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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Squealer," Edgar Wallace deftly intertwines suspense and social commentary within a gripping narrative that examines the complexities of crime and morality. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century London, the novel employs Wallace's characteristic fast-paced prose and sharp dialogue, capturing the anxieties and intrigues of a rapidly modernizing society. With its exploration of journalistic ethics and the power of the press, the story reflects both the societal concerns of the time and Wallace's sharp insights into human behavior, showcasing his ability to blend entertainment with a deeper critique of contemporary issues. Edgar Wallace was a prolific writer whose background as a journalist informed much of his literary output. His experiences in investigative reporting sharpened his understanding of corruption and truth, themes that permeate "The Squealer." Known for his vivid characterizations and intricate plots, Wallace's work was instrumental in popularizing the crime fiction genre during the early 20th century, drawing readers into a world of intrigue that mirrored the complexities of his own life and times. Readers seeking a thrilling yet thought-provoking novel will find "The Squealer" an essential addition to their literary collection. Wallace's expert storytelling not only entertains but also encourages critical reflection on the interplay between power and responsibility, making this book a compelling read for both genre enthusiasts and those curious about the ethical dimensions of journalism. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Squealer
Table of Contents
Introduction
A ruthless economy of secrets drives this tale, where the power to expose is as deadly as the power to kill, and the fragile bonds of trust fray under the pressure of fear, ambition, and the cold arithmetic of survival.
Edgar Wallace, a British writer of the early twentieth century, brings his signature command of pace and intrigue to The Squealer, a work of crime fiction rooted in the interwar years. Its milieu is the modern city in all its contrasts—glitter and grime, public spectacle and private menace—where criminal enterprise intersects with official authority. Published during a period when popular thrillers flourished and new media accelerated the circulation of sensational stories, this novel sits comfortably within Wallace’s prolific output, offering readers a brisk, plot-forward experience that reflects the anxieties and appetites of its time.
At its core is a figure known for turning information into influence, a presence whose betrayals unsettle the criminal world and complicate the work of investigators. The premise unfolds as a cat-and-mouse pursuit that moves through clubs, offices, and backstreets, where every conversation might be leverage and every alliance provisional. Wallace frames the chase not as a simple duel between law and crime, but as a delicate negotiation of risks in which each player is vulnerable to exposure. The resulting narrative invites readers to anticipate twists while keeping the central mystery carefully in play.
Readers can expect an agile, highly readable style that privileges momentum and clarity. Wallace’s technique pairs swift scene changes with cleanly staged confrontations, creating an elastic rhythm that alternates between terse encounters and tightly wound set pieces. Dialogue is purposeful and brisk, the descriptions efficient, and the stakes increase by increments that feel inevitable once revealed. Rather than lingering in introspection, the book advances through actions and consequences, allowing character to emerge from choices under pressure. The effect is a steady climb in tension, punctuated by reversals that reinforce the story’s core concern with knowledge as a weapon.
The themes resonate beyond their immediate plot mechanics. Betrayal is not only a personal act but a structural force that keeps the underworld in motion, while trust becomes a luxury that few can afford. The novel probes the ethics of information—who owns it, who profits from it, and who pays when it circulates—and asks whether justice can be served by methods that are themselves compromising. In exploring fear, opportunism, and the allure of power, the narrative reflects on how institutions, reputations, and relationships are reshaped by the threat of exposure, a question that remains strikingly contemporary.
Situated within the interwar crime boom, The Squealer speaks to a society grappling with rapid urbanization, professionalized policing, and the spectacle of public scandal. Wallace channels the period’s fascination with networks—of crime, commerce, and influence—showing how information flows bind disparate worlds together. The city becomes a theater where appearances can be manufactured and undone, and where proximity to power confers both protection and peril. This context foregrounds the story’s moral ambiguity: good intentions falter in the face of expedience, and the line between enforcement and exploitation proves negotiable, depending on who holds the secrets and who stands to gain.
For today’s readers, the novel offers more than suspense; it raises enduring questions about accountability, leverage, and the costs of disclosure. It will appeal to those who enjoy taut, plot-driven crime fiction with a keen sense of place and an undercurrent of social observation. Approach it for the chase and stay for the unsettling implications: that justice may hinge on compromised means, that reputation can be a currency, and that truth, once weaponized, rarely returns to neutrality. In this landscape, every revelation comes at a price—and that calculus is the drama’s lasting hook.
Synopsis
Set in London’s interwar underworld and drawing rooms, The Squealer follows a climate of fear created by a shadowy figure who informs on criminals for profit. Known only as the Squealer, this unseen broker trades secrets to the police and squeezes the crooks he exposes, feeding on panic and mistrust. The city’s thieves, fences, and confidence men change habits, abandon plans, and turn on one another, while Scotland Yard is both aided and embarrassed by anonymous tips. The novel opens with this imbalance of power established: crime continues, but every enterprise risks betrayal, and both sides are forced into new, cautious strategies.
Against this backdrop, three strands take shape. A determined Scotland Yard inspector pursues the Squealer as a matter of public safety and institutional credibility. A resourceful newspaper reporter seeks the story that will reveal how the Squealer operates and how the criminal net stretches into respectable society. A talented but inexperienced thief, newly arrived in the city’s hierarchy, is pulled between ambition and survival as the Squealer’s shadow falls across his plans. Each perspective adds a different motive—duty, exposure, and self-preservation—and their intersecting agendas drive the investigation, the coverage, and the underworld’s attempts to adapt.
An audacious jewel theft provides the first major movement. The robbery is executed with precision, but a remarkably swift police interception follows, triggered by inside information that no ordinary patrol could possess. The Squealer’s reach appears immediate and intimate, suggesting access to criminals’ confidences and to official procedures. Suspicions concentrate on a clandestine market where stolen goods change hands, and on the channels through which the Squealer learns, trades, and coerces. As plans fray, the inspector refines a theory of how the informant profits at both ends, the reporter retraces the tip’s path, and the young thief recognizes he has entered a game with fixed odds.
The inquiry moves beyond alleys and safe houses into fashionable salons, clubs, and auctions where wealth and status mingle with rumor and risk. A set of distinctive jewels, already notorious, circulates as a marker for schemes that blur class lines. The reporter cultivates sources in both worlds, noting how a society hostess, a discreet dealer, and a club patron seem to share connections that outlast any single crime. Blackmail surfaces as a quiet currency: compromising letters, debts, and reputations traded alongside diamonds. The Squealer emerges less as a lone whisperer than as the organizing principle of a network conditioned by leverage and fear.
To break the cycle, the inspector designs controlled leaks and decoy operations, attempting to trace the Squealer’s relay of information. An undercover operative is planted among intermediaries to test who passes what to whom, and when. The young thief, pressured by threats and promises, faces a choice between resisting extortion or cooperating to save himself and protect an associate. The reporter, sensing a larger exposé, weighs the ethics of disclosure against the risk of spoiling a police trap. Throughout, the narrative emphasizes process: coded messages, timed meetings, and silent watchers who prove that information, not brute force, is the decisive commodity.
Pressure escalates with a sudden death that removes a loquacious fixer before he can testify, narrowing the field but thickening uncertainty. A scheduled raid collapses when suspects vanish minutes ahead of time, implying a leak close to official circles. The inspector considers whether the Squealer is a single mastermind or a mask adopted by more than one player. The reporter maps overlapping alliances, while the thief discovers that a small act of trust can be as dangerous as a confession. Evidence accumulates in fragments—handbills, receipts, and telephone traces—suggesting a disciplined system able to convert minor indiscretions into decisive leverage.
The investigation converges on a high-profile event used as bait: a public sale where marked jewels and prominent attendees bring criminals, police, and spectators into the same room. The inspector arranges surveillance to follow any item that changes hands, while the undercover agent signals interest in a side deal. The reporter positions for an exclusive, aware that a single misstep could alert the very person whose exposure is sought. The young thief, sensing both opportunity and danger, moves within the crowd, balancing boldness and caution. The stage is set for the Squealer to act, forcing hidden connections into visible motion.
In the ensuing sequence, carefully planted clues close around their target. A whispered rendezvous leads to a darkened meeting place where identities are tested and alibis strain. A sudden pursuit across nighttime streets and along the riverbank compresses the novel’s threads: private vice, public duty, and the price of silence. Disguises peel away under pressure, and methods—how the tips were gathered, how the threats were delivered—come into focus. Without revealing the pivotal disclosure, the story builds to a decisive confrontation in which the Squealer’s influence is challenged, and the balance between fear and law shifts in a way that alters every participant’s calculus.
After the climax, the narrative resolves its principal tensions with measured consequences. Criminal enterprises adjust or disband, reputations are reassessed, and official records reflect both success and compromise. The inspector’s case closes with lessons about safeguarding information and resisting shortcuts that invite corruption. The reporter’s account acknowledges the public’s appetite for sensation while recognizing the risks of premature revelation. The young thief’s future is shaped by choices made under pressure, illustrating the costs of dependency on secrecy. Overall, The Squealer presents a portrait of power built on knowledge and leverage, arguing that exposure can be both remedy and weapon in the contest between crime and order.
Historical Context
Edgar Wallace’s The Squealer is set in interwar London, largely in the mid-1920s, when the metropolis was a mosaic of glittering West End streets, discreet Mayfair clubs, and the shadowed warrens of Soho and Clerkenwell. Scotland Yard and Bow Street Magistrates’ Court supplied the institutional backdrop, while motorcars, telephones, and electric light created new conditions for both crime and policing. The city’s luxury trade—especially jewelers around Bond Street and Piccadilly—stood beside pawnshops and fencing dens, inviting illicit economies. The setting captures a stratified society, where the nightlife of theatres and restaurants intersected with a professionalized Criminal Investigation Department (CID) that relied on informers, surveillance, and rapid communication.
The aftermath of the First World War (1918) reshaped British urban life. Demobilization brought a surge of ex-servicemen and a volatile labor market; unemployment peaked above 2 million during the 1921 slump, aggravating poverty and social tension. Fears of armed crime prompted the Firearms Act 1920, restricting handgun possession. Motorized “bandits” exploited cars for quick getaways, and property crimes rose with consumer goods and jewelry as prime targets. The Squealer mirrors this climate: its criminals are modern, mobile, and opportunistic, and its atmosphere of anxiety reflects a city negotiating the social dislocation and hardened underworld that followed the war.
Policing underwent intense reform between 1918 and the late 1920s. The London police strikes of 1918–1919 led to the Police Act 1919, creating the Police Federation and banning strikes after the Desborough Committee’s pay recommendations. At the Metropolitan Police, Commissioners Sir Nevil Macready (1918–1920) and Sir William Horwood (1920–1928) presided over consolidation and a stronger CID. Detective leaders such as Frederick Porter Wensley (1872–1949), Chief Constable CID from 1925 to 1929, became public figures through high-profile investigations. Wallace, a former crime reporter, drew on these developments; his Yard men in The Squealer emulate the procedural confidence and informant networks that characterized the period.
The single most formative historical reality for The Squealer is the system of informers—“squealers” or “grasses”—that underpinned interwar policing and criminal commerce in London. The Larceny Act 1916 consolidated offenses concerning theft and receiving; receivers and fences, crucial to jewelry and luxury-goods theft, faced severe penalties, incentivizing clandestine arrangements and betrayals. West End jewelers around Bond Street and Regent Street coexisted with discreet pawnbrokers and backroom dealers, creating a chain from shop window to illegal market. Notorious rings included women-led shoplifting syndicates such as the Forty Elephants, commanded by Alice Diamond in the 1910s–1920s, who fed stolen goods into metropolitan fencing networks and sometimes used motorcars to elude capture. Racecourse gangs and city operators alike survived by balancing violence against the risk of exposure—where a single informant could collapse an enterprise. The CID cultivated informers as a pragmatic necessity, and those informers leveraged their value for money or protection, turning information itself into a commodity. Public concern about police methods and the ethics of interrogation crested with the Savidge Inquiry (1928), following the controversial Hyde Park indecency arrest of Irene Savidge and Sir Leo Chiozza Money and the later Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure (1929). These controversies clarified the fraught boundaries of surveillance, coercion, and due process. The Squealer transforms this ecosystem into drama: its titular figure weaponizes information, blackmailing criminals and encroaching on the respectability of legitimate tradesmen who traffic too near the underworld. By staging informers as both indispensable and dangerous, the book distills a 1920s London in which state authority, private vice, and commercial respectability were bound together by the price of a secret.
Racecourse warfare and organized extortion in the 1920s supplied further context. Italian-descended boss Charles “Darby” Sabini (Ottavio Sabini, 1888–1950) dominated tracks from Epsom to Hurst Park, clashing with rivals like the Birmingham Boys (Billy Kimber) and London outfits into the early 1930s. Violence, protection rackets, and control of bookmakers created a template for disciplined gangs reaching into pubs, cab ranks, and clubs. The book echoes these structures through its depiction of coordinated criminal pressure and the soft corruption surrounding lucrative leisure markets, suggesting how tightly knit groups could police their own members through threats of exposure and punishment.
The interwar tabloid boom made crime a national spectacle. Dailies such as the Daily Mail and Sunday papers like News of the World amplified trials and police hunts, from the Thompson-Bywaters case (1922) to Patrick Mahon’s “Crumbles” murder (1924). Wallace’s own career as a reporter and popularizer of sensational cases gave him deep familiarity with headlines, scoops, and the theater of Bow Street remands. The Squealer reflects this publicity culture: exposure becomes a civil death, and the fear of one’s name in print is as potent as arrest. The interplay of press, police, and public opinion shapes motives as surely as the law.
The 1926 General Strike (4–12 May 1926) revealed the state’s capacity to manage mass unrest under the Emergency Powers Act 1920, mobilizing special constables and volunteer transport. Although industrial conflict is not the novel’s subject, its world inherits the strike’s lesson: order in modern Britain depended on rapid coordination, intelligence-gathering, and exemplary enforcement. Informants proved as valuable in labor surveillance as in criminal detection, reinforcing a culture where information equaled power. The Squealer’s fixation on files, whispers, and strategic leaks resonates with a polity alert to subversion and a police apparatus conditioned to preempt disruption by cultivating sources.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the moral ambiguity of a metropolis that punishes theft while tolerating, even relying on, clandestine informers and complicit middlemen. It interrogates class hypocrisy by showing how Mayfair respectability and West End commerce skirt illegality through fences and hush money, while the poorest actors bear the harshest risks. The narrative questions whether policing that depends on paid betrayal can remain just, especially amid public scandals over interrogation and procedure (1928–1929). In dramatizing the commerce of secrets, The Squealer indicts a society where legal order, economic ambition, and reputational fear are entangled to the point of corruption.
The Squealer
CHAPTER I
IT WAS not a night that normal people would choose for a stroll across Putney Common. A night of wind and sleet and a cold that penetrated through soddened gloves. So dark it was, in spite of the lights set at long intervals along the highway, that Larry Graeme was compelled to use his electric torch whenever he came to a crossroad, or he would have stumbled over the curbing.
He was cosy enough in his long rubber coat and galoshes, though his big umbrella was more of a liability than an asset. Eventually, after a gust of wind that almost turned it inside out, he furled it. A little rain in the face was good for the complexion, he told himself humorously.
He glanced at the illuminated dial of his wrist watch. It wanted now a few minutes of the half-hour, and “The Big Fellow[1]” was invariably punctual. Mean, but punctual. Larry had dealt with “The Big Fellow” before and had sworn never to repeat the experience. He was a driver of hard bargains, but he had the money and reduced risk to a minimum. This time he must pay full price—there were no ifs or buts about the exact value of the Van Rissik diamonds. The newspapers were full of the robbery; the underwriters had catalogued exactly, in figures beyond dispute, just the amount of money that every piece would fetch in the open market. And because of the very bigness of the deal, Larry had inserted the usual code advertisement:
Lost on Putney Common (in the direction of Wimbledon) at 10:30 on Thursday a small yellow handbag containing five letters of no value to anybody but owner.
The “yellow handbag with five letters” was the notification to “The Big Fellow” that jewellery was an offer. A “brown handbag” meant furs, a “white handbag” announced the fact that the advertiser had banknotes which he wished to dispose of. And the “five letters” indicated that the value of the property on offer ran to five figures.
And it was ten-thirty on Thursday night, and Larry was waiting expectantly on the Richmond road. Borne on the wind came the sound of a church clock striking the half hour.
“Punctual!” murmured the watcher.
Far away along the road, two dim lights appeared, drawing wider apart as they came nearer. Suddenly, the headlamps glowed blindingly, and the man waiting on the curb’s edge was held in the beam.
The car slowed, the long, rain-streaming bonnet came past him and stopped. From the dark interior of the coupé came a voice, a little harsh, more than a little querulous.
“Well?”
“Evening, boss.”
Larry strained his eyes to glimpse the figure inside. He guessed that the timely use of his hand lamp would not only be impolite but useless. “The Big Fellow” would hardly leave his face uncovered. But——
The hand that rested on the edge of the window was ungloved, and the third finger had a broken nail and a double white scar across the first knuckle—the hand was suddenly snatched away as though its owner were conscious of the scrutiny.
“I gotta deal: good stuff. You’ve seen the papers?”
“The Van Rissik stuff?”
“You’ve said it. Worth thirty-two thousand pounds—hundred an’ sixty thousand dollars. And all of it easy to market. This Rissik woman put her money into stones—none of that fancy French setting that looks pretty and sells for dirt. I reckon five thousand’s the basement price——”
“Twelve hundred,” said the voice definitely, “and I’m paying two hundred more than I intended.”
Larry breathed heavily through his nose.
“I’m a reasonable man——” he began.
“Have you got the stuff here?”
“I have not got the stuff here.” By his very emphasis the man in the car knew that he was lying. “And I’ll never have the stuff here till you talk business. There’s a Jewish gentleman in Maida Vale who’s offered me three thousand and would spring another. But I’d rather deal with you—you’re safer. See what I mean?”
“I’ll spring you to fifteen hundred, and that’s my last word,” said the occupant of the coupé. “I’ve got the money here, and you’ll be a wise man to take it.”
Larry shook his head.
“I’m detaining you,” he said politely.
“You’ll not deal?”
“We’re wasting both our times,” said Larry, and almost before the last word was uttered, the car shot forward, and before he could rightly see the number, its dimming red light was vanishing into the storm.
Larry relit the stub of his cigar and went in search of the small car he had left on the common.
“Shylock turns in his grave to-night,” was the only comment he made aloud.
Less than a week later, Larry Graeme came out of the Fiesole Restaurant in Oxford Street, and none observing him would imagine that he was anything more than what he appeared, a smart man about town approaching middle age, a connoisseur of good food and the creature comforts of life. The gardenia that he wore in the buttonhole of his dress coat seemed to advertise the buoyancy of his soul; and he had every reason to feel good, for Mrs. Van Rissik’s jewels had sold well; and nobody in the wide expanse of London should have been aware of his enterprise, for Larry worked single-handed.
As he stood on the sidewalk, waiting for a taxi, a tall, thickset man came to his side and took him affectionately by the arm.
“Hullo, Larry!”
The long cone of gray ash on the end of Larry’s cigar dropped for no perceptible reason—it was the only evidence of that quick moment of perturbation.
“Hullo, Inspector!” he said, with a genial smile. “Glad to meet you again!”
He really wasn’t, but it was a moment for polite exchanges. His quick glance round had revealed the presence of three other gentlemen of Inspector Elford’s profession. He accepted his fate philosophically, entered the cab with the three detectives, and smoked and chatted with great calmness till the taxi drove down through the narrow entrance of Scotland Yard and pulled up before Cannon Row police station.
The preliminaries were few. Larry Graeme listened in silence, a slight smile on his dark face, while the charge was read, and then:
“I am living at the Shelton Hotel,” said Mr. Graeme. “You might get me a suit of clothes. I shouldn’t like to come before the beak got up like a head waiter. And, Elford, is there any chance of seeing this Barrabal I hear so much about? They say he’s mustard—and there are one or two people I’d like to make feel sore.”
Elford thought there was little chance of seeing that mysterious police officer, but when he had seen the steel door close on Larry, he went across the roadway and found Chief Inspector Barrabal in his room, a pipe clenched between his teeth, his mind completely occupied with certain documents that had come down from the Record Department.
“I’ve pulled Larry, Mr. Barrabal,” said Elford. “He wants to know if you’d like to go across and have a chat with him. I told him that I didn’t think you’d want to see him, but you know what these fellows are.”
The Chief Inspector leaned back in his chair and frowned.
“Asked for me, did he? I seem to be getting notorious,” he complained, and the other man guffawed.
It was the joke of Scotland Yard that Inspector Barrabal, who had been instrumental in bringing to justice so many surprised men, had never appeared in a witness box and was almost unknown, even to the pressmen who specialized in crime, except as a name. For eight years he had sat in the long room on the third floor amid banks of files, examining, checking, and comparing odd little pieces of evidence that were to bring about the undoing of many clever men. It was he who discovered the system of the Dutchman Goom, bigamist and murderer, yet he and Goom had never met face to face. An agony advertisement in a London newspaper, placed side by side with a paragraph in an obscure German sheet, had sent the brothers Laned to penal servitude for life; and they were the most skilful and cautious of all the blackmailing tribes.
“I’ll see our friend,” he said at last, and went down into the dark cell to interview the disgruntled Larry, a somewhat incongruous figure in his classy clothes and wilting gardenia.
Larry, who had an acquaintance with many policemen, both in England and in America, greeted his visitor with a twisted smile.
“Glad to meet you, Chief,” he said briskly. “You’ve got me with the goods, and I’m giving you no trouble—anyway, there’s enough in my trunk at the Shelton Hotel to convict me ten times over. Overconfidence has always been my weakness.”
Barrabal did not reply, waiting for the inevitable question. Presently it came.
“Who was the squealer, Chief? I only want to get that and I’ll go down with the band playing. I just want to know who was the squealer who squealed!”
Still Barrabal did not speak.
“There are three men it might be”—Larry ticked them off on his fingers—“and I won’t mention names. There’s the man who bought the stuff, and he’s all right. There’s Number Two, who’s got a down on me, but he’s in France. There’s Broken Nail, who offered me fifteen hundred for stuff that’s worth twelve thousand, but he couldn’t have known me.”
“Squeal yourself,” suggested Barrabal. “Who is Broken Nail?”
Larry grinned again.
“Squealing’s a grand exercise for those who like it,” he said. “I’m asking you a silly question—I know it. There never was a ‘busy’ that gave away a squealer.”
He looked expectantly at the police officer, and Barrabal nodded.
“You think one of three receivers has betrayed you,” he said. “Tell me their names, and I give you my word that, if you mention the right man, I’ll say yes to him.”
Larry looked hard at him and shook his head.
“I can’t give away two to catch one, Barrabal,” he said. “Nobody knows that better than you.”
The police officer was stroking his little black moustache thoughtfully.
“I’ve given you a chance,” said Barrabal at last. “Perhaps I’ll see you again in the morning, before they take you to the police court. You’ll be a wise man if you give me the three names in confidence.”
“I’ll sleep on it,” said Larry.
Barrabal went slowly back to his office, and, unlocking his safe, took out a steel box, which he opened. It contained numerous slips of paper on which were typed, in some cases only a few lines, in others quite long messages. They had all been typed on the same machine, and every one was a “squeal.” Somewhere in London was a receiver on the grand scale; a man with his agents in every district, his finger in every illicit pie; and these little strips of paper represented the price that thieves paid who took their loot for sale elsewhere.
He picked up the top sheet: it was the latest of all the squeals.
Larry Graeme took Mrs. Van Rissik’s jewels. He went there on the night of her party disguised as an extra waiter. He fenced the stuff with Moropoulous, the Greek, of Brussels, with the exception of a diamond star, which you will find in his trunk at the Shelton Hotel. Moropoulous would not buy the star because of the pink diamonds, which he thought would be recognized.
“P.S.—The star is in the false bottom of Larry’s trunk.”
There was no signature. The paper was identical with all the other papers that had ever come to him.
Inspector Barrabal stroked his silky moustache again and looked at the paper through half-closed eyes.
“Squealer,” he said softly, “I’m going to get you!”
CHAPTER II
IT WAS two years and six months after Larry Graeme had made his grateful bow to the judge—he had certainly expected more than three years’ penal servitude for his offence—and the leaves of the Park trees were assuming their autumnal tints when two people walked slowly along the gravelled path that skirts the road between Marble Arch[2] and Hyde Park Corner. They walked much more slowly than was necessary; for, despite the brightness of the day, the unclouded sky, and the golden sunlight, the wind was in the east and there was a nip of coming winter in the air.
The man was something over forty, just above middle height, and sturdily built. There were long streaks of gray in his black hair, which corrected the first impression given by his smooth, boyish face that he was still in the twenties.
“One has to live[1q],” he was saying. “But jobs are not as plentiful as they were before the war. Besides, it’s a pretty good position.”
Beryl Stedman shook her head.
“It’s not the position you should be occupying, Captain Leslie,” she said. She hesitated, and went on quickly: “There’s one thing that rather puzzles me that I can’t understand. I wonder if you’ll be hurt if I tell you?”
“Nothing hurts me,” he said. “Fire ahead!”
But she found some difficulty in framing the words.
“Frank says you’re very unpopular at the office, and I can’t understand that—you won’t tell him I said so, will you? I know I’m betraying a confidence, but——”
He nodded.
“I am unpopular—dashed unpopular,” he said. “In a sense, Miss Stedman, I am an admirable foil to your engaging fiancé.”
Though the words were sour, there was no bitterness in his tone, no sneer, no implied self-pity.
“Frank Sutton has a knack of making himself adored. It is rather amusing to watch the almost genuflections with which he is greeted when he arrives every morning——”
“You’re not being nice, are you?” she asked.
“I’m not being intentionally unpleasant,” he answered quickly. “It is amusing—instructive is a better word. If Frank Sutton asked the staff to work all night for a week on end, I honestly believe they’d pay for the privilege! If I asked them to stay five minutes over their allotted time, there would be a riot!”
He laughed softly to himself.
“There is only one member of the staff who approves of me—a fellow named Tillman, a new clerk we took on a fortnight ago—and I’m not so sure that he is a disinterested admirer. And then there’s——”
He stopped suddenly.
“You haven’t discovered another admirer?” she asked ironically, and he smiled.
“I don’t know. Sutton’s secretary is quite pleasant to me—I would almost describe her as friendly. Perhaps she’s been so long in the service of the admirable Frank that his sweetness has begun to cloy.”
“You’re being rather horrid now.”
“I know I am,” and he was so cheerful about it that she was amused.
