‘He was quite polite, but would not help me, referring me to the quay office and offering to take me there and find a clerk to attend to me. As we were leaving he called out to the man at the cask, “You understand, Harkness, to do nothing till you hear from Mr. Avery.”’
At the wharf office the young man left me in the outer office while he went, as he said, to get the proper clerk for my work. But he returned with a man that was evidently the manager, and I knew at once that something was wrong. This opinion was confirmed when the manager began raising objection after objection to letting the cask go.
‘Some judicious questions elicited the fact that “Mr. Avery” was the managing director in the head office in Fenchurch Street. I left the wharf office, sat down on some boxes, and thought out the situation.
‘It was clear that something had aroused the suspicions of the clerk and the docker, Harkness, and the former’s remark to the latter to do nothing without instructions from Mr. Avery seemed to mean that the matter was to be laid before that gentleman. To “do nothing” evidently meant to hold on to the cask. If I were to get my property it was clear I must see to the supplying of those instructions myself.
‘I went to Fenchurch Street and asked for Mr. Avery. Fortunately for me he was engaged. I said I could not wait, and asked for a sheet of paper and envelope on which to write him a note. By the simple expedient of sealing and addressing the empty envelope, I thus provided myself with a sheet of paper bearing the firm’s heading.
‘I dropped into a bar and, ordering some ale, borrowed a pen and ink. Then I composed a letter from Mr. Avery to Harkness, instructing him to hand over the cask at once to me.
‘While I was writing this it occurred to me that if this man’s suspicions were really seriously aroused, he would probably follow the cask and thus trace me to my house. I lost another quarter of an hour pondering this problem. Then an idea occurred to me, and I added a paragraph saying that as the Navigation Company had contracted to deliver the cask at an address in the city, he, Harkness, was to accompany it and see that it reached its destination safely.
‘I wrote the letter in the round hand of a junior clerk, signing it “The I. and C. S. N. Co., Ltd., per” in the same hand, and “Avery” with an undecipherable initial in another kind of writing, and another “per,” and then two not very clear initials. I hoped in this way to mislead Harkness, if he happened to know the genuine signature.
‘It was my design to get Harkness away from the ship with the cask and my own men, when I hoped to find some way of giving him the slip. This I eventually did by instructing one of the men to clamour for a drink, and the other, a man named Watty, to refuse to leave the horse when I invited the party to a bar for some beer. On the plea of relieving Watty, I left Harkness and the other man drinking in the bar, and slipped away with Watty and the dray. Then he and I went back to the shed and I ran a coat of paint over the dray, restoring it to its original brown and painting out the fictitious name. In the evening we brought the dray home, timing ourselves to arrive here after dark, and unloaded the cask in one of the out-houses, where it now is.’
When Felix ceased speaking, the two men sat in silence for several minutes while Burnley turned the statement over in his mind. The sequence of events was unusual, but the story hung together, and, as he went over it in detail, he could see no reason why it should not, from Felix’s point of view, be true. If Felix believed his friend’s letter, as he appeared to, his actions were accounted for, and if the cask really contained a statue, the letter might explain the whole thing. On the other hand, if it held a corpse, the letter was a fraud, to which Felix might or might not be party.