CLEEK EXPLAINS
"How did I manage to find the thing out?" said Cleek, answering the
duke's query as they all sat together in the vicarage drawing-room, an
hour or more afterward, discussing the affair. "Well, to tell you the
truth, I think I got the very first inkling from the ringing of the
bells. Oh, no, not through any special power of deduction or any
super-human nonsense of that sort, but simply and solely through my
memory. You will remember that I said Overton was not very original in
his methods. Well, it so happened that I recalled the circumstance of a
monkey which escaped from its cage and terrorized a Swiss village some
years ago by climbing into the church belfry and inadvertently setting
the bells ringing in the middle of the night by hopping from one to the
other in an effort to maintain its equilibrium. That, of course,
suggested a similar possibility here, and I set about deciding the point
by means of the fullers' earth. By the way, Mr. Narkom, I chose fullers'
earth not alone because of its yielding quality and its ability to
receive impressions of even very slight things falling upon it, but
because by reason of its weight and its rather tenacious character it
was not so likely as another medium to be blown away by any sudden
rising of the wind. I suppose you know that I placed the stuff about the
tower's base when I left you at the limousine?"
"I judged that," replied the Superintendent. "The thing which amazed me,
however, was all that meaningless stuff about timber and cubic feet you
talked about when you came back. I can't even yet get the hang of that."
"Can't you? It will be getting in advance of the story a bit, but I may
as well explain it now as later. I had come to the point of certainty
regarding the making of a tunnel--how, you shall hear later--and as a
tunnel of 288 feet in length will require shoring up and bracing with
balks at intervals if one doesn't want it to become one's grave, timber
for that purpose becomes a necessity. Now, as it would have been a
pretty risky business to have left a trail by purchasing timber, and a
worse one to attempt to smuggle it into the Hurdons' cottage, I had to
figure out just where those beauties were going to get it. Old or new,
they simply must have it, and the idea of _old_ timber set my thoughts
going--opened up, as it were, the possibility of the adjoining house
being kept tenantless so that they could quietly demolish it and get the
wood from there. So, when I went to lay the fullers' earth about the
tower, I determined to have a look inside that other cottage and decide
the point. A skeleton key let me in, and one flicker of my torch settled
the question. The floors were up, the walls had been broken with a
sledge-hammer until the place was fairly littered with mortar and lime
from end to end, and every joist and beam that could be removed without
bringing the place down had been taken away. I made a rapid inventory,
calculated roughly about how much timber it would take to supply what
had been removed, reduced that to the requirements of the tunnel, and
when you caught me going about that little problem in mental arithmetic,
I was trying to discover just how far those chaps must have progressed
with the tunnel on the basis of the cubic feet of timber used.
"Now, to get back to the beginning. The tunnel idea was really the
outcome of speculating with regard to Sir Julius Solinski's possible
connection with the matter. That, of course, set me to thinking on the
subject of digging for the purpose of getting something out of the earth
by secret means and defeating the duke that way; then, when I got to
thinking over Captain Paul Sandringham's position in the event of the
proposed marriage and the possibility of an heir coming between him and
his expectations, and added to that my knowledge of the dishonest
character of the man--why, there you are! The tunnel and the reason for
it simply evolve themselves by natural means out of such fertile soil
as that; and, this much accomplished, it was but a step to the Hurdons
and that very delightful garden which was so delightfully kept."
"How?"
"I didn't like the idea of that garden in that particular place for one
thing, and then, for another, I didn't like its being so wonderfully
kept up by a couple of people who couldn't apparently be scared into
neglecting it or frightened out of the neighbourhood by all the ghosts
and bells and curses in Christendom. I asked myself: 'Why do people of
position and means so humble that they have to live in a little thatched
cottage go to the expense of a garden so ornamental that even a ducal
residence is enhanced by the presence of it?' The answer appeared to be
that they were doing it for the purpose of making the duke pleased to
have them remain there; and if they had any reason for spending a lot of
money in plants and flowers simply to prevent the duke from tearing down
the cottages and putting an end to the nuisance of that ill-kept one
next door, there must be something at the bottom of it that would not
stand looking into. If there was to be a tunnel, then, why should not
that be the starting point? The more I thought over the thing the more
promising it looked. For, I said to myself, to keep up a garden in the
state of constant bloom and continual perfection, as that one appears to
be, will need a lot of work; in fact, will keep that one old man and
woman busy in it pretty much all their time, if there is no fake about
it; but if there is, and they are digging in the tunnel, and the garden
still bears those outward signs of constant care, why, there will be
only one possible solution, one possible way to do it. In other words,
there will have to be a constant supply of fresh plants that can be
popped into the place of any that show the slightest trace of neglect,
and that means that they will have to be shallow-rooted things like
geraniums, fuchsias, lilies, and the like, so that the change cannot
only be accomplished quickly, but will show no sign to the casual
observer."
"Ah, now I understand what you meant by all that stuff about geraniums
which I couldn't make head or tail of at the time. And that's why you
were so interested and so anxious to go over and talk with the Hurdon
woman the minute you caught sight of the place."
"That's it precisely, Mr. Narkom. I saw at once that I had hit upon
something very like the truth; and as I also saw that the woman was very
particular in rising from her work to see that her gardening apron was
brushed down over her skirt, I wondered what she was so anxious to hide,
and took means to find out by tossing the wall plant to her on the plea
of its being a very choice plant. When she caught it in her apron and I
saw those marks of caked yellow clay about her knees, I was both
gratified and--disappointed."
"Disappointed, old chap?"
"Yes, in the colour of the stuff. I'd expected it to be blue. For, as
you know, the county of Essex may be said to rest almost entirely on a
foundation of what is geologically known as 'London clay' and that is
decidedly blue. All in a moment, however, I remembered that we were
close to the border line of Suffolk, and consequently on the edge of the
yellow clay belt, and--there you are. Pardon, Duke? How did I get the
idea of Captain Sandringham's connection with the affair? Oh, that
fellow Carstairs gave me the first hint of that at the vicarage gate
when the news of the man's death was made known, and Overton clinched
the nail at once. He was obviously distressed by the news, and didn't
know how to proceed; but when Carstairs flung out that little hint about
there being 'one the less to reckon with' the fellow's eyes lit up in a
manner not to be mistaken. They are expressive eyes. To-day, when I went
over to the Castle and got the duke to send him off to Braintree so that
I could slip into the Lodge and search his effects I found all the proof
of 'Miss Emmy Costivan's' identity and of the beggar's arrangements with
Captain Sandringham.
"I also made use of my time at the Castle to question the duke's valet
and to learn what happened when Tom Davis went out to investigate the
matter of the bells that night. Just before he went, Carstairs had
treated him to half a bottle of the ducal champagne. When I heard that,
I knew at once how the morphia had been administered. I had known from
the first, however, that, if morphia should turn out to be the drug
employed, Carstairs would be the man, because the rascal had it handy.
How did I know that? Well, you remember that time when Sir Julius
Solinski passed us in his motor? Carstairs saluted him. As the beggar
put his hand to his hat, his sleeve slipped down, and I could see the
evidence of the thing. The man was addicted to the use of hypodermic
injections of morphia--the scars of the needle were clearly visible. I
don't think there is any doubt of how poor Davis died. The drug overcame
him on the road, and he dropped down in a stupor. There is clear
evidence of that. You saw me examine his nails? The flint dust of the
road was under them. After that, I suppose, Carstairs, who had been
following him and watching him out for just such a time, pounced on him,
carried him into the half-demolished cottage, and brained him with the
hammer that was being used to batter down the walls and beat out the
joists. As for the other tragic affair connected with the same
cottage--namely, the mysterious disappearance of the child and the
insanity and suicide of the father? I don't suppose we need regard that
as other than a pleasant little fiction upon the part of Mr. James
Overton. The duke tells me that the body of the man Smale was never
recovered, and that his going insane and drowning himself rests only
upon a 'farewell note' from him to Mr. Overton, who afterward declared
that he had seen his body fished out of the river a good ten miles away.
Of course the story of the child's vanishing in the dead of the night
was another piece of fiction of the same sort. Nor would it surprise me
in the slightest if the man called Smale, who posed as her father, was
really no less a person than Captain Paul Sandringham himself.
"One thing, however, I think we can assert positively, and that is that
Mrs. Mallory, the widow who set the ball rolling, was no other than Miss
Emily Overton, otherwise Emily Costivan, and that the person who figured
as her sister is the woman who passed as her mother."
"Mrs. Costivan?"
"Yes. I think we shall find that she and her husband were admitted into
the game simply because they had at the time a nephew who was in the
last stages of consumption. Of course the story about the gypsy who was
beating him and who told the curse that would follow if he were buried
here was made from whole cloth. The youth was simply carried into the
house in the night, and Doctor Forsyth was right in the matter of his
not having been able to lift a hand for days before he was called in to
him. Since then it would appear that Mrs. Costivan had directed her
energies toward washing the clay-stained overalls of one and the other
of the 'tunnellers' when her husband carried them to her--for I dare say
that every one of them--Carstairs, Overton, Costivan, all of them, took
a hand in it at times; and if it hadn't been for poor Tom Davis, they
might have carried it through successfully, after all. Which shows again
that 'there's many a slip----!'"
And so ended the case of the Mysterious Light which nearly lost a duke a
most valuable heritage and to which only Cleek could find the solution.