The Ringer/Chapter 1

LANDERS LANE, DEPTFORD, is narrow and dingy. If you crowd the houses of Fitzroy Square into a breathless thoroughfare, wherein two taxis cannot pass one another without danger to paint and certainty of profane exchanges; leave the resplendent woodwork of door and sash to blister in the sun and grow streaky with rain-carried grime; strip the entrance lobbies of their carpets and the rooms of their furniture, and substitute the crazy household gods of the worse than poor; crowd every room with a family—with sometimes more than one; let the stairs be broken and holes gape in the floors and roofing so that on rainy days every wall shows blotches of grey; fill passage and stairs and rooms and the roadway between these kennels with shrieking, whooping children in every stage of uncleanliness, you would have Flanders Lane, that leads crookedly to the Creek Bridge and eventually to Greenwich.

There are certain forms of architecture, just as there are certain types of humanity, from which the pristine beauty of design cannot be wholly worn, and the houses of Flanders Lane maintain something of their faded dignity.

Mr. Evelyn, the diarist, walked the narrow sidewalk and saw the leather-breeched workmen fitting the lead gutterings. Peter the Great, working in a shipyard nearby, got drunk at The Pretty Maid Inn at the corner.

Poverty began to trickle this way in the forties, when the gentry moved up to Blackheath; and poverty, being ratlike, burrowed itself into cellars and basements and could not be ousted; crept gradually upward until it reached the attic rooms, where it stole the leadgutterings, whilst a lower strata removed all superfluous panelling and closet doors and used the wood to kindle its fires.

Here came the police in twos, sometimes carrying their clubs conveniently up their sleeves; here at odd moments in the dusk and the night the screams of women were a disturbance to light sleepers.

Sometimes a big police car would dart into Flanders Lane, disgorging the Flying Squad from headquarters, and there would be a howling and a yelling in some dark interior, the blubbering sobs of a girl bereft of her man, and the squad car would go silent away, carrying an extra passenger, and as like as not there would be a red-eyed woman waiting at Mr. Meister's forbidding front door long before he was up the next morning.

Mr. Meister's house was most unexpectedly different from all the rest. It stood back from the street and was entirely surrounded by a high wall, which on the Lane side was punctured by a stout black door. Behind this door was a short paved path, protected above by a glass awning invisible from the road. It was a very old house, but was distinct from its fellows in this respect: the windows were clean and neatly curtained. The sashes were painted white, the wooden sunshades a bright green. A fair-sized lawn was spread behind the wall, and two big apple trees foamed with blossom above the May daisies. The little boys of Flanders Lane never stole his apples, or broke the glass of his awning; or yet spoke disrespectfully to the slim girl in black who opened the front door with her key as the clock struck nine every morning. Most of the people in Flanders Lane knew that she was Johnny Lenley's sister, and she had the title to their respect which is offered to the relatives of people in trouble, but this was not the sole reason for her immunity.

Mr. Meister was a lawyer. He was more than this: he was a philanthropist. Many a man had "gone away" and left his wife and children to starve—as they would have starved but for the little allowance they received in Meister's gaunt reception-room on the entrance floor.

He defended clients in the courts and never asked a penny for his services. In some cases he employed great advocates to plead for the liberty of a big man taken in crime. He did this for Johnny Lenley—though Johnny could not, by any stretch of imagination, be called big, for he fell at his second burglary and was sent down to the Awful Place for seven long and bitter years.

Mr. Meister had helped Mary a lot: had made her a substantial allowance, and at last, fearing (as he said) that she fretted after her brother, had her taught shorthand and typewriting and took her into his office at a generous wage.

Flanders Lane did not love him. Nor did Old Mill Lane, nor Little Holland Street, nor other of these ungracious places. But for some reason they were afraid of him. Men who got too fresh with Lewis Meister were often arrested by the police and charged with crimes which they themselves had almost forgotten. It was regarded as unlucky to quarrel with this good man.

There was once a lag who shot a policeman at Eastbourne and got away without leaving so much as a fingerprint. He quarrelled with Meister months after. And the very next day two busy men from headquarters pulled him. And he was hanged. It was (all agreed) very unlucky to quarrel with a philanthropist who not only charged his clients nothing for defending them, but actually supported their dependents during their regrettable absence.

That you cannot touch pitch without being defiled, is one of the three wisest sayings. His zeal on behalf of unfortunate people had twice brought him into conflict with the Law Society. He had on each occasion nearly escaped expulsion for unprofessional conduct. Other lawyers were jealous of him, since he had the best practice in Deptford. He told friends and clients that this was the cause of his unpopularity with his own cloth, and since the psychology of envy was a phenomenon familiar enough, they thought it was very likely that Mr. Meister stated the fact.

He had one real enemy: one man who actively hated him. All Deptford knew this; the police knew this; Mr. Meister knew it best of all. It was brought home to him one warm autumn day (before Mary Lenley was a regular visitor), when he lounged in a deep cane chair under the grateful shade of an apple tree, a long tumbler filled with sparkling amber and tinkling ice at his side, a new novel on his knees, his soul at peace with the world. A stout and placid man, with a pink face and a slightly bald head, his teeth were clenched on a long cigar when his old housekeeper came hobbling rheumatically into the garden with a telegram.

"Put it down," said Mr. Meister, not raising his eyes from the book.

She had been gone some time when out of the tail of his eye he saw the envelope on the table and caught just a glimpse of a word scrawled across the corner.

"Urgent!"

Mr. Meister frowned. Telegrams so inscribed are a rarity in England. They come only on Government service. Even Mr. Meister in all his experience had never received one before. He put down his book deliberately, fixed a pair of folding glasses to his nose and tore open the telegram. First came his name and address:

Mr. Meister lifted his glass with a shaking hand and drank the contents at a gulp.

The Ringer was free!

The pink of Mr. Meister's countenance had gone; he was all grey. With a groan he got up jerkily to his feet and cast a fearful glance at the high wall. From the street without came the shrill squawks of children at play, and the high-pitched cockney whine of a boy placating an enraged parent who was seeking him.

He had no woman secretary in those days; an elderly clerk lived on the premises, and he, with the housekeeper, who was also cook, and a youthful and homely housemaid, comprised the establishment.

Returning to the room that served as office, study and sitting-room, he found a tall, good-looking man of thirty awaiting him, and in his state of anguish Meister could have fallen on his neck.

"Captain Wembury, isn't it?" he gasped. The hand that grasped Alan Wembury's was cold and damp. "Is there any—any news about—about?"

"You've had a wire, I suppose?" Meister nodded and swallowed. "I doubt if The Ringer will bother you: he has been seen in the neighbourhood of Southampton Docks. At least, a dock policeman, who, we have since discovered, knew the man, was found clubbed insensible behind one of the dock stores. He isn't conscious yet—but we guess The Ringer."

"The Ringer uses a knife—he always uses a knife," said Meister, and his full lower lip trembled.

"Maybe he hasn't a knife," replied Inspector Wembury dryly. "He's an adaptable man. What makes you say he uses a knife?"

He was scrutinising the quaking figure closely.

"I don't know ... what in hell's the use of asking me?" answered Meister, distracted to foolish anger. "They say he—he killed somebody who tried to shop him?"

"Betray him? Forgive my ignorance of the new argot—I was attached to the Embassy at Washington until a month ago, and my vocabulary has been purified." Wembury laughed softly. "He's that kind of bird, is he?"

"That kind!" Meister almost shrieked the words. "He's a killer—everybody knows that! Everybody except you!"

Then he took a hold of himself and proceeded more calmly.

"I'm sorry—this fellow gets me rattled. He threatens me! After all I did for him! I defended him in the magistrate's court, fought tooth and nail for him, and when he was sent to trial I engaged the two biggest men at the bar to look after him. And not a cent did I get for it, Wembury! And now he's threatening me. My God, is there any justice in the world, any gratitude?"

He mopped his face; the grey had deepened to an angry red and was moist.

The days that followed remained with Mr. Lewis Meister all his life, a poignant memory. A man respited at the foot of the scaffold might as easily have forgotten the horrid second of time when death leered at him through a dangling noose. And respited Mr. Meister was. Months later the news came through that the escaped prisoner had reached an Australian port. Then Cora Milton disappeared from London, to be seen again on Flemington race track; and when Cora was around, The Ringer was not far away, for she was reputedly his wife, a wild girl from Gary, Indiana.

Flanders Lane, agitated and agog for the moment by his escape, slowly settled back to apathy again. The Ringer would never be caught. He was a master of disguise, the greatest since the passing of, the legendary hero of the street. His very name labelled his graft. He was a ringer of changes.

Forgathering in their frowsy parlours, the Laners talked with hushed voices of the day when The Ringer walked into the Bank of England, an anæmic-looking parson, and walked out again in the uniform of a bank messenger with half a million dollars' worth of American bills taken from under the cashier's nose.

He would never be caught; and as the days went on, Mr. Meister was seen abroad again, and the plain-clothes policemen who guarded his house were withdrawn, and nothing stayed behind except the recollection of a telegram marked "Urgent" and the reeling terror of a second's space of time. That Mr. Meister could not wholly banish from his mind. Not even the grace and charm of Mary Lenley and all his thoughts of her excluded The Ringer from his daily thoughts.

Mary Lenley was regarded by Flanders Lane as being excessively ladylike. The drab women who supported most doorposts on fine mornings and occupied the front steps on warm nights were in agreement, and since she gave smile for smile and nod for nod, "Good morning, Mrs. Timms" for "Good morning, Miss Lenley," the general approval had no reservations as to haughtiness. Invariably she looked as if she had stepped from the show window of Higgins & Jones' Select Mantle House & Ladies' Outfitters, and achieved, in point of appearance, the ideal of every scrawny and sophisticated maiden of Deptford.

She was a pretty, slim-bodied, straight-backed girl, who walked humanly, for she was of a class which neither envied nor copied the mannequin or the chorus girl.

Alan came face to face with her exactly eleven months to the day after their previous meeting, and it was an embarrassing moment for Mr. Wembury, whose lean, tanned face grew redder as the distance between them decreased. He raised his hat and would have passed on, but she stopped.

"Good morning, Mr. Wembury—this is the third time in a month you have tried to 'cut' me!"

Alan Wembury was a little incoherent in his protestation, and she laughed and, laughing, all the pale sadness went out of her face, and she was the mischievous little girl he had known ten—fifteen years ago, when the bracken under the elms of Lenley Court was his favourite playground.

"I saw you in the High Street and I saw you again on the Hilly Fields. And each time you hurried away as though you had a very pressing engagement elsewhere!" she challenged him.

"Well, Miss Lenley"—awkwardly—"I am afraid that is a true bill. Naturally I thought..."

She nodded and was serious again.

"I understood, of course. But, Alan—do I get arrested for calling a very important police officer 'Alan'? I used to call you that when I was a very small girl."

"I wish you would continue," he said quietly. "It would make my mind so much easier. I've hated myself ever since that horrible night. And going on to the stand to give evidence against Johnny was torture. Every second I expected to see your face—thank God you weren't in court! I never dreamt you would forgive me."

Her grave eyes were raised to his for a second, and in their grey deeps he saw again for an instant the tragedy of that unforgotten moment when he had walked into her little sitting room and taken Johnny Lenley for his second burglary.

"It seems very banal and theatrical to say that you only did your duty," she said, smiling faintly. "I know exactly how you hated it when you discovered the man was Johnny." She sighed heavily. "Seven years is a long time, isn't it? Johnny bears no malice, Alan: I had a letter from him a month ago and he asked to be remembered to you if I ever saw you. Walk back with me, won't you? Flanders Lane is all eyes! They will think I am being arrested, and I am in a fair way to being a heroine."

She laughed softly as they turned back towards Mr. Meister's house. For a few paces he was silent, then:

"Do you like it?" he asked abruptly, and she knew what he meant.

"Working for Mr. Meister? Yes, it is rather amusing. It might be more amusing, but I see very little of his clients: I'm afraid they are mostly poor people in trouble, and have a lot to say that they would not like to tell before a third person."

"Do you like him—Meister?" he asked, and he was quick to mark her hesitancy.

"Yes: he has been very good to me. After Johnny went he made me a small allowance, and then, when I told him that I was trying to get some work and was practising on an old typewriter of Johnny's, he paid my fees at a commercial college and I had a three months' intensive course of typing. Fortunately, I learnt shorthand years ago for amusement. It was good of him to take me into his office."

"Yes," said Alan, without conviction.

They had reached the black door: from where they stood Alan could see the high wall, the tall chimney stacks and shingled roof of the house behind. That and the top of one apple tree swaying in the gentle wind were the only visible portions of Mr. Meister's demesne.

"I want to see Meister," he said suddenly, as the girl's hand was coming out to him. "You have a key?"

"To the outer door," she said, with the old light of amusement in her eyes. "Which is a great concession! The housekeeper lets me into the house. It is rather early for Mr. Meister: he doesn't usually come down before ten unless he has a case in the courts."

"I'll risk the shock of seeing him in his pajamas," said Alan gravely, and they both laughed.

Mr. Meister was, indeed, in bed. The room on the first floor which overlooked the garden and the leaded roof of a small room built on to the house in the eighteenth century for no apparent reason, since it was never occupied, was close and fusty with the faintly sour nidor of stale cigar smoke. But Mr. Meister was not there.

A big room with high canopied doorways and deep plaster frieze where the worn wood panelling ended. There was one door which never failed to excite the detective's curiosity. It stood between the fireplace and the window overlooking the roof of the superfluous room, and differed from the rest in several respects. In one panel was a tiny trapdoor about nine inches square and fastened by a broad steel bar which worked on a pivot at one end and fell into a steel socket at the other. The door was probably locked; three heavy bolts, always shot, made ingress impossible except with the consent and assistance of the inmate.

For the rest the room was undistinguished. It had a more homely appearance than most offices, in spite of its shelves laden with law books and deed boxes. The carpet was old and worn by the feet of criminal generations, for here Mr. Meister interviewed his clients at all hours of the day and night. The place also served him as a study. There was a deep armchair in the confined space between the fireplace and his writing table; the chair had a loose cretonne cover, and there was a hassock for Mr. Meister's slippered feet as he sat in comfort, reading in his evening newspaper the record of a world which was largely populated by men and women who envied their neighbours' goods and did not stop short at envy. Here, if he were an egoistical man, he might reflect complacently upon his own benefactions—his deeds of charity and compassion. For he had helped the widow and the fatherless and had made smooth the path of many a wife whose helpmeet was an unwilling guest of the king's majesty.

There were two empty whisky bottles on the writing table, as Alan saw; a plate of biscuits and a soiled glass. The grate showed the drear cinders of a fire, and the hearth was littered with cigar ash. The old woman who attended Mr. Meister mumbled an apology for the state of the room as she pulled back the curtain, shot a malignant glance at the girl for bringing a visitor at such an hour, and shuffled off to inform her master.

"She'll hate me for bringing you in," said Mary ruefully, "and my lunch will be late in consequence. No, I don't know her name; I don't think she has one. Mr. Meister never refers to her except as 'the old woman' or 'Mrs. K.' She's a comparatively newcomer; I never met her predecessor. Mr. Meister says he likes old women about the house—they make him feel young."

She looked round the room; evidently its gross untidiness, the smell and fug of it, were not unfamiliar.

"Alan, don't you think Mr. Meister is a very generous man?"

Alan Wembury scratched his thin nose thoughtfully.

"I suppose he is," he said with caution.

"He must pay out an immense sum in the course of a year to these poor people," she went on; "and some of them aren't a bit grateful. I've overheard them wrangling with him as though they had a right to his charity. One woman, Mrs. Haggitt—do you know her?"

"Very well," said Alan grimly, for only the previous week he had been in the magistrate's court when the truculent Mrs. Haggitt was sent to six months' imprisonment for "unlawful wounding," the victim being an equally violent lady friend.

"She was quite abusive," said Mary. "I came into the room in the middle of it. She said that he ought to have a ringer to deal with"

"The Ringer," interrupted Alan. "He's a hero in these parts. The rarest of criminal types—a killer!"

"How dreadful!" She shivered. "Has he ever been caught?"

He nodded.

"Once. He escaped after nearly murdering one of the guards at Dartmoor. But he's a killer all right—a cold-blooded, logical man, without the slightest respect for human life—or personal property. Happily Mrs. Haggitt will never be able to call upon him for assistance. He is hiding in Australia. And he'll stay hidden. We have a murder charge against him."

Mrs. K. lumbered in at that moment. Surveying the ungainly figure, the lined yellow face and faded eyes, Alan found it difficult to believe that she had ever been a baby; for this was a hobby of his, imagining his unsavoury "customers" in their cradles.

"He'll see you upstairs, inspector," croaked Mrs. K., jerking her thumb to the door. "You must excuse us being a bit untidy this morning: what with my rheumatic arthripus"

Alan went up the narrow stairs and a half-open door on the landing would have told him Mr. Meister's sleeping room even if he had not known already.

"Come in, Wembury."

Meister was sitting up in bed; his purple pajamas an unfortunate accompaniment to a face that was red and swollen from his overnight excesses.

"Sit down—somewhere. Anything wrong?"

Alan sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed.

"You phoned me last night?" he said.

Mr. Meister held his head between his hands, trying to separate the confused realities from the nightmare thoughts which had crowded in upon him during his uneasy sleep.

"Did I?" blankly. And then: "Yes; I saw little Peter last night. The Nose."

Alan nodded. For five years he had been chief of the British police unit which is maintained in Washington. Intercourse with foreign embassies and the federal service had rubbed away most of the familiar argot, and since the cant of the underworld changes every seven years, "nose" had been Greek to him. But you pick up such idioms very easily, and he knew Peter, the police informer.

"Oh, yes, I know Peter. Well?"

Mr. Meister stretched out his hand for a half-emptied glass that stood on the side table and swallowed the yellow contents before he spoke.

"Ah! that's good! Peter comes here with queer stories. I suppose he wanted easy money. He said—heard anything of Cora Milton?"

Wembury had heard; nevertheless, he shook his head. Cora he knew very well. She was one of the O'Hara crowd who had blackmailed Senator Holz, and she and her confederates had got out through the loophole of a faulty indictment. The American police had broken the gang by arresting O'Hara under the Sullivan Act a month after his release. Whether it was true or not that the detectives slipped a gun in his pocket (as he swore) after his arrest, he was found guilty of carrying concealed weapons and was sent down for longer than he could have wished.

After the Washington scandal the girl came into the purview of Alan Wembury, whose duty it was to notify Scotland Yard that the fascinating lady had sailed for Europe. Of her meeting with The Ringer and her marriage to Henry Arthur Milton, he only learnt at third hand. Alan came back to duty on promotion, a week before The Ringer escaped.

"Peter says that she's left Australia—that's all." Meister blinked rapidly. He had a trick of expressing disapproval that way. "Queer thing when the Australian police had her trailed they couldn't pick up The Ringer. It ought to have been easy. That is what women are for, Wembury—police work would be hell if it wasn't for the woman who's always around to lead you to the man you want."

"Nobody has ever seen her with The Ringer," said Alan in defence of his Australian colleagues. "I should think they had never met. She went out to trace him, but The Ringer was too clever."

"Do you mean that they never got into touch?" asked Mr. Meister sceptically. "The man was crazy about her?"

"No, I don't mean that. The Melbourne police are pretty sure she spoke to him. She had two 'phone calls through to her room at the hotel in one night soon after she arrived. That was The Ringer. The police arranged to listen in next night, but she was too clever. Cora began to travel about the country, coming and going without warning. She generally sailed in ahead of the police and got the 'phone working. She never called anybody— somebody called her. She left Australia six weeks ago on the P. & A. boat Mogador."

Again Mr. Meister blinked.

"Can't you expel her? She's American."

"British by marriage," said Alan dryly, and then, with a laugh: "I shouldn't worry about her. She's probably quarrelled with him. Stamina isn't the long suit of the criminal class and a telephone honeymoon would hardly suit Cora."

The man nervously fingered the edge of the silken coverlet.

"Where she is—he is!" he blurted, and Alan rose.

"The day The Ringer arrives in England I'll wire the hangman to put off his holiday," he smiled.

When he went down to Mr. Meister's office the room was empty. Mary's little table held her notebook and the cover was off the typewriter, and Mrs. K. had managed to give the office the illusion of tidiness. He waited at the door, then, when she did not come, walked down the stairs to find her at the front door talking with a sharp-featured man in gold-rimmed spectacles.

"If you'll come back in an hour, Mr. Haggitt" the girl was saying when Alan appeared.

"Good-morning, Haggitt."

To say that the visitor was surprised to see the tall figure emerge from the gloom of the hallway is to understate his emotion. But only for a second did he falter.

"Bless my life and soul!" he said piously. "Fancy meeting you! I've always said there was too many police in London—can't go anywhere without fallin' over 'em. How the taxpayers stand for it I don't know. I was readin' the other day in a paper that every policeman costs the state four hundred an' fifty pounds sterling per annum..."

"Glad to see you, Haggitt," Alan interrupted good-humouredly. "Not in trouble, I hope?"

Mr. Haggitt sniffed contemptuously.

"Would I go to Meister if I was, after the way he's treated me?" he demanded. "No, when he wants me he sends for me and I come."

"Wonderful man," said Alan.

He did not mention the fact that a fortnight before Mr. Haggitt would not have been in a position to answer the summons without permission of the officer controlling Maidstone Prison, because Mary was an interested audience, and it is not good police work to betray the misfortunes of their "clients."

Alan went out into Flanders Lane, and at the sight of him men melted back into the squalor from which the bright spring sunshine had lured them. And the word ran down Little Ruth Street that there was a "busy" about, and the unwashed who were playing pitch and toss grabbed their pennies and scattered. Menacing, hateful eyes watched the debonair figure as he passed, greeted by the forced smiles of women to whom he was as an angel of judgment—and not so much of an angel. All Flanders Lane stole or lied or did worse for a living, and Alan stood for the bleakness of desolation that comes to the home when its bread-stealer is sitting at Wormwood Scrubbs sewing mailbags for the glory and profit of the Empire.