For Information Received E-Book

Edgar Wallace

• Herausgeber: Alien Ebooks
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 186

Beschreibung

From the masterful mind of Edgar Wallace comes a riveting collection of short stories that will leave you spellbound. In the title story "For Information Received," a down-on-his-luck carpenter hatches a clever scheme, only to find that his mark is shrewder than he appears. This classic page-turner serves up intrigue and irony in equal measure.

The other 8 stories in this collection are equally captivating, including:

"Snares of Paris": A soldier returns from war to discover his fiancée's shocking secret.

"A Business Training": A naive young woman takes on her scheming half-siblings to protect her father.

"Miss Prentiss Tells a Lie": A woman's deception could cost an innocent man his life.

"A Priestess of Osiris":

Ancient rituals collide with modern life in London, with disastrous results.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

1.

For Information Received

2.

Snares of Paris

3.

A Business Training

4.

Miss Prentiss tells a Lie

5.

A Priestess of Osiris

6.

The Timid Admirer

7.

The Jewel

8.

Findings Are Keepings

9.

The Ear of the Sanctuary

FOR INFORMATION RECEIVED

In the days of his youth, long before he so much as dreamt of millions, Mr. Roy Emmet Grayson had asked a chance-met boy to carry his bag from one railway station to another, offering him, as a reward, a sum so large that, had the boy been blessed with intelligence, might have set him wondering why his benefactor did not hire a cab. And at the end of the journey he had dismissed the lad with a cuff, and might have got away with his conspiracy to defraud but for the intervention of a large-sized policeman.

Grayson made his money that way; in the fortunate absence of policemen at the crucial moments of his high-class larcenies. Seldom did his signature appear in binding documents: it was his boast that his word was his bond, and his favourite saying was, “You can leave it to me. . . . I’ll see you right.”

Most people believed him, only to discover that, their services ended, his memory failed to function.

Norma Brayle, his niece and secretary, knew him rather well, and gained her knowledge by successive jars, which rather shook her faith in human nature. Once she had protested. . . .

“Listen,” said Mr. Grayson, pointing the wet end of his cigar at her, “you’ve got a good job, haven’t you? I keep you, I feed you, I pay you real money. Want to lose it? Want to go back to the girls’ hostel and tout work in the City? You don’t!”

“No, Mr. Grayson,” she said, a little pale at the prospect.

“Well, see nothing, hear nothing, and say nothing. That’s what you’re paid for. And get that uncle and niece idea out of your head. You’re my secretary, and when I die, the only difference it will make to you will be that you’ll be short of a salary.”

She hated him and was afraid of him—that was before she met Johnny Westall. And she would never have met Johnny but for the fact that Mr. Grayson left her in Paris for a whole week whilst he was in Madrid, fixing his new iron company.

Johnny was wonderful. He was an engineer, a metallurgist, and a dancing partner of supreme merit. He had the most glorious grey-blue eyes and a smile that was altogether adorable. And he was romantically poor, because he was a young engineer with ideas that old engineers were loth to accept.

Mr. Grayson came back from Madrid, flushed with success, for he had manœuvred a concession without binding himself to giving any quid pro quo, and that kind of contract was his ideal.

He did not meet Johnny, but Norma spoke about him, timidly and with a grand attempt at indifference.

Mr. Grayson grunted. He was by nature suspicious, and never grudged time or money to prove that his suspicions were justified, but on this occasion he merely said: “Shut up! I’ve got something else to think about than your dam’d dancing partners,” and there the matter ended. A day or so later, when he was lunching at the Embassy, he heard about Johnny Westall as an engineer, and at the moment did not identify him as his secretary’s friend.

One morning, many months later, Mr. Roy Grayson finished the dictation of a letter, and said:

“You know that fellow Westall—the engineering fellow?”

“Yes, Mr. Grayson.”

“I’m sending him to Russia. Some new platinum deposits have been found in the Urals. We have got the Russian Government’s permission. It will be a fine thing for him, if the report is a good one . . .”

She did not ask what would happen if it was bad—good or bad, the result would be very much the same. There was little need for Mr. Grayson to take her into his confidence. In the privacy of her room she found a letter that had come by the morning post.

“. . . I wish I could have met him, dear—he seems to be a very decent fellow. The allowance for expenses is good, and his agent (who made the arrangement after he had spoken to Grayson on the ’phone) says that, although Mr. Grayson has fixed no salary, I can depend upon his doing the right thing. This is the biggest chance I have had, and when I come back I know a dear little flat in Knightsbridge that is mine for the asking.”

Norma sighed. She was cursed with the instinct for loyalty, or Johnny Westall would know the value of her relative’s promise. Yet, there was a chance, in this case. . . .

Johnny had been gone three months, and only one letter had come to her and to her employer . . . there followed an interval of nine weeks’ silence.

Mr. Grayson, with American engagements to fulfil, fumed angrily. It never occurred to him that his niece might have heard.

“What the devil he is doing I don’t know!” he snarled. “I’m leaving for America on Wednesday, and not a line! This comes of employing a waster who thinks more of his infernal dancing . . . he’s in some pretty Moscow dance hall wasting my money . . .”

In reality he did not think this: in his soul was a growing suspicion that maddened him. There were other seekers after platinum in Russia. Men could be bought—his head swum with fury as he contemplated the bare possibility.

Then one morning came a wire from Berlin.

“Arriving Wednesday,” and nothing more.

“Arriving Wednesday! And not a word about whether he has found anything!” he raged. “The dog! He knows I am leaving England on Wednesday——”

“He wouldn’t willingly miss his bonus,” she said, watching him, and he exploded.

“Bonus! Good God! do you imagine that I’m waiting for that! I never promised him a bonus anyway. He’s had the experience at my expense, and he’ll be lucky to get anything more.”

On the Tuesday night, Roy Emmet Grayson left his sitting-room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and strolled out to the Embankment to cool off.

“And who the devil are you?” demanded Mr. Grayson, not without annoyance.

The shabby apparition that confronted him, so suddenly that it seemed to have risen from the earth, chuckled. How shabby he was, the night mercifully hid. Grayson saw only a squat figure and the red glow of a burning cigar, but then his eyes were not yet accustomed to the darkness.

“My name,” said the other amusedly, “is Caston—P. B. Caston—suggest anything?”

“It suggests printing machines to me,” replied the millionaire, “but as I am not a printer——”

The cigar waved gracefully in the protesting hand of the other.

“I am hardly likely to hold you up outside the Ritz-Carlton to sell you a printing press,” he said. “Fortunately, it is so dark that you cannot see me, otherwise you would probably hand me over to the police. For I am a most unprepossessing tramp. I have a four days’ beard, my shoes are gaping at the toes, and my trousers are held up by a rope belt.”

Grayson was interested—so interested that he forgot for the first time the irritation which had possessed him all that day.

“What is it?” he asked briskly. “A hard luck story? You were a schoolfellow of mine at Vermont—you were ruined by speculating in my Iron Syndicate—your wife played hockey with my sister—or is it a new one you are trying to put over?”

Again the stranger chuckled.

“Wrong!” he said triumphantly. “I’ve never seen you until to-day. I don’t want to borrow anything, and I’ve never speculated a penny in any of your wild-cat corporations. I merely offer you my services.”

The millionaire smiled in the night.

“Shoot, Felix,” he said, for him good-humouredly.

The other pulled at his cigar.

“This afternoon you offered the Western Route Steamship Company a fabulous sum if they would postpone the sailing of the Carpathania. The ship leaves for New York to-morrow and you’re anxious to cross by her—stop me if I’m wrong—but it is necessary that you should meet one John Westall, who is on his way from Russia and cannot possibly reach London until to-morrow, after the Carpathania has sailed.”

Grayson listened with growing wonder at this very accurate recital of the situation.

“How do you know this?” he demanded suspiciously.

Again the cigar waved.

“Write me down head of the English Secret Service,” said its owner easily; “call me Little Willie Pinkerton, the Boy Sleuth from Baker Street. Read this.”

He produced from somewhere a sheet of paper. Mr. Grayson walked to a lamp-post and began reading. It was in Westall’s writing and was the first part of a report—the very report on the very property he had been commissioned to make for Grayson.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded. “And where is the rest of it—the report leaves off before . . . before . . .”

“Exactly—before it starts in to report,” said the man complacently. “Now the question is, not how I came to get this—I’ve just returned from Russia—but whether you will pay me for the remainder. One thing I can tell you: this is your chance of getting the first reading of Westall’s interesting statement.”

“You mean, if I don’t buy it from you, he will sell it elsewhere—the swine!”

“Swine or hog or human, it is a matter of indifference to me,” said the stranger. “Do you buy?”

“Yes,” promptly. “Let me see the remainder.”

The tramp chuckled softly.

“Let me see something more substantial than a promise without witnesses,” he said. “One thousand pounds net and the report is yours.”

Grayson thought quickly. Obviously the report was genuine. He knew the handwriting; the statement began by a recapitulation of the instructions Westall had received before he left . . . but a thousand pounds!

It would be worth that in many ways. The day’s start he would get over his competitors, the fact that he would be able to catch his boat.

“I’ll give you a cheque——” he began.

“Cheque me no cheques, man,” said the tramp. “Cash is the blood of my body. I’ll wait for you whilst you get it. . . .”

A queer transaction in the darkness of a wind-swept embankment. . . . Roy Grayson hated to see money go—hated the tramp worse when he counted the notes that the millionaire gave him and found them a hundred short. At last:

“Here is the rest of the report—call a policeman if I have deceived you.”

Rapidly the millionaire read . . . half-way through he uttered a cry.

“There isn’t any platinum on the property!” he said angrily. “Then why is he trying to sell the report elsewhere.”

“He isn’t—I never said so. You’re right about the platinum; there isn’t the colour of it. And with a report like that, I knew (for I have been well informed upon your generous nature) that I might whistle for a bonus.”

“You knew—who are you?”

“Westall—John Westall.”

      *      *      *      *      *      

Mr. Grayson did not see his secretary when he got back to his room. He did not even go to her wedding—you can get married on a thousand pounds—or send her a present.

SNARES OF PARIS

I

Johnny Kelly of the Special Branch

Johnny Kelly, in the outward guise of a gentleman of leisure, stood on the corner of Rue de la Paix and the Boulevard des Italiennes, and he was chewing a toothpick in his contemplative fashion. So he might have stood at the corner of Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue, indicating with a wave of his white-gloved hand this way or that to the bewildered country visitor. For years and years ago he had served his apprenticeship in the uniformed constabulary.

Only now he was in evening dress and apparently wholly dissociated from the police force—though in this respect appearance lied, as any international crook could have testified, for Johnny Kelly, or “J. K.” as they called him, was the cleverest inspector of the “Special Branch”—an unobtrusive force which Scotland Yard maintained in all the great capitals. The date was May 1919, and the conditions were ideal for introducing one who more than any other stood perpetually between the snares of Paris and its orders. He strolled a few paces along the deserted pavement—it was after the dinner-hour and the thick stream of traffic moved slowly on the other sidewalk. For here sat those connoisseurs in humanity, the clients of the Café de la Paix. They sat four deep facing the street, and above them the lights glowed and glittered, and the furled red and white sun-blind furnished a suggestion of decoration and festivity.

Johnny had often stood outside the Equitable Building and watched dusk fall over Paris. Mingling with the stars which hung in the dusky sky were millions of green stars and new constellations which spring had brought, for they were budding leaves on the branches of invisible trees, a trick of the arc lights which caught the emerald of the new green and toned the grey branches into the greyer dusk.

Mr. Kelly threw a professional glance along the Boulevard des Italiennes. The Café Americaine was a blob of light. To the left a golden slit marked the entrance to the Olysia, where rough houses might not be expected for hours yet, when the underground café was packed with moist humanity and the “private” dance hall where five franc champagne and women who looked cheaper got going.

He rolled his toothpick to the other corner of his mouth and nodded slightly to an officer of the Surete who approached him.

“Hello, M’sieur Kelly,” said that individual, “your man has not turned up yet?”

Johnny shook his head.

“Tigiliki won’t come himself,” he said; “he’s not the kind of fellow who would take a risk—your people are sure that he is up to his old game?”

“Certain,” said the other emphatically. “He has a man named Smith working for him. If you can catch him we will put him over the border to-night.”

Kelly nodded and resumed his lonesome vigil. It was a night for thought only. Johnny Kelly’s thoughts were of a girl. . . . He sighed and eyed the stars again with a little twinge of pain.

In the very corner of the mass which packed the sidewalk before de la Paix, sat two bad men. They sat at a little table under the glass screen, and they talked across their sirops in low tones. They were both men of middle age, grey at the temple, and one was bald. Lex Smith was the notable leader of this pair. To describe them both as bad men is perhaps a little ungenerous to Solomon Levinsky, the second member of the party. He was a pale man with large, white hands. They were large because Nature made them so, they were white because he had been employed in the King’s Prison at Portland in “light clerical duties.”

Lex Smith regarded his friend with good-natured contempt.

“There never was a good crook with a conscience, Solly,” he said; “a crook with a conscience is a bad crook. It don’t pay anyway. Look at you. You’ve been doing five years in an English jug and why——”

“Because I wouldn’t double-cross a pal,” growled the other shortly; “but that’s nothing to do with it, Lex. This kind of job you are putting up to me I don’t want, and that’s a fact.”

“Well, you were in stripes——”

“Arrows,” corrected the other grimly; “big, black, broad arrows, Lex.”

“Don’t make me a liar for the sake of a little error of description,” pleaded Lex Smith; “it doesn’t matter how you were decorated anyway. You were jailed whilst I was in Switzerland making good money, living in the best hotels, old pal—the Kaiserhof and the Beau Rivage—with wine at every meal, eh? And that’s just the kind of life you can have for the next ten years. Now be wise. I’ve got you to France. I’ve done everything I can for you, and I need not even take you into this job at all. It’s a one-man job and no sharings, but because I like you, Solly——”

“I only knew the girl slightly,” interrupted Levinsky, “we had rooms in the same boarding-house—I knew her father.”

“So much the better,” said Lex Smith; “you will be able to pull some of that soft stuff about the old man—how you used to play Snap together on the dear old farm——”

He looked at his watch—a large golden machine set with flashing stones that glittered in the light of the overhead lamps.

“She will be here in ten minutes, and you have got to make up your mind.”

Solly was biting his nails thoughtfully.

“Who is this fellow that wants her?” he asked.

“He’s a prince,” said Lex Smith enthusiastically. “He’s got a flat on the Avenue Victor Hugo that’s got Sarah Bernhardt’s boudoir looking like a junk-shop. He’s got a villa at Beaulieu that you couldn’t describe and keep your reputation for veracity.”

“And he’s black,” said Solomon bluntly.

“Not black,” protested Lex Smith carefully, “he’s lived in a sunny clime, and I guess it has kinder tanned him. His name’s Tigiliki, and he calls himself Mr. Tigiliki, though his father was a prince in his native land, which is Ceylon. And he’s worth millions of real money, Solly, made it out of tea, and selling his ancestral estates to the hated British planters. He is dark,” he confessed, “and he’s not what I might call a beauty, but he’s got a heart of gold.”

Solomon Levinsky shifted uneasily in his chair, and with a jerk of his head summoned a white-aproned waiter. He did not speak till the man returned with the Cognac, and had carefully measured two portions into the empty glasses.

“Give us the real strength of it again,” he said.

“I met him in Switzerland,” explained Lex, “and that is where I saw her. She was at the Red Cross Headquarters looking after those fool prisoners. Tigiliki saw her one day on the lake and went clean crazy over her, used to send her flowers, candies, and that kind of stuff to her hotel by the car-load.”

“And she turned him down?” suggested Levinsky.

“Good and hard,” said the cheerful Lex, “say, every morning when the post came, the hotel used to shake. She complained to the Red Cross people, and they passed the word to the British Commissioner or Ambassador, or whatever the guy is, and they put Tigiliki over the frontier into France, having no further use for the same. I came with him. I was sort of attached to him. I saw Molly once, but I knew there was nothing to be gained by persuasion. She is as crazy about a man who was killed in the last attack on Cambrai, and what do you think he was?”

The other shook his head.

“A cop!” said Lex contemptuously, “a low-down copper. Can you beat it!”

“He was killed?”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” explained Lex, choosing his words carefully, “he was dead to her. She got a wire saying he was killed, and a printed casualty list. It cost me 250 francs to get the casualty list printed, but the wire was less expensive. Wouldn’t you have thought she would have done something desperate? That’s where I came in, to advise her, but apparently some old hen in the Red Cross Service supplied all the sympathy she wanted.”

“But didn’t she write to him?” asked Solomon, “she could find out——”

“There had been a quarrel. She was in Switzerland unknown to the fellow, which I only found out by accident by talking to a girl pal about this affair.”

“What do you expect me to do?” asked Levinsky sullenly.

“When she comes you are to have been in the British Army and fought like Hell. You saw Private Johnny Kelly die, and you have some letters in your possession written by him to her. Do you understand?”

Solomon nodded.

“A car will be waiting at the corner of the Rue de la Paix. That looks like it,” he nodded his head to a large limousine with bright headlights which was drawn up on the deserted corner opposite. “She will go away with you, and you are to keep her sweet till you reach your destination.”

“Where will that be?” asked the other.

“God knows!” said Lex cheerfully, “but it will be somewhere where a Son of Araby hands you a wad of bills, and takes delivery of the goods. You needn’t count them because Tigiliki is dead straight where money is concerned. There will be five hundred mille notes, and I shall expect you back at midnight.”

Again a pause.

“Fifty-fifty I suppose?”

“Would I offer you any less?” demanded Lex, “here she is!”

He jumped to his feet and his hat flew off.

      *      *      *      *      *      

On the corner of Rue de la Paix, Johnny Kelly of the Special Branch was surveying a handsome limousine which had drawn up opposite to him. It was a very nice car, and the driver was a turbanned Hindoo.

“There’s trouble coming my way,” said Johnny, and he showed his teeth in a wicked smile.

      *      *      *      *      *      

The girl was very pretty. Levinsky could hardly associate this radiant specimen of womanhood with the lank girl he had known in the old days.

“I remember you, Mr. Levinsky,” she smiled, “and I was so glad when Mr. Smith told me that you were in Paris. I only arrived the day before yesterday you know. It was difficult getting away from Switzerland because I had taken on new work,” she went on, “but the moment I got Mr. Smith’s letter I applied for leave.”

She wore some sort of close-fitting dark blue uniform and a wide-brimmed hat which shadowed her face.

“Oh yes, I knew Johnny Kelly,” said Solomon awkwardly, “he was in my company. Let me get you some coffee.”

She shook her head.