Читать книгу The Terror - Edgar Wallace, Martin Edwards - Страница 16

HALLICK, after an extensive search of the grounds which produced no other clue than an expended cartridge case, went up to town, leaving Sergeant Dobie in charge.

Mary never distinctly remembered how that dreadful day dragged to its end. The presence of the Scotland Yard man in the house gave her a little confidence, though it seemed to irritate her father. Happily, the detective kept himself unobtrusively in the background.

The two people who seemed unaffected by the drama of the morning were Mr Fane and the new clerical boarder. He was a loquacious man, primed with all kinds of uninteresting anecdotes; but Mrs Elvery found him a fascinating relief.

Ferdie Fane puzzled Mary. There was so much about him that she liked, and, but for this horrid tippling practice of his she might have liked him more—how much more she did not dare admit to herself. He alone remained completely unperturbed by that shot which had nearly ended her life and his.

In the afternoon she had a little talk with him and found him singularly coherent.

‘Shooting at me? Good Lord, no!’ He scoffed. ‘It must have been a Nonconformist—we High Church parsons have all sorts of enemies.’

‘Have you?’ she asked quietly, and there was an odd look in his eyes when he answered:

‘Maybe. There are quite a number of people who want to get even with me for my past misdeeds.’

‘Mrs Elvery said they were going to send Bradley down.’

‘Bradley!’ he said contemptuously. ‘That back number at Scotland Yard!’ And then, as though he could read her thoughts, he asked quickly: ‘Did that interesting old lady say anything else?’

They were walking through the long avenue of elms that stretched down to the main gates of the park. Two days ago she would have fled from him, but now she found a strange comfort in his society. She could not understand herself; found it equally difficult to recover a sense of her old aversion.

‘Mrs Elvery’s a criminologist.’ She smiled whimsically, though she never felt less like smiling in her life. ‘She keeps press cuttings of all the horrors of the past years, and she says she’s sure that that poor man Connor was connected with a big gold robbery during the war. She said there was a man named O’Shea in it—’

‘O’Shea?’ said Fane quickly, and she saw his face change. ‘What the devil is she talking about O’Shea for? She had better be careful—I beg your pardon.’ He was all smiles again.

‘Have you heard of him?’

‘The merest rumour,’ he said almost gaily. ‘Tell me what Mrs Elvery said.’

‘She said that a lot of gold disappeared and was buried somewhere, and she’s got a theory that it was buried in Monkshall or in the grounds; that Connor was looking for it, and that he got Cotton, the butler, to let him in—that’s how he came to be in the house. I heard her telling Mr Partridge the story. She doesn’t like me well enough to tell me.’ They paced in silence for a while.

‘Do you like him—Partridge, I mean?’ asked Ferdie.

She thought he was very nice.

‘That means he bores you.’ He chuckled softly to himself. And then: ‘Why don’t you go up to town?’

She stopped dead and stared at him.

‘Leave Monkshall? Why?’

He looked at her steadily.

‘I don’t think Monkshall is very healthy; in fact, it’s a little dangerous.’

‘To me?’ she said incredulously, and he nodded.

‘To you, in spite of the fact that there are people living at Monkshall who adore you, who would probably give their own lives to save you from hurt.’

‘You mean my father?’ She tried to pass off what might easily develop into an embarrassing conversation.

‘I mean two people—for example, Mr Goodman.’

At first she was inclined to be angry and then she laughed.

‘How absurd! Mr Goodman is old enough to be my father.’

‘And young enough to love you,’ said Fane quietly. ‘That middle-aged gentleman is genuinely fond of you, Miss Redmayne. There is one who is not so middle-aged who is equally fond of you—’

‘In sober moments?’ she challenged.

And then Mary thought it expedient to remember an engagement she had in the house. He did not attempt to stop her. They walked back towards Monkshall a little more quickly.

Inspector Hallick went back to London a very puzzled man, though he was not as hopelessly baffled as his immediate subordinates thought. He was satisfied in his mind that behind the mystery of Monkshall was the more definite mystery of O’Shea.

When he reached his office he rang for his clerk, and when the officer appeared:

‘Get me the record of the O’Shea gold robbery, will you?’ he said. ‘And data of any kind we have about O’Shea.’

It was not the first time he had made the last request and the response had been more or less valueless, but the Record Department of Scotland Yard had a trick of securing new evidence from day to day from unexpected sources. The sordid life histories that were compiled in that business-like room touched life at many points; the political branch that dealt with foreign anarchists had once exposed the biggest plot of modern times through a chance remark made by an old woman arrested for begging.

When the clerk had gone Hallick opened his notebook and jotted down the meagre facts he had compiled. Undoubtedly the shot had been fired from the ruins which, he discovered, were those of an old chapel in the grounds, now covered with ivy and almost hidden by sturdy chestnut trees. How the assassin had made his escape was a mystery. He did not preclude the possibility that some of these wizened slabs of stone hidden under thickets of elderberry and hawthorn trees might conceal the entrance to an underground passage.

He offered that solution to one of the inspectors who strolled in to gossip. It was the famous Inspector Elk, saturnine and sceptical.

‘Underground passages!’ scoffed Elk. ‘Why, that’s the last resource, or resort—I am not certain which—of the novel writer. Underground passages and secret panels! I never pick up a book which isn’t full of ’em!’

‘I don’t rule out either possibility,’ said Hallick quietly. ‘Monkshall was one of the oldest inhabited buildings in England. I looked it up in the library. It flourished even in the days of Elizabeth—’

Elk groaned.

‘That woman! There’s nothing we didn’t have in her days!’

Inspector Elk had a genuine grievance against Queen Elizabeth; for years he had sought to pass an education test which would have secured him promotion, but always it was the reign of the virgin queen and the many unrememberable incidents which, from his point of view, disfigured that reign, that had brought about his undoing.

‘She would have secret panels and underground passages!’

And then a thought struck Hallick.

‘Sit down, Elk,’ he said. ‘I want to ask you something.’

‘If it’s history save yourself the trouble. I know no more about that woman except that she was not in any way a virgin. Whoever started this silly idea about the Virgin Queen?’

‘Have you ever met O’Shea?’ asked Hallick.

Elk stared at him.

‘O’Shea—the bank smasher? No, I never met him. He is in America, isn’t he?’

‘I think he is very much in England,’ said Hallick, and the other man shook his head.

‘I doubt it.’ Then after a moment’s thought: ‘There’s no reason why he should be in England. I am only going on the fact that he has been very quiet these years, but then a man who made the money he did can afford to sit quiet. As a rule, a crook who gets money takes it to the nearest spieling club and does it in, and as he is a natural lunatic—’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Hallick sharply.

Before he answered, Elk took a ragged cigar from his pocket and lit it.

‘O’Shea is a madman,’ he said deliberately. ‘It is one of the facts that is not disputed.’

‘One of the facts that I knew nothing about till I interviewed old Connor in prison, and I don’t remember that I put it on record,’ said Hallick. ‘How did you know?’

Elk had an explanation which was new to his superior.

‘I went into the case years ago. We could never get O’Shea or any particulars about him except a scrap of his writing. I am talking about the days before the gold robbery and before you came into the case. I was just a plain detective officer at the time and if I couldn’t get his picture and his fingerprints I got on to his family. His father died in a lunatic asylum, his sister committed suicide, his grandfather was a homicide who died whilst he was awaiting his trial for murder. I’ve often wondered why one of these clever fellows didn’t write a history of the family.’

This was indeed news to John Hallick, but it tallied with the information that Connor had given to him.

The clerk came back at this moment with a formidable dossier and one thin folder. The contents of the latter showed the inspector that nothing further had been added to the sketchy details he had read before concerning O’Shea. Elk watched him curiously.

‘Refreshing your mind about the gold robbery? Doesn’t it make your mouth water to think that all these golden sovereigns are hidden somewhere. Pity Bradley isn’t on this job. He knows the case like I know the back of my hand, and if you think this murder has got anything to do with O’Shea, I’d cable him to come back if I were you.’

Hallick was turning the pages of the typewritten sheets slowly.

‘As far as Connor is concerned, he only got what was coming to him. He squealed a lot at the time of his conviction about being double-crossed, but Connor double-crossed more crooks than any man on the records, and Soapy Marks. I happened to know both of them. They were quite prepared to squeak about O’Shea just before the gold robbery. Where is Soapy?’

Hallick shook his head and closed the folder.

‘I don’t know. I wish you would put the word round to the divisions that I’d like to see Soapy Marks,’ he said. ‘He usually hangs out in Hammersmith, and I should like to give him a word of warning.’

Elk grinned.

‘You couldn’t warn Soapy,’ he said. ‘He knows too much. Soapy is so clever that one of these days we’ll find him at Oxford or Cambridge. Personally,’ he ruminated reflectively, ‘I prefer clever crooks. They don’t take much catching; they catch themselves.’

‘I am not worrying about his catching himself,’ said Hallick. ‘But I am a little anxious as to whether O’Shea will catch him first. That is by no means outside the bounds of possibility.’

And here he spoke prophetically.

He got through by ’phone to Monkshall, but Sergeant Dobie, who had been left in charge, had no information.

‘Has that woman, Elvery, left?’ asked Hallick.

‘Not she!’ came the reply. ‘She will hang on to the last minute. That woman is a regular crime hound. And, Mr Hallick, that fellow Fane is tight again.’

‘Is he ever sober?’ asked Hallick.

He did not trouble about Fane’s insobriety, but he was interested to learn that life in Monkshall, despite the tragedy and the startling event of the morning, was going on as though nothing had happened. Reporters had called in the course of the day and had tried to interview the colonel.

‘But I shunted them off. The general theory here is that Connor had somebody with him, that they got hold of the money and quarrelled about it. The other fellow killed Connor and got away with the stuff. When I said “The general idea”,’ said Dobie carefully, ‘I meant it is my idea. What do you think of that, sir?’

‘Rotten,’ said Hallick, and hung up the receiver.