OSBORNE'S STORY
"Good heavens, Dulcie!" I exclaimed, hurrying across to her, "whatever
are you doing here? And you, Aunt Hannah?"
At the sound of my voice Dulcie started up in her chair, and Aunt Hannah
turned quickly. To my amazement they both looked at me without uttering.
Dulcie's eyes were troubled. She seemed inclined to speak, yet afraid
to. The expression with which Aunt Hannah peered at me chilled me.
"What is the meaning of this, Mr. Berrington?" she asked coldly, after a
brief pause. Even in that moment of tense anxiety it struck me that Aunt
Hannah looked and spoke as though reproving a naughty schoolboy.
"Meaning of what?" I said stupidly, astonishment for the moment
deadening my intelligence.
"Of your bringing us up to London to find—this."
"Bringing you up? What do you mean, Miss Challoner?" I exclaimed,
mystified.
In spite of my deep anxiety, a feeling of annoyance, of resentment, had
come over me. No man likes to be made to look ridiculous, and here was I
standing before a lot of constables, all of them staring in inquisitive
astonishment at my being thus addressed by the old lady.
"Is this Mr. Berrington, madam?" an immensely tall, bull-necked,
plain-clothes policeman, of pompous, forbidding mien, suddenly asked.
"Yes, officer, it is," she snapped. During all the time I had known her
I had never seen her quite like this.
"See here," he said, turning to me, "I want your address, and for the
present you will stay here."
I am considered good-tempered. Usually, too, I can control my feelings.
There is a limit, however, to the amount of incivility I can stand, and
this fellow was deliberately insulting me.
"How dare you speak like that to me!" I burst out. "What has this affair
to do with me? Do you know who I am?"
"Aren't you Mr. Michael Berrington?" he inquired more guardedly,
apparently taken aback at my outburst of indignation.
"I am."
"Then read that," he said, producing a telegram and holding it out
before me.
It was addressed to:
"Miss Dulcie Challoner, Holt Manor, Holt Stacey," and ran:
"The police have recovered property which they believe to have been
stolen from Holt Manor. Please come at once to 430 Grafton Street, Bond
Street, to identify it. Shall expect you by train due Paddington 12:17.
Please don't fail to come as matter very urgent.
"MICHAEL BERRINGTON."
It had been handed in at the office in Regent Street at 9:30 that
morning, and received at Holt Stacey village at 9:43.
"How absurd! How ridiculous!" I exclaimed. "My name has been forged, of
course. I never sent that telegram; this is the first I have seen or
heard of it."
"That you will have to prove," the detective answered, with official
stolidity.
"Surely, Aunt Hannah," I almost shouted—so excited did I feel—as I
again turned to her, "you can't think I sent that telegram?"
"I certainly think nothing else," she replied, and her eyes were like
shining beads. "Who would send a telegram signed with your name but you,
or someone instructed by you?"
I saw that to argue with her in the frame of mind she was then in would
be futile—my presentiment at Holt that some day I should fall foul of
her had come true! I turned to the officer.
"I must see the original of that telegram," I said quickly, "and shall
then quickly prove that it was not sent by me. How soon can I get
hold of it?"
"Oh, we can see about it at once, sir," he answered much more civilly,
for, pretending to look for something in my pocket, I had intentionally
pulled out my leather wallet, containing two hundred pounds or more in
notes, and opened it for an instant. There is nothing like the sight of
paper money to ensure civility from a policeman disposed to be
impertinent—I should like, in justice, to add that most policemen
are not.
Also Easterton had come over and spoken to me, and of course pooh-poohed
the idea of my having sent the telegram, which had just been shown to
him. Dulcie stared at me with large, pathetic eyes, and I knew that, but
for Aunt Hannah's so-to-speak mounting guard, she would have asked me
endless questions instead of sitting there mute.
"You had better come with me and hear Jack Osborne's story," Easterton
said some moments later. "The Inspector tells me he is upstairs, and
still rather weak from the effect of the treatment he has received."
I had seen a puzzled look come into Aunt Hannah's eyes while Easterton
was speaking, but she remained sour and unbending.
Osborne was sitting up in a chair, partly undressed—he still wore his
evening clothes—cotton wool bound round his ankles and one wrist. He
smiled weakly as we entered, and the policeman who sat at his bedside
immediately rose. It was easy to see that Jack had suffered a good deal;
he looked, for him, quite pale, and there were dark marks beneath his
eyes. Nor was his appearance improved by several days' growth of
beard—he was usually clean-shaven.
His story was quickly told, and points in it gave food for thought, also
for conjecture.
It seemed that, while he was at supper with the woman I knew as "Mrs.
Gastrell," at Gastrell's reception, two men, unable to find a vacant
table, had asked if they might sit at his table, where there were two
vacant seats. Both were strangers to him, and apparently to "Mrs.
Gastrell" too. They seemed, however, pleasant fellows, and presently he
had drifted into conversation with them, or they with him, and with his
fair companion—Jack, as I have said, is extremely cosmopolitan, and
picks up all sorts of acquaintances. I could well believe that at a
reception such as Gastrell's he would waive all formality of
introduction if he found himself with companionable strangers.
Supper over, the four had remained together, and later, when Jack had
seen his fair friend safely into a cab, he had rejoined the two
strangers, becoming gradually more and more friendly with them. The
reception had not ended until past one in the morning, and he and his
two acquaintances had been among the last to leave. Having all to go in
the same direction, they had shared a taxi, and on arriving at the
chambers which the strangers had told him they shared—these chambers
were in Bloomsbury, but Jack had not noticed in what street—one of the
strangers had suggested his coming in for a few minutes before returning
to the Russell Hotel, where he had his rooms, which was close by.
At first disinclined to do this, he had finally yielded to their
persuasion. He had a whiskey-and-soda with them, he said—he mentioned
that the chambers were comfortable and well furnished—and one of them
had then suggested a game of cards. They had all sat down to play, and—
Well, he remembered, he said, seeing cards being dealt—but that was all
he did remember. He supposed that after that he must have fainted, or
been made unconscious; he now suspected that the drink he had taken had
been drugged.
When he recovered consciousness he had no idea where he was, or how long
he had been insensible. The room was unfamiliar to him, and everything
about him strange. He was stretched upon a bed, in an apartment much
larger than the one he was now in, with hands and feet tightly tied. The
two windows faced a blank wall, the wall apparently of the next house;
later he came to know, by the sound of Big Ben booming in the night,
that he was still in London.
The door of the room was at the back of the bed; he could not see it
from where he lay, and, bound as he was, could not even turn, but was
forced to lie flat upon his back.
He had not long been conscious, when the light of day began to fade.
Soon the room was in pitch darkness. Then it was he became aware that
someone was in the room. He listened attentively, but could hear
nothing; nevertheless the presence of a man or woman made itself "felt"
beyond a doubt. He judged the time of day to be about six o'clock in the
evening, when suddenly somebody touched him—a hand in the darkness. He
started, and called out; but there was no answer. Some minutes later a
man spoke.
The voice was not that of either of the men he had met at Gastrell's
reception; he could swear to that, he said. Yet he seemed to recognize
the voice, indeed, to have heard it recently. He racked his brains to
remember where, but to no purpose.
The man spoke in a low tone, and its _timbre_ and inflection betrayed
what is called the voice of a gentleman, he said.
"You have been brought here," the man said, "to give certain
information, and to reveal certain secrets. If you do this, you will be
released at once—you will be taken away from here in an unconscious
state, just as you were brought here, and set down in the night not far
from your hotel. If you refuse, you will be taken out during the night,
and dropped into the Thames."
The man had then gone on to question him. The questions he had asked had
been numerous, and one and all had had to do with persons of high
station with whom Jack was on terms of intimacy—all of them rich
people. What most astonished him, he said, was that his unseen
interlocutor should know so much about him—his questions and remarks
showed how much he knew—and that he should apparently know who all his
friends were.
Jack could not remember all the questions he had been asked, but he
repeated some of them. Whereabouts did the Duchesse de Montparnasse keep
her jewels in her chateau on the Meuse? The questioner said he knew that
Osborne could tell him, because he knew that Osborne, just before going
to Nigeria, had, while staying at that chateau, been shown by the
Duchesse herself her priceless jewellery—one of the finest collections
in the world, chiefly valuable owing to its interesting historic
associations.
Then, in which apartment in Eldon Hall, in Northumberland, the seat of
the Earl of Cranmere, was the large safe that Lord Cranmere had bought
ten months before from an American firm, the name of which was given? He
said that he, Osborne, must know, because he was a guest at Lord
Cranmere's when the safe arrived—which was the truth. He also wanted to
know if there were a priests' hiding-hole in Eldon Hall, as was the case
in so many of the large country mansions built about the same period,
and, if so, its exact whereabouts in the house.
As Jack Osborne said this, my thoughts flashed away to Berkshire, to
Holt Manor, to the dark, depressing hiding-hole there that I had peered
down into more than once. Who had spoken to me of that hiding-hole only
recently? Why, Dulcie, of course. She had mentioned it whilst telling me
about Mrs. Stapleton, and about Sir Roland's showing the young widow
over the house. Dulcie had mentioned it specially, because Mrs.
Stapleton had evinced such evident interest in it.
I checked my train of thought, focussing my mind upon that single
incident.
Mrs. Stapleton, the "mysterious widow" of whom nobody appeared to know
anything, had been strangely interested in that hiding-hole and in all
that Sir Roland had said about it—Dulcie had told me that. The
hiding-hole was in close proximity to Sir Roland's bedroom, and to one
other room from which valuable jewellery had been stolen. Mrs. Stapleton
had left the neighbourhood on the day after the robbery, had been absent
ever since—that of course might be, and probably was, merely a
coincidence. At supper at Gastrell's reception in Cumberland Place Mrs.
Stapleton had acknowledged "Mrs. Gastrell's" smile of recognition, and
an instant later the two women had stared at each other stonily, and
Mrs. Stapleton had assured me that she did not know the other woman,
that she had "never seen her before." Then those two men, of whom
Osborne had just spoken, had of their own accord joined him and "Mrs.
Gastrell" at supper, and eventually he had gone with the men to their
flat in Bloomsbury. And now here was an unseen man, evidently a
scoundrel, inquiring the whereabouts of a safe in a country house
belonging to a nobleman known to be extremely rich, and asking in
particular if the house possessed a priests' hiding-hole, and if so,
exactly where it was located—a man who threatened evil if the
information were withheld. Could all this, I could not help wondering,
be mere coincidence? Then on the top of it came that extraordinary
telegram sent to Dulcie from London, with my name attached to it.
Jack, however, had not done relating his adventures, so I turned again
to listen to him.
"A third thing the fellow asked," he said, "was the name of Hugo
Salmonsteiner's bankers—Salmonsteiner the millionaire timber-merchant
whose son was out big-game shooting with me a year ago. It seemed an
absurd question, for surely it must be easy to find out who any man's
bankers are, but still he asked me, and appeared to be most anxious
that I should tell him. Oh, but there were scores of other questions,
all much on the same lines, and tending to extract from me information
of a peculiar kind."
"Did you answer any of them?" Easterton asked.
"Answer them? Why, of course—all of 'em. I didn't want to remain here
in durance vile an hour longer than I could help, I can assure you. But
naturally my answers were—well, 'inaccurate,' to say the least. I had
to word them very carefully, though, or the fellow would have caught me
out. He suspected that I might be misleading him, I think, for once or
twice he put questions which might have unmasked me if I had not been on
my guard when answering them. Really we pitted our brains and cunning
against each other's all the time, and, if I may say so without
boasting, I think my cunning won."
"Then why were you not released?" I said.
"I was to have been, to-night—_so he said_. Do you think, though, he
would, whoever he was, have let me go after questioning me like that? He
said not a word about my not giving information to the police, or
warning the people he had questioned me about. Do you think he would
have let me go? I don't.
"Every day food and drink were left by me—set on a table within reach
of me, while the room was in inky blackness, for the man who had touched
me in the dark had also released my right arm and left it so. Several
times I tried to free my other arm, and my feet, but I couldn't manage
it. I have been lying here with both feet and one arm bound for four
nights and three days, to my knowledge, without seeing anybody, and, of
course, without shaving or washing. I can't tell you what these days and
nights have been like—they have been like a long, awful nightmare;
even the house has all the time been as still as death. My God, what a
relief it was to hear the door bell ringing this afternoon, and the
knocker going as though the place was on fire!
"And when the police did force an entrance it seems they found nobody
but me!"