Presently my leisurely perambulations brought me opposite a shop of more than common smartness, and here—perhaps because the crowd of market folk was a little more dense—I paused and gazed somewhat absently into the window. I have no idea why I looked into that particular shop window. The wares exposed in it—ladies’ hats—have no special attraction to the masculine eye—at least in the state in which they are presented by the milliner, bereft of the principal ornament which should be found underneath them. Nevertheless, I was not the only male observer. Another man had stopped and stood, nearer to the window than I, inspecting the gaily-flowered and feathered headgear with undeniable interest.
The incongruity of this eager scrutiny of things so characteristically feminine struck me with amused curiosity, and I watched the man with a half-suppressed smile. He was a small, slight man, neatly dressed in a suit of tweeds and a tweed hat, and the trouser-clips at his ankles suggested that he had cycled in from the country. I could not see his face, as I was standing nearly behind him, but apparently he became aware, after a time, of my presence—perhaps he saw my reflection in the window—and of the fact that I was observing him somewhat curiously, for he turned away with some suddenness, glancing up at me as he passed and then half pausing to look at me again before he bustled away and disappeared up an alley.
There was something very odd in that second look. The first had been a mere casual glance, but the second—quick, searching, even startled—suggested recognition, and something more than recognition. What could it have been? And who could he be? The face—a clean-shaved, thin, sallow face, not very young, seen only for a moment, left a clear mental image that still remained. And as I visualised it afresh I was conscious of a faint sense of familiarity. I had seen this man before. Where had I seen him; and who was he? And why did he look at me with that singular expression?
I stood where he had left me, cudgelling my brains for an answer to these questions. And even as I stood there, a cyclist passed swiftly across the end of the square and disappeared in the direction of the London Road. He was too far off for his face to be clearly recognisable: but he was a small man, he wore a tweed suit and hat, and trouser-clips, and I had no doubt that he was the same man.
Now who was he? The more I recalled the face, the more convinced I was that I had seen it before. But the identity of its owner eluded me completely. I couldn’t place the fellow at all. Probably it didn’t matter in the least who he was. But still it was exasperating to be baffled in this way. Unconsciously, I turned and stared into the milliner’s window. And then, in a flash it came. The middle of the window was occupied by an enormous hat—a huge, bloated, fungous structure overrun with counterfeit vegetation and bristling with feathers; such a hat as might have adorned the cranium of a Hottentot queen. A glance at that grisly head-dress supplied the missing link in the chain of association. The face that had looked into mine was the face of the woman who had shadowed Winifred and me from Hampstead; who had lured her to the empty house, and had there revealed herself as a man in disguise. In short, this was the murderer of poor Drayton, and the would-be murderer of Winifred!
And I had held this wretch in the hollow of my hand and I had let him go! It was an infuriating thought. If my quickness of observation had only been equal to his, I should have had him by now safely under lock and key. No wonder he had looked startled. But he must have a remarkably good memory for faces to have recognised me in that instantaneous glance. For he had seen me only once—at the inquest at Hampstead—and then but for a moment. Unless he had got a glimpse of me at the empty house, or—which seemed more probable—had shadowed and watched me when I had been acting as Winifred’s escort. At any rate he knew me, better than I knew him, and had managed very adroitly to slip through my fingers.
But what on earth was he doing at Aylesbury? Was it possible that he lived in this neighbourhood? If so, a description given to the police might even yet secure his arrest. I was turning over this possibility when the chiming of a clock recalled my appointment. I glanced up at the dial on the clock-tower and had just noted that the appointed hour had struck when I observed Thorndyke ascending the steps to the platform at the base. This was our rendezvous, and I forthwith hurried across the cobbled square and presented myself, bursting with my news and discharging them in a volley as soon as I arrived.
Thorndyke was deeply interested, but yet I found in his manner something slightly disappointing. He was an impassive man, difficult to surprise or move to any outward manifestation of emotion. Still, knowing this, I was a little chilled by the almost academic view that he took of the incident, and especially by his firm rejection of my plan for invoking the aid of the police.
“It sounds tempting,” he admitted, “to swoop down on this man and put an end forthwith to all our dangers and complications, but it would be a bad move. Quite probably the police would decline to take any action. And then what sort of description could you give them? For the purposes of a search it is far too general, and a change of clothing would make it entirely inapplicable. And we must admit the possibility of your being mistaken. And finally, if we gave this information, we should almost certainly lose one man—whom none of us has ever seen, but who is probably the principal. We should have let the cat out of the bag, and all our carefully-laid plans would come to nought.”
“I didn’t know that we had any carefully-laid plans,” said I.
“You know that we are engaged in investigating a murder; that our aim is to secure the two or more murderers and to elucidate the causes and circumstances of the crime, and that we have accumulated a certain number of data to that end.”
“You have,” I objected. “I have practically no data at all. May I ask if you know who this sallow-faced little devil is?”
“I have a strong suspicion,” he replied. “But suspicion isn’t quite what one wants to take into a court of law. I want to verify my suspicions and turn them into conclusive evidence. So that when I play my card it shall be a trump card.”
To this I had no reply to make. I knew Thorndyke’s methods. For years I had acted as his leading counsel, and always when I had gone into court I had taken with me a case complete to the last detail. Now, for the first time, I was realising the amount of patience and self-restraint that went to the making of a case of unassailable conclusiveness, and I found myself with difficulty overcoming the temptation to make a premature move.
While we had been talking, we had been making our way at an easy pace out of the town on to the London Road, and now Thorndyke, with the one-inch ordnance map in his hand, indicated our route.
“Beauchamp Blake,” said he, “lies just off the Lower Icknield Way, on the left of the London Road. But there is no need for us to take the shortest way. The by-road through Stoke Mandeville looks more entertaining than the main road, and we can pick up the Lower Icknield Way at the crossroads below the village.”
Our route being thus settled, we set forth, turning off presently into the quiet, shady by-road. And as we swung along between the thinning hedgerows, with the majestic elms—now sprinkled with yellow—towering above us and casting athwart the road streaks of cool shadow, we chatted sporadically with long intervals of silence, for we were Londoners on holiday to whom the beauty of this fair countryside was reinforced by a certain pleasant strangeness.
“I have wondered from time to time,” I said, after one of the long pauses, “what can be the significance—if it has any—of that blue-dyed hair that you extracted from Winifred’s locket” (I had confided to Thorndyke the new relations that had grown up between our fair client and me).
“Ah,” he replied. “A very interesting problem, Anstey.”
“I have also wondered what made you take the hair out of the locket to examine it under the microscope.”
“The answer to that question is perfectly simple,” said he. “I took it out to see if it was blue. In the mass the hair looked black.”
“But do I understand that you thought it might be
blue?”
“I expected to find it blue. The examination was a measure of verification.”
“But why, in the name of Fortune, should you expect to find blue hair in a locket? I had no idea that hair ever was dyed blue—except,” I added with a sudden flash of recollection, “in the case of ancient Egyptian wigs, and I had an idea that they were not hair at all.”
“Some of them, I believe, were not. However, this was not ancient Egyptian hair. It was modern.”
“Then, will you tell me what it was that made you expect to find the hair in the locket dyed blue?”
“The expectation,” he replied, “arose out of an inspection of the locket itself.”
“Do you mean those mysterious and obscure Biblical references engraved inside?”
“No; I mean the external characters, the peculiar construction, the motto engraved on the front, and the hallmark on the back.”
“But what,” I asked, “was the connection between those external characters and this most extraordinary peculiarity of the hair inside?”
He looked at me with the exasperating smile that I knew so well (and was, in fact, expecting).
“Now, you know, Anstey,” said he, “you are trying to pump me; to suck my brains instead of using your own. I am not going to encourage you in any such mental indolence. The proper satisfaction of a discovery is in having made it yourself. You have seen and handled the locket, you have heard my comments on it, and you have access to it for further examination. Try to recall what it is like, and if necessary, examine it afresh. Consider its peculiarities one by one and then in relation to one another. If you do this attentively and thoughtfully you will find that those peculiarities will yield some most curious and interesting suggestions, including the suggestion that the hair inside is probably blue.”
“I shan’t find anything of the kind, you old devil,” I exclaimed wrathfully, “and you know perfectly well that I shan’t. Still, I will take an early opportunity to put the ‘little Sphinx’ under cross-examination.”
While we had been talking we had passed through the village of Stoke Mandeville, and we now arrived at the crossroads, where we turned to the left into the ancient Icknield Way.
“A mile and a half farther on,” said Thorndyke, again consulting the map, “we cross the London Road. Then we turn out of the Icknield Way into this lane, leaving Weston Turville on our left. I note there is an inn opposite the gates of Beauchamp Blake. Does that topographical feature interest you?”
“I think,” said I, “that after another couple of miles, we shall be ready for what the British workman calls a ‘breaver.’ But it is probably only a wayside beerhouse.”
Another half-hour’s walking brought us to the London Road, crossing which we followed a side road—apparently part of the Icknield Way—which skirted the lake-like reservoir and presently gave off as a branch a pleasant, elm-bordered lane on the right-hand side of which was a tall oak paling.
“This,” said Thorndyke, whose stature enabled him easily to look over the fence, “is the little park of Beauchamp Blake. I don’t see the house, but I see the roof of a gatekeeper’s lodge. And here is the inn.”
A turn of the lane had brought into view a gatekeeper’s lodge by the main gates of the park, and nearly opposite, the looked-for hostelry. And a very remarkable-looking hostelry it was, considering its secluded position; an antique, half-timbered house with a high, crinkly roof in which was a row of dormer windows, and a larger, overhanging gabled bay supported below by an immense carved corner-post. But the most singular feature of the house was the sign, which swung at the top of a tall post by a horse-trough in the little forecourt, on which was the head of a gentleman wearing a crown and a full-bottomed wig, apparently suspended in mid-air over a brown stone pitcher.
“It seems to me,” said I, as we approached the inn, “that the sign needs an explanatory inscription. The association of a king and a brown jug may be natural enough, but it is unusual as an inn-sign.”
“Now, Anstey,” Thorndyke exclaimed protestingly, “don’t tell me that that ancient joke has missed its mark on your superlative intellect. The inscription on the parlour window tells us that the sign is the King’s Head, and the pitcher under that portrait explains that the king is James the Second or Third—His Majesty over the water. This is evidently a Jacobite house. Does the sedition shock you? Or shall we enter and refresh? If the landlord’s ale is as old as his politics we ought to find quite exceptional entertainment within, and perhaps pick up a trifle of local gossip that may interest us.”
I assented readily, secretly denouncing my slowness in the “uptake.” Thorndyke’s explanations were always so ridiculously simple—when you had heard them.
The landlord, who looked like a retired butler, received us with old-fashioned deference and inducted us into the parlour, drawing a couple of Wycombe armchairs up to the table.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” he inquired.
“Well, what can you do for us?” asked Thorndyke. “Is it to be bread and cheese and beer?”
“I can let you have a cold fowl and a cut of boiled bacon,” said the landlord with the air of one who lays down the ace of trumps.
“Can you really!” exclaimed Thorndyke. “That is a repast fit for a king—even for the king over the water.”
The landlord smiled slyly. “Ah, you’re alluding to my old sign, sir,” said he. “’Twouldn’t have done to have had him swingin’ up there time back. Some others would have been swingin’ too. In those days he used to hang in this room over the fireplace, only there was a portrait of King George fixed over him with concealed hinges. When strangers came to the house there was King George—God bless him!—the same as the sign that used to hang outside; but when the villagers or the people from the Hall opposite sat in the room, then George was swung back on his hinges to bring James into view and a pitcher of water was put on the table to drink the toasts over. This was a thriving house in those days. They say that Percival Blake—he was the last of the old family and a rare plotter by all accounts—used to meet some of his political cronies in this very room, and I’ve no doubt a lot of business was plotted here that never came to anything.”
“Who has the place now?” asked Thorndyke.
“The present squire is Mr. Arthur Blake, and a queerish sort of squire he is.”
“In what way queer?” I asked.
“Well, you see, sir, he’s a Colonial—lived in Australia all his life, I understand. And he looks it—a big, roughish-looking man, and very short spoken. But he can ride, I’ll say that for him. There isn’t a better horseman in the county. Mounts from the off-side, too. I suppose that’s their way out there, though it don’t suit our rule of the road.”
As the landlord gave these particulars, he proceeded, with swift dexterity, to lay the table and furnish it with the materials for the feast, aided and abetted by an unseen female who lurked in the background. When he had put the final touch with a “foam-crowned jug of nut-brown,” he showed a tendency to withdraw and leave us to our meal; but Thorndyke was in a conversational mood and induced him, without difficulty, to fetch another tumbler and proceed with his output of local lore.
“Is it true that the place is going to be sold?” Thorndyke inquired.
“So they say,” replied the landlord. “And the best thing the squire could do if the lawyers will let him. The place is no good to him.”
“Why not?”
“Well, sir, he’s a bachelor, and like to remain one it seems. Then he’s a stranger to the place and don’t appear to take to English ways. He keeps no company and he makes no visits; he don’t know any of his neighbours and doesn’t seem to want to. He has only kept on one or two of the servants, and he lives with his man—foreign-looking chap named Meyer—in a corner of the house and never uses the rest. He’d be more comfortable in a little farm house.”
“And how does he spend his time?” asked Thorndyke.
“I don’t know, sir,” wa
s the answer. “Mostly loafing about, I should say. He takes photographs, I hear; quite clever at it, too, it seems. And he goes out for a ride every afternoon—you’ll see him come out of the gate at three o’clock almost to the minute—and sometimes he goes out in the morning, too.”
“And as to visitors? Are strangers allowed to look over the house?”
“No, sir. The squire won’t have any strangers about the place at all. I fancy what made him so particular was a burglary that occurred there about a couple of years ago. Not that there was much in it, for they got all the things back and they caught the burglar the very next day.”
“That was smart work,” I remarked.
“Yes,” our friend agreed, “they did the thief very neatly. It was a one-man job and the burglar seems to have been a downy bird, for he worked in gloves so that he shouldn’t leave any marks behind. But he took those gloves off a bit too soon, for, when they heard him making off and let the dogs loose, he had to do a bolt, and he dropped one of the things in the park—a silver salver it was, I think—and the police found it the next morning and found some finger-marks on it. They wanted to take the salver up to Scotland Yard to have it examined, but the squire wouldn’t have that. He took a photograph of the fingermarks and gave it to the police, and they took it up to Scotland Yard, and the people there were able to tell them at once whose fingermarks they were, and they got the burglar that very evening with all the stolen goods in his possession. Wonderful smart, I call it.”
The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack Page 37