The Chinaman was unconscious and Carver looked around for the second
visitant. He rushed to the gate, the road was deserted. Flinging
himself upon the roadway to secure an artificial skyline, he peered
first in one direction and then in the other. Presently he saw his man
running swiftly in the cover of the hedges and started in pursuit.
A hundred yards away from the house was a secondary road, and into this
the runner turned. As Carver reached the corner he heard a motor-car
engine and dimly saw the bulk of a large touring car retreating rapidly.
He came back to the house to find Yeh Ling sitting in Ursula’s room
holding his head in his hands.
“This is the second man; it isn’t the wide-awake gentleman,” said
Carver. “Now, Yeh Ling, give an account of your actions. How are you
feeling?”
“Pretty dizzy,” said Yeh Ling and to Tab’s surprise his tone was that
of a cultured man, his English faultless.
He looked up at the girl reproachfully.
“You did not tell me these gentlemen were coming down, Miss Ardfern,
when you wrote to me,” he said.
“I hadn’t any idea when I wrote, that they were coming, Yeh Ling,” she
answered.
“If I had been here a little earlier I should have seen him,” he said.
“As it was, I am afraid I have spoiled your evening, Mr. Carver.” His
expressionless brown eyes looked up at the detective.
“I see! You were on guard too, were you?” said Carver good-humouredly.
“Yes, we seem to have made a mess of it between us. Did you see the
man?”
“I didn’t see him,” said Yeh Ling, “but,” he added, “I felt him,” and
he rubbed his head. “I think it must have been his fist. I did not
notice any weapon.”
“You didn’t see his face?” persisted Carver.
“No, he had a beard of some kind. I felt it as my hands clutched at
him. I am afraid I over-estimated my strength,” he said apologetically
to the girl, “yet there was a time when I was a star performer at
Harvard, in the days when Chinese students were something of a
curiosity.”
“Harvard?” said Tab in surprise. “Great Moses--I thought you were a--”
he couldn’t very well finish his sentence.
But the other helped him.
“You thought I was a very ordinary Chink?” he said. “Possibly I am. I
hope I am,” he said. “Certainly Miss Ardfern knew me when I was a very
poor Chink! We lodged in the same house, she will remember, and she
placed me under an eternal obligation by saving the life of my son.”
Then Tab remembered the little Chinese boy Ursula had nursed when she
herself was little more than a child. Remembering this, a great many
things which had been obscure to him, became clear and understandable.
“I had no idea you would come tonight, Yeh Ling, but you begged me
if I was in any kind of difficulty to let you know,” she said. “You
shouldn’t have taken the trouble.”
“Events seem to prove that,” said the Chinaman drily, “I am merely
being consistent, Miss Ardfern. You have been under my personal
observation for seven years. Seven years, day and night, either I, or
one of my servants have been watching you. You never went--” he stopped
and changed the conversation.
“Miss Ardfern never went to Mr. Trasmere’s house but you weren’t
watching outside, that is what you were going to say, wasn’t it, Yeh
Ling?” smiled Carver. “You need not be reticent, because I know all
about it, and Miss Ardfern knows that I know.”
“That was what I was going to say,” said the other. “I usually
followed Miss Ardfern from the theatre to her hotel; from her hotel to
Trasmere’s house, and home again when she had finished working.”
The reporter and detective exchanged glances. This, then, was the
explanation of the mysterious Chinaman who had been seen by Mr. Stott’s
servant waiting outside Mayfield smoking a cigar in the cold hours of
the morning. It explained, also the appearance of the cyclist in the
roadway that morning when the tyres of Ursula Ardfern’s car had burst
and Tab had been on hand to render timely assistance.
“I had no idea,” breathed the astonished girl, “is that true, Yeh Ling?
Oh, how kind you have been.”
Tab saw tears in her eyes and wished that he, and not this
uninteresting Chinaman, had been the person who excited her gratitude.
“Kindness is a relative term,” said Yeh Ling. He had brought his feet
up on a chair and was rolling a cigarette; he had asked permission
with his eyes and as Ursula nodded, he lit it with a quick flick of
his fingers, a match having appeared, as it seemed, out of space, and
carefully replaced the stalk in a match-box. “Was it kindness that
you saved the life of one who is to me the light of my eyes and the
inspiration of my soul, if you will forgive what may seem to you, a
writer, Mr. Holland, a piece of flowery orientalism, but which is to me
the quintessence of sincerity.”
Then without preamble he told his story; a story which was only
half-known to the girl.
“I was in this peculiar position,” he said, “that I was a rich man or
a poor man, whichever way the great law of this country interprets an
agreement I made with Shi Soh. Shi Soh you know as ‘Trasmere’ and that,
of course, is his name. On the Amur River we called him Shi Soh. I came
to this country many years ago and worked in the restaurant of which I
am now proprietor. I do not mean the Golden Roof, but the little place
in Reed Street. The man who owned it lost all his money at Fan-tan, and
I bought it a bargain. You may wonder why a man of education, and the
son of a great Clan should be here in this country, playing the humble
part of waiter in a Chinese restaurant. I might tell you,” he said
simply and without conscious humour, “that education in China, when it
is applied to political objectives is not always popular, and I left
China hurriedly. That, however, is all past. The Manchu has gone, the
old Empress, the Daughter of Heaven is dead, and Li Hung is asleep on
the Terraces of the Night.
“I was making slow progress when Mr. Trasmere came one night. I did not
recognize him at first. When I knew him first he was a very strong,
healthy man, with a reputation for being cruel to his employees.
I have known him to burn men to death in order to make them reveal
where they had hidden gold which they had stolen from the diggings.
We talked of old times, and then he asked me if there was money to be
made in the restaurant business. I told him there was, and that was the
beginning of the partnership which lasted until the day of his death.
Three-quarters of the profits of the Golden Roof was paid every Monday
to Mr. Trasmere and that was our agreement. It was the only agreement
that we had, except one which I myself wrote at his dictation and which
placed on record this fact: that in the event of his dying, the whole
of the property should come to me. It was signed by me with my ‘hong’
and by him with his ‘hong’ which he always carried in his pocket.”
“The ‘hong’,” interrupted Carver, “is a small ivory stamp with a
Chinese character at the end. It is carried in a thin ivory case,
rather like a pencil case, isn’t it?”
Yeh Ling nodded.
“I kept the document until a few days before his death, when he asked
me to let him take it away with him to make a copy. It will be news to
you, though not perhaps to you, Miss Ardfern, that Mr. Trasmere spoke
and wrote Chinese with greater ease than I, who am almost an authority
upon Mandarin. A few days later he was murdered. My only hope of saving
myself from ruin was to find that agreement, which he had taken away in
my little lacquer box.”
“But could they touch your restaurant? Are there any other documents
in existence which would give Mr. Trasmere’s heir the right of
interfering with you?”
Yeh Ling looked at him steadily.
“It does not need a document,” he said quietly. “We Chinese are
peculiar people. If Mr. Lander came to me on his return from Italy and
said--‘Yeh Ling, this property is my uncle’s in which you have only a
small share’, I would reply, ‘that is true’, and if the agreement which
we two men had not signed was not discovered, I should make no effort
at law to preserve my rights.”
And he meant it. Tab knew as he spoke, that he was telling the truth.
He could only marvel that such an exalted code of honour could be held
by a man who subconsciously, he regarded as of an inferior race and of
an inferior civilisation.
“You found the agreement?”
“Yes, sir,” said Yeh Ling. “It had been taken out of the box in
which I gave it to Mr. Trasmere and placed--elsewehere. But I found
it--and other documents of no immediate interest. As to my coming here
tonight--apart from your letter, lady, I was anxious to meet the Black
Man also. Yes. He has been watching me for many days. I am certain it
is the same.” He made a little grimace and rubbed his bruised head. “I
met him,” he said.
Carver jotted down a few notes in his book and then putting the book
away, he turned and faced the Chinaman squarely.
“Yeh Ling,” he said, “who murdered Jesse Trasmere?”
The Chinaman shook his head.
“I do not know,” he said simply. “To me it is amazing. There must be a
secret passage that opens into the vault. I can think of no other way
in which the murderer could have got in or out.”
“If there is a secret way,” said the detective grimly, “then it is the
best kept secret I have known. It has certainly been kept a secret
from the men who built the house and the vault, and the Clerk of the
Works who was on the spot all the time it was being erected. No, Yeh
Ling, you must get that idea out of your head. Either the man Brown or
Walters is guilty. We shall know the method they employed when we get
them.”
“Brown was not guilty,” said Yeh Ling quietly, “for I was with him when
the murder was committed!”
They heard his pronouncement with astonishment, even the girl seemed
surprised.
“Do you know what you are saying?”
“I know what I am saying, and I rather wish I hadn’t said it,” said
the Chinaman with a quick smile. “Nevertheless, it is true. If the
murder was committed on Saturday afternoon, then I certainly was with
the man called Wellington Brown, but whom we called The Drinker or the
Unemployed One, at that hour. It embarrasses me to say how or where,
but it would embarrass me more if you were to ask me whether I know his
whereabouts at the present moment. To that question I should answer:
‘No.’”
“And you would lie,” said Carver quietly.
“I should lie,” was the calm answer. “Yet I tell you, Mr. Carver, that
Wellington Brown was with me, under my eye, from half-past one o’clock
in the afternoon of the Saturday on which Jesse Trasmere was killed
until night.”
Carver eyed him keenly.
“When he came to you,” he asked, “how was he dressed?”
The other shrugged his shoulders.
“Poorly. He has always been dressed poorly.”
“Did he wear gloves?”
“No. He had no gloves. That was the first thing I noticed because he
was, what do you call it in English--fastidious to a degree. In the
hottest days I have seen him wearing gloves. A shabby dandy! That is
the expression I was seeking. I am sorry to disappoint you.”
“You haven’t disappointed me,” said Carver bitterly, “you have merely
added another brick wall between me and my objective.”
Yeh Ling left soon after. He had bicycled down from town and cheerfully
undertook the long return journey in preference to spending the
remainder of the night at the cottage.
It was too late for Ursula to go to her hotel and they sat up all
night, Carver playing an interminable game of Solitaire, whilst Tab and
the girl walked about the garden in the growing light and talked oddly
of incongruous things.
As soon as it was light, Carver went out to find the place where the
car had stood and to examine wheel-tracks. He gained little from his
inspection, except that the tyres were new and that the car was a
powerful one, which was hardly a discovery.
“The man who drove was not a skilled driver, or else he was very
nervous. Half-way up the lane he nearly swerved into a ditch and came
into collision with a telegraph pole, which must have damaged his
mud-guard severely. I found flakes of brand new enamel attaching to the
damaged wood, so I guessed that the car also had not been long from the
maker’s hands.”
Thus passed the second appearance of the Man In Black.
The third was to come in yet a more dramatic fashion.