Cleek of Scotland Yard Part 12

Claws and the marks of scales, Mr. Nippers had a.s.serted; and claws and the marks of scales the prints in the soft earth showed.

"La! la! the horror of them," exclaimed Mrs. Armroyd, putting up her little hands and averting her face. "It could kill and kill and kill--horses, oxen, anything--an abominable creature like that!

What do you figure it to have been, monsieur?--souls of the saints, _what_?"

"Blest if I know," said Cleek. "Only, of course, it couldn't possibly be anything human; so we may put the idea of the old chap having been killed by anything of his kind out of our minds altogether. It is perfectly clear that the creature, whatever it might be, got in through the window there (you see it is open) and killed him before he could call out for help or strike a blow in his own defence."

"Eh, but window's six foot up, Mr. Headland, sir," put in Nippers excitedly; "and howm a thing the weight o' that goin' to fly in?"

"Didn't fly in, my friend," replied Cleek with an air of lofty superiority. "Use your wits, man. It _jumped_ in--from the tree there. Look here--see!" going to it and tapping certain abrasions upon the trunk. "Here's where it peeled off the bark in climbing up. Lord, man! why, it's plain as the nose on your face. Ten to one we shall find the same sort of footprints when we go into the laboratory--damp ones, you know, from the moisture of the earth; and to make sure, in case we do find 'em let's take the length of the things and see. Got a tape measure with you? No? Oh, well, lend me your handcuffs, if you've got a pair with you, and we can manage a measurement with those. Thanks very much. Now, then, let's see.

One, two, three, by Jupiter--three fingers longer than these things, chain and all. That'll do. Now, then, let's go in and see about the others. Lead the way, Miss Renfrew, if you will."

She would, and did. Leading the way back to the covered pa.s.sage, she opened a door in the side of it--a door designed to let the inventor out into the grounds without going through the house, if he so desired--and conducted them to the laboratory, leaving Constable Gorham to continue his dreary sentry duty outside.

At any time the interior of that huge, stone-walled, steel-lined tube must have been unlovely and depressing to all but the man who laboured in it. But to-night, with that man sitting dead in it, with his face to the open window, a lamp beside him, and stiff hands resting on the pages of a book that lay open on the desk's flat top, it was doubly so; for, added to its other unpleasant qualities, there was now a disagreeable odour and a curious, eye-smarting, throat-roughening heaviness in the atmosphere which was like to nothing so much as the fumes thrown off by burnt chemicals.

Cleek gave one or two sniffs at the air as he entered, glanced at Mr.

Narkom, then walked straightway to the desk and looked into the dead man's face. Under the marks of the scratches and cuts upon it--marks which would seem to carry out the idea of an animal's attack--the features were distorted and discoloured, and the hair of beard and moustache was curiously crinkled and discoloured.

Cleek stopped dead short as he saw that face, and his swaggering, flippant, c.o.c.ksure air of a minute before dropped from him like a discarded mantle.

"Hullo! this doesn't look quite so promising for the animal theory as it did!" he flung out sharply. "This man has been shot--shot with a sh.e.l.l filled with his own soundless and annihilating devil's invention, lithamite--and bomb throwing is _not_ a trick of beasts of a lower order than the animal tribe! Look here, Mr. Narkom--see! The lock of the desk has been broken. Shut the door there, Nippers.

Let n.o.body leave the room. There has been murder and robbery here; and the thing that climbed that tree was not an animal nor yet a bird. It was a cut-throat and a thief!"

Naturally enough, this statement produced something in the nature of a panic; Miss Renfrew, indeed, appearing to be on the verge of fainting, and it is not at all unlikely that she would have slipped to the floor but for the close proximity of Mrs. Armroyd.

"That's right, madame. Get a chair; put her into it. She will need all her strength presently, I promise you. Wait a bit! Better have a doctor, I fancy, and an inquiry into the whereabouts of Mr. Charles Drummond. Mr. Narkom, cut out, will you, and wire this message to that young man's employer."

Pens and papers were on the dead man's desk. Cleek bent over, scratched off some hurried lines, and pa.s.sed them to the superintendent.

"Sharp's the word, please; we've got ugly business on hand and we must know about that Drummond chap without delay. Miss Renfrew has not been telling the truth to-night! Look at this man. _Rigor mortis_ p.r.o.nounced. Feel him--muscles like iron, flesh like ice! _She_ says that he spoke to her at a quarter to eight o'clock. _I_ tell you that at a quarter to eight this man had been dead upward of an hour!"

"Good G.o.d!" exclaimed Mr. Narkom; but his cry was cut into by a wilder one from Miss Renfrew.

"Oh, no! Oh, no!" she protested, starting up from her seat, only to drop back into it, strengthless, shaking, ghastly pale. "It could not be--it could not. I have told the truth--nothing but the truth. He did speak to me at a quarter to eight--he did, he did! Constable Gorham was there--he heard him; he will tell you the same."

"Yes, yes, I know you said so, but--will he? He looks a st.u.r.dy, straightgoing, honest sort of chap who couldn't be coaxed or bribed into backing up a lie; so send him in as you go out, Mr. Narkom; we'll see what he has to say."

What he had to say when he came in a few moments later was what Miss Renfrew had declared--an exact corroboration of her statement.

He _had_ seen a man whom he fancied was Sir Ralph Droger run out of the grounds, and he had suggested to Miss Renfrew that they had better look into the Round House and see if all was right with Mr. Nosworth. They had looked in as she had said; and Mr. Nosworth had called out and asked her what the devil she was coming in and disturbing him for, and it was a quarter to eight o'clock exactly.

"Sure about that, are you?" questioned Cleek.

"Yes, sir, sure as that I'm telling you so this minute."

"How do you fix the exact time?"

"As we came out of the covered pa.s.sage Miss Renfrew looked at her wrist-watch and says, impatient like, 'There, I've lost another two minutes and am that much later for nothing. See! It's a quarter to eight. Good night.' Then she cut off over the grounds and leaves me."

"La! la!" exclaimed Mrs. Armroyd approvingly. "There's the brave heart, to come to mademoiselle's rescue so gallantly. But, yes, I make you the cake of plums for that, _mon cher_. Monsieur of the yard of Scotland, he can no more torture the poor stricken child after that--not he."

But Cleek appeared to be less easy to convince than she had hoped, for he pursued the subject still; questioning Gorham to needless length it seemed; trying his best to trip him up, to shake his statement, but always failing; and, indeed, going over the same ground to such length that one might have thought he was endeavouring to gain time. If he was, he certainly succeeded; for it was quite fifteen minutes later when Mr. Narkom returned to the Round House, and he was at it still. Indeed, he did not conclude to give it up as a bad job until the superintendent came.

"Get it off all right, did you, Mr. Narkom?" he asked, glancing round as he heard him enter.

"Quite all right, old chap. Right as rain--in every particular."

"Thanks very much. I'm having rather a difficult task of it, for our friend the constable here corroborates Miss Renfrew's statement to the hair; and yet I am absolutely positive that there is a mistake."

"There is no mistake--no, not one! The wicked one to say it still!"

"Oh, that's all very well, madame, but I know what I know; and when you tell me that a dead man can ask questions--Pah! The fact of the matter is the constable merely fancies he heard Mr. Nosworth speak.

That's where the mistake comes in. Now, look here! I once knew of an exactly similar case and I'll tell you just how it happened. Let us suppose"--strolling leisurely forward--"let us suppose that this s.p.a.ce here is the covered pa.s.sage, and you, madame--step here a moment, please. Thanks very much--and you are Miss Renfrew, and Gorham here is himself, and standing beside her as he did then."

"Wasn't beside her, sir--at least not just exactly. A bit behind her--like this."

"Oh, very well, then, that will do. Now, then. Here's the pa.s.sage and here are you, and I'll just show you how a mistake could occur, and how it did occur, under precisely similar circ.u.mstances. Once upon a time when I was in Paris----"

"In Paris, monsieur?"

"Yes, madame--this little thing I'm going to tell you about happened there. You may or may not have heard that a certain Frenchy dramatist wrote a play called _Chanticler_--or maybe you never heard of it? Didn't, eh? Well, it's a play where all the characters are barnyard creatures--dogs, poultry, birds and the like--and the odd fancy of men and women dressing up like fowls took such a hold on the public that before long there were Chanticler dances and Chanticler parties in all the houses, and Chanticler 'turns' on at all the music halls, until wherever one went for an evening's amus.e.m.e.nt one was pretty sure to see somebody or another dressed up like a c.o.c.k or a hen, and running the thing to death. But that's another story, and we'll pa.s.s over it. Now, it just so happened that one night--when the craze for the thing was dying out and barnyard dresses could be bought for a song--I strolled into a little fourth-rate cafe at Montmarte and there saw the only Chanticler dancer that I ever thought was worth a sou. She was a pretty, dainty little thing--light as a feather and graceful as a fairy. Alone, I think she might have made her mark; but she was one of what in music-halldom they call 'a team.' Her partner was a man--bad dancer, an indifferent singer, but a really pa.s.sable ventriloquist."

"A ventriloquist, monsieur--er--er!"

"Cleek, madame--name's Cleek, if you don't mind."

"Cleek! Oh, Lummy!" blurted out Mr. Nippers. But neither "madame"

nor Constable Gorham said anything. They merely swung round and made a sudden bolt; and Cleek, making a bolt, too, pounced down on them like a leaping cat, and the sharp click-click of the handcuffs he had borrowed from Mr. Nippers told just when he linked their two wrists together.

"Game's up, Madame Fifine, otherwise Madame Nosworth, the worthless wife of a worthless husband!" he rapped out sharply. "Game's up, Mr.

Henry Nosworth, bandit, pickpocket, and murderer! There's a hot corner in h.e.l.l waiting for the brute-beast that could kill his own father, and would, for the simple sake of money. Get at him, quick, Mr. Narkom. He's got one free hand! Nip the paper out of his pocket before the brute destroys it! Played, sir, played! Buck up, Miss Renfrew, buck up, little girl--you'll get your 'Boy' and you'll get Mr. Septimus Nosworth's promised fortune after all! 'G.o.d's in his heaven, and all's right with the world.'"

CHAPTER X

"Yes, a very, very clever scheme indeed, Miss Renfrew," agreed Cleek. "Laid with great cunning and carried out with extreme carefulness--as witness the man's coming here and getting appointed constable and biding his time, and the woman serving as cook for six months to get the entree to the house and to be ready to a.s.sist when the time of action came round. I don't think I had the least inkling of the truth until I entered this house and saw that woman. She had done her best to pad herself to an unwieldy size and to blanch portions of her hair, but she couldn't quite make her face appear old without betraying the fact that it was painted--and hers is one of those peculiarly pretty faces that one never forgets when one has ever seen it. I knew her the instant I entered the house; and, remembering the Chanticler dress with its fowl's-foot boots, I guessed at once what those marks would prove to be when I came to investigate them. She must have stamped on the ground with all her might, to sink the marks in so deeply--but she meant to make sure of the claws and the exaggerated scales on the toes leaving their imprint. I was certain we should find that dress and those boots among her effects; and--Mr. Narkom did. What I wrote on that pretended telegram was for him to slip away into the house proper and search every trunk and cupboard for them. Pardon? No, I don't think they really had any idea of incriminating Sir Ralph Droger.

That thought came into the fellow's mind when you stepped out and caught him stealing away after the murder had been committed. No doubt he, like you, had seen Sir Ralph practising for the sports, and he simply made capital of it. The main idea was to kill his father and to destroy the will; and of course, when it became apparent that the old gentleman had died intestate, even a discarded son must inherit. Where he made his blunder, however, was in his haste to practise his ventriloquial accomplishment to prevent your going into the Round House and discovering that his father was already dead. He ought to have waited until you had spoken, so that it would appear natural for the old man to know, without turning, who it was that had opened the door. That is what put me on the track of him. Until that moment I hadn't the slightest suspicion where he was nor under what guise he was hiding. Of course I had a vague suspicion, even before I came and saw her, that 'the cook' was in it. Her readiness in inventing a fict.i.tious gypsy with a bear's muzzle, coupled with what Nippers had told me of the animal marks she had pointed out, looked a bit fishy; but until I actually met her nothing really tangible began to take shape in my thoughts. That's all, I think. And now, good-night and good luck to you, Miss Renfrew. The riddle is solved; and Mr.

Narkom and I must be getting back to the wilderness and to our ground-floor beds in the hotel of the beautiful stars!"

Here, as if some spirit of nervous unrest had suddenly beset him, he turned round on his heel, motioned the superintendent to follow, and brus.h.i.+ng by the awed and staring Mr. Ephraim Nippers, whisked open the door and pa.s.sed briskly out into the hush and darkness of the night.

The footpath which led through the grounds to the gate and thence to the long lonely way back to Dollops and the caravan lay before him. He swung into it with a curious sort of energy and forged away from the house at such speed that Narkom's short, fat legs were hard put to it to catch up with him before he came to the path's end.

"My dear chap, are you going into training for a match with that Sir Ralph What's-his-name of whom Miss Renfrew spoke?" he wheezed when he finally overtook him. "You long, lean beggars are the very old boy for covering the ground. But wait until you get to be _my_ age, by James!"

"Perhaps I shan't. Perhaps they won't let me!" threw back Cleek, in a voice curiously blurred, as if he spoke with his teeth hard shut. "Donkeys do die, you know--that little bit of tommyrot about the absence of their dead bodies to the contrary."