Chapter XXXII: Run to Earth

“I have to tell you, Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “that your colleague has deserted you.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“He has driven away this morning to catch the early express. Disillusioned for ever, he told me, as to our police methods, disappointed in his one cherished ideal, he has gone to London, to deliver his report and state his case before the court of final appeal as represented by our employer, Mr Dando.”

“Very well, sir. Then, p’raps its time as _we_ got to business.”

“I don’t understand you, Jannaway.”

“Maybe not, Mr Shapter. Maybe it’s a side of my business to be misunderstood, and a side of yours to know it.”

“Well, I should have thought I knew you pretty well by this time.”

“_Should_ you, sir? With respect, and judging by results, I must take leave to doubt it.”

“Well, Jannaway, well.”

The detective warmed a little, his grievance coming to an irresistible head.

“Look you here, Mr Shapter,” he said. “If we’re all to be judged by what we go a-boasting of ourselves, we might as well petition the Almighty to open Paradise again, and give us that Valombroso for our head gardener. But He’s not to be took in, like some folks, by the clanging of an empty brass pot; and mayhap He’d ask for a little more proof of what was at the inside of all the noise that pretended to such a bellyful of wisdom. It’s time for a cock to crow when it’s out of the egg.”

“But really, inspector, mayn’t silence sometimes be a little empty too?”

“That’s for you to judge, sir.”

“I am your very humble servant, Jannaway.”

“Then, sir, if you’ll come along with me, I’ll show you where the body of this man Dalston is lying at this moment.”

“Dead?”

The bolt, loosed serenely from that official blue, caught us fairly in the wind, and sent us staggering. The whispered cry came from us together. The inspector nodded his head, with his lips set very grim.

“Dead, gentlemen. Look in a well, they say, for truth. It’s worth bearing in mind.”

“In a well!”

“In a well, sir. Mrs Dalston done him. I’ve got her under arrest at this moment.”

“Murder?”

The detective with a swift movement gripped my arm.

“Hold on, sir,” he said. “It’ll pass in a bit.”

“I’m all right,” I whispered huskily. “Did she murder him!”

“I didn’t say she did, now did I?” he protested. “She drove him to kill himself, if you want the truth. We got him up at daybreak, and he’s lying in the parlour now. _His_ ticket’s cancelled for good and all. I want you over there at once, Mr Shapter; but the young gentleman needn’t come unless he likes.”

“I’m ready,” I retorted fiercely. “What do you suppose? Have I run him so far to shirk the end? Come, hurry; what are you waiting for?”

“Well,” said the detective, “he’s not a pretty sight, that’s all. There’s few as is what shoots themselves in the head.”

I stared at him; I would ask no more. In a minute we were on our way.

“Since when have you known this, Jannaway?” asked Mr Shapter, pale and breathless, as we hurried on.

“Only since early this morning for certain, sir,” answered the man. “But I’d been awake and busy half the night before, while the Italian gentleman, I suppose, was a-fuming and a-packing of his bag. He’d better have waited a little longer. I couldn’t have kept the truth from him another day.”

“How long have you been keeping it from him, from us all, as it is?”

“I mentioned, since this morning, didn’t I, sir? I don’t say as that covers the whole process of my reasoning up to it. But, as to that, you’ll hardly blame me, I suppose, for sitting close. Anyway, its the inferior English method, Mr Shapter, and, being an inferior English detective myself, I’m stupidly prejudiced in favour of it.”

It was wounded dignity’s last shot. We hardly spoke another word as we sped across the fields. For myself, I was so overcome with agitation as to find the mere effort of speech a labour. Yet once I found voice to ask Jannaway a question appalled: “What will be done with her?”

He shook his head, grating his chin.

“What indeed, sir? It might be proved incitement to suicide. More like she’ll be found incapable to plead. I’m detaining her as a matter of form; but the County Asylum’s more in her line than the police station. Don’t you be afraid for her, sir.”

Afraid? Merciful heavens! if this might be found the solution!--my mother--never as yet so realised--never, until made a widow for the second time, and by her own revengeful act, it seemed. Yet, dreadful as that might prove itself, it restored her somehow in my mind to her right place in the triple tragedy of my life.

We found a knot of gaping, whispering rustics gathered about the farm when we reached it. The news had already got abroad, and a potent shadow was henceforth to add itself to the traditional spectres of the place. A stolid hot-faced member of the local police opened the door to us. A fellow-constable was in charge of the prisoner in the study. Thither we went.

She rose, with a smile, upon seeing us--there was a bright unearthly light in her eyes--and glided across to me.

“Hush!” she said. “They have found him, Charlie darling; but it does not matter, he can never hurt you again. How big and strong you have grown while you slept; and he has fallen to nothing. He would be no match for you now; and yet, in spite of all, I used to think him a fine man. He would woo so confidently; and all the time he never guessed what was in my heart. And in the end I did it so cleverly. He just went down there into hiding, into the place which he had discovered and told me of--I let him down myself--and afterwards it was so simple. I had only to wind up the bucket again and leave him. He had never foreseen that, for all his cleverness; and I kept my secret too well. He used to call up to me--the names that had once seemed to give me to him, and I listened and never answered. And then he implored and implored, and I never answered; but I looked over the rim and laughed at him until he knew. I saw his face hang white above the water--whiter and whiter every day--and then once, when evening had fallen, came the sound--O, my God!--and I knew that at last he had shot himself in his despair.”

She flung her hands to her throat, with a gasping cry--

“It was like him to take that way. He knew that the sound would go on for ever and ever in that pit and betray me in the end. Don’t you hear it now, coming from the garden? But you needn’t be afraid to touch me, my lord; my hands are clean. Gentlemen of the Jury, I did not kill him. Please let me pass. He has a headache, and it is my duty to attend to him. He is a very handsome man when he is himself. I should like to tell him that--it is so little--and I have never said as much to him before. I think it might help to cure him and stop the sound. Gentlemen--please!”

At a sign from Jannaway the two constables advanced, and put firm but not ungentle hands upon the poor creature. She struggled, uttering shriek upon shriek.

“Best leave her to us, sir,” panted one of the men. “She’ll go quiet in a little.”

Mr Shapter led me, inexpressibly agitated, from the room, and out into the open at the back. Here the detective took the lead, and, conducting us by way of weed-grown paths and tangled vegetation through a wicket into an old walled fruit garden, turned towards an angle of the enclosure where, on a little elevation, the yoke of a great well sprouted from the ground.

My heart shuddered in me as we approached the thing. It was a pretty massive structure, built for endurance, and calculated to the strain of a heavy load of water. The bucket, the loop of a strong chain connecting it with the windlass barrel, stood empty on the grass by the well rim--a great sheet-iron pail, capable of holding eight or perhaps half-a-score gallons. But the machinery by which it was manipulated was the most curious, being a nest of powerful cog-wheels and blocks, so adjusted under the butt of the windlass that, by turning a handle, a child, or little stronger, could wheel up the full bucket with perfect ease and as many pauses by the way as he chose. What was as striking as anything, perhaps, was the state of preservation of the whole structure; but, no doubt, the entire water supply of the farm depending on it had made that a perennial necessity.

“Will you look down now, gentlemen,” said the detective, “and see if anything strikes you? Hold steady, sir!”

I balanced myself by the upright post of the windlass, and peered into the well. Its heavy wooden lid, pierced by a trap in the middle, through which the bucket could be raised and lowered without disturbing the rest, had been bodily removed, and stood on its rim against the wall hard by. The diameter of the shaft was considerable--a full six feet, I should say--and the depth of the boring, it might be, two hundred, but I am not certain. I know only that the eye of water at the bottom looked no larger than a full moon, and that a surprising interval elapsed between the dropping of a stone from above and its answering plop from below.

“Well, gentlemen?” said Jannaway, after we had been gazing down some moments; “nothing strikes you out of the common?”

“Nothing whatever.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed, satisfied. “They was pretty cute in those days. Now, I’ll tell you, there _is_ something peculiar, and not more’n thirty or forty feet down; but you’d never guess it from here, would you? If you doubt me, go and satisfy yourselves. I don’t ask you to, mind you. I say only as I’ve been the journey myself this morning, and more than once; and if that’s enough for you, you can take my word on it.”

I came away instantly from the post.

“I’m going down,” I said.

“No!” exclaimed Mr Shapter violently.

“Yes,” I insisted.

“He’ll do all right, sir,” said the detective, after a moment’s survey of me. “I should be glad, as a matter of fact, of the corroborative testimony, and there’s no more danger in it than in a fire escape, if he keeps his hold and his nerve.”

“I am going down,” I repeated. “What shall I do, Jannaway?”

“Nothing more, sir, than sit on the bucket edge, with your legs inside, and hold on to the chain. When you come to it, shout, and I’ll stop.”

I did as he bid me. He went to the windlass handle, and without a moment’s hesitation began to turn. Instantly the bucket containing me swung free, and, after a little sluggish oscillation, descended slow and smooth, dropping into the bowels of the earth. It was a curious rather awful sensation, going down so into that smooth-walled shaft, with its deep-sunk eye watching for the breaking of the thread which was to precipitate me to an unthinkable death. I could not find the nerve, after one glance, to look down again. But, on the other hand, the brightness of my descent both surprised and comforted me. I had peered from above into a pit of gloom, rather appalling and fathomless to the eye; now, descending into it, under its open circular skylight all was as clear as day, so that I could see the shadows under the projecting bricks, and the little hartstongues in the crevices of mortar a vivid green.

I must have dropped already some thirty or more feet, when I saw a curious hooded bulge, so slight as to be imperceptible from above, swell from the curve of the wall; and immediately afterwards the wall itself appeared to gape beneath it like a yawning mouth. I shouted in another moment, and the bucket stopped. Right opposite me, gouged out of the wellside, was a deep niche like an oriel, forming a sort of grotto or retreat. It was quite roomy, and lined and floored with brick; and a stone ledge in it formed a seat. At the entrance an iron stanchion was let into the wall, so that one, setting the bucket gently swinging, might easily grasp that hold and land himself in the cave. A man might lie hid there indefinitely, with the aid of a confederate above, and not a soul guess the secret of his disappearance. It was as cunning a cover, I am convinced, as persecution had ever inspired.

Now, as I gazed fascinated, a certain token of some late human occupation there entered into my vision and set the brain of it reeling. I screeched out, and clung frantically to the chain. In an instant I was going upward, and in a little more the wholesome daylight came about me.

“Swing!” cried the detective, bending at the crank; and he slipped in a block that held up the machinery.

I obeyed, as well as my shaken nerves would let me; and in a little they had caught the rim of the bucket, and held it to the side while I stepped out.

“Why the devil didn’t you tell me of the blood?” I gasped, wiping my wet forehead as I stood away.

The inspector looked at me queerly.

“Truth is, sir,” he said, “I never thought. We’d had to get him out, you see; and a nice job it was. What was left of it didn’t seem to matter.”

Mr Shapter, with his eyes like grey agates, was holding my left hand in his left, his right placed sympathetically on my shoulder.

“What was it, my boy?” he said.

“A cave, sir,” I answered--“a scoop in the wall where he’d hidden--water and a cave like that other. And the shot in his head! My God! who fired it? My God, sir!”

“An awful retribution,” he said. “But come, come--you are overwrought; and no wonder. Let us go back to the house--or into the open fields, if you prefer it; and Jannaway shall give us the story of his discovery, in good matter-of-fact reviving prose.”

* * * * * * * * *

The detective took from his pocket the letter which he had obtained from Mrs Dalston, and held it up to the light for our inspection.

“Do you observe the water-mark, gentlemen--Nolans, the big North Hampshire paper mills? It was that first put me on the scent. Here was local-made foreign note-paper, asserted to have been received from Spain. He might, of course, have took some with him; but it wasn’t likely, was it, seeing as how the letter itself refers to the journey as unpremeditated, and him away from home, or wished it to be supposed so, at the time? Inference, that he’d wrote it here for a blind, and give it to be produced by Mrs D. in case of inquiry, while he himself dropped into hiding.

“He was clever, and he knew a good deal--not the least of his knowledge that the game was threatening to be up with him--but the best of his sort make their slips. He’d made his, and it left me pretty convinced that he’d be found lying close somewheres about the neighbourhood, while the hunt ran abroad.

“I didn’t much cotton to the house, myself, for a solution. It was reasonable to suppose, of course, that, during his tenancy of the place, he hadn’t overlooked its best facilities for concealment. But, then, where _he_ could find a way, others could too, and the reputation of the farm promised a pretty searching inquiry into its holes and corners. No, I thought, if our gentleman’s to be unearthed at all, it will be from somewheres characteristic of his genius, and the least likely to be considered by the ordinary. Probability pointed to the house for that: therefore I made it my business to look outside.

“Now, I don’t know if you may recall, gentlemen, a rather queer thing--and that was the odd laugh the lady give in answer to our Italian friend’s remark that she’d been too precipitate? She had--she admitted it indirectly. She’d always been looking, the inference was, for this solution to the long grudge she’d bore against him, and, when at last it come, it come too late. Why? By God, gentlemen, the answer took me in a flash. It was because she herself had already anticipated the law by killing him.

“Once, in my mind, I couldn’t get it out. Yet, if it was true, it only made the puzzle deeper. For where could she have hid him, none the less? and why had she chosen this particular time more than another for the deed? The plain answer to that second seemed because he must have put himself suddenly at her mercy, in a way he’d never done before, and the temptation had proved too strong for her. It was then for the first time that the well occurred to me. Could she have pushed him in unexpected when he was gone to draw water?

“I had observed the thing, of course, often enough before. Its size and depth and the machinery about it was only too conspicuous to draw my serious notice. But now I went to a closer examination--and, by the Lord, gentlemen, what do you think I found caught among the cogs? Why, a finger-stall. That was something, at least, for on the day we first saw her, Mrs D. was wearing such a thing.

“That decided me. I tested the machinery, and found the bucket drop like oil. A child could have worked it. I determined to go down into that well, and find out, if I could, what a little fishing at its bottom might bring to light. You see, the discovery of the grotto was an accident. I’d been looking for murder, not suicide, and the truth met me, like you, sir, half way. Only God or a Jury can give it a name. That was no earlier than this morning, when I got over a couple of the locals, and had the cover off and was let down. _He’d_ never wanted the cover off. The man must have been built of stone and steel. To sit there those days and nights famished and deserted, waiting for his release that never came! The most of us, I think, would have dropped into the water and ended it long before he did. But he always had his revolver, that’s true. He could afford to stake up to the last chance. I don’t know how long he himself had known about the grotto; but he only let his wife into the secret of it a fortnight ago. He’d seen or heard from the woman Carey, as far as I can gather, and thought as we should be down upon him at once. He bolted for his hiding at the first in a panic, arranging with Mrs D. that she was to come and wind him up at evenfall if nothing happened; and that was the last the world saw of him. It come on the woman in a moment as how she’d got him in a trap, and her chance was given her at last. I had it all out of her, while she kept the reason to speak it, and that wasn’t long. When she saw _him_ being brought in, she broke out like a screech-owl; and a mercy for her if she could be turned into one in actual fact, poor creatur’.”

“Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “I owe you an apology.”

“I’ll cancel the debt, sir,” answered the inspector. “After all, your saying _you_ couldn’t understand me was a compliment.”