CANON Effingham and Mr. Atherton left us at this point, and Mr. Sewell turned to Jalvane.

“I don’t know what you official people intend to do next,” he said, “but as for myself, I propose to go to the house where my unfortunate brother lodged, for the purpose of examining his belongings. There may be something there, papers, for instance, which I ought to know of.”

“I was thinking of doing the same thing, sir,” replied Jalvane. “If not just now, certainly tomorrow. But we may as well go now.”

“Any objection to Camberwell and myself going with you?” asked Chaney.

“None!” said Jalvane. “We’re all in the same boat. Where can we find a taxi?”

I went into the street to look round. A man, obviously a constable in plain clothes, passed me in the doorway. A moment later Jalvane called me back; when I turned, the man was speaking to him.

“All right,” I heard Jalvane say. “Be there in twenty minutes. Don’t let him go.” He turned to me. “Got a taxi?” he asked. “Get one, then. But we’re going to the Yard; there’s a man turned up there who thinks he can tell something about the supposed Dean of Norchester. As all this is in my hands, they sent for me. Better come with us, sir,” he concluded, glancing at Mr. Sewell. “We’ll hear what this man has to say and we can go on to Star Street afterwards.”

The four of us got into a taxi-cab and went off to New Scotland Yard. There, in a waiting-room, we found a man of respectable appearance who, on our entrance, rose to his feet and stood to attention.

“Ah!” remarked Jalvane. “Old soldier, eh?”

The man smiled.

“Late King’s Own, sir,” he answered.

“Name?” asked Jalvane.

“Robert Evison, sir. Now employed at Paddington railway station. We have dressing-rooms there, sir. I’m in charge of them.”

“I understand you can tell something about the man who’s been going about calling himself the Dean of Norchester,” continued Jalvane. “Can you?”

“Well, sir, I’ve read a lot in the newspapers about him, and I firmly believe that I’ve had a bit of business with him,” replied Evison. “That’s my convinced impression, sir, and why I came here.”

“Quite right,” said Jalvane. “Sit down, my lad. Now, then, tell about it.”

Evison resumed his seat; we took chairs and listened.

“Well, sir, it was like this. The other morning,” began Evison, “Tuesday morning it was----”

Jalvane stopped him and turned to me.

“Let’s get things in order,” he said. “What night was it that the stuff was stolen from Linwood Church?”

“Monday last,” I answered.

“What morning was it on which the so-called Dean of Norchester went to the American man?”

“Next morning---Tuesday,” I replied.

“Go on!” said Jalvane, nodding at Evison. “On Tuesday morning last----”

“Tuesday morning it was, sir, about nine o’clock, a gentleman came up to me and said he wanted a dressing-room. I supposed, of course, that he’d just come off a long-distance train. He’d two suit-cases with him; one of ’em a deep, square one; the other a small one, perhaps eighteen by twelve. He----”

“Old or new?” asked Jalvane.

“Well-worn, both of ’em, sir. I showed him into a dressing-room and followed him in to see if there was anything I could get him. He was a pleasant, chatty sort of gentleman----”

“Better describe him before you go any further,” said Jalvane. “What like?”

Evison looked across the room---at Mr. Sewell.

“Well, sir, begging the gentleman’s pardon, he was the very spit of your friend there!” he answered. “Never seen two gentlemen more alike in my life!”

“That’ll do,” said Jalvane. “How was he dressed?”

“Dark-grey tweed suit, sir. But as soon as he got into the dressing-room, he opened the big suit-case and I saw black clothes in it which he began to take out. ‘You’ll see a---a’---he used some long word, sir----”

“Metamorphosis,” suggested Mr. Sewell.

“I think that was it, sir, by the sound. Yes---‘metamos’---whatever it is, ‘when I come out, my friend,’ he said. ‘The fact is, I never travel in my clerical clothes---I prefer to put them on when I reach town.’ Then I gathered he was a clergyman of some sort. So when I’d got him something he’d asked for---fresh soap, or something---I left him. In about a quarter of an hour he opened the door and called me in again. And of course I shouldn’t have known him. He wasn’t dressed like an ordinary clergyman, but like one of these---I don’t know if they’re bishops or what---gaiters on their legs, and a big top hat with strings, and so on. He’d put his other suit in the case, and he was locking it when I went in. ‘Now look here, my friend,’ he said, ‘I shall be coming back to change my clothes again before leaving town this afternoon---what shall I do with this suit-case? Shall I put it in the cloak-room, or do you think you could keep an eye on it?’ ‘Leave it with me, sir,’ I said, ‘I’ll see to it.’ And with that he paid me for the dressing-room, gave me half a crown for myself, and went away, carrying the little case.”

“What did you do with the big one?” asked Chaney.

“Put it in my own place, sir---I have a bit of a spot there where I keep things.”

“Did you notice if it had any lettering on it?” inquired Chaney.

“I looked particular for that, sir---I thought it would perhaps say Bishop of somewhere. But there was nothing of that sort; only two initials. H. S. It was an old suit-case, dark-brown leather; and the letters were a good deal worn.”

“Well,” said Jalvane. “And---did he come back?”

“Yes, sir---about four o’clock that afternoon.”

“Still carrying the small case?”

“Yes, sir. He’d the same room. He changed back into the dark-grey suit, paid me, gave me another halfcrown, and left. I wanted to get him a porter to carry his things, but he wouldn’t let me.”

“Did he say anything about where he was going?”

“No, sir---not a word. And, of course, after he’d left me, I saw nothing more of him. But when I read the papers this morning, and the evidence of that American gentleman, I told my boss all about it, and he said I’d better come here and tell all I knew.”

“Quite right, Evison, and what you’ve told will be very useful,” said Jalvane. “And now just keep all that to yourself till you’re asked to repeat it---and tell your boss to do the same thing.”

Then Evison went away, and we who had listened to his story went out and got into another taxi-cab and set off for Star Street, Paddington.

“Damned clever, that!” murmured Chaney as we moved away. “I’d been wondering where he got into his dean’s clothes! And what I’d now like would be to find ’em---we might trace something.”

“We shall find them,” remarked Jalvane. “Only a question of time---and patience.”

Mrs. Pentridge came to the door of her humble dwelling with a mouth full of tea and toast; she’d just sat down to a quiet cup on returning home, she said. And of course she’d expected the police gentlemen would come, and was truly thankful---and much obliged---we weren’t in uniform, not wishing to draw attention. And this was Mr. Seward’s room, which it was just as he left it, excepting that it had been tidied up and the bed made.

We found ourselves in a ground-floor bed-sitting-room; drab, dismal, but clean. There was a bed in a corner; a chest of drawers that also served as dressing-table; a small writing-table in the window between the dingy lace curtains; an easy chair, a sofa. In a recess were two shelves; the top one was filled with books; the lower one with piles of newspapers---back issues of the Times, chiefly---and magazines. Under the bed was a suit-case---empty. The chest of drawers contained clothing and linen, but an examination of its contents yielded no information. There were no private papers anywhere in the room.

The books, as Mrs. Pentridge had said in her evidence, were all in what she called foreigneering languages; they were, as a matter of fact, almost without exception, Greek and Latin classics. We examined every volume separately; there were plenty of pencil notes on margins, but no name on fly-leaves. The books themselves were chiefly the working editions of the classics issued by the university presses; my own opinion was that they had one and all been picked up at the second-hand bookstalls.

Chaney made the first find. From the midst of a pile of magazines and reviews---all of the serious and heavy sort, and all, like the books, second-hand---he suddenly extracted something which he at once held up between finger and thumb as a notable acquisition.

“Here you are!” he exclaimed. “Back number of the Linwood Parish Magazine, with article on the stolen goods. See? ‘The Treasures of Linwood Church,’ by the Reverend Wilford Effingham, M.A., Rector of Linwood and Canon of the Diocese of Southwark. What’s the date? October 1919. Two years old, this. And look!---the article’s marked in blue pencil. Pictures of the treasures---photographs. The cup and saucer---I mean chalice and paten---and the two old books. Significant we should find this---eh?”

I made the next discovery. Rooting about amongst the papers, I found a shipping list---announcements of sailings to American and Canadian ports. And against one departure---from Liverpool, at a very near date---somebody, Seward presumably, had made a mark, also in blue pencil.

And then Jalvane distinguished himself. He had been poking about in nooks and corners of the room. From a bracket on the wall he had taken down a hideous yellow and purple ornament, a sort of vase; turning this up in his hand, he shook out a bit of folded paper which he picked up and unwrapped.

“There we are!” he said. “I thought we should find something. Cloak-room ticket for a suit-case. Date April the---well, last Tuesday. So there we are!”

“What station?” demanded Chaney.

“Paddington!---and I’m going there, straight off,” replied Jalvane. “It’s close by. You wait here, all of you---have another look round. I’ll be back---with the suit-case---in no time.”

He was actually back within twenty minutes, and when he came, he had the suit-case in his hand and set it down, triumphantly, on the table. We gathered round, staring at it and wondering, no doubt, what it contained.

“Old, well-worn stuff, you see,” remarked Jalvane, tapping somewhat frayed leather. “Had its travels too---see the foreign hotel labels on it? Of course we haven’t the keys, but it’s a very ordinary lock, and I’ve no doubt I’ve something that’ll do.” He produced a bunch of keys and selected one that looked likely. “There you are!” he continued, raising the lid. “Now, what have we here?”

What we had there was, without doubt, the garments in which Seward had presented himself to Mr. Atherton at the Savoy Hotel---everything that a dean should wear, down to the black gaiters and up to the broad-brimmed, stringed hat.

“Wonder how he got all this stuff?” mused Jalvane. “None of it new, you see. I suppose, though, that deans and bishops sometimes get rid of their old clothes---all this stuff is pretty well-worn, and the hat is anything but new. Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything else.”

Chaney, however, was going through the various garments, one by one, and presently he found and held up a card, duly engraved.

“Apparently armed himself with two or three of these,” he observed. “Unless after giving one to Mr. Atherton he picked it up again. What I should like to know is---did he have these cards specially engraved for him, for this job, or have they been stolen from the real Dean of Norchester?”

“That’s one thing we ought to find out,” said Jalvane. “And the other is---where and when did he get these clothes and the hat? The last thing rather licks me. Supposing a real, genuine dean’s toggery did somehow get into a second-hand clothes-shop, who’s likely to want to buy it? It would be no use to an ordinary clergyman, and a dean’s costume isn’t exactly the thing for a fancy-dress ball. Yet---he must have got it somewhere.”

Mr. Sewell left us at that stage. He should stay in town for a few days, he said, to make arrangements about the burial of his unfortunate brother’s remains, and he gave us an address at which we could find him. And after some further discussion with Jalvane as to future procedure we all parted, leaving Seward’s belongings, by arrangement with Mrs. Pentridge, locked up in the room. During the next day or two Chaney and I were busy in giving proper publicity to Mr. Atherton’s munificent offer of five thousand pounds. Chaney attached more importance to that than to any other efforts on the part of ourselves or of the police to unravel the mystery; I myself was not very sanguine about it. It seemed to me that if Seward had an accomplice, there would now, as Seward was dead, be only one person in all the world who would know of it, and that would be the accomplice himself---or herself. And it was not likely that the accomplice would reveal his identity.

Then, two or three days later, we received a communication from the Superintendent of Police at Havering St. Michael. He enclosed for our perusal a copy of a statement just procured, he said, from a man who had voluntarily come forward to make it. It appeared, he continued, to settle the question: had Seward an accomplice? If Seward was the man mentioned in the statement, there was no doubt that he had. The enclosure ran as follows:

Statement of Henry Charles Marsden, garage-proprietor, Pennydoon Corner, near Kingston, Surrey: About dusk on the evening of Monday, April---, I was standing at the door of my garage when a small car, coming from London way and going south, passed me. It was travelling slowly. There were two men in it. About forty or fifty yards from my garage, it pulled up, and both men got out. Something seemed to be wrong. One of the men came back along the road, to me. He was a smallish, spare man, fresh-complexioned; a gentleman by his speech. He wore a leather motoring-coat, but it was slightly open and I noticed his dark-grey tweed suit. He asked if I could sell him a spanner? I fetched a new one and asked if I could do anything to help. He said no, it was a mere nothing---something wanted tightening up; the spanner would do it. He paid for the spanner and went back, and within a few minutes they were off again. At the distance between them and me, I could not see the other man’s face, but he was a tallish, well-built man. The man in the leather coat who bought the spanner drove the car. I have seen a spanner shown to me by the police at Havering St. Michael and am confident that it is the one sold by me to the man I have just described.

“Um!” said Chaney when I had read this over to him. “Well, we always thought it would take two to carry Skate’s body into that old pew. That’s outside help. But what about inside help, Camberwell? Was there any? And don’t forget that Canon Effingham is pestering us for news of Miss Bolton.”

That was true. Canon Effingham was ringing us up two or three times a day with inquiries on that point. For Miss Bolton had never been heard of since she walked out of the Rectory.

TO say that this sudden and dramatic intervention raised a sensation in court would be to understate things. The court was closely packed, and from every corner rose excited murmurs; people elbowed and jostled each other in an effort to see the man who had come forward at this---as it were---eleventh hour. But of all the people present none could possibly be so much surprised as those of us were who had actually seen the man now lying dead in the neighbouring mortuary. For this man, standing before us alive, and quietly watching the Coroner, was so like him that out of Mr. Atherton’s lips issued the exclamation which I, too, had been out to make.

“Double---his double!”

The Coroner was calling for order; so were his officials and the police. A hush fell on the court; the Coroner spoke.

“You had better go into the witness-box and say what you have to say on oath,” he suggested. “You have no objection?”

“None whatever!” replied the stranger. “It is what I came for.”

We waited---some of us breathlessly---to hear what this new witness had to say; to know who he was; what he had to tell.

Francis William Sewell. Retired bank-manager. Residing at Harfordness, near Spalding, in Lincolnshire. A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries---member of some well-known archæological societies.

“Why are you here, Mr. Sewell?” inquired the Coroner.

“Because first thing this morning I read in my newspaper the account of the proceedings at the inquest held at Linwood yesterday, regarding the murder of the man Skate, and especially the evidence of the witness Mr. Stecke,” replied the new-comer. “And as I knew that I was the person who had spoken to Mr. Stecke in Linwood Church one afternoon last winter, and next morning to a young lady who, I knew at the time, had some connexion with Linwood Rectory and whom I now understand to have been Miss Bolton, Canon Effingham’s secretary, I ran straight off to the station and caught the next train for London, so that I could come here---I knew from the paper that this inquest was to be opened today.”

“We shall be much obliged to you for any information you can give us, Mr. Sewell,” said the Coroner. “You read Mr. Stecke’s evidence given at Linwood yesterday, you say?”

“All of it! And I have just heard him repeat that evidence---I was at the back of the court there, just now, while he gave it.”

“And you suggest that Mr. Stecke is mistaken? He has already positively identified one man---the man into whose death we are inquiring---as the man he saw and spoke to at Linwood. He is mistaken in that?”

“I don’t know---I can’t say, of course---if Mr. Stecke ever saw and spoke to the dead man at Linwood. But I do know that I am the man who approached him in the church one afternoon last winter and did his best to persuade him to show me the treasures which have lately been stolen from the safe in the vestry. I also know that I am the man who spoke to the young lady I have referred to---next morning, in the woods behind Linwood Rectory.”

“Perhaps you can give us particulars, details, Mr. Sewell?” suggested the Coroner. “How you came to be there, for instance?”

“Willingly! I am, as I said at first, retired from business, and I spend my leisure time in antiquarian and archæological pursuits. There are certain very interesting things in the immediate neighbourhood of Havering St. Michael, which is the market town of the Linwood district. As it was very fine weather for the time of year at the period I am speaking of, I went down to Havering St. Michael for a few days, to look round---I stayed at the Havering Arms Hotel there. I knew of the treasures of Linwood Church before going to Havering St. Michael; their existence is well known to antiquaries. Of course I went to see them. I found Mr. Stecke in the church. He told me that Canon Effingham never allowed anyone to see the treasures except in his presence and under his own personal supervision, and that, as Canon Effingham was ill in bed, my wish could not be gratified. I tried persuasion, but it was no good, so I had to return to my hotel disappointed. But I had seen that the country round about Linwood was well worth inspection, so next morning I went back there, to explore a little. I turned up the lane which runs between the church and the Rectory, and as I did so, I saw a young lady come out of the Rectory grounds and go up the lane in advance of me. Near a cottage on the right-hand side I caught up with her and, asking her if she was from the Rectory, said that I had been sorry to hear of Canon Effingham’s illness and hoped that it was not serious. She replied that Canon Effingham was only laid up for a few days and would soon be about again, and we parted. And---that is all.”

The Coroner turned to where Stecke was sitting. Since the appearance on the scene of Mr. Sewell, Stecke had sat motionless, watching him as if fascinated, and when the Coroner addressed him, he started as if frightened.

“Mr. Stecke,” said the Coroner, “you have heard what the witness says? Will you look closely at him? Is he the gentleman you saw in Linwood Church and afterwards speaking to the young lady, Miss Bolton?”

Stecke looked more fascinated, amazed, thunderstruck, than ever. There was something in his mind that was producing a mental cataclysm.

“I---I do not know what to say!” he faltered. “If---if this gentleman says---but then---is it possible for two men----”

He got no further than that. The Coroner turned to the witness-box.

“Mr. Sewell---you see what Mr. Stecke suggests? That the man---the dead man---he identified is so much like you that---you follow me? Now I want to ask you a very particular and perhaps a very delicate question. Have you seen the dead body of the man we are alluding to?”

“No---not yet.”

“This is the delicate question. Have you, from the fact of the likeness just referred to, any idea as to who this dead man really is?”

Mr. Sewell nodded, gravely.

“I have!” he replied.

“Will you go to the mortuary and look?” suggested the Coroner.

Mr. Sewell left the court, accompanied by the two police officials with whom he had previously entered. He was not long away; when he returned, he re-entered the witness-box with as much show of composure as when he had left it. And the Coroner simplified matters by immediately putting a direct question.

“Have you recognized this man, Mr. Sewell?”

Mr. Sewell inclined his head.

“Yes!” he replied.

“Who is he?”

“He is my twin brother, Henry Sewell!”

“You positively identify him?”

“Positively!”

“You could give proof of that?”

“I can give it now. He and I are, as I said, twin brothers. Each bears a certain birth-mark on the left arm---identical in both cases. I have satisfied these two police officers on that point.”

“Can you give us any information, Mr. Sewell?”

“The only information I can give is that until just now, when I saw him dead, I had not seen my brother for eleven years. During the whole of that time I have never heard one word of him. I have never known his whereabouts during that time. I have often wondered if he was dead. He completely passed out of my ken about eleven years ago. None of our family---there are another brother and two sisters---have ever heard of or from him since then.”

“You can give us his exact age, of course, Mr. Sewell?”

“We are fifty-six years of age.”

“Then eleven years ago he would be forty-five. What was his occupation at that time?”

“He was a private tutor.”

“Where?”

“That I can’t say. He came down to see the rest of us in Lincolnshire eleven years ago and told us he was engaged in that way---private teaching. We believed it to be in London. He had always been doing something of that sort---ever since he left Oxford.”

“He was an Oxford man, then? Clever?”

“He was a very clever man; he took a very brilliant degree at Oxford. Classics.”

The Coroner hesitated a little, fingering his papers.

“I don’t want to question you too closely, Mr. Sewell,” he said. “After all, we are here only to inquire into the cause of your brother’s death. But from the evidence we have had it looks as if he came by his death in flying from arrest. Do you wish to say anything more---in view of that? About his---character, for instance?”

“I see no object in concealing the truth,” replied Mr. Sewell. “I am afraid he was a man of no principles. Brilliantly clever, but---I don’t know that I need say any more.”

One of the police officials approached the Coroner and appeared to make a suggestion.

“One more question, Mr. Sewell,” said the Coroner. “Do you know if your brother ever fell into the hands of the police---the law?”

“Not to my knowledge. It must have been within the last eleven years if he did. We had a good deal of trouble with him previous to our last seeing anything of him, in the way of periodically paying off his debts, but I know of nothing worse than that. As to what he did, where he was, during the last eleven years, I repeat that I know nothing whatever.”

This episode then came to an end. So, a few minutes later, did the inquest. As the Coroner had remarked, all he and the jury were there for was to inquire into the cause of the man’s death. Presently, on the Coroner’s direction, the jury found a verdict of accidental death, and we all left---to discuss what had happened and to consider what to do next in the light of our newly-acquired knowledge.

Mr. Stecke stood outside the court, in conversation with Mr. Sewell. Since Mr. Sewell’s appearance in the witness-box, Stecke had shown all the signs of absolute mystification; he was staring at Mr. Sewell now as if he could scarcely believe that he saw him. And when Chaney and I and Jalvane---who had turned up just after the opening of the inquest and had listened with grim watchfulness to all that went on---joined them, he was questioning his companion as if to test his veracity. Mr. Sewell listened to him with an amused air. Suddenly he interrupted him.

“My dear sir!” he said. “Do you really doubt the evidence I have just given---on oath?”

“I---I certainly should not dream of doubting the word of any gentleman!” protested Stecke. “But really I---everything is so very extraordinary!”

“There is nothing so very extraordinary in the fact that twins---especially male twins---closely resemble each other,” said Mr. Sewell. “I have known some remarkable instances in my time. I know two twin brothers so much alike that when they were young men and became engaged, their sweethearts had---for a time, at any rate, until one distinguished himself from the other by growing a beard---the greatest difficulty in knowing which was which! This may seem a very exaggerated case, but I dare say others have occurred.”

“I have known of one such case, myself, sir,” remarked Jalvane. “We had two men in my division at one time, Irishmen, brothers, who were so exactly alike that until we got into the trick of it, we never knew which was Pat and which was Tim! But I will say this, sir---as such men approach middle age, a difference becomes noticeable---as a rule.”

Stecke stood listening and still staring at Mr. Sewell. His wondering gaze travelled from Mr. Sewell’s face to his clothes; he appeared to be making a close study of their cut and texture. Suddenly, with a shake of his head, and without a word, he turned and went off.

“Beats him, completely!” remarked Jalvane. “Well, I don’t wonder. But now I want a word with you, sir, if you please,” he continued, turning to Mr. Sewell. “This brother of yours----”

“Who is it that’s questioning me?” asked Mr. Sewell, with a good-humoured glance at Jalvane’s odd features. “Police?”

“Inspector Jalvane, Criminal Investigation Department, sir, watching this case. This brother of yours, now---you know literally nothing about his doings for some years?”

“Literally nothing, Inspector! Never seen him, heard from him, heard of him! None of us---I mean the family---have.”

“Do you think he’s been out of the country?”

“May have been. I have no idea.”

“Is he---was he, I mean---the sort of man who’d adopt aliases?”

“Well, you know he’d adopted one, anyway---Seward. He may have had several, for anything I know.”

“Adventurer?”

“I should scarcely call him that. It’s difficult to classify him. He was decidedly eccentric. And, I regret to say, he’d no principles. He never had---even as a boy. And he’d a love of sheer, unadulterated mischief.”

“Um!” Jalvane began to finger his queer jaw. “There’s another thing I want to know about,” he went on, presently. “Canon Effingham can perhaps inform me. Those church treasures, now? Were they well known, famous, and so on? I mean, had they been written about, talked about?”

“Both!” said Canon Effingham, with emphasis. “They have frequently been written about; I have written two or three special articles about them myself. Also they have been exhibited in public---twice at the Church Congress; once at South Kensington. They are---you may say famous.”

“Then there’s nothing remarkable in the fact that an educated man like this gentleman’s brother should know of their existence and value?” said Jalvane.

“Nothing!” agreed Canon Effingham.

Jalvane nodded. Then his snuff-box came out and occupied his attention for a minute or two. Refreshed, he suddenly snapped out a brief sentence with all the force of an ex cathedra pronouncement.

“Seward had an accomplice!”

No one said anything. Jalvane took another pinch of snuff and spoke again.

“He---or she!---has got to be found!”

Mr. Atherton found his tongue at that point.

“That is what I hoped you were coming to,” he remarked. “Now I wish to come in there! Put it down, if you like, as a little fancy, a little whim on my part. But I am so deeply interested in the solving of this mystery that I intend to see it through. Now, Canon Effingham has already offered a thousand pounds’ reward in this affair, and I have offered the same amount. I have just now persuaded Canon Effingham to withdraw his offer and to allow me to take the whole thing on my shoulders. I want to know how Seward effected that robbery, and how Skate was killed, and who was Seward’s accomplice, male or female, for I, like Inspector Jalvane, am sure he had one, and a very clever one; I also want to know where the missing chalice is. And to that end I will give five thousand pounds cash down to whosoever---but you can fill in the phraseology. Mr. Chaney, I put this in the able hands of yourself and partner, Mr. Camberwell. Get busy on it during what remains of this very day!”

NO one spoke until Jalvane had taken his pinch of snuff. And it was Jalvane who spoke when that had been satisfactorily accomplished.

“Humph!” he muttered. “Now I wonder if she recognized me? I haven’t changed much in the last five years---if any.”

Bleacher was still standing in the doorway, watching her master. Canon Effingham suddenly waved her away.

“Dear, dear, dear!” he said, when she had closed the door. “This is most distressing! Do---do you think this---this annoying episode---has sent her away?”

“That,” replied Jalvane, “is precisely what I do think, sir! Pre-cise-ly!”

“But,” began the Canon. “But really----”

Chaney interrupted him by springing to his feet and pointing to the telephone.

“What’s the number of your local railway station, sir,” he demanded. “Linwood 231? A moment, then.”

He picked up the receiver; within a minute or two he was talking.

“Linwood station? Yes---speaking here on behalf of Canon Effingham. Do you know Miss Bolton, Canon Effingham’s secretary? Yes---have you seen her at the station this afternoon? Yes---what train? Thank you.”

He replaced the receiver and turned to the rest of us.

“Miss Bolton left by the 5.19,” he said. “That’s a Waterloo train. She’ll be there by now. In London---amongst seven million other people. Got any address of hers in London, sir?”

“I---I think I have an address, somewhere,” replied Canon Effingham, who was obviously becoming more and more upset. “Really, this is becoming a very serious matter---very serious indeed!”

“It’s all that, sir,” assented Jalvane. “Serious is the word!”

“I referred to the fact that my secretary and I are in the middle of a most important chapter in my book,” said Canon Effingham. He rose, went to his desk, and, opening a drawer, shuffled about amongst its contents. “I wish,” he continued pettishly, “I wish you had warned Stecke not to mention Miss Bolton’s name! She is a high-spirited young lady, and---dear me, now where did I put that particular letter? Ah, here it is! That is the only address---private address---of hers which I know. You had better take it with the references---and please do your best to find Miss Bolton at once and get her to return to her work.”

He handed a letter to me, and after glancing at the address---a street in Bayswater---I put it away with the other papers. We all rose; there was nothing more to be done. Chaney offered Jalvane a lift back to town in our car, and we went out to the lane by the churchyard, where we had left it. Mrs. Effingham and Mr. Stecke were still walking about there, talking; they were there when we drove off.

Late that evening I went down to Bayswater and to the address from which Miss Bolton had written when, some months previously, she had been in correspondence with Canon Effingham about the secretaryship. It turned out to be a typical Bayswater private hotel; Miss Bolton, said its manageress, had certainly lived there for a few weeks the previous autumn. But she had never been there since, and the manageress knew nothing more about her. Had I carried out Canon Effingham’s last expressed desires, I should have resumed my task of searching for Miss Bolton early next morning, but, in my opinion, Chaney and I had something more important than that in view. The inquest on the dead body of the man who had called himself Dean of Norchester was to be opened that day, and we felt it necessary to be present; indeed, it was possible that our evidence might be called for. So at eleven o’clock we went along, and at the Coroner’s court found Canon Effingham, Mr. Atherton, and Mr. Stecke, together with certain bank officials and the Inspector with whom we had already had some dealings. The Inspector drew us aside.

“I’ve got a witness that knows this dead man,” he said. “Knows, at any rate, what he called himself to her. Woman who lets lodgings---he lodged with her for a while. Came forward through reading the paper accounts. I’ll get her called as soon as the American gentleman and the parsons have done their bits.”

This idea, however, apparently did not suit the Coroner and his immediate officials; the woman of whom the Inspector had spoken to us was called as soon as an eyewitness account (furnished by a City policeman) of the accident which resulted in the man’s death had been given. She was a middle-aged, washed-out bit of a thing, timid, pathetic in the attempt to present a decent appearance in this public ordeal. Mrs. Pentridge---Eliza Pentridge---Number 257, Star Street, Paddington. Widow. Yes, had been shown the body of the dead man now lying in the mortuary.

“Do you recognize it as that of someone you knew, Mrs. Pentridge?” asked the Coroner.

“Yes, sir. A gentleman as has lodged with me, recent.”

“What was his name, Mrs. Pentridge?”

“He give me his name as Seward, sir---Mr. Seward.”

“How long has he lodged with you?”

“It’ll be all about six months, sir.”

“How did he come to lodge at your house? Did you know him at all before he came there?”

“No, sir. He came through the card in the window, which, since my husband was took, I’ve always had a lodger, having one good room to spare.”

“I see---so you put a card in your window?”

“Yes, sir. Lodgings for a respectable gentleman.”

“And this man, Mr. Seward, applied to you?”

“Yes, sir---which he knocked at the door one morning and asked to see the accommodation. And then wanted to know what my charges was. Which I told him ten shilling a week, just for the room.”

“And he took it, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir, and paid the first week then and there. Which he always paid, regular, to the minute, every Saturday morning, it being a Saturday when he come in.”

“What did he do about his meals, Mrs. Pentridge? Did you cook for him?”

“No, sir, I never did nothing for him, that way. He had a spirit stove, sir, and he made himself a cup of tea when he happened to want it, mornings and afternoons. He took his dinner at a place close by, sir---a resty-rong.”

“Didn’t give you much trouble, then?”

“None at all, sir. A very quiet, peaceable gentleman. Never had no trouble with him at all, sir.”

“What did he do, Mrs. Pentridge? Any work?”

“Not that I know of, sir. He never mentioned no work to me. He went out every day, but it seems as if it was for no more than a look round. He was a great hand at reading, sir. The boy from the news-agent’s shop left him the Times every morning. And he had a shelf of books, sir, and read in them a great deal. I brought two of them along, sir, as they have names wrote in them, and I thought the police gentlemen might----”

“Very proper, Mrs. Pentridge. Have you got the books there?”

Mrs. Pentridge produced two small, fat volumes, bound in vellum, much stained by use, and handed them over. The Coroner fixed his spectacles and inspected these exhibits with interest.

“Um!” he remarked. “He was evidently a classical scholar. This, gentlemen, is a copy of Horace, in, I should say, a somewhat rare edition; the other is a volume of Plato. Both are in the originals. It is evident that this man, whoever he really was, was familiar with Greek and Latin. As the witness says, there are names on the fly-leaves of both books. They are different, and neither of them is Seward. We will go into that later.” He turned to the witness-box again. “You say he had more of these books, Mrs. Pentridge?”

“A small shelf full, sir---all like them. In foreigneering languages, sir.”

“What other property had he in the room you let him?”

“Nothing very much. I made bold to go through what he had after reading in the papers about his misfortune, sir. He’d a portmanteau---it’s not locked, sir---and a few things in it---what you might call a change of linen, sir. There’s another suit of clothes there, too, and an extra pair of boots, and his toilet things, sir, and that’s about all he had.”

“He hadn’t any clothes such as clergymen wear?”

“No, sir, never while he was with me.”

“You never saw him in such clothes?”

“Never, sir. Never see him in anything but the suit what they showed me in the police station and the one that’s in his room now.”

“Well, now, about his habits again, Mrs. Pentridge. You say he lived a very quiet life. Did he ever have any visitors?”

“Never one, sir, from first to last!”

“Nobody ever dropped in on him?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor inquired for him?”

“No, sir.”

“Did he ever have any letters?”

“Not oft, sir. Now and then.”

“Can you remember how they were addressed?”

“Mr. Seward, sir, or Mr. Henry Seward.”

“Well, now, Mrs. Pentridge, a very important question. You say he lodged at your house some six months. Was he ever away from his room during that time?”

“Never until a few days ago, sir. Then he went away one afternoon, telling me he should be away that night and next day and possibly the second night. I never see him again after that, sir,” added Mrs. Pentridge, “until I see him just now---where he is, sir.”

“He never returned?”

“No, sir.”

“How was he dressed when he went away?”

“In that suit what the police has shown me, sir.”

“Did he take any luggage away with him?”

“Oh, no, sir---nothing.”

“Went out just as he was?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I think that’s all, Mrs. Pentridge. One more question, perhaps. Did he ever tell you anything about himself---what he’d been, before he came to lodge at your house, and so on. Anything of that sort?”

“No, sir, never! He never tell me nothing. Which, beyond passing the time of day, and remarking on the weather, he never exchanged no conversation. He was a very quiet gentleman, sir, and always the gentleman. A decayed gentleman, sir---that’s what I considered him,” continued Mrs. Pentridge, who, the longer she occupied the witness-box, became more inclined to talk. “But his money being always there to the minute, and him giving not the least of trouble----”

“You regarded him as a model lodger,” said the Coroner. “Very well, Mrs. Pentridge.”

Mrs. Pentridge retired, conscious that she had done her duty. Mr. Atherton succeeded her in the witness-box. His evidence was a repetition of that he had given the day before at the inquest on Skate at Linwood; it was brought forward here to form a connecting link between the crimes at Linwood and the man into the cause of whose death the Coroner was inquiring. To us, of course, there was nothing new in it, or in that of Canon Effingham, who followed Mr. Atherton and proved that the solid gold paten, found in the dead man’s possession, was the paten stolen from the church safe. Then came an official from Mr. Atherton’s bank, and afterwards another from the Bank of England. Then, just as we were expecting to hear Mr. Stecke’s evidence again, came an interruption. The Inspector with whom we had had our dealings so far was fetched out of court; presently he returned and fetched out another---and higher---police official. This man, coming back a few minutes later, approached the Coroner and made a whispered communication to him. He appeared to be suggesting something, and, the Coroner evidently assenting, he went away again---just as Mr. Stecke was called into the witness-box.

Stecke’s story, of course, was precisely that which Chaney and I had heard at least twice. He said just what he had said at the inquest on Skate; he described his interview with the strange man in Linwood Church and his accidentally seeing that man and Miss Bolton walking and talking together in the wood next morning. His manner, it seemed to me, was more confident than ever; he had evidently recovered from Miss Bolton’s attack on him of the previous afternoon. Confident as he appeared, however, Stecke found the Coroner rather more inquisitive than the Linwood Coroner had been.

“I want to ask you two or three questions, Mr. Stecke,” said he. “Did you tell Canon Effingham of your meeting with this stranger in the church?”

“No---I did not,” replied Stecke.

“Why?”

“Canon Effingham was ill at the time. I did not wish to upset him.”

“Why should that have upset him?”

“I considered---knowing that he was ill---that it would. I exercised my own judgment in the matter.”

“Why didn’t you tell Mrs. Effingham?”

“Mrs. Effingham would probably have told her husband.”

“Well, you have told us that you saw this man in conversation with Canon Effingham’s secretary, Miss Bolton, next morning. I want to ask you a particular question about that. Did you think the fact suspicious?”

“Not then!”

“If you had, I suppose you’d have mentioned it?”

“Probably.”

“When did you think it suspicious?”

“I won’t say that I think it suspicious. After learning what I have learnt during the last few days, I considered it my duty to tell all I know.”

“What have you learnt---in particular---during the last few days?”

“That the man who stole the plate and books is the man who spoke to me in the church and whom I saw next day speaking to Miss Bolton!”

“You mean the man whom we now know as Seward?”

“Yes!”

“You have seen Seward’s dead body. Is Seward the man you are referring to?”

“Unquestionably! There is not the slightest doubt of it.”

The Coroner paused and glanced across the court. The police official who had recently spoken to him came forward, leading an elderly, quietly but, very well-dressed man who, confronting the Coroner, paused and made a polite bow.

“I understand,” said the Coroner, “that you wish to give some evidence? Why?”

The new-comer smiled gravely.

“Because,” he answered, “I am the man who spoke to Mr. Stecke in Linwood Church one afternoon, and to Miss Bolton in the woods next morning!”

INSPECTOR Jalvane---whose name was known to me as that of a prominent detective who had recently distinguished himself in the pursuit and capture of a notorious criminal---acknowledged our salutations with no more than a quiet nod; he might wish to speak to us, to all of us, as Canon Effingham had said, but he showed no particular interest in the Superintendent, or in Chaney, or in me---it was to the Canon that he addressed himself. And he began to do that as soon as the four of us had seated ourselves round him.

“Now, Canon Effingham,” he said in tones remarkable for their curious combination of gentleness and firmness, “I shall be much obliged if you will answer a few questions which I want to put to you. I want to know more about your two sets of keys---the bunch which---so I gathered from your evidence just now---you carry in your pocket, and the bunch which is comprised of the church key, vestry key, and safe key. I want to be clear about these keys.”

“I don’t know that I can tell more than I have told,” said Canon Effingham. “And I have told it so many times----”

“Never mind, sir---just tell it again---tell me,” replied Jalvane. “Or, rather, answer my questions. Now, to begin with----”

He went on to put a lot of searching questions to the Canon, one or two of which it had not occurred to us to put. But when he had finished his examination, the position, so it seemed to me, was just the same. It could be summarized like this:

1. On the night of the theft the church keys, when Canon Effingham went to bed, were safely locked up in the left-hand top drawer of the big desk-table in his study, their usual place.

2. The key which opened that drawer was on Canon Effingham’s private bunch of keys, which he deposited in its usual place on the table in his dressing-room.

3. The private bunch of keys lay next morning exactly where he had placed it the night before.

4. But the church keys were gone from the drawer in the study and were found hanging from the outside of the chancel door.

It was thus that Jalvane did summarize the matter when he had finished questioning the unfortunate Canon. And suddenly there came out of his rat-trap of a mouth a few words which made Canon Effingham gasp.

“Now, sir---what does all this amount to? This!---that the thief, or thieves, had an accomplice in this house! Sir, who is it?”

Canon Effingham threw up his hands and groaned. When he had groaned two or three times, he looked at Chaney and me imploringly. I fear we---or our faces---gave him little comfort; he groaned again, more deeply than before.

“There is no one, no one!” he protested. “We have gone into all that---I and these gentlemen---previously. There is no one that could be suspected---possibly.”

“Anyone can be suspected,” said Jalvane imperturbably. “No one is safe from suspicion. Your servants, sir?”

“I would stake my own honour on their probity!” declared Canon Effingham. “I have already explained to these gentlemen----”

“I don’t think any of the servants could be suspected,” remarked Chaney.

“No!---no more do I,” added the Superintendent. “And I know them all---well!”

“Then---the young lady, your secretary?” demanded Jalvane. “Remember, sir, what we heard this afternoon! True, she endeavoured to put a different complexion on it, but the fact remains that Mr. Stecke’s evidence was unshaken----”

“I am as convinced of Miss Bolton’s honesty, truthfulness, probity, as I am of---well, as I possibly can be!” asserted Canon Effingham. “I had the most excellent testimonials----”

“Testimonials, sir, are things that I give no heed to,” interrupted Jalvane. “They were, no doubt, testimonials to Miss Bolton’s powers as a private secretary. But---what do you know of Miss Bolton’s private life? Her father? Her connexions? Her past? Do you know anything, sir---anything?”

“I---I’m afraid I do not,” admitted Canon Effingham sorrowfully. “It never occurred to me---such a very well-bred, estimable----”

“Ah!” said Jalvane, allowing himself what I may describe as the fractional part of a thin smile. “I have known estimable and well-bred young ladies who---but we won’t waste time on that! The fact is, sir, beyond her capabilities as a typist and secretary, you know nothing whatever about Miss Bolton?”

“I---I do not know anything about Miss Bolton’s private affairs,” replied Canon Effingham. “No!”

Jalvane drew himself still more erect in the straight-backed chair on which his tall figure was perched. He looked round our circle of faces as if to command our attention.

“Just so!” he said. “Well---I do!”

I heard Chaney draw in his breath as if he was going to whistle. He didn’t---he remained silent. But the Superintendent started---apprehensively.

“I do!” repeated Jalvane. “Something!”

Once again he drew himself up, looking from one to the other. It was not a look of vanity or complacence or smug satisfaction, but, rather, the sort of look which you see on the face of a man who is sure of his facts. None of us made any remark, and presently Jalvane spoke again.

“The truth is,” he said, “I have seen this young lady before; I recognized her as soon as she came into the schoolroom with you and your wife this afternoon, sir. I have a remarkable gift of memory for faces---and up to now I never remember being mistaken. I repeat, I knew this young lady secretary of yours at once.”

“Yes?” said Canon Effingham, feebly. “You had seen her before?”

“Yes,” replied Jalvane, “five years ago. At the Central Criminal Court!”

This announcement affected Jalvane’s four hearers in different ways. As for me, I jumped, involuntarily. The Superintendent of Police said: “Dear, dear, dear---oh, dear!” in a whisper. Canon Effingham said nothing, but I saw his hands shake as he spread them out as if to ward off a blow. And this time Chaney did whistle---and then snapped out one word.

“Dock?”

“No!” replied Jalvane. “Neither dock nor witness-box. But---there!”

“What as?” asked Chaney.

“I’m going to tell you,” answered Jalvane. “Nothing unusual about it. It was not a case of mine, I wasn’t concerned in it at all. But I happened to be down there---at the Central Criminal Court---one morning when a case was put forward which rather interested me, and I sat down to hear it through. Very ordinary case. A solicitor---City solicitor, in, I should say, a rather small way of practice---was charged with fraud. He was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. So he will now have been out for a few months. His name was Bascombe---I remember it very well. And the young lady you know as Miss Bolton, and whom I saw in court at his trial, is his daughter.”

“You may be mistaken,” said Canon Effingham.

Jalvane smiled---pityingly.

“Ask her, sir!” he retorted.

Chaney became business-like and practical.

“Remember the personal appearance of this Bascombe?” he asked.

“Quite well,” replied Jalvane. “Tallish, good-looking man, about forty-five; brown hair and eyes; well made; well set up.”

“Then you aren’t suggesting that this man we’ve heard about as being seen with Miss Bolton was her father?”

“Not at all---nor that---which, of course, I couldn’t suggest!---that the man who called himself Dean of Norchester was Bascombe, either.”

“What are you suggesting, then?” asked Chaney.

“Perhaps something like this. The story of the church treasures here may have been told to Bascombe by his daughter. Bascombe may have entered into a scheme to get them with an ex-convict like himself---the man who called himself Dean of Norchester. And---to put things in a nutshell, the girl may have handed out Canon Effingham’s keys from her window, having previously taken care to see that the side-door of which we have heard was left open.”

“That would make her an accomplice!” said Chaney.

“Well?” remarked Jalvane. “Why not? Anything remarkable in that?”

Canon Effingham moaned---once, twice. He lifted his hands again.

“I cannot believe it!” he said. “I cannot---cannot believe such a thing possible!”

Jalvane put his fingers in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out an old-fashioned snuff-box. Having tapped the lid once or twice, he opened the box and helped himself to a generous pinch of its contents.

“Humph!” he said. “I can believe anything---that’s likely!”

The Superintendent of Police suddenly got out of his chair. For the last five minutes he had been manifesting unmistakable signs of unrest; now he began to walk about the room. He looked as if he wanted to speak---and didn’t know whether he ought to speak.

“Something wrong?” asked Jalvane, laconically.

The Superintendent came back to his chair, threw himself into it, thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers, looked down at his toes, and showed still more signs of unrest and uncertainty.

“Better out with it!” said Jalvane.

The Superintendent looked up.

“I’ve never liked saying anything against anybody,” he blurted out, desperately. “And especially if it’s a woman! But---circumstances being what they are----”

“And circumstances always altering cases!” murmured Jalvane quietly.

“---it’ll perhaps be better,” continued the Superintendent, “if I admit that I happen---just happen, you understand---to know something!”

“About the lady in question?” asked Chaney.

“Exactly! Information acquired, you know, accidentally,” replied the Superintendent. “Quite accidentally! Something---well, something I saw, with my own eyes. And should never have mentioned to a soul---and never have mentioned till now---if the Inspector here hadn’t said what he has said. And, of course, there may be, and probably is, nothing whatever in it, nothing at all. Still----”

“Still, you’d better tell us what it is,” suggested Jalvane.

“This, then! Some few weeks since, I was having two or three days’ holiday, in London,” continued the Superintendent. “And a friend of mine asked me one evening if I’d care to go to a night-club, just to see what it was like, you know; I’d never even seen the outside of one. So I said I would, leaving it to him where we went. He took me to the Glass Slipper.”

“Ah!” murmured Jalvane. “A good choice!”

“So he said,” assented the Superintendent, who appeared to be possessed of a refreshing innocence in these matters. “Typical!---that was the word he used. Didn’t think much of it myself, once we’d got inside---seemed to me to be a bit dull, though to be sure there was music and dancing----”

“And drinks at an exorbitant price!” interrupted Jalvane.

“We only had one, and my friend paid, and I don’t know what he paid---we weren’t there long,” continued the Superintendent. “The fact was that I saw somebody there that I didn’t want to see me, and we cleared out.”

“Who was the somebody?” demanded Chaney. “You don’t mean----”

“Miss B.,” said the Superintendent, dropping his voice to a whisper. “Miss B.!---she came in soon after we’d got there. But she never saw me---I didn’t want her to see me! You see, everybody about here knows me, and though I was in mufti, of course, I was afraid she’d recognize me. And I didn’t want it to be known that the Superintendent of Police at Havering St. Michael had been seen in plain clothes in a night-club in London!”

“You wouldn’t---in a private capacity,” agreed Jalvane. “Well, this young woman? Was she alone?”

“She was not. She’d a young fellow with her who was in evening dress---just as she was. They were both in very fine feathers. And I knew him---by sight, anyway. I recognized him as a young gentleman who’s occasionally stopped at the Squire’s here---Sir Bartle Shardale’s.”

Canon Effingham, who had been listening to this with strained attention, punctuating the Superintendent’s statement with occasional groans, leaned forward.

“His name---you know his name?”

“No, sir, I did not!” replied the Superintendent. “Only knew him by sight as one of Sir Bartle’s occasional guests---I’ve seen him hereabouts several times.”

“The name can easily be ascertained,” observed Chaney. “Well, what about these two, Superintendent. She didn’t see you?”

“Neither of them saw me---my friend and I, we were in an alcove. They passed on to where dancing was going on. I saw ’em dancing,” continued the Superintendent. “Then I cleared out. I did not want her---or him---to see me at the Glass Slipper.”

Jalvane rubbed his chin.

“The Glass Slipper,” he remarked, “is not exactly the sort of place where they hold Dorcas Societies or mothers’ meetings. Still, we can’t say, because a young lady goes there to hop a bit, that----” He broke off his reflections and turned to Canon Effingham. “I think, sir,” he went on, “that you must see that in view of all we know, Miss Bolton’s antecedents should be inquired into, and the references she gave you examined, and----”

Canon Effingham lifted his hands in protest.

“This is most distressing!” he exclaimed. “I am more pained than I can express. I cannot believe----”

“Let me put this to you, sir,” said Jalvane. “It is in Miss Bolton’s own interest that this should be cleared up. It would be unfair to her not to clear it up. I suggest that as you are employing these two gentlemen, Mr. Chaney and Mr. Camberwell, you hand over to them the references you received and let them use their discretion about them. That, at any rate, can do no harm.”

Canon Effingham reflected a minute or two; then he rose, went to his desk, opened a drawer, and, taking from it some papers, placed them in Chaney’s hands.

“You will find them exceptional testimonials,” he said. “I hand them to you in confidence.”

“That’s good, sir,” said Jalvane. “And now---just let us see Miss Bolton herself for two minutes. I won’t frighten her---all I want is to ask her a question about what she said about the Reverend Mr. Stecke.”

Canon Effingham hesitated, but he rang the bell. The parlour-maid, Bleacher, appearing in answer, he sent her for Miss Bolton. Some minutes passed by; Miss Bolton did not come. Then---more minutes having elapsed---Bleacher reappeared.

“I don’t know where Miss Bolton’s got to, sir,” she reported. “She isn’t in her room; she isn’t anywhere in the house; she’s not in the garden. Cook says she saw her come in from the inquest and go out again, almost immediate!”

Jalvane took out his snuff-box and quietly opened its lid.

CHANEY and I went down to Linwood next day in good time for the inquest on Skate; we wanted to talk matters over with the local police in view of all that had happened since the theft of the church treasures and Skate’s murder. We were hoping, too, that the local police would by that time have secured some further information. But the local police so far had found out next to nothing. There was nothing surprising in the fact that they had acquired no knowledge of Skate’s movements on the night of his death; Skate in his lifetime had been essentially a night-bird, a sort of hermit, living in what was little better than a hovel on the outskirts of the village, and no one knew anything of his comings and goings. In his case the first presumption was doubtless correct---he had gone out that night on one of his poaching expeditions, seen a light in the church or seen somebody coming away from it, hailed or laid hands on the person seen, and reaped the reward of his temerity by getting a crack on the head which had proved fatal.

But as to the identity of the man who dealt that blow, the local police knew nothing, had found out nothing. According to the Superintendent at Havering St. Michael, they had made the most searching and exhaustive inquiries and had failed to hear even a whisper of news about the presence of any stranger, suspicious or otherwise, in the village or district. The Superintendent felt sure that the miscreant, or miscreants, had come to Linwood by car, but he had not been able to ascertain that any strange car had been seen waiting about or left in any lonely place or quiet by-lane. In short, he was as wise as ever---which means that he was no nearer a solution of the mystery than when we had last seen him. But he knew what had happened in London, and he and ourselves mapped out to the Coroner, before the evidence was taken at the inquest, the line on which it should run. Matters shaped themselves thus:

1. There was no doubt that on the night into the events of which the Coroner was inquiring, the famous treasures of Linwood Church were stolen from the safe in the vestry.

2. There was no doubt, either, that on that night Skate was killed in Linwood churchyard.

3. Nor was there any doubt that next morning a man calling himself the Dean of Norchester offered and sold to Mr. Atherton at the Savoy Hotel the two old books stolen from Linwood.

4. It was certain, too, from the mere fact that the man killed in the City on the following day had the missing paten in his possession, and from the further fact that Mr. Atherton positively identified him as the supposed Dean of Norchester, that he was concerned in the theft and was in all probability Skate’s murderer.

5. All evidence concerning this man was, accordingly, permissible at the inquest as an aid to the coroner and his jury in their effort to determine the question: how did Richard Skate come by his death?

The village schoolroom was packed to its doors when the Coroner opened the proceedings; it seemed as if everybody in the neighborhood had flocked, open-mouthed, to Linwood. I was only interested in making sure that our witnesses Atherton and Stecke were both there and in making sure that Miss Bolton had come with Canon and Mrs. Effingham. Glancing round, however, just before the proceedings began, I became interested in a man who, I felt sure, was a stranger. He was a tall, spare, ramrod of a man, gaunt, stern of face, who sat in an excellent position for seeing the various witnesses, and once one of them was in the box, never took his eyes off him or her as long as he or she remained there.

The story of the double crime unrolled itself beautifully, in clear sequence---the Coroner, a local solicitor, had arranged it in proper order after his talk with us and the Superintendent of Police. Some villagers who knew him well identified Skate’s dead body. I told how I discovered it. A medical man testified as to the cause of death. Then came Canon Effingham to tell of the theft from the safe in the vestry. That evidence took some little time to give; the Coroner and one or two of the jurymen had several questions to ask, especially about the all-important matter of the keys. And when Canon Effingham had been got rid of, Mr. Atherton filled the picture with his dramatic and sensational story of how a man calling himself the Dean of Norchester had come to him the morning after the theft and by means of a plausible story had sold him the two missing volumes for five thousand pounds. He told also how, being with Chaney, Canon Effingham and me in the City next day, he had suddenly recognized his man in a passer-by, had chased him, and had seen him knocked down and killed on the spot by a heavy motor-drawn vehicle. And---amidst a silence which was almost awe-stricken---he further told how he saw the City police, examining the dead man’s dispatch case, take from it, wrapped in pages of the Linwood Parish Magazine, the stolen paten.

It was easy, at that stage of the proceedings, to sense the general feeling of the excited spectators. Every man and woman there was silently asking a question: Who was this man?

This made an excellent background for the appearance of the Reverend Herbert Stecke. When he modestly advanced into the witness-box, I glanced at Miss Bolton. I saw her flush a little; I noticed a slight puckering of her forehead, as if she were wondering what Mr. Stecke was doing there. She made some remark to Mrs. Effingham; Mrs. Effingham behaved as if she had not heard it.

Mr. Stecke, quietly, lucidly, told the story he had told us. He was precise, methodical, sparing of words. And he concluded his story---as regards the first part of it---at exactly the right place, his leaving the mysterious man in the church.

For leaving it there brought the obvious question from the Coroner, the question which could not have been more aptly put if we had deliberately planned the putting of it:

“And I suppose you saw no more of him---never saw him again?” asked the Coroner.

Mr. Stecke hesitated. He hesitated so long that the Coroner stirred him up.

“Did you?” he said.

“Well---I did,” replied Mr. Stecke, reluctantly. “Yes---once!”

“When---where?”

“Next morning. I saw him from the window of a cottage in the wood---Watson, the gamekeeper’s cottage---where I was paying a sick-call.”

“What was he doing?”

“Walking along the lane,” replied Mr. Stecke. “Towards the woods.”

“Alone?”

Mr. Stecke hesitated again.

“N---o,” he said at last. “No, he was not alone.”

“Who was with him? Anyone you knew?”

Mr. Stecke tapped the ledge of the witness-box, as if perturbed and nervous.

“I---I do not like to mention names,” he said. “I----”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to,” said the Coroner. “Who was it?”

“Well,” replied Mr. Stecke, more nervously than ever, “Canon Effingham’s secretary, Miss Bolton. I regret that----”

He got no further than that. An excited murmur broke out all round him and rose to unchecked exclamations. I heard some of these and knew from what I heard that Miss Bolton had been suspected in the village. But my attention was fixed on her. When Mr. Stecke pronounced her name, she sat up in her place with a sudden incredulous stare at him and flushed crimson. The next instant she turned first to Mrs. Effingham and then to Canon Effingham, as if to ask them what on earth all this meant. But Mrs. Effingham kept a fixed and stony gaze elsewhere, and Canon Effingham had his hand shading a bent head---Miss Bolton comprehended and suddenly leapt to her feet, fronting the Coroner.

“May I speak?” she demanded eagerly. “I can’t----”

“A moment, if you please,” interrupted the Coroner. “I have not finished with the present witness.” He motioned to Mr. Stecke. “Tell what you saw,” he said.

Mr. Stecke told---what he had told us. When he had finished, the Coroner waved him away. But before he could move, Miss Bolton was on her feet again.

“My name has been mentioned!” she exclaimed. “May I ask this man---this witness---two or three questions?”

The Coroner looked at Miss Bolton. Then he looked at Mr. Stecke---and from Mr. Stecke to Miss Bolton again.

“Yes!” he replied.

Miss Bolton turned a look on Mr. Stecke which I felt thankful was not directed on me.

“Why are you---a clergyman!---endeavouring to put me in a false position?” she demanded. “Why are you---for that’s what it is!---lying about me?”

“Oh, no, oh, no!” protested Mr. Stecke. “I----”

“It is a lie!” broke in Miss Bolton. “You are leading the court to believe that I was walking and talking with the man you have described. That is a downright lie! Mr. Coroner!” she continued, turning away from the witness-box, “I will tell you the real truth! One morning during Canon Effingham’s illness I was walking in the lane near Watson’s cottage when a gentleman---a stranger---overtaking me asked if I was not the Canon’s secretary? On my replying that I was, he said that he was very sorry to hear of his illness and hoped it was not serious and that he would soon recover. He passed me and went on, and that was all that happened. I was neither walking nor talking with the man, as the witness implies----”

“I merely said that I saw you from the cottage window,” protested Mr. Stecke. “I did not say how long the conversation lasted----”

“You implied that I was in company with the man, and you are a liar!” interrupted Miss Bolton. “And you did it for a purpose---out of sheer desire to revenge yourself because I resented and refused the unwelcome attentions you tried to force on me while you were at Linwood Rectory----”

The hubbub in court broke out in worse fashion than ever at that. In the midst of it and the demands for silence and order from the officials, Miss Bolton left her place between Canon Effingham and his wife and made her way to the door. As for Mr. Stecke, he stood in the witness-box, angry, white, protesting. Mr. Atherton, sitting next to me, whispered:

“Say! I don’t like the looks of that fellow! Guess the little lady hit him good and straight. What’s going to happen now?”

What happened, there and then, was an exhibition of good common sense on the part of the Coroner, who, without reference to what had just taken place, and with a few quiet words of advice to the jury, adjourned the proceedings for a fortnight. We all trooped out into the open. Mr. Stecke came up to Canon Effingham, who was talking to me.

“I trust, sir----” he began, “I sincerely trust----”

Canon Effingham gave his former assistant a look.

“I prefer Miss Bolton’s word to yours, Stecke,” he said quietly. “I think you had better go away.”

Mr. Stecke went. But Mrs. Effingham came across his path, and he spoke to her. And I saw that Mrs. Effingham’s reception of him was very different---they moved off together, talking earnestly. When I turned again from watching them, Canon Effingham was speaking to Chaney and the Superintendent, while Mr. Atherton stood by, listening intently.

“I do not attach the slightest importance to Stecke’s evidence,” the Canon was saying. “I have no doubt whatever that some man did speak to him about the church treasures when I was ill---probably someone interested in such things, who had, as he said, come a long way to see them. But I do not believe he was the man who stole them and who afterwards posed as Dean of Norchester.”

“But, my dear sir, Mr. Stecke identified the dead man, the man who said he was the Dean, as the man he saw in your church!” said Chaney. “His identification was positive!”

Canon Effingham shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t believe Mr. Stecke’s identification is to be trusted!” he said, dryly. “If it is no more trustworthy than what he said about my secretary---whose every word I trust implicitly---it is not to be depended upon for an instant.”

Therewith he turned and went off, alone, towards the Rectory. And, happening to glance after him, I saw the tall, spare man whose presence had attracted me before the inquest opened, following in his footsteps. He walked swiftly and caught up with the Canon; he addressed him; the Canon turned, paused, replied; they exchanged a few words. Then Canon Effingham raised his old-fashioned umbrella and signalled to me. I went along, wondering.

“Mr. Camberwell,” said the Canon, “I want you and Mr. Chaney and the Superintendent to join me and this gentleman in the Rectory. Will you come over at once?”

He turned away, the tall man accompanying him. I went back to where Chaney, the Superintendent, and Mr. Atherton stood in a group; Mr. Atherton was talking. And he was accompanying his talk with a glance of extreme disfavour in the direction of Mr. Stecke and Mrs. Effingham, who were still in close conference some little way off.

“I don’t like that fellow!” Mr. Atherton was saying. “I don’t like his looks; I didn’t like his evidence; I did not like the way in which he brought in that girl’s name! And I incline to the opinion expressed by Reverend Mr. Effingham that the young lady’s word is more to be relied on than this parson fellow’s.”

“He said no more than that he’d seen her talking to the man whom he’d seen and talked to in the church the previous afternoon, sir,” remarked Chaney.

“He said a great deal more, begging your pardon!” retorted Mr. Atherton. “There are more ways than one of saying a thing! His tone and manner suggested a great deal more than the mere words. That girl was honestly indignant---and where you get honest indignation, you get truth. I am not so sure about this Stecke person’s truthfulness---after that.”

“He couldn’t invent all this about the dead man,” said Chaney.

“Why couldn’t he?” asked Mr. Atherton. “You’ve only his word that the man we saw killed and whom he viewed is the man he met in that old church! He may have met somebody there---but you don’t know that that somebody really was the fellow who called himself Dean of Norchester. If I were you, I should want to know a lot about the Reverend Mr. Stecke!”

With this Mr. Atherton said good-bye, got into his car, and was driven off to town, and having given Chaney and the Superintendent Canon Effingham’s message, I took them to the Rectory and into the study. To my surprise, we were no sooner inside the room than Canon Effingham locked the door. Then he pointed to the tall stranger, who was seated in a chair on the hearth.

“This gentleman,” said Canon Effingham, “is Inspector Jalvane, of Scotland Yard. He wishes to speak to us---to all of us---in strict confidence.”

THERE was that in Mr. Stecke’s tone and manner when he made this announcement which caused Chaney and me to turn on him with some surprise. And Chaney’s glance, I think, had something of suspicion in it---not of Mr. Stecke, but of whatever lay behind Mr. Stecke’s words.

“Oh!” he said. “You---you haven’t told us everything, then?”

“Not quite,” replied Mr. Stecke. “I---as I said just now, I wished to be quite certain, positively certain, that this was the man.”

“Well, you are certain?” said Chaney.

“Quite!” assented Stecke. “That is the man. So----” he hesitated, looking round. “We can’t talk in the street,” he added. “There’s a good deal to say----”

Chaney looked round, too. There was a saloon bar close by---the one he and I had been in the day before. But there was also a tea-shop. Chaney made for the tea-shop.

“Come over here,” he said, leading us towards a quiet corner. “Now, Mr. Stecke! And just a word of advice. Don’t keep anything back!”

“I don’t wish to,” replied Mr. Stecke. “But, you see, I shall have to mention the name of another person. The name of---a woman!”

“A woman? Yes---well?”

“In fact, Miss Bolton,” said Mr. Stecke.

Chaney let out a whistle of astonishment.

“Oh, oh!” he exclaimed when the whistle had died away. “Miss Bolton, eh?”

“Canon Effingham’s secretary,” explained Mr. Stecke.

“Oh, we know!” said Chaney. “We’ve seen her. Well---and how does Miss Bolton come in?”

Mr. Stecke took a sip of the coffee which had been set before him. He shook his head, but not at the quality of his refreshment.

“I do not like to bring any woman’s name into an affair of this sort,” he said slowly. “But considering----”

“Considering that murder comes into it,” suggested Chaney, “I think you’d better put all scruples aside.”

Mr. Stecke hesitated.

“It may be all nothing,” he said, after a pause. “A mere coincidence! But the fact is that the morning after I had seen the man in Linwood Church, I saw him again, in conversation with Miss Bolton.”

“Where?” asked Chaney.

“Not very far away from the Rectory,” replied Mr. Stecke. “I had better explain. You don’t know the surroundings of church and Rectory?”

“Not beyond the very immediate surroundings,” said Chaney.

“Well, you may have noticed that between the grounds of the Rectory and the side of the churchyard there is a lane. That lane leads towards the woods which close in that side of Linwood village. About half a mile along that lane there is a solitary cottage. It is tenanted by Watson, the gamekeeper. At the time I am speaking of, Watson’s wife was ill in bed. On the morning after I had seen the man in the church, I went along to Watson’s cottage to ask how his wife was getting on. Watson himself was out, but the woman who was nursing Mrs. Watson asked me upstairs to see her; she was somewhat better that day. While I was up there, talking to the two women, I happened to glance out of the bedroom window and I saw Miss Bolton---with the man who had accosted me in the church the previous afternoon.”

“You’re sure it was he?” asked Chaney.

“Oh, quite certain! I recognized him at once.”

“Where were they? What were they doing?”

“Walking along the lane, in front of the cottage. The lane bends a little just there before the garden of the cottage. They came round the bend, from the direction of the village, passed the cottage, and disappeared round the corner towards the woods.”

“Were they in conversation?”

“I gathered that they were.”

“Walking alongside each other?”

“Yes.”

“Did you notice anything that led you to think they knew each other?”

“Well, you see, I only saw them for a moment. He was talking when they passed in front of the cottage; Miss Bolton was, well, just listening to whatever it was he was saying.”

“And that was all you saw?”

“That was all I saw.”

“Is it very lonely about there, Mr. Stecke?” asked Chaney. “Sort of place where people would meet who wanted to escape observation?”

“Oh, very lonely! Watson’s cottage is the only human habitation anywhere about there. The woods beyond it stretch for miles.”

Chaney reflected awhile in silence on this information. Then:

“I suppose Miss Bolton was there---at Linwood Rectory---when you went there?” he asked.

“Oh, yes---I gathered that she had been there some little time.”

“I suppose you saw a good deal of her?”

“No, not a great deal. She had her work, and I had mine.”

“Canon Effingham reposed a good deal of confidence in her, eh?”

“I don’t know. He only mentioned her to me once---said she was a very clever secretary.”

“Did he keep her constantly employed?”

“I believe so. He’s writing a history of the parish, and she had a great deal to do in copying authorities, making researches, and so on. Once a week she used to go up to town for the night.”

“On his work?”

“No, I think it was---yes, I’m sure it was---a sort of weekly holiday. I heard her speak of it once, jokingly, as her night out.”

Mr. Stecke appeared to have nothing further to tell us, but I still had two or three questions to put to him.

“Did you ever tell anyone about the man who came to you in the church and who wished to see the treasures kept in the safe?” I asked.

“No, I never told anyone---until now,” he replied.

“Why?”

“I---really, I can’t say!”

“Why didn’t you mention it to Canon Effingham?”

“Oh, I can explain that! Canon Effingham, as I have already told you, was ill. I had already realized that he is a very nervous and excitable man, and I felt that if I told him about the stranger’s evidently strong desire to see the church treasures, it might upset him. So I said nothing.”

“And nothing to Mrs. Effingham?”

“No---nothing to her.”

“Nor to Miss Bolton?”

“I did not speak of it to Miss Bolton.”

“That strikes me as a bit odd, Mr. Stecke,” I remarked. “You saw this man with Miss Bolton. I should have thought----”

He held up his hand as if to check me.

“You forget,” he said, “that perhaps Miss Bolton would not have liked it to be known that I, or anybody, had seen her with this man. Anyway, I did not mention the matter to her. As I said just now, I have not mentioned it to anyone previous to telling---yourselves.”

“Well,” I said, “you realize, Mr. Stecke, that, in view of your identification of the dead man, you’ll have to give evidence at the inquest on him?” I said. “And not only at the inquest on him, but at the inquest on Skate---which begins tomorrow. Are you aware of all that?”

“Why at the inquest on Skate?” he asked.

“Because, in view of the evidence accumulated so far, the presumption is that the man whose dead body you have just seen is the man who stole the treasures from Linwood Church safe and who also murdered Skate in Linwood churchyard,” I answered. “We shall have to tell the police authorities of your evidence, and it’ll save time and trouble if you can give me your promise to be at Linwood for the opening of the Skate inquest tomorrow afternoon.”

“Very well,” he said. “If you say it is necessary, I will be there. What time?”

“Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon, at the village schoolroom, Mr. Stecke,” I replied. “Probably there’ll be a good deal more evidence than yours.”

“And what am I to say---to tell?” he asked.

“All that you have told us,” I answered.

“And---about Miss Bolton, too?” he said, hesitatingly.

“Most certainly! We shall want to question Miss Bolton about that,” I answered. “We want to know, we and the police, who this dead man is.”

“I will be at Linwood,” he said.

Then he went away, but for a few minutes Chaney and I remained talking over what we had heard. The result of our conversation was that we went back to the office, got our car from the garage close by, and ran out to Linwood. We felt that it was necessary to tell Canon Effingham there and then all that Mr. Stecke had just told us. The introduction of Miss Bolton into this case had made a difference to everything. And before we reached Linwood we had further decided that we would bring Mrs. Effingham into our councils---for obvious reasons. Mrs. Effingham, as a woman, would be much more likely to have an intimate knowledge of Miss Bolton than Canon Effingham, a man, possibly could have, in spite of the fact that she was his private secretary.

Up to then we had never been brought into contact with Mrs. Effingham. We were a good deal surprised to find that she was very much younger than her husband. I was not impressed by her appearance---a tallish, somewhat ungainly woman of florid complexion, sandy hair, pale-blue restless eyes, badly or, perhaps I should say, untidily dressed. She gave one the impression of being both suspicious and watchful; certainly she passed the first few minutes of our interview with Canon Effingham and herself in inspecting me and my partner as if we had been some rare specimens of zoology or entomology and she as a scientist previously unacquainted with such examples. Although I took a dislike to Mrs. Effingham—and I was not surprised, a little later, to find that my first surmise concerning her---that she was not of the same class as her husband---was correct. She had, in fact, been a professional nurse who had attended upon Canon Effingham during a serious illness which attacked him while on holiday in the west of England. Canon Effingham had returned from that holiday, or, rather, from the period of convalescence which followed it, bringing a wife.

Husband and wife were, of course, by this time acquainted with what had happened in London after I had bundled Canon Effingham away from the scene of the accident; the Daily Sentinel lay open on the Canon’s desk. But they did not know of Stecke’s interview with us, or what he had told us. Neither said anything until, retailing this to them, I came to the episode connected with Miss Bolton. Then Mrs. Effingham let out an exclamation.

“There!” she said, with something like a note of triumph. “What have I always told you, Wilford? Haven’t I always said she was sly? Now, why didn’t she tell you that?”

Canon Effingham shook his head in remonstrance.

“My dear, why should Miss Bolton tell me that?---and tell me---what? What I am astonished at---very, very much astonished at!---is, why did not Stecke tell me about the man who wished to see the church treasures? Most unaccountable!”

“No, Wilford, nothing of the sort!” protested Mrs. Effingham. “Mr. Stecke knew that you were ill, and that the doctor had given strict orders---and so, too, had I---that you were not to be bothered about anything. Mr. Stecke did quite right; you’d only have been worrying yourself and bringing on a temperature. But Miss Bolton----”

“But, my dear, what do you expect Miss Bolton could have told me?” protested Canon Effingham. “Supposing the very worst suspicions we could form were true---and I, personally, refuse to hear one word against Miss Bolton---supposing, I say, it were true, and that Miss Bolton was in league---an unbelievable thing!---with this mysterious man----”

“As no doubt she was!” muttered Mrs. Effingham.

“Stuff and nonsense, my dear! But supposing she were,” continued the Canon, “do you for one moment believe that she’d have come and told me? What are you thinking of? Her policy, of course, would have been one of concealment!”

“As it is, no doubt,” said Mrs. Effingham, muttering again. “I’ve always said, from the very first----”

We had had enough of that, and Chaney interrupted Mrs. Effingham without apology or ceremony.

“Is Miss Bolton about, sir?” he asked. “Can we have a word with her?”

“Miss Bolton is not at home today,” replied Canon Effingham. “She has a weekly holiday—”

“And always goes up to town and spends the night there,” added Mrs. Effingham. “And goes in very different costume from what she appears here in. I’ve always said, Wilford----”

“My dear, you have always said a great deal, and you are now saying too much,” interrupted Canon Effingham, at last becoming testy. “I am sure these gentlemen----”

“All we want, sir,” said Chaney, “is just to get at the truth of things. Now, Mr. Stecke will be present at the inquest on Skate, at your village schoolroom tomorrow, and he will have to retell the story he told us, and Miss Bolton’s name will come in. I want to impress upon you and Mrs. Effingham the necessity of not telling Miss Bolton anything whatever of what we have told you, and also the equal necessity of seeing that she is present at the inquest in your company. We want to see the effect on her of Mr. Stecke’s evidence. If you need an excuse, sir, you can tell her you wish her to take a shorthand note of the proceedings.”

“I don’t like all this,” said Canon Effingham. “Is it really necessary?”

“Absolutely necessary, sir!” replied Chaney. “And---you must see that it is in the young lady’s interest that she should be there.”

We left at that. When Chaney and I were half-way to our car, Mrs. Effingham, coming out of the porch, alone called to us and hurried across the lawn.

“We just wanted to know something,” she said. “The dead man---the man who called himself the Dean of Norchester---has anybody identified him yet?”

“By name, ma’am?” replied Chaney. “No! No one.”

“The police---and you---have no idea who he is?” she asked.

“Not the remotest idea, ma’am!” said Chaney. “So far---absolutely unknown.”

Mrs. Effingham made no further remark. She nodded, turned, and went back to the house.

CHANEY and I were both engrossed in copies of the Daily Sentinel next morning when Chippendale came into our room with a card. It was Chippendale’s habit when bringing in anything of this sort, a card, a pencilled note, any scrap of paper heralding somebody, to accompany whatever he brought with a curt, and usually graphic, hint as to the personality of the sender. On this occasion he was unusually curt.

“Parson!” he said. “Young ’un.”

I glanced at the card.

The Rev. Herbert Stecke

The card was printed---I concluded from that that Mr. Stecke was not conversant with the strict rules in such matters.

“Bring Mr. Stecke in,” I commanded. “And then see that we’re not interrupted while he’s here.”

I tossed the card over to Chaney. Chaney put down his paper.

“Linwood affair, no doubt,” he said. “Find out where he’s from, first. No address there.”

Mr. Stecke entered. I took a good look at him as he came forward to the chair which I indicated at the side of my desk. He was a tallish, well-built, rather good-looking fellow about twenty-eight or thirty years of age, as far as I could judge. Rather sandy-coloured hair and eyebrows---blue eyes. Clean-shaven. Roman collar, black stock, black jacket and vest, dark-grey trousers, stoutly-soled shoes. Good specimen of average young curate. Watchful, somewhat eager expression. No particular feature, except that he had a rather long nose and that his eyes were a little too narrowly set. Later I observed that he had unusually large hands and feet.

Mr. Stecke advanced a little nervously, looking from one to the other of us. He spoke first.

“Mr. Chaney?” he said inquiringly. “Mr. Camberwell?”

“I’m Mr. Camberwell,” I replied. “That is Mr. Chaney. What can we do for you, Mr. Stecke?”

Mr. Stecke took the chair I had motioned him to, and rested his big hands on the head of a big oak stick.

“I---the fact is I called to see you about this Linwood affair,” he replied. “I should have called yesterday, but I was out of town. I----”

“Excuse me a moment,” I said, drawing my note-book forward. “We like to know certain particulars about anyone with whom we have dealings. I see from your card Mr. Stecke, that you are a clergyman. Of what church or denomination?”

“I am a clergyman of the Church of England,” he answered, looking a little surprised. “In priest’s orders.”

“Beneficed, Mr. Stecke?”

“No!”

“Curate---assistant priest anywhere?”

“Not at present. I---I am writing for another curacy---I have one in view. That was why I was out of town yesterday.”

“You live in London, Mr. Stecke?”

“In the suburbs. My address? 247, Laburnum Villas, Newington.”

“Thank you. And why have you come to us, Mr. Stecke, about this Linwood affair, instead of the police?”

“Because I learnt from the newspapers---the Daily Sentinel, I should say---that you are inquiring into the matter on behalf of Canon Effingham. I therefore preferred to come direct to you.”

“As representing Canon Effingham? Yes---why, now?”

“Because I know Canon Effingham, and Linwood. I took three Sundays’ duty at Linwood for Canon Effingham last December and lived in the Rectory.”

“Was Canon Effingham there, too?”

“Canon Effingham was there, but he was confined to bed most of the time and up to within a few days of my leaving Linwood.”

“What was the matter with him? Anything serious?”

“Bronchitis. I believe he is subject to it. Anyway, I was sent there---Canon Effingham had asked a friend of his, Canon Telson, of Southwark, if he could find him some help for a while, and Canon Telson, knowing me and that I was unplaced just then, sent me down. I was there the first three Sundays in December---a little over a fortnight in actual residence.”

“I see! But you didn’t come here merely to tell us that, Mr. Stecke?”

“No! I came to tell you of something that happened while I was there. Since reading the accounts in the newspapers, and especially that in the Daily Sentinel, I feel sure that while I was at Linwood, I saw and had conversation with the man who passed himself off to the American gentleman, Mr. Atherton, as the Dean of Norchester.”

“Indeed! That’s good! Tell us the story, Mr. Stecke.”

“There is really not much to tell. I had forgotten all about it until I read of these recent affairs, in the newspapers. But of course as soon as I had read the papers, the incident was recalled and I saw that it might be of great importance. It was something that happened when I had been at Linwood about a week or ten days. This man that I speak of came up to me in the church one afternoon and wanted to see the chalice, the paten, and the two ancient manuscripts preserved in the vestry. He----”

“Pardon me! You say you had only been at Linwood a week or ten days. Did you know of the existence of these valuables?”

“I should imagine that everybody---I mean every educated person---in the diocese knows of them! They are, I believe I might say, world-famous. Oh, yes, I knew of their existence long before I went to Linwood. You see, they have been written about a good deal. Canon Effingham himself has written about them. More than that, they have more than once been lent for exhibition---at the annual Church Congress and elsewhere. Oh, yes, I knew of them.”

“Yes. When I went to Linwood, early in December, Canon Effingham was ill, but not sufficiently so to be confined to his room or even to the house, and---I think it was the second day after my arrival---he took me across to the church to show me the valuables; it was a day or two after this that he took to his bed. He told me at the time that he never, under any circumstances whatever, allowed anyone to open the safe in which they were kept but himself; he had never even permitted Mrs. Effingham to open it. I remember that he was most peremptory about that---people might inspect the church as freely as they pleased and it was always open to inspection---but his rule as regards the treasures was adamant. Only in his presence and under his personal supervision!”

“Well, this man, Mr. Stecke? What about him?”

“He came to me in the church, rather late one afternoon—I forget what I was doing there; I had gone across on some errand or other, anyway. He asked me if he could see the famous treasures; I think he particularized them. I at once told him it was impossible, for Canon Effingham’s illness had developed and he was by that time confined to bed. The man pressed the point; he said he was an enthusiastic archæologist and had come a long way for the express purpose of inspecting these things, specially the chalice and paten. He suggested that I should go and tell this to Canon Effingham. I told him that was impossible and that I knew for a fact that Canon Effingham would permit no inspection of the treasures unless he himself was present. He remained very persistent, and, with another expression of my regret, I left him.”

“In the church?”

“In the church---yes.”

“He couldn’t get into the vestry, of course?”

“Oh, no---no one could enter the vestry unless Canon Effingham was there.”

At this Chaney put in a question or two.

“You say nobody could enter that vestry unless the Canon was there,” he said. “How did you manage, then, sir, while you were taking the duty for him? Didn’t you require the use of the vestry?”

“No,” replied Mr. Stecke, promptly. “There are two vestries, or, rather, three. That vestry where the safe is kept is sacred to the safe and to the various parish registers. There is another vestry---the vestry, proper---at the west end of the church, under the tower; the clergy robe in it, and next to it is the choir vestry.”

“I see,” said Chaney. “Then you might say that the vestry where the safe is is Canon Effingham’s absolutely strict private preserve?”

“Precisely!”

“So you saw no danger in leaving this persistent gentleman in the church?”

“None at all! I knew that Canon Effingham had the keys of vestry and safe.”

“I was going to ask you about that matter, Mr. Stecke,” I said, resuming my examination of our visitor. “Did you, as a resident in the Rectory, know Canon Effingham’s arrangements about his keys?”

“I only knew what I actually saw. When Canon Effingham said he would show me the treasures, he took a bunch of keys from his trousers pocket and with one of them opened a drawer in his desk in the study. From this he took three keys which were on a stout ring, and when we went across to the church, he used them there for the chancel door, the vestry door, the door of the safe. When we returned to his study, he restored the three keys to his drawer.”

“You never had those keys in your possession, I suppose---as his locum tenens?”

“I? Never!”

“There’s a thing that rather puzzles me, there,” remarked Chaney. “You say, Mr. Stecke, that Linwood Church is always open?”

“From eight o’clock in the morning until six in the evening in summer; from nine till four in winter.”

“Why, then, if it’s open should Canon Effingham bother to let himself and you in by the chancel door when you could have walked in at the open door at the west end?”

“I can only suppose that he did so from habit---or, perhaps, because the chancel door is exactly opposite the little gate which admits from the Rectory grounds to the churchyard.”

“I suppose that’s it,” muttered Chaney. “He took us in by the open door, though, didn’t he?” he went on, turning to me. “Um!---well, Mr. Stecke, can you give us a description of this man who was so keen about seeing the valuables?”

Mr. Stecke’s eyes turned towards the copy of the Daily Sentinel opened out on my desk.

“I think there is a remarkably accurate description of him in that newspaper!” he answered. “It is exactly what I should have written myself had I been asked to describe him for purposes of publication.”

“Would you be able to identify him if you saw him again?” asked Chaney.

“I feel sure I could have identified him, unhesitatingly, had I met him again.”

“The man who called himself Dean of Norchester and who undoubtedly had the missing paten in his possession is dead, as you know,” said Chaney. “Now, if we take you to see his body, do you think you can identify it as that of the man you saw and talked to in Linwood Church?”

“If it is the body of that man, yes,” replied Mr. Stecke, “I can!”

“Then we’d better go along to the City,” said Chaney, rising. “We----”

“Wait a moment,” I said. “There’s another question or two I want to put to Mr. Stecke before we go. Mr. Stecke, as you were an inmate of Linwood Rectory for between a fortnight and three weeks, you became, of course, more or less conversant with the doings of the household?”

“Oh, well,” replied Mr. Stecke, “I suppose I noticed things.”

“Have you noticed, then, in the papers that when Canon Effingham found out about this robbery, he about the same time discovered that a side-door in his house had been left open all night?”

“Yes, I read that.”

“Well, now, do you know anything about this---who saw to the locking-up every night at the Rectory? Canon Effingham himself?”

“No, the parlour-maid, Bleacher, saw to it. I remember all about that; it amused me. Bleacher is a very big woman---a grenadier of a woman! She used to go round the house every night at precisely ten o’clock with an enormous bunch of keys and lock the various doors.”

“A bunch of keys? Then---the keys were not left in the locks?”

“No---the keys were on her bunch.”

“What did she do with the bunch?”

“I can’t say---unless she gave it to Mrs. Effingham.”

That was all I had to ask, just then. We took Mr. Stecke off to the City in our car. And there in the mortuary to which it had been carried we showed him the dead body of the man who had called himself Dean of Norchester. After one steady look at the face Mr. Stecke nodded his head with a gesture of positive affirmation.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “that is the man!”

“You’re sure, sir?” asked Chaney. “It’s not a close resemblance---or anything like that?”

“No! That is the man. I recognized him at once. His is not a common type of countenance, is it? A fine head, too!”

“A good many of these criminals have fine heads!” muttered Chaney. “Seen some really remarkable headpieces amongst ’em in my time. Too much in the way of brains some of ’em have!---that’s my opinion. Well, just come and look here, now, Mr. Stecke.”

Mr. Stecke followed to where the dead man’s effects had been placed, neatly put together.

“Do you recognize that suit?” asked Chaney. “Was he wearing it when you saw him?”

“Yes---I remember the herring-bone pattern. Oh, yes!” Mr. Stecke began turning the three articles of the lounge suit over; I wondered why. Suddenly he pointed to something, a mark, two or three inches above the turn-up of the trousers.

“Chalk!” he said. “Linwood is on the chalk.”

“Um!” remarked Chaney. “It is chalk! Thank you for pointing it out, sir---I hadn’t noticed it myself. Well---now we know that much! This is the man you saw at Linwood Church one afternoon last December.”

Mr. Stecke nodded. It seemed to me that he still had something to say. And as we left the mortuary, he spoke.

“Now that I am certain that that is the man I have told you of,” he said, “I think I had better tell you something which I didn’t want to tell you until I really was certain. The fact is I saw the man again, near Linwood, next morning!”

WE all came to a halt---all, that is, except Mr. Atherton, who after his sudden, startling shout, rushed forward, still shouting and pointing an outstretched arm, after a little man in a dark-blue suit who, carrying a small suit-case, had just passed us at a smart pace. As a matter of fact, I had noticed that this man glanced at us as he edged his way past us; he glanced over his shoulder again as Mr. Atherton shouted. And then he was off, and Mr. Atherton after him, and therewith came one of those curious examples of what a crowd will do and will not do. The street was thick with men---some stood aside to let the fugitive pass; some remained motionless, staring first at pursuer, then at pursued. Suddenly a man coming in the opposite direction woke to his senses and sticking out a foot tried to trip the runaway. And then came something that for a second made me shut my eyes and turned me sick, and at my side I heard Canon Effingham let out a groan of horror. For the hunted man leapt to avoid the tripping foot, cleared it, lost his balance, crashed over the curb, and fell heavily beneath the great wheels of a passing motor-wagon. There was a cry---one!---that rang in my ears for hours and haunted me that night. And then---silence.

We fought our way through the crowd---all except Canon Effingham, who tottered to the nearest support and clung there, gasping for breath. Chaney, big and muscular, fought his way through. There were two policemen there already; a word to them from Chaney and they let him and me close in to where men were drawing the dead man from beneath the wagon. The great near-side wheel had gone clean over his chest. . . .

I went back to Canon Effingham, got him away to his car, put him in charge of his man, and sent him off. When I returned to the scene of the accident, an inspector of the City police had come up who knew Chaney well, and Chaney was telling him all about it from our angle.

“And you’ve no doubt about your recognition of him, sir?” concluded Chaney, turning to Mr. Atherton. “You’re sure of him?”

The dead man was lying close by, a sheet snatched from the wagon that had killed him stretched over his body. Atherton went up, lifted a corner of the sheet, and looked.

“Not a doubt!” he said, gravely. “That is the man!”

A street-ambulance came up; the police lifted the body on to it and moved off; Mr. Atherton, Chaney, and I followed with the Inspector, Chaney still explaining the story and circumstances. The Inspector was vastly interested.

“Think he’s the man you wanted for the Linwood Church affair, then?” he said when he had heard everything. “Well, well, I’ve always said that I didn’t believe in coincidences---reckon there’s some fate about things like this. You’d better come and see his clothing examined; we may find something important.”

“I’m anxious to see what’s inside that suit-case,” said Chaney, pointing to the article mentioned, which one of the policemen was now carrying. “I have an idea that we may find something there that will help.”

“Of course, you’ve no idea who he is?” suggested the Inspector.

“Not the slightest!” replied Chaney. “But whoever he is, he’s been a clever chap in his time. This gentleman here, Mr. Atherton, of New York---forget if I mentioned his name before---says that he’d all the style and manners of an accomplished gentleman and was a scholar into the bargain.”

“And dressed as a---bishop, was it?” asked the Inspector.

“Dean! Said he was the Dean of Norchester.”

The Inspector was profoundly impressed. He was also curious; but before he proceeded to any examination of the dead man’s clothing and the suit-case, he sent for the police surgeon. There was only one thing that the police surgeon could say. The man had been killed instantaneously.

We stood by, watching, while the police searched the clothing---first noting that the blue serge suit, obviously new, was a ready-made one, but of good cut and quality; the sort of suit that you can get at certain shops where better-class ready-to-wear goods can be had at a few minutes’ notice. The man who was conducting the search immediately drew our attention to something that he evidently considered important.

“See here!” he said. “There’s been a tab, a label, inside this coat, with the maker’s name on it. Cut out! And not so long since, either. Didn’t want anybody to know where he’d got it. I reckon---from that---that we aren’t going to find very much on him.”

He was right in this supposition---as regards the clothing, at any rate. The coat contained nothing but a handkerchief---no mark or initials---a theatre play-bill, a brier pipe---new---a tobacco-pouch---also new---and a box of matches. In the left-hand pocket of the waistcoat was a cheap watch; one of the sort you can buy, with a guarantee that it will run for at least twelve months; it, too, was new, and so was the cheap silver chain which connected it with a buttonhole. In the right-hand pocket was a penknife and two bits of lead pencil. The left-hand pocket of the trousers yielded a few coppers; the right a handful of loose silver. But on the right hip there was another pocket, with a flap that buttoned down, and from this the searcher drew forth more likely and interesting things. One was a somewhat bulky envelope, evidently stuffed with papers; the other was a purse.

“The envelope first,” muttered the Inspector. “See what’s in that.”

The contents of the envelope---a square, linen-lined thing---forced exclamations of surprise from Mr. Atherton and myself and even extracted a grunt from Chaney. For the dead man had cut out from every morning paper in London---Times, Post, Telegraph, Express, News, Chronicle, Mail, Mirror, Sketch, Herald, Advertiser---their accounts, long or short, of the Linwood Church affair. Each was cut out very neatly, with the name of its source at the head, written in a scholarly hand, and underneath that the date. And on one cutting there was a marginal comment, the importance of which, remarked Chaney, we might discover later on. One of the newspaper scribes, dilating at some length on the mystery of the theft from the safe in the vestry, concluded:

The most mysterious feature of the case is that which centres round the keys. How did the thief obtain possession of the key---on Canon Effingham’s private bunch---by which was opened the drawer in the desk in the study wherein the church keys were kept? Did he, somehow, enter the rectory in the dead of night and steal the private bunch of keys from the dressing-room? It is possible. Indeed, it looks probable. But in that case why, seeing that he left the church keys dangling from the chancel door, did he trouble to go back to the rectory and restore the private keys to the place whereat Canon Effingham found them in the morning? Why this piece of punctilious politeness? This mystery of the keys is a deep one!

On the margin of this, some hand---the dead man’s, no doubt---had drawn two heavy upright lines, and against them an equally heavy note of admiration. And---about that note of admiration there was something which suggested that its maker was indulging in a cynical laugh as he made it.

“Put ’em all back in the cover,” commanded the Inspector, “We shall want ’em as exhibits. Now see what’s in the purse.”

The purse---again something new---was one of those leather ones in which there are two pockets and an inner and outer flap. The bigger pocket contained a few Treasury notes: two or three twenty-shilling notes and as many for ten shillings. The smaller pocket held but one thing only---a small key, dangling at the end of a bit of stout cord.

The Inspector looked round at the small suit-case, which we had previously found to be locked.

“Try that key on the lock there,” he said. “Looks like fitting it.”

The key did fit---both locks. The searcher snapped them open and threw back the lid. And there before our---I was going to write “astonished eyes,” but I am not sure that all of us were astonished---before our eyes, anyway, lay, in neat rubber-banded bundles, piles and piles of Treasury notes, fresh, virgin, brand-new, crisp, clean!

“Ah!” exclaimed Chaney. “Just what that cashier at your bank said, Mr. Atherton! He’d have no difficulty in changing the big B. of E. notes, and he’d get ’em changed at once into these Treasury things. Evidently he did! Now, how much has he got there?”

But the police were already at work, counting. In a few minutes one of them snapped out the total.

“Twenty-five hundred pounds!”

“One half!” said Chaney. “Um!---now, who’s got the other?”

The searcher turned again to the suit-case. There was a lot of loose paper in it which looked as if it had been torn from some periodical. He picked out a sheet or two, glancing at its heading.

“Wasn’t that robbery at Linwood?” he asked. “Linwood Church, eh? Well, look at that? See? Linwood Parish Magazine!”

“Of which I saw a good quantity lying in the vestry,” remarked Chaney. “Yes, that’s right enough. He’s used that to---good Lord, what’s this?”

He had been rummaging in the suit-case as he spoke, and now from amidst the mass of crumpled parish-magazine pages he held up a small parcel that looked as if it might contain a saucer or a small plate. The next instant he had torn the paper away from it and revealed the stolen paten.

I think Mr. Atherton was the only person there who really appreciated this discovery. He took the paten from Chaney with almost reverential fingers, making a clicking noise with his tongue.

“Clk, clk, clk!” he murmured. “So this is----”

“I’ll bet it is!” interrupted Chaney. “One of the two stolen pieces of plate. Two, I know the Canon said. Fourteenth or thirteenth or somethingth century---and priceless. A cup and a---what did he call this thing, Camberwell?”

“What was stolen was a chalice and a paten,” I said. “Both considerably pre-Reformation and worth no end of money.”

Mr. Atherton sighed deeply; he was still fingering and loving the paten.

“Worth no end of money!” he repeated softly. “I should think so!”

The Inspector took the paten from Mr. Atherton’s unwilling hands, turned it over, and stared at it dubiously.

“No end of money?” he exclaimed. “What, this bit of a thing? What d’ye mean by no end of money?”

Chaney winked at Mr. Atherton.

“What would you give for it, sir?” he asked.

Mr. Atherton winked back---unseen by the Inspector.

“No end of money---as you say!” he answered. “Spot cash!”

The Inspector stared again. Then he suddenly shoved the paten back into the hands of the searcher.

“Lock it up again!” he commanded. “And all these Treasury notes! Seal the suit-case and have it locked up. No end of money, eh? Oh, well, the thing is that it’s the article stolen from Linwood Church. No doubt of that, I suppose? None, eh? And not much, I should think, that this dead man stole it? Very well, then the next thing we want to know is---who is he?”

None of us attempting to answer that all-important question, the Inspector followed it up with another.

“Can’t be nobody, can he?” he said, satirically. “And if he isn’t nobody, he must be somebody, and have a name, and live somewhere, eh? Got to find all that out! And we’d better be getting to work.”

Chaney, Mr. Atherton, and I remained in the City until we had been with the Inspector to the Bank of England and with some little trouble had ascertained that the dead man, still posing as the Dean of Norchester, had exchanged his fifty hundred-pound Bank of England notes for one-pound Treasury notes. The official who had effected the exchange was vague about the transaction---an ordinary enough one for him, no doubt. All that he remembered was that a clergyman in apron and gaiters and wearing a very big hat had asked for Treasury notes and had got them. Oh yes, he remembered another thing---he himself had remarked that five thousand notes would be rather heavy to carry, and that the clergyman had replied that he had a car outside.

“So he got the whole amount in small notes?” said Chaney, musingly. “Um---now where’s the remaining twenty-five hundred pounds? Shared with somebody, no doubt. Well, it’s a stiff business tracing one-pound Treasury notes. We could spend years at that game and be no better off!”

We parted then---the Inspector going back to his job, and Mr. Atherton returning to his hotel. But Chaney and I turned into a quiet saloon bar and over a sandwich and a glass of beer discussed matters.

“Publicity!---publicity’s the thing!” affirmed Chaney. “Light!---bring all the light we can get hold of to bear on it. There’ll be no end in the papers tomorrow, and a good deal this evening, but I wonder if we couldn’t do something special that way? Is there one of these morning rags that would make a real flare-up of the story?---do it in such a fashion that every Tom, Dick, and Harry, Susan, Poll, and Kate would know all about it?”

I thought that idea over.

“I know a chap who might know,” I said after considering possibilities.

“Who is he?” demanded Chaney.

“Old schoolfellow---Holford---who’s on the Daily Sentinel,” I replied. “But I don’t think he’s any very big position there.”

“The Daily Sentinel is the paper!” said Chaney. “Could this chap get at the editor?”

“I suppose he could get at somebody,” I answered.

Chaney swallowed his last crumb and drank off his beer.

“Come on!” he said. “Sentinel office!”

We sought Holford---an ingenuous youth whose admission to the ranks of journalism I had never been able to understand, considering his school record. And Holford put us on to the chief reporter, and the chief reporter secured an interview with a somebody who had a rare gift of silence coupled with a greater of listening, and the result was that for the next two or three hours we were engaged in giving the materials of what, as we gave it, seemed to be a chapter torn out of a volume of utterly improbable fiction.

There was a great deal about our affair in all next morning’s papers, but none of them came near the Sentinel. The Sentinel had nearly two whole pages of the story. And it had pictures. Linwood Church, Linwood Rectory. Portrait of Canon Effingham. Portrait of Mr. Atherton. Picture of the two rare books. Picture of Marwood, Littledale’s bank. Picture of exact spot near Royal Exchange where the supposed Dean of Norchester, then in mufti, was killed. And so on and so on. As to gigantic headlines, cross-headings, and sentences in thick type, the pages were full of them. Chaney sighed as he gazed and admired.

“If all that doesn’t make somebody speak,” he said, “then I don’t know what will!”

FOR a moment Chaney stood motionless, staring. Then, with a gasp, he dropped back into his chair, set his hands on his knees, and stared harder than ever---at Mr. Atherton. And Mr. Atherton laughed.

“Guess you’re quite right!” he said, with a twinkle of his eye. “But I did it! You see, he gave some plausible reason for wanting the ready money---something to do with this restoration business---cash to be paid here in London, or some bunk of that sort.”

Chaney drew a long breath and found his tongue again.

“You’re sure he cashed the cheque, sir?”

“I phoned the bank just before you came in,” replied Mr. Atherton. “He must have gone straight there, to Lombard Street, immediately he left me.”

“We shall have to see the bankers,” muttered Chaney; “they’ll have the numbers of the notes. But---do you mind answering a few questions, sir?”

“Go ahead!” said Mr. Atherton.

“Well, sir, to begin with---can you give us a description of this man who called himself Dean of Norchester?”

“Sure! He was a fairly little, somewhat insignificant looking----”

Canon Effingham sniffed.

“The real Dean of Norchester,” he said, with fitting emphasis on the adjective, “is a man of remarkable presence!”

“Well, so one would expect,” remarked Mr. Atherton, “but I am not acquainted with the exalted hierarchy of this country, and when the man sent in his beautifully engraved card, I naturally supposed he was what he represented himself to be. And when he came in, in the flesh, I found no reason to change that supposition. I took it that he was the Dean.”

“He’d the manners, I suppose, sir---the manners you expected?” suggested Chaney.

“I don’t know what a dean’s manners are expected to be,” replied Mr. Atherton. “But he’d the manners of a gentleman, and he was certainly a scholar, and, I should say, a learned one.”

“Gave you evidences, I suppose, sir?”

“Well, he quoted one bit of Latin with which I do happen to be very familiar,” said Mr. Atherton, smiling, “for I see it pretty nearly every day at the top of one charitable appeal or another! Bis dat qui cito dat---and I reckon we all know enough to translate that!”

Canon Effingham groaned. The idea of a thief---and murderer---quoting from one of the classical languages was evidently most painful to his feelings.

“Ah, well!” said Chaney. “That shows that we’re dealing with a superior type of criminal, a man of education. That’s the worst sort---they’re always full of resource. But I want more particulars of his appearance, sir---can you give them?”

“Well, I tell you, he was a smallish man---what you’d call medium height---and, as a man, not a great deal to look at,” answered Mr. Atherton. “In age I should say he was anything from fifty to sixty. Nice, fresh complexion, hair going a bit grey, clean-shaven, wore glasses, but gave the impression that he’d got a pair of keen, wide-awake eyes behind them. Very loquacious---great talker---full of humour----”

“The real Dean of Norchester, my friend Dr. Perrible-Browne,” remarked Canon Effingham, “is a man of the most reserved---and perfect---manners!”

“Yes, well, this fellow’s manners were perfect enough, but you couldn’t call them reserved,” said Mr. Atherton. “He was what we should call a good mixer---made himself very friendly at once.”

“He appears to have impressed you, sir!” observed Chaney.

“Oh, well, I don’t mind saying he did! Nothing that I’m ashamed of in that. He was good company---while he was here.”

“I suppose he was correctly attired?” suddenly asked Canon Effingham.

“Well, I can’t say---not being of that persuasion myself---what the correct attire of a dean may be,” replied Mr. Atherton. “But he wore what I should call small-clothes, and gaiters to continue them, and he’d a sort of apron with a sash round his middle, and a long-tailed coat on it, and as for his hat, well, the brim seemed to be tied up to the crown with strings. And I reckon that when a man calls on you who’s dressed up in that way and says he’s a dean, well, you’ve just got to believe him!”

“And you did, sir, and you parted with---five thousand pounds!” murmured Chaney.

Mr. Atherton glanced at the two old books still resting on his knee.

“For value received,” he replied softly. “Don’t forget that!”

“You consider those two articles worth that, sir?”

Mr. Atherton gave Chaney a sudden swift look.

“See here!” he answered. “I consider them worth a good deal more! And my advice to Reverend Mr. Effingham, now that he’s got them back----”

“Oh!” gasped Canon Effingham. “You intend to---to restore them?”

“Sure! Here they are,” answered Mr. Atherton, pushing the books over. “They ain’t mine, though they’ve cost me all that money---twenty-five thousand dollars! And my advice to you, sir, is---go put ’em straight away in the British Museum.”

In the midst of Canon Effingham’s almost incoherent expressions of gratitude, Chaney returned to his questioning.

“What do you propose to do, sir?” he asked. “I mean about trying to get hold of this man?”

“What do I propose to do?” repeated Mr. Atherton. “Well, I suppose I had better join in the hunt. I suppose the police are after him?”

“The police are after him, and we are after him,” replied Chaney. “But you can help, sir. Now, frankly, do you mind being laughed at?”

“I do not! But why?”

“I want you to give me your permission to retell your story to the newspaper men! Every detail of it!”

“You think that’ll help?”

“I think,” replied Chaney, “that in this case nothing but the very widest publicity will help!”

“You don’t want---as police so often do---to keep anything back?”

Chaney shook his head in a decided negative.

“My partner and I, sir, are not policemen, though, to be sure, I myself was once in the detective service,” he said. “We’ve got our own methods. In this case I want to get everything out---let the public know everything. You yourself don’t know everything. You don’t know how these things came to be stolen. Well, I’ll tell you, briefly.” He proceeded to give a rapid, condensed account of all that we knew so far. “Now,” he continued, “we want, through publicity, to know a lot of things. We want to know how Canon Effingham’s keys were got at and who got at ’em. We want to trace the ownership of the new spanner picked up in the churchyard. We want to know who the man is who brought you those two books. In fact, we want to know all about it, and for that reason we want to tell the public everything that we ourselves know up to now in the hope that somebody will be able to amplify our knowledge. You get all that, sir?”

“Sure!---and I’m with you. Tell anything you like of all I’ve told you. If the newspaper men want more, tell ’em to come along,” replied Mr. Atherton. “But I’ve told you everything that happened. Oh, yes, put it all in---I don’t mind being laughed at. But say!---although we’ve said nothing of it, there’s more than theft in this case---eh?”

“Sacrilege!” murmured Canon Effingham. “Sacrilege!”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking of that, either,” said Mr. Atherton. “I understand that a man was killed?”

“May as well say murdered, sir, and be done with it,” replied Chaney. “He was murdered, without a doubt.”

“By the thieves?”

“Our theory, sir, is that this dead man, one Richard Skate, commonly known thereabouts as Weasel Dick, a village ne’er-do-well and a confirmed poacher, was out on one of his nocturnal expeditions, around the churchyard, saw or heard the thieves, challenged or interfered with them, and was promptly cracked on the head for his pains,” answered Chaney. “And that is---murder!”

“Exactly!” said Mr. Atherton. “Then---the man who came to me as Dean of Norchester may have been the murderer!---may have come to me with his hands---so to speak---red with blood?”

“That’s so, Mr. Atherton,” agreed Chaney. “It’s so, all the time.”

Mr. Atherton began to look more serious than at any previous moment of the interview.

“Well, in that case,” he said slowly, “I should like to mark my sense of the evil of such proceedings, and I will therefore add a thousand pounds to the reward which has already been offered by Canon Effingham. Kindly make a note that I do so.”

“It shall be done, sir,” asserted Chaney, cheerfully. “Human nature is such, Mr. Atherton, that a little timely reward---eh?”

“There are certain human beings,” remarked Mr. Atherton, “who will never tell or do anything unless they are paid to do or tell it---we will hope to catch some of them! But now look here---the two ancient volumes are recovered, and I trust safe, in the hands of our reverend friend here. But are there not still the equally ancient gold cup and plate?”

“Chalice and paten!” corrected Canon Effingham. “Of the fourteenth century.”

“I wonder, now, that he didn’t offer me those,” remarked Mr. Atherton, ruminatively. “I suppose I should have bought them. Well, gentlemen, what do you do next?”

“Spread everything as wide and far as we can through the medium of the press, sir,” replied Chaney. “And then, tomorrow, I believe, the inquest on this murdered man, Skate, will be opened, and I’m just wondering whether you ought not to attend it? There can, of course, be no doubt whatever that the murder of Skate is mixed up with the theft from the church safe, and as two of the missing articles were offered to you, I think your evidence not only should be of interest, but will be considered necessary.”

“I will be there,” said Mr. Atherton. “I am deeply interested---I shall remain deeply interested until I meet my adventurous visitor of yesterday once more. Well, sir,” he continued, turning with a smile to Canon Effingham, “now that they are once more in your hands, what, may I ask, are you going to do with those two venerable tomes?”

But Canon Effingham had been reflecting, and he had his answer ready.

“I am going to place them in the keeping of my bankers---at least, with a firm of bankers with whom I do business here in London,” he said. “My London bank, in fact. I have two banks---one near home, at Havering St. Michael; the other here, in the City. I think the City bank will be safest?”

“An excellent idea, sir,” remarked Mr. Atherton. “You cannot be too careful in your disposal of those treasures. Well, now, I, too am going down to the City to see my bankers, and these gentlemen,” he added, turning to Chaney and me, “are also anxious to see them, so I propose we all go down together---shall I order my car to be brought round?”

“Mine is at the door,” said Canon Effingham. “It will accommodate four.”

We trooped down to the courtyard to the hotel and found the car, Canon Effingham clinging tightly to his marvellously recovered treasures. His bank, the Home Counties, was in the same street as Mr. Atherton’s---Lombard Street. We drove there first; Canon Effingham vanished within its portals. Mr. Atherton turned to Chaney and me. His voice took a different tone.

“Say,” he said, “what do you fellows make of this?”

Chaney answered that question with promptitude.

“Very carefully planned business, sir!” he said. “Thought out and prepared with a great deal of attention to detail, and would, I think, have been entirely successful but for the unexpected turning-up of the poacher.”

“That’s a queer business about the keys,” remarked Mr. Atherton. “Seems to me that whoever the men were---or, if it was a single-handed job, the man was---who was outside, he had a confederate inside. Somebody who passed the church keys out to him, eh?”

“All that requires investigation, sir,” said Chaney. “On the surface of things, your idea is justified. It has already occurred to several people. As for me, I’m by no means satisfied that Canon Effingham’s private keys were ever used!”

Before Mr. Atherton could remark on this, the Canon returned from the bank, looking intensely relieved. He climbed into the car again, sighing with satisfaction---and we went forward amidst the surging traffic to Mr. Atherton’s bank.

Marwood, Littledale & Co. is one of those solidly founded, intensely respectable private banks which, somehow or other, look as if they never did any business, and in reality do some very big business in silence and dignity. There was no difficulty once we were within, under Mr. Atherton’s protection, in seeing and talking to the particular official who had cashed the cheque for five thousand pounds on the previous day. And within one minute we knew that the cheque had been presented by the man himself whom we were so anxious to find.

“You took him for the Dean of Norchester?” asked Mr. Atherton.

“I took him for what he said he was,” replied the official. “Why not? I don’t know the Dean of Norchester! Here is his card---he laid it before me with your cheque. And---his assured and confident manner, of course, was not what one would expect of an impostor. You say he was one? A very clever man, then!”

“How did he take the money?” asked Chaney.

“He took it in fifty hundred-pound Bank of England notes.”

“Of course you have the numbers?”

“Of course I have the numbers! But---you must remember that if he’s an impostor, or rather, as he is an impostor, it’s extremely unlikely that those hundred-pound notes would remain in his possession very long. He’d get rid of ’em immediately if he was up to the game!”

“How?” demanded Mr. Atherton.

“Nothing to do but go over to the Bank of England and exchange them for one-pound Treasury notes. He’d find no difficulty in carrying five thousand one-pound notes. I noticed he had a dispatch or attaché case with him.”

“Would they tell us at the Bank of England?”

“They would tell you---from my list---if those notes have come in, and somebody might remember a man dressed as a dean. Will you have the list?”

We had the list, and, Chaney taking charge of it, we all went out again and, bidding Canon Effingham’s man take the car to a certain corner and wait for us, turned the corner of Lombard Street and made for the Bank of England. It was now the very height of noontide; in front of the Royal Exchange and the Bank and the Mansion House there was the usual crush of men, horses, cars, carriages, heavy traffic, light traffic. . . .

And in the very midst of this, Mr. Atherton suddenly let out a wild yell.

“There he is---that’s he! Stop him---stop him---stop that man! Stop---thief!”

I HAD had some such thought myself as I sat in Canon Effingham’s study watching Miss Bolton’s steady fingers taking down his instructions. It certainly seemed strange that he had made no mention of the murder. But there were stranger things than that in the circumstances of the morning.

“Queer business altogether, Chaney,” I said. “And one thing strikes me as being extraordinarily queer!”

“What?” he asked. “What---more than another?”

“Why, the business of the keys! Why on earth should the thief---and especially after his encounter with this poacher chap!---bother to restore that small bunch of private keys to Canon Effingham’s dressing-room? He’d got what he wanted by that time. Why didn’t he go straight off? Why risk detection a second time by returning to the house?”

“Ay---but did he?” asked Chaney, with a dry laugh.

“The keys were there, anyway, when the Canon looked for them this morning. There, he says, in their usual place, where he had laid ’em last night.”

“Again ay, my lad! But---had they ever been touched?”

“That’s a special lock on the drawer in the study desk, Chaney.”

“Maybe. Say it is. But special locks can be picked.”

“You think that, eh? That the thief never entered the dressing-room?”

“I don’t say he did, and I don’t say he didn’t. What I say is just what you say---that if the thief did abstract the small bunch of private keys from Canon Effingham’s table in his dressing-room, it’s the most astonishing thing I ever heard of that he troubled to put ’em back!”

We were not the only persons whose minds were occupied by the queerness of that key business. As we were about to set off, the Superintendent signalled to us from the churchyard, where he was talking with one of his men and the doctor, and came across to our car.

“I say, just a word or two before you go,” he said, “Have you got the description of these missing goods?”

“We have---and the Canon’s offering a reward, too,” replied Chaney.

“Much?”

“A thousand!”

“Whew!---well, he’s a well-to-do man; he’ll not miss that bit. But I say---that tale of his about the keys? Do I understand that he says that though his private keys must have been abstracted during the night in order to open the drawer in his study wherein the church keys were kept, they were in their proper place this morning? Is that it---have I got it?”

“You’ve got it!”

“Very well, then---the thief must have had an accomplice in the house!”

“What are you figuring?” asked Chaney.

“You’ll not make me believe that the thief, after securing the loot, and incidentally killing this chap Skate, would bother to make his way back to the Canon’s dressing-room to put those keys where he found ’em! No, no---I can’t swallow that. I think that the church keys were handed to him from inside the house, and that he never handled the private keys at all!”

“Um!” remarked Chaney reflectively. “You mean that somebody inside the house quietly possessed him or herself of Canon Effingham’s private keys, went down to the study, took the church keys from the drawer, handed ’em out through a window or a door at a certain time, and then put the private keys in their proper place? That something like it?”

“That is it! That’s what I do think!”

“That, then, would certainly mean that there’s an accomplice inside that very innocent-looking residence! But---which of ’em is it? According to Canon Effingham, they’re all absolutely above suspicion.”

“He’d say that, of course. But we know that nobody’s above suspicion.”

“I prefer to say that everybody’s subject to temptation,” said Chaney. “However, which of ’em do you suspect?”

The Superintendent looked round. Our car was still stationary at the garden gate of the Rectory; it was, however, well away from the house.

“Oh, well,” he said in a cautious whisper, “there’s only one person in that house who’s what you might call a stranger, a new-comer. The secretary!”

“Miss Bolton?”

“Miss Pamela Bolton. That’s her full name. Been here---I live in Linwood, so I know---a few months. Came from London to be the Canon’s secretary and typist---he writes a good deal, and he’s busy at some big book on this parish and neighbourhood. Smart girl, no doubt---but who is she?”

“Canon Effingham says he had the most exceptional references.”

“Oh, I reckon nothing of references! Anyway, there’s nobody in that house but Miss B. that I should suspect. None of the servants, certainly. I know ’em, every one. Old and tried stuff, all of ’em. But she---new!”

“What do you suggest?” asked Chaney.

“Well, I think we ought to make some investigations into her antecedents and so on. Just to make certain that---eh? Now, as you two are in town, I should think you could do all that, on the quiet, and leave me to work on the murder of this chap Jim Skate. Of course, we’ll post each other up.”

“Have to be done very quietly, the investigation business,” remarked Chaney. “It would never do to let the Canon know what we were after, and yet I see no way of starting out except from him.”

“Oh, you can think a way out!” said the Superintendent. “Well, that’s my notion, anyway. That description, I suppose, will get into the papers at once? All right---see you again soon, no doubt.”

He was turning away, but Chaney stopped him.

“What are you going to do first?” he asked.

The Superintendent tapped the pocket in which we had seen him place the spanner.

“Try to find out somebody who sold this to somebody,” he answered. “Nice job, too! Then have a careful look round about here---I expect this man or men came in a car. General inquiries---and about Skate’s doings last night, of course. Plenty to do, I can tell you.”

“Going to call in anybody from the Yard?” inquired Chaney.

“At present, no. I have some brains of my own,” replied the Superintendent. “And I’ve two or three men who are not without. So long!”

We left him at that and, going back to town, busied ourselves for the next hour or two with the press agencies. Announcements based on the particulars we supplied appeared in the late editions of the evening papers that night; the London dailies and big provincial journals were full of them next morning. And at ten o’clock Chippendale poked his sharp nose into my office, interrupting Chaney and me in a discussion as to our next proceedings, and announced that the Reverend Canon Effingham was outside and desired to see us at once.

Canon Effingham came in a minute later. He held a telegram in his hand, and he was obviously excited.

“I received this just before nine o’clock this morning,” he said breathlessly. “I had scarcely begun my breakfast, but the message seems to be so important that I ordered out my car and set off to town immediately. And I thought---having reflected on matters during the journey---that I had better come to you before going to the place indicated.”

He held out the buff envelope and I took it from him and drew forth the bit of flimsy paper. The message had been handed in at the Strand office at 7.50 that morning and received at Linwood three quarters of an hour later. And this is what it said:

Will the Reverend Mr. Effingham kindly call on Mr. Henry J. Atherton, at the Savoy Hotel, London, at once?

I handed the message over to Chaney, Canon Effingham following the action and watching Chaney with anxious eyes.

“What---what do you think it means?” he asked.

Chaney made short work of that question.

“It means, sir, that we’re going to learn something,” he replied. “This is the first result of the publicity we gave to the matter yesterday afternoon. Is your car below, sir?”

“It is at your door,” replied Canon Effingham.

“Then Camberwell and I will go with you, straight away, to see this Mr. Henry J. Atherton,” said Chaney. “I happen to know who he is---a well-known American collector of pictures, books, objects of virtu, and so on, and, I believe, a multimillionaire, but whether in pounds or dollars, I don’t know.”

“But what should he know of our affair----” began Canon Effingham.

Chaney winked at me---behind our client’s back.

“Ah, what indeed!” he said. “However, we’ll soon know. There are some very strange things happen, sir, when a really clever crook gets to work. Tell your man to drive straight to the Savoy Hotel, if you please.”

Within twenty minutes we had sent up our cards to Mr. Henry J. Atherton and were being conducted up lifts and along corridors to a private suite of rooms overlooking the river. There we found an elderly gentleman standing in the middle of his sitting-room and, save for ourselves, alone. As we entered, he regarded us with a quiet, speculative smile in which I seemed to see some signs of amusement. Looking at him more closely, I realized a well-set-up, very smartly dressed man, keen-eyed, watchful, who, in my opinion, would not be easy to get round or deceive; in short, a man of affairs and of business.

Mr. Atherton ran the three of us over; his eyes grew keener when he looked at Chaney and me. But he addressed his first words to the clergyman.

“Reverend Mr. Effingham?” he said. “Pleased to meet you, sir. Your friends----”

“I have taken the liberty to bring these gentlemen with me, Mr. Atherton,” replied Canon Effingham. “Mr. Chaney---Mr. Camberwell. They are well-known inquiry agents----”

“Sure! I read their names in the newspaper in connexion with your loss. I might have communicated with Messrs. Chaney and Camberwell,” continued Mr. Atherton, “but I thought I’d rather have you yourself right along---glad to see you all three, anyway. And of course you’re wondering why I sent for you at all!”

“I am certainly wondering!” admitted Canon Effingham.

“Sure you are---but I dare say Messrs. Chaney and Camberwell never wonder at anything!” said Mr. Atherton, with something very like a wink at us. “Not in their line of business, no doubt?”

“Scarcely, sir,” observed Chaney. “We see too much for that. Perhaps, however, you have news for us that----”

“That’ll stir your admiration, eh?” interrupted Mr. Atherton. “Well, now, let’s see---here is something Canon Effingham had better look at, at once, and then we shall settle one question definitely. Step this way, gentlemen.”

He led us out of the sitting-room, past a closed door or two in the suite, into a bedroom, wherein were conspicuous various travelling-trunks and suit-cases. One of the smaller suit-cases he picked up and laid on a table in the centre of the room. Selecting a key from a big bunch drawn from his trousers pocket, he opened the suit-case and, turning back a fold or two of paper, revealed two objects lying within, at the same time facing Canon Effingham with a sudden question.

“Are those the two volumes stolen from your church safe?”

Canon Effingham’s lips opened; his fresh-coloured cheeks paled; he clutched at my arm, as I happened to be standing next to him.

“Merciful Heavens!” he gasped. “Yes! But---but----”

“But what?” asked Mr. Atherton, regarding his questioner with his characteristic, somewhat cynical smile.

“Where---how---did you get them?” replied Canon Effingham, still gasping.

“Sure, I bought them, yesterday morning,” said Mr. Atherton. “Here!”

“Bought them! Yesterday morning? From whom?” demanded Canon Effingham.

“Well,” replied Mr. Atherton, the smile deepening further, “he said he was the Dean of Norchester, but since hearing of your loss and the circumstances under which it was suffered, as narrated in the newspaper this morning, I conclude that he was not!”

“Your conclusion is not far from the truth, sir,” remarked Chaney. “In fact, I should say it was the truth.”

“The absolute truth!” exclaimed Canon Effingham, who was now purple with indignation. “The Dean of Norchester? The Dean of Norchester, sir, is Dr. Perrible-Browne; he and I have been close friends all our lives; we were at Winchester together and at Cambridge together. Certainly we don’t often meet nowadays, as he is in the north of England and I in the south, but---dear me, the mere suggestion that he should steal our----”

“Well, nobody ever said that he did!” interrupted Mr. Atherton, smiling again. “What I said was that the enterprising person who sold me these dear old books said he was the Dean of Norchester, which, of course, was adventurous on his part and also highly improper, not to say wicked. But come back to my parlour.”

He took the two old volumes from the suit-case and, shepherding us back to the sitting-room, motioned us to seats, and himself sat down facing us, the stolen property on his knees.

“Well, now, all about it!” he said, good-humouredly. “And a very pretty tale it is---now that I know more chapters of it than I knew yesterday. You gentlemen may not be aware that I have a little weakness for acquiring certain things, due, perhaps, to an undue development of my bump of acquisitiveness---quite harmless, though, and merely in the way of things like these, old books, old china, old pictures----”

“We are aware of your reputation as a collector, sir,” remarked Chaney. “World-wide, I believe.”

“Well, I have certainly bought pretty extensively in various European countries,” admitted Mr. Atherton, “and so I suppose a good many people know about me. Well, now, about ten o’clock yesterday morning this highwayman, calling himself the Dean of Norchester, sent in his card to me---here it is, beautifully engraved. I saw him. He produced these two books. He said that they were making a great effort to restore Norchester Cathedral and wanted ready money badly, and with the approval of the Bishop and the proper authorities he and his Chapter had decided to sell certain valuable old things out of the Cathedral library and museum. He had come, in person, to me, knowing my interest in antiquities, to offer me these two ancient volumes, on the charms and glories of which he expatiated most eloquently and learnedly---a very clever fellow indeed! Well, I fell to his temptation, and I gave him a cheque for the price he fixed. How much? Oh, well, five thousand pounds!”

“Cheque, sir?” demanded Chaney. “On a London bank? Crossed? Open?”

“Cheque on Marwood, Littledale & Co., Lombard Street. Open!”

With a sudden gasp Chaney leapt to his feet and made across the room to a telephone. But Mr. Atherton laughed and held up his hand.

“Exactly!” he said. “But that’s no good. The cheque was cashed at noon yesterday!”

I KNEW, of course, that this man was dead and that in all probability he had been murdered. The wooden walls of the old pew were high, and the light in its interior dim, and the man’s face was mostly hidden from me, but I fancied that on a bit of cheek-bone which caught the light I could see the mark of a terrible blow. For a moment longer I stood looking at him, without going nearer. He was a little chap, undersized, roughly dressed in poor clothes; the best part of his attire was a pair of good, serviceable nearly new leggings or gaiters. The boots which terminated these were hob-nailed; there was chalk on their soles. That is a chalk district.

I turned suddenly and, stealing back to the vestry door, attracted Chaney’s attention and beckoned to him. He came out. Canon Effingham followed; I waved him back.

“A moment, if you please, sir,” I said. “I want to speak to my partner.”

He turned into the vestry again, and Chaney followed me into the nave.

“What is it?” he asked. “Seen something suspicious?”

“Found something!” I whispered. “A dead man!”

He started, staring at me incredulously.

“Where?” he exclaimed after a gasp of astonishment.

“Come this way,” I said, and led him along the nave to the open door of the old pew.

“There!” I continued, pointing. “And now, what’s that mean?”

With a smothered exclamation Chaney bent down and looked closer.

“Dead enough!” he muttered, straightening himself again. “Nice mess they’ve made of his face and forehead, too, poor chap. Who will he be? Some villager, I’ll bet.”

“Canon Effingham will know him if he is,” I said. “Better fetch him.”

Turning in its direction, I saw that Canon Effingham was watching us from the vestry door. I motioned to him; he came hurrying to us. Chaney went to meet him.

“Prepare yourself for a shock, sir,” he said. “There’s a man laying dead in the big pew.”

Canon Effingham threw up his hands in horror as he started forward.

“In that pew!” he exclaimed. “The Squire’s pew? Who----”

He was at the open door by that time, and we stood aside and let him look in. Probably he recognized the man by his clothes; at any rate, he spoke his name without hesitation.

“Merciful Heaven!” he said. “Jim Skate! What---what does this mean? You say he’s dead? Why, how----”

“He’s as dead as a man can be, sir,” answered Chaney, stolidly, “and as to how, well, I’ve already got my ideas about that! But---who is he, sir?”

“A man living in the village,” replied the Canon. “A native, indeed. A sort of ne’er-do-well. And I believe he had the reputation of being a confirmed poacher.”

“Poacher, eh?” exclaimed Chaney. “Ah, that simplifies things! I see it, now! This chap was out poaching last night. He came this way---by the church. He saw and perhaps interfered with the fellows who carried out the raid on the safe. And---he paid for his interference with his life! They knocked him on the head and bundled his dead body into this queer old pew.”

“What is to be done?” asked the Canon, almost piteously. “This is---murder!”

“Murder it is, sir, hard enough, and now we want the murderers!” agreed Chaney. “Now we’ll just have to call in the official police. Will you go over to your phone, sir, and ask the Police Superintendent at Havering St. Michael to come here at once---and say that we are here, Camberwell and Chaney? He knows us. But---don’t tell him what the trouble is---we’ll tell him all that. And you might send your man for the nearest doctor---I want to find out how long this chap’s been dead.”

Canon Effingham hurried away, and Chaney beckoned me to follow him into the churchyard. Once outside in the bright spring sunlight, he drew a long breath and stretched his arms.

“Phew!” he said. “That’s better! Well, here we are again, Camberwell, faced with another murder!”

“You think it’s that?” I replied.

“Pooh, man, what else? Plain as that stone! As soon as I heard the parson say that this fellow was a poacher, I saw through it. What’s his name---Skate? Well, this is my reconstruction of it. Skate was out last night on one of his little excursions. Rabbits, I suppose----”

“Breeding season!” I objected.

“Oh, well, something---I’m not a countryman. But he was out. He came through this churchyard. He saw or heard something. Perhaps he saw a spot of light in that vestry. Anyhow, he was fool enough to interfere, instead of going for assistance. And---he got a tap on his head that settled him! That’s all there is to it,” he concluded with decision. “But come---let’s have a look round. For my belief is that the dead man was carried in there from outside.”

We began to search the churchyard. It was of considerable extent and of varied arrangement. On one side it sloped down to the main road and the village; on the other it extended to the outer edge of a thick wood which stretched along the hill-side. It was beautifully kept and planted, and the turf was well cropped and rolled. That last fact was all in our favour; we had not been searching about very long before we came on a stretch where the velvet-like surface showed the marks of much trampling and here and there exhibited, unmistakably, the imprint of heavy-soled and nail-studded boots.

“Those are Skate’s---the dead man’s,” muttered Chaney. “I noticed his boots and leggings particularly. I reckon this is where he held up the raiders; it’s between the church and the lych-gate, you see. And---hello, what’s this?”

As he spoke, Chaney moved quickly forward, to pick up from a flower-bed close by something which had suddenly glittered in a shaft of sunlight that pierced the light clouds overhead. He turned to me, holding the thing out for my inspection.

“A spanner!” he said. “Brand-new and stainless---except for those specks of rust caused by lying out in the dew all night and for---that! See what that is, Camberwell? Blood!”

I looked at the mark he meant; it certainly seemed to me something other than rust.

“You may be pretty certain that this is what that poacher chap in there was hit with,” Chaney continued. “Probably one of his assailants----”

“Why the plural?” I interrupted. “Do you think more than one man has been in at this job?”

“I should say at least two,” he replied confidently. “It doesn’t seem to me like a one-man job at all. What I expect we shall find out is that these fellows---let’s suppose there were two of ’em---made use of a car. They came down from town. They hid their car somewhere in the lanes close by this spot. They secured the keys we’ve heard so much about---never mind exactly how; we’ll go into all that later---and they got into the church and secured the loot. As they were coming away, Skate stopped ’em. One of them had this new spanner---don’t forget that it’s brand-new---in his pocket. He quietened Skate with it. Then they carried Skate back to the church and put him in the Squire’s pew.”

“How do you account for that spanner being dropped---just here?” I asked.

“I think there’s no need to account for it! It was dropped---or I shouldn’t be handling it. I should say that after using it to crack Skate’s skull the man who had it in hand shoved it back in his pocket, as he thought---and dropped it in that patch of soft grass. Anyway, here it is. A brand-new spanner, out of a motorist’s outfit. We’re going to trace its ownership, Camberwell.”

“Stiff job, I think, Chaney!” I said. “I guess they turn those things out by the scores, perhaps hundreds of thousands!”

“Never mind, my lad!” he retorted. “We’ll see. All sorts of ways by which we may get a bit of information on that little point. Hallo! Here’s his reverence coming back with somebody; doctor, I suppose.”

We went back into the church with the doctor and were presently listening to what he had to say. And that was little---Skate, he said, had been struck two violent blows on the left temple; yes, the spanner which Chaney showed him was probably the weapon which the murderer had used, and either blow was sufficient to cause death. And Skate had been dead, approximately, nine or ten hours. That meant, we concluded, that the raid on the church safe and the murder of Skate had taken place soon after midnight.

The Superintendent of Police, bringing a couple of his men and the village policeman, had arrived by this time, and to him the whole story had to be told. He was obviously not at all well pleased that Canon Effingham had sent for us before sending for him, and said so.

“I was not aware of the---the murder, as I fear it is,” pleaded the Canon, “and I wished to avoid publicity in respect of the robbery, as far as I could.”

“That’s impossible, sir!” snapped the Superintendent. “Crime is crime and can’t be treated as a private affair. We should have been informed at once---every hour that’s elapsed means additional facility to the criminal to get clear away.” He turned to Chaney and me; he knew us well enough, for we’d had previous dealings with him over the Wrides Park affair. “I suppose you’ve heard all about it from the Canon?” he suggested. “You’d better post me up.”

We went out into the churchyard with him and told him all we knew, Canon Effingham standing by and corroborating and amplifying where necessary. The Superintendent listened without comment, but he put a shrewd question at the end which Chaney had not put.

“Yes,” he said, when the full story had been told, “but there’s something I want to know about.” He turned to Canon Effingham. “Did anybody in your household, sir---I don’t include Mrs. Effingham---know where you kept those church keys---that you kept them in that particular drawer in your desk in the study?”

Canon Effingham made a wry face and shook his head.

“I should say,” he answered, slowly, “I should say---as they must have seen me take the keys from that drawer hundreds of times---that everybody did!”

The Superintendent shrugged his shoulders and turned to Chaney.

“What’s your notion about it?” he asked brusquely.

“Mine?” responded Chaney. “That’s soon told! That the man we want was well aware of the value of the articles deposited in the vestry safe. That he was equally well acquainted with Canon Effingham’s arrangements about his keys---private bunch and church bunch. That he came here last night, got the keys, effected the robbery, and was probably getting quietly away when Skate accosted him. Whereupon he settled Skate. Those are my notions. But I have still another.”

“Well?” asked the Superintendent. “Out with it! What?”

“That he had an accomplice!”

The Superintendent gave Chaney a sharp look.

“Inside---or outside?” he asked, significantly.

“That,” replied Chaney, “is just what somebody has got to find out!”

The Superintendent nodded and, walking across to the spot which we had previously pointed out to him as the probable scene of the scuffle, stood there for a minute or two in silence, evidently reflecting on the problems just put before him. He came back, glancing from Chaney to me and evidently joining us together in his thoughts.

“I think we’d better make a division of labour,” he said. “Canon Effingham fetched you two down on account of the robbery, eh? I think you’d better stick to that and leave the other matter to us.”

“Are not the two crimes indissolubly united?” remarked Canon Effingham.

“They are, sir, they are, no doubt,” agreed the Superintendent. “When we find the thief, we find the murderer; when we find the murderer, we find the thief. But Mr. Chaney knows what I mean. Let him and his partner go on the track of the missing articles and we’ll see to the other. Now, to start with, sir, those matters that have been stolen---they’re of real value? Not sentimental, but real?”

“They are of real value,” asserted Canon Effingham. “Great value---in money.”

“You couldn’t put a figure to it, sir?”

“I can say confidently that they are worth a great many thousand pounds!”

“And could realize that?”

“Most certainly!”

“Then there’s one thing you must do at once, sir,” said the Superintendent. “You must prepare a full description of the four missing articles---the two pieces of plate and the two books---and it must be supplied to the London press and to the news-distributing agencies this afternoon. And now if Mr. Chaney and Mr. Camberwell will give you their assistance in that matter, and will then see about the necessary publicity, I and my men will----”

He completed his sentence by a significant wave of the hand in the direction of the church and went off there. Canon Effingham, Chaney, and I returned to the Rectory; once within his study, Canon Effingham rang a bell, once, twice. An inner door opened; a lady appeared.

“My secretary, Miss Bolton,” said the Canon. “Miss Bolton, I want to supply these gentlemen with a description of the articles stolen from the vestry safe last night. If you will kindly take it down, we’ll afterwards revise it before you make a typed copy in duplicate. You have your note-book? Well, now----”

Miss Bolton spread out her note-book on a table near Canon Effingham’s desk and prepared to write, and Chaney and I sat down to wait. We listened, of course, to the Canon’s description of the lost valuables, but I confess that I was rather more interested in Miss Bolton herself than in what she was writing down---in shorthand. She was not at all the sort of secretary I should have expected to find employed by a man of learning, devoted to such dry-as-dust subjects as archæology and ecclesiastical history, for she was young, smart as to clothes and appearance, and therefore quite a contrast to the surroundings in which we sat. As for the rest of her it needed very little observation to see that behind her retiring and demure air there was an unusual fund of perception and intelligence; she had, in short, as Chaney subsequently observed of her, all the appearance of a smart young woman of superior mental powers.

We had to check and, as it were, edit Canon Effingham’s descriptions---he was inclined to be too technical and too prolix. Eventually we got what was really necessary for publication, and Miss Bolton was retiring to typewrite the revised matter when Canon Effingham stopped her. He turned to us.

“There is still something to add,” he said. “I must insist on its being added, and on due stress being laid on it in any publication of these descriptions. As these valuable articles were stolen out of my guardianship, I will give a reward of a thousand pounds to any person whose information---you understand?”

“Leads to their recovery,” added Chaney. “We understand, sir. Very good.”

“Add a sentence---clearly worded---to that effect,” said the Canon to Miss Bolton. “And then---two copies, if you please.”

Miss Bolton brought us the typed copies very shortly; we told Canon Effingham what we should do with them and went away. Outside, Chaney gave me a queer look.

“Um!” he said. “Cool old chap, his reverence, after all!”

“Why?” I asked, wondering what he meant. “What makes you say that?”

“What?” he answered. “Why, didn’t you notice that he sat down and gave that girl a calm, detailed description of the stolen goods, but never even mentioned to her that the theft of ’em had led to murder? I call that damned cool!”

I DON’T know whether Canon Effingham understood or appreciated Chaney’s remark; he turned a somewhat puzzled glance on him.

“You think----?” he said.

“Ah, I don’t know what I think yet, sir!” replied Chaney, still examining the drawer and the key which fitted its lock. “What I see is that this, as you say, is a special lock, with, of course, its own specially made key. Therefore, on the surface of things, it looks as if we must presume that when the drawer was opened for the purpose of abstracting the keys of the chancel, the vestry, and the safe, it was this key, from your private bunch, that opened it.”

“And that means---eh?” asked the Canon.

“That means, sir, that we must set up the theory that the thief first stole your keys from your dressing-room. Then he came down here to your study, unlocked this drawer, and abstracted the church keys. Then he went across to the church, entered by the chancel, passed into the vestry, opened the safe, and removed the four missing articles. Then, locking things up again, he left the church keys in the chancel door, returned to the house, and replaced your private bunch of keys in your dressing-room. And that, to me, is a most amazing thing! Why on earth should he, having accomplished his object, have troubled himself to come back here and put those keys of yours in your room upstairs? Extraordinary!”

“It certainly seems so,” admitted the Canon. “But the facts are as I have said---there the keys were!”

“Well, sir, then all I can say is that on those facts I must ask you a very plain, but very necessary question,” said Chaney. “What about the members of your household?”

Canon Effingham smiled---a very deprecating smile.

“Oh!” he answered promptly, “I can assure you that there is no one---no one at all!---in my house whom we could possibly suspect. There are not many of us. My wife---I suppose no one would suspect her!---my secretary, Miss Bolton---a lady of the highest character and abilities, for whom, when she came to me some months ago, I had the most satisfactory ref----”

“I was thinking more particularly of your domestic staff, sir,” interrupted Chaney. “Servants are sometimes got at, you know.”

“Our domestic staff is a very limited one,” replied Canon Effingham, smiling. “A cook, Mary Summers, who is elderly and has been with us nearly twenty years; a parlour-maid, Jane Bleacher, who has been in our service about ten; a housemaid, Jane Flint, a good, honest, unimaginative country lass; and a page-boy, Tom Deane. I don’t think----”

“No menservants, sir?” inquired Chaney.

“We have a gardener, the man you see working out there,” said the Canon. “Charles Lightowler, a plain, bluff Yorkshireman who has been in my employ nearly as long as the cook, Summers; he came to us soon after she did, I remember. But he does not live in the house.”

“All these people, then, are like---like somebody’s wife---I’m no great scholar, sir---beyond suspicion?” said Chaney, smiling. “Well, we must turn elsewhere. Now, have you had any visitors here lately that you----”

The Canon lifted his hands.

“That I could suspect of stealing my keys and robbing a church?” he exclaimed. “No, indeed!---most emphatically not. Anyone received in this house----”

“Would, I am sure, sir, be of the highest character---and ability---” said Chaney, dryly. “But you see, sir, in the exercise of my profession, if you like to dignify a detective’s work with that word, I have known a good many people of supposed high character and of unquestionable ability who, on occasion, and under the pressure of necessity---especially the latter---could do some very, very naughty deeds! I have known ladies of title who were thieves; men of rank who cheated; young society women who----”

“We are not acquainted with any of that sort of person,” interrupted Canon Effingham, a little loftily. “I should as soon think of suspecting my own wife as any of the visitors we have ever had. Of course,” he added, hastily, “I cannot vouch for the occasional visitors who come to see the church.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Chaney, cheerfully. “Now, that’s more like it, sir! Visitors to the church, eh? Though, to be sure, it’s difficult to see how a visitor to the church could get into your dressing-room during the night and abstract your private keys. But we’ll pursue that subject a little. You have many visitors to the church?”

“A considerable number in the course of a year,” asserted the Canon. “It is a remarkably fine and interesting edifice, and of historic associations, too.”

“Then I suppose a great number of people have seen the stolen valuables at one time or another?” suggested Chaney. “They must be quite well known to a lot of people.”

“No!” replied Canon Effingham. “They are not. There are two classes of visitors to the church. There are the people who can enter it whenever they like---it is open all day---and there are the people who are what one may call special and privileged visitors. It is only these---the last-named---who ever see the valuable things I have told you of. And those are never shown to anybody but by myself. That safe has never been opened except by me since it was built into the church wall; no other hands than mine have ever handled the missing chalice and paten, and if I have occasionally allowed bibliophiles or very distinguished visitors to take the two books into their hands, I can assure you that I have kept a jealous eye on them while they did!”

“Is there such a thing as a register of visitors in the church, sir?” inquired Chaney. “There is? Good!---I suggest that we go across and inspect it.”

Canon Effingham led us across the garden and through an intervening shrubbery to the church. The west door stood wide open; through it we had a vision of the big nave, with its high roof and massive pillars, and of the chancel in the distance. At the base of one of the piers of the chancel arch we found the register, a strongly bound volume laid out on a desk, with pen and ink ready to hand.

“This,” remarked Canon Effingham, laying a hand on the book, “is the ordinary register. It is ruled, you observe, for the name and address of the visitor and the date of visit. But I have another, a sort of private register, in the vestry, in which are the signatures of the people who have been allowed to inspect the contents of the safe. Some of those signatures may appear in both books---I think you will be most interested in the vestry register.”

“I think so, sir,” agreed Chaney. “These, after all, are signatures and only signatures and can’t convey much to me. Possibly you can tell something about the persons whose signatures are in the other book?”

“We will go into the vestry,” said the Canon. “But, first, observe the door in the south wall of the chancel. That is the door I spoke of whereby the thieves entered---as far as I know. They would then cross the front of the chancel to this vestry door---the vestry, you see, is situated in the north-east angle of the church. Look at the lock and key of this door; you see they are exceptional. Now here is the interior of the vestry---and there is the safe!”

He opened the safe door; the cavity was, of course, empty; he had already remarked that the safe had been specially built for the secure keeping of the valuables now missing from it.

“And here,” Canon Effingham presently continued, “is the vestry register. It goes back, of course, for some years.”

“Ah, but we needn’t turn back as far as all that, sir,” remarked Chaney. “Recent entries are what I want to see---entries made since, say, the New Year.”

Canon Effingham turned the pages of his register until he came to one headed in boldly made figures “1921.” He ran a finger down it.

“There have been only a few visitors---I mean visitors to whom the valuables were exhibited---since the year began,” he said. “I can, of course, tell you anything you want to know about them---all of them. You see what the general type is---two or three ecclesiastical dignitaries, certain eminent archæologists, an antiquary or two, two or three foreigners of distinction, and so on. Nobody, I think, likely to be a burglar in disguise!”

Chaney made no reply to the last remark. He was rapidly glancing over the names before him, and I, standing at his elbow, was doing the same thing. Suddenly he put a finger on a section of the page dated February 21.

“What is this group of names---some nine or ten; no, eleven in all---all coming together, sir?” he asked, turning to the Canon. “A Sunday-school party?”

“No, no!” replied Canon Effingham, smiling. “Those are the signatures of a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Sir Bartle Shardale----”

“The racing man?” interrupted Chaney quickly.

“Sir Bartle has racehorses, certainly,” assented Canon Effingham. “He is our local Squire, you know, living at Linwood Hall, just beyond the Rectory.”

“Yes?” continued Chaney. “And these people were his guests, at this date?”

“He had a large house-party just then---hunting people, most of them,” replied the Canon. “One day---owing, I believe, to an unusually severe frost---they couldn’t hunt, and a great many of them---all whose signatures are there---came over to inspect the church. I took them round myself, and of course showed them the treasures.”

“Ah, to be sure!” said Chaney, with affected carelessness. “Principal thing to see, of course. Did you expatiate on the value of the treasures, sir?”

“I may have done,” replied Canon Effingham. “Probably I did.”

Chaney’s note-book suddenly appeared. So did his pencil.

“I think I’ll just copy a name or two,” he said guilelessly. “You never know what may be useful, you know, sir.”

Leaving him to this occupation, with the Canon watching him, I went out of the vestry and back into the body of the church, to have a look round. There was a great deal in that church that was very old and very interesting, but what had struck me most as we walked up the nave was a great, square, horse-box of a pew which, Canon Effingham had remarked in passing, had for generations been sacred to the Squire. I wanted, out of sheer curiosity, to look inside it. And now, approaching it, I pulled open the heavy door and peeped in. The next instant I started back, staring. There before me, stretched out, face downward, across the flooring lay the body of a man---still, rigid.

WE had just settled down to business that morning---a Tuesday morning in the second week of April 1921---when the telephone bell in my room suddenly interrupted Chaney and myself in the middle of an argument. The next moment an unfamiliar voice asked a question:

“Is that Camberwell and Chaney?”

“Yes! This is Camberwell speaking.”

“This is Canon Effingham, Rector of Linwood---speaking from Linwood.”

“Yes, Canon Effingham---we know Linwood.”

“Can you and your partner come down to see me at once, Mr. Camberwell? Both of you?”

“Urgent business, Canon Effingham?---Serious?”

“Both urgent and serious!”

“Can you tell me the nature?”

“I had rather tell you in person. Can you come---this morning?”

I turned to Chaney, who was engaged in opening our letters.

“Canon Effingham, Rector of Linwood, wants to see us there, immediately. Won’t say what it is till we get there. But very serious and urgent.”

“Tell him we’ll go,” said Chaney.

I turned to the telephone again.

“We’re coming, Canon Effingham. Both! At once.”

“Thank you. There’s a fast train----”

“We’ll run over in our own car, sir. Be with you in about an hour.”

I put down the receiver and turned to my job---which was to complete the drafting of a brief memorandum for our invaluable clerk, Chippendale. Chaney in silence finished reading, sorting, and arranging the letters.

“Nothing here that can’t wait until this afternoon, or, for that matter, until tomorrow,” he said, rising from his desk. “Linwood, eh? Let’s see, that’s the pretty village just beyond Havering St. Michael, isn’t it?”

“That’s it---close to Wrides Park,” I replied, “where, Chaney, you made my acquaintance! Perhaps this is another Wrides Park case---murder.”

“A good burglary would be a pleasant change,” he remarked. “Any particular shade of excitement or that sort of thing in his reverence’s voice?”

“N---no,” I said, a little uncertainly. “Seemed a bit flurried. Besides, if it’s murder, he’d have been at the police, not us.”

“Family plate stolen, I suppose,” grunted Chaney. “Well, let’s be off---nothing here that Chip can’t attend to. Where is he?”

Chippendale, duly summoned from the eight-foot square cabinet in which he exercised his already busy brain, expressed his ability to deal with anything with which Chaney and I had the ability to deal---which was not far from the truth---and we left him in charge and went down to dig out our car from a neighbouring garage. We had only recently set up that car and were very proud of it; already it had proved eminently useful. And its usefulness on this occasion was proved anew by the fact that although Linwood is some twenty-seven miles south of London, we were in sight of its ancient church within an hour and five minutes of quitting our offices in Conduit Street, in spite of suburban traffic and constant other drawbacks.

Havering St. Michael, well known to Chaney and me, is a small, old-world market town; Linwood, two miles away, is an equally old-world village of timbered houses set in homely gardens and deep orchards and shut in from all the world by thick woods. It is just a bit of the old rural England, and very peaceful and quiet it looked that April morning when we ran our car off the main road up to the gates of the Rectory. There, on one side of us, stood the fine old fourteenth-century church with its splendid proportions crowned by the high and massive keep-like tower; there, on the other, was the scarcely less venerable-looking Rectory---really a seventeenth-century erection---its grey walls, high roofs, and queer chimneys rising from its beautifully kept gardens and shaven green lawns. Nothing could be more inviting, nothing more suggestive of peace, quietude.

“Not much like the scene of anything in our line, this, Camberwell,” said Chaney, as we got out of the car. “But look!---the good gentleman seems grave enough!”

I glanced across the lawn and saw Canon Effingham coming from his front door to meet us. I recognized him at once as an elderly clergyman I had often seen in Havering St. Michael at the time Chaney and I were investigating the Wrides Park murder---a tall, ascetic, rather distinguished-looking man, probably about sixty years of age, who was characterized by what is called the scholar’s stoop and had a trick of walking with downcast eyes, and hands clasped behind his back. He was walking in this way now, but he raised his head as he came close to the gate and, out of innate politeness, smiled faintly at us.

“It is very kind of you to come so quickly,” he said. “Your car, now? We have a garage. Or will you let the car remain where it is until----”

“Until we have had our little talk, sir,” replied Chaney. “As a result of that talk we might require the car in a hurry.”

“Oh, just so, just so!” agreed Canon Effingham. “It will, I am sure, be quite safe there---my gardener”---he indicated a man who was working close by---“will keep an eye on it. This way, gentlemen. Which of you, now, is Mr. Chaney, and which Mr. Camberwell?”

We informed him on this point, and he led the way across the garden to the house, where he conducted us into a big room lined from floor to ceiling with books. Closing the door carefully, he motioned us to easy chairs on either side of a cheerful fire of logs and was about to take a chair between us when he suddenly appeared to remember something.

“I am forgetful!” he said. “You have had a journey---you would like some refreshment? Wine? A little whisky?”

He pointed to a cupboard set in an angle of the room and was moving across to it, but Chaney stopped him.

“Nothing, sir, thank you, for either of us!” he said. “Later, perhaps, as you’re so very kind. But---business first, I think, sir.”

Canon Effingham sat down, rubbing his hands slowly around his knees and staring at the fire. He sat there for a moment and then looked from one to the other of us, shaking his head.

“What I have to tell you is really of a most extraordinary nature!” he said: “I have been reflecting on it, in all its various phases, for the last four or five hours, and I am utterly at a loss to understand what has occurred!”

“Perhaps we may be helpful, sir,” responded Chaney. “If you will put us in possession of the facts----”

“The facts are very strange---and very puzzling,” replied Canon Effingham. “Beyond me! I have not told anyone---except my wife, and my lady secretary---of them so far. I thought at first of the local police, but there are reasons---as you will see---for privacy, and even secrecy, at first, at any rate. I sent for you, Mr. Chaney and Mr. Camberwell, because I am acquainted with your work in the Wrides Park case, and, later, your work in connection with those dreadful affairs in London----”

“Hope yours is nothing of that sort, sir,” interrupted Chaney.

“It isn’t,” said the Canon. “No---it is not murder. But crime, yes! Theft---and in addition to that, sacrilege!”

“Ah!” exclaimed Chaney. “Something stolen from the church, eh, sir?”

“I had better explain everything,” answered the Canon. “And, to begin at the beginning, you are no doubt aware that our parish church is of great antiquity---one of the very oldest churches in this diocese. It preserves certain treasures. Four are of great age, and---though I could not estimate the exact amounts---of great value; I mean, value in money. There is a fifteenth-century chalice of solid gold---a most rare specimen---and a paten, also of solid gold, which matches it. There is an illuminated Book of Hours, on vellum, exquisitely bound, and its covers studded with precious stones. And there is a copy of the four Gospels, on purple vellum, bound in gold plates and ornamented similarly. Well, gentlemen, the fact is that these four valuable things have been stolen!”

“From here---from your house, sir?” asked Chaney.

Canon Effingham shook his head and looked sad.

“No!” he replied. “Perhaps I should have kept them in the house---and yet they could not possibly have been safer here than where they were. No---they were stolen from the church.”

“When, sir?” inquired Chaney.

“During last night,” replied the Canon. “I will further explain matters. These treasures, when I came here, some years ago, were kept in a stout oak box in the rectory---I don’t think many people knew of their existence, and of those who did, few, I believe, realized their immense interest and value. But, having been all my life a student of archæology, I did realize, and I took immediate steps for the safety of all four. I had a special safe built into the outer wall of the vestry, wherein to house these treasures, and a special lock placed on the vestry door. The key of the safe, the key of the vestry, and the key of the small door opening into the chancel have always been in my personal possession, and I can testify that no other hand than mine has ever opened that safe---until now! But now---the safe is empty!”

“When did you discover the loss, sir?” asked Chaney.

“This morning---very early,” replied Canon Effingham. “I am in the habit of rising very early. This morning, about seven o’clock, remembering that I wanted a certain register from the church, I went to this desk”---here he turned in his chair and indicated a massive oak desk which stood in the centre of the room---“to get the keys from that drawer----”

“A moment, sir,” interrupted Chaney, who had begun making notes in his little book. “Please particularize these keys. What were they on?”

“A substantial ring,” replied the Canon. “And there were, as I have said, three of them. The key of the chancel door; the key of the vestry; the key of the safe.”

“Proceed, sir, if you please,” said Chaney.

“The drawer was locked----”

Chaney held up a finger.

“On that point, sir, will you be most particular---for I see what is coming,” he said. “You are absolutely certain that the drawer---that drawer, which you now indicate---was locked?”

“Absolutely certain!” assented the Canon.

“But---you see, sir, how I anticipate---the church keys, the three keys already particularized, were not there?”

“They were not there!”

Chaney wrote in his book for a minute or two. Then he looked up.

“When had you last seen them there, sir?”

“Last? I put them there myself last night! Just before going to bed.”

“And locked the drawer?”

“Certainly, I locked the drawer.”

“Where did you put the key which locks the drawer, sir?”

“It is a key which is on my private bunch of keys,” replied the Canon, thrusting a hand in his trousers pocket. “This bunch. This is the key.”

“We will return to the subject of that key later,” remarked Chaney. “Well, sir, on opening the drawer---the locked drawer---you found the church keys gone. What did you do?”

“Well, at first I was tempted---scarcely the word to use, but you know what I mean---tempted to think that I hadn’t put the church keys there last night! But I knew---knew beyond question---that I had. I remembered most clearly---and most positively---the exact moment in which I had placed them in the drawer. As to what I did---well, after a brief consideration of the matter, I hurried across to the church. And I found the keys in the door of the chancel.”

“Outside or inside, sir?” inquired Chaney.

“They were hanging from the lock outside,” replied Canon Effingham. “The chancel door was locked. I turned the key, withdrew the bunch, and hurried to the vestry. The vestry door was locked. I entered the vestry. The door of the safe was locked. I unlocked it. The contents, as I have already said, were gone!”

“And---then, sir?” continued Chaney, still busy with his book. “You---what?”

“I returned to the house. No one---I mean none of the servants---had come down, and I went round the doors and windows, for I was certain that the house had been entered and my keys abstracted during the night. Everything was as it should have been, with one exception. There is a side-door in one of our ground-floor rooms which opens on the gardens. When I returned from the church, Bleacher, our parlour-maid, told me she had found it open on coming down this morning, though she was certain she locked it last night.”

“Yes,” said Chaney. “Well, sir---and anything else?”

“Nothing---until I telephoned to you,” said the Canon. “Except that I told my wife and my secretary, Miss Bolton, of what had occurred.”

“Did you make any inquiries in the house as to whether any of its inmates had heard any noise, any unusual sound in the night?”

“I have not done so yet.”

Chaney put his book and pencil away.

“There are two questions I’d like to put to you, Canon Effingham, at once,” he said. “The first is: when did you last see these valuable articles in the safe in the church vestry? The very last time?”

Canon Effingham replied promptly.

“Yesterday afternoon at five o’clock.”

“That’s positive?”

“Absolutely positive!”

“Then they have been stolen during this last night! Well, the next question---a most important one, sir---is about your private bunch of keys. Where do you keep that bunch? In your pocket, of course, during the day? Yes---but what do you do with it when you retire?”

“I place it with my watch, purse, small pocket articles, on a certain small tray on the table of my dressing-room. Always in the same place---I am a man of regular habits and never deviate from them.”

“Then you put the private bunch of keys in its usual place last night?”

“Certainly!”

“Was it there this morning?”

“Yes---just where I had placed it.”

“Do you sleep in that dressing-room, sir?”

“No. But my room is close by---opens from the dressing-room, in fact.”

“Did you hear any sound---unusual sound---from the dressing-room last night, sir?”

“No!”

“And this morning the private bunch of keys was in the same place on the table in which you had placed it last night?”

“The exact place.”

Chaney rose from his seat and approached the desk.

“The next thing I want to know,” he said, “is---is this sort of lock, this lock in the drawer in which you keep the church keys, a simple one to open? A special lock, too, sir? Um!---this, sir, is becoming a really interesting case!”

Joseph Smith Fletcher was born in Halifax in 1863, and attended Silcoates School in Wakefield. He gave us more than a hundred detective novels.

"Murder in the Squire's Pew" appeared in 1932, and has twenty-seven chapters:

1)    Theft---and Sacrilege
2)    The Squire's Pew
3)    The Brand-New Spanner
4)    Who is He?
5)    The Accomplished Imposter
6)    Again---who is He?
7)    That is the Man!
8)    Watson’s Cottage
9)    The Irate Lady
10)  Revelations
11)  Mrs. Pentridge’s Lodger
12)  Mr. Atherton Launches Forth
13)  We Begin to Hear News
14)  Brick Walls
15)  Facts and Gossip
16)  Enter Miss Bleacher
17)  The Club in Comma Street
18)  The Little Jew Tailor
19)  Who Stole the Cards?
20)  Progress---and Regress
21)  A One-Man Job
22)  The Friendly Greengrocer
23)  Seward's Safe
24)  The Archdeacon
25)  Blackmail
26)  Miss Pratt Takes Charge
27)  Steel Bracelets

Here is a list of many of his productions:
    Frank Carisbroke's Stratagem (1888)
    Andrewlina (1889)
    Mr. Spivey's Clerk (1890)
    When Charles the First Was King (1892)
    In the Days of Drake (1895)
    Where Highways Cross (1895)
    Mistress Spitfire (1896)
    Baden Powell of Mafeking (1900)
    Lucian the Dreamer (1903)
    Perris of the Cherry-Trees (1913)
    The King versus Wargrave (1915)
    The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation (1917)
    Paul Campenhaye (1918)
    The Chestermarke Instinct (1918)
    The Borough Treasurer (1919)
    The Middle Temple Murder (1919)
    The Talleyrand Maxim (1919)
    Scarhaven Keep (1920)
    The Herapath Property (1920)
    The Lost Mr. Linthwaite (1920)
    The Orange-Yellow Diamond (1920)
    The Markenmore Mystery (1921)
    The Root of All Evil (1921)
    Wrychester Paradise (1921)
    In the Mayor's Parlour (1922)
    Ravensdene Court (1922)
    The Middle of Things (1922)
    The Million Dollar Diamond (1923)
    The Charing Cross Mystery (1923)
    The Mazaroff Murder (1923)
    The Kang-He Vase (1924)
    The Safety Pin (1924)
    Sea Fog (1925)
    The Bedford Row Mystery (1925)
    The Cartwright Gardens Murder (1925)
    The Mill of Many Windows (1925)
    The Passenger to Folkestone (1927)
    Dead Men's Money (1928)
    The Ransom for London (1929)
    Murder at Wrides Park (1931)
    Murder in Four Degrees (1931)
    Murder of the Ninth Baronet (1932)
    Murder in the Squire's Pew (1932)
    The Borgia Cabinet (1932)
    The Solution of a Mystery (1932)

AS he stood staring at what lay on Mr. Hawkswood's table it seemed to Scarf as if he must be in some nightmare. Though he had burnt the calendar with his own hand, here was the all-important slip which seemed to have escaped the fire by magic. For the moment he was dazed and speechless.

"You can't very well deny that this is your handwriting, as I see that you have put your signature down here at the end," said Mr. Hawkswood. "Come now, you admit that this is your doing?"

"Yes, sir," was the faint reply.

He still felt thunderstruck, like a person who has for some time felt confident that he is winning a race, and finds himself hopelessly beaten in the last lap.

"I'm not going to ask why you wrote it," continued the master. "The document itself is a sufficient explanation of your motive. You thought you were leaving at the end of last term, so I presume it was written then, the intention being that I should not have a chance of reading it till you were safely out of the way. The language is hardly what you would have used to my face. Apart from that, doesn't this strike you as a very mean and cowardly thing for anyone to do?"

"I know it is, sir," began Scarf in a broken voice. "I'm very sorry. I don't think I realised what I was doing. I've been wretched about it ever since---wished I'd never done such a thing. I'd have destroyed it if I could."

"I've no doubt you would," returned Mr. Hawkswood dryly. "And that was why you were so anxious to get the calendar from the pavilion."

Scarf made no reply, he wished that some trap-door in the floor would open and let him through. He would not have cared much where he landed---anywhere to be out of this room.

"It's no good telling any more lies," continued the master. "You asked Maple to get the calendar for you. Did you tell him why you wanted it?"

"No, sir. He thought I'd put it there in joke, and wished to get it back."

"I can understand that you were alarmed when you heard that a watch and several other things had been stolen from the pavilion, but what seems to me almost incredible is that you should refuse to exonerate another boy, and tell any number of falsehoods rather than admit the truth. You must, of course, be aware that this boy, Maple, is looked upon as a thief?"

Scarf opened his mouth as if to speak, but words failed him.

"I suppose you would be shocked if anyone suspected you of having picked a person's pocket, and yet you are ready enough to rob another boy of his character. That is a small matter as long as you yourself escape. What did you do with the calendar?"

Scarf glanced at the slip of paper, the appearance of which on the writing-table was still a mystery. He almost wondered, if he told the truth, if it would seem like another falsehood.

"I burnt it, sir, down in the furnace."

"Oh, you burnt it---or rather, you thought you did."

There was a moment's silence. Though Scarf had heard the last words, they conveyed no meaning to his mind. When he had closed the furnace door the calendar was already in flames, and there was no possibility of its having escaped total destruction.

"You don't understand?"

"No, sir."

"Then I may as well explain. The calendar of which this paper is a part belongs to Mr. Rosvale. For a certain reason he lent it me towards the end of last term, which is why you found it hanging in this room. When we came back after the holidays I returned it; and, from that time onward, Mr. Rosvale has kept it in his bedroom. He neglected to tear off the dates for the last three days, and it was only this morning that he discovered the one we have here. The fact that you have made use of a nickname which we all know quite well is frequently applied to myself, made it clear for whom the message was intended. Mr. Rosvale thought it only right that I should read it. The calendar which you destroyed belonged to Jason, and it was he who hung it in the pavilion."

So this was the explanation of the mystery. Scarf felt completely crushed. He was overwhelmed with a sense of dismay at the complete and dismal failure of his plot to get the calendar from the pavilion. That he had burnt it seemed now to him a matter of no importance, but here he was destined to find himself mistaken.

"You and I are both leaving Rockfield in about three weeks' time," continued Mr. Hawkswood, "and I should have been disposed to treat this note with the contempt it deserves. I might have torn it up as one would an anonymous letter; but, since you have dragged another boy into trouble, it is no longer a personal affair between you and myself. I shall have to show this to Mr. Densham."

"I hope you won't do that, sir," whimpered Scarf. "I'm very sorry----"

"You are not sorry that you have caused another boy to he branded as a liar and a thief," interrupted the master sharply. "It is high time the whole thing was cleared up. To that end Mr. Densham must be informed what your real object was in using Maple as a cat's-paw, and then making out that you knew nothing about the calendar, or what had become of it after its disappearance from the pavilion. I will take you to him now."

Outside the Lower Fifth the majority of the school were too excited over the fact of the thief having been captured to give much thought to the question as to how the incident would affect Fred Maple. Up till the time the bell rang for morning school the boot-room was thronged with boys, eager to learn from Thorn's own lips a true and authentic account of exactly what had happened in the small hours of the morning.

"Look here, Thorn," shrieked Lanvey II., "why didn't you bash him. It's what I'd have done."

There was a shout of laughter, mingled with which rose a plaintive bleat of "Oh, shut up!" as certain young gentlemen, who objected to what they considered "swank" on the part of Lanvey II., promptly chastised him with slippers.

"What's the good of 'itting a chap who's got no fight in him?" demanded Thorn, working away with his brushes while he talked. "I asked him in as quiet a tone as what I'm speaking in now to put his 'ands up, and he was that scared he turned a back somersault down the steps. Nice thing for me if he'd broke his neck; I'd have been sat upon by a coroner's jury."

"I wouldn't have cared about that," squeaked the irrepressible Lanvey. "I'd have broken his----"

"O---oh, shut UP!"

While Thorn was being lionised in the basement, Jason was holding an informal levee in his study, so many members of the Sixth crowding into the tiny den that someone suggested that a placard, with "House Full" written upon it, should be affixed to the outside of the door.

"I guessed at once it was a bit of a rabbit snare," the cricket captain was saying. "It's lucky Newte picked it up, and that Farren conceived the wild idea of its being used for opening shutters with. I nearly kicked him out as soon as he began his yarn, then it suddenly struck me that a person who carried rabbit wires about with him wasn't the sort of individual we should care to have loafing round our pavilion. So I thought I'd go down and have a talk to Thorn, who might be able to throw some light on the matter. The rest you know already."

"Has this fellow, Mouser, as they call him, confessed?" asked Chase.

"Oh yes. The police found Hudson's watch and a sweater at his cottage. He seems to have begun to look upon the pavilion as a sort of happy hunting-ground, and probably thought it would be supposed that the things which disappeared had simply been lost."

"I'm glad I got that watch back," chuckled Hudson. "It can now be handed down to my children's children as the one I didn't wear at the Okechester match, when the famous Knott was laid low by young Maple."

"Hum, that reminds me," began Steel. "We know now who stole the watch, but that doesn't explain the disappearance of the calendar. I wonder if young Maple did take it after all?"

"Why should he say he did, if he didn't?" asked Chase.

The bystanders shook their heads. There was not one of them but would have been glad to hear that Maple was innocent; but, since the boy himself had pleaded guilty, it was difficult to see how he could ever be exonerated.

Chase's question was not answered till some hours later. As the school assembled at the end of the morning's work there was something in the headmaster's look, as he took his seat on the raised platform at the end of the big room, which made those who had grown weather wise fancy that there was tempest in the air. They wondered what was coming.

Mr. Densham rose, and, after giving out some minor announcements, paused for some moments as if to give greater emphasis to what was to follow.

"I do not propose," he began, "to dwell on a matter which I consider so disgraceful that I would rather not mention it at all. As you all know, a calendar disappeared from the pavilion. It was generally believed that a certain boy had stolen it. I am referring to Maple. I wish you now to understand that Maple was not in any way to blame, as he took the calendar believing that he was returning it to its rightful owner. The boy who posed as such afterwards flatly denied that he had ever asked Maple to do such a thing, or that he knew there was such a calendar in the pavilion. As it happened, he had his own private reasons---and very amazing ones they are---for wishing to obtain the calendar and destroy it. Scarf, stand up!"

Amid a deathlike silence the boy named rose to his feet.

"I wish you to own, in the hearing of the school, that what I have just said is correct."

Scarf certainly said something, but his reply was too low to be audible half-way down the room. What the Lower Fifth did hear was a whispered ejaculation from Dawson: "Well, I'm jiggered!" It was felt to be a comment which expressed the sentiments of all.

The order was given for dismissal, and the Big School began to empty, a hum of voices rising almost immediately outside on the gravel. Scarf managed to lag behind till several forms below his own had taken their departure. When at length he did reach the porch, he hesitated. The gathering in the quad looked unfriendly, and they seemed to be waiting for someone. Should he double back under pretence of having dropped a book, or should he attempt a quick dask for the basement entrance? Before he had time to weigh the question it was decided for him, for someone, coming up from behind, drove him forward and pushed him down the stone steps.

A moment later there was an ugly rush, accompanied with a chorus of catcalls and groans, school books were scattered wildly on the gravel, and Scarf, white-faced and terror-stricken, was the centre of a surging mass. Dawson and Richards, for once on the same side with all personal differences forgotten, had been the first to seize hold of him, and were now shaking him like two angry terriers.

It was a good thing that the scene was allowed to last only a few seconds. Waidman, who had lingered in the quad expecting that there might be trouble, now burst into the throng, pushing boys unceremoniously to right and left.

"Stop that!" he ordered. "Leave that fellow alone. You ought to know better than to handle him at all. I wouldn't touch him with the end of a barge pole. Now, clear off."

Scarf was the first to obey the order, and did so at a run, leaving his books where they had fallen, and where they were afterwards picked up by Thorn. He promptly hid himself, and for the next few hours went about in fear and trembling. But he had no cause to fear a repetition of the attack. As a resultof Waidman's action it came to be understood that the correct way to deal with Scarf was to have no dealings with him at all.

During his last three weeks at Rockfield he might have been some guilty ghost haunting the scene of a crime. No one spoke to him, no one appeared to be aware of his existence. Not a soul even troubled to find out what punishment he had received, though the fact that, for some days, little was seen of him out of school hours intimated that he was undergoing penal servitude of some kind.

Rusper narrowly escaped being mauled for his share in the scandal, though he defended himself by rounding on Scarf with a full confession of what the latter had done, and it was from Rusper that the school at large first heard the story of Mr. Hawkswood's calendar.

+++

"Now, try to look pleasant," urged Dawson.

He was holding the post-card camera, and his request seemed hardly necessary, since the four persons who formed the group about to be photographed all had broad grins on their faces.

Dawson peered for a moment into the view-finder, then raised his head.

"Reading from left to right," he began: "Number One, Mr. Maple, the supposed burglar; Two, Mr. Newte, who, with his six-horse power specs, discovered the piece of wire which led to the arrest of the real thief; Three, Mr. Farren, who saw in a flash how the whole thing had been done, and took the clue to Jason; Four, Mr. Platen, who---er----"

It was Fred Maple finished the sentence.

"Who is the burglar's best friend, and always has been!"

THE END