10: News

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SANDERTHWAITE turned to the detective with a deprecating, apologetic smile.

“My sister Cora!” he whispered. “She cherishes a hatred of Land that seems to get worse as time goes on. But who’s with her----”

He turned into the room, and Liversedge followed close on his heels---to find Richard Marchmont standing, hat in hand, just within the doorway, looking highly uncomfortable. Facing him, on the other side of a centre table, stood a woman who, Liversedge was quick to see, had once been remarkably handsome, and whose eyes were still full of life and fire. Something had evidently happened just then to rouse her anger; her face was distorted with passion, and she took no notice of the entrance of her brother and the stranger.

“Only let me see Land in the dock!” she went on, facing Richard as if he were the object of her rage. “Only let me hear him sent off to be hanged!---I wish I could see that! Land?---I curse the very day I first saw him---he’s the cause of all this trouble from that day to this. I’d cheerfully give----”

“Come, come, Cora, my girl!” interposed Sanderthwaite, stepping forward. “You’re getting into one of your tantrums! And what’s it all about? This young gentleman----”

“Mr. Richard Marchmont!” whispered Liversedge. “Henry’s nephew! Didn’t expect to find you here, Mr. Marchmont,” he continued, turning to Richard. “I didn’t know you were thinking of coming this way.”

Richard moved towards the door.

“I came here to ask Mrs. Mansiter and Miss Sanderthwaite a question---about Mr. Lansdale, or Land,” he said. “Mrs. Mansiter is out, and I seem to have occasioned Miss Sanderthwaite some distress, so----”

He made as if to leave, but Liversedge stopped him.

“Half a minute, Mr. Marchmont!” he said. “I, too, came to ask a question of these ladies. This is their brother, the Mr. Lionel Sanderthwaite we heard old Daverill speak of last night---I just met him, accidentally. And I understand from him that his sister visited Mr. Henry Marchmont on the morning before his death. Perhaps Miss Sanderthwaite will just tell me----”

But Miss Sanderthwaite suddenly moved from behind the table and strode out of the room, still white with anger.

“I shall tell nothing---unless it’s in a witness-box, and there I’ll tell plenty!” she exclaimed. “I know who you are, you’re a detective! I saw you at the inquest. You catch James Land and put him in the dock---I’ll speak then. I want to see James Land hanged---do you hear? Hanged---and buried like a dog!”

She hurried out of the room, and Richard and Liversedge looked at each other. Lionel Sanderthwaite shut the door.

“There’s no dealing with her when she’s in one of these fits of rage, gentlemen!” he said. “The mere mention of Land’s name is enough to set her off. She’s never forgiven him! The fact is---it’s a delicate subject, a very delicate subject, but my sister---you’ll understand, I’m sure---my sister was---er---in love with Land!”

“What!---in the old days?” exclaimed Liversedge.

“When he ran away from Clayminster,” replied Sanderthwaite. “You see, she was always going to his office about those stock and share affairs, and he was a very good-looking fellow, and she---well, she was madly in love with him! And---well, he made off without as much as a word to her! She---she was always a very strong-natured woman, Cora! And---she’s got worse!”

“I’m sorry I mentioned Land’s name,” said Richard. “I only came to ask your sisters a question. I happened to see them talking to my uncle outside his house in Bedford Row the day of his death, and I wanted to hear from them now if he mentioned Land to them. I had no intention of hurting Miss Sanderthwaite’s feelings.”

“Oh, I am sure you hadn’t, sir, I am sure you hadn’t!” answered Sanderthwaite. “But Cora is---it’s the result of years of repression and brooding, sir. However, I can answer that question---indeed, I’ve just answered a similar question, put to me by Mr. Liversedge. Your uncle did speak of Land to my sisters---that’s why he sent for them that morning.”

“Yes,” remarked Liversedge. He nudged Richard’s elbow. “Let’s get out!” he whispered. “Nasty scene, Mr. Marchmont,” he went on, when they had left the house and walked away along the street. “Lot of suppressed fury in that woman!---what?”

“Very unpleasant,” said Richard. “She seemed to lose all control of herself at the mere mention of Land’s name. I’d scarcely been there a moment when you arrived.”

“Of course, I didn’t know you knew anything about her and her sister’s visit to your uncle,” continued Liversedge. “You saw them with Mr. Henry Marchmont?”

“Only for a minute,” said Richard. “I’d forgotten all about it until last night. It appears to be of no importance, anyway.”

“I don’t know!” remarked the detective. “Do you know why your uncle sent for Mrs. Mansiter and her sister? No? Well, I do---the brother told me. Your uncle told them that Land was back, a rich man, and that he, your uncle, was going to try to get money out of him---for them!”

“Well?” said Richard. “I didn’t know that. But---what of it?”

“Just this!” answered Liversedge, with a meaning look. “I wonder if he did!”

Richard paused and stared at his companion.

“Do you mean---did my uncle get money out of Land?” he exclaimed. “Why----”

“That’s it!---that’s what I do mean,” replied Liversedge. “Isn’t it much more likely that Land would ensure your uncle’s silence by giving him money---a good lot of money!---for these people, than make that silence certain, yet dangerous for himself, by murdering him? Of course! Look here! I’m beginning to think that Land, or Lansdale---same thing and one name’s as good as t’other---came to Bedford Row a bit earlier than he’d arranged, and that he did give your uncle money for the Sanderthwaites, and possibly for some other victims of twenty-five years ago---and then went away. Perhaps when Mother Capstick saw him muttering to himself---for you may safely bet it was Land that she saw---he was grumbling about being bled pretty freely! Eh?”

“Then---who shot my uncle?” demanded Richard. “Who----”

“Not Land, anyway!---if that theory’s right,” said Liversedge. “Who, indeed?---we’re about as wise on that point as we were at the beginning!”

Richard looked up and down the street as if he were lost. But he was not seeing the street nor thinking of it.

“What a muddle!” he exclaimed.

“To be sure, Mr. Marchmont---a muddle!” assented Liversedge. “But these things always are muddles! What do you expect? The thing is---to muddle through them!”

“If we could only find Lansdale!” said Richard.

“Just so!---and if and when we do, there’ll probably be more muddle than ever!” remarked the detective. “However, I’ve heard nothing from headquarters for twenty-four hours, and now I’ll go along there and find out if they’ve any news. If I hear anything, Mr. Marchmont, I’ll communicate with you; if you hear anything, send for me.”

He jumped on a west-bound bus and went off, and Richard returned to Bedford Row. He had many things to attend to. Throughout all of them ran the undercurrent of anxious speculation as to the whereabouts of Angelita and her father and doubt as to Lansdale’s guilt or innocence. At the end of a week from Henry Marchmont’s death, matters had not become any clearer. The police had not discovered Lansdale’s whereabouts nor traced the man with whom he left the hotel, nor the woman in whose company Angelita had gone away. No news of any sort came to the office in Bedford Row; the police had discovered nothing; apparently no information of any description had been given to Crench. It came to this, thought Richard---Henry Marchmont was dead and buried, and there he was, successor to his wealth, as wise as ever as to the real truth about the tragedy that had forced him to step into his uncle’s shoes.

And then, suddenly, and when he was least expecting it, came news. Returning to his rooms in Jermyn Street very late one evening, he found a solitary letter in his box. He knew at the first glance that it was from Angelita; at the second he felt sure that it had been written and posted under unusual circumstances. His address had been written in pencil; the handwriting was hurried; the envelope, a cheap, common thing, was creased and thumb-marked. These outward signs made him open the letter very carefully; he observed as he did so that the postmark was that of a place he had never heard of before---Malbourne. Still keenly observant, he saw that the single sheet of paper which he drew out of the dirty envelope had been torn from some book, a cheaply printed book---was in fact a fly-leaf. And these discoveries prepared him for the opening sentences of Angelita’s letter; it, too, had been hastily scrawled in pencil:

“I do not know how or when you will get this---please first thing you do, look at the postmark so that you may find out where the letter was posted. I don’t know where we are. I was brought here by a woman who said that my father had been taken ill; I and my maid left with her in a car she had waiting for us and were brought a long, long way into the country. My father is not ill; he and I and my maid are prisoners. We are in a big house and have every comfort and are politely treated, but we cannot go out without being watched and the whole place seems to be guarded. I do not know why we are here. I am going to try to get this posted, somehow, but we cannot leave the grounds and they are walled in. If you can find out where we are from the postmark, try to rescue us---there are men here who frighten me. I must stop.”

There was no date on this letter; but on turning to the postmark Richard found that it had been posted at Malbourne at seven-thirty that morning. But where was Malbourne? Fortunately he had an old gazetteer throwing about on his desk, and on consulting it he found that Malbourne was a small place, a market-town, in one of the wildest, least-populated corners of the South Downs. He determined to go there at once, and late as it was set about looking out a train. There was no train that night to anywhere in the neighbourhood of Malbourne, but there was one from Victoria at six o’clock in the morning and he immediately decided to travel by it, and began making his arrangements accordingly.

The arrangements were hurried; his valet was left in ignorance of his destination; he neglected the ordinary precaution of writing to Liversedge or to Simpson; consequently when he went out of his rooms in Jermyn Street at half-past five next morning not a soul but himself knew on what expedition he was adventuring.

He began to review matters as his train moved out into the still half-lighted country south of London. The interview with Cora Sanderthwaite had puzzled him. He had gone to Bernard Street to ask her and her sister one or two simple questions about their visit to Henry Marchmont’s office, and had found Mrs. Mansiter out. As soon as he had mentioned Lansdale’s name Cora had burst into a rage of white-heat fury. He had scarcely comprehended half of what she said in her rage, but it was easily to be seen that she cherished a hatred of Lansdale which nothing could appease and was all the more vindictive for having been saved up and brooded over for twenty-five years. Her brother’s explanation to Liversedge and himself gave some solution of it, perhaps, but Richard was too inexperienced in the ways of the world, and too innocent of feminine characteristics to understand how love, or what passes for it, could turn to such hatred as this woman displayed. And he was still puzzling over one sentence of hers, spoken after her brother and the detective had walked in on them.

“Land?---I curse the very day I first saw him!---he’s the cause of all this trouble from that day to this---to this!”

What did Cora Sanderthwaite mean by “this trouble”? Why did she reiterate the word “this”? Why did she repeat “this” yet again, with a strange emphasis? Was she referring to Henry Marchmont’s murder? Why should that affect her---particularly? What trouble, of any special nature, was hanging over her, or over her and her sister and brother, through Lansdale? There had been a curiously sinister significance in all she had poured out about Lansdale which was, to say the least of it, puzzling in the extreme. And Richard began to believe that Cora Sanderthwaite knew something---something which she would conceal, in spite of her unquenchable rage against Lansdale.

However, there was little use in speculating on an angry woman’s fury and what it really meant; his present job was to find Angelita. He had previously never been in that part of England in which he now found himself at an early hour of the morning---at an hour, in fact, in which Malbourne was just waking up to the new day’s business. It was a very small town, an old-fashioned, picturesque place surrounded on three sides by high hills, on the other by shelving moorlands; a place that presented vast possibilities to the landscape painter and the poet, and, thought Richard somewhat ruefully, might not be an unfitting background for mystery of anything but the idyllic and pleasing sort. He could see, as he walked from the railway station into the town, that the overhanging hills were wild and solitary, with deep recesses between them; he knew from a map which he had torn from his gazetteer that the surrounding country was thinly populated, and that miles upon miles of it had scarcely any human habitation. Angelita in her letter had said that she and her father were prisoners in a big house; Richard could see the towers, gables, chimneys of several big houses on the hillsides in the distance. Round about Malbourne, no doubt, there were many great country houses, old and new, but it was impossible to make a house-to-house visitation of them, and he had no clue whatever that would help him, beyond the postmark on the letter. He felt it out of the question to approach the local police; any application to them could only result in his having to give Lansdale’s name, and he knew well enough that every police station in the country was acquainted with that, through the notices issued by Scotland Yard and the advertisements inserted wholesale by Crench. It was like looking for a needle amongst a bottle of hay; all the same, he was going through with it.

He came across a quaint, old-world hotel as he turned towards the main street of the little town, and entering, ordered breakfast. And as he ate and drank he tried to puzzle out some plan of campaign—and had hit upon nothing satisfactory by the time he had risen. Nor did the smoking of an after-breakfast pipe give him any help; it seemed to him that he could do no more than wander round, keep his eyes and ears open, and trust to luck. And suddenly luck came his way. As he stood lounging in the window of the old-fashioned parlour in which he had breakfasted he caught sight of a smart car, on the front of which was a liveried driver and a liveried footman, passing rapidly along the street beneath. The car was closed, but its windows were large and clear, and there, lolling against luxurious cushions, and reading a newspaper, Richard saw the Chancery Lane lawyer, Crench!