In the Dead of Night: A Novel. Volume 2 (of 3)

by T. W. Speight

CHAPTER IV.
MR. DRAYTON’S SUSPICIONS

The escape of Lionel Dering from Duxley Gaol created an extraordinary sensation throughout the country. Government at once offered a reward of two hundred pounds, which, a week later, was increased to four hundred. The telegraph was set to work in every direction, and at every sea-port in England and on the Continent sharp eyes were made sharper still by the possibility of winning so magnificent a prize. But day passed after day till a fortnight had come and gone, and still there was not the slightest clue to the whereabouts of the missing man; nor the smallest scrap of comfort for the disconsolate soul of Mr. Drayton, the superintendent of the Duxley police.

However positive Jabez Creede, his landlady, and the various prison warders might be that Mr. Hoskyns, and no one but he, was the man who had assisted Lionel Dering to escape, it was easily proved that they were one and all in the wrong. On the evening of the escape Mr. Hoskyns had dined with Mr. Tressil and three or four other members of the bar, and had not parted from them till after midnight. This fact the gentlemen in question all came forward and swore to, and Mr. Hoskyns was at once exculpated from any share in the extraordinary escape of his client. With Jabez Creede it fared somewhat more hardly. Every one at first was inclined to regard him in the light of an accomplice, and it was not till after he had spent upwards of a week in prison, and had been examined and remanded about a dozen times, that he was able to prove how really innocent he was of any complicity in the heinous crime of which he was accused.

But who, then, was the consummate actor who had so cleverly outwitted, not only drink-soddened Jabez Creede, but the keen-eyed warders of the prison, who, for weeks past, had been in the habit of seeing the real Hoskyns almost daily, and who, one would have thought, were about the last men in the world to be so easily deceived? Government supplemented its second reward for the capture of the escaped prisoner by offering a hundred and fifty pounds for the capture of the man who had helped him to escape. But Government, to all appearance, might as well have never offered to unloosen its purse-strings.

From the moment Lionel Dering and the arch-impostor who aided and abetted him in his nefarious scheme set foot outside the walls of Duxley Gaol, they seemed to have vanished into thinnest air. Like creatures of a dream, they had melted utterly away; and not all the ten thousand practised eyes that were on the look-out for them here, there, and everywhere, could succeed in finding the faintest clue to their hiding-place.

Of the two, as far as his private feelings went, Mr. Drayton would much rather have captured the sham lawyer than the escaped prisoner. He had no ill feeling towards Mr. Dering. Under similar circumstances, who would not have attempted to escape? But towards the sham Hoskyns, who had deceived everybody with such apparent ease, he certainly felt a degree of animus which had kept him in a chronic state of ill-temper both at home and abroad ever since the discovery of the escape, and which would have caused it to fare but ill with the miscreant in question, could Mr. Drayton’s heavy hand but once have been laid upon his shoulder.

The celebrated Mr. Whiffins, of Scotland Yard, had, in the first instance, been sent down to investigate the case, and had, so to speak, taken the conduct of it into his own hands. But Mr. Drayton did not believe in Mr. Whiffins—did not believe in his talents as a detective, and secretly resented his interference. But, by-and-by, Mr. Whiffins went back to London not much wiser than he had left it, and Mr. Drayton was left to pursue his investigations in peace.

Many and profound were the cogitations of the worthy superintendent of police, indulged in the privacy of his own circle, before the following deductions worked themselves out to a logical issue in his mind:—The man who personated Mr. Hoskyns so successfully must evidently have been thoroughly acquainted with the speech, dress, gait, manner, and every minute peculiarity in the appearance and habits of that gentleman, down even to his yellow pocket-handkerchief and his silver snuff box. He must also have had some knowledge of Jabez Creede, and of the position he held with regard to his employer. He must also have known Mr. Dering, and Mr. Dering must have known him: the supposition, in fact, being that the two men were bosom friends—for who but a staunch friend would have run the risk of failure in attempting so remarkable an escape? Then, the man, whoever he might be, must also have had some acquaintance with the gaol and with the gaol officials. Had he not mentioned two or three of the warders by name? Then, he must be a man about the same size and build as Mr. Hoskyns, with a thin, clear-cut face, something like that of the old lawyer. Having worked out his problem so far, Mr. Drayton’s next care was to look carefully round, and endeavour to “spot” the man in whom the various requirements of the case were most evidently combined.

The result of the cautious inquiries instituted by Mr. Drayton was, that suspicion pointed in one direction, and in one only.

There was only one person to be found to whom the whole of the deductions worked out in the superintendent’s mind would clearly apply. That person was Mr. Tom Bristow.