Detection by Gaslight (23 page)

She said nothing further, but went back to the ground floor and now commenced a systematic search on her own account.

At last we reached the top floor, where the pawnbroker and his assistant had evidently slept. Here Miss Cusack walked at once to the window and flung it open. She gazed out for a minute, and then turned to face us. Her eyes looked brighter than ever, and a certain smile played about her face.

“Well, miss,” said the police inspector, “we have now searched the whole house, and I hope you are satisfied.”

“I am,” she replied.

“The gold is not here, miss.”

“We will see,” she said. As she spoke she turned once more and bent slightly out, as if to look down through the murky air at the street below.

The inspector gave an impatient exclamation.

“If you have quite finished, miss, we must return to the station,” he said. “I am expecting some men from Scotland Yard to go into this affair.”

“I do not think they will have much to do,” she answered, “except, indeed, to arrest the criminal.” As she spoke she leant a little further out of the window, and then withdrawing her head said quietly, “Yes, we may as well go back now; I have quite finished. Things are exactly as I expected to find them; we can take the gold away with us.”

Both the inspector and I stared at her in utter amazement.

“What do you mean, Miss Cusack?” I cried.

“What I say,” she answered, and now she gave a light laugh; “the gold is here, close to us; we have only to take it away. Come,” she added, “look out, both of you. Why, you are both gazing at it.”

I glanced round in utter astonishment. My expression of face was reproduced in that of the inspector's.

“Look,” she said, “what do you call that?” As she spoke she pointed to the sign that hung outside—the sign of the three balls.

“Lean out and feel that lower ball,” she said to the inspector.

He stretched out his arm, and as his fingers touched it he started back.

“Why, it is hot,” he said; “what in the world does it mean?”

“It means the lost gold,” replied Miss Cusack; “it has been cast as that ball. I said that the advertisement would give me the necessary clue, and it has done so. Yes, the lost fortune is hanging outside the house. The gold was melted in the crucible downstairs, and cast as this ball between twelve o'clock and four-thirty to-day. Remember it was after four-thirty that you arrested the pawnbroker and his assistant.”

To verify her extraordinary words was the work of a few moments. Owing to its great weight, the inspector and I had some difficulty in detaching the ball from its hook. At the same time we noticed that a very strong stay, in the shape of an iron-wire rope, had been attached to the iron frame from which the three balls hung.

“You will find, I am sure,” said Miss Cusack, “that this ball is not of solid gold; if it were, it would not be the size of the other two balls. It has probably been cast round a centre of plaster of Paris to give it the same size as the others. This explains the advertisement with regard to the charcoal and sand. A ball of that size in pure gold would weigh nearly three hundred pounds, or twenty stone.”

“Well,” said the inspector, “of all the curious devices that I have ever seen or heard of, this beats the lot. But what did they do with the real ball? They must have put it somewhere.”

“They burnt it in the furnace, of course,” she answered; “these balls, as you know, are only wood covered with gold paint. Yes, it was a clever idea, worthy of the brain of Mr. Graham; and it might have hung there for weeks and been seen by thousands passing daily, till Mr. Higgins was released from imprisonment, as nothing whatever could be proved against him.”

Owing to Miss Cusack's testimony, Graham was arrested that night, and, finding that circumstances were dead against him, he confessed the whole. For long years he was one of a gang of coiners, but managed to pass as a gentleman of position. He knew old Bovey well, and had heard him speak of the curious will he had made. Knowing of this, he determined, at any risk, to secure the fortune, intending, when he had obtained it, to immediately leave the country. He had discovered the exact amount of the money which he would leave behind him, and had gone carefully into the weight which such a number of sovereigns would make. He knew at once that Tyndall would be out of the reckoning, and that the competition would really be between himself and Wimburne. To provide against the contingency of Wimburne's being the lucky man, he had planned the robbery; the gold was to be melted, and made into a real golden ball, which was to hang over the pawnshop until suspicion had died away.

SILAS K. HOCKING, an ordained United Methodist minister, was at one time the best selling novelist in England, and his fifty novels were published and re-published in matching sets. In 1903, his publishers claimed that over one million of his books had been sold. His stories tended to be edifying, as were the periodicals he edited—
Family
Circle
and
Temple Magazine.

The short stories in
The Adventures of Latimer Field, Curate
(1903) are much more interesting to the modern taste. They are set in small towns, or in country houses, and occasionally they deal with hauntings and gypsy curses. More significantly, Latimer Field was probably the first clergyman to turn to fictional sleuthing, even though most of the time his religious and theological views don't play much of a role in the investigations. Still, as Field's first case shows, Hocking could put a twist in the tale.

 

 

A Perverted Genius

 

 

CONVERSATION THAT EVENING turned on the subject of burglary. Within the last fortnight there had been four cases of house-breaking of the most daring character, and not a single trace of the miscreants or their booty had been discovered. This, in a small town like Banfield, was exceptional and alarming.

Miss Pinskill, our landlady, who always sat at the head of the table, declared—not without hesitancy—that if she awoke in the middle of the night and found a burglar in her room, she should scream and scream, even if she were certain she would be shot for it, and would never stop screaming till either death or deliverance came.

“I'm certain I should do nothing of the kind,” Miss Eliza, who sat at the opposite end of the table, remarked. “I should just hide my head in the clothes, and let him take everything in the room.”

“I think that would be very foolish,” said Mr. Ball, my fellow-lodger, a very clever and gentlemanly man, who occupied the drawing-room, and sat directly opposite me at dinner.

“And what would you do?” I questioned.

“I should show fight,” he replied. “If I knew I should be killed, I should fight all the same. I admit I should stand no chance with a strong man; but, you see, I come from a race of fighters, and so the fighting instinct would leap to the top in spite of everything.”

“You might feel differently if it came to the pinch, Mr. Ball,” Miss Pinskill remarked.

“I don't think so,” he answered quietly. “I don't like boasting; but I did tackle a burglar once.”

“You don't say so!” cried Miss Eliza.

“I was only about nineteen at the time,” went on Mr. Ball, “and a burglar broke into my father's house. I woke up in the middle of the night, and found the rascal in my room. He had been in the other rooms before.”

“And you went for him?” I questioned eagerly.

“I did. Before he knew it I had grabbed him by the collar. He tried to fling me from him, but I held on like grim death; and, finding I was determined, he just slipped out of his coat, leaving it in my hands, and before I could grip him again he had disappeared through the window.”

“What a pity!” said Miss Pinskill.

“It was a pity; for three minutes later a policeman came on the scene, but, of course, too late. Now, what would you have done under the circumstances?” he said, turning to me.

“I—I don't know,” I said, with some hesitation, at which he smiled, and went on with his dinner.

As a matter of fact, I felt pretty certain that if I found a burglar in my room in the dead of the night I should simply collapse, and let him work his will on me and on my property without the least resistance. I did not feel called upon, however, to say so. A man may be a coward, but he need not tell people. They generally find it out quite soon enough.

I was not at all sorry when the dinner ended, for the subject of burglary, having been introduced, was kept up, and such subjects always make me nervous. I am just as bad if people begin to tell ghost stories. I keep awake half the night after, fancying I hear all kinds of unaccountable noises.

Leaving the dining-room, I retired to my study, and lighted a cigarette to calm my nerves, first of all, however, making sure that my window was properly fastened.

I heard Mr. Ball walk slowly along the hall and up the stairs, and a few minutes later I heard him call, in an excited and most distressed tone of voice, “Miss Pinskill! Miss Pinskill!”

“Yes, Mr. Ball,” she cried, running into the hall. “What is the matter?”

“Please come here at once,” he said, “and ask the curate to come also.”

Now, this was the one and only thing I disliked about my fellow-lodger. He always spoke of me to others as “the curate,” and usually in a tone of voice that implied that, in his opinion, curates were something less than men. I knew, of course, that I had nothing to boast of in the way of physical strength, and, moreover, that I was frightfully nervous.

These facts kept me from openly resenting his manner and tone.

There was nothing in his tone, however, to resent on the present occasion. Indeed, he spoke like one in mortal terror.

Instantly opening the door, I rushed up the stairs after Miss Pinskill.

“What is it, Mr. Ball?” she kept asking, as she panted in front of me.

“Burglars!” he said. “Everything of value I possess has been stolen.”

Miss Pinskill, true to her nature, sat down on the floor and began to shriek.

I followed Mr. Ball into his bedroom, and found the whole place in a litter. Nearly every drawer had been turned out on the floor, and—as he said, in a most lugubrious tone—all his valuables were missing.

“I hope
my
things are safe, at any rate,” I said; and I made off to my own room, only to find that it was in as complete a state of upset as Mr. Ball's.

A minute later Miss Eliza—who had come to her sister's rescue—began to call out that their room had been entered also, and everything of value taken away.

The state of confusion that followed cannot be very well described. No one seemed to know what to do or what to say. I was in such a condition of nervous tremor that my legs almost gave way under me. I had not lost very much of value, it is true, for the simple reason that I possessed no valuables; but the shock had taken all the strength out of me, and left me absolutely helpless.

Mr. Ball suggested at length that the police should be sent for, and Mary, the housemaid, was quickly despatched for that purpose. Half an hour later the place was overrun with policemen.

They examined the windows and doors, they searched the garden for footmarks, they looked into the cellars and outbuildings, they questioned Mr. Ball and myself until we grew sick of answering their questions, they drew sketches of the various rooms in their notebooks, and finally took their departure.

The only discovery they made was that the drawing-room window was unfastened, for which Mary admitted she was to blame. The thief or thieves had evidently come in by that way while we were at dinner, and there the matter ended. As in the case of the other burglaries, not a trace of the robbers could be found.

On the following evening Mr. Ball and I went across to the vicarage, where we had accepted an invitation to dinner. Though Mr. Ball had been in Banfield not more than two months at the outside, he had established himself a general favourite with all who knew him. He was most agreeable in his manners, and was well informed on all questions of general interest, and practically sympathetic with all religious and philanthropic movements. He was clever, too, and knew how to say a commonplace thing in a striking way. And, though he could be very sarcastic at times, sarcasm was a weapon he very rarely used.

He was somewhat dull and silent as we walked across to the vicarage; but that was easily accounted for; he had not yet got over the loss of the previous night.

“I wish to my heart we could lay hands on the thief!” he said to me. “It is bad enough to be robbed, but to be so completely outwitted by a common burglar is humiliating.”

Over the dinner he quite recovered his spirits, and for a while—much to my relief—nothing was said of the burglary of the previous night. He greatly admired the vicar's silver and glass, and went into raptures over a richly-chased antique cup that stood in the centre of the table. He spotted some valuable lace that Mrs. Ramsey wore, and admired it in such an adroit way that he quite won that good woman's heart. He discussed the paintings on the walls with keen insight and knowledge, and hinted to a fraction the value of some rare old china.

I quite envied him his knowledge, his easy grace, his rare conversational powers, his subtle diplomacy. I never knew him shine as he did that night, and my admiration of him very considerably increased.

The vicar became quite confidential, and showed him over the house, and gave him a sight of his treasures.

Mr. Ball suggested that, after our experience of the previous night, he ought to have his doors and windows well bolted. And, the inevitable subject having once started, there was no getting away from it for the rest of the evening.

We did not stay late, as Mr. Ball had to catch the early train to London next morning.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Ramsey, we business men, even when we come away for a few months' rest, cannot wholly escape,” he said to the vicar as we were leaving. “I have to run up to town at least once a fortnight. But I feel infinitely better already for my sojourn here.”

“I am glad to hear it. But Banfield is a wonderfully healthy and bracing place. What a pity that the good should be discounted by the robbery of last evening!”

“Yes, it is a very annoying affair. But I am not without hopes that I may yet recover some of the plunder. You know the old saying, that rogues are generally fools also.”

“In the case of burglars that seems scarcely true,” said the vicar. “I think of the fact that five houses have been broken into in Banfield, and not a single clue has been obtained.”

“You will be saying soon that burglary must not be reckoned among the hazardous callings,” was the laughing reply.

“Indeed, I shall.”

And so we parted from our host, and made our way home through the dimly lighted streets.

He shook my hand cordially as we said good night in the hall.

“I shall not see you again for three days at least. But, all being well, I shall be back again on Saturday evening.”

I never imagined that I should look for his return as eagerly as I did. I felt that we needed some one in our midst who was clever and resourceful and far seeing. The local police seemed utterly helpless, and the case was becoming desperate. The latest victim was the vicar. On the night following our little dinner his house was broken into, and literally stripped of every valuable thing that was at all portable.

When I told Mr. Ball, he fairly gasped, and sank into a chair, quite overcome.

“Good heavens!” he said. “You don't mean to say they've been mean enough to rob the vicarage?”

“They have indeed,” I answered.

“And the fools of police have been foiled again?”

“Yes. It seems they had got a suspicion that a burglary had been planned quite the other side of the town.”

“Just like them; they are always in the wrong place!” he said angrily.

“The vicar is inconsolable,” I said.

“I don't wonder,” he answered. “He had some lovely things. I must go across and condole with him.”

“You must do more,” I said. “You are a City man. You have courage and resource, and if you will only play the part of detective—and, mind you, I am willing to join you in it—if we don't catch the thieves, we may at least prevent further robberies.”

“Not a bad idea,” he said thoughtfully. “It will be a novelty, at any rate. But I am afraid, Mr. Field, you are too nervous for the task. You don't mind my saying so, do you?”

“Not in the least,” I replied. “I own I'm nervous—ridiculously so. But something must be done, and done soon.”

“You are right in that. After I have had a little refreshment, we will go across to the vicarage and see if we can find any clue to work upon.”

The vicar received us with manifest relief, and entered into the scheme with enthusiasm.

Mr. Ball discovered a footprint outside the window that had been opened, of which he took careful measurements, and under a bundle of sticks in a corner of the garden I found an old pair of shoes, one of which tallied with the footprint. But most important of all, was a strip of tweed cloth in a thorn hedge which separated the vicarage grounds from an adjoining farm.

“If we can only find the jacket that this fits, we may soon find the wearer,” Mr. Ball said exultingly. “I really think, Mr. Ramsey, we've got a clue at last.”

“I hope so indeed!” said the vicar, warmly. “I would give almost anything if we could find the scoundrels!”

For nearly a month Mr. Ball and I exhausted all our energies, but without success. Mr. Ball even sacrificed his fortnightly visit to London, and gave up all his time to the work of tracking down the burglars. Every now and then we fancied we were on the right track, and followed up our supposed clue for days at a stretch, only to find that we were wasting our strength and energy on a wild-goose chase.

A month of keener disappointment than that I have rarely known. Nothing is more depressing than to have your hopes raised to the very highest pitch, and then suddenly to find yourself plunged headlong again into despair. This was our case time after time, till even Mr. Ball, with his seemingly inexhaustible patience and resource, began to lose heart.

One satisfaction, indeed, we had, and we made the most of it; and that was that, though we had not discovered the burglars, we had prevented any fresh burglaries.

“They evidently know we are on the war-path,” Mr. Ball said to me, with a laugh, “and so, to all appearances, have withdrawn from the neighbourhood altogether. But it would have been a satisfaction to me if I could have tracked them before I said good-bye to Banfield.”