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Title: Clubfoot the Avenger
Date of first publication: 1924
Author: Valentine Williams (1883-1946)
Date first posted: Apr. 14, 2018
Date last updated: Apr. 14, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180412

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Stephen Hutcheson
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

CLUBFOOT THE AVENGER

BEING SOME FURTHER ADVENTURES OF DESMOND OKEWOOD, OF THE SECRET SERVICE

_by_
VALENTINE WILLIAMS

_Secret Service Series_

[Illustration: Publisher logo]

New York
P. F. Collier & Son Company
PUBLISHERS

IN AFFECTIONATE MEMORY OF
“G”

CONTENTS

Introduction ix
I. The Purple Cabriolet 1
II. Enter Miss Vere Slade 13
III. The Man with the Clubfoot 34
IV. The Strange Experience of Miss Patricia Maxwell 46
V. The Ikon of Smolensk 61
VI. The Secret of the Ikon 75
VII. The Unseen Menace 91
VIII. The Top Flat 101
IX. The Footstep in the Dark 124
X. In which Desmond Okewood finds Clubfoot in Strange Company 140
XI. The Constantinople Courier 154
XII. Xenia 166
XIII. In which Check proves to be Checkmate 179
XIV. The Girl at the Hexagon 188
XV. The Decoy 201
XVI. The House in Pimlico 214
XVII. The Meeting 236
XVIII. The Chamois Leather Packet 253
XIX. A Flight and What came of It 268
XX. In which Miss Mary Brewster speaks her Mind 279

INTRODUCTION

At the risk of straining an old and valued friendship, I have persuaded
Major Desmond Okewood and his brother to allow me to set down in
narrative form some account of a remarkable series of events that, for
reasons sufficiently obvious, have never been fully described.

It is now some eighteen months since Dr. Adolf Grundt, the notorious
German Secret Service agent, better known to the British Intelligence
Corps as “The Man with the Club Foot,” was last heard of; and there
appears to remain no valid grounds why the extraordinary happenings
which marked his reappearance in England should not now be related,
especially as they were sedulously withheld from the newspapers at the
time.

Though Major Desmond Okewood and his brother, Mr. Francis Okewood,
played a prominent part in these strange adventures, I have been unable
to persuade either of them to tell the story himself. It has therefore
fallen to my lot to be the Froissart of this chronicle. I do not fear
criticism; for my severest critics have been the brothers themselves.
Desmond Okewood, for instance, jibs strongly at what he calls my
“incurable love of the dramatic”; while Francis, after reading through
my much-censored and revised manuscript, pitched it back at me with the
curt remark that the interesting thing about Secret Service yarns is
what you are obliged to leave out.

On this plea, then, that in Secret Service matters the whole truth can
seldom be told, I would claim indulgence; and, further, on the score
that this narrative has been pieced together from talks, often spasmodic
and disjointed, with my two friends in all manner of odd places—the golf
links, the tennis court, in the train, the Berkeley grill, the
smoke-room of the Senior. Sometimes I questioned; but more often I was a
listener when a chance remark, a name read in a newspaper, a face seen
in a crowd, started the flow of reminiscence. And so, little by little,
I gathered the facts about the reëmergence out of the fire and smoke of
the World War of this extraordinary character, who, in his day, wielded
only less power in Imperial Germany than the Emperor himself.

In a short span of years immense changes have taken place in Europe.
To-day it is a far cry to the times of Dr. Grundt and the “G” Branch of
Section Seven of the Prussian Political Police. As head of the
ex-Kaiser’s personal Secret Service, “der Stelze,” as the Germans
nicknamed him from his crippled foot, was the all-powerful instrument of
the anger and suspicion of the capricious and neurotic William II. In
Germany his very existence was a mere rumour whispered only in the
highest circles; and abroad, except in the innermost ring of the Secret
Service, he was quite unknown. In the archives of the French Foreign
Office there is, I understand, a dossier dealing with his activities of
the time of the Algeciras Conference and, later, on the occasion of King
Edward’s meeting with the Czar at Reval.

My friends, the two Okewoods, are reticent on this point; but I make no
doubt that they, who originally encompassed the downfall of “der
Stelze,” know more about the secret history of his career than any other
man living, except the ex-Emperor himself. Perhaps, now that memoirs are
the fashion, from the seclusion of the little property he is known to
possess in southern Germany, The Man with the Clubfoot may one day give
the world some pages from his career. If he tell the truth—and Desmond
Okewood says he is the kind of man who glories in the blackest
crimes—his revelations should eclipse the memoirs of Sénart or Vidocq.

I have begun, as a story-teller should, at the beginning and set down
the extraordinary circumstances of the first case to engage the
attention of my two friends on the reappearance of Dr. Grundt in
England. The affair of the purple cabriolet, which the newspapers at the
time reported as a case of suicide, was actually the fourth link in the
horrifying chain of crimes which marked Dr. Grundt’s campaign of
vengeance against the British Secret Service. I have made it my point of
departure, however, because it was not until after the mysterious deaths
of Sir Wetherby Soukes, Colonel Branxe, and Mr. Fawcett Wilbur that
Desmond and Francis Okewood, who had already retired from the Secret
Service, were called back to the sphere of their former activity.

CLUBFOOT THE AVENGER