CHAPTER XV
THE SOLUTION
If you can understand that all the extraordinary events of the previous chapters occurred without the knowledge of Fleet Street, that eminent journalists went about their business day by day without being any the wiser, that eager news editors were diligently searching the files of the provincial press for news items, with the mystery of the safe at their very door, and that reporters all over London were wasting their time over wretched little motor-bus accidents and gas explosions, you will all the easier appreciate the journalistic explosion that followed the double inquest on Spedding and his victim.
It is outside the province of this story to instruct the reader in what is so much technical detail, but it may be said in passing that no less than twelve reporters, three sub-editors, two “crime experts,” and one publisher were summarily and incontinently discharged from their various newspapers in connection with the “Safe Story.” The Megaphone alone lost five men, but then the Megaphone invariably discharges more than any other paper, because it has got a reputation to sustain. Flaring contents bills, heavy black headlines, and column upon column of solid type, told the story of Reale’s millions, and the villainous lawyer, and the remarkable verse, and the “Borough Lot.” There were portraits of Angel and portraits of Jimmy and portraits of Kathleen (sketched in court and accordingly repulsive), and plans of the lawyer’s house at Clapham and sketches of the Safe Deposit.
So for the three days that the coroner’s inquiry lasted London, and Fleet Street more especially, reveled in the story of the old croupier’s remarkable will and its tragic consequences. The Crown solicitors very tactfully skimmed over Jimmy’s adventurous past, were brief in their examination of Kathleen; but Angel’s interrogation lasted the greater part of five hours, for upon him devolved the task of telling the story in full.
It must be confessed that Angel’s evidence was a remarkably successful effort to justify all that Scotland Yard had done. There were certain irregularities to be glossed over, topics to be avoided—why, for instance, official action was not taken when it was seen that Spedding contemplated a felony. Most worthily did Angel hold the fort for officialdom that day, and when he vacated the box he left behind him the impression that Scotland Yard was all foreseeing, all wise, and had added yet another to its list of successful cases.
The newspaper excitement lasted exactly four days. On the fourth day, speaking at the Annual Congress of the British Association, Sir William Farran, that great physician, in the course of an illuminating address on “The first causes of disease,” announced as his firm conviction that all the ills that flesh is heir to arise primarily from the wearing of boots, and the excitement that followed the appearance in Cheapside of a converted Lord Mayor with bare feet will long be remembered in the history of British journalism. It was enough, at any rate, to blot out the memory of the Reale case, for immediately following the vision of a stout and respected member of the Haberdasher Company in full robes and chain of office entering the Mansion House insufficiently clad there arose that memorable newspaper discussion “Boots and Crime,” which threatened at one time to shake established society to its very foundations.
“Bill is a brick,” wrote Angel to Jimmy. “I suggested to him that he might make a sensational statement about microbes, but he said that the Lancet had worked bugs to death, and offered the ‘no boots’ alternative.”
It was a fortnight after the inquiry that Jimmy drove to Streatham to carry out his promise to explain to Kathleen the solution of the cryptogram.
It was his last visit to her, that much he had decided. His rejection of her offer to equally share old Reale’s fortune left but one course open to him, and that he elected to take.
She expected him, and he found her sitting before a cozy fire idly turning the leaves of a book.