The Council of Justice Read Online

Francois also. Some day'—he looked leisurely about the room—'I shall also—'

  'Stop!' she cried, and then:

  'Release him,' she said, and, wonderingly, Schmidt cut the bonds that bound him. He stretched himself.

  'When you took me,' he said, 'I had a book; you will understand that here in England I find—forgetfulness in books—and I, who have seen so much suffering and want caused through departure from the law, am striving as hard for the regeneration of mankind as you—but differently.'

  Somebody handed him a book.

  He looked at it, nodded, and slipped it into his pocket.

  'Farewell,' he said as he turned to the open door.

  'In God's name!' said the Woman of Gratz, trembling, 'go in peace, Little Father.'

  And the man Jessen, sometime headsman to the Supreme Council, and latterly public executioner of England, walked out, no man barring his exit.

  The power of the Red Hundred was broken. This much Falmouth knew. He kept an ever-vigilant band of men on duty at the great termini of London, and to these were attached the members of a dozen secret police forces of Europe. Day by day, there was the same report to make. Such and such a man, whose very presence in London had been unsuspected, had left via Harwich. So-and-so, surprisingly sprung from nowhere, had gone by the eleven o'clock train from Victoria; by the Hull and Stockholm route twenty had gone in one day, and there were others who made Liverpool, Glasgow, and Newcastle their port of embarkation.

  I think that it was only then that Scotland Yard realized the strength of the force that had lain inert in the metropolis, or appreciated the possibilities for destruction that had been to hand in the days of the Terror.

  Certainly every batch of names that appeared on the commissioner's desk made him more thoughtful than ever.

  'Arrest them!' he said in horror when the suggestion was made. 'Arrest them! Look here, have you ever seen driver ants attack a house in Africa? Marching in, in endless battalions at midnight and clearing out everything living from chickens to beetles? Have you ever seen them re-form in the morning and go marching home again? You wouldn't think of arresting 'em, would you? No, you'd just sit down quietly out of their reach and be happy when the last little red leg has disappeared round the corner!'

  Those who knew the Red Hundred best were heartily in accord with his philosophy.

  'They caught Jessen,' reported Falmouth. 'Oh!' said the commissioner.

  'When he disclosed his identity, they got rid of him quick.'

  'I've often wondered why the Four Just Men didn't do the business of Starque themselves,' mused the Commissioner.

  'It was rather rum,' admitted Falmouth, 'but Starque was a man under sentence, as also was Francois. By some means they got hold of the original warrants, and it was on these that Jessen—did what he did.'

  The commissioner nodded. 'And now,' he asked, 'what about them?' Falmouth had expected this question sooner or later. 'Do you suggest that we should catch them, sir?'-he asked with thinly veiled sarcasm; 'because if you do, sir, I have only to remind you that we've been trying to do that for some years.' The chief commissioner frowned.

  'It's a remarkable thing,' he said, 'that as soon as we get a situation such as—the Red Hundred scare and the Four Just Men scare, for instance, we're completely at sea, and that's what the papers will say. It doesn't sound creditable, but it's so.'

  'I place the superintendent's defence of Scotland Yard on record in extenso.'

  'What the papers say,' said Falmouth, 'never keeps me awake at night. Nobody's quite got the hang of the police force in this country—certainly the writing people haven't.

  'There are two ways of writing about the police, sir. One way is to deal with them in the newspaper fashion with the headline "Another Police Blunder" or "The Police and The Public", and the other way is to deal with them in the magazine style, which is to show them as softies on the wrong scent, whilst an ornamental civilian is showing them their business, or as mysterious people with false beards who pop up at the psychological moment, and say in a loud voice, "In the name of the Law, I arrest you!"'

  'Well, I don't mind admitting that I know neither kind. I've been a police officer for twenty-three years, and the only assistance I've had from a civilian was from a man named Blackie, who helped me to find the body of a woman that had disappeared. I was rather prejudiced against him, but I don't mind admitting that he was pretty smart and followed his clues with remarkable ingenuity.

  'The day we found the body I said to him:

  '"Mr. Blackie, you have given me a great deal of information about this woman's movements—in fact, you know a great deal more than you ought to know—so I shall take you into custody on the suspicion of having caused her death."

  'Before he died he made a full confession, and ever since then I have always been pleased to take as much advice and help from outside as I could get.

  'When people sometimes ask me about the cleverness of Scotland Yard, I can't tell 'em tales such as you read about. I've had murderers, anarchists, burglars, and average low-down people to deal with, but they have mostly done their work in a commonplace way and bolted. And as soon as they have bolted, we've employed fairly commonplace methods and brought 'em back.

  'If you ask me whether I've been in dreadful danger, when arresting desperate murderers and criminals, I say "No".

  'When your average criminal finds himself cornered, he says, "All right, Mr. Falmouth; it's a cop", and goes quietly.

  'Crime and criminals run in grooves. They're hardy annuals with perennial methods. Extraordinary circumstances baffle the police as they baffle other folks. You can't run a business on business lines and be absolutely prepared for anything that turns up. Whiteley's will supply you with a flea or an elephant, but if a woman asked a shopgirl to hold her baby whilst she went into the tinned meat department, the girl and the manager and the whole system would be floored, because there is no provision for holding babies. And if a Manchester goods merchant, unrolling his stuff, came upon a snake lying all snug in the bale, he'd be floored too, because natural history isn't part of their business training, and they wouldn't be quite sure whether it was a big worm or a boa constrictor.'

  The Commissioner was amused.

  'You've an altogether unexpected sense of humour,' he said, 'and the moral is—'

  'That the unexpected always floors you, whether it's humour or crime,' said Falmouth, and went away fairly pleased with himself.

  In his room he found a waiting messenger.

  'A lady to see you, sir.'

  'Who is it?' he asked in surprise.

  The messenger handed him a slip of paper and when he read it he whistled.

  'The unexpected, by—! Show her up.'

  On the paper was written—'The Woman of Gratz…'

  Manfred sat alone in his Lewisham house,—he was known to the old lady who was his caretaker as 'a foreign gentleman in the music line'—and in the subdued light of the shaded lamp, he looked tired. A book lay on the table near at hand, and a silver coffee-service and an empty coffee-cup stood on the stool by his side. Reaction he felt.