Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns Read Online Free PDF Page B

acquired by illicit and altogether disreputable means.”
    Larry went red. He was a dreamer, and he was annoyed that anybody should know him as such, so annoyed that he abruptly changed the subject.
    It was that night for the first time that J G Reeder learned the story of Larry O’Ryan’s boyhood, and the circumstances which had determined him in his career.
    “I’m glad you’ve told me, Mr O’Ryan.” (Curiously enough, during all the years he knew Larry he never addressed him in any other way.) “It makes you more understandable than I thought you were, and excuses, as far as abnormal tendencies can be excused, your subsequent – um – behaviour. You should, of course, have gone to the head master and told the truth, and probably in later years, since thinking the matter over, you have come to the same conclusion.”
    Larry nodded.
    “Have you met the man since – the master who stole the money?”
    “No,” said Larry, “but I should have probably met him if I had made Wormwood Scrubbs en route to Dartmoor. Only a born crook could have stolen from Farthingale, who was a good-hearted soul and hadn’t too much money. I sent him a monkey, by the way, last week. His wife’s had an operation, and I know the little man hasn’t a great deal of money.”
    “A monkey being twenty-five or five hundred pounds? I have never quite accustomed myself to these sporting terms,” asked Mr Reeder. “Five hundred pounds? Well, well, it is nice to be generous with other people’s money, but we won’t go into that.”
    He sat, drumming his fingers on the table.
    “Once a crook, always a crook – that is your real belief, Mr O’Ryan? But at heart you’re not a crook. You’re just a young man who thought that he was taking the law into his own hands and was perfectly justified in doing so, which of course is absurd. If everybody thought as you do – but I am getting on to a very old and a tedious subject.”
    The telephone bell rang shrilly. Mr Reeder walked to his desk, picked up the receiver and listened, answering monosyllabically. When he had finished: “I’m afraid our evening is going to be spoilt, Mr O’Ryan. I am wanted at the office.”
    “It must be something very important to take you up on Sunday evening,” said O’Ryan.
    “Everything that comes to me from the office is very important, on Sunday evening or even Monday evening,” said Reeder.
    He took up the telephone directory, called a number and gave explicit and urgent instructions.
    “If you’re hiring a car, it is important!”
    Mr Reeder inclined his head.
    “It is rather a matter of urgency,” he said. “It is, in fact – um – a murder.”
4
    On this Sunday morning a policeman patrolling the very edge of the Metropolitan area, at that point near Slough where the County of Buckinghamshire and the County of London meet, had seen a foot sticking up apparently from the grass. It was in a place where no foot should have been, a rough, uneven field, crossed by an irrigation ditch which was now dry. The fact that there was a ditch there was unknown to the policeman until he opened a gate leading into the field and investigated.
    As he opened the gate he noticed the marks of car wheels leading into the field, and saw that the padlocked chain which fastened the gate to a post had been broken. The policeman noticed this mechanically. He crossed the rough ground, wet with recent rain and came to the ditch, and the mystery of the foot was revealed. A man lay there on his back. He was dressed in his underclothes and a pair of socks, and one glance at the face told the policeman what had happened.
    He hailed a passing motorist and sent him off to the station to procure assistance. A police surgeon and an ambulance arrived, and the body was removed. Within an hour Scotland Yard was working on the case.
    They had little guidance for their investigations. The man’s clothes were innocent even of laundry marks; there was nothing whatever to assist in