19000 Pound Part 29

They parted. Danvers went home and wrote a letter to Loide. It ran:

DEAR SIR:

I happened to hear that your clerk is leaving you. At the end of the year I am going to Germany to join (as junior partner) a commercial house, where a knowledge of the rudiments of English commercial law may be of much use to me. May I offer my services as your clerk?

You can see I write well, and am quick at figures, and willing to make myself useful. Of course I shall not expect any salary.

Yours truly, G. DANVERS.

"If he is hard up," muttered the writer, "that last line may appeal to him. It may come off: it may not. If it does, a week will enable me to turn the place inside out for any clue there may be. Was the nineteen thousand pounds ever handed Josh Todd?"

Therein lay the reason for the course Danvers was taking. It seemed to him a reasonable solution of the matter.

Instead of handing Todd the money, the lawyer had killed him, bribed another man to help him, and to divert suspicion, had sent that man with Todd's body on the s.h.i.+p for America, telling him to return and share the spoil.

But before the s.h.i.+p left English waters, Loide had managed to kill his accomplice, and so, as he thought, destroy all trace of his crime.

But, thought the pursuer, he has Gerald Danvers to deal with!

Gerald said this to himself, with a note of exclamation at the end of it. Most of us have a trace of melodrama in our natures. Gerald was not without it.

He had a description of the perky, red haired, rough voiced, flas.h.i.+ly dressed man who had left the boat at Queenstown, and he quite reckoned that when he saw Lawyer Loide he would--mentally--exclaim, "Thou art the man!"

With that melodramatic trait aforesaid, he no doubt would.

If he found it so, he would not betray the faintest sign of his knowledge. He must work quietly, and give his man no pretext for flight.

He must find where that nineteen thousand pounds was deposited, and draw the meshes of his net so closely around that the bird could not escape--anyway, with the money.

As a matter of fact, Gerald was more concerned about the money than the murder. Because it concerned Tessie more closely.

Moreover, it was but human to expect that a nineteen thousand pound father-in-law would be generous in the way of wedding presents.

He guessed that the housekeeper's story of Loide's poverty was a piece of acting on Loide's part to divert suspicion.

Perhaps the discharge of the clerks meant only the gradual winding up of his business, and that presently he would sail away to another land.

Danvers felt cold at the fear of this. If it were true, there was not the faintest chance of a reply to his application for a situation. His letter could only appeal to a poor man.

And while he was thinking this again the next morning, an answer came.

CHAPTER XX

INSIDE THE LAWYER'S OFFICE

Gerald opened the letter. The flap of the envelope bore the embossed name and address of the lawyer. The contents read:

I shall be pleased to see you if you will give me a call to-morrow between ten and eleven o'clock, with reference to your letter of yesterday's date.

Gerald was pleased too. He just chuckled with glee. He did not fear obtaining the situation. And then the smile left his face.

His theory that the lawyer had the nineteen thousand pounds had received rather a rude shock. A man with that money would not trouble about the mere saving of a clerk's salary.

Anyway, he thought he would be in touch with the man who last dealt with Josh Todd.

In Todd's letter to his wife, he had spoken of Loide as a "cute thief."

Was there anything in that?

There would be the letter books and office papers open to him. If he was unable to get an answer to that question, surely it would be his own fault.

He was in Liverpool Street between ten and eleven o'clock next morning.

Saw the lawyer and settled with him.

He was to begin his duties on Monday--three days after. The lawyer was satisfied with his appearance, and did not ask for references.

He could not very well do so, as the man was giving him his services.

Moreover, things were fitting so tightly with Mr. Loide that anything a clerk could filch would not be worth looking at.

When a man's income is suddenly reduced it hurts. Hurts badly.

Loide was experiencing that. At present his little luxuries were knocked off, and in the future he foresaw a difficulty in the procuration of even necessaries.

He had been wont to take home from the city fish shop a middle cut of salmon. Now he took the--perhaps as toothsome but certainly cheaper--fresh herring.

As with the fish, so with all things. His economy was of the studied kind. It had to be.

The cutting off of the twenty pounds a week did not unfortunately mean that sum only. Money breeds money, and Mr. Loide was an excellent breeder--sixty pet cent. breed.

He liked to lend a man a five or ten pound note for a week, and charge him one or two guineas for the loan. If you work that out you will find it quite a big percentage.

Mr. Loide did not need to do so. He knew. He had done it so often. It was a big source of revenue to him.

Indeed money lending was the profitable part of his business. He had found it so much so, that he had neglected the more legitimate but less profitable legal work.

The result was that that had slowly filtered away. It had not mattered a bit so long as the thousand pounds a year was coming in. In the course of the year his interest enabled him to double it.

So it will be seen that honesty--strictly speaking--if the best was certainly not the most profitable policy with Mr. Loide.

Wipe that nearly forty pounds a week away from his income, and--well, wipe the naught off the forty, and you get at about what his legal work brought him in now.

Four pounds a week is not colossal wealth. It comes very, very hard on a man to have to live on it who has been living on ten times as much.

Loide found it so. Cold, flinty, bed rock bottom hardness.

On Monday morning Gerald took his first step on the trail, and his seat in Loide's office.