RAUGHT, as he made his way homewards to his place of refuge at the corner of Newbury Place, was in a dangerous temper. Always an unstable character, he had lived of late through days of desperate anxiety, a crushing culmination to the years of ceaseless chafing and smothered hatred in Randolph’s service. With lack of occupation, self-pity had wholly taken possession of him, encouraged as it was by the affection of the woman who had befriended him. He knew now that what he had dreaded had happened in fact; that the old man’s malevolence, even after death, had denounced him for the Maidstone crime of long ago. As he went through the half darkness of the lamp-lit streets, deserted almost entirely at this hour, he brooded over his hard luck. What chance had he ever been given? Raught, for that matter, like many another in cases like his, was far from grasping fully how bad his luck had been, how little the chance that life had offered. Neglect and harshness had marked him in infancy; there had been nothing at any time to tell against the effect of them. But in all of the past that he remembered and could understand there had been more than enough to be stored up as matter for savage resentment, for the soul-sick criminal’s conviction that he owes the world no more than such repayment as he can make in its own coin.
The small figure, for all its scowling brow, moved with an assumed jauntiness of carriage. Raught knew well enough that he must not have the appearance of a hunted man; he was living up as he best could to the chauffeur’s uniform that clothed him. He was a skilled man in a good job, a man with a character and prospects; he was nobody’s football. It was well done, and the one or two policemen whom he passed had no more than a glance for him.
Even less reason, it seemed, was there to look for any trouble from the solitary person to be seen as Raught turned up the long westward side of Purbeck Square. The tall man who was approaching him from the other end of the line of solid Georgian houses was, to any experienced eye, a slightly intoxicated gentleman. His clothes and bearing, the just perceptible deviation from the straight line in his walk, the occasional pause to gaze attentively at nothing in particular, could easily be made out in the lamplight. They told their own story; and it was one with which Raught had no fault to find. He was less afraid of gentlemen than of most other kinds of men; for instinct told him that, however detestable a gentleman’s personal character might be, he was usually not inclined to be censorious or even inquisitive about the conduct of his fellow-creatures. As for the condition in which this particular gentleman was, Raught made the natural assumption that, in what was evidently an early stage of it, tipsiness would conduce to an amiability that was even more to be approved than indifference.
But in this assumption Raught was ill-advised. There are some natures which are too complex to conform to any recognized standard of behaviour; which are, in other words, unpleasant natures. This was eminently true of the person whom Raught was now able to recognize as they approached each other, both coming under the white beams of a street lamp. It was Eugene Wetherill, on his way home from a private place of resort where gambling was the principal attraction, and champagne figured as a popular sub-motive. Wetherill had done, for once in a way, pretty well at both sources of entertainment. He was in merry mood; and it was among his peculiarities, when in that mood, to be disposed to make himself a nuisance. He was far from being fighting drunk—a state in which he sometimes was, and in which he was never less than a violent and dangerous brute; but he was feeling mischievous.
The recognition was mutual. On the two recent occasions when Wetherill had been admitted by Raught to the little establishment in Newbury Place, each had so far fallen in with prevalent public feeling as to dislike the other at sight. The second time, when Raught had dropped the visitor’s hat in taking it from him, Wetherill had cursed him peevishly, and had been silently cursed in return in language much less printable. Now, as Raught was about to pass him by with a studiously blank expression, Wetherill suddenly shot out an arm and gripped the little man’s shoulder.
‘Well, well! See who’s here!’ he crowed. ‘Murdered millionaire’s damned ugly-looking devil of a manservant, disappeared in highly s’picious cir’mstances. Where you going to, my pretty maid? You know you’re wanted by police? Damn queer taste to want you I must say; but police always had rotten taste—famous for it. Fine body of men, admiration and envy of civilized world, but as for their taste—simply ’plorable, no other word for it! Mind you, goes to my heart to say this, but fact must be faced—simply ’plorable.’
Raught tried vainly to shake off the vigorous grasp. ‘You leave me alone,’ he growled. ‘Let go of my shoulder, blast you! I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Says he doesn’t know me,’ Wetherill lamented, shaking his head in sorrowful reproof. ‘Cutting me in the street, openly and ost’ashously. Modelling yourself on Beau Brummel—I know you! Tell your ’stinguished friends at White’s—met that damn feller Wetherill—I looked all round him, and there was an end of him. Stuck up, that’s what you are—just because you disappear in highly s’picious cir’mstances, and wanted by police. All right—not going to force my society on anybody.’ He suddenly raised his voice to a loud shout. ‘Police can have you … Police!’
‘You let me go, or you’ll be sorry,’ Raught muttered, pouring out a stream of obscenity as he struggled to wrench himself free. The man was now blind with rage and quite reckless.
‘Police!’ roared Wetherill again.
‘Have it then!’ Raught darted his right hand to a breast pocket, and thrust the nose of an automatic against his tormentor’s epigastrium. There was a dull report, and Wetherill, with a deep cough, dropped to the pavement and lay still.
Instantly a whistle was blown from the end of the square, at the corner from which Raught had come.
‘Go on! Blow your—flute!’ Raught screamed. He kicked the body viciously. ‘You won’t bring him back!’ He fired a wild shot towards the uniformed figure that was now to be seen coming up at a run, and took to his heels in the opposite direction.
Half-way down Lapworth Street, turning at a right angle out of Purbeck Square, the black cat in residence at No. 38 was sitting upon the steps, submitting with dignified condescension to being tickled behind the ears by Constable Mavor. Such attention to any small animal was automatic with that officer. What was really occupying his mind at the moment was his chance of being included in the divisional first eleven at the opening of the season. The time had come for it, he thought; he had given his proofs. If they had any sense they ought to play him for his bowling alone, good enough as he was all round; and this, as he was happily conscious, was not merely his own idea, but an opinion widely held even among his seniors.
But Constable Mavor had another and yet more serious interest in life—the desire for advancement in his career. It was never far from his thoughts. He had devoted his capable and alert intelligence to those studies of police technique and the operation of the law which were a part of the routine of the force; and he had notions of his own. When his chance came, he would, he believed, be fully prepared for it.
All this side of Mavor’s nature was startled into tense activity by a distant shout, ‘Police!’ from round the corner in Purbeck Square. The black cat, from whose ears his hand had been withdrawn as abruptly as if they were red-hot, stared after him with cool disdain as he departed at a brisk, athletic trot, pulling out his watch and noting the time as he went. Mavor was ready for business.
There was another shout, and then a sound that opened Mavor’s eyes more wide, and brought a new light into them. It was that flat report for which American experts in homicide have coined the expressive word ‘Ker-bap!’; and it was followed immediately by the deep buzzing chord of a police whistle. As Mavor quickened his pace, he pressed his helmet firmly down on his head, shifted the strap slightly on his chin to get the maximum tension, and drew his baton.
Another shot sounded; and then round the corner from the square, now some twenty yards away, a small man came pelting straight towards him. As the fugitive raised his hand with a menacing yell, Mavor could see the glint of lamplight on the automatic. Instantly he ducked his head, ‘covering up’ with his helmet and arms, and charged like a bull at a gate. A moment before the impact, there came a shattering pang in his left shoulder and the clap of the pistol deafened him; then Raught was down, fighting like a maniac to throw off the weight of Mavor’s thirteen stone, and to free the right arm to whose wrist Mavor was clinging with the only hand he now could use.
All was over in the space of a few seconds. Before the first policeman could reach the scene of the wild-cat scramble, and while windows and doors were being flung open all the length of the street, the rising tumult of shouts and screams was cloven by a fourth report.
Helmetless, breathless, white from the pain of his broken bone, and with blood running into his eyes from a cut on the forehead, Constable Mavor rose on his knees and looked down at the ugly sight before him.
‘—the—!’ he panted, while his right hand pressed his wounded shoulder. ‘He’s done himself in after all!’