THE MIDNIGHT SUMMONS
The search-party separated outside the bank, not too well satisfied with
the result of its labours. The old antiquary walked away obviously
nettled that he was not allowed to pursue his investigations further;
Betty Fosdyke and the solicitor went across to the hotel in deep
conference; the Earl accompanied Starmidge and Polke to the
police-station. And there the detective laid down a firm outline of the
next immediate procedure. It was of no use to half-do things, he
said--they must rouse wholesale attention. Once more the press must be
made use of--the sudden disappearance of Mrs. Carswell must be noised
abroad in the next morning's papers. A police notice describing her must
be got out and sent all over the kingdom. And--last, but certainly not
least--Lord Ellersdeane must offer a substantial reward for the recovery
of, or news of, his missing property. Let the Chestermarkes adopt their
own method--if they had any--of finding the alleged absconding manager;
he, Starmidge, preferred to solve these mysteries by ways of his own.
It was growing near to dusk when all their necessary arrangements had
been made, and Starmidge was free to seek his long-delayed dinner. He
had put himself up, of his own choice, at a quiet and old-fashioned inn
near the police-station, where he had engaged a couple of rooms and
found a landlady to his liking. He repaired to this retreat now, and ate
and drank in quiet, and smoked a peaceful pipe afterwards, and was glad
of a period of rest. But as he took his ease, he thought and pondered,
and by the time that evening had fairly settled over the little town, he
went out into the streets and sought the ancient corner of Scarnham
which was called Cornmarket.
Starmidge wanted to take a look at the house in which Joseph
Chestermarke spent his bachelor existence. Since his own arrival in the
town, he had been learning all he could about the two Chestermarkes, and
he was puzzled about them. For a man who was still young, Starmidge had
seen a good deal of the queer side of life, and had known a good many
strange people, but so far he had never come across two such apparently
curious characters as the uncle and nephew who ran the old-fashioned
bank. Their evident indifference to public opinion puzzled him. He could
not understand their ice-cold defiance of what he himself called law. He
never remembered being treated as they had treated him. For Starmidge,
when on duty, considered himself as much the representative of Justice
as any ermined and coifed judge could be, and he had been accustomed--so
far--to attentive and respectful consideration. But neither Gabriel nor
Joseph Chestermarke appeared to have any proper appreciation of the
dignity of a detective-sergeant of the Criminal Investigation
Department, and their eyes had regarded him as if he were something
very inferior indeed. Starmidge, though by no means a vain man, felt
nettled by such treatment, and he accordingly formed something very like
a prejudice against the two partners. That prejudice was quickly
followed by suspicion--especially in the case of Joseph Chestermarke.
According to Starmidge's ideas, the bankers, if they really believed
Horbury to have absconded, if certain securities of theirs really were
missing, if they really thought that Horbury had carried them off, and
the Countess of Ellersdeane's jewels with him, ought to have placed
every information in their power at the disposal of the police: it was
suspicious, and strange, and not at all proper, that they didn't. And it
was suspicious, too, that the housekeeper, Mrs. Carswell, should take
herself off after a brief exchange of words with Joseph. It looked very
much as if the junior partner had either warned her to go, or had told
her to go. Why had she gone _then_?--when she might have gone before.
And why in such haste? Clearly, considering everything, there were
grounds for believing that there was some secret between Mrs. Carswell
and Joseph Chestermarke.
Anyway, rightly or wrongly, Starmidge was suspicious of the junior
partner in Chestermarke's Bank, and he wanted to know everything that he
could find out about him. He had already learnt that Joseph, like his
uncle, was a confirmed bachelor, and lived in an old house at the corner
of Cornmarket, somewhat--so far as the town-folk could judge--after the
fashion of a hermit. Starmidge would have given a good deal for a really
good excuse to call on Joseph Chestermarke at that house, so that he
might see the inside of it: indeed, if he had only met with a better
reception at the bank, he would have invented such an excuse. But if
Gabriel was icily stand-offish, Joseph was openly sneering and
contemptuous, and the detective knew that no excuse would give him
admittance. Still, there was the outside: he would take a look at that.
Starmidge was a young man of ideas as well as of ability, and without
exactly shaping his thought in so many words, he felt--vaguely perhaps,
but none the less strongly--that just as you can size up some men by the
clothes they wear, so you can get an idea of others by the outer look of
the houses which shelter them.
Cornmarket in Scarnham lay at the further end of the street called
Finkleway. It was a queer, open space which sloped downhill from the
centre of the ridge on which the middle of the town was built to the
valley through which the little river meandered. Save where the streets,
and the road leading out to the open country and Ellersdeane cut into
it, it was completely enclosed by old houses of the sort which Starmidge
had already admired in the Market-Place: many of them half-timbered, all
of them very ancient. One or two of them were inns; some were evidently
workmen's cottages; others were better-class dwelling-houses. From the
description already furnished to him by Polke, Starmidge at once
recognized Joseph Chestermarke's abode. It was a corner house, abutting
on the road which ran out at the lower angle of this irregular space and
led down to the river and Scarnham Bridge. It was by far the biggest
house thereabouts--a tall, slender, stone-built house of many stories,
towering high above any of the surrounding gables. And save for a very
faint, dull glow which shone through the transom window of the front
door, there was not a vestige of light in a single window of the seven
stories. Cornmarket was a gloomy commonplace, thought Starmidge, but the
little oil lamps in the cottages were riotously cheery in comparison
with the darkness of the tall, gaunt Chestermarke mansion. It looked
like the abode of dead men.
Starmidge longed to knock at that door--if only to get a peep inside the
hall. But he curbed his desires and went quietly round the corner of the
house. There was a high black wall there which led down to the grassy
bank of the river. From its corner another wall ran along the
river-side, separated from the stream by a path. There was a door set in
this wall, and Starmidge, after carefully looking round in the gloom,
quietly tried it and found it securely locked.
An intense desire to see the inside of Joseph Chestermarke's garden
seized the detective. Near the door, partly overhanging the garden wall,
partly overshadowing the path and the river-bank, was a tree: Starmidge,
after listening carefully and deciding that no one was coming along the
path, made shift to climb that tree, just then bursting into full leaf.
In another minute he was amongst its middle branches, and peering
inquisitively into the garden which lay between him and the gaunt
outline of the gloom-stricken house.
The moon was just then rising above the roofs and gables of the town,
and by its rapidly increasing light Starmidge saw that the garden was of
considerable size, running back quite sixty yards from the rear of the
house, and having a corresponding breadth. Like all the gardens which
stretched from the backs of the Market-Place houses to the river-bank,
it was rich in trees--high elms and beeches rose from its lawns, and
made deep shadows across them. But Starmidge was not so much interested
in those trees, fine as they were, as in a building; obviously modern,
which was set in their midst, completely isolated. That it was a
comparatively new building he could see; the moonbeams falling full on
it showed that the stone of which it was built was fresh and unstained
by time or smoke. But what was it? Of what nature, for what purpose? It
was neither stable, nor coach-house, nor summer-house, nor a grouping of
domestic offices. No drive or path led to it: it was built in the middle
of a grass-plot: round it ran a stone-lined trench. Its architecture was
plain but handsome; it possessed two distinctive features which the
detective was quick to notice. One, was that--at any rate on the two
sides which he could see--its windows were set at a height of quite
twelve feet from the ground: the other, that from its flat parapeted
roof rose a conical structure something like the rounded stacks of glass
foundries and potteries. This was obviously a chimney, and from its
mouth at that moment was emerging a slight column of smoke which threw
back curiously coloured reflections, blue, and yellow, and red, to the
moonlight which fell on its thickening spirals.
Starmidge felt just as much desire to get inside this queer structure as
into the house behind it, and if he could have seen any prospect of
taking a peep through its windows he would have risked detection and
dropped from his perch into the garden. But he judged that if the
windows were twelve feet from the ground on the two sides of the
building which he could see, they would be the same height on the sides
which he couldn't see; moreover, he observed that they were obscured by
either dull red glass or red curtains. Clearly no outsider was intended
to get a peep into this temple of mystery. What was it? What went on
within it? He was about to climb down from the tree when he got some
sort of an answer to these questions. From within the building, muffled
by the evidently thick walls, came the faintest sound of metal beating
on metal--a mere rippling, tinkling sound, light and musical, such as
might have been made by fairy blacksmiths beating on a fairy anvil. But
far away as it sounded, it was clear and unmistakable.
Starmidge regained the path between the wall and the river and went
slowly forward. The place, he decided, was evidently some sort of a
workshop, in which was a forge: probably Joseph Chestermarke amused
himself with a little amateur work in metals. He thought no more of the
matter just then; he wanted to explore the river-bank along which he now
walked. For according to the story of the landlady of the Station Hotel,
it was on that river-bank that the mysterious stranger was to meet
whoever it was that he spoke to over the telephone, and so far
Starmidge had not had an opportunity of examining its geography.
There was not much to examine. The river, a mere ditch, eight or ten
yards in breadth, wandered through a level mead at the base of the
valley, separated from the gardens by a wide path. Between Scarnham
Bridge, at the foot of Cornmarket and the corner of Joseph
Chestermarke's big garden, and the end of Cordmaker's Alley, a narrow
street which ran down from the further end of the Market-Place to the
river-side, there were no features of any note or interest. On the other
side of the river lay the deep woods through which Neale and Betty
Fosdyke had passed on their way to Ellersdeane Hollow: Starmidge had
heard all about that expedition, and he glanced curiously at the black
depths of the trees, wondering if John Horbury and the mysterious
stranger, supposing they had met, had turned into these woods to hold
their conference. He presently came to the foot-bridge by which access
to the woods and the other bank of the river was gained, and by it he
lingered for a moment or two, looking at it in its bearings to the
bank-house garden and orchard on his left hand, and to the Station
Hotel, the lights of which he could plainly see down the valley.
Certainly, if John Horbury and the stranger desired to meet in secret,
here was the place. The stranger had nothing to do but stroll along the
river-bank from the hotel; Horbury had only to step out of his orchard
and meet him. Once together, they had only to cross that foot-bridge
into the woods to be immediately in surroundings of great privacy.
Starmidge turned up Cordmaker's Alley, regained the Market-Place, and
strolled on to Polke's private house. The superintendent was taking his
ease after his day's labours and reading the Ecclesborough evening
newspapers: he tossed one of them over to his visitor.
"All there!" he said, pointing to some big headlines. "Got it all in,
just as you told it to Parkinson. Full justice to the descriptions of
both Horbury and the Station Hotel stranger. Smart work, eh?"
"Power of the Press--as Parkinson said," answered Starmidge, with a
laugh. "It's very useful, the Press: I don't know how they managed
without it in the old days of criminal catching, Mr. Polke. Press and
telegraph, eh?--they're valuable adjuncts."
"You think all that would be in the London papers this evening?" asked
Polke.
"Sure to be," replied Starmidge. "I'm hoping we'll hear something from
London tomorrow. I say--I've been taking a bit of a look round one or
two places tonight, quietly, you know. What's that curious building in
Joseph Chestermarke's garden?"
Polke put down his paper and looked unusually interested.
"I don't know!" he answered. "How did you see it? I've never seen inside
his garden."
"Climbed a tree on the river-bank and looked over the wall," replied
Starmidge.
"Well," said Polke, "I did hear, some few years ago, that he was
building something in that garden, but the work was done by
Ecclesborough contractors, and nobody ever knew much about it here. I
believe Joseph's a bit of an amateur experimenter--but I don't know what
he experiments in. Nobody ever goes inside his house--he's a hermit."
"He's got some sort of a forge there, anyhow," said Starmidge. "Or a
furnace, or something of that sort."
Then they talked of other things until half-past ten, when the detective
retired to his inn and went to bed. He was sleeping soundly when a
steady knocking at his door roused him, to hear the voice of his
landlady outside. And at the same time he heard the big clock of the
parish church striking midnight.
"Mr. Starmidge!" said the voice, "there's a policeman wanting you. Will
you go round at once to Mr. Polke's? There's a man come from London
about that piece in the newspapers."