P.-C. Lee: Complete Series (ALL 24 Detective Stories in One Volume). Edgar Wallace

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      “‘I am not discussin’ the ethical side of the question, he says.

      “That conversation made me think a bit. What with his long words an’ his ready tongue, I hadn’t an answer ready for him, an’ I had my misgivings.

      “The next thing I heard about him was that he’d gone to a trainin’ college, an’ that he’d passed through that with every kind of honour.

      “All this time his father was in an’ out. Three month’ for larceny, six months for robbery from the person, twelve months for felony.

      “Then his mother died. ‘Chronic alcoholism’ was the verdict of the coroner’s jury. Albert didn’t go to the funeral, but sent a beautiful wreath with a Latin inscription which, properly translated, meant ‘She was all right accordin’ to her lights, but her lights were pretty bad.’

      “One of the masters at the school translated it to me, an’ shook his head.

      “I saw Albert again soon after an’ he gave me his views on the subject.

      “‘Bein’ my mother was only an accident,’ he said, very serious, ‘she couldn’t help it any more than me. Gen’rally speakin’, I’m glad she’s dead.’

      “‘That’s not the way for a boy to speak about his mother, however bad she was,’ I says reprovingly.

      “‘I’m speakin’ less as a son than as a philosopher,’ he says very thoughtful, then he added, ‘Father looks very healthy, don’t you think, Mr. Lee?’

      “‘Yes,’ I says, for he’d just come out of the ‘College’.

      “Albert shook his head.

      “‘The short sentence system is wasted on father,’ he says sadly, ‘he’ll last for ages.’

      “I never saw Albert again for eight — nine — why, it must have been ten years.

      “One day I was on duty in the Kensington Park Road — one summer day it was — when a cab drove up to one of the swaggerest houses an’ out stepped — Albert! He was well-dressed, not showily dressed like one of the ‘nuts’ would have been, but quietly in dark grey, an’ he recognised me instantly.

      “‘Hullo, constable!’ he said with a smile, ‘I think we’ve met before?’

      “‘Not Albert!’ I says, astonished.

      “‘He nodded. ‘You can go on calling me Albert,’ he says easy and affable. ‘I don’t want ‘sir’ from you.’

      He told me he lived in the big house, was goin’ to be married, and was makin’ money.

      “His father was dead, an’ he’d forgotten about the old Lambeth life.

      ‘‘It seems a nightmare,’ he says.

      “He told me how he’d left school-teaching an’ had gone in for business at printin’ in High Street, Kensington. Started in a small way, an’ worked up until he was employin’ over a hundred workmen.

      “He was very enthusiastic about printin’ — it was as much a hobby as anything else with him. I could see his heart was in his work, an’ in my mind I marked him down as bein’ a brand from the burnin’.

      “He must have guessed my thoughts.

      “‘Honesty’s the best policy, eh, Lee?’ he says, smilin’, ‘especially in the case of the modern thief who endeavours to combat scientific safeguards with a half-digested education from which the very elements of science are absent.’

      “I used to meet him occasionally, an’ I got into the habit of touchin’ my hat to him. At Christmas time he sent me a fiver with a little note askin’ me to accept it in the spirit in which it was sent.

      “He was very good to the poor, too; gave ’em dinner an’ coal an’ started a soup kitchen down Latimer Road way — in fact people got to look on him as a rich man, an’ Nick Moss an’ a pal of his named ‘Copper’ went down to Kensington Road an’ had a look at the house. Nick told me afterwards there was twenty ways of gettin’ into it.

      There was a kitchen window without bars, an’ a conservatory, an’ a billiard room — in fact, it was the easiest crib he’d ever seen.

      “So, accordingly, Nick an’ his pal took their swag — nice little centre-bits an’ glass cuttin’ machines, an’ drills — an’ as we say in court ‘effected an entrance’. I happened to be strolling up Kensington Park Road at about 2 a.m. smokin’ a pipe, contrary to all regulations, when passin’ Albert’s house I tried the front gate. It was fastened all right, but as I stepped up to it I trod on something soft. I stooped down an’ picked it up. It was a thin cotton glove — a new one what had never been worn.

      “Now I know that all up-to-date burglars carry cotton gloves because of the fear of leavin’ finger prints, an’ a policeman’s mind being naturally a suspicious one, I nipped over the low gate an’ walked quietly up to the house. I’d got my rubber heels on an’ made no noise. I put the light of the lantern over the front door. It was not marked, so I walked round to the servants’ entrance. There was no sign of chisel marks, then I put up my hand to the little window that opens from the pantry. ‘Opens is a good word, for wide open it was.

      “Very quietly I got back into the street again. I knew I should find P.C. Sampson at the corner of Kensington Park Square. He came to the ‘point’ to time an’ I called him quietly, an’ together we walked back to the house.

      “To cut a long story short we took Nick Moss as he came out of the servants’ entrance, an’ a few minutes afterwards we took his pal. I put the irons on Nick, because he was a dangerous character. Then I left Sampson to guard the two whilst I knocked up Mr. Walker. At the second knock up went a window an’ out came his head.

      “Hullo,’ says he, quietly. ‘what do you want?’

      “‘Will you come down here for a moment?’ says I.

      “‘What do you want?’ he asked again, so in as few words as possible I told him that his house had been broken into, an’ that we had caught the man. He came down, an’ opened the door cautiously. To my surprise he had a revolver in his hand — not an ordinary revolver, but one of these automatic pistols that you sometimes find in the possession of foreign anarchists.

      “‘Come in,’ says he, so me an’ Sampson an’ the two prisoners went in, an’ he switched on the light of the dinin’ room.

      “It seemed to me that when they met face to face — the man who had been robbed an’ the burglars — there a curious, eager look on Mr. Walker’s face, an’ a sort triumphant smile on the other’s.

      Copper, his pal, was an ordinary type of lag, an’ scowled from one to the other of us.

      “‘I shall want you to come to the station,’ I says. ‘an’ charge these men.’.

      “‘What for?’ says Mr. Walker coolly.

      “‘Burglary,’ I says.

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