THE PLACE OF DRAGONS
A MYSTERY
By
WILLIAM LE QUEUX
Author of "In White Raiment," "If Sinners Entice Thee,"
"The Room of Secrets," etc.
WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED
LONDON AND MELBOURNE
MADE IN ENGLAND
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I PRESENTS A PROBLEM 5
II IS MAINLY ASTONISHING 12
III SHOWS LIGHT FROM THE MIST 22
IV OPENS SEVERAL QUESTIONS 30
V IN WHICH THE SHADOW FALLS 38
VI MYSTERY INEXPLICABLE 44
VII TELLS OF TWO MEN 52
VIII REMAINS AN ENIGMA 60
IX DESCRIBES A NIGHT VIGIL 67
X CONTAINS A CLUE 73
XI THE AFFAIR OF THE SEVENTEENTH 81
XII LOLA 87
XIII RELATES A STRANGE STORY 95
XIV WHEREIN CONFESSION IS MADE 103
XV CONFIRMS CERTAIN SUSPICIONS 110
XVI WHERE TWO C'S MEET 118
XVII REVEALS ANOTHER PLOT 125
XVIII DONE IN THE NIGHT 131
XIX RECORDS FURTHER FACTS 139
XX ANOTHER DISCOVERY IS MADE 145
XXI EXPLAINS LOLA'S FEARS 152
XXII THE ROAD OF RICHES 160
XXIII FOLLOWS THE ELUSIVE JULES 166
XXIV MAKES A STARTLING DISCLOSURE 173
XXV IS MORE MYSTERIOUS 181
XXVI HOT-FOOT ACROSS EUROPE 188
XXVII OPENS A DEATH-TRAP 196
XXVIII DESCRIBES A CHASE 204
XXIX THE HOUSE IN HAMPSTEAD 212
XXX NARRATES A STARTLING AFFAIR 219
XXXI "SHEEP OF THY PASTURE" 227
XXXII THE TENTS OF UNGODLINESS 235
XXXIII DISCLOSES A STRANGE TRUTH 241
XXXIV CONCERNS TO-DAY 250
THE PLACE OF DRAGONS
CHAPTER I
PRESENTS A PROBLEM
"Curious affair, isn't it?"
"Very."
"Now, you're a bit of a mystery-monger, Vidal. What's your theory--eh?"
"I haven't one," I replied with a smile.
"I knew the old boy quite well by sight. Didn't you?" asked my friend,
Major Keppell, as we stood gossiping together in the doorway of the
_Hôtel de Paris_, high up on the cliff opposite the pier at Cromer.
"Perfectly. His habit was to go down the slope yonder, to the pier each
morning at ten, and to remain there till eleven," I said. "I used to
watch him every morning. He went as regularly as the clock, wet or
fine."
"A bit eccentric, I thought," remarked the Major, standing astride in
his rough golfing clothes, and puffing at his briar pipe. "Quite a
character for a novel--eh?" and he laughed. "You'll do a book about this
strange affair--what?"
I shrugged my shoulders and smiled, as I replied: "Not very likely, I
think. Yet the circumstances are, to say the least, extremely curious."
"They are, from all I hear," said my friend. Then, glancing at his
wristlet watch, he exclaimed: "By Jove!--nearly seven! I must get in and
dress for dinner. See you later."
With this he passed through the swing-doors of the hotel, leaving me
standing upon the short sweep of gravel gazing out upon the summer sea,
golden in the glorious June sunset.
The Major had spoken the truth. A discovery had been made in Cromer that
morning which possessed many remarkable features, and to me, an
investigator of crime, it presented an extremely interesting
problem--one such as I, Herbert Vidal, had never before heard of.
Briefly related, the facts were as follows. Early in February--four
months before--there had arrived in Cromer a queer, wizened, little old
man named Vernon Gregory. He was accompanied by his nephew, a rather
dandified, overdressed young fellow of twenty-three, named Edward Craig.
Strangers are very few in Cromer in winter, and therefore Mrs. Dean,
landlady of Beacon House, on the West Cliff, a few doors west of the
_Hôtel de Paris_, where the asphalted footpath runs along the top of the
cliff, was very glad to let the new-comers the first-floor front
sitting-room with two bedrooms above.
In winter and spring, Cromer, high and bleak, and swept by the wild,
howling winds from the grey North Sea, its beach white with the spume of
storm, is practically deserted. The hotels, with the exception of the
_Paris_, are closed, the boarding-houses are mostly shut, and the
landladies who let apartments wait weeks and weeks in vain for the
arrival of a chance visitor. In August, however, the place overflows
with visitors, all of the best class, and for six weeks each year Cromer
becomes one of the gayest little towns on the breezy East Coast.
So, all through the spring, with its grey, wet days, when the spindrift
swept in a haze across the promenade, old Mr. Gregory was a familiar
figure taking his daily walk, no matter how inclement the weather.
In appearance he was unusual, and seedy. His bony face was long, thin,
and grey; a countenance that was broad at the brow and narrowed to a
pointed chin. He had a longish white beard, yet his deep-set eyes with
their big bushy brows were so dark and piercing that the fire of youth
seemed still to burn within them. He was of medium height, rather
round-shouldered, and walked with a decided limp, aided by a stout ash
stick. Invariably he wore an old, dark grey, mackintosh cape, very
greasy at the collar; black trousers, old and baggy; boots very down at
heel; and on his mass of long white hair a broad-brimmed felt hat, which
gave him the appearance of a musician, or an artist.
Sometimes, on rare occasions, his well-dressed nephew walked with
him--but very seldom were they together.
Craig was a tall, well-set-up young fellow, who generally wore a drab
golf-suit, smoked cigarettes eternally, and frequently played billiards
at the _Red Lion_. He was also a golfer and well known on the links for
the excellence of his play.
Between uncle and nephew there was nothing in common. Craig had dropped
a hint that he was down there with his relative "just to look after the
old boy." He undoubtedly preferred London life, and it was stated that a
few years before he had succeeded to a large estate somewhere on the
Welsh border.
The residents of Cromer are as inquisitive as those of most small towns.
Therefore, it was not very long after the arrival of this curious
couple, that everybody knew that old Mr. Gregory was concealing the fact
that he was head of the famous Sheffield armour-plate making firm,
Messrs. Gregory and Thorpe, though he now took but little part in the
active work of the world-famed house that rolled plates for Britain's
mighty "Dreadnoughts."
Cromer, on learning his identity, at once regarded old Gregory's queer
figure with due reverence. His parsimonious ways, the clockwork
regularity with which he took his morning walk, bought his daily paper
at Munday's Library, and took his afternoon stroll up past the
coast-guard station, or towards the links, or along the Overstrand or
Sheringham roads, were looked upon as the eccentricities of an immensely
wealthy man.
In rich men the public tolerate idiosyncrasies, that in poorer persons
are declared to betoken either lunacy, or that vague excuse for the
contravention of the conventionalities known as "the artistic
temperament." Many men have actually earned reputations, and even
popularity, by the sheer force of cultivated eccentricities. With
professional men eccentricity is one of the pegs on which their astute
press-agents can always hang a paragraph.
In the case of Mr. Vernon Gregory, as he limped by, the good
shop-keeping public of Cromer looked after him with benevolent glances.
He was the great steel magnate who ate frugally, who grumbled loudly at
Mrs. Dean if his weekly bill exceeded that of the City clerk and his
wife who had occupied the same rooms for a fortnight in the previous
July. He was pointed at with admiration as the man of millions who eked
out every scuttleful of coal as though it were gold.
Undoubtedly Mr. Gregory was a person of many eccentricities. From his
secretary in Sheffield he daily received a bulky package of
correspondence, and this, each morning, was attended to by his nephew.
Yet the old man always made a point of posting all the letters with his
own hand, putting them into the box at the post-office opposite the
church.
Sometimes, but only at rare intervals--because, as he declared, "it was
so very costly"--Mr. Gregory hired an open motor-car from Miller's
garage. On such occasions, Craig, who was a practised motorist, would
drive, and the pair would go on long day excursions towards Yarmouth, or
Hunstanton, or inland to Holt or Norwich. At such times the old man
would don many wraps, and a big blue muffler, and wear an unsightly pair
of goggles.
Again, the old fellow preferred to do much of his shopping himself, and
it was no uncommon sight to see him in the street carrying home
two-pennyworth of cream in a little jug. Hence the good people of Cromer
grew to regard their out-of-season visitor as a harmless, but
philanthropic old buffer, for his hand was in his pocket for every local
charity. His amusements were as frugal as his housekeeping. During the
spring his only recreation was a visit to the cinema at the Town Hall
twice a week. When, however, the orchestral concerts commenced on the
pier, he became a constant attendant at them.
So small is Cromer, with its narrow streets near the sea, that in the
off-season strangers are constantly running into each other. Hence, I
frequently met old Gregory, and on such occasions we chatted about the
weather, or upon local topics. His voice was strangely high-pitched,
thin, but not unmusical. Indeed, he was a great lover of music, as was
afterwards shown by his constant attendance at the pier concerts.
His nephew, Craig, was what the people of Cromer, in vulgar parlance,
dubbed a "nut." He was always immaculately dressed, wore loud socks,
seemed to possess a dozen styles of hats, and was never seen without
perfectly clean wash-leather gloves. He laughed loudly, talked loudly,
displayed money freely and put on patronizing airs which filled those
who met him with an instinctive dislike.
I first made his acquaintance in April in the cosy bar of the _Albion_,
where, after a long walk one morning, I went to quench my thirst. Craig
was laughing with the barmaid and gingerly lighting a cigarette. Having
passed me by many times, he now addressed a casual remark to me, to
which I politely responded, and we got into conversation. But, somehow,
his speech jarred upon me, and, like his personal appearance, struck an
unpleasant note, for his white shoes and pale blue socks, his light
green Tyrolese hat, and his suit of check tweeds distinctly marked him
as being more of a cad than a gentleman.
I remarked that I had walked to Overstrand, whereupon he asked--
"Did you chance to meet my uncle? He's gone out that way, somewhere."
I replied in the negative.
"Wonderful old boy, you know," he went on. "Walks me clean right out!
But oh! such a dreadful old bore! Always talking about what he did in
the seventies, and how much better life was then than now. I don't
believe it. Do you?"
"I hardly know," was my reply. "I wasn't old enough then to appreciate
life."
"Neither was I," he responded. "But really, these eccentric old people
ought all to be put in an asylum. You don't know what I have to put up
with. I tell you, it's a terrible self-sacrifice to be down in this
confounded hole, instead of being on the Riviera in decent sunny
weather, and in decent society."
"Your uncle is always extremely pleasant to me when I meet him," I said.
"Ah, yes, but you don't know him, my dear sir," said his nephew. "He's
the very Old Nick himself sometimes, and his eccentricities border upon
insanity. Why, only last night, before he went to bed, he put on his
bed-gown, cut two wings out of brown paper, pinned them on his back, and
fancied himself the Archangel Gabriel. Last week he didn't speak to me
for two days because I bought a box of sardines. He declares they are
luxuries and he can't afford them--he, with an income of forty thousand
a year!"
"Rich men are often rather niggardly," I remarked.
"Oh, yes. But with Uncle Vernon it's become a craze. He shivers with
cold at night but won't have a fire in his bedroom because, he says,
coals are so dear."
I confess I did not like this young fellow. Why should he reveal all his
private grievances to me, a perfect stranger?
"Why did your uncle come to Cromer?" I asked. "This place is hardly a
winter resort, except for a few golfers."
"Oh, because when he was in Egypt last winter, some fool of a woman he
met at the _Savoy_ in Cairo, told him that Cromer was so horribly
healthy in the winter, and that if he spent six months each year in this
God-forgotten place, he'd live to be a hundred. Bad luck to her and her
words! I've had to come here with the old boy, and am their victim."
Then he added warmly: "My dear sir, just put yourself in my place. I've
nobody to talk to except the provincial Norfolk tradespeople, who think
they can play a good game at billiards. I've got the absolute hump, I
tell you frankly!"
Well, afterwards I met the loud-socked young man more frequently, but
somehow I had taken a violent and unaccountable dislike to him. Why, I
cannot tell, except perhaps that he had disgusted me by the way he
unbosomed himself to a stranger and aired his grievances against his
eccentric uncle.
To descend that asphalted slope which led, on the face of the cliff,
from the roadway in front of the _Hôtel de Paris_, away to the
Promenade, old Gregory had to pass beneath my window. Hence I saw him
several times daily, and noted how the brown-bloused fishermen who
lounged there hour after hour, gazing idly seaward, leaning upon the
railings and gossiping, respectfully touched their caps to the limping,
eccentric old gentleman who in his slouch hat and cape looked more like
a poet than a steel magnate, and who so regularly took the fresh,
bracing air on that breezy promenade.
On that morning--the morning of the twelfth of June--a startling rumour
had spread through the town. It at once reached me through Charles, the
head-waiter of the hotel, who told me the whole place was agog. The
strange story was that old Mr. Gregory had at three o'clock that morning
been found by a coast-guard lying near a seat on the top of the east
cliff at a point near the links, from which a delightful view could be
obtained westward over the town towards Rimton and Sheringham.
The coast-guard had at once summoned a doctor by telephone, and on
arrival the medical man had pronounced the mysterious old gentleman
dead, and, moreover, that he had been dead several hours.
More than that, nobody knew, except that the dead man's nephew could not
be found.
That fact in itself was certainly extraordinary, but it was not half so
curious, or startling, as certain other features of the amazing affair,
which were now being carefully withheld from the public by the
police--facts, which when viewed as a whole, formed one of the most
inexplicable criminal problems ever presented for solution.