Elk 04 White Face by Edgar Wallace Page A

nosing round the neighbourhood—I shouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t turn in a new devil. It’s a good story for him.”
    Mr. Mason indicated a chair.
    “Sit down, my poor fellow,” he said with spurious sympathy. “What are the features of this murder which have separated it from an ordinary case of knifing?”
    Elk’s long arm went out, and he pointed in a direction which Mr. Mason, not wholly acquainted with the geography of the station, decided was the matron’s room.
    “She’s it!” said Elk. His voice shook. “What happened to-night, Mr. Mason? An unknown man has a fight with another unknown man, who bolts. The first fellow walks along and meets a police officer and tells him all about it. He’s alive and well; obviously he’s not stabbed; yet within a few seconds after the officer moves on, this fellow drops in his track like a man shot. A cheap crook comes over and dips him, and is seen by Hartford, who tackles the man. They then discover that the fellow on the ground is stabbed. Nobody saw the blow struck. Yet there he is dead—knifed, and the knife’s well away and can’t be found.”
    Mason leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
    “End of the first reel; the second reel will follow immediately,” he murmured, but Elk was undisturbed. That bright light in his eye was now a steely glitter. He was agitated as he had never been seen before in all the years of his service.
    “Out of nowhere comes Mrs. Weston. She’d warned this man he was going to be killed. She wants to be sure that it is him.”
    “He,” murmured Mason gently.
    “Never mind about grammar.” Elk was frankly insubordinate in his vehemence. “She takes a look at the man on the ground and drops.”
    He laid his hand almost violently upon the superintendent’s arm and shook it.
    “I was watching her. I knew the woman, though I didn’t recognise her at first. She drops—and what do we find? She’s a needler—a dope. Does that mean anything to you, sir?”
    “I’m glad you said ‘sir,’” said Mason. “I was wondering how I’d bring you back to a sense of discipline. Yes, it means a lot to me. Now I’m going to ask you a question: does the can of beer which Mrs. Albert was carrying mean anything to you, and does that can of beer associate itself in your active and intelligent mind with the disappearance of Mr. Louis Landor—if that’s the name of the man who fought with the dead one?”
    Elk was frankly bewildered.
    “You’re trying to pull my leg.”
    “Heaven forbid!” said the patient Mason. “Bring in Mrs. Albert. She’s waited long enough to get three kinds of panic—I want her to have the kind where she’ll tell the truth.”
    Mrs. Albert came, a rather pale woman, sensible of her disgraceful surroundings, conscious, too, of her responsibility for four children, only three of which, Mason learned, were yet born. She still clutched in her hand the tell-tale can of beer. The liquid was now flat and uninviting and some of it had spilt in her agitation, so that she brought with her to the inspector’s room a faint aroma of synthetic hops. She was quivering, more or less speechless. Mason gave her no opportunity for recovering her self-possession or her volubility.
    “Sorry I’ve had to keep you so long, Mrs. Albert,” he said. “Your husband’s the night watchman at the Eastern Trading Company, isn’t he?”
    She nodded mutely.
    “The Eastern Trading Company do not allow their night watchman to have beer?”
    Mrs. Albert found her voice.
    “No, sir,” she piped. “The last night watchman got the sack for drinking when he was on duty.”
    “Exactly,” said Mason, at his most brusque. “But your husband likes a drop of beer, and it’s fairly easy to pass the beer through the wicket gate, isn’t it?”
    She could only blink at him pathetically.
    “And he’s in the habit of leaving the wicket gate undone every night about eleven o’clock, and you’re in the habit of putting that