"I can make a devilish good guess, then," rapped in Narkom, a trifle testily, his vanity a little hurt by that final suggestion, and his mind harking back to the brief enlightening conversation between Margot and Count Waldemar that night on the spray-swept deck of the Channel packet. "Behind them is "the implacable hate and the malignant hand" of the King of Mauravania!"
"What utter rubbish!" Cleek"s jeering laughter fairly stung, it was so full of pitying derision. "My friend, have you taken to reading penny novelettes of late? A thief-taker and a monarch! An ex-criminal and a king! I should have given you credit for more common sense."
"It was the King of Mauravania"s equerry who directed that attempt to kill you by blowing up the house in Clarges Street."
"Very possibly. But that does not incriminate his royal master.
Count Waldemar is not only equerry to King Ulric of Mauravania, but is also nephew to its ex-Prime Minister--the gentleman who is doing fifteen years" energetic labour for the British Government as a result of that attempt to trap me with his witless "Silver Snare.""
"Oh!" said Narkom, considerably crestfallen; then grasped at yet another straw with sudden, breathless eagerness. "But even then the head of the Mauravanian Government must have had some reason for wishing to "wipe you out,"" he added, earnestly. "There could be no question of avenging an uncle"s overthrow at that time. Cleek!"--his voice running thin and eager, his hand shutting suddenly upon his famous ally"s arm--"Cleek, trust me! Won"t you? Can"t you? As G.o.d hears me, old chap, I"ll respect it. Who are you? What are you, man?"
"Cleek," he made answer, calmly drawing out a chair and taking his seat at the table. "Cleek of Scotland Yard; Cleek of the Forty Faces--which you will. Who should know that better than you whose helping hand has made me what I am?"
"Yes, but before, Cleek? What were you, who were you, in the days before?"
"The Vanishing Cracksman--a dog who would have gone on, no doubt, to a dog"s end but for your kind hand and the dear eyes of Ailsa Lorne. Now give me my tea--I"m famishing--and after that we"ll talk of this new riddle that needs unriddling for the honour of the Yard.
Yes, thanks, two lumps, and just a mere dash of milk. Gad! It"s good to be back in England, dear friend; it"s good, it"s good!"
CHAPTER II
"Five men, eh?" said Cleek, glancing up at Mr. Narkom, who for two or three minutes past had been giving him a sketchy outline of the case in hand. "A goodish many that. And all inside of the past six weeks, you say? No wonder the papers have been hammering the Yard, if, as you suggest, they were not accidental deaths. Sure they are not?"
"As sure as I am that I"m speaking to you at this minute. I had my doubts in the beginning--there seemed so little to connect the separate tragedies--but when case after case followed with exactly, or nearly exactly, the same details in every instance, one simply _had_ to suspect foul play."
"Naturally. Even a donkey must know that there"s food about if he smells thistles. Begin at the beginning, please. How did the affair start? When and where?"
"In the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath at two o"clock in the morning. The constable on duty in the district came upon a man clad only in pajamas lying face downward under the wall surrounding a corner house--still warm but as dead as Queen Anne."
"In his pajamas, eh?" said Cleek, reaching for a fresh slice of toast. "Pretty clear evidence that that poor beggar"s trouble, whatever it was, must have overtaken him in bed and that that bed was either in the vicinity of the spot where he was found, or else the man had been carried in a closed vehicle to the place where the constable discovered him. A chap can"t walk far in that kind of a get-up without attracting attention. And the body was warm, you say, when found. Hum-m! Any vehicle seen or heard in the vicinity of the spot just previously?"
"Not the ghost of one. The night was very still, and the constable must have heard if either cab, auto, carriage, or dray had pa.s.sed in any direction whatsoever. He is positive that none did. Naturally, he thought, as you suggested just now, that the man must have come from some house in the neighbourhood. Investigation, however, proved that he did not--in short, that n.o.body could be found who had ever seen him before. Indeed, it is hardly likely that he could have been sleeping in any of the surrounding houses, for the neighbourhood is a very good one, and the man had the appearance of being a person of the labouring cla.s.s."
"Any marks on the clothing or body?"
"Not one--beyond a tattooed heart on the left forearm, which caused the coroner to come to the conclusion later that the man had at some time been either a soldier or a sailor."
"Why?"
"The tattooing was evidently of foreign origin, he said, from the skilful manner in which it had been performed and the brilliant colour of the pigments used. Beyond that, the body bore no blemish. The man had not been stabbed, he had not been shot, and a post-mortem examination of the viscera proved conclusively that he had not been poisoned. Neither had he been strangled, etherized, drowned, or bludgeoned, for the brain was in no way injured and the lungs were in a healthy condition. It was noticed, however, that the pa.s.sages of the throat and nose were unduly red, and that there was a slightly distended condition of the bowels. This latter, however, was set down by the physicians as the natural condition following enteric, from which it was positive that the man had recently suffered. They attributed the slightly inflamed condition of the nasal pa.s.sage and throat to his having either swallowed or snuffed up something--camphor or something of that sort--to allay the progress of the enteric, although even by a.n.a.lysis they were unable to discover a trace of camphor or indeed of any foreign substance whatsoever. The body was held in the public mortuary for several days awaiting identification, but n.o.body came forward to claim it; so it was eventually buried in the usual way and a verdict of "Found Dead" entered in the archives against the number given to it. The matter had excited but little comment on the part of the public or the newspapers, and would never have been recalled but for the astonishing fact that just two nights after the burial a second man was found under precisely similar circ.u.mstances--only that this second man was clad in boots, undervest, and trousers. He was found in a sort of gulley (down which, from the marks on the side, he had evidently fallen), behind some furze bushes at a far and little frequented part of the heath. An autopsy established the fact that this man had died in a precisely similar manner to the first, but, what was more startling, that he had evidently pre-deceased that first victim by several days; for, when found, decomposition had already set in."
"Hum-m-m! I see!" said Cleek, arching his brows and stirring his tea rather slowly. "A clear case of what Paddy would term "the second fellow being the first one." Go on, please. What next?"
"Oh, a perfect fever of excitement, of course; for it now became evident that a crime had been committed in both instances; and the Press made a great to-do over it. Within the course of the next fortnight it was positively frothing, throwing panic into the public mind by the wholesale, and whipping up people"s fears like a madman stirring a salad; for, by that time a third body had been found--under some furze bushes, upward of half a mile distant from where the second had been discovered. Like the first body, this one was wearing night clothes; but it was in an even more advanced state of decomposition than the second, showing that the man must have died long before either of them!"
"Oho!" said Cleek, with a strong rising inflection. "What a blundering idiot! Our a.s.sa.s.sin is evidently a raw hand at the game, Mr. Narkom, and not, as I had begun to fancy, either a professional or the appointed agent of some secret society following a process of extermination against certain marked men. Neither the secret agent nor the professional bandit would be guilty of the extreme folly of operating several times in the same locality, be a.s.sured; and here is this muddling amateur letting himself be lulled into a feeling of security by the failure of anybody to discover the bodies of the first victims, and then going at it again in the same place and the same way. For it is fair to a.s.sume, I daresay, that the fourth man was discovered under precisely similar circ.u.mstances to the first."
"Not exactly--very like them, but not exactly like them, Cleek. As a matter of fact, he was alive when found. I didn"t credit the report when I first heard it (a newspaper man brought it to me), and sent Petrie to investigate the truth of it."
"Why didn"t you believe the report?"
"Because it seemed so wildly improbable. And, besides, they had hatched up so many yarns, those newspaper reporters, since the affair began. According to this fellow, a tramp, crossing the heath in quest of a place to sleep, had been frightened half out of his wits by hearing a voice which _he_ described as being like the voice of some one strangling, calling out in the darkness, "Sapphires!
Sapphires!" and a few moments later, when, as the reporter said, the tramp told him, he was scuttling away in a panic, he came suddenly upon the figure of a man who was dancing round and round like a whirling dervish, with his mouth wide open, his tongue hanging out, and the forefinger of each hand stuck in his nostril as if----"
"What"s that? What"s that?" Cleek"s voice flicked in like the crack of a whip. "Good G.o.d! Dancing round in circles? His mouth open? His tongue hanging out? His fingers thrust into his nostrils? Was that what you said?"
"Yes. Why? Do you see anything promising in that fact, Cleek? It seems to excite you."
"Never mind about that. Stick to the subject. Was that report found to be correct, then?"
"In a measure, yes. Only, of course, one had to take the tramp"s a.s.sertion that the man had been calling out "Sapphires" upon faith, for when discovered and conveyed to the hospital, he was in a comatose condition and beyond making any sound at all. He died, without recovering consciousness, about twenty minutes after Petrie"s arrival; and, although the doctors performed a post-mortem immediately after the breath had left his body, there was not a trace of anything to be found that differed in the slightest from the other cases. Heart, brain, liver, lungs--all were in a healthy condition, and beyond the reddened throat and the signs of recent enteric there was nothing abnormal."
"But his lips--his lips, Mr. Narkom? Was there a smear of earth upon them? Was he lying on his face when found? Were his fingers clenched in the gra.s.s? Did it look as if he had been biting the soil?"
"Yes," replied Narkom. "As a matter of fact there was both earth and gra.s.s in the mouth. The doctors removed it carefully, examined it under the microscope, even subjected it to chemical test in the hope of discovering some foreign substance mixed with the ma.s.s, but failed utterly to discover a single trace."
"Of course, of course! It would be gone like a breath, gone like a pa.s.sing cloud if it were that."
"If it were what? Cleek, my dear fellow! Good Lord! you don"t mean to tell me you"ve got a clue?"
"Perhaps--perhaps--don"t worry me!" he made answer testily; then rose and walked over to the window and stood there alone, pinching his chin between his thumb and forefinger and staring fixedly at things beyond. After a time, however:
"Yes, it could be that--a.s.suredly it could be that," he said in a low-sunk voice, as if answering a query. "But in England--in this far land. In Malay, yes; in Ceylon, certainly. And sapphires, too--sapphires! Hum-m-m! They mine them there. One man had travelled in foreign parts and been tattooed by natives. So that the selfsame country----Just so! Of course! Of course! But who? But how? And in England?"
His voice dropped off. He stood for a minute or so in absolute silence, drumming noiselessly with his finger tips upon the window-sill, then turned abruptly and spoke to Mr. Narkom.
"Go on with the story, please," he said. "There was a fifth man, I believe. When and how did his end come?"
"Like the others, for the most part, but with one startling difference: instead of being undressed, nothing had been removed but his collar and boots. He was killed on the night I started with Dollops for the Continent in quest of you; and his was the second body that was not actually found _on_ the heath. Like the first man, he was found under the wall which surrounds Lemmingham House."
"Lemmingham House? What"s that--a hotel or a private residence?"
"A private residence, owned and occupied by Mr. James Barrington-Edwards."
"Any relation to that Captain Barrington-Edwards who was cashiered from the army some twenty years ago for "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman"?"
"The same man!"
"Oho! the same man, eh?" Cleek"s tone was full of sudden interest.
"Stop a bit! Let me put my thinking box into operation. Captain Barrington-Edwards--hum-m-m! That little military unpleasantness happened out in Ceylon, did it not? The gentleman had a fancy for conjuring tricks, I believe; even went so far as to study them firsthand under the tutelage of native fakirs, and was subsequently caught cheating at cards. That"s the man, isn"t it?"
"Yes," said Narkom, "that"s the man. I"ll have something startling to tell you in connection with him presently, but not in connection with that card-cheating scandal. He always swore that he was innocent of that. In fact, that it was a put-up job by one of the other officers for the sake of ruining him."
"Yes, I know--they all say that. It"s the only thing they can say."
"Still, I always believed him, Cleek. He"s been a pretty straightforward man in all my dealings with him, and I"ve had several. Besides which, he is highly respected these days. Then, too, there"s the fact that the fellow he said put up the job against him for the sake of blackening him in the eyes of his sweetheart, eventually married the girl, so it does look rather fishy.