19000 Pound Part 30

There was not much work to do. Gerald saw that at a glance.

There was no acting about the matter. His employer was poor. What did it mean?

Round the walls of the outer office were black tin boxes, with--real and imaginary--names of clients printed on the flap doors thereof in white letters.

You turned the key and the flap fell down, enabling you to get at the contents. One in particular had a great charm for the new clerk. He fixed his eyes on it with an eager I-wonder-what's-inside-you sort of glance.

It bore the name of Depew.

The locks were poor things. Evidenced by the fact that one key on the bunch seemed to open them all.

Loide kept the bunch in his trousers pocket. If he wanted a paper from a particular box, he would ring his bell, give the keys and ask for the paper to be brought to him.

That seemed to take the pebbles out of Gerald's part--smoothed his course a trifle.

Why? Because he knew it would enable him to examine the Depew papers.

The next time he was asked to get a paper, he first opened the Depew flap, and closed it again without turning the key.

He kept the flap in position by a small wedge of paper. It was handy that way.

Mr. Loide would go to lunch at one o'clock, and Gerald proposed devoting that hour to an examination of the Depew papers.

He was not the kind of young man to let the gra.s.s grow to any extreme length under his feet.

"If you are learning, you should commence at the beginning. Mount the ladder from the lowest rung, and you will know then what the work is like."

So spake the lawyer to Gerald. It was in connection with the letter book.

The indexing of it was in arrear, and Gerald's business was to bring that index up to date.

The lawyer showed him how. He had a system of his own, had Loide. In addition to the name of the sender of the letter, the letter itself was indexed under the name of the action or matter.

It was a good way, because when Loide made out his bills of costs, he did not miss a single letter he could charge for.

There was perhaps no man in the City of London who could make out a better bill of costs than Loide.

There were rivals in his profession who said that if you blew your nose in his office, he clapped down six and eightpence, while if you wiped your feet on his door-mat, it meant three and six.

But then rivals will say anything, won't they? And again, if there is any reputation for truthfulness in the legal profession, it is not a world-wide one.

Its patron saint is the father of lies.

So it was that, with the letter book in his hand, at his own desk, Gerald turned up in the index "Depew."

There were two entries; one he found applied to a letter sent to Depew in America, which had brought him over, and the other to a series of letters connected with the winding up of the affair.

The letter to Depew he read, and was not a whit the wiser. Then he took on a perusal of the others.

He started at the last, and proposed to work his way back.

He was surprised to find the last letter of so recent a date. And when he saw it was to the governor of the Bank of England, and read in it that Loide was stopping the numbers of the notes for nineteen thousand pounds, he stopped himself.

Stopped right there and did nothing but look out of the window blankly--he was so unutterably amazed.

That he had struck a tangled web he knew quite well. That when he was in the lawyer's office he was in the meshes of that web, he guessed.

But he had not expected the spider to give him such a facer as this. He knew--knew most certainly now that Loide did not possess the missing money.

He was depressed, his heart sank a bit, he had been so sure--so sure.

Chicken counting before hatchment is a poor game anyway. Gerald indorsed that.

When lunch time came, he did not even open the tin box with "Depew" on it. It had ceased to interest him.

He knew it would not help him along a bit. He sat there all the time thinking.

His theory of Todd's disappearance shaped differently now.

He somehow felt convinced that the lawyer had had a hand in the man's murder, and he tried to piece things together so that he could account for the notes being missing.

His short acquaintance with the lawyer did not favor the idea that he was a man to lose things.

Then ideas came to him. He thought he had struck the solution.

There had been a quarrel about the division of the spoil--the nineteen thousand pounds--between Loide and the man who was lying with his throat cut on the boat. Or Loide had perhaps murdered him for possession of the whole sum.

He had been disappointed to find that his victim had not the notes in his possession, had probably given them to a friend in London to mind till his return from America.

The moment Loide got back to London he would stop the notes.

He tallied the date of the murder and the date of the letter to the bank. They fitted his idea.

Gerald was aware that where there had been a mere hill, there was a mountain for him to climb now; but he was not dismayed. There was Tessie for certain, and a possible _dot_ on the top of that mountain. Its summit was worth reaching.

He meant getting there--he was full up to the brim with excelsior.

He was debating now whether he should keep up the farce of clerks.h.i.+p any longer, or blossom forth--for surprise purposes--as a New York detective, and see what he could frighten out of Loide.

Then he determined to wait a little longer, till he had seen the pa.s.senger agent at Eldon Street.

That individual had been away ill, and would be at the office, it was thought, to-morrow or the day after. Gerald decided to wait till then.

CHAPTER XXI

THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S ART AND ARTFULNESS