The First R. Austin Freeman Megapack: 27 Mystery Tales of Dr. Thorndyke & Others

by R. Austin Freeman

  The big car whirled us rapidly over Blackfriars Bridge into the region of the Borough, whence we presently turned down Tooley Street towards Bermondsey.

  As soon as Dockhead came into view, the detective, Thorndyke and I, alighted and proceeded on foot, leaving our client, who was now closely veiled, to follow at a little distance in the car. Opposite the head of St. Saviour’s Dock, Thorndyke halted and, looking over the wall, drew my attention to the snowy powder that had lodged on every projection on the backs of the tall buildings and on the decks of the barges that were loading with the flour and ground rice. Then, crossing the road, he pointed to the wooden lantern above the roof of the spice works, the louvres of which were covered with greyish-buff dust.

  “Thus,” he moralized, “does commerce subserve the ends of justice—at least, we hope it does,” he added quickly, as Miller disappeared into the semi-basement of the buildings.

  We met the detective returning from his quest as we entered the building.

  “No go there,” was his report. “We’ll try the next floor.”

  This was the ground-floor, or it might be considered the first floor. At any rate, it yielded nothing of interest, and, after a glance at the doors that opened on the landing, he strode briskly up the stone stairs. The next floor was equally unrewarding, for our eager inspection disclosed nothing but the gaping keyhole associated with the common type of night-latch.

  “What name was you wanting?” inquired a dusty knight of industry who emerged from one of the flats.

  “Muggs,” replied Miller, with admirable promptness.

  “Don’t know ’im,” said the workman. “I expect it’s farther up.”

  Farther up we accordingly went, but still from each door the artless grin of the invariable keyhole saluted us with depressing monotony. I began to grow uneasy, and when the fourth floor had been explored with no better result, my anxiety became acute. A mare’s nest may be an interesting curiosity, but it brings no kudos to its discoverer.

  “I suppose you haven’t made any mistake, sir?” said Miller, stopping to wipe his brow.

  “It’s quite likely that I have,” replied Thorndyke, with unmoved composure. “I only proposed this search as a tentative proceeding, you know.”

  The superintendent grunted. He was accustomed—as was I too, for that matter—to regard Thorndyke’s “tentative suggestions” as equal to another man’s certainties.

  “It will be an awful suck-in for Mrs. Chater if we don’t find him after all,” he growled as we climbed up the last flight. “She’s counted her chickens to a feather.” He paused at the head of the stairs and stood for a few moments looking round the landing. Suddenly he turned eagerly, and, laying his hand on Thorndyke’s arm, pointed to a door in the farthest corner.

  “Yale lock!” he whispered impressively.

  We followed him silently as he stole on tiptoe across the landing, and watched him as he stood for an instant with the key in his land looking gloatingly at the brass disc. We saw him softly apply the nose of the fluted key-blade to the crooked slit in the cylinder, and, as we watched, it slid noiselessly up to the shoulder. The detective looked round with a grin of triumph, and, silently withdrawing the key, stepped back to us.

  “You’ve run him to earth, sir,” he whispered, “but I don’t think Mr. Fox is at home. He can’t have got back yet.”

  “Why not?” asked Thorndyke.

  Miller waved his hand towards the door. “Nothing has been disturbed,” he replied. “There’s not a mark on the paint. Now he hadn’t got the key, and you can’t pick a Yale lock. He’d have had to break in, and he hasn’t broken in.”

  Thorndyke stepped up to the door and softly pushed in the flap of the letter-slit, through which he looked into the flat.

  “There’s no letter-box,” said he. “My dear Miller, I would undertake to open that door in five minutes with a foot of wire and a bit of resined string.”

  Miller shook his head and grinned once more. “I am glad you’re not on the lay, sir; you’d be one too many for us. Shall we signal to the lady?”

  I went out onto the gallery and looked down at the waiting car., Mrs. Chater was staring intently up at the building, and the little crowd that the car had collected stared alternately at the lady and at the object of her regard. I wiped my face with my handkerchief—the signal agreed upon—and she instantly sprang out of the car, and in an incredibly short time she appeared on the landing, purple and gasping, but with the fire of battle flashing from her eyes.

  “We’ve found his flat, madam,” said Miller, “and we’re going to enter. You’re not intending to offer any violence, I hope,” he added, noting with some uneasiness the lady’s ferocious expression.

  “Of course I’m not,” replied Mrs. Chater. “In the States ladies don’t have to avenge insults themselves. If you were American men you’d hang the ruffian from his own bedpost.”

  “We’re riot American men, madam,” said the superintendent stiffly. “We are law-abiding Englishmen, and, moreover, we are all officers of the law. These gentlemen are barristers and I am a police officer.”

  With this preliminary caution, he once more inserted the key, and as he turned it and pushed the door open, we all followed him into the sitting-room.

  “I told you so, sir,” said Miller, softly shutting the door; “he hasn’t come back yet.”

  Apparently he was right. At any rate, there was no one in the flat, and we proceeded unopposed on our tour of inspection. It was a miserable spectacle, and, as we wandered from one squalid room to another, a feeling of pity for the starving wretch into whose lair we were intruding stole over me and began almost to mitigate the hideousness of his crime. On all sides poverty—utter, grinding poverty—stared us in the face. It looked at us hollow-eyed in the wretched sitting-room, with its bare floor, its solitary chair and tiny deal table; its unfurnished walls and windows destitute of blind or curtain. A piece of Dutch cheese-rind on the table, scraped to the thinness of paper, whispered of starvation; and famine lurked in the gaping cupboard, in the empty bread-tin, in the tea-caddy with its pinch of dust at the bottom, in the jam-jar, wiped clean, as a few crumbs testified, with a crust of bread. There was not enough food in the place to furnish a meal for a healthy mouse.

  The bedroom told the same tale, but with a curious variation. A miserable truckle-bed with a straw mattress and a cheap jute rug for bed-clothes, an orange-case, stood on end, for a dressing-table, and another, bearing a tin washing-bowl, formed the wretched furniture. But the suit that hung from a couple of nails was well-cut and even fashionable, though shabby; and another suit lay on the floor, neatly folded and covered with a newspaper; and, most incongruous of all, a silver cigarette-case reposed on the dressing-table.

  “Why on earth does this fellow starve,” I exclaimed, “when he has a silver case to pawn?”

  “Wouldn’t do,” said Miller. “A man doesn’t pawn the implements of his trade.”

  Mrs. Chater, who had been staring about her with the mute amazement of a wealthy woman confronted, for the first time, with abject poverty, turned suddenly to the superintendent. “This can’t be the man!” she exclaimed. “You have made some mistake. This poor creature could never have made his way into a house like Willowdale.”

  Thorndyke lifted the newspaper. Beneath it was a dress suit with the shirt, collar and tie all carefully smoothed out and folded. Thorndyke unfolded the shirt and pointed to the curiously crumpled front. Suddenly he brought it close to his eye and then, from the sham diamond stud, he drew a single hair—a woman’s hair.

  “That is rather significant,” said he, holding it up between his finger and thumb; and Mrs. Chater evidently thought so too, for the pity and compunction suddenly faded from her face, and once more her eyes flashed with vindictive fire.

  “I wish he would come,” she exclaimed viciously. “Prison won’t be much hardship to him after this,” but I want to see him in the dock all the same.”

  “No,” the det
ective agreed, “it won’t hurt him much to swap this for Portland. Listen!”

  A key was being inserted into the outer door, and as we all stood like statues, a man entered and closed the door after him. He passed the door of the bedroom without seeing us, and with the dragging steps of a weary, dispirited man. Almost immediately we heard him go to the kitchen and draw water into some vessel. Then he went back to the sitting-room.

  “Come along,” said Miller, stepping silently towards the door. We followed closely, and as he threw the door open, we looked in over his shoulder.

  The man had seated himself at the table, on which now lay a hunk of household bread resting on the paper in which he had brought it, and a tumbler of water. He half rose as the door opened, and as if petrified remained staring at Miller with a dreadful expression of terror upon his livid face.

  At this moment I felt a hand on my arm, and Mrs. Chater brusquely pushed past me into the room. But at the threshold she stopped short; and a singular change crept over the man’s ghastly face, a change so remarkable that I looked involuntarily from him to our client. She had turned, in a moment, deadly pale, and her face had frozen into an expression of incredulous horror.

  The dramatic silence was broken by the matter-of-fact voice of the detective.

  “I am a police officer,” said he, “and I arrest you for—?”

  A peal of hysterical laughter from Mrs. Chater interrupted him, and he looked at her in astonishment. “Stop, stop!” she cried in a shaky voice. “I guess we’ve made a ridiculous mistake. This isn’t the man. This gentleman is Captain Rowland, an old friend of mine.”

  “I’m sorry he’s a friend of yours,” said Miller, “because I shall have to ask you to appear against him.”

  “You can ask what you please,” replied Mrs. Chater. “I tell you he’s not the man.”

  The superintendent rubbed his nose and looked hungrily at his quarry. “Do I understand, madam,” he asked stiffly, “that you refuse to prosecute?”

  “Prosecute!” she exclaimed. “Prosecute my friends for offences that I know they have not committed? Certainly I refuse.”

  The superintendent looked at Thorndyke, but my colleague’s countenance had congealed into a state of absolute immobility and was as devoid of expression as the face of a Dutch clock.

  “Very well,” said Miller, looking sourly at his watch. “Then we have had our trouble for nothing. I wish you good afternoon, madam.”

  “I am sorry I troubled you, now,” said Mrs. Chater.

  “I am sorry you did,” was the curt reply; and the superintendent, flinging the key on the table, stalked out of the room.

  As the outer door slammed the man sat down with an air of bewilderment; and then, suddenly flinging his arms on the table, he dropped his head on them and burst into a passion of sobbing.

  It was very embarrassing. With one accord Thorndyke and I turned to go, but Mrs. Chater motioned us to stay. Stepping over to the man, she touched him lightly on the arm.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked in a tone of gentle reproach.

  The man sat up and flung out one arm in an eloquent gesture that comprehended the miserable room and the yawning cupboard.

  “It was the temptation of a moment,” he said. “I was penniless, and those accursed diamonds were thrust in my face; they were mine for the taking. I was mad, I suppose.”

  “But why didn’t you take them?” she said. “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. The madness passed; and then—when I saw you lying there—? Oh, God! Why don’t you give me up to the police?” He laid his head down and sobbed afresh.

  Mrs. Chater bent over him with tears standing in her pretty grey eyes. “But tell me,” she said, “why didn’t you take the diamonds? You could if you’d liked, I suppose?”

  “What good were they to me?” he demanded passionately. “What did any thing matter to me? I thought you were dead.”

  “Well, I’m not, you see,” she said, with a rather tearful smile; “I’m just as well as an old woman like me can expect to be. And I want your address, so that I can write and give you some good advice.”

  The man sat up and produced a shabby card-case from his pocket, and, as he took out a number of cards and spread them out like the “hand” of a whist player, I caught a twinkle in Thorndyke’s eye.

  “My name is Augustus Bailey,” said the man. He selected the appropriate card, and, having scribbled his address on it with a stump of lead pencil, relapsed into his former position.

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Chater, lingering for a moment by the table. “Now we’ll go. Good-bye, Mr. Bailey. I shall write tomorrow, and you must attend seriously to the advice of an old friend.”

  I held open the door for her to pass out and looked back before I turned to follow. Bailey still sat sobbing quietly, with his hand resting on his arms; and a little pile of gold stood on the corner of the table.

  “I expect, doctor,” said Mrs. Chater, as Thorndyke handed her into the car, “you’ve written me down a sentimental fool.”

  Thorndyke looked at her with an unwonted softening of his rather severe face and answered quietly, “It is written: Blessed are the Merciful.”

  THE OLD LAG (1912)

  PART I

  THE CHANGED IMMUTABLE

  Among the minor and purely physical pleasures of life, I am disposed to rank very highly that feeling of bodily comfort that one experiences on passing from the outer darkness of a wet winter’s night to a cheerful interior made glad by mellow lamplight and blazing hearth. And so I thought when, on a dreary November night, I let myself into our chambers in the Temple and found my friend smoking his pipe in slippered ease, by a roaring fire, and facing an empty arm-chair evidently placed in readiness for me.

  As I shed my damp overcoat, I glanced inquisitively at my colleague, for he held in his hand an open letter, and I seemed to perceive in his aspect something meditative and self-communing—something, in short, suggestive of a new case.

  “I was just considering,” he said, in answer to my inquiring look, “whether I am about to become an accessory after the fact. Read that and give me your opinion.”

  He handed me the letter, which I read aloud.

  “Dear sir, I am in great danger and distress. A warrant has been issued for my arrest on a charge of which I am entirely innocent. Can I come and see you, and will you let me leave in safety? The bearer will wait for a reply.”

  “I said ‘Yes,’ of course; there was nothing else to do,” said Thorndyke. “But if I let him go, as I have promised to do, I shall be virtually conniving at his escape.”

  “Yes, you are taking a risk,” I answered. “When is he coming?”

  “He was due five minutes ago—and I rather think—yes, here he is.”

  A stealthy tread on the landing was followed by a soft tapping on the outer door.

  Thorndyke rose and, flinging open the inner door, unfastened the massive “oak.”

  “Dr. Thorndyke?” inquired a breathless, quavering voice.

  “Yes, come in. You sent me a letter by hand?”

  “I did, sir,” was the reply; and the speaker entered, but at the sight of me he stopped short.

  “This is my colleague, Dr. Jervis,” Thorndyke explained. “You need have no—?”

  “Oh, I remember him,” our visitor interrupted in a tone of relief. “I have seen you both before, you know, and you have seen me too—though I don’t suppose you recognize me,” he added, with: a sickly smile.

  “Frank Belfield?” asked Thorndyke, smiling also.

  Our visitor’s jaw fell and he gazed at my colleague in sudden dismay.

  “And I may remark,” pursued Thorndyke, “that for a man in your perilous position, you are running most unnecessary risks. That wig, that false beard and those spectacles—through which you obviously cannot see—are enough to bring the entire police force at your heels. It is not wise for a man who is wanted by the police to make up as though he had just escaped from
a comic opera.”

  Mr. Belfield seated himself with a groan, and, taking off his spectacles, stared stupidly from one of us to the other.

  “And now tell us about your little affair,” said Thorndyke. “You say that you are innocent?”

  “I swear it, doctor,” replied Belfield; adding, with great earnestness, “And you may take it from me, sir, that if I was not, I shouldn’t be here. It was you that convicted me last time, when I thought myself quite safe, so I know your ways too well to try to gammon you.”

  “If you are innocent,” rejoined Thorndyke, “I will do what I can for you; and if you are not—well, you would have been wiser to stay away.”

  “I know that well enough,” said Belfield, “and I am only afraid that you won’t believe what I am going to tell you.”

  “I shall keep an open mind, at any rate,” replied Thorndyke.

  “If you only will,” groaned Belfield, “I shall have a look in, in spite of them all. You know, sir, that I have been on the crook, but I have paid in full. That job when you tripped me up was the last of it—it was, sir, so help me. It was a woman that changed me—the best and truest woman on God’s earth. She said she would marry me when I came out if I promised her to go straight and live an honest life. And she kept her promise—and I have kept mine. She found me work as clerk in a warehouse and I have stuck to it ever since, earning fair wages and building up a good character as an honest, industrious man. I thought all was going well, and that I was settled for life, when only this very morning the whole thing comes tumbling about my ears like a house of cards.”

  “What happened this morning, then?” asked Thorndyke.

  “Why, I was on my way to work when, as I passed the police station, I noticed a bill with the heading ‘Wanted’ and a photograph. I stopped for a moment to look at it, and you may imagine my feelings when I recognized my own portrait—taken at Holloway—and read my own name and description. I did not stop to read the bill through, but ran back home and told my wife, and she ran down to the station and read the bill carefully. Good God, sir! What do you think I am wanted for?” He paused for a moment, and then replied in breathless tones to his own question: “The Camber-well murder!”