Cleek, the Master Detective Part 30

In another instant Black Riot was led out, uninjured, untouched, in the very pink of condition and, in spite of the tragedy and the dead man's presence, one or two of the guards were so carried away that they essayed a cheer.

"Stop that! Stop it instantly!" rapped out Sir Henry, facing round upon them. "What's a horse, even the best, beside the loss of an honest life like that?" and flung out a shaking hand in the direction of dead Logan.

"It will be the story of last night over again, of course? You heard his scream, heard his fall, but he was dead when you got to him--dead--and you found no one here?"

"Not a soul, Sir Henry. The doors were all locked; no grille is missing from any window; no one is in the loft; no one in any of the stalls; no one in any crook or corner of the place."

"Send for the constable, the justice of the peace, anybody!" chimed in the Rev. Ambrose Smeer at this. "Henry, will you never be warned; never take these awful lessons to heart? This sinful practice of racing horses for money----"

"Oh, hush, hus.h.!.+ Don't preach me a sermon now, uncle," interposed Sir Henry. "My heart's torn, my mind crazed by this abominable thing. Poor old Logan! Poor, faithful old chap! Oh!" He whirled and looked over at Cleek, who still stood inactive, staring at the flour-dusted floor. "And they said that no mystery was too great for you to get at the bottom of it, no riddle too complex for you to find the answer? Can't you do something? Can't you suggest something? Can't you see any glimmer of light at all?"

Cleek looked up, and that curious smile which Narkom knew so well, and would have known had he been there was the "danger signal," looped up one corner of his mouth.

"I fancy it is _all_ 'light,' Sir Henry," he said. "I may be wrong, but I fancy it is merely a question of comparative height. Do I puzzle you by that? Well, let me explain. Lady Wilding there is one height, Mr.

Sharpless is another, and I am a third; and if they two were to place themselves side by side, and, say, about four inches apart, and I were to stand immediately behind them, the difference would be most apparent.

There you are. Do you grasp it?"

"Not in the least."

"Bothered if I do either," supplemented Sharpless. "It all sounds like tommy rot to me."

"Does it?" said Cleek. "Then let me explain it by ill.u.s.tration," and he walked quietly toward them. "Lady Wilding, will you oblige me by standing here? Thank you very much. Now, if you please, Mr. Sharpless, will you stand beside her ladys.h.i.+p while I take up my place here immediately behind you both? That's it exactly. A little nearer, please--just a little, so that your left elbow touches her ladys.h.i.+p's right. Now then," his two hands moved briskly, there was a click-click; and then: "There you are; that explains it, my good Mr. and Mrs. Filippo Bucarelli; explains it completely!"

And as he stepped aside on saying this, those who were watching, those who heard Lady Wilding's scream and Mr. Sharpless's snarling oath and saw them vainly try to spring apart and dart away, saw also that a steel handcuff was on the woman's right wrist, its mate on the man's left one, and that they were firmly chained together.

"In the name of heaven, man," began Sir Henry, appalled by this, and growing red and white by rapid turns.

"I fancy that heaven has very little to do with this precious pair, Sir Henry," interposed Cleek. "You want the two people who are accountable for these diabolical crimes, and there they stand."

"What! Do you mean to tell me that Sharpless, that my wife----"

"Don't give the lady a t.i.tle to which she has not and never had any legal right, Sir Henry. If it had ever occurred to you to emulate my example to-night and search the lady's effects, you would have found that she was christened Enriqua Dolores Torjada, and that she was married to Senor Filippo Bucarelli here, at Valparaiso in Chili, three years ago, and that her marriage to you was merely a clever little scheme to get hold of a pot of money and share it with her rascally husband."

"It's a lie!" snarled out the male prisoner. "It's an infernal policeman's lie! You never found any such thing!"

"Pardon me, but I did," replied Cleek serenely. "And what's more, I found the little phial of coriander and oil of sa.s.safras in your room, senor, and I shall finish off the Mynga Worm in another ten minutes!"

Bucarelli and his wife gave a mingled cry, and, chained together though they were, made a wild bolt for the door; only, however, to be met on the threshold by the local constable to whom Cleek had dispatched a note some hours previously.

"Thank you, Mr. Philpotts; you are very prompt," he said. "There are your prisoners nicely trussed and waiting for you. Take them away, we are quite done with them here. Sir Henry"--he turned to the baronet--"if Black Riot is fitted to win the Derby she will win it and you need have no more fear for her safety. No one has ever for one moment tried to get at her. You yourself were the one that precious pair were after, and the bait was your life a.s.surance. By killing off the watchers over Black Riot one by one they knew that there would come a time, when, being able to get no one else to take the risk of guarding the horse and sleeping on that bed before the steel-room door, you would do it yourself; and when that time came they would have had you."

"But how? By what means?"

"By one of the most diabolical imaginable. Among the reptiles of Patagonia, Sir Henry, there is one, a species of black adder, known in the country as the Mynga Worm whose bite is more deadly than that of the rattler or the copperhead, and as rapid in its action as prussic acid itself. It has, too, a great velocity of movement and a peculiar power of springing and hurling itself upon its prey. The Patagonians are a barbarous people in the main and, like all barbarous people, are vengeful, cunning, and subtle. A favourite revenge of theirs upon unsuspecting enemies is to get within touch of them and secretly to smear a mixture of coriander and oil of sa.s.safras upon some part of their bodies, and then either to lure or drive them into the forest. By a peculiar arrangement of Mother Nature this mixture has a fascination, a maddening effect upon the Mynga Worm, just as a red rag has on a bull, and, enraged by the scent, it finds the spot smeared with it and delivers its deadly bite."

"Good heaven! How horrible! And you mean to tell me----"

"That they employed one of those deadly reptiles in this case? Yes, Sir Henry. I suspected it the very moment I smelt the odour of the coriander and sa.s.safras, but I suspected that an animal or a reptile of some kind was at the bottom of the mystery at a prior period. That is why I wanted the flour. Look! Do you see where I sifted it over this spot near the Patagonian plant? And do you see those serpentine tracks through the middle of it? The Mynga Worm is there in that box, at the roots of that plant. Now see!"

He caught up a horse blanket, spread it on the floor, lifted the box and plant, set them down in the middle of it and, with a quick gathering up of the ends of the blanket, converted it into a bag and tied it round with a hitching strap.

"Get spades, forks, anything, and dig a hole outside in the paddock," he went on. "Make a deep hole, a yard deep at the least--then get some straw, some paraffin, turpentine, anything that will burn furiously and quickly, and we will soon finish the little beast."

The servants flew to obey, and when the hole was dug, he carried the bag out and lowered it carefully into it, covered it with straw, drenched this with a gallon or more of lamp oil, and rapidly applied a match to it and sprang back.

A moment later those who were watching saw a small black snake make an ineffectual effort to leap out of the blazing ma.s.s, fall back into the flames, and disappear forever.

"The method of procedure?" said Cleek, answering the baronet's query as the latter was pouring out what he called "a nerve settler" prior to following the Rev. Ambrose's example and going to bed. "Very cunning, and yet very, very simple, Sir Henry. Bucarelli made a practice, as I saw this evening, of helping the chosen watcher to make his bed on the floor in front of the door to the steel room, but during the time he was removing the blankets from the cupboard his plan was to smear them with the coriander and sa.s.safras and so arrange the top blanket that when the watcher lay down, the stuff touched his neck or throat and made that the point of attack for the snake, whose fang makes a small round spot not bigger than the end of a knitting needle, which is easily pa.s.sed over by those not used to looking for such a thing. There was such a spot on Tolliver's throat; such another at the base of Murple's skull, and there is a third in poor Logan's left temple. No, no more, please; this is quite enough. Success to Black Riot and the Derby! The riddle is solved, Sir Henry. Good-night!"

CHAPTER X

THE RIDDLE OF THE SIVA STONES

Cleek threw aside his newspaper as the telephone jingled, and walking to the instrument, unhooked the receiver.

"Hallo!" he said; then, a second later, "Yes. This is Captain Burbage speaking," he added, and stood silent, waiting. Not for long, however.

Almost instantly the connecting line hummed with the sound of some one at the other end whistling the opening bars of "G.o.d Save the King," and that settled it.

"You, is it, Mr. Narkom?" Cleek said, as the anthem broke off at an agreed point, which point, by the way, was altered every twenty-four hours. "No, nothing in particular. I was only reading the account of Black Riot's Derby. Ripping, wasn't it? Half a yard ahead of the nearest compet.i.tor, and Minnow nowhere. What? Yes, certainly, if you want me. A great hurry, eh? Yes, start this minute if that will do. What's that?

Yes; I know the place well. All right. I'll be there almost as soon as you are. Good-bye," and he switched off the line instantly.

Five minutes later, accompanied by Dollops bearing the inevitable brown leather kit-bag, in case a change of attire should be found necessary, he emerged from the house in Clarges Street, walked down Piccadilly as far as Duke Street, turned from that into Jermyn Street, and strolled leisurely along in the direction of the Geological Museum, keeping a sharp look-out, however, for the red limousine.

Of a sudden it came pelting round the corner of Regent Street, whizzed along until Lennard, the chauffeur, caught sight of the well-known figure, then swung to the kerb close to the corner of York Street and came to an abrupt halt. In another moment Cleek had taken the brown kit-bag from Dollops, stepped with it into the vehicle, and was by Narkom's side.

"Well," he said, gripping the superintendent's welcoming hand and settling himself comfortably as the motor swung out into the roadway again and continued on its way. "Here I am, you see, Mr. Narkom, and,"

nodding toward the kit-bag, "prepared for any emergency, as they say in the melodramas. It isn't often you give me a 'hurry call' like this, so it's fair to suppose that you have something of unusual importance on hand."

"If you said I had something positively amazing on hand you'd come a deal nearer the mark, my dear fellow," returned the superintendent. "The steel-room case was a fool to it for mystery, although it is not entirely unlike it in some respects; for the thing happened behind locked doors, and there's no clue to when, where, or how the a.s.sa.s.sin got in nor the ghost of an explanation to be given as to how he got out again. That is where the two cases are alike; but where they differ, is the most amazing point; for the d.i.c.kens of it is that whereas the steel room was a stable and there were a few people on guard, this crime was committed in a house filled with company. A reception was in progress, yet not only was one of the best-known figures in London society done to death under the very noses, so to speak, of her friends and acquaintances, but jewels of immense value, jewels of historical interest, in fact, were carried off in the most unaccountable manner. In brief, my dear Cleek, the victim was the aged d.u.c.h.ess of Heatherlands; the jewels that have vanished are those two marvellous blush-pink diamonds known to the world of gem collectors as 'The Siva Stones.'

Surely, you whose knowledge seems unlimited"--noting the blank look on Cleek's face--"must have heard of those divine gems?"

"Indeed, yes," replied Cleek. "I have good reason to know of them, as I shall prove to you presently. My knowledge of the diamonds is so complete that I can tell you at once that they weigh twenty-four and one sixty-fifth carats each; that, apart from their marvellous and most unusual colour, a delicate azalea pink, like the first flush of the morning, they are, perhaps, the most perfectly cut and most perfectly matched pair of diamonds in the world. What may be their earliest history it is impossible to state. All that is positively known of them is that they once formed two of the three eyes of the G.o.d Siva, and that they were abstracted from the head of the idol during the loot of the Hindu temples after Clive's defeat of Suraja Dowlah, in 1757. They were subsequently brought to England, where, in course of time, they pa.s.sed into the possession of the fifth Duke of Heatherlands, who bestowed them upon his wife as a personal gift, so that they were never at any time included in the entail."

"My dear Cleek," said Narkom, looking at him with positive bewilderment, "is there anything you do not know? It is positively marvellous that you should be in possession of all these details regarding the Siva stones."

Cleek looked down at his toes and a faint flush reddened his drooping face.

"Not so marvellous as you may think, Mr. Narkom, when I tell you the genesis of it," he said with a slight show of embarra.s.sment. "The S'aivas, or wors.h.i.+ppers of Siva, have never relaxed their efforts to regain possession of the stones and return them to their place in the head of their desecrated idol. They have, in fact, offered immense sums to the successive holders of them, and an immense reward to anybody who shall be instrumental in restoring them. In the old times, in my vanis.h.i.+ng cracksman days, I once planned to get that reward by stealing the gems, and if I had lived that life another month--if the eyes of a woman had not dimmed the splendid opulence of these cold eyes of a G.o.d----" His voice sank and dropped off into silence, and Narkom had the good sense and the good taste to look out of the window and say nothing.

"And so these remarkable diamonds have been stolen after all, have they?" said Cleek, breaking silence suddenly. "And that vulgar and overbearing old shrew, the Dowager d.u.c.h.ess of Heatherlands, has paid for the possession of them with her life! Ah, my dear Mr. Narkom, what a disastrous thing l.u.s.t of power and craving for position is! The lady would better have stuck to her father's beer vats and the glory of Hobson and Simkin's entire, and Heatherlands might better have left her there instead of selling her the right to wear his ducal coronet. They both would have lived and died a deal happier, I am sure."

"Yes," agreed Narkom. "They lived a veritable cat-and-dog life, I believe, although it was years before my time, or yours either, for the matter of that, so I can only speak from hearsay. His Grace didn't find Miss Simkins, the brewer's daughter, so enviable a possession after marriage as she had appeared before; and, as she held the purse-strings--and held them closely, too--he got precious little but abuse and unhappiness out of the bargain. The lady, feeling herself miles above her former connections when she became d.u.c.h.ess, cut her own people completely; and as her husband's family would have none of her at any price, she simply made enemies for herself on both sides. It was perhaps just as well for all concerned that there were no children."