“Well, I had to be somebody, you know, and I had to stay on the spot to work the clues and keep an eye on the developments. I couldn’t be a woman because that would have required a heavy make-up that would almost certainly have been spotted, and would have been an intolerable bore; whereas Bundy, as you have pointed out, was not a disguise at all. When once I had got my hair cut and had provided myself with the clothes and eyeglass, there was no further trouble. I could have lived comfortably as Bundy for the rest of my life.
“So that is my story,” Angelina concluded; “and,” she added, with a sudden change of manner, “I am your grateful debtor for ever. You have done far more for me even than you know. Only this morning, poor Peter Bundy was a forlorn little wretch, miserably anxious about the present and looking to a future that had nothing but empty freedom to offer. And now I am the happiest of women—for I should be a hypocrite if I pretended to have any regrets for poor Nicholas. I will say good-bye to him in his coffin and give him a decent funeral, and try to think of him as he was before he sank into the depths. But I am frankly glad that he is gone out of his own miserable life and out of mine. And his going, which would never have been known but for the wisdom of the benevolent serpent, has left me free, With a promise of a happiness that even he does not guess.”
“I am not so sure of that,” said Thorndyke, with a sly smile.
“Well, neither am I, now you come to mention it,” said she, smiling at him in return. “He is an inquiring and observant serpent, with a way of nosing out all sorts of things that he is not supposed to be aware of. And, after all, perhaps he has a right to know. It is proper that the giver should have the satisfaction of realizing the preciousness of that which he has given.”
Here endeth the Mystery of Angelina Frood. And yet it is not quite the end. Indeed, the end is not yet; for the blessed consequences still continue to develop like the growth of a fair tree. The story has dwindled to a legend, whose harmless whispers call but a mischievous smile to that face that, like the dial in our garden, acknowledges only the sunshine. Mrs. Dunk, it is true, still wages public war, but it is tempered by private adoration; and almost daily baskets of flowers, and even tomatoes and summer cabbages, arrive at our house accompanied by the beaming smile and portly person of Inspector Cobbledick.
THE SHADOW OF THE WOLF (1925) [Part 1]
CHAPTER I
In which Two Men go forth and One Arrives
About half-past eight on a fine, sunny June morning a small yacht crept out of Sennen Cove, near the Land’s End, and headed for the open sea. On the shelving beach of the Cove two women and a man, evidently visitors (or “foreigners,” to use the local term), stood watching her departure with valedictory waving of cap or handkerchief; and the boatman who had put the crew on board, aided by two of his comrades, was hauling his boat up above the tide-mark.
A light northerly breeze filled the yacht’s sails and drew her gradually seaward. The figures of her crew dwindled to the size of a doll’s, shrank with the increasing distance to the magnitude of insects, and at last, losing all individuality, became mere specks merged in the form of the fabric that bore them. At this point the visitors turned their faces inland and walked away up the beach, and the boatman, having opined that “she be fetchin’ a tidy offing,” dismissed the yacht from his mind and reverted to the consideration of a heap of netting and some invalid lobster-pots.
On board the receding craft two men sat in the little cockpit. They formed the entire crew, for the Sandhopper was only a ship’s lifeboat, timber and decked, of light draught, and, in the matter of spars and canvas, what the art critics would call “reticent.”
Both men, despite the fineness of the weather, wore yellow oilskins and sou’westers, and that was about all they had in common. In other respects they made a curious contrast: the one small, slender, sharp-featured, dark almost to swarthiness, and restless and quick in his movements; the other large, massive, red-faced, blue-eyed, with the rounded outlines suggestive of ponderous strength—a great ox of a man, heavy, stolid, but much less unwieldy than he looked.
The conversation incidental to getting the yacht under way had ceased, and silence had fallen on the occupants of the cockpit. The big man grasped the tiller and looked sulky, which was probably his usual aspect, and the small man watched him furtively. The land was nearly two miles distant when the latter broke the silence with a remark very similar to that of the boatman on the beach.
“You’re not going to take the shore on board, Purcell. Where are we supposed to be going to?”
“I am going outside the Longships,” was the stolid answer.
“So I see,” rejoined the other. “It’s hardly the shortest course for Penzance, though.”
“I like to keep an offing on this coast,” said Purcell; and once more the conversation languished.
Presently the smaller man spoke again, this time in a more cheerful and friendly tone.
“Joan Haygarth has come on wonderfully the last few months; getting quite a fine-looking girl. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” answered Purcell, “and so does Phil Rodney.”
“You’re right,” agreed the other. “But she isn’t a patch on her sister, though, and never will be. I was looking at Maggie as we came down the beach this morning and thinking what a handsome girl she is. Don’t you agree with me?”
Purcell stooped to look under the boom, and answered without turning his head:
“Yes, she’s all right.”
“All right!” exclaimed the other. “Is that the way—”
“Look here, Varney,” interrupted Purcell, “I don’t want to discuss my wife’s looks with you or any other man. She’ll do for me, or I shouldn’t have married her.”
A deep coppery flush stole into Varney’s cheeks. But he had brought the rather brutal snub on himself, and apparently had the fairness to recognize the fact, for he mumbled an apology and relapsed into silence.
When he next spoke he did so with a manner diffident and uneasy, as though approaching a disagreeable or difficult subject.
“There’s a little matter, Dan, that I’ve been wanting to speak to you about when we got a chance of a private talk.” He glanced a little anxiously at his stolid companion, who grunted, and then, without removing his gaze from the horizon ahead, replied: “You’ve a pretty fair chance now, seeing that we shall be bottled up together for another five or six hours. And it’s private enough, unless you bawl loud enough to be heard at the Longships.”
It was not a gracious invitation. But that Varney had hardly expected; and if he resented the rebuff he showed no signs of annoyance, for reasons which appeared when he opened his subject.
“What I wanted to say,” he resumed, “was this. We’re both doing pretty well now on the square. You must be positively piling up the shekels, and I can earn a decent living, which is all I want. Why shouldn’t we drop this flash note business?”
Purcell kept his blue eye fixed on the horizon, and appeared to ignore the question; but after an interval, and without moving a muscle, he said gruffly, “Go on,” and Varney continued:
“The lay isn’t what it was, you know. At first it was all plain sailing. The notes were first-class copies, and not a soul suspected anything until they were presented at the bank. Then the murder was out, and the next little trip that I made was a very different affair. Two or three of the notes were suspected quite soon after I had changed them, and I had to be precious fly, I can tell you, to avoid complications. And now that the second batch has come into the bank, the planting of fresh specimens is no sinecure. There isn’t a money changer on the Continent of Europe that isn’t keeping his weather eyeball peeled, to say nothing of the detectives that the bank people have sent abroad.”
He paused and looked appealingly at his companion. But Purcell, still minding his helm, only growled: “Well?”
“Well, I want to chuck it, Dan. When you’ve had a run of luck and pocketed your winnings is the time to stop
play.”
“You’ve come into some money then, I take it,” said Purcell.
“No, I haven’t. But I can make a living now by safe and respectable means, and I’m sick of all this scheming and dodging with the gaol everlastingly under my lee.”
“The reason I asked,” said Purcell, “is that there is a trifle outstanding. You hadn’t forgotten that, I suppose?”
“No, I hadn’t forgotten it, but I thought that perhaps you might be willing to let me down a bit easily.”
The other man pursed up his thick lips, but continued to gaze stonily over the bow.
“Oh, that’s what you thought, hey?” he said; and then, after a pause, he continued: “I fancy you must have lost sight of some of the facts when you thought that. Let me just remind you how the case stands. To begin with, you start your career with a little playful forgery and embezzlement; you blue the proceeds, and you are mug enough to be found out. Then I come in. I compound the affair with old Marston for a couple of thousand, and practically clean myself out of every penny I possess, and he consents to regard your temporary absence in the light of a holiday.
“Now why do I do this? Am I a philanthropist? Devil a bit. I’m a man of business. Before I ladle out that two thousand, I make a business contract with you. I happen to possess the means of making and the skill to make a passable imitation of the Bank of England paper; you are a skilled engraver and a plausible scamp. I am to supply you with paper blanks; you are to engrave plates, print the notes, and get them changed. I am to take two-thirds of the proceeds, and, although I have done the most difficult part of the work, I agree to regard my share of the profits as constituting repayment of the loan. Our contract amounts to this: I lend you two thousand without security—with an infernal amount of insecurity, in fact—you ‘promise, covenant, and agree,’ as the lawyers say, to hand me back ten thousand in instalments, being the products of our joint industry. It is a verbal contract which I have no means of enforcing; but I trust you to keep your word, and up to the present you have kept it. You have paid me a little over four thousand. Now you want to cry off and leave the balance unpaid. Isn’t that the position?”
“Not exactly,” said Varney. “I’m not crying off the debt; I only want time. Look here, Dan: I’m making about five-fifty a year now. That isn’t much, but I’ll manage to let you have a hundred a year out of it. What do you say to that?”
Purcell laughed scornfully. “A hundred a year to pay off six thousand! That’ll take just sixty years, and as I’m now forty-three, I shall be exactly a hundred and three years of age when the last instalment is paid. I think, Varney, you’ll admit that a man of a hundred and three is getting a bit past his prime.”
“Well, I’ll pay you something down to start. I’ve saved about eighteen hundred pounds out of the note business. You can have that now, and I’ll pay off as much as I can at a time until I’m clear. Remember that if I should happen to get clapped in chokee for twenty years or so you won’t get anything. And, I tell you, it’s getting a risky business.”
“I’m willing to take the risk,” said Purcell.
“I dare say you are!” Varney retorted passionately, “because it’s my risk. If I am grabbed, it’s my racket. You sit out. It’s I who passed the notes, and I’m known to be a skilled engraver. That’ll be good enough for them. They won’t trouble about who made the paper.”
“I hope not,” said Purcell.
“Of course they wouldn’t, and you know I shouldn’t give you away.”
“Naturally. Why should you? Wouldn’t do you any good.”
“Well, give me a chance, Dan,” Varney pleaded. “This business is getting on my nerves. I want to be quit of it. You’ve had four thousand; that’s a hundred per cent. You haven’t done so badly.”
“I didn’t expect to do badly. I took a big risk. I gambled two thousand for ten.”
“Yes, and you got me out of the way while you put the screw on to poor old Haygarth to make his daughter marry you.”
It was an indiscreet thing to say, but Purcell’s stolid indifference to his danger and distress had ruffled Varney’s temper somewhat.
Purcell, however, was unmoved. “I don’t know,” he said, “what you mean by getting you out of the way. You were never in the way. You were always hankering after Maggie, but I could never see that she wanted you.”
“Well, she certainly didn’t want you,” Varney retorted, “and, for that matter, I don’t much think she wants you now.”
For the first time Purcell withdrew his eye from the horizon to turn it on his companion. And an evil eye it was, set in the great sensual face, now purple with anger.
“What the devil do you mean?” he exclaimed furiously, “you infernal sallow-faced little whipper snapper! If you mention my wife’s name again I’ll knock you on the head and pitch you over board.”
Varney’s face flushed darkly, and for a moment he was inclined to try the wager of battle. But the odds were impossible, and if Varney was not a coward, neither was he a fool. But the discussion was at an end. Nothing was to be hoped for now. Those indiscreet words of provocation had rendered further pleading impossible; and as Varney relapsed into sullen silence, it was with the knowledge that, for weary years to come, he was doomed, at best, to tread the perilous path of crime, or, more probably, to waste the brightest years of his life in a convict prison. For it is a strange fact, and a curious commentary on our current ethical notions, that neither of these rascals even contemplated as a possibility the breach of a merely verbal covenant. A promise had been given. That was enough. Without a specific release, the terms of that promise must be fulfilled to the letter. How many righteous men—prim lawyers or strait-laced, church-going men of business—would have looked at the matter in the same way?
The silence that settled down on the yacht and the aloofness that encompassed the two men were conducive to reflection. Each of the men ignored the presence of the other. When the course was altered southerly, Purcell slacked out the sheets with his own hand as he put up the helm. He might have been sailing single-handed. And Varney watched him askance, but made no move, sitting hunched up on the locker, nursing a slowly matured hatred and thinking his thoughts.
Very queer thoughts they were, rambling, but yet connected and very vivid. He was following out the train of events that might have happened, pursuing them to their possible consequences. Supposing Purcell had carried out his threat? Well, there would have been a pretty tough struggle, for Varney was no weakling. But a struggle with that solid fifteen stone of flesh could end only in one way. He glanced at the great purple, shiny hand that grasped the knob of the tiller. Not the sort of hand that you would want at your throat! No, there was no doubt; he would have gone overboard.
And what then? Would Purcell have gone back to Sennen Cove, or sailed alone into Penzance? In either case, he would have had to make up some sort of story, and no one could have contradicted him, whether the story was believed or not. But it would have been awkward for Purcell.
Then there was the body: That would have washed up sooner or later, as much of it as the lobsters had left. Well, lobsters don’t eat clothes or bones, and a dent in the skull might take some accounting for. Very awkward, this, for Purcell. He would probably have had to clear out—to make a bolt for it, in short.
The mental picture of this great bully fleeing in terror from the vengeance of the law gave Varney appreciable pleasure. Most of his life he had been borne down by the moral and physical weight of this domineering brute. At school Purcell had fagged him; he had even bullied him up at Cambridge; and now he had fastened on for ever like the Old Man of the Sea. And Purcell always got the best of it. When he, Varney, had come back from Italy after that unfortunate little affair, behold! the girl whom they had both wanted (and who had wanted neither of them) had changed from Maggie Haygarth into Maggie Purcell. And so it was even unto this day. Purcell, once a book-keeper in a paper-mill, now a prosperous “financier”—a money-lender, as Varn
ey more than suspected—spent a part of his secret leisure making, in absolute safety, those paper blanks, which he, Varney, must risk his liberty to change into money. Yes, it was quite pleasant to think of Purcell sneaking from town to town, from country to country, with the police at his heels.
But in these days of telegraphs and extradition there isn’t much chance for a fugitive. Purcell would have been caught to a certainty, and he would have been hanged; no doubt of it. And, passing lightly over less attractive details, Varney considered luxuriously the circumstances of the execution. What a figure he would have made, that great human ox, turning round and round at the end of a taut rope, like a baron of beef on a colossal roasting-jack! Varney looked gloatingly at his companion, considered his large sullen face, and thought how it would swell and grow purple as the rope tightened round the thick crimson neck.
A disagreeable picture, perhaps, but not to Varney, who saw it through the distorting medium of years of accumulated dislike. Then, too, there was the consideration that in the very moment that those brawny limbs had ceased to twitch Maggie would have been free—would have been a widow. Not that that would have concerned him, Varney: he would have been in some Cornish churchyard, with a dent in his skull. Still, it was a pleasant reflection.
The imagined picture of the execution gave him quite a lengthy entertainment. Then his errant thoughts began to spread out in search of other possibilities. For, after all, it was not an absolute certainty that Purcell could have got him overboard. There was just the chance that he might have gone overboard himself. That would have been a very different affair.
Varney settled himself composedly to consider the new and interesting train of consequences that would thus have been set going. They were more agreeable to contemplate than the others, because they did not include his own demise. The execution scene made no appearance in this version. The salient fact was that his oppressor would have vanished; that the intolerable burden of his servitude would have been lifted for ever; that he would have been free.
The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack Page 74