Cleek: The Man of the Forty Faces | Page 3

deriding voice that set the
crowd jeering anew. "You'll git promoted, you will! See it in all the
evenin' papers--oh, yus! ''Orrible hand-to-hand struggle with a
desperado. Brave constable has 'arf a quid's worth out of an infuriated
ruffin!' My hat! won't your missis be proud when you take her to see
that bloomin' film?"
"Move on, now, move on!" said Collins, recovering his dignity, and
asserting it with a vim. "Look here, cabby, I don't take it kind of you to
laugh like that; they had you just as bad as they had me. Blow that
Frenchy! She might have tipped me off before I made such an ass of
myself. I don't say that I'd have done it so natural if I had known,
but--Hullo! What's that? Blowed if it ain't that blessed whistle again,
and another crowd a-pelting this way; and--no!--yes, by Jupiter!--a
couple of Scotland Yard chaps with 'em. My hat! what do you suppose
that means?"
He knew in the next moment. Panting and puffing, a crowd at their
heels, and people from all sides stringing out from the pavement and
trooping after them, the two "plain-clothes" men came racing through
the grinning gathering and bore down on P.C. Collins.

"Hullo, Smathers, you in this, too?" began he, his feelings softened by
the knowledge that other arms of the law would figure on that film with
him at the Alhambra to-night. "Now, what are you after, you goat? That
French lady, or the red-headed party in the grey suit?"
"Yes, yes, of course I am. You heard me signal you to head him off,
didn't you?" replied Smathers, looking round and growing suddenly
excited when he realized that Collins was empty-handed, and that the
red-headed man was not there. "Heavens! you never let him get away,
did you? You grabbed him, didn't you--eh?"
"Of course I grabbed him. Come out of it. What are you giving me, you
josser?" said Collins with a wink and a grin. "Ain't you found out even
yet, you silly? Why, it was only a faked-up thing--the taking of a
kinematograph picture for the Alhambra. You and Petrie ought to have
been here sooner and got your wages, you goats. I got half a quid for
my share when I let him go."
Smathers and Petrie lifted up their voices in one despairing howl.
"When you what?" fairly yelled Smathers. "You fool! You don't mean
to tell me that you let them take you in like that--those two? You don't
mean to tell me that you had him--had him in your hands--and then let
him go? You did? Oh! you seventy-seven kinds of a double-barrelled
ass! Had him--think of it!--had him, and let him go! Did yourself out of
a share in a reward of two hundred quid when you'd only to shut your
hands and hold on to it!"
"Two hundred quid? Two hun--W-what are you talking about? Wasn't
it true? Wasn't it a kinematograph picture, after all?"
"No, you fool, no!" howled Smathers, fairly dancing with despair. "Oh,
you blithering idiot! You ninety-seven varieties of a fool! Do you know
who you had in your hands? Do you know who you let go? It was that
devil 'Forty Faces'--'The Vanishing Cracksman'--the man who calls
himself 'Hamilton Cleek'; and the woman was his pal, his confederate,
his blessed stool-pigeon--'Margot, the Queen of the Apache'; and she
came over from Paris to help him in that clean scoop of Lady Dresmer's

jewels last week!"
"Heavens!" gulped Collins, too far gone to say anything else, too
deeply dejected to think of anything but that he had had the man for
whom Scotland Yard had been groping for a year--the man over whom
all England, all France, all Germany wondered--close shut in the grip of
his hands and then had let him go. The biggest and boldest criminal the
police had ever had to cope with, the almost supernatural genius of
crime, who defied all systems, laughed at all laws, mocked at all the
Vidocqs, and Dupins, and Sherlock Holmeses, whether amateur or
professional, French or English, German or American, that ever had
been or ever could be pitted against him, and who, for sheer devilry, for
diabolical ingenuity and for colossal impudence, as well as for a
nature-bestowed power that was simply amazing, had not his match in
all the universe.
Who or what he really was, whence he came, whether he was English,
Irish, French, German, Yankee, Canadian, Italian or Dutchman, no man
knew and no man might ever hope to know unless he himself chose to
reveal it. In his many encounters with the police he had assumed the
speech, the characteristics, and, indeed, the facial attributes of each in
turn, and assumed them with an ease and a perfection that