CLEAR DECKS
The bit of head-gear which Lorrimore had taken down assumed a new
interest; Scarterfield and I gazed at it as if it might speak to us.
Nevertheless the detective when he presently spoke showed some
incredulity.
"That's the sort of cap that any Chinaman wears," he remarked. "It may
have belonged to any of them."
"No!" answered Lorrimore, with emphatic assurance. "That's my man's. I
saw him making it--he's as deft with his fingers, at that sort of
thing, as he is at cooking. And since this cap is his, and as he's not
amongst the lot there on deck, he's the man that you, Middlebrook, saw
escaping in the boat. And since he is that man, I know where he'd be
making."
"Where, then?" demanded Scarterfield.
"To my house!" answered Lorrimore.
Scarterfield showed more doubt.
"I don't think that's likely, doctor," he said. "Presumably, he's got
those jewels on him, and I should say he'd get away from this with the
notion of trusting to his own craft to get unobserved on a train and
lose himself in Newcastle. A Chinaman with valuables on him worth
eighty thousand pounds? Come!"
"You don't know that he's any valuables of any sort on him," retorted
Lorrimore. "That's all supposition. I say that if my man Wing was on
this vessel--as I'm sure he was--he was on it for purposes of his own.
He might be with this felonious lot, but he wouldn't be of them. I
know him!--and I'm off to get on his track. Lay you anything you
like--a thousand to one!--that I find Wing at my house!"
"I'm not taking you, Lorrimore," said I. "I don't mind laying the
same."
Scarterfield looked curiously at the two of us. Apparently, his belief
in Chinese virtue was not great.
"Well," he said. "I'm on his track, anyhow, and I propose to get away
to the beach. There's nothing more we can do here. These naval people
have got this job in charge, now. Let's leave them to it. Yet," he
added, as we left the galley, and with a significant glance at me,
"there is one thing Middlebrook!--wouldn't you like to have a look
inside those two chests that we've heard so much about?--you and I."
"I certainly should!" I answered.
"Then we will," he said. "I, too, have some curiosity that way. And if
Master Wing has repaired to the doctor's house he's all right, and if
he hasn't, he can't get very far away, being a Chinaman, in his native
garments, and wounded."
The chests which had come aboard the yawl with Miss Raven and myself
the previous afternoon--it seemed as if ages had gone by since
then!--still stood where they had been placed at the time; close to
the gangway leading to the main cabin. Lorrimore, Scarterfield, the
young naval officer and I gathered round while a couple of handy
blue-jackets forced them open--no easy business, for whether the
dishonest bank-manager and Netherfield Baxter had ever opened them or
not, they were screwed up again in a fashion which showed
business-like resolves that they should not easily be opened again.
But at last the lids were off--to reveal inner shells of lead. And
within these, gleaming dully in the fresh sunlight lay the monastic
treasures of which Scarterfield and I had read in the hotel at Blyth.
"Queer!" said the detective, as he stood staring meditatively at
patens and chalices, reliquaries and pyxes. "All these, I reckon, are
sacred things, consecrated and all that, and yet ever since that
Reformation time, they've been mixed up with robbery, and now at last
with wholesale murder! Odd, isn't it? However, there they are!--and
here," he added, pulling the parchment schedules out of his pocket
which he had discovered at Baxter's old lodgings in Blyth, and handing
them to the lieutenant, "here is the list of what there ought to be;
you'll take all this in charge, of course--I don't know if it comes
within the law of treasure trove or not, but as the original owners
are dust and ashes four hundred years ago, I should say it
does--anyway, the Crown solicitors'll soon settle that point."
We went off from the yawl, the three of us, in the boat which had
brought Lorrimore and me aboard her. The group on shore saw us making
for the point whereat the escaping figure had landed in the early
morning, and followed us thither along the beach. They came up to us
as we stepped ashore, and while Lorrimore began giving Mr. Raven an
account of what we had found on the yawl I drew his niece aside.
"You had better know the worst in a word," I said. "We were more than
fortunate in getting away from the yawl as we did. Don't be
upset--there isn't a man alive on that thing!"
"Baxter?" she exclaimed.
"I said--not one!" I answered. "Wholesale! Don't think about it--as
for me, I wish I'd never seen it. But now it's a question of a living
man--Wing."
"Then it was as I thought?" she asked. "Wing was there?"
"Lorrimore is sure of it--he found a cap of Wing's in the galley,"
said I. "And as Wing isn't amongst the dead, he's the man who
escaped."
Scarterfield came up, the local policeman with him who had joined Mr.
Raven's search-party as it came across country.
"Whereabouts did this man land, Middlebrook?" he asked. "You saw him,
you and Miss Raven, didn't you?"
"We saw him round these rocks," I replied. "But then they hid him from
us--we couldn't see exactly. Somewhere on the other side of them,
anyway."
We spread ourselves out along the shore, crossing the spit of sand,
now encroached on considerably by the tide, and began to search
amongst the black rocks that jutted out of it thereabouts. Presently
we came across the boat, slightly rocking in the lapping water
alongside a ledge--I took a hasty glance into it and drew Miss Raven
away. For on the thwarts, and on the seat in the stern, and on one of
the oars, thrown carelessly aside, there was blood.
A sharp cry from one of the men who had gone a little ahead brought us
all hurrying to his side. He had found, amongst the rocks, a sort of
pool at the sides of which there was dry, sand-strewn rock; there were
marks there as if a man had knelt in the sand, and there was more
blood, and there were strips of clothing--linen, silk, as if the man
had torn up some of his garments as temporary bandages.
"He's been here," said Lorrimore in a low voice. "Probably washed his
wounds here--salt is a styptic. Flesh wounds, most likely, but," he
added, sinking his voice still lower, "judging from what we've seen of
the blood he's lost, he must have been weakening by the time he got
here. Still, he's a man of vast strength and physique, and--he'd push
on. Look for marks of his footsteps."
We eventually picked up a recently made track in the sand and followed
it until it came to a point at the end of the overhanging woods, where
they merged into open moorland running steeply downwards to the beach.
There, in the short, wiry grass of the close-knitted turf, the marks
vanished.
"Just as I said," muttered Lorrimore, whom with Miss Raven and myself, was
striding on a little in advance of the rest. "He's made for my place--as I
knew he would. I knew enough of this country to know that there's a road
at the head of these moors that runs parallel with the railway on one side
and the coast on the other towards Ravensdene--he'd be making for that.
He'd take up the side of this wood, as the nearest way to strike the
road."
That he was right in this we were not long in finding out. Twice, as
our party climbed the steep side of the moorland we came across
evidences of the fugitive. At two points we found places whereat a man
had recently sat down on the bank beneath the trees, to rest. And at
one of them we found more--a blood-soaked bandage.
"No man can go far, losing blood in that way," whispered Lorrimore to
me as we went onward. "He can't be far off."
And suddenly we came across our quarry. Coming out on the top of the
moorland, and rounding the corner of the woods, we hit the road of
which Lorrimore had spoken--a long, white, hedgeless, wall-less ribbon
of track that ran north and south through treeless country. There, a
few yards away from us, stood an isolated cottage, some gamekeeper's
or watcher's place, with a bit of unfenced garden before it. In that
garden was a strange group, gathered about something that at first we
did not see--Mr. Cazalette, obviously very busy, the police-inspector
(a horse and trap, tethered to a post close by, showed how they had
come) a woman, evidently the mistress of the cottage, a child,
open-mouthed wide-eyed with astonishment at these strange happenings,
a dog that moved uneasily around the two-legged folk, whimpering his
concern. The bystanders moved as we hurried up, and then we caught
glimpses of towels and water and hastily-improvised bandages and smelt
brandy, and saw, in the midst of all this Wing, propped up against a
bank of earth, his eyes closed, and over his yellow face a queer
grey-white pallor. His left arm and shoulder were bare, save for the
bandages which Cazalette was applying--there were discarded ones on
the turf which were soaked with blood.
Lorrimore darted forward with a hasty exclamation, and had Cazalette's
job out of the old gentleman's hands and into his own before the rest
of us could speak. He motioned the whole of us away except Cazalette
and the woman, and the police-inspector turned to Mr. Raven and his
niece, and to myself and Scarterfield.
"I think we were just about in time," he said, laconically. "I don't
know what it all means, but I reckon the man was about done for.
Bleeding to death, I should say."
"You found him?" I asked.
"No," he answered. "Not at first anyway. The woman there says she was
out here in her garden, feeding her fowls, when she saw him stagger
round the corner of the wood there, and make for her. He fell across
the bank where he's lying in a dead faint, and she ran for water. Just
then we came along in the trap, saw what was happening and jumped out.
Fortunately, when we set off, Mr. Cazalette insisted on bringing a big
flask of neat brandy, and some food--he said you never knew what you
mightn't want--and we gave him a stiff dose, and pulled him round
sufficiently to be able to tell us where he was wounded. And he's got
a skinful!--a bullet through the thick part of his left arm, another
at the point of the same shoulder, and a third just underneath it. Mr.
Cazalette says they're all flesh wounds--but I don't know: I know the
man's fainted twice since we got to him. And look here!--just before
he fainted the last time, he managed to fumble amongst his clothing
with his right hand and he pulled something out and shoved it into my
hand with a word or two. 'Give it Lorrimore,' he said, in a very weak
voice. 'Tell him I found it all out--was going to trap all of
them--but they were too quick for me last night--all dead now.' Then
he fainted again. And--look at this!"
He drew out a piece of canvas, twisted up anyhow, and opening it
before our wondering eyes, revealed a heap of magnificent pearls and a
couple of wonderful rubies that shone in the sunlight like fire.
"That's what he gave me," said the inspector. "What is it? what's it
mean?"
"That's what Salter Quick was murdered for," said I. "And it means
that Lorrimore's man ran down the murderer."
And without waiting for any comment from him, and leaving Scarterfield
to explain matters, I went across the little garden to see how the
honest Chinaman was faring.
* * * * *
It was a strange, yet a plain story that Wing told his master and a
select few of us a day or two later, when Lorrimore had patched him
up. To anybody of a hum-drum life--such as mine had always been until
these events--it was, indeed, a stirring story. The queer thing,
however--at any rate, queer to me--was that the narrator, as calm and
suave as ever in his telling of it--did not seem to regard it as
anything strange at all--he might have been explaining to us some new
way of making a good cake.
At our request and suggestion, he had journeyed to London and plunged
into those quarters of the East End wherein his fellow-countrymen are
to be found. His knowledge of the district of which Limehouse Causeway
forms a centre soon brought him in touch with Lo Chuh Fen, who, as he
quickly discovered, had remained in London during the last two or
three years, assisting in the management of a Chinese eating-house.
Close by, in a lodging kept by a compatriot, Wing put himself up and
cultivated Chuh's acquaintance. Ere many days had passed another
Chinaman came on the scene--this was the man whom Baxter had described
as a Chinese gentleman. He represented himself to Wing and Chuh as a
countryman of theirs who had been engaged in highly successful trading
operations in Europe, and was now, in company with two friends, an
Englishman and a Frenchman, carrying out another which involved a trip
in a small, but well-appointed yacht, across the Atlantic: he wanted
these countrymen of his own to make up a crew. An introduction to
Baxter and the Frenchman followed, and Wing and Chuh were taken into
confidence as regards the treasure hidden on the Northumberland coast.
A share of the proceeds was promised them: they secured a third,
trustworthy Chinaman in the person of one Ah Wong, an associate of
Chuh's, and the yawl, duly equipped, left the Thames and went
northward. By this time, Wing had wormed himself completely into
Chuh's confidence, and without even discovering whether Chuh was or
was not the actual murderer of Salter Quick (he believed him to be
and believed Wong to be the murderer of Noah, at Saltash) he had found
out that Chuh was in possession of the pearls and rubies which--though
Wing had no knowledge of that--Salter had exhibited to Baubenheimer.
And as the yawl neared the scene of the next operations, Wing made his
own plans. He had found out that its owners, after recovering the
monastic treasures, were going to call at Leith, where they were to be
met by the private yacht of some American, whose name Wing never
heard. Accordingly, he made up his mind to escape from the yawl as
soon as it got into Leith, to go straight to the police, and there
give information as to the doings of the men he was with. But here his
plans were frustrated. He was taken aback by the capture of Miss Raven
and myself by Baxter and the Frenchman, and though he contrived to
keep out of our way, he was greatly concerned lest we should see him
and conclude that he had joined the gang and was privy to its past and
present doings. But that very night a much more serious development
materialized. The Chinese gentleman, arriving from London, and being
met by the Frenchman at Berwick, had a scheme of his own, which, after
he had attempted the drugging of his two principal associates, he
unfolded to his fellow-countrymen. This was to get rid of Baxter and
the Frenchman and seize the yawl and its contents for themselves,
sailing with it to some port in North Russia. Wing had no option but
to profess agreement--his only proviso was that Miss Raven and myself
should be cleared out of the yawl. This proposition was readily
assented to, and Chuh was charged with the job of sending us ashore.
But almost immediately afterwards, everything went wrong with the
conspirator's plans. The drug which had been administered to Baxter
and the Frenchman failed to act; Baxter, waking suddenly to find the
Chinamen advancing on the cabin with only too evident murderous
intent, opened fire on them, and the situation rapidly resolved itself
into a free fight, in the course of which Wing barricaded himself into
the galley. Before long he saw that of all the men on board, only
himself and Baxter remained alive--he saw, too, that Baxter was
already wounded. Baxter, evidently afraid of Wing, also barricaded
himself into the cabin; for some hours the two secretly awaited each
other's onslaught. At last, Wing determined to make a bid for liberty,
and cautiously worming his way to the cabin he looked in and as he
thought, saw Baxter lying either dead or dying. He then hastily
stripped Chuh of the belt in which he knew him to carry the precious
stones, and taking to the boat which lay at the side of the yawl,
pushed off, only to find Baxter after him with a revolver. In the
exchange of shots which followed Wing was hit twice, but a lucky reply
of his laid Baxter dead. At that he got away, weak and fainting,
managed to make the shore, to bind up as much of his wounded body as
he could get at, and set out as well as he was able for his master's
house. The rest we knew.
* * * * *
So that was all over, and it only remained now for the police to clear
things up, for Wing to be thoroughly whitewashed in the matter of the
shooting of Netherfield Baxter, and for everybody in the countryside
to talk of the affair for nine days--and perhaps a little more. Mr.
Cazalette talked a great deal: as for Miss Raven and myself, as actors
in the last act of the drama which ended in such a tragedy, we talked
little: we had seen too much at close quarters. But on the first
occasion on which she and I were alone again, I made a confession to
her.
"I don't want you--of all people--to get any mistaken impression about
me," I said. "So, I'm going to tell you something. During the whole of
the time you and I were on that yawl, I was in an absolute panic of
fear!"
"You were?" she exclaimed. "Really frightened?"
"Quaking with fright!" I declared boldly. "Especially after you'd
retired. I literally sweated with fear. There! Now it's out!"
She looked at me not at all unkindly.
"Um!" she said at last. "Then, all I have to say is that you concealed
it admirably--when I was about, at any rate. And"--here she sunk her
voice to a pleasing whisper--"I'm sure that if you were frightened, it
was entirely on my account. So--"
In that way we began a courtship which, proving highly satisfactory on
both sides, is now about to come to an end--or a new beginning--in
marriage.
THE END.
* * * * *
_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. S. 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."--_Newark Evening News._
THE ORANGE-YELLOW DIAMOND [1921]
"... A rattling good yarn.... An uncommonly well written
tale."--_New York Times._
THE CHESTERMARKE INSTINCT [1921]
"Mr. Fletcher is a master of plot.... To tell a story as well
as this is a literary achievement."--_Boston Transcript._
THE BOROUGH TREASURER [1921]
"As mystifying a tale as even Mr. Fletcher himself has
written."--_New York Times._
THE HERAPATH PROPERTY [1921]
Numerous complications lead from the murder of Jacob Herapath
and the search for his will.
SCARHAVEN KEEP [1922]
The mystery of the disappearance of Bassett Oliver, famous
actor.
RAVENSDENE COURT [1922]
Two men are struck down by an unseen hand, at the same time
in widely separated places--who killed them?
_$2.00 net each at all booksellers or from the Publisher_
ALFRED A. KNOPF, New York.