The Mystery of the Moor

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 430, 11 August 1928, Page 22

The Mystery of the Moor

By

J. S. Fletcher

CHAPTER VII. —Continued. She produced another key, unlocked the cabin trunk, and from a pocket inside it, took out an envelope, from which she withdrew a letter written on several sheets of foreign notepaper. She handed it to Crole. “You and Mr. Holt can read that together, she said. “Read it carefully.” “I read the letter over Crole’s shoulder. It was from one James Sinclair, who introduced himself as Captain of the S.S. General Clive, trading as a rule between Bombay and Durban. He said that on his last voyage from Bombay he had taken on board at that port a passenger named Andrew Merchison, whom he described: Mr. Merchison was bound for Durban. In the course of the voyage, a stay was made off Mombasa. On October 18, the steamer being at anchor in Mombasa Bay, Mr. Merchison disappeared. He was last seen, rather late at night, sitting on a rail of the ship, aft, smoking his pipe. No one ever saw him again. The writer’s belief was that Mr. Merchison had had a sudden attack of faintness or giddiness, lost his balance, and fallen overboard, probably striking his head against the side of the ship as he fell. He added, naively, “the waters of Mombasa Bay are thickly infested with sharks.” Nothing being discovered about his passenger, he had examined his effects, found Mrs. Merchison’s address in a memorandum book, and therefore now wrote to her and at the same time forwarded Mr. Merchison’s cabin trunk, and all that it contained, with other small matters lying about his cabin; he drew particular attention to the fact that in a pocket in the trunk there was a considerable sum of money in gold, chiefly in English sovereigns. The solicitor read this letter through in silence, and silently handed it back to Mrs. Elphinstone. She replaced it in the trunk. “This trunk and its contents have remained intact ever since I received them, now many years ago,” she said. “Now you come and tell me that this stranger, calling himself Mazaroff, was in reality Andrew Merchison! Absurd!” “Nothing absurd, ma’am, in my telling you that,” retorted Crole, with the least touch of asperity. “As you will see when you hear what our young friend here has to tell. Now, Holt," he went on, turning to me, “you will just tell us precisely what Mazaroff confided to you, the second night of your stay at the Woodcock. Tell the whole story.” I told the whole story, as we ali stood there in that little room. I left nothing out! I laid stress on Mazaroff’s assertion that he could easily substantiate his identity, and how, and on the utter confidence with which he spoke of the matter. But, though I watched Mrs. Elphinstone closely during my narrative. I saw no sign of any wavering on her part; instead, there was incredulity, scepticism, even ridicule in her expression. “The thing’s absurd!” she declared in the end. “Utterly absurd! The man was probably some adventurer who had got hold of certain facts about Merchison’s past history, and

wanted to make money out of his knowledge. I glanced at Crole, and Crole looked at Mrs. Elphinstone as if he were sizing her up in a new light. “Dm!” he said quietly. “Now that, ma’am, if you will pardon me for using plain speech to a lady, is indeed an utterly absurd suggestion! Mr. Mazaroff, or, as we should call him, Mr. Merchison, though he had a perfectly legal right to the other name, according to his own account —so far from being a needy adventurer, was a wealthy man, a very wealthy man! And if you will pardon me still further, I will just put something before you. If this man was. as he asserted himself to be. and we shall probably prove, Andrew Merchison. who married you twenty-two or three years ago, your second marriage with Mr. Elphinstone is no marriage at all! You are, of course, protected from any consequences of such a marriage by the fact that when it was contracted you had not heard of Merchison for many years, and had the best grounds for believing him to be dead. But as he was not dead, you are still, in law, Mrs. Merchison, and ”

‘What is all this leading up to?” demanded Mrs. Elphinstone. “I ” “To this, ma’am,” continued Crole, lifting an admonitory finger, “and a very important point, too, as you will quickly see. Although T have had very little dealing with this unfortunate man I have had some dealing, while he was in London, and it is my distinct impression that he has died intestate. You understand me, of course—that he has left no will.” “Well—and what has that to do with me?” questioned Mrs. Elphinstone. “Merely this,” retorted Crole, picking up his hat, which he had laid aside while he read Captain Sinclair’s letter. “Merely this, ma’am. If he was Merchison, and you his wife, and this young lady your child, you and she come in, between you, for every penny he’s left! And there will be a great many pennies, or I’m a Dutchman! My advice to you, ma’am, is this—before settling on an attitude of incredulity and denial, just step across to the Woodcock, and see if you cannot satisfv yourself that the man lying there, so.dlv disfigured, but identifiable, was not the man he claimed to be? Verhum sanienti, ma’am’ —I daresay you know enough Latin to know what that means!”

With this Crole made one of his old-fashioned bows and walked out. and T followed him, leaving mother and daughter standing looking at each other. We went through the house and out into the gardens, in silence. As we passed the gates. Crole pulled out a snuffbox and took a hearty pinch. “That’s a damned, flint-like woman. Holt!” he said, cynically. “Hard—hard—and obstinate!” CHAPTER VIII. —THE LANDLORD’S GUN. My own impressions of Mrs. Elphinstone were precisely those which Mr. Crole expressed so emphatically. But I was just then thinking of other mat ters. “If the real Andrew Merchison was drowned in Mombasa Bay,” I said.” “how could—”

Crole Interrupted me with a sharp, sceptical laugh. “Aye, but was he so drowned there, or elsewhere, or anywhere?” he exclaimed. “My own belief is that he was never drowned at all.” “But the letter—and his belongings?” I suggested. “What can one make—” “Oh, I can make a lot!” retorted Crole. “From what bit I saw of him, and from your account of him, Mazaroff, or Merchison, was a queerish chap, all his life. I can quite understand that he just disappeared at Mombasa for good reasons of his own. What easier? For all that Sinclair, the writer of that letter, knew, Mer-

chison had arranged for a boat to come off for him at a certain hour at night —it comes, and he slips off into it and is clean gone. Easy!” “Leaving his money and things behind him?” I questioned. “He could have sent money and things—especially money—ahead of him to wherever he was bound,” said Crole drily. “Didn’t you tell me he spoke of Durban?” “Of Durban, yes,” I answered. "It was there he took the name of Mazaroff.”

“Aye, well,” continued Crole, “no doubt he’d some reason, other than the one he told you of, for leaving his old name behind him. He may have wished folk in both England and India to believe that Andrew Merchison was dead. But letter or no letter, cabin trunk or no cabin trunk, monument or no monument, I believe that Salim Mazaroff was Andrew Merchison. and that he was murdered as Merchison, and not as Mazaroff.” “As Merchison!” I exclaimed, pausing in sheer surprise. “But —who knew him, here, as Merchison?” “That’s got to be found out, my lad!” he answered, with a knowing look. “Come on—let’s see what Maythorne’s up to.” We found Maythorne standing at the door of the inn, in company with Musgrave. Maythorne gave Crole a sort of informing smile as we came up to them. “Mr. Musgrave has just made a discovery,” he said. “His gun is missing.” Musgrave, to whom we turned instinctively, made a sullen movement of his head; he was evidently vexed. “Not three months since I gave £2O for it,” he muttered. “Very near brand new it was. Couldn’t have believed it could ha’ been taken from there, neither. But, of course, it’s been done that night we’d all that crowd in. Still—” “And where was it taken from?” asked Crole. “It was taken from the private sitting room that Mr. Holt there and the dead gentleman had,” replied the landlord, with a glance at me. “Hung on the wall, on two hooks it was, just inside the door. You may lia’ noticed it, Mr. Holt?” “Yes, I noticed a gun there, certainly,” I replied. “But—l hadn’t noticed that it had gone.” “Nor me —only I haven’t been into that room these last two or three days,” said Musgrave. “It was the missis that found it out; she came to me about it just now. Of course, some o’ them drover chaps poked their noses in there, and seeing nobody about, helped themselves to it; easy enough, that would be. Neither you nor your friend were in much that night, 1 think, Mr. Holt?” “Mr. Mazaroff went out soon after dinner,” I answered, “and, as you know, he never returned. I was out myself for some time. So the room would, of course, be empty.” Musgrave growled and shook his head. “I ought to ha’ seen that the door was locked when you gentlemen went out,” he remarked, ruefully. “Well— I’ll have to set the police on it.” “Was the gun loaded?” asked Maythorne. “I suppose not?” “Well, it was,” admitted Musgrave.

“I kept it loaded—you never know what you may want in a lonely place like this. Of course, nobody but me was expected to touch it, and the hooks are a good height up the wall.” “Dangerous, though, to keep a loaded gun about, don’t you think?” said Maythorne, good-humouredly. “Doesn’t take the fraction of a minute to slip a cartridge in. By the bye, what sort of cartridges were there in your gun?” “Kynoch’s number twelves,” replied Musgrave. promptly. “Always use those.”

“That might help you in tracing the gun,” remarked Maythorne. “You should tell the police that.” He turned from the landlord toward the door, motioning Crole and myself to follow him. “I’m going to have a look at this Reiver’s Den,” he said. “Better come with me. Odd, isn’t it, that Musgrave’s gun, loaded with number twelves, should disappear on the very night on which Mazaroff is shot dead? Didn’t you tell us, Mr. Holt, that the doctor showed you some shot which he called number twelves?” “He did,” I assented. “I suppose this doctor —what’s his name—Eccleshare? —knows number twelves from number tens?” he suggested. “There’s a difference, eh?” “He’s a shooting man himself,” I replied. “Staying at High Cap Lodge with a shooting party.” “Ah, then he’d know what he was talking about,” he remarked, and turned from me to Crole. “Well—and Mrs. Elphinstone?” Crole told him all about our doings at Marrasdale Tower as we walked across the moor. He listened and said little —already he struck me as the sort of man who takes everything in and gives next to nothing out. But I noticed that his eyes grew brighter and his whole air more alert when we came to Reiver’s Den —a dark, rockbound cavity, or coomb, in the heart of the moor, lying in a ravine between the hamlet of Birnside and High Cap Lodge; black, gloomy, eerie; just the place for murderous deeds. There was a local policeman on guard there; he told us that he was to stay there until the Inspector and the Chief Constable arrived, and he showed us the place where Mazaroff’s body had lain and been discovered. This was among a mass of gorse and bramble at the foot of an almost perpendicular rock, some thirty to forty feet in height; the policeman pointed to the top of it.

“My mate, what found him,” he said in a confidential whisper, “he says as how when he first came across him, he thought as the gentleman had fallen over them crags in the dark ness. But, of course, he hadn’t —and ’cause why? If he’d ha’ fallen from there, he’d ha’ broken his neck and every bone in his body: big. heavy man like that he was. And there wasn’t no bones broken. My impression, gentleman, is as how he was murdered first, and carried here afterwards. Look how these here shrubs is trampled down!” Maythorne was closely examining the surroundings: I noticed that he, too, was apparently struck by the evident trampling of the gorse and bramble. Once or tw-'ce he stooped as if to look closer at his objects—once I saw him pick something from the ground and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket. Presently “e came back to where Crole and I stood with the policeman. He swung his walkingINFLUENZA ABOUT “BAXTER’S” TO THE RESCUE There is quite a lot of influenza about at the present time, and because the weather is mild at times people are apt to regard it too lightly. If taken in the early stages Baxter’s Lung Preserver arrests the malady before it gets a grip. “Baxter’s” quickly heals all rawness and inflammation of chest and lungs; stops the dreadful tickling sensation in the throat, eases breathing and routs even deep-seated coughs and chronic colds. The gentle soothing influence of this good old remedy is invaluable. Another important feature of Baxter’s Lung Preserver is that, while it brings relief, it also builds up the system to avoid a relapse and fortifies it against future attacks of disease. “Baxter’s” is a genuine tonic as well as a lung preserver. Oet a bottle of “Baxter's” to-di y. All chemists and stores. Generoussized bottle 2s 6d, or more economical family size 4s 6d. Bachelor size Is

cane jauntily toward the formid&bk wall of rock above us. “If a gun were fired in this ravine, those rocks would give back a fine reverberation,” he observed. Tha he looked at the policeman. “Yos didn’t hear anything that night?” be asked with a smile. “Though I suppose your beat isn’t far off?" “I heard nothing,” agreed the policeman. “Out that night I was, iron dusk, ail along top side of the moo: and never heard no unusual sound s: all. Don’t know nobody as did. neither. There’s a cottage close by her—just back o’ that clump o’ beeci —the folks there, they didn’t bee* nothing. Not—nothing whatsoever!' “Oh, there’s a cottage there, is there?” said Maythorne. “And wio lives in it?” “Old shepherd and his missis—Jit Cowie, his name is.” replied the policman. “I was talking to him aboc this affair just now — they heard noil ing. As I said before.” Maythorne turned away, toward tfe clump of beech. We followed him along a narrow track that ran at tit foot of the rocks, under the lower branches of the trees, and past a hithedge that enclosed a garden and s stone-walled, heavily-roofed cottaft We went up a flagged path to th‘ cottage door. Maythorne knocked: » woman’s voice, shrill and cracker bade us enter. A pleasant smell of something gooc greeted our nostrils as Maythorrlifted the latch; inside at a TOUtable drawn up in front of a turf nr an -old man and an old woman sweating their dinner. At sight of the old woman rose, politely, but told man stuck to his seat, eyeing ns with no friendly glance. He got the first word, too, surlily, and wtu no good temper, before Maytbor:could address him.

“Don’t know nothing about there affair In the Den yoDder! » growled. "Tell’d the policeman J®now we neither heard nor see d an. thing, and don’t want no bother abo it. We didn’t hear no shooting tit night—couldn’t, ’cause we goes to beas soon as ’tis dark. And, u 1°; be come about the crowner’s ’quest ain’t nothing to tell, and don’t wc for to come to it —something do!”

“My good friend!” said Maython* soothingly. “We’re not from - coroner, nor from anybody else. only wanted to ask you where _ footpath that crosses Reiver’s Den goes outside your garden, leads

We’re strangers.” “There now, master!” remarked *- old woman, glancing reprovingly old man. “You see now! —this man’s only asking his way. mustn’t mind him, sir,” she-w® turning to Maythorne. "He s two or three asking him - terrible affair, and of course he nothing. The path, sir?—A across the moor to High Cap sir; Mr. Courthope’s place? “Then it makes a short cur where, now?” asked Maythorne. “Well, sir, it’s a short cut from Courthope’s to Birnside, ana Woodcock,” replied the old “But It’s little used, sir— its better than a sheep-track. “And we didn’t see nobody it that night, neither one . t’other." growled the old rto ttZ know nothing—ain’t got nothl s —nothing!” . jjd We backed out. closed the <**** went away. Maythorne sm scrutably. , “All the same, ptf b« this path,” he said. jlr want to go to High Cap Lodg - Courthope’s place? Or ha B tI ’ there and was coming a **- . t 0 f> Who knows? However, I it up to the top of those rocks (To be Continued)