Crossword Mystery (34 page)

“His finger-prints were on the handle of the knife used,” Major Markham pointed out.

“Why was that knife used at all?” Mitchell asked. “It was used on an obviously dead man, remember. No one could have lived with his head battered in like that. My own theory is that Mrs. Cooper in giving Ross, as he said she had done, a day or two before, one of the kitchen knives to handle, did so to get his fingerprints on it. Then it was thrust into the dead body of the victim to implicate Ross – great care, of course, being taken in handling it to leave no other finger-prints.”

“Yes, I know,” Markham said. “If you hadn't put that possibility to me, I should have arrested Ross immediately.”

“It might have saved his life if we had done so,” Mitchell observed musingly. “One can't tell. I think he would have kept quiet about the hidden gold though. Anyhow, it's too late to think of that now. But until Owen got hold of the copy of the crossword Miss Raby made, only Ross had any clue to the whereabouts of the gold, and the first thing that went wrong with Mrs. Cooper's plans was when they dug up the summer-house floor and found the gold had gone. That must have been a nasty jar. I take it that then they began to suspect Ross had some idea where it was. They watched him and followed him. They found him in the garage, overcome by the gas, and I suppose we can guess the rest. Had Owen not worked out the crossword in the same way that Ross did, I suppose most likely they would have brought it all to what they would have called a satisfactory conclusion, and Mrs. Cooper, with the power of the gold behind her, would gradually have emerged from housekeeper at the contemplated Fairview club to be a director of the whole concern on the lines drawn up and submitted to Shorton he was so much impressed by. For it is that she has been aiming at all the time, nor merely a parcel of sovereigns, but to give herself place and opportunity.”

“Are you sure this plan or scheme of the development here, you told us about, was all her work?”

“There is no one else,” Mitchell answered. “It all came out of her mind. It is her mind we have been struggling against all through.” He added, a little heavily, a little slowly: “Now it is her mind that it is our duty to settle accounts with.”

One of the county constables came up and saluted.

“All ready now, sir,” he reported.

“Then we'll get along,” Major Markham said.

Bobby's dash on his motor-cycle through the village at an hour so early had naturally not been unnoticed by the inhabitants, nor had the appearance of the two motor-cars a little later on gone unremarked. Three-fourths, indeed, of the villagers were watching as the police party came back on their way towards Fairview, and when they were quite near the village, just by the bridge that crossed the creek, Bobby leaned forward to speak to Mitchell.

“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but there's a man running across the fields over there, towards the house, and he looks to me like Cooper.”

“Got word something was happening, came out to see, and now he's running back to warn his wife,” Mitchell commented. “Too late for that to help them any.”

Major Markham halted the cars.

“Better stop him getting there, if we can,” he remarked. “He may make trouble, one way or another.”

He directed Inspector Wake and one of the constables to try to cut off Cooper before he reached the house. Bobby asked, and received, permission to accompany them. Major Markham said: “He seems to be making straight across country for the house. You ought to be able to cut him off easily enough.”

Bobby and his two companions had, in fact, a shorter distance to traverse than had Cooper to the point where their paths must cross if he kept straight on towards Fairview. They ran therefore, indeed, but not at their best speed, for they all three thought they had time in hand, till abruptly they became aware that Cooper was outpacing them.

For he was running, that pasty-faced, flat-footed butler, like a man possessed; racing over the roughest ground as over a smooth cinder track; taking the hedges in his stride like a practised hurdler; covering the distance with huge leaps and bounds; his coat-tails flapping grotesquely behind him; his rather long hair streaming out in the wind, for he had long since lost his hat.

“Gosh, look at that,” Wake exclaimed.

Cooper had cut straight across a field, not towards the gate, which would have brought him out nearer the course his pursuers were taking, but straight for a corner where the hedge was high, and strong, and laced with wire – it had been specially strengthened for the field it bounded as that held a bull, valuable and pure bred, but also of uncertain temper. The field he was in was wide and broad, but Cooper seemed to cross it in a stride or two, like Speed itself made incarnate in the form of a flat-footed, middle-aged butler, with such amazing ease and lightness did he flash by, straight for that high fence behind which the great bull grazed. One might have thought he did not see the hedge. The thing was a good six-foot high, close-growing, wire supported, and whether he jumped it clear, as Wake afterwards maintained, or whether somehow he crashed his way through it, as the others thought, at any rate in a moment he was over, and still upon his feet, and still running swift and straight. That was all they could be sure of, that, and that the great bull, indignant at this sudden irruption into its domain, had snorted its anger, and put its huge head down to charge.

Cooper paid the creature no attention. Still, with those great leaps and bounds of his, he ran straight on. The bull might not have been there, he ran at it, straight at it, and passed it like the wind; he reached the fence upon the field's further side, and was over it and away, while, behind, the bull bellowed disapproval, and tore up and down its domain in search of something whereon to vent its wrath and indignation.

At the gate, Wake paused and looked thoughtful. So did Bobby. So did their companion. The bull saw them, and, pawing at the ground, snorted a challenge to them to come on.

“I think,” decided Wake, “we'll go round.”

It was certainly a wise decision. The bull, now thoroughly aroused, was making quite clear it would allow no further passage through its territory without offering very active protest. To have challenged that determination would plainly have occupied more time than would be lost in going round, and Wake added consolingly :

“Anyway, he's making straight for the house. The cars will get there first, and our people will be waiting for him. Whoever would have thought the blighter could run like that?” He added reproachfully to Bobby: “You never told us he was that kind of champion athlete.”

“He isn't,” Bobby said. “He's fat and forty, and can't go upstairs without wheezing.” He added, rather gravely: “We have seen a miracle.”

Wake stared and shrugged his shoulders, but made no comment, and they went on together, leaving the big bull pawing at the ground in undisputed possession of its territory. Beyond the next field they came in sight of Fairview. At the entrance to the drive leading up to the house, the cars had stopped. Their inmates had seen what had happened, had seen Cooper, still running, as straight and swift as before, straight for the gate to the drive where they were waiting. They alighted, and stood in a little group watching him as he raced towards them, taking no more heed that they were there than he had done before of the presence and resentment of the great bull. Seeing how fiercely he still ran, the constable driving one of the cars backed it across the road to make him stop. Still he took no heed, but made one leap to the bonnet of the car, and touched it lightly with his right foot, and took fresh impetus for another leap that landed him right into the midst of the little group waiting for him. Mitchell tried to tackle him, but failed, for he went by like a darting bird. Markham jumped in his way, and got a blow, or rather push, on the chest that sent him reeling to fall flat on his back in the ditch by the way side, where the next moment Andrews joined him, flung aside as one might fling aside a straw that had drifted across one's path.

“Well, I'm blessed,” Mitchell said, and began to run.

“He's mad, mad,” Markham panted, as he and Andrews scrambled to their feet and followed.

The driver of the second car followed, too, and all four of them fled up the drive, with Cooper leading and gaining at every stride, so fast he ran – faster even than before.

So he gained the house the first, and they saw him vanish within and crash-to the door behind him.

“Round to the back,” Mitchell shouted.

He led the way, running at his best speed, and the others followed. The back door was open. They went in, and Major Markham called out:

“Take care, he may be armed.”

“They heard his voice in the kitchen.

“Quick, quick, while there's time. I can hold them back. I can hold the lot of them back while you get away.”

They heard Mrs. Cooper answer.

“Too late for that.”

They were in a narrow, stone-flagged passage. In front of them were three or four steps leading to the dining-room, and on their right was a door. Someone pushed it open, and they entered. They were in the kitchen, a big, long, low, dark room, very badly lighted by two small windows. In the middle of the floor, on the nearer side of the table that ran across the room, stood Cooper. He was holding in one hand a short iron bar. He looked fierce and wild and formidable; he had the air of being about to hurl himself upon them, as in days gone by baresark warriors charged upon their enemies, careless of death, if only first they themselves could slay. His eyes were pin-points of fire, and on his lips a little white foam showed. But Mrs. Cooper looked at the new-comers, and then at him, and shook her head slightly.

“Drop that,” she said. “No use. Too late.”

And then they saw a strange thing happen, for at once it was as though all strength and energy drained from him. Almost visibly he shrank; almost visibly his vigour and the passion of his wrought-up will went from him; as they watched it seemed as though that which had sustained him vanished quite away and he grew small again. There was no more light in his eyes, the fierce alert determination of his pose changed, so that now he sagged and drooped. Very carefully he put down upon the table the iron bar he had been holding, and went, shuffling, dragging his steps, to sit down carefully in a corner by the nearest window. He had the air of having suddenly been emptied, so that one felt there was no more in him.

“I'm not sorry,” Andrews muttered below his breath. “If he had fought the way he ran, the four of us would have had our work cut out.”

And he took care to get possession of that short iron bar, and to put it safely out of the way.

They forgot Cooper now, and turned their attention to his wife. At the further end of the kitchen where she was standing was an enormous, old-fashioned, coal-using range. In it a great fire burned, making the air in the room on that warm summer day intolerably hot. On the fire stood a huge iron cauldron, and in one hand Mrs. Cooper held a great ladle. That end of the room, even at high noon, was always dark, and perhaps it was the effect of the shadows clustering there, of the great fire that burned and crackled behind her, of the heat waves and currents of hot air that filled the room, that together combined to give them, as they looked at her, an impression of almost superhuman size. Gigantic she seemed as she stood there in the shadow against that background of fire, and smoke, and the steam from the huge iron cauldron. No one spoke, and slowly she lifted both arms with a gesture alike of defiance and despair, as of one who knew that all was lost yet repented nothing, regretted nothing, and even in the dust would yield and acknowledge nothing. Irresistibly, Bobby was reminded of a drawing by William Blake he had once seen somewhere, depicting Satan calling on the fallen angels to rise and resume their hopeless struggle against their God. Just such was Mrs. Cooper's gesture of her lifted arms. She lowered them, and said aloud:

“Little men, little men, have you found me at last?”

Major Markham stepped forward, and cleared his throat. Somehow the usual formulae seemed to him oddly banal now, and he hesitated to make use of them. Mrs. Cooper turned back to her cauldron, picking up her huge iron ladle, and stirring gently with it the contents of the cauldron.

“Is she making soup?” Andrews muttered in a very puzzled tone.

“Odd soup, I think,” Mitchell answered in the same low tone.

As if she had heard them, she lifted her ladle, and let the contents stream back into the cauldron. It shone as it fell; it glittered, like the sunshine, in a great stream of light – of liquid, running light – against the mirk of that background of dark shadows and shifting smoke and steam. The flame that leaped upwards from a displaced coal was not brighter or more living than that downward stream she poured back again into the cauldron.

“My God, it's molten gold,” Markham whispered. Yet his whisper sounded almost loud, so clearly did they all hear it.

“Molten gold,” she repeated, looking at them over her shoulder. “It wasn't much of a chance. We thought, if I melted the sovereigns down, they could not be identified.” Then suddenly she laughed, quite naturally, even pleasantly. “‘Double, double toil, and trouble,'” she quoted, and looked at Bobby, who, with his two companions, had now joined the others. “Was that what you meant,” she said to him, “when you got talking about Shakespeare and
Macbeth
? But in the play the cauldron and the witches come at the beginning, and this is the end of it all. Or was it as Lady Macbeth that you saw me? I never thought of myself like that, you know.”

Bobby did not answer, and she went on slowly:

“No, I never thought of myself like that, and yet I suppose that like her I wanted to rule, to be a sort of queen, too, for to-day it is the rich who are kings and queens, and I meant to be rich, and I meant no old men to stand in the way – but they had no silver hair to lace with golden blood, because they were both bald. You know, I expect Lady Macbeth would have made a good queen. She knew her mind, and what she wanted, and if only you had left me alone” – she paused and drew a deep breath – “I would have done great things,” she said. “I would have made all this part the biggest pleasure resort in the world. I had every detail thought out. But that would only have been a beginning. It's the land that counts, always the land, and at my pleasure resort I would have used English fruit and English meat, and English birds, and fish straight from the sea, till no one would have dared to talk of good living till they had been here and seen what we could do, till every English farm was flourishing again with providing, not beetroot and corn and turnips anyone can grow anywhere, but the apples and cherries and strawberries, the cream and butter, and the beef and mutton, only our soft, rainy climate can give in perfection. Why, I would have made all England a garden once again, if only you little men had let me be.”