The Woman with One Hand (and) Mr. Ely's Engagement Part 5

The inspector carefully read the letter which had come to me signed "Duncan Rothwell." Then, without asking with your leave or by your leave, he placed the letter, the advertis.e.m.e.nt, and the telegram in his pocket-book, and the pocket-book in his pocket. The action struck me as extremely, and indeed unpleasantly, significant.

An examination of the dead man's pockets disclosed the somewhat curious fact that they contained nothing but a ma.s.sive gold watch, without a maker's name; a sheaf of bank-notes, which, unenclosed in any cover, was simply thrust in the breast-pocket of his coat, and consisted of no less than one hundred ten-pound notes; some gold and silver coins--four pounds, thirteen shillings, if I remember rightly--in a plain leather purse; and, in an apparently forgotten corner of his right-hand waistcoat pocket, was a torn sc.r.a.p of a visiting card. On it was the name, "Raymond." But the card was torn in such a manner that, whether this was a surname or a Christian name, there was, as the police would themselves have said, no evidence to show. But beyond these articles there was absolutely nothing which would serve or could be used as a means of identification. It almost seemed as if the dead man had taken care that there should be nothing about him by means of which he could be identified.

As soon as the inspector seemed disposed to allow me to quit his presence I went straight away to Messrs. Cleaver and Caxton. Again I found the senior partner alone. My appearance seemed to surprise him; possibly in my bearing there was something which was a trifle suggestive of the condition of my mind.

"Well, has Mr. Rothwell been?"

I shut the door behind me, looking him full in the face.

"You appear to have let me in for a nice little thing, Mr. Cleaver."

"What do you mean?"

"It is what you mean I intend to understand before I leave this room.

You will be so good as to answer me one or two questions, Mr. Cleaver.

First, is Mr. Duncan Rothwell the name of the client for whom you have been acting?"

He leaned back in his chair, regarding me with rather a curious smile.

"You have a singular method of address, Mr. Southam. Before I answer this question perhaps you will answer mine. Has Mr. Rothwell been to see you?"

"What does he look like?"

"Look like!" Again the curious smile. "You continue to answer question with question. Tell me, sir, has any one calling himself Duncan Rothwell been to see you? We will discuss the question of what he looked like afterwards."

I paused before I spoke again, then keenly noted the effect of my words.

"For all I know, Mr. Duncan Rothwell lies murdered at Mrs. Barnes's hotel."

Mr. Cleaver sprang to his feet. "Murdered!"

"Precisely! Some one lies there murdered. If you will tell me what he looks like I will tell you if it is Mr. Duncan Rothwell."

Not unnaturally, Mr. Cleaver appeared bewildered.

"Explain yourself a little more clearly, Mr. Southam; and, to begin with, will you be so good as to answer Yes or No to my question. Has any one calling himself Duncan Rothwell been to see you?"

I told him what had happened--so far as I understood it. His amazement unmistakably was genuine.

"You say that the dead man had nothing on him by means of which he could be recognised. Then, in that case, we can do nothing to a.s.sist in his identification; we ourselves have never seen Mr. Duncan Rothwell in our lives. All our communications with him have been by letter."

He acknowledged one thing: that the person for whom they had been acting was Mr. Duncan Rothwell. But, beyond that one fact, I learned nothing at all. He protested that Mr. Duncan Rothwell had instructed them, by letter, to advertise for a James Southam, of Dulborough, and that that was all they knew of the matter. He even suggested that, since I was James Southam, I, if I chose, could fill up the blanks.

When I returned to the hotel, little wiser than I left it, as soon as I set foot inside the door the inspector of police, clapping his hand upon my shoulder, drew me aside. I did not like the fashion in which he addressed me at all.

"See here, Mr. Southam. I do not wish to make myself disagreeable, but I need scarcely point out to you that there are circ.u.mstances in this case which are, to say the least of it, peculiar. I may as well tell you that your movements will be under the surveillance of the police; and, should you make any attempt to elude us we may consider it our duty to place you in safe custody."

"That's all right," I replied. "Lock me up and hang me, do! It only needs some little trifle of that kind to make the situation altogether what it should be. The man is a perfect stranger to me, and I know no more how he came to his death than the man in the moon; which things are, possibly, a sufficient reason why the police should make of me one of their proverbial examples."

It struck me that the inspector did not altogether know what to make of me; Although he did not arrest me, to all intents and purposes he might almost as well have done. Until the inquest took place the hotel was practically in charge, with everybody in it. A policeman slept on the premises; other policemen were continually about the premises, asking questions and making themselves objectionable both by day and night. I myself began to feel that I had a haunted, hangdog sort of air. As for Mrs. Barnes, if she had not a great crime upon her conscience, it was not because she did not look it. She seemed to be growing hourly thinner. I knew very well that she was full of a great anxiety to say a word or two to me in private, but dared not for fear of prying eyes and ears. She solved the difficulty in her own way by pinning a note to my pillow, so that I found it on going to bed on the night before the inquest.

It had neither beginning nor end, and ran something like this; every word was underlined--

"Say nothing to-morrow about my husband, for G.o.d's sake! I am quite sure that he had nothing to do with this deed of horror--you know that he had not--and I know! No good purpose will be served by dragging him into it, and so bringing on me greater ruin than has come already!"

As I read this scarcely judicious appeal I told myself that Mrs.

Barnes was certainly wrong in saying that I knew that her mysterious husband had had nothing to do with the crime which had been wrought.

As a matter of fact, I knew nothing.

The more I reflected, however, the less I liked the look of the circ.u.mstances, which seemed to suggest a guilty knowledge on the part of my whilom friend, the waiter. It appeared at least possible that he was the James Southam who had been actually advertised for, and that he was very well aware that Duncan Rothwell had something to say to him which was, very distinctly, not to his advantage. Looking at the violence which, without hesitation, he had used towards me, was it not conceivable that he might have, and indeed had, used still greater violence towards Mr. Rothwell?

The inquest was not over in a day, though the only light it threw upon the crime went to prove the ident.i.ty of the murdered man. A singular state of things the evidence upon this point revealed--by no means tending to elucidate the mystery. The dead man actually turned out to be Jonas Hartopp--the head, and, in fact, the sole remaining partner, in the well-known firm of manufacturing jewellers--Hartopp and Company. The strange part of the business was that he seemed to have been Duncan Rothwell as well--that is, he had a.s.sumed that name for reasons which were very far from being plain.

Hartopp and Company were a Birmingham firm--a wealthy one. Jonas Hartopp himself had had the reputation of being as rich as a reasonable man would care to be. Duncan Rothwell had written to Messrs. Cleaver and Caxton from Liverpool, where he had taken rooms, as it would seem, for the special purpose of communicating with them.

He had never occupied the rooms, but had given the most peremptory instructions that all letters and telegrams should at once be forwarded to an address at Aston. The address at Aston turned out to be a tobacconist's shop. The tobacconist at once recognised the dead man as being the person he had known as Duncan Rothwell. Why the wealthy Birmingham jeweller, Jonas Hartopp, had chosen to masquerade as Duncan Rothwell, or what was the something to his advantage which he proposed to communicate to James Southam, there was not a shred or t.i.ttle of evidence to show; nor was there a thread of light thrown upon the shadows which enveloped the mystery of his sudden death.

As it chanced, no question was asked me while I was in the witness-box which gave me an opportunity of bringing in the incident of Mrs.

Barnes's husband. I had a sufficiently bad time of it without being actuated by a burning desire to involve myself in further complications. Never in my life had I been so badgered. They would not accept my plain statement that I had not the faintest notion why James Southam had been advertised for, or who had advertised for him, or what was the something which he was to learn to his advantage. The coroner and the police, and, for the matter of that, the public too, appeared to be under the impression that, since I owned that my name was James Southam, therefore I held the key of the mystery in the hollow of my hand; or, at any rate, that I ought to. They had raked up the circ.u.mstances of my life from my earliest days; they had made all sorts of inquiries about me in all sorts of directions, yet they could find nothing which could fairly be said to tell against me; and that for the sufficient, and, from my point of view, satisfactory reason, that there was nothing to find.

Notwithstanding which, when the inquiry closed, I was conscious that more than one person in court, and a good many out of it, cherished the impression that I had had a hand indirectly, if not directly, in the murdered man's despatch, the verdict of the coroner's jury being that Jonas Hartopp, otherwise known as Duncan Rothwell, had been murdered by some person or persons unknown.

CHAPTER V

THE NEW GUEST

Oddly enough it was not until I was smarting under the feelings occasioned by the reflection that I had come out of the inquiry with a smirch upon my character that it occurred to me what a fool I had been, when I was in the witness-box, in not going even out of my way to transfer suspicion from myself to the scamp whom Mrs. Barnes had a.s.sured me was her husband. I arrived, then and there, at a resolution. I would play, on lines of my own, that favourite part in fiction--the role of the amateur detective. I would trace to their sources the various threads which had become complicated in such a tangled web of crime. I would unravel them, one by one. Single-handed, if necessary, I would make the whole thing plain.

In theory, an excellent resolution; situated as I was, not an easy one to put into practice. Before the end of the coroner's inquest Messrs.

Cleaver and Caxton informed me that their guarantee to provide for the expenses of my sojourn at Mrs. Barnes's establishment thenceforward was withdrawn. Of the four banknotes which had come to me in Duncan Rothwell's letter about fifteen pounds remained. If that sum might be credited to my account, on the debit side of the column was the injury which my connection with the affair had, at least temporarily, done my character. If before I had found it difficult to obtain remunerative employment, I should find it now still harder.

On the morning after the close of the inquiry I was meditating taking an immediate departure from the house in which I had met with experiences which had been to anything but my advantage, when Mrs.

Barnes came into the room. Her worries had worn her almost to a shadow. I felt that, if she continued to diminish at the same rate long, she soon, literally, would entirely waste away. Her nervous tricks seemed to have become accentuated. She stood rubbing her hands together, apparently for the moment at a loss for something to say.

"I hope, sir, that you are not going?"

"Then you hope wrong, Mrs. Barnes. I certainly am going, and that at once."

"You mustn't sir--you really mustn't."

"You are wrong again, Mrs. Barnes, for I really must, if on one account only--that I am not in a position to pay your terms."

She gave a sudden movement forward, coming to lean with both her hands upon the table. Her voice dropped to that odd, palpitating whisper of which she seemed to be so fond.