Part 7 (1/2)
It was three o'clock on Christmas morning when they saw the lights of London from the top of Brockley Hill; a minute later they were on the tram-lines at the foot, and almost immediately in the purlieus of the town.
The trip did not end without a telling taste of Mr. Vinson's very individual quality. In Maida Vale he suddenly announced his intention of having the life-preserver identified in those very small hours by the p.a.w.nbroker who had sold it on the morning of the autumn raid. The crime doctor was terrified; for aught he knew the man might be well aware that he had sold it to Lady Vera Moyle. She was notorious enough, in all conscience; his only hope lay in the fact that he himself had not known her by sight before that day. In vain he raised various objections; they were well met by his own previous arguments for the immediate reprieve of Alfred Croucher, and he feared to press them. He knew only the name of the p.a.w.nbroker's street, but here c.o.c.kney sharpness came in again, and they were pounding on the right shutters by half past three. An up-stairs window flew alight, up went a sash, and out came an angry head.
”My name is Topham Vinson,” said one of the swaddled men in a sepulchral voice. ”I'm the Home Secretary, but I can't force you to come down and speak to me because of that. I can only make it more or less worth your while.”
He was fis.h.i.+ng for his sovereign-case as he spoke. In another minute the private door had shut behind him and Doctor Dollar, and an obsequious sack of humanity shuffled before them into a sanctum still redolent of a somewhat highly-seasoned meal.
”I remember 'aving it in the thop,” said the unkempt head protruding from the sack. ”But I can't thay 'ow it came here--that I can thwear in a court of jutht.i.th, my lord! It'th a narthy, beathly thing, but I thwear it wath here when I took over the bithneth.”
”I don't care how or when it came here,” said Topham Vinson, counting the sovereigns in the gold case attached to the watch-chain of other memories. ”I want to know if you remember selling this life-preserver?”
”Yeth, I do!”
”When?”
”It would be--let me thee--thome time lartht October or November.”
”Do you remember who bought it?”
”Yeth--a young lady!”
Dollar breathed again. The man did not know her name; at first he was extremely shaky on the point of personal appearance. But the doctor a.s.sisted him by unscrupulously suggesting a number of marked characteristics which Lady Vera Moyle did not happen to possess. The man fell straight into the trap, recalled every imaginary feature, and finally earned big gold by quite convincingly connecting the sale of the life-preserver with the date of the great women's raid. Mr. Vinson looked very stern as he led the way out into the street; and it was he who sharply woke the little chauffeur, who was snoring heartily over his wheel.
”I like that lad,” he muttered in the car. ”He does nothing by halves.
No more do I! Do you mind dropping me first at Portman Square?”
Dollar gave the order, and they slid through the empty streets as though man and car were fresh from the garage. There was not a soul in Portman Square, or a light in any of the houses except the Home Secretary's.
They had telephoned through from Stockersham after his departure, and the door opened as he emptied his remaining sovereigns into the chauffeur's hand, before taking Dollar's with no lack of warmth.
”I can't ask you in this time,” said Topham Vinson, smiling. ”Apart from the hour, I've got to go straight to the telephone, get through to Pentonville, and spoil the Governor's night!”
”Reprieved?” gasped the doctor. It was the one word that would come.
The Home Secretary nodded rather grimly, but was smiling as he shut the door almost on the hand with which John Dollar would have seized his once more. There was a shooting of bolts inside.
Dollar turned slowly round, wondering if at last he could tell the little driver something about the night's enterprise in which he had played so heroic a part. There was no need. The driver had kept eyes and ears wide open--and collapsed once more over the wheel. This time it was not in sleep, but in a dead faint; and the driving goggles were all awry, the driver's hat had tumbled off, the driver's hair had broken bounds.
It was a girl's hair, and the girl was Lady Vera Moyle.
III
A HOPELESS CASE
Alfred Croucher had the refres.h.i.+ng attribute of looking almost as great a ruffian as he really was. His eyes swelled with a vulgar cunning, his mouth was coa.r.s.e and pitiless; no pedestal of fine raiment could have corrected so low a cast of countenance, or enabled its possessor to pa.s.s for a moment as a gentleman or a decent liver. But he had often looked a worse imitation than on the morning of his triumphant exit from the jail, his bullet head diminished in a borrowed cap, his formidable physique tempered by a Burberry all too sober for his taste.
Nor was that all the change in Mr. Croucher at this agreeable crisis of his career. The bulging eyes were glazed with a wonder which quite eclipsed the light of triumph; and they were fixed, in unwilling fascination, upon the tall figure to which the borrowed plumes belonged, whom he had never beheld before that hour, but at whose heels he trotted from the bowels of the prison to the motor-car flas.h.i.+ng in the sun beyond the precincts.
”'Alf a mo'!” cried Croucher, making a belated stand instead of jumping in as he was bid. ”I didn't rightly catch your name inside, let alone wot you got to do with me an' my affairs. If you come from my s'lic'tor, I should like to know why; if you're on the religious lay, 'ere's your 'at an' coat, and I won't trouble you for a lift.”