Mrs. Vanderstein's jewels

In vain Madame Querterot urged the danger of delay, and the perils which would attend on their keeping Barbara in the house for the next twenty-four hours. Bert was obstinately determined not to venture forth with her at this hour, for it wanted but a short time to sunrise and any delay would mean that the culminating act must be performed after the full darkness of the night had been diluted by the coming dawn. Even Madame Querterot was obliged to admit that there was something in his argument, and it was finally decided that he should wait till another day had passed.

In the meantime the Frenchwoman, as had previously been arranged, would lose no time in leaving England, carrying with her the jewels, which, she assured Bert, would be very easy for her to dispose of in her own country without detection, as she had old friends there who were “in that business.” She promised faithfully to send him one-half of the proceeds as soon as she received the money.

“And then, mon cher,” said she, “you and Julie will set up your little ménage. I think you will find my daughter less capricious when I am gone. She will be lonely, the poor little one, without her mother.” Madame Querterot’s voice quavered with emotion at the thought, and she lifted her handkerchief to her face to wipe away a tear – or was it to conceal a smile?

In spite of all assurances, she was unable to impart to Bert her confidence in their safety from suspicion.

“You’ll see, something will give the whole show away,” he kept saying, half for the comfort of hearing himself contradicted. “Murder will out; that’s well known.”

“It is impossible.” Madame Querterot spoke with refreshing conviction. “Absolutely impossible if you manage the canal affair with discretion. Consider. You walk innocently along a public path by the waterside, with a companion who, mon Dieu! is so maladroit as to stumble and to fall in. If anyone should be attracted by the splash, or she should scream and be heard, are you not doing your utmost to rescue her? – though, if possible, at a different place on the bank to the spot at which she displayed such unfortunate clumsiness – but that is a remote chance, for with proper care you will be able to manage so that the contretemps occurs at a point from which no noise will reach the ears of strangers.”

“I know where there’s a gap in the fence that runs along the park side of the canal,” Bert interrupted involuntarily.

“Mourning her loss,” Madame Querterot went on, “but silently, you understand, you continue your walk, and the world hears no more of Miss Barbara Turner. Even if her body is eventually found, there will be nothing on it which can be recognised as belonging to any particular person; and who would connect the wearer of the clothes I have provided with the fashionable young lady, who may, perchance, be missing from her home in Grosvenor Street? No one. I repeat, no one. With regard to Mrs. Vanderstein we are even more entirely beyond suspicion. In the first place nobody will even enter this house for some weeks at least. When they do so it is unlikely that the flower stand will be touched. Though the plants will be renewed there will be no occasion, as far as I can see, to disturb the soil to a regrettable depth. But admitting that luck may go against us and the body be discovered, it will not be identified. I cut off the initials that were embroidered on her chemise, and the rest of the clothing I will take home with me now, and burn before I start on my journey. And I have a still better idea for diverting any suspicion from us. Listen to this.”

And she expounded to Bert a plan, which made him open his eyes in unwilling admiration of the coolness and courage of the woman. Such a course as she proposed to adopt would have been entirely beyond his powers, and well he knew it; indeed at first sight it seemed to require an almost inhuman audacity to carry it out successfully. Her intention was to go to a large hotel at some French watering place, Boulogne or Dieppe for choice, and there to pass herself off as Mrs. Vanderstein for a day or two, not long enough for the Jewess’ friends to discover that she was there, but long enough to allow no doubt to exist of her having really been there when the fact should subsequently come to be known.

“I shall be far away by the time inquiries begin to reach to the other side of the channel,” she told Bert, “and the proprietor of the hotel will answer all questions to our satisfaction. I shall so contrive that it is not I who write my name in the visitors’ book. The manager will be so obliging as to do it for me when he hears that I have slightly injured my finger. But I shall not be feeling very well, I shall need repose after the journey. I think, yes, I think that I shall send for the doctor. When he is gone I shall give out that he has told me to keep to my room for a few days, and I shall therefore remain upstairs during the whole of my visit. When I leave I shall have established beyond doubt that the lady I impersonate was staying in the hotel when she was being sought in London, and after that she will be looked for abroad. Once the police have got the idea fixed in their stupid heads that Mrs. Vanderstein has left England, they may dig up her body as soon as they like, and I, for one, shall not feel a moment’s anxiety.”

“But,” objected the startled Bert, “the people at the hotel will describe you, and that will be a give away.”

“They will describe me,” said Madame Querterot airily, “or they will describe Mrs. Vanderstein. It will be the same thing. We are much alike, she and I. That is,” she added hastily, “we were much alike. In the matter of the colour of my hair, it is true, I must make a great sacrifice. But I have resolved to forget the value that not I alone have always attached to the golden hue of my chevelure, and to dye it black this same morning, before I start on my travels. You see that I shrink at nothing! I promise you that, with a dress such as the Vanderstein would have worn and a trifling alteration in my colouring, you yourself would have doubts as to who I am. There will be no risk to speak of, though it is worth a little to cover my retreat by a stratagem so masterly.”

With Bert’s aid the clothes belonging to the two ladies were folded and made into a tidy parcel, then with a few more words of advice, and a special recommendation never to come into the house without the precaution of wearing gloves – for she was deeply impressed with the dangers attendant on careless finger-prints – Madame Querterot said a hasty farewell, the early summer dawn being at hand, and in another moment the back door of the house had shut behind her vanishing figure.

Bert, left alone without the support of the woman’s ready resource and calm confidence, would have soon sunk again into despair if his time had not been too much occupied to admit of reflection. He was by now, besides, so tired and exhausted with the emotions he had undergone as to be incapable of coherent thought, and he was more than content to give his whole mind to carrying out the instructions he had received.

His first business was to get a brush from the cupboard under the stairs and to sweep and brush the floor of the hall, and the carpets of the stairs and drawing-room. He was awkward at the work, but made up in thoroughness what he lacked in skill. Little shining pieces of paste off Mrs. Vanderstein’s dress were scattered everywhere; he swept up quantities of them, but still some, better concealed than others, escaped his diligence.

Then having set straight such of the furniture as had been moved or disarranged, he quietly opened the dining-room shutters and those of the back drawing-room, for he did not wish the place to look uninhabited. The shutters of the front drawing-room, however, he could not bring himself to touch, though he seemed to hear the words of scorn which Madame Querterot would have used if she had still been present. He listened at the door of the library for some time, but not a sound came from within; at last, seeing no more to do, he stole quietly out of the house and back to his lodgings, where, in spite of the fears that pursued him and the dreadful memory of the night’s work, he soon slept the sleep of exhaustion.

Not for long, however. In a couple of hours his alarm clock awakened him, and he started up to face the new terrors which the day would bring. He had to feed the dun horse, he remembered; it would not do to annoy Ned.

After that came breakfast, for which he was surprised to find he had a certain appetite, and soon it was time to begin his daily routine at Ennidge and Pring’s office.

Every time the door opened that day, and on the days that succeeded it, Bert expected to see a policeman enter. But the evening came without any such nightmare materialising, and he even managed to snatch some more uneasy slumber during the evening, before he once more assumed his disguising beard and stealthily returned to the house in Scholefield Avenue, knowing that before him lay far the worst part of the whole business. He was too frightened for his own safety, however, to hesitate.

Madame Querterot had counted on that when she mentally balanced his regard for his own neck against what she would have designated his milksoppy squeamishness. It was hard to stay in that house of death alone and in the dark, waiting till the small hours, when his project might be best entered upon.

Bert was very, very sorry for himself as he sat, trembling violently, in an arm-chair in the dining-room. His pity did not extend to the other side of the partition wall, where the girl whose life he was about to take had sat in the same darkness and solitude for the last twenty-four hours. For her, Bert, thoroughly selfish by nature and education – as, cowering among the shadows in the grim company of his fears, he shuddered away the hours – was shaken from start to finish by no disabling pang of sympathy. Though at times his heart was like to burst with compassion, it held barely enough to meet the urgent need of Albert Tremmels; and when like her he heard the far-off murmurs which heralded the approaching storm and the angry boom of the thunder began to rumble closer and closer, though he started at each clap as if it were indeed the wrathful voice of the Avenger drawing near to him, his whole being cried out in resentful protest against this judgment that was being passed on him in the heavens, and against the certainty that it would be endorsed by mankind.

His intention was to wait till two o’clock, but it was not yet half-past one when he got to his feet, unable to face his solitary vigil any longer. Better get it over, he said to himself, like a patient in a dentist’s room who has got to have a tooth out. Only this tooth was not his. He had long since decided that the spade would be the best thing to ensure the sinking of his victim, and he had placed it, with a piece of cord tied to it, ready by the door.

Weighted with that heavy piece of iron, so he comforted himself, there would be a single splash and all would be over. He would be spared the sight of a struggling figure rising to the surface, perhaps crying to him for help or mercy, which above all things was what he most dreaded.

Fortifying himself with a mental vision, in which Julie, the hangman, and the body in the flower stand upstairs were all mingled, he unlocked the library door and pushed it open.

It is not necessary to tell again of his walk with Barbara through the drenching rain and clamour of the storm, which was more severe and prolonged than any of those that burst over London during a year remarkable for the number and fierceness of its atmospheric disturbances. The horror with which, at the last moment, as he was trying to tie the spade to Barbara before pushing her into the water, he beheld the running figure of the advancing policeman need not be described. In a frenzy of disappointment, rage and fear, he lifted the spade and struck at the girl again and again, missing her the first time, and, as the handle twisted in his weak grasp, bringing it down flat on the top of her head at the second blow, instead of edgeways as he was trying to do. He did not stay to see the result, but throwing down the spade fled for dear life.

His legs were long, and he could run fast for a short distance. In a few minutes he had lost himself and his pursuer in the darkness, but he still ran blindly on, till his utmost efforts would drag him no further, when he threw himself at full length on one of the park seats and endeavoured to still his panting, laboured breath. If the policeman should come upon him now, he thought his only chance lay in being able to simulate profound slumber. Luckily the working powers of this plan were not put to the test. Minutes passed, and no one came near him. It was some time before he could convince himself that he had eluded all pursuit for the present. When he was at last sure of it the fact heartened him wonderfully. If he could so easily escape when caught in the actual perpetration of a violent attack, it would bother the authorities indeed to fasten on him as one of those concerned in a crime so well concealed as that in which he had only unwillingly assisted.

It was when he remembered that he was quite ignorant of the damage he had inflicted on Barbara that doubts assailed him again. It seemed to him that he must have killed her. But if not … if not? Why then, even though she could hardly denounce him, she would not forget Madame Querterot. And Madame Querterot’s first line of defence would be to accuse him, as she herself had declared.

Curse the woman, how he hated her! From first to last everything was her doing; he wished, oh, how he wished that it was she he had killed. If he had thought of that sooner, he told himself savagely, all these troubles would have been saved. As things were he would probably be arrested that day.

He did not lose his head, however, and went back presently to Scholefield Avenue, where he cleared away the broken glass in the library and put everything in that room to rights, as he had already done upstairs. Then he conquered his repugnance and went out on to the balcony with his brush, and swept up a handful or so of earth, which they had not been able to remove with the spade.

He did not know how to get rid of the broken glass, as by now it was daylight and he did not dare go out to bury it in the garden; so he left it in the dustpan, and swept the grains of soil into an old newspaper, which he crumpled up and thrust into the back of the cupboard in the basement. Then he closed the shutters again, for he could not bear to be a moment in the room without the friendly screen that interposed between him and the flower stand. Finding, however, no more to do upstairs, he went down, and knocked out the pieces of the window pane in the library that still remained stuck in the frame; he thought that the empty space might well pass unobserved for a considerable time. In doing this he cut his hand, through the glove he was wearing in obedience to Madame Querterot’s reiterated commands, and some drops of blood fell on to the shining tin of the dustpan, but he wiped them off carefully and polished the pan with his sleeve as it had certainly never been polished since it left the shop and entered into domestic service.

At last his anxious mind could suggest nothing further, and he surveyed the results of his efforts with some complacency.

“I’m bothered,” said Bert to himself, “if the brainiest detective on this rotten earth could set his fingers on a clue now.”

CHAPTER XXVII

There was no sleep for him that morning, and he felt wretchedly ill and exhausted when the time came to go to the office. Mr. Ennidge, always kind, remarked sympathetically upon his looks, and he replied that he had been kept awake all night by the storm. The day passed without the expected appearance of the policeman, though he saw in the papers the first allusion to the disappearance of Mrs. Vanderstein and Miss Turner, and felt a horrified sinking at the heart when he read that search was being made, even though he had of course known all along that there must be a hue and cry.

He could not find any reference to his exploit in Regent’s Park, and he was afraid this meant that the girl had survived, for if he had killed her surely there would have been some mention of it. Yet if she were alive it was strange that Miss Turner should still be thought to be missing. Perhaps it was a dodge of the police to fill him with false confidence. He could not guess what it meant, anyhow, and at all events he was thankful for one thing: that he had cleared up and finished with Scholefield Avenue. If they thought they would catch him there again they were jolly well wrong. He would never set foot in the place again, so help him!

He supposed that his confederate had got clear away, and after his work was over he went to see Julie, to make sure that everything had gone well.

He found her in despair at her mother’s departure, or, rather, at the manner of it; and it was with the utmost horror and indignation that he learned that Julie – as she afterwards admitted to Gimblet – had been left absolutely penniless. All his savings had been willingly given to Madame Querterot to help her flight, but he had things which could be pawned, and he pressed Julie to accept his assistance. This she would not do.

Then she showed him the string of pearls, and he recognised it at once as the necklace Mrs. Vanderstein had worn. He had seen since, in the newspapers, that these enormous pearls were well known to every jeweller in Europe, and there had not been wanting forecasts to the effect that, if they had been stolen, an attempt to sell them would lead to the arrest of the thieves. He had wondered if Madame Querterot knew this, and reassured himself by thinking that, if she did not, the friends she was to consult certainly would. But now, with passionate resentment, he realised that she had known it very well and had left the necklace to Julie, careless of the suspicion that might fall on her daughter if she should be tempted to try and sell it. Nay, it seemed even possible that she deliberately wished to cast suspicion upon Julie; her action was otherwise unaccountable. But was it possible that she would risk not only his safety but her own, in order to gratify her spite against her daughter?

Before he had fully grasped the meaning of this last manœuvre on the part of the woman he hoped to call his mother-in-law, Julie was telling him of the clothes her mother had given her, and which she had already sold to a second-hand dealer. In hoarse tones he demanded a description of the garments, and, when he had received it, burst forth into such raging comments on the girl’s folly in selling them, and such furious imprecations at the wickedness and stupidity of her mother, that Julie took offence, and in a fit of anger as hot as his own, though less justly provoked, told him to leave the house.

He was all penitence in a moment, and she ended by accepting his grovelling apologies. All the same, the fire of his wrath was not extinguished, but smouldered with a dull red heat in his heart, ready at any moment to leap into a fierce flame, burning to consume and devour.

When the night came he could not sleep, in spite, or perhaps because, of his extreme fatigue and harassed nerves. Not till daylight did he drop at last into an uneasy slumber, from which a nightmare sent him leaping up in bed, disturbing the house with his cries. His irate landlady appeared in his room, in extreme deshabille, and her scathing references to delirium tremens gave him the idea of the brandy bottle. He bought one at the nearest public-house the moment he was dressed, and drank a good wineglassful before he opened the daily paper that he procured at the same time.

There was nothing new in it, however. Though it contained plenty of allusions to the missing ladies there was nothing about a girl being knocked on the head in Regent’s Park; and to Bert’s fears this silence appeared ominous as a denunciation. He found the brandy very comforting, and took it to the office with him. There his appearance – rendered still more ghastly by want of sleep than it had been on the preceding days – moved Mr. Ennidge to such genuine concern that, Mr. Pring being away and not returning till Monday, he told Bert he had better take a holiday on the next day, which would be Friday.

In the afternoon he was beginning to feel a little better and to hope that after all things were going right for him somehow, when at the eleventh hour Mr. Gimblet made his appearance upon the scene. From the moment when Bert understood who he was and what was his business, he gave himself up for lost. Some unsuspected gleam of courage came to his aid now, however – a sort of phantom of the real thing, found, it may be imagined, in the brandy bottle – and he made up his mind that, if he must be taken, it should not be due, at all events, to any revelation of his own.

The agony of mind endured during the hours which followed is not to be described in mere words. The dread, the suspense, the feeling of physical weakness which nearly overcame him as he witnessed the detective’s search, and the final horrible moment when he saw the body of the poor lady drawn from the grave where he had thought it hidden for ever from his own, if not from every other eye, would have strained the nerve of any man. It was, indeed, a heaping of horror upon horror.

What unthinkable clairvoyance, what supernatural omniscience had led Gimblet to pick out that house, of all the dwellings in the great city and its suburbs, for his investigations, was as much beyond Bert’s imagination as the means by which he himself succeeded in refraining from revealing, then and there, the part he had taken in the ghastly business.

To his almost incredulous astonishment no one seemed to suspect him, and instead of being removed in irons, as he expected, he found himself free to return to his lodgings, there to recuperate from the shocks he had sustained, in a deep, brandy induced sleep.

The next morning he was out early, and the first poster gave him the news that Mrs. Vanderstein was found, and staying at Boulogne. He bought the paper, and, even as he read the paragraph in which the news was related, made up his mind to spend the holiday given him by Mr. Ennidge in running over to Boulogne to see Madame Querterot. He had no definite idea in doing so. But his rage at her treatment of her daughter was still red-hot, and now was added to it a furious resentment at her departure from the conduct they had agreed she should observe. What possessed her not to stay quietly in her room? It was madness to have gone out; yes, actually to have gone to the Casino, the place of all others where she was most likely to be seen by some acquaintances of Mrs. Vanderstein’s. Did she want to lose them all by her folly and recklessness?

And in any case he could not rest till he had told her what he thought of her.

He went out to a pawnbroker’s, and by pawning his watch and some odds and ends of jewellery that had belonged to his mother collected enough money for the return journey. Then he took a taxi for the first time in his life, and drove to Whitehall. He had seen Gimblet’s address on the card he sent in to Mr. Ennidge.

Higgs told him, in answer to his inquiries, that the inquest would not be till the next day, so that there was nothing to prevent him from taking the ten o’clock train from Charing Cross. There was time before it started to put on his false beard, in an empty waiting-room, and to gulp down a strong dose of brandy at the bar of the refreshment-room. He felt safer when he had taken these precautions, for he had been haunted by an uneasy feeling that Higgs might have followed him from the flat.

The journey was uneventful, the sea as smooth as a pond. He hardly knew how the time passed before they arrived at Boulogne pier.

He walked round the harbour, asking the way by the simple repetition of the words “Hôtel de Douvres,” and following the direction in which the fingers of those who answered him were pointed.

Soon he came upon the hotel on the Digue, facing the sea. The name in golden letters a yard long danced before his eyes, but with a great effort of the will he steadied himself, and passed through the door into the hall.

As luck would have it there was no one about, and the only person to come forward at his entrance was a small page or lift boy.