The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  “Pardon me, Mr. Dacre,” I said, “but there is still a sovereign resting on the mantelpiece.”

  Dacre threw back his head and laughed with greater heartiness than I had yet known him to indulge in during our short acquaintance.

  “By Jove!” he cried; “you’ve got me there. I’d forgotten entirely about that pound on the mantelpiece, which belongs to you.”

  “To me? Impossible!”

  “It does, and cannot interfere in the least with our century calculation. That is the sovereign you gave to my man Hopper, who, knowing me to be hard pressed, took it and shamefacedly presented it to me, that I might enjoy the spending of it. Hopper belongs to our family, or the family belongs to him. I am never sure which. You must have missed in him the deferential ring of a manservant in Paris, yet he is true gold, like the sovereign you bestowed upon him, and he bestowed upon me. Now here, monsieur, is the evidence of the theft, together with the rubber band and two pieces of cardboard. Ask my friend Gibbes to examine them minutely. They are all at your disposition, monsieur and thus you learn how much easier it is to deal with the master than with the servant. All the gold you possess would not have wrung these incriminating documents from old Hopper. I was compelled to send him away to the West End an hour ago, fearing that in his brutal British way he might assault you if he got an inkling of your mission.”

  “Mr. Dacre,” said I slowly, “you have thoroughly convinced me—”

  “I thought I would,” he interrupted with a laugh.

  “—that you did not take the money.”

  “Oho, this is a change of wind, surely. Many a man has been hanged on a chain of circumstantial evidence much weaker than this which I have exhibited to you. Don’t you see the subtlety of my action? Ninety-nine persons in a hundred would say: ‘No man could be such a fool as to put Valmont on his own track, and then place in Valmont’s hands such striking evidence.’ But there comes in my craftiness. Of course, the rock you run up against will be Gibbes’s incredulity. The first question he will ask you may be this: ‘Why did not Dacre come and borrow the money from me?’ Now there you find a certain weakness in your chain of evidence. I knew perfectly well that Gibbes would lend me the money, and he knew perfectly well that if I were pressed to the wall I should ask him.”

  “Mr. Dacre,” said I, “you have been playing with me. I should resent that with most men, but whether it is your own genial manner or the effect of this excellent champagne, or both together, I forgive you. But I am convinced of another thing. You know who took the money.”

  “I don’t know, but I suspect.”

  “Will you tell me whom you suspect?”

  “That would not be fair, but I shall now take the liberty of filling your glass with champagne.”

  “I am your guest, Mr. Dacre.”

  “Admirably answered, monsieur,” he replied, pouring out the wine, “and now I offer you a clue. Find out all about the story of the silver spoons.”

  “The story of the silver spoons! What silver spoons?”

  “Ah! That is the point. Step out of the Temple into Fleet Street, seize the first man you meet by the shoulder, and ask him to tell you about the silver spoons. There are but two men and two spoons concerned. When you learn who those two men are, you will know that one of them did not take the money, and I give you my assurance that the other did.”

  “You speak in mystery, Mr. Dacre.”

  “But certainly, for I am speaking to Monsieur Eugene Valmont.”

  “I echo your words, sir. Admirably answered. You put me on my mettle, and I flatter myself that I see your kindly drift. You wish me to solve the mystery of this stolen money. Sir, you do me honor, and I drink to your health.”

  “To yours, monsieur,” said Lionel Dacre, and thus we drank and parted.

  * * * *

  On leaving Mr. Dacre, I took a hansom to a cafe in Regent Street, which is a passable imitation of similar places of refreshment in Paris. There, calling for a cup of black coffee, I sat down to think. The clue of the silver spoons! He had laughingly suggested that should take by the shoulders the first man I met and ask him what the story of the silver spoons was. This course naturally struck me as absurd, and he doubtless intended it to seem absurd. Nevertheless, it contained a hint. I must ask somebody, and that the right person, to tell me the tale of the silver spoons.

  Under the influence of the black coffee, I reasoned it out in this way. On the night of the twenty-third one of the six guests there present stole a hundred pounds, but Dacre had said that an actor in the silver-spoon episode was the actual thief. That person, then, must have been one of Mr. Gibbes’s guests at the dinner of the twenty-third. Probably two of the guests were the participators in the silver-spoon comedy, but, be that as it may, it followed that one, at least, of the men around Mr. Gibbes’s table knew the episode of the silver spoons.

  Perhaps Bentham Gibbes himself was cognizant of it. It followed, therefore, that the easiest plan was to question each of the men who partook of that dinner. Yet if only one knew about the spoons, that one must also have some idea that these spoons formed the clue which attached him to the crime of the twenty-third, in which case he was little likely to divulge what he knew to an entire stranger.

  Of course, I might go to Dacre himself and demand the story of the silver spoons, but this would be a confession of failure on my part, and I rather dreaded Lionel Dacre’s hearty laughter when I admitted that the mystery was too much for me. Besides this, I was very well aware of the young man’s kindly intentions toward me. He wished me to unravel the coil myself, and so I determined not to go to him except as a last resource.

  I resolved to begin with Mr. Gibbes, and, finishing my coffee, I got again into a hansom and drove back to the Temple. I found Bentham Gibbes in his room, and after greeting me, his first inquiry was about the case.

  “How are you getting on?” he asked.

  “I think I’m getting on fairly well,” I replied, “and expect to finish in a day or two, if you will kindly tell me the story of the silver spoons.”

  “The silver spoons?” he echoed, quite evidently not understanding me.

  “There happened an incident in which two men were engaged, and this incident related to a pair of silver spoons. I want to get the particulars of that.”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea of what you are talking out,” replied Gibbes, thoroughly bewildered. “You will need to be more definite, I fear, if you are to get any help from me.”

  “I cannot be more definite, because I have already told you all I know.”

  “What bearing has all this on our own case?”

  “I was informed that if I got hold of the clue of the silver spoons, I should be in a fair way of settling our case.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Mr. Lionel Dacre.”

  “Oh, does Dacre refer to his own conjuring?”

  “I don’t know, I’m sure. What was his conjuring?”

  “A very clever trick he did one night at dinner here about two months ago.”

  “Had it anything to do with silver spoons?”

  “Well, it was silver spoons or silver forks, or something of that kind. I had entirely forgotten the incident. So far as I recollect at the moment, there was a sleight-of-hand man of great expertness in one of the music-halls, and the talk turned upon him. Then Dacre said the tricks he did were easy, and holding up a spoon or a fork, I don’t remember which, he professed his ability to make it disappear before our eyes, to be found afterwards in the clothing of some one there present. Several offered to bet that he could do nothing of the kind, he said he would bet with no one but Innis, who sat opposite him. Innis, with some reluctance, accepted the bet, and then Dacre, with a great show of the usual conjurer’s gesticulations, spread forth his empty hands, and said we should find t
he spoon in Innis’s pocket, and there, sure enough, it was. It seemed a proper sleight-of-hand trick, but we were never able to get him to repeat it.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Gibbes; I think I see daylight now.”

  “If you do, you are cleverer than I by a long chalk,” cried Bentham Gibbes, as I took my departure.

  * * * *

  I went directly downstairs, and knocked at Mr. Dacre’s door once more. He opened the door himself, his man not yet having returned.

  “Ah, monsieur,” he cried, “back already? You don’t mean to tell me you have so soon got to the bottom of the silver-spoon entanglement?”

  “I think I have, Mr. Dacre. You were sitting at dinner opposite Mr. Vincent Innis. You saw him conceal a silver spoon in his pocket. You probably waited for some time to understand what he meant by this, and as he did not return the spoon to its place, you proposed a conjuring trick, made the bet with him, and thus the spoon was returned to the table.”

  “Excellent! Excellent, monsieur! That is very nearly what occurred, except that I acted at once. I had had experiences with Mr. Vincent Innis before. Never did he enter these rooms of mine without my missing some little trinket after he was gone. Although Mr. Innis is a very rich person, I am not a man of many possessions, so if anything is taken, I meet little difficulty in coming to a knowledge of my loss. Of course, I never mentioned these abstractions to him. They were all trivial, as I have said, and so far as the silver spoon was concerned, it was of no great value, either. But I thought the bet and the recovery of the spoon would teach him a lesson; it apparently has not done so. On the night of the twenty-third, he sat at my right hand, as you will see by consulting your diagram of the table and the guests. I asked him a question twice, to which he did not reply, and looking at him I was startled by the expression in his eyes. They were fixed on a distant corner of the room, and following his gaze I saw what he was staring at with such hypnotizing concentration. So absorbed was he in contemplation of the packet there so plainly exposed, now my attention was turned to it, that he seemed to be entirely oblivious of what was going on around him. I roused him from his trance by jocularly calling Gibbes’s attention to the display of money. I expected in this way to save Innis from committing the act which he seemingly did commit. Imagine then the dilemma in which I was placed when Gibbes confided to me the morning after what had occurred the night before. I was positive Innis had taken the money, yet I possessed no proof of it. I could not tell Gibbes, and I dared not speak to Innis. Of course, monsieur, you do not need to be told that Innis is not a thief in the ordinary sense of the word. He had no need to steal, and yet apparently cannot help doing so. I am sure that no attempt has been made to pass those notes. They are doubtless resting securely in his house at Kensington. He is, in fact, a kleptomaniac, or a maniac of some sort. And now, monsieur, was my hint regarding the silver spoons of any value to you?”

  “Of the most infinite value, Mr. Dacre.”

  “Then let me make another suggestion. I leave it entirely to your bravery; a bravery which, I confess, I do not myself possess. Will you take a hansom, drive to Mr. Innis’s house on the Cromwell Road, confront him quietly, and ask for the return of the packet? I am anxious to know what will happen. If he hands it to you, as I expect he will, then you must tell Mr. Gibbes the whole story.”

  “Mr. Dacre, your suggestion shall be immediately acted upon, and I thank you for your compliment to my courage.”

  * * * *

  I found that Mr. Innis inhabited a very grand house. After a time, he entered the study on the ground floor to which I had been conducted. He held my card in his hand and was looking at it with some surprise.

  “I think I have not the pleasure of knowing you, Monsieur Valmont,” he said courteously enough.

  “No. I ventured to call on a matter of business. I was once investigator for the French Government, and now am doing private detective work here in London.”

  “Ah! And how is that supposed to interest me? There is nothing that I wish investigated. I did not send for you, did I?”

  “No, Mr. Innis, I merely took the liberty of calling to ask you to let me have the package you took from Mr. Bentham Gibbes’s frock-coat pocket on the night of the twenty-third.”

  “He wishes it returned, does he?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Innis calmly walked to a desk, which he unlocked and opened, displaying a veritable museum of trinkets of one sort and another. Pulling out a small drawer, he took from it the packet containing the five twenty-pound notes. Apparently it had never been opened. With a smile he handed it to me.

  “You will make my apologies to Mr. Gibbes for not returning it before. Tell him I have been unusually busy of late.”

  “I shall not fail to do so,” said I, with a bow.

  “Thanks so much. Good morning, Monsieur Valmont.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Innis.”

  And so I returned the packet to Mr. Bentham Gibbes, who pulled the notes from between their pasteboard protection, and begged me to accept them.

  JEM BINNEY AND THE SAFE AT LOCKWOOD HALL, by William Hope Hodgson

  “Drat it!” muttered Jem, as a big thorn scratched his face in the darkness. Jem Binny, the dandy Anglo-American cracksman, was doing some cross-country work in a manner that might have excited the professional poachers of the district to envy. Silence and speed marked his progress as masterly, so that the dark October night saw no more than a swift shadow that passed from hedge to hedge.

  Binny had left his lodgings at the White Lyon, in the little Kentish village of Bartol, by the window, and was “stretching himself”—as he would have phrased it—to reach the railway embankment at the Lower Bend, where the ten o’clock express was forced to slow down to some five miles per hour for a few hundred yards. His intention was to board the train during those seconds of lagging, and so reach town both quickly and secretly.

  Yet you must not suppose that Jem Binny was doing anything so vulgar as a “bunk” from his lodgings because of an uncomfortable cash shortage, or for any other reason. It was very much the other way. In fact, his one desire was to get back as smartly as possible; for he was working what Mr. Weller would have termed “a halibi.”

  You see, Jem had a little bit of “business” on hand which must be begun and concluded between dusk and dawn. It included this flying visit into town to make certain arrangements with men whose business was done—shall we say?—on the shady side of the fence.

  He had to return by the Boat Express, which passed the Lower Bend at precisely 3 a.m., as he had taken good care to ascertain. Here, once more, he intended to avail himself of that convenient “five-mile limit” round the curve, and disembark himself and gear as inconspicuously and speedily as possible.

  Then would follow two miles of cross-country work in the dark, preceding the little “operation” which he—as an expert—contemplated upon the safe at Lockwood Hall, where were stored some very remarkable solid items of gold and silver that no melting-pot need turn up its nose at.

  The business of the night would end in the corner of a certain field, where a large stone already concealed a hole prepared. The “goods” would be afterwards removed as circumstance and caution decided.

  Meanwhile, Jem Binny would have done a further mile and a half to his lodgings in the White Lyon, where, having ascended via the window to his virtuous couch, he would contemplate affectionately a certain wax phonograph record within the machine that stood beside his bed.

  It may be wondered wherein lay the “halibi,” and I would reply: “In that same record,” which was entirely a notion of the sagacious Binny; for the record gave a very fair reproduction of Binny’s cough, which had earned for him at the White Lyon much sympathy, and the name of “that young fellow with the cough.”

  Now, normally—that is, when engaged upon his
nocturnal trade—Binny was not given to coughing. He would have considered it unprofessional, as being something of a physical trait inclined to hamper him in climbing to the proudest heights of his career. In fact, he never coughed except at the White Lyon, or when in the company of the villagers.

  Yet this wise conserving of his vocal efforts was his own secret, and, had you ventured to suggest the truth to any of the customers of the White Lyon, you would have been disappointed in its reception.

  They had all heard him cough. Did he not cough between drinks, or would not the point of many a somewhat racy tale be unduly delayed by the inevitable paroxysm? Finally, was not the landlady of the White Lyon often awakened in the night-time by the distressful throat of her lodger?

  “Poor lad!” she would mutter sleepily; and fall again into the pit of slumber. And next morning she would ask Binny how he felt, and assure him—to his enormous gratification—that she had heard him in the night, and pitied him.

  I have said that the news proved gratifying to Binny. You will the better understand this when I tell you that Jem Binny refused to lie awake and cough in the night, even to have the pleasure of disturbing the rest of the landlady. He invariably slept, or just as invariably opened his bedroom window and slipped out into the darkness.

  Yet, all through his absences, or his sleep, there would come at pleasingly regular intervals, the well-known “A-haa! A-haa! A-haa!” which told all the world—in the shape of his wakeful landlady—of his whereabouts.

  This was, as will be now understood, a convenient kind of thing to occur in the case of a man who designed to earn for himself the reputation of extreme regularity of habit, and an “early-to-bed-fear-the-night-air-y’-know” kind of disposition. He could take his night walks and investigations in peace, assured that he had left his cough behind him to signify his innocence. For it was clear that if a man lay coughing in his bedroom he could not be confounded with some unknown law-breaker who may have had a penchant for safe-testing in other peoples’ houses.