large room, being two rooms which had been converted into one and it had been decorated under Mr Ballam’s eye. In this room nothing but opium was smoked. If you had a fancy for hasheesh you indulged yourself in a basement apartment. Sometimes Mr Ballam himself came to take a whiff of the dream-herb, but he usually reserved these visits for such occasions as the introduction of a new and profitable client. The pipe had no ill-effect upon Mr Ballam. That was his boast. He boasted now to a new client, a rich Spanish artist who had been picked up by one of his jackals and piloted to the International Artists’ Club.

‘Nor on me,’ said the newcomer, waving away a yellow-faced Chinaman who ministered to the needs of the smokers. ‘I always bring my own smoke.’

Ballam leant forward curiously as the man took a silver box from his pocket and produced therefrom a green and sticky-looking pill.

‘What is that?’ asked Ballam curiously.

‘It is a mixture of my own,
cannabis indica
, opium and a little Turkish tobacco mixed. It is even milder than opium and the result infinitely more wonderful.’

‘You can’t smoke it here,’ said Ballam, shaking his head. ‘Try the pipe, old man.’

But the ‘old man’ – he was really young in spite of his grey hair – was emphatic.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘I can smoke at home. I only came out of curiosity,’ and he rose to go.