Missing or Murdered (15 page)

“I suppose you'll finish it?” he asked. “What's it supposed to be?”

“An industrial landscape, Ricky. Just near Bricklayers Arms Station, a yard with oil barrels by the score, all shining wet on a drenching winter's day. One of the most heartlessly depressing scenes imaginable, but visually exquisitely beautiful. I'm going to call it ‘Civilization'—if I can just capture that light and atmosphere and overwhelming sadness.”

“Sounds morbid,” suggested Ricardo. “Give me a jolly old picture post card with hollyhocks and a thatched cottage and roses and a girl with a Dolly Varden hat. Something wholesome, you know. I count these first-class kippers, don't you?”

“They're excellent.”

“Of course it's the cooking. You'd have spoilt 'em, my old sky-pilot; but tell me all about this sleuth-hound business you're wasting your time at. I guessed it was over the Bygrave affair, but didn't know you were playing an important character part.”

Vereker sketched the matter as briefly as he could to Ricardo and, when they had finished tea, cleared the table and promptly emptied his pockets of the contents of the waste-paper-basket that he had stuffed into them at his newly-found lodgings.

“By Jingo, it sounds awfully exciting,” exclaimed Ricardo, as he watched his friend deftly sort out the pieces of paper and arrange them on the table until they fitted into their original entities.

“This is absolutely splendid,” exclaimed Vereker at last. “Mr. Henry Parker, otherwise Lord Bygrave if I'm not mistaken, leaves a track behind him like an elephant on soft ground.”

He sat for a long while examining the writing and comparing it with that of a letter produced from his pocket-book.

Ricardo was looking over his shoulder and wondering what was the cause of his friend's undue excitement.

“What would you say about the writing on the envelope and label that I have just pieced together when compared with that on this letter, Ricky?” asked Vereker at length.

“I suppose I'm to make you shine in the Watsonian manner, Sherlock, eh? I don't bite, old man.”

“No; be serious, Ricky. What do you think?”

Ricardo gazed earnestly at the specimens of writing and after some hesitation remarked:

“I'm no expert, but it looks as if the writing on the envelope and label which you have reconstructed is an attempt to disguise the actual handwriting as seen on the letter. From which I deduce by a process unknown to anyone but myself that Lenin and Trotzky—”

Vereker smiled.

“An excellent guess, Ricky. It looks very much like that to me. We don't want your esoteric deductions. More important still is the information conveyed. On the label is the address, ‘Mill House, Eyford,' which probably means nothing to you beyond an ordinary address. To me it is most significant. On the envelope is another address, ‘Mrs. Cathcart, Bramblehurst, Farnaby, Sussex.'”

“Lord! that's the lady about whose address I inquired some time ago on your behalf. I'd quite forgotten her. Well, you've found out that much, anyway. Who is she, by the way?”

“Looks as if she's going to be the lady in the case,” remarked Vereker, and added, “This has been a most fruitful day's work. It's too late to get down to Farnaby to-night, but I must make a point of seeing Mrs. Cathcart before she takes it into her head to change her address once more.”

“I believe she's an extremely pretty woman, or rather has been, so Mrs. Parslow told me,” mused Ricardo.

“Her looks don't concern me, Ricky. What I want to know is who she is, what she does, what she has done?”

“Futile questionings. If a woman's good-looking what does the rest matter? Don't you remember once quoting your musty old Emerson to me, ‘Beauty is the form under which intellect prefers to study the world? Measuring up with that rule, Vereker, I find I'm something like pure intellect.”

Vereker was obliged to laugh. “Fancy your remembering that, Ricky!” he exclaimed. “You're a freakish youth!”

“Heavens! I must be off!” exclaimed Ricardo, glancing swiftly at his wrist watch. “Kippers and crime and a dash of the philosophy of beauty are entertaining enough, but I'm taking Molly to dinner to-night. You haven't met Molly yet—she's a peach!”

“I know, and she'll be a pumpkin in about a fortnight's time—good-bye, Ricky. When this case is done with you must accompany me to France. I'm going to have a long holiday in Provence. We shall be troubadours.”

“Accepted, Vereker. I love a Romaunt,” replied Ricardo, and the door of Vereker's little flat slammed noisily as he vanished.

Vereker donned the overall that Ricardo had flung over a chair and picked up his brushes. He stood for many minutes before his easel lost in a reverie over that scene at Bricklayers Arms. At the moment of conception the significance of the picture had been overwhelming, it carried more than its visual beauty of colour and light and mass and composition. Underneath lay the impersonal tragedy of modern industrial life binding together the whole in a forceful unity. But now! No, he was not in the mood. He flung palette and brushes listlessly down on his table and pulled a chair over to the glowing gas fire. His meeting with Ricardo had been an interlude, a sudden thrust of his normal life into his present absorbing work. He must now return with redoubled ardour into the atmosphere of the mystery of his missing friend—for the moment it must be the Bygrave case and nothing but the Bygrave case!

For over an hour Vereker sat gazing into the orange glow of his gas fire, turning over in his mind the facts of the Bygrave case from the very beginning to the point reached by his recent discoveries at 10 Glendon Street. Those discoveries had finally convinced him that Lord Bygrave had disappeared of his own volition, whatever might be the motive for that disappearance. That Farnish and Winslade were secretly acquainted with the facts of the case was apparent from their clandestine visits to Glendon Street, in the hope that they might see Lord Bygrave on business known only to themselves. Certain facts swung as satellites to this central theory. They might be intimately connected, but at present they moved obscurely.

There was the strange behaviour of Mr. Smale, Lord Bygrave's secretary who, whatever he knew, was discreet enough to refuse to disclose that knowledge. There was the mysterious Mrs. Cathcart, with her unknown history and her receipt of £10,000 worth of bearer bonds from Lord Bygrave. Still unexplained and refusing to fall into any scheme of things was the fact that a drawer had been forced by a screw-driver in Lord Bygrave's study and some paper or papers extracted from one bundle of letters. These were probably significant facts, but the difficulty lay in discovering their orientation.

Lastly, who had impersonated Lord Bygrave at the White Bear Inn? Could it be Farnish? Vereker had thought deeply over this possibility. There were many facts in its favour. Farnish was about the same age and height; he assumed that aloof and reserved mien which his master wore by nature; he had access to his master's clothes; he knew Lord Bygrave's affairs and habits, he alone could have managed to secure the loan of Lord Bygrave's ring for the purpose of creating the belief that Lord Bygrave had actually stayed at the White Bear. The egg breakfast and tobacco were a lapse in cunning, but a pardonable lapse with a man unacquainted with the clever criminal's habit of avoiding glaring mistakes when removing his traces or creating fictitious ones. It was a possibility not to be lightly dismissed.

The underlying motive, however, of all this mystery floated beyond Vereker's ken—that motive could only swim into his vision by the discovery of further facts. He rose suddenly from his chair and crossing over to the table on which lay the reconstructed envelope and luggage label examined them once more. The altered handwriting was pregnant, it was a very ordinary ruse to hide a clue to the writer's identity. Vereker was obliged to smile when he thought of his friend, Henry, descending to these subterfuges. It pointed to the fact that the necessity was urgent, the consequence of discovery calamitous! In no other way could it be explained when taken in conjunction with Lord Bygrave's known probity and upright, almost Puritanical character.

Vereker glanced again at the label. The name was not there, but the address, Mill House, Eyford, fell in with his previous deductions so neatly that the conclusion was inevitable—Winslade had called at Mill House on that memorable Friday night to see Lord Bygrave or had even taken him there from Fordingbridge Junction. In further corroboration Heather had practically proved that Lord Bygrave had not arrived at Hartwood by train. Vereker once more pulled out his ordnance survey map and glanced at the network of roads from Fordingbridge Junction down to Hartwood.

“It seems pretty definite to me now!” he exclaimed. In any case, I hope to prove it within the next few days.

A loud knock at his door startled Vereker from his reverie. Quietly picking up the label and envelope from his table, he walked over to a bureau and thrust them into a drawer containing some unfinished sketches, and then opened the door.

“Come in, Heather, come in!” he exclaimed, as he caught sight of his visitor. “I was just wondering where you had vanished to.”

“Oh, I've been poking about town, Mr. Vereker. I had an hour to spare and thought I'd look you up. I felt you'd be here.”

Vereker closed the door, ushered the inspector into a comfortable chair and produced whisky, soda and glasses.

Heather glanced inquisitively round the room, and his eyes finally alighted on the easel and canvas.

“Gone back to the old love, Mr. Vereker?” he asked, jerking a thumb in the direction of the sketch.

“No, not yet, Heather. I can only return when I've finished with the present job.”

“How are you getting on?”

“Still in a maze, Heather, and yourself?”

“Sure but slow,” remarked Heather quietly. “I had a rather startling piece of news this morning. You'll be interested in it, I'm sure.”

“You've discovered Lord Bygrave's whereabouts?” questioned Vereker, with sudden excitement and not a little misgiving that he had been beaten in the game.

“Not so rapidly as all that, Mr. Vereker. But we have discovered a rather important factor. Mr. Sidney Smale has suddenly left Bygrave Hall, and at present we've got no trace of him. It looks fishy.”

Vereker whistled.

“Farnish is still there?” he asked quickly.

“Oh, yes, Farnish is there. I don't think there's anything wrong with Farnish. But Mr. Smale's quite another proposition. It won't be long before we lay him by the heels. A man doesn't fling up a comfortable, well-paid job without some very good reason. What do you say?”

“But I thought you had decided that the centre of gravity of the Bygrave case had unaccountably shifted to London!” asked Vereker, with a smile.

“So it has, Mr. Vereker.”

“Then this discovery about Smale is just a piquant bit of news solely intended for my edification or distraction, Heather?”

“You'll grant it's interesting, Mr. Vereker?”

“Oh, quite, but it points nowhere.”

“It may.”

“That's possible, but off with the motley, Heather, what have you been discovering in London that's really vital?”

“Ah, now you're treading on forbidden ground. There are certain things we don't disclose even to a promising amateur like yourself,” remarked Heather pompously.

“I think I can make a fair guess, Heather. Let me try just for the fun of the thing. Now when you came to the conclusion that Lord Bygrave had not stayed at the White Bear—”

“I didn't come to any such conclusion,” interjected Heather, lighting his pipe.

“Well, you were driven to it by my brilliant deductions. I grant I had a big advantage over you because I was intimately acquainted with Lord Bygrave, but that is neither here nor there.” Vereker joined in Heather's loud amusement.

“Well, proceed, Mr. Vereker,” continued the inspector.

“Having been driven to the conclusion that Lord Bygrave had never put up at the White Bear, you promptly decided to work on the assumption that he never left London.”

“Quite true: it's a possibility if not a probability.”

“Agreed. Then you directed your inquiries again as to when he left his office, who was there when he left, where he went after he left. What train he caught to Hartwood, etc., if— But, no, in your opinion he never caught the train to Hartwood.”

“He never
arrived
at Hartwood,” remarked Heather, emphasizing the words with a gesture of his pipe.

“I agree with you in that particular. However, you've searched the whole office, you've gone into his papers, you've tried to find out the relations existing between him and his subordinates, you've inquired about all callers prior to his disappearance—in fact, you have covered every inch of the ground that I as an unmethodical amateur have omitted to cover. But you've omitted to examine one very important particular.”

“What is that?” asked Heather, without displaying the vaguest emotion.

“Have you examined the waste paper furnace in the basement of the Ministry offices?”

“I've made a very careful examination of that furnace, Mr. Vereker.”

“Splendid, Heather, you are shaping uncommonly well for Scotland Yard. Do you know that that furnace would incinerate a body in a very short space of time.”

“What about the odour?” asked the inspector, looking up suspiciously.

“Who could detect that odour? The resident clerk lives on the top floor of the building; the night-watchman would not go down to the basement till ten o'clock at night. They are the only people in the building after six o'clock at the latest. It's a closed furnace with a terrific draught and, after all, I should say roast humanity differs little from roast beef as far as odour is concerned. If the night-watchman on the ground floor detected it he would promptly ascribe it to the resident clerk's kitchen efforts.”