Elk 04 White Face Read Online Free PDF Page B

who looked older. Spare of build, his greying hair was thin on the top. He wore absurd little side-whiskers half-way down his cheek, and gold-rimmed spectacles, one lens of which was usually cracked.
    For a long time they stood in silence behind the calico curtains, attracting no attention from the passers-by, for there was no light in the surgery.
    “My idea of hell,” said Elk again.
    Dr. Marford laughed softly.
    “With its own particular devil, by all accounts,” he said.
    Detective-Sergeant Elk permitted himself to guffaw.
    “That bunk! Listen, these people believe anything. Funny thing, they don’t read, so they couldn’t have got the idea out of books. It’s one of the—what do you call the word—um—damn it! I’ve got it on the end of my tongue…”
    “Legends?”
    “That’s it—it’s like the Russians passing through England with the snow on their boots. Everybody’s met the man who saw ‘em, but you never meet him. Every time there’s a murder nobody can explain, you see it in the newspaper bills: ‘The Devil of Tidal Basin,’ an’ even after you’ve pinched the murderer an’ all the earth knows that he never heard of Tidal Basin, or thinks it’s a patent wash-bowl, they still hang on to the idea. These newspapers! Next summer you’ll have joy-wagons full of American trippers comin’ here. Limehouse has had it, why shouldn’t we?”
    A bright young newspaper man had invented the Devil of the Basin. It was the general opinion in Tidal Basin that he wasn’t any too bright either.
    “There is a devil—hundreds of ‘em! The waterside crowd wouldn’t think twice of putting me out. They tried one night—Dan Salligan. The flowers I sent to the man when he was in hospital is nobody’s business.”
    Dr. Marford moved uncomfortably.
    “I’m afraid I helped that legend to grow. The reporter saw me and very—er—indiscreetly, I told him of the patient who used to come to me—he hasn’t been for months, by the way—always came at midnight with his face covered with a mask. It wasn’t good to see the face, I mean. Explosion in a steel works.”
    Elk was interested.
    “Where does he live?”
    The doctor shook his head.
    “I don’t know. The reporter tried to find out but couldn’t. He always paid me in gold—a pound a visit, which is forty times more than I get from my regulars.”
    Mr. Elk was not impressed. His eyes were fixed upon the squalling larrikins in the roadway.
    “Weeds!” he said, and the doctor laughed softly.
    “Those ugly little boys are probably great political leaders of the future, or literary geniuses. Tidal Basin may be stiff with mute, inglorious Miltons,” he said.
    Sergeant Elk of the Criminal Investigation Department made a noise that expressed his contempt.
    “Nine-tenths of that crowd will pass through the hands of me and my successors,” he said drearily, “and all your electric rays won’t stop um! And such of them as don’t finish in Dartmoor will end their days in the workhouse. Why they call it a workhouse, God knows. I’ve never known anybody to work in a workhouse except the staff. You know Mrs. Weston?” he asked suddenly. “A pretty woman. She’s got the only respectable apartment in the Basin. All Ritzy—I went up there when some kids broke her windows. She’s not much good.”
    “If she’s not much good,” said Marford, and again that ghost of a smile came and went, “if she’s not much good, I probably know her. If she’s the kind of woman who doesn’t pay her doctor’s bills, I certainly know her. Why do you ask?”
    Elk took a cigar from his pocket and bit off the end. It was obviously a good cigar. He had hoarded it so long that it had irregular fringes of leaf. He lit it with great deliberation and puffed enjoyably.
    “She was saying that she knew you,” he said, fully two minutes after the question had been asked. “Naturally I said a good word for you.”
    “Say a few good words for the clinic,” said the