CHAPTER XXXIII.

LEW

When he got back to the house Diana was dressed and sitting down to breakfast.

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said with a little sigh.

“Why the sigh?” asked Larry.

“Because--I thought you weren’t coming back to breakfast,” she said.

He told her of the chase in the park.

“That rather upsets my theory that Blind Jake is still at the Home or at the laundry,” she said, “because the house is being watched, isn’t it?”

“On both sides,” said Larry. “But there are a dozen ways this fellow could get out, and the fact that he goes for an early morning constitutional, and the people who are behind him consider that his health is of sufficient importance to put a car at his disposal, rather proves that he is confined during the day.”

They were alone, for the nurse chaperon had not finished dressing.

“I don’t know how this case is going to end, Diana,” said Larry after a little silence, “and this is a most prosaic moment to say what I want to say, but--but--but after this case is ended, I don’t want you to remain at the Yard.”

She went a little pale.

“You mean I am not satisfactory?” she said. “As a secretary?”

“You’re very satisfactory, both as a secretary and an individual,” said Larry, trying hard to maintain command of his voice. “I don’t like your--I don’t like your working.”

There was another silence.

“I don’t think I shall work after this case,” she said quietly. “I thought of leaving, too.”

This was an unexpected reply, and it filled him with a sense of panic.

“You’re not going away?” he asked, and she laughed.

“You’re really a most inconsistent person. You dismiss me in one breath and hope I’m not leaving you in another,” she said, and she was treading on dangerous ground and was well aware of the fact. “After all,” she went on, solemnly mischievous, “there are so many jobs where competent girls are wanted.”

“I know a job where a competent girl is wanted,” said Larry, swallowing something, “and her job is to look after a flat and share the modest fortune of a detective-inspector who may be something better one of these fine days.”

She was helping herself to a triangular piece of toast when he spoke, and she let the toast drop.

“I don’t quite know what you mean,” she faltered.

“I mean,” said Larry. “I want to marry you--go to the devil!”

She looked up open-mouthed, in time to see the door shut upon the outraged Sunny.

“I’m awfully sorry,” stammered Larry. “I didn’t mean that last remark for you, dear. I really mean----”

“I know what you mean,” she said, and laid her hand on his. “You mean you want me?”

“I want you so much,” said Larry, “that I can’t find words to make my want plain.”

She did not speak. She suffered her hand to stay under his, and her eyes catching the distorted reflection of her face in the polished coffee-pot, she laughed. Larry drew his hand away quickly, for he was a sensitive man.

“I’m rather a fool, I’m afraid,” he said quietly. She had not moved.

“Put your hand back.” Her voice was no higher than a whisper, but he obeyed. “Now tell me what you were saying. I was laughing at myself in the coffee-pot. I don’t look like a person that anybody could propose to at half-past eight in the morning.”

“Then--then you know that you are being proposed to?” he said huskily.

She nodded, and her shining eyes turned to meet his.

“And--will you?” he asked, finding it difficult to frame the words.

“Will I what--be proposed to?” she answered innocently. “I think I will, Larry dear: I rather like it.”

And then she was in his arms, and he was holding her tightly, tightly.

And then Sunny came in, and they did not see him. He stole forth silently and made his way to the landing outside the door and rang the elevator bell. The girl who worked the elevator was a great friend of his and supplied him with much information which was of value.

“Louie,” he said, and he was more than usually sober, “can you tell me where I can get lodgings near at hand? I think I shall soon be sleeping out.”

“Sleeping out, Pat?” said the wondering Louie. (She called him Pat because it was his name, but more because he had graciously permitted her that liberty.) “Is your master getting a housekeeper?”

“I think so,” said Sunny very gravely indeed. “I think so, Louie.”

Larry may have walked to the office that morning, or he may have ridden, or floated. He had no distinct recollection of what happened, or how he got there, except that he knew that Diana Ward was by his side and that he was hopelessly, ridiculously, overwhelmingly happy in his love. It had been the most extraordinary courting, and the proposal had been as amazingly unconventional. He had pictured such a scene, but it had been set in a quiet drawing room under shaded lights, or in some bosky dell, or in the shade of an old tree along some backwater of the ancient river.

“Not at breakfast,” he said aloud, “oh, dear, no.”

“Not at breakfast?” repeated the girl. “Oh, you are thinking---- Yes, it was funny.”

“It was wonderful!” said Larry. “I feel all puffed up.”

“Then I’m going to take some of the puffed-up feeling out of you,” she said calmly. “I want you to make me a promise.”

“I’ll promise you anything in the world, Diana,” he said extravagantly. “Ask me for the top brick off the chimney pots, or a slice of the moon----”

“Nothing so difficult as that. I merely want to---- And yet perhaps it will be more difficult,” she said seriously. “Will you promise me that under no circumstances you will ask to be released from your engagement?”

He turned round to her, and almost stopped in his walk.

“That’s an easy one,” he said. “Whatever makes you think I should want to break off this wonderful----”

“I know, I know,” she interrupted. “It’s very wonderful to me, and yet”--she shook her head--“will you promise that whatever happens, whatever be the outcome of the Stuart case, whether you fail or succeed, whatever revelations come, you will not break your engagement?”

“I promise you that,” said Larry eagerly. “There’s nothing in the world which would induce me to take back a word I’ve said. I am living in mortal terror lest you discover how you are throwing yourself away upon somebody who is not worthy of you. If you do, I swear I will sue you for breach of promise! My fine feelings are not to be trifled with.”

When they reached Room 47 they found two men waiting in the corridor. One was a plain-clothes officer, the other was a wizened little man who sat pensively on a form, his hands on his knees, staring with unseeing eyes at the floor.

Larry stopped at the sight.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the girl penitently, “I should have told you--I sent for him.”

“Why, it’s Lew!” said Larry in surprise, and Diana nodded.

“You told me that I could call for any witness I wanted,” she began, and he stopped her.

“My dear, of course you can,” he said.

He looked at the old man curiously, and Lew, oblivious of all things, sat in his dark and silent world, consuming his own thoughts.

“Bring him in,” said Larry. “How are you going to make him talk, or convey our wishes to him?” He shook his head pityingly. “I never realized before what a terrible affliction this combination of circumstances might be,” he said. “Can you talk to him?”

“I think so,” said the girl quietly, “but you must realize that he has no idea where he is. For all he knows, he may still be in that dreadful house of the blind, still under the care of the men who have treated him so cruelly.”

Larry nodded.

“When you said he was dead I thought you were mad,” he said; “but I understand now.”

“I want a shotgun,” said the girl, “and I want a uniformed officer.” She turned to Larry. “I am going to see whether I have forgotten all I learnt in the Blind Hospital,” she said. She took the old man by the hand and he followed her obediently.

She caught his two wrists gently and raised them to her face.

“A woman,” he said; then she took up the little vase of flowers on her desk and held them under his nose.

“Roses, ain’t they?” he said. “This is a hospital.”

She beckoned the uniformed policeman who stood at the door and again raised the old man’s hands, letting them rest lightly on the collar of his tunic, and his buttons, then she raised them to his helmet.

“A copper!” said Lew, and shrank back.

She gave him the flowers again, and again raised his gnarled old hand and brought it to her cheek.

“I’m in a hospital and a policeman’s looking after me. Am I wanted for anything?”

She took his head between her hands and gently shook it.

“I’m not, eh?” he said, relieved.

Larry was watching the play, fascinated.

“Am I safe from them swine?”

She took his head between her hands and forced him to nod.

“Do you want me to talk?”

She repeated the movement, and pushed a chair up to him, guiding him down to it.

The plain-clothes officer had brought the gun and she took it from him, and lifting Lew’s hand passed it lightly over the barrel and the stock. He shivered.

“Yes, that’s what they’ve done to me,” he said. “You want them for that, don’t you? It was cruel hard on a blind man. What are you pinching my left hand for?”

Again she made him nod, then she pinched the right hand, and without waiting for his question made him shake his head.

“I see, I see,” he said eagerly. “The right hand is no and the left hand is yes. Is there somebody here--high?”

She signalled yes.

“Do they want me to tell?”

Again she signalled the affirmative, and he began his story.

He and Blind Jake had been companions in misfortune. He had been a slave to the big man, almost since his youth, and had lived a life of terror, dominated by this extraordinary villain.

“He done things that would make you curl up if you knew! Jake did,” nodded Lew. “Things that I don’t like thinking about, that haunt me at nights.”

Then five or six years before Lew’s own brother had joined this extraordinary band of criminals.

“A fine big fellow he was, too,” said Lew proudly, “and he could see! He used to go round the fairs pretending he couldn’t, but he had grand eyesight, could read newspapers and books. A big chap, sir, with long bushy whiskers down to here. A grand fellow was Jim, but a hook.”

Then they had come under the influence of this extraordinary power, to which Blind Jake was used to refer in reverent tones. They had been sent to carry bodies from a house, and Jake had assisted, and so had Jim and Lew. He didn’t know that they were murdered, but he thought they were.

“A clever gang they are. Why, six years ago, do you know what they did?” He seemed almost proud of the genius of these terrible men. “We chucked a man in the river with a weight round his legs. You’d think they’d be suspicious, wouldn’t you, when they found the body? Not they! What do you think the weight was attached to, guv’nor? A big block of salt that fitted just round the cove’s legs, and as soon as the salt dissolved, up he came.”

“Was he alive when you put him in?” asked Larry, and the girl shivered.

The man could not hear, but he answered almost as though he could.

“He may have been dead, I forget,” Lew went on. “He didn’t holler or anything. God’s truth, I didn’t know they was going to put him in the water! How was I to know? But in the water he went. And then Jim disappeared. I don’t know what happened to him. He just went away and we never saw him again. That was four years ago in May, as far as I can remember.”

Lew had got frightened after a while and began to suspect the danger to himself, if he did not know it already, and was fearful of Jake and his threats, more fearful of the mysterious vanishing of his brother. He could not write Braille, but he had got a man in Todd’s Home, a “straight ’un,” to write the message that he intended putting in the pocket of the next victim. Possibly he had heard from Jake that there was a “job” at hand.

“I think I will go now,” said the girl, suddenly white.

Larry took her out into the corridor and brought her a glass of water.

“I’m quite all right,” she smiled bravely. “Go back and listen.”

Lew was talking when Larry returned, and when he had finished, Larry knew almost all there was to be known about the murder of Gordon Stuart.

That evening there was a conference of all heads of departments, presided over by the Chief Commissioner.

“We may not be able to convict on the evidence of this man,” said Sir John gravely; “we will get the warrants if you like, but I think with a little more rope, and the knowledge we have, we could catch them red-handed.”

Larry came back to his office--the girl had gone home--in time to hear his telephone bell ringing.

“Is that Mr. Holt?” said a strange voice.

Now it is unusual to receive a call at Scotland Yard from anybody but police or public officials because the numbers of the various departments do not appear in the telephone book.

“I am Inspector Holt,” replied Larry.

“Dr. Judd asks you whether you can come to his office at once. He has something important to communicate.”

Larry thought a moment.

“Yes, I will come immediately,” he said.

He picked up Harvey, and a cab deposited them at Bloomsbury Pavement.

At this hour Larry expected the building to be deserted, but there was a light showing in one of the upstairs windows. The long, narrow vestibule was also illuminated.

Larry walked quickly through the vestibule; the porter’s little recess was empty. At the far end were the doors of two automatic lifts, one of which was in position.

“Shall I come up with you?” asked the sergeant.

There was no reason why he shouldn’t, and yet----

“No, no, stay here,” said Larry.

He stepped into the lift and pushed the ivory button marked “Fourth Floor” and the elevator jerked upward. At the fourth floor it stopped and Larry, pushing open the grille, stepped out on to the landing. Immediately opposite him was a glass door, behind which a light shone. The words “Dr. Judd” were written legibly enough, and he turned the handle of the door and stepped into an empty room. He called, but nobody answered him, and, puzzled, he came back to the landing.

Every sense in Larry Holt’s system was alert. Dr. Judd was not the kind of individual who would indulge in a silly practical joke, or attempt to hoax him.

Then he had a mild surprise. He had come by the left-hand elevator, which had now disappeared, and in its place was the right-hand lift, which must have been on a higher floor when he had reached the landing. What was more remarkable, the lift door was wide open.

Who had come up?

He looked along the corridor, but there was nobody in sight.

“Is everything all right?”

It was the hollow voice of Harvey coming up the elevator shaft.

“I’m coming down,” said Larry, and stepped through the open grille into the waiting elevator.

His foot was poised, he was in the very act of bringing it down upon the floor of the lift, when he realized in a flash that what he had thought was solid wood flooring was no more than paint and paper. There was no possibility of drawing back. His balance had shifted, and the full weight of his body was thrown forward.

He had the fraction of a second to think, and then, utilizing every ounce of strength, every atom of impetus he could get from his left foot, which still rested on the solid edge of the landing, he leapt forward and gripped the moulding of one of the panels at the back of the elevator. He had less than half an inch to hold on by, but by the extraordinary strength in his hands he maintained his hold, even as his feet crashed through the paper flooring and the whole weight of his body was flung upon his finger-tips. He hung thus, suspended in space, a fifty-foot fall upon the stone flags beneath him.

“Quick, come up!” he shouted. “Fourth floor. I’m trapped!”

He heard the rattle of the other lift and the whine of the motor, and at the same time he heard another sound above him, and, glancing up, saw a face looking down from the opening on the fifth floor.

Then something whizzed past him and struck the panelling of the elevator with a crash. For a second he nearly released his hold. He felt the lift shaking unaccountably, and then, to his horror, the ascending lift passed him.

“Here, here!” he shouted.

The face above seemed to be growing dimmer; but again he saw the hand poised, something struck him on the shoulder, he released his hold and fell.