Elk 02 The Joker (18 page)

A BRIEF paragraph appeared in the morning newspapers.

‘Sir Joseph Layton, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, is seriously ill in a nursing home.’

It would take more than this simple paragraph to restore the markets of the world to the level they had been when the threat of war had sent them tumbling like a house of cards. The principal item of news remained this world panic, which the Foreign Secretary’s speech had initiated. A great economist computed that the depreciation in gilt-edged securities represented over PS100,000,000 sterling and whilst the downward tendency at least to some stocks was recovering, a month or more must pass before the majority reached the pre-scare level. One newspaper, innocent of the suspicion under which the financier lay in certain quarters, interviewed Mr Harlow.

‘I think,’ said Mr Stratford Harlow, ‘that the effect of the slump has been greatly exaggerated. In many ways, such a panic has ultimately a beneficial result. It finds out all the feeble spots in the structure of finance, breaks down the weak links, so that in tile end the fabric is stronger and more wholesome than it was before the dump occurred.’

‘Is it possible that the slump was engineered by a group of market-riggers?’

‘Mr Harlow scoffed at the idea.

‘How could it have been engineered without the connivance or assistance of the Foreign Secretary, whose speech alone was responsible?’ he asked. ‘It is certainly an amazing statement for a responsible Minister to make. Apparently Sir John was a very sick man when he addressed the House of Commons. It is suggested that he was suffering from overwork, but whatever may have been the cause, he, and he alone, brought about this slump.’

‘You knew Sir John?’

‘Mr Harlow agreed.

‘He was in my house, in this very room, less than a quarter of an hour before the speech was made,’ he said, ‘and I can only say that he appeared in every way normal. If he was ill, he certainly did not show it.’

‘Reverting to the question of world-wide depreciation of stock values, Mr Harlow went on to say…’

Jim read the interview with a wry smile. Harlow had said many things, but he had omitted many more. He did not speak of the feverish activity of Rata, Limited, whose every window had been blazing throughout a week of nights - not one word had he suggested that he himself would benefit to an enormous extent through the tragedy of that unhappy speech.

The man puzzled him. If he was, as Jim was convinced, behind the scare, if his clever brain had devised, and by some mysterious means had brought about the financial panic, what end had he in view? He had been already one of the three richest men in England. He had not the excuse that he had a mammoth industry to benefit. He had no imperial project to bring to fruition. Had he been dreaming of new empires created out of the wilds; were he a great philanthropist who had some gigantic enterprise to advance for the benefit of mankind, this passionate desire for gold might be understood if it could not be excused.

But Harlow had no other objective than the accumulation of money. He had shown a vicarious interest in the public weal when he had presented his model police station to the country; he had certainly subscribed liberally to hospital appeals; but none of these gifts belonged to a system of charity or public spirit. He was a man without social gifts - the joys or suffering of his fellows struck no sympathetic chord in his nature. If he gave, he gave cold-bloodedly, and yet without ostentation.

True, he had offered to build, on the highest point of the Chiltern Hills, an exact replica of the Parthenon as a national war memorial, but the offer had been rejected because of the inaccessibility of the chosen spot. There was a certain freakishness in his projects; and Jim suspected that they were not wholly disinterested. The man baffled him: he could get no thread that would lead him to the soul and the mind behind those cold blue eyes.

For six hours that night he sat by the bedside of the unconscious Foreign Minister. What strange story could he tell, Jim wondered. How came he to be perambulating the streets in the guise of a drunken mountebank, whose wanderings were to end in a vulgar brawl, with a policeman and the cheerless lodgings of a prison cell? Had he some secret weakness which Harlow had learnt and exploited? Did he live a double life? Jim thought only to reject the idea. Sir Joseph’s life was more or less an open book; his movements for years past could be traced day by day from the information supplied by the diaries of his secretary, from the knowledge of his own colleagues.

Whilst Jim kept his vigil he made another attempt to decipher the writing on the card, but he got no farther. He was taking turns with Inspector Wilton of Evory Street in watching beside the bedside. The doctor had said that at any moment the Minister might recover consciousness; and though he took the gravest view of the ultimate result of the drugging, his prognosis did not exclude the chance of a complete recovery. It was at a quarter after three in the morning that the sick man, who had been tossing from side to side, muttering disjointed words which had no meaning to the listener, turned upon his back and, opening his eyes, blinked round the dimly lighted room. Jim, who had been studying the card in the light of a shaded lamp, put it into his pocket and came to the side of the bed.

Sir Joseph looked at him wonderingly, his wide brows knit in an effort of memory.

‘Hullo!’ he said faintly. ‘What happened…? Did the car smash up?’

‘Nothing serious has happened. Sir Joseph,’ said Jim gently.

Again the wondering eyes wandered around the bare walls of the room, and then they fell upon a temperature chart hanging against the wall. ‘This is a hospital, isn’t it?’

‘A nursing home,’ said Jim.

There was a long silence before the sick man spoke. ‘My head aches infernally. Can you give me a drink, or isn’t that allowed?’

Jim poured out a glass of water and, supporting the shoulders of the Minister, put the glass to his lips. He drank the contents greedily and sank back with a sigh upon the pillow.

‘I suppose I am a little light-headed, but I could swear that your name was Carlton,’ he said.

‘That is my name, sir,’ said Jim, and the Minister pondered this for a little time.

‘Anything broken?’ he asked. ‘It was the car, I suppose? I told that stupid chauffeur of mine to be careful. The road was like glass.’

He moved first one leg and then the other gingerly, and then his arms.

‘Nothing is broken at all, Sir Joseph,’ said Jim. ‘You have had a shock.’ He had already rung for the doctor, who was sleeping in a room below.

‘Shock, eh?…I don’t remember…And Harlow!’ His eyebrows lowered again. ‘A decent fellow but rather over-dressed. I went to his house tonight, didn’t I…? Yes, yes, I remember. How long ago was it?’ Jim would not tell him that the visit to Harlow’s had happened days before. ‘Yes, yes, I remember now. Where did I go after that…to the House, I suppose? My mind is like a whirling ball of wool!’

The doctor came in, a dressing-gown over his pyjamas, and the Minister’s mind was sufficiently clear to guess his profession. ‘I’m all in, doctor. What was it, a stroke?’

‘No Sir Joseph,’ said the doctor. He was feeling his patient’s pulse and seemed satisfied.

‘Sir Joseph thinks he might have been in a car collision,’ suggested Jim with a significant glance at the doctor.

The man was terribly weak, but the brightness of his intellect was undimmed. ‘What is the matter with me?’ he asked irritably as the medical man put the stethoscope to his heart.

‘I’m wondering whether you have ever taken drugs in your life?’

‘Drugs!’ snorted the old man. ‘Good God! What a question! I don’t even take medicine! When I feel ill I go to my osteopath and he puts me right.’

The doctor grinned, as all properly constituted doctors grin when an osteopath is mentioned, for the medical profession is the most conservative and the most suspicious of any.

‘Then I shan’t give you drugs.’ He had a nimble turn of mind to cover up an awkward question. ‘Your heart is good and your pulse is good. And all you want now is a little sleep.’

‘And a little food,’ growled Sir Joseph. ‘I am as hungry as a starved weasel!’

They brought him some chicken broth, hot and strong, and in half an hour he had fallen into a gentle sleep. The doctor beckoned Jim outside the room.

‘I think it is safe for you to leave him,’ he said. ‘He is making a better recovery than I dreamt was possible. I suppose he has said nothing about his adventures?’

‘Nothing,’ said Jim, and the man of medicine realised that, even if Sir Joseph had explained the strange circumstances of his arrest and appearance in the police court, it was very unlikely that he would be told.

Early the next morning Jim called at Downing Street and saw the Prime Minister.

‘He is under the impression that he was in a car accident after leaving Park Lane. He remembers nothing about the speech in the House; the doctors will not allow him to be told until he is strong again. I have very grave doubt on one point, sir, which I want to clear up. And to clear it up it may be necessary to go outside the law.’

‘I don’t care very much where you go,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘but we must have the truth! Until the facts are known, not only Sir Joseph but the whole Cabinet is under a cloud. I will give instructions that you are to have carte blanche, and I will support you in any action you may take.’

With this confident assurance Jim went on to Scotland Yard to prove the truth ‘of a theory which had slowly evolved in the dark hours of the night; a theory so fantastical that he could hardly bring himself to its serious contemplation.

FOUR HUNDRED and fifteen cablegrams were put on the wire in one morning and they were all framed in identical terms:

Remit by cable through Lombard Bank Carr Street Branch all profits taken in Rata Transaction 17 to receipt of this instruction. Acknowledge. Rata.

This message was dispatched at three o’clock in the morning from the GPO.

The Foreign Department manager of the Lombard Bank was an old friend of Mr Ellenbury, and had done business with him before. Mr Ellenbury drove to the bank the following afternoon and saw the head of the Foreign Department.

‘I am ejecting some very extensive cable remittances through the Lombard,’ he said, ‘and I shall want cash.’

The sour-looking manager looked even more sour.

‘Rata’s, I suppose? I’m surprised that you are mixed up with these people, Mr Ellenbury. I don’t think you can know what folks are saying in the City…’

He was a friend and was frank. Mr Ellenbury listened meekly.

‘One cannot pick and choose,’ he said. ‘The war made a great deal of difference to me; I must live.’

The war is an unfailing argument to explain changed conditions and can be employed as well to account for adaptable standards of morality. The manager accepted the other’s viewpoint with reservations. ‘How much has Harlow made out of this swindle?’ he asked, again exercising the privilege of friendship.

‘Someday I will tell you,’ said the lawyer cryptically. ‘The point is, I expect very large sums.’

‘Sterling or what?’

‘Any currency that is stable,’ said Mr Ellenbury.

That evening came the first advice - from Johannesburg.

The sum remitted was not colossal, but it was large. New Orleans arrived in the night and was delivered to Mr Ellenbury with Chicago, New York, Toronto and Sydney.

The cable advices accumulated; Mr Ellenbury took no steps to draw the money that was piling up at the Lombard Bank until the second day.

On the morning of that day he walked round his bedraggled demesne before going to the City. He had grown attached to Royalton House, he discovered, and almost wished he could take it with him. It was ugly and dreary and depressing. Even the vegetable garden seemed decayed.

Pale ghosts of cabbages drooped like aged and mourning men amidst the skeleton stalks of their departed fellows.

Across the desolation came the gardener, his shoulders protected from the drizzle by a sack.

‘I’ve got a load of stuff to fill the pit,’ he said. ‘Came yesterday.’

The pit was an eyesore and had been for thirty years. It was a deep depression at the edge of the kitchen garden and Mr Ellenbury had sited many dreams upon it. An ornamental pond, surrounded by banked rhododendrons. A swimming pool with a white-tiled bed and marble seats, where, hidden from the vulgar eye by trellised roses, a bather might sit and bask in the sun. Now it was the end of dreams - a pit to be filled. He stood on the edge of it. An unlovely hole in the ground, the bottom covered with water, the rusty corner of a petrol tin showing just above the surface. By the side was a heap of rubbish, aged bricks and portions of brick, sand gravel, sheer ashpit emptyings.

‘I will fill it in - I have promised myself that exercise,’ said Mr Ellenbury, forgetting for the moment that by tomorrow he would be filling in nothing more substantial than time.

The slimy hole held his eyes. If he could put Harlow there and see his big white face staring up from the mud - that would be a good filling! He felt his face and neck go red, his limbs tingling. Presently he tore himself away and walked back to the house.

The car that Rata’s hired for him was waiting - the driver bade him a civil good morning and said the weather was the worst he had ever known. Mr Ellenbury went in to breakfast without replying. The sight of the car was suggestive.

There was another garage known to Mr Ellenbury where a car could be hired and no inconvenient questions asked. Stated more clearly, there are many people in London engaged in peculiar professions, to whom money was not an important consideration. They could not buy loyalty, but they were willing to pay for discretion.

Nova’s Garage had a tariff that was considerably higher than any other, but the extra cost was money well spent. For when the police came to Nova’s to learn who was the foreign-looking gentleman who had driven away from a West End jeweller’s with the diamond ring he had bought and the row of pearls that had disappeared with him. Nova’s were blandly ignorant. Nor could they recognise the lady who had driven the rich Bradford merchant to Marlow and left him drugged and penniless in the long grass of the meadows.