THE COMPLETE FOUR JUST MEN SERIES (6 Detective Thrillers in One Edition). Edgar Wallace
brim of his hat.
“Nice time ahead of us — I don’t think,” he remarked paradoxically.
“What are the people thinking about it?” asked the Commissioner.
“You’ve seen the papers?”
Mr. Commissioner’s shrug was uncomplimentary to British journalism.
“The papers! Who in Heaven’s name is going to take the slightest notice of what is in the papers!” he said petulantly.
“I am, for one,” replied the calm detective; “newspapers are more often than not led by the public; and it seems to me the idea of running a newspaper in a nutshell is to write so that the public will say, ‘That’s smart — it’s what I’ve said all along.’”
“But the public themselves — have you had an opportunity of gathering their idea?” Superintendent Falmouth nodded. “I was talking in the Park to a man only this evening — a master-man by the look of him, and presumably intelligent. ‘What’s your idea of this Four Just Men business?’ I asked. ‘It’s very queer,’ he said: ‘do you think there’s anything in it?’ — and that,” concluded the disgusted police officer, “is all the public thinks about it.”
But if there was sorrow at Scotland Yard, Fleet Street itself was all a-twitter with pleasurable excitement. Here was great news indeed: news that might be heralded across double columns, blared forth in headlines, shouted by placards, illustrated, diagramised, and illuminated by statistics.
“Is it the Mafia?” asked the Comet noisily, and went on to prove that it was.
The Evening World, with its editorial mind lingering lovingly in the ‘sixties, mildly suggested a vendetta, and instanced ‘The Corsican Brothers’.
The Megaphone stuck to the story of the Four Just Men, and printed pages of details concerning their nefarious acts. It disinterred from dusty files, continental and American, the full circumstances of each murder; it gave the portraits and careers of the men who were slain, and, whilst in no way palliating the offence of the Four, yet set forth justly and dispassionately the lives of the victims, showing the sort of men they were.
It accepted warily the reams of contributions that flowed into the office; for a newspaper that has received the stigma ‘yellow’ exercises more caution than its more sober competitors. In newspaper-land a dull lie is seldom detected, but an interesting exaggeration drives an unimaginative rival to hysterical denunciations.
And reams of Four Men anecdotes did flow in. For suddenly, as if by magic, every outside contributor, every literary gentleman who made a speciality of personal notes, every kind of man who wrote, discovered that he had known the Four intimately all his life.
‘When I was in Italy…’ wrote the author of Come Again (Hackworth Press, 6s.: ‘slightly soiled’, Farringdon Book Mart, 2d.) ‘I remember I heard a curious story about these Men of Blood…’
Or —
‘No spot in London is more likely to prove the hiding-place of the Four Villains than Tidal Basin,’ wrote another gentleman, who stuck Collins in the northeast corner of his manuscript. ‘Tidal Basin in the reign of Charles II was known as…’
“Who’s Collins?” asked the super-chief of the Megaphone of his hardworked editor.
“A liner,” described the editor wearily, thereby revealing that even the newer journalism had not driven the promiscuous contributor from his hard-fought field; “he does police-courts, fires, inquests, and things. Lately he’d taken to literature and writes Picturesque-Bits-of-Old London and Famous Tombstones-of-Hornsey epics…”
Throughout the offices of the newspapers the same thing was happening. Every cable that arrived, every piece of information that reached the subeditor’s basket was coloured with the impending tragedy uppermost in men’s minds. Even the police-court reports contained some allusion to the Four. It was the overnight drunk and disorderly’s justification for his indiscretion.
“The lad has always been honest,” said the boy’s tearful mother; “it’s reading these horrible stories about the Four Foreigners that’s made him turn out like this”; and the magistrate took a lenient view of the offence.
To all outward showing, Sir Philip Ramon, the man mostly interested in the development of the plot, was the least concerned.
He refused to be interviewed any further; he declined to discuss the possibilities of assassination, even with the Premier, and his answer to letters of appreciation that came to him from all parts of the country was an announcement in the Morning Post asking his correspondents to be good enough to refrain from persecuting him with picture postcards, which found no other repository than his wastepaper basket.
He had thought of adding an announcement of his intention of carrying the Bill through Parliament at whatever cost, and was only deterred by the fear of theatricality.
To Falmouth, upon whom had naturally devolved the duty of protecting the Foreign Secretary from harm, Sir Philip was unusually gracious, and incidentally permitted that astute officer to get a glimpse of the terror in which a threatened man lives.
“Do you think there’s any danger, Superintendent?” he asked, not once but a score of times; and the officer, stout defender of an infallible police force, was very reassuring.
“For,” as he argued to himself, “what is the use of frightening a man who is half scared of death already? If nothing happens, he will see I have spoken the truth, and if — if — well, he won’t be able to call me a liar.”
Sir Philip was a constant source of interest to the detective, who must have shown his thoughts once or twice. For the Foreign Secretary, who was a remarkably shrewd man, intercepting a curious glance of the police officer, said sharply, “You wonder why I still go on with the Bill knowing the danger? Well, it will surprise you to learn that I do not know the danger, nor can I imagine it! I have never been conscious of physical pain in my life, and in spite of the fact that I have a weak heart, I have never had so much as a single ache. What death will be, what pangs or peace it may bring, I have no conception. I argue with Epictetus that the fear of death is by way of being an impertinent assumption of a knowledge of the hereafter, and that we have no reason to believe it is any worse condition than our present. I am not afraid to die — but I am afraid of dying.”
“Quite so, sir,” murmured the sympathetic but wholly uncomprehending detective, who had no mind for nice distinctions.
“But,” resumed the Minister — he was sitting in his study in Portland Place— “if I cannot imagine the exact process of dissolution, I can imagine and have experienced the result of breaking faith with the chancellories, and I have certainly no intention of laying up a store of future embarrassments for fear of something that may after all be comparatively trifling.”
Which piece of reasoning will be sufficient to indicate what the Opposition of the hour was pleased to term ‘the tortuous mind of the right honourable gentleman’.
And Superintendent Falmouth, listening with every indication of attention, yawned inwardly and wondered who Epictetus was.
“I have taken all possible precautions, sir,” said the detective in the pause that followed the recital of this creed. “I hope you won’t mind for a week or two being followed about by some of my men. I want you to allow two or three officers to remain in the house whilst you are here, and of course there will be quite a number on duty at the Foreign Office.”
Sir Philip expressed his approval, and later, when he and the detective drove down to the House in a closed brougham, he understood why cyclists rode before and on either side of the carriage, and why two cabs followed the brougham into Palace Yard.
At Notice Time, with a House sparsely filled, Sir Philip rose in his place and gave notice that he would move the second reading of the Aliens Extradition (Political Offences) Bill, on Tuesday week, or, to be exact, in ten days.