CHAPTER VIIMY FIRST MEETING WITH JAMES MULLEN
And now it is high time that I told the reader something more about the circumstances under which I had seen James Mullen, and why I was so positive that he and the man in whose company I had travelled down to Southend were one and the same person.
Firstly, it must be remembered that I sat opposite to my travelling companion for more than an hour, during which time I had watched him narrowly; and secondly, that there are some faces which, once seen, one never forgets. Such a face was the face of the man I had seen on that eventful journey. His eyes were bright, prominent, and had heavy lids. His complexion was clear and pale, and his nose was well shaped, though a little too pronouncedly aquiline. The nostrils were very unusual, being thin and pinched, but arching upward so curiously that one might almostfancy a part of the dilatable cuticle on each side had been cut away. The finely-moulded chin was like the upper lip and cheek, clean-shaven, and the lips were full and voluptuous. Thick but fine and straight, straw-coloured hair was carefully brushed over a well-formed forehead, and the face, taken altogether, was decidedly distinguished, if not aristocratic, in the firmness of outline and the shaping of the features.
After the train had started, Mullen sank back into his seat and appeared to be thinking intently. I noticed that his eyes were never still a moment, but darted restlessly from object to object in a way which seemed to indicate great brain excitability. That he was excitable was clear from his vehement outburst about the fusee; but almost the next minute he had, so to speak, made amends for his apparent rudeness by explaining that he was peculiarly sensitive to smell, and had an especial dislike to fusees.
Nevertheless the sudden change in the expression of his face at the moment of the outbreak was remarkable. The previously smooth and unpuckered brows gathered themselvestogether into two diagonal wrinkles that met above the nose, which had in the meantime become beak-like, and the effect recalled in some curious way a bird of prey. He was soon all smiles again; but once or twice throughout the journey, when his thoughts were presumably unpleasant, I caught the same expression, and it was the fact of my seeing in the photograph this same unmistakable expression on the face of a man who was apparently a different person which had set me fumbling with such uncertain hand among the dog’s-eared pages of the past. The eyes, the hawk-like wrinkling of the brows, and the nose and nostrils were of course the same, but the addition of the beard, the evident swarthiness of the skin, and darkening of the hair led to my failing at first to connect the portrait with my fellow-passenger to Southend. But the missing link was no sooner found and the connection established than I felt that the identity of Mullen with the man I had seen in the train admitted of no uncertainty, especially as, after examining under a powerful lens, the photograph which the informer had given to the police, I satisfied myself that the beard was false.
My next step was to set on foot an inquiry into Mullen’s family history and antecedents. I hoped, and in fact believed, that the clue which I held to his identity would in itself enable me to trace him, but at the same time I fully recognised that circumstances might arise which would render that clue useless and throw me back upon such information as could be ascertained apart from it. That I should not be unprepared for such a contingency was very necessary, and I therefore commissioned a private detective named Green, whom I knew to be able and trustworthy, to ferret out for me all that could be discovered of Mullen’s past.
Having wished him good-bye and good luck, I started for Southend, whither I intended journeying in the company of the little talkative man with whom Mullen had had the brush about the fusees. I thought it more than likely that he was a commercial traveller, partly because of the deferential stress and frequency with which he interpolated the word “sir” into any remarks he chanced to make, and partly because of the insinuating politeness with which he addressed Mullen and myself—politeness which seemed to suggest that he had accustomedhimself to look upon every one with whom he came into contact as a possible customer, under whose notice he would one day have occasion to bring the excellence of his wares, and with whom, therefore, he was anxious to be on good terms.
That he lived at Southend I knew from an observation he had let fall; and after watching the barrier at Fenchurch Street station for a couple of hours, I saw him enter an empty third-class smoking compartment five minutes before the departure of an evening train. Half-a-crown slipped into the guard’s hand, with a request that he would put me into the same carriage and reserve it, effected the desired result, and when the train moved out of the station the little man and myself had the compartment to ourselves.
I knew from what I had heard of my companion’s remarks on the occasion when I had journeyed to Southend with him that, though talkative and inquisitive, he was also shrewd and observant, as men of his occupation generally are, and as it would be necessary to ask him two or three pertinent questions, I thought it advisable to let the first advance come from him.That he was already eyeing me in order to ascertain whether an overture towards sociability was likely to meet with a welcome, I could see. The result was apparently satisfactory, for after an introductory cough he inquired whether I would like the window up or down.
Always beware on a railway journey, when you wish to be left to the company of your newspaper, of the man who is unduly anxious for your comfort. ’Twere wise to roar him at once into silence, for your gentle answer, instead of turning away wrath, is often too apt to beget it. Speak him civilly, and you deliver yourself bound into his hands; for you have scarce made your bow of acknowledgment, sunk back into your place and taken up your paper again, before his tongue is hammering banalities about the weather at the thick end of the wedge he has inserted.
In the present instance, as the little man sat facing the engine and with the wind blowing directly in his face, whereas I was on the opposite and sheltered side, the window rights were, according to the unwritten laws of the road, entirely at his disposal. But as it suited my purpose to show a friendly front to his advances,I protested with many thanks that I had no choice in the matter, and awaited with composure the inevitable observation about the probability of rain before morning. From the weather and the crops we got to the results of a wet summer to seaside places generally, and thence to Southend. I remarked that I thought of taking a house there, and asked him about the residents.
“Oh, Southend is very much like other places of the sort,” he answered. “It’s got a great many pleasant and a few objectionable folks. There are the local celebrities (eminent nobodies I call them), who, it is true, are very important personages indeed, their importance in Southend being only equalled by their utter insignificance and total extinction outside that locality. And there’s a good sprinkling of gentlemen with ‘sporting’ tendencies. I must tell you, by the bye, that the qualities which constitute a man a sportsman in Southend are decided proclivities towards cards, billiards, and whisky—especially whisky. But take the Southend folk all round they’re the pleasantest of people, and a chummier little place I never knew.”
I made a great show of laughing at the littleman’s description, which, as he evidently laid himself out to be a wit, put him in the best of humours with himself and with me, and I then went on to say that I thought he and I had travelled down together on another occasion, and reminded him of the fusee incident.
He replied that he did not recollect me, which was not to be wondered at, for I had sat well back in the darkest corner, and had taken no part in the conversation. “But I remember the man who objected so to the fusee,” he went on with a smile. “Hedidget excited over it, didn’t he?”
I said that he certainly had done so, and asked with apparent unconcern whether the man in question was a friend.
“No, I can’t say that he’s a friend,” was the answer; “but I’ve travelled down with him several times, and always found him very pleasant company.”
I was glad to hear this, for it satisfied me that the fact of my having seen Mullen in the Southend train was not due to a chance visit which might never have been repeated. Had it been so the difficulty of my undertaking would have been enormously increased, for I should thenhave held a clue only to his identity, whereas I had now a clue to his whereabouts as well.
“But now you mention it” (which, as I had nothing to mention, was not the case), my companion went on, “now that you mention it—though it had never struck me before—it is rather strange that, though I’ve seen our friend several times in the train, I have never once seen him anywhere in Southend. In a place like that you are bound to see any one staying there, and in fact I’ve often knocked up against the same people half a dozen times in an evening, first on the cliffs, then on the pier, and after that in the town. But I can’t recall ever once seeing our fusee friend anywhere. It seems as if when he got to Southend he vanished into space.”
I looked closely at my companion, lest the remark had been made with intentional significance and indicated that he himself entertained suspicions of Mullen’s object in visiting Southend. Such was apparently not the case, however, for after two or three irrelevant observations he got upon the subject of politics, and continued to bore me with his own very positive ideas upon the matter for the rest of the journey.
If Mullen were hiding in the neighbourhood of Southend, the chances were that he was somewhere on board a boat. To take a house of any sort would necessitate the giving of references, and might lead to inquiries, and, on the other hand, the keepers of hotels and lodging-houses are often inconveniently inquisitive, and their servants are apt to gossip and pry. If Mullen had a small yacht lying off the town, and lived on board, as men with the yachting craze sometimes do, the only person who need know anything about his movements would be the paid hand, or skipper, and it would be comparatively easy to find a suitable man who was not given to gossip, and to engage him under some explanation which would effectually prevent his entertaining any suspicion as to his employer’s identity.
Before commencing my search for Mullen, I thought it advisable to look up an old friend of mine, Hardy Muir, a painter, who lives a mile or two out of Southend.
I was sure he would join heart and soul in an enterprise which had for its object the hunting down of such an enemy of the race as Captain Shannon; but to have taken him into my confidencewould have been ill-advised, for had we succeeded in laying hands upon that arch-conspirator, no one could have prevented Muir from then and there pounding the monster into a pulp. Personally I had no objection to such a proceeding, but as I considered that the ends of justice would be better served by the handing over to the authorities of Captain Shannon’s person in the whole, rather than in pieces, I decided to withhold from my impetuous friend the exact reason for my being in Southend.
As a matter of fact, it was not his assistance that I needed, but that of a very quiet-tongued, shrewd, and reliable man named Quickly, who was employed by Muir as skipper of his yacht. It occurred to me that Quickly would be the very person to find out what I wanted to know about the boats, concerning which I was unable to satisfy myself. Men of his class gossip among themselves very freely, and inquiries made by him would seem as natural as the curiosity of the servants’ hall about the affairs of masters and mistresses, whereas the same inquiries made by me, a stranger, would be certain to arouse suspicion, and might even reachthe ears of Mullen himself were he in the neighbourhood.
“All serene, my boy,” said Muir, when I told him that I wanted Quickly’s help for a few days on a matter about which I was not at liberty to speak for the present. “You’re just in time. Quickly was going out with me in the boat, but I’ll call him in.”
“Quickly,” he said, when the skipper presented himself, “this is my friend Mr. Max Rissler, whom you know. Well, Mr. Rissler’s a very particular friend of mine, and by obliging him you’ll be obliging me. He’s to be your master for the next day or two, and I want you to do just as he tells you, and to keep your mouth shut about it. Now Mr. Rissler’s going to have some lunch with me. In the meantime, you go into the kitchen and play‘Rule Britannia’on the cold beef and beer, and be ready to go into Southend with him by the next train, as he’s in a hurry and wants to set to work this afternoon.”
And set to work we did that very afternoon, the plan pursued being to make out a list of all the vessels lying off the neighbourhood, and to ascertain the owners, and whether there wasany one else on board. The task was not difficult, as Quickly seemed to know the name and history of almost every craft afloat, but the result was disappointing, for not all our inquiries could discover any one answering to Mullen’s description, or indeed any one whose presence was not satisfactorily accounted for.
Even the Nore lightship, which lies several miles out to sea, was not forgotten, for the very first idea which occurred to me in connection with Southend and Mullen was, what a snug and out-of-the-world hiding-place the vessel would make, were it possible to obtain shelter there.
Had there been only one man in charge, it was not inconceivable that he might—like the jailer who assisted the head centre, James Stephen, to escape from Dublin jail in 1865—have been a secret sympathizer with the conspirators, or at all events in their pay, and that a fugitive who could offer a sufficiently tempting bribe might succeed in obtaining shelter and the promise of silence.
I found on inquiry, however, that there was quite a crew on board, and that the lightship is frequently visited by the Trinity House boats,so the chance of any one being concealed there was out of the question. But though I dismissed the lightship from my consideration, I could not help asking myself if there might not be some similar place in the neighbourhood of Southend to which the objection which rendered the Nore lightship impossible as a hiding place would not apply, and even as I did so the thought of the dynamite hulks off Canvey Island occurred to me.