The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Читать онлайн книгу.
is possible for one look to be from another. The young surgeon’s eyes wander here and there, fix themselves nowhere, and rest two or three times upon the same object before they seem to take in the full meaning of that object. The eyes of Mr. Peters, on the contrary, take the circuit of the apartment with equal precision and rapidity—go from number one to number two, from number two to number three; and having given a careful inspection to every article of furniture in the room, fix at last in a gaze of concentrated intensity on the tout ensemble of the chamber.
“Can you make out anything?” at last asks Mr. Darley.
Mr. Peters nods his head, and in reply to this question drops on one knee, and falls to examining the flooring.
“Do you see anything in that?” asks Gus.
“Yes,” replies Mr. Peters on his fingers; “look at this.”
Gus does look at this. This is the flooring, which is in a very rotten and dilapidated state, by the bed-side. “Well, what then?” he asks.
“What then?” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers, with an expression of considerable contempt pervading his features; “what then? You’re a very talented young gent, Mr. Darley, and if I wanted a prescription for the bile, which I’m troubled with sometimes, or a tip for the Derby, which I don’t, not being a sporting man, you’re the gent I’d come to; but for all that you ain’t no police-officer, or you’d never ask that question. What then? Do you remember as one of the facts so hard agen Mr. Marwood was the blood-stains on his sleeve? You see these here cracks and crevices in this here floorin’? Very well, then; Mr. Marwood slept in the room under this. He was tired, I’ve heard him say, and he threw himself down on the bed in his coat. What more natural, then, than that there should be blood upon his sleeve, and what more easy to guess than the way it came there?”
“You think it dropped through, then?” asked Gus.
“I think it dropped through,” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers, with biting irony; “I know it dropped through. His counsel was a nice un, not to bring this into court,” he added, pointing to the boards on which he knelt. “If I’d only seen this place before the trial——But I was nobody, and it was like my precious impudence to ask to go over the house, of course! Now then, for number two.”
“And that is——?” asked Mr. Darley, who was quite in the dark as to Mr. Peters’s views; that functionary being implicitly believed in by Richard and his friend, and allowed, therefore, to be just as mysterious as he pleased.
“Number two’s this here,” answered the detective. “I wants to find another or two of them rum Indian coins; for our young friend Dead-and-Alive, as is here to-day and gone to-morrow, got that one as he gave the girl from that cabinet, or my name’s not Joseph Peters;” wherewith Mr. Peters, who had been entrusted by Mrs. Marwood with the keys of the cabinet in question, proceeded to open the doors of it, and to carefully inspect that old-fashioned piece of furniture.
There were a great many drawers, and boxes, and pigeon-holes, and queer nooks and corners in this old cabinet, all smelling equally of old age, damp, and cedar-wood. Mr. Peters pulled out drawers and opened boxes, found secret drawers in the inside of other drawers, and boxes hid in ambush in other boxes, all with so little result, beyond the discovery of old papers, bundles of letters tied with faded red tape, a simpering and neutral-tinted miniature or two of the fashion of some fifty years gone by, when a bright blue coat and brass buttons was the correct thing for a dinner-party, and your man about town wore a watch in each of his breeches-pockets, and simpered at you behind a shirt-frill wide enough to separate him for ever from his friends and acquaintance. Besides these things, Mr. Peters found a Johnson’s dictionary, a ready-reckoner, and a pair of boot-hooks; but as he found nothing else, Mr. Darley grew quite tired of watching his proceedings, and suggested that they should adjourn; for he remarked—“Is it likely that such a fellow as this North would leave anything behind him?”
“Wait a bit,” said Mr. Peters, with an expressive jerk of his head. Gus shrugged his shoulders, took out his cigar-case, lighted a cheroot, and walked to the window, where he leaned with his elbows on the sill, puffing blue clouds of tobacco-smoke down among the straggling creepers that covered the walls and climbed round the casement, while the detective resumed his search among the old bundles of papers. He was nearly abandoning it, when, in one of the outer drawers, he took up an object he had passed over in his first inspection. It was a small canvas bag, such as is used to hold money, and was apparently empty; but while pondering on his futile search, Mr. Peters twisted this bag in a moment of absence of mind between his fingers, swinging it backwards and forwards in the air. In so doing, he knocked it against the side of the cabinet, and, to his surprise, it emitted a sharp metallic sound. It was not empty, then, although it appeared so. A moment’s examination showed the detective that he had succeeded in obtaining the object of his search; the bag had been used for money, and a small coin had lodged in the seam at one corner of the bottom of it, and had stuck so firmly as not to be easily shaken out. This, in the murderer’s hurried ransacking of the cabinet, in his blind fury at not finding the sum he expected to obtain, had naturally escaped him. The piece of money was a small gold coin, only half the value of the one found by the landlord, but of the same date and style.
Mr. Peters gave his fingers a triumphant snap, which aroused the attention of Mr. Darley; and, with a glance expressive of the pride in his art which is peculiar to your true genius, held up the little piece of dingy gold.
“By Jove!” exclaimed the admiring Gus, “you’ve got it, then! Egad, Peters, I think you’d make evidence, if there wasn’t any.”
“Eight years of that young man’s life, sir,” said the rapid fingers, “has been sacrificed to the stupidity of them as should have pulled him through.”
Chapter V
Mr. Peters Decides on a Strange Step, and Arrests the Dead
While Mr. Peters, assisted by Richard’s sincere friend, the young surgeon, made the visit above described, Daredevil Dick counted the hours in London. It was essential to the success of his cause, Gus and Peters urged, that he should not show himself, or in any way reveal the fact of his existence, till the real murderer was arrested. Let the truth appear to all the world, and then time enough for Richard to come forth, with an unbranded forehead, in the sight of his fellow-men. But when he heard that Raymond Marolles had given his pursuers the slip, and was off, no one knew where, it was all that his mother, his friend Percy Cordonner, Isabella Darley, and the lawyers to whom he had intrusted his cause, could do, to prevent his starting that instant on the track of the guilty man. It was a weary day, this day of the failure of the arrest, for all. Neither his mother’s tender consolation, nor his solicitor’s assurances that all was not yet lost, could moderate the young man’s impatience. Neither Isabella’s tearful prayers that he would leave the issue in the hands of Heaven, nor Mr. Cordonner’s philosophical recommendation to take it quietly and let the “beggar” go, could keep him quiet. He felt like a caged lion, whose ignoble bonds kept him from the vile object of his rage. The day wore out, however, and no tidings came of the fugitive. Mr. Cordonner insisted on stopping with his friend till three o’clock in the morning, and at that very late hour set out, with the intention of going down to the Cherokees—it was a Cheerful night, and they would most likely be still assembled—to ascertain, as he popularly expressed it, whether anything had “turned up” there. The clock of St. Martin’s struck three as he stood with Richard at the street-door in Spring Gardens, giving friendly consolation between the puffs of his cigar to the agitated young man.
“In the first place, my dear boy,” he said, “if you can’t catch the fellow, you can’t catch the fellow—that’s sound logic and a mathematical argument; then why make yourself unhappy about it? Why try to square the circle, only because the circle’s round, and can’t be squared? Let it alone. If this fellow turns up, hang him! I should glory in seeing him hung, for he’s an out-and-out scoundrel, and I should make a point of witnessing the