The Valley of Fear: Chapter 4
Chapter 4
At three in the morning the chief Sussex detective, obeying the
urgent call from Sergeant Wilson of Birlstone, arrived from
headquarters in a light dog-cart behind a breathless trotter. By
the five-forty train in the morning he had sent his message to
Scotland Yard, and he was at the Birlstone station at twelve
o'clock to welcome us. White Mason was a quiet,
comfortable-looking person in a loose tweed suit, with a
clean-shaved, ruddy face, a stoutish body, and powerful bandy
legs adorned with gaiters, looking like a small farmer, a retired
gamekeeper, or anything upon earth except a very favourable
specimen of the provincial criminal officer.
"A real downright snorter, Mr. MacDonald!" he kept repeating.
"We'll have the pressmen down like flies when they understand it.
I'm hoping we will get our work done before they get poking their
noses into it and messing up all the trails. There has been
nothing like this that I can remember. There are some bits that
will come home to you, Mr. Holmes, or I am mistaken. And you
also, Dr. Watson; for the medicos will have a word to say before
we finish. Your room is at the Westville Arms. There's no other
place; but I hear that it is clean and good. The man will carry
your bags. This way,gentlemen, if you please."
He was a very bustling and genial person, this Sussex detective.
In ten minutes we had all found our quarters. In ten more we
were seated in the parlour of the inn and being treated to a
rapid sketch of those events which have been outlined in the
previous chapter. MacDonald made an occasional note; while
Holmes sat absorbed, with the expression of surprised and
reverent admiration with which the botanist surveys the rare and
precious bloom.
"Remarkable!" he said, when the story was unfolded, "most
remarkable! I can hardly recall any case where the features have
been more peculiar."
"I thought you would say so, Mr. Holmes," said White Mason in
great delight. "We're well up with the times in Sussex. I've
told you now how matters were, up to the time when I took over
from Sergeant Wilson between three and four this morning. My
word! I made the old mare go! But I need not have been in such
a hurry, as it turned out; for there was nothing immediate that I
could do. Sergeant Wilson had all the facts. I checked them and
considered them and maybe added a few of my own."
"What were they?" asked Holmes eagerly.
"Well, I first had the hammer examined. There was Dr. Wood there
to help me. We found no signs of violence upon it. I was hoping
that if Mr. Douglas defended himself with the hammer, he might
have left his mark upon the murderer before he dropped it on the
mat. But there was no stain."
"That, of course, proves nothing at all," remarked Inspector
MacDonald. "There has been many a hammer murder and no trace on
the hammer."
"Quite so. It doesn't prove it wasn't used. But there might
have been stains, and that would have helped us. As a matter of
fact there were none. Then I examined the gun. They were
buckshot cartridges, and, as Sergeant Wilson pointed out, the
triggers were wired together so that, if you pulled on the hinder
one, both barrels were discharged. Whoever fixed that up had
made up his mind that he was going to take no chances of missing
his man. The sawed gun was not more than two foot long--one
could carry it easily under one's coat. There was no complete
maker's name; but the printed letters P-E-N were on the fluting
between the barrels, and the rest of the name had been cut off by
the saw."
"A big P with a flourish above it, E and N smaller?" asked
Holmes.
"Exactly."
"Pennsylvania Small Arms Company--well-known American firm," said
Holmes.
White Mason gazed at my friend as the little village practitioner
looks at the Harley Street specialist who by a word can solve the
difficulties that perplex him.
"That is very helpful, Mr. Holmes. No doubt you are right.
Wonderful! Wonderful! Do you carry the names of all the gun
makers in the world in your memory?"
Holmes dismissed the subject with a wave.
"No doubt it is an American shotgun," White Mason continued. "I
seem to have read that a sawed-off shotgun is a weapon used in
some parts of America. Apart from the name upon the barrel, the
idea had occurred to me. There is some evidence then, that this
man who entered the house and killed its master was an American."
MacDonald shook his head. "Man, you are surely travelling
overfast," said he. "I have heard no evidence yet that any
stranger was ever in the house at all."
"The open window, the blood on the sill, the queer card, the
marks of boots in the corner, the gun!"
"Nothing there that could not have been arranged. Mr. Douglas
was an American, or had lived long in America. So had Mr.
Barker. You don't need to import an American from outside in
order to account for American doings."
"Ames, the butler--"
"What about him? Is he reliable?"
"Ten years with Sir Charles Chandos--as solid as a rock. He has
been with Douglas ever since he took the Manor House five years
ago. He has never seen a gun of this sort in the house."
"The gun was made to conceal. That's why the barrels were sawed.
It would fit into any box. How could he swear there was no such
gun in the house?"
"Well, anyhow, he had never seen one."
MacDonald shook his obstinate Scotch head. "I'm not convinced
yet that there was ever anyone in the house," said he. "I'm
asking you to conseedar" (his accent became more Aberdonian as he
lost himself in his argument) "I'm asking you to conseedar what
it involves if you suppose that this gun was ever brought into
the house, and that all these strange things were done by a
person from outside. Oh, man, it's just inconceivable! It's
clean against common sense! I put it to you, Mr. Holmes, judging
it by what we have heard."
"Well, state your case, Mr. Mac," said Holmes in his most
judicial style.
"The man is not a burglar, supposing that he ever existed. The
ring business and the card point to premeditated murder for some
private reason. Very good. Here is a man who slips into a house
with the deliberate intention of committing murder. He knows, if
he knows anything, that he will have a deeficulty in making his
escape, as the house is surrounded with water. What weapon would
he choose? You would say the most silent in the world. Then he
could hope when the deed was done to slip quickly from the
window, to wade the moat, and to get away at his leisure. That's
understandable. But is it understandable that he should go out
of his way to bring with him the most noisy weapon he could
select, knowing well that it will fetch every human being in the
house to the spot as quick as they can run, and that it is all
odds that he will be seen before he can get across the moat? Is
that credible, Mr. Holmes?"
"Well, you put the case strongly," my friend replied
thoughtfully. "It certainly needs a good deal of justification.
May I ask, Mr. White Mason, whether you examined the farther side
of the moat at once to see if there were any signs of the man
having climbed out from the water?"
"There were no signs, Mr. Holmes. But it is a stone ledge, and
one could hardly expect them."
"No tracks or marks?"
"None."
"Ha! Would there be any objection, Mr. White Mason, to our going
down to the house at once? There may possibly be some small
point which might be suggestive."
"I was going to propose it, Mr. Holmes; but I thought it well to
put you in touch with all the facts before we go. I suppose if
anything should strike you--" White Mason looked doubtfully at
the amateur.
"I have worked with Mr. Holmes before," said Inspector MacDonald.
"He plays the game."
"My own idea of the game, at any rate," said Holmes, with a
smile. "I go into a case to help the ends of justice and the
work of the police. If I have ever separated myself from the
official force, it is because they have first separated
themselves from me. I have no wish ever to score at their
expense. At the same time, Mr. White Mason, I claim the right to
work in my own way and give my results at my own time--complete
rather than instages."
"I am sure we are honoured by your presence and to show you all
we know," said White Mason cordially. "Come along, Dr. Watson,
and when the time comes we'll all hope for a place in your book."
We walked down the quaint village street with a row of pollarded
elms on each side of it. Just beyond were two ancient stone
pillars, weather-stained and lichen-blotched, bearing upon their
summits a shapeless something which had once been the rampant
lion of Capus of Birlstone. A short walk along the winding drive
with such sward and oaks around it as one only sees in rural
England, then a sudden turn, and the long, low Jacobean house of
dingy, liver-coloured brick lay before us, with an old-fashioned
garden of cut yews on each side of it. As we approached it,
there was the wooden drawbridge and the beautiful broad moat as
still and luminous as quicksilver in the cold, winter sunshine.
Three centuries had flowed past the old Manor House, centuries of
births and of homecomings, of country dances and of the meetings
of fox hunters. Strange that now in its old age this dark
business should have cast its shadow upon the venerable walls!
And yet those strange, peaked roofs and quaint, overhung gables
were a fitting covering to grim and terrible intrigue. As I
looked at the deep-set windows and the long sweep of the
dull-coloured, water-lapped front, I felt that no more fitting
scene could be set for such a tragedy.
"That's the window," said White Mason, "that one on the immediate
right of the drawbridge. It's open just as it was found last
night."
"It looks rather narrow for a man to pass."
"Well, it wasn't a fat man, anyhow. We don't need your
deductions, Mr. Holmes, to tell us that. But you or I could
squeeze through all right."
Holmes walked to the edge of the moat and looked across. Then he
examined the stone ledge and the grass border beyond it.
"I've had a good look, Mr. Holmes," said White Mason. "There is
nothing there, no sign that anyone has landed--but why should he
leave any sign?"
"Exactly. Why should he? Is the water always turbid?"
"Generally about this colour. The stream brings down the clay."
"How deep is it?"
"About two feet at each side and three in the middle."
"So we can put aside all idea of the man having been drowned in
crossing."
"No, a child could not be drowned in it."
We walked across the drawbridge, and were admitted by a quaint,
gnarled, dried-up person, who was the butler, Ames. The poor old
fellow was white and quivering from the shock. The village
sergeant, a tall, formal, melancholy man, still held his vigil in
the room of Fate. The doctor had departed.
"Anything fresh, Sergeant Wilson?" asked White Mason.
"No, sir."
"Then you can go home. You've had enough. We can send for you
if we want you. The butler had better wait outside. Tell him to
warn Mr. Cecil Barker, Mrs. Douglas, and the housekeeper that we
may want a word with them presently. Now, gentlemen, perhaps you
will allow me to give you the views I have formed first, and then
you will be able to arrive at your own."
He impressed me, this country specialist. He had a solid grip of
fact and a cool, clear, common-sense brain, which should take him
some way in his profession. Holmes listened to him intently,
with no sign of that impatience which the official exponent too
often produced.
"Is it suicide, or is it murder--that's our first question,
gentlemen, is it not? If it were suicide, then we have to
believe that this man began by taking off his wedding ring and
concealing it; that he then came down here in his dressing gown,
trampled mud into a corner behind the curtain in order to give
the idea someone had waited for him, opened the window, put blood
on the--"
"We can surely dismiss that," said MacDonald.
"So I think. Suicide is out of the question. Then a murder has
been done. What we have to determine is, whether it was done by
someone outside or inside the house."
"Well, let's hear the argument."
"There are considerable difficulties both ways, and yet one or
the other it must be. We will suppose first that some person or
persons inside the house did the crime. They got this man down
here at a time when everything was still and yet no one was
asleep. They then did the deed with the queerest and noisiest
weapon in the world so as to tell everyone what had happened--a
weapon that was never seen in the house before. That does not
seem a very likely start, does it?"
"No, it does not."
"Well, then, everyone is agreed that after the alarm was given
only a minute at the most had passed before the whole
household--not Mr. Cecil Barker alone, though he claims to have
been the first, but Ames and all of them were on the spot. Do
you tell me that in that time the guilty person managed to make
footmarks in the corner, open the window, mark the sill with
blood, take the wedding ring off the dead man's finger, and all
the rest of it? It's impossible!"
"You put it very clearly," said Holmes. "I am inclined to agree
with you."
"Well, then, we are driven back to the theory that it was done by
someone from outside. We are still faced with some big
difficulties; but anyhow they have ceased to be impossibilities.
The man got into the house between four-thirty and six; that is
to say, between dusk and the time when the bridge was raised.
There had been some visitors, and the door was open; so there was
nothing to prevent him. He may have been a common burglar, or he
may have had some private grudge against Mr. Douglas. Since Mr.
Douglas has spent most of his life in America, and this shotgun
seems to be an American weapon, it would seem that the private
grudge is the more likely theory. He slipped into this room
because it was the first he came to, and he hid behind the
curtain. There he remained until past eleven at night. At that
time Mr. Douglas entered the room. It was a short interview, if
there were any interview at all; for Mrs. Douglas declares that
her husband had not left her more than a few minutes when she
heard the shot."
"The candle shows that," said Holmes.
"Exactly. The candle, which was a new one, is not burned more
than half an inch. He must have placed it on the table before he
was attacked; otherwise, of course, it would have fallen when he
fell. This shows that he was not attacked the instant that he
entered the room. When Mr. Barker arrived the candle was lit and
the lamp was out."
"That's all clear enough."
"Well, now, we can reconstruct things on those lines. Mr.
Douglas enters the room. He puts down the candle. A man appears
from behind the curtain. He is armed with this gun. He demands
the wedding ring--Heaven only knows why, but so it must have
been. Mr. Douglas gave it up. Then either in cold blood or in
the course of a struggle--Douglas may have gripped the hammer
that was found upon the mat--he shot Douglas in this horrible
way. He dropped his gun and also it would seem this queer
card--V.V. 341, whatever that may mean--and he made his escape
through the window and across the moat at the very moment when
Cecil Barker was discovering the crime. How's that, Mr. Holmes?"
"Very interesting, but just a little unconvincing."
"Man, it would be absolute nonsense if it wasn't that anything
else is even worse!" cried MacDonald. "Somebody killed the man,
and whoever it was I could clearly prove to you that he should
have done it some other way. What does he mean by allowing his
retreat to be cut off like that? What does hemean by using a
shotgun when silence was his one chance of escape? Come, Mr.
Holmes, it's up to you to give us a lead, since you say Mr. White
Mason's theory is unconvincing."
Holmes had sat intently observant during this long discussion,
missing no word that was said, with his keen eyes darting to
right and to left, and his forehead wrinkled with speculation.
"I should like a few more facts before I get so far as a theory,
Mr. Mac,"said he, kneeling down beside the body. "Dear me! these
injuries are really appalling. Can we have the butler in for a
moment?... Ames, I understand that you have often seen this very
unusual mark--a branded triangleinside a circle--upon Mr.
Douglas's forearm?"
"Frequently, sir."
"You never heard any speculation as to what it meant?"
"No, sir."
"It must have caused great pain when it was inflicted. It is
undoubtedly a burn. Now, I observe, Ames, that there is a small
piece of plaster at the angle of Mr. Douglas's jaw. Did you
observe that in life?"
"Yes, sir, he cut himself in shaving yesterday morning."
"Did you ever know him to cut himself in shaving before?"
"Not for a very long time, sir."
"Suggestive!" said Holmes. "It may, of course, be a mere
coincidence, or it may point to some nervousness which would
indicate that he had reason to apprehend danger. Had you noticed
anything unusual in his conduct, yesterday, Ames?"
"It struck me that he was a little restless and excited, sir."
"Ha! The attack may not have been entirely unexpected. We do
seem to make a little progress, do we not? Perhaps you would
rather do the questioning, Mr. Mac?"
"No, Mr. Holmes, it's in better hands than mine."
"Well, then, we will pass to this card--V.V. 341. It is rough
cardboard. Have you any of the sort in the house?"
"I don't think so."
Holmes walked across to the desk and dabbed a little ink from
each bottle on to the blotting paper. "It was not printed in
this room," he said; "this is black ink and the other purplish.
It was done by a thick pen, and these are fine. No, it was done
elsewhere, I should say. Can you make anything of the
inscription, Ames?"
"No, sir, nothing."
"What do you think, Mr. Mac?"
"It gives me the impression of a secret society of some sort; the
same with his badge upon the forearm."
"That's my idea, too," said White Mason.
"Well, we can adopt it as a working hypothesis and then see how
far our difficulties disappear. An agent from such a society
makes his way into the house, waits for Mr. Douglas, blows his
head nearly off with this weapon, and escapes by wading the moat,
after leaving a card beside the dead man, which will, when
mentioned in the papers, tell other members of the society that
vengeance has been done. That all hangs together. But why this
gun, of all weapons?"
"Exactly."
"And why the missing ring?"
"Quite so."
"And why no arrest? It's past two now. I take it for granted
that since dawn every constable within forty miles has been
looking out for a wet stranger?"
"That is so, Mr. Holmes."
"Well, unless he has a burrow close by or a change of clothes
ready, they can hardly miss him. And yet they HAVE missed him up
to now!" Holmes had gone to the window and was examining with
his lens the blood mark on the sill. "It is clearly the tread of
a shoe. It is remarkably broad; a splay-foot, one would say.
Curious, because, so far as one can trace any footmark in this
mud-stained corner, one would say it was a more shapely sole.
However, they are certainly very indistinct. What's this under
the side table?"
"Mr. Douglas's dumb-bells," said Ames.
"Dumb-bell--there's only one. Where's the other?"
"I don't know, Mr. Holmes. There may have been only one. I
have not noticed them for months."
"One dumb-bell--" Holmes said seriously; but his remarks were
interrupted by a sharp knock at the door.
A tall, sunburned, capable-looking, clean-shaved man looked in at
us. I had no difficulty in guessing that it was the Cecil Barker
of whom I had heard. His masterful eyes travelled quickly with a
questioning glance from face to face.
"Sorry to interrupt your consultation," said he, "but you should
hear the latest news."
"An arrest?"
"No such luck. But they've found his bicycle. The fellow left
his bicycle behind him. Come and have a look. It is within a
hundred yards of the hall door."
We found three or four grooms and idlers standing in the drive
inspecting a bicycle which had been drawn out from a clump of
evergreens in which it had been concealed. It was a well used
Rudge-Whitworth, splashed as from a considerable journey. There
was a saddlebag with spanner and oilcan, but no clue as to the
owner.
"It would be a grand help to the police," said the inspector, "if
these things were numbered and registered. But we must be
thankful for what we've got. If we can't find where he went to,
at least we are likely to get where he came from. But what in
the name of all that is wonderful made the fellow leave it
behind? And how in the world has he got away without it? We
don't seem to get a gleam of light in the case, Mr. Holmes."
"Don't we?" my friend answered thoughtfully. "I wonder!"
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