Red aces Being three cases of Mr. Reeder
“Elsa wants me to keep firearms in the house. Now you, as a detective,
I suppose would think nothing of that. To me it is an abhorrent
practice. I may not be a great preacher, but I am, I hope, a good
Christian, and the idea of taking life--ugh!”
Mr. Reeder tried to raise a complimentary shudder, but failed. For his
part he believed in taking life. He was old-fashioned enough to regard
the gallows as an instrument of the highest social value.
“I presume you carry a gun?”
Mr. Reeder shook his head.
“On occasions that dreadful necessity has been forced upon me,” he
said. “I dislike the practice. I have--er--two such weapons, but I
have never had to use them. One is at my office and one at my private
residence.”
The doctor made a little face.
“You disappoint me, Mr. Reeder. I am not a nervous man, but in view of
what happened the other night”--he touched his injured face--“I should
have felt a little safer. Hello, sweetness.”
Sweetness wore a perfectly cut gown of deep crimson velvet. Mr. Reeder
thought that she looked twenty-four and not a day over, and had he the
courage of a lady’s man--a quality he much envied--he would have said
as much.
“What were you talking about?” she asked.
“We were talking of guns,” said Mr. Reeder loudly, “um--revolvers.”
She smiled at this.
“And my husband was giving his well-known views on the sanctity of
human life,” she said scornfully.
Mr. Reeder smiled.
“Rather I was giving a bit of my mind, my dear madam,” he said.
“My dear,” broke in the host, “all this arose from a question I asked
Mr. Reeder: whether he carried weapons. He doesn’t.”
“I expect poor Thomas was terribly disappointed,” said Mrs. Ingham.
“When he unpacked your bag he had expected to find it full of pistols
and handcuffs.”
She took them back to the drawing room, but either she thought it was
a painful subject, or she wanted to postpone the discussion till after
dinner, for she made no reference to her husband’s experience.
It was Mr. Reeder who brought up that matter. They were passing
through the hall on their way to the dining room--
“Which axe was it you used?” he asked.
The panelled walls were entirely innocent of armour or battle axes.
“We have had them moved,” said Mrs. Ingham. “It occurred to me
afterwards that these dreadful people might have used the battle axe
instead of my husband.”
They had passed the broad stairs on which the battle between Dr.
Ingham and his midnight intruders had been fought, and Mr. Reeder
tried to visualize the scene. But there were occasions when his
imagination failed, and this was one.
The dining room had been fashioned like an Elizabethan banqueting hall
in miniature. There was a big Tudor fireplace, a minstrel gallery, and
he noticed with surprise that the floor was of flag-stones.
“That is the original floor of the old castle,” said Mrs. Ingham
proudly. “The builders unearthed it whilst they prepared the
foundation, and my husband insisted that it should remain. Of course
we had it levelled, and in some cases the flags had to be replaced.
But it was in a marvellous state of preservation. It used to belong to
the De Boisy family----”
Mr. Reeder nodded.
“De Tonsin,” he said gently. “The De Boisys were related by marriage,
and only one De Boisy occupied the castle in 1453.”
She was a little taken aback by his knowledge.
“Yes, I have made a study of this place,” Mr. Reeder went on. “I am
something of a student of archæology.”
He beamed up and down the room approvingly.
“Dirty work.”
Mrs. Ingham lifted her eyebrows.
“I don’t quite get you?”
“On this floor,” said Mr. Reeder almost jovially, “wicked old barons
were slicing off their enemies’ heads and were dropping them into the
deepest dungeon beneath the--um.” No, he had never heard of a moat. It
could not well be that, could it?
As the footman placed a cup of soup before him, and the tall butler
poured him out a glass of wine, Mr. Reeder looked at the glass, held
it up to the light.
“That’s good stuff. I can quite imagine,” he said reminiscently, “that
dramatic scene when Geoffrey De Boisy induced his old rival to come to
dinner. How he must have smiled as his varlets ended--um--the
unfortunate gentleman with wine from a poisoned flagon.”
He finished the scrutiny of the wine and put it down untasted.
Mrs. Ingham was amused.
“You have a mediæval mind, Mr. Reeder.”
“A criminal mind,” said that gentleman.
He did not drink throughout the meal, and Dr. Ingham remembered that
he had merely sipped his whisky in the study.
“Yes, I am a teetotaller in a sense,” said Mr. Reeder, “but I find
life so completely exciting that I require no other stimulant.”
He had observed that the man who had valeted him was also the footman.
He waited till the two servants were at the other end of the room, and
then:
“Your man is looking rather ill. Has he also been injured in the
fight?”
“Thomas? No, he did not appear on the scene until it was all over,”
said Dr. Ingham, in surprise. “Why?”
“I thought I saw a bandage round his throat.”
“I haven’t noticed it,” said the host.
The conversation flagged. The coffee was served on the table, and Mr.
Reeder helped himself liberally to sugar. He refused a cigar, and,
apologizing for his bad manners, took one of his own cigarettes.
“Matches, Thomas,” said Dr. Ingham, but before the footman could obey,
Mr. Reeder had taken a box from his pocket and struck a match.
It was no ordinary match: the light of it blazed blindingly white so
that he had to screw up his eyes to avoid the glare. Only for a
moment, then it died down, leaving the party blinking.
“What was that?” asked Ingham.
Mr. Reeder stared hopelessly at the box.
“Somebody has been playing a joke on me,” he said. “I am terribly
sorry.”
They were very ordinary looking matches. He passed the box across to
his host, who struck one, but produced nothing more startling than a
mild yellow flame.
“I have never seen anything so extraordinary,” said the beautiful lady
who sat on his left. “It was almost like a magnesium flare. We see
them sometimes when ships are in distress.”
The incident of the match passed. It was the doctor who led the
conversation to the Pizarros and Mrs. Ingham who elaborated her
theory. J.G. Reeder sat listening, apparently absorbed.
“I don’t think he was a really bad man,” Mrs. Ingham was saying when
he interrupted.
“Pizarro was a blackguard,” said Mr. Reeder. “But he had the kind of
nature one would have expected in a half-bred Dago.”
If he saw Mrs. Ingham stiffen, he gave no sign.
“Kennedy, his confederate,” he went on, “was, as I said this
afternoon, a man to be pitied. His mother was a moral leper, a woman
of no worth, the merest chattel.”
Dr. Ingham’s face had gone white and tense, his eyes glowed like red
coals, but J.G. Reeder, sitting there with his hands thrust into his
trouser pockets, his cigarette hanging limply from his lower lip,
continued as though he had the fullest approval of the company.
“Kennedy was really the brain of the gang, if you can call it a brain,
the confidence man with some sort of college education. He married
Pizarro’s daughter, who was not a nice young lady. He was, I think,
her fourth lover before he married her--if they were married at all…”
“Take that back, you damned liar!”
The woman was on her feet, glowering down at him, her shrill voice
almost a scream.
“You liar, you beast!”
“Shut up!”
It was Dr. Ingham’s voice--harsh, commanding. But the injunction came
too late. One of Mr. Reeder’s hands had come out from his pocket and
it held an automatic of heavy calibre. He came to his feet so quickly
that they were unprepared for the manœuvre.
Mr. Reeder pushed the chair behind, and leant back against the wall.
Thomas, the footman, had come in running, but stopped now at the sight
of the pistol. Mr. Reeder addressed him: “I’m afraid I hurt you
Thursday night,” he said, pleasantly. “A pellet from an air pistol can
be very painful. I owe you an apology--I intended it to be for your
friend.”
He nodded towards the butler.
“It was very stupid of you, Dr. Ingham, to allow your two men to come
to London, and it led to very unpleasant consequences. I saw the dead
man to-day. Rather a powerful looking fellow named Gelpin. The
knuckles of his hand were bruised. I presume that, in an unguarded
moment, you went too near to him without your body-guard.”
He reached one of the long windows, and with a quick movement of his
hand he drew the curtain aside. The window was open. The military
looking man who had accompanied him from London climbed through. Then
followed the three who had followed Mr. Reeder to the house. Dr.
Ingham stood paralysed to inaction.
Suddenly he turned and darted towards the small door in a corner of
the room. Mr. Reeder’s pistol exploded and the panel of the door split
noisily. Ingham stood stock still--a pitiable, panic-stricken thing,
and he came staggering back.
“It wasn’t my idea, Reeder,” he said. “I will tell you everything. I
can prove I had nothing to do with it. They are all safe, all of
them.”
Stooping, almost beneath his feet he turned back the heavy carpet, and
Reeder saw a large stone flag in which was inserted a heavy metal
ring.
“They are all alive… every one of them. I shot Gelpin in self defence.
He would have killed me if I hadn’t killed him.”
“And Litnoff?” asked Mr. Reeder, almost good humouredly.
Dr. Ingham was silent.
* * * * * *
Mr. Reeder wrote in his case book:
Dr. Ingham’s real name was Casius Kennedy. He was born in England,
convicted at the age of seventeen for obtaining money under false
pretences. He afterwards became a reformed character and addressed
many revival meetings, and he was known as a boy preacher. He was
again convicted on a charge of obtaining money by a trick, sentenced
to nine months’ imprisonment, and on his discharge emigrated to
America, where he fell in with Pizarro and assisted him in most of his
swindles.
He was very useful to Pizarro, gaining, as he did, the confidence of
victims by his appeals in various pulpits. He either acquired, or
assumed, the title of doctor of divinity.
After the biggest of the Pizarro swindles he escaped to California and
in some way, which is not known, acquired a very considerable fortune,
most of which he lost in speculation subsequent to his arrival in
England.
In his statement to me he was emphatic on this one point: that after
he had built Grayne Hall on the foundations of the old castle, and he
discovered the commodious dungeons which, I can testify, were in a
remarkable state of preservation beneath the house, he had no
intention of making illicit use of them until his heavy losses
compelled him to look around for a method of replenishing his
exchequer.
Five years ago he met a Russian actor named Litnoff, a drunkard who
was on the point of being arrested for debt, and who was afraid that
he might be deported to his own country, where he was wanted by the
Tcheka for a number of political offences.
Kennedy and his wife, with the approval and assistance of Litnoff,
evolved a scheme whereby big money could be made. Litnoff took a small
flat in London mansions, which was cheaply furnished, and it was here
that the swindle was worked. Very carefully and with all his old
cleverness, Kennedy got into touch with the likely victims, and
naturally he chose the credulous people who would subscribe money to
the Pizarro Syndicate. One by one the “doctor” made their
acquaintance. He studied their habits, their methods of life, found
out at what hotels they stayed when they were in London, their hobbies
and their weaknesses. In some cases it took three months to establish