The Trail of Fu-Manchu Read online

  Feverishly, nursing the limited power of the torch, he began to search for this switch. The din of falling water was numbing: one’s brain almost refused to function. Murphy and Sterling were groping up the steps; he signaled to them to proceed higher. He continued his search for the switch.

  Suddenly, he came upon it, and reversed it.

  There was no result.

  The explosion had disconnected the current.

  He glanced back ere beginning to climb. Water was creeping up to the first step. Spray and mist obstructed his view of the furnace. He wondered if the Burmese horror, to whom human life meant no more than wood to a circular saw, had triumphed over injury, or if he was doomed to be swallowed in that unnatural tide.

  Smith started for the stairs.

  He was planning for the imminent catastrophe, nor thinking any further ahead than the moment when the rising water should reach the furnace. He had placed the direction of the fall, and knew that except at one point where the waterspout came perilously near to the stairs, these were navigable to within one stage of the top.

  Beyond that point, progress was impossible—and the volume of water was increasing minute by minute.

  His feet were wet when he began to mount. The tunnel must be full, now, right to the dead end. It was only a question of time for this forgotten shaft to be filled to its brim.

  Sterling was breathing heavily and Sergeant Murphy was giving him some assistance, when Nayland Smith caught up with them on the stairs.

  He shouted in Sterling’s ear:

  “Did that yellow swine crock you?”

  Sterling grasped his arm and gripped it strongly, pressing his lips to the speaker’s ear.

  “It’s only my wind,” he explained; “otherwise O.K.”

  Smith who had momentarily snapped his torch on, snapped it off again, nursing the precious light. Fighting against the brain-damning clamor of falling water, he tried to estimate their chances.

  He guessed that now the tunnel would be full. The flood would rise in the shaft at least a foot a minute. Failing inspiration on the part of the police, ultimate escape was problematical.

  But he was thinking at the moment of that white hot furnace when steam was generated. That one point on the stairs almost touched by the waterspout was the only possible shelter. That an explosion there in the depths might wreck the entire shaft, was a possibility which one could not calculate.

  Up they went, and up, until the spray cut off by an iron girder lashed them stingingly. Nayland Smith pressed the switch of his torch.

  Sterling had sunk down upon the step—Murphy was supporting him. Smith bent to Murphy’s ear.

  “Stay where you are!” he shouted.

  He groped his way upward.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  GALLAHO BRINGS UP THE REAR

  “Is it fast?” shouted Gallaho.

  “It’s fast,” Merton shouted back, “but you’re not going down there!”

  Gallaho bent to Merton’s ear.

  “Mind your own bloody business, my lad,” he roared. “If ever I want your advice I shall ask for it.”

  Chief Detective-inspector Gallaho climbed over the hand rail and began to descend the rope ladder, his bowler hat firmly screwed on to his bullet skull. Immediately, he was drenched to the skin.

  Steam was rising from the shaft. The touch of the water was icy, numbing. But he knew that unless the ladder was too short he could reach a point of the staircase just below that ever-increasing cataract, and follow it down. He was a man with a clear-cut idea of what duty demanded.

  The ladder proved to be of ample length. Gallaho gained the wooden steps, flashed his powerful torch, and saw that he stood near the waterfall thundering down into those unimaginable depths.

  A faint light flickered far below.

  Gallaho, his torch in his left hand, held well clear of his body, directed its ray towards that spot of light visible through the mist.

  At first, what he saw was no more than a moving shadow, then it became concrete; and in the light, haggard, staggering, he saw Sir Denis Nayland Smith!

  Gallaho ran down the intervening steps, and as the light showed more and more clearly the lean angular features, the detective saw the ghost of a smile break through their haggardness.

  An unfamiliar wave of emotion claimed him. He threw his arm around Sir Denis’s shoulder, and, shouting:

  “Thank God I’ve found you, sir!” he said.

  Smith bent to his ear.

  “Good man!” he replied.

  “The others, sir?”

  Nayland Smith indicated the steps below, and Gallaho lighting the way, the two began to descend. A sheet of water swept the point at which Smith had left Sterling and Sergeant Murphy.

  Their situation had become untenable and they had mounted half-way up to the next platform. Smith’s chief worry was concerned with Sterling who was obviously in bad shape. But the sight of Gallaho afforded just that stimulus which he required. And the detective, throwing an arm around him to help him upwards, and recognizing that he was nearly spent, had an inspiration.

  Bending close to his ear:

  “Stick to it, sir!” he shouted. “Your friend Miss Petrie is safe and well in Sir Denis’s flat!”

  That stimulant was magical.

  Nevertheless, the rope ladder, now nearly submerged in the ever widening waterspout, taxed Sterling to the limit. Murphy followed up behind. Merton, at the top, when collapse threatened, at the critical moment craned over and hauled Sterling to safety.

  Nayland Smith came next—Gallaho truculently having claimed the right to bring up the rear.

  He had earned that perilous honor.

  The men in the brick passage-way broke into unorthodox cheers; nor did Forester check them.

  “All out!” cried Nayland Smith. “Anything may happen when the furnace goes!”

  The passage already was an inch deep in water, but they retreated along it, Gallaho and Nayland Smith last of the party.

  They had reached the masked door in Sam Pak’s kitchen when the furnace exploded. Steam belched out of the corridor as from a huge exhaust. The ancient building shook.

  Nayland Smith turned to Gallaho and very solemnly held out his hand.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  WAITING

  “Nothing to report,” said Inspector Gallaho.

  Nayland Smith nodded and glanced at Alan Sterling seated smoking in the armchair. It was the evening of the sixth day after the subterranean explosion in Chinatown, an explosion which had had several remarkable results.

  The top of that forgotten pit leading down to the abandoned tunnel was actually covered, as later investigations showed, by the paved yard which adjoined Sam Pak’s restaurant. The ventilation shaft passed right through his premises; and there seemed to be a distinct possibility that the old house as well as the wooden superstructure, were actually part of the abandoned workings, modified and adapted to their later purpose.

  A great crack had appeared in one wall of the restaurant. But no other visible damage appeared upon the surface.

  Something resembling a phenomenal tide had disturbed Limehouse Reach that night and was widely reported from crafts upon the river. The shaft with its horrible secrets was filled to within fifteen feet of the top.

  Even allowing for secret getaways communicating with adjoining premises, it was reasonable to assume that neither Dr. Fu-Manchu nor any of those attached to his service had escaped alive from the fire and flood.

  A cordon had been thrown around the entire area with the cooperation of the River Police. Of old Sam Pak and the other Asiatics who had been in the Sailors’ Club, nothing had been seen. A house to house search in the yellow light of dawn satisfied Gallaho that they were not concealed in the neighborhood. Nothing came of these researches to afford a clue to the mystery.

  A guarded communication was issued to the newspapers under the Commissioner’s direction, to the effect that in forcing a way into suspected premise
s a buttress had collapsed and an old tunnel working been flooded by the river.

  Fleet Street suspected that there was a wonderful story behind this communique, but the real story if ever discovered was never published.

  Mrs. Sam Pak was let off with a fine and had been covered assiduously ever since. Her movements had afforded no clue to those who watched her. She accepted the disappearance of her aged husband as philosophically as she had accepted his presence. She was permitted to re-open the shop but not the Sailors’ Club.

  Enquiries at Dovelands Cottage, Lower Kingswood, revealed the fact that the place belonged to a Mrs. Ryatt, who lived in Streatham and who used it in the summer but let it when possible during the winter months.

  The place had been vacant for a long time, but had recently been leased by a gentleman whose address proved to be untraceable, for the convalescence of his daughter who had had a nervous breakdown. Mrs. Ryatt had actually visited the cottage on the evening that her new tenant entered into occupation, and reported that the daughter was an uncommonly pretty girl whose manner was very strange; and the nurse in charge an elderly foreign woman of rather forbidding appearance.

  She had been satisfied, however, of the respectability of her tenant and had returned to London.

  No trace of the woman described by Mrs. Ryatt and by Fleurette could be found...

  Nayland Smith, tugging at the lobe of his ear, walked up and down the room. He glanced several times at a large clock upon the mantelpiece; then:

  “I expected no news, Gallaho,” he said, rapidly. “Yet—”

  “Surely you have no doubts left, sir?”

  Sterling stared eagerly at Sir Denis, awaiting his reply.

  “Fleurette’s manner disturbs me,” snapped the latter. “She seems to have inherited from her mother a sort of extra sense where Dr. Fu-Manchu is concerned. It is no doubt due, in both cases, to the fact that he has subjected Fleurette—as he subjected Karamaneh—to hypnotic influence at various times.”

  Sterling moved cautiously in the armchair. He was nursing an injured rib.

  “In fact,” Smith went on, “I never feel entirely happy about her, when she is not here, actually under my own eyes.”

  “Dr. Petrie, her father, is with her,” Gallaho growled.

  “I agree, she could not be in better hands. It’s just an instinctive distrust.”

  “Based upon her queer ideas, sir?” Gallaho went on in a puzzled way.

  He had assumed his favorite pose, one elbow resting on the mantelpiece.

  “Surely her manner is to be expected in one who has suffered the sort of things that she has suffered. I mean—” he hesitated, seeking for words—“it will naturally take some little time before she gets over the idea that her movements are controlled. Now that I know her history, I think she is simply wonderful.”

  “You are right, Inspector,” said Sterling, warmly. “She is wonderful. If you or I had been through what Fleurette has been through I wager we should be stretcher cases.”

  “You are probably right,” said Gallaho.

  Nayland Smith, his back to the room, stood staring out of the window. He was thinking of the itinerant match seller, who beyond any shadow of doubt had been a spy of Dr. Fu-Manchu. Fey’s report of what had happened down there on the Embankment on the night of the destruction of the Thames tunnel, frequently recurred to his mind, but the match seller—like the other mysterious servants of the Chinese doctor—had disappeared; all enquiries had failed to establish his identity.

  He was said to have traded there for many years, but there was some difference of opinion on this point between constables patrolling that part of the Embankment. Nayland Smith was inclined to believe that the original vendor had been bought out, or driven out, and that an understudy made up to resemble him had taken his place.

  Suddenly turning:

  “Switch the lights up, Gallaho, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  The lofty, homely room became brilliantly illuminated.

  “Ah!” muttered Gallaho—“this will be the doctor and the young lady.”

  The faint but familiar sound of the lift gate had arrested his attention. A moment later, Fey opened the outer door. The voice of Fleurette was heard—as she came running in, followed by Dr. Petrie.

  She was very lovely, and ignoring Petrie’s frown, Sterling struggled to his feet.

  “Please sit down, dear!” Fleurette pressed her hands on his shoulders. “No! You must rest.”

  “But I feel so rottenly guilty.”

  “I know it’s a shame that this big darling has to come pottering around all the shops with me,” said Fleurette, laughingly. “But there are so many things I want before we leave for Egypt. The longer we stay the more I shall want! And I don’t believe he really minds.” She linked her arm in Petrie’s and leaned her head upon his shoulder. “Do you?”

  “Mind?” he said, and hugged her. “It’s a joy to be with you, dear. And although Alan is temporarily crocked, it’s only right that you should get out sometimes, after all.”

  “I suggest cocktails,” said Sir Denis, his good humor quite restored; and was about to press a bell when the ringing of the telephone in the lobby arrested him in the act.

  “I can make cocktails,” said Fleurette, gaily. “I’ll make you one none of you has ever tasted before, if you’ll just wait until I take my hat off.”

  She ran out. Petrie watched her with gleaming eyes. This miraculous double of his beautiful wife had brought a new happiness into his life, keen as only a joy can be which one has relinquished for ever.

  Fey rapped upon the door, and in response to Nayland Smith’s snappy “Come in,” entered.

  “Yes, Fey, what is it?”

  “There’s a P.C. Ireland on the telephone, sir; he says you know him—and he has something which he believes to be important to tell you.”

  “Ireland?” Gallaho growled. “That’s the constable who was on duty at Professor Ambroso’s house on the night this business started.”

  “A good man,” snapped Nayland Smith. “I marked him at the time.”

  He went out into the lobby.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  THE NIGHT WATCHMAN

  “Strangely like old times, Smith!”

  Nayland Smith stared at Petrie. Gallaho, bowler worn at a rakish angle, sat on the seat before them in the Scotland Yard car.

  This was one of those nondescript nights which marked the gradual dispersal of the phenomenal fog of 1934. There was a threat in the air that the monster might at any moment return. The car was speeding along beside a Common. Lamps gleamed yellowly where roads crossed it. One could see, through gaunt, unclothed trees, a distant highroad.

  “Yes,” Smith returned. “Some queer things have happened to us, Petrie, on that Common.”

  “The queerest thing of all is happening now,” Petrie went on. “The inevitable cycle of it is almost appalling. Here we are, after all the years, back again in the same old spot.”

  “Sir Denis pointed out to me this queer cycle, Doctor, which seems to run through our lives,” Gallaho said, glancing back over his shoulder. “I’ve thought about it a lot since. And I can see, now that over and over again it crops up. I suppose Sir Denis has told you that we were actually in your old room early last week?”

  “Yes,” said Petrie, and stared vaguely from the window.

  There came a silent interval.

  Sterling had been deposited in his apartment at a hotel in Northumberland Avenue. “You are under my orders, now,” Petrie had said, “and I don’t want you out on this foul night. I dislike that cough. Lie down when you have had something to eat. I shall of course come and see you when I return...”

  The doctor had been loath to leave his daughter at Sir Denis’s flat where they were staying. But recognizing how keenly he wanted to go, Fleurette had insisted. “I have victimized you all the afternoon, dear; I think you deserve an hour off. I shall read until you come back...”

  “This may be a w
ild-goose chase,” growled Gallaho suddenly, “but on the other hand, it may not. We’ve got to remember the old bloke may have been drunk or he may have been barmy...”

  “From what Ireland told me,” said Nayland Smith, “I don’t think either of those possibilities calls for consideration. Hello! Isn’t this where we get out?”

  The driver pulled up on a street corner and the three alighted.

  This street, lined with small suburban houses, so characteristic of the outlying parts of London, vividly recalled to Petrie the days when he had practised in this very district, and when his patients had inhabited just such houses. There was a considerable stream of traffic and at some points beyond it seemed to be badly congested.

  P.C. Ireland was standing in the shadow of a wall which lined the street for twenty yards or so on one side, bordering the garden of a larger house situated upon a corner facing the Common.

  “Ah, there you are, Constable,” Gallaho said gruffly.

  “Good evening,” said Sir Denis. “All luck comes your way in this case, Constable.”

  “Yes, sir. It looks like it.”

  “Repeat,” Smith directed tersely, “in your own words, what you told me on the telephone.”

  “Very good, sir.” The man paused for a moment; then:

  “There’s some cable-laying job going on at the corner of the lane there which cuts across the Common; a big hole in the road and a lot of drain pipes stacked up. When the gang ceased work this evening, and the night watchman came on, I thought there was likely to be a jam with the traffic, and so I stepped across and asked him to put another red lamp on this side to show where drivers should pull out. That’s how I got into conversation with him, sir. He’s a bit of a character and he said—I’m sticking as nearly as possible to his own words—if all coppers were human, it might be better for some of them. I asked him what he meant by that; but when he told me the story, which I thought it was my duty to report to you—”

  “You were quite right,” snapped Nayland Smith.