Mystery of Mr. Jessop (34 page)

Ulyett grunted. The story was reasonable enough, and to some extent the condition of the car confirmed it.

“If you knew where the Fellows necklace was, it was your duty to give information to the police,” he said.

“Was it?” asked Denis coolly. “For one thing, I didn't know. All I knew was something Miss Ellison thought something she heard Wright saying might possibly mean. Apparently he had a private detective bloke messing about trying to find out things. It was his business to say anything to you chaps if he wanted to, not mine. What I wanted was to get in ahead of him if I jolly well could.”

“Mr. Wright,” Ulyett pointed out, with rebuke in every tone, “is in lawful charge of the Fellows necklace.”

“Then what,” demanded Denis, “was he up to when he nearly did in Hilda? I owe him for that,” said Denis, with deep anger in his voice. “You said yourself another half-hour and Hilda...” He left the sentence unfinished, but there was no mistaking the deep emotion in his tone. “And then you expect me to sweat my innards out getting his necklace back for him. I meant to make him pay all right, if I could.”

“You are charging Wright with the attack on Miss May?” Ulyett asked. “Have you any evidence?”

“Your job, isn't it?” retorted Denis.

Ulyett turned to Bobby.

“Wasn't there a report you made?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Bobby answered, remembering the fragment of steel identified with Wright's pocket-knife and how Wright had forestalled questions thereon by spontaneously volunteering the information that he had lent it to Denis himself. “There was some evidence, but it was hardly thought sufficient to take action on. Miss May was unable to help us. There was one point that seemed to clear Wright. He was stated to have been at the Yard with Mr. Jacks, reporting to you, sir, the loss of the necklace.”

“That's right,” Ulyett answered. “So he was. Better check up on the times, though. It'll be on record. So far as I remember, Mr. Jacks came up alone first and Wright waited in the car outside. Wright only came up afterwards, to confirm some point or another Mr. Jacks wasn't quite sure about.”

“That would probably give him time to get round to Miss May's flat, as far as that goes,” observed Bobby. “Spoils his alibi, anyhow.” He turned to Denis and said: “We have information that that day, or the day before, you called at the Mayfair Square shop and borrowed a certain article from Mr. Wright?”

“Rot,” asserted Denis, with swift emphasis. “Who told you that? I was never at the Mayfair Square shop in my life, and the only thing I would borrow from Wright would be his walking-stick to break over his back, blast him.”

“No good talking like that without evidence,” declared Ulyett.

“I told Mr. Chenery I thought it was Mr. Wright,” interposed Hilda, who had been listening quietly to all this. “I thought it was like his step. He has a quick, light step. I'm not sure.”

“I believe he had some sort of cracked idea Hilda had the thing hidden in her flat,” Denis said. “Like his cheek. He's crooked himself and so he thinks everyone else is. Crooks always do. And Jessop had been telling lies behind Hilda's back because she told him what she thought of him, the filthy old blackguard. Perhaps that's what put it into Wright's head,” said Denis, grudgingly admitting a faint shadow of something resembling a possible excuse. “And I dare say they were all pretty well off their chumps – they were about done in if they didn't get the necklace back. Good thing, too. Wright ought to get ten years for what he did to Hilda.”

“Denis,” Hilda said quietly, “I told you I wasn't sure. And I would rather go through it all again than have to go into a police court and tell everyone, and have everyone asking questions.”

“Yes,” said Denis bitterly, “you want to let the brute off. Just like a girl.”

“No, I don't,” Hilda contradicted him with some heat; “only I don't want anyone sent to prison, that's all.”

“Who burnt the van? And who got shot?” Denis asked Ulyett. “Wasn't Wright, was it?” he added hopefully.

“We don't know yet exactly what happened,” Ulyett answered. “All we know for certain is what I told you.”

“What about the necklace?”

“We have no information,” answered Ulyett, “except that we believe it may have been concealed in the van. Anyone may have it now for all we know. It may be anywhere; it might still be in what's left of the van among the ashes. Not likely, though.”

“You bet it isn't likely,” agreed Denis.

“And,” continued Ulyett, “I must ask you to accompany us to Cheltenham. I shall want you to make a statement there.”

“Thought that's what I had been doing,” grumbled Denis. “Besides, I want to get back to London now this is a wash-out. How far's Cheltenham?”

Bobby looked up from the map he had been studying by the light of the car lamps.

“I can't make out quite where we are,” he said, “or where this road goes to.”

“Straight on across the Wiltshire downs by Stonehenge,” Denis answered. “At least, a chap in a Hotspur Seven said so. He stopped to see if he could help, and I asked him where this road went to, and that's what he said.”

Ulyett had been looking at Denis's car. He remarked:

“At your garage your foreman told us you were driving a Bayard Twenty. It's a Hotspur, isn't it? He gave us the wrong number, too.”

“Must have got mixed somehow,” answered Denis. “Good chap, George. Tactful and all that. Very. Can't think how he came to make such a bloomer.”

“I can,'' said Ulyett severely, but Denis had turned his head. “Someone pushing along in a hurry,” he said.

That was evident, for now out of the night there came to them the roar of a car – of cars, it seemed, from the volume of sound – rushing with the wind behind as though it were the wind itself they raced. As they listened, as they stood, before they had time to do more than draw a step or two aside, a car came screaming at them from the night that split before its headlights, and then closed again, more darkly even than before. It fled on, the miles as naught before it, and after it there followed another at the same wild, frantic speed that, at every yard almost, played even chances with disaster. Nor was that all, for behind was still a third, travelling at a rate as wild and fierce, and adding to the clamour of their general passage the shrieking of its horn, in angry, unheeded summons. Then from the first car in this lunatic procession, as it went roaring by, those at the roadside saw a stabbing flash of light dart out, like a strong lamp turned on and off, and then another and another and another.

“What's that?” Bobby exclaimed, though he knew.

“Shots,” Denis said. “Pistol. He's potting at 'em.”

“It was Wright in the first car,” Bobby said. “He was driving. Our headlights showed him up a minute.”

“Wynne and T.T. following,” Ulyett said, not moving; “and a police car after them both. Wright was shooting – trying to do in their tyres, most likely. If he does, they'll somersault, the pace they're going. They'll scrag him if they catch him.”

“Hilda, you stop here. I'll see what's happening,” Denis exclaimed.

“I'm coming, too,” Hilda said.

Denis was starting the car. Hilda leaped in by his side. He said something. He was plainly telling her to wait. She took no notice. He started the car and followed in the wake of the others.

“Don't we, too, sir?” Bobby said to Ulyett, astonished at his senior's inaction.

“It was Wright firing,” Ulyett said. “At their tyres. Silly trick.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bobby, almost dancing with impatience. “What do we do?”

“I think I'm hit,” Ulyett said, and sat down gently on the road.

Bobby bent down anxiously over the stricken man. He had been hit on the left thigh, where showed a gaping, jagged wound from whose appearance Bobby guessed it had been caused by a ricochet. Fortunately the artery had not been cut, and, as Bobby was doing his best to bandage the injury, Ulyett opened his eyes.

“What you doing?” he demanded fiercely. “Get after 'em.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bobby, who, indeed, was near to weeping as he thought of that wild chase continuing through the dark night and he unable to take part in it. “Got to fix you first, sir.”

“Fix nothing,” retorted Ulyett in the feeblest of whispers that was ever intended for an intimidating roar. “I'm all right. Get after 'em. Orders.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bobby, acquiescent as ever. “One moment, sir, till I've finished this.”

Ulyett jerked his injured thigh away, so undoing all Bobby's work and starting the bleeding again.

“Orders,” he gasped again. “Get after 'em.”

Therewith he fainted, and to Bobby's relief he heard a motor-cyclist approaching – if approaching is the right word to use when scarcely had the noise of the engine become audible when the thing itself was there, roaring by, throwing the miles behind it, one and more to every passing minute. The rider took no notice of Bobby's shout, possibly did not hear it even. Unheeded equally was the signal Bobby made by flashing his headlights across the road. He roared on, a dark and huddled figure bending low over his handle-bars, and in a second or two was no more than a clamour dying into the distance.

Bobby was not much given to violent language – he heard so much of it in the execution of his duties that it bored him, as chocolates are said to bore the girl assistants in confectioners' shops – but the curse he threw after that cyclist now would have astonished the most lurid of the practitioners in the profanity genre. There were tears in his eyes – actual tears of rage and disappointment – as he set himself to the task of getting the now unconscious Ulyett, who ( weighed a good fifteen stones, into the car without starting his wound bleeding once again. He had lost quite enough blood as it was, and his life must come first, but Bobby's self-control almost broke down as he thought of what might be happening elsewhere.

“That motor-cyclist,” he said to himself, “going all out like that – who was he?”

With a feeling of deep thankfulness he became aware of another car approaching, though this time at a more normal speed and from the opposite direction. Bobby shouted, and again signalled by flashing his headlight up and down across the road, and the newcomer stopped.

“Accident?” the driver asked. “Homicidal maniac on a motor-cycle just passed me. Was it him? What's happened? I'm a doctor.”

“Thank God,” said Bobby fervently. He explained briefly. The doctor looked at Ulyett's wound, asked a question or two, and pronounced it probably not serious. He rearranged Bobby's bandage, admitting that possibly, though only possibly, it might have been put on more clumsily, and he undertook to convey the wounded man to the hospital.

Together they got Ulyett as comfortably as possible into the car, and the injured man, opening his eyes when they had settled him, gave Bobby a baleful glare.

“Insubordination – report you – discipline board,” he gasped, and then, in a kind of muffled roar: “Get after 'em,” he said, and forthwith fainted again.

The doctor climbed into the driver's place, and for just one second Bobby hesitated. A detective-sergeant's pay leaves no great margin for luxuries, and Argus was but poorly supplied with eyes compared with those who in the receiver's office check expense lists. No C.I.D. man exists who is not convinced, and can prove by figures, that he is down pounds and pounds every year for what by rights a niggardly country should provide. Still, Bobby had an odd copper or two in the savings bank, and pay-day does ultimately come round, even though with incredible slowness, and, as the doctor was starting with his patient, Bobby said quickly:

“Oh, do you mind? Would you tell the hospital people I'll give a guinea to their funds if they'll put Mr. Ulyett in the next bed to the shock patient they've just got?”

“Friends?” asked the doctor, and, without waiting for a reply, drove off, while Bobby was aware of a glow of pure philanthropy as he thought of Ulyett's nicely mingled awe, embarrassment, wonder, and delight at finding himself bedded next to a duke.

Then he forgot it as he made a leap into his car, started it, jammed a foot on the accelerator, vanished into the darkness, like the nightmare of a bullet shot from the maw of chaos and old night.

He supposed that after this long delay those he sought would be many miles away, and in which direction he had no idea. Not much chance of either finding them or overtaking them, he felt. Still, at the speed they had been using there would not have been much opportunity for taking side-turnings, and Denis Chenery had said that the road ran straight across the Wiltshire downs. Wright, driving the first car, might have known that, and have thought the lonely Wiltshire country – the lonely Marlborough Downs or the even lonelier Salisbury Plain – a good place in which to shake off his pursuers, or perhaps, Bobby thought uncomfortably, those pursuers might have been deliberately shepherding him that way. If Wynne's reputation were anything to go by, if it were true that he cared as little for his own life as for the lives of others, then there might be grim work done that night on the wide Wiltshire plain.

That must mean, then, that Wright and Jacks, and not Wynne and T.T., were in possession of the necklace. Presumably somehow they had got hold of it before the other two had found the van, and then Wynne and T.T. – T.T. probably dragged and coerced into the adventure by his reckless associate very much against his own will – had set out in pursuit. Naturally this pursuit and flight had soon drawn after it one of the cruising police cars warned to be on the look-out. The motor-cyclist Bobby was not sure about. He might be merely a youth enjoying the thrill of night-riding at speed, or he might be someone in a hurry for some reason of his own, in no way connected with these happenings. But if he were concerned in them, then Bobby supposed it would not be difficult to guess his identity.