A number of partly broken-up packing-cases littered about this room, with much other rubbish. Hewitt took the lid of one of the newest-looking packing-cases, and glanced at the address label. Then he turned to a rusty old iron box that stood against a wall. “I should like to see behind this,” he said, tugging at it with his hands. “It is heavy and dirty. Is there a small crowbar about the house, or some similar lever?”
Mr. Claridge shook his head. “Haven’t such a thing in the place,” he said.
“Never mind,” Hewitt replied, “another time will do to shift that old box, and perhaps, after all, there’s little reason for moving it. I will just walk round to the police-station, I think, and speak to the constables who were on duty opposite during the night. I think, Lord Stanway, I have seen all that is necessary here.”
“I suppose,” asked Mr. Claridge, “it is too soon yet to ask if you have formed any theory in the matter?”
“Well—yes, it is,” Hewitt answered. “But perhaps I may be able to surprise you in an hour or two; but that I don’t promise. By the by,” he added suddenly, “I suppose you’re sure the trap-door was bolted last night?”
“Certainly,” Mr. Claridge answered, smiling. “Else how could the bolt have been broken? As a matter of fact, I believe the trap hasn’t been opened for months. Mr. Cutler, do you remember when the trap-door was last opened?”
Mr. Cutler shook his head. “Certainly not for six months,” he said.
“Ah, very well; it’s not very important,” Hewitt replied.
As they reached the front shop a fiery-faced old gentleman bounced in at the street door, stumbling over an umbrella that stood in a dark corner, and kicking it three yards away.
“What the deuce do you mean,” he roared at Mr. Claridge, “by sending these police people smelling about my rooms and asking questions of my servants? What do you mean, sir, by treating me as a thief? Can’t a gentleman come into this place to look at an article without being suspected of stealing it, when it disappears through your wretched carelessness? I’ll ask my solicitor, sir, if there isn’t a remedy for this sort of thing. And if I catch another of your spy fellows on my staircase, or crawling about my roof, I’ll—I’ll shoot him!”
“Really, Mr. Woollett—” began Mr. Claridge, somewhat abashed, but the angry old man would hear nothing.
“Don’t talk to me, sir; you shall talk to my solicitor. And am I to understand, my lord”—turning to Lord Stanway—“that these things are being done with your approval?”
“Whatever is being done,” Lord Stanway answered, “is being done by the police on their own responsibility, and entirely without prompting, I believe, by Mr. Claridge—certainly without a suggestion of any sort from myself. I think that the personal opinion of Mr. Claridge—certainly my own—is that anything like a suspicion of your position in this wretched matter is ridiculous. And if you will only consider the matter calmly—”
“Consider it calmly? Imagine yourself considering such a thing calmly, Lord Stanway. I won’t consider it calmly. I’ll—I’ll—I won’t have it. And if I find another man on my roof, I’ll pitch him off!” And Mr. Woollett bounced into the street again.
“Mr. Woollett is annoyed,” Hewitt observed, with a smile. “I’m afraid Plummer has a clumsy assistant somewhere.”
Mr. Claridge said nothing, but looked rather glum, for Mr. Woollett was a most excellent customer.
Lord Stanwood and Hewitt walked slowly down the street, Hewitt staring at the pavement in profound thought. Once or twice Lord Stanway glanced at his face, but refrained from disturbing him. Presently, however, he observed: “You seem, at least, Mr. Hewitt, to have noticed something that has set you thinking. Does it look like a clue?”
Hewitt came out of his cogitation at once. “A clue?” he said; “the case bristles with clues. The extraordinary thing to me is that Plummer, usually a smart man, doesn’t seem to have seen one of them. He must be out of sorts, I’m afraid. But the case is decidedly a most remarkable one.”
“Remarkable in what particular way?”
“In regard to motive. Now it would seem, as Plummer was saying to me just now on the roof, that there were only two possible motives for such a robbery. Either the man who took all this trouble and risk to break into Claridge’s place must have desired to sell the cameo at a good price, or he must have desired to keep it for himself, being a lover of such things. But neither of these has been the actual motive.”
“Perhaps he thinks he can extort a good sum from me by way of ransom?”
“No, it isn’t that. Nor is it jealousy, nor spite, nor anything of that kind. I know the motive, I think—but I wish we could get hold of Hahn. I will shut myself up alone and turn it over in my mind for half an hour presently.”
“Meanwhile, what I want to know is, apart from all your professional subtleties—which I confess I can’t understand—can you get back the cameo?”
“That,” said Hewitt, stopping at the corner of the street, “I am rather afraid I can not—nor anybody else. But I am pretty sure I know the thief.”
“Then surely that will lead you to the cameo?”
“It may, of course; but, then, it is just possible that by this evening you may not want to have it back, after all.”
Lord Stanway stared in amazement.
“Not want to have it back!” he exclaimed. “Why, of course I shall want to have it back. I don’t understand you in the least; you talk in conundrums. Who is the thief you speak of?”
“I think, Lord Stanway,” Hewitt said, “that perhaps I had better not say until I have quite finished my inquiries, in case of mistakes. The case is quite an extraordinary one, and of quite a different character from what one would at first naturally imagine, and I must be very careful to guard against the possibility of error. I have very little fear of a mistake, however, and I hope I may wait on you in a few hours at Piccadilly with news. I have only to see the policemen.”
“Certainly, come whenever you please. But why see the policemen? They have already most positively stated that they saw nothing whatever suspicious in the house or near it.”
“I shall not ask them anything at all about the house,” Hewitt responded. “I shall just have a little chat with them—about the weather.” And with a smiling bow he turned away, while Lord Stanway stood and gazed after him, with an expression that implied a suspicion that his special detective was making a fool of him.
* * * *
In rather more than an hour Hewitt was back in Mr. Claridge’s shop. “Mr. Claridge,” he said, “I think I must ask you one or two questions in private. May I see you in your own room?”
They went there at once, and Hewitt, pulling a chair before the window, sat down with his back to the light. The dealer shut the door, and sat opposite him, with the light full in his face.
“Mr. Claridge,” Hewitt proceeded slowly, “when did you first find that Lord Stanway’s cameo was a forgery?”
Claridge literally bounced in his chair. His face paled, but he managed to stammer sharply: “What—what—what d’you mean? Forgery? Do you mean to say I sell forgeries? Forgery? It wasn’t a forgery!”
“Then,” continued Hewitt in the same deliberate tone, watching the other’s face the while, “if it wasn’t a forgery, why did you destroy it and burst your trap-door and desk to imitate a burglary?”
The sweat stood thick on the dealer’s face, and he gasped. But he struggled hard to keep his faculties together, and ejaculated hoarsely: “Destroy it? What—what—I didn’t—didn’t destroy it!”
“Threw it into the river, then—don’t prevaricate about details.”
“No—no—it’s a lie! Who says that? Go away! You’re insulting me!” Claridge almost screamed.
“Come, come, Mr. Claridge,” Hewitt said more placably, for he had gained his point; “don’t distress yourself, and don’t attempt to
deceive me—you can’t, I assure you. I know everything you did before you left here last night—everything.”
Claridge’s face worked painfully. Once or twice he appeared to be on the point of returning an indignant reply, but hesitated, and finally broke down altogether.
“Don’t expose me, Mr. Hewitt!” he pleaded; “I beg you won’t expose me! I haven’t harmed a soul but myself. I’ve paid Lord Stanway every penny back, and I never knew the thing was a forgery till I began to clean it. I’m an old man, Mr. Hewitt, and my professional reputation has been spotless until now. I beg you won’t expose me.”
Hewitt’s voice softened. “Don’t make an unnecessary trouble of it,” he said. “I see a decanter on your sideboard—let me give you a little brandy and water. Come, there’s nothing criminal, I believe, in a man’s breaking open his own desk, or his own trap-door, for that matter. Of course I’m acting for Lord Stanway in this affair, and I must, in duty, report to him without reserve. But Lord Stanway is a gentleman, and I’ll undertake he’ll do nothing inconsiderate of your feelings, if you’re disposed to be frank. Let us talk the affair over; tell me about it.”
“It was that swindler Hahn who deceived me in the beginning,” Claridge said. “I have never made a mistake with a cameo before, and I never thought so close an imitation was possible. I examined it most carefully, and was perfectly satisfied, and many experts examined it afterward, and were all equally deceived. I felt as sure as I possibly could feel that I had bought one of the finest, if not actually the finest, cameos known to exist. It was not until after it had come back from Lord Stanway’s, and I was cleaning it the evening before last, that in course of my work it became apparent that the thing was nothing but a consummately clever forgery. It was made of three layers of molded glass, nothing more nor less. But the glass was treated in a way I had never before known of, and the surface had been cunningly worked on till it defied any ordinary examination. Some of the glass imitation cameos made in the latter part of the last century, I may tell you, are regarded as marvelous pieces of work, and, indeed, command very fair prices, but this was something quite beyond any of those.
“I was amazed and horrified. I put the thing away and went home. All that night I lay awake in a state of distraction, quite unable to decide what to do. To let the cameo go out of my possession was impossible. Sooner or later the forgery would be discovered, and my reputation—the highest in these matters in this country, I may safely claim, and the growth of nearly fifty years of honest application and good judgment—this reputation would be gone forever. But without considering this, there was the fact that I had taken five thousand pounds of Lord Stanway’s money for a mere piece of glass, and that money I must, in mere common honesty as well as for my own sake, return. But how? The name of the Stanway Cameo had become a household word, and to confess that the whole thing was a sham would ruin my reputation and destroy all confidence—past, present, and future—in me and in my transactions. Either way spelled ruin. Even if I confided in Lord Stanway privately, returned his money, and destroyed the cameo, what then? The sudden disappearance of an article so famous would excite remark at once. It had been presented to the British Museum, and if it never appeared in that collection, and no news were to be got of it, people would guess at the truth at once. To make it known that I myself had been deceived would have availed nothing. It is my business not to be deceived; and to have it known that my most expensive specimens might be forgeries would equally mean ruin, whether I sold them cunningly as a rogue or ignorantly as a fool. Indeed, my pride, my reputation as a connoisseur, is a thing near to my heart, and it would be an unspeakable humiliation to me to have it known that I had been imposed on by such a forgery. What could I do? Every expedient seemed useless but one—the one I adopted. It was not straightforward, I admit; but, oh! Mr. Hewitt, consider the temptation—and remember that it couldn’t do a soul any harm. No matter who might be suspected, I knew there could not possibly be evidence to make them suffer. All the next day—yesterday—I was anxiously worrying out the thing in my mind and carefully devising the—the trick, I’m afraid you’ll call it, that you by some extraordinary means have seen through. It seemed the only thing—what else was there? More I needn’t tell you; you know it. I have only now to beg that you will use your best influence with Lord Stanway to save me from public derision and exposure. I will do anything—pay anything—anything but exposure, at my age, and with my position.”
“Well, you see,” Hewitt replied thoughtfully, “I’ve no doubt Lord Stanway will show you every consideration, and certainly I will do what I can to save you in the circumstances; though you must remember that you have done some harm—you have caused suspicions to rest on at least one honest man. But as to reputation, I’ve a professional reputation of my own. If I help to conceal your professional failure, I shall appear to have failed in my part of the business.”
“But the cases are different, Mr. Hewitt. Consider. You are not expected—it would be impossible—to succeed invariably; and there are only two or three who know you have looked into the case. Then your other conspicuous successes—”
“Well, well, we shall see. One thing I don’t know, though—whether you climbed out of a window to break open the trap-door, or whether you got up through the trap-door itself and pulled the bolt with a string through the jamb, so as to bolt it after you.”
“There was no available window. I used the string, as you say. My poor little cunning must seem very transparent to you, I fear. I spent hours of thought over the question of the trap-door—how to break it open so as to leave a genuine appearance, and especially how to bolt it inside after I had reached the roof. I thought I had succeeded beyond the possibility of suspicion; how you penetrated the device surpasses my comprehension. How, to begin with, could you possibly know that the cameo was a forgery? Did you ever see it?”
“Never. And, if I had seen it, I fear I should never have been able to express an opinion on it; I’m not a connoisseur. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know that the thing was a forgery in the first place; what I knew in the first place was that it was you who had broken into the house. It was from that that I arrived at the conclusion, after a certain amount of thought, that the cameo must have been forged. Gain was out of the question. You, beyond all men, could never sell the Stanway Cameo again, and, besides, you had paid back Lord Stanway’s money. I knew enough of your reputation to know that you would never incur the scandal of a great theft at your place for the sake of getting the cameo for yourself, when you might have kept it in the beginning, with no trouble and mystery. Consequently I had to look for another motive, and at first another motive seemed an impossibility. Why should you wish to take all this trouble to lose five thousand pounds? You had nothing to gain; perhaps you had something to save—your professional reputation, for instance. Looking at it so, it was plain that you were suppressing the cameo—burking it; since, once taken as you had taken it, it could never come to light again. That suggested the solution of the mystery at once—you had discovered, after the sale, that the cameo was not genuine.”
“Yes, yes—I see; but you say you began with the knowledge that I broke into the place myself. How did you know that? I can not imagine a trace—”
“My dear sir, you left traces everywhere. In the first place, it struck me as curious, before I came here, that you had sent off that check for five thousand pounds to Lord Stanway an hour or so after the robbery was discovered; it looked so much as though you were sure of the cameo never coming back, and were in a hurry to avert suspicion. Of course I understood that, so far as I then knew the case, you were the most unlikely person in the world, and that your eagerness to repay Lord Stanway might be the most creditable thing possible. But the point was worth remembering, and I remembered it.
“When I came here, I saw suspicious indications in many directions, but the conclusive piece of evidence was that old hat hanging below the trap-door.”
/> “But I never touched it; I assure you, Mr. Hewitt, I never touched the hat; haven’t touched it for months—”
“Of course. If you had touched it, I might never have got the clue. But we’ll deal with the hat presently; that wasn’t what struck me at first. The trap-door first took my attention. Consider, now: Here was a trap-door, most insecurely hung on external hinges; the burglar had a screwdriver, for he took off the door-lock below with it. Why, then, didn’t he take this trap off by the hinges, instead of making a noise and taking longer time and trouble to burst the bolt from its fastenings? And why, if he were a stranger, was he able to plant his jimmy from the outside just exactly opposite the interior bolt? There was only one mark on the frame, and that precisely in the proper place.
“After that I saw the leather case. It had not been thrown away, or some corner would have shown signs of the fall. It had been put down carefully where it was found. These things, however, were of small importance compared with the hat. The hat, as you know, was exceedingly thick with dust—the accumulation of months. But, on the top side, presented toward the trap-door, were a score or so of raindrop marks. That was all. They were new marks, for there was no dust over them; they had merely had time to dry and cake the dust they had fallen on. Now, there had been no rain since a sharp shower just after seven o’clock last night. At that time you, by your own statement, were in the place. You left at eight, and the rain was all over at ten minutes or a quarter past seven. The trap-door, you also told me, had not been opened for months. The thing was plain. You, or somebody who was here when you were, had opened that trap-door during, or just before, that shower. I said little then, but went, as soon as I had left, to the police-station. There I made perfectly certain that there had been no rain during the night by questioning the policemen who were on duty outside all the time. There had been none. I knew everything.
“The only other evidence there was pointed with all the rest. There were no rain-marks on the leather case; it had been put on the roof as an after-thought when there was no rain. A very poor after-thought, let me tell you, for no thief would throw away a useful case that concealed his booty and protected it from breakage, and throw it away just so as to leave a clue as to what direction he had gone in. I also saw, in the lumber-room, a number of packing-cases—one with a label dated two days back—which had been opened with an iron lever; and yet, when I made an excuse to ask for it, you said there was no such thing in the place. Inference, you didn’t want me to compare it with the marks on the desks and doors. That is all, I think.”
The Arthur Morrison Mystery Page 34