THE SEARCH OF MILBURGH'S COTTAGE
Mr. Milburgh had a little house in one of the industrial streets of
Camden Town. It was a street made up for the most part of blank walls,
pierced at intervals with great gates, through which one could procure at
times a view of gaunt factories and smoky-looking chimney-stacks.
Mr. Milburgh's house was the only residence in the road, if one excepted
the quarters of caretakers and managers, and it was agreed by all who saw
his tiny demesne, that Mr. Milburgh had a good landlord.
The "house" was a detached cottage in about half an acre of ground, a
one-storey building, monopolising the space which might have been
occupied by factory extension. Both the factory to the right and the left
had made generous offers to acquire the ground, but Mr. Milburgh's
landlord had been adamant. There were people who suggested that Mr.
Milburgh's landlord was Mr. Milburgh himself. But how could that be? Mr.
Milburgh's salary was something under £400 a year, and the cottage site
was worth at least £4,000.
Canvey Cottage, as it was called, stood back from the road, behind a
lawn, innocent of flowers, and the lawn itself was protected from
intrusion by high iron railings which Mr. Milburgh's landlord had had
erected at considerable cost. To reach the house it was necessary to pass
through an iron gate and traverse a stone-flagged path to the door of the
cottage.
On the night when Tarling of Scotland Yard was the victim of a murderous
assault, Mr. Milburgh unlocked the gate and passed through, locking and
double-locking the gate behind him. He was alone, and, as was his wont,
he was whistling a sad little refrain which had neither beginning nor
end. He walked slowly up the stone pathway, unlocked the door of his
cottage, and stood only a moment on the doorstep to survey the growing
thickness of the night, before he closed and bolted the door and switched
on the electric light.
He was in a tiny hallway, plainly but nicely furnished. The note of
luxury was struck by the Zohn etchings which hung on the wall, and which
Mr. Milburgh stopped to regard approvingly. He hung up his coat and hat,
slipped off the galoshes he was wearing (for it was wet underfoot), and,
passing through a door which opened from the passage, came to his living
room. The same simple note of furniture and decoration was observable
here. The furniture was good, the carpet under his feet thick and
luxurious. He snicked down another switch and an electric radiator glowed
in the fireplace. Then he sat down at the big table, which was the most
conspicuous article of furniture in the room. It was practically covered
with orderly little piles of paper, most of them encircled with rubber
bands. He did not attempt to touch or read them, but sat looking moodily
at his blotting-pad, preoccupied and absent.
Presently he rose with a little grunt, and, crossing the room, unlocked a
very commonplace and old-fashioned cupboard, the top of which served as a
sideboard. From the cupboard he took a dozen little books and carried
them to the table. They were of uniform size and each bore the figures of
a year. They appeared to be, and indeed were, diaries, but they were not
Mr. Milburgh's diaries. One day he chanced to go into Thornton Lyne's
room at the Stores and had seen these books arrayed on a steel shelf of
Lyne's private safe. The proprietor's room overlooked the ground floor of
the Stores, and Thornton Lyne at the time was visible to his manager, and
could not under any circumstances surprise him, so Mr. Milburgh had taken
out one volume and read, with more than ordinary interest, the somewhat
frank and expansive diary which Thornton Lyne had kept.
He had only read a few pages on that occasion, but later he had an
opportunity of perusing the whole year's record, and had absorbed a great
deal of information which might have been useful to him in the future,
had not Thornton Lyne met his untimely end at the hands of an unknown
murderer.
On the day when Thornton Lyne's body was discovered in Hyde Park with a
woman's night-dress wrapped around the wound in his breast, Mr. Milburgh
had, for reasons of expediency and assisted by a duplicate key of Lyne's
safe, removed those diaries to a safer place. They contained a great deal
that was unpleasant for Mr. Milburgh, particularly the current diary, for
Thornton Lyne had set down not only his experiences, but his daily
happenings, his thoughts, poetical and otherwise, and had stated very
exactly and in libellous terms his suspicions of his manager.
The diary provided Mr. Milburgh with a great deal of very interesting
reading matter, and now he turned to the page where he had left off the
night before and continued his study. It was a page easy to find, because
he had thrust between the leaves a thin envelope of foreign make
containing certain slips of paper, and as he took out his improvised
book mark a thought seemed to strike him, and he felt carefully in his
pocket. He did not discover the thing for which he was searching, and
with a smile he laid the envelope carefully on the table, and went on at
the point where his studies had been interrupted.
"Lunched at the London Hotel and dozed away the afternoon. Weather
fearfully hot. Had arranged to make a call upon a distant cousin--a
man named Tarling--who is in the police force at Shanghai, but too
much of a fag. Spent evening at Chu Han's dancing hall. Got very
friendly with a pretty little Chinese girl who spoke pigeon English.
Am seeing her to-morrow at Ling Foo's. She is called 'The Little
Narcissus.' I called her 'My Little Daffodil'--"
Mr. Milburgh stopped in his reading.
"Little Daffodil!" he repeated, then looked at the ceiling and pinched
his thick lips. "Little Daffodil!" he said again, and a big smile dawned
on his face.
He was still engaged in reading when a bell shrilled in the hall. He rose
to his feet and stood listening and the bell rang again. He switched off
the light, pulled aside the thick curtain which hid the window, and
peered out through the fog. He could just distinguish in the light of the
street lamp two or three men standing at the gate. He replaced the
curtain, turned up the light again, took the books in his arms and
disappeared with them into the corridor. The room at the back was his
bedroom, and into this he went, making no response to the repeated jingle
of the bell for fully five minutes.
At the end of that time he reappeared, but now he was in his pyjamas,
over which he wore a heavy dressing-gown. He unlocked the door, and
shuffled in his slippers down the stone pathway to the gate.
"Who's that?" he asked.
"Tarling. You know me," said a voice.
"Mr. Tarling?" said Milburgh in surprise. "Really this is an unexpected
pleasure. Come in, come in, gentlemen."
"Open the gate," said Tarling briefly.
"Excuse me while I go and get the key," said Milburgh. "I didn't expect
visitors at this hour of the night."
He went into the house, took a good look round his room, and then
reappeared, taking the key from the pocket of his dressing-gown. It had
been there all the time, if the truth be told, but Mr. Milburgh was a
cautious man and took few risks.
Tarling was accompanied by Inspector Whiteside and another man, whom
Milburgh rightly supposed was a detective. Only Tarling and the Inspector
accepted his invitation to step inside, the third man remaining on guard
at the gate.
Milburgh led the way to his cosy sitting-room.
"I have been in bed some hours, and I'm sorry to have kept you so long."
"Your radiator is still warm," said Tarling quietly, stooping to feel the
little stove.
Mr. Milburgh chuckled.
"Isn't that clever of you to discover that?" he said admiringly. "The
fact is, I was so sleepy when I went to bed, several hours ago, that I
forgot to turn the radiator off, and it was only when I came down to
answer the bell that I discovered I had left it switched on."
Tarling stooped and picked the butt end of a cigar out of the hearth. It
was still alight.
"You've been smoking in your sleep, Mr. Milburgh," he said dryly.
"No, no," said the airy Mr. Milburgh. "I was smoking that when I came
downstairs to let you in. I instinctively put a cigar in my mouth the
moment I wake up in the morning. It is a disgraceful habit, and really is
one of my few vices," he admitted. "I threw it down when I turned out the
radiator."
Tarling smiled.
"Won't you sit down?" said Milburgh, seating himself in the least
comfortable of the chairs. "You see," his smile was apologetic as he
waved his hand to the table, "the work is frightfully heavy now that poor
Mr. Lyne is dead. I am obliged to bring it home, and I can assure you,
Mr. Tarling, that there are some nights when I work till daylight,
getting things ready for the auditor."
"Do you ever take exercise?" asked Tarling innocently. "Little night
walks in the fog for the benefit of your health?"
A puzzled frown gathered on Milburgh's face.
"Exercise, Mr. Tarling?" he said with an air of mystification. "I don't
quite understand you. Naturally I shouldn't walk out on a night like
this. What an extraordinary fog for this time of the year!"
"Do you know Paddington at all?"
"No," said Mr. Milburgh, "except that there is a station there which I
sometimes use. But perhaps you will explain to me the meaning of this
visit?"
"The meaning is," said Tarling shortly, "that I have been attacked
to-night by a man of your build and height, who fired twice at me at
close quarters. I have a warrant--" Mr. Milburgh's eyes narrowed--"I
have a warrant to search this house."
"For what?" demanded Milburgh boldly.
"For a revolver or an automatic pistol and anything else I can find."
Milburgh rose.
"You're at liberty to search the house from end to end," he said.
"Happily, it is a small one, as my salary does not allow of an expensive
establishment."
"Do you live here alone?" asked Tarling.
"Quite," replied Milburgh. "A woman comes in at eight o'clock to-morrow
morning to cook my breakfast and make the place tidy, but I sleep here
by myself. I am very much hurt," he was going on.
"You will be hurt much worse," said Tarling dryly and proceeded to the
search.
It proved to be a disappointing one, for there was no trace of any
weapon, and certainly no trace of the little red slips which he had
expected to find in Milburgh's possession. For he was not searching for
the man who had assailed him, but for the man who had killed Thornton
Lyne.
He came back to the little sitting-room where Milburgh had been left with
the Inspector and apparently he was unruffled by his failure.
"Now, Mr. Milburgh," he said brusquely, "I want to ask you: Have you ever
seen a piece of paper like this before?"
He took a slip from his pocket and spread it on the table. Milburgh
looked hard at the Chinese characters on the crimson square, and then
nodded.
"You have?" said Tarling in surprise.
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Milburgh complacently. "I should be telling an
untruth if I said I had not. Nothing is more repugnant to me than to
deceive anybody."
"That I can imagine," said Tarling.
"I am sorry you are sarcastic, Mr. Tarling," said the reproachful
Milburgh, "but I assure you that I hate and loathe an untruth."
"Where have you seen these papers?"
"On Mr. Lyne's desk," was the surprising answer
"On Lyne's desk?"
Milburgh nodded.
"The late Mr. Thornton Lyne," he said, "came back from the East with a
great number of curios, and amongst them were a number of slips of paper
covered with Chinese characters similar to this. I do not understand
Chinese," he said, "because I have never had occasion to go to China. The
characters may have been different one from the other, but to my
unsophisticated eye they all look alike."
"You've seen these slips on Lyne's desk?" said Tarling. "Then why did you
not tell the police before? You know that the police attach a great deal
of importance to the discovery of one of these things in the dead man's
pocket?"
Mr. Milburgh nodded.
"It is perfectly true that I did not mention the fact to the police," he
said, "but you understand Mr. Tarling that I was very much upset by the
sad occurrence, which drove everything else out of my mind. It would have
been quite possible that you would have found one or two of these strange
inscriptions in this very house." He smiled in the detective's face. "Mr.
Lyne was very fond of distributing the curios he brought from the East
to his friends," he went on. "He gave me that dagger you see hanging on
the wall, which he bought at some outlandish place in his travels. He may
have given me a sample of these slips. I remember his telling me a story
about them, which I cannot for the moment recall."
He would have continued retailing reminiscences of his late employer, but
Tarling cut him short, and with a curt good night withdrew. Milburgh
accompanied him to the front gate and locked the door upon the three men
before he went back to his sitting-room smiling quietly to himself.
"I am certain that the man was Milburgh," said Tarling. "I am as certain
as that I am standing here."
"Have you any idea why he should want to out you?" asked Whiteside.
"None in the world," replied Tarling. "Evidently my assailant was a man
who had watched my movements and had probably followed the girl and
myself to the hotel in a cab. When I disappeared inside he dismissed his
own and then took the course of dismissing my cab, which he could easily
do by paying the man his fare and sending him off. A cabman would accept
that dismissal without suspicion. He then waited for me in the fog and
followed me until he got me into a quiet part of the road, where he first
attempted to sandbag and then to shoot me."
"But why?" asked Whiteside again. "Suppose Milburgh knew something about
this murder--which is very doubtful--what benefit would it be to him to
have you put out of the way?"
"If I could answer that question," replied Tarling grimly, "I could tell
you who killed Thornton Lyne."