Crow's Inn Tragedy Read online

  The clergyman shook his head.

  “I don’t know. He only spoke of her the other day. But it will be good for the lad, Luke. I believe it is the genuine thing.”

  “Genuine thing! Good for the lad!” Luke Bechcombe repeated scornfully. “Tony can’t keep himself. How is he going to keep my secretary?”

  “Tony can work if he likes,” his father maintained stoutly. “And if he has some one to work for I think he will.”

  “Girl won’t take him. She has too much sense,” growled the solicitor.

  “Oh, I think she has given Tony some reason to hope.”

  “She is as big a fool as he is then,” Mr. Bechcombe said with asperity. “But Tony isn’t the only one of the family on matrimony bent. What do you think of Aubrey Todmarsh?”

  “Aubrey Todmarsh!” repeated the rector of Wexbridge in amazed accents. “I should have thought matrimony would have been the last thing to enter his head. His whole life seems to be bound up in that community of his.”

  “Not so bound up but that he still has a very good eye to the main chance,” retorted Luke Bechcombe. “He is not thinking of a penniless secretary! He’s after money, is Mr. Aubrey. What do you think of Mrs. Phillimore?”

  “Mrs. Phillimore! The rich American widow! She must be much too old for him.”

  “Old enough to be his mother, I dare say. She is pretty well made up, though, and that doesn’t matter to Aubrey as long as she has got the money. She has been financing these wildcat schemes of his lately. But I suppose he thinks the whole would suit him better than part.”

  “But are they really engaged?”

  “Oh, nothing quite so definite yet. But I am expecting the announcement every day. Hello!”—as an intermittent clicking made itself heard—“there’s your future daughter-in-law at work. That’s the typewriter.”

  Mr. Collyer started.

  “You don’t mean that she has been able to hear what we have been saying?”

  Mr. Bechcombe laughed.

  “Hardly! That would be delightful in a solicitor’s office. She sits in that little room at the side, but there is no communicating door and of course she can’t hear what goes on here. The door is in the top passage, past my private entrance. I didn’t expect to hear her machine, but there is something particularly penetrating about a typewriter. However, it is really very faint and I have got quite used to it. Would you like to see her?”

  The clergyman looked undecided for a moment; then he shook his head.

  “No, I shouldn’t care to do anything that might look like spying. Time enough for me to see her when there is anything decided.”

  “Please yourself!” Luke Bechcombe said gruffly. “Anyway if I had to choose between Tony and Aubrey Todmarsh I should take Tony.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Tony’s father said. “The lad is a good lad when he is away from these friends of his. But he is weak—terribly weak. Now Aubrey Todmarsh—though I haven’t always approved of him—is doing wonderful work in that East End settlement of his. He is marvellously successful in dealing with a class of men that we clergy are seldom able to reach.”

  “Umph! Well, he is always out for money for something,” said the solicitor. “He invades this office sometimes almost demanding subscriptions. Will he expect his wife to go and live down at his Community house, I wonder? However, I believe the settlement is an attraction to some silly women, and to my mind he will want all the attraction he can get. I can’t stand Aubrey myself. I have no use for conscientious objectors—never had!”

  “There I am with you,” assented the clergyman. “But I think Aubrey is hardly to be judged by ordinary standards. He is a visionary, an enthusiast. Of course I hold him to have been mistaken about the War, but honestly mistaken. With his dreams of reforming mankind I can understand—”

  Mr. Bechcombe snorted.

  “Can you? I can’t! I am jolly glad your Tony didn’t dream such dreams. Two conscientious objectors in the family would have been too much for me. I never could stand old Todmarsh. Aubrey is the very spit of him, as we used to say in Leicestershire.”

  “Oh, I don’t see any resemblance between Aubrey and his father,” the rector dissented. “Old Aubrey Todmarsh was a thoroughly self-indulgent man. I don’t believe he ever gave a thought to anyone else in the world. Now Aubrey with his visions and his dreams—”

  “Which he does his best to get other people to pay for,” the solicitor interposed. “No use. You won’t get me to enthuse over Aubrey, James. I remember him too well as a boy—a selfish, self-seeking little beast.”

  “Yes, I was not fond of him as a child. But I believe it to be a case of genuine conversion. He spends himself and his little patrimony for others. Next week he goes to Geneva, he tells me, to attend a sitting of the League of Nations, to explain the workings of—”

  “Damn the League of Nations!” uttered the solicitor, banging his fist upon his writing-pad with an energy that rattled his inkstand. “I beg your pardon, James. Not but what it went out of fashion to apologize to parsons for swearing in the War. Most of them do it themselves nowadays—eh, what?” with a chuckle at his own wit that threatened to choke him.

  The rector did not smile.

  “I look upon the League of Nations as our great hope for the future.”

  “Do you? I don’t,” contradicted his brother-in-law flatly. “I look to a largely augmented Air Force with plenty of practice in bomb-throwing as my hope for the future. It will be worth fifty of that rotten League of Nations. Aubrey Todmarsh addressing the League of Nations! It makes me sick. I suppose they will knight him next. No, no more of that, please, James. When I think of the League of Nations I get excited and that is bad for my heart. But now to business. You say you want money for Tony—how do you propose to get it? I should say you have exhausted all ways of doing it by now.”

  “How about a further mortgage on my little farm at Halvers?”

  The solicitor shook his head.

  “No use thinking of it. Farm is mortgaged up to the hilt already—rather past it, in fact.”

  “And I can’t raise any more on my life insurance.” Mr. Collyer sighed. “Well, it must be—there is nothing else—the emerald cross.”

  “Oh, but that would be a thousand pities—an heirloom with a history such as that. Oh, you can’t part with it.”

  “What else am I to do?” questioned the clergyman. “You said yourself that I had exhausted all my resources. No. I had practically made up my mind to it when I came here. I had just a forlorn hope that you might be able to suggest something else, though as a matter of fact I want your assistance still. I am deplorably ignorant on such matters. How does one set about selling jewellery? Can you tell me a good place to go to?”

  “Um!” The solicitor pursed up his lips. “If you have really made up your mind, how would you like to put the matter in my hands? First, of course, I must have the emeralds valued—then I can see what offers we get, and you can decide which, if any, you care to accept. Not but what I think you are quite wrong, mind you!”

  “I shall be enormously obliged to you,” the clergyman said haltingly. “But do you know anything of selling jewellery yourself, Luke?”

  Mr. Bechcombe smiled. “A man in my position and profession has to know a bit of everything. As a matter of fact I have a job of this kind on hand just now, and I might work the two together. I will do my best if you like to entrust me with the emeralds.”

  The clergyman rose.

  “You are very good, Luke. All my life long you have been the one to help me out of any difficulty. Here are the emeralds,” fumbling in his breast pocket. “I brought them with me in case of any emergency such as this that has arisen.”

  “You surely don’t mean that you have put them in your pocket?” exclaimed the solicitor.

  Mr. Collyer looked surprised.

  “They are quite safe. See, I button my coat when I am outside. No one could possibly take them from me.”

  Mr. Bechcombe coughe
d.

  “Oh, James, nothing will ever alter you! Don’t you know that there have been as many jewels stolen in the past year in London as in twenty years previously? People say there is a regular gang at work—they call it the Yellow Gang, and the head of it goes by the name of the Yellow Dog. If it had been known you were carrying the emeralds in that careless fashion they would never have got here. However, all’s well that ends well. You had better leave them in my safe.”

  The rector brought an ancient leather case out of his pocket.

  Mr. Bechcombe held his hand out for the case.

  “Here it is.”

  “So this is the Collyer cross! I haven’t seen it for years.” He was opening the case as he spoke. Inside the cross lay on its satin bed, gleaming with baleful, green fire. As Mr. Bechcombe looked at it his expression changed. “Where have you kept the cross, James?”

  The rector blinked.

  “In the secret drawer in my writing-table. Why do you ask?”

  Mr. Bechcombe groaned.

  “A secret drawer that is no secret at all, since all the household, not to say the parish, knows it. As for why I asked, I know enough about precious stones to see”—he raised the cross and peered at it in a ray of sunlight that slanted in through the dust-dimmed window—“to fear that these so-called emeralds are only paste.”

  “What!” The rector stared at him. “The Collyer emeralds—paste! Why, they have been admired by experts!”

  “No. Not the Collyer emeralds,” Mr. Bechcombe contradicted. “The Collyer emeralds were magnificent gems. This worthless paste has been substituted.”

  “Impossible! Who would do such a thing?” Mr. Collyer asked.

  “Ah! That,” said Luke Bechcombe grimly, “we have got to find out.”

  CHAPTER II

  The settlement of the Confraternity of St. Philip was situated in one of the most unsavoury districts in South London. It faced the river, but between it and the water lay a dreary waste of debatable land, strewn with the wreckage and rubbish thrown out by the small boat-building firms that existed on either side.

  Originally the Settlement had been two or three tenement houses that had remained as a relic of the days when some better class folk had lived there to be near the river, then one of London’s great highways. At the back the Settlement had annexed a big barnlike building formerly used as a storehouse. It made a capital room for the meetings that Aubrey Todmarsh and his assistants were continually organizing. In the matter of cleanliness, even externally, the Settlement set an example to the neighbourhood. No dingy paint or glass there. The windows literally shone, the front was washed over as soon as there was the faintest suspicion of grime by some of Todmarsh’s numerous protégés. The door plate, inscribed “South London Settlement of the Confraternity of St. Philip,” was as bright as polish and willing hands could make it.

  The Rev. James Collyer looked at it approvingly as he stood on the doorstep.

  “Just the sort of work I should have loved when I was young,” he soliloquized as he rang the door bell.

  It was answered at once by a man who wore the dark blue serge short coat and plus fours with blue bone buttons, which was the uniform of the Confraternity. In addition he had on the white overall which was de rigueur for those members of the Community who did the housework. This was generally understood to be undertaken by all the members in turn.

  But Mr. Collyer did not feel much impressed with this particular member. He was a rather short man with coal-black hair contrasting oddly with his unhealthily white face, deep-set dark eyes that seemed to look away from the rector and yet to give him a quick, furtive glance every now and then from beneath his lowered lids. He was clean-shaven, showing an abnormally large chin, and he had a curious habit of opening and shutting his mouth silently in fish-like fashion.

  “Mr. Todmarsh?” the rector inquired.

  The man held the door wider open and stood aside. Interpreting this as an invitation to enter, Mr. Collyer walked in. The man closed the door and with a silent gesture invited the clergyman to follow him.

  The Community House of St. Philip was just as conspicuously clean inside as out. Mr. Collyer had time to note that the stone floor of the hall had just been cleaned, that the scanty furniture, consisting of a big oak chest under the window and a couple of Windsor chairs at the ends, was as clean as furniture polish and elbow-grease could make them. His guide opened a door at the side and motioned him in.

  A man who was writing at the long centre table got up quickly to meet him and came forward with outstretched hands.

  “My dear uncle, this is a pleasure!”

  “One to which I have long been looking forward,” Mr. Collyer responded warmly. “My dear Aubrey, the reports I have heard of the Settlement have been in no way exaggerated. And so far as I can see this is an ideal Community house.”

  Todmarsh held his uncle’s hand for a minute in his firm clasp, looking the elder man squarely in the eyes the while.

  “There is nothing ideal about us, Uncle James. We are just a handful of very ordinary men, all trying to make our own bit of the world brighter and happier. It sounds very simple, but it isn’t always easy to do things. Sometimes life is nothing but disappointments. But I know you realize just how it feels when one spends everything in striving to cleanse one’s own bit of this great Augean mass that is called London—and fails.”

  His voice dropped as he spoke, and the bright look of enthusiasm faded from his face, leaving it prematurely old and tired. For it was above all things his enthusiasm, a sort of exalted look as of one who dreamed dreams and saw visions not vouchsafed to ordinary men, that made Aubrey Todmarsh’s face attractive. Momentarily stripped of its bright expression it was merely a thin rather overjowled face, with deep-set, dark eyes, noticeably low forehead, and thick dark hair brushed sleekly backwards, hair that was worn rather longer than most men’s.

  The clergyman looked at him pityingly.

  “Oh, my dear Aubrey, this is only nerves, a very natural depression. We parsons know it only too well. It is especially liable to recur when we are beginning work. Later one learns that all one can do is to sow in faith, and then be content to wait the issue in patience, leaving everything to Him whose gracious powers can alone give the increase.” Todmarsh did not speak for a moment, then he drew a long breath and, laying his hand on the rector’s shoulder, looked at him with the bright smile with which his friends were familiar.

  “You always give me comfort, Uncle James. Somehow you always know just what to say to heal when one has been stricken sorely. That idea of sowing and waiting—somehow one gets hold of that.”

  “It isn’t original, dear Aubrey,” his uncle said modestly. “But for all Christian work I have found it most helpful. But you, my dear Aubrey, the founder of this—er—splendid effort—might rather have cause for—er—spiritual exaltation than depression.”

  “There is cause enough for depression sometimes, I assure you,” Aubrey returned gloomily. “Much of our work is done among the discharged prisoners, you know, Uncle James. Different members of our Community look after those bound over under the First Offenders’ Act, and those undergoing terms of imprisonment. With those who have had longer sentences and the habitual offenders I try to deal as much as possible myself with the valuable help of my second-in-command.”

  “I know. I have heard how you attend at police courts and meet the prisoners when they come out. I can hardly imagine a more saintly work or one more certain to carry with it a blessing.”

  “It doesn’t seem to,” Todmarsh said, his face clouding over again. “There is this man, Michael Farmore, the case I was speaking of. He was convicted of burglary and served his five years. We got hold of him when he came out and brought him here. In time he became one of our most trusted members. If ever there was a case of genuine conversion I believed his to be one. Yet—”

  “Yes?” Mr. Collyer prompted as he paused.

  “Yet last night he was arrested attemptin
g to break into General Craven’s house in Mortimer Square.”

  Todmarsh blew his nose vigorously. His voice was distinctly shaky as he broke off. His uncle glanced at him sympathetically.

  “You must not take it too much to heart, my dear Aubrey. Think of your many successes, and even in this case that seems so terrible I feel sure that your labour has not really been wasted. You have cast your bread upon the waters, and you will assuredly find it again. You are fighting against the forces of the arch-enemy, remember.”

  “We are fighting against a gang of criminals,” Aubrey said shortly. “We hear of them every now and then in our work. The Yellow Gang they call them in the underworld—they form regular organizations of their own, working on a system, and appear to carry out the orders of one man. Sometimes I think he is the arch-fiend himself, for it seems impossible to circumvent him.”

  “But who is he?” the rector inquired innocently.

  Aubrey Todmarsh permitted himself a slight smile.

  “If we knew that, my dear uncle, it wouldn’t be long before this wave of crime that is sweeping over the Metropolis was checked. But I have heard that even the rank and file of his own followers do not know who he is, though he is spoken of sometimes as the Yellow Dog. Anyway, he has a genius for organization. But now we must think of something more cheerful, Uncle James. I want you to see our refectory and the recreation rooms, and our little rooms, cells, kitchens. Through here”—throwing open a glass door—“we go to our playground as you see.”

  Mr. Collyer peered forth. In front of him was a wide, open space, partly grass, partly concrete. On the grass a game of cricket was proceeding, the players being youths apparently all under twenty. On the concrete older men were having a game at racquets. All round the open space at the foot of the high wall that surrounded the Community grounds there ran a flower border, just now gay with crocuses and great clumps of arabis—white and purple and gold. The walls themselves were covered with creepers that later on would blossom into sweetness. Here and there men were at work. It was a pleasant and a peaceful scene and the Rev. James Collyer’s eyes rested on it approvingly.