by Molly Thynne
“Oh dear, what has happened now, Mr. Stuart?” she exclaimed apprehensively. “Not that dreadful man again?”
Before he could answer she recoiled with a shrill scream of terror.
“Oh! Oh, they’ve caught him! Why don’t the; make him take off that frightful mask? And Bates hasn’t even put the handcuffs on!”
Stuart turned, to discover that the group he had left at the door of the barn had joined them. Lord Romsey was regarding Miss Adderley with marked severity.
“They have not caught him, madam,” he said, totally unaware that his own appearance was the sole cause of her distress. “Nor, as matters are at present, are they likely to do so.”
He passed majestically on into the house.
Miss Adderley peered after him.
“Surely that wasn’t Lord Romsey?” she piped in amazement.
“It was,” Stuart assured her.
“Then why has he disguised himself? Was he trying to trap that man?”
“I’m afraid the truth is that the man trapped him,” said Stuart, trying to attune his countenance to her shocked gaze.
In as few words as possible, for the yard was growing colder each moment, he told her what had happened. He had just succeeded in making the situation clear to her when they were joined by Soames.
“I’d like a few words with you, Stuart,” he said in a low voice.
Miss Adderley, in her excitement, ignored him.
“Did Bates find any clues?” she asked.
Stuart smiled.
“I don’t think there were any,” he replied. “In any case, we were all rather absorbed in the rescue of Lord Romsey, and I’m afraid we didn’t look for any.”
“I wish I had a light,” she said wistfully. “Then I could have a look round while you are talking to Mr. Soames. One never knows, I might stumble on something.”
Stuart produced his torch from his pocket.
“Take this,” he suggested. “But I’m afraid you’ll find it a cold, fruitless job. Do you want me to come with you?”
She drew her short figure up to its full height.
“I’m not afraid, thank you,” she assured him. At least, not so long as you and Mr. Soames are within hail.”
Stuart regretfully abandoned his plan of making a speedy retreat to a warmer sphere.
“Don’t be long, will you?” he begged, as she departed.
Soames waited until she was out of hearing.
“Well, what do you think of the Romsey crowd now?” he asked.
Stuart stared at him.
“You don’t mean to say that you’re still harping on that old string?” he exclaimed.
Soames reddened.
“Take the facts,” he retorted. “Ford’s room was empty to-night, not for the first time, remember. It doesn’t look out on the yard, so that, even if his father’s story that he left his room because he saw a light in the barn is true, the son was not burglar hunting. Where was he? Then, when we go down, whom do we find in the barn? Lord Romsey; and to make it all the more mysterious, we run into his daughter, obviously keeping watch behind the yard door. If she wasn’t there to warn him of any possible interruption, I should like to know what she was doing!”
Stuart laughed, though he was beginning to feel more angry than amused.
“You’re not seriously going to suggest that Lord Romsey blacked his own face and locked himself into the barn on purpose?” he exclaimed.
“So far as his blacking his face is concerned, little Miss Adderley gave me a hint as to that just now,” returned Soames triumphantly. “She as good as recognized him as the man in the mask, before she realized that he was Lord Romsey. No one’s set eyes on this blessed mask except her, and there’s no reason why the man she saw shouldn’t have been the old boy with his face blacked, just as it was to-night!”
This time Stuart’s laugh was one of sheer mirth. It nettled Soames, but he stuck to his guns.
“It’s all very well to laugh,” he continued stubbornly. “But the truth is that you’re all such infernal snobs that you won’t look facts in the face. Just because the chap’s got a title—”
“Nonsense!” interrupted Stuart sharply. His own temper was beginning to suffer. “The fact that the man’s Lord Romsey has nothing to do with it. But what you refuse to take into account is his position. He’s a rich man, against whose name there’s never been a breath of scandal. Why in the name of goodness should he start pinching other people’s jewels at his time of life? According to Constantine, he’s got plenty of his own.”
“If he was the public prosecutor himself, it wouldn’t alter the evidence against him! And he wouldn’t be the first rich man that’s been found to be penniless when he turned up his toes! Who saw this man to-night? The Romseys. If you ask me, we’ve been nicely had, and the whole lot of us have been wasting our time on a wild-goose chase. Who was the only person near the barn after the assault Lord Romsey declares was made on him? His daughter. What was to prevent her from turning the key on him, once she realized that the whole house was roused, and that a get-away was out of the question? He couldn’t get back to his room, and the only thing for them to do was to concoct some sort of story to account for his presence in the barn. Then she conveniently forgot he was there, while we were footling round the house.”
“As you’ve worked the whole thing out so nicely, perhaps you’ll tell me the reason for that,” said Stuart.
“The reason’s obvious. She wanted us, and more particularly Bates, kept away from the barn until her father and brother had finished their work.”
“Their work being … ?” pursued Stuart in his most annoying drawl.
“I don’t know,” admitted Soames. “But I shall soon, if you people will only concentrate on Romsey, and stop treating him like a little tin god.”
Stuart gathered his forces together to demolish Soames’s arguments, and, as he did so, he realized, with some misgiving, the formidable array of facts he was called upon to meet. The mere idea of any complicity on the part of Lord Romsey or any member of his family still seemed to him absurd; but, on the whole, Soames had succeeded in making out a pretty good case against them. And the one piece of knowledge he now held concerning Geoffrey Ford, he did not care to use without his sister’s permission. He was not sorry to see Miss Adderley speeding towards them from the barn.
“We can’t discuss it now,” he contented himself with saying; “but you can take my word for it that you’re on the wrong track altogether.”
Soames’s indignant snort was drowned by Miss Amy’s voice, high and shrill with excitement.
“I have found something!” she exclaimed. “You see what a good thing it was that I decided to have a good look round. How did this get there?”
She held up a small red leather case.
“A jewel-case,” she went on breathlessly. “And look what’s on it!”
She turned the light from Stuart’s torch on to the lid and revealed, stamped in gold letters, the initials: “B. O. C.”
“O. C. Orkney Cloude!” she carolled. “They must be her jewels!”
“Where did you find them?” asked Soames.
Miss Adderley turned on him a face beaming with innocent joy.
“Underneath the seat in that big motor-car of Lord Romsey’s,” she answered.
CHAPTER XIII
They trooped back into the house, Miss Amy triumphantly leading the way, Mrs. Orkney Cloude’s jewel-case clasped to her bosom. It was to Soames’s credit that, after a futile attempt to catch Stuart’s eye, he refrained from any comment on Miss Adderley’s singularly opportune discovery.
Bates having taken charge of the jewel-case, Stuart and Soames adjourned to their own landing, where they found Constantine still keeping guard in Stuart’s bedroom. He had nothing to report save the abrupt arrival of Miss Amy at the bedroom door, bursting with the news that “something was going on in the barn,” and that she had watched the lights and moving figures until she could bear it no lo
nger.
“She invited me to accompany her,” he informed them; “but running about in the snow with a lantern in the early hours does not appeal to me, so I cunningly suggested that it was the duty of old gentlemen like myself to hold the fort in the absence of the more active members of the community. I assured her that her sister would be quite safe in my care, upon which she dashed off in search of adventure. I hope she found it?”
“She found something worth having, at any rate,” said Stuart. “It’s probable that Mrs. Cloude would never have seen her jewels again if Miss Adderley hadn’t happened on them.”
He told Constantine of the evening’s work.
“Finishing up,” he concluded, “with the usual fruitless paper-chase. The chap, whoever he is, had vanished into thin air as he always does.”
Constantine frowned.
“That’s the most puzzling element in the whole case,” he said. “Try as I will, I can’t place him.”
Stuart took him up sharply.
“Which means, that you have placed the original thief?”
But Constantine still declined definitely to commit himself.
“I’m not sufficiently sure of my facts yet to say for certain,” he answered; “but I think so.”
Soames, who had been restraining himself with difficulty, burst into speech.
“Look here, doctor,” he exclaimed. “After what happened to-night, you can’t rule Lord Romsey out any longer. Stuart’s talk of the man vanishing into thin air is all bunkum. If you ask me, he’s washing the black off his face at this minute, and cursing Miss Adderley for having stumbled on the jewel-case he’d tucked away so neatly in his car. The whole bunch of them’s in it, and you must admit that they’d got it worked out pretty cleverly. If I hadn’t been on the watch, the thing would have gone like clockwork, and none of us would have dreamed of suspecting them.”
“Speaking for myself, I should have been mildly surprised if the entire Romsey family had disappeared during the night,” suggested Constantine slyly.
Soames snorted.
“They’re not such fools as that! Young Ford would have slipped away with the loot, and his family would have been suitably anxious till they got a wire from him saying he was safe in London. And it might have been all of twenty-four hours before Mrs. Cloude missed her jewels!”
Stuart lost the rest of the argument. His mind had gone off at a tangent, which had been suggested by Soames’s last words. Angela Ford, in her search for her brother, had gone straight to Mrs. Orkney Cloude’s room. Supposing that, for purposes of his own, Geoffrey Ford had been conducting an intrigue with that lady and had, earlier in the evening, passed the jewel-case out to his sister! It was a relief to Stuart to feel that Soames was mercifully unaware of this further complication. He came to the surface again in time to hear Constantine’s closing remark.
“You’ve got a good enough case against them. I’m quite ready to admit it. But I still stick to my original contention that, knowing the Romseys as I do, I find it impossible to connect them in any way with a theft of that kind. I repeat once more, there is no earthly reason why they should do it!”
“Which means that you’ll simply leave them a free hand till they have done it, and, what’s more, got away with it!” retorted the disgusted Soames. “I’m fed up with this, and I’m going now to put a few plain facts to Bates, and see how he takes them.’”
“You’ll probably find that he’s come to much the same conclusion as yourself,” returned Constantine, “which will be a pity. Bates has only room for one theory in his head, and, once it’s firmly established there, he’ll work blindly on it till he suddenly discovers how his time has been wasted. He’s not been much good so far, I admit, but he’s more useful with an open mind than he will ever be trying to make a burglar out of poor old Romsey.”
Soames was frustrated in his retort by the sound of footsteps in the passage, followed by the appearance of Miss Amy Adderley in the doorway.
“It was Mrs. Orkney Cloude’s jewel-case!” she exclaimed impressively. “Would you believe it, she had never even looked to see if it was safe! And she’d probably never have missed it if I hadn’t seen it! She actually said that she’d forgotten all about it!”
“Where did she keep it, do you know?” asked Constantine.
“In her dressing-case. It’s got a special lock, not the kind of one that the cheap cases have. Of course any one can open those. This one would be much more difficult.”
From her tone it would seem that her knowledge of locks was profound, and Constantine’s lips twitched as he realized that she was merely quoting Bates.
“Was the lock forced?” he asked.
Miss Amy’s manner became even more portentous.
“No. Picked! And very cleverly too. It wasn’t till Bates tried to open the case that we found it out. He says it is the work of a professional!”
She paused to give her words full effect, then continued breathlessly—
“You realize what that implies, Dr. Constantine? We are harbouring a professional burglar in this house!”
Constantine nodded.
“I find it even more disquieting to remember that we are harbouring the murderer of Major Carew,” he said mildly.
Miss Amy blenched. Her little triumph collapsed like a pricked bubble, and she became a very frightened elderly lady.
“Oh!” she whispered. “I’d forgotten poor Major Carew. And if he thinks we suspect him, the man must be desperate by now. I wish we could get away!”
Stuart came impetuously to the rescue.
“Don’t you worry, Miss Adderley,” he said reassuringly. “We’re on the watch now, and we’ll take good care of you and your sister between us. He won’t find much further scope for his activities.”
“He got Mrs. Cloude’s jewels quite easily,” pointed out Miss Adderley with unerring logic. “The moment the roads are clear I shall take my sister away.”
“You suggested that the thief might know we suspect him,” said Constantine. “Had you any one special in mind, Miss Adderley?”
The panic in her eyes gave place to bewilderment.
“Whom could I have?” she asked helplessly. “There is no one, unless it’s that Mr. Melnotte. He never seems to be there when anything happens, does he? But that’s not really a reason for suspecting him, and he certainly doesn’t look like a professional burglar.”
“What is everybody doing downstairs?” asked Stuart, more in the hope of turning her mind to more harmless topics than from any real desire for information.
“When I came away, Girling was just about to lock up the barn, and Bates was going with him to take a last look round.”
“How was the barn first entered this evening, by the way?” asked Constantine. “As you had to break open the door to release Lord Romsey, I gather that the lock hadn’t been forced in the first instance. I thought Girling had put the key in a safe place.”
It was Miss Adderley who answered. Since her interview with Bates she had become a fount of information.
“He had. It was locked up in his desk, and Bates says that the lock of the desk was picked too. Just as skilfully as Mrs. Orkney Cloude’s dressing-case. It must, of course, have been the same man.”
“What’s he done about it now?” asked Soames. “The lock’s smashed, and, in any case, he hadn’t got the key.”
Miss Adderley was vague on this point.
“I think he’s doing something with a padlock. He’d got his tools with him. Shall you be sitting up, Mr. Stuart?”
Her voice was pathetically anxious, and Stuart hastened to set her mind at rest. He assured her that he and Soames would be on guard till the servants were up and about.
“So you see you needn’t be anxious,” he concluded. “You’re lucky in one thing. You haven’t got a balcony to your room.”
Miss Amy cast a stricken glance at him as she backed out of the doorway.
“For all we know, he may be a cat-burglar,” she said.
Stuart waited till he heard her door close, then he turned reproachfully to Constantine.
“You frightened the poor old thing half out of her wits,” he said. “She’s been jumpy enough over the whole business, as it is.”
Constantine’s thoughts were evidently elsewhere.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured vaguely. “It was stupid of me to say what I did, but my mind was so full of the vanishing gentleman that I forgot to allow for Miss Adderley’s nerves. What is bothering me is this. The roads will be clear very soon now, and, as soon as they are, we shall have the man from New Scotland Yard upon us. A professional burglar won’t take the risk of being recognized. If we’re not careful he’ll slip through our fingers before the London man gets here.”
“As he was trying to do to-night,” insisted Soames stubbornly.
Constantine smiled.
“As the Romseys will have no chance of doing so long as you’re about, my dear Soames,” he amended. “I’m trusting you to look after them.”
The muscles round Soames’s mouth stiffened.
“I shall,” he rejoined shortly, as he left the room, presumably to take up his old post on the landing occupied by his special quarry.
In less than a quarter of an hour he was back again.
“Things are getting beyond a joke,” he announced acridly.
Stuart was feeling both jaded and sleepy, and he cordially agreed with him. Constantine, who, a book in one hand, the other fondling the bowl of his pipe, seemed to be the only member of the party completely unaffected by the long vigil, surveyed him quizzically.
“You are not going to tell me that the Romseys have taken French leave while your back was turned?” he protested.
Soames ignored the gibe.
“Did you look at any of the tyres in the barn when you were there?” he demanded of Stuart.
“No. I never went into the barn. Bates said they were all right. Why do you ask?”
“Because they’re anything but all right now. Somebody’s had a go at the tyres with a knife, and done the job pretty thoroughly, too. The only car that’s escaped is yours. Every one of the others has been put out of action.”
