MR. BROAD EXPLAINS
DETAINED under police supervision, Mr. Broad did not seem in any way surprised or disconcerted. Dick Gordon and his assistant reached Wandsworth Common ten minutes after the news came through, and found the wreckage of the police car surrounded by a large crowd, kept at a distance by police.
The dead prisoner had been taken into the prison, together with one of the attackers, who had been captured by a party of warders, returning to the gaol after their luncheon hour.
A brief examination of Litnov told them no more than they knew. He had been shot through the heart, and death, must have been instantaneous.
The prisoner, brought from a cell, was a man of thirty and better educated than the average run of Frogs. No weapon had been found upon him and he protested his innocence of any complicity in the plot. According to his story, he was an out-of-work clerk who had been strolling across the Common when the ambush occurred. He had seen the fight, seen the second motor-car which carried the attackers away, and had been arrested whilst running in pursuit of the murderers.
His captors told a different story. The warder responsible for his arrest said that the man was on the point of boarding the car when the officer had thrown his truncheon at him and brought him down. The car was moving at the time, and the remainder of the party had not dared to stop and pick up their comrade. Most damning evidence of all was the tattoo mark on his wrist.
“Frog, you’re a dead man,” said Elk in his most sepulchral voice. “Where did you live when you were alive?”
The captive confessed that his home was in North London.
“North Londoners don’t come to Wandsworth to walk on the Common,” said Elk.
He had a conference with the chief warder, and, taking the prisoner into the courtyard, Elk spoke his mind.
“What happens to you if you spill the beans, Frog?” he asked.
The man showed his teeth in an unpleasant smile.
“The beans aren’t grown that I can spill,” he said.
Elk looked around. The courtyard was a small, stone-paved quadrangle, surrounded by high, discoloured walls. Against one of these was a little shed with grey sliding doors.
“Come here,” said Elk.
He took the key that the chief warder had given him, unlocked the doors and slid them back. They were looking into a bare, clean apartment with whitewashed walls. Across the ceiling ran two stout oak beams, and between them three stubby steel bars.
The prisoner frowned as Elk walked to a long steel lever near one of the walls.
“Watch, Frog!” he said.
He pulled at the lever, and the centre of the floor divided and fell with a crash, revealing a deep, brick-lined pit.
“See that trap . . . see that ‘T’ mark in chalk? That’s where a man puts his feet when the hangman straps his legs. The rope hangs from that beam, Frog!”
The man’s face was livid as he shrank back.
“You . . . can’t . . . hang—me,” he breathed. “I’ve done nothing!”
“You’ve killed a man,” said Elk as he pulled the doors to and locked them. “You’re the only fellow we’ve got, and you’ll have to suffer for the lot. Are them beans growin’?”
The prisoner raised his shaking hand to his lips.
“I’ll tell you all I know,” he said huskily.
Elk led him back to his cell.
An hour later, Dick was speeding back to his headquarters with considerable information. His first act was to send for Joshua Broad, and the eagle-faced “tramp” came cheerfully.
“Now, Mr. Broad, I’ll have your story,” said Dick, and motioned the other to be seated.
Joshua seated himself slowly.
“There’s nothing much to tell,” he said. “For a week I’ve been getting acquainted with the Frogs. I guessed that it was unlikely that the bulk of them would be unknown to one another, and I just froze on to the first I found. Met him in a Deptford lodging-house. Then I heard there was a hurry-up call for a big job to-day and joined. The Frogs knew that the real attack might be somewhere else, and on the way to Scotland Yard I heard that a party had been told off to watch for Litnov at Wandsworth.”
“Did you see any of the big men?”
Broad shook his head.
“They looked all alike, but undoubtedly there were two or three section leaders in charge. There was never any question of rescuing. They were out to kill. They knew that Litnov had told all that he knew, and he was doomed—they got him, I suppose?”
“Yes—they got him!” said Dick, and then: “What is your interest in the Frogs?”
“Purely adventitious,” replied the other lazily. “I’m a rich man with a whole lot of time on my hands, and I have a big interest in criminology. A few years ago I heard about the Frogs, and they seized on my imagination. Since then I’ve been trailing them.”
His gaze did not waver under Dick Gordon’s scrutiny.
“Now will you tell me,” said Dick quietly, “how you became a rich man? In the latter days of the war you arrived in this country on a cattle-boat—with about twenty dollars in your pocket. You told Elk you had arrived by that method, and you spoke the truth. I’ve been almost as much interested in you as you have been in the Frogs,” he said with a half-smile, “and I have been putting through a few inquiries. You came to England 1917 and deserted your ship. In May, 1917, you negotiated for the hire of an old tumbledown shack near Eastleigh, Hampshire. There you lived, patching up this crazy cottage and living, so far as I can discover, on the few dollars you brought from the ship. Then suddenly you disappeared, and were next seen in Paris on Christmas Eve of that year. You were conspicuous in rescuing a family that had been buried in a house bombed in an air raid, and your name was taken by the police with the idea of giving you some reward. The French police report is that you were ‘very poorly dressed’—they thought you might be a deserter from the American Army. Yet in February you were staying at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, with plenty of money and an extensive wardrobe!”
Joshua Broad sat through the recital unmoved, except for the ghost of a smile which showed at the corner of his unshaven mouth.
“Surely, Captain, Monte Carlo is the place where a man would have money?”
“If he brought it there,” said Dick, and went on: “I’m not suggesting that you are a bad character, or that your money came in any other way than honestly. I merely state the facts that your sudden rise from poverty to riches was, to say the least, remarkable.”
“It surely was,” agreed the other; “and, judging by appearances, my change from riches to poverty is as sudden.”
Dick looked at the dirty-looking tramp who sat on the other side of the table and laughed silently.
“You mean, if it is possible for you to masquerade now, it was possible then, and that, even though you were apparently broke in 1917, you might very well have been a rich man?”
“Exactly,” said Mr. Joshua Broad.
Gordon was serious again.
“I would prefer that you remained your more presentable self,” he said. “I hate telling an American that I may have to deport him, because that sounds as if it is a punishment to return to the United States. But I may find myself with no other alternative.”
Joshua Broad rose.
“That, Captain Gordon, is too broad for a hint and too kindly for a threat—henceforth, Joshua Broad is a respectable member of society. Maybe I’ll take the Prince of Caux’s house and entertain bims and be a modern Harun al Raschid. I’ve got to meet them somehow.”
At the mention of that show house that had cost a king’s ransom to build and a queen’s dowry to furnish, Dick smiled.
“It isn’t necessary you should advertise your respectability that way,” he said. But Broad was not smiling.
“The only thing I ask is that you do not advise the police to withdraw my permits,” he said.
Dick’s eyebrows rose.
“Permits?”
“I carry two guns, and the time is coming when two won’t be enough,” said Mr. Broad. “And it is coming soon.”