Elk 04 White Face by Edgar Wallace

out with this thing on his face. I haven’t seen him for years, but I remember him well. What was his name—West something—not Weston?”
    The doctor shrugged.
    “I never knew his name. He came to me about three years ago and asked for ray treatment. He was stupidly sensitive and only came after he had fixed the interview up by telephone. He’s been several times since, round about midnight, and he invariably pays me a pound.”
    Mason thought for a while, then went to the telephone and called a central police station off Regent Street. The sergeant in charge remembered the man at once, but was not sure of his name.
    “He hasn’t been seen round the West End for years,” he said. “The Yard has been arguing about him—wondering if he was White Face.”
    “Was his name Weston?” suggested Mason, but the sergeant was without information.
    Mason came back to the doctor.
    “Does this man live in the neighbourhood?”
    But here Dr. Marford could tell him nothing. The first time he had met his queer patient he had undoubtedly lived in the region of Piccadilly; thereafter he had only appeared at irregular intervals.
    “Do you think he’s our devil?” asked Mason bluntly, and the lean man chuckled.
    “Devil! It’s queer how normal people attribute devilry to any man or woman who is afflicted—the hunchback and the misshapen, the cross-eyed and the lame. You’re almost medieval, Mr. Mason.”
    He could say very little that might assist the police, except that he no longer received warning when the man with the mask made his appearance. Invariably he came through the little yard that ran by the side of the surgery into the passage which Dr. Marford’s patients used when they queued up for their medicine.
    “I never have the side door locked—I mean the door that goes into the yard.” Marford explained that he was a very heavy sleeper, and it was not unusual for his clients to come right into the house to wake him, and the first intimation of their needs was a knock on his bedroom door.
    “I’ve nothing to lose except a few instruments and a few bottles of poison; and to do these fellows justice, I’ve never had a thing stolen from me since I’ve been in the neighbourhood. I treat these people like friends, and so long as they’re reasonably wholesome I don’t mind their wandering about the house.”
    Mr. Mason made a little grimace.
    “How can you live here? You’re a gentleman, you have education. How can you meet them every day, listen to their miseries, see their dirt—ugh!”
    Dr. Marford sighed and looked at his watch.
    “If that child’s normal he’s born,” he said, and at that moment the sergeant called him across to the telephone at the desk.
    The child had been normal and had made his appearance into the world without the doctor’s assistance. The male parent, a careful man, was already disputing the right of the doctor to any fee. Dr. Marford had had previous experience of a similar character, and knew that for the fact that the baby arrived before the doctor came the mother would claim and receive the fullest credit.
    “Half fee, as usual,” he told the district nurse and hung up the receiver.
    “I used to charge half fees, but double visiting fees if I was called in afterwards. That didn’t work, because the mother was usually dead before they risked the expense of calling me in. The economy of these people is excessive.”
    The ambulance was ready. He and Rudd saw the woman placed in charge of a uniformed nurse, and Sergeant Elk appointed a detective officer to accompany the patient to the infirmary.
    Elk was silent, and his eyes were preternaturally bright when he lounged into the inspector’s room.
    “This is a case which ought to get me promotion,” he said, a shameless thing to say in the presence of a man who expected most of the kudos. “Here I’ve been working for years, and this is the first real mystery I’ve struck. More like a book than a police case. Quigley’s