“The writing,” said the commissioner, referring to a bunch of letters he held in his hand.
“Latin; but that may be a fake. And suppose it isn’t? There’s no difference between the handwriting of a Frenchman, Spaniard, Portuguese, Italian, South American, or Creole—and, as I say, it might be a fake, and probably is.”
“What have you done?” asked the commissioner.
“We’ve pulled in all the suspicious characters we know. We cleaned out Little Italy, combed Bloomsbury, been through Soho, and searched all the colonies. We raided a place at Sunhead last night—a lot of Armenians live down there, but—”
The detective’s face bore a hopeless look.
“As likely as not,” he went on, “we should find them at one of the swagger hotels—that’s if they were fools enough to bunch together; but you may be sure they’re living apart, and meeting at some unlikely spot once or twice a day.”
He paused, and tapped his fingers absently on the big desk at which he and his superior sat.
“We’ve had de Courville over,” he resumed. “He saw the Soho crowd, and what is more important, saw his own man who lives amongst them—and it’s none of them, I’ll swear—or at least he swears, and I’m prepared to accept his word.”
The commissioner shook his head pathetically.
“They’re in an awful stew in Downing Street,” he said. “They do not know exactly what is going to happen next.”
Mr. Falmouth rose to his feet with a sigh and fingered the brim of his hat.
“Nice time ahead of us—I don’t think,” he remarked paradoxically.
“What are the people thinking about it?” asked the commissioner.
“You’ve seen the papers?”
Mr. Commissioner’s shrug was uncomplimentary to British journalism.
“The papers! Who in Heaven’s name is going to take the slightest notice of what is in the papers?” he said petulantly.
“I am, for one,” replied the calm detective; “newspapers are more often than not led by the public; and it seems to me the idea of running a newspaper, in a nutshell, is to write so that the public will say, ‘That’s smart—it’s what I’ve said all along.’ ”
“But the public themselves—have you had an opportunity of gathering their idea?”
Detective Falmouth nodded.
“I was talking in the Park to a man only this evening—a master-man by the look of him, and presumably intelligent. ‘What’s your idea of this Four Just Men business?’ I asked. ‘It’s very queer,’ he said: ‘do you think there’s anything in it?’—and that,” concluded the disgusted police officer, “is all the public thinks about it.”
But if there was sorrow at Scotland Yard, Fleet Street itself was all a-twitter with pleasurable excitement. Here was great news indeed: news that might be heralded across double columns, blared forth in headlines, shouted by placards, illustrated, diagramized and illuminated by statistics.
“Is it the Mafia?” asked the Comet noisily, and went on to prove that it was.
The Evening World, with its editorial mind lingering lovingly in the sixties, mildly suggested a vendetta, and instanced “The Corsican Brothers.”
The Megaphone stuck to the story of the Four Just Men, and printed pages of details concerning their nefarious acts. It disinterred from dusty files, Continental and American, the full circumstances of each murder; it gave the portraits and careers of the men who were slain, and, whilst in no way palliating the offence of the Four, yet set forth justly and dispassionately the lives of the victims, showing the sort of men they were.
It accepted warily the reams of contributions that flowed into the office; for a newspaper that has received the stigma “yellow” exercises more caution than its more sober competitors. In newspaperland a dull lie is seldom detected, but an interesting exaggeration drives an unimaginative rival to hysterical denunciations.
And reams of “Four Men” anecdotes did flow in. For suddenly, as if by magic, every outside contributor, every literary gentleman who made a specialty of personal notes, every kind of man who wrote, discovered that he had known the Four intimately all his life.
“When I was in Italy …” wrote the author of Come Again (Hackworth Press, 6s.; “slightly soiled,” Farringdon Book Mart, 2d.), “I remember I heard a curious story about these Men of Blood …”
Or—
“No spot in London is more likely to prove the hiding-place of the Four Villains than Tidal Basin,” wrote another gentleman, who stuck “Collins” in the northeast corner of his manuscript. “Tidal Basin in the reign of Charles II was known as …”
“Who’s Collins?” asked the super-chief of the Megaphone of his hard-worked editor.
“A liner,” described the editor wearily, thereby revealing that even the newer journalism has not driven the promiscuous contributor from his hard-fought field; “he does police-courts, fires, inquests and things. Lately he’s taken to literature and writes Picturesque-Bits-of-Old-London and Famous-Tombstones-of-Hornsey epics. …”
Throughout the office of the newspaper the same thing was happening. Every cable that arrived, every piece of information that reached the subeditor’s basket, was coloured with the impending tragedy uppermost in men’s minds. Even the police-court reports contained some allusion to the Four. It was the overnight drunk and disorderly’s justification for his indiscretion.
“The lad has always been honest,” said the peccant errand boy’s tearful mother; “it’s reading these horrible stories about the Four Foreigners that’s made him turn out like this”; and the magistrate took a lenient view of the offence.
To all outward showing, Sir Philip Ramon, the man mostly interested in the development of the plot, was the least concerned.
He refused to be interviewed any further; he declined to discuss the possibilities of assassination, even with the premier, and his answer to letters of appreciation that came to him from all parts of the country was an announcement in the Morning Post asking his correspondents to be good enough to refrain from persecuting him with picture postcards, which found no other repository than his waste-paper basket.
He had thought of adding an announcement of his intention
