Читать книгу Tales of Mystery & Suspense: 25+ Thrillers in One Edition - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 106

“Getting kind of used to these courthouse shows, aren’t you, Lenora?” Quest remarked, as they stepped from the automobile and entered the house in Georgia Square.

Lenora shrugged her shoulders. She was certainly a very different-looking person from the tired, trembling girl who had heard Macdougal sentenced not many weeks ago.

“Could anyone feel much sympathy,” she asked, “with those men? Red Gallagher, as they all called him, is more like a great brute animal than a human being. I think that even if they had sentenced him to death I should have felt that it was quite the proper thing to have done.”

“Too much sentiment about those things,” Quest agreed, clipping the end off a cigar. “Men like that are better off the face of the earth. They did their best to send me there.”

“Here’s a cablegram for you!” Lenora exclaimed, bringing it over to him. “Mr. Quest, I wonder if it’s from Scotland Yard!”

Quest tore it open. They read it together, Lenora standing on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder:

“Stowaway answering in every respect your description of Craig found on ‘Durham.’ Has been arrested, as desired, and will be taken to Hamblin House for identification by Lord Ashleigh. Reply whether you are coming over, and full details as to charge.”

“Good for Scotland Yard!” Quest declared. “So they’ve got him, eh? All the same, that fellow’s as slippery as an eel. Lenora, how should you like a trip across the ocean, eh?”

“I should love it,” Lenora replied. “Do you mean it really?”

Quest nodded.

“The fellow’s fooled me pretty well,” he continued, “but somehow I feel that if I get my hands on him this time, they’ll stay there till he stands where Red Gallagher did to-day. I don’t feel content to let anyone else finish off the job. Got any relatives over there?”

“I have an aunt in London,” Lenora told him, “the dearest old lady you ever knew. She’d give anything to have me make her a visit.”

Quest moved across to his desk and took up a sailing list. He studied it for a few moments and turned back to Lenora.

“Send a cable off at once to Scotland Yard,” he directed. “Say—‘Am sailing on Lusitania to-morrow. Hold prisoner. Charge very serious. Have full warrants.’”

Lenora wrote down the message and went to the telephone to send it off. As soon as she had finished, Quest took up his hat again.

“Come on,” he invited. “The machine’s outside. We’ll just go and look in on the Professor and tell him the news. Poor old chap, I’m afraid he’ll never be the same man again.”

“He must miss Craig terribly,” Lenora observed, as they took their places in the automobile, “and yet, Mr. Quest, it does seem to me a most amazing thing that a man so utterly callous and cruel as Craig must be, should have been a devoted and faithful servant to anyone through all these years.”

Quest nodded.

“I am beginning to frame a theory about that. You see, all the time Craig has lived with the Professor, he has been a sort of dabbler with him in his studies. Where the Professor’s gone right into a thing and understood it, Craig, you see, hasn’t managed to get past the first crust. His brain wasn’t educated enough for the subjects into the consideration of which the Professor may have led him. See what I’m driving at?”

“You mean that he may have been mad?” Lenora suggested.

“Something of that sort,” Quest assented. “Seems to me the only feasible explanation. The Professor’s a bit of a terror, you know. There are some queer stories about the way he got some of his earlier specimens in South America. Science is his god. What he has gone through in some of those foreign countries, no one knows. Quite enough to unbalance any man of ordinary nerves and temperament.”

“The Professor himself is remarkably sane,” Lenora observed.

“Precisely,” Quest agreed, “but then, you see, his brain was big enough, to start with. It could hold all there was for it to hold. It’s like pouring stuff into the wrong receptacle when a man like Craig tries to follow him. However, that’s only a theory. Here we are, and the front door wide open. I wonder how our friend’s feeling to-day.”

They found the Professor on his hands and knees upon a dusty floor. Carefully arranged before him were the bones of a skeleton, each laid in some appointed place. He had a chart on either side of him, and a third one on an easel. He looked up a little impatiently at the sound of the opening of the door, but when he recognised Quest and his companion the annoyance passed from his face.

“Are we disturbing you, Mr. Ashleigh?” Quest enquired.

The Professor rose to his feet and brushed the dust from his knees.

“I shall be glad of a rest,” he said simply. “You see what I am doing? I am trying to reconstruct from memory—and a little imagination, perhaps—the important part of my missing skeleton. It’s a wonderful problem which those bones might have solved, if I had been able to place them fairly before the scientists of the world. Do you understand much about the human frame, Mr. Quest?”

Quest shook his head promptly.

“Still life doesn’t interest me,” he declared. “Bones are bones, after all, you know. I don’t even care who my grandfather was, much less who my grandfather a million times removed might have been. Let’s step into the study for a moment, Professor, if you don’t mind,” he went on. “Lenora here is a little sensitive to smell, and a spray of lavender water on some of your bones wouldn’t do them any harm.”

The Professor ambled amiably towards the door.

“I never notice it myself,” he said. “Very likely that is because I see beyond these withered fragments into the prehistoric worlds whence they came. I sit here alone sometimes, and the curtain rolls up, and I find myself back in one of those far corners of South America, or even in a certain spot in East Africa, and I can almost fancy that time rolls back like an unwinding reel and there are no secrets into which I may not look. And then the moment passes and I remember that this dry-as-dust world is shrieking always for proofs—this extraordinary conglomeration of human animals in weird attire, with monstrous tastes and extraordinary habits, who make up what they call the civilized world. Civilized!”

They reached the study and Quest produced his cigar case.

“Can’t imagine any world that existed before tobacco,” he remarked cheerfully. “Help yourself, Professor. It does me good to see you human enough to enjoy a cigar!”

The Professor smiled.

“I never remember to buy any for myself,” he said, “but one of yours is always a treat. Miss Lenora, I am glad to see, is completely recovered.”

“I am quite well, thank you, Mr. Ashleigh,” Lenora replied. “I am even forgetting that I ever had nerves. I have been in the courthouse all the morning, and I even looked curiously at your garage as we drove up.”

“Very good—very good, my dear!” the Professor murmured. “At the courthouse, eh? Were those charming friends of yours from Bethel being tried, Quest?”

Quest nodded.

“Red Gallagher and his mate! Yes, they got it in the neck, too.”

“Personally,” the Professor exclaimed, his eyes sparkling with appreciation of his own wit, “I think that they ought to have got it round the neck! However, let us be thankful that they are disposed of. Their attack upon you, Mr. Quest, introduced rather a curious factor into our troubles. Even now I find it a little difficult to follow the workings of our friend French’s mind. It seems hard to believe that he could really have imagined you guilty.”

“French is all right,” Quest declared. “He fell into the common error of the detective without imagination.”

“What about that unhappy man Craig?” the Professor asked gloomily. “Isn’t the Durham almost due now?”

Quest took out the cablegram from his pocket and passed it over. The Professor’s fingers trembled a little as he read it. He passed it back, however, without immediate comment.

“You see, they have been cleverer over there than we were,” Quest remarked.

“Perhaps,” the Professor assented. “They seem, at least, to have arrested the man. Even now I can scarcely believe that it is Craig—my servant Craig—who is lying in an English prison. Do you know that his people have been servants in the Ashleigh family for some hundreds of years?”

Quest was clearly interested. “Say, I’d like to hear about that!” he exclaimed. “You know, I’m rather great on heredity, Professor. What class did he come from then? Were his people just domestic servants always?”

The Professor’s face was for a moment troubled. He moved to his desk, rummaged about for a time, and finally produced an ancient volume.

“This really belongs to my brother, Lord Ashleigh,” he explained. “He brought it over with him to show me some entries concerning which I was interested. It contains a history of the Hamblin estate since the days of Cromwell, and here in the back, you see, is a list of our farmers, bailiffs and domestic servants. There was a Craig who was a tenant of the first Lord Ashleigh and fought with him in the Cromwellian Wars as a trooper and since those days, so far as I can see, there has never been a time when there hasn’t been a Craig in the service of our family. A fine race they seem to have been, until—”

“Until when?” Quest demanded.

The look of trouble had once more clouded the Professor’s face. He shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“Until Craig’s father,” he admitted. “I am afraid I must admit that we come upon a bad piece of family history here. Silas Craig entered the service of my father in 1858, as under game-keeper. Here we come upon the first black mark against the name. He appears to have lived reputably for some years, and then, after a quarrel with a neighbour about some trivial matter, he deliberately murdered him, a crime for which he was tried and executed in 1867. John Craig, his only son, entered our service in 1880, and, when I left England, accompanied me as my valet.”

There was a moment’s silence. Quest shook his head a little reproachfully.

“Professor,” he said, “you are a scientific man, you appreciate the significance of heredity, yet during all this time, when you must have seen for yourself the evidence culminating against Craig, you never mentioned this—this—damning piece of evidence.”

The Professor closed the book with a sigh.

“I did not mention it, Mr. Quest,” he acknowledged, “because I did not believe in Craig’s guilt and I did not wish to further prejudice you against him. That is the whole and simple truth. Now tell me what you are going to do about his arrest?”

“Lenora and I are sailing to-morrow,” Quest replied. “We are taking over the necessary warrants and shall bring Craig back here for trial.”

The Professor smoked thoughtfully for some moments. Then he rose deliberately to his feet. He had come to a decision. He announced it calmly but irrevocably.

“I shall come with you,” he announced. “I shall be glad of a visit to England, but apart from that I feel it to be my duty. I owe it to Craig to see that he has a fair chance, and I owe it to the law to see that he pays the penalty, if indeed he is guilty of these crimes. Is Miss Laura accompanying you, too?”

Quest shook his head.

“From what the surgeons tell us,” he said, “it will be some weeks before she is able to travel. At the same time, I must tell you that I am glad of your decision, Professor.”

“It is my duty,” the latter declared. “I cannot rest in this state of uncertainty. If Craig is lost to me, the sooner I face the fact the better. At the same time I will be frank with you. Notwithstanding all this accumulated pile of evidence I feel in my heart the urgent necessity of seeing him face to face, of holding him by the shoulders and asking him whether these things are true. We have faced death together, Craig and I. We have done more than that—we have courted it. There is nothing about him I can accept from hearsay. I shall go with you to England, Mr. Quest.”