§2
"The next exciting incident," the Old Man in the Corner continued glibly, "in this remarkably mysterious case, was the news that Mr. Allan Carysfort, eldest son of Sir David Carysfort, Bart., had been detained in connection with the assault upon Mr. Stonebridge and the disappearance of certain papers, the property of Mr. Felix Shap of Batavia.
"Young Allan Carysfort, who was a subaltern in a cavalry regiment, had come home from India recently, and, as a matter of fact, he had arrived at the Grange, the family seat just outside Tytherton, the very evening of the outrage. Acting upon certain information received, the police had detained him; he was to be brought before the magistrates on the following day; and in the meanwhile it was generally understood that some highly sensational evidence had been collected by the police.
"It has been asserted that Sir David Carysfort and his family were the last to realise how very strong public opinion had been against them ever since Shap's story and the loss of the documents had become generally known. Though there had been no hint of it in the Press, the public loudly declared that the Carysforts must have had something to do with the outrage, seek him whom the crime benefits being a most excellent adage. But imagine the sensation when Allan Carysfort, the eldest son of Sir David Carysfort, Bart., was arrested!
"Need I say that the following day when the young man was brought before the magistrates, the court was crowded. Sir David was a magistrate, too, but of course he did not sit that day. To see his eldest son arraigned before his brother Beaks must have been a bitter pill for his pride to swallow.
"We had the usual formal evidence of arrest, the medical evidence, and so on, after which we quickly plunged into exciting business. Mr. Stonebridge we were soon told had made a statement. He was not yet strong enough to appear in person, but he had made a statement, so at last the public was to be initiated into the mysteries that surrounded the inexplicable assault.
"'After my servants had gone to bed,' Mr. Stonebridge had stated, 'I sat awhile reading in my study. I was expecting a visit from Mr. Shap, as we had talked over the possibility of a quiet chat at my house that evening on the subject of his affairs. He and Mr. Lloyd, who were both of them very fond of the cinema, were in the habit of dropping in after the show, on their way home. At about a quarter to eleven—I am sure it was not later—there was a ring at the front-door bell, and I went to open the door. No sooner had I done this than a shawl or muffler of some sort was thrown over my face, and I was made to lose my balance by the thrust of a foot between my two shins. I came down backwards with a crash.
"'The whole thing occurred in fewer seconds than it takes to describe; the next moment I had the sensation of cold steel against my temple, I heard an ominous click, and a husky voice whispered in my ear, "Your servant is coming out of his room. Speak to him, tell him you are all right, or I shoot." What could I do? I was utterly helpless and a revolver was held to my temple. The muffler was then lifted from my mouth, I could feel the man bending over me, I could feel his hot breath on my forehead, and a few seconds later I heard Henning come out of his room upstairs and switch on the light on the top landing. "If he comes downstairs," the voice whispered close to my ear, "I shoot."
"'Then it was,' Mr. Stonebridge went on to say, 'that I shouted up to Henning that I had only tripped over a rug, and that I was quite all right. I don't think I ever looked death so very near in the face before. The next moment I heard Henning switch off the light upstairs and go back to his room. After that I remember nothing more. I only have a vague recollection of a sudden terrible pain in my head; everything else is a blank until I found myself in bed, and with vague stirrings of memory bringing a return of that same appalling headache.'
"The great point about Mr. Stonebridge's evidence was that he was utterly unable to identify his assailant. He was not even sure whether he had been attacked by two men or one, since he had been blindfolded at the outset, and all that he heard was a husky voice that spoke in a whisper. He was ready to admit that he might have left the safe unlocked when he went to answer the front-door bell, and he certainly had the papers relating to Mr. Shap's case on his desk as he had been going through them earlier in the evening. Those papers, therefore, had undoubtedly been burned in the grate, and it was obvious that the theft and destruction of those papers was the motive of the assault.
"After that we went from excitement to excitement. We did not get it all the same day, of course; Allan Carysfort appeared, as far as I can remember, three or four times before the local magistrates; in between times he was out on bail, this having been fixed at £1,000 in two recognisances £500 each, with an additional £500 on his own. It seems that when he was arrested he had made a statement, to which he had since unreservedly subscribed. He said that he had arrived in London from Southampton on Monday the twenty-sixth, and after seeing to some business in town, he took the eight-ten P.M. train on the twenty-eighth to Tytherton, where he arrived at nine-fifty, having dined on board. His father met him at the station with the car, but it was such a beautiful moon-lit night Sir David and himself decided that they would walk to the Grange and then sent the car home with a message to Lady Carysfort that they would be home at about eleven o'clock.
"Carysfort had been asked whether it was not strange that after being absent from home for so long, he should have elected to put off seeing his mother till a much later hour.
"'Not at all,' he replied. 'My father wished to put me au fait of certain family matters before I actually saw Lady Carysfort. These matters,' he added emphatically in reply to questions put to him by the magistrate, 'had nothing whatever to do with financial business, least of all were they in any relation to Mr. Shap and his affairs. Sir David and I,' he went on calmly, 'walked about for a while, and then Sir David remembered that he wished to see a friend at the County Club. He went in there, but I preferred to take another turn out of doors, as I had not had a taste of English country air for nearly two years.'
"Asked how long he had walked about Tytherton waiting for Sir David, Carysfort thought about half an hour, and when questioned as to the direction he had taken, he said he really couldn't remember.
"The police of course had adduced certain witnesses whose testimony would justify the course they had taken in arresting a gentleman in the position of Mr. Allan Carysfort. There was, first of all, Felix Shap himself and his friend Julian Lloyd. They deposed that at about half-past ten, or perhaps a little earlier, they were on their way to see Mr. Stonebridge, as the latter had expressed a wish to see them both and have another quiet talk over a cigar and a glass of wine; Shap and Lloyd had been to the P.P.P. cinema in High Street, and they left just before the end to go to Mr. Stonebridge's house. They were within fifty yards of it when they saw a man turn out of the nearest side street and go up to Mr. Stonebridge's house. The man went through the garden gate and up to the front door. Shap and Lloyd saw him in the act of ringing the bell. It was then somewhere between ten-thirty and ten-forty-five. Mr. Stonebridge was so very much in the habit of seeing friends, and even those clients with whom he was intimate, late in the evenings, that Mr. Shap and Mr. Lloyd didn't think anything of the incident; but, at the same time, they made up their minds to postpone their own visit to Mr. Stonebridge until they could be quite sure of seeing him alone. So they turned then and there, and went straight back to the Black Swan where they lodged.
"I may add that with commendable reserve both these witnesses refused to identify Allan Carysfort with Mr. Stonebridge's visitor on that memorable Wednesday evening. The man they saw had an overcoat and wore a Glengarry cap. More they could not say, as they had not seen his face clearly.
"On the other hand the hall-porter at the County Club, another witness for the Treasury, had no cause for such reserve. He said that on the evening of February twenty-eighth, Sir David Carysfort came to the Club a little before half-past ten. Mr. Allan was with him then, but he didn't come in. The hall-porter heard him say to Sir David: 'Very well, then! I'll pick you up here in about half an hour!' And Sir David rejoined: 'Yes; don't be late!' Mr. Allan did return to the Club at about eleven o'clock and the two gentlemen then went off together. The hall-porter remembered the incident on that date quite distinctly, because he recollected being much surprised at seeing Mr. Allan Carysfort, who he thought was still abroad.
"After that there was another remand, Allan Carysfort's solicitor having asked and obtained an adjournment for a week. But by this time, as you may imagine, not only the county, but London Society too were absolutely horror-struck. To think that a man in the position of the Carysforts should have stooped to such an act, not only of violence, but of improbity, was indeed staggering. Nor did public opinion swerve from this attitude one hair's breadth, even though at the next hearing all the proofs which the police had adduced against the accused were absolutely confuted.
"Fortunately for Carysfort, his solicitors had been successful in finding two witnesses, Miriam Page and Arthur Ormeley, who had seen Mr. Allan Carysfort, whom they knew by sight, strolling by the river at a quarter to eleven. They—like the hall-porter of the County Club—remembered the circumstance very clearly, because they did not know that Mr. Allan was home from abroad, and were astonished to see him there.
"The point of the evidence of these witnesses was that the river where they had seen Allan Carysfort strolling at a quarter to eleven is at the diametrically opposite end of the town to that where lies the Great West Road. Now the hall-porter had seen Allan Carysfort outside the County Club at half-past ten and again at eleven. If Carysfort was strolling by the river at a quarter to eleven, and there was no reason to impugn the credibility of the witnesses, he could not possibly have been the man whom Mr. Shap and Mr. Lloyd saw ringing the bell of Mr. Stonebridge's house at about that same hour.
"Allan Carysfort was discharged by the magistrates, as you know. There was no definite proof against him. But public opinion is ever an uncertain quantity, and it is still dead against the Carysforts. In the public mind two facts have remained indelibly fixed: firstly, that the Carysforts had everything to gain by the destruction of Felix Shap's papers and, secondly, that there was nobody else who could possibly have benefited by it.
"Since then also Mr. Stonebridge has made a declaration that nothing was stolen out of his safe and pocketbook except the papers and letters belonging to Felix Shap. So what would you? Although Allan Carysfort was discharged by the magistrates, really because there was no tangible evidence against him, he did not leave the court without a stain on his character. The stain was there, and there it is to this day. It will take the Carysforts years to live the scandal down; though some friends have remained loyal, there are always the enemies, the envious, the uncharitable, and they insist that the two witnesses—the only two, mind you, whose evidence did clear Allan Carysfort of suspicion—had been bought and should not be believed, while others simply declare that Sir David and his son employed some ruffian to do the dirty work for them."
He gave a dry cackle, and contemplated me through his huge horn-rimmed spectacles.
"And you are of that opinion, too, I imagine," he said.
"Well, it seems the only likely explanation," I replied guardedly.
"Surely you don't suppose," he retorted, "that a business man like David Carysfort would place himself so entirely in the hands of a ruffian that he would for ever after be the victim of blackmail! Why, it would have been cheaper to buy off Felix Shap!"
"But," I rejoined, "I don't see who else had any interest in doing away with those documents."
"I'll tell you," he rejoined dryly. "Felix Shap himself."
"What do you mean?" I queried, with as much lofty scorn as I could command.
"I mean," he replied, "that all Felix Shap's documents were forgeries."
"Forgeries?" I exclaimed.
"Yes, spurious! False affidavits! Forgeries, the lot of 'em. My belief is that Stonebridge began to suspect this himself, and I think he has had a narrow escape of being murdered outright by those two rascals. As it is, they have destroyed every proof of their villainy, and old Stonebridge, I imagine, is content to let things remain as they are rather than admit publicly that he was completely taken in by two very plausible rogues."
"But," I urged, "what about the handwriting expert?"
The funny creature laughed aloud.
"Yes!" he said, "what about the expert? If there had been two they would have disagreed. And mind you at a distance of twelve years a signature would be difficult of absolute identification. Every one's handwriting undergoes certain modifications in the course of years. Experts," he reiterated. "Bah!"
"But," I went on, impatiently, "I don't see the object of the whole scheme."
"The object was blackmail," the whimsical creature retorted, "and it has succeeded admirably. Already we read that Messrs. Shap and Lloyd are staying at expensive hotels in London, that they have granted interviews to pressmen and written articles for half-penny newspapers. We shall hear of them as cinema stars presently. They have had the most gorgeous, the most paying publicity, and presently Sir David Carysfort will have had enough of them and will put a few more hundreds in their pockets just to be rid of them. That was the object of the whole scheme, my dear young lady! And see how well it was carried out.
"Of course the fuddle-headed Dutchman never thought of it. I imagine that the whole scheme originated in the fertile brain of Mr. Julian Lloyd. And it was thoroughly well thought out from the manufacture of the documents and letters down to the assault on the silly old country attorney. And, mind you, the rascals originally went to a silly country attorney; they would have been afraid to go to a London lawyer, lest he be too sharp for them.
"The only mistake they made were the letters purported to be written to Berta Shap by the husband who is supposed to have disappeared, and the copy of Berta's marriage certificate. It is those letters that gave me the clue to the whole thing; old Stonebridge was too dull to have seen through those letters. If they were genuine why should Felix Shap have brought them over to England? They had nothing whatever to do with any contract about the Shap Fuelettes. If they were genuine, how could he guess that he would have to disprove a story of a secret marriage and of young Alfred being the son of Sir Alfred Carysfort? By wanting to prove too much, he, to my mind, gave himself away, and one can but marvel that neither lawyers nor police saw through the roguery.
"Of course the moment one understands that one set of papers was spurious, it is easily concluded that all the others were forgeries. And the late Sir Alfred Carysfort, anxious only to obliterate every vestige of that early marriage of his, unwittingly played into the hands of those two scoundrels by destroying all the correspondence that he had ever had with Shap.
"Think it all over, you will see that I am right. Look at this paragraph again in the Evening Post, does it not bear out what I say?"
The paragraph in the evening paper to which the Old Man in the Corner was pointing read as follows:
"Among the passengers on the Dutch liner Stadt Rotterdam is Mr. Felix Shap, the hero of a recent celebrated case. He is returning to Batavia, having, through a misadventure which has remained an impenetrable mystery to this day, been deprived of all the proofs that would have established his claim to a substantial share of the profits in the Shap Fuelettes Company. Fortunately Mr. Shap had enlisted so many sympathies in England that his friends had no difficulty in collecting a considerable sum of money which was presented to him on his departure in the form of a purse and as a compensation for the ill-luck which has attended him since he set foot in this country. Mr. Shap will now be able to take abroad with him the assurance that British public opinion is always on the side of the victims of an adverse and unmerited fate."
"Yes!" the funny creature concluded with a cackle, "until the victims are found out to be rogues. Mr. Felix Shap and his friend, Mr. Julian Lloyd, will be found out some day."
The next moment he had gone with that rapidity which was so characteristic of him, and I might have thought that he was just a spook who had come to visit me whilst I dozed over my cup of tea, only that on the table by the side of an empty glass was a piece of string adorned with a series of complicated knots.