Dead Men's Money

by J. S. Fletcher

"Panama!" he exclaimed, with a jerk of his head. "Panama! just that! It began a long way off—Panama, as far as I see it. And what did begin, and what was going on? The two men that knew, and could have told, are dead as door-nails—and both buried, for that matter."

So, in spite of Mrs. Hanson's coming and her revelations as to some, at any rate, of James Gilverthwaite's history, we were just as wise as ever at the end of the first week after the murder of John Phillips. And it was just the eighth night after my finding of the body that I got into the hands of Abel Crone.

Abel Crone was a man that had come to Berwick about three years before this, from heaven only knows where, and had set himself up in business as a marine-store dealer, in a back street which ran down to the shore of the Tweed. He was a little red-haired, pale-eyed rat of a man, with ferrety eyes and a goatee beard, quiet and peaceable in his ways and inoffensive enough, but a rare hand at gossiping about the beach and the walls—you might find him at all odd hours either in these public places or in the door of his shop, talking away with any idler like himself. And how I came to get into talk with him on that particular night was here: Tom Dunlop, Maisie's young brother, was for keeping tame rabbits just then, and I was helping him to build hutches for the beasts in his father's back-yard, and we were wanting some bits of stuff, iron and wire and the like, and knowing I would pick it up for a few pence at Crone's shop, I went round there alone. Before I knew how it came about, Crone was deep into the murder business.

"They'll not have found much out by this time, yon police fellows, no doubt, Mr. Moneylaws?" he said, eyeing me inquisitively in the light of the one naphtha lamp that was spurting and jumping in his untidy shop. "They're a slow unoriginal lot, the police—there's no imagination in their brains and no ingenuity in their minds. What's wanted in an affair like this is one of those geniuses you read about in the storybooks—the men that can trace a murder from the way a man turns out his toes, or by the fashion he's bitten into a bit of bread that he's left on his plate, or the like of that—something more than by ordinary, you'll understand me to mean, Mr. Moneylaws?"

"Maybe you'll be for taking a hand in this game yourself, Mr. Crone?" said I, thinking to joke with him. "You seem to have the right instinct for it, anyway."

"Aye, well," he answered, "and I might be doing as well as anybody else, and no worse. You haven't thought of following anything up yourself, Mr. Moneylaws, I suppose?"

"Me!" I exclaimed. "What should I be following up, man? I know no more than the mere surface facts of the affair."

He gave a sharp glance at his open door when I thus answered him, and the next instant he was close to me in the gloom and looking sharply in my face.

"Are you so sure of that, now?" he whispered cunningly. "Come now, I'll put a question to yourself, Mr. Moneylaws. What for did you not let on in your evidence that you saw Sir Gilbert Carstairs at yon cross-roads just before you found the dead man? Come!"

You could have knocked me down with a feather, as the saying is, when he said that. And before I could recover from the surprise of it, he had a hand on my arm.