by Ashby, R. C.
Mr. Ahrman tried to pacify her, but it was no good and she screamed. Two miles away! They must have heard in South Shields and all down the Tyne. But one scream was enough, and Mr. Ahrman gave in and told the men to dig.
So they dug, and I dug, and I was so excited I could feel in my bones I was going to turn something up in a minute, gold or diamonds or dead men’s bones; but the minutes went by and we didn’t find anything. Molly had told us wrong; if there was a place this wasn’t it.
“Go on!” she kept saying greedily. “Go on!”
Mr. Ahrman looked annoyed, standing there smoking his pipe.
He never said a word.
After a bit I said: “It’s no good, Molly. The treasure isn’t here. I’ve got it down to solid rock.” And in a minute the other two men agreed with me. So Molly saw it wasn’t any good, and as she was greedy to get the treasure she said: “Stop then, and try somewhere else.”
Mr. Ahrman turned away and began walking round the walls, striking them and beating the weeds and nettles, and at last he came to a place where there weren’t any weeds and nettles, and there he stood still, looking down. Then he called: “Mertoun!”
Mr. Mertoun went over to him, and I went too, because I pretended to myself that I’d heard him call Hamleth.
“Do you remember,” Mr. Ahrman was saying, “that in the edifying discourse to which you referred a few minutes ago, we learned—unless I’m very much mistaken—that the relics discovered by our friend who spoke on the radio were found in an underground chamber, below the level of the broch. Well, why not here? And since you ask me so nicely, what do you think of this for the place?”
As I said before, where he was standing there was no undergrowth, only a lot of big, scattered stones, fallen from the broken wall above.
“Supposing,” said Ahrman, “there was the entrance to an underground cache, under the stones?”
Mr. Mertoun went down on his knees and rolled a couple of the big stones over.
“Look!” he said excitedly.
“What?”
“These stones I’ve just moved . . . the grass was green underneath them!”
“And what does that mean, Sherlock?”
“I don’t know!”
“It means,” said Mr. Ahrman, “that they’ve been moved from their original position, and recently. Quite right, friend, and I moved them.”
“You? I didn’t see you.”
“I moved them on Wednesday night,” said Mr. Ahrman, “when you saw me go out at two o’clock in the morning. But don’t tell anybody.”
Mr. Mertoun was dumbfounded. So was I.
“What!” Mr. Mertoun said. “You came here on Wednesday night, alone?”
“Sure.”
“But . . . good lord!”
“I had an automatic.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Wanted to have a look round by myself before the circus came.”
“You might have brought me!”
“A look round by myself, I said. . . . Somebody’s coming.”
It was me moving in the shadow that hid me, so when I knew I was seen I came out into the ring of torchlight.
“Are we going to dig here, Mr. Ahrman?” I said.
“We are,” he said. “Here—give me your spade, and you get one from the other men. Mertoun, call the others and tell them I want all these stones rolled away to the other side, every one, well out of the way.”
So they did that and it took quite a while, but when it was done the bare ground was revealed, and the round white beams of the torches drew together and they all poured down their circle of blazing white light on one place, where the earth had been loosened and trampled down.
“Now, Hamleth!” said Mr. Ahrman; and he and I put our spades to it with one great heave of earth.
Down . . . down . . . not two feet, and my spade struck something hard, and I gave a kind of shout that must have sounded queer, as if I were being strangled. So we turned all the earth away, and it wasn’t an underground chamber, it was a box; a blackened box made of I don’t know what—wood or steel—with iron bands. When we had it free it must have been four feet by two, a great hulking thing.
“Smash it open!” said Mr. Ahrman, and I did. The first thing that we saw was a flash of scarlet, and evil it looked, winking up at the white light of the torches. I wouldn’t have touched it for a hundred pounds, but Mr. Ahrman stooped down and lifted it up, and there it was, stained and draggled and tattered, the tunic of a Roman soldier.
Molly gave a little cry and fell down all in a heap. She never said another word about treasure. I found myself holding my head with both hands. It was all there—the battered breast-plate, the sandals, the helmet. . . .
Mr. Mertoun’s face was as white as a sheet.
“It is! It is!” he gasped. “The twisted neck-guard, bent from a blow. I saw it that night . . .”
“What is all this? Who are you?” a voice cracked out.
We all whirled round, and in the broken doorway there stood a man, a furiously angry man with bare head and unshaven chin, a pistol in one hand and a torch in the other.
“Charlie!” cried Mr. Mertoun.
“Who’s that? . . . Oh, Mertoun, it’s you! You gave me a nasty turn. I saw lights moving up here, and I couldn’t imagine what on earth was happening.”
“So you came up to see? By Jove, Charlie, I admire your pluck.”
“Of course I came to see. I was ready to shoot too. But what are you doing? Why, there are dozens of you!”
Mr. Ahrman stepped forward. “Mr. Barr, I believe? Well, we’re trespassing, Mr. Barr, but I believe this isn’t your land? No? That’s good; it spares us a profound apology. And we’ve just made the discovery of a lifetime.”
“What’s that?”
Mr. Ahrman held up a scarlet rag and a battered helmet of tarnished brass.
“Those? You never found them here? . . . But, by Jupiter, they must be at least fifteen hundred years old!”
The mad doctor and I were still kneeling by the smashed box, and suddenly he pushed his hand down into it. “There’s something else here,” he whispered to me. “Ah!” He shouted it. Everybody turned to see.
The mad doctor was holding up something that I couldn’t account for; it looked like a veil of grey gauze, but he shook it in front of his own puzzled eyes, and what do you think fell out of its folds? Why, the stub-end of a fat, pale-brown cigarette.
“Not quite so old as that!” I heard Mr. Ahrman’s voice ring out, and suddenly all the men in the enclosure seemed to rush together and there was a crash and a thud, and a torch whizzed through the air like a comet and narrowly missed the mad doctor’s head.
I slipped away into the shadows until I heard what I was waiting to hear . . . his voice again.
“Charles Barr,” he said, “I am Inspector Ahrman of New Scotland Yard, and I have with me the district Superintendent of Police and two constables. I hold a warrant for your arrest on a charge of murdering Ian Barr and James Blaik, and I warn you that anything you say may be used as evidence against you.”
I didn’t wait to hear another word; afterwards I was sorry for anything I might have missed, but at the time I was in a hurry to get home.
I ran nearly all of that nine miles. When I got to the farm dawn had broken and its pink fingers were trailing through the eastern sky. The farm was just waking, and Winifred stood watching for me at the yard gate.
I ran right up to her and looked her in the face.
I said to her: “They’ve got that devil.”
“Who have?” she said.
“The police,” I said.
“Thank God,” was all she said. And then she began to cry.
Here ends the diary of Hamleth Goff.
PART III
ahrman’s report
i
THE trial of Charles Barr, alias Chippy Barron, alias Doctor Gladius, lasted for eight days and occupied the headlines of both London and New York newspapers; though the greater sensation was probably apparent in New York, where Doctor Gladius, the psycho-analyst, had conducted his fashionable practice. The prosecution brought many witnesses across the Atlantic to identify the accused and to give evidence of the nature of his activities in the States. Among them, curiously enough, was a Texas Ranger called Phillips who held a nine-year-old warrant for the arrest of one Chippy Barron on a charge of robbery and murder at Galveston, Texas, in 1922. Phillips had long ago given up hope of ever discovering his man and was emphatic in his identification of the accused. He even went so far as to talk loudly of extradition so that Texas might have the honour of dispatching its own miscreant, but this was out of the question.
The New York witnesses included men and women well known in business and society, so well known that for their own sakes their names were suppressed to the newspaper-reading public.
Doctor Gladius had practised in New York for about four years, from 1926 to 1930. He had been all the rage in his day, a society craze. His luxurious apartment on Riverside Drive had contained silver-framed photographs of his distinguished clients; his limousine was a gift from the van B—— family, which was among the first ten of New York’s four hundred. The income of Doctor Gladius at the height of his fame was estimated at something like twenty-five thousand dollars, and where it went to nobody knew, except that when he finally disappeared from Riverside Drive he left behind him nothing but debts, and had he remained he would have found himself in a very tight position indeed. Doctor Gladius, in fact, got away while the going was good.
II
The full story of his career emerged like the picture on a jig-saw puzzle.
His father, Roland Barr, was an Englishman; his mother came from Milwaukee and had Indian blood; in fact, her father was said to be a full-blooded Sioux. I say, said to be, for this was not proved. The son, Charles Barr, was brought up, as you might say, all over the place, his father having independent means and a roving disposition. His education was comprehensive, if unconventional, and at eighteen he had half a dozen completely different handwritings of which he was master, and, what is noteworthy, three different voices. Displaying this last trick of his, he would stand behind a screen and carry on a conversation between three men, so flawlessly that even a critical listener could not catch him tripping. As a young man he left home to go on the stage. His father died; his mother married again; Charles Barr was no more, and a certain Chippy Barron appeared in Galveston, Texas, in a Stetson hat, with his pockets full of money.
Mr. Barron made a good living in—or I should say, out of—Galveston, until some years later when he went too far. He broke into a ranch-house some few miles out of town on the night after a big deal in stock had taken place, opened a safe containing several thousand dollars in bills, was surprised and recognized by two occupants of the house, fought, shot and mortally wounded one of them, and escaped, never to be seen again—not as Chippy Barron, anyway.
I don’t think he was ever cut out for burglary or violence. His brain was better than his hands, and he realized it. He was capable of subtler methods, capable of commercializing his wits and talents.
A few years went by; and Doctor Gladius dawned upon New York. The years had doubtless been spent in preparation for that dawning. To outward appearance his profession was harmless enough and even praiseworthy. He undertook to cure all the neuroses and phobias induced by the hot-speed living of a hectic city. At a price, of course. He had the sense to know that cheapness is never fashionable, and that a twenty-dollar fee for a consultation would ensure him the very best clients and plenty of them. Further treatments might run you into the hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars. Stories came out and ran round the town. A Jewish banker’s wife, worn out with maintaining her position as the best-dressed woman on Long Island, became a victim of persecution mania. A guilty conscience, probably. Doctor Gladius held her fat hand and cured her in six visits. He charged her a thousand dollars, and she continued her visits from time to time at the same rate of fee, and sent all her friends.
The breaking of Miss Victorine M——’s engagement “by mutual consent” caused a nine days’ wonder. Miss M——, having eaten nothing during this period, was taken by her mother and two chauffeurs to Doctor Gladius’s exquisite reception-room, where she confessed that she had been jilted in favour of an English peer’s daughter, just over on a visit. She emerged an hour later strangely radiant, and left next day for Europe, where three months afterwards she was married to a Balkan prince. She then confessed that Doctor Gladius had prophesied this pleasant eventuality, but withheld details. For the next six weeks the apartment on Riverside Drive was besieged by society buds, all clamouring for Balkan princes. They didn’t get them, though they paid in hundreds of dollars and confessed to having been thrilled by the processes of the consulting-room. Hundreds of business men were rejuvenated and vowed that, queerly enough, their businesses looked up from the day they went to Doctor Gladius; hundreds of society women were restored from their boredom, languor, and neurasthenia to plunge again into the whirl of social triumphs.
What was the secret of it all? Of course it was hypnotism at its most subtle and powerful. Literal hypnotism with no frills. On that point a great deal of the evidence at the trial turned. Of course the great point of the defence was to deny in toto that the accused had ever practised, in fact had any knowledge whatever of, hypnotism. Was incapable of hypnotizing a rabbit; had never tried to hypnotize so much as a rabbit, and would have no notion as to how to go about the process did he so desire. What did he do with his clients? Held their hands, gazed into their eyes, and crooned in a monotonous, soothing voice about pleasant, vague matters. The room was just right. Silver walls and ceiling; indirect lighting, amber and subdued; a black carpet; a bowl of white orchids fresh each day, in and out of season; great chairs, soft as sinking into a cloud; a ball of crystal held in the silver hands of a classic statuette. Simple applied psychology, said the defence. Ha ha, said the prosecution; gazed into their eyes, did he? Call Mr. Meakin of Des Moines, Iowa. And Mr. Meakin admitted that he had once run a School of Necromancy—what a title!—and taught heaven knows what queer arts, chiefly to actors who wished to tour the States under the title of Professor Knebiolski or The Western Wizard. He identified the accused as one of his most proficient pupils between the years 1924 and ’26. Accused had afterwards gone to New York and practised under the name of Doctor Gladius. Was accused capable of hypnotism? Capable! Why that fellow could have hypnotized a deaf-and-dumb cow-puncher two hundred miles away so that he couldn’t get down off his horse until he was released from the control.
Defence tried hard to discredit this witness and stuck to its former position; in fact, Barr’s line throughout was total and absolute denial of all the charges brought against him.
As I said some time ago, though Doctor Gladius was minting money he was spending a good deal more than he made; in fact, his position promised to be nasty. It was also rumoured that the new District Attorney of New York County had an eye on such practices as his own; not that he was in any way suspect, but all the same he had to consider the future.
Barr had always been interested in his English father’s family history and was well up in its details. He confided to one of his clients, an elderly man-about-town, that his father’s family, consisting of three bachelor uncles, owned an estate in England and a fortune of several million dollars. He was the only child of his father and therefore heir-presumptive to this richness, though the bachelor uncles were quite unaware of his existence and therefore capable of leaving the lot to charity. What ought Barr—or rather, Doctor Gladius—to do? T
he elderly man-about-town client thought that under the circumstances he personally would write. So Charlie Barr wrote, just a nice, simple, friendly letter from a long-lost nephew, and back came a very cordial and gratifying answer from the three elderly Barrs in England suggesting that their brother’s son whom they had never seen should come over on a visit. Charlie declined. The idea didn’t appeal to him. A few months later he was informed of the death of his Uncle Bourdon, the eldest of the three bachelors. “Uncle Bourdon is dead,” a letter informed him. “You will some day be heir to our house and estate. Won’t you come over and make your home here?”
“It’ll be a long time to wait!” thought Doctor Gladius. “They may live twenty years yet.” And I suppose at once came the horrid thought—need they?
So he realized his dwindling funds, buried Doctor Gladius in a single night, and slipped away to England to see for himself. Being an opportunist he had no plans, and at first the outlook in that desolate spot would seem bad—until he stumbled upon the legend of the Roman ghost and saw how it could be worked up into a monstrous fraud. It was so essentially the material most suitable for his peculiar talents.
He would begin cautiously, gently reviving the legend, keeping it alive, inducing people to talk, with understanding of a village’s powers of repetition and exaggeration.
Then the spirit in the house. First, things moved out of place, with infinite caution and patient persistence until somebody begins to notice and the servants talk and it gets to the ears of the masters. Easy then to become more daring, run downstairs one night and pop a hat from the hall into a kitchen saucepan. The poltergeist has arrived. And later still a convenient thunderstorm gives him the opportunity to play that trick with the marmalade and convince everybody of supernatural activities. Meanwhile he is the dutiful nephew, keeping himself to himself on the pretext of having much writing to do, amusing himself with frequent holidays. Being canny—as the local people say—with their money, his uncles had put him upon an allowance which they considered sufficient for a young man; hence more grounds for resentment when he thought of the fortune which was piling up and which he might never touch until he was too old to enjoy it.
