Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three] Read online

  “Electric lighted. I think you might almost cross that house off also. I consider electric lighting one of the greatest safeguards against burglars that a man can give his house.”

  “Yes, if he doesn’t rely exclusively upon it; it might be a nasty trap under certain circumstances. I see this gentleman also has magnificent presentation and other plate.”

  “Yes. Mr. Jameson is a wealthy man and very popular in the neighbourhood; his cups and epergnes are worth looking at.”

  “Is it the only house in the district that is lighted with electricity?”

  “Yes; and, begging your pardon, Miss Carter, I only wish it were not so. If electric lighting were generally in vogue it would save the police a lot of trouble on these dark winter nights.”

  “The burglars would find some way of meeting such a condition of things, depend upon it; they have reached a very high development in these days. They no longer stalk about as they did fifty years ago with blunderbuss and bludgeon; they plot, plan, contrive and bring imagination and artistic resource to their aid. By-the-way, it often occurs to me that the popular detective stories, for which there seems to large a demand at the present day, must be, at times, uncommonly useful to the criminal classes.”

  At Three Bridges they had to wait so long for a return train that it was nearly dark when Kristen got back to Redhill. Mr. Garamond did not accompany her thither, having alighted at a previous station. Kristen had directed her portmanteau to be sent direct to Laker’s Hotel, where she had engaged a room by telegram from Victoria Station. So, unburthened by luggage, she slipped quietly out of the Redhill Station and made her way straight for the draper’s shop in the London Road. She had no difficulty in finding it, thanks to the minute directions given her by the Inspector.

  Street lamps were being lighted in the sleepy little town as she went along, and as she turned into the London Road, shopkeepers were lighting up their windows on both sides of the way. A few yards down this road, a dark patch between the lighted shops showed her where Paved Court led off from the thoroughfare. A side-door of one of the shops that stood at the corner of the court seemed to offer a post of observation whence she could see without being seen, and here Kristen, shrinking into the shadows, ensconced herself in order to take stock of the little alley and its inhabitants. She found it much as it had been described to her—a collection of four-roomed houses of which more than half were unlet. Numbers 7 and 8 at the head of the court presented a slightly less neglected appearance than the other tenements. Number 7 stood in total darkness, but in the upper window of number 8 there showed what seemed to be a night-light burning, so Kristen conjectured that this possibly was the room set apart as a dormitory for the disabled.

  While she stood thus surveying the home of the suspected Sisterhood, the Sisters themselves—two, at least, of them—came into view, with their donkey-cart and their disabled, in the main road. It was an odd little cortège. One Sister, habited in a nun’s dress of dark blue serge, led the donkey by the bridle; another Sister, similarly attired, walked alongside the low cart, in which were seated two sickly-looking children. They were evidently returning from one of their long country circuits, and unless they had lost their way and been belated—it certainly seemed a late hour for the sickly to be abroad.

  As they passed under the gas lamp at the corner of the court, Kristen caught a glimpse of the faces of the Sisters. It was easy, with Inspector Garamond’s description before her mind, to identify the older and taller woman as Sister Monica, and a more coarse-featured and generally repellent face Kristen admitted to herself she had never before seen. In striking contrast to this forbidding countenance, was that of the younger Sister. Kristen could only catch a brief passing view of it, but that one brief view was enough to impress it on her memory as of unusual sadness and beauty. As the donkey stopped at the corner of the court, Kristen heard this sad-looking young woman addressed as “Sister Anna” by one of the children, who asked plaintively when they were going to have something to eat.

  “Now, at once,” said Sister Anna, lifting the little one, as it seemed to Kristen, tenderly out of the cart, and carrying him on her shoulder down the court to the door of number 8, which opened to them at their approach. The other Sister did the same with the other child; then both Sisters returned, unloaded the cart of sundry bundles and baskets, and, this done, led off the old donkey and trap down the road, possibly to a neighbouring costermonger’s stables.

  A man, coming along on a bicycle, exchanged a word of greeting with the Sisters as they passed, then swung himself off his machine at the corner of the court, and walked it along the paved way to the door of number 7. This he opened with a key, and then, pushing the machine before him, entered the house.

  Kristen took it for granted that this man must be the John Murray of whom she had heard. She had closely scrutinized him as he had passed her, and had seen that he was a dark, well-featured man of about fifty years of age.

  She congratulated herself on her good fortune in having seen so much in such a brief space of time, and coming forth from her sheltered corner turned her steps in the direction of the draper’s shop on the other side of the road.

  It was easy to find it. “Golightly” was the singular name that figured above the shop-front, in which were displayed a variety of goods calculated to meet the wants of servants and the poorer classes generally. A tall, powerfully-built man appeared to be looking in at this window. Kristen’s foot was on the doorstep of the draper’s private entrance, her hand on the door-knocker, when this individual, suddenly turning, convinced her of his identity with the journeyman workman who had so disturbed Mr. Garamond’s equanimity. It was true he wore a bowler instead of a journeyman’s cap, and he no longer carried a basket of tools, but there was no possibility for anyone, with so good an eye for an outline as Kristen possessed, not to recognize the carriage of the head and shoulders as that of the man she had seen walking along the railway siding. He gave her no time to make minute observation of his appearance, but turned quickly away, and disappeared down a by-street.

  Kristen’s work seemed to bristle with difficulties now. Here was she, as it were, unearthed in her own ambush; for there could be but little doubt that during the whole time she had stood watching those Sisters, that man, from a safe vantage point, had been watching her.

  She found Mrs. Golightly a civil and obliging person. She showed Kristen to her room above the shop, brought her the letters which Inspector Garamond had been careful to have posted to her during the day. Then she supplied her with pen and ink and, in response to Kristen’s request, with some strong coffee that she said, with a little attempt at a joke, would “keep a dormouse awake all through the winter without winking.”

  While the obliging landlady busied herself about the room, Kristen had a few questions to ask about the Sisterhood who lived down the court opposite. On this head, however, Mrs. Golightly could tell her no more than she already knew, beyond the fact that they started every morning on their rounds at eleven o’clock punctually, and that before that hour they were never to be seen outside their door.

  Kristen’s watch that night was to be a fruitless one. Although she sat, with her lamp turned out and safely screened from observation, until close upon midnight, with eyes fixed upon numbers 7 and 8 Paved Court, not so much as a door opening or shutting at either house rewarded her vigil. The lights flitted from the lower to the upper floors in both houses, and then disappeared somewhere between nine and ten in the evening; and after that, not a sign of life did either tenement show.

  And all through the long hours of that watch, backwards and forwards there seemed to flit before her mind’s eye, as if in some sort it were fixed upon its retina, the sweet, sad face of Sister Anna.

  Why it was this face should so haunt her, she found it hard to say.

  “It has a mournful past and a mournful future written upon it as a hopeless whole,” she said to herself. “It is the face of an Andromeda! ‘here am I,’ it seem
s to say, ‘tied to my stake, helpless and hopeless.’”

  The church clocks were sounding the midnight hour as Kristen made her way through the dark streets to her hotel outside the town. As she passed under the railway arch that ended in the open country road, the echo of not very distant footsteps caught her ear. When she stopped they stopped, when she went on they went on, and she knew that once more she was being followed and watched, although the darkness of the arch prevented her seeing even the shadow of the man who was thus dogging her steps.

  The next morning broke keen and frosty. Kristen studied her map and her country-house index over a seven o’clock breakfast, and then set off for a brisk walk along the country road. No doubt in London the streets were walled in and roofed with yellow fog; here, however, bright sunshine played in and out of the bare tree-boughs and leafless hedges on to a thousand frost spangles, turning the prosaic macadamized road into a gangway fit for Queen Titania herself and her fairy train.

  Kristen turned her back on the town and set herself to follow the road as it wound away over the hill in the direction of a village called Northfield. Early as she was, she was not to have that road to herself. A team of strong horses trudged by on their way to their work in the fuller’s-earth pits. A young fellow on a bicycle flashed past at a tremendous pace, considering the upward slant of the road. He looked hard at her as he passed, then slackened pace, dismounted, and awaited her coming on the brow of the hill.

  “Good morning, Miss Carter,” he said, lifting his cap as she came alongside of him. “May I have five minutes’ talk with you?”

  The young man who thus accosted her had not the appearance of a gentleman. He was a handsome, bright-faced young fellow of about two-and-twenty, and was dressed in ordinary cyclists’ dress; his cap was pushed back from his brow over thick, curly, fair hair, and Kristen, as she looked at him, could not repress the thought how well he would look at the head of a troop of cavalry, giving the order to charge the enemy.

  He led his machine to the side of the footpath.

  “You have the advantage of me,” said Kristen; “I haven’t the remotest notion who you are.”

  “No,” he said; “although I know you, you cannot possibly know me. I am a north country man, and I was present, about a month ago, at the trial of old Mr. Craven, of Troyte’s Hill—in fact, I acted as reporter for one of the local papers. I watched your face so closely as you gave your evidence that I should know it anywhere, among a thousand.”

  “And your name is—?”

  “George White, of Grenfell. My father is part proprietor of one of the Newcastle papers. I am a bit of a literary man myself, and sometimes figure as a reporter, sometimes as leader-writer, to that paper.” Here he gave a glance towards his side pocket, from which protruded a small volume of Tennyson’s poems.

  The facts he had stated did not seem to invite comment, and Kristen ejaculated merely:

  “Indeed!”

  The young man went back to the subject that was evidently filling his thoughts. “I have special reasons for being glad to have met you this morning, Miss Carter,” he want on, making his footsteps keep pace with hers. “I am in great trouble, and I believe you are the only person in the whole world who can help me out of that trouble.”

  “I am rather doubtful as to my power of helping anyone out of trouble,” said Kristen; “so far as my experience goes, our troubles are as much a part of ourselves as our skins are of our bodies.”

  “Ah, but not such trouble as mine,” said White eagerly. He broke off for a moment, then, with a sudden rush of words, told her what that trouble was. For the past year he had been engaged to be married to a young girl, who, until quite recently had been fulfilling the duties of a nursery governess in a large house in the neighbourhood of Redhill.

  “Will you kindly give me the name of that house?” interrupted Kristen.

  “Certainly; Wootton Hall, the place is called, and Annie Lee is my sweetheart’s name. I don’t care who knows it!” He threw his head back as he said this, as if he would be delighted to announce the fact to the whole world. “Annie’s mother,” he went on, “died when she was a baby, and we both thought her father was dead also, when suddenly, about a fortnight ago, it came to her knowledge that instead of being dead, he was serving his time at Portland for some offence committed years ago.”

  “Do you know how this came to Annie’s knowledge?”

  “Not the least in the world; I only know that I suddenly got a letter from her announcing the fact, and at the same time, breaking off her engagement with me. I tore the letter into a thousand pieces, and wrote back saying I would not allow the engagement to be broken off, but would marry her tomorrow if she would have me. To this letter she did not reply; there came instead a few lines from Mrs. Copeland, the lady at Wootton Hall, saying that Annie had thrown up her engagement and joined some Sisterhood, and that she, Mrs. Copeland, had pledged her word to Annie to reveal to no one the name and whereabouts of that Sisterhood.”

  “And I suppose you imagine I am able to do what Mrs. Copeland is pledged not to do?”

  “That’s just it, Miss Carter,” cried the young man enthusiastically. “You do such wonderful things; everyone knows you do. It seems as if, when anything is wanted to be found out, you just walk into a place, look round you and, in a moment, everything becomes clear as noonday.”

  “I can’t quite lay claim to such wonderful powers as that. As it happens, however, in the present instance, no particular skill is needed to find out what you wish to know, for I fancy I have already come upon the traces of Miss Annie Lee.”

  “Miss Carter!”

  “Of course, I cannot say for certain, but is a matter you can easily settle for yourself—settle, too, in a way that will confer a great obligation on me.”

  “I shall be only too delighted to be of any—the slightest service to you,” cried White, enthusiastically as before.

  “Thank you. I will explain. I came down here specially to watch the movements of a certain Sisterhood who have somehow aroused the suspicions of the police. Well, I find that instead of being able to do this, I am myself so closely watched—possibly by confederates of these Sisters—that unless I can do my work by deputy I may as well go back to town at once.”

  “Ah! I see—you want me to be that deputy.”

  “Precisely. I want you to go to the room in Redhill that I have hired, take your place at the window—screened, of course, from observation—at which I ought to be seated—watch as closely as possible the movements of these Sisters and report them to me at the hotel, where I shall remain shut in from morning till night—it is the only way in which I can throw my persistent spies off the scent. Now, in doing this for me, you will be also doing yourself a good turn, for I have little doubt but what under the blue serge hood of one of the sisters you will discover the pretty face of Miss Annie Lee.”

  As they had talked they had walked, and now stood on the top of the hill at the head of the one little street that constituted the whole of the village of Northfield.

  On their left hand stood the village schools and the master’s house; nearly facing these, on the opposite side of the road, beneath a clump of elms, stood the village pound. Beyond this pound, on either side of the way, were two rows of small cottages with tiny squares of garden in front, and in the midst of these small cottages a swinging sign beneath a lamp announced a “Postal and Telegraph Office.”

  “Now that we have come into the land of habitations again,” said Kristen, “it will be best for us to part. It will not do for you and me to be seen together, or my spies will be transferring their attentions from me to you, and I shall have to find another deputy. You had better start on your bicycle for Redhill at once, and I will walk back at leisurely speed. Come to me at my hotel without fail at one o’clock and report proceedings. I do not say anything definite about remuneration, but I assure you, if you carry out my instructions to the letter, your services will be amply rewarded by me and by my
employers.”

  There were yet a few more details to arrange. White had been, he said, only a day and night in the neighbourhood, and special directions as to the locality had to be given to him. Kristen advised him not to attract attention by going to the draper’s private door, but to enter the shop as if he were a customer, and then explain matters to Mrs. Golightly, who, no doubt, would be in her place behind the counter; tell her he was the brother of the Miss Smith who had hired her room, and ask permission to go through the shop to that room, as he had been commissioned by his sister to read and answer any letters that might have arrived there for her.

  “Show her the key of the side door—here it is,” said Kristen; “it will be your credentials, and tell her you did not like to make use of it without acquainting her with the fact.”

  The young man took the key, endeavoured to put it in his waistcoat pocket, found the space there occupied and so transferred it to the keeping of a side pocket in his tunic.

  All this time Kristen stood watching him.

  “You have a capital machine there,” she said, as the young man mounted his bicycle once more, “and I hope you will turn it to account in following the movements of these Sisters about the neighbourhood. I feel confident you will have something definite to tell me when you bring me your first report at one o’clock.”

  White once more broke into a profusion of thanks, and then, lifting his cap to the lady, started his machine at a fairly good pace.

  Kristen watched him out of sight down the slope of the hill, then, instead of following him as she had said she would “at a leisurely pace,” she turned her steps in the opposite direction along the village street.

  It was an altogether ideal country village. Neatly-dressed chubby-faced children, now on their way to the schools, dropped quaint little curtsies, or tugged at curly locks as Kristen passed; every cottage looked the picture of cleanliness and trimness, and although so late in the year, the gardens were full of late flowering chrysanthemums and early flowering Christmas roses.