CHAPTER XI
THE FISH BAG
For all my recent experiences, I was not yet up to the subtle workings of the detective mind, and when Cherry said this I turned and stared at him in blank wonder.
“The boat?” I exclaimed. “Why, what of it? And which boat, Mr. Cherry?”
“There’s only one boat in question, my lad!” he answered. “The boat that Tom Scripture says he saw drawn up on the beach at Fliman’s End. He saw a boat there, and he saw a man! Now we suppose—I suppose, anyhow!—the man to have been your strangely-behaving uncle, Mr. Joseph Krevin. I think Mr. Krevin went to Fliman’s End, for purposes of his own, when he left your house during Tuesday night—that is, early on Wednesday morning. He left his Zellerquist & Vanderpant brandy bottle—empty, Ben!—there, anyway, in the cave. Yes—I feel sure Uncle Joseph was the big man in dark-coloured clothes whom Tom Scripture saw through his very good glass, bought, a bargain, on the Hard at Kingshaven. But, if he was—how did Uncle Joseph get the boat there?”
“Can’t follow you!” I said. “I don’t see what you mean!”
“You don’t see why he shouldn’t have a boat there?” he remarked, laughing. “But now let your mind go back to what we saw when we went there with Veller, and the boy and girl. We saw one set of footprints in the sand, Ben, the smooth, untouched sand, above high-water mark, and those prints led from the cave to the edge of the beach at that mark—to where the sands are no longer dry but wet from regular washing of the tides. From the cave, mind you! But nothing to the cave! Now supposing Uncle Joseph, when he left your house in the early morning, had appropriated somebody’s boat here in the creek—there are plenty of small boats about, as we can see at this moment: there they are!—and had pulled himself round to Fliman’s End, beaching his boat while he went up to the cave, there’d have been a track across those sands to the cave! But there wasn’t! And that leads me to think—what I’ve thought all along,” he concluded, with sudden abruptness. “Just that!”
“And that is—what?” I asked.
“That when Krevin left your house he went to Fliman’s End to keep a previously-made appointment!” he answered sharply. “Cut-and-dried affair, my lad! Somebody came to meet him there—with a boat. Who?”
“Tom Scripture said nothing about seeing any man in the boat, or about it,” said I. “If there’d been a man in charge of it”
“Scripture mayn’t have seen him—evidently didn’t see him,” he interrupted. “The man may have been sitting in the boat, waiting until Krevin went down to him—he even may have been lying down in the boat, asleep. But that’s how I figure it, Ben—somebody took a boat to Fliman’s End that morning to meet Uncle Joseph and took Uncle Joseph away from Fliman’s End in that boat, and that somebody must have been a somebody belonging to these parts! That’s flat!—and again I say—who?”
“Supposing the boat had come off from a ship—outside the bar?” I suggested.
“I think not, Ben,” he answered. “Tom Scripture sailed his craft outside the bar, and if he’d seen any vessel hanging about there, he’d have told us. No!—it’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking all through—if Krevin and the dead man, Cousins, were fellow-conspirators in the Kang-he vase affair, as I’m sure they were, I think they’d a third accomplice. And who the devil he may be licks me altogether—so far—though he’s probably the man whose handwriting is on the envelope I’ve got! However, here we are at our place—and there’s your good sister, looking out for us.”
Keziah was at the door of our house, gazing along the lane, her hand shading the sun from her eyes. At sight of us, she retreated indoors, and when we presently walked in she was doing just what I knew she would be doing—making the tea. She gave us an admonitory look.
“You’re late!” she said. “You should have been here half an hour ago. I knew what time that London train came in, and how long it would take you to walk down from the station, and I had tea ready to the minute—all but making the tea. And I want mine—long past my regular hour!”
“It’s very kind of you to have tea ready at all, ma’am,” said Cherry. “We’d have hurried if we’d known, but we found some highly important business awaiting us, and had to attend to it. Well, here’s Ben, home again, safe and sound, and in the best of health and spirits, ma’am—and I hope we find you so?”
Keziah muttered something about having a deal to try her spirits, and bade us seat ourselves. She was very silent while we ate and drank, and she asked no questions about our trip to London, and as she was naturally inquisitive and liked to turn everybody’s mind inside out about such things, I felt sure that something had happened during my absence. But I knew better than to ask questions; Keziah had taught me from childhood that it is a foolish thing to hurry other folks’ cattle, and I waited, sure that whatever was on her mind would come out. And out it came, when Cherry had protested that he couldn’t eat another mouthful nor drink another drop, and came, too, in a flood.
“Then if you’ve both done, I’ll tell you something that’s been on my soul ever since within an hour of you two going out of that door yesterday morning!” she exclaimed. “And a nice thing, too, for any respectable Christian woman as has always been proud of her family to have to keep to herself for a day and a night and a day beyond that! Such wickedness and goings on!—I marvel that some sinners has the impudence to show their brazen faces at honest people’s doors, let alone ask to sleep in their beds!”
“What’s the matter, ma’am?” inquired Cherry, quietly kicking me under the table. “You’ve evidently made some discovery?”
“And I should think I have made a discovery!” retorted Keziah, with one of her characteristic snorts. “And it’s not so much what it is in itself as the discoveries that’ll spring out of it! And in my best bedroom, too, of all places!—the very chamber in which my father and mother looked their last on this wicked world and went to a better—couldn’t be worse, anyway!—and their father and mother, on the father’s side, at least, before them, for that matter! Scandalous, I call it!”
“And the precise nature, ma’am?” asked Cherry, solicitously and at the same time giving me another sly kick. “Something that upset you, I’m afraid?”
“And who wouldn’t have been upset?” demanded Keziah, almost fiercely. “Everybody in this neighbourhood knows that we Heckitts—and we’ve been in this house two hundred years, and in this parish for twice as long, as you may see from the gravestones in the churchyard—has always been of the highest respectability; there’s naught common about us! And when I find things in my own best bedroom that suggests untold wickedness—but of course you don’t understand what I’m talking about,” she broke off impatiently. “You see, after Ben there had gone away yesterday morning, I decided I’d clear out that best bedroom; it hadn’t been cleared out since he”—she spoke the personal pronoun with intense scorn and bitterness, and we both knew that she referred to Uncle Joseph Krevin—“since he slept in it! So when I’d done my various jobs down here, I went up and set to work. But I never did any work, for I hadn’t been five minutes in that room before I discovered what I’m now going to show you—and you can draw your own conclusions from it!”
We followed Keziah upstairs to the best bedroom. I saw at once what preparations she had made for beginning a grand clean-up. The window curtains were looped; the valences were turned up round the bed; newspapers and dust-cloths were laid over the furniture; a sweeping-brush leaned against the wall, and a dust-pan lay at the end of the shaft, unused. But there everything had come to a sudden stop; whatever it was that Keziah had discovered, the discovery had taken all the heart out of her. And as she had a veritable passion for cleaning and dusting, being what they call house-proud, I knew that Keziah must have received a pretty smart shock.
The dressing-table in that room was draped with figured muslin, spread over a glazed linen cover—I remember how it used to crackle if you kicked against it. It crackled now as Keziah went straight to and tipped it, revealing, underneath, as commonplace an article as you could think of—a bass-matting fish-basket! It was the sort of thing that you can see by the dozen, hanging in any fishmonger’s shop, or thrown away, a cheap thing, soon done with, on refuse-heaps. I saw, too, as it lay there, a derelict object, where it had come from—there were black letters on its side: Shardham, Fish, Game, & Poultry Dealer, Kingshaven. And it was obviously empty.
“You look at that now!—take it in your hand!” exclaimed Keziah, indignantly. “The very idea of that being left in my best sleeping-chamber! Shameful!”
I think Cherry, who by that time was looking more puzzled than I had ever seen him during the course of these bewilderments, began to have some notion that there was either an infernal machine in the fish-bag, or that it contained some ancient crab or possibly defunct lobster whose presence would naturally be objectionable to any self-respecting housewife. Anyway, he approached the exhibit with diffidence, and took a hold of its looped handle gingerly, looking doubtfully at Keziah as he did so. But nothing exploded, and there was certainly no obnoxious odour—and his wonder grew greater.
“Yes, ma’am?” he said, innocently. “I see this bag—a fish-bag, evidently. It—it appears to be empty, ma’am!”
“Empty!” snorted Keziah. “Aye, I daresay—but not so empty as you’d think, young man! Now come!—didn’t you show me the other night some bits of shavings—packing stuff—that you’d picked up on the carpet in Miss Ellingham’s drawing-room? Of course you did!—I remember ’em. Now you look into that fish-bag!”
With a sudden gleam of intelligence Cherry drew the mouth of the bag open, and he and I looked inside. There, sticking to the rough sides of the matting, were, without doubt, bits, odds and ends, of shavings, the thin, wiry stuff that pots and glasses are packed in. He uttered an exclamation as he drew some loose ends out and laid them carefully on the smooth pediment of the mahogany-mounted mirror. But before he could do more, Keziah had her hand on his arm, twisting him round towards the old-fashioned four-poster bed.
“And look here!” she said, pointing to the floor, near the bedside. “There’s more of that stuff—shreds of it, dropped on my carpet! And though I’m not a detective, I can put two and two together as well and as quickly as any man Jack of you! Those shavings are identical with those that you brought away in your pocket-book from that drawing-room at the Grange! And when Joseph Krevin came in here that night on which he disappeared he had that vase with the foreign-eering name with him, in that fish-bag, packed in those shavings, and, as sure as my name’s Keziah Heckitt, he transferred it to his own bag in this room, and threw the fish-bag under my dressing-table—a dishonest ne’er-do-good that he is! And if I’m not right, then three and four don’t make seven—so there!”
Cherry had taken out his pocket-book. Silently he produced from it an envelope in which he had carefully stored the bits of stuff he had picked up on Miss Ellingham’s drawing-room carpet, and compared its contents with the shavings gathered from our own, and from the fish-bag.
“Of course!” sniffed Keziah. “Anybody with half-an-eye could see they’re identical! Joseph Krevin’s had to do with the theft of that Chinese pot! And I’ll warrant that that’s the first time that this house was ever disgraced by having stolen property brought into it—shameful!”
Cherry remarked soothingly that no stigma would rest upon the house because of Uncle Joseph Krevin’s evil doings, but Keziah refused to be comforted, and she stalked downstairs to wash up the tea-things.
Left alone in the best bedroom, Cherry and I looked at each other. “I think she put two and two together quite successfully, Ben!” he said. “There’s not much doubt that Krevin brought the vase here when he came in that night. But that other man—Cousins! What part did he play? What was he doing at Gallowstree Point? Who murdered him? Was it one man—or two?”
“Could one man, with nobody to help him, have tied another up to a post, as he was tied?” I answered, conscious of a gruesome recollection of what Keziah and I had witnessed. “If you’d only seen it”
“I know—I know!” he said. “Veller gave me one full description—Captain Marigold treated me to another. Yes, I suppose one man could—if he first got a rope round his victim’s neck. But why? What was the motive? And I’m wondering, Ben, if that precious uncle of yours knew anything about that murder before you and your sister came back to tell him?”
He went over to the window, and, drawing the curtain aside, looked out on the creek and on Gallowstree Point. The creek was glowing in the last light of the weakening sun; it looked very peaceful and beautiful in the evening calm. But the rocky promontory at the Point was dark and forbidding as ever, and the old gallows-post, with its finger-like arm and the iron cage-lantern swinging from it, stood up against the white surf-line at the bar, a black and sinister patch on the quiet scene.
“I don’t know whether he did or not,” I said. “All I know is that it gave him what Keziah calls a turn when we did tell him. He crumpled up!—and I had to get his brandy-bottle out of his bag.”
“You opened the bag—yourself?” he asked quickly. “What was in it, Ben?—not the Kang-he vase, of course?—then.”
“I saw all that was in it,” I answered. “There was precious little. Some socks, handkerchiefs, a collar or two, and the brandy-bottle. He was wearing his pyjamas, and his brush and comb were on the dressing-table.”
“Would there have been room in that bag, when he’d put those things in, for the vase as well—packed in shavings?” he inquired.
“Plenty!” said I. “It was a roomy bag—an old, well-worn one.”
Cherry was collecting the shavings as he talked, and presently, having put the fish-bag in a drawer, we went downstairs, and after a word or two with Keziah, who was still in a state of high indignation at Uncle Joseph’s temerity in using her best bedroom as a receptacle for stolen goods, we went out and up to the village, Cherry being intent on finding out if they knew anything at the post office of the handwriting on the envelope which we had found in the lodgings at Calthorpe Street. I posted him up, on the way, about the keeping of the post office. Mrs. Apps and her daughter Nellie kept it; they received and despatched all the telegrams, too; in fact, they did everything, and there was no one in the neighbourhood more likely to identify the handwriting of any inhabitant of Middlebourne. But neither Mrs. Apps nor Nellie, whom we found about to sit down to that very important meal, Sunday supper, recognised the writing which Cherry laid before them as that of any person known to them. It was not a common style of writing, however, but, rather, of a peculiar nature, and both mother and daughter considered it for some time as if it awoke some recollection in them.
“If I’ve ever seen that writing before, mister,” said Mrs. Apps at length, “it’s been on a telegram. Somehow, I’ve a notion that I have seen it, but when I couldn’t say. And if I have, that’s where it’s been.”
“You don’t send many telegrams from here, do you?” asked Cherry.
“A good many more than anybody would think,” replied Mrs. Apps. “You see, this telegraph office serves three villages. And nowadays you’d be surprised how those motorists call in and send telegrams—you see, we’re on the roadside, and it’s handy for them: we’ve a lot of telegraphic business that way.”
“Well, you keep your telegrams, don’t you?” suggested Cherry. “Just so—can’t you look them over, and see if you’ve got any in a handwriting resembling that?”
Mrs. Apps promised that she would do this, and we left the envelope with her and went away. Outside the Apps’ cottage we parted—Cherry to go to his lodgings at the village inn, and I to repair homeward, where Keziah was no doubt waiting to catechise me about London. However, I was not to come under her catechetical powers just then: as I walked down our lane I saw Miss Ellingham’s butler, Carsie, coming along on the other side, as if returning from a Sunday evening stroll. He was very prim and proper in his attire, and he wore a silk hat and primrose-coloured kid gloves. And at sight of me he hesitated for a moment, and then came across the roadway, plainly desirous of speech.