The Dop Doctor Part 97

"Perhaps you wouldn't mind throwin' your eye over the contents of that envelope? There are three photographs of handwritin' inside, marked on the backs respectively." He waited for Saxham to take the enclosures from the big envelope, examining the polish of his own varnished patent-leather boots with a fastidious air of anxiety that was extremely well a.s.sumed, if it was not strictly genuine. His large face was as bland and expressionless as the face of the grandfather-clock in the Sheraton case that ticked against the wainscot behind him, as he advised:

"Take 'em in numerical sequence. No. 1 is the photographed facsimile of the cover of the bogus letter to Mr. Casey. No. 2"--the speaker lightly touched it with a large round finger-tip--"that's the replica--also photographed--of a card the man we're after wrote on and gave to Lady Hannah, in case she found herself inclined to invest a hundred or so in the kind of wares he professed to supply. Photo No. 3 is a reproduction of an autograph and address that's written on the inside cover of the ledger --posted up in thieves' cipher--that was in the cashbox found at Haargrond Plaats." He waited, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g painfully at the stiff, waxed ends of the scrubby moustache.

Saxham took the photographs in their order. The envelope of the bogus letter brought by the supposed runner from Diamond Town had been addressed in a big bold black round hand with curiously malformed capitals, to

"Mr. BARNEY CASEY, "Commercial Traveller, "Gueldersdorp.

"Care of the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces"

"--Don't put it back in the envelope," said Major Bingo. "Compare the writin' with No. 2."

No. 2 was the photograph of an oblong card. On it was written in ink, in the same bold hand:

"Mr. HENDRYK VAN BUSCH, "C/o Mr. W. Bough, "Transport Agent, "Haargrond Plaats, "Near Matambani, "Transvaal."

LXIV

There was a silence in the consulting-room, only broken by street noises filtered thin by walls and curtains, and the ticking of the Sheraton grandfather clock, and the breathing of two people. Saxham glanced at Major Bingo with eyes that seemed to have been bleached of colour, and laid the second calligraphic specimen beside the first, and took up No. 3, and read in the same large nouris.h.i.+ng round hand:

"W. BOUGH, "Free State Hotel, "50 m. from Driepoort, "Orange Free State."

After that the silence was intense. The clock ticked, and the faint, far-off street noises came through the intervening screens, but only one of the men in the room seemed to be breathing. At last Saxham's grey lips moved. He said in a horrible clicking whisper:

"Van Busch and Bough are--one?"

Major Wrynche's large face nodded in the affirmative. But it was as expressionless as the grandfather clock's.

"One man!--and that's what I may call the pith of my verbal Despatch for you!"

Saxham said with hard composure:

"Van Busch is a Dutch surname that, as you say, is common in South Africa.

With the name of Bough, as the Chief is aware, I have--a.s.sociations. It was, in fact, one of the many aliases used by the witness for Regina in an Old Bailey case in which I was concerned nearly seven years ago."

The Major nodded once more, and said with brevity:

"Same man!"

Saxham seemed always to have known that the man was the same man. The tense muscles of his face told nothing. Bingo added:

"--But the wrong and injury done to you by Bough amount to little compared with the wrong and injury inflicted upon Mrs. Saxham! That---- Good Lord!

what's the matter?"

For Saxham, with a madman's face, had leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair, and stuttered with foam on his blue lips:

"What wrong? What injury? What--what are you hinting at?----"

"Hinting!" The astonishment in the Major's round light blue eyes was so palpably genuine that the crazy flame died out of the Doctor's, and his clenched hand dropped. "I didn't hint. I referred to the murder of your wife's adopted mother by this Bough, or Van Busch, that's all!"

"I beg your pardon, Major!" Saxham picked up his chair and sat down on it, inwardly cursing his lack of self-control. "My nerves have been giving trouble of late."

Going by the evidence of the haggard face and fever-bright eyes, the Doctor looked like that--uncommonly like that! And the big Major, remembering Alderman Brooker's revelation, wondered, as he screwed at the stiff, blunt ends of his sandy moustache, whether Saxham might not have reverted to the old vice? "Bad for the girl he's married if he has!" he thought, even as he said:

"Overworked. Get away for a bit. Nothin' like relievin' the tension, don't you know? Norway in June, or the Higher Austrian Tyrol. Make up your mind and go!"

"I have made up my mind," Saxham answered, smiling bitterly, as he remembered the little phial with the yellow label that lay beside the whisky-flask in the drawer beneath his hand. "I shall go very soon now!"

"But not immediately?"

"Not immediately." There was something strange, almost exalted, in the look that accompanied the words. Saxham added: "If you could give me an approximate date as regards the finding of that--needle in the haystack of South Africa, it would--facilitate my departure more than you can guess!"

"Would it, by George!" Bingo slipped the thumb and forefinger of the useful hand into his waistcoat-pocket. Something sparkled in the big pink palm he extended to Saxham--something sparkled, and spurted white and green and scarlet points of fire from a myriad of facets. The something was an oval miniature on ivory. A slender gold chain, broken, dangled from its enamelled bow. From within a rim of brilliants the lovely, wistful face of a young, refined, high-bred woman looked out, and with all his iron self-control Saxham could not restrain a sudden movement and a stifled exclamation of mingled anger and surprise.

For at the first glance the face was Lynette's.

With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an unspeakable rage and horror seething in him, he took the portrait from the Major's palm, and held it with a steady hand, in a favourable light.

Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face!

The eyes were larger, rounder, and of gentle blue-grey, the squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive mouth sensuous as well, the little chin pointed. She might have been a few years under thirty; the arrangement of the hair, the cut of the bodice, might have indicated the height of the latest fas.h.i.+on--say, twenty-two or even three years back. Some delicately fine inscription was upon the dull gold of the inner rim of the miniature-frame, within the diamonds that surrounded it.

Saxham deciphered: "Lucy, to Richard Mildare. For ever! 1879."

The dull, dark crimson that had stained the Dop Doctor's opaque skin had given place to pallor. His face was sharp and thin, and of waxen whiteness, like the face of one newly dead. His blue eyes burned ominously in their caves under the heavy bar of meeting black eyebrows. His voice was very quiet as he asked: "How did you come by this?"

"It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo measuredly, "with the bits of evidence I've told you of, and a few others, when the big stone chimney at Haargrond Plaats blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other bits of evidence were bits of a man--two men you might call him! And, by the Living Tinker, considerin' how he was mixed up with the rest of the rubbish, he might have been half a dozen instead of Bough Van Busch!"

"He had this upon him? He--wore it round his neck?" Saxham asked the question in a grating whisper, dropping the clenched hand that held the diamond-set miniature upon the arm of his chair.

"I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly, "when he had a neck to boast of." He added, as he got up to take his leave: "The thing has been carefully cleaned. The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked in one place, but otherwise it has come off wonderfully. Perhaps you'd hand it over to--anybody it belongs to? Hope I haven't mulled many professional appointments. Remember me to Mrs. Saxham. Thanks frightfully!

So long!"

LXV

In the days that followed Saxham had a letter, written by a man with whom he had been fairly intimate at Gueldersdorp during the strenuous days of the Siege--a man who would undoubtedly not have lived to go through those days but for the Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent letter, written by an unsteady hand.

Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the waste-paper basket with a contemptuous shrug. But he had made a mental note of the address, and drove there that afternoon.

The Doctor's motor-brougham stopped at the door of the grimy stucco Clergy-House that is attached to St. Margaret's in Wendish Street, West.

Saxham rang a loud bell, that sent iron echoes pealing down flagged pa.s.sages, and brought a little bonneted woman in rusty black to answer the door and the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius Fraithorn was at home and able to receive a visitor?