When Mason, Detective-Sergeant, C.I.D., with crestfallen air narrated the history of his adventures with the elusive Mrs Saxton, he had expected his chief to indulge in a few sarcastic comments. But Smeaton only shrugged his shoulders expressively. After all, he had come off only second best in his encounter with her himself.
“A very clever woman, Mason,” he said, after some hesitation. “I found that out at the start. It means she has made a bolt of it. It will be some time before Hyde Park Mansions sees her again.”
He was right. Three days elapsed, and the fugitive did not return. On the fourth, Mason, acting in accordance with instructions, went boldly up to the flat and rang the bell.
The neat-looking maid told him that her mistress had gone abroad.
Mason affected to be very much put out. “Dear me, it’s very annoying. I wanted to see her on most urgent business. Can you oblige me with her address?”
“She didn’t leave one, sir. She said she would be back in a month or six weeks, and would be travelling about from place to place all the time. She told us that any letters could wait till her return.”
Mason observed her sharply while she gave this information in quite a natural manner. She seemed a simple, innocent kind of girl. Of course, she might be in league with the escaped woman, but he was rather inclined to believe she was telling the truth.
Mrs Saxton had begun to find the atmosphere a trifle uncomfortable, and had duped her servants with this story of going abroad, he reasoned with himself. She might give London itself a wide berth, but she was somewhere near where she could be in pretty close touch with her friends. Of that he was certain.
Things, therefore, were at a deadlock as concerned Stent and this woman.
Meanwhile, young Varney, confident that Farloe was a mysterious and important connecting link, kept a steady watch upon the chambers in Ryder Street.
For the first three days his exertions went unrewarded. But on the fourth he followed Farloe in a taxi to the Great Eastern Hotel, in Liverpool Street, where he was joined by a man whom, by his strongly marked aquiline features and piercing eyes, he suspected to be the elusive Stent.
When the pair left the hotel, he followed them. It was the luncheon hour, and the city streets were crowded. For full five minutes he kept them in sight, and then he became separated and lost them.
On the second occasion he was more fortunate. About three o’clock one afternoon the pair came forth from Farloe’s chambers, and together walked leisurely, talking earnestly the while.
As far as Victoria Station they went together to the Brighton line. There they parted. The elder man entered the booking-hall of the London and Brighton line, and asked for a ticket to Horsham. Varney did the same.
It was a slow train, and half-empty. When Horsham was reached, only three passengers alighted: himself, the man he was watching, and a young woman.
He inquired of the ticket-collector if at any place near he could hire a cycle, as he thought of coming down for a week’s holiday, and would like to explore the country for an hour or so.
The man directed him to a shop close by. He seemed a very civil young fellow, and Varney chatted with him for a few seconds.
“By the way,” he said, as he moved away. “That gentleman who went out just now—isn’t he Mr Emerson, the well-known barrister?”
The young man shook his head. “No, sir. Mr Strange has recently come to live here, about five months ago. He’s taken Forest View, an old-fashioned house a mile and a half away.”
“Curious,” remarked the amateur detective, in a voice of well-feigned surprise. “Really, how very easily one may be mistaken. I see Mr Emerson three or four times each week, and I could have sworn it was he.”
The ticket-collector smiled civilly, but made no reply. He was not interested in this sudden creation of Varney’s lively imagination.
The journalist crossed to the cycle shop and there hired a machine, paying down the usual deposit. He wheeled it until he met a small boy, from whom he inquired the whereabouts of Forest View.
He was on the right road, the boy informed him. The house with green iron gates lay on the left-hand side. His machine would take him there in a few minutes.
However, he did not mount it, as in that case he would quickly overtake Mr Strange, who was proceeding there on foot. He preferred that this gentleman should get there first, so as to give him an opportunity of having a good look round.
Twenty minutes’ easy walking brought him to the big iron gates of Forest View. He had seen the man disappear within, about a couple of hundred yards in front of him. There was not a soul in sight; he could reconnoitre at his leisure.
The house, old-fashioned, low and rather rambling, lay well back from the white high road, at right angles to it. A thick hedge led up to within a few feet of the entrance. It seemed to boast a fair piece of ground, at least three acres. The entrance to some rather dilapidated stabling was lower down the road.
He felt a sense of triumph. Smeaton, he knew, was still searching for Stent, and he, the amateur, had forestalled him. Was he right, after all, in his surmise that by some curious lapse the man of wider experience had left Farloe out of his calculations, and the man Stent was identical with the man Strange?
His survey finished, he mounted his machine, and rode along, thinking out his plans.
“Find a nice comfortable inn somewhere near, but not too close, pose as an artist out for a brief holiday, and find out all there is to be found about the mysterious Mr Strange,” was the result of his meditations.
A mile lower down the road he came upon a small, old-fashioned inn, with a swinging sign, and trailing roses over the porch and walls. There he entered, and called for some refreshment.
“Thirsty with your ride—eh, sir?” asked the landlord pleasantly.
“A bit, although I haven’t ridden very far yet. I hired a machine in the town in order to have a look round. I want a week’s holiday badly, and I should like to hit upon some quiet quarters about here. It seems a nice piece of country.”
The landlord pricked up his ears. “Perhaps it’s the George in Horsham you might prefer.”
“Oh dear no! I want an old-fashioned inn, like this. But I suppose you don’t take guests?”
The fat landlord glanced at him hesitatingly. Varney was attired in a well-cut Norfolk suit, and his plush Homburg hat must have hailed from Bond Street. He looked the sort of man for a fashionable hotel, not an obscure bacon-and-egg inn.
“Well, sir, we do now and again. We don’t pretend to do you like the big places with French dishes and that sort of thing. But my wife is a good plain cook, and you won’t get better meat and chickens than we have.”
Terms were soon arranged. Varney—or Mr Franks as he announced himself to the landlord—would come down to-morrow, bringing with him a few sketching materials.
Next day Varney returned with a portable easel, and other paraphernalia appertaining to his supposed art. He had not been in the house half-an-hour before he engaged the landlord in a conversation about the local gentry. And it was soon deftly focussed upon the owner of Forest View.
Mr Peter Chawley was by nature a gregarious and communicative soul. He was only reticent when policy or prudence counselled such a course of action.
“Mr Strange has been here about five months,” he informed young Varney, in his fat, somewhat wheezy voice, “but we don’t know very much about him. When he first came, he used to go up to London pretty often, but for some time he has hardly stirred out of the house.”
“Has he any acquaintances in the place?”
Mr Chawley shook his head. “Doesn’t want any, so he told the Vicar when he called upon him. Said he had come here for a quiet life, and wanted to get away from his business in London and the friends he had already. Of course, that was a pretty broad hint—so nobody called. He doesn’t deal with anybody here for a pennyworth of matches. Gets everything from London.”
“What household has he? And is he a widower, or bachelor, or married?”
“Told the Vicar he was a widower. He has three maids: the cook, a middle-aged woman, housemaid, and parlourmaid—all three he brought with him. The gardener’s a local man, a young chap, and comes in here once in a while; but he knows no more than the rest of us. He hardly ever enters the house, and the maids don’t chatter.”
Forest View was a household that evidently kept its own secrets. The maids did not chatter, even to the young local gardener. Mystery here, thought Varney, without a doubt. It was his business to fathom it. Was he really Stent? That was the point.
“He got the house pretty cheap,” went on Mr Chawley, who was not easily stopped when he indulged in reminiscence, “because it had been unlet for five years. It’s a funny old place, all nooks and corners, without any modern convenience. Some people say it’s haunted, and I’ve heard that there is a secret room in it, like what they used to hide the priests in in the old days.”
A mysterious house, with a mysterious owner, truly, thought Varney, as the landlord rambled on.
“Does he have anybody to see him?”
“He never seems to have had but one visitor, a gentleman rather older than himself. He used to run down for two or three days at a time. For some time now he’s been staying with him altogether.”
Varney pricked up his ears. Was he going to discover anything useful?
“Do you know his friend’s name?” he asked eagerly.
“No, sir. The gardener has never heard it, but then, as I say, he hardly ever goes inside the house.”
The next day, and the day after, Varney watched Forest View closely. From the roadway he had a fairly clear view of the sloping lawn. But neither its occupier nor his visitor were tempted out by the beautiful weather. They were certainly an extraordinary pair to shut themselves up in a gloomy house on these bright sunshiny days.
On the third day, however, both emerged from their seclusion, and sauntered on to the lawn. The visitor seemed to stoop slightly, and walk with the languid air of a man who had recently recovered from an illness.
They walked about only for a little while, and, as they went back into the house, Varney, from his hiding-place behind the hedge, heard Mr Strange say:
“Well, if you think you feel fit enough, we will walk into Horsham after lunch. We can drive back. It may do you good.”
An idea had formed itself in Varney’s brain, fitting in with one of the theories he had formed about this remarkable case.
A little after one o’clock the supposed artist stole through the door of the inn, a basket in one hand, a good-sized bag in the other.
A few yards down the road he disappeared up a side road, crossed a field, and advanced towards an old disused barn which he had noted on the previous day, and slipped inside.
A few moments later there issued a strange and shabbily dressed figure, with a slouching walk. On his left arm hung a basket, full of roses, which had been bought a short time ago from Mrs Chawley. They were so beautiful, Varney told her, that he must paint them.
In the guise of a decrepit flower-seller he limped along to the narrow main street of Horsham, and hung about till the pair from Forest View arrived, when he faced them and advancing towards them with his basket before him, he whined when he had got up to them:
“Buy a bunch of roses, sir. Threepence a bunch. All fresh picked, sir.”
“No,” said Strange gruffly, “we don’t want any, got lots of them,” and the pair turned away in ignorance that within that basket, concealed by the flowers, was a small detective camera by which a snapshot of both of them had already been cleverly secured in secret.
Varney made his way back at once to the old barn, where he discarded his shabby jacket and cap.
Early next morning he was on his way to Smeaton. He had a hope that his investigations had been fruitful, but he could not be sure. Certainly the face and figure of the man Strange answered to the description of the person named Stent whom Scotland Yard had been unable to trace.
Having developed and printed the photograph at his own rooms, he was shown into Smeaton’s bare official sanctum which overlooked Westminster Bridge, when the celebrated official rose and gripped his hand.
“Well, Varney?” he asked, “have you done anything in the Monkton mystery—eh?”
“Yes. A bit. Look here. Is this Stent—or not? If it is. I’ve found him.”
The detective took the damp print and examined it curiously in the light by the window.
“Well—the only man who can really identify it is our friend at the Savoy Hotel. Let’s take a taxi and go and see him.”
They found the hall-porter at the Savoy hotel, and showed him the print. It was not a very wonderful specimen of the photographer’s art, but it was enough for Smeaton’s old friend.
“That’s him—right enough!” the man in uniform exclaimed. “And you say that you were told his name was Stent by the lady we spoke about, and this gentleman has discovered him under another name. Well, I always thought there was something mysterious about him.”
After such confirmation it could no longer be doubted that Varney had run the supposed Stent to earth. He felt a distinct sense of triumph. He had hoped his exertions might have produced some startling results, but still, he had done something.
Smeaton was not an envious man, and congratulated him heartily. “It’s really a feather in your cap, my dear Varney,” he said amiably. “You got on the right track this time.”
Varney thanked him for his encouraging words. “Now, what’s the next move? I leave it to you.”
Smeaton thought a few seconds before he answered. When he spoke, he voiced the man’s inmost thoughts.
“I think the best thing you can do is to go back and keep up the sketching business. We want to find out all we can about that house and its mysterious inmates. And we especially want to know something about that invalid visitor. There is just a chance, of course, that you may find Mrs Saxton popping up there.”
As all this exactly coincided with his own theory, Varney acquiesced readily. He would go back to Horsham the next day, and resume his watch on Forest View.
“You can’t be watching in two places at once,” added Smeaton presently. “So we will take up Farloe.”
So it was decided. Mrs Saxton having disappeared, with small likelihood of her return, there remained three people to be shadowed: the secretary, Bolinski, and the man who went by the name of Strange, and who, for reasons of his own, was keeping away from the Savoy, and coming to London as seldom as possible.
Varney’s discovery, of which he was not a little proud, was duly reported to Sheila by the young man himself, who called upon her as soon as he had left Smeaton.
She could not but admire his energy and determination, and she told him so, in no measured terms. But when he had gone, she could not help thinking how futile it all seemed.
“They all find a little something, and then they seem to come up against a dead end,” she said to Wingate, when he paid her his usual daily visit. “Weeks have gone by, and the mystery is as deep as ever. How can it be otherwise? What have they got to go upon?”
And Wingate, taking her slender hand in his and pressing it, agreed that it was so. He felt, as she did, that anything would be better than this horrible uncertainty.
They had grown very dear to each other in these dark and dismal days. She had liked him from the first, and recognised in him one of those straight, clean-living young Englishmen to whom a girl might safely entrust her life and happiness. He was so tender, so chivalrous, so sympathetic.
If, for a few moments, she threw off the heavy load of sorrow weighing upon her, and showed some semblance of her former bright spirit, he fell at once into her mood. And if she preferred silence, her sorrow-laden eyes filled with tears, he sat silent too, only evincing by a glance, or the pressure of her hand, that he understood and sympathised.
It was not a time for ardent love-making. But for this tragedy in her life, he might never have summoned courage to make love to her at all. The daughter of Reginald Monkton, the rich and popular statesman, seemed so far out of his reach. With her beauty and her advantages, she could aspire to a brilliant match.
Her position now, that of a lonely and orphaned girl, had altered everything, and swept away social barriers. Insensibly, she had been drawn to him, till it seemed he was part of her life.
And a time came when he could tell her of the desire of his heart. One evening, when they had been saying good-bye, she had suddenly broken down, and burst into bitter sobbing.
He had taken her in his arms, and whispered soothing words, while his pulses beat at the contact of her slender form. She had lain in the big chair, crying more quietly as he strove to comfort her. And then she had lifted up her pitiful face to his, and said:
“Oh! Austin, how good and gentle you are with me. How could I have borne it without you?”
He took heart of grace at those tender words. His clasp round her tightened.
“I have been of some help to you, then, dearest?”
“The greatest,” she answered fervently. “If you did not come to me every day, I think I should go mad.”
He bent down and laid his lips upon her bowed head.
“Dearest, if I have been able to comfort you now, could you let me comfort and cherish you all my life? It is hardly a time to speak of such things, but I have loved you from the first moment we met—do you remember that day on the river, and afterwards, when I saw you at Hendon, and you asked me to call?”
“Yes, I remember,” she said in a low whisper.
“Well, dearest, even if the worst should befall, you will want somebody to share your grief with you till time heals your sorrow. I shall not press you till the first bitterness has passed. Then, when you feel you can take up your life again, may I come to you, and repeat what I have said to-night?”
“Yes. Come again some day when my tears have had time to dry, and I will answer as you wish.”
Reverently he kissed the lips that were still trembling from her recent emotion. That night he seemed to walk on air when he left the house, where he had spent so many happy hours before this terrible tragedy had overtaken them.
He had loved her in the bloom and brightness of her youthful beauty, courted and caressed by all who knew her, the idol of her father, the light of his home, moving like a young princess among her subjects. But he loved her ten times more now—pale and sad, with sorrow for her companion day and night.
Meanwhile, down at Forest View things were going very quietly. Varney had long chats with the landlord, and of an evening he picked up a few acquaintances in the inn, and talked with them, always leading the conversation round to the subject of Mr Strange.
But he could discover nothing of any value. Nobody knew anything of the man’s antecedents. As a matter of fact, he did not seem to interest anybody in the place. They simply regarded him as an eccentric sort of person who wished to have nothing to do with his neighbours.
He learned that, immediately on his arrival. Strange had ordered a telephone to be installed. He also gathered from the local postman, whose acquaintance he cultivated, that very few letters were received. Further, that most of them were in a feminine hand. And these had been coming rather more frequently of late.
He at once jumped to the conclusion that the female correspondent was Mrs Saxton. But that did not help him much. They knew already that Strange and she were closely connected.
The two maids walked down to Horsham occasionally. So far he had not set eyes upon the cook, who, apparently, did not require any change of scene.
He was a presentable young fellow enough, and he imagined it would not be difficult to scrape up an acquaintance with the young women. The one whom he took to be the parlourmaid, by her superior bearing, was a good-looking girl.
He tried her first. He opened his campaign by overtaking her on the road, and remarking on the pleasantness of the weather. If she resembled the majority of her class, she would not object to exchanging a few remarks with a decent-looking member of the other sex.
For himself, he was quite prepared to indulge in a flirtation, even a little mild love-making, if it would enable him to worm something out of her about the mysterious inmates of Forest View.
But the parlourmaid was one too many for him. She made no answer to his remark, and when he continued to walk along beside her, in the hope that her silence was only meant for coquetry, she stopped suddenly and faced him.
“Look here, young man,” she said, regarding him with a distinctly hostile countenance; “I’ll thank you not to address any more remarks to me. I suppose you think yourself a gentleman, and because I’m in service I shall be flattered by your taking notice of me. Well, just understand I’m not that sort. When you meet me again, perhaps you’ll remember it.”
She quickened her footsteps, and left Varney feeling very foolish. It was a rebuff alike to the man and the amateur detective. Yes, he had blundered.
She had a good figure, and she carried herself well, walking with a light springy step. She was dressed plainly in neat but evidently inexpensive clothes, such as were suitable to her class. If she had been attired in proper garments, she would have been taken for a young lady immediately.
The thing that puzzled him most was her voice. She had addressed him as “young man,” and there was a certain blunt insolence in her remarks which negatived the idea of refinement.
But even if her speech had been absolutely vulgar, the voice was unmistakably high-bred and cultivated; in a word, the voice of a lady. How came it that Mr Strange’s parlourmaid wore the clothes of a servant, and spoke in the tones of a highly educated young woman? It was one more mystery.
Nothing daunted, he pursued the same tactics with the housemaid when he met her walking alone. She was a plain girl, evidently of a different class. At the start she was more civil, but after a minute or two, during which she had given the briefest answers to his ingratiating questions, she had turned upon him like the other, only in a less hostile manner, and explained to him that she did not desire either his conversation or his company.
She was a little more polite than the parlourmaid, but that was all. She addressed him respectfully but firmly.
“Excuse me, sir, but if it’s the same to you, I’d rather walk alone. I’m not fond of making the acquaintance of gentlemen I know nothing about.”
Poor Varney felt he was not a success with the fair sex. Or did they suspect him?
A further piece of information, however, he got from his friend the postman. He had asked Wingate and Sheila to occasionally put a blank sheet of paper in an envelope, and address it to him under the name of Franks, to keep up appearances.
He met the man one morning outside Forest View and asked if there were any letters for him.
“None by this post, sir. Never had such a light round. This is the last; it’s for Mr Gregory, at Forest View, the gentleman what’s staying there.”
So Gregory was the name of the invalid, who kept so closely to the house.
But Gregory, no doubt, was an assumed name, like Stent alias Strange.
“I am going to ask you a question, dearest; I fear it is a painful one, but I think it ought to be put.”
It was Austin Wingate who spoke. He had dined with Sheila at Chesterfield Street, and after dinner the lovers had gone to her own sitting-room, which was on the first floor.
She looked at him steadfastly. “Painful or not, Austin, please put it. You would not hurt me, I know, unless you felt it was absolutely necessary.”
“Of course not, Sheila,” answered the young man fervently. “In our anxiety to solve this mystery concerning your father we must shrink from nothing. The question I am going to ask you, dear, is this: Have you ever had any cause to suspect there was some hidden mystery in your father’s life? Do not be offended—will you?”
She smiled faintly. “What is called a skeleton in the cupboard, you mean—eh? It seems impossible when one comes to consider the kind of man he was. In political matters he was reserved; that was natural. I have heard him laugh often over the efforts of people to draw him. But, in every other respect he seemed as frank and open as the day.”
“He gave me that impression certainly,” assented Wingate. “During my mother’s lifetime I don’t know that I counted greatly in his life. He was so wrapped up in her that he seemed to have no room for anybody else,” went on the girl, in a musing voice. “Then, after her death, and when his first passionate grief died down, he listened to me. I could not hope to fill her place, but I became very necessary to him. He has told me many times that but for me he would have been the most miserable man on earth. I gave him new interests, and weaned him away from his sad thoughts.”
Wingate leaned forward, and kissed her tenderly upon the brow. “You were born for the rôle of ministering angel, my darling,” he declared.
She thanked him with a grateful glance for the pretty compliment. “You ask me if I ever had cause to suspect that there was some hidden mystery in his life. I can only answer, none. His life seemed to me like an open book, that all who ran might read.”
Wingate was silent for a little time. This was the impression made upon his daughter, an only child, who would have the most intimate opportunity of judging him. It was the impression he had made upon close friends and casual acquaintances alike.
And yet who could be sure? A man trained to the law, versed in public affairs, was he likely to wear his heart upon his sleeve?
When he spoke, it was in a hesitating voice: “I agree that intuition is a very safe guide in many instances. And I believe with you that your father’s life was a blameless one. Still, there is one little thing we must not overlook.”
“And that little thing?” she questioned in a low voice.
“What was the connection between him and the man whom they have identified as Bolinski? Why does a man in his position make an appointment with a person so evidently not of his own world, unless to discuss something of a secret and mysterious nature? Remember where they met, in a little hole-and-corner restaurant in Soho.”
“It has puzzled me, I admit,” replied Sheila. “It is strange, too, that he told me nothing of the appointment, for he used to inform me of his most trivial movements. Thinking over it, as I have over every other incident, I believe it was connected with politics—there are plenty of under-currents in them, as we know. He would not say anything to me about this meeting for fear I might drop an incautious word to some of our friends.”
“It is evident that he apprehended no treachery from this man,” was Wingate’s next remark, “or he would have taken some means to safeguard himself. I mean, for one thing, he would not have left the House of Commons alone. It may be, as you suggest, that this curious meeting, in an out-of-the-way and obscure restaurant, may have had some political motive. But I can hardly bring myself to believe it. I am sure that what brought such a strangely assorted couple together was a private and personal matter.”
“And that we have no means of knowing,” said Sheila sadly.
He was glad that she had not resented his question, and the suggestions that arose from it. It emboldened him to proceed.
“As I have said, it is our duty to leave no stone unturned, to look even in unlikely places for any fresh evidence which might afford a clue. There must be a mass of papers in this house I think you ought to go through them, darling.”
She gave a little cry. “Oh!” she said in a tearful voice. “It seems almost like sacrilege.”
“If such a search were conducted by other hands, it might be so, but assuredly not in your case.”
She thought a little, and her common-sense came to her aid.
“You are quite right, Austin, as you always are. It will be a terrible task, but, as you say, we must leave no stone unturned. I will begin to-morrow, and keep on till I have finished.”
He called late next day, and found that she had got about half-way through the various piles. But so far she had found nothing of importance.
“I came across a few diaries. He seems to have kept them for the best part of five years, and then dropped the practice. They contain records of appointments, whom he met, and political events, but there’s not a single entry that throws any light upon this affair.”
“I wonder if Farloe has any of his papers, or, more likely still, has abstracted any?” said Wingate in a musing voice.
Sheila shuddered at the name. “No wonder that I always hated him,” she cried vehemently. “Shall we ever learn the part he played in this mystery?”
It took her a few days to go through her task, for she was fearful of missing a line in those carefully docketed piles of papers. But it was all to no purpose.
If there had been a secret in Reginald Monkton’s life, no evidence had been preserved in these documents.
“Newsom-Perry is pretty sure to have some papers in his possession,” said Wingate, when she had finished her futile task. “I want to spare you everything I can, dear. Will you give me a note to him, and I will ask him to hand them over to you?”
Mr Newsom-Perry was Monkton’s solicitor, the head of the firm which had acted for the missing statesman, and his father before him.
Wingate presented himself at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and sent in his sweetheart’s note.
The solicitor, a genial, kindly-looking man of fifty or thereabouts, welcomed the young man cordially.
“Pleased to see you, Mr Wingate,” he said, as they shook hands. “Poor Monkton has spoken to me several times of you, in warm terms. I understand that you were a frequent visitor at the house before the sad event.”
Wingate explained that he was with Sheila awaiting her father, on the night when the dying man was brought to Chesterfield Street.
The shrewd, kindly eyes watched him as he made the explanation. Mr Newsom-Perry had his own ideas as to how matters stood between the young couple.
“And what can I do for you, Mr Wingate?”
“We thought it pretty certain that you would have some papers of Mr Monkton’s here. If that is the case, would you let his daughter look through them, in the hope of finding something that might throw a light upon the case?”
“Under the circumstances, by all means, Mr Wingate. Of course, we have got all his business documents, leases, and that kind of thing. Those would be useless for your purpose?”
“I should say, quite useless.”
“But I have a couple of boxes of private papers which he brought about two years ago. He had been sorting out, he said, and his own house was as full as it could hold. Knowing we had plenty of room, he thought we would not mind storing them. I will send them round some time to-day. When she has gone through them perhaps Miss Monkton will let me have them back until, until—” He laughed, and did not finish the sentence.
“I quite understand. Now I will take up as little time as possible, but there are one or two questions I should like to ask you, if I may.”
The solicitor nodded genially. “Go on, sir.”
“I take it that, having known Mr Monkton all your life, and your firm having acted for his father, you were entirely in your client’s confidence.”
“That is so. Monkton and I were personal friends, as well as solicitor and client. We were at Cambridge together, before either of us commenced our respective careers.”
“Has he, to your knowledge, ever made any active enemies?”
“Not that I know of. Political enemies, no doubt, he has by the score—myself included. But you know what English politics are. It’s a fair stand-up fight, and the loser grumbles a bit, but bears no rancour. Men abuse each other across the floor of the House, and are good friends again in the smoking-room.”
“One other question, a somewhat delicate one, and I have done. Had he ever an entanglement of any kind, the effects of which might pursue him in later life?”
The solicitor rubbed his chin, and quite frankly replied:
“Not to my knowledge. That does not, however, conclusively prove a negative.”
“But you were close personal friends, in addition to your business relation. Would it not be natural that, under such circumstances, he would come to you for advice?”
There seemed an extra gleam of shrewdness in the solicitor’s eyes as he answered:
“In such circumstances as you suggest it is by no means easy to predict what course a man would take. If Monkton had got into some entanglement that, to put it bluntly—although, mind you, I don’t believe such a thing occurred—reflected some doubt either on his character or on his intelligence, it is just as likely as not that his old friend would be the last person to whom he would care to expose himself. He would be equally likely to go to a stranger.”
Wingate was fain to admit the force of the argument.
“One can never be sure of any man, even if you have known him all your life,” he added, as they shook hands. “Nobody knows that better than our profession. But I would stake my existence that there were no skeletons in Monkton’s cupboard. The man was as straight as a die, and he was passionately attached to his beautiful wife. Well, Mr Wingate, give my best regards to dear Miss Sheila. I will send those boxes round to-day.”
He was as good as his word. Late in the afternoon they arrived, and Sheila at once set to work reading the various papers, not, it must be confessed, in a very hopeful spirit.
But when Wingate came round in the evening he found her in a state of greatest excitement.
She took from an envelope a letter containing only a few words and passed it to him. “Read that, and tell me what you make of it,” she said. “There is no formal beginning, and no signature. But you see it is addressed to my father, and was evidently delivered by hand.”
Upon the flap of the faded envelope Wingate saw some initials, two C’s in a cipher scroll embossed in black, an old-fashioned monogram such as was in vogue in the early “sixties.”
Then he read upon the half-sheet of notepaper, traced in a bold hand in ink that was brown, as follows:
“You have ruined and disgraced me, and forced me to fly the country and become a wanderer on the face of the earth. Well, I will be even with you. I will wait, if necessary all my life, till my turn comes. Then, when it does, I will strike you at the zenith of your career, and mete out to you the suffering you have dealt to me.”
Wingate laid down the letter and looked at Sheila, who was regarding him expectantly.
“What do you make of it?” she repeated.
“It is evident that he had an enemy, and a very bitter one,” answered her lover. “The sentences are deliberate, but they appear to have been written by a man who was in a white heat of passion when he penned them.”
“Smeaton ought to see that letter, without loss of time, dear,” she said.
“I quite agree. His trained intelligence may get more out of it than we can. I will make an appointment with him for to-morrow morning, and I will be here when he comes.”
Smeaton arrived next morning, hoping that at last he might discover a substantial clue. He read the brief note carefully and deliberately.
“Is it important, do you think?” inquired Sheila eagerly.
“In my opinion it is of very considerable importance. Miss Monkton,” he replied. “I think it will help us.”
“It certainly proves that he had a secret enemy,” interjected Wingate, “and one who would hesitate at nothing that would secure him revenge.”
“I quite agree, sir. The letter breathes the most intense hatred in every line. The motive of that hatred we have got to discover.”
Then the detective, turning to Sheila, said: “Now, Miss Monkton, there is a little information that I am sure you will be able to give us. I am not so well posted in your father’s biography as I ought to be. But, before he became a prominent politician, I understand that he was a barrister with an extensive and lucrative practice.”
“That is so,” corroborated Sheila. “He did not often talk about those times, but I have always understood that he made quite a big income at the Bar.”
“And when did he retire from his profession?”
“About fifteen years ago.”
“And he resolved to say good-bye to the Bar and devote himself entirely to politics?”
Sheila nodded. “That is quite true. He had a very firm opinion that a man could not serve two masters.”
“Was he on the Chancery or the Common Law side?” was Smeaton’s next question.
“On the Common Law,” replied Sheila. “But why do you ask that question?”
“You shall know in good time. Miss Monkton. Well, we may take it, then, that this vindictive letter was written more than fifteen years ago.”
“While he was still at the Bar,” interrupted Wingate, who was beginning to realise the point of the detective’s reasoning. “You are assuming that this venomous epistle did not come from a political enemy.”
“It is an assumption for which I have reasonable grounds,” was Smeaton’s answer. “There has been no bitterness in party politics ever since Mr Monkton became a conspicuous figure in the House. And we know that, while he was most popular with his own side, he was respected and liked by his political opponents.”
“Is it too much to ask you to give us the benefit of any theory you have formed, Mr Smeaton?” suggested Sheila, in her pretty, gracious way.
“With all the pleasure in life, my dear young lady. This letter goes back, in my opinion, to your father’s barrister days, when he was one of the foremost counsel in England. I asked you just now whether he was on the Equity or the Common Law side, and you wondered why I asked the question.”
“I am still wondering,” said Sheila simply.
“On the Equity side they try all sorts of cases concerned with points of law, the majority of them of a very dry and uninteresting character. I should not look in an Equity case for a defeated litigant who would turn into a vindictive enemy of the type of the writer of this letter.”
The young people began to see, as yet very dimly, whither he was leading them.
“On the Common Law side, on the contrary, we are brought into the world of human passion and emotion; one in which the issues of life or death are at stake. We will suppose that your father, in the plenitude of his powers, is retained as counsel against some adroit rogue, some swindling company promoter, for example, who up to that moment had managed to keep himself well on the right side of the law.”
They began to see light, and listened with the closest attention.
“We will say this swindler, a more than usually clever rascal, is living in luxury with his ill-gotten gains, when he makes a slip that brings him within reach of the long arm of justice. One of his victims (or perhaps several in combination) brings an action against him for the return of the money he has inveigled out of him by his lying prospectuses. He employs big counsel to defend him, but your father wins his case. The wealthy rogue is forced to disgorge, finds his occupation gone, and is reduced to penury.”
Sheila nodded to show that she was following his argument.
“I am assuming for a moment that it is a civil action, and that it disclosed sufficient evidence to justify his arrest on a criminal charge later on. I deduce that from the fact that he was not a convicted felon at the time of writing that letter, otherwise he would not have been able to write and send it to your father. The meaning of the words ‘forced me to fly the country’ indicate, in my opinion, that he was in hourly fear of arrest.”
“It seems a very feasible theory,” remarked Wingate.
“The rest is easy to understand. He nourishes a morbid hatred for the man who has been the means of menacing his liberty, and driving him from the society he polluted. He regards him as a personal enemy, not merely the instrument of the justice he has defied. While smarting under this, to his distorted ideas, sense of wrong, he pens the letter and has it conveyed to your father by some trusted confederate. As there is no stamp or postmark on it, it was conveyed by hand.”
Wingate looked at Sheila, and she returned his glance. They were both greatly impressed by the detective’s clear reasoning.
Smeaton took up the half-sheet of notepaper, and submitted it to a close observation.
“The man who wrote it is, I should judge, a keen business man of methodical habits, inclined to neatness, of a strong but not impulsive character. An impulsive man would have torn the sheet across, leaving a rough and jagged edge. It has been pressed down with the finger and thumb, and then carefully cut.”
He held the small sheet up to the light, and made further observations.
“A peculiar paper, peculiar, I mean, as to the texture. The watermark, in its entirety, is, fortunately for us, on this half-sheet. That enables us to trace where it comes from. Come here for a moment and stand beside me.”
They did so, followed his pointing finger, and saw a shield bearing a coat-of-arms, and beneath, the words: “Westford Mill.”
“That will help you,” cried Sheila eagerly.
“I hope so. It is, as I said, a paper of peculiar texture, and doubtless many tons of it have been sold. If, as I guess, it is now off the market, I shall be compelled to fix a date. If I do that, it would considerably narrow the field of my inquiries.”
After a little further conversation, Smeaton took his leave with the letter in his possession. Sheila and Wingate, when they were alone, indulged in mutual admiration of his powers of analysis and deduction.
The detective, an hour later, looked in upon Mr Newsom-Perry, with whom he was slightly acquainted, and handed him the document.
“We found this amongst the papers you sent to Miss Monkton,” he explained. “I called on the chance of finding that your client had spoken to you, at one time or another, of some man who sent him a threatening letter. I may say that we have found no allusion to it amongst the other papers.”
“Which seems to show that Monkton did not attach any importance to it himself, I should say,” remarked the solicitor. “No, so far as I am concerned he never alluded to the matter. You attach some importance to it—eh?”
“Some,” replied Smeaton guardedly.
“Of course, you have a wider experience of these things than I, and you are wise to neglect no possible clue. Still, I should think that any big counsel in extensive practice has many letters of this kind from impulsive and angry litigants, who regard him as the author of their ruin.”
Smeaton rose. “It may be so,” he said quietly. “This man was angry, but he was not impulsive; the handwriting alone proves that. He wrote the letter at white heat, but he is of a resolute and determined character.”
Even though the writer of the anonymous threat had overlooked the fact that a watermark was on the paper, the latter point was not half so easy to clear up as Sheila and Wingate expected.
To the chief firms of paper makers and paper agents in the City Smeaton, through the following days, showed a tracing of the watermark, but without result.
Nobody could identify it.
The managing director of one firm of paper agents in Queen Victoria Street declared it to be a foreign paper, even though it was marked “Westford Mill.”
“The vogue for English notepaper on the Continent has led French and German mills to produce so-called ‘English writing paper’,” he added. “And if I am not mistaken this is a specimen.”
For nearly a week Smeaton prosecuted his inquiries of stationers, wholesale and retail, in all parts of the metropolis, taking with him always the tracing of the watermark. He did not carry the letter, for obvious reasons.
One day at a small retail stationer’s in the Tottenham Court Road, when he showed the tracing to the elderly shopkeeper, the man exclaimed:
“Oh, yes! I’ve seen that before. It’s foreign. When I was an assistant at Grimmel and Grice’s in Bond Street, Mr Grice bought a quantity of it from Paris because of its unusual colour and texture. It was quite in vogue for a time, and it could only be obtained from us.”
“Then all of this particular paper came from Grimmel and Grice’s?”
“Certainly, sir, I recollect the ‘Westford Mill’ well. We supplied it to half the aristocracy of London.”
Smeaton, much pleased with his discovery, took a taxi to Bond Street, and entering the fashionable stationers’ addressed himself to the first person he saw, a young man of about twenty-five.
“Do you make this paper nowadays?” he asked.
The shopman examined it, and shook his head. “No, sir, that paper has not been sold here since I’ve been in the business.”
“And how long would that be?”
“A matter of six years or so.”
“I am anxious to make some further inquiries,” said Smeaton, after a moment’s pause. “Who is the oldest assistant in the shop?”
“Mr Morgan, sir. He’s been with Grimmel and Grice a matter of nearly fifty years, man and boy. He’s on the other side. I will take you to him.”
Smeaton was introduced to the veteran Mr Morgan, an alert-looking man, in spite of his years. Smeaton explained his name and errand, adding that he was from Scotland Yard. Morgan at once became interested. He looked at the watermark.
“I remember that paper well,” he said at length. “It had a tremendous vogue for a little time; we couldn’t get it over from Paris fast enough. Then it went as suddenly out of fashion.”
“I suppose you can’t help me with any dates?”
“Oh, but indeed I can, Mr Smeaton. I have a wonderful memory for everything connected with the business. Old Mr Grice used to say that my memory was as good as the firm’s books. The paper started just twenty-five years ago, and it ran for five years. After that, no more was made.”
Smeaton expressed his gratitude. Mr Morgan’s excellent memory would shorten his labours considerably.
“Can you give me any clue to these letters on the envelope, I wonder?”
But here Mr Morgan was at fault. “We supplied hundreds upon hundreds of customers at the time. And all our old ledgers were burnt in our fire fifteen years ago. But I think I recognise the workmanship of the cipher. I should say that stamp was cut by Millingtons in Clerkenwell Road. They made a speciality of that kind of thing years ago. If you go there, they may have some record. They’re new people there now; old Mr Millington is my senior by ten years or more. He sold the business about fifteen years ago. But he is still alive, and lives somewhere in the Camberwell direction.”
Smeaton entered the address in his notebook, and shook Mr Morgan cordially by the hand. He would go to the Clerkenwell Road, and, if necessary, hunt up the ancient Mr Millington. If he possessed as good a memory as his friend some very useful information might be gathered.