CHAPTER XXXVII
How the Steelwork Arrived
There was no doubt about it: Mr. Benjamin Skeets was a very crafty fellow. By adopting the disguise of a woman, and acting up to the part of a vulgar parvenue, he had completely covered his tracks, and had thrown dust into the eyes of everyone with whom he had come in contact—up to a certain point and then only with one exception.
Messrs. Skeets and Shale were no mere novices in crime, and their daring coup of defrauding the United Trusts Banking Company of the round sum of £30,000, and their subsequent disappearance, had both mystified and astonished the British public by its audacity, and had completely baffled the greatest detective experts of Scotland Yard.
Skeets had lived up to his disguise very thoroughly. Even the subsequent engagement of Miss Olive Baird had been undertaken solely with the idea of elaborating the smaller but by no means unnecessary details of his disguise. Since there was no reliable description of Mr. Joseph Shales, who was the unseen partner in the deal with the banking firm, it was a fairly simple matter for him to get out of the country under the guise of the husband of "Mrs. Shallop".
It had been the intention of the precious pair to leave the West Barbican at Cape Town; hence Mrs. Shallop's anxiety to get a wireless message through as soon as the ship came within radio range of Table Bay. But the absence of a reply from Skeets's confederate at Cape Town had so startled the fugitives that they decided to go on until they found a convenient port, preferably in India, where they could lie low and live on their ill-gotten plunder.
The foundering of the West Barbican had upset their calculations. Practically the whole of the pair's booty went down with the ship. Mr. Shallop, otherwise Shales, having no further use for his destitute partner, went off in one of the ship's boats which was eventually picked up. Arriving at Cape Town he took the ill-advised step of looking-up a pal. The latter was already languishing in a South African penal establishment, and Mr. Shales, upon making inquiries, was enlightened by an acquaintance of the convict, who chanced to be an astute detective.
The outcome of this meeting was that Mr. Shallop, under the mellow influence of strong waters, said more than he would have done had he been in his sober senses. Recovering from his maudlin state he found himself in custody.
Having no belief in the worn proverb concerning honour amongst thieves, and perhaps fully convinced that his partner in crime had been lost in the disaster to the West Barbican, Joseph Shales confessed to a minor part in the United Trusts Bank frauds, at the same time laying the blame upon the missing Benjamin Skeets.
The immediate result was that directly the news was cabled that more survivors from the West Barbican, including Mrs. Shallop, had been landed at Pangawani, the Kilba Protectorate Police were instructed to arrest the much-wanted Benjamin.