CHAPTER XIV
THE SEARCH OF MILBURGH'S COTTAGE
Mr. Milburgh had a little house in one of the industrial streets ofCamden Town. It was a street made up for the most part of blank walls,pierced at intervals with great gates, through which one could procure attimes a view of gaunt factories and smoky-looking chimney-stacks.
Mr. Milburgh's house was the only residence in the road, if one exceptedthe quarters of caretakers and managers, and it was agreed by all who sawhis tiny demesne, that Mr. Milburgh had a good landlord.
The "house" was a detached cottage in about half an acre of ground, aone-storey building, monopolising the space which might have beenoccupied by factory extension. Both the factory to the right and the lefthad made generous offers to acquire the ground, but Mr. Milburgh'slandlord had been adamant. There were people who suggested that Mr.Milburgh's landlord was Mr. Milburgh himself. But how could that be? Mr.Milburgh's salary was something under L400 a year, and the cottage sitewas worth at least L4,000.
Canvey Cottage, as it was called, stood back from the road, behind alawn, innocent of flowers, and the lawn itself was protected fromintrusion by high iron railings which Mr. Milburgh's landlord had haderected at considerable cost. To reach the house it was necessary to passthrough an iron gate and traverse a stone-flagged path to the door of thecottage.
On the night when Tarling of Scotland Yard was the victim of a murderousassault, Mr. Milburgh unlocked the gate and passed through, locking anddouble-locking the gate behind him. He was alone, and, as was his wont,he was whistling a sad little refrain which had neither beginning norend. He walked slowly up the stone pathway, unlocked the door of hiscottage, and stood only a moment on the doorstep to survey the growingthickness of the night, before he closed and bolted the door and switchedon the electric light.
He was in a tiny hallway, plainly but nicely furnished. The note ofluxury was struck by the Zohn etchings which hung on the wall, and whichMr. Milburgh stopped to regard approvingly. He hung up his coat and hat,slipped off the galoshes he was wearing (for it was wet underfoot), and,passing through a door which opened from the passage, came to his livingroom. The same simple note of furniture and decoration was observablehere. The furniture was good, the carpet under his feet thick andluxurious. He snicked down another switch and an electric radiator glowedin the fireplace. Then he sat down at the big table, which was the mostconspicuous article of furniture in the room. It was practically coveredwith orderly little piles of paper, most of them encircled with rubberbands. He did not attempt to touch or read them, but sat looking moodilyat his blotting-pad, preoccupied and absent.
Presently he rose with a little grunt, and, crossing the room, unlocked avery commonplace and old-fashioned cupboard, the top of which served as asideboard. From the cupboard he took a dozen little books and carriedthem to the table. They were of uniform size and each bore the figures ofa year. They appeared to be, and indeed were, diaries, but they were notMr. Milburgh's diaries. One day he chanced to go into Thornton Lyne'sroom at the Stores and had seen these books arrayed on a steel shelf ofLyne's private safe. The proprietor's room overlooked the ground floor ofthe Stores, and Thornton Lyne at the time was visible to his manager, andcould not under any circumstances surprise him, so Mr. Milburgh had takenout one volume and read, with more than ordinary interest, the somewhatfrank and expansive diary which Thornton Lyne had kept.
He had only read a few pages on that occasion, but later he had anopportunity of perusing the whole year's record, and had absorbed a greatdeal of information which might have been useful to him in the future,had not Thornton Lyne met his untimely end at the hands of an unknownmurderer.
On the day when Thornton Lyne's body was discovered in Hyde Park with awoman's night-dress wrapped around the wound in his breast, Mr. Milburghhad, for reasons of expediency and assisted by a duplicate key of Lyne'ssafe, removed those diaries to a safer place. They contained a great dealthat was unpleasant for Mr. Milburgh, particularly the current diary, forThornton Lyne had set down not only his experiences, but his dailyhappenings, his thoughts, poetical and otherwise, and had stated veryexactly and in libellous terms his suspicions of his manager.
The diary provided Mr. Milburgh with a great deal of very interestingreading matter, and now he turned to the page where he had left off thenight before and continued his study. It was a page easy to find, becausehe had thrust between the leaves a thin envelope of foreign makecontaining certain slips of paper, and as he took out his improvisedbook mark a thought seemed to strike him, and he felt carefully in hispocket. He did not discover the thing for which he was searching, andwith a smile he laid the envelope carefully on the table, and went on atthe point where his studies had been interrupted.
"Lunched at the London Hotel and dozed away the afternoon. Weather fearfully hot. Had arranged to make a call upon a distant cousin--a man named Tarling--who is in the police force at Shanghai, but too much of a fag. Spent evening at Chu Han's dancing hall. Got very friendly with a pretty little Chinese girl who spoke pigeon English. Am seeing her to-morrow at Ling Foo's. She is called 'The Little Narcissus.' I called her 'My Little Daffodil'--"
Mr. Milburgh stopped in his reading.
"Little Daffodil!" he repeated, then looked at the ceiling and pinchedhis thick lips. "Little Daffodil!" he said again, and a big smile dawnedon his face.
He was still engaged in reading when a bell shrilled in the hall. He roseto his feet and stood listening and the bell rang again. He switched offthe light, pulled aside the thick curtain which hid the window, andpeered out through the fog. He could just distinguish in the light of thestreet lamp two or three men standing at the gate. He replaced thecurtain, turned up the light again, took the books in his arms anddisappeared with them into the corridor. The room at the back was hisbedroom, and into this he went, making no response to the repeated jingleof the bell for fully five minutes.
At the end of that time he reappeared, but now he was in his pyjamas,over which he wore a heavy dressing-gown. He unlocked the door, andshuffled in his slippers down the stone pathway to the gate.
"Who's that?" he asked.
"Tarling. You know me," said a voice.
"Mr. Tarling?" said Milburgh in surprise. "Really this is an unexpectedpleasure. Come in, come in, gentlemen."
"Open the gate," said Tarling briefly.
"Excuse me while I go and get the key," said Milburgh. "I didn't expectvisitors at this hour of the night."
He went into the house, took a good look round his room, and thenreappeared, taking the key from the pocket of his dressing-gown. It hadbeen there all the time, if the truth be told, but Mr. Milburgh was acautious man and took few risks.
Tarling was accompanied by Inspector Whiteside and another man, whomMilburgh rightly supposed was a detective. Only Tarling and the Inspectoraccepted his invitation to step inside, the third man remaining on guardat the gate.
Milburgh led the way to his cosy sitting-room.
"I have been in bed some hours, and I'm sorry to have kept you so long."
"Your radiator is still warm," said Tarling quietly, stooping to feel thelittle stove.
Mr. Milburgh chuckled.
"Isn't that clever of you to discover that?" he said admiringly. "Thefact is, I was so sleepy when I went to bed, several hours ago, that Iforgot to turn the radiator off, and it was only when I came down toanswer the bell that I discovered I had left it switched on."
Tarling stooped and picked the butt end of a cigar out of the hearth. Itwas still alight.
"You've been smoking in your sleep, Mr. Milburgh," he said dryly.
"No, no," said the airy Mr. Milburgh. "I was smoking that when I camedownstairs to let you in. I instinctively put a cigar in my mouth themoment I wake up in the morning. It is a disgraceful habit, and really isone of my few vices," he admitted. "I threw it down when I turned out theradiator."
Tarling smiled.
"Won't you sit down?" said Milburgh, seatin
g himself in the leastcomfortable of the chairs. "You see," his smile was apologetic as hewaved his hand to the table, "the work is frightfully heavy now that poorMr. Lyne is dead. I am obliged to bring it home, and I can assure you,Mr. Tarling, that there are some nights when I work till daylight,getting things ready for the auditor."
"Do you ever take exercise?" asked Tarling innocently. "Little nightwalks in the fog for the benefit of your health?"
A puzzled frown gathered on Milburgh's face.
"Exercise, Mr. Tarling?" he said with an air of mystification. "I don'tquite understand you. Naturally I shouldn't walk out on a night likethis. What an extraordinary fog for this time of the year!"
"Do you know Paddington at all?"
"No," said Mr. Milburgh, "except that there is a station there which Isometimes use. But perhaps you will explain to me the meaning of thisvisit?"
"The meaning is," said Tarling shortly, "that I have been attackedto-night by a man of your build and height, who fired twice at me atclose quarters. I have a warrant--" Mr. Milburgh's eyes narrowed--"Ihave a warrant to search this house."
"For what?" demanded Milburgh boldly.
"For a revolver or an automatic pistol and anything else I can find."
Milburgh rose.
"You're at liberty to search the house from end to end," he said."Happily, it is a small one, as my salary does not allow of an expensiveestablishment."
"Do you live here alone?" asked Tarling.
"Quite," replied Milburgh. "A woman comes in at eight o'clock to-morrowmorning to cook my breakfast and make the place tidy, but I sleep hereby myself. I am very much hurt," he was going on.
"You will be hurt much worse," said Tarling dryly and proceeded to thesearch.
It proved to be a disappointing one, for there was no trace of anyweapon, and certainly no trace of the little red slips which he hadexpected to find in Milburgh's possession. For he was not searching forthe man who had assailed him, but for the man who had killed ThorntonLyne.
He came back to the little sitting-room where Milburgh had been left withthe Inspector and apparently he was unruffled by his failure.
"Now, Mr. Milburgh," he said brusquely, "I want to ask you: Have you everseen a piece of paper like this before?"
He took a slip from his pocket and spread it on the table. Milburghlooked hard at the Chinese characters on the crimson square, and thennodded.
"You have?" said Tarling in surprise.
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Milburgh complacently. "I should be telling anuntruth if I said I had not. Nothing is more repugnant to me than todeceive anybody."
"That I can imagine," said Tarling.
"I am sorry you are sarcastic, Mr. Tarling," said the reproachfulMilburgh, "but I assure you that I hate and loathe an untruth."
"Where have you seen these papers?"
"On Mr. Lyne's desk," was the surprising answer
"On Lyne's desk?"
Milburgh nodded.
"The late Mr. Thornton Lyne," he said, "came back from the East with agreat number of curios, and amongst them were a number of slips of papercovered with Chinese characters similar to this. I do not understandChinese," he said, "because I have never had occasion to go to China. Thecharacters may have been different one from the other, but to myunsophisticated eye they all look alike."
"You've seen these slips on Lyne's desk?" said Tarling. "Then why did younot tell the police before? You know that the police attach a great dealof importance to the discovery of one of these things in the dead man'spocket?"
Mr. Milburgh nodded.
"It is perfectly true that I did not mention the fact to the police," hesaid, "but you understand Mr. Tarling that I was very much upset by thesad occurrence, which drove everything else out of my mind. It would havebeen quite possible that you would have found one or two of these strangeinscriptions in this very house." He smiled in the detective's face. "Mr.Lyne was very fond of distributing the curios he brought from the Eastto his friends," he went on. "He gave me that dagger you see hanging onthe wall, which he bought at some outlandish place in his travels. He mayhave given me a sample of these slips. I remember his telling me a storyabout them, which I cannot for the moment recall."
He would have continued retailing reminiscences of his late employer, butTarling cut him short, and with a curt good night withdrew. Milburghaccompanied him to the front gate and locked the door upon the three menbefore he went back to his sitting-room smiling quietly to himself.
"I am certain that the man was Milburgh," said Tarling. "I am as certainas that I am standing here."
"Have you any idea why he should want to out you?" asked Whiteside.
"None in the world," replied Tarling. "Evidently my assailant was a manwho had watched my movements and had probably followed the girl andmyself to the hotel in a cab. When I disappeared inside he dismissed hisown and then took the course of dismissing my cab, which he could easilydo by paying the man his fare and sending him off. A cabman would acceptthat dismissal without suspicion. He then waited for me in the fog andfollowed me until he got me into a quiet part of the road, where he firstattempted to sandbag and then to shoot me."
"But why?" asked Whiteside again. "Suppose Milburgh knew something aboutthis murder--which is very doubtful--what benefit would it be to him tohave you put out of the way?"
"If I could answer that question," replied Tarling grimly, "I could tellyou who killed Thornton Lyne."