Читать книгу I, Spy - 6 Espionage & Detective Books in One Edition - Frederic Arnold Kummer - Страница 5

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I was thoroughly tired out by my long day in the open, and I must have gone to sleep at once. It seemed to me that I was disturbed, during the night, by the sound of voices without my door, and the movements of people in the hallway, but I presume it was merely a dream. Just before daybreak, however, I found myself suffering somewhat from the cold, and got up to close one of the windows, to shut off the draught. I had just turned toward the bed again, when I heard from the room across the hall, the one occupied by Mr. Ashton, a sudden and terrible cry as of someone in mortal agony, followed by the sound of a heavy body falling upon the floor. I also fancied I heard the quick closing of a door or window, but of this I could not be sure. With a foreboding of tragedy heavily upon me, I hastily threw on some clothes and ran into the hall, calling loudly for help. Opposite me was the door of Mr. Ashton's room. I rushed to it, and tried the knob, but found it locked. For some time I vainly attempted to force open the door, meanwhile repeating my cries. Presently Major Temple came running through the hallway, followed by his daughter and several of the servants. Miss Temple had thrown on a long silk Chinese wrapper and even in the dim light of the hall I could not help observing the ghastly pallor of her face.

"What's wrong here?" cried Major Temple, excitedly.

"I do not know, Sir," I replied, gravely enough. "I heard a cry which seemed to come from Mr. Ashton's room, but I find his door locked."

"Break it in," cried Major Temple; "break it in at once." At his words, one of the servants and myself threw our combined weight against the door, and after several attempts, the fastening gave way, and we were precipitated headlong into the room. It was dark, and it seemed to me that the air was heavy and lifeless. We drew back into the hall as one of the servants came running up with a candle, and Major Temple, taking it, advanced into the room, closely followed by myself. At first our eyes did not take in the scene revealed by the flickering candlelight, but in a few moments the gruesome sight before us caused both Major Temple and myself to recoil sharply toward the doorway. Upon the floor lay Robert Ashton in his nightclothes, his head in a pool of blood, his hands outstretched before him, his face ghastly with terror. The Major at once ordered the servants to keep out of the room, then turned to his daughter and in a low voice requested her to retire. She did so at once, in a state of terrible excitement. He then closed the door behind us, and, after lighting the gas, we proceeded to examine the body. Ashton was dead, although death had apparently occurred but a short time before as his body was still warm. In the top of his head was found a deep circular wound, apparently made by some heavy, sharp-pointed instrument, but there were no other marks of violence, no other wounds of any sort upon the body. I examined the wound in the head carefully, but could not imagine any weapon which would have left such a mark. And then the wonder of the situation began to dawn upon me. The room contained, besides the door by which we had entered, three windows, two facing to the south and one to the west. All three were tightly closed and securely fastened with heavy bolts on the inside. There was absolutely no other means of entrance to the room whatever, except the door which we had broken open and a rapid examination of this showed me that it had been bolted upon the inside, and the catch into which the bolt slid upon the door-jamb had been torn from its fastenings by the effort we had used in forcing it open. I turned to Major Temple in amazement, and found that he was engaged in systematically searching Mr. Ashton's gladstone bag, which lay upon a chair near the bed. He examined each article in detail, heedless of the grim and silent figure upon the floor beside him, and, when he had concluded, bent over the prostrate form of the dead man and began a hurried search of his person and the surrounding floor. I observed him in astonishment. "The police must never find it," I heard him mutter; "the police must never find it." He rose to his feet with an exclamation of disappointment. "Where can it be?" he muttered, half to himself, apparently forgetful of my presence. He looked about the room and then with a sudden cry dashed at a table near the window. I followed his movements and saw upon the table the small, green leather case from which Ashton had produced the emerald at dinner the night before. Major Temple took up the case with a sigh of relief, and hastily opened it, then dashed it to the floor with an oath. The case was empty.

"It's gone!" he fairly screamed. "My God, it's gone!"

"Impossible," I said, gravely. "The windows are all tightly shut and bolted. We had to break in the door. No one could have entered or left this room since Mr. Ashton came into it."

"Nonsense!" Major Temple snorted, angrily. "Do you suppose Ashton smashed in his own skull by way of amusement?"

He turned to the bed and began to search it closely, removing the pillows, feeling beneath the mattresses, even taking the candle and examining the floor foot by foot. Once more he went over the contents of the portmanteau, then again examined the clothing of the dead man, but all to no purpose. The emerald Buddha was as clearly and evidently gone as though it had vanished into the surrounding ether.

During this search, I had been vainly trying to put together some intelligent solution of this remarkable affair. There was clearly no possibility that Ashton had inflicted this wound upon himself in falling, yet the supposition that someone had entered the room from without seemed nullified by the bolted door and windows. I proceeded to closer examination of the matter.

The body lay with its head toward the window in the west wall of the room, and some six or eight feet from the window, and an even greater distance from the walls on either side. There was no piece of furniture, no heavy object, anywhere near at hand. I looked again at the queer, round conical hole in the top of the dead man's head. It had evidently been delivered from above. I glanced up, and saw only the dim, unbroken expanse of the ceiling above me, papered in white. I turned, absolutely nonplused, to Major Temple, who stood staring with protruding eyes at something upon the floor near one of the windows. He picked it up, and handed it to me. "What do you make of that?" he asked, in a startled voice, handing me what appeared to be a small piece of tough Chinese paper. Upon it was inscribed, in black, a single Chinese letter. I glanced at it, then handed it back, with the remark that I could make nothing of it.

"It is the symbol of the god," he said, "the Buddha. The same sign was engraved upon the base of the emerald figure, and I saw it in the temple at Ping Yang, upon the temple decorations. What is it doing here?" Then his face lighted up with a sudden idea. He rushed to the door, and opened it. "Gibson," he called peremptorily, to his man without, "find Li Min and bring him here at once. Don't let him out of your sight for a moment."

The man was gone ten minutes or more, during which time Major Temple walked excitedly up and down the room, muttering continually something about the police.

"They must be notified," I said, at last. He turned to me with a queer, half-frightened look. "They can do no good, no good, whatever," he cried. "This is the work of one of the Chinese secret societies. They are the cleverest criminals in the world. I have lived among them, and I know."

"Even the cleverest criminals in the world couldn't bolt a door or window from the outside," I said.

"Do not be too sure of that. I have known them to do things equally strange. By inserting a thin steel wedge between the edge of the door and the jamb they might with infinite patience work the bolt to one side or the other. This fellow, Li Min, I brought from China with me. He is one of the most faithful servants I have ever known. He belongs to the higher orders of society—I mean that he is not of the peasant or coolie class. He represented to me that he was suspected of belonging to the Reform Association, the enemies of the prevailing order of things, and was obliged to leave the country to save his head. I do not know, I do not know—possibly he may have been sent to watch. They knew in Ping Yang that I was after the emerald Buddha. Who knows? They are an amazing people—an amazing people." He turned to me suddenly. "Did you hear any footsteps or other noises in the hallway during the night?"

I told him that I thought I had, but that I could not be sure, that my sleep had been troubled, but that I had only awakened a few minutes before I heard Ashton's cry. At this moment Gibson returned, with a scared look on his face. Li Min, he reported, had disappeared. No one had seen him since the night before. His room had apparently been occupied, but the Chinaman was nowhere to be found.

"The police must be notified at once," I urged.

"I will attend to it," said the Major. "First we must have some coffee."

He closed the door of the room carefully, after we left it, and, taking the key from the lock—it had evidently not been used by Mr. Ashton the night before—locked the door from the outside and ordered Gibson to remain in the hallway without and allow no one to approach.

We finished dressing and then had a hurried cup of coffee and some muffins in the breakfast-room. It was by now nearly eight o'clock, and I suggested to Major Temple that if he wished, I would drive into Exeter with one of his men, notify the police and at the same time get my luggage.

I assured him that I had no desire to inflict myself upon him further as a guest, but that the murder of Ashton and the necessity of my appearing as a witness at the forthcoming inquest made it imperative that I should remain upon the scene until the police were satisfied to have me depart. At my mention of the police the Major showed great uneasiness, as before.

"You need not say anything about the—the emerald," he said, slowly; "it would only create unnecessary talk and trouble."

"I'm afraid I must," I replied. "It is evidently the sole motive for the murder—it has disappeared, and unless the police are apprised of its part in the case, I fail to see how they can intelligently proceed in their attempts to unravel the mystery."

He shook his head slowly. "What a pity!" he remarked. "What a pity! If the stone is ever found now, the authorities will hold it as the property of the dead man or his relations, if indeed he has any. And it would have been the crowning glory of my collection." It was evident that Major Temple was far more concerned over the loss of the emerald than over the death of Robert Ashton. "But they will never find it—never!" he concluded with a cunning smile, and an assurance that startled me. I wondered for a moment whether Major Temple knew more about the mysterious death of Robert Ashton than appeared upon the surface, but, recollecting his excited search of the dead man's belongings, dismissed the idea as absurd. It recurred, however, from time to time during my short drive to Exeter, and the thought came to me that if Major Temple could in any way have caused or been cognizant of the death of Robert Ashton from without the room—without entering it—his first act after doing so would naturally have been to search for the emerald in the hope of securing it before the police had been summoned to take charge of the case. I regretted that I had not examined the floor of the attic above, to determine whether any carefully fitted trap door, or hidden chimney or other opening to the interior of the room below existed. I also felt that it was imperative that a careful examination of the walls, as well as of the ground outside beneath the three windows, should be made without delay. It was even possible, I conjectured, that a clever thief could have in some way cut out one of the window panes, making an opening through which the window might have been opened and subsequently rebolted, though just how the glass could then have been replaced was a problem I was not prepared to solve. There was no question, however, that Robert Ashton was dead, and that whoever had inflicted that deadly wound upon his head, and made away with the emerald Buddha, must have entered the room in some way. I was not yet prepared to base any hypotheses upon the supernatural. As I concluded these reflections, we entered the town by way of Sidwell street and I stopped at the Half Moon and secured my luggage. We then drove to the police headquarters and I explained the case hurriedly to the Chief Constable, omitting all details except those pertaining directly to Mr. Ashton's death. The Chief Constable sent one of his men into an inner room, who returned in a moment with a small, keen-looking, ferret-faced man of some forty-eight or fifty years of age, with gray hair, sharp gray eyes and a smooth-shaven face. He introduced him to me as Sergeant McQuade, of Scotland Yard, who it seemed, happened to be in the city upon some counterfeiting case or other, and suggested that he accompany me back to the house. We had driven in Major Temple's high Irish cart, and, putting the man behind, I took the reins and with Sergeant McQuade beside me, started back in the direction of The Oaks. We had scarcely left the limits of the town behind us, when I noticed a figure in blue plodding slowly along the muddy road ahead of us, in the same direction as ourselves, and Jones, the groom upon the drag behind me said, in a low voice as we drew alongside, that it was Li Min, Major Temple's Chinese servant, whose sudden disappearance earlier in the morning had caused so much excitement. The Chinaman looked at us with a blandly innocent face and, nodding pleasantly, bade us good morning. I stopped the cart and ordered Jones to get down and accompany him back to the house, and on no account to let him out of his sight. As we drove on I explained all the circumstances of the case in detail to Sergeant McQuade, and informed him of my reason for placing Jones as guard over the Chinaman. No sooner had I done so than the Sergeant, in some excitement, requested me to return with him to Exeter at once. I did not inquire into his reasons for this step, but turned my horse's head once more toward the town, the Sergeant meanwhile plying me with questions, many of which I regretted my inability to answer to his satisfaction. They related principally to the exact time at which the murder had occurred, and how soon the disappearance of Li Min had been discovered. I decided at once that the detective had concluded that Li Min had committed the murder and had then hurried off to Exeter to place the emerald Buddha in the hands of some of his countrymen in the town, and was now proceeding leisurely back with some plausible story and a carefully arranged alibi to explain his absence from the house. I mentioned my conclusions to the Sergeant and saw from his reply that my assumption was correct. "I hope we are not too late," he exclaimed as he suggested my urging the horse to greater speed. "It is absolutely necessary that we prevent any Chinaman from leaving the town until this matter is cleared up. I'm afraid however, that they have a good start of us. There is a train to London at eight, and, if our man got away on that, it will be no easy matter to reach him."

"Of course you can telegraph ahead," I ventured.

"Of course." The detective smiled. "But the train is not an express, and there are a dozen stations within fifty miles of here where anyone could leave the train before I can get word along the line." He looked at his watch. "It is now ten minutes of nine. I am sorry that you did not notify the police at once." I made no reply, not wishing to prejudice the detective against Major Temple by explaining my desire to do this very thing and the latter's disinclination to have it done. We had reached police headquarters by this time, and the Sergeant disappeared within for perhaps five minutes, then quickly rejoined me and directed me to drive to the Queen Street Station. I waited here for him quite a long time and at last he came back with a face expressive of much dissatisfaction. "Two of them went up on the eight train," he growled. "One of them the clerk in the booking office remembers as keeping a laundry in Frog Street. The other he had never seen. They took tickets for London, third class." He swung himself into the seat beside me and sat in silence all the way to the house, evidently thinking deeply.

When we arrived at The Oaks, very soon after, we found the Major waiting impatiently for us in the hall. Jones and Li Min had arrived, and the Major had subjected the latter, he informed us, to a severe cross-examination, with the result that the Chinaman had denied all knowledge of Mr. Ashton's death and explained his absence from the house by saying that he had gone into town the night before to see his brother who had recently arrived from China, and, knowing the habit of the household to breakfast very late, had supposed his return at nine o'clock would pass unnoticed. I made Major Temple acquainted with Sergeant McQuade, and we proceeded at once to the room where lay all that now remained of the unfortunate Robert Ashton.