of banknotes that she found, and thrust them into her handbag, then, stepping on tiptoe, she went out to the landing, into the unfurnished back room, and, opening the window, dropped to the flat roof of the kitchen. In another minute she was in the garden and through the back gate. A narrow passage divided the two lines of villas that backed on one another. She was in High Street and had boarded a car before Mr. Reeder grew tired of knocking. To the best of his knowledge Mr. Reeder never saw her again.
At the Public Prosecutor’s request, he called at his chief’s house after dinner and told his surprising story.
‘Green, who had the unusual experience of being promoted to his position over the heads of his seniors, for special services he rendered during the war, was undoubtedly an exconvict, and he spoke the truth when he said that he had received a letter from a man who had served a period of imprisonment with him. The name of this blackmailer is, or rather was, Arthur George Crater, whose other name was Malling!’
‘Not the night watchman?’ said the Public Prosecutor, in amazement.
Mr. Reeder nodded.
‘Yes, sir, it was Arthur Malling. His daughter, Miss Magda Crater, was, as she very truly said, born at Walworth on the 17th of October, 1900. She said Wallington after, but Walworth first. One observes that when people adopt false family names, they seldom change their given names, and the ‘Magda’ was easy to identify.
‘Evidently Malling had planned this robbery of the bank very carefully. He had brought his daughter, in a false name, to Ealing, and had managed to get her introduced to Mr. Green. Magda’s job was to worm her way into Green’s confidence and learn all that she could. Possibly it was part of her duty to secure casts of the keys. Whether Malling recognised in the manager an old prison acquaintance, or whether he obtained the facts from the girl, we shall never know. But when the information came to him, he saw, in all probability, an opportunity of robbing the bank and of throwing suspicion upon the manager.
The girl’s role was that of a woman who was to be divorced, and I must confess this puzzled me until I realised that in no circumstances would Malling wish his daughter’s name to be associated with the bank manager.
‘The night of the seventeenth was chosen for the raid. Malling’s plan to get rid of the manager had succeeded. He saw the letter on the table in Green’s private office, read it, secured the keys-although he had in all probability a duplicate set-and at a favourable moment cleared as much portable money from the bank vaults as he could carry, hurried them round to the house in Firling Avenue, where they were buried in the central bed of the front garden, under a rose bush-I rather imagined there was something interfering with the nutrition of that unfortunate bush the first time I saw it. I can only hope that the tree is not altogether dead, and I have given instructions that it shall be replanted and well fertilised.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the Prosecutor, who was not at all interested in horticulture.
‘In planting the tree, as he did in some haste, Malling scratched his hand. Roses have thorns-I went to Ealing to find the rose bush that had scratched his hand. Hurrying back to the bank, he waited, knowing that Constable Burnett was due at a certain time. He had prepared the can of chloroform, the handcuffs and straps were waiting for him, and he stood at the corner of the street until he saw the flash of Burnett’s lamp; then, running into the bank and leaving the door ajar, he strapped himself, fastened the handcuffs and lay down, expecting that the policeman would arrive, find the open door and rescue him before much harm was done.
‘But Constable Burnett had had some pleasant exchanges with the daughter. Doubtless she had received instructions from her father to be as pleasant to him as possible. Burnett was a poetical young man, knew it was her birthday, and as he walked along the street his foot struck an old horseshoe and the idea occurred to him that he should return, attach the horseshoe to some flowers, which the nurseryman had given him permission to pick, and leave his little bouquet, to so speak, at his lady’s feet-a poetical idea, and one worthy of the finest traditions of the Metropolitan Police Force. This he did, but it took some time; and all the while this young man was philandering-Arthur Crater was dying!
In a few seconds after lying down he must have passed from consciousness… the chloroform still dripped, and when the policeman eventually reached the bank, ten minutes after he was due, the man was dead!’
The Public Prosecutor sat back in his padded chair and frowned at his new subordinate.
‘How on earth did you piece together all this?’ he asked in wonder.
Mr. Reeder shook his head sadly.
“I have that perversion,” he said. ‘It is a terrible misfortune, but it is true. I see evil in everything… in dying rose bushes, in horseshoes – in poetry even. I have the mind of a criminal. It is deplorable!’
Chapter 2
The Treasure Hunt
There is a tradition in criminal circles that even the humblest of detective officers is a man of wealth and substance, and that his secret hoard was secured by thieving, bribery and blackmail. It is the gossip of the fields, the quarries, the tailor’s shop, the laundry and the bakehouse of fifty county prisons and three convict establishments, that all highly placed detectives have by nefarious means laid up for themselves sufficient earthly treasures to make work a hobby and their official pittance the most inconsiderable portion of their incomes.
Since Mr. J.G. Reeder had for over twenty years dealt exclusively with bank robbers and forgers, who are the aristocrats and capitalists of the underworld, legend credited him with country houses and immense secret reserves. Not that he would have a great deal of money in the bank. It was admitted that he was too clever to risk discovery by the authorities. No, it was hidden somewhere: it was the pet dream of hundreds of unlawful men that they would some day discover the hoard and live happily ever after. The one satisfactory aspect of his affluence (they all agreed) was that, being an old man-he was over 50-he couldn’t take his money with him, for gold melts at a certain temperature and gilt-edged stock is seldom printed on asbestos paper.
The Director of Public Prosecutions was lunching one Saturday at his club with a judge of the King’s Bench-Saturday being one of the two days in the week when a judge gets properly fed. And the conversation drifted to a certain Mr. J.G. Reeder, the chief of the Director’s sleuths.
‘He’s capable,’ he confessed reluctantly, ‘but I hate his hat. It is the sort that So-and-so used to wear,’ he mentioned by name an eminent politician; ‘and I loathe his black frockcoat, people who see him coming into the office think he’s a coroner’s officer, but he’s capable. His sidewhiskers are an abomination, and I have a feeling that, if I talked rough to him, he would burst into tears-a gentle soul. Almost too gentle for my kind of work. He apologises to the messenger every time he rings for him!’
The judge, who knew something about humanity, answered with a frosty smile.
‘He sounds rather like a potential murderer to me,’ he said cynically.
I lore, in his extravagance, he did Mr. J.G. Reeder an injustice, for Mr. Reeder was capable of breaking the law-quite. At the same time there were many people who formed an altogether wrong conception of J.G.’s harmlessness as an individual. And one of these was a certain Lew Kohl, who mixed banknote printing with elementary burglary.
Threatened men live long, a trite saying but, like most things trite, true. In a score of cases, when Mr. J.G. Reeder had descended from the witness stand, he had met the baleful eye of the man in the dock and had listened with mild interest to divers promises as to what would happen to him in the near or the remote future. For he was a great authority on forged banknotes and he had sent many men to penal servitude.
Mr. Reeder, that inoffensive man, had seen prisoners foaming at the mouth in their rage, he had seen them white and livid, he had heard their howling execrations and he had met these men after