Detective Hamilton Cleek's Cases - 5 Murder Mysteries in One Premium Edition. Thomas W. Hanshew
darkness and the shapelessness of crowded trees.
In the shadows of that narrow alley made by the wall and the furze bushes Cleek crouched a moment and listened before he ventured to move another inch. Not a sound, not the merest ghost of a sound. If the woman were in the immediate neighbourhood, she was keeping extremely quiet; therefore it behoved him to progress with infinite caution. Inch by inch, on hands and knees, he moved up that narrow alley, stopping every now and then to prick up his ears and listen breathlessly. But upon every occasion he found the stillness yet unbroken and no sign or sound of breathing life anywhere about him.
Two minutes passed—three—five—half a dozen, and still all was as it had been in the beginning. By this time this slow, cautious creeping had carried him over two thirds of the distance, and he was now within ten or eleven feet of the hidden gate; and still no sound or sign of the woman's return. Indeed, no sound of any sort until, with one hand outstretched and one knee lifted to edge forward yet a trifle more, he paused abruptly, sucked in his breath, and huddled softly down, becoming but a mere dark heap on the damp, dark grass.
A sound had come at last! The unmistakable sound of some one moving cautiously through close-pressing branches and crowded leaves.
It was so faint a thing that ears less keen than his might not have detected it. Yet, at the first rustle of the first stirred leaf he caught the hiss of it and knew it was not the woman that made it; for the prickly foliage of furze makes no rustling sound when a passing body brushes it, and there was nothing upon the outer side of the wall but furze that was low enough to be brushed in passing.
Clearly, then, the sound was from the other side of the wall, from within the grounds of the Grange! Some one was coming to keep the tryst—some one who, evidently, had been delayed past an agreed time, otherwise the woman would not have made all those anxious pilgrimages to the door and been so upset when she found it still locked and nobody there to meet her.
Well, this was a stroke of good fortune at all events; for if by any chance the woman did not return there would at least be the satisfaction of discovering——A sound interrupted: a cat's mew to the life. And from the shadow of a thick furze hedge on the Common side of the lane it was answered.
"Yes, I am here," a shrill, eager voice called out in a sharp, keen whisper. "Oh, come quickly or I shall go insane!"
Almost instantly there was a rustle of silken garments, a patter of footsteps, the swift moving of a figure across the lonely lane, followed by the rattle and click of a key in a spring lock, the creak of an in-swung gate moving upon its hinges, and with these things the sound of an excited man whispering warningly, "Sh-h-h!" as the woman swept down upon him in a state bordering on absolute hysteria.
"Oh, if you could but know what agonies I have suffered, what horrors of suspense I have endured!" she said in a wailing sort of whisper, "I feared that you might not be able to come, after I have risked so much to be here; but when I heard the cat's mew, I wonder that I did not scream."
And again the man's whispered "Sh-h-h!" sounded, but fuller than ever of excitement and fear.
But Cleek scarcely heard it. Other and more startling things were claiming his thoughts. A scent of violets was in his nostrils; a sting of bitter recollection was in his memory. What was it the dying Common keeper had said? "All shiny pale green satin, sir, with sparklin' things on her bosom, and smellin' like a field of voylits in the month of May!"
He did not need Ailsa Lorne to point her out to him after this. He knew without anybody telling him; knew in that first moment, as surely as he ever lived to know in moments yet to come, that this veiled and night-hidden woman who stood there by the garden door keeping tryst with a man was she who had been out on the Common last night: Sir Philip Clavering's wife!
And the man she was meeting, this crafty fellow who hung back in the shadow of the solid gate, who and what was he? What part was his in this grim riddle of death?
It was Lady Clavering herself who gave the answer.
"Oh, it is so easy to say that," she went on, answering his warning "Sh-h-h" in a whisper that was shrill with agony and despair, "but the dread of shrieking will be on me forever after this, the horrible dread that if I do not cry out in my waking moments I may unconsciously do so in my sleeping ones. I know it was mad of me to do this thing, to take this dreadful risk in coming here; but I couldn't sleep until I saw you, until I had told you that I know! I think I knew it yesterday; I think I foresaw it when you wrote and warned me, and if I had not been a coward, if fate had not sent him to Clavering Close last night and let me see that it was written he should come back into my life again——"
Her voice snapped off and failed her for an instant, sinking down to a dull, whimpering sound like the wail of an animal that is beaten; then it came back to her and she spoke again.
"I knew you would kill him, I knew that you would!" she said in that horrible, excited whisper. "I felt it in my soul the moment he looked up and recognized me, and I knew what I—what you—had to dread. It was that that drove me out on the Common. I wanted to find you; I wanted to stop you. But it was too late, too late! I know that you did it for my sake as much as for your own, but the thought of the thing, the thought of it! If anything can palliate that, if God can in any way excuse it, it will be that you got the letters; that you tore them up, burnt them, did anything in the world but let them fall into that woman Margot's hands! Oh, did you? I cannot sleep until I know. For if you did not——"
Here her voice snapped again, but for quite another reason this time, a reason which made Cleek groan inwardly.
Far down at the other end of the dark alley where he lay breathlessly listening, a faint rustling sound had suddenly risen—the sound of some one creeping gently toward him. He knew and understood what was happening, what an unkindly blow fate had dealt him. Ailsa was returning. She had taken his expression, "Afterward you and I can meet here again," to mean after she had conducted Dollops to the ruin, not after Cleek's own work was done; and lo! here she was returning at this inopportune moment. She was creeping along on tiptoe, it was true, and moving as stealthily and as silently as she knew how, but in that utter stillness, with silk skirts that brushed the wall as she advanced——
The end came abruptly. There was just one second of breathless listening, then without a word the two people at the open doorway parted. Lady Clavering jumped back, darted across the lane, and vanished in the blackness of the Common; the wall door closed, the spring lock clicked, and the sound of a man's running echoed faintly from the other side. No time this for craft and finesse. Here was a call for action, a demand for muscle, not brain. If that man was a member of this household, if fleet running could do it, if any man who should be under that roof was not there——
Cleek was on his feet like a flash. He scudded down the lane openly, he ducked into the door and vanished into the gardens without so much as a word to Ailsa, he struck through the plantation and made a short cut for the lawn and the front door, and with jaw squared and teeth shut, ran and ran and ran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE MOUSETRAP
Cleek covered the distance between the wall angle and the door of the Grange in a fraction over a minute, and he had neither heard any one nor seen any one on the way. He went up the steps two at a time, and, swinging into the hallway, made hot foot for the dining-room. An inward push on the door and all that lay beyond it was in view.
The lights were still burning, the decanter and the glasses still en évidence, and, what was still more to the point, there lay Mr. Harry Raynor with his arms sprawled out over the tablecloth and his head between them, snoring away in a semi-drunken stupor, with his mouth wide open and his flushed face a little less attractive in slumber than it was in wakefulness.
Not he, then!
Cleek dashed out of the room and flew upstairs to Lord St. Ulmer's room. No time for craft and cunning this. At whatever risk, at whatever