Red Aces by Edgar Wallace Page A

squad. We’ll keep that bird out at any rate.”
    “Where is Ena?” asked Kingfether.
    “She’ll be in later,” lied Machfield. “She had a bit of a headache, and I advised her not to come.”
    The bank manager helped himself to a whisky from a decanter on the sideboard.
    “I’m very fond of that girl,” said Kingfether.
    “Who isn’t?” asked the other.
    “To me” – there was a tremor in the younger man’s voice – “she is something outside of all my experience. Do you think she’s fond of me, Machfield?”
    “I am sure she is,” said the other heartily; “but she’s a woman of the world, you know, my boy, and women of the world do not carry their hearts on their sleeves.”
    He might have added, that, in the case of Ena she carried the business equivalent of that organ up her sleeve, ready for exhibition to any susceptible man, young or old.
    “Do you think she’d marry me, Machfield?”
    Mr Machfield did not laugh. He had played cards a great deal and had learned to school his countenance. Ena had two husbands, and had not gone through the formality of freeing herself from either. Both were officially abroad, the foreign country being that stretch of desolate moorland which lies between Ashburton and Tavistock. Here, in the gaunt convict establishment of Princeton, they laboured for the good of their souls, but with little profit to the tax–payers who supported them, and even supplied them with tobacco.
    “Why shouldn’t she? But mind, she’s an expensive kind of girl, K,” said Machfield very seriously. “She costs a lot of money to dress, and you’d have to find it from somewhere – five hundred a year doesn’t go far with a girl who buys her dresses in Paris.”
    Kingfether strode up and down the apartment, his hands in his pockets, his head on his chest, a look of gloom on a face that was never touched with brightness.
    “I realize that,” he said, “but if she loved me she’d help to make both ends meet. I’ve got to cut out this business of the bank; I’ve had a fright, and I can’t take the risk again. In fact, I thought of leaving the bank and setting up a general agency in London.”
    Mr Machfield knew what a general agency was when it was run by an inexperienced man. An office to which nobody came except bill collectors. He didn’t, however, wish to discourage his client; for the matter of that, Kingfether gave him little opportunity for comment.
    “There is going to be hell’s own trouble about that cheque,” he said. “I had a letter from head office – I have to report to the general manager in the morning and take McKay with me. That is the usual course.”
    Such details were distasteful to Mr Machfield. He needed all the spare room in his mind for other matters much more weighty than the routine of the Great Central Bank, but he was more than interested in the fate of McKay.
    Kingfether came back to Ena, because Ena filled his horizon.
    “The first time I ever met her,” he said, “I knew she was the one woman in the world for me. I know she’s had a rough time and that she’s had a battle to live. But who am I to judge?”
    “Who, indeed?” murmured Mr Machfield, with considerable truth. And then, pursuing his thought, “What will happen to Mr Kenneth McKay?”
    Only for a moment did the manager look uncomfortable.
    “He is not my concern,” he said loudly. “There is no doubt at all that the signature on the cheque–”
    “Oh, yes, yes,” said the other impatiently. “We don’t want to discuss that, do we? I mean, not between friends. You paid me the money you owed me, and there was an end to it so far as I am concerned. I took a bit of a risk myself, sending Ena down – I mean, letting Ena go,” he corrected, when he saw the look on the other’s face. “What about young McKay?”
    The manager shrugged his shoulders.
    “I don’t know and I really don’t care. When I got back to the bank this afternoon he’d gone, though I’d left