It was two days later before it did, when the contents of the house at Deneswood Valley had been carefully examined and certain documents that had been kept in a box at the Safe Deposit in Chancery Lane were brought to light. And then they learned the real secret of the Deneswood Estate.
Blessington, or to give him his real name, Sam Gates, had at one time been a solicitor. He had specialised in cases that, to put it mildly, could not be investigated too closely, and had eventually been struck off the Rolls. During the period of his legal operations, however, he had acquired a considerable amount of money and also a lot of out-of-the-way information that later was to prove the basis of one of the most ingenious schemes in the history of crime.
He conceived and built the Deneswood Valley Estate, and then he went systematically to work to find suitable tenants, and they had to be suitable in two ways. They had to be rich, and they also had to have something criminal in their past lives that was known to Gates and which he could hold over them and use as a means of extorting blackmail. That, in a nutshell, was the secret of the valley. Every resident was a man who, in the acquiring of his wealth, had overstepped the law and against whom Gates held evidence that could send him to prison. He forced them to live in the valley, and it was a very paying scheme, for his blackmail was levied in the form of rent and was therefore untraceable.
From his books Hallick discovered that Sopley had been paying two thousand a year for his house, and Feldon three, and the others in proportion to their income. So cleverly had Gates gone to work that those paying the largest sums had the larger houses, so that had anyone at any time questioned such exorbitant charges it was quite easy to reply that the valley was a very select community arid therefore if people wished to live there and enjoy its facilities they had to pay for it. Gates waxed fat and rich, but he foresaw his greatest danger and guarded against it. It was quite possible that one of his victims might kick against being squeezed so regularly and for such a large sum and try and remove the man who held them at his mercy. In order to safeguard himself against attacks, Gates rendered any such course futile by letting it be known that full particulars regarding each individual crime had been deposited with his solicitors in a sealed envelope with instructions to forward it to the police in the event of his death. This rendered him perfectly safe, or so he thought, until he went too far in the case of Harold Earnshaw.
He had conceived a desire to marry Pamela and had used his hold on her father to force him to bring about this end. Earnshaw had kicked. He had determined to break the shackles which Gates had wound about him. The attack on the golf course was his first attempt; the second he had made on the night when Gates and Oliver had been in the act of removing Lesley Thane from the quarry to the house.
When Blessington had built the estate he had had a passage constructed from the cellar of his own house to a golf hut near the quarry. By this means it was possible for him to visit Felix Dexon in his prison, and, later, to come and go while the estate was being watched by the men whom Hallick had put on guard. Earnshaw had been decoyed into the quarry on the pretext of talking matters over, and there killed.
Gates’s schemes would have gone well but for the greediness which proved his undoing. He heard about Felix Dexon from Feldon, and conceived the idea of getting his hands on Dexon’s money. He forced Feldon to decoy Dexon down to the valley and then imprisoned him in the quarry, torturing him until he agreed to write the letters received by the lawyers and the receipts for the money they forwarded.
His scheme worked. Sopley and Earnshaw had been forced to help him in the conspiracy, and then, like a bolt from the blue, came Lew Miller, an old associate of Gates’s, who had just come out of prison. He had succeeded in tracing Gates to the valley, but didn’t know that his name was now Blessington. The man had changed beyond recognition, for good living and prosperity had fattened him. Besides which, Gates, in the old days when Miller had known him, had worn a moustache.
Miller, however, was a danger, and at any time he might discover that Gates was Blessington; and he drank, and men who drank also talked. Gates considered the matter, and when Miller, more drunk than he had been in the afternoon, came back to the valley that night, he made sure of his silence forever. He had followed Farringdon when the reporter had called to see Feldon and listened under the window. He had heard Feldon make his midnight appointment with the reporter and had taken the only step possible to prevent Feldon giving the game away. He had killed him, taking the contents of the safe in case Feldon had left behind anything that incriminated him in writing.
The biggest shock of his career had been the arrival of the escaped Felix Dexon at Feldon’s house. A word from him and the trap yawned at his feet. He made sure that word was never uttered. He was near the light switch and he acted promptly. After shooting Dexon he put the revolver on the top of the clock, where later it had been found. His greatest touch of genius, however, undoubtedly lay in his abduction of Lesley Thane, and the substitution of Mrs. Canning in her place.
When the girl had first arrived in England he had foreseen the possibility that sooner or later it would be necessary for her to go the same way as her uncle, and he had searched round for someone sufficiently like her to assist him in his scheme. In Mrs. Canning he had found the person he sought. She was the wife of a man over whom Gates had a hold, and it was easy to force her to do his bidding. The scheme was well-nigh perfect, and, but for an accident, might easily have succeeded.
‘I never thought there was such a thing as a great criminal,’ commented Farringdon Street, when the whole of Sam Gates’s schemes had been laid bare, ‘but he certainly was one. He possessed the organising power of a Napoleon. In legitimate business he might have become a millionaire.’
‘He must have been nearly that as it was,’ grunted Hallick. ‘The money he made out of the estate was enormous.’
Farringdon sighed. ‘I shall have to try something of the sort myself,’ he remarked.
The inspector looked at him. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What do you want to become a millionaire for?’
The reporter reddened, and a look of understanding came into Hallick’s eyes.
‘Oh, I see.’ He whistled softly. ‘Yes, she’ll have a lot of money, Street. A hell of a lot of money! More than the finest reporter in the world could ever earn.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right, Hallick,’ said Farringdon. ‘Well, I’ve got the satisfaction of knowing that I did my bit towards her getting it.’ He sighed again, and then, changing the subject: ‘I’m sorry for that poor girl, Pamela Earnshaw. She was terribly cut up at the news of her father’s death.’
‘You needn’t be sorry for her,’ grunted Hallick. ‘She’s marrying young Holt next month.’
‘Marrying him!’ Farringdon stared his astonishment. ‘Why, they’ve only met three times.’
‘He’s an American,’ said the inspector, ‘and ‘hustle’ is their motto!’
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The Hand of Fear Page 18