Elk 01 The Fellowship of the Frog Read Online Free Page A

Inspector Genter from police headquarters, and if you resist I’ll kill you!”
    For a second there was a deathly silence. Then Genter felt his pistol wrist seized in a vice-like grip. He struck out with his other hand, but the man stooped and the blow fell in the air, and then with a wrench the pistol was forced out of the big man’s hand and he closed with his prisoner. So doing, his face touched the Frog’s. Was it a mask he was wearing?…The cold mica goggles came against his cheek. That accounted for the muffled voice…
    Powerful as he was, he could not break away from the arms which encircled him, and they struggled backward and forward in the darkness.
    Suddenly the Frog lifted his foot, and Genter, anticipating the kick, swerved round. There was a crash of broken glass, and then something came to the detective—a faint but pungent odour. He tried to breathe, but found himself strangling, and his arms fell feebly by his side.
    The Frog held him for a minute, and then let the limp figure fall with a thud to the ground. In the morning a London police patrol found the body of Inspector Genter lying in the garden of an empty house, and rang for an ambulance. But a man who has been gassed by the concentrated fumes of hydrocyanic acid dies very quickly, and Genter had been dead ten seconds after the Frog smashed the thin glass cylinder which he kept in the hut for such emergencies as these.

    IV - ELK

    There was no detective in the world who looked less like a police officer, and a clever police officer, than Elk. He was tall and thin, and a slight stoop accentuated his weediness. His clothes seemed ill-fitting, and hung upon rather than fitted him. His dark, cadaverous face was set permanently in an expression of the deepest gloom, and few had ever seen him smile. His superiors found him generally a depressing influence, for his outlook on life was prejudiced and apparently embittered by his failure to secure promotion. Faulty education stood in his way here. Ten times he had come up for examination, and ten times he had failed, invariably in the same subject—history.
    Dick, who knew him better than his immediate chiefs, guessed that these failures did not worry Mr. Elk as much as people thought. Indeed, he often detected a glum pride in his inability to remember historical dates, and once, in a moment of astonishing confidence, Elk had confessed that promotion would be an embarrassment to a man of his limited educational attainments. For Elk’s everyday English was one of his weaknesses.
    “There’s no rest for the wicked, Mr. Gordon,” he sighed as he sat down. “I thought I’d get a holiday after my trip to the U.S.A.”
    “I want to know all about Lola Bassano—who are her friends, why she has suddenly attached herself to Raymond Bennett, a clerk in the employ of Maitlands Consolidated. Particularly why she picked him up at the corner of St. James’s Square and drove him to Horsham last night. I saw them by accident as I was coming out of my club, and followed. They sat in her coupe for the greater part of two hours within a hundred yards of Bennett’s house, and they were talking. I know, because I stood in the rain behind the car, listening. If he had been making love to her I should have understood—a little. But they were talking, and talking money. I heard certain sums mentioned. At four o’clock he got out of the car and went into his house, and Lola drove off.”
    Elk, puffing, sadly shook his head.
    “Lola wouldn’t talk about anything but money anyway,” he said. “She’s like Queen What’s-her-name who died in 1077, or maybe it was 1573. She married King Henry, or it may have been Charles, because she wanted a gold snuff-box he had. I’m not sure whether it was a gold snuff-box or a silver bed. Anyway, she got it an’ was be’eaded in…I don’t remember the date.”
    “Thank you for the parallel,” smiled Dick. “But Lola is not after snuff-boxes of gold or silver. Young