CHAPTER III

“Cinnamon! what a corroboration – what a horrible corroboration! Cleek, you knock the last prop from under me; you make certain a thing that I thought was only a woman’s wild imaginings,” said Narkom, getting up suddenly, all a-tremble with excitement. “Good heavens! to have Miss Valmond’s story corroborated in this dreadful way.”

“Miss Valmond? Who’s she? Any relation to that Miss Rose Valmond whose name one sees in the papers so frequently in connection with gifts to Catholic Orphanages and Foundling Homes?”

“The same lady,” replied Narkom. “Her charities are numberless, her life a psalm. I think she has done more good in her simple, undemonstrative way than half the guilds and missions in London. She has an independent fortune, and lives, in company with an invalid and almost imbecile mother, and a brother who is, I am told, studying for the priesthood, in a beautiful home surrounded by splendid grounds, the walls of which separate her garden from that of Lemmingham House.”

“Ah, I see. Then she is a neighbour of Barrington-Edwards?”

“Yes. From the back windows of her residence one can look into the grounds of his. That is how – Cleek!” Mr. Narkom’s voice shook with agitation – “You will remember I said, a little time back, that I would have something startling to tell you in connection with Barrington-Edwards – something that was not connected with that old army scandal? If it had not been for the high character of my informant; if it had been any other woman in all England I should have thought she was suffering from nerves – fancying things as the result of an overwrought mind sent into a state of hysteria through all those abominable crimes in the neighbourhood; but when it was she, when it was Miss Valmond – ”

“Oho!” said Cleek, screwing round suddenly. “Then Miss Valmond told you something with regard to Barrington-Edwards?”

“Yes – a horrible something. She came to me this morning looking as I hope I shall never see a good woman look again – as if she had been tortured to the last limit of human endurance. She had been fighting a silent battle for weeks and weeks she said, but her conscience would not let her keep the appalling secret any longer, neither would her duty to Heaven. Wakened in the dead of night by a sense of oppression, she had gone to her window to open it for air, and, looking down by chance into the garden of Lemmingham House, she had seen a man come rushing out of the rear door of Barrington-Edwards’ place in his pajamas, closely followed by another, whom she believed to be Barrington-Edwards himself, and she had seen that man unlock the door in the side wall and push the poor wretch out into the road where he was afterward found by the constable.”

“By Jupiter!”

“Ah, you may be moved when you connect that circumstance with what you have yourself unearthed. But there is worse to come. Unable to overcome a frightful fascination which drew her night after night to that window, she saw that same thing happen again to the fourth, and finally, the fifth man – the web-footed one – and that last time she saw the face of the pursuer quite plainly. It was Barrington-Edwards!”

“Sure of that, was she?”

“Absolutely. It was the positive certainty it was he that drove her at last to speak!”

Cleek made no reply, no comment; merely screwed round on his heel and took to pacing the floor again. After a minute however:

“Mr. Narkom,” he said halting abruptly. “I suppose all my old duds are still in the locker of the limousine, aren’t they? Good! I thought so. Give Lennard the signal, will you? I must risk the old car in an emergency like this. Take me first to the cable office, please; then to the mortuary, and afterward to Miss Valmond’s home. I hate to torture her further, poor girl, but I must get all the facts of this, first hand.”

He did. The limousine was summoned at once, and inside of an hour it set him down (looking the very picture of a solicitor’s clerk) at the cable office, then picked up and set him down at the Hampstead mortuary, this time, making so good a counterpart of Petrie that even Hammond, who was on guard beside the dead man, said “Hullo, Pete, that you? Thought you was off duty to-day,” as he came in with the superintendent.

“Jim Peabody fast enough, Mr. Narkom,” commented Cleek, when they were left together beside the dead man. “Changed, of course, in all the years, but still poor old Jim. Good-hearted, honest, but illiterate. Could barely more than write his name, and even that without a capital, poor chap. Let me look at the hand. A violet smudge on the top of the thumb as well as those marks on the palm, I see. Hum-m-m! Any letters or writing of any sort in the pockets when found? None, eh? That old bone-handled pocket knife there his? Yes, I’d like to look at it. Open it, please. Thanks. I thought so, I thought so. Those the socks he had on? Poor wretch! Down to that at last, eh? – down to that! Let me have one of them for a day or so, will you? and – yes – the photographs of the other four, please. Thanks very much. No, that’s all. Now then, to call on Miss Valmond, if you don’t mind. Right you are. Let her go, Lennard. Down with the blinds and open with the locker again, Mr. Narkom, and we’ll ‘dig’ Mr. George Headland out of his two-months’ old grave.” And at exactly ten minutes after eight o’clock, Mr. George Headland was ‘dug up’ and was standing with Mr. Narkom in Rose Valmond’s house listening to Rose Valmond’s story from her own lips, and saying to himself, the while, that here surely was that often talked-of, seldom-seen creature, a woman with an angel’s face.

How it distressed her, to tell again this story which might take away a human life, was manifest from the trembling of her sweet voice, the painful twitching of her tender mouth, and the tears that rose so readily to her soft eyes.

“Oh, Mr. Headland, I can hardly reconcile myself to having done it even yet,” she said pathetically. “I do not know this Mr. Barrington-Edwards but by sight, and it seems such a horrible thing to rise up against a stranger like that. But I couldn’t keep it any longer; I felt that to do so would be equivalent to sharing his guilt, and the thought that if I kept silent I might possibly be paving the way to the sacrifice of other innocent lives almost drove me out of my mind.”

“I can quite understand your feelings, Miss Valmond,” said Cleek, touched to the very heart by the deep distress of her. “But may I say I think you have done right? I never yet knew Heaven to be anything but tender to those who do their duty, and you certainly have done yours – to yourself, to your fellow creatures, and to God!”

Before she could make any response to this, footsteps sounded from the outer passage, and a deep, rich, masculine voice said, “Rose, Rose dear, I am ready now,” and almost in the same moment a tall, well-set-up man in priestly clothing crossed the threshold and entered the room. He stopped short as he saw the others and made a hasty apology.

“Oh, pardon me,” he said. “I did not know that you had visitors, dear, otherwise – Eh, what? Mr. Narkom, is it not?”

“Yes, Mr. Valmond,” replied the superintendent, holding out a welcoming hand. “It is I, and this is my friend and assistant, Mr. George Headland. We have just been talking with your sister over her trying experience.”

“Terrible – terrible is the proper word, Mr. Narkom. Like you, I never heard of it until to-day. It shocked me to the very soul, you may believe. Delighted to meet you, Mr. Headland. A new disciple, eh, Mr. Narkom? Another follower in the footsteps of the great Cleek? By the way, I see you have lost touch with that amazing man. I saw your advertisement in the paper the other day. Any clue to his whereabouts as yet?”

“Not the slightest!”

“Ah, that’s too bad. From what I have heard of him he would have made short work of this present case had he been available. But pray pardon me if I rush off, my time is very limited. Rose, dear, I am going to visit Father Burns this evening and shall stop at the orphanage on the way, so if you have the customary parcel for the children – ”

“It is upstairs, in my oratory, dear,” she interposed. “Come with me – if the gentlemen will excuse us for a moment – and I will get it for you.”

“May we not all go up, Miss Valmond?” interposed Cleek. “I should like, if you do not mind, to get a view of the garden of Lemmingham House from the window where you were standing that night, and to have you explain the positions of the two men if you will.”

“Yes, certainly – come, by all means,” she replied, and led the way forthwith. They had scarcely gone halfway down the passage to the staircase, however, when they came abreast of the open doorway of a room, dimly lit by a shaded lamp, wherein an elderly woman sat huddled up in a deep chair, with her shaking head bowed over hands that moved restlessly and aimlessly – after the uneasy manner of an idiot’s – and the shape of whose face could be but faintly seen through the veil of white hair that fell loosely over it.

Cleek had barely time to recall Narkom’s statement regarding the semi-imbecile mother, when Miss Valmond gave a little cry of wonder and ran into the room.

“Why, mother!” she said in her gentle way, “whatever are you doing down here, dearest? I thought you were still asleep in the oratory. When did you come down?”

The imbecile merely mumbled and muttered, and shook her nodding head, neither answering nor taking any notice whatsoever.

“It is one of her bad nights,” explained Miss Valmond, as she came out and rejoined them. “We can do nothing with her when she is like this. Horace, you will have to come home earlier than usual to-night and help me to get her to bed.” Then she went on, leading the way upstairs, until they came at length to a sort of sanctuary where Madonna faces looked down from sombre niches, and wax lights burnt with a scented flame on a draped and cushioned prie dieu. Here Miss Valmond, who was in the lead, went in, and, taking a paper-wrapped parcel from beside the little altar, came back and put it in her brother’s hand and sent him on his way.

“Was it from there you saw the occurrence, Miss Valmond?” asked Cleek, looking past her into “the dim religious light” of the sanctuary.

“Oh, no,” she made reply. “From the window of my bedroom, just on the other side of the wall. In here, look, see!” And she opened a door to the right and led them in, touching a key that flashed an electric lamp into radiance and illuminated the entire room.

It was a large room furnished in dull oak and dark green after the stately, sombre style of a Gothic chapel, and at one end there was a curtained recess leading to a large bow window. At the other there was a sort of altar banked high with white flowers, and at the side there was a huge canopied bed over the head of which hung an immense crucifix fastened to the wall that backed upon the oratory. It was a majestic thing, that crucifix, richly carved and exquisitely designed. Cleek went nearer and looked at it, his artistic eye captured by the beauty of it; and Miss Valmond, noting his interest, smiled.

“My brother brought me that from Rome,” she said. “Is it not divine, Mr. Headland?”

“Yes,” he said. “But you must be more careful of it, I fear, Miss Valmond. Is it not chipping? Look! Isn’t this a piece of it?” He bent and picked a tiny curled sliver of wood from the narrow space between the two down-filled pillows of the bed, holding it out to her upon his palm. But, of a sudden, he smiled, lifted the sliver to his nose, smelt it, and cast it away. “The laugh is on me, I fear – it’s only a cedar paring from a lead pencil. And now, please, I’d like to investigate the window.”

She led him to it at once, explaining where she stood on the eventful night; where she had seen the two figures pass, and where was the wall door through which the dying man had been thrust.

“I wish I might see that door clearer,” said Cleek; for night had fallen and the moon was not yet up. “Don’t happen to have such a thing as a telescope or an opera glass, do you, Miss Valmond?”

“My brother has a pair of field glasses downstairs in his room. Shall I run and fetch them for you?”

“I’d be very grateful if you would,” said Cleek; and a moment after she had gone. “Run down and get my sketching materials out of the locker, will you, Mr. Narkom?” he added. “I want to make a diagram of that house and garden.” Then he sat down on the window-seat and for five whole minutes was alone.

The field glasses and the sketching materials were brought, the garden door examined and the diagram made, Miss Valmond and Narkom standing by and watching eagerly the whole proceeding.

“That’s all!” said Cleek, after a time, brushing the charcoal dust from his fingers, and snapping the elastic band over the sketch book. “I know my man at last, Mr. Narkom. Give me until ten o’clock to-morrow night, and then, if Miss Valmond will let us in here again, I’ll capture Barrington-Edwards red-handed.”

“You are sure of him, then?”

“As sure as I am that I’m alive. I’ll lay a trap that will catch him. I promise you that. So if Miss Valmond will let us in here again – ”

“Yes, Mr. Headland, I will.”

“Good! Then let us say at ten o’clock to-morrow night – here in this room; you, I, your brother, Mr. Narkom – all concerned!” said Cleek. “At ten to the tick, remember. Now come along, Mr. Narkom, and let me be about weaving the snare that shall pull this Mr. Barrington-Edwards to the scaffold.” Speaking, he bowed to Miss Valmond, and taking Mr. Narkom’s arm, passed out and went down the stairs to prepare for the last great act of tragedy.