บท 35: Dain's single weakness
Valmon Dain waited until the sound of Delbury's voice ceased in the study. All that came to him after that was the sound of quiet weeping, heart broken sobs that came gently over the whispering wires. And he knew that Delbury had gone.
He glanced at his watch.
"Time for a morsel of lunch," he muttered. "Delbury will be twenty minutes at the very least before he gets back to the Yard-probably half an hour before he's through to the chief."
He opened a glass of tongue and ate with his headphones still on. He had fixed up a little electric-cooker in a corner above one of the purring dynamos, not a very elaborate contraption but quite sufficient for the simple needs of a man who was condemning himself to solitary companionship for the next few weeks.
He made a mental note to take out a suitcase with him and lay in a safe supply of provisions. The ante-room outside he was already rearranging as a quick-change bedroom. A convertible bed-divan with the necessary bedclothes was already on the way to him. He could boil his kettle over a little electric radiator, and everything, so far as his commissariat was concerned, was all plain sailing.
The single weakness in his chain of arrangements was one which he could neither strengthen nor eliminate.
Dain was frankly worried about that weakness. Ever since he had first embarked upon his self-imposed task he had come into close contact with the criminal mind, both leader and follower.
He had lived with them invisibly, had overheard them in their closest councils, and among the definite conclusions he had come to, the most searching and intriguing of them all was that they always planned out the way of escape before even consolidating their plans of approach. Always they played for safety. And they lower down the scale of intelligence they were the more avid were their moves for safety. some of the bolder ones, the higher spirits of the game, scarcely seemed to care whether they got clear or not. A good coup was an adventure, something to be tackled with the brave carelessness of the true scout of fortune, a gamble with fate in which the dice were true and the odds fair.
But there were others. And the others were always the underdogs. Dain had discovered that they were not dependable. At the back of his mind there was the carking thought of the squealer. somewhere in London there was one man who had got clear, a man who knew that Lyall was going to see him that night, and, what was a thousand times worse, a man who had actually seen and recognized him. That man was one who was more than likely to save his own skin at the price of King's evidence.
Tansy, the jeweller, was not a savoury character even in his milder moments. He carried the stamp of his calling about with him-as much in his leering eyes as in the whine of his voice. That man had stood over him and watched him mark off the Silver Arrow entries in his notebook. He had had his suspicions so thoroughly aroused that he had followed him all the way to Kingsway.
His one chance lay in the fact that he was aware of the weakness in his chain; he had to thank the whispering wires for that.
He got up several times throughout his meal and tentatively plugged in his contact keys on dials he had never used before. Sometimes he thought he was getting on the trail. Whispers came twittering over the wires. The underworld had got wind of the tragedy over at Hendon.
Odd scraps of surmise and speculation drifted over, but there was nothing tangible in anything that concerned Tansy. One voice Dain recognized it as one he had heard talking in the jeweller's workshop- declared that he knew for a certainty that Tansy had a funk-hole already prepared in the maze of tiny criss-crossing streets of the East End ghetto. Another one butted in with the belief that Tansy would take a flying jump right out of London while the coast was still open.
So it went on-talk, surmise, speculation, and theory; and then Dain got a clue. He glanced up at his dials and found out he was plugged in on a Gerrard combination. A voice had just mentioned that Tansy's first line of flight would take him to the Guv'nor's house.
The mere mention of the word seemed to electrify Valmon Dain. He listened with every atom of intensity that was in him screwed up and concentrated on that thin spidery voice. And, sure enough, when the voice fluttered along again he got the clue he wanted.
"Don't you make no error," said the voice sagely. "Tansy knows how to play a nap-hand all right. And I'd like to bet you a thousand pounds that old Tansy is having a yarn with the Guv'nor right now about it. He hasn't gone to no underground dive in the ghetto-nor he hasn't taken the train out of London. I know where he's gone. The police are watching a certain big house in St. James's."
"St. James's?" said the other in a tone of mild surprise. "Is that where the Guv'nor lives?"
"Yes, mate. You wouldn't think it, would you? But that's how the big jobs do it these days. One of the classiest houses in the whole square, too. I know it's true because Tansy told me himself. He was doing a melting job for him at the time, and I dropped in to have a chat with him. Gold! I'd reckon there was a good stone weight of it in the pot itself.
" 'Strewth,' says I, 'whriose is all that?' "
" 'The Guv'nor's,' says he. Does it prop'ly, don't he? And this is the third load he's landed this years'."
" Where'd he get it?' says I."
" Next door to his own house in St. James's,' says he. Gosh! that's a bit cool, ain't it?"
And then a third voice cut in with a scrap of news of it's own.
"Yes, you're about right, too, Frenchie. I remember that job. The papers were choke-full of it for days. The biggest collection of hammered gold in England; belonged to a duke it did. And the Guv'nor collared it one night, neat as you could want-in between the soup and the joint, as you might say. And there's another thing, too. I'll bet there ain't one of you here knows."
"Well, who is he?" demanded the first suddenly.
"Ah! That's more than it's worth my while to say. I've only heard rumours, mind and it's not a habit of mine to rub my neck into more trouble than I can deal with. And you can make your mind easy. I'm not looking for trouble from the Guv'nor he hits too hard. And I know how to hold my tongue when I'm dealing with titles-which the Guv'nor has got one, you can take it from me."
The other appeared to be slightly sceptical.
"oh?" he said suspiciously. "You seem to know a lot about him. Perhaps you know the name of his house?"
"Yes, I do, " came the quick retort. And his telephone number, too: Western 69542. I've spoke to him on the phone myself by way of takin' orders like; because the Guv'nor talks to the likes of ----
The voice faded suddenly, a quick fade out of sound while they were still talking. Dain with feverish haste had pulled his contact keys and was plugging in rapidly at the other end of the board.
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