THE SHEET OF FIGURES
At that time Stoner had been in the employment of Mallalieu and
Cotherstone for some five or six years. He was then twenty-seven years
of age. He was a young man of some ability--sharp, alert, quick at
figures, good at correspondence, punctual, willing: he could run the
business in the absence of its owners. The two partners appreciated
Stoner, and they had gradually increased his salary until it reached the
sum of two pounds twelve shillings and sixpence per week. In their
opinion a young single man ought to have done very well on that:
Mallalieu and Cotherstone had both done very well on less when they were
clerks in that long vanished past of which they did not care to think.
But Stoner was a young man of tastes. He liked to dress well. He liked
to play cards and billiards. He liked to take a drink or two at the
Highmarket taverns of an evening, and to be able to give his
favourite barmaids boxes of chocolate or pairs of gloves now and
then--judiciously. And he found his salary not at all too great, and he
was always on the look-out for a chance of increasing it.
Stoner emerged from Mallalieu & Cotherstone's office at his usual hour
of half-past five on the afternoon of the day on which the reward bills
were put out. It was his practice to drop in at the Grey Mare Inn every
evening on his way to his supper, there to drink a half-pint of bitter
ale and hear the news of the day from various cronies who were to be met
with in the bar-parlour. As he crossed the street on this errand on this
particular evening, Postick, the local bill-poster, came hurrying out of
the printer's shop with a bundle of handbills under his arm, and as he
sped past Stoner, thrust a couple of them into the clerk's hand.
"Here y'are, Mr. Stoner!" he said without stopping. "Something for you
to set your wits to work on. Five hundred reward--for a bit o' brain
work!"
Stoner, who thought Postick was chaffing him, was about to throw the
handbills, still damp from the press, into the gutter which he was
stepping over. But in the light of an adjacent lamp he caught sight of
the word _Murder_ in big staring capitals at the top of them. Beneath it
he caught further sight of familiar names--and at that he folded up the
bills, went into the Grey Mare, sat down in a quiet corner, and read
carefully through the announcement. It was a very simple one, and
plainly worded. Five hundred pounds would be paid by Mr. Tallington,
solicitor, of Highmarket, to any person or persons who would afford
information which would lead to the arrest and conviction of the
murderer or murderers of the deceased Kitely.
No one was in the bar-parlour of the Grey Mare when Stoner first entered
it, but by the time he had re-read the handbill, two or three men of
the town had come in, and he saw that each carried a copy. One of them,
a small tradesman whose shop was in the centre of the Market Square,
leaned against the bar and read the terms of the reward aloud.
"And whose money might that be?" he asked, half-sneeringly. "Who's
throwing brass round in that free-handed fashion? I should want to know
if the money's safe before I wasted my time in trying to get it."
"Money'll be all right," observed one of the speaker's companions.
"There's Lawyer Tallington's name at the foot o' that bill. He wouldn't
put his name to no offer o' that sort if he hadn't the brass in hand."
"Whose money is it, then?" demanded the first speaker. "It's not a
Government reward. They say that Kitely had no relatives, so it can't be
them. And it can't be that old housekeeper of his, because they say
she's satisfied enough that Jack Harborough's the man, and they've got
him. Queer do altogether, I call it!"
"It's done in Harborough's interest," said a third man. "Either that, or
there's something very deep in it. Somebody's not satisfied and
somebody's going to have a flutter with his brass over it." He turned
and glanced at Stoner, who had come to the bar for his customary
half-pint of ale. "Your folks aught to do with this?" he asked. "Kitely
was Mr. Cotherstone's tenant, of course."
Stoner laughed scornfully as he picked up his tankard.
"Yes, I don't think!" he sneered. "Catch either of my governors wasting
five hundred pence, or five pence, in that way! Not likely!"
"Well, there's Tallington's name to back it," said one of the men. "We
all know Tallington. What he says, he does. The money'll be there--if
it's earned."
Then they all looked at each other silently, surmise and speculation in
the eyes of each.
"Tell you what!" suddenly observed the little tradesman, as if struck
with a clever idea. "It might be young Bent! Five hundred pound is
naught to him. This here young London barrister that's defending
Harborough is stopping with Bent--they're old schoolmates. Happen he's
persuaded Bent to do the handsome: they say that this barrister chap's
right down convinced that Harborough's innocent. It must be Bent's
brass!"
"What's Popsie say?" asked one of the younger members of the party,
winking at the barmaid, who, having supplied her customers' needs, was
leaning over a copy of the handbill which somebody had laid on the bar.
"Whose brass can it be, Popsie?"
The barmaid stood up, seized a glass and a cloth, and began to polish
the glass with vigor.
"What's Popsie say?" she repeated. "Why, what she says is that you're a
lot of donkeys for wasting your time in wondering whose brass it is.
What does it matter whose brass it is, so long as it's safe? What you
want to do is to try and earn it. You don't pick up five hundred pounds
every day!"
"She's right!" said some man of the group. "But--how does anybody start
on to them games?"
"There'll be plenty o' starters, for all that, my lads!" observed the
little tradesman. "Never you fear! There'll be candidates."
Stoner drank off his ale and went away. Usually, being given to gossip,
he stopped chatting with anybody he chanced to meet until it was close
upon his supper-time. But the last remark sent him off. For Stoner meant
to be a starter, and he had no desire that anybody should get away in
front of him.
The lodging in which Stoner kept his bachelor state was a quiet and
eminently respectable one. He had two small rooms, a parlour and a
bedchamber, in the house of a widow with whom he had lodged ever since
his first coming to Highmarket, nearly six years before. In the tiny
parlour he kept a few books and a writing-desk, and on those evenings
which he did not spend in playing cards or billiards, he did a little
intellectual work in the way of improving his knowledge of French,
commercial arithmetic, and business correspondence. And that night, his
supper being eaten, and the door closed upon his landlady, he lighted
his pipe, sat down to his desk, unlocked one of its drawers, and from an
old file-box drew out some papers. One of these, a half-sheet of ruled
foolscap, he laid in front of him, the rest he put back. And then,
propping his chin on his folded hands, Stoner gave that half-sheet a
long, speculative inspection.
If anybody had looked over Stoner's shoulder they would have seen him
gazing at a mass of figures. The half-sheet of foolscap was covered with
figures: the figuring extended to the reverse side. And--what a
looker-on might not have known, but what Stoner knew very well--the
figures were all of Cotherstone's making--clear, plain, well-formed
figures. And amongst them, and on the margins of the half-sheet, and
scrawled here and there, as if purposelessly and carelessly, was one
word in Cotherstone's handwriting, repeated over and over again. That
word was--_Wilchester_.
Stoner knew how that half-sheet of foolscap had come into his
possession. It was a half-sheet which he had found on Cotherstone's desk
when he went into the partners' private room to tidy things up on the
morning after the murder of Kitely. It lay there, carelessly tossed
aside amongst other papers of clearer meaning, and Stoner, after one
glance at it, had carefully folded it, placed it in his pocket, taken it
home, and locked it up, to be inspected at leisure.
He had had his reasons, of course, for this abstraction of a paper which
rightfully belonged to Cotherstone. Those reasons were a little
difficult to explain to himself in one way; easy enough to explain, in
another. As regards the difficulty, Stoner had somehow or other got a
vague idea, that evening of the murder, that something was wrong with
Cotherstone. He had noticed, or thought he noticed, a queer look on old
Kitely's face when the ex-detective left the private room--it was a look
of quiet satisfaction, or triumph, or malice; any way, said Stoner, it
was something. Then there was the fact of Cotherstone's curious
abstraction when he, Stoner, entered and found his employer sitting in
the darkness, long after Kitely had gone--Cotherstone had said he was
asleep, but Stoner knew that to be a fib. Altogether, Stoner had gained
a vague feeling, a curious intuition, that there was something queer,
not unconnected with the visit of Cotherstone's new tenant, and when he
heard, next morning, of what had befallen Kitely, all his suspicions
were renewed.
So much for the difficult reasons which had made him appropriate the
half-sheet of foolscap. But there was a reason which was not difficult.
It lay in the presence of that word _Wilchester_. If not of the finest
degree of intellect, Stoner was far from being a fool, and it had not
taken him very long to explain to himself why Cotherstone had scribbled
the name of that far-off south-country town all over that sheet of
paper, aimlessly, apparently without reason, amidst his figurings. _It
was uppermost in his thoughts at the time_--and as he sat there, pen in
hand, he had written it down, half-unconsciously, over and over
again.... There it was--_Wilchester_--Wilchester--Wilchester.
The reiteration had a peculiar interest for Stoner. He had never heard
Cotherstone nor Mallalieu mention Wilchester at any time since his first
coming into their office. The firm had no dealings with any firm at
Wilchester. Stoner, who dealt with all the Mallalieu & Cotherstone
correspondence, knew that during his five and a half years' clerkship,
he had never addressed a single letter to any one at Wilchester, never
received a single letter bearing the Wilchester post-mark. Wilchester
was four hundred miles away, far off in the south; ninety-nine out of
every hundred persons in Highmarket had never heard the name of
Wilchester. But Stoner had--quite apart from the history books, and the
geography books, and map of England. Stoner himself was a Darlington
man. He had a close friend, a bosom friend, at Darlington, named
Myler--David Myler. Now David Myler was a commercial traveller--a smart
fellow of Stoner's age. He was in the service of a Darlington firm of
agricultural implement makers, and his particular round lay in the
market-towns of the south and south-west of England. He spent a
considerable part of the year in those districts, and Wilchester was one
of his principal headquarters: Stoner had many a dozen letters of
Myler's, which Myler had written to him from Wilchester. And only a year
before all this, Myler had brought home a bride in the person of a
Wilchester girl, the daughter of a Wilchester tradesman.
So the name of Wilchester was familiar enough to Stoner. And now he
wanted to know what--what--what made it so familiar to Cotherstone that
Cotherstone absent-mindedly scribbled it all over a half-sheet of
foolscap paper?
But the figures? Had they any connexion with the word? This was the
question which Stoner put to himself when he sat down that night in his
parlour to seriously consider if he had any chance of winning that five
hundred pounds reward. He looked at the figures again--more carefully.
The truth was that until that evening he had never given much attention
to those figures: it was the word Wilchester that had fascinated him.
But now, summoning all his by no means small arithmetical knowledge to
his aid, Stoner concentrated himself on an effort to discover what
those figures meant. That they were a calculation of some sort he had
always known--now he wanted to know of what.
The solution of the problem came to him all of a sudden--as the solution
of arithmetical problems often does come. He saw the whole thing quite
plainly and wondered that he had not seen it at a first glance. The
figures represented nothing whatever but three plain and common sums--in
compound arithmetic. Cotherstone, for some reason of his own, had taken
the sum of two thousand pounds as a foundation, and had calculated (1st)
what thirty years' interest on that sum at three and a half per cent.
would come to; and (2nd) what thirty years' interest at five per cent.
would come to; and (3rd) what the compound interest on two thousand
pounds would come to--capital and compound interest--in the same period.
The last reckoning--the compound interest one--had been crossed over and
out with vigorous dashes of the pen, as if the calculator had been
appalled on discovering what an original sum of two thousand pounds,
left at compound interest for thirty years, would be transformed into in
that time.
All this was so much Greek to Stoner. But he knew there was something in
it--something behind those figures. They might refer to some Corporation
financial business--Cotherstone being Borough Treasurer. But--they might
not. And why were they mixed up with Wilchester?
For once in a way, Stoner took no walk abroad that night. Usually, even
when he stopped in of an evening, he had a brief stroll to the Grey
Mare and back last thing before going to bed. But on this occasion he
forgot all about the Grey Mare, and Popsie the barmaid did not come into
his mind for even a second. He sat at home, his feet on the fender, his
eyes fixed on the dying coals in the grate. He thought--thought so hard
that he forgot that his pipe had gone out. The fire had gone out, too,
when he finally rose and retired. And he went on thinking for a long
time after his head had sought his pillow.
"Well, it's Saturday tomorrow, anyway!" he mused at last. "Which is
lucky."
Next day--being Saturday and half-holiday--Stoner attired himself in his
best garments, and, in the middle of the afternoon, took train for
Darlington.