A Mysterious Disappearance by Louis Tracy (most read book in the world TXT) 📕

crowd, and travelled with him in the hansom. Phyllis Browne should have her answer sooner than he had expected.

The man who murdered Lady Dyke was her own husband.

“Oh, heavens!” moaned Bruce, as he swayed restlessly to and fro in his chair, “is it possible?”

He sat there for hours. Smith entered, turned on the lights and suggested tea, but received an impatient dismissal.

After another long interval Smith appeared again, to announce that Mr. White had called.

“Did you not say I was out?” said Claude, his hollow tones and haggard air startling his faithful servitor considerably.

“Yes, sir—oh yes, sir. But that’s no use with Mr. White. ’E said as ’ow ’e were sure you were in.”

“Ask him to oblige me by coming again—to-morrow. I am very ill. I really cannot see him.”

Smith left the room only to return and say: “Mr. White says, sir, ’is business is of the hutmost himportance. ’E can’t leave it; and ’e says you will be very sorry afterwards if you don’t see ’im now.”

“Oh, so be it,” cried Bruce, turning to a spirit-stand to seek sustenance in a stiff glass of brandy. “Send him in.”

Quite awed by circumstances, Smith admitted the detective and closed the door upon the two men, who stood looking at each other without a word of greeting or explanation.

CHAPTER XXVII MR. WHITE’S METHOD

The policeman spoke first. “Has Jane Harding been here, then?” he said.

His words conveyed no meaning to his hearer.

They were so incongruous, so ridiculously unreasoning, that Bruce laughed hysterically.

“You must have seen her,” cried the detective excitedly. “I know you have learned the truth, and in no other way that I can imagine could it have reached you.”

“Learnt what truth?”

“That Sir Charles Dyke himself is at the bottom of all this business.”

“Indeed. How have you blundered upon that solution?”

“Mr. Bruce, this time I am right, and you know it. It was Sir Charles Dyke who killed his wife. Nobody else had anything else to do with it, so far as I can guess. But if you haven’t seen Jane Harding, I wonder how you found out.”

“You are speaking in riddles. Pray explain yourself.”

“If Sir Charles Dyke had not been out of town, the riddle would have been answered by this time in the easiest way, as I should have locked him up.”

“Excellent. You remain faithful to tradition.”

“Mr. Bruce, please don’t try to humbug me, for the sake of your friend. I am quite in earnest. I have come to you for advice. Sir Charles Dyke is guilty enough.”

“And what do you want me to do?”

“To help me to adopt the proper course. The whole thing seems so astounding that I can hardly trust my own senses. I spoke hastily just now. I would not have touched Sir Charles before consulting you. I was never in such a mixed-up condition in my life.”

Whatever the source of his information, the detective had evidently arrived at the same conclusion as Bruce himself. There was nothing for it but to endeavor to reason out the situation calmly and follow the best method of dealing with it suggested by their joint intelligence. Claude motioned the detective to a chair, imposed silence by a look, and summoned Smith. He was faint from want of food. With returning equanimity he resolved first to restore his strength, as he would need all his powers to wrestle with events before he slept that night.

Mr. White, nothing loth, joined him in a simple meal, and by tacit consent no reference was made to the one engrossing topic in their thoughts until the table was cleared.

“And now, Mr. White,” demanded the barrister, “what have you found out?”

“During the last two days,” he replied, “I have been unsuccessfully trying to trace Colonel Montgomery. No matter what I did I failed. I got hold of several of Mrs. Hillmer’s tradespeople, but she always paid her bills with her own cheques, and none of them had ever heard of a Colonel Montgomery. That furniture business puzzled me a lot—the change of the drawing-room set from one flat to another on November 7, I mean. So I discovered the address of the people who supplied the new articles to Mrs. Hillmer—”

“How?”

“Through the maid, Dobson. Mrs. Hillmer has given her notice to leave, and the girl is furious about it, as she appears to have had a very easy place there. I think it came to Mrs. Hillmer’s ears that she talked to me.”

“I see. Proceed.”

“Here I hit upon a slight clue. It was a gentleman who ordered the new furniture, and directed the transfer of the articles replaced from No. 61 to No. 12 Raleigh Mansions. He did this early in the morning of November 7, and the foreman in charge of the job remembered that there was some bother about it, as neither Mrs. Hillmer nor Mr. Corbett, as Mensmore used to be called, knew anything about it. But the gentleman came the same morning and explained matters. It struck the foreman as funny that there should be such a fearful hurry about refurnishing a drawing-room, for the gentleman did not care what the cost was so long as the job was carried out at express speed. Another odd thing was that Mrs. Hillmer paid for the articles, though she had not ordered them nor did she appear to want them. The man was quite sure that Mensmore’s first knowledge of the affair came with the arrival of the first batch of articles from Mrs. Hillmer’s flat, but he could only describe the mysterious agent as being a regular swell. He afterwards identified a portrait of Sir Charles Dyke as being exactly like the man he had seen, if not the man himself.”

“How did you come to have a portrait of Sir Charles in your possession?”

“That appears later,” said the detective, full of professional pride at the undoubtedly smart manner in which he had manipulated his facts once they were placed in order before him.

“Of course,” he went on, “I jumped at the conclusion that the stranger was this Colonel Montgomery. Then, while closely questioning the maid about the events of November 7, she suddenly remembered that she lost an old skirt and coat about that time. They had vanished from her room, and she had never laid eyes on them since. This set me thinking. I confronted her with the clothes worn by Lady Dyke when she was found in the river, and I’m jiggered if Dobson didn’t recognize them at once as being her missing property. Now, wasn’t that a rum go?”

“It certainly was,” said Bruce, who was piecing together the story of the murder in his mind as each additional detail came to light.

“Naturally I thought harder than ever after that. It then occurred to me that Jane Harding must have had some powerful reasons for so suddenly shutting up about the identification of her mistress’s underclothing. She was right enough, as we know, in regard to the skirt and coat, but she admitted to me that the linen on the dead body was just the same as Lady Dyke’s. Curiously enough, it was not marked by initials, crest, or laundry-mark, and I ascertained months ago that owing to some fad of her ladyship’s, all the family washing was done on the estate in Yorkshire. This explained the absence of the otherwise inevitable laundry-mark.”

“Thus far you are coherence itself.”

“Well,” said Mr. White complacently, “I was a long time getting to work, Mr. Bruce, and had it not been for your help I should probably never have got at the truth, but I flatter myself that, once on the right track, I seldom leave it. However, as I was saying, I felt that Jane Harding knew a good deal more than she would tell, except under pressure, so I decided to put that pressure on.”

“In what way?”

“I frightened her. Played off on her a bit of the stage business she is so fond of. This afternoon I placed a pair of handcuffs in my pocket and went to her place at Bloomsbury, having previously prepared a bogus warrant for her arrest on a charge of complicity in the murder of Lady Dyke.”

“It was a dangerous game!”

“Very. If it had gone wrong and reached the ears of the Commissioner or got into the papers, I should have been reduced or dismissed. But what is a policeman to do in such cases? I was losing my temper over this infernal inquiry and never obtaining any real light, though always coming across startling developments. It had to end somehow, and I took the chance. The make-believe warrant and the production of handcuffs for a woman—they are never used, you know, in reality—have often been trump-cards for us when everything else failed.”

“This time, then, the ‘properties’ made up the ‘show,’ as Miss Harding would put it?”

“They did, and no mistake. I gave her no time to think or act. I found her sitting with her mother, admiring a new carpet she had just laid down. I said, ‘Is your name Jane Harding, now engaged at the Jollity Theatre, under the alias of Marie le Marchant, but formerly a maid in the service of Lady Dyke?’ She grew very white, and said ‘Yes,’ while her mother clutched hold of her, terrified. Then I whipped out the warrant and the cuffs. My, but you should have heard them squeal when the bracelets clinked together. ‘What has my child done?’ screamed the mother. ‘Perhaps nothing, madam,’ I answered; ‘but she is guilty in the eyes of the law just the same if she persists in screening the guilty parties.’ Jane Harding was trembling and blubbering, but she said, ‘It is very hard on me. I have done nothing.’ I trembled myself then, as I feared that she might offer to come with me to the police station, in which case I should have been dished. But the mother fixed the affair splendidly. ‘I am sure my daughter will not conceal anything,’ she said, ‘and it is a shame to disgrace her in this way without telling what it is you want to know.’ I took the cue in an instant. ‘I am empowered,’ I said, ‘to suspend this warrant, and perhaps do away with it altogether, if she answers my questions fully and truthfully.’ ‘Why, of course she will,’ said the mother, and the girl, though desperately upset, whimpered her agreement. With that I got the whole story.”

“Sir Charles Dyke inspired her actions, I suppose.”

“From the very beginning almost. At first Jane Harding herself believed, when she gave evidence at the inquest, that the body she saw was not that of Lady Dyke; but afterwards she changed her opinion, especially when she recalled the exact pattern and materials of the underclothing. Then my inquiries put her on the scent. Being rather a sharp girl, she jumped to the conclusion that Sir Charles knew more about the matter than he professed. In any case, her place was gone, and she would soon be dismissed, so she resolved on a plan even bolder than mine in threatening to lock her up. She watched her opportunity, found Sir Charles alone one day, and told him that from certain things within her knowledge, she thought it her duty to go to the police-station. He was startled, she could see, and asked her to explain herself. She said that her mistress had been killed, and she might be able to put the police on the right track. He hesitated, not knowing what to say; so she hinted that it would mean a lot of trouble for her, and she would prefer, if she had £500, to go to America, and let the matter drop altogether. He told her that he did not desire to have Lady Dyke’s name brought into public notoriety. Sooner