The Law of the Four Just Men · The Man Who Loved Music (2/2)

“You’re going up to your room, now,” he said, “and you’re going to stay there till I bring you out tonight to do your show, and if you give me any of your nonsense⁠—you’ll be sorry!”

He pushed her through the rough unpainted door of the little cell which was termed bedroom, and he paused in the doorway to convey information (and there was a threat in the course of it) which left her white and staring.

She came down that night and did her performance and to her surprise and relief did not excite even the notice of the wealthy Mr. Santiago, a half-bred Spaniard with a yellow face, who did not so much as look at her.

Mr. Rafferty was also unusually bland and polite.

She went to her room that night feeling more comfortable. Then she discovered that her key was gone, and she sat up until one o’clock in the morning waiting for she knew not what. At that hour came a soft footfall in the passage; somebody tried the handle of her door, but she had braced a chair under the handle. They pushed and the rickety chair creaked; then there was a sound like a stick striking a cushion, and she thought she heard somebody sliding against the wooden outer wall of the room. A tap came to her door.

“Miss Hacker,” the voice said. She recognised it immediately. “Open the door quickly. I want to get you away.”

With a trembling hand she removed the chair, and the few little articles of furniture she had piled against the door, and opened it. By the light of the candle which was burning in her room she recognised the man who had been her fellow passenger on the Braganza.

“Come quietly,” he said. “There is a back stair to the compound. Have you a cloak? Bring it, because you have a sixty-mile motor journey before we come to the railway.”

As she came through the door she saw the upturned toes of somebody who was lying in the passage, and with a shudder she realised that was the thumping sound she had heard.

They reached the big yard behind the “Plaza” crowded with the dusty motorcars of ranchers and their foremen, who had come into town for the evening, and passed out through the doorway. A big car was standing in the middle of the road, and to this he guided her. She threw one glance back at Rafferty’s bar. The windows blazed with light, the sound of the orchestra came faintly through the still night air, then she dropped her head on her hands and wept.

Leon Gonsalez had a momentary pang of contrition, for he might have saved her all this.

It was two months exactly from the day he had left London, when he came running up the stairs of the Jermyn Street flat and burst in upon Manfred.

“You’re looking fit and fine, Leon,” said George, jumping up and gripping his hand. “You didn’t write and I ever expected that you would. I only got back from Spain two days ago.”

He gave the news from Seville and then:

“You proved the case?”

“To our satisfaction,” said Leon grimly. “Though you would not satisfy the law that Lynne was guilty. It is, however, a perfectly clear case. I visited his agent when I was in Buenos Aires, and took the liberty of rifling his desk in his absence. I found several letters from Lynne and by their tone there can be no doubt whatever that Lynne is consciously engaged in this traffic.”

They looked at one another.

“The rest is simple,” said Manfred, “and I will leave you to work out the details, my dear Leon, with every confidence that Mr. Homer Lynne will be very sorry indeed that he departed from the safe and narrow way.”

There was no more painstaking, thorough or conscientious workman that Leon Gonsalez. The creation of punishment was to him a work of love. No General ever designed the battle with a more punctilious regard to the minutest detail than Leon.

Before the day was over he had combed the neighbourhood in which Mr. Lynne lived of every vital fact. It was then that he learnt of Mr. Lynne’s passion for music. The cab which took Leon back to Jermyn Street did not go fast enough: he literally leapt into the sitting-room, chortling his joy.

“The impossible is possible, my dear George,” he cried, pacing about the apartment like a man demented. “I thought I should never be able to carry my scheme into effect, but he loves music, George! He adores the tuneful phonograph!”

“A little ice water, I think,” suggested Manfred gently.

“No, no,” said Leon, “I am not hot, I am cool: I am ice itself! And who would expect such good luck? Tonight we will drive to Hampstead and we will hear his concert.”

It was a long time before he gave a coherent account of what he had learnt. Mr. Lynne was extremely unpopular in the neighbourhood, and Leon explained why.

Manfred understood better that night, when the silence of the sedate road in which Mr. Lynne’s detached house was situated was broken by the shrill sound of trumpets, and the rolling of drums, the clanging of bells, the simulated boom of cannon⁠—all the barbarian musical interjection which has made 1812 so popular with unmusical people.

“It sounds like a real band,” said Manfred in surprise.

A policeman strolled along, and seeing the car standing before the house, turned his head with a laugh.

“It’s an awful row, isn’t it?”

“I wonder it doesn’t wake everybody up,” suggested Manfred.

“It does,” replied the policeman, “or it did until they got used to it. It’s the loudest gramophone in the world, I should think: like one of those things you have at the bottom of the tube stairs, to tell the people to move on. A stentaphone, isn’t it?”

“How long does this go on? All night?” asked Manfred.

“For about an hour, I believe,” said the policeman. “The gentleman who lives in that house can’t go to sleep without music. He’s a bit artistic, I think.”

“He is,” said Leon grimly.

The next day he found out that four servants were kept in the establishment, three of whom slept on the premises. Mr. Lynne was in the habit of returning home every evening at about ten o’clock, except on Fridays when he went out of Town.

Wednesday evening was the cook’s night out, and it was also the night when Mr. Lynne’s butler and general factotum was allowed an evening off. There remained the housemaid, and even she presented no difficulty. The real trouble was that all these people would return to the house or the neighbourhood at eleven o’clock. Leon decided to make his appointment with Mr. Lynne for Friday night, on which day he usually went to Brighton. He watched the genial man leave Victoria, and then he called up Lynne’s house.

“Is that Masters?” he asked, and a man’s voice answered him.

“Yes, sir,” was the reply.

“It is Mr. Mandez here,” said Leon, imitating the curious broken English of Lynne’s Mexican assistant. “Mr. Lynne is returning to the house tonight on very important business, and he does not want any of the servants to be there.”

“Indeed, sir,” said Masters and showed no surprise. Evidently these instructions had been given before. Leon had expected some difficulty here, and had prepared a very elaborate explanation which it was not necessary to give.

“He wouldn’t like me to stay, sir?”

“Oh, no,” said Leon. “Mr. Lynne particularly said that nobody was to be in the house. He wants the side door and the kitchen door left unlocked,” he added as an afterthought. It was a brilliant afterthought if it came off, and apparently it did.

“Very good, sir,” said Masters.

Leon went straight from the telephone call-box, where he had sent the message, to the counter and wrote out a wire, addressed to Lynne, Hotel Ritz, Brighton. The message ran:

“The girl Goldstein has been discovered at Santa Fe. Terrible row. Police have been making enquiries. Have very important information for you. I am waiting for you at your house.”

He signed it Mandez.

“He will get the wire at eight. There is a train back at nine. That should bring him to Hampstead by half past ten,” said Leon when he had rejoined Manfred who was waiting for him outside the post office. “We will be there an hour earlier: that is as soon as it is dark.”

They entered the house without the slightest difficulty. Manfred left his two-seater outside a doctor’s house, a place where an unattended car would not be noticed, and went on foot to Lynne’s residence. It was a large detached house, expensively furnished, and as Leon had expected, the servants had gone. He located Lynne’s room, a big apartment at the front of the house.

“There is his noise box,” said Leon pointing to a handsome cabinet near the window. “Electrical, too. Where does that wire lead?”

He followed the flex to a point above the head of the bed, where it terminated in what looked like a hanging bell push.

Leon was momentarily puzzled and then a light dawned upon him.

“Of course, if he has this infernal noise to make him go to sleep, the bell push switches off the music and saves him getting out of bed.”

He opened the lid of the gramophone cabinet and examined the record.

“1812,” he chuckled. He lifted the needle from the disc, turned the switch and the green table revolved. Then he walked to the head of the bed and pushed the knob of the bell push. Instantly the revolutions stopped.

“That is it,” he nodded, and turned over the soundbox, letting the needle rest upon the edge of the record.

“That,” he pointed to a bronze rod which ran from the centre to the side of the disc and fitted to some adjustment in the soundbox, “is the repeater. It is an American invention which I saw in Buenos Aires, but I haven’t seen many on this side. When the record is finished the rod automatically transfers the needle to the beginning of the record.”

“So that it can go on and on and on,” said Manfred interested. “I don’t wonder our friend is unpopular.”

Leon was looking round the room for something and at last he found what he was seeking. It was a brass clothes peg fastened to a door which led to a dressing-room. He put all his weight on the peg but it held firm.

“Excellent,” he said, and opened his bag. From this he took a length of stout cord and skilfully knotted one end to the clothes hook. He tested it but it did not move. From the bag he took a pair of handcuffs, unlocked and opened them and laid them on the bed. Then he took out what looked to be a Field-Marshal’s baton. It was about fourteen inches long, and fastened around were two broad strips of felt; tied neatly to the baton were nine pieces of cord which were fastened at one end to the cylinder. The cords were twice the length of the handle and were doubled over neatly and temporarily fastened to the handle by pieces of twine.

Leon looked at one end of the baton and Manfred saw a red seal.

“What on earth is that, Leon?”

Leon showed him the seal, and Manfred read:

“Prison Commission.”

“That,” said Leon, “is what is colloquially known as the ‘cat.’ In other words, the ‘cat of nine tails.’ It is an authentic instrument which I secured with some difficulty.”

He cut the twine that held the cords to the handle and let the nine thongs fall straight. Manfred took them into his hands and examined them curiously. The cords were a little thinner than ordinary window line, but more closely woven: at the end of each thong there was a binding of yellow silk for about half an inch.

Leon took the weapon in his hands and sent the cords whistling round his head.

“Made in Pentonville Gaol,” he explained, “and I’m afraid I’m not as expert as the gentleman who usually wields it.”

The dusk grew to darkness. The two men made their way downstairs and waited in the room leading from the hall.

At half past ten exactly they heard a key turn in the lock and the door close.

“Are you there, Mandez?” called the voice of Mr. Lynne, and it sounded anxious.

He took three steps towards the door and then Gonsalez stepped out.

“Good evening, Mr. Lynne,” he said.

The man switched on the light.

He saw before him a figure plainly dressed, but who it was he could not guess, for the intruder’s face was covered by a white semi-diaphanous veil.

“Who are you? What do you want?” gasped Lynne.

“I want you,” said Leon shortly. “Before we go any further, I will tell you this, Mr. Lynne, that if you make an outcry, if you attempt to attract attention from outside, it will be the last sound you ever make.”

“What do you want of me?” asked the stout man shakily, and then his eyes fell upon Manfred similarly veiled and he collapsed into the hall chair.

Manfred gripped his arm and led him upstairs to his bedroom. The blinds were pulled and the only light came from a small table-lamp by the side of the bed.

“Take off your coat,” said Manfred.

Mr. Lynne obeyed.

“Now your waistcoat.”

The waistcoat was discarded.

“Now I fear I shall have to have your shirt,” said Gonsalez.

“What are you going to do?” asked the man hoarsely.

“I will tell you later.”

The stout man, his face twitching, stood bare to the waist, and offered no resistance when Manfred snapped the handcuffs on him.

They led him to the door where the hat peg was, and deftly Leon slipped the loose end of the rope through the links and pulled his manacled hands tightly upwards.

“Now we can talk,” said Gonsalez. “Mr. Lynne, for some time you have been engaged in abominable traffic. You have been sending women, who sometimes were no more than children, to South America, and the penalties for that crime are, as you know, a term of imprisonment and this.”

He picked the baton from where he had placed it, and shook out the loose cords. Mr. Lynne gazed at them over his shoulder, with a fascinated stare.

“This is colloquially known as the ‘cat of nine tails,’ ” said Gonsalez, and sent the thongs shrilling round his head.

“I swear to you I never knew⁠—” blubbered the man. “You can’t prove it⁠—”

“I do not intend proving it in public,” said Leon carefully. “I am here merely to furnish proof to you that you cannot break the law and escape punishment.”

And then it was that Manfred started the gramophone revolving, and the blare of trumpets and the thunder of drums filled the room with strident harmony.

The same policeman to whom Manfred and Gonsalez had spoken a few nights previously paced slowly past the house and stopped to listen with a grin. So, too, did a neighbour.

“What a din that thing makes,” said the aggrieved householder.

“Yes it does,” admitted the policeman. “I think he wants a new record. It sounds almost as though somebody was shrieking their head off, doesn’t it?”

“It always sounds like that to me,” grumbled the neighbour, and went on.

The policeman smiled and resumed his beat, and from behind the windows of Mr. Lynne’s bedroom came the thrilling cadences of the “Marseillaise” and the boom of guns, and a shrill thin sound of fear and pain for which Tschaikovsky was certainly not responsible.