The Second R. Austin Freeman Megapack

by R. Austin Freeman

The mariner brightened up perceptibly. “Please?” said he.

  “A sailor-man with a mole on his nose.”

  “Ach!” exclaimed the mariner. “Vos it tied on?”

  “Tied on!” the sergeant snorted impatiently. “Of course it wasn’t. It grew there.”

  Here the second mariner apparently asked some question, for our friend turned to him and replied: “Ja. Maulwurf,” on which I heard Bundy snigger softly.

  “No, no,” I interposed; “not that sort of mole. A kind of wart, you know. Das Mal.”

  On this the second mariner fell out of the deckhouse door, and the pair burst into yells of laughter, rolling about the deck in agonies of mirth, wiping their eyes, muttering Maulwurf, Maulwurf, and screeching like demented hyenas.

  “Well,” Cobbledick demanded impatiently, “have you seen him?”

  The mariner shook his head. “No,” he replied, shakily. “I have not any mahn seen.”

  “Well, why couldn’t you say so at first” the sergeant growled.

  “I vos zo zubbraised,” the mariner explained, glancing at his shipmate; and the pair burst out into fresh howls of laughter.

  The sergant turned away with a sort of benevolent contempt and ran his eye despairingly over the wilderness. “I suppose we had better search this place,” said he, “though he is pretty certain to have got away.”

  At his suggestion we separated and examined the possible hiding-places systematically, but, of course, with no result. Once only I had a momentary hope that we had not lost our quarry, when the sergeant suddenly stooped and began cautiously to stalk an abandoned boiler surrounded by a clump of bushes; but when the grinning countenance of Bundy appeared at the opposite end and that reprobate crept out stealthily and proceeded to stalk the sergeant, the last hope faded.

  “I certainly thought I saw someone moving in those bushes,” said Cobbledick, with a disappointed air.

  “So did Mr. Bundy,” said I “You must have seen one another.”

  The sergeant glanced suspiciously at our colleague, but made no remark; and we continued our rather perfunctory search. At length we gave it up and slowly returned to the neighbourhood of the pier. By this time the tide had turned, and a few loiterers were standing about watching the procession of barges moving downstream on the ebb. Among them was a grave-looking, sandy-haired man who leaned against the watch-house, smoking reflectively as he surveyed the river. To this philosopher Cobbledick addressed himself, explaining, as he was in plain clothes:

  “Good afternoon. I am a police officer and I am looking for a man who is described on that bill.” Here he indicated the poster.

  The philosopher turned a pale grey, and somewhat suspicious eye on him, and having removed his pipe, expectorated thoughtfully but made no comment on the statement.

  “A sea-faring man,” continued the sergeant, “with a mole on the left side of his nose.” He looked enquiringly at the philosopher, who replied impassively:

  “Nhm—nhm.”

  “Do you happen to have seen a man answering that description?”

  “Nhm—nhm,” was the slightly ambiguous reply.

  “You have seen him?” the sergeant asked, eagerly.

  “Aye.”

  “Do you know if he belongs to any of the craft that trade here?”

  “Nhm—nhm.”

  “Do you happen to know which particular vessel he belongs to?”

  “Aye,” was the answer, accompanied by a grave nod.

  “Can you tell me,” the sergeant asked patiently, “which vessel that is, and where she is at present?”

  Our friend replaced his pipe and took a long draw at it, gazing meditatively at a schooner which was moving swiftly down the river under the power of an auxiliary motor, and setting her sails as she went. I had noticed her already, and observed that she had a white underbody and black top-sides, and that she carried a single long yard on her fore-mast. At length our friend removed his pipe, expectorated, and nodded gravely at the schooner.

  “Yon,” said he, and replaced his pipe, as a precaution, I supposed, against unnecessary loquacity.

  Cobbledick gazed wistfully at the receding schooner. “Pity,” said he. “I should have liked to have a look at that fellow.”

  “You could get the schooner held up at Sheerness, couldn’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes; I could send a ’phone message to Garrison Point Fort. But, you see, she’s a foreigner. Might make trouble. And he is probably not the man we want. After all, it’s only a matter of a mole.”

  “Maulwurf,” murmured Bundy.

  “Yes,” said the sergeant, with a faint grin; “those beggars were laughing at us. Well, it can’t be helped.”

  We stood for a moment or two watching the schooner set one sail after another. Presently Bundy observed:

  “Methinks, Sergeant, that Mr. Noah is trying to attract your attention.”

  We glanced towards the Ark, the tenant of which was seated in the stern-sheets, scrubbing a length of rusty chain. As he caught the sergeant’s eye, he beckoned mysteriously, whereupon we descended the bank, and, picking our way across the muddy grass by his little causeway of stepping-stones, approached the foot of the short ladder.

  “Well, Israel,” said the sergeant, resting his hands on the gunwale of the old boat as he made a rapid survey of the interior, “giving the family plate a bit of a polish, eh?”

  “Plate!” exclaimed the old man, holding up the chain, which, as I now saw, had a number of double hooks linked to it, “this ain’t plate. ’Tis what we calls a creeper.”

  “A creeper,” repeated the sergeant, looking at it with renewed interest. “Ha, yes, hm. A creeper, hey? Well, Israel, what’s a-doing? Have you got something to show us?”

  The old man laid down the creeper and the scrubbing-brush—which had a strong suggestion of salvage in its appearance—and moved towards the door of the Ark. “Come along inside,” said he.

  Cobbledick mounted the ladder and motioned me to follow, which I did, while Bundy discretely sauntered away and sat down on the bank. On entering, I observed that the Ark followed closely the constructional traditions. Like its classical prototype, it was “pitched with pitch, within and without,” and was furnished with a single small window, let into the door and hermetically sealed.

  Seeing that our host looked at me with some disfavour, the tactful sergeant hastened to make us known to one another.

  “This is Dr. Strangeways, Israel. He was Mrs. Frood’s doctor, and he knows all about this affair. This, Doctor, is Mr. Israel Bangs, the eminent long-shoreman, a sort of hereditary Grand Duke of the Rochester foreshore.”

  I bowed ceremoniously, and the Grand Duke acknowledged the introduction with a sour grin. Then, lifting the greasy lid of a locker, he dived into it and came to the surface, as it were, with a small shoe in his hand.

  “What do you say to that?” he demanded, holding the shoe under the sergeant’s nose. The sergeant said nothing, but looked at me; and I, suddenly conscious of the familiar sickening sensation, could do no more than nod in reply. Soiled, muddy and sodden as it was, the poor little relic instantly and vividly recalled the occasion when I had last seen it, then all trim and smart, peeping coyly beneath the hem of the neat brown skirt.

  “Where did you find it, Israel?” asked Cobbledick.

  “Ah,” said Bangs, with a sly leer, “that’s tellin’, that is. Never you mind where I found it. There’s the shoe.”

  “Don’t be a fool, Israel,” said the sergeant.’ “What use do you suppose the shoe is to me if I don’t know where you found it? I’ve got to put it in evidence, you know.”

  “You can put it where you like, so long as you pays for it,” the old rascal replied, doggedly. “The findin’ of it’s my business.”

  There ensued a lengthy wrangle, but the sergeant, though patient and polite, was firm. Eventually Israel gave way.

  “Well,” he said, “if you undertakes not to let on to Sam Hooper or any of his lot, I’ll tell you. I
found it on the mud, side of the long crik betwixt Blue Boar Head and Gas-’us Point.”

  The sergeant made a note of the locality, and, after having sworn not to divulge the secret to Sam Hooper or any other of the shore-rat fraternity, and having ascertained that Israel had no further information to dispose of, rose to depart; and, I noticed that, as we passed out towards the ladder, he seemed to bestow a glance of friendly recognition on the creeper.

  “Well,” said Bundy, when we rejoined him, “what had Mr. Noah to say? I hope you remembered me kindly to my old friends, Shem, Ham, and Japhet.”

  “He has found one of Mrs. Frood’s shoes,” answered the sergeant, producing it from his pocket and offering it for inspection. Bundy glanced at it indifferently, and then remarked: “It seems to answer the description, but, for my part, I don’t quite see the use of all this searching and prying. It only proves what we all know. There’s no doubt that she fell into the river. The question is, how did she get there? It is not likely that it was an accident, and, if it wasn’t, it must have been a crime. What we want to know is, who is the criminal?”

  Cobbledick pocketed the shoe with an impatient gesture. “That’s the way they always talk,” said he. “They will always begin at the wrong end. The question, ‘Who is the murderer?’ does not arise until it is certain that there has been a murder; and it can’t be certain that there has been a murder until it is certain that the missing person is dead. And that certainty can hardly be established until the body is found. But, in the meantime, these articles are evidence enough to justify us in making other inquiries, and they may give us a hint where to look for the body. They do, in fact. They suggest that the body is probably not very far away, and more likely to be upstream than down.”

  “I don’t see how they do,” said Bundy.

  “I do,” retorted the sergeant, “and that’s enough for me.”

  Bundy, with his customary discretion, took this as closing the discussion, and further—as I guessed—surmising that the sergeant might wish to have a few words with me alone, took his leave of us when we reached the vicinity of the office.

  “That is not a bad idea of old Israel’s,” said Cobbledick, when Bundy had gone. “The creeper, I mean.”

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “You know what a creeper is used for, I suppose,” said he. “In the old days, the revenue boats used to trail them along over the bottom in shallow water where they suspected that the smugglers had sunk their tubs. You see they couldn’t always get a chance to land the stuff. Then they used to fill the spirits into a lot of little ankers or tubs, lash them together into a sort of raft and sink the raft close in-shore, on a dark night, in a marked place where their pals could go some other night and fish them up. Well the revenue cutters knew most of those places and used to go there and drift over them trailing creepers. Of course, if there were any tubs there, the creepers hooked on to the lashings and up they came.”

  “But what do you suppose is Israel’s idea?” I asked. “Why, as the body ought to have come up long before this, and it hasn’t, he thinks it has been sunk. It might have been taken up the river in a boat, and sunk in mid-stream with a weight of some sort. Or it might have got caught by a lost anchor or on some old moorings. That would account for its not coming up and for these oddments getting detached and drifting ashore. So old Israel is going to get to work with a creeper. I expect he spends his nights creeping over the likely spots, and that is what makes him so deuced secret about the place where he found that shoe. He reckons that the body is somewhere thereabouts.”

  I made no comment on this rather horrible communication. Of course, it was necessary that the body should be searched for, since its discovery was the indispensable condition of the search for the murderer. But I did not want to hear more of the dreadful details than was absolutely unavoidable.

  When we reached the Guildhall, I halted and was about to take leave of the sergeant when he said, somewhat hesitatingly:

  “Do you remember, Doctor, when you met me last Saturday, you had a gentleman with you?”

  “I remember,” said I.

  “Now, I wonder if you would think I was taking a liberty if I were to ask what that gentleman’s name was. I had an idea that I knew his face.”

  “Of course it wouldn’t be a liberty,” I replied. “His name is Thorndyke; Dr. John Thorndyke.”

  “Ah!” exclaimed Cobbledick, “I thought I couldn’t be mistaken. It isn’t the sort of face that one would forget. I once heard him give evidence at the Old Bailey. Wonderful evidence it was, too. Since then I’ve read reports of his investigations from time to time. He’s a marvellous man. The way he has of raking up evidence from nowhere is perfectly astonishing. Did you happen to talk to him about this case at all?”

  “Well, you see, Sergeant,” I answered, rather evasively, “he had come down here for the weekend as my guest—”

  “Exactly, exactly,” Cobbledick interrupted, unconsciously helping me to avoid answering his question, “he came down for a rest and a change, and wouldn’t want to be bothered with professional matters. Still, you know, I think he would be interested in this case. It is quite in his own line. It is a queer case; a very queer case in some respects.”

  “In what respects?” I asked.

  It was Cobbledick’s turn to be evasive. He had apparently said more than he had intended, and now drew in his horns perceptibly.

  “Why,” he replied, “when you come to think of—of the—er—the character of the lady, for instance. Why should anyone want to do her any harm? And then there is the mystery as to how it happened, and the place, and—in fact, there are a number of things that are difficult to understand. But I mustn’t keep you standing here. If you should happen to see Dr. Thorndyke again, it might be as well to tell him about the case. It would be sure to interest him; and if he should, by any chance, want to know anything that you are not in a position to tell him, why, you know where I am to be found. I shouldn’t want to make any secrets with him. And he might spot something that we haven’t noticed.”

  I promised to follow the sergeant’s advice, and, having bid him adieu, turned back, and walked slowly homeward. As I went I reflected profoundly on my conversation with Cobbledick; from which, as it seemed to me, two conclusions emerged. First, there were elements in this mystery that were unknown to me. I had supposed that the essence of the mystery was the mere absence of data. But it now appeared from the sergeant’s utterances, and still more from his evasions, that he saw farther into the affair than I did; either because he had more facts, or because, by reason of his greater experience, the facts meant more to him than they did to me. The second conclusion was that he was in some way in difficulties; that he was conscious of an inability to interpret satisfactorily the facts that were known to him. His evident eagerness to get into touch with Thorndyke made this pretty clear; and the two conclusions together suggested a further question. How much did Thorndyke know? Did he know all that the sergeant knew? Did he perchance know more? From the scanty data with which I had supplied him, might he possibly have drawn some illuminating inferences that had carried his understanding of the case beyond either mine or Cobbledick’s? It was quite possible. Thorndyke’s great reputation rested upon his extraordinary power of inference and constructive reasoning from apparently unilluminating facts. The facts in this case seemed unilluminating enough. But they might not be so to him. And again I recalled how both he and the sergeant seemed to look to the finding of the body as probably furnishing the solution of the mystery.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Prints of a Vanished Hand

  Mr. Bundy’s opinion that no particular significance attached to the finding of further relics of the missing woman was one that I was myself disposed to adopt. The disappearance of poor Angelina was an undeniable fact, and there seemed to be no doubt that her body had fallen, or been cast, into the river. On these facts, the recovery of further articles belonging to her, and presumably detached fr
om the body, shed no additional light. From the body itself, whenever it should be surrendered by the river, one hoped that something fresh might be learned. But all that anyone could say was that Angelina Frood had disappeared, that her disappearance was almost certainly connected with a crime, and that the agents of that crime and their motives for committing it were alike an impenetrable mystery, a mystery that the finding of further detached articles tended in no way to solve.

  I shall, therefore, pass somewhat lightly over the incidents of the succeeding discoveries, notwithstanding the keen interest in them displayed by Sergeant Cobbledick and even by Thorndyke. On Monday, the 25th of May, the second shoe was found (to Israel Bangs’ unspeakable indignation) by Samuel Hooper of Foul Anchor Alley, who discovered it shortly after high-water, lying on the gridiron close to Gas-house Point, and brought it in triumph to the police station.

  After this, there followed a long interval, occupied by a feverish contest between Israel Bangs and Samuel Hooper. But the luck fell to the experienced Israel. On Saturday, the 20th of June, that investigator, having grounded his boat below a wharf between Gas-house Point and the bridge, discovered a silver-headed hat-pin lying on the shore between two of the piles of the wharf. Its identity was unmistakable. The silver poppy-head that crowned the pin was no trade production that might have had thousands of indistinguishable fellows. It was an individual work wrought by an artist in metal, and excepting its fellow, there was probably not another like it in the world.

  The discovery of this object roused a positive frenzy of search. The stretch of muddy shore between Gas-house Point and the bridge literally swarmed with human shore-rats, male and female, adult and juvenile. Every day, and all the day, excepting at high-water, Israel Bangs hovered in his oozy little basket of a boat on the extreme edge of the mud, scanning every inch of slime, and glowering fiercely at the poachers ashore who were raking over his preserves. But nothing came of it. Day after day passed. The black and odorous mud was churned up by countless feet; the pebbles were sorted out severally by innumerable filthy hands; every derelict pot, pan, box, or meat-tin was picked up again and again, and explored to its inmost recesses. But in vain. Not a single relic of any kind was brought to light by’ all those searchings and grubbings in the mud. Presently the searchers began to grow discouraged. Some of them gave up the search; others migrated to the shore beyond the bridge, and were to be seen wading in the mud below the Esplanade, the cricket-ground, or the boat-building yards. So the month of June ran out, and the third month began. And still there was no sign of the body.