The Trail of the Serpent (Detective Mystery). Мэри Элизабет Брэддон
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on. Richard, puzzled, bewildered, and unresisting, walked between them towards the railway station; but presently Mr. Jinks condescended to reply to his prisoner’s questions, in this wise:—
“You want to know what inquest? Well, a inquest on a gentleman what’s been barbarously murdered. You want to know who’s dead? Why, your uncle is the gent as has been murdered. You want to know why we are going to take you back to Slopperton? Well, because we’ve got a warrant to arrest you upon suspicion of having committed the murder.”
“My uncle murdered!” cried Richard, with a face that now for the first time since his arrest betrayed anxiety and horror; for throughout his interview with Mr. Jinks he had never once seemed frightened. His manner had expressed only utter bewilderment of mind.
“Yes, murdered; his throat cut from ear to ear.”
“It cannot be,” said Richard. “There must be some horrid mistake here. My uncle, Montague Harding, murdered! I bade him good-bye at twelve last night in perfect health.”
“And this morning he was found murdered in his bed; with the cabinet in his room broken open, and rifled of a pocket-book known to contain upwards of three hundred pounds.”
“Why, he gave me that pocket-book last night. He gave it to me. I have it here in my breast-pocket.”
“You’d better keep that story for the coroner,” said Mr. Jinks. “Perhaps he’ll believe it.”
“I must be mad, I must be mad,” said Richard.
They had by this time reached the station, and Mr. Jinks having glanced into two or three carriages of the train about to start, selected one of the second-class, and ushered Richard into it. He seated himself by the young man’s side, while his silent and unobtrusive friend took his place opposite. The guard locked the door, and the train started.
Mr. Jinks’s quiet friend was exactly one of those people adapted to pass in a crowd. He might have passed in a hundred crowds, and no one of the hundreds of people in any of those hundred crowds would have glanced aside to look at him.
You could only describe him by negatives. He was neither very tall nor very short, he was neither very stout nor very thin, neither dark nor fair, neither ugly nor handsome; but just such a medium between the two extremities of each as to be utterly commonplace and unnoticeable.
If you looked at his face for three hours together, you would in those three hours find only one thing in that face that was any way out of the common—that one thing was the expression of the mouth.
It was a compressed mouth with thin lips, which tightened and drew themselves rigidly together when the man thought—and the man was almost always thinking: and this was not all, for when he thought most deeply the mouth shifted in a palpable degree to the left side of his face. This was the only thing remarkable about the man, except, indeed, that he was dumb but not deaf, having lost the use of his speech during a terrible illness which he had suffered in his youth.
Throughout Richard’s arrest he had watched the proceedings with unswerving intensity, and he now sat opposite the prisoner, thinking deeply, with his compressed lips drawn on one side.
The dumb man was a mere scrub, one of the very lowest of the police force, a sort of outsider and employé of Mr. Jinks, the Gardenford detective; but he was useful, quiet, and steady, and above all, as his patrons said, he was to be relied on, because he could not talk.
He could talk though, in his own way, and he began to talk presently in his own way to Mr. Jinks; he began to talk with his fingers with a rapidity which seemed marvellous. The fingers were more active than clean, and made rather a dirty alphabet.
“Oh, hang it,” said Mr. Jinks, after watching him for a moment, “you must do it a little slower, if you want me to understand. I am not an electric telegraph.”
The scrub nodded, and began again with his fingers, very slowly.
This time Richard too watched him; for Richard knew this dumb alphabet. He had talked whole reams of nonsense with it, in days gone by, to a pretty girl at a boarding-school, between whom and himself there had existed a platonic attachment, to say nothing of a high wall and broken glass bottles.
Richard watched the dirty alphabet.
First, two grimy fingers laid flat upon the dirty palm, N. Next, the tip of the grimy forefinger of the right hand upon the tip of the grimy third finger of the left hand, O; the next letter is T, and the man snaps his fingers—the word is finished, NOT. Not what? Richard found himself wondering with an intense eagerness, which, even in the bewildered state of his mind, surprised him.
The dumb man began another word—
G—U—I—L—
Mr. Jinks cut him short.
“Not guilty? Not fiddlesticks! What do you know about it, I should like to know? Where did you get your experience? Where did you get your sharp practice? What school have you been formed in, I wonder, that you can come out so positive with your opinion; and what’s the value you put your opinion at, I wonder? I should be glad to hear what you’d take for your opinion.”
Mr. Jinks uttered the whole of this speech with the most intense sarcasm; for Mr. Jinks was a distinguished detective, and prided himself highly on his acumen; and was therefore very indignant that his sub and scrub should dare to express an opinion.
“My uncle murdered!” said Richard; “my good, kind, generous-hearted uncle! Murdered in cold blood! Oh, it is too horrible!”
The scrub’s mouth was very much on one side as Richard muttered this, half to himself.
“And I am suspected of the murder?”
“Well, you see,” said Mr. Jinks, “there’s two or three things tell pretty strong against you. Why were you in such a hurry this morning to cut and run to Gardenford?
“My uncle had recommended me to a merchant’s office in that town: see, here is the letter of introduction—read it.”
“No, it ain’t my place,” said Mr. Jinks. “The letter’s not sealed, I see, but I mustn’t read it, or if I do, I stand the chance of gettin’ snubbed and lectured for goin’ beyond my dooty: howsumdever, you can show it to the coroner. I’m sure I should be very glad to see you clear yourself, for I’ve heard you belong to one of our good old county families, and it ain’t quite the thing to hang such as you.”
Poor Richard! His reckless words of the night before came back to him: “I wonder they don’t hang such fellows as I am.”
“And now,” says Jinks, “as I should like to make all things comfortable, if you’re willing to come along quietly with me and my friend here, why, I’ll move those bracelets, because they are not quite so ornamental as they’re sometimes useful; and as I’m going to light my pipe, why, if you like to blow a cloud, too, you can.”
With this Mr. Jinks unlocked and removed the handcuffs, and produced his pipe and tobacco. Richard did the same, and took from his pocket a match-box in which there was only one match.
“That’s awkward,” said Jinks, “for I haven’t a light about me.”
They filled the two pipes, and lighted the one match.
Now, all this time Richard had held his uncle’s letter of introduction in his hand, and when there was some little difficulty in lighting the tobacco from the expiring lucifer, he, without a moment’s thought, held the letter over the flickering flame, and from the burning paper lighted his pipe.
In a moment he remembered what he had done.
The letter of introduction! the one piece of evidence in his favour! He threw the blazing paper on the ground and stamped on it, but in vain. In spite of all his efforts a few black ashes alone remained.
“The devil must have possessed me,” he exclaimed. “I have burnt my uncle’s letter.”
“Well,”