Cleek of Scotland Yard Part 21

"Hardly that, I'm afraid," replied Cleek. "I think it was accident which put a _stop_ to the proceedings here, not one which created them. We now know perfectly well that the woman was in this house--undiscovered and unsuspected for days; and you may safely lay your life that she wasn't idle, wasn't stopping here for nothing.

The pile of papers burnt shows very clearly that considerable intelligence had been forwarded to her brother, so it is safe to infer that she was wiring it to him constantly."

"But how was it possible for her to obtain that information?" queried Sir Charles. "I again declare to you most solemnly, Mr. Cleek, that no one entered or left the room, that no word was spoken that could be said to have any bearing upon secret matters, so nothing could possibly be overheard; and how could the woman read doc.u.ments which were never out of our sight for a minute? Granted that she had some means of wiring intelligence to her brother--indeed, we now know that to have been the case--how under G.o.d's heaven did she obtain that intelligence?"

"Well, that's a facer, certainly, Sir Charles; but with such a past-mistress of ingenuity as she--well, you never know. Sure she couldn't possibly have managed to get into the room and hide herself somewhere, you think?"

"I am positive she couldn't. The thing isn't possible. There's no place where she _could_ have hidden. Come in and see."

He unlocked the door and, followed by the rest, led the way into the room where the inquiry into the dockmaster's affairs had been held. A glance about it was sufficient to corroborate Sir Charles's statement.

On one side stood a large fireproof safe, closely locked; on the other were two windows--iron-grilled and with inside shutters of steel; at one end was a large flat-topped table, at which Sir Charles and MacInery had conducted their investigation of the books, et cetera, and at the other a smaller writing-table, upon which stood a typewriter set on a sound-deadening square of felt, and over which hung a white-disked electric bulb. There were five chairs, and not another mortal thing. No cupboard, no wardrobe, no chest--nothing under heaven in which a creature any bigger than a cat could have hidden.

"You see," said Sir Charles, with a wave of the hand, "she couldn't have hidden in here, neither could she have hidden outside and overheard, for nothing was said that could have been of any use to her."

"Quite confident of that?"

"Oh, I can answer for that, Mr. Cleek," put in young Grimsd.i.c.k. "We were so careful upon that point that Sir Charles never dictated even the smallest thing that he wanted recorded; merely pa.s.sed over the papers and said: 'Copy that where I have marked it'; and to save my table from being overcrowded, I scratched down the marked paragraphs in shorthand, and prepared to transcribe them on the typewriter later. Why, sir, look here; the diabolical part of the mystery is that those two fragments of sentences flashed out at the telegraph office at the time of that frightful peal of thunder, and at that very instant I was in the act of transcribing them on the typewriter."

"h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo!" rapped out Cleek, twitching round sharply. "Sure of that, are you--absolutely sure?"

"Beyond all question, Mr. Cleek. Sir Charles will tell you that the thunder-clap was so violent and so sudden that both he and Mr.

MacInery fairly jumped. As for me, I was so startled that I struck a wrong letter by mistake and had to rub out a word and type it over again. Come and see. The paper is still on my table, and I can show you the erasure and the alteration. Now, n.o.body could have seen that paper, at that particular time; not a solitary word had been spoken with regard to it, and it wasn't more than half a minute before that Sir Charles himself had taken it out of the safe. Look, sir, here's the paper and here's the place where I erased the word--see?"

Cleek walked over to the typewriter and looked at the paper, saw the erasure, lifted it, looked at other typed sheets lying under it, and then knotted up his brows.

"H'm!" he said reflectively, and looked farther. "You've got a devilish hard touch for a man who does this sort of thing constantly, and ought therefore to be an adept in the art of typewriting evenly.

And there are other errors and erasures. Look here, my friend, I don't believe you're used to this machine."

"No, sir, I'm not. I'm not accustomed to a s.h.i.+ft key. My own machine hasn't one."

"Your own! By Gad! What are you using this machine for, then, if you've got one of your own? And why didn't you bring your own when you came here on important business like this?"

"I did; but as we found this one already here I started in on it; and when I found it difficult to work, I went out to get my own, which I'd left in the outer room, just as I'd taken it from the carrier who brought it over. But the careless beggar must have handled it as if it were a trunk, for the spring was broken, the carriage wouldn't work, and two of the type bars were snapped off."

"By _Jupiter!_" Cleek's voice struck in so suddenly and with such vehemence that it was almost a bark, like that of a startled terrier, and Mr. Narkom, knowing the signs, fairly jumped at him.

"You've found out something, _I_ know!" he cried. "What is it, old chap--eh?"

"Let me alone, let me alone!" flung back Cleek, irritably. "I want the dockmaster! I want him at once! Where is the man? Oh, there you are, Mr. Beachman. Speak up--quickly. Was that 'Hilmann' woman ever allowed to enter this room? Did she ever make use of this typewriter at any time?"

"Yes, sir--often," he replied. "She was one of the best and most careful typists I ever saw. Used to attend to all my correspondence for me and----Good G.o.d, man, what are you doing? Don't you know that that thing's Government property?"

For Cleek, not waiting for him to finish what he was saying, had suddenly laid hands on the machine, found it screwed fast to the table and, catching up the nearest chair, was now smas.h.i.+ng and banging away at it with all his force.

"Government destruction, you mean!" he gave back sharply. "Didn't I tell you she was a very demon of ingenuity, stupid? Didn't I say----Victory! Now then, look here--all of you! Here's a pretty little contrivance, if you like."

He had battered the typewriter from its fastenings and sent it cras.h.i.+ng to the floor, a wreck, not ten seconds before; now, his hand, which, immediately thereafter, had been moving rapidly over the surface of the sound-deadening square of felt beneath, whisked that, too, from the table, and let them all see the discovery he had made.

Protruding from the surface of that table and set at regular intervals there were forty-two needle points of steel--one for each key of the typewriter--which a moment before had pierced the felt's surface just sufficient to meet the bottom of the "key" above it, and to be driven downward when that key was depressed.

Spectacular as ever in these times, he faced about and gave his hand an outward fling.

"Gentlemen, the answer to the riddle," he said. "You have been supplying her with the needed information yourselves. A ducat to a door k.n.o.b, every time a letter was struck on this machine its exact duplicate was recorded somewhere else. Get a saw, Mr. Beachman, and let us see to what these steel points lead."

They led to a most ingenious contrivance, as it turned out. A highly sensitive spiral spring attached to an "arm" of thin, tough steel beneath the surface of the table communicated with a rigid wire running down the wall behind one of that table's back legs and, pa.s.sing thence through a small gimlet-hole in the floor, descended and disappeared.

Following that wire's course, they, too, descended until, in the fulness of time, the end was reached in a far corner of the cellar underneath the building.

There, behind an upturned empty cask, they came upon yet another wire, which wound upward, and was found afterward to travel out and up beside the "leader" until it joined the private wire of the dockyard just outside the dormer window of what had once been Miss Greta Hilmann's bedroom. And to these wires--the one descending and the other ascending from behind that empty cask in the cellar--there was a singular contrivance attached. To one, a plain, everyday instrument for dispatching telegrams by the Morse system; to the other, a curious little keyboard which was an exact counterpart of the keyboard to the typewriter upstairs; and besides this there lay some remnants of food from the store cupboard of the house, and a sheaf of paper leaves covered with typewritten characters.

"Gentlemen, the absolute end of the riddle at last," said Cleek as he took up one of those leaves. "Look at them--Government secrets every one. And I, like an a.s.s, forgot to remember that Nicolo Ferrand was one of the cleverest mechanicians and one of the craftiest 'wire workers' that the underworld boasts. Look, Sir Charles; look, Mr. Narkom. Every touch of a letter on the keyboard of the typewriter upstairs registered its exact duplicate on this infernal contrivance down here, and fast as it was recorded, that vixen wired it on to Boris Borovonski. Can't you understand now why she left her post and flew to him? The shock which killed him and travelled with lessened force down the wire to the telegraph operator was felt here, and the instrument she used was, in all probability, disabled. She knew then, of course, that something had happened to her brother, and in a panic flew to find out what.

"But even the shrewdest slip up sometimes and overlook things. Her foolish slip lay in this: that she forgot to take with her these original drafts of the intelligence she had wired to the dead man."

"Ah, weel," said Mr. Alexander MacInery, who, like a true Scotsman, never liked to be found at the small end of the horn upon any occasion, "after all, 'tis no more than I expected. I said it was accident that was at the bottom of it, and accident it's turned out to be."

"No doubt," agreed Cleek, with one of his peculiar smiles. "But, personally, I always like to think that there's a Power above, and when men--_and_ nations--have played the game squarely----Shan't we be going upstairs, Sir Charles? Mr. Narkom and I have a long ride back to town, and the afternoon is on the decline."

It was still farther on that road, however, before he was able to actually tear himself away from the dockyard and be off home; for there were those little legal necessities which are the penalty of dealing with Government affairs to be attended to; there was the boring business of meeting high officials, and listening to compliments and congratulations, and he was really glad when the limousine, answering to orders, rolled up, the final good-byes were said, and he and Mr. Narkom swung off townward together.

But despite the fact that he had just carried to a successful conclusion a case which would go far to enhance his reputation and to hasten the day for which he had so long and so earnestly worked, Cleek was singularly uncommunicative, markedly abstracted, as they rode back through the streets of Portsmouth Town on their way to the highroad; and had the superintendent been more observant and less wrapped up in the glory that was to be theirs as the result of the day's adventure, he might have discovered that, while his ally seemed to be dozing stupidly when he was not leaning back in a corner and smoking, he was all the time keeping a close watch of the crowded streets through which they were speeding as if looking for some one or something he expected to see. Nor did he relax this peculiar system of vigilance even after the town itself had dropped away into the far distance, and the car was scudding along over the broad stretches and the less-frequented thoroughfares of the open country.

"I shall not go all the way back with you, if you don't mind, Mr.

Narkom," he said, breaking silence abruptly, as they raced along.

"Just set me down at the place where you picked me up this morning, please, and I will do the rest of the journey by train."

"Cinnamon! Why?"

"Oh, just a mere whim of mine, that's all. No--don't press me for an explanation, please. 'Where ignorance is bliss,' et cetera. Besides, I'm a whimsical beggar at best, you know--and who bothers to inquire why a donkey prefers thistles to hay? So just drop me down when we reach the outskirts of Guildford, if you will be so kind."

Mr. Narkom was discreet enough to drop the subject at that and to make no further allusion to the matter until they came, in the fulness of time, to the place in question. Here he called Lennard to a halt, and Cleek alighted--not furtively, nor yet in haste--and, standing beside the car, reached in and shook hands with him.

"Until you want me again," he smiled in his easy, offhand way. "And if that turns out to be a long time off I shan't be sorry. Meanwhile, if you wish to do me a favour, look about for a limousine of another make and a quite different colour. I've an odd idea that this one is fast coming to the end of its career of usefulness. Good-bye. All right, Lennard--let her go."

Then the door of the car closed with a smack, and he was off and away--so openly and at such a leisurely pace that it was clear he had neither need nor desire to effect a getaway un.o.bserved.

"Well, I'll be dashed!" was Mr. Narkom's unspoken comment upon the proceeding--for, under his hat, he had come to the conclusion that Cleek had, in some way, by some unconfessed means, learned that Waldemar or the Apache had come back into the game and were again on his heels, but had said nothing for fear of worrying him. "Walking off as cool as you please and never the first attempt to come any of his old Vanis.h.i.+ng Cracksman's dodges. Amazing beggar! What's he up to now, I wonder?"

It is just possible that could he have followed he would have wondered still more, for Cleek was bearing straight down upon the populous portions of the town, and about ten minutes after the two had parted, struck into the High Street, walked along it for a short distance, studying the signs over the various buildings until, sighting one which announced that it was the Guildford Office of the Royal British Life a.s.surance Society, he crossed the street, and with great deliberation pa.s.sed in under it, and disappeared from sight.

It was one of the contradictory points of his singularly contradictory character, that whereas he had chafed under the delay in getting away from the Royal dockyard at Portsea because he was eager to get back to his work in the little old walled garden, and all his thoughts were with the flowers he was preparing for _her_, in the end he did not see the place until after the moon was up, and all hope of gardening for that day had to be abandoned entirely, yet--he came back to Dollops whistling and as happy as a sandboy.

He was up with the first c.o.c.k crow next morning, and dawn found him plying fork and rake and trowel among the flowers, and positively bubbling over with enthusiasm; for the budding roses were just beginning to show colour and to give promise of full bloom for the day of days--and more than that he did not ask of heaven.

Indeed, it was written that he might not, for the balance had again swung over, the call of Nature again sounded, and the Great Mother, taking him to her bosom, had again merged the Man in the Idealist and cradled him into forgetfulness of all spells but hers. So that all through the day he went in and out among his flowers whistling and singing and living in a sort of ecstasy that ran on like a dream without end.

On the morrow the little garden was all finished and ready, and nothing now remained but to sit in idleness and wait.