THE SPOILS OF SACRILEGE
Until that moment I had not thought much about the reason of my
presence at Blyth--I had, at any rate, thought no more than that
Scarterfield had merely come across some writing which he found it
hard to decipher. But one glance at the documents which he placed in
my hands showed me that he had accidentally come across a really
important find; within another moment I was deeply engrossed, and he
saw that I was. He sat silently watching me; once or twice, looking up
at him, I saw him nod as if to imply that he had felt sure of the
importance of the things he had given me. And presently, laying the
documents on the table between us, I smiled at him.
"Scarterfield!" I said. "Are you at all up in the history of your own
country?"
"Couldn't say that I am, Mr. Middlebrook," he answered with a shake of
his head. "Not beyond what a lad learns at school--and I dare say I've
forgotten a lot of that. My job, you see, has always been with the
hard facts of the actual present--not with what took place in the
past."
"But you're up to certain notable episodes?" I suggested. "You know,
for instance, that when the religious houses were suppressed--abbeys,
priories, convents, hospitals--in the reign of Henry the Eighth, a
great deal of their plate and jewels were confiscated to the use of
the King?"
"Oh, I've heard that!" he admitted. "Nice haul the old chap got, too,
I'm given to understand."
"He didn't get all," said I. "A great deal of the monastic plate
disappeared--clean vanished. It used to be said that a lot of it was
hidden away or buried by its owners, but it's much more likely that it
was stolen by the covetous and greedy folk of the neighbourhood--the
big men, of course. Anyway, while a great deal was certainly sent by
the commissioners to the king's treasury in London, a lot
more--especially in out-of-the-way places and districts--just
disappeared and was never heard of again. Up here in the North of
England that was very often the case. And all this is merely a preface
to what I'm going to tell you. Have you the least idea of what these
documents are?"
"No," he replied. "Unless they're lists of something--I did make out
that they might be, by the way the words and figures are arranged.
Like--inventories."
"They are inventories!" I exclaimed. "Both. Written in crabbed
caligraphy, too, but easy enough to read if you're acquainted with
sixteenth century penmanship, spelling and abbreviations. Look at the
first one. It is here described as an inventory of all the jewels,
plate, et cetera, appertaining and belonging unto the Abbey of
Forestburne, and it was made in the year 1536--this abbey, therefore,
was one of the smaller houses that came under the £200 limit and was
accordingly suppressed in the year just mentioned. Now look at the
second. It also is an inventory--of the jewels and plate of the Priory
of Mellerton, made in the same year, and similarly suppressed. But
though both these houses were of the smaller sort, it is quite
evident, from a cursory glance at these inventories that they were
pretty rich in jewels and plate. By the term jewels is meant plate
wherein jewels were set; as to the plate it was, of course, the
sacramental vessels and appurtenances. And judging by these entries
the whole mass of plate must have been considerable!"
"Worth a good deal, eh?" he asked.
"A great deal!--and if it's in existence now, much more than a great
deal," I replied. "But I'll read you some of the items set down
here--I'll read a few haphazard. They are set down, you see, with
their weight in ounces specified, and you'll observe what a number of
items there are in each inventory. We'll look at just a few. A
chalice, twenty-eight ounces. Another chalice, thirty-six ounces. A
mazer, forty-seven ounces. One pair candlesticks, fifty-two ounces.
Two cruets, thirty-one ounces. One censer, twenty-eight ounces. One
cross, fifty-eight ounces. Another cross, forty-eight ounces. Three
dozen spoons, forty-eight ounces. One salt, with covering,
twenty-eight ounces. A great cross, seventy-two ounces. A paten,
sixteen ounces. Another paten, twenty ounces. Three tablets of proper
gold work, eighty-five ounces in all. And so on and so on!--a very
nice collection, Scarterfield, considering that these are only a few
items at random, out of some seventy or eighty altogether. But we can
easily reckon up the total weight--indeed, it's already reckoned up at
the foot of each inventory. At Forestburne, you see, there was a sum
total of two thousand two hundred and thirty-eight ounces of plate; at
Mellerton, one thousand eight hundred and seventy ounces--so these two
inventories represent a mass of about four thousand ounces. Worth
having, Scarterfield!--in either the sixteenth or the twentieth
century."
"And, in the main, it would be--what?" asked Scarterfield. "Gold,
silver?"
"Some of it gold, some silver, a good deal of it silver-gilt," I
replied. "I can tell all that by reading the inventories more
attentively. But I've told you what a mere, cursory glance shows."
"Four thousand ounces of plate--some of it jewelled!" he soliloquised.
"Whew! And what do you make of it, Mr. Middlebrook? I mean--of all
that I've told you?"
"Putting everything together that you've told me," I answered, with
some confidence, "I make this of it. This plate, originally church
property, came--we won't ask how--into the hands of the late Lord
Forestburne, and may have been in possession of his family, hidden
away, perhaps, for four centuries. But at any rate, it was in his
possession, and he deposited it with his bankers across the way. He
may, indeed, not have known what was in it--again, he may have known.
Now I take it that the dishonest temporary manager you told me of
examined those chests, decided to appropriate their valuable contents,
and enlisted the services of Netherfield Baxter in his nefarious
labours. I think that these inventories were found in the chests--one,
probably, in each--and that Baxter kept them out of sheer
curiosity--you say he was a fellow of some education. As for the
plate, I think he and his associate hid it somewhere--and, if you want
my honest opinion, it was for it that Salter Quick was looking."
Scarterfield clapped his hand on the table.
"That's it!" he exclaimed. "Hanged if I don't think that myself! It's
my opinion that this Netherfield Baxter, when he hooked it out of
here, got into far regions and strange company, came into touch with
those Quicks and told 'em the secret of this stolen plate--he was, I'm
sure, the Netherfield of that ship the Quicks were on. Yes, sir!--I
think we may safely bet on it that Salter Quick, as you say, was
looking for this plate!"
"And--so was somebody else," said I. "And it was that somebody else
who murdered Salter Quick."
"Aye!" he assented. "Now--who? That's the question. And what's the
next thing to do, Mr. Middlebrook?"
"It seems to me that the next thing to do is to find out all you can
about this plate," I replied. "If I were you, I should take two people
into your confidence--the head man, director, chairman, or whatever he
is, at the bank--and the present Lord Forestburne."
"I will!" he agreed. "I'll see 'em both, first thing tomorrow morning.
Do you go with me, Mr. Middlebrook? You'll explain these old papers
better than I should."
So Scarterfield and I spent that evening together in the little hotel,
and after dinner I explained the inventories more particularly. I came
to the conclusion that if the four thousand ounces of plate specified
in them were in the chests which the dishonest temporary bank-manager
had stolen, he had got a very fine haul: the value, of course, of the
plate, was not so much intrinsic as extrinsic: there were collectors,
English and American, who would cheerfully give vast sums for
pre-Reformation sacramental vessels. Transactions of this kind, I
fancied, must have been in the minds of the thieves. There were
features of the whole affair which puzzled me--not the least important
was my wonder that this plate, undeniably church property, should have
remained so long in the Forestburne family without being brought into
the light of day. I hoped that our inquiries next morning would bring
some information on that point.
But we got no information--at least, none of any consequence. All that
was known by the authorities at the bank was that the late Lord
Forestburne had deposited two chests of plate with them years before,
with instructions that they were to remain in the bank's custody until
his son succeeded him--even then they were not to be opened unless the
son had already come of age. The bank people had no knowledge of the
precise contents of the chests--all they knew was that they contained
plate. As for the present Lord Forestburne, a very young man, he knew
nothing, except that his father's mysterious deposit had been burgled
by a dishonest custodian. He expressed no opinion about anything,
therefore. But the chief authority at the bank, a crusty and
self-sufficient old gentleman, who seemed to consider Scarterfield and
myself as busybodies, poohpoohed the notion that the inventories which
we showed him had anything to do with the rifled Forestburne chests,
and scorned the notion that the family had ever been in possession of
goods obtained by sacrilege.
"Preposterous!" said he, with a sniff of contempt. "What the chests
contained was, of course, superfluous family plate. As for these
documents, that fellow Baxter, in spite of his loose manner of living,
was, I remember, a bit inclined to scholarship, and went in for old
books and things--a strange mixture altogether. He probably picked up
these parchments in some book-seller's shop in Durham or Newcastle. I
don't believe they've anything to do with Lord Forestburne's stolen
property, and I advise you both not to waste time in running after
mare's nests."
Scarterfield and I got ourselves out of this starchy person's presence
and confided to each other our private opinions of him and his
intelligence. For to us the theory which we had set up was
unassailable: we tried to reduce it to strict and formal precision as
we ate our lunch in a quiet corner of the hotel coffee-room, previous
to parting.
"More than one of us, Scarterfield, who have taken part in this
discussion, have said that if we are going to get at the truth of
things we shall have to go back," I observed. "Well, what you have
found out here takes us back some way. Let us suppose--we can't do
anything without a certain amount of supposition--let us, I say, for
the sake of argument, suppose that the man Netherfield of Blyth, who
was with Noah and Salter Quick on the ship _Elizabeth Robinson_, bound
from Hong-Kong to Chemulpo is the same person as Netherfield Baxter,
who certainly lived in this town a few years ago. Very well--now then,
what do we know of Baxter? We know this--that a dishonest
bank-manager stole certain valuables from the bank, died suddenly just
afterwards, and that Baxter disappeared just as suddenly. The
supposition is that Baxter was concerned in that theft. We'll suppose
more--that Baxter knew where the stolen goods were; had, in fact,
helped to secrete them. Well, the next we hear of him is--supposing
him to be Netherfield--on this ship, which, according to the reports
you got at Lloyds, was lost with all hands in the Yellow Sea. But--a
big but!--we know now that whatever happened to the rest of those on
board her, three men at any rate saved their lives--Noah Quick, Salter
Quick and the Chinese cook, whose exact name we've forgotten, but one
of whose patronymics was Chuh. Chuh turns up at Lloyds, in London, and
asks a question about the ship. Noah Quick materialises at Devonport,
and runs a public-house. Salter joins him there. And presently Salter
is up on the Northumbrian coast, professing great anxiety to find a
churchyard, or churchyards wherein are graves with the name
Netherfield on them--he makes the excuse that that is the family name
of his mother's people. Now we know what happened to Salter Quick, and
we also know what happened to Noah Quick. But now I'm wondering if
something else had happened before that?"
"Aye, Mr. Middlebrook?" said Scarterfield. "And what, now?"
"I'm wondering," I answered, leaning nearer to him across the little
table at which we sat, "if Noah and Salter, severally, or conjointly,
had murdered this Netherfield Baxter before they themselves were
murdered? They--or somebody who was in with them, who afterwards
murdered them? Do you understand?"
"I'm afraid I don't," he said. "No--I don't quite see things."
"Look you here, Scarterfield," said I. "Supposing a gang of men--men
of no conscience, desperate, adventurous men--gets together, as men
were together on that ship, the doings and fate of which seem to be
pretty mysterious. They're all out for what they can get. One of them
is in possession of a valuable secret, and he imparts it to the
others, or to some of them--a chosen lot. There have been known such
cases--where a secret is shared by say five or six men--in which
murder after murder occurs until the secret is only held by one or
two. A half-share in a thing is worth more than one-sixth,
Scarterfield--and a secret of one is far more valuable than a secret
shared with three. Do you understand now?"
"I see!" he answered slowly. "You mean that Salter and Noah may have
got rid of Netherfield Baxter and that somebody has got rid of them?"
"Precisely!" said I. "You put it very clearly."
"Well," he said, "if that's so, there are--as has been plain all
along--two men concerned in putting the Quicks out of the way. For
Noah was finished off on the same night that saw Salter finished--and
there was four hundred miles distance between the scenes of their
respective murders. The man who killed Noah was not the man who killed
Salter, to be sure."
"Of course!" I agreed. "We've always known there were two. There may
be more--a gang of them, and remarkably clever fellows. But I'm
getting sure that the desire to recover some hidden treasure,
valuables, something of that sort, was at the bottom of it, and now
I'm all the surer because of what we've found out about this monastic
spoil. But there are things that puzzle me."
"Such as what?" he asked.
"Well, that eagerness of Salter Quick's to find a churchyard with the
name Netherfield on the stones," I replied. "And his coming to that
part of the Northumbrian coast expecting to find it. Because, so far
as the experts know, there is no such name on any stone, nor in any
parish register, in all that district. Who, then, told him of the
name? You see, if my theory is correct, and Baxter told him and Noah,
he'd tell them the exact locality."
"Ah, but would he?" said Scarterfield. "He mightn't. He might only
give them a general notion. Still--Netherfield it was that Salter
asked for."
"That's certain," said I. "And--I'm puzzled why. But I'm puzzled still
more about another thing. If the men who murdered Noah and Salter
Quick were in possession of the secret as well, why did they rip their
clothes to pieces, searching for--something? Why, later, did somebody
steal that tobacco-box from under the very noses of the police?"
Scarterfield shook his head: the shake meant a great deal.
"That fairly settles me!" he remarked. "Why, the murderer must have
been actually present at the inquest."
But at that I shook my head.
"Oh, dear me, no!" said I. "Not at all! But--some agent of his was
certainly there. My own impression is that Mr. Cazalette's eagerness
about that box gave the whole show away. Shall I tell you how I figure
things out? Well, I think there were men--we don't know who!--that
either knew, with absolute certainty, or were pretty sure that Noah
Quick, and Salter Quick were in possession of a secret and that one or
the other--and perhaps both--carried it on him, in the shape of
papers. Each was killed for that secret. The murderers found nothing,
in either case. But Mr. Cazalette's remarks, made before a lot of men,
drew attention to the tobacco-box, and the murderer determined to get
it. And--what was easier than to abstract it, at the inquest, where it
was exhibited in company with several other things of Salter's?"
"I can't say if it was easy or not, Mr. Middlebrook," observed
Scarterfield. "Were you there--present?"
"I was there," said I. "So were most people of the neighbourhood--as
many as could get into the room, anyway. A biggish room--there'd be a
couple of hundred people in it. And many of them were strangers. When
the proceedings were over, men were crowding about the table on which
Quick's things had been laid out, for exhibition to the coroner and
the jury--what easier than for someone to pick up that box? The place
was so crowded that such an action would pass unnoticed."
"Very evident it did!" observed Scarterfield.
"But I've heard of such things being taken out of sheer
curiosity--morbid desire to get hold of something that had to do with
a murder. However, if this particular thing was abstracted by the
murderer, or by somebody acting on his behalf it looks as if he, or
they, were on the spot. And then--that affair of Mr. Cazalette's
pocket-book!"
"Well, Scarterfield," said I. "There's another way of regarding both
these thefts. Supposing tobacco-box and pocket-book were stolen, not
as means of revealing a secret, but so that no one else--Cazalette or
anybody--should get at it! Eh?"
"There's something in that," he admitted thoughtfully. "You mean that
the murderers had already got rid of the Quicks so that there should
be two less in the secret, and these things stolen lest outsiders
should get any inkling of it?"
"Precisely!" I answered. "Closeness and secrecy--that's been at the
back of everything so far. I tell you--you're dealing with unusually
crafty brains!"
"I wish I could get the faintest idea of whose brains they were!" he
sighed. "A direct clue, now--"
Before he could say any more one of the hotel servants came into the
coffee-room and made for our table.
"There's a man in the hall asking for Mr. Scarterfield," he announced.
"Looks like a seafaring man, sir. He says Mrs. Ormthwaite told him
he'd find you here."
"Woman with whom Baxter used to lodge," muttered Scarterfield, in an
aside to me. "Come along, Mr. Middlebrook--you never know what you
mayn't hear."
We went out into the hall. There, twisting his cap in his hands, stood
a big, brown-bearded man.