The Detective Megapack

by Various Writers

  “I was only too willing to hear any theory which pointed to any one else as the criminal than Arthur, but Lyle’s explanation was too utterly fantastic. I told him that he certainly showed imagination, but that he could not hang a man for what he imagined he had done.

  “‘No,’ Lyle answered, ‘but I can frighten him by telling him what I think he has done, and now when I again question the Russian servant I will make it quite clear to him that I believe he is the murderer. I think that will open his mouth. A man will at least talk to defend himself. Come,’ he said, ‘we must return at once to Scotland Yard and see him. There is nothing more to do here.’

  “He arose, and I followed him into the hall, and in another minute we would have been on our way to Scotland Yard. But just as he opened the street door a postman halted at the gate of the garden, and began fumbling with the latch.

  “Lyle stopped, with an exclamation of chagrin.

  “‘How stupid of me!’ he exclaimed. He turned quickly and pointed to a narrow slit cut in the brass plate of the front door. ‘The house has a private letter-box,’ he said, ‘and I had not thought to look in it! If we had gone out as we came in, by the window, I would never have seen it. The moment I entered the house I should have thought of securing the letters which came this morning. I have been grossly careless.’ He stepped back into the hall and pulled at the lid of the letterbox, which hung on the inside of the door, but it was tightly locked. At the same moment the postman came up the steps holding a letter. Without a word Lyle took it from his hand and began to examine it. It was addressed to the Princess Zichy, and on the back of the envelope was the name of a West End dressmaker.

  “‘That is of no use to me,’ Lyle said. He took out his card and showed it to the postman. ‘I am Inspector Lyle from Scotland Yard,’ he said. ‘The people in this house are under arrest. Everything it contains is now in my keeping. Did you deliver any other letters here this morning!’

  “The man looked frightened, but answered promptly that he was now upon his third round. He had made one postal delivery at seven that morning and another at eleven.

  “‘How many letters did you leave here!’ Lyle asked.

  “‘About six altogether,’ the man answered.

  “‘Did you put them through the door into the letter-box!’

  “The postman said, ‘Yes, I always slip them into the box, and ring and go away. The servants collect them from the inside.’

  “‘Have you noticed if any of the letters you leave here bear a Russian postage stamp!’ Lyle asked.

  “The man answered, ‘Oh, yes, sir, a great many.’

  “‘From the same person, would you say!’

  “‘The writing seems to be the same,’ the man answered. ‘They come regularly about once a week—one of those I delivered this morning had a Russian postmark.’

  “‘That will do,’ said Lyle eagerly. ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’

  “He ran back into the hall, and, pulling out his penknife, began to pick at the lock of the letter-box.

  “‘I have been supremely careless,’ he said in great excitement. ‘Twice before when people I wanted had flown from a house I have been able to follow them by putting a guard over their mail-box. These letters, which arrive regularly every week from Russia in the same handwriting, they can come but from one person. At least, we shall now know the name of the master of this house. Undoubtedly it is one of his letters that the man placed here this morning. We may make a most important discovery.’

  “As he was talking he was picking at the lock with his knife, but he was so impatient to reach the letters that he pressed too heavily on the blade and it broke in his hand. I took a step backward and drove my heel into the lock, and burst it open. The lid flew back, and we pressed forward, and each ran his hand down into the letterbox. For a moment we were both too startled to move. The box was empty.

  “I do not know how long we stood staring stupidly at each other, but it was Lyle who was the first to recover. He seized me by the arm and pointed excitedly into the empty box.

  “‘Do you appreciate what that means?’ he cried. ‘It means that some one has been here ahead of us. Some one has entered this house not three hours before we came, since eleven o’clock this morning.’

  “‘It was the Russian servant!’ I exclaimed.

  “‘The Russian servant has been under arrest at Scotland Yard,’ Lyle cried. ‘He could not have taken the letters. Lord Arthur has been in his cot at the hospital. That is his alibi. There is some one else, some one we do not suspect, and that some one is the murderer. He came back here either to obtain those letters because he knew they would convict him, or to remove something he had left here at the time of the murder, something incriminating—the weapon, perhaps, or some personal article; a cigarette-case, a handkerchief with his name upon it, or a pair of gloves. Whatever it was it must have been damning evidence against him to have made him take so desperate a chance.’

  “‘How do we know,’ I whispered, ‘that he is not hidden here now?’

  “‘No, I’ll swear he is not,’ Lyle answered. ‘I may have bungled in some things, but I have searched this house thoroughly. Nevertheless,’ he added, ‘we must go over it again, from the cellar to the roof. We have the real clew now, and we must forget the others and work only it.’ As he spoke he began again to search the drawing-room, turning over even the books on the tables and the music on the piano. “‘Whoever the man is,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘we know that he has a key to the front door and a key to the letter-box. That shows us he is either an inmate of the house or that he comes here when he wishes. The Russian says that he was the only servant in the house. Certainly we have found no evidence to show that any other servant slept here. There could be but one other person who would possess a key to the house and the letter-box—and he lives in St. Petersburg. At the time of the murder he was two thousand miles away.’ Lyle interrupted himself suddenly with a sharp cry and turned upon me with his eyes flashing. ‘But was he?’ he cried. ‘Was he? How do we know that last night he was not in London, in this very house when Zichy and Chetney met?’

  “He stood staring at me without seeing me, muttering, and arguing with himself.

  “‘Don’t speak to me,’ he cried, as I ventured to interrupt him. ‘I can see it now. It is all plain. It was not the servant, but his master, the Russian himself, and it was he who came back for the letters! He came back for them because he knew they would convict him. We must find them. We must have those letters. If we find the one with the Russian postmark, we shall have found the murderer.’ He spoke like a madman, and as he spoke he ran around the room with one hand held out in front of him as you have seen a mind-reader at a theatre seeking for something hidden in the stalls. He pulled the old letters from the writing-desk, and ran them over as swiftly as a gambler deals out cards; he dropped on his knees before the fireplace and dragged out the dead coals with his bare fingers, and then with a low, worried cry, like a hound on a scent, he ran back to the waste-paper basket and, lifting the papers from it, shook them out upon the floor. Instantly he gave a shout of triumph, and, separating a number of torn pieces from the others, held them up before me.

  “‘Look!’ he cried. ‘Do you see? Here are five letters, torn across in two places. The Russian did not stop to read them, for, as you see, he has left them still sealed. I have been wrong. He did not return for the letters. He could not have known their value. He must have returned for some other reason, and, as he was leaving, saw the letter-box, and taking out the letters, held them together—so—and tore them twice across, and then, as the fire had gone out, tossed them into this basket. Look!’ he cried, ‘here in the upper corner of this piece is a Russian stamp. This is his own letter—unopened!’

  “We examined the Russian stamp and found it had been cancelled in St. Petersburg four days ago. The back of the envelope bore the postmark of the branch station in upper Sloane Street, and was dated this morning. The envelope was
of official blue paper and we had no difficulty in finding the two other parts of it. We drew the torn pieces of the letter from them and joined them together side by side. There were but two lines of writing, and this was the message: ‘I leave Petersburg on the night train, and I shall see you at Trevor Terrace after dinner Monday evening.’

  “‘That was last night!’ Lyle cried. ‘He arrived twelve hours ahead of his letter—but it came in time—it came in time to hang him!’”

  The Baronet struck the table with his hand.

  “The name!” he demanded. “How was it signed? What was the man’s name!”

  The young Solicitor rose to his feet and, leaning forward, stretched out his arm. “There was no name,” he cried. “The letter was signed with only two initials. But engraved at the top of the sheet was the man’s address. That address was ‘THE AMERICAN EMBASSY, ST. PETERSBURG, BUREAU or THE NAVAL ATTACHE,’ and the initials,” he shouted, his voice rising into an exultant and bitter cry, “were those of the gentleman who sits opposite who told us that he was the first to find the murdered bodies, the Naval Attache to Russia, Lieutenant Sears!”

  A strained and awful hush followed the Solicitor’s words, which seemed to vibrate like a twanging bowstring that had just hurled its bolt. Sir Andrew, pale and staring, drew away with an exclamation of repulsion. His eyes were fastened upon the Naval Attache with fascinated horror. But the American emitted a sigh of great content, and sank comfortably into the arms of his chair. He clapped his hands softly together.

  “Capital!” he murmured. “I give you my word I never guessed what you were driving at. You fooled me, I’ll be hanged if you didn’t—you certainly fooled me.”

  The man with the pearl stud leaned forward with a nervous gesture. “Hush! be careful!” he whispered. But at that instant, for the third time, a servant, hastening through the room, handed him a piece of paper which he scanned eagerly. The message on the paper read, “The light over the Commons is out. The House has risen.”

  The man with the black pearl gave a mighty shout, and tossed the paper from him upon the table.

  “Hurrah!” he cried. “The House is up! We’ve won!” He caught up his glass, and slapped the Naval Attache violently upon the shoulder. He nodded joyously at him, at the Solicitor, and at the Queen’s Messenger. “Gentlemen, to you!” he cried; “my thanks and my congratulations!” He drank deep from the glass, and breathed forth a long sigh of satisfaction and relief.

  “But I say,” protested the Queen’s Messenger, shaking his finger violently at the Solicitor, “that story won’t do. You didn’t play fair—and—and you talked so fast I couldn’t make out what it was all about. I’ll bet you that evidence wouldn’t hold in a court of law—you couldn’t hang a cat on such evidence. Your story is condemned tommy-rot. Now my story might have happened, my story bore the mark—”

  In the joy of creation the story-tellers had forgotten their audience, until a sudden exclamation from Sir Andrew caused them to turn guiltily toward him. His face was knit with lines of anger, doubt, and amazement.

  “What does this mean!” he cried. “Is this a jest, or are you mad? If you know this man is a murderer, why is he at large? Is this a game you have been playing? Explain yourselves at once. What does it mean?”

  The American, with first a glance at the others, rose and bowed courteously.

  “I am not a murderer, Sir Andrew, believe me,” he said; “you need not be alarmed. As a matter of fact, at this moment I am much more afraid of you than you could possibly be of me. I beg you please to be indulgent. I assure you, we meant no disrespect. We have been matching stories, that is all, pretending that we are people we are not, endeavoring to entertain you with better detective tales than, for instance, the last one you read, ‘The Great Rand Robbery.’”

  The Baronet brushed his hand nervously across his forehead.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” he exclaimed, “that none of this has happened? That Lord Chetney is not dead, that his Solicitor did not find a letter of yours written from your post in Petersburg, and that just now, when he charged you with murder, he was in jest?”

  “I am really very sorry,” said the American, “but you see, sir, he could not have found a letter written by me in St. Petersburg because I have never been in Petersburg. Until this week, I have never been outside of my own country. I am not a naval officer. I am a writer of short stories. And tonight, when this gentleman told me that you were fond of detective stories, I thought it would be amusing to tell you one of my own—one I had just mapped out this afternoon.”

  “But Lord Chetney is a real person,” interrupted the Baronet, “and he did go to Africa two years ago, and he was supposed to have died there, and his brother, Lord Arthur, has been the heir. And yesterday Chetney did return. I read it in the papers.” “So did I,” assented the American soothingly; “and it struck me as being a very good plot for a story. I mean his unexpected return from the dead, and the probable disappointment of the younger brother. So I decided that the younger brother had better murder the older one. The Princess Zichy I invented out of a clear sky. The fog I did not have to invent. Since last night I know all that there is to know about a London fog. I was lost in one for three hours.”

  The Baronet turned grimly upon the Queen’s Messenger.

  “But this gentleman,” he protested, “he is not a writer of short stories; he is a member of the Foreign Office. I have often seen him in Whitehall, and, according to him, the Princess Zichy is not an invention. He says she is very well known, that she tried to rob him.”

  The servant of the Foreign Office looked unhappily at the Cabinet Minister, and puffed nervously on his cigar.

  “It’s true, Sir Andrew, that I am a Queen’s Messenger,” he said appealingly, “and a Russian woman once did try to rob a Queen’s Messenger in a railway carriage—only it did not happen to me, but to a pal of mine. The only Russian princess I ever knew called herself Zabrisky. You may have seen her. She used to do a dive from the roof of the Aquarium.”

  Sir Andrew, with a snort of indignation, fronted the young Solicitor.

  “And I suppose yours was a cock-and-bull story, too,” he said. “Of course, it must have been, since Lord Chetney is not dead. But don’t tell me,” he protested, “that you are not Chudleigh’s son either.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the youngest member, smiling in some embarrassment, “but my name is not Chudleigh. I assure you, though, that I know the family very well, and that I am on very good terms with them.”

  “You should be!” exclaimed the Baronet; “and, judging from the liberties you take with the Chetneys, you had better be on very good terms with them, too.”

  The young man leaned back and glanced toward the servants at the far end of the room.

  “It has been so long since I have been in the Club,” he said, “that I doubt if even the waiters remember me. Perhaps Joseph may,” he added. “Joseph!” he called, and at the word a servant stepped briskly forward.

  The young man pointed to the stuffed head of a great lion which was suspended above the fireplace.

  “Joseph,” he said, “I want you to tell these gentlemen who shot that lion. Who presented it to the Grill?”

  Joseph, unused to acting as master of ceremonies to members of the Club, shifted nervously from one foot to the other.

  “Why, you—you did,” he stammered.

  “Of course I did!” exclaimed the young man. “I mean, what is the name of the man who shot it! Tell the gentlemen who I am. They wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Who you are, my lord?” said Joseph. “You are Lord Edam’s son, the Earl of Chetney.”

  “You must admit,” said Lord Chetney, when the noise had died away, “that I couldn’t remain dead while my little brother was accused of murder. I had to do something. Family pride demanded it. Now, Arthur, as the younger brother, can’t afford to be squeamish, but personally I should hate to have a brother of mine hanged for murder.”

  “You
certainly showed no scruples against hanging me,” said the American, “but in the face of your evidence I admit my guilt, and I sentence myself to pay the full penalty of the law as we are made to pay it in my own country. The order of this court is,” he announced, “that Joseph shall bring me a wine-card, and that I sign it for five bottles of the Club’s best champagne.” “Oh, no!” protested the man with the pearl stud, “it is not for you to sign it. In my opinion it is Sir Andrew who should pay the costs. It is time you knew,” he said, turning to that gentleman, “that unconsciously you have been the victim of what I may call a patriotic conspiracy. These stories have had a more serious purpose than merely to amuse. They have been told with the worthy object of detaining you from the House of Commons. I must explain to you, that all through this evening I have had a servant waiting in Trafalgar Square with instructions to bring me word as soon as the light over the House of Commons had ceased to burn. The light is now out, and the object for which we plotted is attained.”