“I am not surprised,” said Osmond, with a slightly sheepish grin. “It was beyond even your powers to conceive the possible actions of an impulsive fool who has mistaken the facts. However, as I have put you to the trouble of trying to account for my unaccountable conduct, it is only fair that I should make it clear, if I can; even though I know that when I have finished, your opinion of me will be like Bumble’s opinion of the Law—that I am ‘a ass and a idiot.’”
“I hardly think that very likely,” said Thorndyke, turning a twinkling eye on Betty. “As I said just now, you seem to have brought a most unpromising affair to an extraordinarily satisfactory conclusion which is not at all suggestive of ‘a ass and a idiot.’”
“But,” objected Osmond, “the satisfactory conclusion which you are putting to my credit is entirely your own work. I set up the obstacles; you knocked them down. However, we need not argue the point in advance. I will tell you the story and you shall judge for yourself.”
CHAPTER XX
OSMOND’S MOTIVE
“In order to make my position clear,” Osmond began, “it is necessary for me to say certain things to you, my best and kindest of friends, which I should not confide to any other human creature. I shall have to confess to thoughts and suspicions which were probably quite unjust and unreasonable and which are now uttered subject to the seal of the confession.”
The two lawyers bowed gravely in acknowledgement, and Osmond continued: “I was introduced to Mr. Woodstock, as you know, by my brother-in-law, Mr. Hepburn; and I may say that I accepted the post chiefly that I might be near my sister. She and I had always been very devoted to one another, and from the time when I left Oxford up to the date of her marriage we had lived under one roof; and that was how she came to make the acquaintance of Hepburn.
“I did not encourage the intimacy, but neither could I hinder it. She was of a responsible age and she knew her own mind. The end of it was that, after an engagement lasting a few months, they were married, and there was nothing more to be said. But I was rather troubled about it. I had known Hepburn nearly all my life. We had been at school together and the greater part of our time at Oxford, where we belonged to the same college, Merton. Through all those years we were on the footing of intimate friends—rather oddly, for we were very different in temperament and tastes, and, indeed, had very little in common—and we knew one another extremely well. I don’t know what Hepburn thought of me, but I must confess that I never had much of an opinion of him. He was a clever man; rather too clever, to my taste. An excellent manager, very much on the spot, and in fact decidedly cunning; fearfully keen on the main chance, fond of money and ambitious to be rich, and none too scrupulous in his ideas. At school he was one of those boys who contrive to increase their pocket-money by all sorts of mysterious little deals, and the same tendency showed up at Oxford. I didn’t like his ways at all. I always had the feeling that, if he should ever be tempted by an opportunity to make a haul by illegitimate means, he might be led by his acquisitiveness to do something shady.
“However, his morals were not in my custody and were none of my business until he began to visit us at my rooms, where I was living with my sister. Then I gave her a few words of warning; but they took no effect. He made himself acceptable to her, and, as I have said, they became engaged and eventually, when Hepburn took up his job with Woodstock, married. For a year or two I saw little of them—I was articled to a solicitor in London; but when I was fully qualified Hepburn, at my sister’s suggestion, offered to speak to Woodstock on my behalf, and the result was that I entered the office, as you have heard.
“And now I come to the particular transaction. Woodstock’s office was, as you know, conducted in a rather happy-go-lucky fashion, especially as regards the strong-room. The key hung on the wall practically all day. Usually, Woodstock took it away with him at night; but quite frequently, when Woodstock was away for a night, it would be left in Hepburn’s charge. Occasionally it was left with me; and on one occasion, at least, Wampole had charge of it for a night. And each of us four, Woodstock, Hepburn, Wampole, and myself, had a key of the outer door and could enter the premises whenever we pleased. You will remember, too, that the house was empty, out of office hours. There was no caretaker.
“Now, one night when I had been out on the river and got home rather late, I found that I had run out of tobacco. The shops were all shut, but I remembered that there was a nearly full tin in my desk at the office, so I ran round there to fill my pouch. I am always rather quiet in my movements, and perhaps, as it was late, I may have moved, instinctively, more silently than usual. Moreover, I still wore my rubber-soled boating-shoes. Well, I let myself in with my key and entered the office, leaving the outer door ajar. As I came in through the clerks’ office I could see through the open doorway that there was a light in Woodstock’s office and that the door of the strong-room was open. A good deal surprised at this, I stopped and listened. There were sounds of someone moving about in the strong-room, and I was on the point of going in to see who it was when Hepburn came out with one of Hollis’s boxes in his hand. And at that moment the outer door blew-to with a bang.
“At the sound of the closing door Hepburn started and whisked round to re-enter the strong-room. Then he saw me standing in the dark office, and I shall never forget his look of terror. He turned as white as a ghost and nearly dropped the box. Of course I sang out to let him know who I was and apologized for giving him such a start, but it was a minute or two before he recovered himself, and when he did he was decidedly huffy with me for creeping in so silently. His explanation of the affair was quite simple. He had been up to London with Woodstock, who had stayed in town for the night and had sent him down with a consignment of valuable securities which the firm were taking charge of. Not liking to have them in his personal possession, he had come on to the office to deposit them in the strong-room; and then, while he was there, he had taken the opportunity of checking Hollis’s boxes, which he informed me he was in the habit of doing periodically and usually after office hours.
“The explanation was, as I have said, quite simple; indeed, no explanation seemed to be called for. There was nothing in the least abnormal about the affair. When I had once more apologized for the fright that I had given him, I filled my pouch and we went away together, and I dismissed the matter from my mind.
“I don’t suppose I should ever have given the incident another thought if nothing had occurred to remind me of it. The months went by and it seemed to have passed completely out of my memory. Then Hollis dropped his bomb-shell into the office. Some one among us, he declared, had secretly opened his boxes and stolen his gems; and until that somebody was identified, we were all more or less under suspicion.
“Of course, Hepburn scouted the idea of there having been any robbery at all, and so did Wampole. They both pointed to the unbroken seals and declared that the thing was a physical impossibility; and I should have been disposed to take the same view, in spite of the strong evidence of the missing emerald. But as soon as I heard the charge, that scene in the office came back to me in a flash; and now, somehow, it did not look by any means so natural and simple as it had at the time. I recalled Hepburn’s terrified stare at me; his pale face and trembling hands. Of course, my sudden appearance must have been startling enough to upset anyone’s nerves; but it now seemed to me that his fright had been out of all proportion to the cause.
“Then, when I came to think it over, the whole affair seemed very characteristic of Hepburn; of his greed for money, his slyness, his cunning, calculating ways. The property which had been stolen was of great value, and I did not doubt that Hepburn would have annexed it without a qualm if he could have done so with complete safety. But it had been done so skilfully that the risk had been almost entirely eliminated. It was a very clever robbery. But for the merest chance the things would have gone back to Hollis’s cabinet unchallenged; and when they had been there a week or two the issues would have become hopelessly confused
. It would have been impossible to say when or where the robbery had been committed. The whole affair had been most cunningly planned and neatly carried out. I felt that, if Hepburn had been the robber, that was just the way in which he would have done it.
“Moreover, the robbery—if there had really been one, as I had no doubt there had—seemed to lie between three, or at the most, four of us: those who had easy access to the strong-room. But of these Woodstock was out of the question, Wampole had practically no access to the strong-room and was an old and trusted servant of irreproachable character, and as I was out of it, there remained only Hepburn. Whichever way I thought of the affair, everything seemed to point to him, and whenever I thought of it the vision came back to me of that scared figure standing by the the strong-room door with the box of gems in his hand.
“But I need not go into any further detail. The bald fact is that it appeared to me beyond a doubt that Hepburn was the thief, and the only question was, what was to be done. The fat was in the fire. The police would be called in. The stolen property would be traced and the crime pretty certainly brought I home to Hepburn. That was how I forecast the probable course of events.
“Now, if Hepburn had been a single man it would have been no affair of mine. But he was my sister’s husband and the father of my two little nephews, who had been to me like my own children. If Hepburn had been convicted of this crime, my sister’s life would have been absolutely wrecked. It would have broken her heart; and as for the two little boys, their future would have been utterly and irrevocably damned. I couldn’t bear to think of it. But was there any way out? It seemed to me that there was. I was a bachelor with no home-ties but my sister and the kiddies. I had always had a desire to travel and see the world. Well, now was the time. If I cleared off to some out-of-the-way region, the dangerous inquiries at the office would stop at once and the whole hue-and-cry would be transferred to me. So I decided to go. And the place that I selected as my destination was Adaffia, where I knew that an old friend of Hepburn’s had settled as a trader.
“But I thought I would take Hepburn into my confidence and give him a chance of doing the same by me, only I am afraid I rather muddled the business. The fact is that, when it came to the point, I was a little shy of telling him exactly what was in my mind. It is a delicate business, telling a man that you have discovered him to be a thief. So I hummed and hawed and approached the subject gradually by remarking that it looked as if there would be wigs on the green presently. But that cat didn’t jump. Hepburn declined to admit that any robbery had occurred in the office. However, I persisted that we should presently have the police buzzing about the office and that then the position would become mighty uncomfortable for some of us. Still, he professed to be—and, of course, was—quite unconcerned; but when I went on to suggest that if I took a little holiday the state of affairs at the office would be made more comfortable for everybody, he stared at me in astonishment, as well he might. Of course, I could think of nothing but what I had seen that night when I caught him coming out of the strong-room, and I took it for granted that he realized what was in my mind, so that his astonishment didn’t surprise me.
“‘Wouldn’t it look a bit queer if you went away just now?’ he asked.
“‘That is just the point,” I replied. ‘I’ll hop off, they will leave the office alone and there will be no more trouble.’
“He seemed a good deal puzzled, but he didn’t raise any objections; and of course he did not make any confidences, which again did not very much surprise me. He was the very soul of caution and secretiveness.
“‘Where did you think of going for your holiday?’ he asked.
“I told him that I thought of running over to Adaffia to call on Larkom, the trader there, and suggested that he should send Larkom a letter introducing me. He didn’t much like writing that letter, and he liked it less when I mentioned that I proposed to travel under the name of Walker. However, Larkom was an old friend whom he knew that he could trust, so, in the end, he agreed to write the letter. And that settled the affair. In due course I went off in the comfortable belief that he understood the position exactly, leaving him considerably surprised but quite confident that he knew all about the robbery. It was a very pretty comedy of errors; but it would have become a tragedy but for your wonderful insight and for the strange chance that the results of your investigations should have found their way into the newspapers. That is to say, if it was a chance.”
“It was not a chance,” said Mr. Penfield. “As a matter of fact, Dr. Thorndyke wrote out the account himself and broadcast it to all the papers, including those of the United States.”
“Why did you do that?” Betty inquired, with a glance of intense curiosity at Thorndyke.
“For two reasons,” the latter replied: “one obvious, the other less so. In the first place, Osmond had been publicly accused, and as there had been no trial, there had been no public withdrawal of the accusation. But he was a man of honourable antecedents and irreproachable character. Common justice demanded that his innocence should be proclaimed at least as widely as had been the presumption of his guilt. Even if he were dead, it was necessary that his memory should be cleared of all reproach. But, in the second place, it was not at all clear to me that he was dead.”
“The deuce it wasn’t!” exclaimed Osmond. “I thought I had settled that question beyond any possible doubt. But you were not satisfied?”
“No. The report which reached me was singularly unconvincing, and there were certain actual discrepancies. Take first the general appearance of the alleged occurrences; here is a man, a fugitive from justice, whose purpose is to disappear. He lands at Adaffia and in the course of a week or two is reported to have died. Now, West Africa is a very unhealthy place, but people don’t usually drop down dead as soon as they arrive there. On the contrary. The mortality among newcomers is quite small. Death is most commonly due to the cumulative effects of repeated attacks of malaria and does not ordinarily occur during the first year of residence. Osmond’s death under the circumstances alleged was not in agreement with ordinary probabilities.
“Then the fact of death was not certified or corroborated. The officer who reported it had not seen the body; he had only seen the grave. But to a man of my profession, the uncorroborated grave of a man who is admittedly trying to escape from the police is an object of deep suspicion. The possibility of a sham burial was obvious. This man, on leaving his home, had made a bee-line for Adaffia, an insignificant village on the African coast the existence of which was unknown to the immense majority of persons, including myself. How came he to know of Adaffia? and why did he select it as a hiding-place? The obvious answer suggested was that he had a friend there. But as there was only one white man in the place—who must have been that friend—a sham death and burial would have been perfectly easy and a most natural expedient.
“Then there was the discrepancy. Osmond was reported to have died of blackwater fever. Now, this was almost an impossibility. Blackwater fever is not a disease which attacks newcomers. It lies in wait for the broken-down coaster whose health has been sapped by long-standing chronic malaria. In the immense majority of cases it occurs during, or after the third year of residence. I have found no record of a single case in which the patient was a newcomer to the coast. It was this discrepancy that immediately aroused my suspicions; and as soon as I came to consider the circumstances at large, the other improbabilities came into view. The conclusion that I arrived at was that there was a considerable probability that the trader, Larkom, had carried out a sham burial; or, if it it had really been a case of blackwater fever at Adaffia, the victim was Larkom himself, and that a false name had been put on the grave; in which case the man whom the officer saw must have been Osmond. You will note the suspicious fact that the name on the grave was ‘John Osmond’—not ‘Walker.’ That impressed me very strongly. It met the necessities of the fugitive so very perfectly.”
Osmond chuckled softly. “It seems to me, D
r. Thorndyke,” said he, “that you and I represent the two opposite extremes. You take nothing for granted. You accept no statement at its face value. You weigh, measure, and verify every item of evidence put to you. Whereas I—well, I wonder what you think of me. I shan’t be hurt if you speak your mind bluntly.”
“There is nothing in my mind,” said Thorndyke, “by which you need be hurt. It would, of course, be insincere to pretend that you did not display very bad judgement in taking so momentous a course of action on a mere, unconfirmed suspicion. But perhaps there are qualities even more valuable than worldly wisdom, and certainly more endearing; such as chivalry, generosity and self-forgetfulness. I can only say that what you have told us as to your motives has made my little service to you a great pleasure to me; it has turned a mere technical success into a source of abiding satisfaction—even though you did seek to defeat the ends of justice.”
“It is nice of you to say that, Dr. Thorndyke,” Betty exclaimed with brimming eyes. “After all, it is better to be generous than discreet—at least, I think so; and I don’t mind admitting that I am proud to be the wife of a man who could cheerfully give up everything for the good of his kinsfolk.”
“I think,” said Mr. Penfield, tapping his snuff-box by way of emphasis, “you have very good reason to be proud of one another.”
“Thank you, Mr. Penfield,” she replied, smilingly. “And that brings me to what really was the object of our visit today. Only, here I am in rather a difficulty. I am commissioned to give thanks for all that has been done for us, and I really don’t know how to express one-half of what we feel.”
The Third R. Austin Freeman Megapack Page 52
