Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT: The Dark House

From somewhere a church clock struck midnight as we went together along the silent country road, lit only by the pale light of the waning moon.

We conversed in whispers. In the still night air human voices carry far. Our driver remained behind with the car, and with him Rayner fixed a rendezvous. If he heard a pistol-shot he was to come instantly in search of us.

“I’m certain he has stopped somewhere near here,” Rayner said to Mr. Gell. “We can only hope that he has left his bike outside.”

We climbed the hill eagerly and gazed down the road, but there was, alas! no light to indicate the presence of a motor-cycle. All was quiet and deserted. In the far distance we heard the hum of a motor car on another road. But nothing else disturbed the rural silence.

Quietly we proceeded down the hill when, of a sudden, we came to a good-sized, detached cottage standing in a small orchard, the only habitation in the vicinity.

Obeying Rayner, who quickly held up his hand, we halted while he crept forward, stepping noiselessly over the grass at the roadside.

Five minutes later he returned to us, exclaiming in a low voice:

“He’s here! His bike is under the portico. I can hear voices, but the place is in darkness. Now, I think the best trick is for you, Dick, to go there and pretend you’ve lost your way,” he said, addressing his colleague from the Yard. “You look like an honest working-man,” he added, with a light laugh. “Get the door open, and we’ll rush it, light or no light. I’ve got my torch.”

“So have I,” declared the stalwart detective addressed as Dick. “We’ll get him all right, never fear.”

“There may be a bit of a scrap, sir,” Rayner said, addressing Mr. Gell. “So you’d better keep out of it. But you, Mr. Hipwell, will give us a helping hand, won’t you?”

“Rather!” I cried. “I’m with you all right.”

“Good! Then let’s get on,” whispered Sergeant Rayner. “We’ve traced the old bird to his nest,” he laughed.

Together we trod in silence over the grass, and entered the golden gate. Then, one by one, we crept noiselessly over the soil to behind the creeper-covered portico in which stood the still hot motor-cycle. When all was ready, Rayner’s colleague trod heavily up the garden-path, stumbled purposely near the door, and rapped upon it.

We could hear a movement within. But no reply was vouchsafed.

Twice he knocked vigorously, until at last we heard a woman’s querulous voice inquire who was there.

“Only me,” was Dick Perry’s reply. “I’m on the road, and I’ve lost my way. I’m very sorry to disturb you at this late hour, missus.”

“Where are you going?” inquired the woman.

“Well, I don’t quite know. I want to get to Wavendon,” he said.

A few moments later we heard the bolts drawn, and an elderly woman stood, an indistinct figure, in the doorway. Next instant she screamed as, pushing her aside, Rayner and two detectives darted in, followed by me, while Mr. Gell remained outside to see if anyone escaped by the window.

The dash was accomplished in a few moments. Rayner and his friends were adepts at forcibly entering premises.

I heard a man on the stairs give vent to a loud curse, when full into my face there came a blood-red flash with a loud report, and a bullet whistled by my head. Next second, however, the man was pinned down by the two detectives.

Exactly what occurred immediately afterwards I hardly know.

The uncertain light of flash-lamps showed the face of a gray-haired hag of a woman who, startled and screaming, was being held by a third plain-clothes man from Shepherdess Walk, who had followed us on a motor-cycle. Meanwhile the fugitive we had overtaken was struggling and cursing, held firmly by Rayner and Perry.

The sound of a pistol-shot brought up our car, and into it the two prisoners were quickly bundled. The man--whose name we afterwards discovered was “Old Tom” or Booth, and whose fingerprints revealed a very interesting record as a thief--became very violent, so that Rayner slipped a pair of handcuffs upon him. Then, leaving him in charge of his assistant, Dick Perry, he and the other man, Denham, re-entered the house to search it.

In the downstairs living-room we found a cheap paraffin-lamp and lit it. Then with Mr. Gell, the detectives ascended the stairs, leaving me below, pistol in hand, ready to prevent anyone, who might still be in the house, from leaving.

After a few minutes I heard Joan’s father utter a loud cry, and shout to me:

“Lionel! Come up here at once!”

Up the two flights of stairs I dashed, to where I saw a light, and found myself in a low-ceilinged attic. In the centre of a bare, miserable room was a bed, and upon it a female figure.

Next second I recognized the pallid, wasted face as that of Joan--_my Joan_!

My love was inert and apparently unconscious. She opened her eyes for a single second, then closed them again. She recognized neither her father nor me. Mr. Gell suddenly was aged. A moan escaped him.

“This must be the woman whom the fellow in the public-house said couldn’t last much longer,” Rayner remarked. “Do you know her, sir?” he asked of the famous King’s Counsel.

“Know her? Why, she’s my daughter! We must get a doctor at once.”

I stroked my dear one’s hot brow tenderly, and then, realizing that a medical man must be obtained without delay, rushed downstairs to the fugitive’s motor-cycle, and, mounting it, dashed at full speed along the road. After a few miles I entered the dark main-street of a small country town which proved to be Woburn and, of a sleepy man driving a cart, I inquired the whereabouts of the doctor’s house.

Ten minutes later I had explained briefly the discovery of the police, and very shortly the doctor got his car out and followed me back to where my loved one was lying.

After two hours she was removed to the hospital at Leighton Buzzard. But it was nearly three weeks before she was able to relate what had happened to her after being decoyed away by that message purporting to have been sent by me.

While seated in the drawing-room at Queen’s Gate, still very pale and weak from the ill-treatment and semi-starvation she had undergone, she related to us fully her startling adventures.

After going to the Florida Club she had received a second message saying that I had been the victim of a street accident, that I had been taken to St. George’s Hospital. The man who told her so was Owen. And he, having a car outside, offered to take her to the hospital. Naturally alarmed and eager to be at my side, she accepted, only to fall into a well-prepared trap!

In the car she had been seized with dizziness, doped, no doubt. But, on coming to herself, she found to her horror that she was locked in an upstairs room in a small and dirty house kept by a foreigner, named Dufour, and his wife.

She was constantly threatened with death if she shouted for help. But once or twice in her half-demented state she did shout, and her cries were no doubt those heard in Finlay Street by the neighbor, Mrs. Richmond, wife of the draper’s assistant.

Of her removal to the country she had no recollection, for she had again been doped. At Fulham she had been seized with a sudden illness. Then, later at the hospital, at Leighton Buzzard, the doctors had found that from time to time drugs had been given her. All of which had aggravated her condition until she was so ill at the time of her discovery that she could not have lived another week under such conditions.

Happily, she was snatched from the grave just in time. After a fortnight with her mother at Eastbourne she had almost regained her normal health.

Naturally, I spent all the time I could with her, and my blood boiled when she related the ill-treatment and insults meted out to her by her father’s vindictive enemies.

Often, when alone, I held her fondly in my arms and kissed her passionately upon the lips. Nevertheless, my senses were ever benumbed by the terrible knowledge of that tell-tale entry at Somerset House.

From her, as indeed from everyone, I preserved strictly the secret of my marriage. But the appalling fact obsessed me day and night. I dare not attempt to sue for a divorce for fear of the scandal it must certainly entail. Illona was my enemy, and if I attempted to free myself she would, I knew, rise against me and do her worst.

Several weeks went by.

I was compelled to make two journeys abroad--one to Lord Oxenwood at the League of Nations at Geneva, the other by the Sud Express to Madrid, returning on the day following my arrival.

Meanwhile, the Press had reported the dramatic arrest of Owen, Dufour, and Booth. They had been charged at Bow Street with the smash-and-grab robbery from the shop-window of Appleyard’s, the well-known jewelers in Old Bond Street. And, after a remand, they had been committed for trial at the London Sessions. To the intense chagrin of the prisoners, Mr. Gell, K.C., had been instructed by the Director of Public Prosecutions to conduct the case against them. Well they knew that their bitter reprisals against the great lawyer would go against them. Joan, they were well aware, had been discovered, and had related her whole sensational story.

As a matter of fact, her father was furious, even though he was grateful that his daughter had been restored to them. Nevertheless, his anger against Owen knew no bounds.

As for me, I was in an overwhelming quandary.

My own guilt held me speechless.

Day followed day, yet I constantly feared lest one or another of the prisoners might give information against me. For indeed, they must have suspected that I had put the police on the track of the young scoundrel Owen, with the disastrous results to them.

The police, of course, had no idea that the gang of shop-window thieves was affiliated with the cosmopolitan gang under the desperate motor-bandit, Felix Zuroff.

It was only long afterward that I discovered from Lisely Hatten, or Hattenescu--the Roumanian girl who had always acted as my friend and who, having cut herself adrift from the gang, married a respectable banker’s clerk--the truth concerning that well-remembered night in Camberwell. It seems that the Soviet Government had disposed of about half the Imperial Russian Crown jewels, together with those filched from the fashionable jewelers’ shops in Leningrad and Moscow. The remaining half of the jewels of the Romanoffs was being sent in charge of a special messenger and two armed guards, to be delivered in Antwerp to a rich international syndicate which had arranged to purchase them for two and a half millions sterling.

In fear that the train might be wrecked by robbers, the jewels were sent by fast motor car from Moscow to the town of Zdolbunow, on the Polish frontier, whence they were to be conveyed by train across to Belgium. Twenty miles before the frontier was reached there appeared suddenly in the night three cars upon the road. In the first was Zuroff and three men. They ran the Soviet car into a ditch, and, after a fierce encounter, shot dead the courier, the driver, and the two guards. Afterwards they made off to Zdolbunow with their booty. The railway authorities, warned from Moscow of the official courier’s arrival, and never dreaming of the raid, welcomed the bandits; and three of them were soon in the train on their way to Warsaw and Berlin. The others--including Illona, Dufour, and Owen--traveled as ordinary passengers by the same train. But at Lublin, half way to Warsaw, they all alighted. Two cars awaited them, and they disappeared, subsequently arriving at Vienna, and getting to London via Switzerland, by the Arlberg Express.

On the foggy night in Camberwell they were examining their booty in that small, stuffy room which was the London meeting-place of the notorious and elusive gang, and into which I had so unfortunately stumbled.

At that hour the girl Hatten had taken compassion on me, and, since her happy marriage, I, on more than one occasion, have thanked her for allowing me possession of the most precious of the senses--my eyesight.

Still vividly I remember that old rickety table piled with jewels of such magnitude that my eyes had been dazzled, and of the dark, sinister face of the man who had emulated the infamous Bonnot, the motor bandit, and whose daring crimes had become the terror of the Continental police.

I compared his imperious appearance in that squalid working-class house in Camberwell with the luxury and ease in which he lived in retirement in his flower-embowered flat in Lausanne--the man who in his great criminal coup had taken the lion’s share of jewels worth two and a half million pounds.

But all this was of no assistance to me. Two hard facts obsessed me. The defiant Felix Zuroff, the most notorious motor bandit of the century and the inventor of the musical code, had not released me from my unwilling bondage. Neither could I cast off the shackles which bound me forever to that ugly, ill-formed adventuress who called herself Illona.

Though occupying one of the most trusted offices at Downing Street, I was, nevertheless, an expert jewel-thief. Recollections of that wonderful rope of stolen pearls which had reposed in a hollow book in my room, held me bewildered. Sometimes with excuses and untruths forced to my lips by Joan, and the ever-present fear of denunciation to the police, I felt myself on the verge of madness.

I put the situation plainly to you, my reader. Had you awakened, as from a trance, to find yourself to be an expert jewel-thief, married to a rouged and made-up old hag whose criminal record was known, and yet you were engaged to a sweet, innocent girl whom you adored--how, I ask, would you--how would you have acted?