Edgar Wallace

“ Sir Philip Ramon was a man with very few friends. He had none of the qualities that go to the making of a popular man. He was an honest man, a conscientious man, a strong man. He was the cold-blooded, cynical creature that a life devoid of love had left him. ”

“ He looked up at the detective in perplexity, then a light broke upon him and he whistled.
“Well, I’m—” he said, then he added softly—“But what does the Government say to this?”
“The Government,” said Falmouth in his best official manner, smoothing the nap of his hat the while—“the Government regard the circumstances as unusual, but they have accepted the situation with great philosophy.”
That night Mr. Long (or Jessen) reappeared at the Guild as though nothing whatever had happened, and addressed his audience for half an hour on the subject of “Do burglars make good caretakers?” ”

“ Thery nodded.
“There must be no hitch—no bungling; you and I and Poiccart and Gonsalez will kill this unjust man in a way that the world will never guess—such an execution as shall appal mankind—a swift death, a sure death, a death that will creep through cracks, that will pass by the guards unnoticed. ”

“ Superintendent Falmouth reported to the Commissioner that afternoon that all arrangements were now complete for the protection of the threatened Minister.
“I’ve filled up 44 Downing Street,” he said; “there’s practically a man in every room. I’ve got four of our best men on the roof, men in the basement, men in the kitchens.” ”

“ He is the instrument, duly appointed, to put into tangible form the wishes and desires of those who naturally look to him not only to furnish means and methods for the betterment of their conditions, or the amelioration of irksome restrictions upon international commercial relations, but to find them protection from risks extraneous of purely commercial liabilities ... in such a case a Minister of the Crown with a due appreciation of his responsibilities ceases to exist as a man and becomes merely an unhuman automaton. ”

“ These he straddled in the dark passage, and mounting quickly pushed up a trapdoor that led to the flat roof of the building. He pulled himself up carefully, crawled along the leaden surface, and raising himself cautiously looked over the low parapet. He was in the centre of a half-mile circle of uneven roofs. Beyond the circumference of his horizon London loomed murkily through smoke and mist. Below was a busy street. He took a hasty survey of the roof with its chimney stacks, its unornamental telegraph pole, its leaden floor and rusty guttering ”

“ Nor to the blowing up of the main in Oxford Street, which was a much more simple explanation than the fantastic theories of the Megaphone would have you imagine. This was not the first time that a fused wire and a leaking gas main brought about the upheaval of a public thoroughfare, and the elaborate plot with which organized anarchy was credited was without existence. ”

“ Sooner or later the connection must occur to Charles, and he was the only man who would be likely to surprise Jessen”s secret. Better that the journalist should know now.
“If I were you,” said Falmouth quietly, “I shouldn”t worry Jessen; you know what he is, and in what capacity he serves the Government. Come along with me.” ”

“ A private telephone wire connected his study in Portland Place with the official residence, and but for this Sir Philip had cut himself adrift from the house in Downing Street, to occupy which had been the ambition of the great men of his party. Now, however, with the approach of the day on which every effort would be taxed, the police insisted upon his taking up his quarters in Downing Street.
Here, they said, the task of protecting the Minister would be simplified. No. 44 Downing Street they knew. ”

“ Jessen”s visit to the Home Office that the discovery of the Carlby Mansions Tragedy was made, and I cannot do better than quote the Times, since that journal, jealous of the appearance in its columns of any news of a sensational character, reduced the intelligence to its most constricted limits. ”

“ He remains at 44 all day to-morrow until half past eight, goes over to the House at nine to move the reading of the Bill, returns at eleven.”
“I have given orders for the traffic to be diverted along the Embankment between a quarter to nine and a quarter after, and the same at eleven,” said the Commissioner. “Four closed carriages will drive from Downing Street to the House, Sir Philip will drive down in a car immediately afterwards.” ”

“ When Mr. Long had told his story he was taken to the Home Secretary himself, and the chief commissioner was sent for, and came hurriedly from Scotland Yard, accompanied by Superintendent Falmouth. All this is made clear in Mr. Ashton’s book.
“For some extraordinary reason,” I quote the same authority, “Long, or Jessen, seems by means of documents in his possession to have explained to the satisfaction of the Home Secretary and the Police Authorities his own position in the matter, and moreover to have inspired the right hon. gentleman with these mysterious documents, that Mr. ”

“ Ridgeway, so far from accepting the resignation that Jessen placed in his hands, reinstated him in his position.”
As to how two of these documents came to Jessen or to the Four Just Men, Mr. Ashton is very wisely silent, not attempting to solve a mystery which puzzled both the Quai d’Orsay and Petrograd. For these two official forms, signed in the one case by the French President and in the other with the sprawling signature of Czar Nicholas, were supposed to be incorporated with other official memoranda in well-guarded national archives. ”

“ It is not so easy to understand,” said the Telegram, “why, having the miscreants in their hands, certain journalists connected with a sensational and halfpenny contemporary allowed them to go free to work their evil designs upon a great statesman whose unparalleled... ”