Chapter TWENTY: To-Morrow!

As soon as she had gone, I rang up Mr. Gell at his chambers. But he was still at the Old Bailey, and would not return to the Temple. So I rang up Queen’s Gate, and asked his man to let me know instantly that he would return home.

About seven o’clock the bell rang and I found myself talking to the famous lawyer.

“I want to see you at once,” I said. “I’m taking a taxi along to you.”

“All right, Lionel. But I have a dinner of the Silk and Stuff Club at eight. Come along with me. You’ll be interested, I think.”

I thanked him, slipped into a dinner-jacket, and made all haste possible down to Queen’s Gate.

The stout old gentleman, already dressed, was sitting in his den poring over a brief of many folios when I entered.

He greeted me cordially, as he usually did. But, noting my gravity of manner, he asked what was the matter.

Without disclosing the source of my inspiration as to the cause of Joan’s fate, I asked:

“Among all the criminals you have lately prosecuted do you think you have many enemies?”

“Well, that’s rather a strange question,” he replied, looking up at me in some surprise. “I don’t fancy any prisoner against whom I secure a conviction really likes me. The majority of habitual crooks, however, are good sportsmen. If they are unfortunate enough to make a slip, and fall into the hands of the police, they usually blame themselves for not being smart enough.”

“Have you ever had threats uttered against you?”

“Sometimes,” he laughed, in his hearty way.

“But aren’t prisoners often incensed at what counsel says against them?” I queried.

“Counsel’s instructions are precise, and to the point. He has the statement of the prosecutor, and uses it to the full. To the jury he is impartial--unlike counsel for the defence, whose moving appeal may soften the hearts of the men sitting, to decide on the prisoner’s innocence or guilt. The work of counsel for the prosecution is a cut-and-dried job into which he puts no acrimony or sentiment. He is simply the mouthpiece of the Crown.”

“And, as such, you think that he never incurs the malice of the accused’s friends?”

“I won’t go so far as to say that,” Mr. Gell replied at once. “Of course, in the case of one member of a gang being convicted, the others, unknown and unidentified, might easily wreak private vengeance on counsel.”

“Mr. Gell,” I said, looking straight into his round, clean-shaven face, “has it never occurred to you that Joan’s disappearance might be due to such private spite?”

“God, Lionel!” cried the man, springing from his chair. “I believe you are right, after all! You’re right!” he shouted. “You’re right! I’m sure you are! As you say, it is the devil’s work of some gang.”

“There is more than suspicion that Joan was with that fellow Owen on the night of her leaving home,” I pointed out. “We know that Owen was at least on friendly terms with an expert thief. And, further we know that he made himself scarce as soon as he suspected that he was under the eye of the police!”

“True!” cried the distressed man. “The brutes have my poor girl in their clutches--if she is still alive.”

“They know you are seeking her, and that Scotland Yard intends to find her, dead or alive.”

“Ah, she may be dead! Their vengeance is perhaps complete!” he said brokenly.

“But whose vengeance?” I queried. “Go over your recent cases, and discover if, in any one of them, either Owen, Wilson, or Dufour was implicated.”

“I wonder,” he said reflectively. “I wonder!”

He pointed out that, if a man were charged with a crime, the police would perhaps know his associates, but their names would not be given to him. His duty was simply to prosecute, and bring upon the culprit the just and legal sentence of the law.

In view of Lisely’s connection with that mysterious gang in Camberwell--who were sharing out those priceless jewels when I inadvertently entered the room--and her friendship with Owen, I asked:

“Have you of late prosecuted, say, any gang of jewel-thieves?”

“Not recently,” he replied, thinking deeply. “But about a year ago I had a case at the Old Bailey--a rather curious case, I remember--and one which caused me to suspect the existence of a gang, who had in secret given a woman away to the police, and who afterwards made themselves scarce. The woman made a statement--a wild allegation, it seemed.”

“What was the woman’s name?” I asked, much interested.

“I can’t remember. I’ll look it up.” And he took down a diary from a shelf, and after turning over many pages, exclaimed: “Here it is! Before the Recorder in April of last year. The prisoner’s name was Hilda Bennett, alias May, and she was charged with complicity in a jewel-robbery at Dover Marine Station.”

“Hilda Bennett!” I repeated astounded.

“Yes. You probably read of the affair,” he went on. “She stole the jewel-case of the wealthy Baroness d’Armenonville, wife of the Paris banker, who was on her way to London. There was a rope of pearls worth fifty thousand pounds, and a quantity of other jewels. The lady, no doubt, was followed by the thieves in the Golden Arrow train from the Gare du Nord in Paris. And, at Dover the prisoner, a big, well-built woman, snatched the case from the Baroness’s hand after she had passed the Customs. Then, with the connivance of her confederates, she succeeded in getting away in a motor-car. The alarm was given, and the Dover police, knowing that the thief would not attempt to go by train to London, telephoned along the roads. A car had been seen going swiftly towards Folkestone. Outside the latter town the car was stopped, and the prisoner was arrested, with the jewels in a big false pocket. The case had been thrown away into a hedge, where it was found next day.”

“Hilda Bennett!” I repeated, for across my brain passed the horrible recollection of that fatal night in Bloomsbury.

“Yes. The case was of more than usual interest, because of a statement given by the police after the jury had pronounced a verdict of guilty. It was given in evidence that the woman was present in Bloomsbury about fourteen months previously, when her lover, a man named Rodwell, was shot dead by a man unknown. The pistol was found to have been stolen by burglars from a house in Cromwell Road, and his finger-prints taken after death showed the man to be one of the most expert jewel-thieves, who was wanted by the police of half Europe. This man Rodwell, alias May, lived quite respectably in a nice house in Fitz-John’s Avenue, Hampstead, and was ostensibly a corn merchant, in a big way of business, at Highbury. His finger-prints, however, had been identified as Monkey Dick’s, one of a desperate gang of motor bandits who had operated in and around Riga, on the Russian border. Indeed, I myself saw the report from the police of Riga asking for any information concerning the English bandit. But he was dead, and a report was sent to them to that effect.”

“But the prisoner? What sort of woman was she? Interesting, no doubt?” I asked, keeping my information to myself.

“I recollect her as a smart, rather overdressed, attractive woman, full of alertness, but with that sly expression beneath the eyes that we legal men as prosecutors always look for. Few of us, at the Criminal Bar, make mistakes. I have prosecuted persons whom I have realized at once are innocent, and about whom I have agreed with my learned friend for the defence. No innocent man or woman has guilt written on the countenance. But the guilty have, and the sense of crime is such in a practised advocate, that he can himself separate the guilty from the innocent.”

“And this woman Bennett was guilty?” I asked, staggered by his statement.

“Of course. It seemed to me that she had been implicated with Rodwell, the cosmopolitan motor bandit, who had a hand in certain amazing thefts. Who killed her lover will probably never be known. In any case, the jury found her guilty, and she left the dock shrieking when the Recorder sentenced her to five years.”

“Five years. So she is in prison now?” I remarked.

“Yes. But I think the jury were certain that the woman was more sinned against than sinning. She declared most vehemently that one of her enemies had deliberately murdered Rodwell, and that the same enemy had betrayed her to the police.”

I said nothing. My thoughts were full. I saw now what I had never seen before--the reason of Joan’s disappearance. The friends of that woman of the night, whose evil face was ever impressed on my memory, had wrought vengeance on the man who had secured her conviction.

I recalled that, at that crucial moment in Camberwell, she had failed to recognize me as her lover’s antagonist. Perhaps it was because of Lisely’s declaration that I was a police informer. Still, I owed my life to her, just as I owed my eyesight to the woman who had so cleverly mystified me.

“Well,” I exclaimed at last. “Doesn’t this case of the woman Bennett throw some light on the present position, Mr. Gell? Don’t you think that her friends, proved as they were by the police to be a desperate cosmopolitan gang, might not have retaliated by decoying Joan?”

“It certainly seems so,” he said. “I might admit that I have not thought so until now. I have now to see Scotland Yard, and endeavor to trace who were her friends, and if the gang now exists, as no doubt it does.”

Then, glancing at the old-fashioned marble clock upon the mantelshelf, he remarked:

“By jove! We must be off. We’re very late, Lionel. I only wish I could escape to-night. I’m in no mood for a humorous speech. But that’s the worst of popularity, my boy. You must always give the public what they expect, or you go under in their estimation like a dead dog attached to a stone.” He stretched his arms above his head, yawned wearily, and then said, “Come along. Let’s go. The car is outside.”

Through the busy London streets, where the lights were twinkling, we drove, but he spoke little. His one obsession, like my own, was the fate of poor Joan. Yet we both felt that we were on the eve of discovery, and that the future held for us some amazing disclosures.

What he had told me about that woman Hilda Bennett astounded me. I never dreamt that, due to his cold, hard accusation in court, she was now languishing in a female convict prison--that woman who had declared to the police that I had deliberately killed her lover, yet well knowing that it was he who had drawn the weapon on me.

To her false allegations had been due my flight, my trouble, my ill-fortune, and now the loss of the woman whom I loved so dearly. To her had been due the loss of two of the best years of my life, thrown as I had been within that time, into a maelstrom of uncertainty and despair.

To her was due my amazing marriage with the unknown and elusive Illona, whoever she might be. That she was my friend was plain, but who she was, her age, her beauty, or ugliness, I knew not.

Sometimes I pictured her as a smart, young, up-to-date girl with well-chosen clothes and smart stockings and shoes--just those differences which attract or repel a man. Nothing repels the modern young man, used as he is to _chic_ and dancing, so much as cheap, ill-fitting stockings and shoes. The modern girl may be smart on her feet, if dowdy above. But nobody forgives the laddered stocking, however well darned, or the shoe which has the slightest turn-over at the heel.

We have all changed, not only the gentler sex to whom, guided by the fashion pages of our daily journals, we all allow changes of mode. Yet even the mere male who puts on his multi-colored abomination and plus fours is still relegated to his funereal black at night. Men are still replicas of undertakers and waiters, I daresay more than one of my male readers, like myself, has been “asked the way” in a crush, being taken for the man from the caterers.

Life to-day is a succession of problems--terrible problems which few care to face.

Alas, that it is so! But the truth must be confronted. The divorce courts are daily examples of man’s perfidy and woman’s weakness. They are examples under which the judges writhe, and yet have their duty to perform. They are examples, too, in which the King’s Proctor is daily bamboozled, and the decree nisi, like a Rolls Royce, is open to anybody who deals in daily commodities and “makes money” in any form whatever.

One famous divorce judge, in his memoirs, has said with truth:

“Nobody in my court ever tells the truth. I listen to a hundred perjuries a day!”

And this is in our modern post-Soviet England!

The dinner of the Silk and Stuff Club proved a long affair, its principal speaker being its famous president, Mr. John Gell, K.C. Many were the jokes and many the toasts, yet I knew that Joan’s father like me, had a heavy heart amid all the hilarity.

It was nearly two o’clock in the morning before I opened the door of my chambers. Bruce, awakened by my entrance, rose from a chair in which he had been waiting for me.

“Oh, sir,” he said sleepily. “I tried to get you at Mr. Gell’s and at the club, but was unable. About ten o’clock the lady called.”

“The lady. Who?” I cried.

“The lady for whom you left a note some time ago--Madame Illona. She waited half an hour to see if I could find you, but she had to go. And she left word that she would call to-morrow!”

To-morrow!