Daredevil
of half an opportunity showed its tail. The risk of lowering police
prestige still further by giving the Triangle the chance to make yet
another daring coup must be taken. The Triangle must be set on the
run, and kept there--hazed, harassed and bulldozed into confusion,
till they didn't know whether they were coming or going.
Storm telephoned the prison and ordered a van with double escort to
be sent immediately. It would take some time to arrive, and he
followed the order with a call to Vine Street asking for a dozen men
to guard the prisoners meantime. He had seen the microphone attached
to the loud speaker. Already the Big Triangle knew of his presence,
and he did not put it above the capabilities of that stupendous brain
to organise a lightning sortie to rescue their captives before a
conveyance could reach Cornwall House.
"Put your hands high over your heads and face along that wall," he
commanded the prisoners, and they obeyed without demur.
Their position did not seem to trouble them at all, and this earnest
of their confidence in the Apex was somewhat disquieting. Storm and
the detective watched them, cat-eyed, until the men from Vine Street
arrived. Then the captives were searched, and Storm sat down to
smoke a cigarette while he waited for the prison van. It came
surprisingly quickly. The prisoners were rushed down the stairs into
the street, loaded into the Maria, and three of the Vine Street
plain-clothes men crammed in on top of them to reinforce the warders.
All the captives were handcuffed together in a string and the end
handcuffs were locked over staples on the inside of the van.
"They'll be blistering miracles if they get out of that mess!" said
Storm, watching the red tail-light speed down Piccadilly.
After that the other detectives were dismissed, and Storm and Teal
returned to make a more thorough search of the inner flat. They
stopped en route to look over the assembly room, and it was while
they were there that Storm distinctly heard the sound of a door
closing in the next flat.
Teal's ears intercepted the dull click at the same time, and the two
jumped for the partition door. The sitting-room was empty, but in
that cursory glance round Storm saw that the headpieces and
transmitter he had left on a chair had vanished. He jerked open the
bedroom door and ran through into the bathroom, but there was no one
to be seen. And then a second door slammed, and he whipped round
with a frown. Almost at once he grasped his mistake.
"Je-rusalem--the hall!" he snapped, and led the way back through the
sitting-room.
Besides the door into the bedroom there was another which he had
missed, masked behind a heavy curtain. He flung it open and entered
a tiled lobby furnished only with a hat-stand and an occasional
table. Opening the farther door, he found himself in the corridor,
and sprinted for the stairs.
He overtook nobody in his headlong descent, and he saw nobody he
recognised in the street. The porter's cubicle at the entrance was
empty, and while Storm stroked his chin in perplexity that worthy
toiler came across the road singing a little tune.
"I run out of fags," he replied to Storm's brisk query. "I just went
over to a slot machine up the street. No, not five minutes
ago--shortly after all those men came out."
"Have you seen any other guys come out or go in?" asked Storm, and
the man shook his head.
Kit climbed the stairs again with a frown, and found Teal ruminating
torpidly in the bedroom. The detective was dangling a flimsy article
of feminine underwear in one of his vast paws.
"This is embroidered 'J.S.'," he said. "Sounds like my old friend
Joan to me."
Storm scowled.
"D'you know we're a couple of dyed-in-the-wool mutts?" he demanded.
"I'm willing to bet the Big Triangle was lying doggo in the vestibule
all the time I was making that first search--I never spotted the
hall. And when I went back to the big room he must have padded back
and listened to everything we said.... _God's Glory!_"
The oath cracked out like the lash of a stock-whip, and Teal's eyes
opened wide at the sibilant intensity of it.
Storm had picked up a brass candlestick, and he smashed it into the
glass front of one of the compartments of the bookcase. He wrenched
Open the dummy line of books, and then stepped back with his lips
lifting from his white teeth.
The headphones and mouthpiece were back in their places, connected up.
"Great Thor in hell!" he breathed.
In an instant he was back to the outer sitting-room. He grabbed up
the telephone and gave a number even as Teal, moving with astonishing
speed, arrived behind him.
"Hullo," snapped Arden. "_Hullo_ ... Pentonville? ... How long have
you been on duty? ... Right. Then what time did you get my order for
the prison van? ... I see." Storm's voice suddenly became gentle.
"You're absolutely certain no call could have come through and been
taken by someone else? ... Oh--about half an hour ago.... Arden,
Central Office, five-double-seven--you poor fish. Why not think of
asking before? ... Well, get me the Governor.... My dear good soul,
I don't care if he's asleep--I don't care if he'll be furious--I
don't care if he's dying! _Get--me--the--Governor_.... Thank you."
A lengthy pause, and then a querulous growl:
"Yes?"
"Colonel Dayne?"
The affirmative was unprintable.
"I called you up about half an hour ago and ordered your van to
Cornwall House. A van came, but apparently it was a fake. I want
you to send a man down to your garage and find out if your van is
there."
Storm got his answer in about ten minutes, and then he set down the
receiver and whistled musically, strolling up and down the room. The
expression on his face made it unnecessary for Mr. Teal to ask any
questions.
The Triangle had scored again, right under their noses. The fake van
must have been waiting for just such an emergency, and the Apex had
had all the odds in his favour--he had heard Storm and Teal come,
heard their plans, and was already tapped in on the telephone to
waylay their message and send a totally different one along to his
confederates. The luck of the game had been his down to the last
milligramme.
"The only consolation is that the Press won't hear about our wiped
eyes," said Teal gloomily, and Storm stopped whistling to grin.
"Don't bet on it," he recommended. "The Triangle might mail a
graphic account to all the News Agencies. If I were the Apex, and
I'd scooped the kitty like that with a pair of deuces, I'll say I'd
sing about it!"
It took a lot to upset Storm. The inevitable cigarette lofted
heavenwards between his smiling lips, his hands were deep in his
pockets--that boyish enthusiasm, which nothing could damp, shone in
his eyes. It was an attribute of his which, delightful in the
ordinary way, could be incredibly aggravating in moments of stress,
and Inspector Teal glared at him moodily.
_Zzzzzzing! ... Zzzzzzing-zing! ..._
Through the other flat the hall bell jingled shrilly.
"One rings!" said Storm brightly. "Teal, be a good boy and come
greet the visitor!"
He went through to answer the door, Teal following. As he flung it
wide the corridor light outside showed up a stumpy, rotund form
surmounted by a chubby pink face which split in a jovial beam as it
recognised the two men who stood in the hall surveying it.
Teal reached out a languid arm and took the newcomer by the wrist,
drawing him inside and kicking the door shut behind him.
"Come right in, Uncle Joe," said Mr. Teal with savage cordiality.
"Come right in and open your sweet heart to old Uncle Claud Eustace.
He wants to hear a little fairy tale about loud-speaking telephones!"
CHAPTER XIX
NCl3
Joe Blaythwayt waddled into the sitting-room. He turned and gaped at
the detective.
"Loud Speaking Telephones?" he repeated in an awed whisper. "My dear
sir--my Very Dear Sir--I--er--I--I--I----" His fishlike mouth closed
with a smack. "Why, what a coincidence! Finding you here, I mean.
I didn't know you were friends of Jimmy's."
A gargantuan grin overspread Teal's homely features with the slow
ponderous momentum of an incoming tide. Jimmy; James Norman Mattock.
The connection with Joan Sands had eluded Mr. Teal, but now it had
been suggested to him his mind invested it with all the immutable
actuality of proven fact. The truth sounds almost sacrilegious, but
it is that Claud Eustace Teal, flushed with the joy of discovery, was
composing a little song on the lines of a well-known nursery rhyme.
It ran something like this--
Mattock had a little Joan
Whose soul was blushing poor,
And everywhere lamb Mattock went
His Joan went on before.
Mr. Teal was not a great poet, but he had a wonderful knack of
getting a stranglehold on axioms.
"Funny that Jimmy never occurred to me," he said. "Let's take
another look at that flat."
A novel lay on one chair, and when Storm picked it up to read the
title a thin yellow envelope fell out. It was addressed to J.N.
Mattock, and the postmark showed that it had been mailed in Putney at
2 p.m. the previous day. Storm smoothed put the slip of expensive
creamy notepaper which it contained.
Raegenssen having disappeared, the office can probably dispense with
your services for a few hours.
You and Sands will take the Torbay Limited from Paddington on the
morning you receive this. You will go to Torquay and stay at the Spa
Hotel. You will return to London by the noon express the next day.
£15 is enclosed for your expenses.
The signature was the device of the Alpha Triangle.
Storm passed the letter over to Teal, and when the detective had read
it he pursed his lips.
"He's the sort of snake who would have an alibi handy," was Mr.
Teal's sour comment.
The voice they had heard over the telephone was certainly that of a
man--but whose? Mattock's? Blaythwayt's? Teal could arrive at no
plausible solution. And an odd dozen little Triangles had slithered
through their fingers that night, winning clear on the blindest, most
hopeless bluff that had ever been put up in the history of New
Scotland Yard. The detective was anything but satisfied with his
evening's work, and proceeded to vent his spleen on the unhappy Joe.
"Who told you to come butting in here?" he wanted to know. "I'll
tell you, Joe, you dillytanty bloodhounds rile me. Now, just you
warble me that little fairy tale I asked you for--and put in an
opening chorus saying why you come rubing round this manor at twenty
to midnight."
"Really, there's no need for you to be so offensive, Teal,"
Blaythwayt protested miserably. "I happened to be in court when
Mattock was brought up after the Triangle got Mecklen away from the
station--I go round the police courts when I've got any time to
spare. It's the best method of seeing Life in the Raw." Joe's tone
suggested the suppression of nameless horrors witnessed in the
metropolitan courts of summary jurisdiction. "And I'm interested in
this case, as you know, so I shadowed Mattock home. Then I had to
hurry away, but I wanted to ask him a few questions, so I came along
to-night."
"What questions?"
Blaythwayt waggled a podgy hand.
"Material for Writing," he explained unctuously. "One should strive
for Accuracy. I wanted to know what it felt like to be set upon by
two scoundrels, how it was to be up before a magistrate, and so on.
I have never been before a magistrate, nor have I ever been molested
by armed desperados, and so I resolved to get my sensations at least
at second hand."
Storm lounged into a settee and put his feet up. His glance
commanded Teal to cut short the persecution, for Storm had his own
idea of the right way to deal with _l'affaire Blaythwayt_.