Into a circle of suspicious men the manager tottered. He unlocked the drawer of his desk, looked and crumbled up.
“They’re not here!” he said wildly. “I left them here—my keys—with the note!”
And then he swooned. When the dazed man recovered he found himself in a police cell and, later in the day, he drooped before a police magistrate, supported by two constables and listened, like a man in a dream, to a charge of causing the death of Arthur Malling, and further, of converting to his own use the sum of £100,000.
It was on the morning of the first remand that Mr. John G. Reeder, with some reluctance for he was suspicious of all Government departments, transferred himself from his own office on Lower Regent Street to a somewhat gloomy bureau on the top floor of the building which housed the Public Prosecutor. In making this change he advanced only one stipulation: that he should be connected by private telephone wire with his old bureau.
He did not demand this—he never demanded anything. He asked, nervously and apologetically. There was a certain wistful helplessness about John G. Reeder that made people feel sorry for him, that caused even the Public Prosecutor a few uneasy moments of doubt as to whether he had been quite wise in substituting this weak-appearing man of middle age for Inspector Holford—bluff, capable and heavily mysterious.
Mr. Reeder was something over fifty, a long-faced gentleman with sandy-grey hair and a slither of side whiskers that mercifully distracted attention from his large outstanding ears. He wore halfway down his nose a pair of steel-rimmed pince-nez, through which nobody had ever seen him look—they were invariably removed when he was reading. A high and flat-crowned bowler hat matched and yet did not match a frock-coat tightly buttoned across his sparse chest. His boots were square-toed, his cravat—of the broad, chest-protector pattern—was ready-made and buckled into place behind a Gladstonian collar. The neatest appendage to Mr. Reeder was an umbrella rolled so tightly that it might be mistaken for a frivolous walking cane. Rain or shine, he carried this article hooked to his arm, and within living memory it had never been unfurled.
Inspector Holford (promoted now to the responsibilities of Superintendent) met him in the office to hand over his duties, and a more tangible quantity in the shape of old furniture and fixings.
“Glad to know you, Mr. Reeder. I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you before, but I’ve heard a lot about you. You’ve been doing Bank of England work, haven’t you?”
Mr. Reeder whispered that he had had that honour, and sighed as though he regretted the drastic sweep of fate that had torn him from the obscurity of his labours. Mr. Holford’s scrutiny was full of misgivings.
“Well,” he said awkwardly, “this job is different, though I’m told that you are one of the best informed men in London, and if that is the case this will be easy work. Still, we’ve never had an outsider—I mean, so to speak, a private detective—in this office before, and naturally the Yard is a bit—”
“I quite understand,” murmured Mr. Reeder, hanging up his immaculate umbrella. “It is very natural. Mr. Bolond expected the appointment. His wife is annoyed—very properly. But she has no reason to be. She is an ambitious woman. She has a third interest in a West End dancing club that might be raided one of these days.”
Holford was staggered. Here was news that was little more than a whispered rumour at Scotland Yard.
“How the devil do you know that?” he blurted.
Mr. Reeder’s smile was one of self-depreciation.
“One picks up odd scraps of information,” he said apologetically. “I—I see wrong in everything. That is my curious perversion—I have a criminal mind!”
Holford drew a long breath.
“Well—there is nothing much doing. That Ealing case is pretty clear. Green is an ex-convict, who got a job at the bank during the war and worked up to manager. He has done seven years for conversion.”
“Embezzlement and conversion,” murmured Mr. Reeder. “I—er—I’m afraid I was the principal witness against him: bank crimes were rather—er—a hobby of mine. Yes, he got into difficulties with moneylenders. Very foolish—extremely foolish. And he doesn’t admit his error.” Mr. Reeder sighed heavily. “Poor fellow! With his life at stake one may forgive and indeed condone his pitiful prevarications.”
The inspector stared at the new man in amazement.
“I don’t know that there is much ‘poor fellow’ about him. He has cached £100,000 and told the weakest yarn that I’ve ever read—you’ll find copies of the police reports here, if you’d like to read them. The scratches on Malling’s hand are curious—they’ve found several on the other hand. They are not deep enough to suggest a struggle. As to the yarn that Green tells—”
Mr. J. G. Reeder nodded sadly.
“It was not an ingenious story,” he said, almost with regret. “If I remember rightly, his story was something like this: he had been recognised by a man who served in Dartmoor with him, and this fellow wrote a blackmailing letter telling him to pay or clear out. Sooner than return to a life of crime, Green wrote out all the facts to his directors, put the letter in the drawer of his desk with his keys, and left a note for his head cashier on the desk itself, intending to leave London and try to make a fresh start where he was unknown.”
“There were no letters in or on the desk, and no keys,” said the inspector decisively. “The only true part of the yarn was that he had done time.”
“Imprisonment,” suggested Mr. Reeder plaintively. He had a horror of slang. “Yes, that was true.”
Left alone in his office, he spent a very considerable time at his private telephone, communing with the young person who was still a young
