Chapter TWENTY-ONE: Mr. Wentworth Disappears

Scottie loafed into his room before Andy was awake the following morning. Scottie had his hands thrust into his pockets and his face wore a look of supreme discontent.

“Hullo, Scottie,” said Andrew, struggling to his elbow. “Anything wrong?”

“Nothing, except the general moral tone of this community,” said Scottie, sitting down. “I am going up to town, Macleod. This place is a bit too exciting for me, and, anyway, you’re getting yourself a bad name. I met that pen-pusher, Downer, this morning, and he was as full of trouble as a dog is full of fleas. Said it was the worst case he had ever handled, and that he had given up a good, comfortable, straightforward murder to come here, and he wishes he hadn’t.”

“Have you seen his paper?”

Scottie nodded.

“Mild, Macleod, that’s the word, and punk. It was all about what terrible danger he was in, and how a masked figure sprang from the curtains and threatened him with death.”

“Whether it was masked or not, nobody knows. I should say it wasn’t,” said Andy. “What does he say about Miss Nelson?”

“He gives her a clean bill. Everything has been satisfactorily explained, he says, and there is an apology in the paper.”

“Then he’s going away?” asked Andy with some satisfaction.

Scottie shook his head.

“He said so. But what a—a—reporter! I’ll bet he’s staying another week.”

He strolled to the door.

“Maybe I’ll come back, Macleod,” he said. “So long.”

He was gone before Andy could ask him whether Stella Nelson was visible at that hour.

He was reaching the dead-end of this crime, facing a baffling cul-de-sac. The time was approaching when he must leave Beverly Green and the murder must pass into the category of unpunished crimes.

The real mystery was the chain of circumstances that bound together Darius Merrivan, Abraham Selim, and the murderer.

He intended calling on Stella, but his plan was changed by the arrival of a long telegram from headquarters. He read it and whistled.

“Come to town at once. Mr. Wentworth, a member of a business in Ashlar Buildings, has disappeared. Enquiries at his bank show that he has an enormous sum of money on deposit. There is reason to believe that Abraham Selim is connected with the disappearance.”

Mr. Wentworth had occupied a suite of offices next door to that which Abraham Selim had rented. Andrew knew this from his previous enquiries; knew, too, something of the standing of the firm before he questioned Mr. Wentworth’s distressed lady clerk.

“He was in the office last Friday,” said the girl. “He left my salary, money for petty cash, and told me that he would be in on Monday or Tuesday. I had a little talk with him about the business, because we were doing practically none and I was worrying about how long he would go on before he closed up the office. But he was very cheerful and told me that he would soon have good news for me. He said this in a joking way. He was always a little jocular.”

“You know where he lives, of course?” asked Andy.

“No, sir, I don’t. I have an idea that he lives in hotels. He wrote me once or twice when he was away, and his address was always an hotel, though I never sent any letters to him there. Another remark I remember his making the last time I saw him was, that it was funny we never saw much of Mr. Selim.”

“You told me that before,” said Andy, nodding. “Do you remember the hotel he wrote you from and about what date?”

“I’ve got those in the day book,” she said. “I thought you might want them, and I have taken them out.”

Andy glanced at the list she had prepared. They were well-known hotels in various parts of the country and he pocketed the memorandum for future action.

“Have you a photograph of Mr. Wentworth?”

She shook her head.

“In appearance, what was he like?”

Here she was very vague indeed. Her own age was nineteen, which is an age when anybody over thirty-five is “old.” He had a stoop, she remembered, and wore horn-rimmed spectacles. She knew very little about the business, and had only been in his employ for twelve months. She knew no other houses that he did business with; she never sent out accounts, and apparently her job was to receive callers who did not come, to make a précis from the newspapers of transactions on the Provision Exchange (she showed him a great heap of manuscript she had compiled in this way), and to receive her salary regularly on Friday afternoon.

It was not much of a business, she admitted.

“I did write a letter or two to him about the prices, but beyond that I did nothing.”

Andrew visited the two hotels in town which were included in the list the girl had given him. They turned up their books and confirmed her story. Mr. Wentworth had stayed with them, but they knew nothing about him, except that he was a name and a number.

Andy went back to headquarters and reported.

“Wentworth and Abraham Selim are identical personages,” he said. “‘Wentworth & Wentworth’ is a fake concern, and existed to give Selim an excuse for being in the building. Remember that Selim’s clerk only attended at the office between eleven and one. Wentworth never came to Ashlar Buildings until two o’clock in the afternoon, and then only on certain days, which were the days that the clerk was away on his holiday. For Wentworth to slip into Abraham Selim’s office, take out the letters, and get back into his own room was a simple matter. Wentworth’s banker tells me that he has a dozen deed boxes filled with papers, and with these, I think, we shall be able to establish the identity beyond any doubt.”

“Has Wentworth drawn any money from the bank since he disappeared?”

“I asked that, and they tell me that he has not. That, however, is easily accounted for. Selim knew that we should go straight to his office. He probably thought that we should immediately discover the relationship between Wentworth and himself. To draw a cheque as Wentworth would mean that he would run the risk of detection.”

He secured the necessary orders for access to the possessions of Wentworth, and in the manager’s private office he sat through the afternoon and far into the night, examining the contents of six tightly packed steel boxes.

His work was facilitated by the discovery that two of the boxes had documents relating to the legitimate firm of Wentworth. Apparently Selim had purchased the business some years before, and even then it was not in a flourishing condition. Under his guidance it had gone from bad to worse, for the simple reason there was no need for his exploiting legitimate trade when he found an easier way to wealth, a way which offered few risks and enormous benefits.

The other boxes held title deeds, instruments of transfer, old contracts, and in every case they were made out in the name of Abraham Selim.

The man seemed to possess property in every part of the country. A farm here, a few workmen’s cottages there, a coal-mine in some other place; there were particulars of mineral rights he had acquired, details of a sugar plantation in the West Indies, and numerous other pieces of documentary evidence of his enormous wealth.

It was nearing the hour of midnight, and the last pile of papers was being disposed of, when Andrew, glancing at an old contract, saw a familiar name.

“John Aldayn Severn.”

Severn!

The contract was drawn up in legal language. It was between Abraham Selim on the one part, “hereinafter called the lender,” and John Aldayn Severn on the other part. And as he read he grew more and more amazed at the extraordinary conditions which were imposed. Stripped of its legal terminology, the lender agreed to place at the unknown Severn’s disposal the sum of five thousand pounds per annum for life, and “for particular services rendered” Severn agreed that, in the event of his inheriting any property which produced the sum assured to him, he would pay regularly to Selim’s account one-half of the revenues he acquired. The property concerned was not particularised.

Andy looked at the deed thoughtfully. It was dated five years after Severn’s marriage, if Arthur Wilmot’s information was correct. Had Severn ever inherited his estate, and, if he had, did he ever fulfil the contract?

The bank manager had left two clerks to assist him, and there was available all the books dealing with Selim’s accounts. Andrew ran his finger down page after page, but it was difficult to distinguish the origin of any sum except——

He glanced at the contract again. The payments were to be made on the 1st. of March and the 1st. of September. He turned to the books and traced back the accounts for twenty years, and on the 1st. March and the 1st. September, every year, there had been paid to Selim’s account sums varying from seven thousand to nine thousand five hundred. So Severn had acquired his property and was paying.

“Here is my man,” said Andrew to himself. “If I find Severn I can find Abraham Selim.”

There were no works of reference available, and on the following morning he examined carefully every directory of landed proprietors he could find. The name Severn occurred three times, but in each case they owned very little land, and his telegraph enquiries brought him no nearer to the identity of the John Aldayn Severn of the contract. It was a name entirely unknown in the vicinity of Beverley except to one man.

Mr. Boyd Salter was something of an authority on the landed gentry, and Andy called on him the morning he came back to Beverley Green.

“I think the Severn you are in search of went to Australia some years ago. I told you when we first met that a friend of mine had suffered grievously at the hands of Selim. I was speaking of Severn at the time. I knew him rather well, and I knew he was in the hands of moneylenders.”

“Then the estate he inherited was in Australia?” suggested Andy.

“You sound disappointed,” smiled Boyd Salter.

“I am a little,” replied Andy. “Can you suggest any reason why Merrivan should have treasured his marriage certificate?”

“I had no idea that he had, and talking of Merrivan reminds me of my burglar. I hit him.”

“The dickens you did!” said Andy, interested. “How do you know, sir?”

“We found blood marks the next morning; not many, but sufficient to show that he had been wounded, and in the hand. The imprint of his hand is on a leaf. I took the liberty of informing Inspector Dane in your absence, and I believe he has made enquiries of the doctors around, so far without success.”

Instead of going to the village by car Andy walked back, leaving the car to be brought round to the village by Mr. Boyd Salter’s chauffeur. He followed the supposed track of the thief, and Madding, the gamekeeper, pointed out where the blood-stains had been found. The faintest trace remained. He examined the leaf; that and the twigs about it were gory evidence of the burglar’s hurt.

Andy went on by the covert path into the village. His way skirted the orchard where Sweeny had been found, and he came on to the green via the tennis court and the narrow lane which ran by the side of Mr. Merrivan’s house.

He had not seen Stella for two days. It seemed more like two years, and a century since he had first watched her through the glass panel of the telephone booth in Beverley post office.

A servant answered the door.

“Miss Nelson has gone away, sir.”

“Gone away?” repeated Andy in astonishment. “Where has she gone?”

“Would you like to see Mr. Nelson, sir. He is in the studio. You know your way.”

Andy found the artist pretending to work, and Kenneth Nelson welcomed him warmly.

“You don’t know how glad I am you are back, Macleod,” he said. “I am worried almost to death.”

“Where is Stella?”

“Well, she is supposed to be at her aunt’s,” said Nelson slowly.

“Supposed to be? Isn’t she there?”

“I sent a wire asking when she was coming back, and I had a reply from my sister saying that Stella had only spent the afternoon in the house and that she had gone north on business.”

“Very probably she has,” said Andy, relieved.

What he had expected he could not say, but Nelson’s news was certainly not alarming. He had a suspicion that Stella did not take her father into her confidence even in matters pertaining to his own welfare.

“That alone wouldn’t worry me,” said Nelson, as though he read his thoughts. “I’ll show you what does.”

He went upstairs with a wondering Andy behind him, and on the second floor he opened a door disclosing a pretty little bedroom.

“This is Stella’s room,” he said unnecessarily, for Andrew knew the exact location.

“I came up here the day she left, which, by the way, was the same day that you went to town, to get some soft rags—Stella keeps a supply of them for me—but the cupboard was locked. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I had a key which fitted, and the first thing which met my eye when I opened the door was this.”

He put his hand on to a shelf and pulled down a little bundle of linen strips. They were stained a deep red.

“And look there.”

He pointed to the floor, where the tell-tale spots showed clearly.

“And on the edge of that basin. She must have cut herself and did not tell me a word. Her hand, I should think, from the regular intervals in which the stain occurs. Of course she can look after herself. She had a full nursing course during the war and liked it.”

Andy looked at the bandages without seeing them. That sudden light which had occurred in Stella’s room after the burglary at Beverley Hall! The stains which had been found in the park! It was incredible, impossible, that Stella could have been the burglar, but her sudden disappearance from view almost confirmed his half-formed suspicion. Why had she gone away so unexpectedly?

“Did you see Stella’s hand when she went?” he asked.

“No; she had it in her muff. It was strange that she had a muff on a warm day like this. I particularly remembered that after I had found the bandages. She was awfully nervous, too. Quite jumpy for Stella.”

Andrew threw out his arms with a gesture of despair.

“I’m beaten,” he said.

He packed his bag that afternoon and stowed it behind his car, and with one glance at the valley of mystery he drove through Beverley village and to town. But it was not the Beverley mystery which had beaten him. It was the inexplicable Miss Nelson.