The Riddle of the Mysterious Light

  CHAPTER XVI

  CLEEK EXPLAINS

  "How did I manage to find the thing out?" said Cleek, answering theduke's query as they all sat together in the vicarage drawing-room, anhour or more afterward, discussing the affair. "Well, to tell you thetruth, I think I got the very first inkling from the ringing of thebells. Oh, no, not through any special power of deduction or anysuper-human nonsense of that sort, but simply and solely through mymemory. You will remember that I said Overton was not very original inhis methods. Well, it so happened that I recalled the circumstance of amonkey which escaped from its cage and terrorized a Swiss village someyears ago by climbing into the church belfry and inadvertently settingthe bells ringing in the middle of the night by hopping from one to theother in an effort to maintain its equilibrium. That, of course,suggested a similar possibility here, and I set about deciding the pointby means of the fullers' earth. By the way, Mr. Narkom, I chose fullers'earth not alone because of its yielding quality and its ability toreceive impressions of even very slight things falling upon it, butbecause by reason of its weight and its rather tenacious character itwas not so likely as another medium to be blown away by any suddenrising of the wind. I suppose you know that I placed the stuff about thetower's base when I left you at the limousine?"

  "I judged that," replied the Superintendent. "The thing which amazed me,however, was all that meaningless stuff about timber and cubic feet youtalked about when you came back. I can't even yet get the hang of that."

  "Can't you? It will be getting in advance of the story a bit, but I mayas well explain it now as later. I had come to the point of certaintyregarding the making of a tunnel--how, you shall hear later--and as atunnel of 288 feet in length will require shoring up and bracing withbalks at intervals if one doesn't want it to become one's grave, timberfor that purpose becomes a necessity. Now, as it would have been apretty risky business to have left a trail by purchasing timber, and aworse one to attempt to smuggle it into the Hurdons' cottage, I had tofigure out just where those beauties were going to get it. Old or new,they simply must have it, and the idea of _old_ timber set my thoughtsgoing--opened up, as it were, the possibility of the adjoining housebeing kept tenantless so that they could quietly demolish it and get thewood from there. So, when I went to lay the fullers' earth about thetower, I determined to have a look inside that other cottage and decidethe point. A skeleton key let me in, and one flicker of my torch settledthe question. The floors were up, the walls had been broken with asledge-hammer until the place was fairly littered with mortar and limefrom end to end, and every joist and beam that could be removed withoutbringing the place down had been taken away. I made a rapid inventory,calculated roughly about how much timber it would take to supply whathad been removed, reduced that to the requirements of the tunnel, andwhen you caught me going about that little problem in mental arithmetic,I was trying to discover just how far those chaps must have progressedwith the tunnel on the basis of the cubic feet of timber used.

  "Now, to get back to the beginning. The tunnel idea was really theoutcome of speculating with regard to Sir Julius Solinski's possibleconnection with the matter. That, of course, set me to thinking on thesubject of digging for the purpose of getting something out of the earthby secret means and defeating the duke that way; then, when I get tothinking over Captain Paul Sandringham's position in the event of theproposed marriage and the possibility of an heir coming between him andhis expectations, and added to that my knowledge of the dishonestcharacter of the man--why, there you are! The tunnel and the reason forit simply evolve themselves by natural means out of such fertile soilas that; and, this much accomplished, it was but a step to the Hurdonsand that very delightful garden which was so delightfully kept."

  "How?"

  "I didn't like the idea of that garden in that particular place for onething, and then, for another, I didn't like its being so wonderfullykept up by a couple of people who couldn't apparently be scared intoneglecting it or frightened out of the neighbourhood by all the ghostsand bells and curses in Christendom. I asked myself: 'Why do people ofposition and means so humble that they have to live in a little thatchedcottage go to the expense of a garden so ornamental that even a ducalresidence is enhanced by the presence of it?' The answer appeared to bethat they were doing it for the purpose of making the duke pleased tohave them remain there; and if they had any reason for spending a lot ofmoney in plants and flowers simply to prevent the duke from tearing downthe cottages and putting an end to the nuisance of that ill-kept onenext door, there must be something at the bottom of it that would notstand looking into. If there was to be a tunnel, then, why should notthat be the starting point? The more I thought over the thing the morepromising it looked. For, I said to myself, to keep up a garden in thestate of constant bloom and continual perfection, as that one appears tobe, will need a lot of work; in fact, will keep that one old man andwoman busy in it pretty much all their time, if there is no fake aboutit; but if there is, and they are digging in the tunnel, and the gardenstill bears those outward signs of constant care, why, there will beonly one possible solution, one possible way to do it. In other words,there will have to be a constant supply of fresh plants that can bepopped into the place of any that show the slightest trace of neglect,and that means that they will have to be shallow-rooted things likegeraniums, fuchsias, lilies, and the like, so that the change cannotonly be accomplished quickly, but will show no sign to the casualobserver."

  "Ah, now I understand what you meant by all that stuff about geraniumswhich I couldn't make head or tail of at the time. And that's why youwere so interested and so anxious to go over and talk with the Hurdonwoman the minute you caught sight of the place."

  "That's it precisely, Mr. Narkom. I saw at once that I had hit uponsomething very like the truth; and as I also saw that the woman was veryparticular in rising from her work to see that her gardening apron wasbrushed down over her skirt, I wondered what she was so anxious to hide,and took means to find out by tossing the wall plant to her on the pleaof its being a very choice plant. When she caught it in her apron and Isaw those marks of caked yellow clay about her knees, I was bothgratified and--disappointed."

  "Disappointed, old chap?"

  "Yes, in the colour of the stuff. I'd expected it to be blue. For, asyou know, the county of Essex may be said to rest almost entirely on afoundation of what is geologically known as 'London clay' and that isdecidedly blue. All in a moment, however, I remembered that we wereclose to the border line of Suffolk, and consequently on the edge of theyellow clay belt, and--there you are. Pardon, Duke? How did I get theidea of Captain Sandringham's connection with the affair? Oh, thatfellow Carstairs gave me the first hint of that at the vicarage gatewhen the news of the man's death was made known, and Overton clinchedthe nail at once. He was obviously distressed by the news, and didn'tknow how to proceed; but when Carstairs flung out that little hint aboutthere being 'one the less to reckon with' the fellow's eyes lit up in amanner not to be mistaken. They are expressive eyes. To-day, when I wentover to the Castle and got the duke to send him off to Braintree so thatI could slip into the Lodge and search his effects I found all the proofof 'Miss Emmy Costivan's' identity and of the beggar's arrangements withCaptain Sandringham.

  "I also made use of my time at the Castle to question the duke's valetand to learn what happened when Tom Davis went out to investigate thematter of the bells that night. Just before he went, Carstairs hadtreated him to half a bottle of the ducal champagne. When I heard that,I knew at once how the morphia had been administered. I had known fromthe first, however, that, if morphia should turn out to be the drugemployed, Carstairs would be the man, because the rascal had it handy.How did I know that? Well, you remember that time when Sir JuliusSolinski passed us in his motor? Carstairs saluted him. As the beggarput his hand to his hat, his sleeve slipped down, and I could see theevidence of the thing. The man was addicted to the use of hypodermicinjections of morphia--the scars of the needle were clearly visible. Idon't think
there is any doubt of how poor Davis died. The drug overcamehim on the road, and he dropped down in a stupor. There is clearevidence of that. You saw me examine his nails? The flint dust of theroad was under them. After that, I suppose, Carstairs, who had beenfollowing him and watching him out for just such a time, pounced on him,carried him into the half-demolished cottage, and brained him with thehammer that was being used to batter down the walls and beat out thejoists. As for the other tragic affair connected with the samecottage--namely, the mysterious disappearance of the child and theinsanity and suicide of the father? I don't suppose we need regard thatas other than a pleasant little fiction upon the part of Mr. JamesOverton. The duke tells me that the body of the man Smale was neverrecovered, and that his going insane and drowning himself rests onlyupon a 'farewell note' from him to Mr. Overton, who afterward declaredthat he had seen his body fished out of the river a good ten miles away.Of course the story of the child's vanishing in the dead of the nightwas another piece of fiction of the same sort. Nor would it surprise mein the slightest if the man called Smale, who posed as her father, wasreally no less a person than Captain Paul Sandringham himself.

  "One thing, however, I think we can assert positively, and that is thatMrs. Mallory, the widow who set the ball rolling, was no other than MissEmily Overton, otherwise Emily Costivan, and that the person who figuredas her sister is the woman who passed as her mother."

  "Mrs. Costivan?"

  "Yes. I think we shall find that she and her husband were admitted intothe game simply because they had at the time a nephew who was in thelast stages of consumption. Of course the story about the gypsy who wasbeating him and who told the curse that would follow if he were buriedhere was made from whole cloth. The youth was simply carried into thehouse in the night, and Doctor Forsyth was right in the matter of hisnot having been able to lift a hand for days before he was called in tohim. Since then it would appear that Mrs. Costivan had directed herenergies toward washing the clay-stained overalls of one and the otherof the 'tunnellers' when her husband carried them to her--for I dare saythat every one of them--Carstairs, Overton, Costivan, all of them, tooka hand in it at times; and if it hadn't been for poor Tom Davis, theymight have carried it through successfully, after all. Which shows againthat 'there's many a slip----!'"

  And so ended the case of the Mysterious Light which nearly lost a duke amost valuable heritage and to which only Cleek could find the solution.