The Three Just Men

I

The Firm of Oberzohn

“£520 p.a. Wanted at once, Laboratory Secretary (lady). Young; no previous experience required, but must have passed recognized examination which included physics and inorganic (elementary) chemistry. Preference will be given to one whose family has some record in the world of science. Apply by letter, Box 9754, Daily Megaphone. If applicant is asked to interview advertiser, fare will be paid from any station within a hundred and fifty miles of London.”

A good friend sent one of the issues containing this advertisement to Heavytree Farm and circled the announcement with a blue pencil.

Mirabelle Leicester found the newspaper on the hall settee when she came in from feeding the chickens, and thought that it had been sent by the Alington land agent who was so constantly calling her attention to the advertisers who wished to buy cheap farms. It was a practice of his. She had the feeling that he resented her presence in the country, and was anxious to replace her with a proprietor less poverty-stricken.

Splitting the wrapper with a dusty thumb, she turned naturally to the advertisement pages, having the agent in mind. Her eyes went rapidly down the “Wanted to Buy” column. There were several “gentlemen requiring small farm in good district,” but none that made any appeal to her, and she was wondering why the parsimonious man had spent tuppence-ha’penny on postage and paper when the circled paragraph caught her eye.

“Glory!” said Mirabelle, her red lips parted in excited wonder.

Aunt Alma looked up from her press-cutting book, startled as Mirabelle dashed in.

“Me!” she said dramatically, and pointed a finger at the advertisement. “I am young—I have no experience—I have my higher certificate—and daddy was something in the world of science. And, Alma, we are exactly a hundred and forty miles from London town!”

“Dear me!” said Aunt Alma, a lady whose gaunt and terrifying appearance was the terror of tradesmen and farm hands, though a milder woman never knitted stockings.

“Isn’t it wonderful? This solves all our problems. We’ll leave the farm to Mark, open the flat in Bloomsbury … we can afford one or even two theatres a week …”

Alma read the announcement for the second time.

“It seems good,” she said with conventional caution, “though I don’t like the idea of your working, my dear. Your dear father …”

“Would have whisked me up to town and I should have had the job by tonight,” said Mirabelle definitely.

But Alma wasn’t sure. London was full of pitfalls and villainy untold lurked in its alleys and dark passages. She herself never went to London except under protest.

“I was there years ago when those horrible Four Just Men were about, my dear,” she said, and Mirabelle, who loved her, listened to the oft-told story. “They terrorized London. One couldn’t go out at night with the certainty that one would come back again alive … and to think that they have had a free pardon! It is simply encouraging crime.”

“My dear,” said Mirabelle (and this was her inevitable rejoinder), “they weren’t criminals at all. They were very rich men who gave up their lives to punishing those whom the law let slip through its greasy old fingers. And they were pardoned for the intelligence work they did in the war—one worked for three months in the German War Office—and there aren’t four at all: there are only three. I’d love to meet them—they must be dears!”

When Aunt Alma made a grimace, she was hideous. Mirabelle averted her eyes.

“Anyway, they are not in London now, darling,” she said, “and you will be able to sleep soundly at nights.”

“What about the snake?” asked Miss Alma Goddard ominously.

Now if there was one thing which no person contemplating a visit to London wished to be reminded about, it was the snake.

Six million people rose from their beds every morning, opened their newspapers and looked for news of the snake. Eighteen daily newspapers never passed a day without telling their readers that the scare was childish and a shocking commentary on the neurotic tendencies of the age; they also published, at regular intervals, intimate particulars of the black mamba, its habits and its peculiar deadliness, and maintained quite a large staff of earnest reporters to “work up the story.”

The black mamba, most deadly of all the African snakes, had escaped from the Zoo one cold and foggy night in March. And there should have been the end of him—a three-line paragraph, followed the next day by another three-line paragraph detailing how the snake was found dead on the frozen ground—no mamba could live under a temperature of 75° Fahrenheit. But the second paragraph never appeared. On the 2nd of April a policeman found a man huddled up in a doorway in Orme Place. He proved to be a well known and apparently wealthy stockbroker, named Emmett. He was dead. In his swollen face were found two tiny punctured wounds, and the eminent scientist who was called into consultation gave his opinion that the man had died from snakebite: an especially deadly snake. The night was chilly; the man had been to a theatre alone. His chauffeur stated that he had left his master in the best of spirits on the doorstep. The key found in the dead man’s hand showed that he was struck before the car had turned. When his affairs were investigated he was found to be hopelessly insolvent. Huge sums drawn from his bank six months before had disappeared.

London had scarcely recovered from this shocking surprise when the snake struck again. This time in the crowded street, and choosing a humble victim, though by no means a blameless one. An ex-convict named Sirk, a homeless down-and-out, was seen to fall by a park-keeper near the Achilles statue in Hyde Park. By the time the keeper reached him he was dead. There was no sign of a snake—nobody was near him. This time the snake had made his mark on the wrist—two little punctured wounds near together.

A month later the third man fell a victim. He was a clerk of the Bank of England, a reputable man who was seen to fall forward in a subway train, and, on being removed to hospital, was discovered to have died—again from snakebite.

So that the snake became a daily figure of fear, and its sinister fame spread even so far afield as Heavytree Farm.

“Stuff!” said Mirabelle, yet with a shiver. “Alma, I wish you wouldn’t keep these horrors in your scrapbook.”

“They are Life,” said Alma soberly, and then: “When will you take up your appointment?” she asked, and the girl laughed.

“We will make a beginning right away—by applying for the job,” she said practically. “And you needn’t start packing your boxes for a very long time!”

An hour later she intercepted the village postman and handed him a letter.

And that was the beginning of the adventure which involved so many lives and fortunes, which brought the Three Just Men to the verge of dissolution, and one day was to turn the heart of London into a battlefield.

Two days after the letter was dispatched came the answer, typewritten, surprisingly personal, and in places curiously worded. There was an excuse for that, for the heading on the notepaper was

Oberzohn & Smitts

Merchants and Exporters