‘I mustn’t interrupt you with questions,’ said she, ‘but I can’t imagine how you found out where Uncle Reuben was buried.’
‘We will go into that later,’ he replied; ‘but first we have got to find Uncle Reuben.’ He laid his research case down on the ground, and opening it, took out three sheets of paper, each bearing a duplicate of his tracing of the map; and on each was marked a spot on this meadow from which a number of lines radiated like the spokes of a wheel.
‘You see, Jervis,’ he said, exhibiting them to me, ‘the advantage of a map. I have been able to rule off these sets of bearings regardless of obstructions, such as those young trees, which have arisen since Silas’s day, and mark the spot in its correct place. If the recent obstructions prevent us from taking the bearings, we can still find the spot by measurements with the land-chain or tape.’
‘Why have you got three plans?’ I asked.
‘Because there are three imaginable places. No. 1 is the most likely; No. 2 less likely, but possible; No. 3 is impossible. That is the one that our friend tried last night. No. 1 is among those young trees, and we will now see if we can pick up the bearings in spite of them.’
We moved on to the clump of young trees, where Thorndyke took from the research-case a tall, folding camera-tripod and a large prismatic compass with an aluminium dial. With the latter he made one or two trial bearings and then, setting up the tripod, fixed the compass on it. For some minutes Miss Blowgrave and I watched him as he shifted the tripod from spot to spot, peering through the sight-vane of the compass and glancing occasionally at the map. At length he turned to us and said: ‘We are in luck. None of these trees interferes with our bearings.’ He took from the research-case a surveyor’s arrow, and sticking it in the ground under the tripod, added: ‘That is the spot. But we may have to dig a good way round it, for a compass is only a rough instrument.’
At this moment Mr Blowgrave staggered up, breathing hard, and flung down on the ground three picks, two shovels and a spade. ‘I won’t hinder you, doctor, by asking for explanations,’ said he, ‘but I am utterly mystified. You must tell us what it all means when we have finished our work.’
This Thorndyke promised to do, but meanwhile he took off his coat, and rolling up his shirt sleeves, seized the spade and began cutting out a large square of turf. As the soil was uncovered, Blowgrave and I attacked it with picks and Miss Blowgrave shovelled away the loose earth.
‘Do you know how far down we have to go?’ I asked.
‘The body lies six feet below the surface,’ Thorndyke replied; and as he spoke he laid down his spade, and taking a telescope from the research-case, swept it round the margin of the meadow and finally pointed it at a farmhouse some six hundred yards distant, of which he made a somewhat prolonged inspection, after which he took the remaining pick and fell to work on the opposite corner of the exposed square of earth.
For nearly half-an-hour we worked on steadily, gradually eating our way downwards, plying pick and shovel alternately, while Miss Blowgrave cleared the loose earth away from the edges of the deepening pit. Then a halt was called and we came to the surface, wiping our faces.
‘I think, Nellie,’ said Blowgrave, divesting himself of his waistcoat, ‘a jug of lemonade and four tumblers would be useful, unless our visitors would prefer beer.’
We both gave our votes for lemonade, and Miss Nellie tripped away towards the house, while Thorndyke, taking up his telescope, once more inspected the farmhouse.
‘You seem greatly interested in that house,’ I remarked.
‘I am,’ he replied, handing me the telescope. ‘Just take a look at the window in the right-hand gable, but keep under the tree.’
I pointed the telescope at the gable and there observed an open window at which a man was seated. He held a binocular glass to his eyes and the instrument appeared to be directed at us.
‘We are being spied on, I fancy,’ said I, passing the telescope to Blowgrave, ‘but I suppose it doesn’t matter. This is your land, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ replied Blowgrave, ‘but still, we didn’t want any spectators. That is Harold Bowker,’ he added steadying the telescope against a tree, ‘my cousin Arthur’s nephew, whom I told you about as having inherited the farmhouse. He seems mighty interested in us; but small things interest one in the country.’
Here the appearance of Miss Nellie, advancing across the meadow with an inviting-looking basket, diverted our attention from our inquisitive watcher. Six thirsty eyes were riveted on that basket until it drew near and presently disgorged a great glass jug and four tumblers, when we each took off a long and delicious draught and then jumped down into the pit to resume our labours.
Another half-hour passed. We had excavated in some places to nearly the full depth and were just discussing the advisability of another short rest when Blowgrave, who was working in one corner, uttered a loud cry and stood up suddenly, holding something in his fingers. A glance at the object showed it to be a bone, brown and earth-stained, but evidently a bone. Evidently, too, a human bone, as Thorndyke decided when Blowgrave handed it to him triumphantly.
‘We have been very fortunate,’ said he, ‘to get so near at the first trial. This is from the right great toe, so we may assume that the skeleton lies just outside this pit, but we had better excavate carefully in your corner and see exactly how the bones lie.’ This he proceeded to do himself, probing cautiously with the spade and clearing the earth away from the corner. Very soon the remaining bones of the right foot came into view and then the ends of the two leg-bones and a portion of the left foot.
‘We can see now,’ said he, ‘how the skeleton lies, and all we have to do is to extend the excavation in that direction. But there is only room for one to work down here. I think you and Mr Blowgrave had better dig down from the surface.’
On this, I climbed out of the pit, followed reluctantly by Blowgrave, who still held the little brown bone in his hand and was in a state of wild excitement and exultation that somewhat scandalised his daughter.
‘It seems rather ghoulish,’ she remarked, ‘to be gloating over poor Uncle Reuben’s body in this way.’
‘I know,’ said Blowgrave, ‘it isn’t reverent. But I didn’t kill Uncle Reuben, you know, whereas – well it was a long time ago.’ With this rather inconsequent conclusion he took a draught of lemonade, seized his pick and fell to work with a will. I, too, indulged in a draught and passed a full tumbler down to Thorndyke. But before resuming my labours I picked up the telescope and once more inspected the farmhouse. The window was still open, but the watcher had apparently become bored with the not very thrilling spectacle. At any rate he had disappeared.
From this time onward every few minutes brought some discovery. First, a pair of deeply rusted steel shoe buckles; then one or two buttons, and presently a fine gold watch with a fob-chain and a bunch of seals, looking uncannily new and fresh and seeming more fraught with tragedy than even the bones themselves. In his cautious digging, Thorndyke was careful not to disturb the skeleton; and looking down into the narrow trench that was growing from the corner of the pit, I could see both legs, with only the right foot missing, projecting from the miniature cliff. Meanwhile our part of the trench was deepening rapidly, so that Thorndyke presently warned us to stop digging and bade us come down and shovel away the earth as he disengaged it.
At length the whole skeleton, excepting the head, was uncovered, though it lay undisturbed as it might have lain in its coffin. And now, as Thorndyke picked away the earth around the head, we could see that the skull was propped forward as if it rested on a high pillow. A little more careful probing with the pick-point served to explain this appearance. For as the earth fell away and disclosed the grinning skull, there came into view the edge and ironbound corners of a small chest.
It was an impressive spectacle; weird, solemn and rather dreadful. There for over a century the ill-fated gambler had lain, his mouldering head pillowed on the booty of unrecorded villainy, booty
that had been won by fraud, retrieved by violence, and hidden at last by the final winner with the witness of his crime.
‘Here is a fine text for a moralist who would preach on the vanity of riches,’ said Thorndyke.
We all stood silent for a while, gazing, not without awe, at the stark figure that lay guarding the ill-gotten treasure. Miss Blowgrave – who had been helped down when we descended – crept closer to her father and murmured that it was ‘rather awful’; while Blowgrave himself displayed a queer mixture of exultation and shuddering distaste.
Suddenly the silence was broken by a voice from above, and we all looked up with a start. A youngish man was standing on the brink of the pit, looking down on us with very evident disapproval.
‘It seems that I have come just in the nick of time,’ observed the newcomer. ‘I shall have to take possession of that chest, you know, and of the remains, too, I suppose. That is my ancestor, Reuben Blowgrave.’
‘Well, Harold,’ said Blowgrave, ‘you can have Uncle Reuben if you want him. But the chest belongs to Nellie.’
Here Mr Harold Bowker – I recognised him now as the watcher from the window – dropped down into the pit and advanced with something of a swagger.
‘I am Reuben’s heir,’ said he, ‘through my Uncle Arthur, and I take possession of this property and the remains.’
‘Pardon me, Harold,’ said Blowgrave, ‘but Nellie is Arthur’s residuary legatee, and this is the residue of the estate.’
‘Rubbish!’ exclaimed Bowker. ‘By the way, how did you find out where he was buried?’
‘Oh, that was quite simple,’ replied Thorndyke with unexpected geniality. ‘I’ll show you the plan.’ He climbed up to the surface and returned in a few moments with the three tracings and his letter-case. ‘This is how we located the spot.’ He handed the plan numbered 3 to Bowker, who took it from him and stood looking at it with a puzzled frown.
‘But this isn’t the place,’ he said at length.
‘Isn’t it?’ queried Thorndyke. ‘No, of course; I’ve given you the wrong one. This is the plan.’ He handed Bowker the plan marked No. 1, and took the other from him, laying it down on a heap of earth. Then, as Bowker pored gloomily over No. 1, he took a knife and a pencil from his pocket, and with his back to our visitor scraped the lead of the pencil, letting the black powder fall on the plan that he had just laid down. I watched him with some curiosity; and when I observed that the black scrapings fell on two spots near the edges of the paper, a sudden suspicion flashed into my mind, which was confirmed when I saw him tap the paper lightly with his pencil, gently blow away the powder, and quickly producing my photograph of the typewritten letter from his case, hold it for a moment beside the plan.
‘This is all very well,’ said Bowker, looking up from the plan, ‘but how did you find out about these bearings?’
Thorndyke swiftly replaced the letter in his case, and turning round, replied, ‘I am afraid I can’t give you any further information.’
‘Can’t you, indeed!’ Bowker exclaimed insolently. ‘Perhaps I shall compel you to. But, at any rate, I forbid any of you to lay hands on my property.’
Thorndyke looked at him steadily and said in an ominously quiet tone: ‘Now, listen to me, Mr Bowker. Let us have an end of this nonsense. You have played a risky game and you have lost. How much you have lost I can’t say until I know whether Mr Blowgrave intends to prosecute.’
‘To prosecute!’ shouted Bowker. ‘What the deuce do you mean by prosecute?’
‘I mean,’ said Thorndyke, ‘that on the 7th of June, after nine o’clock at night, you entered the dwelling-house of Mr Blowgrave and stole and carried away certain of his goods and chattels. A part of them you have restored, but you are still in possession of some of the stolen property, to wit, a scarab and a deed-box.’
As Thorndyke made this statement in his calm, level tones, Bowker’s face blanched to a tallowy white, and he stood staring at my colleague, the very picture of astonishment and dismay. But he fired a last shot.
‘This is sheer midsummer madness,’ he exclaimed huskily; ‘and you know it.’
Thorndyke turned to our host. ‘It is for you to settle, Mr Blowgrave,’ said he. ‘I hold conclusive evidence that Mr Bowker stole your deed-box. If you decide to prosecute I shall produce that evidence in court and he will certainly be convicted.’
Blowgrave and his daughter looked at the accused man with an embarrassment almost equal to his own.
‘I am astounded,’ the former said at length; ‘but I don’t want to be vindictive. Look here, Harold, hand over the scarab and we’ll say no more about it.’
‘You can’t do that,’ said Thorndyke. ‘The law doesn’t allow you to compound a robbery. He can return the property if he pleases and you can do as you think best about prosecuting. But you can’t make conditions.’
There was silence for some seconds; then, without another word, the crestfallen adventurer turned, and scrambling up out of the pit, took a hasty departure.
It was nearly a couple of hours later that, after a leisurely wash and a hasty, nondescript meal, we carried the little chest from the dining-room to the study. Here, when he had closed the French window and drawn the curtains, Mr Blowgrave produced a set of tools and we fell to work on the iron fastenings of the chest. It was no light task, though a century’s rust had thinned the stout bands, but at length the lid yielded to the thrust of a long case-opener and rose with a protesting creak. The chest was lined with a double thickness of canvas, apparently part of a sail, and contained a number of small leathern bags, which, as we lifted them out, one by one, felt as if they were filled with pebbles. But when we untied the thongs of one and emptied its contents into a wooden bowl, Blowgrave heaved a sigh of ecstasy and Miss Nellie uttered a little scream of delight. They were all cut stones, and most of them of exceptional size; rubies, emeralds, sapphires and a few diamonds. As to their value, we could form but the vaguest guess; but Thorndyke, who was a fair judge of gem-stones, gave it as his opinion that they were fine specimens of their kind, though roughly cut, and that they had probably formed the enrichment of some shrine.
‘The question is,’ said Blowgrave, gazing gloatingly on the bowl of sparkling gems, ‘what are we to do with them?’
‘I suggest,’ said Thorndyke, ‘that Dr Jervis stay here tonight to help you to guard them and that in the morning you take them up to London and deposit them, at your bank.’
Blowgrave fell in eagerly with this suggestion, which I seconded. ‘But,’ said he, ‘that chest is a queer-looking package to be carrying abroad. Now, if we only had that confounded deed-box—’
‘There’s a deed-box on the cabinet behind you,’ said Thorndyke.
Blowgrave turned round sharply. ‘God bless us!’ he exclaimed. ‘It has come back the way it went. Harold must have slipped in at the window while we were at tea. Well, I’m glad he has made restitution. When I look at that bowl and think what he must have narrowly missed, I don’t feel inclined to be hard on him. I suppose the scarab is inside – not that it matters much now.’
The scarab was inside in an envelope; and as Thorndyke turned it over in his hand and examined the hieroglyphics on it through his lens, Miss Blowgrave asked: ‘Is it of any value, Dr Thorndyke? It can’t have any connection with the secret of the hiding-place, because you found the jewels without it.’
‘By the way, doctor, I don’t know whether it is permissible for me to ask, but how on earth did you find out where the jewels were hidden? To me it looks like black magic.’
Thorndyke laughed in a quiet, inward fashion. ‘There is nothing magical about it,’ said he. ‘It was a perfectly simple, straightforward problem. But Miss Nellie is wrong. We had the scarab; that is to say we had the wax impression of it, which is the same thing. And the scarab was the key to the riddle. You see,’ he continued, ‘Silas’s letter and the scarab formed together a sort of intelligence test.’
‘Did they?’ said Blowgrave. ‘Then he drew a blank e
very time.’
Thorndyke chuckled. ‘His descendants were certainly a little lacking in enterprise,’ he admitted. ‘Silas’s instructions were perfectly plain and explicit. Whoever would find the treasure must first acquire some knowledge of Egyptian lore and must study the scarab attentively. It was the broadest of hints, but no one – excepting Harold Bowker, who must have heard about the scarab from his Uncle Arthur – seems to have paid any attention to it.
‘Now it happens that I have just enough elementary knowledge of the hieroglyphic characters to enable me to spell them out when they are used alphabetically; and as soon as I saw the seal, I could see that these hieroglyphics formed English words. My attention was first attracted by the second group of signs, which spelled the word “Reuben”, and then I saw that the first group spelled “Uncle”. Of course, the instant I heard Miss Nellie speak of the connection between the scarab and Uncle Reuben, the murder was out. I saw at a glance that the scarab contained all the required information. Last night I made a careful tracing of the hieroglyphics and then rendered them into our own alphabet. This is the result.’
Thorndyke’s Tracing of the Impression of the Scarab
The Transliteration of the Hieroglyphics
He took from his letter-case and spread out on the table a duplicate of the tracing which I had seen him make, and of which he had given me a copy. But since I had last seen it, it had received an addition; under each group of signs the equivalents in modern Roman lettering had been written, and these made the following words:
‘UNKL RUBN IS IN TH MILL FIELD SKS FT DOWN CHURCH SPIR NORTH TEN THIRTY EAST DINGL SOUTH GABL NORTH ATY FORTY FIF WEST GOD SAF KING JORJ.’
Our two friends gazed at Thorndyke’s transliteration in blank astonishment. At length Blowgrave remarked: ‘But this translation must have demanded a very profound knowledge of the Egyptian writing.’
‘Not at all,’ replied Thorndyke. ‘Any intelligent person could master the Egyptian alphabet in an hour. The language, of course, is quite another matter. The spelling of this is a little crude, but it is quite intelligible and does Silas great credit, considering how little was known in his time.’
Murder in Midsummer Page 12