CHAPTER FOUR
CLEWS AND SUSPICIONS
A minute more and Cleek was in the house--in the presence of Hammond andPetrie--and Narkom had introduced him as "Monsieur Georges de Lesparre,a distinguished French criminologist who had come over to England thismorning upon a matter connected with the French Police Department andwho, in the absence of Mr. Cleek, had consented to take up this peculiarcase."
"My hat! Wouldn't that drive you to drink!" commented Petrie in adisgusted aside as he eyed this suave and sallow gentleman with opendisapproval. "What will we be importing from the continent next,Hammond? As if there aren't detectives in England good enough to do theYard's work without setting them to twiddling their blessed thumbswhilst a blooming Froggie runs the show and--beg pardon! what's that?Yes, Mr. Narkom. Searched the house from top to bottom, sir. Nobody init, and nobody been here either, sir, not a soul since you left."
"You are quite sure, monsieur?" This from Cleek. "About the 'nobody inthe house,' I mean, of course. You are quite sure?"
"Of course we're sure!" snapped Hammond savagely. "Been from the top tothe bottom of it--me and Petrie and the constable here--and not a soulin it anywhere."
"Ah, the constable, eh? You shall tell me, please, Mr. Narkom, is thisthe constable who was at the one end of the arch while the keeper waschasing the man in at the other? Ah, it is, eh? Well--er--shall not wesee the keeper, too? I do not find him about and I should much like tospeak with him. Where is he?"
"Who--the keeper?" said Narkom. "Blest if I know. Is he about, my lads?"
"No, sir. Ain't _been_ about--has he, Petrie?--for the Lord knows howlong. Never thought of the beggar until this moment, sir."
"Nor did I," said Narkom. "Come to think of it, I haven't seen thefellow since we came to the 'Y' of the road and found those footprintsleading here. No doubt he has gone back to his shelter on the Commonand---- Monsieur! Why are you smiling? Good God! you-- I---- Monsieur,shall I send my men for the fellow? Do you want to see him?"
"Yes, Monsieur Narkom, I want to see him very, very much indeed--if youcan find him! But you can't, monsieur; and I fear me that you neverwill. What you will find, however, if you will send your men to theshelter of which you speak will be the _real_ keeper, either dead orstunned or gagged, and his coat and hat and badge removed from his bodyby the man who personated him."
"Good heavens above, man, you don't mean to say----"
"That you had the real criminal in your hands and let him go, that youtalked with him, walked with him, were taken in by him, and that he toldyou no lie when he said the assassin really _did_ run into the arch,"replied Cleek quietly. "It is the old old trick of that fellow who wascalled the 'Vanishing Cracksman,' my friend: to knock down the fellowwho first gives the alarm, rip off his clothing, and then to lead thehue and cry until there's a chance to steal away unobserved. Send yourmen to the keeper's shelter and see if I have guessed the truth of thatlittle riddle or not. I'll lay you a sovereign, my friend, that your manhas slipped the leash, and it will be but a fluke of fate if you everlay hands on him again."
In a sort of panic Narkom turned to his men and sent them flying fromthe house to investigate this startling assertion; and, turning as theywent, Cleek walked into the room where that awful dead figure hung. Hehad taken but one step across the threshold, however, when he stoppedsuddenly and began to sniff the air--less to the surprise of Narkom, whohad often seen him do this sort of thing before, than to ConstableMellish, who stood looking at him in open-mouthed amazement.
"Good lud, man-- I should say, monsieur," exclaimed the superintendentagitatedly, "after what you have just hinted, my head is in a whirl andI am prepared for almost anything; but surely you cannot find anythingsuspicious in the mere atmosphere of the place?"
"No; nothing but what you yourself must have observed. There is adistinct odour of violets in the room; so that unless that unhappy manyonder was of the kind that scents itself, we may set it down that awoman has been in here."
"A woman? But no woman could do a thing like that," pointing to theposition of the dead man. "Nor," after sniffing the air repeatedly, "doI notice anything of the odour which you speak."
"Nor me nuther, sir," put in the constable.
"Still, the odour is here," returned Cleek. "And--no! it does notemanate from the dead man. There is scent on him to be sure, but it isnot the scent of violets. Odours last at best but a little time afterthe person bearing them has left the room, and as it must now be upwardof an hour since the discovery of the crime----"
Cleek sucked in his upper lip and took his chin between his thumb andforefinger and pinched it hard. What was that that Narkom had told himregarding Lennard's startling experience after he had been left on guardat the old railway arch? Hum-m-m! Certainly there was _one_ woman abroadin this neighbourhood to-night, and a woman decidedly _not_ of the lowerclasses at that, as witness the fact that she had worn an ermine cloak.Certainly, that would point to the wearer being a woman to whom moneywas no object--and to Lady Katharine Fordham, with all the great St.Ulmer wealth behind her, it assuredly was not. Clearly, then, whoeverwas or was not the actual perpetrator of this night's crime, a woman ofthe higher walk of life--a rich and fashionable woman, in fact--was insome way connected with it.
The question was, did Lady Katharine Fordham possess an ermine cloak?And if she did, would she be likely to have brought it up from Suffolkat this time of the year? The curious smile slid down his cheek andvanished. He turned to Mr. Narkom, who had been watching him anxiouslyall the time.
"Well, my friend, let us poke about a bit more till your assistants getback from the shelter on the Common," he said and dropped down on hisknees, examining every inch of the flooring with the aid of a pockettorch and a magnifying glass. For some moments nothing came of this, butof a sudden Narkom saw him come to an abrupt halt.
Twitching back his head, he sniffed at the air, two or three times,after the manner of a hound catching up a lost scent; then he bent over,brought his nose close to the level of the bare and dirty boards,sniffed again, blew aside the dust, and exposed to view a tiny greasespot not bigger than a child's thumbnail.
"_Huile Violette!_" he said, with a sound as of satisfied laughter inhis voice. "No wonder the scent of violets lingered. Look! here isanother spot--and here another," he added, blowing the dust away andcreeping on all fours in the direction the perfumed trail led. "Oh, Iknow this stuff well, my friend," he went on. "For many, many years itsmanufacture was a secret known only to the Spanish monks who carried itwith them to South America and subsequently established in that part ofthe country now known as Argentina a monastery celebrated all over theworld as the only source from which this essential oil could beprocured."
"Argentina?" repeated Narkom agitatedly. "My dear chap, have youforgotten that it was in Argentina Lord St. Ulmer spent those many yearsof his self-imposed exile? If then, the stuff is only to be procuredthere----"
"Gently, gently--you rush at top speed, Mr. Narkom. I said '_was_,'recollect. It is still the chief point of its manufacture, but sincethose days when the Spanish monks carried it there others have learnedthe secret of it, notably the Turks who now manufacture an attar ofviolets just as they have for years manufactured an attar of roses. Itis enormously expensive; for the veriest drop of it is sufficient, withthe necessary addition of alcohol, to manufacture half a pint of theperfume known to commerce as 'Extract of Violet.' At one time it was afavourite trick of very great ladies to wear on a bracelet a tiny goldencapsule containing two or three drops of it and supplied with a minutejewelled stopper attached to a slender golden chain, which stopper theyoccasionally removed for a moment or two that the aroma of the contentsmight diffuse itself about them. I knew one woman--and one only--whopossessed such a bracelet. You, too, have heard of her. Whatever herreal name may be, she is simply known to those with whom she associatesas 'Margot.'"
"Scotland! The queen of the Apaches?"
"Yes."
"You are sure of that?"
r /> "I ought to be. I, myself, stole the bracelet from the collection of theComte de Champdoce and presented it to her. I remember that the stopperto the capsule was carved from a single emerald that, owing to itsage--it was said to have belonged in its day to Catherine deMedicis--had worn loose, and could only be prevented from dropping outand allowing the contents to drip away by wedging it into the orifice inthe capsule by winding the stopper with silk."
Narkom's face positively glowed.
"My dear Cleek, you give me the brightest kind of hope," he saidenthusiastically, as he stooped and investigated the tiny, perfumedgrease spots on the floor, so clearly made by the dropping of some oilysubstance that there could be no question regarding their origin. "Then,there can be no possibility of connecting young Geoff Clavering or thegirl he loves with this ghastly business if that Margot woman has beenhere, and it was from her bracelet that these stains were dropped?Besides, after what you said about that fellow of her crew who wasspiked to the wall as this poor wretch here is----"
"A moment, my friend--you are on the rush again," interjected Cleek."All that we actually _know_, at present, Mr. Narkom, is that some one,and very likely a woman, has been here and--unconsciously, ofcourse--has spilled some drops of a very valuable and highlyconcentrated perfume. This naturally points to a defective stopper tothe article containing that perfume, but whether or not that defectivestopper was one carved from a single emerald and wound with silk----"
He stopped and let the rest of the sentence go by default. All the whilehe had been speaking he had been following, after the manner of a houndon the scent, the trail of that perfume's lead; now it had brought himto a litter of rat-gnawed paper and a parcel containing a peach and theremnants of a roasted fowl. As if the scent seemed stronger here thanelsewhere--so strong, in fact, that it was suggestive of a goal--hebegan tossing the scraps about, till at last he gave a sort of cry andpounced upon something in a distant corner.
"Cleek!" rapped out Narkom in an excited but guarded tone, as he notedthis, "Cleek, you have found something? Something that decides?"
"Yes," the detective made answer. "Something which proves that, whoeverthe woman who dropped the scent may be, Mr. Narkom, she was _not_Margot!"
He unclosed his hand and stretched it out toward the superintendent, andNarkom saw lying on his palm a crushed and gleaming thing which lookedlike a child's gold thimble that had been trodden upon. The snappedfragment of a hairlike gold chain still clung to it, and at the end ofthis dangled a liliputian stopper, a wee mite of a thing that was littlemore than a short, thick pin of plain, unjewelled, unornamented gold.
"One of the 'capsules' of which I spoke, you see," said Cleek, "andbearing not the slightest resemblance to the one belonging to Margot.The thing has snapped from its fastening and been trodden upon--troddenunder a very heavy foot, I should say, from the condition of it. Thereis something engraved upon it, something that won't tend to ease yourmind, Mr. Narkom. Take my glass and look at it."
Narkom did so. Engraved on the crushed and fragrant-smelling bit of goldhe saw a coat-of-arms--arms which he, at least, knew to be those of thehouse of St. Ulmer--and under this the name "Katharine."
"Good Lord!" he said, and let the crushed bauble fall back upon the palmfrom which he had lifted it. "That child--that dear girl who is as muchas life itself to young Geoff Clavering? But how could she--a slip of agirl like that----"
He turned and looked over at the dead figure spiked to the cottage wall.
Cleek made no reply--at least for the moment. He had gone back to the"hound's trick" of sniffing the trail and was creeping on again--_past_the litter of papers this time--and crawling on all fours toward thevery doorway by which the police had first gained access to the room.
"Wait! Cross no bridges until you come to them," he said at last in anexcited whisper. "Some one who trod upon that thing passed out this way.I _knew_ I smelt the oil the very instant I crossed the threshold; now Ican understand why. The assassin left by the very door you entered, butwhether man or woman----"
By now the trail had led him to the very threshold of the room. Beyondlay the dark hall by which Narkom and his men had entered the house, andthe light of his upraised electric torch shining out into that blackpassage showed him something that made his pulses leap. It was simply afragment of some soft pinkish material, caught and torn off from awoman's skirt by a nail head that protruded above the level of theboarded floor. He rose and ran out to it; he caught it up and examinedit; then, with a laugh, shut his hand over it and went hurriedly back tothe superintendent's side.
"Mr. Narkom," he said, "tell me something! We have, presumably, found aperfume receptacle belonging to the Lady Katharine Fordham; but did younotice--can you remember what manner of frock her ladyship wore atClavering Close to-night?"
"I remember it very well indeed. It was a simple white satin frock, veryplain and very girlish, and she wore a bunch of purple pansies with it."
"Ah-h-h!" Cleek's voice was full of relief, his eyes full of sparkle andlife. "Then she did _not_ wear a gown of some soft, gauzy pink material,eh? An airy sort of gown trimmed at the hem with scalloped embroideryof rose-coloured silk. Good! Can you remember any lady to-night thatdid?"
"Yes," said Narkom promptly. "Miss Ailsa Lorne did. She wore some soft,gauzy pink stuff--chiffon, I think I've heard the wife call it--with alot of rose-coloured silk stitchery on the edges of the flounces, andshe had a band of pink ribbon in her hair."
Cleek made no comment, nor did his countenance betray even the slightesttrace of emotion. He simply put the shut hand that held that gauzy pinkfragment into his pocket and shoved it far down out of sight.
A while ago he could have sworn that Ailsa Lorne's foot had nevercrossed the threshold of this house of crime; now he knew that it had,and if the evidence of this scrap of chiffon stood for anything, crossedit _after_ she had left Clavering Close--after she had heard that threatagainst the Count de Louvisan's life.