CHAPTER XXV.
JOHN CARLETON'S DOUBLE.
ThatKate and her aunt were now aware of the identity of John Carleton with the Dumpling, I was absolutely sure. I could point back, even, to the moment when—to the latter, at least—the suspicion which afterwards became certainty was first aroused.
It was when I was repeating, word for word, as they had fallen from his lips, the Dumpling's expressions about the poor, that the first sign of agitation had been noticeable in the elder woman. Then, when I went on to speak of his mania in regard to his being none other than Napoleon—then it was, as I clearly remembered, that the self-possessed and by no means impressionable Miss Clara had astonished and alarmed me by looking as if she were about to faint.
Doubtless she had heard him say the same thing before and in the same words, and so had no difficulty in identifying the speaker as her brother.
Kate, on the contrary, had apparently heard me out without connecting her father with the Dumpling. She had shown no sign of dismay or agitation, while listening to my story, and when her aunt had called her aside, at its conclusion, and had urged her to obtain from me the promise to give up my detective work, Kate had undertaken the task somewhat light-heartedly, as witness the episode of the uneclipsed eye.
It must have been after Kate had left me, that the elder woman had spoken of some great and impending danger. How much of the truth she had told her niece I did not know; but when the poor girl returned alone to speak to me, she seemed visibly aged, and was trembling in every limb. Then it was that, by her aunt's command, she forbade me ever again to enter the house. Were I to do so, John Carleton and I must sooner or later come face to face, and that I should be the means of arresting—perhaps of bringing to the gallows—the father of the girl I loved, was too horrible to contemplate.
Of all conceivable happenings, nothing could so irretrievably part Kate and myself for ever as that, whereas could Miss Claracontrive to obtain a medical certificate, to the effect that her brother was of unsound mind, and have him put under restraint, the further committal of crimes by him would effectively be prevented, and Carleton, once out of the way, Kate and I might come together again. That, I believed, was the end for which Miss Clara was working, and as it was an end which would spare Kate from being publicly branded as the daughter of a madman and a murderer, I could not but feel myself in sympathy with it.
That John Carleton and the Dumpling were one and the same man, there was no room for doubt. That fact explained everything. That was why Mr. John Carleton had absented himself unexpectedly from his home, and caused thereby some anxiety to his sister and daughter. He had intended no doubt to return thither, after superintending the carrying out of the projected kidnapping operation—instead of which my unexpected appearance, and subsequent escape from the opium den, had compelled him to devote himself to the clearing out of the bombs, chemicals, and other contents of the place, before the arrival of the police.The telegram from Glasgow was, of course, a fake. He might have instructed some accomplice of his to despatch a telegram from that place, or the whole thing, post-mark and all, might have been a forgery.
Which of the two suppositions was true I did not greatly care. It was enough for me to know that in discovering the reason for Mr. John Carleton's non-return to his family that night, I had discovered also the reason for several of his subsequent acts. I had discovered, for instance, his reason for watching No. 5, Taunton Square, not, as in my anxiety to form a theory of some sort, I had supposed—because one of the millionaires whom he was scheming to kidnap, and to hold to ransom, lived there, but because that house was his home, and because, before returning to its shelter, he wished to satisfy himself that all was secure, and that no police trap had been set for him. It was because the house was his own that he had taken shelter in the garden after the murder of young Grant. A hiding-place of some sort it was necessary speedily to find, for the police were everywhere on the watch; and once he could obtain entrance to hisown house he would be safe. Nor would that entrance be difficult to obtain. None knew better than he that, by the breaking of a certain pane of glass in the conservatory, he would be able to shoot back the bolt on the conservatory door; and but for my accidental presence, he would in all probability have effected undisturbed the purpose at which he aimed.
He had, no doubt, done his best to deaden the noise he made in breaking the glass; and, far away as the conservatory was from the living rooms and from the servants' quarters, the sound would have passed unheeded but for my abnormally acute sense of hearing. Even if it had been heard, and had Metcalfe or Miss Clara hurried thither, some plausible story of his having been accidentally shut out, or other explanation, would have been forthcoming, and no one was likely to give a respectable householder in charge for forcing his way into his own residence, or to connect the fact of his doing so with a recent murder.
That was why, having failed in the first attempt, he had returned, at dead of night—to discover me emerging from the wine cellar. That was why he knew therewas a gas-jet laid on there, though he had tried to explain away his knowledge of the fact, and had done his best to throw dust in my eyes, by telling me that he made it a rule never to enter a place without finding out all he could about it beforehand.
I could have kicked myself for my density in not having seen daylight before, but the possibility of connecting my lovely Lady of the Lake and her eminently respectable, if somewhat unconventional, aunt with a criminal of the Dumpling type, was so unthinkable that I may, perhaps, be forgiven for not having entertained it until it was thus forced upon me.
Of one thing I was certain—that whatever the explanation, the good faith of Kate and Miss Clara was above suspicion. Unknown to them, the man was leading a double life. They may, perhaps, have wondered at his absences from home, and at his trouble in contriving a pretended burglar alarm, which, I had little doubt, had been invented for quite another purpose than was pretended. The fact that he had fitted up a police call for protection against burglars, seemed to point to him as a reputable member of society and a person of means. Nodoubt, when he was absent from home, the use to which the thing was put was actually that of a burglar alarm. But when he was at home, I thought it more than possible that he would be at the trouble of making a disconnection (it could be done by the turning of a switch) between his house and the police station, and that in cases of emergency—as, for instance, a surprise visit by the police—the so-called burglar alarm could as effectively be used against the officers of the law as against burglars. The simultaneous locking of all doors and windows must necessarily delay the entrance of the officers who had come to arrest him, and in the meantime Mr. Carleton would no doubt be making good his escape by some secret means of exit, known only to himself.
That his sister and his daughter and possibly his servants were his dupes, and in no sense his accomplices, I was absolutely convinced. But dupes his sister and daughter could be no more. They, at least, knew something of the truth, if not the whole of it. Hence their letters to me; hence their endeavours to induce me to give up Dumpling hunting and detective work; and hence their disappearance. And now that I, too,knew the truth, later though my knowledge might be, I was confronted with the question, "How, in view of what you know, do you propose to act?"