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Four Stragglers

<h3> BOOK I: SHADOW VARNE </h3> <h3> —I— </h3> <h4> THREE YEARS LATER </h4> The East End being, as it were, more akin to the technique and the mechanics of the thing, applauded the craftsmanship; the West End, a little grimly on the part of the men, and with a loquacity not wholly free from nervousness on the part of the women, wondered who would be next. "The cove as is runnin' that show," said the East End, with its tongue delightedly in its cheek, "knows 'is wye abaht. Wish I was 'im!" "The police are nincompoops!" said the outraged masculine West End. "Absolutely!" "Yes, of course! It's quite too impossible for words!" said the female of the West End. "One never knows when one's own—do let me give you some tea, dear Lady Wintern..." From something that had merely been of faint and passing interest, a subject of casual remark, it had grown steadily, insidiously, had become conversationally epidemic. All London talked; the papers talked—virulently. Alone in that great metropolis, New Scotland Yard was silent, due, if the journals were to be believed, to the fact that that world-famous institution was come upon a state of hopeless and atrophied senility. With foreknowledge obtained in some amazing manner, with ingenuity, with boldness, and invariably with success, a series of crimes, stretching back several years, had been, were being, perpetrated with insistent regularity. These crimes had been confined to the West End of London, save on a few occasions when the perpetrators had gone slightly afield—because certain wealthy West-Enders had for the moment changed their accustomed habitat. The journals at spasmodic intervals printed a summary of the transactions. In jewels, and plate, and cash, the figures had reached an astounding total, not one penny of which had ever been recovered or traced. Secret wall safes, hidden depositories of valuables opened with obliging celerity and disgorged their contents to some apparition which immediately vanished. There was no clue. It simply happened again and again. Traps had been set with patience and considerable artifice. The traps had never been violated. London was accustomed to crimes, just as any great city was; there were hundreds of crimes committed in London; but these were of a genre all their own, these were distinctive, these were not to be confused with other crimes, nor their authors with other criminals. And so London talked—and waited. It was raining—a thin drizzle. The night was uninviting without; cosy within the precincts of a certain well-known West End club, the Claremont, to be exact. Two men sat in the lounge, in a little recess by the window. One, a man of perhaps thirty-three, of athletic build, with short-cropped black hair and clean-shaven face, a one-time captain of territorials in the late war, and though once known on the club membership roll as Captain Francis Newcombe was to be found there now as Francis Newcombe, Esquire; the other, a very much older man, with a thin, grey little face and thin, grey hair, would, on recourse to the club roll, have been found to be Sir Harris Greaves, Bart. The baronet made a gesture with his cigar, indicative of profound disgust. "Democracy!" he ejaculated. "The world safe for democracy! I am nauseated with that phrase. What does it mean? What did it ever mean? We have had three years now since the war which was to work that marvel, and I have seen no signs of it yet. So far as I—" Captain Francis Newcombe laughed. "And yet," he said, "I embody in my person one of those signs. You can hardly deny that, Sir Harris. Certainly I would never have had, shall I call it the distinction, of being admitted to this club had it not been for the democratic leaven working through the war. You remember, of course? An officer and a gentleman! We of England were certainly consistent in that respect. While one was an officer one was a gentleman. The clubs were all pretty generally thrown open to officers during the war. Some of them came from the Lord knows where. T.G.'s they were called, you remember—Temporary Gentlemen. Afterward—but of course that's another story so far as most of them were concerned. Take my own case. I enlisted in the ranks, and toward the latter end of the war I obtained my commission—I became a T.G. And as such I enjoyed the privileges of this club. I was eventually, however, one of the fortunate ones. At the close of the war the club took me on its permanent strength and, ergo, I became a—Permanent Gentleman. Democracy! Private Francis Newcombe—Captain Francis Newcombe—Francis Newcombe, Esquire." "A rather thin case!" smiled the baronet. "What I was about to say when you interrupted me was that, so far as I can see, all that the world has been made safe for by the war is the active expression of the predatory instinct in man. I refer to the big interests, the trusts; to the radical outcroppings of certain labour elements; to—yes!"—he tapped the newspaper that lay on the table beside him—"the Simon-pure criminal such as this mysterious gang of desperadoes that has London at its wits' ends, and those of us who have anything to lose in a state of constant apoplexy." Captain Francis Newcombe shook his head. "I think you're wrong, sir," he said judicially. "It isn't the aftermath of the war, or the result of the war. It is the war, of which the recent struggle was only a phase. It's been going on since the days of the cave man. You've only to reduce the nation to the terms of the individual, and you have it. A nation lusts after something which does not belong to it. It proceeds to take it by force. If it fails it is punished. That is war. The criminal lusts after something. He flings down his challenge. If he is caught he is punished. That is war. What is the difference?" The baronet sipped at his Scotch and soda. "H'm! Which brings us?" he suggested. "Nowhere!" said Captain Francis Newcombe promptly. "It's been going on for ages; it'll go on for all time. Always the individual predatory; inevitably in cycles, the cumulative individual running amuck as a nation. Why, you, sir, yourself, a little while ago when somebody here in the room made a remark to the effect that he believed this particular series of crimes was directly attributable to the war because it would seem that some one of ourselves, some one who has the entrée everywhere, who, through being contaminated by the filth out there, had lost poise and was probably the guilty one, meaning, I take it, that the chap finding himself in a hole wasn't so nice or particular in his choice of the way out of it as he would have been but for the war—you, Sir Harris, denied this quite emphatically. It—er—wouldn't you say, rather bears me out?" The old baronet smiled grimly. "Quite possibly!" he said. "But if so, I must confess that my conclusion was based on a very different premise from yours. In fact, for the moment, I was denying the theory that the criminal in question was one of ourselves, quite apart from any bearing the war might have had upon the matter." The ex-captain of territorials selected a cigarette with care from his case. "Yes?" he inquired politely. The old baronet cleared his throat. He glanced a little whimsically at his companion. "It's been a hobby, of course, purely a hobby; but in an amateurish sort of way as a criminologist I have spent a great deal of time and money in—" "By Jove! Really!" exclaimed Captain Newcombe. "I didn't know, Sir Harris, that you—" He paused suddenly in confusion. "That's anything but a compliment to your reputation though, I'm afraid, isn't it? A bit raw of me! I—I'm sorry, sir." "Not at all!" said the old baronet pleasantly; and then, with a wry smile: "You need not feel badly. In certain quarters much more intimate with the subject than you could be supposed to be, I am equally unrecognised." "It's very good of you to let me down so easily," said the ex-captain of territorials contritely. "Will you go on, sir? You were saying that you did not believe these crimes were being perpetrated by one in the same sphere of life as those who were being victimised. Why is that, sir? The theory seemed rather logical." "Because," said the old baronet quietly, "I believe I know the man who is guilty." The ex-captain of territorials stared. "Good Lord, sir!" he gasped out. "You—you can't mean that?" "Just that!" A grim brusqueness had crept into the old baronet's voice. "And one of these days I propose to prove it!" "But, sir"—the ex-captain of territorials in his amazement was still apparently groping out for his bearings—"in that case, the authorities—surely you—" "They were very polite at Scotland Yard—very!" The old baronet smiled drily again. "That was the quarter to which I referred. Socially and criminologically—if I may be permitted the word—I fear that the Yard regards me from widely divergent angles. But damme, sir"—he became suddenly irascible—"they're too self-sufficient! I am a doddering and interfering old idiot! But nevertheless I am firmly convinced that I am right, and they haven't heard the end of the matter—if I have to devote every penny I've got to substantiating my theory and bringing the guilty man to justice!" Captain Francis Newcombe coughed in an embarrassed way. The old baronet reached for his tumbler, and drank generously. It appeared to soothe his feelings. "Tut, tut!" he said self-chidingly. "I mean every word of that—that is, as to my determination to pursue my own investigations to the end; but perhaps I have not been wholly fair to the Yard. So far, I lack proof; I have only theory. And the Yard too has its theory. It is a very common disease. The theory of the Yard is that the man I believe to be guilty of these crimes of to-day died somewhere around the middle stages of the war." "By Jove!" Captain Francis Newcombe leaned sharply forward on the arms of his chair. "You don't say!" The old baronet wrinkled his brows, and was silent for a moment. "It's quite extraordinary!" he said at last, with a puzzled smile. "I can't for the life of me understand how I got on this subject, for I think we were discussing democracy—but you appear to be interested." "That is expressing it mildly," said the ex-captain of territorials earnestly. "You can't in common decency refuse me the rest of the story now, Sir Harris." "There is no reason that I know of why I should," said the old baronet. "Did you ever hear of a man called Shadow Varne?" Captain Francis Newcombe shook his head. "No," he said. "Possibly, then," said the old baronet, "you may remember the robbery at Lord Seeton's place? It was during the war." "No," said the other thoughtfully. "I can't say I do. I don't think I ever heard of it." "Well, perhaps you wouldn't," nodded the old baronet. "It happened at a time when, from what you've said, I would imagine you were in the ranks, and—however, it doesn't matter. The point is that the robbery at Lord Seeton's is amazingly like, I could almost say, each and every one of this series of robberies that is taking place to-day. The same exact foreknowledge, the hidden wall safe, or hiding place, or repository, or whatever it might be, that was supposedly known only to the family; the utter absence of any clue; the complete disappearance of—shall we call it?—the loot itself. There is only one difference. In the case of Lord Seeton, the jewels—it was principally a jewel robbery—were eventually recovered. They were found in Paris in the possession of Shadow Varne. But"—the old baronet smiled a little grimly again—"the police were not to blame for that." Sir Harris Greaves, amateur criminologist, reverted to his tumbler of Scotch and soda. Captain Francis Newcombe knocked the ash from his cigarette with little taps of his forefinger. "Yes?" he said. "It's a bit of a story," resumed the old baronet slowly. "Yes, quite a bit of a story. I do not know how Shadow Varne got to Paris; I simply know that, had he not taken sick, neither he nor the jewels would ever have been found. But perhaps I am getting a little too far ahead. I think I ought to say that Shadow Varne, though he had never actually up to this time been known in a physical sense to the police, had established for himself a widespread and international reputation. His name here, for instance, amongst the criminal element of our own East End was a sort of talisman, something to conjure with, as it were, though no one could ever be found who had seen or could describe the man. I suppose that is how he got the name of Shadow. Some must have known him, of course, but they were tight-lipped; and even these, I am inclined to believe, would never have been able to lay fingers on him, even had they dared. He was at once an inscrutable and diabolical character. I would say, and in this at least Scotland Yard will agree with me, he seemed like some evil, unembodied spirit upon whom one could never come in a tangible sense, but that hovered always in the background, dominating, permeating with his personality the criminal world." "But if this is so, if no one knew him, or had ever seen him," said the ex-captain of territorials in a puzzled way, "how was he recognised as Shadow Varne in Paris?" "I am coming to that," said the old baronet quietly. "As you know very well, in those days they were always poking into every rat hole in Paris for draft evaders. That is how they stumbled on Shadow Varne. They dug him out of one of those holes, a very filthy hole, like a rat—like a very sick rat. The man was raving in delirium. That is how they knew they had caught Shadow Varne—because in his delirium he disclosed his identity. And that is how they recovered Lord Seeton's jewels." "My word!" ejaculated Captain Francis Newcombe. "A bit tough, I call that! My sympathies are almost with the accused!" "I am afraid I have failed to make you understand the inhuman qualities of the man," said the old baronet tersely. "However, Shadow Varne was even then too much for them—at least temporarily. A few nights later he escaped from the hospital; but he was still too sick a man to stand the pace, and they were too close on his heels. He had possibly, all told, a couple of hours of liberty, running, dodging through the streets of Paris. The chase ended somewhere on the bank of the Seine. He was fired at here as he ran, and though quite a few yards in the lead, he appeared to have been hit, for he was seen to stagger, fall, then recover himself and go on. He refused to halt. They fired and hit him again—or so they believed. He fell to the ground—and rolled over the edge into the water. And that was the last that was ever seen of him." "My word!" ejaculated the ex-captain of territorials again. "That's a nice end! And I must say, with all due deference to you, Sir Harris, that I can't see anything wrong with Scotland Yard's deduction. I fancy he's dead, fast enough." "Yes," said the old baronet deliberately, "I imagined you would say so; and I, too, would agree were it not for two reasons. First, had it been any other man than Shadow Varne; and, second, that the body was never recovered." "But," objected Captain Francis Newcombe, "if, as you believe, the man is still carrying on, having been identified once, he would, wouldn't you say, be recognised again?" "Not at all!" said the old baronet decidedly. "You must take into account the man's sick and emaciated condition when he was caught, and the subsequent hospital surroundings. Let those who saw him then see the same man to-day, robust, in health, and in an entirely different atmosphere, locality and environment! Recognised? I would lay long odds against it, even leaving out of account the man's known ingenuity for evading recognition." The ex-captain of territorials nodded thoughtfully. "Yes," he said, "that is quite possible; but, even granting that he is still alive, I can't see—" "Why I should believe he is at the bottom of what is going on to-day here in London?" supplied the old baronet quickly. "Perhaps intuition, perhaps the mystery about the man that has interested me from the time I first heard of him in the early years of the war, and which has ever since been a fascinating study with me, has something to do with it. I told you to begin with that my proof was theory. But I believe it. I do not say he is alone in this, or was alone in the Lord Seeton affair; but he is certainly the head and front and brains of whatever he was, or is, engaged in. As for the similarity of the cases, I will admit that might be pure coincidence, but we know that Shadow Varne did have the Seeton jewels in his possession. The strongest point, however, that I have to offer in a tangible sense, bearing in mind the man himself and his hideously elusive propensities, is the fact there is no absolute proof of his death. Why wasn't his body recovered? You will answer me probably along the same lines that the Paris police argued and that were accepted by Scotland Yard. You will say that it was dark, that the body might not have come to the surface immediately, and under the existing conditions, by the time they procured a boat and began their search, it might easily be missed. Very good! That is quite possible. But why, then, was not the body eventually recovered in two or three days, say—a week, if you like? You will say that this would probably be very far indeed from being the first instance in which a body was never recovered from the Seine. And here, too, you would be quite right. But I do not believe it. I do not believe it was a dead man, or a man mortally wounded, or a man wounded so badly that he must inevitably drown, who pitched helplessly into the water that night. I believe he did it voluntarily, and with considered cunning, as the only chance he had. Go into the East End. Listen to the stories you will hear about him. The world does not get rid of such as he so easily! The man is not human. The crimes he has committed would turn your blood cold. He is the most despicable, the most wanton thing that I ever heard of. He would kill with no more compunction than you would break in two that match you are holding in your hand. Where he came from God alone knows, and—" A club attendant had stopped beside the old baronet's chair. "Yes?" said the old baronet. "I beg pardon, Sir Harris, but your car is here," announced the man. "Very good! Thank you!" The old baronet drained his glass and stood up. "Well, you have heard the story, captain," he said with a dry smile. "I shall not embarrass you by asking you to decide between Scotland Yard and myself, but I shall at least expect you to admit that there is some slight justification for my theory." The ex-captain of territorials, as he rose in courtesy, shook his head quietly. "If I felt only that way about it," he said slowly, "I should simply thank you for a very interesting story and your confidence. As it is, there is so much justification I feel impelled to say to you that, if this man is what you describe him to be, is as dangerous as you say he is, I would advise you, Sir Harris, in all seriousness to leave him—to Scotland Yard." "What!" exclaimed the old baronet sharply. "And let him go free! No, sir! Not if every effort I can put forth will prevent it! Never, sir—under any circumstances!" Captain Francis Newcombe smiled gravely, and shrugged his shoulders. "Well, at least, I felt I ought to say it," he said. "Good-night, Sir Harris—and thank you so much!" "Good-night, captain!" replied the old baronet cordially, as he turned away. "Good-night to you, sir!" Captain Francis Newcombe watched the other leave the room, then he walked over to the window. The drizzle had developed into a downpour with gusts of wind that now pelted the rain viciously at the window panes. He frowned at the streaming glass. A moment later, as he moved away from the window, he consulted his watch. It was a quarter past eleven. Downstairs he secured his hat and stick, and spoke to the doorman. "Get a taxi, please, Martin," he requested, "and tell the chap to drive me home." He lighted a cigarette as he waited, and then under the shelter of the doorman's umbrella entered the taxi. It was not far. The taxi stopped before a flat in a fashionable neighbourhood that was quite in keeping with the fashionable club Captain Francis Newcombe had just left. His man admitted him. "It's a filthy night, Runnells," said the ex-captain of territorials. Runnells slammed the door against a gust of wind. "You're bloody well right!" said Runnells. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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