The Best Crime Stories Ever Told (7 page)

BOOK: The Best Crime Stories Ever Told
3.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

She shook her head, gazing at him with her chin on her hand. Presently she said, “I think you are not against me. But I do not understand why you kept my secret from others when you had found it out.”

“I sought for it because I am curious,” he answered. “I kept it, and I will always keep it, because—oh, well! because to me Lillemor Wergeland is a sort of divinity.”

She laughed suddenly. “Incense! And I in these rags, in this place, with what I can see in this little spotty piece of cheap looking-glass! Ah, well! You have come a long way. Monsieur le Curieux, and it would be a cruelty not to confide in you. After all, it was simple.

“It was only a day or two after the disaster that the resolve came to me. I never hesitated a moment. It was through me that they were in that place—you have heard that? I felt I must leave the world I knew, and that knew me. Suicide never occurred to me—what is there more contemptible? As for a convent, unhappily there is none for people with minds like mine. I meant simply to disappear, and the only way to succeed was to get the reputation of being dead. I thought it out for some days and nights. Then I wrote, in the name of my maid, to an establishment in Paris where I used to buy things for the stage. I sent money, and ordered a dark brown transformation—that is a lady’s word for a wig—some stuff for darkening the skin, various pigments and pencils, et tout le bazar. My maid did not know what I had sent for; she only handed the parcel to me when it arrived. She would have thrown herself in the fire for me, I think, my maid Maria. The day the things came I announced that I would return home by the route you know.”

“Then it was as I guessed!” Trent exclaimed. “You disguised yourself on the steamer at Brindisi, and slipped off in the dark before it started.”

“I was no such imbecile, indeed,” returned the lady, with a hint of sharpness. “How if my absence had been discovered somehow before the starting? That could happen; and then what? No; when we reached Brindisi from Taormina, I knew we had some hours there. I put on a thick veil and went out alone. At the office by the harbour I took a second-class berth for myself, Miss Julia Simms, travelling from Brindisi to Venice. I found the boat was already alongside the quay. Then I went into the poorer streets of the town and bought some clothes, very ugly ones, some shoes, some cheap toilet things.”

“Some black hair-pins,” murmured Trent.

“Naturally, black,” she assented. She looked at him inquiringly, then resumed. “I bought also a melancholy little cheap portmanteauthing, and put my purchases in it. I took it on a cab to the harbour, and gave one of the ship’s stewards a lira to put it in Miss Simms’s cabin to await her. After that I bought two other things, a long mackintosh coat and a funny little cap, the very things for Miss Simms, and at the hotel I pushed them under the things my maid had already packed in my dressing case. On the steamer, when I was locked in my cabin without danger of disturbance, I took off my fur coat, I arranged a dark, rather catty sort of face for myself, and fitted on Miss Simms’s hair. I put on her mackintosh and cap. When the boat began to move away from the quay, and people on deck were looking over the rail, I just stepped out of my cabin, shut the door, and walked straight to Miss Simms’s berth at the other end of the ship. There is not much more to say. When we reached Venice I did not look for the others, and I never saw them. I went straight on to Paris, and wrote to my brother Knut that I was alive, and told him just what I meant to do if he would help me. Such things do not seem so mad to a true child of Norway.”

“What things?” Trent asked.

“Things of deep sorrow, malady of soul, escape from the world. He and his wife have been true and good to me. I am supposed to be her cousin, Hilda Bjornstad. I left them money, more than enough to pay for me, but they did not know that when they welcomed me here.”

She ceased, and smiled vaguely at Trent, who was considering her tale with eyes that gazed fixedly at the sky-line. “Yes, of course,” he remarked, presently, in an abstracted manner. “That was it. So simple! And now may I tell you,” he went on, with a sudden change of tone, “one or two details you have forgotten?

“At Brindisi you bought, just before going on the boat, a box of the stuff called Ixtil, to prevent sea-sickness. You took a dose before going on board and another just after, as the directions prescribed. Then, as Mr. Selby happened to know you had it, you thought it best to leave it behind when you vanished. Also you left behind you, in your hurry, four black hair-pins, quite new, which had somehow, I suppose, got loose inside your little bag, and which were found there by Selby. You see, Lady Aviemore, it was Selby who brought me into this. He told me all the facts he knew. And he showed me the velvet bag and its contents. But he did not attach any importance to the two things I have just mentioned.”

Lady Aviemore raised her eyebrows perceptibly. “I cannot see why he should. And I cannot see why he should bring in anybody.”

“Because he had some vague idea of your brother-in-law having caused your death, or, at any rate, having known your intention to commit suicide. He never said it outright, but it was plain that that was in his mind. You see, Lord Aviemore stood to benefit enormously by your death; and then there was the matter of your note announcing your suicide.”

“It announced,” she remarked, “the truth: that I was leaving a world I could not bear. The words might mean one thing or another. But what of the note?”

“That truthful note,” said Trent, “was written with pen and ink, of which there was none in your cabin. It was written on paper which had been torn from a block, and no block was found. Also it was discovered that that particular make of paper is sold in Canada, but has never been sold in Europe. You had never been in Canada. Lord Aviemore had just come back from Canada. You see?”

“But did not Mr. Selby perceive that my brother-in-law is a saint?” inquired the lady, with a touch of impatience. “Surely that was plain! An evident saint!”

“In my slight knowledge of him,” admitted Trent, “he struck me in that way. But Selby is a lawyer, and lawyers don’t understand saints. Besides, Lord Aviemore disliked him, I fancy, and perhaps he felt the same way about Lord Aviemore.”

“It is true he did not approve of Mr. Selby, because he disliked all men who were smart and worldly. But now I will tell you. That evening in the hotel at Brindisi I wanted to write the note, and I asked my brother-in-law for a sheet from a block he had in his hand and was about to write upon. That is all. I wrote it in the hotel writing-room, and took it afterwards in my bag to the cabin.”

“We supposed you had written it beforehand,” Trent observed, “and that was one of the things that led me to feel morally certain that you were still alive. I’ll explain. If, as we thought, you had written the note in the hotel, your suicide was a premeditated act. Yet Selby afterwards saw you buying that medicine, and it was plain that you had taken two doses. Now, it struck me that it was ridiculous for anyone already determined on drowning herself at sea to begin treating herself against sea-sickness. Then there were those new black hair-pins. The sight of them was a revelation to me. They meant disguise. For I knew, of course, that with that hair you had probably never used a dark hair-pin in your life.”

The Countess felt at her pale-gold plaits, and gravely extended a black hair-pin. “In the valley we all use them.”

“It is very different in the valley, I know,” he said, quietly.

The lady regarded her guest with something of respect. “It still remains,” she said, “to explain how you knew it was in Norway, and here, as a poor farm-servant, that I should hide myself. It seemed to me the last thing in the world—your world—that a woman who had lived my life would be expected to do.”

“There was no certainty about it,” he answered. “It was a strong possibility, that’s all. Your problem, you see, was just what you say—to hide yourself. And you had another, I think. You had to get your living somehow. Everything you possessed—except some small sum in cash, I suppose—you left behind you when you disappeared. Now, a woman cannot very well go on acting and disguising herself for ever. A man can grow hair on his face or shave it off; for a woman, disguise must be a perpetual anxiety. If she has to get employment, and especially if she has no references, it’s an impossibility.”

She nodded gravely. “That was how I saw it.”

“So,” he pursued, “it came to this: that Lillemor Wergeland had to come to the surface again somewhere, and in no long time; Lillemor Wergeland, whose type of beauty and general appearance were so marked and unmistakable, and whose photograph had gone all over the world. The fact is that for some time I didn’t see how it could possibly have been done. There were only a few countries, I supposed, of which you knew enough of the language to make any attempt to live and work in them. In those countries you would always attract attention by your physical type and your accent; and if you attracted attention, discovery might follow at any moment. The more I thought of it the more difficult it seemed.

“And then the idea came. There was one country in which your looks and speech would not betray you as a foreigner—your own country. And among those corners of the world where Lillemor Wergeland could go with a fair certainty of being unrecognised, the remoter villages of Norway would be. And at Myklebostad, on the Langfjord, which the map told me was thirty miles from the nearest town and sixty from the nearest railway, Lillemor Wergeland had a brother, who was also the richer by two thousand pounds for her supposed death.

“You see, then, how I formed the theory which brought me to this place on a sketching holiday,” Trent stood up and gazed across the valley to the sunlit white peaks beyond. “I have visited Norway before, but I have never had such an interesting time. And now, before I return to the haunts of men, let me say again that I shall forget at once all that has happened to-day. Don’t think it was a vulgar curiosity that brought me here. There was once a supreme artiste called Lillemore Wergeland, whose gifts made me her debtor and servant. Anything that happened to her touched me; I had a sort of right to go seeking what it really was that had happened.”

She stood before him in her coarse and stained clothes, her hands clasped behind her, with a face and attitude of perfect dignity.

“Very well. You stand on your right, and I on mine—to arrange my own life, since I am alone in it. And I will spend it here, where it began. My soul was born here, before it went out to have adventures, and it has crept home again for comfort. Believe me, it is not only as you say, that I am safe from discovery here. That counts very much; but it is the truth that I felt I must go out of the world, and live out my life where it began, in this far-away, lonely place, where everything is humble, and there is no wealth or luxury at all, and the hills and the fjords are severe and grand, just as God made them before there were any men. Some people used to have that impulse, you know, long ago, when something had happened to make them tired of the world, or to stain their souls so that they must go apart and wash their wickedness away. And this, all this is my own, own land! And now,” she ended, suddenly, “we understand one another.”

She extended her hand, saying, “I do not know your name.”

“Why should you?” he asked, bending over it; then went quickly from her. At the beginning of the descent he glanced back once; she waved her hand with a quick gesture.

Half-way down the rugged climb Trent stopped. Far above a wonderful voice was singing to the glory of the Norse land, whose mountains (it sang) not even the storm that should rive the globe itself would be able to shake.

“Ja! Herligt er mit Fodeland,

Der ewig trodser Tidens Tand,”

sang the voice.

Trent looked out upon the wild landscape.

“Her Fatherland!” he soliloquised. “Well, well! They say the strictest parents have the most devoted children.”

THE BITER BIT

WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS

FROM CHIEF INSPECTOR THEAKSTONE, OF THE
DETECTIVE POLICE, TO SERGEANT BULMER OF
THE SAME FORCE

L
ONDON
,
4th July, 18—.

S
ERGEANT
B
ULMER
,—

This is to inform you that you are wanted to assist in looking up a ease of importance, which will require all the attention of an experienced member of the force. The matter of the robbery on which you are now engaged, you will please to shift over to the young man who brings you this letter. You will tell him all the circumstances of the case, just as they stand; you will put him up to the progress you have made (if any) towards detecting the person or persons by whom the money has been stolen; and you will leave him to make the best he can of the matter now in your hands. He is to have the whole responsibility of the case, and the whole credit of his success, if he brings it to a proper issue.

So much for the orders that I am desired to communicate to you.

A word in your ear, next, about this new man who is to take your place. His name is Matthew Sharpin; and he is to have the chance given him of dashing into our office at a jump—supposing he turns out strong enough to take it. You will naturally ask me how he comes by this privilege. I can only tell you that he has some uncommonly strong interest to back him in certain high quarters which you and I had better not mention except under our breaths. He has been a lawyer’s clerk; and he is wonderfully conceited in his opinion of himself, as well as mean and underhand to look at. According to his own account, he leaves his old trade, and joins ours, of his own free will and preference. You will no more believe that than I do. My notion is, that he has managed to ferret out some private information in connexion with the affairs of one of his master’s clients, which makes him rather an awkward customer to keep in the office for the future, and which, at the same time, gives him hold enough over his employer to make it dangerous to drive him into a corner by turning him away. I think the giving him this unheard-of chance among us, is, in plain words, pretty much like giving him hush-money to keep him quiet. However that may be, Mr. Matthew Sharpin is to have the case now in your hands; and if he succeeds with it, he pokes his ugly nose into our office, as sure as fate. I put you up to this, Sergeant, so that you may not stand in your own light by giving the new man any cause to complain of you at headquarters, and remain yours,

BOOK: The Best Crime Stories Ever Told
3.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Edible Espionage by Shaunna Owens
Scared to Death by Wendy Corsi Staub
Guilty as Sin by Jami Alden
Caressed by Moonlight by Amanda J. Greene