The Disappearing Eye

by Fergus Hume

However, since I was minded to trace out the truth of the crime, it was necessary to find some clue to start the trail. All that evening after dinner, and later in the billiard-room, where I played snooker with sundry young officers, I inwardly wondered how I could and should begin. The hat-pin revealed nothing, as every woman uses hat-pins, and such with blue-glass heads were probably common enough. The missing eye might have thrown some light on the darkness, but that was safe in the pocket of the assassin. It will be noticed that, in spite of the open verdict of the jury, I clung to the idea that the white-cloaked woman was guilty. Not only had she fled with my car, but she had locked me in with her victim to prevent immediate pursuit. Also the abandonment of the motor pointed to guilt. She had been seen by Giles, by Miss Destiny, and by Lucinda, but from the time my machine had been sent crashing through the five-barred gate by her reckless, or intendedly reckless, driving, she had vanished as completely as though the earth had opened to swallow her up. Yet she might have guessed that the aggressively striking white cloak would betray her. In my opinion, a woman who had so cleverly engineered her escape would scarcely be foolish enough to risk detection by her dress, so I conjectured that she must have got rid of the cloak as she had got rid of the Rippler. With this idea in my head, I settled, without telling Cannington, to explore the field wherein the machine had been abandoned.

When at rest for the night, I remembered that Mrs. Giles, who had not been called as a witness, had stated how Mrs. Caldershaw entertained the idea that she would not die in her bed. I had questioned the greengrocer's wife on this point, but she could tell me nothing more. Mrs. Caldershaw gave no hint of any enemy, or even of the possibility of a tragic death. All she had done was to make the above statement to Mrs. Giles in a burst of confidence, and to shiver when the Litany mentioned "murder and sudden death." Mrs. Giles was particular about this point. "I was sitting next to her in the same pew," said Mrs. Giles insistently, "and she shivered and shook and looked over her shoulder, apprehensive like. It happened three times, and that was what made me observe it. I'm sure she was frightened of something or of someone."

This might have been the case, but Mrs. Caldershaw never explained, and carried the reason of her fright in silence to her untimely grave. Connecting Mrs. Giles' story with the remark of Miss Destiny as to the value set on the glass eye by the woman, and with the sinister fact that the glass eye was missing, I felt certain that the way to begin the search was to take the eye itself as a clue. Local gossip in Mootley revealed few useful facts, as Mrs. Faith appeared to be the sole person who had been told about the eye by its owner, and none of the villagers seemed to know that one eye had been different to the other. But in Burwain, where Mrs. Caldershaw had lived for years as Gabriel Monk's housekeeper, and as nurse to his niece, the truth might be found by careful inquiry. If I could learn where the unfortunate woman got her glass eye, and what accident had brought about the necessity for a glass eye, the chances were that I might learn something which would enable me to trace the truth. Therefore I determined to go to Burwain and hunt out all information about Mrs. Caldershaw's past. Meanwhile there remained the field near Murchester to be explored.

Next morning Cannington was engaged on some court-martial so I was left to my own devices, although he wanted to hand me over for entertainment to a less busy brother officer. I excused myself on the plea that I wished to walk off a headache, and so contrived to leave the Barracks unhindered. It was nine o'clock when I set out, and the morning was wonderfully clear for misty August. The field, as I stated before, was only half a mile from Murchester, so I speedily arrived therein. I left the middle of it, where the Rippler had been stranded, severely alone, and skirted round the sides to examine the hedges. These were ragged and untrimmed, with deep ditches on their inner sides, and consisted of holly, bramble, hawthorn, and various saplings. I scratched myself more or less severely for quite one hour, but without discovering any sign of the white cloak. Perhaps, I thought, much discouraged, the woman had risked wearing it after all. Yet I could not believe that she had been such a fool, seeing how cleverly she had manipulated her escape.

Then I noticed that there were two gates to the field, one with the broken bars, through which she had entered from the high-road in the car, and the other on the far side, to the right-hand looking from the road. It then occurred to me that the flying lady, scared by meeting Miss Destiny's trap, and perhaps afraid lest she had injured it and would be stopped for damages, might have left the field by this last gate. I immediately walked towards it and found that it opened on to a narrow lane, which in winter must have become a stream of mud. The hedges were very ragged and tangled here, and the gate was nearly hidden, a common five-barred, unpainted gate, in a worse condition than that opening on to the road.

I knew that I had struck on the flying woman's trail, almost as soon as I arrived at this hidden gate. On one of the brambles a filmy scrap of gauze fluttered in the wind. Apparently while getting over the gate in her hurried flight, the woman's veil had caught in the thorns and she had twitched it irritably away, leaving the scrap unthinkingly behind as evidence. I secured the same and placed it in my pocket-book, then made a thorough examination of the gate on both sides. No further evidence was forthcoming until I searched the ditch, which in this instance was on the farther side of the hedge. There, hidden amongst the dank weeds, thrust into a convenient rabbit-hole in the crumbling clay bank, was the cloak itself. I drew it out with a sensation of triumph, and from it was wafted the torn veil. I had the outfit complete, save for the motoring cap.

Evidently the rending of the veil had drawn the woman's attention to the eccentricity of a white cloak worn on a chilly autumnal evening. Acting promptly, as was her custom--I guessed that from the theft of my car--she had concealed cloak and veil, and then had vanished down the muddy lane, heaven only knows whither. But I had now the evidence.

It was a white cloak, of good and even expensive material. Round the neck, down the front, and along the hem, two letters were embroidered repeatedly in blue silk so as to form a pattern. They were G. M. I dropped the cloak and gasped with dismay. G. M., in twisted fanciful letters, formed the running adornment of the cloak worn by the woman who had stolen my car and who had, to all appearances, murdered Mrs. Anne Caldershaw. And the name of the child she had nursed, of the woman with whose portrait I had fallen so unexpectedly in love, was Gertrude Monk.

"It's a lie," I said aloud to nobody in particular. "I don't believe it."

All the same, the accusing initials were there, G. M.--Gertrude Monk.