by Annie Haynes
“We’ll be married at the church here, as Minnie says, and go away from the Hall afterwards. No Register Office for me – church is better style, and if you get a special licence no banns need be called. So get a move on, Harold. I’ll go up to town for a few days – must see the last of old Maurice and get a bit of shopping done.
“Buck up!” she added. “Not much of the impatient bridegroom about you, I must say!”
“Played out nowadays, that sort of thing,” he answered apathetically. “I think you’re wise to take Lady Medchester’s offer –”
She glanced at him sharply. “No need to swallow the poker,” she put in. “‘Lady Medchester,’ indeed! She’ll be my cousin as well as yours when we’re married!”
“It will save trouble in the long run – a quiet wedding,” he went on as though she had not spoken, “and come to the same thing in the end.”
“Now look here, Harold,” Miss Stainer admonished, “understand I am not going to take any nonsense from you lying down. I know what I know – and there’s others’ll know it too if you don’t behave yourself. Once I’m your wife it’ll be different –”
“Oh, I know all that,” he interrupted wearily. “What more do you want? We’ll be married whenever you like, I tell you. You had better go and tell – Minnie” – he brought the name out with a gulp – “you accept her offer. She’ll bet glad to have it settled – one way or the other – and I’ll see about the licence.”
He strode off, glad to have got it over without a “scene.” Sybil Stainer rather enjoyed scenes; she said it cleared the air and gave an opportunity for getting in a home-truth or two.
She also knew when she was beaten, and it had been dawning upon her for some days that, although for certain reasons she could put the screw on Lady Medchester when she liked, it was a different matter when dealing with Lord Medchester, and she had no idea of losing the bird in her hand because she could glimpse a bigger one in the bush; that is to say, she would never allow the unsubstantial glories of a large and fashionable wedding to endanger seriously the wedding itself.
Before Harold broached the subject to her she had already decided that, as Medchester was making such an unholy fuss about it, it would be politic to give way with regard to the manner of it and get on with the business itself. Life, in her experience, was so essentially a matter of ups and downs, it was foolish to tempt Fate by asking too much.
As Harold drove off after his interview with Sybil Stainer, he passed Harbord walking into Medchester in search of a dentist. He recognized him as one of the detectives engaged on the unravelling of the murders in which they all seemed to have become involved, and suppressed a first kindly impulse to offer him a lift. The man might make use of the opportunity to ask questions – questions Harold did not want to answer. So far as that unpleasant bill with Robert Saunderson’s signature on it was concerned, that had been settled; it had been easy enough to raise the money when he had come into the Gorth properties and, with the principal witness dead, there was no one to bring up awkward questions about the signature. The name had been forged very cleverly, and Messrs. Usher & Snell, the money-lenders in whose office it had been left, had apparently never suspected its genuineness. Saunderson would never have let on about the forgery. He would want to keep all the cards in his own hand till the right time came. Circumstances, accidental or otherwise, had certainly played into Harold’s hands as far as that was concerned.
So he professed not to see Harbord, who, he hoped, had possibly not seen him, little thinking that each step taken by Scotland Yard’s emissary was a step nearer the solution of the problem that was causing them all so much distress.
Who is to say how far we can exercise free will, and how far we are the puppets of an arbitrary fate? What impulse is it that makes us choose this road or that: one perhaps leading to goals big with opportunity; the other dwindling into an arid, barren cul-de-sac, pitted with futile footsteps that never get any further? They may both have looked fair enough at the start. What influence lies behind the final decision?
There were three dentists, it appeared, in Medchester. Harbord learnt so much from a local directory and, knowing nothing about any of them, chose one at random. He did not suppose there was much the matter, and the least efficient member of the dentist’s craft should be able to give him something to stay the pain till he could get back to London.
He missed the first because he disliked the name – Le Mouette. He distrusted flowery names, and it sounded foreign. So he chose the second, bearing the simple and familiar name of Howard, and a few minutes later was knocking at his door.
Mr. Howard was in but engaged; if the gentleman had no engagement he might have to wait a little. Would he take a seat in the waiting-room, and the maid assured him she would let Mr. Howard know the case was urgent.
Harbord found himself sharing the cheerful little waiting-room with two other unfortunates who presumably would be attended to before his turn came. If he had not been reluctant to face another sleepless night he might have been tempted to return to Holford forthwith; but having got so far it seemed foolish to give way to impatience.
A natural instinct, further developed by training, to observe what was going on round him caused him to take stock of his fellow-victims. Not much of interest to be gained there! A young woman, nursing a swelled face, and keeping a pair of scared eyes fixed on the door, as a lost soul might wait a summons to the Inferno; and an elderly man deeply immersed in the pages of a financial paper probably some days old.
Harbord turned to the table upon which papers old and new and a magazine or two lay scattered in untidy profusion. He drew up a chair and selected one at random, and had absently turned over a few leaves before discovering it was a railway guide to the best hotels in the North of England. He dropped it and picked up another. The door opened, the young woman rose and followed the beckoning finger into the Unknown – so Harbord imagined it to be from the expression on her face.
One step nearer to his own turn.
The paper he had chanced on was the “Bysphere,” and hardly knowing what he was doing he turned the pages idly, stared at portraits with names under them, of men in tweeds carrying golf clubs, ladies notorious in society or stageland, a picture of the river crowded with boats, Japanese parasols, girls with bare arms in punts, with “Henley Regatta” beneath. This made him glance up at the date; the paper was an issue of months ago, but it served as well as anything else, and at that moment the maid reappeared and, the elderly gentleman obeying the call, Harbord was left in sole possession of the waiting-room. Anyhow it would be his turn next now, so there would not be so much longer to wait.
He continued to turn over the leaves of the ancient weekly, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He had seen Lord Gorth drive past him outside Medchester; it had set him wondering again, in spite of the pain he was suffering, whether that young gentleman and his sister were really involved, entangled in the knotted threads of this sinister problem. Things were beginning to look bad for Mrs. Burford; he, with Stoddart, would have been almost ready to vouch for her innocence, and yet here she was, telling lies like the rest of them, and he was sorry –
His thoughts came to an end in an audible exclamation.
He bent over the page before him, every sense suddenly alert and attentive. He stared at it, turning it this way and that; took it to the window and scanned it in the better light, holding it close to his eyes to examine it in detail. Muttered “Good God!” as visions of a rapid rise in his profession rose before him.
Then returning to the table he flattened out the paper and, with an anxious glance at the door, which might admit a witness at any moment, he took out a penknife and rapidly detached the entire page neatly from the rest; folded it carefully and slipped it into the breast pocket of his coat.
This done, he wiped his forehead, upon which tiny beads of perspiration stood out as the result of unusual excitement, and realized that every trace of the pain in his tooth had disappea
red! He seized his hat, opened the door softly, and tiptoed along the entrance passage, through the front door, into the street.
Half an hour later Inspector Stoddart, still busy over his reports, was startled by the sudden and somewhat violent entrance of his colleague.
“What the devil?” he began, annoyed at the interruption; but at the sight of the other’s face the words died on his lips.
“Sorry, sir,” Harbord said, “but I’ve got news for you!”
The inspector raised his eyebrows. “Well – had the tooth out?” he asked sardonically.
“Damn the tooth!” the other replied without emotion; then lowering his voice, “I can tell you who the crystal beads belong to!” and with a glance behind him to make sure the door was closed, he drew the page he had cut out of the “Bysphere” from his pocket and laid it on the table.
CHAPTER 23
Mrs. Yates was setting out the breakfast things for herself and her daughter on the morning following Harbord’s remarkable recovery in the dentist’s waiting-room, and grumbling to herself as she did it.
Devoted mother as she was, she was growing tired of doing the work while Miss Tottie Delauney reaped the benefit, lolling in idle self-indulgence while her mother washed up or swept the floors. At the moment she was still lying in bed in the room above, while Mrs. Yates had already been up and about for an hour or two; as she set teacups and saucers on the kitchen table, neatly covered for the meal by a red and white checked cloth, she was conscious that even a mother’s devotion might peter out, and had a curious sense of futility and a wish to sit down and cry her eyes out.
The year was dying slowly. A thin drizzle blurred the outlines of bush and hedge round the lodge, the big iron gates barring the way to visitors, ghostly in the grip of the wet mist. The road shone dark and grey, reflecting as clearly as a river the trees and posts that bordered it. Every twig dripped moisture, the reds and yellows of autumn that had glowed so vividly in the sunshine looked dead and lifeless, and the quacking of a string of ducks waddling across the road in single file, to discover what treasure the little rill running under the far hedge might yield, added to the general melancholy of the dismal day.
Mrs. Yates, having opened the window when she first came downstairs to give the place an airing, shut it again with a jerk. It was letting in more damp than air; she shivered as she put the kettle on the fire. She was not going to wait any longer for that lie-abed daughter of hers, nor was she going to pander to her lazy habits by carrying a cup of tea up to her room. She had done so at first, but now she was tired of it. There was still a draught from somewhere, and urged by an ever-present dread, rheumatism, she went back to the window and made sure it was properly closed.
As she glanced through the small, leaded panes, a figure came into view on the road outside, looming dimly into sight through the driving mist: the figure of a man, evidently a gentleman of the road, walking slowly with steps that lagged, and reflected full length by the hard, wet ground at his feet. He limped a little; his shock of flaming red hair, with no hat to shelter it, made a bright blot of colour against the grey hedge beyond.
Mrs. Yates stared through the glass pane, her hand arrested half-way to the latch of the casement. She had seen that red head before, and the rather vacant features it surmounted. But where?
Before the man had reached the centre of her field of vision she remembered. He had passed along the road – she had seen him from the gate – on the morning poor Bill Mayer had been shot. She had never given him a thought since, but the sight of him shuffling along stirred her memory, and she distinctly remembered seeing him on that previous occasion. It was before Mayer himself had come along; he was going towards Medchester while Mayer was coming away from it, and what with seeing the superintendent and hearing all he had to say, and then the disturbing news of his death, the tramp had passed entirely from her mind. Not that it could matter much, but the sight of him brought back the tragic circumstances of that day with sudden poignancy.
She was a kind-hearted woman and the slowly moving figure appealed so eloquently as a bit of human flotsam and jetsam, drifting past through the murk of the autumn morning, that she impulsively threw the window open and called to him as he passed. He was not the sort to be invited into a spotlessly kept kitchen, especially with the possibility of a sudden descent on the part of the fastidious lady of the music-halls upstairs, but a cup of hot tea passed through the window could hurt nobody. He imbibed it greedily.
“Thank ’ee kindly,” he said, returning it, “puts a bit o’ life into you on a morning like this. Las’ time I was ’ere –” He looked round curiously, but the closed gates barred the view into the drive beyond, and a curtailed vision of grey, dripping branches and a hedge already shorn of its summer foliage was all that could be seen.
The man moved nearer to the window and dropped his voice.
“There was a murder near ’ere, wasn’t there? A nark ’e was, wasn’t ’e – policeman I mean?” he asked in a hoarse whisper. “’Appened the very day I was ’ere las’. I seed it in a picture paper wot somebody had dropped in the road just this side o’ Mapsdale. Well, missis” – he wiped his mouth with the back of his stumpy fingers – “they do say ’tis an ill wind wot blows nobody no good, and maybe there’s a bit waitin’ for services done. Leastways there’s no ’arm in tryin’.”
“What do you know about it?” Mrs. Yates asked sharply.
A sudden caution looked out through a pair of cunning little eyes.
“I’ll deliver the goods to the proper party, missis. I ain’t a-givin’ nothin’ away. Not me! Thank ’ee kindly for the tea.’’ And, jerking a finger towards a lock of red hair drooping disconsolately over one eye, he shuffled off to be swallowed up immediately by the wreathing mists.
Stoddart and his colleague were finishing a late breakfast when Mrs. Marlow knocked at their sitting-room door later on in the morning.
“A man to see you, sir, and never in my life did I see a redder head of hair – carrots and pillarboxes are fools to it, and that’s a fact,” she said volubly, her hand round the edge of the door, her body somewhere in the background. “I said as how you were busy eating your breakfast, and he said he’d wait – and, if you ask me, he means it – looks as if he’d wait till the last day and then wait some,” she added thoughtfully, “though I told him –”
“That’s all right, Mrs. Marlow,” the inspector interrupted.
“The man who called before probably,” Harbord muttered.
“Clear away these things and then show him up,” Stoddart finished.
Considerably more bedraggled than when enjoying Mrs. Yates’s hospitality outside the lodge, the red-haired tramp entered the room and, touching his forelock, stood awkwardly by the door.
“Are you the man who called the day before yesterday?” the inspector asked curtly.
His visitor nodded assent, finding it difficult perhaps to find his voice in so august a presence.
“What’s your name?”
“Ted Watson.”
“Why didn’t you come here yesterday?”
The man swallowed twice, and Stoddart continued:
“Never mind; it doesn’t matter. What do you want?”
The nearest publican could probably furnish the answer.
The tramp looked nervously from one to the other of the men before whom he was arraigned, and then apparently plucked up courage.
“It’s this way, mister,” he began. “There was a man shot about here not so long ago, though I don’t mind the date” – Stoddart, suddenly alive to the possibility that the man might know something, nodded encouragement – “a police constable seemingly – done in ’e was – name of Mayer –”
“How do you know what his name was?” the inspector snapped.
“Saw it in the papers – it was coz of what I sees in the papers I’m ’ere now. I knows what I knows” – the cunning in his eyes increased and he edged nearer to where the two detectives sat by the table �
�� “and I’ll tell what I knows, when I knows what I’ll get for it, see? That’s fair.”
The inspector looked at him sternly. “You don’t make bargains with the police, my man. What you know you’ll tell, or it will be the worse for you.”
The man stared back truculently. “When you ’appen to ha’ got summat another party wants –” he began.
Stoddart tapped authoritatively on the table.
“Lock the door,” he said to his assistant.
Harbord rose and made a step forward. The bluff acted like magic: the red-haired man subsided.
“Now, mister, no offence,” he cringed. “I’ll tell what I know, but I may tell ’ee the cop what was called Mayer promised me, ’e did –”
The two detectives exchanged a rapid glance.
“Tell us what you know,” the inspector urged more gently. “You won’t lose by it if it’s worth listening to. A jug of beer, Alfred, from Mrs. Marlow – it’s dry work talking.”
The visitor appeared to find the prospect of beer encouraging. He grinned broadly and plunged forthwith into his story.
On the night when so much tragedy had been staged at Holford Hall – the night of Saunderson’s murder, though he hadn’t known then there’d been a murder – it seemed he had been on the road, making his way to Medchester through the village of Holford. It had been a warmish day and a bad one – that was to say, he had had no luck on the road, and was both tired and hungry. But he wanted to get to Medchester before night, and that evening some time after dark – he couldn’t tell what time exactly – he found himself where the road was overshadowed by trees, and where a little gate led into what he now knew to be Holford woods.
As he was about to pass on the figure of a woman appeared suddenly on the other side of the gate, and he instinctively drew back into the shadow on the far side of the road. For a moment the moon shone full on her face and he would know her again anywhere. She fumbled with the latch, glancing up and down the road nervously, but never noticing the man cowering in the ditch opposite. Having got the gate open, she came through, closed it softly behind her, and went off at a run along the road.