Free (1929) The Three Just Men by Edgar Wallace

expert thought the whip used was the official cat-o’-nine-tails.
    Scotland Yard, curious, suspicious, sought out the Three Just Men. They had alibis so complete as to be unbreakable. Sven Gurther went unavenged—but he kept from the tow-path thereafter.
    In this house of his there were rooms which only Dr. Oberzohn visited. The Danish maid complained to the cook that when she had passed the door of one as the doctor came out, a blast of warm, tainted air had rushed out and made her cough for an hour. There was another room in which from time to time the doctor had installed a hotchpotch of apparatus. Vulcanizing machines, electrical machines (older and more used than Mirabelle had seen in her brief stay in the City Road), a liquid air plant, not the most up-to-date but serviceable.
    He was not, curiously enough, a doctor in the medical sense. He was not even a doctor of chemistry. His doctorate was in Literature and Law. These experiments of his were hobbies—hobbies that he had pursued from his childhood.
    On this evening he was sitting in his stuffy parlour reading close-printed and closer-reasoned volume of German philosophy, and thinking of something else. Though the sun had only just set, the blinds and curtains were drawn; a wood fire crackled in the grate, and the bright lights of three half-watt lamps made glaring radiance.
    An interruption came in the shape of a telephone call. He listened, grunting replies.
    “So!” he said at last, and spoke a dozen words in his strange English.
    Putting aside his book, he hobbled in his velvet slippers across the room and pressed twice upon the bell-push by the side of the fireplace. Gurther came in noiselessly and stood waiting.
    He was grimy, unshaven. The pointed chin and short upper lip were blue. The V of his shirt visible above the waistcoat was soiled and almost black at the edges. He stood at attention, smiling vacantly, his eyes fixed at a point above the doctor’s head.
    Dr. Oberzohn lifted his eyes from his book.
    “I wish you to be a gentleman of club manner to-night,” he said. He spoke in that hard North-German tongue which the Swede so readily acquires.
    “Ja, Herr Doktor!”
    The man melted from the room.
    Dr. Oberzohn for some reason hated Germans. So, for the matter of that, did Gurther and Pfeiffer, the latter being Polish by extraction and Russian by birth. Gurther hated Germans because they stormed the little jail at Altostadt to kill him after the dogs found Frau Siedlitz’s body. He would have died then but for the green police, who scented a Communist rising, scattered the crowd and sent Gurther by road to the nearest big town under escort. The two escorting policemen were never seen again. Gurther reappeared mysteriously in England two years after, bearing a veritable passport. There was no proof even that he was Gurther—Leon knew, Manfred knew, Poiccart knew.
    There had been an alternative to the whipping.
    “It would be a simple matter to hold his head under water until he was drowned,” said Leon.
    They debated the matter, decided against this for no sentimental or moral reason—none save expediency. Gurther had his whipping and never knew how near to the black and greasy water of the canal he had been.
    Dr. Oberzohn resumed his book—a fascinating book that was all about the human soul and immortality and time. He was in the very heart of an analysis of eternity when Gurther reappeared dressed in the “gentleman-club manner,” The dress-coat fitted perfectly; shirt and waistcoat were exactly the right cut The snowy shirt, the braided trousers, the butterfly bow, and winged collar…
    “That is good.” Dr. Oberzohn went slowly over the figure. “But the studs should be pearl—not enamel. And the watch-chain is demode—it is not worn. The gentleman-club manner does not allow of visible ornament Also I think a moustache…?”
    “Ja, Herr Doktor!”
    Gurther, who was once an actor, disappeared again. When he returned the enamel