The Mystery of the Skeleton Key

by Bernard Capes

  Whether it were in some apology for a darkness which he could not afford to illuminate, or to avoid teasing inquiries, or for any other reason, the Sergeant came gradually to give the house less and less of his company. He seemed rather to avoid contact with its inmates, and his manner, when he rarely appeared, was sombre and preoccupied. No one, perhaps, felt this withdrawal more than the housekeeper, Mrs Bingley, with whom he had been accustomed to take his meals, and who had found him, when once her awe of his office was overcome, a most entertaining guest, full of intelligence, rich in anecdote, and deeply interested in everything appertaining to Wildshott, from its family portraits and accumulated collections to the beauty of its grounds and of the country in which it lay situated.

  ‘It must have been,’ she said one day to her master, to whom she was lamenting the Sergeant’s prolonged absences, ‘such a relief to a man of his occupations to be able to forget himself, even for an hour or two, in such noble surroundings. But perhaps he wants to show us that he’s taking no advantage of the attentions paid him, lest we might think he was trying to worm himself into our confidence.’

  ‘Or can it be that he has already found out from you all that he wants to know?’ observed Le Sage, who was present on the occasion, with a humorous look.

  ‘I’m sure, sir,’ said Mrs Bingley with asperity, ‘that he is incapable of the meanness. If you had heard him express the sentiments that I have you would never hint such a charge. No, there is some delicacy of feeling, take my word for it, at the bottom of this change in him; and I can’t help fearing that it means he has found out something fresh, something even more distressful to the family, which makes him chary of accepting its hospitality. I only hope—’ she paused, with a little sigh.

  ‘You’re thinking of Cleghorn!’ broke in her master. ‘Damme! I’ll never believe in respectability again if that man’s done it.’

  ‘God forbid!’ said the housekeeper. ‘But I wish Sergeant Ridgway would appear more, and more in his old way, when he does honour me with his company.’

  Her wish, however, was not to be fulfilled. The detective more and more absented himself as the days went on, and became more and more of an Asian mystery in the fleeting glimpses of his presence vouchsafed the household. Dark, taciturn, abysmal, he flitted, a casual shadow, through the labyrinthine mysteries of the crime, and could never be said to be here before an echo of his footfall was sounding in the hollows far away. A picturesque description of his processes, perhaps, but consorting in a way with the housekeeper’s fanciful rendering. Perhaps delicacy rather than expediency was the motive of his tactics; perhaps, having virtually completed his case, he was keeping out of the way until the time came to expound it; perhaps a feature of its revision was that distressful something, menacing, appalling, foreseen by the housekeeper. He had plenty otherwise to do, no doubt, in the way of collecting evidence, consulting Counsel, and so forth, which alone gave plenty of reason for neglecting the social amenities. Whatever the explanation, however, the issue was not to be long delayed.

  The Baron came upon him unexpectedly one morning in the upper grounds, where the fruit gardens were, and the espaliers, and all the signs of a prosperous vegetable order. There was a fair view of the estate to be gained from that elevation, and the Sergeant appeared to be absorbed for the moment in the gracious prospect. He waited unmoving for the other to join him, and nodded as he came up.

  ‘It’s pleasant to snatch a minute, sir,’ he said, ‘to give to a view like this. People of my profession don’t get many such.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ answered Le Sage, ‘nor of a good many other professions. Proprietary views, like incomes, are very unfairly distributed, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, that’s so, no doubt; and among the wrong sort of people often enough.’

  Le Sage laughed.

  ‘Are you one of the right sort of people, Sergeant?’

  ‘I won’t go so far as to say that, sir, but I will go so far as to say that, if I owned this property, I’d come to feast my eyes on it here more often than what Sir Calvin does.’

  The Baron, without moving his head, took in the face of the speaker. He saw a glow, a subdued passion in it which interested him. What spirit of romance, to be sure, might lurk unsuspected under the hard official rind. Here was the last man in the world whom one would have credited with a sense of beauty, and he was wrought to emotion by a landscape!

  ‘You talk,’ said he, ‘of your profession not affording you many such moments as this. Now, to my mind, it seems the profession for a man romantically inclined.’

  ‘Does it, indeed, sir?’

  ‘Why, don’t you live in a perpetual atmosphere of romance? Think of the mysteries which are your daily food.’

  ‘That’s it—my daily food, and lodging too. The men who pull on the ropes for a living don’t think much, or see much, of the fairy scene they’re setting. That’s all for the prosperous folks in front.’

  ‘You’d rather be one of them?’

  ‘Which would you rather, sir—be a police-officer, or the owner of an estate like this? If such things were properly distributed, as you say, there’d be no need perhaps for police-officers at all. You read the papers about a case like ours here, and you see only a romance: we, whose necessity puts us behind the scenes, see only, in nine cases out of ten, the dirty mishandling of Fate. Give a man his right position in the world, and he’ll commit no crimes. That’s my belief, and it’s founded on some experience.’

  ‘I dare say you’re right. It’s comforting to know, in that case, that my valet has always fitted into his place like a stopper into a bottle.’

  The detective stood silent a moment; then turned on the speaker with a queer enigmatic look.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t lose heart about him, if I was you,’ he said drily.

  ‘That’s good!’ said Le Sage. ‘I can leave him with a tolerably safe conscience then.’

  ‘What, sir—you’re going away before the inquiry?’

  ‘I must, I am afraid. I have business in London which I can no longer postpone.’

  ‘But how about your evidence?’

  ‘After what you have said, cannot you afford to do without it?’

  The detective considered, frowning and rubbing his chin; then said simply, ‘Very well,’ and made a movement to go.

  They went down the garden together, and parted at the door in the wall. This was on the Saturday. On the following Monday the officer appeared for the last time to arrange for his witnesses on the Wednesday ensuing. He carried his handbag with him, and intimated that it was not his purpose to return again before the event. They were all—Mrs Bingley perhaps excepted—glad to see the last of him, and the last of what his presence there implied, and welcomed the prospect of the one clean day which was to be theirs before their re-meeting in Court.

  The Sergeant’s manner at his parting was restrained, and his countenance rigidly pale. Sir Calvin, receiving his formal thanks for the courtesy shown him, remarked upon it, and asked him if he were feeling overdone.

  ‘No, sir,’ he replied: ‘never better, thank you. I hope you yourself may never feel worse than I do at this moment.’

  Something in his way of saying it, some significance of tone, or look, or emphasis, seemed to cast a sudden chill upon the air. The General turned away with a slightly wondering, puzzled expression, and shrugged his shoulders as if he were cold. There were one or two present who remembered that gesture afterwards, identifying it with some vague sensation in themselves.

  That same night the Baron caused a considerable stir by announcing his intention of leaving them on the morrow. They all had something to say in the way of surprise and remonstrance except Mr Bickerdike, and he judiciously held his tongue. Even Hugo showed a certain concern, as a man might who felt, without quite realizing what it was he felt, the giving way of some moral support on which he had been unconsciously leaning. He looked up and asked, as the detective had asked, ‘What about your evidence?’r />
  ‘It is said to be immaterial,’ answered Le Sage. ‘I am speaking on the authority of the Sergeant himself.’

  Hugh said no more; but he eyed the Baron in a wistful, questioning way. He was in a rather moving mood, patently looking forward to Wednesday’s ordeal with considerable nervousness and apprehension, and not altogether without reason. The Inquest had been trying enough; yet that had been a mere local affair, conducted amid familiar surroundings. To stand up in public Court and repeat, perhaps be forced to amplify, the evidence he had already given was a far different and more agitating prospect. What was in his mind, who could know? There was something a little touching in the way he clung to his family, and in the slight embarrassment they showed over his unaccustomed attentions. Audrey, falling in for her share, laughed, and responded with only a bad grace; but the glow in her eyes testified to feelings not the less proud and exultant because their repression had been so long a necessity with her.

  Coming upon the Baron in the hall by-and-by, as he was on his way upstairs to prepare for the morrow’s journey, she stopped and spoke to him.

  ‘Can you manage without a valet, Baron?’

  ‘As I have managed a hundred times before, my dear.’

  ‘Must you really go?’

  ‘I must, indeed.’

  ‘Leaving Louis to shift for himself?’

  ‘I leave him in the hands of Providence.’

  ‘Yes, but Providence is not a lawyer.’

  ‘Heaven forbid! God, you know, like no lawyer, tempers the wind to the shorn lamb—à brebis tondue Dieu mesure le vent. That is a good French proverb, and I am going to France in the faith of it.’

  ‘But you will come back again?’

  ‘Yes, I will come back. It will be all right about Louis—you will see.’

  She did not answer. She had been holding him by the lapels of his coat, running her thumbs down the seams, and suddenly, feeling a little convulsive pressure there, he looked up in her face and saw that thick tears were running down her cheeks. Very softly but resolutely then he captured the two wandering hands and held them between his own.

  ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘my dear, I understand. But listen to this—have confidence in your friend the Baron.’

  And on the morrow morning he left, accompanied by Mr Vivian Bickerdike’s most private and most profound misgivings. That he was going to London on some business connected with the stolen document was that gentleman’s certain conviction. But what was he to do? Expose at once, or wait and learn more? On the whole it were better to wait, perhaps: the fellow was coming back—he had said so, and to the same unconsciousness of there being one on his track who at the right moment could put a spoke in his nefarious wheel.

  He was still considering the question, when something happened which, for the time being, put all considerations but one out of his head. By the first post on the very morning of the inquiry he received, much to his astonishment, a subpoena binding him to appear and give evidence in Court. About what? If any uneasy suspicion in his mind answered that question, to it was to be attributed, no doubt, his rather white conscience-troubled aspect as he presently joined the party waiting to be motored over to the Castle in the old city where the case was to be tried.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE EXPLOSION

  THE Magistrates assembled to hear the case were four in number, two of them being local magnates and personal friends of Sir Calvin, who was accorded a seat on the Bench. They took their places at eleven o’clock, the Court being then crowded to its utmost capacity. The case stood first on the list, and no delay was experienced in opening it. As before, Mr Fyler appeared for the police, and Mr Redstall for Sir Calvin. The prisoner was undefended.

  At the outset of the proceedings a surprise awaited the public. The prisoner having been brought up from the cells beneath the Court, and placed in the dock, Sergeant Ridgway asked permission to speak. Addressing the Bench, he said that since the inquiry before the Coroner, which had ended, as their Worships were aware, in a verdict by the jury of wilful murder against the prisoner Louis Victor Cabanis, facts had come to his knowledge which entirely disposed of the theory of the prosecution, proving, as they did, an unquestionable alibi in the prisoner’s favour. Under these circumstances he proposed to offer no evidence against the accused, who, with their Worships’ permission, would be discharged.

  Smart in aspect, concise in phrase, the detective stood up and made his avowal, and again, though in an auguster atmosphere, with a marked impression upon his hearers. Some of them had already encountered him, no doubt, and were prepared to concede to his every statement the force and value of an official fiat.

  ‘Very well, Sergeant,’ was the reply, while the public wondered if they were going to be defrauded of their feast of sensation, or if some spicier substitute were about to be placed before them. They were not kept long in suspense.

  Following the Sergeant’s declaration, brief evidence was given by Andrew Marie, shepherd, and Nicholas Penny, thatcher. The former deposed that on the afternoon in question he was setting hurdles on the uplands above Leighway, at a point about three miles north-east of Wildshott Park as the crow flies, when he saw prisoner. That was as near three o’clock as might be. Prisoner had stood watching him for a few minutes while exchanging a remark or two, and had then gone on in a northerly direction.

  Penny gave evidence that, on the same afternoon, at three-thirty, he was working in the garden of his cottage at Milldown, two miles beyond the point mentioned by the last witness, when prisoner came by and asked him the time. He gave it him, and prisoner thanked him and continued his way, still bearing north by east until he was out of sight. He was going leisurely, both witnesses affirmed, and there appeared nothing peculiar about him except his foreign looks and speech. Neither had the slightest hesitation in identifying the prisoner with the man they had seen. There was no possibility of mistaking him.

  This evidence, said the detective, addressing the justices again at the end of it, precluded any idea of the prisoner’s being the guilty party, the case for the prosecution holding that the murder was committed at some time between three and four o’clock in the afternoon. At three o’clock the accused was proved to have been at a spot good three miles away from the scene of the crime, and again at 3.30 at a spot five miles away, representing a distance which, even on an extravagant estimate, he could hardly have covered within the period remaining to him if the theory of the prosecution was to be substantiated. There was no case, in fact, and the prosecution therefore withdrew the charge.

  A Magistrate put the question somewhat extra-judicially, why had he not pleaded this alibi in the first instance. The accused, who appeared overwhelmed by the change in his situation, was understood to say, with much emotion and gesticulation, that he had not been advised, nor had he supposed that the deposition of a prisoner himself would count for anything, and, moreover, that he had been so bewildered by the labyrinth of suspicion in which he had got himself involved, that it had seemed hopeless to him to think of ever extricating himself from it. He seemed a simple soul, and the justices smiled, with some insular superiority, over his naïve declaration. He was then given to understand that he was discharged and might go, and with a joyous expression he stepped from the dock and vanished like a jocund goblin down the official trap.

  Counsel for the prosecution then rose, and stated that, the charge against Cabanis being withdrawn, it was proposed to put in his place Samuel Cleghorn, against whom, although no definite charge had as yet been preferred by the police, a prima facie case existed. His examination, and the examination of the witnesses concerned, would probably prove a lengthy affair, and he asked therefore that the case might be taken next on the list. The justices concurring, Samuel Cleghorn was brought up from the cells, and stood to undergo his examination.

  Confinement and anxiety, it was evident, had told upon the prisoner, whose aspect since the Inquest had undergone a noticeable change. He looked limp and deteriorated, li
ke a worn banknote, and his lips were tremulous. Respectability in a sidesman caught pilfering from the plate could not have appeared more self-conscious of its fall. He bowed deferentially to the Bench, with a slight start on seeing his master seated there, and, making some ineffectual effort to appear at ease, clasped his plump white hands before him and fixed a glassy eye on the wall. The public, reassured, settled down, like a music-hall audience to a new exciting ‘turn’, the Bench assumed its most judicial expression, and Counsel, adjusting its wig for the fray, proceeded to open the case

  It is not proposed to recapitulate in extenso the evidence already given. In bulk and essentials the two hardly differed, the only marked changes being in the order of the witnesses examined, and in the absence from their list of the Baron Le Sage, who, however, inasmuch as his sole use had been to testify to the character of his servant, was no longer needed. There was the same reference to the insuperable difficulty—experienced and still unsurmounted—in tracing out the deceased’s connexions, the same statement by Sergeant Ridgway as to the fruitlessness of the measures taken, and the same request that, in default of further information, such evidence of identification as was at present available should be provisionally accepted. The Bench agreed, the detective sat down, and Counsel rose once more, this time with a formidable eye to business.