Chapter XVI

"Later or sooner by a minute then, So much for the untimeliness of death,-- And as regards the manner that offends, That rude and rough, I count the same for gain-- Be the act harsh and quick!"

His interview with Chater left John Faunce troubled in mind, and deeply meditative. Had there been a crime, or was the disappearance of Colonel Rannock a fact easily accounted for in the natural course of events? The mother's conviction that some evil had befallen him was after all founded on an inadequate reason. If he had gone to Klondyke, as he intended, the whole fabric of his life would have been changed, and the man who while in the civilized world corresponded regularly with his mother, might well forget his filial duty, in the daily toil and hourly dangers, hopes, and disappointments of the struggle for gold. It was difficult to judge a man so placed by previous experience or everyday rules. The most dutiful son might well leave home letters unwritten; or a letter, trusted to a casual hand, might easily go astray.

Then there was always the possibility that he had changed his plans; that he had stayed in New York or in San Francisco; that he had chosen some other portion of the wild West for his hunting ground; that he had spent the summer fishing in Canada, or the autumn shooting in the Alleghanies; and, again, that his letters to England had been lost in transit.

Faunce would not have been disposed to suspect foul play on so slight a ground as the absence of news from the wanderer, but there had been that in Mrs. Randall's manner and countenance which had excited his darkest suspicions, and which had been the cause of his undiminished interest in her proceedings.

If there had been a crime she knew of it, had been in it, perhaps. He had watched her and studied her, but he had never questioned her. The time was not ripe for questioning. He did not want to alarm her by the lightest hint of his suspicions. She was too important a factor in the mystery.

He called on her on the evening after his interview with Chater, and persuaded her to go to a theatre with him. It was the first time he had assumed the attitude of established friendship, but although she seemed surprised at the invitation, she accepted it.

"I shall be glad to get out of this hole for a few hours," she said, with an impatient sigh, as she pinned on her hat before the glass over the mantelpiece, the little fur toque in which she had charmed the jury.

Faunce took her to see a musical comedy, a roaring farce from start to finish, in which the most popular low comedian in London gave a free rein to his eccentricities; and he watched his companion's face from time to time while the auditorium rocked with laughter at the wild fun. Not a smile illumined that gloomy countenance. He could see that she was hardly conscious of the scene, at which she stared with fixed melancholy eyes. Once she looked round at the people near her, with a dazed expression, as if she wondered why they were laughing.

It is recorded of the first Napoleon that he once sat through a broad farce with an unchanged countenance; but then his shoulders bore the burden of empire, the lives and fortunes of myriads.

The experience of this evening went far to confirm Faunce's ideas. He took Mrs. Randall to an oyster shop, and gave her some supper, and then put her into a cab and sent her back to Selburne Street.

Just at the last, when he had paid the cabman and given her the man's ticket, her face lighted up for a moment with a forced smile.

"Thank you no end for a jolly evening," she said.

"I'm afraid it hasn't been very jolly for you, Mrs. Randall. You didn't seem amused."

"Oh, I don't think I'm up to that sort of trash now. I had too much of it when I was on the boards. And the more comic the show is, the more I get thinking of other things."

"You shouldn't think too much; it'll spoil your beauty."

"Oh, that's gone," she said, "or, if it ain't, I don't care. I'd as leave be a nigger as a 'has been,' any day. Good night. Come and see me soon; and perhaps, if you take me to a tragedy next time, I may laugh," she added.

"There's something bitter bad behind that," mused Faunce, as he tramped across the bridge to Waterloo Station for the last Putney train, "but, for all that, I can't believe she's a murderess."

Faunce spent the next morning in his den in Essex Street poring over a book to which he had frequent recourse, and of which he was justly proud, since it was the wife of his bosom who had compiled this register of passing events for his study and use, a labour of love on her part, achieved with abnormal slowness, and kept closely up to date. The book was carried home to Putney on the first of every month, and Mrs. Faunce's careful hands added such paragraphs bearing on the scheme of the work, as she had cut out of the newspapers during the previous four weeks.

It had pleased this good helpmeet to think that she was assisting her husband in his professional labours, and the gruesome nature of her researches had never troubled her.

Mrs. Faunce's book was a large folio bound in red levant leather, and containing newspaper cuttings, pasted in by the lady's careful hands, and indexed and classified with neatness and intelligence.

The volume was labelled "Not accounted for," and was a record of exceeding ghastliness.

It contained the reports of coroners' inquests upon all manner of mysterious deaths, the unexplained cases which might have been murder, the "found drowned," the nameless corpses discovered in empty houses, in lodging-house garrets, on desolate heaths and waste places; a dismal calendar of tragic destinies, the record of hard fate or of undiscovered crime.

Steadily, carefully, John Faunce searched the spacious pages where the scraps of newspaper type stood out against a broad margin of white paper. He began his scrutiny at the date on which Colonel Rannock was said to have left London, and pursued it without finding any fact worth his attention till he came to a paragraph dated May 30, and extracted from the _Hants Mercury_, a popular bi-weekly newspaper, published in Southampton.

"STRANGE DISCOVERY AT REDBRIDGE.--An inquest was held yesterday afternoon at the Royal George, Redbridge, on the body of a man, which had been found the previous day by some workmen engaged on the repair of the road by the river. Their attention was attracted by the proceedings of some gulls that were hovering and screaming over a discarded boat that lay keel upwards in the slime and weeds of the foreshore, at a spot where the tide must have washed over it day by day. The timbers were so rotten that they crumbled under the men's hands as they tried to lift the boat; but worthless as it was, they found it carefully secured with two strong stakes which had been thrust between the timbers at stern and bow, and driven deep into the beach below the soft ooze and shifting mud that moved with every tide.

"The men pulled up the stakes and turned the keel over, and, almost buried in the mud, they found the body of a man which had evidently been lying there for a long time, and of which even the clothing was so decomposed as to be unrecognizable. The most careful scrutiny failed to afford any indication of identity, except the name of a well-known West End tailor on the trousers-buttons, and the fact that the unknown had been tall and strongly built. The doctor's evidence showed that the back of the skull had been fractured by some blunt instrument, and by a single blow of extraordinary violence. Death must have been almost instantaneous. The inquiry was adjourned in the hope of further evidence transpiring."

Other notices followed at short intervals, but no further evidence had "transpired." A verdict of murder by some person or persons unknown had ended the inquiry.

"Curious," mused Faunce, after reading the report a second time, and with profound attention, and then he went on with his book till he came to the last extract from a recent paper, another unknown victim of an unknown murderer, pasted on to the page a week ago. And of all those unsavoury records there was only that one of the body hidden under the discarded boat that engaged his attention.

He knew Redbridge, a village street with its back to the water, a few scattered houses along the shore, a homely inn, a bridge, and for the rest a swampy waste where the reeds grew tall and rank, and the wild duck skimmed. He knew the solitude that could be found along that shore, not a quarter of a mile from pleasant cottage houses, and lamplit village shops, and the gossip and movement of the inn. A likely spot for a murderer to hide his victim; and this was clearly a case of murder, the stealthy murderer's sudden blow, creeping noiselessly behind the doomed man's back, with the strong arm lifted ready to strike.

That single blow of great violence indicated the murderer's strength. But where and how had the blow been dealt, and what connection could there be between Colonel Rannock's supposed departure from Southampton, and the body found on the shore at Redbridge, four miles away?

The question was one which John Faunce told himself that he had to answer. The answer, when arrived at, might have no bearing on the case in hand, but it had to be found. Faunce's science was an inductive science, and he was always asking himself apparently futile questions and working hard at the answers.

* * * * *

Mr. Faunce spent the evening in his snug little sitting-room at Putney, and his sole recreation during those domestic hours was furnished by Mrs. Randall's discarded blotting-book, which he had not examined since he obtained it from the little servant in Selburne Street.

With a clear table and a strong duplex lamp in front of him, Faunce took the leaves of blotting-paper one by one, and held them between his eyes and the light, while Mrs. Faunce, reading a novel in her armchair by the fire, looked up at him every now and then with an indulgent smile.

"At your old blotting-paper work again, Faunce," she said. "I don't fancy you'll get much information out of that ragged stuff. There's too much ink, and too many blots and splotches."

"It's not a very good specimen, Nancy; but I suppose I shall come to something before I've done. It's finnicking work; but it almost always pays."

"You're so persevering; and then you love your work."

"If I didn't I should never have stuck to it, Nancy. It's rather trying work for any man that hasn't a heart like the nether millstone; and I'm afraid I haven't."

Faunce had been at work nearly two hours, and his wife's interest in a transcendently lovely heroine and a repulsively plain hero was beginning to flag, before he came upon a blurred and broken line that rewarded his patience.

In that splotched and besmeared labyrinth of lines the detective's trained eye had discovered--

1. A date, March 27.

2. Two words, "meet me----"

3. A line of fragmentary syllables, "Sou--ton--est--o'clock."

4. Three words, "always loved you."

5. "Your--nd----"

6. "ig----"

This much, the inky impression of a heavy hand and a broad-nibbed pen, Faunce was able to decipher upon two sheets of blotting-paper.

That last item, the letters "ig," with a flourish under the g, was the most significant part of his discovery.

The letter had been signed with the lady's pet name, "Pig," and Faunce told himself that to only one man would she have so signed herself--the lover who had called her by that name at the Mecca Hotel, and whose playful invention was doubtless responsible for the endearing sobriquet.

"She told me she did not know whether he sailed from Southampton or Liverpool," mused Faunce, "yet here, under my hand, is the evidence that she asked him to meet her at Southampton West."

He went to Southampton next day, and called at the office of the American Line. If Colonel Rannock had carried out his intention there must be some record of his passage to New York.

There was such a record, and a startling one, for it proved that he had not gone to America by the ship in which he meant to sail.

After some difficulty, and being referred from one clerk to another, Faunce found the young man who had booked Colonel Rannock's passage in the _Boston_ on Friday, March 29, the evening before she sailed.

"He came after seven o'clock, when the office was shut," said the clerk. "I was at work here, and as he made a great point of it I booked his berth for him. He suffered for having left it till the eleventh hour, for there were only two berths vacant--the two worst on the ship. He grumbled a good deal, but took one of them, paid the passage money, and left his cabin trunk to be sent on board next morning. And from that day to this we have never heard of him. He gave us no address, but we have his trunk, and we hold the cash to his credit, and I suppose he'll claim it from us sooner or later."

"Was he alone?"

"He was alone when he came into the office, but there was some one waiting for him in a cab outside, and I believe the some one was a lady. He spoke to her as he came in at the door, and I heard her answer him. 'Don't be all night about it, Dick,' she said."

"Thank you," said Faunce. "His friends are getting anxious about him, but, for all that, I dare say he's safe enough, and he'll call upon you for that passage money before long."

"If he's above ground I should think he would," answered the clerk, "but I must say it looks rummy that he hasn't claimed the cash and the trunk before now," and Faunce left the office more and more concerned about that corpse under the disused boat.

The steamer _Boston_ was to leave the docks late on Saturday afternoon. Why did Colonel Rannock go to Southampton on Friday, and how did he propose to spend the intervening hours? More questions for Faunce to answer.

A woman was with him at Southampton--a woman who had not travelled with him from Waterloo, since he was alone when Chater saw the evening express leave the platform. Who was the woman, and what was her business on the scene? That she had addressed him by his Christian name showed that she was not the casual acquaintance of an idle hour.

Faunce believed that he had found the answer to this question in Mrs. Randall's blotting-book. If the letter that had left its fragmentary impression on the blotting-paper had been sent to Colonel Rannock, a letter urging him to meet her at Southampton West, it would account for his going there the night before the steamer left. From those scattered words, and that signature, "Your fond Pig," Faunce concluded that Kate Delmaine had written to the man she loved, pleading for a parting interview, and that Rannock had responded to her appeal.

There were other questions for Faunce to answer, and it was in the quiet pursuit of knowledge that he took himself to the hotel which he deemed the best in Southampton, engaged a bedroom, and ordered a dinner in the coffee-room at the old-fashioned hour of six.

Before dining he called upon the coroner, who was also a well-known family solicitor, and heard all that gentleman could tell him about the inquest at Redbridge, which was no more than had been recorded in the local newspaper.

Faunce having revealed himself in his professional capacity, the coroner expressed his own opinion freely.

"I made up my mind that it was a murder case, and a bad one," he said; "I've got the tailor's buttons in my criminal museum. Dash, Savile Row. That stamps the victim as a stranger. We Southampton people don't get our clothes in Savile Row."

The fashionable tailor's name was the only link between the nameless corpse and the world of the living; the sole clue to identity.

There was no one in the coffee-room at six o'clock, and Faunce dined snugly at a small table near the fire, where he was able to enjoy a _tête-à-tête_ with the head-waiter, an old servant of the hotel, and possessed of that vast extent of local and general knowledge which seems the peculiar property of head-waiters and hotel-porters. The porter's knowledge takes a wider range; but the waiter has the more subtle mind.

Faunce started his inquiry with a bold guess.

"Do you happen to remember a lady and gentleman who dined here one Friday evening in March last year--a tall man, good-looking, and a very handsome woman. He was to leave for New York next day."

"We get a good many people who are going to New York, sir--chiefly Americans who want to look about the neighbourhood--but I do call to mind such a gentleman dining here one night in the spring of last year--for the special reason that he engaged a bedroom, and didn't occupy it, and also that he left a crocodile dressing-bag that has never been claimed from that day to this."

"Should you remember his face, do you think, if you saw his photograph?"

"I think I might, sir. I don't often forget a face that I've waited upon--unless it's no more than a casual drink and out again."

Faunce produced his capacious letter-case, in which there were half-a-dozen cabinet photographs.

He selected one, and showed it to the waiter.

"Was this the man?"

"No, sir, not a bit like him."

Faunce showed him another.

"No, sir."

Faunce took out the other four, and laid them on the table. The waiter's square forefinger alighted instantly on Colonel Rannock's photograph.

"That was the man, sir."

"Good! Now I want you to tell me anything you can remember about this gentleman and the lady who was with him. Take your time. I shall be here all the evening."

"There's not much to tell, sir, except the odd thing of his not coming back to the hotel. You see, sir, it's in this way. He and she comes in after eight o'clock. He gives me his bag, and tells me to order his room for him, and he orders dinner, anythink on the premises, as quick as possible, in a private room. I offers him the cartdurving, and he orders a bottle of Wachter, and they has their dinner cosy and quiet, all to theirselves. I can see as she is upset about something, and I gather that he's starting for New York next day, and that he's going to Klondyke. He sends me out of the room when the dishes are on the table, and I gather that they want to talk--but in taking in the tart--which they don't touch--and the cheese, I hear her persuade him to go for a turn by the water after dinner. He doesn't seem to want to go, but she presses it, saying as she has a splitting head, and thinks the night air will do her good. She looks pretty bad, as white as chalk, and her eyelids red with crying."

"Well, they went out together, I suppose?"

"Yes, they has their coffee and their liqueur--she has two goes--and then they go out. It must have been near eleven, for they sat a long time over their dinner, and the night was pitch dark. If they was strangers they might have walked into the water as easy as walk beside it; but whatever they did, that's the last we ever see of 'em, and my master was out of pocket for two dinners and a bottle of champagne; but there's the crocodile bag, and even if it's full of brickbats, it's worth three or four sovereigns to anybody as a bag; and if the gent don't turn up at the end of the year we shall put in an advertisement that, if not claimed, it will be sold to pay expenses."

"Did it never strike you that the gentleman might have met with foul play?"

"Well, no! There was her, you see. Two of 'em could hardly have got made away with and nobody hear of it. I expect he was running away with somebody else's wife, or some other rum start, and they went off to Jersey by the steamer that starts at midnight."

"And you've never given the matter a thought since that night, I suppose?"

"Well, sir, it wasn't my business to think about it. I ain't in the detective line, thank God."

Faunce smoked the cigar of thoughtfulness by the coffee-room fire, went to bed at ten o'clock, and was out after an early breakfast next morning, strolling by the water between all that is left of the old city wall and the West Station. The tide was in, and the wavelets plashed gaily against the low parapet, and Faunce saw how by a false step in the darkness any one might drop into eight or nine feet of water. But then there was the medical evidence of that smashing blow on the skull. Nor could any theory of accidental drowning account for the finding of the body four miles away, battened down under a rotten boat.

Faunce spent the rest of his morning in desultory conversation with three or four men who let out boats for hire, in whose ways and customs he showed a keen interest, wanting to know the how, when, and where of their letting, and if ever they lost a boat. He discovered one case--happening late in the previous March--of a man who had had a narrow escape of losing a handsome skiff, which had been taken "off" him one afternoon by a stranger, and which had been found adrift next morning near the West Station, and never a sixpence of the day's hire did he get from that swindling rascal.

Faunce tested the boatman's memory by close questioning about the stranger's personal appearance, and with some difficulty arrived at certain broad characteristics which had impressed the man at the time of the hiring.

"There was not many people wanting boats so early in the year," he said; "but this one told me as he had a niece living at Hythe, and wanted to give her an afternoon on the water. 'It may be dark when I brings back your boat,' he says, 'but I'm an old salt, and you needn't be afraid I shall damage her.' He was a big, powerful-looking chap, and he had something of a seaman's look, so I trusted him--and that's how he tret me," concluded the boatman, resentfully.

"If you can find me the precise date of that hiring, I'll give you a sovereign for it," said Faunce.

Thus stimulated, the boatman knew he could find the date. He had a rough-and-ready ledger in which he entered most hirings, and cash received--and he had certainly noted down the loss of a day, and the way he'd been swindled.

Faunce went home with him to a queer little slum between the river and the bar gate, and did not leave him till he had a copy of the man's entry in his pocket-book.

"I may want your evidence next assizes," he said; "but if I do, you'll be paid for your time."

"Thank 'ee, sir. I knew that bloke was a bad 'un."

These were all the answers to his questions that Faunce could find in Southampton. He went back to town that afternoon, and he spent a rollicking evening at the Battersea Gamecock, in the company of Mr. Bolisco and a little knot of his admirers, of whom some were "bookies," and others, members of the pugilists' noble profession. The evening's talk was mostly of the Turf and the prize-ring, and it furnished Faunce with no direct answers to his questions; but it enabled him to turn the full light of his psychological science upon Bolisco's character and temperament.

"A wild beast on two legs," was Faunce's summing up of the pugilist, as he strolled away from the sporting tavern.

He was closeted for an hour next morning with the landlord of the Gamecock, from whom he received more than one direct answer to his questions.

First, as to the link between Kate Delmaine, alias Prodgers, and Jim Bolisco?

Mr. Lodway, the present landlord, had been barman when Bill Prodgers had the Gamecock, and he remembered Kitty Prodgers running about, fifteen years old, a rough-headed girl in a pinafore; but always a beauty, and always with a devil of a temper. She was an only child, and motherless. Nobody knew anything about her mother, who had died before Prodgers took the Gamecock. The girl and her father used to quarrel, and Bolisco, who lodged in the house off and on, used to stick up for her, and Prodgers and he sometimes came to blows.

"And this," concluded Mr. Lodway, "was the beginning of their walking about together."

"They were sweethearts then, Kate and Bolisco?"

"Well, they kind of kep' company, though she was such a kid that nobody thought it was going to lead to anything. Bolisco was a good-looking chap then, before he got his smeller smashed in the mill with the Hammersmith nigger. They kep' company for a year or two, off and on, for it wasn't in Kate to go on long with anybody without quarrelling; and then, after one of her rows with her father, she walks off and gets herself engaged at the Spectacular Theatre, straight off. She was such a clipper at seventeen that she had but to show herself to a manager to get took on. He'd have engaged forty such, I reckon, at the same price. The father was drinking as much as he knew how by that time, and things were going to the bad here, and he took no more trouble about the girl than if she'd been a strayed kitten: but me and one or two more went after her, and found her in decent lodgings in Katherine Street, and as straight as a die. But six months after that she had her house in St. John's Wood, and her brougham, as smart as a duchess; and the mug who was paying the piper was one of Bolisco's patrons, a Yorkshire bart, very young, and as green as a spring cabbage."

"And Bolisco was still hanging about her?"

"Lord! yes; he wasn't likely to lose sight of her while she had the spending of that young softy's rhino."

"Mr. Bolisco is a bit of a spendthrift, I take it."

"Above a bit. Never could keep his money long, and yet never was guilty of a generous action, as I know of. It's all gone backing wrong 'uns--sometimes horses, sometimes pugilists. Of course, he's had the straight tip now and again, and has pulled off a good thing; but as a rule, Bolisco ain't lucky. Why, to my certain knowledge he had four hundred pound spare cash less than a year ago--won it over the City and Suburban--and I don't believe he's got a tanner except what she gives him."

"Meaning Mrs. Randall?"

"Just so! And he owes me nine weeks' board and lodging. I shouldn't take it as quiet as I do, if he wasn't a bit of a draw. The young 'uns like to see him and hear him talk."

"And he sets a good example in the way of hard drinking?"

"Oh, I don't encourage any man to drink more than he can stand. But as long as he can carry his liquor like a gentleman----"

"You don't put the skid on. But how did you come to know of this money of Bolisco's, last March?"

"I didn't say anythink about March."

"No, but it was about March--or April last year, that Bolisco was flush, wasn't it?"

"It was after Epsom Spring; and that was near the end of April."

"True. Did he show you the cash?"

"He brought the notes to me to get changed for him--four fifties and two hundreds. He'd been paid short, and he wanted tenners and fivers. I paid the two hundreds to my brewer, and gave Bolisco my cheque for the lot, on the London and Provincial, Battersea Branch."

"Did you keep the numbers of the notes?"

"Not me. I got the collector's receipt for the money, and that was good enough for me. I paid the four fifties into my account at the L. and P."

"You hadn't often known Bolisco as flush as that?"

"Well, perhaps not. He's often been able to flourish a tenner, or a twenty-pun' note, after a race; but he didn't use to deal in fifties and hundreds. 'Why, Jim,' says I, 'you've been getting out of your depth.' 'Why, yes, mate,' says he, 'may be I've been a bit out of my depth.'"