Caught in a Trap

by John C. Hutcheson

“Oh, dear no!” said Miss Kingscott; and after a very trifling delay, Miss Kingscott, the lawyer, and John Bounce, special detective, of Scotland Yard, were in the coupé of a first-class carriage, and rattling down at express speed to Hartwood.

Arrived there, they managed to secure one of those extraordinary cabs or flys that are to be met with at country places, and which, I believe, are derelict London carriages that are thrown away by their former owners as worn out and useless: and after a short time they got to The Poplars, just as the doctor and the dowager, worn out with waiting, began to feel tired of the unusual pleasure of each other’s company.

Matters having been explained over again, the detective, John Bounce, was set to work; and he, with that look of mystic preparation which the craft glory in, asked at once to be shown over the house. He examined every hole and corner as if he thought Susan had been purposely stowed away by the members of the family. When he was satisfied with an inspection of the house and garden, giving especial care to examining the various locks and appurtenances of the gates, he appeared to think profoundly for a short time, when he asked to be shown the clothes which Susan had left behind her. These gave him immense gratification, for he turned them over and over again, giving vent to sundry Lord Burleigh’s shakings of the head, and portentous “humphs,” as if he had the whole thing in his mind’s eye.

Detectives, my dear sir, or madam, are not by any means such sharp personages as writers of fiction generally love to depict. There are some especially “cute” members of the force I don’t for a moment deny; but as a class their knowledge and acquirements are fearfully exaggerated. Indeed, I must be so severe as to call them at once, humbugs; but they deceive themselves quite as greatly and as often as they deceive the public, and are by no means so sharp as the malefactors they are set to catch. I think a clergyman I once knew would have made a far better detective than a good many real mouchoirs I have come across. He had the gift of at once divining at the truth, investigating the morality and ethics of his parishioners which not one detective in a hundred possesses. They put on a great deal of mystery, and appear to “know all about it,” but they are really much more shallow conjurers than Herr Frickell when, turning up the sleeves of his coat and his snow-white wristbands and calling his audience’s attention to the theory that there is “no preparation, gentlemen! no preparation,” at once proceeds to smuggle eggs up his sleeves with a “Hi, Presto! Begone!”

The detective placed great emphasis on the fact that Susan had taken Miss Kingscott’s dress and bonnet with her. “Putting two and two together,” as he said, he delivered himself of the oracular assertion, that she “must have gone off somewhere,” which, of course, no one else would have dreamt of but the dowager, who observed snappishly that she could have told him that before, and advised him to try and find out where the girl had gone to, as that was what he had been employed for. Whereupon, John Bounce appeared all at once to wake up to the notion that he would have to go somewhere else to look for the missing girl. He asked if they had enquired about her at the nearest railway station, and was told they had; and on being further told that another station, Bigglethorpe, was also not far from The Poplars, he said she might have gone there, which was also perfectly feasible to the meanest comprehension.

At Bigglethorpe they found out that the station-master remembered a tall, dark gentleman getting out on the previous day, and coming back shortly afterwards with a lady. He thought it was the same, because now he remembered the gentleman had left his bag there, and had taken it, and gone off in the next up-train. On the detective’s telling him to “Take care!” and mentioning that he was a policeman, which he generally found to have an awe-inspiring influence on the gamins of London, the station-master said he could not tell him any more, not if he were “twenty detectives, and the Lord Mayor into the bargain, all rolled into one.” He recollected a gentleman getting out there, he thought, and coming back again, and going up to London, and he believed he had a lady with him, but he would not be sure. It was “no use a pestering him with any more questions, for he had his own business to attend to about the traffic returns.” He did not know who the gentleman was, nor the lady, and he “had not seen them afore or since, and didn’t want to see ’em either, for that matter.” There the enquiry ended, for the detective was at fault; and that is all they found out about Susan, after searching for days about the neighbourhood in every direction.

Nothing could be done now but to wait and see what effect the advertisements and handbills would have in discovering her whereabouts. So Mr Trump and the detective had to go back to London as unsuccessful as when they had gone down; while Doctor Jolly and the old lady and Tom, who were all greatly grieved at the disappearance of the girl, could but wonder what had become of her. The only thing they had learnt for a certainty was that she was not in the county; and they could only hope that a good providence would watch over her, and bring her back to them safe: in the interim the police in the metropolis, with their wits sharpened by the reward offered, were doing all they could to ferret her out in London. And thus a month passed by.

During all this time, Messrs Trump, Sequence, and Co. had been fairly worried out of their wits, day and night, with false reports about the finding of Susan. More than a hundred persons had come to their offices brimful of the intelligence that they had secured the fugitive, and had seen her at all sorts of unheard of places; but the persons whom they thought to be Susan turned out to be totally unlike her in every particular. Mr Trump was for ever going with the police to inspect the bodies of drowned persons; and yet no trace was found of the missing girl, and he at last began to hope devoutly that she would be found soon, whether dead or alive he did not care which, for he was bothered to death about the matter. Indeed, he would have cheerfully given a handsome sum to have “washed his hands,” as he often said to Sequence, who had a peculiar, parrot-like habit of repeating Trump’s words after him, as if affirmatively, “of the whole affair.” To which Sequence would nod his head, and respond sagaciously, “Certainly, of the whole affair.”

When Markworth, therefore, after the search had lasted a month, walked into the office one morning just after his interview with the Jew, Solomonson, and told Mr Trump, who had accosted him graciously, thinking he was a new client, that he came about the advertisement for the lost girl, Mr Trump was wroth and slightly snappy.

“I hope to goodness you’ve really found her, and not come here with any cock and bull story like the rest of ’em.”