Scarhaven Keep, J. S. Fletcher [best romantic novels to read .TXT] 📗

considerably exercised by this sudden turn of events and the disappearance of the chests, looked after his out-stretched hand and then at each other.

"Well, we can't stand here doing nothing," said Gilling at last. "Look here, we'd better divide forces. This chap'll have to be removed and got to some hospital. Vickers!—I guess you're the quickest-footed of the lot—will you run back to High Nick and tell that chauffeur to bring his car round here? If Sir Cresswell and the police are there, tell them what's happened. Spurge—you go down the glen there, and see if you can see anything of any suspicious-looking craft in that bay you told us of. Copplestone, we can't do any more for this man just now—let's look round. This is a queer business," he went on when they had all departed, and he and Copplestone were walking towards the tower. "The gold's gone, of course?"

"No sign of it here, anyway," answered Copplestone, leading him into the ruinous courtyard and pointing to the cavity in the fallen masonry. "That's where it was placed by Chatfield, according to Zachary Spurge."

"And of course Chatfield's removed it during the night," remarked Gilling. "That message which Sir Cresswell read us must have been all wrong—the Pike's come south and she's been somewhere about—maybe been in that cove at the end of the glen—though she'll have cleared out of it hours ago!" he concluded disappointedly. "We're too late!"

"That theory's not necessarily correct," replied Copplestone. "Sir Cresswell's message may have been quite right. For all we know the folks on the Pike had confederates on shore. Go carefully, Gilling—let's see if we can make out anything in the way of footprints."

The ground in the courtyard was grassless, a flooring of grit and loose stone, on which no impression could well be made by human foot. But Copplestone, carefully prospecting around and going a little way up the bank which lay between the tower and the moorland road, suddenly saw something in the black, peat-like earth which attracted his attention and he called to his companion.

"I say!" he exclaimed. "Look at this! There!—that's unmistakable enough.
And fresh, too!"

Gilling bent down, looked, and stared at Copplestone with a question in his eyes.

"By Gad!" he said. "A woman!"

"And one who wears good and shapely footwear, too," remarked Copplestone. "That's what you'd call a slender and elegant foot. Here it is again—going up the bank. Come on!"

There were more traces of this wearer of elegant foot-gear on the soft earth of the bank which ran between the moorland and the stone-strewn courtyard—more again on the edges of the road itself. There, too, were plain signs that a motor-car of some sort had recently been pulled up opposite the tower—Gilling pointed to the indentations made by the studded wheels and to droppings of oil and petrol on the gravelly soil.

"That's evident enough," he said. "Those chests have been fetched away during the night, by motor, and a woman's been in at it! Confederates, of course. Now then, the next thing is, which way did that motor go with its contents?"

They followed the tracks for a short distance along the road, until, coming to a place where it widened at a gateway leading into the wood, they saw that the car had there been backed and turned. Gilling carefully examined the marks.

"That car came from Norcaster and it's gone back to Norcaster," he affirmed presently. "Look here!—they came up the hill at the side of the wood—here they backed the car towards that gate, and then ran it backwards till they were abreast of the tower—then, when they'd loaded up with those chests they went straight off by the way they'd come. Look at the tracks—plain enough."

"Then we'd better get down towards Norcaster ourselves," said Copplestone. "Call Spurge back—he'll find nothing in that cove. This job has been done from land. And we ought to be on the track of these people—they've had several hours start already."

By this time Zachary Spurge had been recalled, Vickers had brought the car round from High Nick, and the injured man was carefully lifted into it and driven away. But at High Nick itself they met another car, hurrying up from Norcaster, and bringing Sir Cresswell Oliver and three other men who bore the unmistakable stamp of the police force. In one of them Copplestone recognized the inspector from Scarhaven.

The two cars met and stopped alongside each other, and Sir Cresswell, with one sharp glance at the rough bandage which Vickers had fastened round Jim Spurge's head, rapped out a question.

"Gone!" replied Gilling, with equal brusqueness. "Came in a motor, during the night, soon after Zachary Spurge left Jim. They hit him pretty hard over his head and left him unconscious. Of course they've carried off the boxes. Car appears to have gone to Norcaster. Hadn't you better turn?"

Sir Cresswell pointed to the Scarhaven police inspector.

"Here's news from Scarhaven," he said, bending forward to the other car,
"The inspector's just brought it. The Squire—whoever he was—is dead.
They found his body this morning, lying at the foot of a cliff near the
Keep. Foul play?—that's what you don't know, eh, inspector?"

"Can't say at all, sir," answered the inspector. "He might have been thrown down, he might have fallen down—it's a bad place. Anyway, what the doctor said, just before I hurried in here to tell Mrs. Greyle, as the next relative that we know of, is that he'd been dead some days—the body, you see, was lying in a thicket at the foot of the cliff."

"Some days!" exclaimed Copplestone, with a look at Gilling. "Days?"

"Four or five days at least, sir," replied the inspector. "So the doctor thinks. The place is a cliff between the high road from Northborough and the house itself. There's a short cut across the park to the house from that road. It looks as if—"

"Ah!" interrupted Gilling. "It's clear how that happened, then. He took that short cut, when he came from Northborough that night! But—if he's dead, who's engineering all this? There's the fact, those chests of gold have been removed from that old tower since Zachary Spurge left his cousin in charge there early this morning. Everything looks as if they'd been carried to Norcaster. Therefore—"

"Turn this car round," commanded Sir Cresswell. "Of course, we must get back to Norcaster. But what's to be done there?"

The two cars went scurrying back to the old shipping town. When at last they had deposited the injured man at a neighbouring hospital and came to a stop near the "Angel," Zachary Spurge pulled Copplestone's sleeve, and with a look full of significance, motioned him aside to a quiet place.

CHAPTER XXIX SCARVELL'S CUT

The quiet place was a narrow alley, which opening out of the Market Square in which the car had come to a halt, suddenly twisted away into a labyrinth of ancient buildings that lay between the centre of the town and the river. Not until Spurge had conducted Copplestone quite away from their late companions did he turn and speak; when he spoke his words were accompanied by a glance which suggested mystery as well as confidence.

"Guv'nor!" he said. "What's going to be done?"

"Have you pulled me down here to ask that?" exclaimed Copplestone, a little impatiently. "Good heavens, man, with all these complications arising—the gold gone, the Squire dead—why, there'll have to be a pretty deep consultation, of course. We'd better get back to it."

But Spurge shook his head.

"Not me, guv'nor!" he said resolutely. "I ain't no opinion o' consultations with lawyers and policemen—plain clothes or otherwise. They ain't no mortal good whatever, guv'nor, when it comes to horse sense! 'Cause why? 'Tain't their fault—it's the system. They can't do nothing, start nothing, suggest nothing!—they can only do things in the official, cut-and-dried, red-tape way, Guv'nor—you and me can do better."

"Well?" asked Copplestone.

"Listen!" continued Spurge. "There ain't no doubt that that gold was carried off early this morning—must ha' been between the time I left Jim and sun-up, 'cause they'd want to do the job in darkness. Ain't no reasonable doubt, neither, that the motor-car what they used came here into Norcaster. Now, guv'nor, I ask you—where is it possible they'd make for? Not a railway station, 'cause them boxes 'ud be conspicuous and easy traced when inquiry was made. And yet they'd want to get 'em away—as soon as possible. Very well—what's the other way o' getting any stuff out o' Norcaster? What? Why—that!"

He jerked his thumb in the direction of a patch of grey water which shone dully at the end of the alley and while his thumb jerked his eye winked.

"The river!" he went on. "The river, guv'nor! Don't this here river, running into the free and bounding ocean six miles away, offer the best chance? What we want to do is to take a look round these here docks and quays and wharves—keeping our eyes open—and our ears as well. Come on with me, guv'nor—I know places all along this riverside where you could hide the Bank of England till it was wanted—so to speak."

"But the others?" suggested Copplestone. "Hadn't we better fetch them?"

"No!" retorted Spurge, assertively. "Two on us is enough. You trust to me, guv'nor—I'll find out something. I know these docks—and all that's alongside 'em. I'd do the job myself, now—but it'll be better to have somebody along of me, in case we want a message sending for help or anything of that nature. Come on—and if I don't find out before noon if there's any queer craft gone out o' this since morning—why, then, I ain't what I believe myself to be."

Copplestone, who had considerable faith in the poacher's shrewdness, allowed himself to be led into the lowest part of the town—low in more than one sense of the word. Norcaster itself, as regards its ancient and time-hallowed portions, its church, its castle, its official buildings and highly-respectable houses, stood on the top of a low hill; its docks and wharves and the mean streets which intersected them had been made on a stretch of marshland that lay between the foot of that hill and the river. And down there was the smell of tar and of merchandise, and narrow alleys full of sea-going men and raucous-voiced women, and queer nooks and corners, and ships being laden and ships being stripped of their cargoes and such noise and confusion and inextricable mingling and elbowing that Copplestone thought it was as likely to find a needle in a haystack as to make anything out relating to the quest they were engaged in.

But Zachary Spurge, leading him in and out of the throngs on the wharves, now taking a look into a dock, now inspecting a quay, now stopping to exchange a word or two with taciturn gentlemen who sucked their pipes at the corners of narrow streets, now going into shady-looking public houses by one door and coming out at another, seemed to be remarkably well satisfied with his doings and kept remarking to his companion that they would hear something yet. Nevertheless, by noon they had heard nothing, and Copplestone, who considered casual search of this sort utterly purposeless, announced that he was going to more savoury neighborhoods.

"Give it another turn, guv'nor," urged Spurge. "Have a bit o' faith in me, now! You see, guv'nor, I've an idea, a theory, as you might term it, of my very own, only time's too short to go into details, like. Trust me a bit longer, guv'nor—there's a spot or two down here that I'm fair keen on taking a look at—come on, guv'nor, once more!—this is Scarvell's Cut."

He drew his unwilling companion round a corner of the wharf which they were just then patrolling and showed him a narrow creek which, hemmed in by ancient buildings, some of them half-ruinous, sail-lofts, and sheds full of odds and ends of merchandise, cut into the land at an irregular angle and was at that moment affording harbourage to a mass of small vessels, just then lying high and dry on the banks from which the tide had retreated. Along the side of this creek there was just as much crowding and confusion as on the wider quays; men were going in and out of the sheds and lofts; men were busy about the sides of the small craft. And again the feeling of uselessness came over Copplestone.

"What's the good of all this, Spurge!" he exclaimed testily. "You'll never—"

Spurge suddenly laid a grip on his companion's elbow and twisted him aside into a narrow entry between the sheds.

"That's the good!" he answered in an