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

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СКАЧАТЬ vaguely that he was face to face with death, and for one second he was seized with a wild panic.

      ‘Last night,’ Starque went on deliberately, ‘the Council met secretly, and your name was read from the list.’ The Englishman’s mouth went dry.

      ‘And the Council said with one voice…’ Starque paused to look at the Woman of Gratz. Imperturbable she stood with folded hands, neither approving nor dissenting. Momentarily Bartholomew’s eyes too sought her face — but he saw neither pity nor condemnation. It was the face of Fate, inexorable, unreasoning, inevitable.

      ‘Death was the sentence,’ said Starque in so soft a voice that the man facing him could scarcely hear him. ‘Death…’

      With a lightning motion he raised his hand and threw the knife… ‘Damn you…’ whimpered the stricken man, and his helpless hands groped at his chest…then he slid to his knees and Francois struck precisely…

      Again Starque looked at the woman.

      ‘It is the law,’ he stammered, but she made no reply.

      Only her eyes sought the huddled figure on the floor and her lips twitched.

      ‘We must get away from here,’ whispered Starque.

      He was shaking a little, for this was new work for him. The forces of jealousy and fear for his personal safety had caused him to take upon himself the office that on other occasions he left to lesser men.

      ‘Who lives in the opposite flat?’

      He had peeped through the door.

      ‘A student — a chemist,’ she replied in her calm, level tone.

      Starque flushed, for her voice sounded almost strident coming after the whispered conference between his companion and himself.

      ‘Softly, softly,’ he urged.

      He stepped gingerly back to where the body was lying, made a circuit about it, and pulled down the blind. He could not have explained the instinct that made him do this. Then he came back to the door and gently turned the handle, beckoning the others. It seemed to him that the handle turned itself, or that somebody on the other side was turning at the same time.

      That this was so he discovered, for the door suddenly jerked open, sending him staggering backward, and a man stood on the threshold.

      With the drawn blind, the room was in semi-darkness, and the intruder, standing motionless in the doorway, could see nothing but the shadowy figures of the inmates.

      As he waited he was joined by three others, and he spoke rapidly in a language that Starque, himself no mean linguist, could not understand. One of his companions opened the door of the student’s room and brought out something that he handed to the watcher on the threshold.

      Then the man entered the room alone and closed the door behind him, not quite close, for he had trailed what looked like a thick cord behind him and this prevented the shutting of the door.

      Starque found his voice.

      ‘What do you want?’ he asked, quietly.

      ‘I want Bartholomew, who came into this room half an hour ago,’ replied the intruder.

      ‘He has left,’ said Starque, and in the darkness he felt at his feet for the dead man — he needed the knife.

      ‘That is a lie,’ said the stranger coolly; ‘neither he nor you, Rudolph Starque, nor the Woman of Gratz, nor the murderer Francois has left.’

      ‘Monsieur knows too much,’ said Starque evenly, and lurched forward, swinging his knife.

      ‘Keep your distance,’ warned the stranger, and at that moment Starque and the silent Francois sprang forward and struck…

      The exquisite agony of the shock that met them paralysed them for the moment. The sprayed threads of the ‘live’ wire the man held before him like a shield jerked the knife from Starque’s hands, and he heard Francois groan as he fell.

      ‘You are foolish,’ said the voice again, ‘and you, madame, do not move, I beg — tell me what has become of Bartholomew.’

      A silence, then:

      ‘He is dead,’ said the Woman of Gratz.

      She heard the man move.

      ‘He was a traitor — so we killed him,’ she continued calmly enough. ‘What will you do — you, who stand as a self-constituted judge?’

      He made no reply, and she heard the soft rustle of his fingers on the wall.

      ‘You are seeking the light — as we all seek it,’ she said, unmoved, and she switched on the light.

      He saw her standing near the body of the man she had lured to his death, scornful, defiant, and strangely aloof from the sordidness of the tragedy she had all but instigated.

      She saw a tanned man of thirty-five, with deep, grave eyes, a broad forehead, and a trim, pointed beard. A man of inches, with strength in every line of his fine figure, and strength in every feature of his face.

      She stared at him insolently, uncaring, but before the mastery of his eyes, she lowered her lids.

      It seemed the other actors in the drama were so inconsiderate as to be unworthy of notice. The dead man in his grotesque posture, the unconscious murderer at his feet, and Starque, dazed and stunned, crouching by the wall.

      ‘Here is the light you want,’ she went on, ‘not so easily do we of the Red Hundred illuminate the gloom of despair and oppression—’

      ‘Spare me your speechmaking,’ said Manfred coldly, and the scorn in his voice struck her like the lash of a whip. For the first time the colour came to her face and her eyes lit with anger.

      ‘You have bad counsellors,’ Manfred went on, ‘you, who talk of autocrats and corrupt kingship — what are you but a puppet living on flattery? It is your whim that you should be regarded as a conspirator — a Corday. And when you are acclaimed Princess Revolutionary, it is satisfactory to your vanity — more satisfactory than your title to be hailed Princess Beautiful.’

      He chose his words nicely.

      ‘Yet men — such men as these,’ he indicated Starque, ‘think only of the Princess Beautiful — not the lady of the Inspiring Platitudes; not the frail, heroic Patriot of the Flaming Words, but the warm flesh and blood woman, lovable and adorable.’

      He spoke in German, and there were finer shades of meaning in his speech than can be exactly or literally translated. He spoke of a purpose, evenly and without emotion. He intended to wound, and wound deeply, and he knew he had succeeded.

      He saw the rapid rise and fall of her bosom as she strove to regain control of herself, and he saw, too, the blood on her lips where her sharp white teeth bit.

      ‘I shall know you again,’ she said with an intensity of passion that made her voice tremble. ‘I shall look for you and find you, СКАЧАТЬ