Trent’s Own Case. E. C. Bentley
uneasy pacing of the deck.
Miss Yates was naturally taken aback. Why the man should so reject her good offices she was unable to conceive. The paper had unquestionably fallen from his chair. More than that—she had seen him, with a perplexed and frowning brow, intently studying that very paper more than once during the progress of his writing. Indignation might have overcome her; but Miss Yates was one of those who will always find excuses for anyone seeming so distressed and overwrought as did this fellow-passenger. She felt the agreeable thrill of a mystery as she carefully tucked the disowned scrap of writing in a pocket of her handbag.
The voyagers, for the most part, settled themselves for the crossing in the saloons and cabins, for the night was wet and cold. Miss Yates, in a glow of freedom and adventure, was resolved to lose none of the sensations proper to travel; she preferred to seclude herself with a rug in the shelter of one of the boats. That end of the deck might well have appeared deserted to the man who had so aroused her interest, when next she saw him. Emerging from one of the deck-houses, he resumed his pacing to and fro; and she noted that he now carried the shapeless package under his arm. Soon he paused beside the rail; and he quitted it with a nervous start when one of the crew passed by on some errand.
A minute later, what Miss Yates was half-expecting happened. The mysterious traveller again approached the rail, and furtively dropped overboard whatever it was that he was carrying. That done, he disappeared below; and Miss Yates saw no more of him until the disembarkation at Dieppe. She noted that he was among the first to pass out of the Customs shed; but neither on the Paris train nor elsewhere did she again set eyes on the man who had so surprisingly disowned the little sheet of paper.
Not until half an hour later did Miss Yates, having savoured the pleasure of skimming the first French newspaper she had seen for many years, think again of the leaflet which she had tried to restore to its possessor. Turning from the lively polemics of the Homme Trompé, which she had found more than a little bewildering, she began to review the details of the puzzle which had so much intensified the happiness of her release from the daily round of life in Farnham. The scrap of paper, now! If its possessor chose to deny his right to it, it was surely for anybody’s reading.
Miss Yates drew the paper from her handbag and noted at once that it was headed by that same day’s date. But what she read next, in a firm and legible pencilling, gave her a surprise far more thrilling than she had yet known in the brief affair of the mysterious passenger to Dieppe.
Heads jerked round, and startled looks were turned upon the quiet little Englishwoman, as she exclaimed aloud: ‘Good gracious!’
TO Chief Inspector Gideon Bligh’s experienced eye the scene explained itself—up to a point. That able officer stood in the centre of the late James Randolph’s bedroom on the upper floor of No. 5, Newbury Place, known to a simpler age as Newbury Mews. This was a small enclosure, approached by archways from the streets at either end of it, in one of the purlieus of Park Lane; No. 5 being the nearest to Bullingdon Street of the neat row of stables and coach-houses, converted now to the uses of well-to-do human habitation.
Mr Bligh stroked with one great hand his prematurely bald cranium while he considered the position. His appearance always commanded respect. He was tall and loosely built. His clean-shaven face, with its massive, vigorous features, wore habitually a stern expression. His skin, slightly tanned, was otherwise colourless.
In the doorway stood a police-sergeant, closely attentive to the proceedings of the man from headquarters. He had already put his superior in possession of the facts learned since the police had been called to the place by telephone, just after midnight; he had mentioned the points of interest so far disclosed in examination of the bedroom, and what he regarded as ‘a queer piece of evidence’ in the sitting-room below it. The time now was half past eight in the morning.
The body had been left by the police-surgeon as he had found it, lying prone before the dressing-table. The old man had been shot from behind and killed instantly, the bullet entering below the left shoulder-blade. He had been at the time—whether it mattered or not—in a peculiarly defenceless posture; for, being fully dressed in day clothes, he had been in the act of taking off his coat. The left sleeve was half-way down the arm, and the right had just slipped from the shoulder, so that the arms were for the moment pinioned. Clearly he had not believed himself to be in danger of any sort of attack. He had placed the contents of his pockets on the table before the looking-glass. Assuming him to have been still facing the table at the moment of his death, the murderer would have been standing at or near the doorway of the room—possibly outside the open door.
The room, kept in a state of speckless neatness, was somewhat scantily furnished; but Inspector Bligh knew enough of such matters to perceive that the few movables were articles of value—probably, seeing what had been the dead man’s reputation as a connoisseur, of great value.
Randolph, it was evident, had been about to dress for dinner. His evening clothes were neatly set out on two chairs. What he had carried in his pockets lay in a small disorderly heap before the looking-glass—a case containing notes to the value of seven pounds; a handful of coins; a watch with its slender chain of gold and platinum links; an eye-glass case; a leather key-case; a few letters, being ordinary business communications; a pencil; and, incongruous among these other articles, a champagne cork.
The inspector examined this last with some interest. Certainly it was an odd thing for Randolph to have been carrying, as appearances suggested, on his person. Had it been used, perhaps, to sheathe the end of some sharp-pointed object? The officer satisfied himself that this was not so. The cork was flawless and compact, to all appearances in just that condition in which it had left the bottle; it was branded ‘Felix Poubelle 1884.’ The inspector rubbed his chin as he considered these facts; but he found himself unable to attach to them any significance at all.
Close to this pile of personal oddments lay the separated parts of a safety razor, lacking a blade. The other materials for shaving, as Mr Bligh soon ascertained, lay among the articles on a shelf in the bathroom adjoining. They had not been recently used. On the same shelf lay the little case belonging to the razor, and within it were two new blades in their unbroken envelopes. Curious, then, was the presence of the razor alone, unscrewed and bladeless, on the dressing-table.
The inspector turned now to a small chest of drawers against the wall hard by the door opening from the passage. On the embroidered blue linen ‘runner’ covering its top stood a water-bottle, half-empty, and a tumbler from which, it appeared, water had been drunk. A glance showed that the inevitable fingerprints had been left on both of these—probably Randolph’s own prints, the inspector reflected sadly. Still, you couldn’t be sure. Murderers were not—so ran Mr Bligh’s train of thought—like criminals as a rule. All the regular crooks knew about fingerprints; and none of them were deliberate killers. Murderers were apt to be quite respectable; at least to know nothing of the ways of criminals or of the police either. But again, you couldn’t be sure.
Leaving this point for later investigation, he turned next to the fireplace. Randolph, the police had learned, had always a good coal fire burning in this during the cold weather. Yesterday’s fire had long burnt itself out, and the inspector raked through the ashes with the small poker that lay to hand. Nothing, however, rewarded his search.
His eye travelled now over the floor of the room, and came to rest where, beneath the window, there lay a quantity of crumpled brown paper and tangled string, marring the extreme tidiness of the surroundings. A moment’s examination showed that several packets, fastened with sealed cord, had been opened, their contents removed, and the covers flung down carelessly. From the appearance of these relics Mr Bligh judged them to have been slim parcels containing letters or documents of some kind, each parcel conspicously marked with a number in soft black pencil. The string in each case, the seals being unbroken, had been cut with an instrument of peculiar sharpness, as the perfectly clean division of the strands made plain.
The