Produced by Annie McGuire
THE
CHESTERMARKE
INSTINCT
THE MYSTERY STORIES OF
J. S. FLETCHER
"_We always feel as though we were really spreading happiness when we
can announce a genuinely satisfactory mystery story, such as J. B.
Fletcher's new one._"--N. P. D. in the New York Globe.
THE MIDDLE TEMPLE MURDER [1918]
"Unquestionably, the detective story of the season and, therefore, one
which no lover of detective fiction should miss."--_The Broadside._
THE TALLEYRAND MAXIM [1920]
"A crackerjack mystery tale; the story of Linford Pratt, who earnestly
desired to get on in life, by hook or by crook--with no objection
whatever to crookedness, so long as it could be performed in safety and
secrecy."--_Knickerbocker Press._
THE PARADISE MYSTERY [1920]
"As a weaver of detective tales Mr. Fletcher is entitled to a seat among
the elect. His numerous followers will find his latest book fully as
absorbing as anything from his pen that has previously appeared."--_New
York Times._
DEAD MEN'S MONEY [1920]
"The story is one that holds the reader with more than the mere interest
of sensational events: Mr. Fletcher writes in a notable style, and he
has a knack for sketching character rapidly. Reminds one of
Stevenson--and Mr. Fletcher sustains the comparison well."--_Newark
Evening News._
THE ORANGE-YELLOW DIAMOND [1921]
"... A rattling good yarn.... The excellence of The Orange yellow
Diamond does not depend, however, entirely upon its plot. It is an
uncommonly well written tale."--_New York Times._
_To be published July 1st, 1921:_
THE BOROUGH TREASURER
Blackmail, murder and the secret of an ancient quarry go to make a very
exciting yarn.
_$2.00 net each at all booksellers or from the Publisher_
ALFRED A. KNOPF, New York.
THE
CHESTERMARKE
INSTINCT
BY
J. S. FLETCHER
NEW YORK
ALFRED A KNOPF
MCMXXI
COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. The Missing Bank Manager, 9
II. The Ellersdeane Deposit, 19
III. Mr. Chestermarke Disclaims Liability, 29
IV. The Modern Young Woman, 39
V. The Search Begins, 49
VI. Ellersdeane Hollow, 59
VII. The Travelling Tinker, 69
VIII. The Saturday Night Stranger, 79
IX. No Further Information, 89
X. The Chestermarke Way, 99
XI. The Search-Warrant, 109
XII. The First Find, 119
XIII. The Partners Unbend, 129
XIV. The Midnight Summons, 139
XV. Mr. Frederick Hollis, 149
XVI. The Lead Mine, 159
XVII. Accident or Murder? 170
XVIII. The Incomplete Cheque, 179
XIX. The Dead Man's Brother, 189
XX. The Other Cheque, 200
XXI. About Cent per Cent, 209
XXII. Speculation--and Certainty, 221
XXIII. The Aggrieved Victim, 230
XXIV. Mrs. Carswell? 240
XXV. The Portrait, 248
XXVI. The Lightning Flash, 257
XXVII. The Old Dove-Cot, 266
XXVIII. Sound-Proof, 273
XXIX. The Sparrows and the Sphere, 279
XXX. Wreckage, 289
XXXI. The Prisoner Speaks, 295
CHAPTER I
THE MISSING BANK MANAGER
Every Monday morning, when the clock of the old parish church in
Scarnham Market-Place struck eight, Wallington Neale asked himself why
on earth he had chosen to be a bank clerk. On all the other mornings of
the week this question never occurred to him: on Sunday he never allowed
a thought of the bank to cross his mind: from Sunday to Saturday he was
firmly settled in the usual rut, and never dreamed of tearing himself
out of it. But Sunday's break was unsettling: there was always an effort
in starting afresh on Monday. The striking of St. Alkmund's clock at
eight on Monday morning invariably found him sitting down to his
breakfast in his rooms, overlooking the quaint old Market-Place, once
more faced by the fact that a week of dull, uninteresting work lay
before him. He would go to the bank at nine, and at the bank he would
remain, more or less, until five. He would do that again on Tuesday, and
on Wednesday, and on Thursday and on Friday, and on Saturday. One
afternoon, strolling in the adjacent country, he had seen a horse
walking round and round and round in a small paddock, turning a crank
which worked some machine or other in an adjoining shed: that horse had
somehow suggested himself to himself.
On this particular Monday morning, Neale, happening to catch sight of
his reflection in the mirror which stood on his parlour mantelpiece,
propounded the usual question with added force. There were reasons. It
was a beautiful morning. It was early spring. There was a blue sky, and
the rooks and jackdaws were circling in a clear air about the church
tower and over the old Market-Cross. He could hear thrushes singing in
the trees in the Vicarage garden, close by. Everything was young. And he
was young. It would have been affectation on his part to deny either his
youth or his good looks. He glanced at his mirrored self without pride,
but with due recognition of his good figure, his strong muscles, his
handsome, boyish face, with its cluster of chestnut hair and steady grey
eyes. All that, he knew, wanted life, animation, movement. At
twenty-three he was longing for something to take him out of the
treadmill round in which he had been fixed for five years. He had no
taste for handing out money in exchange for cheques, in posting up
ledgers, in writing dull, formal letters. He would have been much
happier with an old flannel shirt, open at the throat, a pick in his
hands, making a new road in a new country, or in driving a path through
some primeval wood. There would have been liberty in either occupation:
he could have flung down the pick at any moment and taken up the
hunter's gun: he could have turned right or left at his own will in the
unexplored forest. But there at the bank it was just doing the same
thing over and over again: what he had done last week he would do again
this week: what had happened last year would happen again this year. It
was all pure, unadulterated, dismal monotony.
Like most things, it had come about without design: he had just drifted
into it. His father and mother had both died when he was a boy; he had
inherited a small property which brought in precisely one hundred and
fifty pounds a year: it was tied up to him in such a fashion that he
would have his three pounds a week as long as ever he lived. But as his
guardian, Mr. John Horbury, the manager of Chestermarke's Bank at
Scarnham, pointed out to him when he left school, he needed more than
three pounds a week if he wished to live comfortably and like a
gentleman. Still, a hundred and fifty a year of sure and settled income
was a fine thing, an uncommonly fine thing--all that was necessary was
to supplement it. Therefore--a nice, quiet, genteel profession--banking,
to wit. Light work, an honourable calling, an eminently respectable one.
In a few years he would have another hundred and fifty a year: a few
years more, and he would be a manager, with at least six hundred: he
might, well before he was a middle-aged man, be commanding a salary of a
thousand a year. Banking, by all means, counselled Mr. Horbury--and
offered him a vacancy which had just then arisen at Chestermarke's. And
Neale, willing to be guided by a man for whom he had much respect, took
the post, and settled down in the old bank in the quiet, sleepy
market-town, wherein one day was precisely like another day--and every
year his dislike for his work increased, and sometimes grew unbearably
keen, especially when spring skies and spring air set up a sudden
stirring in his blood. On this Monday morning that stirring amounted to
something very like a physical ache.
"Hang the old bank!" he muttered. "I'd rather be a ploughman!"
Nevertheless, the bank must be attended, and, at ten minutes to nine,
Neale lighted a cigarette, put on his hat, and strolled slowly across
the Market-Place. Although he knew every single one of its cobblestones,
every shop window, every landmark in it, that queer old square always
fascinated him. It was a bit of old England. The ancient church and
equally ancient Moot Hall spread along one side of it; the other three
sides were filled with gabled and half-timbered houses; the Market-Cross
which stood in the middle of the open space had been erected there in
Henry the Seventh's time. Amidst all the change and development of the
nineteenth century, Scarnham had been left untouched: even the bank
itself was a time-worn building, and the manager's house which flanked
it was still older. Underneath all these ancient structures were queer
nooks and corners, secret passages and stairs, hiding-places, cellarings
going far beneath the gardens at the backs of the houses: Neale, as a
boy, had made many an exploration in them, especially beneath the
bank-house, which was a veritable treasury of concealed stairways and
cunningly contrived doors in the black oak of the panellings.
But on this occasion Neale did not stare admiringly at the old church,
nor at the pilastered Moot Hall, nor at the toppling gables: his eyes
were fixed on something else, something unusual. As soon as he walked
out of the door of the house in which he lodged he saw his two
fellow-clerks, Shirley and Patten, standing on the steps of the hall by
which entrance was joined to the bank and to the bank-house. They stood
there looking about them. Now they looked towards Finkleway--a narrow
street which led to the railway station at the far end of the town. Now
they looked towards Middlegate--a street which led into the open
country, in the direction of Ellersdeane, where Mr. Gabriel
Chestermarke, senior proprietor of the bank, resided. All that was
unusual. If Patten, a mere boy, had been lounging there, Neale would not
have noticed it. But it was Shirley's first duty, on arriving every
morning, to get the keys at the house door, and to let himself into the
bank by the adjoining private entrance. It was Patten's duty, on
arrival, to take the letter-bag to the post-office and bring the bank's
correspondence back in it. Never, in all his experience, had Neale seen
any of Chestermarke's clerks lounging on the steps at nine o'clock in
the morning, and he quickened his pace. Shirley, turning from a
prolonged stare towards Finkleway, caught sight of him.
"Can't get in," he observed laconically, in answer to Neale's inquiring
look. "Mr. Horbury isn't there, and he's got the keys."
"What do you mean--isn't there!" asked Neale, mounting the steps. "Not
in the house?"
"Mean just what I say," replied Shirley. "Mrs. Carswell says she hasn't
seen him since Saturday. She thinks he's been week-ending. I've been
looking out for him coming along from the station. But if he came in by
the 8.30, he's a long time getting up here. And if he hasn't come by
that, there's no other train till the 10.45."
Neale made no answer. He, too, glanced towards Finkleway, and then at
the church clock. It was just going to strike nine--and the station was
only eight minutes away at the most. He passed the two junior clerks,
went down the hall to the door of the bank-house, and entered. And just
within he came face to face with the housekeeper, Mrs. Carswell.
Mrs. Carswell had kept house for Mr. John Horbury for some years--Neale
remembered her from boyhood. He had always been puzzled about her age.
Of late, since he knew more of grown-up folk, he had been still more
puzzled. Sometimes he thought she was forty; sometimes he was sure she
could not be more than thirty-two or three. Anyway, she was a fine,
handsome woman--tall, perfectly shaped, with glossy black hair and dark
eyes, and a firm, resolute mouth. It was rarely that Mrs. Carswell went
out; when she did, she was easily the best-looking woman in Scarnham.
Few Scarnham people, however, had the chance of cultivating her
acquaintance; Mrs. Carswell kept herself to herself and seemed content
to keep up her reputation as a model housekeeper. She ordered Mr.
Horbury's domestic affairs in perfect fashion, and it had come upon
Neale as a surprise to hear Shirley say that Mrs. Carswell did not know
where the manager was.
"What's all this?" he demanded, as he met her within the hall. "Shirley
says Mr. Horbury isn't at home? Where is he, then?"
"But I don't know, Mr. Neale," replied the housekeeper. "I know no more
than you do. I've been expecting him to come in by that 8.30 train, but
he can't have done that, or he'd have been up here by now."
"Perhaps it's late," suggested Neale.
"No--it's in," she said. "I saw it come in from my window, at the back.
It was on time. So--I don't know what's become of him."
"But--what about Saturday?" asked Neale. "Shirley says you said Mr.
Horbury went off on Saturday. Didn't he leave any word--didn't he say
where he was going?"
"Mr. Horbury went out on Saturday evening," answered Mrs. Carswell. "He
didn't say a word about where he was going. He went out just before
dusk, as if for a walk. I'd no idea that he wasn't at home until Sunday
morning. You see, the servants and I went to bed at our usual time on
Saturday night, and though he wasn't in then, I thought nothing of it,
because, of course, he'd his latch-key. He was often out late at night,
as you know, Mr. Neale. And when I found that he hadn't come back, as I
did find out before breakfast yesterday, I thought nothing of that
either--I thought he'd gone to see some friend or other, and had been
persuaded to stop the night. Then, when he didn't come home yesterday at
all, I thought he was staying the week-end somewhere. So I wasn't
anxious, nor surprised. But I am surprised he's not back here first
thing this morning."
"So am I," agreed Neale. "And more than surprised." He stood for a
moment, running over the list of the manager's friends and acquaintances
in the neighbourhood, and he shook his head as he came to the end of his
mental reckoning of it. "It's very odd," he remarked. "Very surprising,
Mrs. Carswell."
"It's all the more surprising," remarked the housekeeper, "because of
his going off for his holiday tomorrow. And Miss Fosdyke's coming down
from London today to go with him."
Neale pricked his ears. Miss Fosdyke was the manager's niece--a young
lady whom Neale remembered as a mere slip of a girl that he had met
years before and never seen since.
"I didn't know that," he remarked.
"Neither did Mr. Horbury until Saturday afternoon--that is, for
certain," said Mrs. Carswell. "He'd asked her to go with him to Scotland
on this holiday, but it wasn't settled. However, he got a wire from her,
about tea-time on Saturday, to say she'd go, and would be down here
today. They're to start tomorrow morning."
Neale turned to the door. He was distinctly puzzled and uneasy. He had
known John Horbury since his own childhood, and had always regarded him
as the personification of everything that was precise, systematic, and
regular. All things considered, it was most remarkable that he should
not be at the bank at opening hours. And already a vague suspicion that
something had happened began to steal into his mind.
"Did you happen to notice which way he went, Mrs. Carswell?" he asked.
"Was it towards the station?"
"He went out down the garden and through the orchard," replied the
housekeeper. "He could have got to the station that way, of course. But
I do know that he never said a word about going anywhere by train, and
he'd no bag or anything with him--he'd nothing but that old oak stick he
generally carried when he went out for his walks."
Neale pushed open the house door and went into the outer hall to the
junior clerks. Little as he cared about banking as a calling, he was
punctilious about rules and observances, and it seemed to him somewhat
indecorous that the staff of a bank should hang about its front door, as
if they were workshop assistants awaiting the arrival of a belated
foreman.
"Better come inside the house, Shirley," he said. "Patten, you go to the
post-office and get the letters."
"No good without the bag," answered Patten, a calm youth of seventeen.
"Tried that once before. Don't you know!--they've one key--we've
another."
"Well, come inside, then," commanded Neale. "It doesn't look well to
hang about those steps."
"Might just as well go away," muttered Shirley, stepping into the hall.
"If Horbury's got to come back by train from wherever he's gone to, he
can't get here till the 10.45, and then he's got to walk up. Might as
well go home for an hour."
"The partners'll be here before an hour's over," said Neale. "One of
them's always here by ten."
Shirley, a somewhat grumpy-countenanced young man, made no answer. He
began to pace the hall with looks of eminent dissatisfaction. But he had
only taken a turn or two when a quietly appointed one-horse coupé
brougham came up to the open door, and a well-known face was seen at its
window. Mr. Gabriel Chestermarke, senior proprietor, had come an hour
before his time.