The Law of the Four Just Men · The Man Who Died Twice (2/2)

“In spite of that appointment I must break the news to you that the drug which turns men into senseless beasts is more potent than any you serve in this den.”

“What’s it to do with me?” snarled Ballam.

“It interests you a great deal,” said Leon coolly, “because you are at this moment smoking a double dose!”

With a howl of rage Ballam sprang to his feet and what happened after that he could not remember. Only something seemed to split in his head, and a blinding light flashed before his eyes and then a whole century of time went past, a hundred years of moving time and an eternity of flashing lights, of thunderous noises, of whispering voices, of ceaseless troubled movement. Sometimes he knew he was talking and listened eagerly to hear what he himself had to say. Sometimes people spoke to him and mocked him and he had a consciousness that he was being chased by somebody.

How long this went on he could not judge. In his half-bemused condition he tried to reckon time but found he had no standard of measurement. It seemed years after that he opened his eyes with a groan, and put his hand to his aching head. He was lying in bed. It was a hard bed and the pillow was even harder. He stared up at the whitewashed ceiling and looked round at the plain distempered walls. Then he peered over the side of the bed and saw that the floor as of concrete. Two lights were burning, one above a table and one in a corner of the room where a man was sitting reading a newspaper. He was a curious-looking man and Ballam blinked at him.

“I am dreaming,” he said aloud and the man looked up.

“Hello! Do you want to get up?”

Ballam did not reply. He was still staring, his mouth agape. The man was in uniform, in a dark, tight-fitting uniform. He wore a cap on his head and a badge. Round his waist was a shiny black belt and then Ballam read the letters on the shoulder-strap of the tunic.

“A.W.,” he repeated, dazed. “A.W.”

What did “A.W.” stand for? And then the truth flashed on him.

Assistant Warder! He glared round the room. There was one window, heavily barred and covered with thick glass. On the wall was pasted a sheet of printed paper. He staggered out of bed and read, still open-mouthed:

“Regulations for His Majesty’s Prisons.”

He looked down at himself. He had evidently gone to bed with his breeches and stockings on and his breeches were of coarse yellow material and branded with faded black arrows. He was in prison! How long had he been there?

“Are you going to behave today?” asked the warder curtly. “We don’t want any more of those scenes you gave us yesterday!”

“How long have I been here?” croaked Ballam.

“You know how long you’ve been here. You’ve been here three weeks, yesterday.”

“Three weeks!” gasped Ballam. “What is the charge?”

“Now don’t come that game with me, Ballam,” said the warder, not unkindly. “You know I’m not allowed to have conversations with you. Go back and sleep. Sometimes I think you are as mad as you profess to be.”

“Have I been⁠—bad?” asked Ballam.

“Bad?” The warder jerked up his head. “I wasn’t in the court with you, but they say you behaved in the dock like a man demented, and when the Judge was passing sentence of death⁠—”

“My God!” shrieked Ballam and fell back on the bed, white and haggard. “Sentenced to death!” He could hardly form the words. “What have I done?”

“You killed a young lady, you know that,” said the warder. “I’m surprised at you, trying to come it over me after the good friend I’ve been to you, Ballam. Why don’t you buck up and take your punishment like a man?”

There was a calendar above the place where the warder had been sitting.

“Twelfth of April,” read Ballam and could have shrieked again, for it was the first day of March that he met that mysterious stranger. He remembered it all now. Bal! The drug that drove men mad.

He sprang to his feet.

“I want to see the governor! I want to tell them the truth! I’ve been drugged!”

“Now you’ve told us all that story before,” said the warder with an air of resignation. “When you killed the young lady⁠—”

“What young lady?” shrieked Ballam. “Not Maggiore! Don’t tell me⁠—”

“You know you killed her right enough,” said the warder. “What’s the good of making all this fuss? Now go back to bed, Ballam. You can’t do any good by kicking up a shindy this night of all nights in the world.”

“I want to see the governor! Can I write to him?”

“You can write to him if you like,” and the warder indicated the table.

Ballam staggered up to the table and sat down shakily in a chair. There was half a dozen sheets of blue notepaper headed in black: “H.M. Prison, Wandsworth, SW1.”

He was in Wandsworth prison! He looked round the cell. It did not look like a cell and yet it did. It was so horribly bare and the door was heavy looking. He had never been in a cell before and of course it was different to what he had expected.

A thought struck him.

“When⁠—when am I to be punished?” he said chokingly.

“Tomorrow!”

The word fell like a sentence of doom and the man fell forward, his head upon his arms and wept hysterically. Then of a sudden he began to write with feverish haste, his face red with weeping.

His letter was incoherent. It was about a man who had come to the club and had given him a drug and then he had spent a whole eternity in darkness seeing lights and being chased by people and hearing whispering voices. And he was not guilty. He loved Genee Maggiore. He would not have hurt a hair of her head.

He stopped here to weep again. Perhaps he was dreaming? Perhaps he was under the influence of this drug. He dashed his knuckles against the wall and the shock made him wince.

“Here, none of that,” said the warder sternly. “You get back to bed.”

Ballam looked at his bleeding knuckles. It was true! It was no dream! It was true, true!

He lay on the bed and lost consciousness again and when he awoke the warder was still sitting in his place reading. He seemed to doze again for an hour, although in reality it was only for a few minutes, and every time he woke something within him said: “This morning you die!”

Once he sprang shrieking from the bed and had to be thrown back.

“If you give me any more trouble I’ll get another officer in and we’ll tie you down. Why don’t you take it like a man? It’s no worse for you than it was for her,” said the warder savagely.

After that he lay still and he was falling into what seemed a longer sleep when the warder touched him. When he awoke he found his own clothes laid neatly by the side of the bed upon a chair and he dressed himself hurriedly.

He looked around for something.

“Where’s the collar?” he asked trembling.

“You don’t need a collar,” the warder’s voice had a certain quality of sardonic humour.

“Pull yourself together,” said the man roughly. “Other people have gone through this. From what I’ve heard you ran an opium den. A good many of your clients gave us a visit. They had to go through with it, and so must you.”

He waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands and then the door opened and a man came in. He was a slight man with a red beard and a mop of red hair.

The warder swung the prisoner round.

“Put your hands behind you,” he said and Ballam sweated as he felt the strap grip his wrists.

Then light was extinguished. A cap was drawn over his face and he thought he heard voices behind him. He wasn’t fit to die, he knew that. There always was a parson in a case like this. Someone grasped his arm on either side and he walked slowly forward through the door across a yard and through another door. It was a long way and once his knees gave under him but he stood erect. Presently they stopped.

“Stand where you are,” said a voice and he found a noose slipped round his neck and waited, waited in agony, minutes, hours it seemed. He took no account of time and could not judge it. Then he heard a heavy step and somebody caught him by the arm.

“What are you doing here, governor?” said a voice.

The bag was pulled from his head. He was in the street. It was night and he stood under the light of a streetlamp. The man regarding him curiously was a policeman.

“Got a bit of rope round your neck, too, somebody tied your hands. What is it⁠—a holdup case?” said the policeman as he loosened the straps. “Or is it a lark?” demanded the representative of the law. “I’m surprised at you, an old gentleman like you with white hair!”

Gregory Ballam’s hair had been black less than seven hours before when Leon Gonsalez had drugged his coffee and had brought him through the basement exit into the big yard at the back of the club.

For here was a nice new garage as Leon had discovered when he prospected the place, and here they were left uninterrupted to play the comedy of the condemned cell with blue sheets of prison notepaper put there for the occasion and a copy of Prison Regulations which was donated quite unwittingly by Mr. Fare, Commissioner of Police.