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CHAPTER XV
THE LAYING OF THE VALEHAMPTON "GHOST"

AS they issued from the churchyard a couple of gamekeepers, standing on guard with loaded shotguns, challenged them.

"That's all right, Norton," said Cleek, as one of them stepped forward to bar the way. "It is only His Grace and the rest of us coming to see the final kick-up. You can let us pass with impunity."

"Right, sir," said Norton, and stepped aside.

"The beggars made fine work of it, didn't they, Mr. Narkom?" said Cleek with a laugh, as he pointed to the battered condition of the raided cottage. "Door, window, and half the wall battered down! They were an energetic lot! Did they all go in, then, Norton?"

"Yes, sir, every blessed one of them; and Mr. Naylor himself with the lot. They'll be coming out in a minute, I'm thinking – fancy I can hear someone running."

He had scarcely more than finished speaking than there came a clatter of hasty footsteps running up wooden steps, and presently a man, smeared and streaked with yellow clay, dashed in through the scullery door of the cottage and flung himself across the main room, as if running for dear life.

The two gamekeepers rushed forward, and their guns went up like clockwork.

"Now, then, you! Stop where you are," sang out Norton. "You don't take your hook without there's a line on it – and a sinker, too, if you don't look sharp. Hands up!"

The runner obeyed one part of the command at least. That is to say, he stopped short, but instead of throwing up his hands he shouted out in a voice of great excitement:

"Don't make a fool of yourself, Norton; it is only I – Naylor. Get a litter! Get a doctor! We've nabbed the two Hurdons and the gypsy, Costivan; but that fellow Carstairs had a pistol with him, the brute, and after putting a ball through Weston's leg and another into Farley's cap, the beggar shot himself."

"What's that? Shot himself? Carstairs?"

"Oh, that you, Mr. Cleek, is it? Yes, sir, shot himself – through the temple, and I'm afraid he's done himself in."

"Dead?"

"As a doornail, sir. Hole in his head you could put your two fingers in! It's Weston I want the doctor and the litter for. Carstairs won't need anything any more – his little jig is done!"

"And I let the beggar slip me like that!" said Cleek, striking his tongue against the roof of his mouth with a mild clicking sound thrice repeated. "A cold-blooded butcher of that fellow's type – the one real tiger in the whole skulking pack of jackals – and to get off so easily! Too bad, too bad. Well, it can't be helped, I suppose. You got the others all safe and sound, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir, all three."

"Close to the end, were they?"

"Very close, sir. Just as you reckoned. They'd have been in before morning. The floor of the strong-room was just beginning to show in places, and they had the soup all ready and waiting. We nabbed them just in time."

Here the sound of a woman's smothered screams and of men's curses became dimly audible. Mr. Naylor jerked his thumb backward over his shoulder in the direction from which they came.

"That will be them now," he said. "They are bringing the lot up."

"Get down and stop them, then," said Cleek. "All these good people will not care to see an exhibition of that sort now that it has taken a tragic turn. Hold them there for another ten minutes. Don't bring even Weston up. The sight would not be a pleasant one for the duke."

Here Mr. Narkom, waiting only for Naylor to take his departure, chose to deliver a dig at his friend.

"I notice," he said in an undertone, "that for all your fine scorn of dukes you are taking devilish good care of this one."

"Excellent, my friend! Your powers of observation are improving. Notice anything else as well?"

"Yes. You are conducting this affair somewhat off your usual lines, and instead of being bowled over with astonishment by your revelations, this particular duke doesn't seem surprised at anything."

"He isn't. I told him everything beforehand. Doctor Forsyth advised it; his heart is weak. Any more questions, please?"

"Yes, one. In the name of Heaven, what did you cut up that fainting caper for last night?"

"Come over to the cottage door. Look there. See that thing in the corner? By the sofa there – with the quilt half over it?"

"Mean the box with the wire netting over the front?"

"Exactly. That's what I did it for. I wanted to see if there was such a thing here. It was necessary to get down on the floor to see it, and there it was."

"But what on earth – ?"

Mr. Narkom did not bother to complete the sentence. It would have been useless. Cleek had walked away and left him – going back to the place where the duke and the others were standing.

"I think, Duke, it will be as well to return to the vicarage," he said, "and leave the rest of this unpleasant business to the law alone. I am sorry, gentlemen, that I have put you all to the useless trouble of coming out here. I should not have done so had I known or even guessed of Carstairs' act. Still, it doesn't matter. You know the result; you know the game. The robbery of the gold service has been prevented, the criminals unmasked, and – that's all. I think we may be satisfied that the riddle has been solved."

"Do you? Well, I'm blest if I do, then!" exclaimed Captain Weatherley. "There is one little point which you decidedly have not cleared up, if you don't mind my saying so. That thing!" Here he flung out his hand and made a sweeping gesture in the direction of the bell-tower, from which the discordant clang had all the time been sounding. "How about that, please? Who has been managing that little dodge, and – how?"

"Oh, the ghost, you mean?"

"Yes, the ghost, the power – the thing, or whatever it is, that rings bells without ropes, and yet – Uppingham, Essex, look round, look round, for Heaven's sake. It has got beyond mere sound alone – it has become visible now – visible! Look, there's a light there – a light!"

"Yes," said Cleek. "It appeared for the first time last night. It gave me quite a shock for the minute, until I remembered."

"Remembered?"

"Yes. Our friend Mr. Overton arranged it for me. He knew, of course, that 'George Headland' would inspect the place some time or another, and he wanted to back up his little ghost story of the night before."

"Overton? Overton, Mr. Cleek?"

"Yes; he is a quite ingenious gentleman when you come to know him – only he is not very original at bottom, I fear. Would you like to see the Valehampton ghost laid, Captain? Would you like to know how bells can be rung without hands or ropes, or wires, or anything of that sort, gentlemen? Very well, then, step this way, and you shall."

Here, beckoning Norton to follow, he walked to the lich-gate, opened it, and, accompanied by the six men, led the way to the belfry.

The clanging bells still flung their discord upon the air, the globe of light still circled in the darkness of the tower's top, and, although the head which had devised it was laid low and the hand which had directed it was now a manacled one, the Valehampton ghost still played its uncanny part.

Cleek turned to the gamekeeper, a smile hovering around his lips.

"Gun for a minute, please. Norton. Thanks. Keep your eyes on the light, gentlemen, and stand back a bit. All ready, are you?"

Bang! Bang!

The gun barked twice in rapid succession, and two charges of buckshot rattled against the bells. A scream, almost human in its note, shrilled out from the tower's top, the ball of light lurched outward and came tumbling downward till it struck the earth with a curious crunching sound, and then lay quiet in a cloud of fullers' earth.

"Gentlemen, the Valehampton Ghost," said Cleek; then he whipped out his torch and switched a circle of light upon it where it lay – a little black monkey with a wire muzzle over its mouth and a sponge that glowed brightly and smelt strongly of phosphorus fastened to the top of its shattered head. And hard by the spot where it lay there was one single trail of its footprints going across the fullers' earth and pointing toward the stone tower.

CHAPTER XVI
CLEEK EXPLAINS

"How did I manage to find the thing out?" said Cleek, answering the duke's query as they all sat together in the vicarage drawing-room, an hour or more afterward, discussing the affair. "Well, to tell you the truth, I think I got the very first inkling from the ringing of the bells. Oh, no, not through any special power of deduction or any super-human nonsense of that sort, but simply and solely through my memory. You will remember that I said Overton was not very original in his methods. Well, it so happened that I recalled the circumstance of a monkey which escaped from its cage and terrorized a Swiss village some years ago by climbing into the church belfry and inadvertently setting the bells ringing in the middle of the night by hopping from one to the other in an effort to maintain its equilibrium. That, of course, suggested a similar possibility here, and I set about deciding the point by means of the fullers' earth. By the way, Mr. Narkom, I chose fullers' earth not alone because of its yielding quality and its ability to receive impressions of even very slight things falling upon it, but because by reason of its weight and its rather tenacious character it was not so likely as another medium to be blown away by any sudden rising of the wind. I suppose you know that I placed the stuff about the tower's base when I left you at the limousine?"

"I judged that," replied the Superintendent. "The thing which amazed me, however, was all that meaningless stuff about timber and cubic feet you talked about when you came back. I can't even yet get the hang of that."

"Can't you? It will be getting in advance of the story a bit, but I may as well explain it now as later. I had come to the point of certainty regarding the making of a tunnel – how, you shall hear later – and as a tunnel of 288 feet in length will require shoring up and bracing with balks at intervals if one doesn't want it to become one's grave, timber for that purpose becomes a necessity. Now, as it would have been a pretty risky business to have left a trail by purchasing timber, and a worse one to attempt to smuggle it into the Hurdons' cottage, I had to figure out just where those beauties were going to get it. Old or new, they simply must have it, and the idea of old timber set my thoughts going – opened up, as it were, the possibility of the adjoining house being kept tenantless so that they could quietly demolish it and get the wood from there. So, when I went to lay the fullers' earth about the tower, I determined to have a look inside that other cottage and decide the point. A skeleton key let me in, and one flicker of my torch settled the question. The floors were up, the walls had been broken with a sledge-hammer until the place was fairly littered with mortar and lime from end to end, and every joist and beam that could be removed without bringing the place down had been taken away. I made a rapid inventory, calculated roughly about how much timber it would take to supply what had been removed, reduced that to the requirements of the tunnel, and when you caught me going about that little problem in mental arithmetic, I was trying to discover just how far those chaps must have progressed with the tunnel on the basis of the cubic feet of timber used.

"Now, to get back to the beginning. The tunnel idea was really the outcome of speculating with regard to Sir Julius Solinski's possible connection with the matter. That, of course, set me to thinking on the subject of digging for the purpose of getting something out of the earth by secret means and defeating the duke that way; then, when I get to thinking over Captain Paul Sandringham's position in the event of the proposed marriage and the possibility of an heir coming between him and his expectations, and added to that my knowledge of the dishonest character of the man – why, there you are! The tunnel and the reason for it simply evolve themselves by natural means out of such fertile soil as that; and, this much accomplished, it was but a step to the Hurdons and that very delightful garden which was so delightfully kept."

"How?"

"I didn't like the idea of that garden in that particular place for one thing, and then, for another, I didn't like its being so wonderfully kept up by a couple of people who couldn't apparently be scared into neglecting it or frightened out of the neighbourhood by all the ghosts and bells and curses in Christendom. I asked myself: 'Why do people of position and means so humble that they have to live in a little thatched cottage go to the expense of a garden so ornamental that even a ducal residence is enhanced by the presence of it?' The answer appeared to be that they were doing it for the purpose of making the duke pleased to have them remain there; and if they had any reason for spending a lot of money in plants and flowers simply to prevent the duke from tearing down the cottages and putting an end to the nuisance of that ill-kept one next door, there must be something at the bottom of it that would not stand looking into. If there was to be a tunnel, then, why should not that be the starting point? The more I thought over the thing the more promising it looked. For, I said to myself, to keep up a garden in the state of constant bloom and continual perfection, as that one appears to be, will need a lot of work; in fact, will keep that one old man and woman busy in it pretty much all their time, if there is no fake about it; but if there is, and they are digging in the tunnel, and the garden still bears those outward signs of constant care, why, there will be only one possible solution, one possible way to do it. In other words, there will have to be a constant supply of fresh plants that can be popped into the place of any that show the slightest trace of neglect, and that means that they will have to be shallow-rooted things like geraniums, fuchsias, lilies, and the like, so that the change cannot only be accomplished quickly, but will show no sign to the casual observer."

"Ah, now I understand what you meant by all that stuff about geraniums which I couldn't make head or tail of at the time. And that's why you were so interested and so anxious to go over and talk with the Hurdon woman the minute you caught sight of the place."

"That's it precisely, Mr. Narkom. I saw at once that I had hit upon something very like the truth; and as I also saw that the woman was very particular in rising from her work to see that her gardening apron was brushed down over her skirt, I wondered what she was so anxious to hide, and took means to find out by tossing the wall plant to her on the plea of its being a very choice plant. When she caught it in her apron and I saw those marks of caked yellow clay about her knees, I was both gratified and – disappointed."

"Disappointed, old chap?"

"Yes, in the colour of the stuff. I'd expected it to be blue. For, as you know, the county of Essex may be said to rest almost entirely on a foundation of what is geologically known as 'London clay' and that is decidedly blue. All in a moment, however, I remembered that we were close to the border line of Suffolk, and consequently on the edge of the yellow clay belt, and – there you are. Pardon, Duke? How did I get the idea of Captain Sandringham's connection with the affair? Oh, that fellow Carstairs gave me the first hint of that at the vicarage gate when the news of the man's death was made known, and Overton clinched the nail at once. He was obviously distressed by the news, and didn't know how to proceed; but when Carstairs flung out that little hint about there being 'one the less to reckon with' the fellow's eyes lit up in a manner not to be mistaken. They are expressive eyes. To-day, when I went over to the Castle and got the duke to send him off to Braintree so that I could slip into the Lodge and search his effects I found all the proof of 'Miss Emmy Costivan's' identity and of the beggar's arrangements with Captain Sandringham.

"I also made use of my time at the Castle to question the duke's valet and to learn what happened when Tom Davis went out to investigate the matter of the bells that night. Just before he went, Carstairs had treated him to half a bottle of the ducal champagne. When I heard that, I knew at once how the morphia had been administered. I had known from the first, however, that, if morphia should turn out to be the drug employed, Carstairs would be the man, because the rascal had it handy. How did I know that? Well, you remember that time when Sir Julius Solinski passed us in his motor? Carstairs saluted him. As the beggar put his hand to his hat, his sleeve slipped down, and I could see the evidence of the thing. The man was addicted to the use of hypodermic injections of morphia – the scars of the needle were clearly visible. I don't think there is any doubt of how poor Davis died. The drug overcame him on the road, and he dropped down in a stupor. There is clear evidence of that. You saw me examine his nails? The flint dust of the road was under them. After that, I suppose, Carstairs, who had been following him and watching him out for just such a time, pounced on him, carried him into the half-demolished cottage, and brained him with the hammer that was being used to batter down the walls and beat out the joists. As for the other tragic affair connected with the same cottage – namely, the mysterious disappearance of the child and the insanity and suicide of the father? I don't suppose we need regard that as other than a pleasant little fiction upon the part of Mr. James Overton. The duke tells me that the body of the man Smale was never recovered, and that his going insane and drowning himself rests only upon a 'farewell note' from him to Mr. Overton, who afterward declared that he had seen his body fished out of the river a good ten miles away. Of course the story of the child's vanishing in the dead of the night was another piece of fiction of the same sort. Nor would it surprise me in the slightest if the man called Smale, who posed as her father, was really no less a person than Captain Paul Sandringham himself.

"One thing, however, I think we can assert positively, and that is that Mrs. Mallory, the widow who set the ball rolling, was no other than Miss Emily Overton, otherwise Emily Costivan, and that the person who figured as her sister is the woman who passed as her mother."

"Mrs. Costivan?"

"Yes. I think we shall find that she and her husband were admitted into the game simply because they had at the time a nephew who was in the last stages of consumption. Of course the story about the gypsy who was beating him and who told the curse that would follow if he were buried here was made from whole cloth. The youth was simply carried into the house in the night, and Doctor Forsyth was right in the matter of his not having been able to lift a hand for days before he was called in to him. Since then it would appear that Mrs. Costivan had directed her energies toward washing the clay-stained overalls of one and the other of the 'tunnellers' when her husband carried them to her – for I dare say that every one of them – Carstairs, Overton, Costivan, all of them, took a hand in it at times; and if it hadn't been for poor Tom Davis, they might have carried it through successfully, after all. Which shows again that 'there's many a slip – !'"

And so ended the case of the Mysterious Light which nearly lost a duke a most valuable heritage and to which only Cleek could find the solution.

CHAPTER XVII
THE MYSTERY OF THE "ROSE OF FIRE"

Some few days later, Mr. Narkom, breathing noisily and obviously hard pressed for time, pushed open the door of Cleek's apartment on Portman Square and carefully inserted his head into the room. His face lighted up and he drew a deep sigh of relief as he caught sight of Cleek, reclining in an easy-chair and apparently day-dreaming.

He glanced up as the Superintendent entered.

"Well, for once you have caught me napping, Mr. Narkom," he said. "I was so deep in thought, I never heard a sound. But sit down, old friend. You look worried."

"I am," admitted the Superintendent. "I was on pins and needles for fear this gorgeous day might have drawn you up the river, and I didn't dare use the public telephone."

"Which tells me very plainly that you have not come directly from the Yard. So I may assume it is a case of some importance that has brought you here in post haste," said Cleek.

"It is indeed," said Narkom, "and it is a case connected with jewels.

"You remember that young American chap I pointed out in a motor last week – the fellow who came over about the Panama Canal, intending to go back, but wound up by getting engaged to an English girl and settling down here…?"

"Anthony Winton, do you mean? Yes, of course I do. If my memory holds right, he is the son of a California millionaire, and with a pretty taste in jewels. Made a hobby of outlandish settings, photographs were in the Connoisseur. The woman who marries him will never go short of unique jewels. Wasn't he to have been married to-day, by the way, according to the papers?"

"'Was' is the correct word, Cleek," said Narkom in a hushed tone. "There will be no wedding for him, poor chap. The man has been murdered – "

"Murdered!" Cleek interrupted, sitting up suddenly. "Winton murdered! How? When?"

"Last night," said Narkom. "Robbery is supposed to have been the motive, and suspicion points in half-a-dozen directions."

"What has been stolen, something from his collection?"

"Yes. As you yourself said, he had a mania for queer jewels, and the one that is missing is the queerest of the lot – rubies mounted on a stem. A Burmese thing, known as the 'Rose of Fire,' made of priceless pigeon-blood rubies, and supposed to have been stolen from the temple of Buddha in Mandalay.

"I was told it was a rose with ruby petals and emerald stem and worth thousands."

"Of course; everyone knows of it. Thousands won't replace it," said Cleek. "Its historical value alone makes it priceless. It is supposed to have belonged to Buddha himself. But to come back to Winton. How was he killed? Stabbed? Shot?"

"I can't say for certain," said Narkom, "save that he was certainly not shot or stabbed. There is no mark or blemish on the body at all. All that is positive, according to the doctor, who did not arrive until after his death, is that he had been asphyxiated by some unknown fumes. He was found by his servant, who says he heard him struggling with an assailant, but when he forced the door in, the room was empty, the windows shut, and he was only just in time to reach his master and hear him say with his last gasp 'Death's Head!' Then he fell back, dead as the skeleton to which he pointed."

"'Death's Head'," repeated Cleek, knitting his brows. "Does anybody know what he meant?"

"Not unless he was still thinking of his words with Miss Parradine, the bride-to-be."

"What had she to do with it?" asked Cleek.

"A great deal, I should say. As you know, Winton had queer taste in jewels and it seems that he had had some of his finest diamonds mounted in skull-and-crossbones brooches as his present to the bride and as bridesmaid gifts. He was obsessed with breaking superstitions – insisted on sitting down thirteen at table when possible, had the knives crossed, had skull and crossbones on his notepaper and cutlery. He defied, in fact, every legend and superstition known, even to having a skeleton present at the table."

"H'm, cheerful companion! Every man has some whim, but for a young man all this was peculiar, to say the least of it. I suppose he wanted his future wife to indulge in the same tricks, eh?"

"Yes, that's just it, Cleek, and evidently she resisted. Anyhow, with the exception of Calvert, the valet, she was the last person to see him alive last night. She arrived unexpectedly during the evening, and was shown in to him. It seems that they were not entirely on the best of terms. Both have, or had I suppose I must say, strong wills, and Miss Parradine was obviously in a furious temper, for Calvert declared that he heard her voice raised high and shrill more than once. He even goes further than that, for he swears that as he was passing the door, just before she flung herself out, flushed with rage and mortification, he heard her say distinctly: 'I won't have it. I'd sooner see you a skull and crossbones yourself than ask such a thing'."

"Humph," commented Cleek. "I wonder if Calvert is to be trusted. Sure he wasn't making the words fit those of the dying man? Possibly Miss Parradine was angry at the gift and carried away by temper. Vanity plays a great part with women at the best of times, and a wedding, after all, is a trying experience."

"In this case vanity, or rather wealth, plays the chief part, I fear, Cleek, for to all accounts the lady only consented to the marriage because of the pressure brought to bear upon her by her family, and secondly because of her own love of precious stones. According to the marriage settlements, on his death all jewels go to her."

"Oho!" said Cleek in two different inflections.

"The lady herself," continued Mr. Narkom, "was really engaged to a neighbouring land-owner, Robert Bristol, but she had to give him up. Probably Winton had a financial hold over her father. Anyhow, the marriage was hastened, and Winton had decided to take his bride back to America before settling down here."

"And where did the murder take place – in London?" queried Cleek, diving for his cigarette-case.

"No, in Essex, in the village of Grays, where Winton had leased a very old solidly built manor house, and had had his jewel collection, which he made while travelling from place to place, transferred to the big picture gallery there. This collection included the famous 'Rose of Fire'."

"H'm. I see. And considering that the Burmese priests will never rest till they regain that holy relic, it was positively asking for trouble. The Death's Head, sign of the skull and crossbones, is an emblem of one of their rites, I believe, and if one of them were in the neighbourhood, might Winton not have recognized the instigator of his death? The hypothesis is rather far-fetched, I admit, but still – Well, continue with the story, please. How long had the lady left before Calvert began to suspect trouble?"

"About ten minutes. As a matter of fact, she let herself out, apparently. Calvert was called away by the telephone down another passage, and when he came back she was gone. He took the 'phone message to Mr. Winton and found the door locked. According to him, he called, and at last broke in the door on hearing a funny scuffling noise inside, but getting no answer to his knocks found his master dying, and later discovered the loss of the 'Rose of Fire' from his table. That is as far as I can get."

"How was it that Miss Parradine was able to make such an inopportune call? Does she live in Grays, too?"

"Yes, she does. She is, as you doubtless are aware, the daughter of Colonel Parradine, late of the Bengal Lancers, and – "

"Stop a moment," cut in Cleek, sharply. "It isn't often my memory fails me. Wasn't it about '74 when the Bengal Lancers were stationed at Mandalay? I seem to remember some yarns about ragging. If I am not wrong, I expect it must have been that same Colonel, or Captain Parradine as he then was, who nearly got cashiered. Is he still up to high jinks?"

"Well, he acts pretty queerly," said Narkom, "according to Winton's butler, Wills. It was he, by the way, who went flying off for the doctor when they found that the telephone was out of order at the same time as the lights."

"What's that? The lights wrong?"

"Yes, he said, and Calvert, too, that every light in the place went out just as Calvert got into the room. Then they flashed on again, and that's how he looked for the jewels, directly he saw his master was dead, in order to find whether they had been stolen."

"Very thoughtful of him," put in Cleek, pinching up his chin. "Very!"

"Yes, and that's not the only funny thing. Nothing else but the 'Rose' was missing, although other stones of the collection were there. Winton had evidently been polishing or looking at them. You would have thought the thief would have cleared the lot."

"Possibly! And yet, too, he might have banked on one single jewel not being missed immediately and let him get a good start away."

"But to come back to Colonel Parradine," said Narkom. "Wills tells me he met him half-way down the lane as he was going for the doctor either very ill and shaken or much the worse for drink. His clothes were dusty and awry as if he had had a fall, and that's how he accounted for his condition. He said he had been knocked down by a motor on his way from the station. But there were scratches on his face and hands which gave him the appearance of having dropped from a high window rather than of having been in a motor accident. As Winton's gallery is a sheer drop of thirty feet from the ground, you can imagine it looks strange. Anyhow, Wills told him what had happened and left the Colonel to come on to the Manor Lodge as best he could."

"Looks bad, I must say. Still, if he had had any hand in it, he would hardly have been hanging about the lane near the scene of the murder. But you never know. Anyhow, it's easy to round up someone who saw or heard of that accident. It remains to be seen what the Colonel has to say. Any possibility of his secreting the jewel himself?"

"Hardly," said Narkom. "Considering that he drew my attention to its loss. Besides, to make things worse, I phoned through to headquarters on my way up and learned that some loose rubies were pawned in London at nine o'clock this morning by a woman who answers vaguely a description of Miss Parradine herself."

"That looks worst of all," said Cleek. "Give me five minutes to jump into another suit, Mr. Narkom, and we'll see what Mr. George Headland can do."