THE COMPLETE FOUR JUST MEN SERIES (6 Detective Thrillers in One Edition). Edgar Wallace

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СКАЧАТЬ gentlemen whom you see have each fortunes exceeding six million pesetas, and I am even richer; we kill and we will kill because we are each sufferers through acts of injustice, for which the law gave us no remedy. If — if — —” he hesitated, still keeping his grey eyes fixed unflinchingly on the Spaniard. Then he resumed gently: “If we kill you it will be the first act of the kind.”

      Thery was on his feet, white and snarling, with his back to the wall; a wolf at bay, looking from one to the other with fierce suspicion.

      “Me — me!” he breathed, “kill me?”

      Neither of the three men moved save Manfred, who dropped his outstretched hand to his side.

      “Yes, you.” He nodded as he spoke. “It would be new work for us, for we have never slain except for justice — and to kill you would be an unjust thing.”

      Poiccart looked at Thery pityingly.

      “That is why we chose you,” said Poiccart, “because there was always a fear of betrayal, and we thought — it had better be you.”

      “Understand,” resumed Manfred calmly, “that not a hair of your head will be harmed if you are faithful — that you will receive a reward that will enable you to live — remember the girl at Jerez.”

      Thery sat down again with a shrug of indifference but his hands were trembling as he struck a match to light his cigarette.

      “We will give you more freedom — you shall go out every day. In a few days we shall all return to Spain. They called you the silent man in the prison at Granada — we shall believe that you will remain so.”

      After this the conversation became Greek to the Spaniard, for the men spoke in English.

      “He gives very little trouble,” said Gonsalez. “Now that we have dressed him like an Englishman, he does not attract attention. He doesn’t like shaving every day; but it is necessary, and luckily he is fair. I do not allow him to speak in the street, and this tries his temper somewhat.”

      Manfred turned the talk into a more serious channel.

      “I shall send two more warnings, and one of those must be delivered in his very stronghold. He is a brave man.”

      “What of Garcia?” asked Poiccart.

      Manfred laughed.

      “I saw him on Sunday night — a fine old man, fiery, and oratorical. I sat at the back of a little hall whilst he pleaded eloquently in French for the rights of man. He was a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Mirabeau, a broad-viewed Bright, and the audience was mostly composed of Cockney youths, who had come that they might boast they had stood in the temple of Anarchism.”

      Poiccart tapped the table impatiently.

      “Why is it, George, that an element of bathos comes into all these things?”

      Manfred laughed.

      “You remember Anderson? When we had gagged him and bound him to the chair, and had told him why he had to die — when there were only the pleading eyes of the condemned, and the half-dark room with a flickering lamp, and you and Leon and poor Clarice masked and silent, and I had just sentenced him to death — you remember how there crept into the room the scent of frying onions from the kitchen below.”

      “I, too, remember,” said Leon, “the case of the regicide.”

      Poiccart made a motion of agreement.

      “You mean the corsets,” he said, and the two nodded and laughed.

      “There will always be bathos,” said Manfred; “poor Garcia with a nation’s destinies in his hand, an amusement for shopgirls — tragedy and the scent of onions — a rapier thrust and the whalebone of corsets — it is inseparable.”

      And all the time Thery smoked cigarettes, looking into the fire with his head on his hands.

      “Going back to this matter we have on our hands,” said Gonsalez. “I suppose that there is nothing more to be done till — the day?”

      “Nothing.”

      “And after?”

      “There are our fine art reproductions.”

      “And after,” persisted Poiccart.

      “There is a case in Holland, Hermannus van der Byl, to wit; but it will be simple, and there will be no necessity to warn.”

      Poiccart’s face was grave.

      “I am glad you have suggested van der Byl, he should have been dealt with before — Hook of Holland or Flushing?”

      “If we have time, the Hook by all means.”

      “And Thery?”

      “I will see to him,” said Gonsalez easily; “we will go overland to Jerez — where the girl is,” he added laughingly.

      The object of their discussion finished his tenth cigarette and sat up in his chair with a grunt.

      “I forgot to tell you,” Leon went on, “that today, when we were taking our exercise walk, Thery was considerably interested in the posters he saw everywhere, and was particularly curious to know why so many people were reading them. I had to find a lie on the spur of the minute, and I hate lying” — Gonsalez was perfectly sincere. “I invented a story about racing or lotteries or something of the sort, and he was satisfied.”

      Thery had caught his name in spite of its anglicised pronunciation, and looked inquiry.

      “We will leave you to amuse our friend,” said Manfred, rising. “Poiccart and I have a few experiments to make.”

      The two left the room, traversed the narrow passage, and paused before a small door at the end. A larger door on the right, padlocked and barred, led to the studio. Drawing a small key from his pocket, Manfred opened the door, and, stepping into the room, switched on a light that shone dimly through a dust-covered bulb. There had been some attempt at restoring order from the chaos. Two shelves had been cleared of rubbish, and on these stood rows of bright little phials, each bearing a number. A rough table had been pushed against the wall beneath the shelves, and on the green baize with which the table was covered was a litter of graduated measures, test tubes, condensers, delicate scales, and two queer-shaped glass machines, not unlike gas generators.

      Poiccart pulled a chair to the table, and gingerly lifted a metal cup that stood in a dish of water. Manfred, looking over his shoulder, remarked on the consistency of the liquid that half filled the vessel, and Poiccart bent his head, acknowledging the remark as though it were a compliment.

      “Yes,” he said, satisfied, “it is a complete success, the formula is quite right. Some day we may want to use this.”

      He replaced the cup in its bath, and reaching beneath the table, produced from a pail a handful of ice-dust, with which he carefully surrounded the receptacle.

      “I regard that as the multum in farvo of explosives,” he said, and took down a small СКАЧАТЬ