Cleek of Scotland Yard Part 31

"Good! And while you have been attending to your little part of the business I've been looking out for mine, dear friend. Look!" said Cleek, and opened up the little ball of paper sufficiently to show what looked like a cut-gla.s.s scent bottle belonging to a lady's dressing-bag close stoppered with a metal plug sealed round with candle wax. "Woorali, my friend; and enough in it to kill an army.

Come along--we've got to the bottom of the thing, let us go up and 'report.' The gentlemen will be getting anxious."

They were; for on reaching the armoury they found young Drake and Lord Fallowfield showing strong traces of the mental strain under which they were labouring and talking agitatedly with Lady Marjorie Wynde, who had, in the interim, come up and joined them, and was herself apparently in need of something to sustain and to strengthen her; for Ojeebi was standing by with an extended salver, from which she had just lifted to her lips a gla.s.s of port.

"Good G.o.d! I never was so glad to see anybody in my life, gentlemen,"

broke out young Drake as they appeared. "It's beyond the hour you asked for--ages beyond--and my nerves are almost p.r.i.c.king their way through my skin. Mr. Cleek--Mr. Narkom--speak up, for heaven's sake. Have you succeeded in finding out anything?"

"We've done better than that, Mr. Drake," replied Cleek, "for we have succeeded in finding out everything. Look sharp there, Mr.

Narkom, and shut that door. Lady Marjorie looks as if she were going to faint, and we don't want a whole houseful of servants piling in here. That's it. Back against the door, please; her ladys.h.i.+p seems on the point of crumpling up."

"No, no, I'm not; indeed, I'm not!" protested Lady Marjorie with a forced smile and a feeble effort to hold her galloping nerves in check. "I am excited and very much upset, of course, but I am really much stronger than you would think. Still, if you would rather I should leave the room, Mr. Cleek----"

"Oh, by no means, your ladys.h.i.+p. I know how anxious you are to learn the result of my investigations. And, by that token, somebody else is anxious, too--the doctor. Call him in, will you, Mr. Drake? He is still with the others in the Stone Drum, I a.s.sume."

He was; and he came out of it with them at young Drake's call, and joined the party in the armoury.

"Doctor," said Cleek, looking up as he came in, "we've got to the puzzle's unpicking, and I thought you'd be interested to hear the result. I was right about the substance employed, for I've found the stuff and I've nailed the guilty party. It was woorali, and the reason why there was no trace of a weapon was because the blessed thing melted. It was an icicle, my friend, an icicle with its point steeped in woorali, and if you want to know how it did its work--why, it was shot in there from the cross-bow hanging on the wall immediately behind me, and the person who shot it in was so short that a chair was necessary to get up to the bowman's slit when----No, you don't, my beauty! There's a gentleman with a noose waiting to pay his respects to all such beasts as you!"

Speaking, he sprang with a sharp, flas.h.i.+ng movement that was like to nothing so much as the leap of a pouncing cat, and immediately there was a yap and a screech, a yell and a struggle, a click of clamping handcuffs, and a scuffle of writhing limbs, and a moment later they that were watching saw him rise with a laugh, and stand, with his hands on his hips, looking down at Ojeebi lying crumpled up in a heap, with gyves on his wrists and panic in his eyes, at the foot of the guarded door.

"Well, my pleasant-faced, agreeable little demon, it'll be many a long day before the spirits of your ancestors welcome you back to Nippon!" Cleek said as the panic-stricken j.a.p, realizing what was before him, began to shriek and shriek until his brain and nerves sank into a collapse and he fainted where he lay. "I've got you and I've got the woorali. I went through your trunk and found it--as I knew I should from the moment I clapped eyes upon you. If the laws of the country are so lax that they make it possible for you to do what you have done, they also are stringent enough to make you pay the price of it with your yellow little neck!"

"In the name of heaven, Mr. Cleek," spoke up young Drake, breaking silence suddenly, "what can the boy have done? You speak as if it were he that murdered my father; but, man, why should he? What had he to gain? What motive could a harmless little chap like this have for killing the man he served?"

"The strongest in the world, my friend--the greed of gain!" said Cleek. "What he could not do in your father's land it is possible for him to do in this one, which foolishly allows its subjects to insure even the life of its ruler without his will, knowledge, or consent. For nearly a twelvemonth this little brute has been carrying a heavy insurance upon the life of Jefferson P. Drake; but, thank G.o.d, he'll never live to collect it. What's that, Doctor? How did I find that out? By the simplest means possible, my dear sir.

"For a reason which concerns n.o.body but myself, I dropped in at the Guildford office of the Royal British Life a.s.surance Society in the latter part of last May, and upon that occasion I marked the singular circ.u.mstance that a j.a.panese was then paying the premium of an already existing policy. Why I speak of it as a singular circ.u.mstance, and why I let myself be impressed by it, lie in the fact that, as the j.a.panese regard their dead ancestors with absolute veneration and the privilege of being united with them a boon which makes death glorious, life a.s.surance is not popular with them, since it seems to be insulting their ancestors and makes joining them tainted with the odour of baser things.

Consequently, I felt pretty certain that it was some other life than his own he was there to pay the regularly recurring premium upon. The chances are, Doctor, that in the ordinary run of things I should never have thought of that man or that circ.u.mstance again.

But it so happens that I have a very good memory for faces and events, so when I came down here to investigate this case, and in the late Mr. Drake's valet saw that j.a.panese man again--voila! I should have been an idiot not to put two and two together.

"The remainder, a telegram inquiring if an insurance upon the life of Jefferson P. Drake, the famous inventor, had been effected by anybody but the man himself, settled the thing beyond question. As for the rest, it is easy enough to explain. Your remark that the little puddle found upon the floor of the Stone Drum appeared to you to bear a distinct resemblance to the water resulting from melted snow, added to what I already knew regarding the refrigerating plant installed here, put me on the track of the ice; and as the small spot on the temple was of so minute a character, I knew that the weapon must have been pointed. A pointed weapon of ice leaves but one conclusion possible, Doctor. I have since learned from the man in charge of the refrigerating plant that this yellow blob of iniquity here was much taken by the icicles which the process of refrigeration caused to acc.u.mulate in the place and upon the machine itself during rotation, and that last night shortly after twelve o'clock he came down and broke off and carried away three of them. How I came to know what motive power he employed to launch the poisoned shaft can be explained in a word. Most of the weapons--indeed, all but one--hanging on the wall of this armoury are lightly coated with dust, showing that it must be a week or more since any housemaid's work was attended to in this particular quarter. One of them is not dusty. Furthermore, when I took it down for the purpose of examining it I discovered that, although smeared with ink or paint to make it look as old as the others, the bowstring was of fresh catgut, and there was a suspicious dampness about the 'catch,' which suggested either wet hands or the partial melting, under the heat of living flesh, of the 'shaft,' which had been an icicle. That's all, Doctor; that's all, Mr. Drake; that's quite all, Lord Fallowfield. A good, true-hearted young chap will get both the girl he wants and the inheritance which should be his by right; a good, true friend will get back the ancestral home he lost through misfortune and has regained through chance, and a patient and faithful lady will, in all probability, get the man she loves without now having to wait until he comes into a dead man's shoes. Lady Marjorie, my compliments. Doctor, my best respects, and gentlemen all--good afternoon."

And here with that weakness for the theatrical which was his besetting sin, he bowed to them with his hat laid over his heart, and walked out of the room.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

"No, Mr. Narkom, no. As an instrument of death the icicle is _not_ new," said Cleek, answering the superintendent's question as the limousine swung out through the gates of Heatherington Hall and faced the long journey back to London. "If you will look up the records of that energetic female, Catherine de Medici, Queen of France, you will find that she employed it in that capacity upon two separate occasions; and coming down to more modern times, you will also find that in the year 1872 the Russian, Lydia Bolorfska, used it at Galitch, in the province of Kostroma, to stab her sleeping husband. But as a projectile, it _is_ new--as a _successful_ projectile, I mean--for there have been many attempts made, owing to its propensity to dissolve after use, to discharge it from firearms, but never in one single instance have those attempts resulted in success. The explosion has always resulted in s.h.i.+vering and dispersing it in a shower of splinters as it leaves the muzzle of the weapon. There can be no doubt, however, that could it be propelled in a perfectly horizontal position, the power behind it would, in spite of its brittle nature, drive it through a pine board an inch thick. But, as I have said, the motive power always defeats the object by landing it against the target in a ma.s.s of splinters."

"I see. And the j.a.p got over that by employing a cross-bow; and that, of course, did the trick."

"No. I doubt if he would have been able to put enough power behind that to drive it into the man's body with deadly effect, if, indeed, he could make it enter it at all. Where Ojeebi scored over all others lay in the fact that with his plan there was no necessity to have the icicle enter the victim's body at all. He required nothing more than just sufficient power of propulsion to break the skin and establish contact with the blood, and then that h.e.l.lish compound on the point of the projectile could be depended upon to do the rest. It did, as you know, and then dropped to the floor and melted away, leaving nothing but a little puddle of water behind it."

"But, Cleek, my dear chap, how do you account for the fact that when the doctor came to a.n.a.lyze that water he found no trace of the poison in it?"

"He did, Mr. Narkom, only that he didn't recognize it. Woorali is extremely volatile, for one thing, and evaporates rapidly. For another, there was a very small quant.i.ty used--a very small quant.i.ty necessary, so malignant it is--and the water furnished by the melting icicle could dilute that little tremendously. It would not be able to obliterate all trace of it, however, but the infinitesimal portion remaining would make spring water give the same answer in a.n.a.lysis as that given by the water resulting from melted snow. It was when Doctor Hague mentioned the fact that if it wasn't for the utter absurdity of looking for such a substance in England in July, he should have said it _was_ melted snow, that I really got my first clue. Later, however, when----But come, let's chuck it! I've had enough of murder and murderers for one day--let's talk of something else. Our new 'turnout,' here, for instance. You have 'done yourself proud' this time and no mistake--she certainly _is_ a beauty, Mr. Narkom. By the way, what have you done with the old red one? Sold it?"

"Not I, indeed. I know a trick worth two of that. I send it out, empty, every day, in the hope of having those Apache johnnies follow it, and have a plain-clothes man trailing along behind in a taxi, ready to nip in and follow them if they do. But they don't--that is, they haven't up to the present; but there's always hope, you know."

"Not in that direction, I'm afraid. Waldemar's a better general than that, believe me. Knowing that we have discovered his little plan of following the red limousine just as we discovered his other, of following me, he will have gone off on another tack, believe me."

"Scotland! You don't think, do you, that he can possibly have found out anything about the new one and has set in to follow _this_?"

"No, I do not. As a matter of fact I fancy he has started to do what he ought to have done in the beginning--that is, to keep a close watch on the criminal news in the papers day by day, and every time a crime of any importance crops up, pay his respects to the theatre of it and find out who is the detective handling the case. A ducat to a doughnut he'd have been on our heels down here to-day if this little business of the Stone Drum had been made public in time to get into the morning papers. He means to have me, Mr. Narkom, if having me is possible; and he's down to the last ditch and getting desperate. Yesterday's cables from Mauravania are anything but rea.s.suring."

"I know. They say that unless something happens very shortly to turn the tide in Ulric's favour and quell the cries for 'Restoration,' the King's downfall and expulsion are merely a matter of a few days at most. But what's that got to do with it that you suggest its bearing upon any need for haste on Waldemar's part?"

"Only that, with matters in such a state, he cannot long defer his return to the army of his country and the defence of its king,"

replied Cleek, serenely. "And every day he loses in failing to pay his respects to your humble servant in the manner he desires to do increases the strain of the situation and keeps him from the service of his royal master."

"Well, I wish to G.o.d something would happen to blow him and his royal master and their blooming royal country off the map, dammem!"

blazed out Narkom, too savage to be choice of words. "We've never had a moment's peace, you and I, since the dashed combination came into the game. And for what, I should like to know? Not that it's any use asking _you_. You're so devilish close-mouthed a man might as well ask questions of a ton of coal for all answer he may hope to get. I shall always believe, however, that you did something pretty dashed bad to the King of Mauravania that time you were over there on that business about the Rainbow Pearl, to make the beggar turn against you, as I believe he _has_."

"Then, you will always believe what isn't true," replied Cleek, lighting a fresh cigarette. "I simply restored the pearl and his Majesty's letter to the hands of Count Irma, and did not so much as see the King while I was there. Why should I?--a mere police detective, who had been hired to do a service and paid for it like any other hireling. I took my money and I went my way; that's all there was about it. If it has pleased Count Waldemar to entertain an ugly feeling of resentment toward me, I can't help that, can I now?"

"Oh, then, it's really a personal affair between you and him, after all?"

"Something like that. He doesn't approve of my--er--knowing things that I do know; and it would be the end of a very promising future for him if I told. Here--have a cigarette and smoke yourself into a better temper. You look savage enough to bite a nail in two."

"I'd bite it in four if it looked anything like that Waldemar johnnie, by James!" a.s.serted the superintendent, vigorously. "And if ever he lays a hand on _you_----Look here, Cleek: I know it sounds un-English, very Continental, rotten 'soft' from one man to another, but--dammit, Cleek, I love you! I'd go to h.e.l.l for you! I'd die fighting for you! Do you understand?"

"Perfectly," said Cleek; then he put out his hand and took Mr.

Narkom's in a hard, firm grip, and added, gently: "My friend, my comrade, my _pal_! Side by side--together--to the end." And the car ran on for a good half mile before either spoke again.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

"Mr. Narkom!"

It was an hour later, and Cleek's voice broke the silence abruptly.

He had taken out his notebook and had been scribbling in it for some little time, but now, as he spoke, he tore out the written leaf and pa.s.sed it over to the superintendent.

"Mr. Narkom, I refused, in the beginning, to give you the address of the little house at which I was located. Here it is. Put it in your pocketbook against future need, will you?"

"Yes, certainly. But cinnamon! old chap, what good is it to me now when you've left the place?"

"You will understand, perhaps, when I tell you that Miss Lorne is its present occupant. It was for that I took it in the beginning.

There may come a need to communicate with her; there may come a need for her to communicate with you. There's always a chance, you know, that a candle may be put out when the wind blows at it from all directions; and if anything should happen--I mean if--er--anything having a bearing upon me personally that you think she _ought_ to be told should come to pa.s.s--well, just go to her at once, will you?--there's a dear friend. That's the address (don't lose it) and full directions how to get there speedily. I am giving it to you now, as we shall soon be in town again and I shall leave you directly we arrive there. I'm in haste to get back to Dollops and see if between us we can't hit upon some plan, he and I, to get at the whereabouts of Waldemar. That plain-clothes man of yours is like the butler with the bottle of cider--he 'doesn't seem to get any forrarder.'"

"Kibblewhite!" blurted out the superintendent, sitting up sharply.

"Well, of all the born jacka.s.ses, of all the mutton-heads in this world----"