The Middle Temple Murder, J. S. Fletcher [fb2 epub reader TXT] 📗
- Author: J. S. Fletcher
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Spargo hesitated, considering matters.
“Very well—I promise,” he said.
“And you won’t print it?” continued Elphick, still clinging to him. “Say you won’t print it tonight?”
“I shall not print it tonight,” answered Spargo. “That’s certain.”
Elphick released his grip on the young man’s arm.
“Come—at eleven tomorrow morning,” he said, and drew back and closed the door.
Spargo ran quickly to the office and hurried up to his own room. And there, calmly seated in an easy-chair, smoking a cigar, and reading an evening newspaper, was Rathbury, unconcerned and outwardly as imperturbable as ever. He greeted Spargo with a careless nod and a smile.
“Well,” he said, “how’s things?”
Spargo, half-breathless, dropped into his desk-chair.
“You didn’t come here to tell me that,” he said.
Rathbury laughed.
“No,” he said, throwing the newspaper aside, “I didn’t. I came to tell you my latest. You’re at full liberty to stick it into your paper tonight: it may just as well be known.”
“Well?” said Spargo.
Rathbury took his cigar out of his lips and yawned.
“Aylmore’s identified,” he said lazily.
Spargo sat up, sharply.
“Identified!”
“Identified, my son. Beyond doubt.”
“But as whom—as what?” exclaimed Spargo.
Rathbury laughed.
“He’s an old lag—an ex-convict. Served his time partly at Dartmoor. That, of course, is where he met Maitland or Marbury. D’ye see? Clear as noontide now, Spargo.”
Spargo sat drumming his fingers on the desk before him. His eyes were fixed on a map of London that hung on the opposite wall; his ears heard the throbbing of the printing-machines far below. But what he really saw was the faces of the two girls; what he really heard was the voices of two girls …
“Clear as noontide—as noontide,” repeated Rathbury with great cheerfulness.
Spargo came back to the earth of plain and brutal fact.
“What’s clear as noontide?” he asked sharply.
“What? Why, the whole thing! Motive—everything,” answered Rathbury. “Don’t you see, Maitland and Aylmore (his real name is Ainsworth, by the by) meet at Dartmoor, probably, or, rather, certainly, just before Aylmore’s release. Aylmore goes abroad, makes money, in time comes back, starts new career, gets into Parliament, becomes big man. In time, Maitland, who, after his time, has also gone abroad, also comes back. The two meet. Maitland probably tries to blackmail Aylmore or threatens to let folk know that the flourishing Mr. Aylmore, M.P., is an ex-convict. Result—Aylmore lures him to the Temple and quiets him. Pooh!—the whole thing’s clear as noontide, as I say. As—noontide!”
Spargo drummed his fingers again.
“How?” he asked quietly. “How came Aylmore to be identified?”
“My work,” said Rathbury proudly. “My work, my son. You see, I thought a lot. And especially after we’d found out that Marbury was Maitland.”
“You mean after I’d found out,” remarked Spargo.
Rathbury waved his cigar.
“Well, well, it’s all the same,” he said. “You help me, and I help you, eh? Well, as I say, I thought a considerable lot. I thought—now, where did Maitland, or Marbury, know or meet Aylmore twenty or twenty-two years ago? Not in London, because we knew Maitland never was in London—at any rate, before his trial, and we haven’t the least proof that he was in London after. And why won’t Aylmore tell? Clearly because it must have been in some undesirable place. And then, all of a sudden, it flashed on me in a moment of—what do you writing fellows call those moments, Spargo?”
“Inspiration, I should think,” said Spargo. “Direct inspiration.”
“That’s it. In a moment of direct inspiration, it flashed on me—why, twenty years ago, Maitland was in Dartmoor—they must have met there! And so, we got some old warders who’d been there at that time to come to town, and we gave ’em opportunities to see Aylmore and to study him. Of course, he’s twenty years older, and he’s grown a beard, but they began to recall him, and then one man remembered that if he was the man they thought he’d a certain birth-mark. And—he has!”
“Does Aylmore know that he’s been identified?” asked Spargo.
Rathbury pitched his cigar into the fireplace and laughed.
“Know!” he said scornfully. “Know? He’s admitted it. What was the use of standing out against proof like that. He admitted it tonight in my presence. Oh, he knows all right!”
“And what did he say?”
Rathbury laughed contemptuously.
“Say? Oh, not much. Pretty much what he said about this affair—that when he was convicted the time before he was an innocent man. He’s certainly a good hand at playing the innocent game.”
“And of what was he convicted?”
“Oh, of course, we know all about it—now. As soon as we found out who he really was, we had all the particulars turned up. Aylmore, or Ainsworth (Stephen Ainsworth his name really is) was a man who ran a sort of what they call a Mutual Benefit Society in a town right away up in the North—Cloudhampton—some thirty years ago. He was nominally secretary, but it was really his own affair. It was patronized by the working classes—Cloudhampton’s a purely artisan population—and they stuck a lot of their brass, as they call it, in it. Then suddenly it came to smash, and there was nothing. He—Ainsworth, or Aylmore—pleaded that he was robbed and duped by another man, but the court didn’t believe him, and he got seven years. Plain story you see, Spargo, when it all comes out, eh?”
“All stories are quite plain—when they come out,” observed Spargo. “And he kept silence now, I suppose, because he didn’t want his daughters to know about his past?”
“Just so,” agreed Rathbury. “And I don’t know that I blame him. He thought, of course, that he’d go scot-free over this Marbury affair. But he made his mistake in the initial stages, my boy—oh, yes!”
Spargo got up from his desk and walked around his room for a few minutes, Rathbury meanwhile finding and lighting another cigar. At last Spargo came back and clapped a hand on the detective’s shoulder.
“Look here, Rathbury!” he said. “It’s very evident that you’re now going on the lines that Aylmore did murder Marbury. Eh?”
Rathbury looked up. His face showed astonishment.
“After evidence like that!” he exclaimed. “Why, of course. There’s the motive, my son, the motive!”
Spargo laughed.
“Rathbury!” he said. “Aylmore no more murdered Marbury than you did!”
The detective got up and put on his hat.
“Oh!” he said. “Perhaps you know who did, then?”
“I shall know in a few days,” answered Spargo.
Rathbury stared wonderingly at him. Then he suddenly walked to the door. “Good-night!” he said gruffly.
“Good-night, Rathbury,” replied Spargo and sat down at his desk.
But that night Spargo wrote nothing for the Watchman. All he wrote was a short telegram addressed to Aylmore’s daughters. There were only three words on it—Have no fear.
THE CLOSED DOORS
Alone of all the London morning newspapers, the Watchman appeared next day destitute of sensationalism in respect to the Middle Temple Murder. The other daily journals published more or less vivid accounts of the identification of Mr. Stephen Aylmore, M.P. for the Brookminster Division, as the ci-devant Stephen Ainsworth, ex-convict, once upon a time founder and secretary of the Hearth and Home Mutual Benefit Society, the headquarters of which had been at Cloudhampton, in Daleshire; the fall of which had involved thousands of honest working folk in terrible distress if not in absolute ruin. Most of them had raked up Ainsworth’s past to considerable journalistic purpose: it had been an easy matter to turn up old files, to recount the fall of the Hearth and Home, to tell anew the story of the privations of the humble investors whose small hoards had gone in the crash; it had been easy, too, to set out again the history of Ainsworth’s arrest, trial, and fate. There was plenty of romance in the story: it was that of a man who by his financial ability had built up a great industrial insurance society; had—as was alleged—converted the large sums entrusted to him to his own purposes; had been detected and punished; had disappeared, after his punishment, so effectually that no one knew where he had gone; had come back, comparatively a few years later, under another name, a very rich man, and had entered Parliament and been, in a modest way, a public character without any of those who knew him in his new career suspecting that he had once worn a dress liberally ornamented with the broad arrow. Fine copy, excellent copy: some of the morning newspapers made a couple of columns of it.
But the Watchman, up to then easily ahead of all its contemporaries in keeping the public informed of all the latest news in connection with the Marbury affair, contented itself with a brief announcement. For after Rathbury had left him, Spargo had sought his proprietor and his editor, and had sat long in consultation with them, and the result of their talk had been that all the Watchman thought fit to tell its readers next morning was contained in a curt paragraph:
“We understand that Mr. Stephen Aylmore, M.P., who is charged with the murder of John Marbury, or Maitland, in the Temple on June 21st last, was yesterday afternoon identified by certain officials as Stephen Ainsworth, who was sentenced to a term of penal servitude in connection with the Hearth and Home Mutual Benefit Society funds nearly thirty years ago.”
Coming down to Fleet Street that morning, Spargo, strolling jauntily along the front of the Law Courts, encountered a fellow-journalist, a man on an opposition newspaper, who grinned at him in a fashion which indicated derision.
“Left behind a bit, that rag of yours, this morning, Spargo, my boy!” he remarked elegantly. “Why, you’ve missed one of the finest opportunities I ever heard of in connection with that Aylmore affair. A miserable paragraph!—why, I worked off a column and a half in ours! What were you doing last night, old man?”
“Sleeping,” said Spargo and went by with a nod. “Sleeping!”
He left the other staring at him, and crossed the road to Middle Temple Lane. It was just on the stroke of eleven as he walked up the stairs to Mr. Elphick’s chambers; precisely eleven as he knocked at the outer door. It is seldom that outer doors are closed in the Temple at that hour, but Elphick’s door was closed fast enough. The night before it had been promptly opened, but there was no response to Spargo’s first knock, nor to his second, nor to his third. And half-unconsciously he murmured aloud: “Elphick’s door is closed!”
It never occurred to Spargo to knock again: instinct told him that Elphick’s door was closed because Elphick was not there; closed because Elphick was not going to keep the appointment. He turned and walked slowly back along the corridor. And just as he reached the head of the stairs Ronald Breton, pale and anxious, came running up them, and at sight of Spargo paused, staring questioningly at him. As if with a mutual sympathy the two young men shook hands.
“I’m glad you didn’t print more than those two or three lines in the Watchman this morning,” said Breton. “It was—considerate. As for the other papers!—Aylmore assured me last night, Spargo, that though he did serve that term at Dartmoor he was innocent enough! He was scapegoat for another man who disappeared.”
Then, as Spargo merely nodded, he added, awkwardly:
“And I’m obliged to you, too, old chap, for sending that wire to the two girls last night—it was good of you. They want all the comfort they can get, poor things! But—what are you doing here, Spargo?”
Spargo leant against the head of the stairs and folded his hands.
“I came here,” he said, “to keep an appointment with Mr. Elphick—an appointment which he made when I called on him, as you suggested, at nine o’clock. The appointment—a most important one—was for eleven o’clock.”
Breton glanced at his watch.
“Come on, then,” he said. “It’s well past that now, and my guardian’s a very martinet in the matter of punctuality.”
But Spargo did not move. Instead, he shook his head, regarding Breton with troubled eyes.
“So am I,” he answered. “I was trained to it. Your guardian isn’t there, Breton.”
“Not there? If he made an appointment for eleven? Nonsense—I never knew him miss an appointment!”
“I knocked three times—three separate times,” answered Spargo.
“You should have knocked half a dozen times—he may have overslept himself. He sits up late—he and old Cardlestone often sit up half the night, talking stamps or playing piquet,” said Breton. “Come on—you’ll see!”
Spargo shook his head again.
“He’s not there, Breton,” he said. “He’s gone!”
Breton stared at the journalist as if he had just announced that he had seen Mr. Septimus Elphick riding down Fleet Street on a dromedary. He seized Spargo’s elbow.
“Come on!” he said. “I have a key to Mr. Elphick’s door, so that I can go in and out as I like. I’ll soon show you whether he’s gone or not.”
Spargo followed the young
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