The Return Of Bulldog Drummond (29 page)

When he came to himself he was lying huddled up on the floor. His torch was beginning to grow dim, but of the ghostly visitor there was no trace, save a faint smell which lingered in the air. On the bed Sir Edward still lay motionless, and once again the same overmastering terror gripped him. Suppose it returned.

He scrambled to his feet, and seizing the torch, rushed blindly along the passage. Not until he was in the main part of the house would he feel safe, and as he fumbled with the secret door he kept glancing behind him in an agony of fear. At last he stumbled into the hall, and slammed the panel behind him.

The time was four o’clock: dawn had come. For five hours he had been lying unconscious. He walked shakily to the dining-room, and with a trembling hand poured himself out a glass of neat whisky. He gulped it down, and felt a little better.

Five hours! But what had it been – that ghastly foul-smelling black horror? He rubbed his neck gingerly: there had been nothing ghostly about the grip round his throat.

The window was still open, and he stepped through it on to the lawn. Bed was out of the question, and after a while, as he paced up and down in the cool morning air, he began to feel calmer. When all was said and done, save for a stiff neck he was none the worse for his terrible experience.

Suddenly he paused, staring over the moor. There was a column of dust in the distance, and even as he watched it a motorcar breasted a rise. It was moving fast from the direction of London, and he wondered idly who could be out at such an hour. And then, to his surprise, it swung off the road, and came up the drive towards him. He walked round to the front door, and to his amazement found that Penton and Slingsby were the occupants. Their faces were haggard, and with a queer feeling of foreboding he greeted them.

“Hullo! boys,” he cried. “What brings you here?”

“There’s something up,” said Penton. “Something damned queer. Or else Gardini has double-crossed us.”

“What do you mean?” snarled Hardcastle. “How could he?”

“The markets are all going crazy: just exactly the opposite to his instructions.”

“Over Robitos?”

The other nodded, and walked into the house.

“Where’s the whisky? we need one.”

“You haven’t lost?”

“Every penny we made over Perus, and a wad more besides.”

“When did it happen?”

“Yesterday. Something started the rot in the afternoon. It’s all up, Tom, as far as the boodle is concerned.”

“But what can have started it?”

“Search me,” cried Penton. “Jake and I have been trying to get at it the whole way down. Anyway, we’ve got to clear.”

“Clear out?” shouted Hardcastle. “Why?”

“Because we can’t go near meeting our liabilities,” answered the other. “And that means an investigation, which I guess we daren’t risk. The point is – what are we going to do with him?”

He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder towards the secret passage.

“Do with him,” said Hardcastle grimly. “There’s only one thing we can do with him, unless we want prison. And that’s what we intended.”

The other two nodded.

“There’s no time to be lost,” grunted Penton. “I’ll get him now. We’ll steer him down through the trees. There’s no one about.”

He left the room, whilst the other two helped themselves again to whisky.

“I don’t like it,” muttered Slingsby uneasily.

“What I don’t like,” cried Hardcastle, “is losing the dough. All this damned business for nothing. You must have been crazy, you two. Suffering Pete! what’s that?”

From the hall had come a bellow of rage, and the next instant Penton burst into the room. He was almost inarticulate, and the veins were standing out on his forehead as he made for Hardcastle.

“You blasted crook,” he said thickly, “what’s your game?”

The other stared at him in amazement.

“What are you getting at?” he cried.

“Come and look in the hall.”

The three of them crowded through the door. Lying on the floor was the bound-and-gagged body of a man. But it was not Sir Edward Greatorex: it was the understudy Travers.

For a while Hardcastle stared at him foolishly.

“What under the sun does it mean?” he muttered. “Where’s Sir Edward?”

“Where indeed?” came an amiable voice from the front door, and they all swung round. Drummond, with a cheerful grin on his face, was standing there, with Darrell and Jerningham behind him.

“Strong liquor at this hour!” he said reprovingly. “Terrible, polluting the dawn like this. And have we had a nice run from London?”

“Get out, damn you!” snarled Hardcastle, “or I’ll have you gaoled for trespassing.”

“The English law of trespass is a very intricate one, my dear sir,” answered Drummond. “Dear me,” he continued commiseratingly, “I fear your neck is hurting you. Try some arnica. No! Well, it’s your neck. However, to return to what you were discussing when I arrived – where is Sir Edward?”

The three men stared at him, with dawning fear in their eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hardcastle at length.

“You pain me, Tom: positively pain me. Here am I taking a walk in the coolth of the morning, and your conversation descends to that level. But tell me – why is this poor fellow on the floor all bound up? More film work? Ah, good morning, Comtessa. We’re having an awfully jolly little party.”

With a wrap over her pyjamas, the Comtessa was coming down the stairs. She gave a start of surprise as she saw Travers on the floor: then, with an air of calmness that did her credit, she turned to Hardcastle:

“What’s it all mean, Tom?”

“It means, Comtessa,” said Drummond quietly, “that the game is up. Sir Edward Greatorex arrived in London early yesterday afternoon – a fact which may help Mr Penton and Mr Slingsby to understand the failure of their financial operations.”

“Have we got you to thank for this?” said Hardcastle thickly.

“You have, Tom,” answered Drummond affably. “I owed you something for that little episode at the studio, didn’t I? And as far as I am concerned my debt is paid. But I fear you will not find the same happy state of affairs with regard to Sir Edward, who is just about as wild as I have ever seen a man in my life. Still, I believe our prisons are very comfortable, even if the diet is a little monotonous. Well, I will say
au revoir
: we shall doubtless meet again at the trial. And, by the way, if you should find a large black cloak, smelling strongly of that stinking bog, lying about anywhere, you may keep it: it has served its purpose. I think we may say that the second ghost was quite as successful as the first.”

“So they’ve got the lot except Irma. I never thought they’d catch her.”

Hugh Drummond threw down the evening paper and lit a cigarette. It was after dinner the same day, and they were all in the smoking-room at Merridale Hall, with Mr Joseph Hetterbury an interested listener.

“’Pon my soul,” he continued, “if it hadn’t been for that brutal murder of young Marton I wish they’d got away with it: it was a deuced clever idea – carrying out a real crime under the cover of the same crime on the film.”

“I’m still very much in the dark,” said Hetterbury.

Drummond grinned.

“So was I for a long while, though I ought to have tumbled to it when I spotted Marton’s extraordinary resemblance to Sir Edward, and that young blighter Travers as well. Were they going to take all that trouble merely to provide an understudy for a film, especially before they knew whether Sir Edward could act or not? Now you know the plot of the film roughly, and, from what you’ve told me, Hardcastle gave you some more details. A millionaire is kidnapped, and while he is held prisoner on board a yacht his enemies so manipulate the markets by means of information purporting to come from him that they make a pot of money. Thus the film, and thus what they proposed to do in real life, with only one difference – the yacht. In a film it was easy to have all the yacht’s crew villains as Hardcastle said: in real life it was impossible. Something else would have to be thought of. And don’t forget that the film was going to be taken quite genuinely: the cameramen, the producer, were all absolutely honest. So the problem they had to face was how to make Sir Edward a prisoner under the very noses of a bunch of people who were not in the plot, and then hide him in a place where no one would dream of looking for him.

“The second part was easy: Glensham House, with its secret passages, was an ideal spot, especially as everyone believed he was at sea. It was getting him there that was the difficulty. And then they saw how it could be done, with Marton’s help. There was a scene in the film where Sir Edward had to drink a glass of what was supposed to be drugged sherry. Then he was bound and gagged and bunged into the cupboard with the idea of later on being abducted in the lorry. And since there might be a little rough-house about it, it was decided that the understudy should do the second part. And everybody at the time, myself included, believed that he had done the second part.

“And then that night I got you out of bed, Algy, it dawned on me – the whole rich plot. It
was
drugged sherry that Sir Edward drank. He
was
unconscious when he was bound and gagged and bunged into the cupboard, behind which our one and only Irma, screened by a partition, erected on a thoroughly flimsy excuse, was waiting to see that nothing went amiss. But what could go amiss? Had he shouted – cried ‘I’m drugged’ – applause would have greeted his fine piece of acting.”

“By Gosh! Hugh – now I come to think of it – he did shout,” cried Algy.

“Let’s go on. Two hours elapse, during which the still-unconscious Sir Edward is guarded in the office. Then the final abduction scene is played. It is dark, and Marton, talking to two of the gang, stands in the shadow, while Sir Edward is replaced in the cupboard. Naturally everyone thought it was the other way round, and that Marton was bound in the cupboard while Sir Edward looked on. It was all over in a flash: Sir Edward was rushed into the lorry by two innocent actors who thought they were carrying Marton – there was a handkerchief over most of his face – and the lorry went off in the darkness pursued by the camera and the arcs. In the meantime Marton had left for London in his car, which halted a little way from the studio. The ticklish bit was now coming. Marton must show himself again as Marton, or the whole thing would be given away. So he removes his beard, comes back as himself, and is seen by everyone. Then once more he returns to the car, resumes his role of Sir Edward, and is driven to the Ritz Carlton with Gardini in attendance.

“Feeling a little chilly, he is muffled up, and so passes the commissionaire at the door easily. He spends the night in Sir Edward’s suite, and leaves the next morning for a yachting cruise, where more of the film is going to be taken. He is still muffled up, and again completely deceives the man at the door. And now comes the subtle part. The secretary goes straight to Plymouth and boards the yacht. Marton, on the other hand, goes round the corner, boards his small two-seater, removes his beard, and arrives in due course at the studio as himself.

“That was their scheme, and then at the last moment Marton jibbed. Perhaps he lost his nerve – that we shall never know. And even though they thought they’d got him completely under their thumb by getting him into such debt that he stole five thousand pounds – a theft which I believe made his old father, who found it out, kill himself – he proved intractable. And so they did him in, and managed to get Travers as the substitute instead.

“Then came their doubts about me. All the way through, the one thing they had not been sure about was how much Marton told me that afternoon he was here. And so they decided to make sure I was out of the way when the actual abduction took place. If you remember, Algy, I said to you at the time that I wondered why they had selected that night instead of the next.

“It all fitted in, you see, as one looked back on it: I was convinced that Penton driving the lorry in the film had brought Sir Edward straight to Glensham House. The world thought he was on board the yacht: the yacht’s crew knew nothing about it all, since the paragraph in the papers saying he was there had appeared
after
the yacht had sailed. But I had no proof: I had to find out for certain.

“So I toddled round to Dick Newall, and through him got in touch with Glensham, who luckily was in London. And he put me wise as to the secret passages, one of which fortunately led to an underground vault outside. I got in through that, and there, sure enough, I found my bird, in a pitiful condition.

“However, I cheered him up, warned him not to say a word, and then I ran Travers to ground. And with that young man I had a merry half-hour. He tried to bluster at first, and pitched me some cock-and-bull yarn about the whole thing being a joke. But I soon put the fear of God into him, and told him what he had to do. He had impersonated Sir Edward once, and he was damned well going to do it again.

“Then I got Sir Edward out of it the night before last, warned him still not to say a word until he’d queered their pitch over their next deal, and left Travers in his place. I knew they’d got to move quickly, for the yacht would have to put back to refuel, when the thing must come out. Of course I knew Travers wouldn’t pass a close inspection, but it was dark down there, and he managed it for a day. Moreover, I was on hand as the ghost to prevent anyone lingering there, while Joseph kindly held the fort above, and incidentally found out some useful information.

“We were only just in time,” Drummond continued thoughtfully. “Hardcastle was a bit oiled last night, but he was speaking the truth all right when he thought Sir Edward was his audience. Without the slightest doubt, they intended to kill him, and as far as one can see they’d have got away with it. Lapse of memory, nervous breakdown, and another convenient accident in Grimstone Mire.”

The door opened, and the butler entered with the evening mail. And a few moments later a bellow of laughter from Drummond shook the house.

“Listen to this, chaps,” he said weakly.