CHAPTER XVTHE LADY OF THE LEOPARD SKIN
I gotlittle more out of my chief during the rest of the journey to town. The gold repeater came into action as soon as we were seated in the train, and I could only wonder what was the problem that was still baffling that keen intelligence.
To me, I confess, the solution of the mystery seemed now to be well in sight. On our return to town I expected to find that Inspector Charles had ascertained the present whereabouts of the explorer of Sumatra. From him it should not be difficult to learn the identity of the Leopardess, as I called her in my own mind; and I took it for granted that she was a victim of Weathered’s who had delivered herself out of his power by the use of the deadly fungus of the upas.
My one anxiety at present was the thought of the missing letters. I wearied myself with speculating as to whose hands they had passed into since the murder, and by what means they could be recovered and destroyed without their contents becoming known. I was as far as ever from seeing my way clearly when we arrived in Montague Street that evening.
A serious disappointment waited for us there. An official envelope stamped with the seal of NewScotland Yard lay on the table in the hall. Before I had closed the front door Tarleton had pounced upon it, torn it open, and scanned the note inside with an impatient scowl.
“Fool!”
He almost flung the Inspector’s communication in my face. It stated briefly that Captain Armstrong had met his death by malarial fever in Yucatan six months ago; and that was all. I hardly know what more Charles could have said, since he was quite ignorant why the explorer’s address was wanted. Tarleton sometimes failed to allow for the fact that his assistants were not all gifted with his own quickness of apprehension. However, I didn’t venture to defend the delinquent.
My chief’s irritation soon subsided, and as soon as we were seated at a well-spread table he acquitted the Inspector handsomely.
“After all, I didn’t take Charles into my confidence, as I have taken you, Cassilis. But now we must set to work in earnest. What do you suggest as the next step?”
The question was too much for me, as I had to confess. Perhaps I was too much worried about the letters to be able to give my mind to anything else.
The consultant smiled good-naturedly.
“Our only clue to Captain Armstrong’s friend is his book. Books are produced by publishers, and publishers pay royalties. By this time the publisher ofAcross Sumatraought to have heard fromArmstrong’s executor. And the executor should be able to put us on the track of the person who has come into possession of his effects.”
He paused to let this reasoning sink into my mind before he added, “I think this greatly simplifies matters. It is much more likely that Armstrong kept some of the upasine himself among his trophies than that he gave it away, to a woman, above all. Depend upon it, we shall find that it passed on his death to the lady of the leopard’s claws.”
He seemed about to say more but broke off abruptly, as though a new thought had struck him. “She will have to be handled carefully,” was all he said after a short silence.
It was impossible for me to listen any longer without reminding him of the other task before us.
“Have you made any plans yet for the recovery of the letters?” I asked anxiously.
“Ah!” He gave me a shrewd look. “You are quite right to interest yourself in that business, my boy. It is more important to protect Lady Violet than even to detect Weathered’s murderer. The living come before the dead, eh? I am inclined to trust that part of the work to you.”
I suppose I must have shown some dismay. My kindly chief proceeded to explain himself.
“We must begin with the assumption that everything that Weathered left behind him, including his correspondence, has become the property of his widow. If he kept these letters in his house theymust be now in her possession, unless her daughter has annexed them. I think you should go round to Warwick Street to-morrow morning, and ask to see Mrs. Weathered.”
I thought of the rather commonplace widow, who had appeared to be completely dominated by her daughter, and I did not hope much from the interview.
“I doubt if she will part with them without Miss Neobard’s consent,” I said with hesitation. “Even if she has them.”
“Try,” the physician urged. “I should not be surprised if that woman, quiet as she looked, was deeper in her husband’s secrets than Sarah Neobard was, in spite of her jealousy. Still waters run deep, remember. See her alone, if you can, and put the matter to her as a woman and a mother. Ask her how she would feel if her own daughter had been enticed to writing very confidential letters to a doctor, and those letters were now in a stranger’s hands. I fancy you will get something out of Mrs. Weathered.”
“And if I fail?”
Tarleton compressed his lips rather grimly. “In that case, one of us may have to show her that her own daughter is not yet out of the wood. We have both heard a confession from Sarah Neobard, and it was not made under any pledge of secrecy.”
There the matter rested that night. The next day soon after breakfast my chief set off to makeinquiries at the publishers ofAcross Sumatra, and I started on my difficult errand to Warwick Street.
Only my knowledge of the desperate position in which Violet had placed herself could have nerved me to the task in front of me. It was painful enough to have to plead for mercy from a stranger; the prospect of having to threaten the mother with her daughter’s prosecution for a crime of which I did not believe her guilty was so repugnant to me that I made up my mind beforehand not to act on Tarleton’s hint. My confidence in his sense of justice was very strong, but I felt that I was too much in the dark myself to accept such a responsibility.
The blinds of the house were down, a circumstance which I attributed to the presence of a corpse inside. But there was a long delay in answering my ring, and when the youthful butler opened the door to me his untidy dress and rough hair suggested that he did not consider himself on duty.
“Mrs. Weathered isn’t here,” he told me, without ceremony, as soon as I asked to see her. “The funeral took place yesterday and the ladies have gone out of town.”
“Where have they gone?” I demanded in dismay.
The youth put on a stolid look.
“My instructions are to say that letters will be forwarded,” he answered, with a touch of sullenness.
And I could get no more out of him. To all appearances Sarah Neobard and her mother had fled.
As soon as I had got over my first surprise, I felt more relief than disappointment. Tarleton himself would now have to take the matter in hand, and I had more confidence in his power to deal with it than in my own. When we met again at lunch time I reported my failure to him, and he heard me with a tightening of the jaws that boded no good to the fugitives.
“Our friend Sarah has made a mistake,” he commented. “She ought to have known that she could not hide herself very long if the police really wanted her. I think we can trust Captain Charles to let us know where she is before many days have passed. I wonder what she told her mother to persuade her to run away like that.”
Again some thought seemed to strike him which he did not see fit to disclose to me. He shook his head doubtfully, and then sprang to his feet and hurried to the telephone.
When he came back it was to tell me that the police had been put on the trail of the two women. “I have told them nothing about the letters,” he added for my consolation. “We don’t want them to get on the files of Scotland Yard if we can help it. I have given them a hint that I have something up my sleeve.”
He poured himself out a glass of wine and sipped it with a relish.
“I have been more fortunate than you this morning,” he resumed. “It appears that Armstronghad another book in the press when he died, so that his publishers have been in active communication with his executor—or rather his executrix.”
The correction startled me. Tarleton had laid some emphasis on the feminine termination.
“She is Armstrong’s sister, his only one. He had no other near relations, so far as the publishers could tell me, and with his solitary, wandering life he is not likely to have had any intimate friends. At all events, he left everything he possessed to his sister. I have made sure of that by looking up the will at Somerset House.”
The atmosphere seemed to become heavier as he spoke. At last the quarry was almost in sight. If the explorer had kept any of the mysterious poison it must have passed into his sister’s possession on his death.
“The publisher couldn’t tell me whether she was a married woman or a widow,” the specialist continued, “but he gave me her name and address: Mrs. Amelia Baker, Carlyle Square, Chelsea.”
“Carlyle Square!” I ejaculated. “That is within a stone’s throw of the Domino Club.”
My chief gave me a look of mild disappointment.
“Is that the only thing that strikes you? What about the name?”
“Amelia Baker.” I repeated the name to myself. “Baker”—surely one of the commonest of English surnames. There must be hundreds of Bakers in the London Directory. And yet I had a dim consciousnessof some association with it that I couldn’t quite fix. Tarleton’s patience gave out before my helplessness.
“Think? Where did you come across that name last?” He snatched out a slip of paper from his breast pocket and passed it across the table.
It was the list of names he had given me to copy three days before, the list of Weathered’s patients who had given numbers under which, as we had learned since from Violet, they could write to him. And at the bottom of the list there stood, “Mrs. Baker, 35.”
To me it looked like proof conclusive. This was Weathered’s latest victim, to all appearance, and in making her his enemy he had at last met his match. I remembered the waiter’s description of her at the dance in her savage dress and savage ornaments, as though she meant by her attire to signify that she was bent on vengeance. And now we knew that she was in possession of a deadly drug which could be given without fear of detection, as she might well suppose if her brother had not told her of his dealings with the great expert. Gerard had testified to her showing a repugnance for Weathered that looked like hatred. The case appeared to be complete.
Something like this I said to Tarleton, carried away by my delight at the thought that I had now no more to dread. But he did not show himself altogether satisfied.
“There is such a thing as having too completea case,” he remarked in a meditative voice. “Even if we are right in believing that we have found the Leopardess, as Gerard called her, we have still to prove that she murdered Weathered. The waiter himself told us that she left early, hours before he showed any symptoms of being poisoned. My instinct tells me that there is something in this business that I don’t yet know. There is no crime so difficult to detect as one in which a woman is concerned. In this case I find myself surrounded by women, and every woman is an enigma to the wisest man.—Now listen to this.”
He took out another paper from his pocket, and read aloud from it.
“This is the report of the Inspector. He has had men engaged in looking up all the names on that list, and the moment it struck me that Armstrong’s executrix might be the Mrs. Baker who figures there, I asked Charles to let me know what his man had found out. Here is what he writes: ‘Widow with independent means. Perfectly respectable. Favourably known to local tradesmen. Keeps two servants. Interested in scientific movements. Sister of well-known traveller. Visits freely in Chelsea. Has friends among literary men and artists. Also fond of animals, cats and birds. Not known to suffer from any serious form of illness. Has been attended by local doctor for small ailments. No connection can be traced with Weathered.’—That is the police report.”
It was a deeply disappointing one to me. My vision of the enraged woman in her leopard costume engaged in a murderous plot against a sinister blackmailer faded as I listened. This harmless, middle-aged woman, living quietly on her income in a good neighbourhood, and amusing herself with animal pets and such artistic and intellectual society as was within her reach, failed altogether to come up to the portrait my imagination had drawn.
Tarleton folded up the report and replaced it in his pocket. “You and I will call on this lady presently, and see if we can find out something more.”
I wondered what we should find. I was wondering still when the physician’s car drew up before a house in the pleasant little square named after Chelsea’s most famous resident since the time of Sir Thomas More. The house was only distinguished from its neighbours by an air of dinginess which seemed due to neglect. In spite of the two servants kept by the owner or tenant, there was a lack of neatness both outside and inside. The steps looked in need of scrubbing, and the paint on the door was disfigured with blisters. The door was opened to Tarleton’s vigorous knock and ring by a housemaid who had evidently not changed her dress since her morning’s work was done, and the hall into which we passed was more like an ill-kept lumber-room than the ordinary entrance to a lady’s house.
The explorer had evidently left many treasures picked up on his travels which his sister had takenno great pains to arrange to the best advantage. Savage weapons of various kinds were nailed up anyhow on the walls, one hiding another. Horns of different strange animals, either deer or oxen, surmounted such doors as we could see. Our feet were entangled in a draggled buffalo skin spread on the floor. The maiden who let us in took no notice of our trouble in following her, and offered no apology for the untidiness of the surroundings. She led the way upstairs to the first landing and threw open the door of a front room which was no doubt dignified with the title of drawing-room.
“I’ll tell the missus you’re here.”
With this ungracious promise, and without suggesting that we should sit down, she shut us in and left us. Tarleton glanced round him with a humorous expression.
“I am reminded of what someone said of a famous explorer—‘Sir —— is admirably qualified to deal with savages because he is just as savage as they are.’ Captain Armstrong seems to have shared the same qualification with his sister, judging from her household.”
The drawing-room resembled a museum as ill-arranged as the hall. Cases of stuffed birds met the eye in every corner. A badly preserved fish of enormous size, lacking an eye, monopolized one wall; I inclined to think it was a tarpon. The space was choked with rickety small tables, and those pieces of furniture dear to the past generation as chiffoniersand what-nots, every one laden with curiosities in the way of shells, savage ornaments, beads and rude knives in sheaths of coloured leather. But what naturally drew our attention most were the skins that strewed the floor and made all movement well-nigh impossible, unless by way of skips and jumps. Every known species of Africa, I should think, was represented, except perhaps the elephant. Two of those in sight were leopards, and my chief gave me a quick look of triumph as he pointed them out. Neither of them, none of the skins in fact, were mounted on cloth in the common fashion. The owner of this weird collection could have picked one up and fastened it across her shoulders without the least difficulty.
Mrs. Baker took some time to appear. Although we had postponed our call till four o’clock, it is probable that her siesta had been interrupted. Certainly she had the air of having only been roused from sleep long enough to make a rather imperfect toilet. Her hair could best be described as touzled, but it was of that light straw colour that lends itself to a pleasing disorder. The face beneath was bright and birdlike, animated by an expression of lively interest amounting to perkiness. The dress, I can only suppose, was intended to rank as a tea-gown, although it was strongly suggestive of a dressing-gown. But whatever impressions of slovenliness and neglect were produced by Mrs. Baker’s appearance and surroundings, they were almost instantlydissipated by her manner, which was the perfection of genuine cordiality and ease.
“I’m ashamed to have kept you waiting, Sir Frank!” she exclaimed, grasping me warmly by the hand. “But dear me,” she proceeded before I could speak, “if I haven’t mistaken the son for the father! How areyou, Sir Frank! I declare the likeness would deceive anybody.”
My chief extricated his hand from her friendly clutch with a smile.
“You flatter me, madam. Dr. Cassilis, I regret to say, is no relation to me, though he is good enough to assist me.”
Mrs. Baker was not in the least embarrassed. Her smile at the mistake was heartier than either of ours.
“Just like me,” she avowed good-naturedly. “If there’s a chance for me to put my foot in it, I’m sure to do it. And I know you so well, by name, of course. To think of all our diseases being due just to tiny weeny insects! I’m sure everybody ought to be grateful to you.”
It was apparent that there was some slight confusion in the mind of our hostess between Tarleton and some other scientist of equal if not greater eminence—possibly the immortal Pasteur. Meanwhile, one thought possessed my mind to an extent that made me indifferent to everything else. This chatty, blundering, good-natured creature could by no conceivable possibility be connected with the tragedyin the Domino Club. Whatever part she had played and whether she had or had not been present on the fateful night, it was no less than absurd to credit her with any responsibility for Weathered’s death.
With an agility which I could only envy she skipped lightly over the many pitfalls that bestrewed the floor, and stage-managed us both into comfortable chairs, while she took up an attitude on a couch smothered in cushions, which faintly recalled Thorwaldsen’s statue of Ariadne.
“I hope you will accept my condolences on Captain Armstrong’s death, if it’s not too late,” the consultant contrived to slip in presently.
The bereaved sister brightened up. Doubtless this was the clue she had wanted to our reason for calling on her.
“To be sure!” she exclaimed. “You knew my brother, of course. Everybody knew him. What a man he was! The greatest explorer who ever lived, so I think. He would have discovered America, and Livingstone, and the North Pole, if only those other people hadn’t done it first.” Her face fell for a moment, as she added, “He was careless in money matters, I know. It was his open, generous nature. Did he borrow from either of you gentlemen?”
The question was put in a tone of resignation which I understood as soon as we had both disclaimed any such transaction with the late Captain Armstrong.
“I am so thankful,” the loyal sister sighed. “So many of his friends have come to me since his death was announced in the papers, and they all brought I O U’s for money that he owed them. I have paid them all, of course, but I had to do it out of my own money. Poor Edgar left nothing.”
I glanced at my chief in some surprise. But he knew the world better than I did, as his answer showed.
“I was afraid that his books hadn’t brought him in very much, valuable as they were to science.”
Mrs. Baker shook her head. “Not one of them paid its expenses. I had to advance the money to publish them, and I don’t suppose I shall ever get it back.”
“You have some things to remember him by, at all events,” Tarleton suggested. “Those leopard skins are very fine.”
“Ah, yes.” The sister brightened up again. “Everything he brought home he gave to me. It’s a wonderful collection, isn’t it? People tell me I ought to give it to the nation. I think I shall leave this house and its contents to trustees as a memorial, like Carlyle’s house in Cheyne Row, you know.”
We could only express approval of this pious intention. My chief now came to the object of our visit.
“Captain Armstrong did me the honour to come to me some time ago, after his return from Sumatra.He had heard of me as a student of poisons, and he brought me a sample of one he had discovered.”
“I know the one you mean, the toadstool that grows round the upas tree. Wasn’t that a wonderful discovery? I can tell you——” She checked herself rather sharply, and said no more.
“I persuaded him to sell me all he had brought to England,” the specialist remarked, without appearing to notice anything. “But it has occurred to me since that he might have kept a little as a specimen, and if that is so, and you are disposed to part with it, I shall be glad.”
Mrs. Baker eyed us with a touch of uneasiness, I thought.
“I know I can trust you, Sir Frederick; and if Dr. Castle is your assistant I suppose I can trust him too. Dear Edgar did leave me a little bottleful, but he told me not to part with it to anyone, and not even to let anyone know I had it.”
This was disconcerting news. I saw Tarleton’s thick eyebrows go up and down.
“That was very sound advice,” he responded quietly. “However, your brother trusted me, as I have said, and I hope you can do the same. I shall be very greatly obliged if you will let me see the bottle.”
The little woman got nimbly off the couch. “After all, it will be a relief to me to get rid of it,” she murmured. “I have always taken care to keep it under lock and key.”
She produced a bunch of about two dozen keys from her pocket, all of them of that common design that will open each other’s locks with ease, and advanced to a chiffonier. “It is in here,” she informed us as she threw back the flimsy door and thrust her head inside.
The next moment we heard a startled cry.
“The bottle is gone!”