Detection by Gaslight

by Unknown

  As she spoke she took a telegram from her pocket and handed it to me. I glanced over the words it contained.

  “Just heard that cart was seen at Higgins’s this morning. Man and assistant arrested on suspicion. House searched. No gold there. Please come down at once.”

  “So they have bolted with it?” I said.

  “That we shall see,” was her reply.

  Shortly afterwards we arrived at the police station. The inspector was waiting for us, and took us at once into a private room.

  “I am glad you were able to come, Miss Cusack,” he said, bowing with great respect to the handsome girl.

  “Pray tell me what you have done,” she answered, “there is not a moment to spare.”

  “When I received your wire,” he said, “I immediately placed a man on duty to watch Higgins’s shop, but evidently before I did this the cart must have arrived and gone—the news with regard to the cart being seen outside Higgins’s shop did not reach me till four-thirty. On receiving it I immediately arrested both Higgins and his assistant, and we searched the house from attic to cellar, but have found no gold whatever. There is little doubt that the pawnbroker received the gold, and has already removed it to another quarter.”

  “Did you find a furnace in the basement?” suddenly asked Miss Cusack.

  “We did,” he replied, in some astonishment; “but why do you ask?”

  To my surprise Miss Cusack took out of her pocket the advertisement which she had shown me that morning and handed it the inspector. The man read the queer words aloud in a slow and wondering voice:—

  Send more sand and charcoal dust. Core and mould ready for casting.

  JOSHUA LINKLATER.

  “I can make nothing of it, miss,” he said, glancing at Miss Cusack. “These words seem to me to have something to do with founder’s work.”

  “I believe they have,” was her eager reply. “It is also highly probable that they have something to do with the furnace in the basement of Higgins’s shop.”

  “I do not know what you are talking about, miss, but you have something at the back of your head which does not appear.”

  “I have,” she answered, “and in order to confirm certain suspicions I wish to search the house.”

  “But the place has just been searched by us,” was the man’s almost testy answer. “It is impossible that a mass of gold should be there and be overlooked; every square inch of space has been accounted for.”

  “Who is in the house now?”

  “No one; the place is locked up, and one of our men is on duty.”

  “What size is the furnace?”

  “Unusually large,” was the inspector’s answer.

  Miss Cusack gave a smile which almost immediately vanished.

  “We are wasting time,” she said; “let us go there immediately.”

  “I must do so, of course, if nothing else will satisfy you, miss; but I assure you——”

  “Oh, don’t let us waste any more time in arguing,” said Miss Cusack, her impatience now getting the better of her. “I have a reason for what I do, and must visit the pawnbroker’s immediately.”

  The man hesitated no longer, but took a bunch of keys down from the wall. A blaze of light from a public-house guided us to the pawnbroker’s, which bore the well-known sign, the three golden balls. These were just visible through the fog above us. The inspector nodded to the man on duty, and unlocking the door we entered a narrow passage into which the swing doors of several smaller compartments opened. The inspector struck a match, and lighting the lantern, looked at Miss Cusack, as much as to say, “What do you propose to do now?”

  “Take me to the room where the furnace is,” said the lady.

  “Come this way,” he replied.

  We turned at once in the direction of the stairs which led to the basement, and entered a room on the right. At the further end was an open range which had evidently been enlarged in order to allow the consumption of a great quantity of fuel, and upon it now stood an iron vessel, shaped as a chemist’s crucible. Considerable heat still radiated from it. Miss Cusack peered inside, then she slowly commenced raking out the ashes with an iron rod, examining them closely and turning them over and over. Two or three white fragments she examined with peculiar care.

  “One thing at least is abundantly clear,” she said at last; “gold has been melted here, and within a very short time; whether it was the sovereigns or not we have yet to discover.”

  “But surely, Miss Cusack,” said the inspector, “no one would be rash enough to destroy sovereigns.”

  “I am thinking of Joshua Linklater’s advertisement,” she said. “‘Send more sand and charcoal dust.’ This,” she continued, once more examining the white fragments, “is undoubtedly sand.”

  She said nothing further, but went back to the ground floor and now commenced a systematic search on her own account.

  At last we reached the top floor, where the pawnbroker and his assistant had evidently slept. Here Miss Cusack walked at once to the window and flung it open. She gazed out for a minute, and then turned to face us. Her eyes looked brighter than ever, and a certain smile played about her face.

  “Well, miss,” said the police inspector, “we have now searched the whole house, and I hope you are satisfied.”

  “I am,” she replied.

  “The gold is not here, miss.”

  “We will see,” she said. As she spoke she turned once more and bent slightly out, as if to look down through the murky air at the street below.

  The inspector gave an impatient exclamation.

  “If you have quite finished, miss, we must return to the station,” he said. “I am expecting some men from Scotland Yard to go into this affair.”

  “I do not think they will have much to do,” she answered, “except, indeed, to arrest the criminal.” As she spoke she leant a little further out of the window, and then withdrawing her head said quietly, “Yes, we may as well go back now; I have quite finished. Things are exactly as I expected to find them; we can take the gold away with us.”

  Both the inspector and I stared at her in utter amazement.

  “What do you mean, Miss Cusack?” I cried.

  “What I say,” she answered, and now she gave a light laugh; “the gold is here, close to us; we have only to take it away. Come,” she added, “look out, both of you. Why, you are both gazing at it.”

  I glanced round in utter astonishment. My expression of face was reproduced in that of the inspector’s.

  “Look,” she said, “what do you call that?” As she spoke she pointed to the sign that hung outside—the sign of the three balls.

  “Lean out and feel that lower ball,” she said to the inspector.

  He stretched out his arm, and as his fingers touched it he started back.

  “Why, it is hot,” he said; “what in the world does it mean?”

  “It means the lost gold,” replied Miss Cusack; “it has been cast as that ball. I said that the advertisement would give me the necessary clue, and it has done so. Yes, the lost fortune is hanging outside the house. The gold was melted in the crucible downstairs, and cast as this ball between twelve o’clock and four-thirty to-day. Remember it was after four-thirty that you arrested the pawnbroker and his assistant.”

  To verify her extraordinary words was the work of a few moments. Owing to its great weight, the inspector and I had some difficulty in detaching the ball from its hook. At the same time we noticed that a very strong stay, in the shape of an iron-wire rope, had been attached to the iron frame from which the three balls hung.

  “You will find, I am sure,” said Miss Cusack, “that this ball is not of solid gold; if it were, it would not be the size of the other two balls. It has probably been cast round a centre of plaster of Paris to give it the same size as the others. This explains the advertisement with regard to the charcoal and sand. A ball of that size in pure gold would weigh nearly three hundred pounds, or twenty stone.”

 
; “Well,” said the inspector, “of all the curious devices that I have ever seen or heard of, this beats the lot. But what did they do with the real ball? They must have put it somewhere.”

  “They burnt it in the furnace, of course,” she answered; “these balls, as you know, are only wood covered with gold paint. Yes, it was a clever idea, worthy of the brain of Mr. Graham; and it might have hung there for weeks and been seen by thousands passing daily, till Mr. Higgins was released from imprisonment, as nothing whatever could be proved against him.”

  Owing to Miss Cusack’s testimony, Graham was arrested that night, and, finding that circumstances were dead against him, he confessed the whole. For long years he was one of a gang of coiners, but managed to pass as a gentleman of position. He knew old Bovey well, and had heard him speak of the curious will he had made. Knowing of this, he determined, at any risk, to secure the fortune, intending, when he had obtained it, to immediately leave the country. He had discovered the exact amount of the money which he would leave behind him, and had gone carefully into the weight which such a number of sovereigns would make. He knew at once that Tyndall would be out of the reckoning, and that the competition would really be between himself and Wimburne. To provide against the contingency of Wimburne’s being the lucky man, he had planned the robbery; the gold was to be melted, and made into a real golden ball, which was to hang over the pawnshop until suspicion had died away.

  Silas K. Hocking

  (1850–1935)

  SILAS K. HOCKING, an ordained United Methodist minister, was at one time the best selling novelist in England, and his fifty novels were published and re-published in matching sets. In 1903, his publishers claimed that over one million of his books had been sold. His stories tended to be edifying, as were the periodicals he edited—Family Circle and Temple Magazine.

  The short stories in The Adventures of Latimer Field, Curate (1903) are much more interesting to the modern taste. They are set in small towns, or in country houses, and occasionally they deal with hauntings and gypsy curses. More significantly, Latimer Field was probably the first clergyman to turn to fictional sleuthing, even though most of the time his religious and theological views don’t play much of a role in the investigations. Still, as Field’s first case shows, Hocking could put a twist in the tale.

  A Perverted Genius

  CONVERSATION THAT EVENING turned on the subject of burglary. Within the last fortnight there had been four cases of house-breaking of the most daring character, and not a single trace of the miscreants or their booty had been discovered. This, in a small town like Banfield, was exceptional and alarming.

  Miss Pinskill, our landlady, who always sat at the head of the table, declared—not without hesitancy—that if she awoke in the middle of the night and found a burglar in her room, she should scream and scream, even if she were certain she would be shot for it, and would never stop screaming till either death or deliverance came.

  “I’m certain I should do nothing of the kind,” Miss Eliza, who sat at the opposite end of the table, remarked. “I should just hide my head in the clothes, and let him take everything in the room.”

  “I think that would be very foolish,” said Mr. Ball, my fellow-lodger, a very clever and gentlemanly man, who occupied the drawing-room, and sat directly opposite me at dinner.

  “And what would you do?” I questioned.

  “I should show fight,” he replied. “If I knew I should be killed, I should fight all the same. I admit I should stand no chance with a strong man; but, you see, I come from a race of fighters, and so the fighting instinct would leap to the top in spite of everything.”

  “You might feel differently if it came to the pinch, Mr. Ball,” Miss Pinskill remarked.

  “I don’t think so,” he answered quietly. “I don’t like boasting; but I did tackle a burglar once.”

  “You don’t say so!” cried Miss Eliza.

  “I was only about nineteen at the time,” went on Mr. Ball, “and a burglar broke into my father’s house. I woke up in the middle of the night, and found the rascal in my room. He had been in the other rooms before.”

  “And you went for him?” I questioned eagerly.

  “I did. Before he knew it I had grabbed him by the collar. He tried to fling me from him, but I held on like grim death; and, finding I was determined, he just slipped out of his coat, leaving it in my hands, and before I could grip him again he had disappeared through the window.”

  “What a pity!” said Miss Pinskill.

  “It was a pity; for three minutes later a policeman came on the scene, but, of course, too late. Now, what would you have done under the circumstances?” he said, turning to me.

  “I—I don’t know,” I said, with some hesitation, at which he smiled, and went on with his dinner.

  As a matter of fact, I felt pretty certain that if I found a burglar in my room in the dead of the night I should simply collapse, and let him work his will on me and on my property without the least resistance. I did not feel called upon, however, to say so. A man may be a coward, but he need not tell people. They generally find it out quite soon enough.

  I was not at all sorry when the dinner ended, for the subject of burglary, having been introduced, was kept up, and such subjects always make me nervous. I am just as bad if people begin to tell ghost stories. I keep awake half the night after, fancying I hear all kinds of unaccountable noises.

  Leaving the dining-room, I retired to my study, and lighted a cigarette to calm my nerves, first of all, however, making sure that my window was properly fastened.

  I heard Mr. Ball walk slowly along the hall and up the stairs, and a few minutes later I heard him call, in an excited and most distressed tone of voice, “Miss Pinskill! Miss Pinskill!”

  “Yes, Mr. Ball,” she cried, running into the hall. “What is the matter?”

  “Please come here at once,” he said, “and ask the curate to come also.”

  Now, this was the one and only thing I disliked about my fellow-lodger. He always spoke of me to others as “the curate,” and usually in a tone of voice that implied that, in his opinion, curates were something less than men. I knew, of course, that I had nothing to boast of in the way of physical strength, and, moreover, that I was frightfully nervous.

  These facts kept me from openly resenting his manner and tone.

  There was nothing in his tone, however, to resent on the present occasion. Indeed, he spoke like one in mortal terror.

  Instantly opening the door, I rushed up the stairs after Miss Pinskill.

  “What is it, Mr. Ball?” she kept asking, as she panted in front of me.

  “Burglars!” he said. “Everything of value I possess has been stolen.”

  Miss Pinskill, true to her nature, sat down on the floor and began to shriek.

  I followed Mr. Ball into his bedroom, and found the whole place in a litter. Nearly every drawer had been turned out on the floor, and—as he said, in a most lugubrious tone—all his valuables were missing.

  “I hope my things are safe, at any rate,” I said; and I made off to my own room, only to find that it was in as complete a state of upset as Mr. Ball’s.

  A minute later Miss Eliza—who had come to her sister’s rescue—began to call out that their room had been entered also, and everything of value taken away.

  The state of confusion that followed cannot be very well described. No one seemed to know what to do or what to say. I was in such a condition of nervous tremor that my legs almost gave way under me. I had not lost very much of value, it is true, for the simple reason that I possessed no valuables; but the shock had taken all the strength out of me, and left me absolutely helpless.

  Mr. Ball suggested at length that the police should be sent for, and Mary, the housemaid, was quickly despatched for that purpose. Half an hour later the place was overrun with policemen.

  They examined the windows and doors, they searched the garden for footmarks, they looked into the cellars and outbuildings, they qu
estioned Mr. Ball and myself until we grew sick of answering their questions, they drew sketches of the various rooms in their notebooks, and finally took their departure.

  The only discovery they made was that the drawing-room window was unfastened, for which Mary admitted she was to blame. The thief or thieves had evidently come in by that way while we were at dinner, and there the matter ended. As in the case of the other burglaries, not a trace of the robbers could be found.

  On the following evening Mr. Ball and I went across to the vicarage, where we had accepted an invitation to dinner. Though Mr. Ball had been in Banfield not more than two months at the outside, he had established himself a general favourite with all who knew him. He was most agreeable in his manners, and was well informed on all questions of general interest, and practically sympathetic with all religious and philanthropic movements. He was clever, too, and knew how to say a commonplace thing in a striking way. And, though he could be very sarcastic at times, sarcasm was a weapon he very rarely used.

  He was somewhat dull and silent as we walked across to the vicarage; but that was easily accounted for; he had not yet got over the loss of the previous night.

  “I wish to my heart we could lay hands on the thief!” he said to me. “It is bad enough to be robbed, but to be so completely outwitted by a common burglar is humiliating.”

  Over the dinner he quite recovered his spirits, and for a while—much to my relief—nothing was said of the burglary of the previous night. He greatly admired the vicar’s silver and glass, and went into raptures over a richly-chased antique cup that stood in the centre of the table. He spotted some valuable lace that Mrs. Ramsey wore, and admired it in such an adroit way that he quite won that good woman’s heart. He discussed the paintings on the walls with keen insight and knowledge, and hinted to a fraction the value of some rare old china.