However, although it ruined Barrington-Edwards for the time being, and embittered him so that he never married, he certainly had the satisfaction of knowing that the fellow who had caused this trouble turned out an absolute rotter, spent all his wife"s money and brought her down to absolute beggary, whereas, if she"d stuck to Barrington-Edwards she"d have been a wealthy woman indeed, to-day. He"s worth half a million at the least calculation."
"How"s that? Somebody die and leave him a fortune?"
"No. He had a little of his own. Speculated, while he was in the East, in precious stones and land which he had reason to believe likely to produce them; succeeded beyond his wildest hopes, and is to-day head of the firm of Barrington-Edwards, Morpeth & Firmin, the biggest dealers in precious stones that Hatton Garden can boast of."
"Oho!" said Cleek. "I see! I see!" and screwed round on his heel and looked out of the window again. Then, after a moment: "And Mr.
Barrington-Edwards lives in the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath, does he?" he asked quite calmly. "Alone?"
"No. With his nephew and heir, young Mr. Archer Blaine, a dead sister"s only child. As a matter of fact, it was Mr. Archer Blaine himself who discovered the body of the fifth victim. Coming home at a quarter to one from a visit to an old college friend, he found the man lying stone dead in the shadow of the wall surrounding Lemmingham House, and, of course, lost no time in dashing indoors for a police whistle and summoning the constable on point duty in the district. The body was at once given in charge of a hastily summoned detachment from the Yard and conveyed to the Hampstead mortuary, where it still lies awaiting identification."
"Been photographed?"
"Not as yet. Of course it will be--as were the other four--prior to the time of burial should n.o.body turn up to claim it. But in this instance we have great hopes that identification _will_ take place on the strength of a marked peculiarity. The man is web-footed and----"
"The man is _what_?" rapped in Cleek excitedly.
"Web-footed," repeated Narkom. "The several toes are attached one to the other by a thin membrane, after the manner of a duck"s feet; and on the left foot there is a peculiar h.o.r.n.y protuberance like----"
"Like a rudimentary sixth toe!" interrupted Cleek, fairly flinging the eager query at him. "It is, eh? Well, by the Eternal! I once knew a fellow--years ago, in the Far East--whose feet were malformed like that; and if by any possibility----Stop a bit! A word more.
Is that man a big fellow--broad shouldered, muscular, and about forty or forty-five years of age?"
"You"ve described him to a T, dear chap. There is, however, a certain other peculiarity which you have not mentioned, though that, of course, maybe a recent acquirement. The palm of the right hand----"
"Wait a bit! Wait a bit!" interposed Cleek, a trifle irritably. He had swung away from the window and was now walking up and down the room with short nervous steps, his chin pinched up between his thumb and forefinger, his brows knotted, and his eyes fixed upon the floor.
"Saffragam--Jaffna--Trincomalee! In all three of them--in all three!"
he said, putting his running thoughts into muttered words. "And now a dead man sticks his fingers in his nostrils and talks of sapphires. Sapphires, eh? And the Saffragam district stuck thick with them as spangles on a Nautch girl"s veil. The Bareva for a ducat! The Bareva Reef or I"m a Dutchman! And Barrington-Edwards was in that with the rest. So was Peabody; so was Miles; and so, too, were Lieutenant Edgburn and the Spaniard, Juan Alvarez. Eight of them, b"gad--eight! And I was a.s.s enough to forget, idiot enough not to catch the connection until I heard again of Jim Peabody"s web foot! But wait! Stop--there should be another marked foot if this is indeed a clue to the riddle, and so----"
He stopped short in his restless pacing and faced round on Mr. Narkom.
"Tell me something," he said in a sharp staccato. "The four other dead men--did any among them have an injured foot--the left or the right, I forget which--from which all toes but the big one had been torn off by a crocodile"s bite, so that in life the fellow must have limped a little when he walked? Did any of the dead men bear a mark like that?"
"No," said Narkom. "The feet of all the others were normal in every particular."
"Hum-m-m! That"s a bit of a setback. And I am either on the wrong track or Alvarez is still alive. What"s that? Oh, it doesn"t matter; a mere fancy of mine, that"s all. Now let us get back to our mutton, please. You were going to tell me something about the right hand of the man with the web foot. What was it?"
"The palm bore certain curious hieroglyphics traced upon it in bright purple."
"Hieroglyphics, eh? That doesn"t look quite so promising," said Cleek in a disappointed tone. "It is quite possible that there may be more than one web-footed man in the world, so of course----Hum-m-m! What were these hieroglyphics, Mr. Narkom? Can you describe them?"
"I can do better, my dear chap," replied the superintendent, dipping into an inner pocket and bringing forth a brown leather case. "I took an accurate tracing of them from the dead hand this morning, and--there you are. That"s what"s on his palm, Cleek, close to the base of the forefinger running diagonally across it."
Cleek took the slip of tracing paper and carried it to the window, for the twilight was deepening and the room was filling with shadows.
In the middle of the thin, transparent sheet was traced this:
[Ill.u.s.tration of a handwritten message]
He turned it up and down, he held it to the light and studied it for a moment or two in perplexed silence, then of a sudden he faced round, and Narkom could see that his eyes were shining and that the curious one-sided smile, peculiar unto him, was looping up his cheek.
"My friend," he said, answering the eager query in the superintendent"s look, "this is yet another vindication of Poe"s theory that things least hidden are best hidden, and that the most complex mysteries are those which are based on the simplest principles. With your permission, I"ll keep this"--tucking the tracing into his pocket--"and afterward I will go to the mortuary and inspect the original. Meantime, I will go so far as to tell you that I know the motive for these murders, I know the means, and if you will give me forty-eight hours to solve the riddle, at the end of that time I"ll know the man. I will even go farther and tell you the names of the victims; and all on the evidence of your neat little tracing. The web-footed man was one, James Peabody, a farrier, at one time attached to the Blue Cavalry at Trincomalee, Ceylon. Another was Joseph Miles, an Irishman, bitten early with the "wanderl.u.s.t" which takes men everywhere, and in making rolling stones of them, suffers them to gather no moss. Still another--and probably, from the tattoo mark on his arm, the first victim found--was Thomas Hart, ablebodied seaman, formerly in service on the P & O line; the remaining two were Alexander McCurdy, a Scotchman, and T. Jenkins Quegg, a Yankee. The latter, however, was a naturalized Englishman, and both were privates in her late Majesty"s army and honourably discharged."
"Cleek, my dear fellow, are you a magician?" said Narkom, sinking into a chair, overcome.
"Oh, no, my friend, merely a man with a memory, that"s all; and I happen to remember a curious little "pool" that was made up of eight men. Five of them are dead. The other three are Juan Alvarez, a Spaniard, that Lieutenant Edgburn who married and beggared the girl Captain Barrington-Edwards lost when he was disgraced, and last of all the ex-Captain Barrington-Edwards himself. Gently, gently, my friend. Don"t excite yourself. All these murders have been committed with a definite purpose in view, with a devil"s instrument, and for the devil"s own stake--riches. Those riches, Mr. Narkom, were to come in the shape of precious stones, the glorious sapphires of Ceylon. And five of the eight men who were to reap the harvest of them died mysteriously in the vicinity of Lemmingham House."
"Cleek! My hat!" Narkom sprang up as he spoke, and then sat down again in a sort of panic. "And he--Barrington-Edwards, the man that lives there--_deals_ in precious stones. Then that man----"
"Gently, my friend, gently--don"t bang away at the first rabbit that bolts out of the hole--it may be a wee one and you"ll lose the buck that follows. _Two_ men live in that house, remember; Mr. Archer Blaine is Mr. Barrington-Edwards" heir as well as his nephew and--who knows?"
CHAPTER III
"Cinnamon! what a corroboration--what a horrible corroboration!
Cleek, you knock the last prop from under me; you make certain a thing that I thought was only a woman"s wild imaginings," said Narkom, getting up suddenly, all a-tremble with excitement. "Good heavens! to have Miss Valmond"s story corroborated in this dreadful way."
"Miss Valmond? Who"s she? Any relation to that Miss Rose Valmond whose name one sees in the papers so frequently in connection with gifts to Catholic Orphanages and Foundling Homes?"
"The same lady," replied Narkom. "Her charities are numberless, her life a psalm. I think she has done more good in her simple, undemonstrative way than half the guilds and missions in London.
She has an independent fortune, and lives, in company with an invalid and almost imbecile mother, and a brother who is, I am told, studying for the priesthood, in a beautiful home surrounded by splendid grounds, the walls of which separate her garden from that of Lemmingham House."
"Ah, I see. Then she is a neighbour of Barrington-Edwards?"
"Yes. From the back windows of her residence one can look into the grounds of his. That is how--Cleek!" Mr. Narkom"s voice shook with agitation--"You will remember I said, a little time back, that I would have something startling to tell you in connection with Barrington-Edwards--something that was not connected with that old army scandal? If it had not been for the high character of my informant; if it had been any other woman in all England I should have thought she was suffering from nerves--fancying things as the result of an overwrought mind sent into a state of hysteria through all those abominable crimes in the neighbourhood; but when it was she, when it was Miss Valmond----"
"Oho!" said Cleek, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g round suddenly. "Then Miss Valmond told you something with regard to Barrington-Edwards?"
"Yes--a horrible something. She came to me this morning looking as I hope I shall never see a good woman look again--as if she had been tortured to the last limit of human endurance. She had been fighting a silent battle for weeks and weeks she said, but her conscience would not let her keep the appalling secret any longer, neither would her duty to Heaven. Wakened in the dead of night by a sense of oppression, she had gone to her window to open it for air, and, looking down by chance into the garden of Lemmingham House, she had seen a man come rushing out of the rear door of Barrington-Edwards" place in his pajamas, closely followed by another, whom she believed to be Barrington-Edwards himself, and she had seen that man unlock the door in the side wall and push the poor wretch out into the road where he was afterward found by the constable."
"By Jupiter!"
"Ah, you may be moved when you connect that circ.u.mstance with what you have yourself unearthed. But there is worse to come. Unable to overcome a frightful fascination which drew her night after night to that window, she saw that same thing happen again to the fourth, and finally, the fifth man--the web-footed one--and that last time she saw the face of the pursuer quite plainly. It _was_ Barrington-Edwards!"
"Sure of that, was she?"
"Absolutely. It was the positive certainty it was he that drove her at last to speak!"
Cleek made no reply, no comment; merely screwed round on his heel and took to pacing the floor again. After a minute however:
"Mr. Narkom," he said halting abruptly. "I suppose all my old duds are still in the locker of the limousine, aren"t they? Good! I thought so. Give Lennard the signal, will you? I must risk the old car in an emergency like this. Take me first to the cable office, please; then to the mortuary, and afterward to Miss Valmond"s home.
I hate to torture her further, poor girl, but I must get all the facts of this, first hand."
He did. The limousine was summoned at once, and inside of an hour it set him down (looking the very picture of a solicitor"s clerk) at the cable office, then picked up and set him down at the Hampstead mortuary, this time, making so good a counterpart of Petrie that even Hammond, who was on guard beside the dead man, said "Hullo, Pete, that you? Thought you was off duty to-day," as he came in with the superintendent.
"Jim Peabody fast enough, Mr. Narkom," commented Cleek, when they were left together beside the dead man. "Changed, of course, in all the years, but still poor old Jim. Good-hearted, honest, but illiterate. Could barely more than write his name, and even that without a capital, poor chap. Let me look at the hand. A violet smudge on the top of the thumb as well as those marks on the palm, I see. Hum-m-m! Any letters or writing of any sort in the pockets when found? None, eh? That old bone-handled pocket knife there his? Yes, I"d like to look at it. Open it, please. Thanks. I thought so, I thought so. Those the socks he had on? Poor wretch! Down to that at last, eh?--down to that! Let me have one of them for a day or so, will you? and--yes--the photographs of the other four, please. Thanks very much. No, that"s all. Now then, to call on Miss Valmond, if you don"t mind. Right you are. Let her go, Lennard.
Down with the blinds and open with the locker again, Mr. Narkom, and we"ll "dig" Mr. George Headland out of his two-months" old grave." And at exactly ten minutes after eight o"clock, Mr. George Headland _was_ "dug up" and was standing with Mr. Narkom in Rose Valmond"s house listening to Rose Valmond"s story from her own lips, and saying to himself, the while, that here surely was that often talked-of, seldom-seen creature, a woman with an angel"s face.