THE SOLUTIONS OF RADFORD SHONE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 9006, 16 December 1907, Page 2

THE SOLUTIONS OF RADFORD SHONE.

BEING NARRATIVES BY OFFICERS OF THE CRIMINAL .INVESTIGATION DEPARTMENT, AND OF THE PROVINCIAL POLICE, IN RESPECT OF 1) '1 ALINGS WITH THE EMINENT EXPERT, MR RADFORD SHONE. Communicated to axd edited hy [Published By Special Arrangement.] [All Eights Eeserved.]

CHAPTER Vll.—Continued. "Martin!" snapped Mr Radford Shone. He was evidently too great a personage to oblige directly a mere policeman, for his henchman produced a notebook, and, whiie his chief surveyed me -with calm insolence, proceeded to read a precis of the case. Compressed still iurther, the sum of Mr Shone's was as follows. He had confounded Harry's statement that he had been away from Eton for a week by questioning his schoolfellows, eliciting that young Lawson had been very much in evidence till the afternoon of the previous day. He had, in fact, been more than usually under notice through having distinguished himself by getting "swished" twice in five days for offences quite foreign to his lovable nature. So disagreeable had he made himself to his own particular chum, Lord Allan ton, that the latter had declined to have any more to do with him. The only ray of truth in the story that he had brought to his people was as to the ride in the motor-car. Curtice minor had testified as to their being overtaken by the car and to Lawson having been invited to jump in, but Curtice added that in less than an hour Lawson had turned up at five o'clock school, thus showing that the occupant of the car had redeemed his promise to bring him back in time. And, to wind up, Radford Shone had uiscovered that an Eton boy, answering to Harry Law•son's description, had left Windsor by the 3.5 train on the previous .afternoon for Waterloo. The deduction at which the expert arrived was that the boy was unhinged by a hypochondriacal attack, which had influenced his recent behaviour at school and caused him to run away the day beiore.

"There, Mr—er Timpany," Shone yawned ashisfatsattellte concluded his phlethoric recital. "I'm afraid your chance of unearthing the South London house where they shut up little Eton boys has gone out to .zero, eh?" "You have saved me a good deal of time and trouble in looking for it," was my reply. It seemed to give him infinite satisfaction, and, as he took up his glossy hat to go, he purred—_ "Make a note, Martin —a note that we ought to have stereotyped, 'Vfe have saved the police trouble.' Ha, .ha!" When the pair had bowed, themselves out, good Mr Pryme turned to me rather nervously. "It seems all very clear, does it not, insnector?" he said. "I confess H do not like the man—there's something about him rubs you the wrong way. He talked to young Allan ton and Curtice minor and thfe rest as if he was three sizes bigger than the head-master. But I can bear out what he says about Hai'ry Lawson's conduct. I was loth to distress his parents by referring to it last night, especially in the boy's presence, but really it has been most outrageous." "For how long?" I asked. Mr Pryme pursed up his lips. "Let me see," he mused aloud. ■"Pn' Tuesday evening the matron caught him drinking bottled Bass in - his study. On Thursday he used disgusting language to my footman. On Saturday he broke the note of Hobson minimus, a poor little chap three years his junior. And he has entirely neglected his studies. He was never particularly brilliant, but he seems to have forgotten everything he ever learned."

"l think, sir, that you would not be altogether displeased if Mr Radford Shone's theory broke down, and Harry's apparently impossible romance v/ere proved true?" I hazarded after a pause. "Frankly, I should be delighted," the house-master replied. "The boy is really a charming little fellow when he is all right. And .1 like the father, too. Of course he is a selfmade man—Levisohn, I believe, was his name till he changed it under letters patent after his successes in South Africa—but he is a gentleman at heart, if not by birth, and I received every consideration from him till yesterday. But you do not speak seriously in hinting at a confutation of the great Shone?" "May I see Lord Allanton?" was my reply, indirect and non-committal. Mr Pryme, however, must have seen its significance, judging by the avidity with which he jumped at it. "I will fetch him at once, if he has come in from football," he said. In another minute I was confronting a tousled little figure in a muddy shirt, who was nevertheless a marquis, and the heir to a dukedom. In this most democratic of aristocratic institutions his title was not for use, except when "absence" was called by the head-master. "Allanton," said Mr Pryme, "this is an officer from Scotland Yard, who wants to ask you about Lawson." The boy looked me coolly over from head to foot, the broke into a friendly grin. '■ J'ire away," lie said. "I'll tell you " wthing I can, but that brute Shone ..ii'ed me so that I shut up. "Then perhaps you won't mind beginning ac ihe point where you shut up," I sUfaf/ested. "Weli, 1 told him what a little beast Lawson bad grown all of a sudden; but Shone kept 'my-lording' me till I turned sulky just as I was coming to our row after dir.nci Lawson had been coming home with ir.e •■ext week to Custlu Chievely for the holiday*, but after the way be had treated Ilobson minimus, and other things, I let him have it straight. 1 said he wasn t sort of nerson I cared to know in private life, and that I had written to my mother asking her 1o cancel the invitation." "About what time did this unpleas-

antness take place'?' was my next question. "At a quarter to three." "And, according to Mr Shone, Lawson left Windsor station for London at 3.45 p.m. Mr Pryme," I added, "if you will excuse me for ten minutes I should like to run out as far as the post office, but first, Lord Allanton will kindly inform me whether Harry Lawson made any reference lately to the Duchess of Sunderland's famous jewels?" "Rather that was one of the things that bored me about him," said the lad. "For the last week he has been gassing to me about our family diamonds, and wondering whether he should see them when he was at the Castle." When I returned from a visit to the po&t-office, where I obtained a sight of the telegram despatched the previous day, Mr Pryme was alone. "No, sir," I said, in answer to his questioning glance, "I can give you nothing definite yet. But will you see me, and possibly Mr Montagu Lawson, at that gentleman's house in Park Lane to-morrow at three o'clock? And it might not be amiss if you asked Mr Radford Shone to meet us there also." "Certainly. To-morrow is a halfbo'iday, and anyhow I shall be there," the tutor replied. And then, coming closer, he whispered, "Did you get your inspiration from what Allantoic incidentally remarked?" "What remark, sir?" I asked in my most innocent manner. "That for the past week, Harry Lawson hadn't seemed like the same boy." Discretion forbade words; but, though the worthy master was the employer of Shone and ostensibly in the opposite camp to mine, he was so obviously sympathetic to my point of view that I could not resist giving him a token. For the first, and pro bably for the last, time in my life I enjoyed the privilege of winking, unrebuked at an Eton master. At the appointed time next day 1 was seated in the library of the Park Lane mansion with the pwner thereof, who, after half-an-hour's talk, looked neither tired nor henpecked. On the floor between us lay some fragments of pink paper at which he kept glancing regretfully in the intervals of consulting the clock on the mantel-piece. To us was admitted, by the bland j butler, Mr Pryme, fully charged with nervous curiosity as to the nature of his reception, which our host promptly ended by warmly shaking his hand. Mr Lawson would have plunged into explanations had not Mr Radford Shone followed hot on the heels of Harry's tutor. The great investigator wore an amused smile. "I trust i am not too late for a j front seat at the play which I presume we owe to Inspector Timpany?" he said, goggling his eyes. "Not a bit of it, and you're not in front —you're on the stage!" cried the little millionaire, skipping round to find him a chair. ''We're all on the stage, but it would be Hamlet minus Hamlet without you, Mr Radford Shone." Shone, though puzzled, accepted the remark as a compliment and sat down with a smirk. I think that the chief feeling in his mind was one of regret that the wealth} financier was not his client instead of the more moderately dowered Eton master. Possibly it was induced by the litter of pink paper on the floor, rt which he kept shooting furtive glances, and which were obviously the fragments of a torn-up cheque. "Shall I tell them, or will you, in-

spector, what a debt of gratitude we owe to Mr Shone for unwittingly helping you to prove that my son is neither the blackguard nor the lying iittie fool he laboured to make him out?" saic s Mr Lawson. "Sir!" Shone protested., tapping his chest, "I never do anything, least of all help a policeman, unwittingly. As' to your son not being what the irrefutable testimony I collected among his schoolfellows shows — noblemen, sir, some of them, with the stamp of truth upon their lipswell, Timpany, nnust be playing on your parental fondness if he has induced you to believe that." "The noble schoolfellows with the stamp ox truth, my dear Mr Phone, having been misled themselves, misled you," Mr Lawson laughed. "But there, you tell him, Timpany. The fellow makes me want to gigele, and I should be incoherent.' (To be continued.)