Read Ebook: The adventures of Dora Bell detective by Corbett George Mrs

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Ebook has 443 lines and 28085 words, and 9 pages

"I shall be ruined, if this misfortune becomes known! You must help me out of the difficulty without the affair coming into the papers."

"We will do our best. But we cannot guarantee success; and I must say that it is an invaluable advantage to have the police on our side."

"The police must know nothing about it. The business lies entirely between my clients and myself. I should lose all my customers at once if, through the slightest indiscretion, they were led to suspect their valuable property to have passed into other hands pro tem."

"But suppose some of them wish to redeem the property upon which you have advanced them money?"

"They are not likely to do that at present. The season has been an exceptionally gay one, and a gay season is always an expensive one. Society dames will be glad to leave their plate and jewellery at 'their bankers' until their most pressing debts are settled. Meanwhile, I have sufficient confidence in your acumen to hope that you will speedily recover the missing goods."

We could not help thinking that Mr Davison's confidence in us was too overweening to be anything but embarrassing, even though our vanity was flattered by having the sole onus of responsibility for the recovery of stolen goods fixed upon us.

The facts are briefly as follows: -

Mr Davison drove a very peculiar trade. In society he figured as a man of culture, and of large independent means. He lived in one of the most costly of the many palatial flats in which opulent London loves to disport itself, and dispensed his hospitality on a very lavish and comprehensive scale. Assisted by his wife, a woman who was very beautiful, and as clever as himself, he gave receptions to which the titled and untitled flower of English aristocracy thought itself fortunate to be invited, and spent vast sums in apparently ostentatious extravagance.

But this extravagance was really the medium by which he found opportunities of gauging, and of trading upon, the social and financial position of his hosts of acquaintances, who never dreamed that the wherewithal of the splendid hospitality at which they wondered was derived from their own needs.

Mr Davison was really a money-lender on a huge scale, and had at least half-a-dozen flourishing West-End establishments. At one of them he traded, under a fictitious name, as a dealer in gold and silver plate, and at another, under another alias, he made costly jewellery his principal line. From still another establishment he drew plethoric profits by lending large sums of money on valuables, at another he advanced money on real estate at huge interest, and at one or two others he drove an equally lucrative trade on somewhat different lines.

But at none of his shops did he ever put in a personal appearance, though he was actually the guiding spirit of them all. He had one little room in his flat to which no one was ever allowed to penetrate except himself and his wife. Connecting this room with his various establishments was an elaborate system of telephoning, and from this so-called "study" he was able to direct the multifarious threads of his vast business.

Add to his acquisitive capacity the fact that he had the power of winning the confidence of others to an extraordinary degree, and it will be seen how much more easy it was for him to manage so complicated a business than for a man with less tact and polish, or for a man whose wife was inferior to Mrs Davison, who was her husband's very double in cunning and suavity.

And then they both had such a clever way of advising their friends out of their difficulties, that success was a foregone conclusion with them.

"Do you know, Lady C.," would be Mrs Davison's advice to a bosom friend whose present condition was that of chronic impecuniosity, but whose future was assured wealth. "If I were you, I would do just what dear Gerald and I had to do a year or two ago, when we were at our wit's end for money, owing to a temporary depreciation of land values. We knew that all would come right in time, and we bought a couple of thousand pounds' worth of jewellery from Edison & Co. and a thousand pounds worth of gold and silver plate from Meeson's."

"But how could it help you to go several thousand pounds deeper into debt?"

"My dear Lady C., how unsophisticated you are! We pawned the things for a thousand pounds at Grinling's. It's a capital place for business of that sort. No questions asked, and no fear of things being lent on hire, as sometimes happens. You see, we got all that ready money without laying any out, and paid all up as soon as we were better off."

The result of some such talk would be that Lady C. and her kindred spirits would do a rather tall business with Edison, Meeson, and Grinling, unconscious of the fact that all three were embodied in the persons of Davison and his charming, sympathetic wife.

Or the prospective heir to vast estates would forestall his inheritance by mortgaging his interest at Robson's estate office at a ruinous percentage, being advised thereto by his friend Davison.

It was this complicated nature of his business which made Davison so nervous about employing the police. He didn't mind trusting us. But he gave the force more credit for bungling, and preferred to lose the things, which, after all, were really his own, since they were not paid for, rather than risk exposure.

Grinling's didn't look at all like a pawnshop, and it was, oddly enough, only patronised by people who knew the Davisons or some of their friends. To all outward seeming, it was but a middle-class private dwelling, hardly likely to tempt a gang of burglars. Even the servants were supposed to be in profound ignorance of the nature of Mr Grinling's business, or of the contents of a certain room on the third storey, into which they were never admitted.

"Do you think Mr Grinling requires a new set of blinds for his windows?" inquired Mr Bell. "If so, I will send a man to measure the windows, and to show you patterns."

Mr Davison had employed Messrs Bell and White before, and understood my uncle's drift at once.

Just an hour later Adam Henniker was interviewing Mr Grinling, who had already been advised of the intended visit. Could the two manservants have seen the systematic way in which the supposed blindmaker pried, peeped, and smelled in every corner, and over every inch of the room from which the theft had been made, they would have been greatly surprised. As it was they were a little astonished, for the man actually went into the back area, and measured the lower windows for outside sunblinds.

"My goodness, I wonder what'll happen next!" said the housemaid. "The master must be thinking of getting married, and if he brings a missis here we shall have to mind our p's and q's. Last week the sweeps and a lot of new furniture, and this week new blinds! We're comin' out, ain't we?"

"Looks like it. Me and my missis would like to come out, too," said Adam Henniker. "But we can't afford new furniture. The whitewashers and sweeps is enough for us. Do you have a decent sort of sweep round here?"

"Oh, yes, he did very well, and was particularly clean. I never knew a sweep take such pains over a job. He lives round the corner, in the back street."

That same evening Adam Henniker imparted his discoveries to me, and invoked my aid in the matter. He had found certain marks on the window-sill, spout, and the flooring of the looted room which his magnifying glass and his sense of smell assured him were produced by soot, and as soot is generally associated with people whose garments are habitually covered with it he had no hesitation in deciding that the sweep must have become suspicious as to the contents of the closed chamber, and that he had made a very profitable nocturnal visit to it, aided by the spout, and by the implements of his real trade.

"I don't know how the people failed to hear the noise that must have been made," continued Adam, "for the man fell and hurt himself severely. I saw evidences of this in the area. There were some spots of blood on the ground, and there were marks on the wall. I should fancy that he must have tied the bag of jewellery on his back, and that he was coming down the spout again, when he slipped, and was supported by his trousers until they gave way, and left this piece of cloth hanging on a nail which projects from the wall. I went to the sweep's house, ostensibly to order a chimney to be swept, but was told that the man had hurt himself at his trade, and was laid up with a broken leg. It is now your turn to take the matter up."

I saw no difficulty in doing this, for my work seemed cut and dried. The next morning witnessed a metamorphosis in my appearance. I presented myself at the sweep's house in the garb of a charity nurse, and said that I had heard there was a man lying ill there, and was willing to nurse him two or three hours a day. As it happened, the sweep's wife was very glad of my services, for though the fellow's leg was not broken, he had sustained so many injuries that I marvelled how he had managed to reach home with his booty.

I concluded that the wife was ignorant of the real cause of her husband's accident, and of the robbery, or she would not have trusted me to sit at the now delirious man's bedside, while she attended to her household duties in the room which served as a kitchen.

It did not take me long to discover that my patient kept a feverish hold upon a small key. This key fitted a box that stood at the foot of the bed, and a judiciously administered opiate enabled me to get it into my possession at a time when Mrs Sweep had gone upon a lengthy errand.

In five minutes my task was accomplished. I opened the box, withdrew a well-filled black leather bag, disposed of its contents in my multitudinous pockets, put the key back in the hand of the sleeping man, after locking the empty bag in the box again, and was ready to leave when the woman came back.

My readers will not be surprised to hear that I did not go back again. But, lest the thief should blame his wife for the loss of his booty, we caused a letter to be sent to him, in which we asserted that he had been tracked and followed to his home. "The property has been returned to Mr Grinling, the rightful owner," concluded this letter, "and he has decided not to prosecute you, for your wife's sake, so long as you keep clear of dishonest doings in the future."

Mr Davison was very much astonished to recover his property so quickly, especially as we gave him no clue to the thief, or a hint of our modus operandi.

We only advised him to remove his pawnbroking business to safer premises.

It does not do for private detectives to let their clients know how simple their business can be on occasion.

We were morally certain that Madame Rose Gringoire was no other than the Fraulein Bertha Gerhardt, whom we had been patiently seeking for six months. But moral certainty is a long way removed from proof positive, and the client who was employing us was slow to believe that we had almost cornered our quarry.

You see, the circumstances were not merely peculiar. They were of desperate moment, and upon the circumvention of Bertha Gerhardt's intrigues depended either the reputation or the fortune of a family which had, by virtue of its wealth and spotless lineage, made itself a power in its residential county. Sir Arthur and Lady Brackett were desperately anxious to recover some papers which the whilom governess had abstracted from a secret drawer in which they were believed to be in absolutely safe keeping.

Of the precise nature of these documents professional honour forbids me to speak. Equally momentous secrets are often confided to us, and the many cases of a delicate nature with which our firm are entrusted are the outcome of a steadily growing reputation for discretion and reliability. Were blackmailing our forte, we might wax rich on our knowledge of the strange events and conditions which harass the lives, and endanger the prosperity, of the apparently rich and happy.

To the latter class belonged Sir Arthur and Lady Brackett, and we were the more anxious to bring their case to a satisfactory issue because we knew that the somewhat disreputable family doings in which this trouble originated were condemned by them at the time, and were beyond their power to prevent.

How Bertha Gerhardt obtained her knowledge of the skeleton in their cupboard is still a mystery. But it is believed that Sir Arthur's scapegrace brother, who hated his father's heir with a hatred which could hardly be equalled by men of alien races, had made a confidant of her, and that she had sought the post of governess as a means of securing the incriminating documents.

"Have you a photograph of Fraulein Gerhardt?" inquired Mr Bell, before whom Sir Arthur had just laid his case.

"Yes, we have a small one, though the original does not know," was the reply. "My wife is very fond of amateur photography, and has photographed nearly every nook and cranny of the house and estate. Miss Gerhardt is not handsome, and she always laughingly refused to have her plainness perpetuated on paper. One morning Lady Brackett had had her camera taken into the drawing-room and had embraced the governess within its scope ere that lady was aware of her intention. When she discovered she had been photographed she with difficulty kept back the signs of her anger, and it was rather odd that the negative of the little picture should have been found broken a day or two later. But, though Miss Gerhardt was not made aware of the fact, two or three prints had been taken before the negative was destroyed, and from one of these we have enlarged her photograph. Here is a copy. It is not very good, but will no doubt be useful."

"Excellent, Sir Arthur! It is evidently a good likeness, and will suit us even better than one which has been toned down and touched up by a professional photographer for the sake of flattering a customer. It is quite apparent that this clever lady meant to take every precaution against being over-reached. She will be astonished when we run her to earth."

"I hope you will manage that feat."

"I do not think there is much doubt on the subject. It is simply a matter of time."

"And meanwhile my fortune is being drained."

"We will be as expeditious as possible. You say that Miss Gerhardt must not be arrested."

"And you have no idea where this woman resides since she quitted Brackett Hall?"

"Not the slightest. We were surprised and mystified at her sudden departure, but did not suspect her of any covert act until she wrote to us. Her letter was an impudent avowal of her abstraction of the papers upon which our destiny hangs, and she demanded a large amount of money as the price of her silence. Since then we have had several letters from her, but both her letters and our remittances all pass through the hands of a shady solicitor, who lives in a short street off the Strand, and who will give us no clue to his client's whereabouts."

Mr White elicited several more particulars from the troubled baronet, and then set about performing the mission entrusted to him. The fact that Miss Gerhardt transacted all her business through a London agent made it seem probable that she herself resided in London, and for several weeks we kept a strict watch upon the lawyer's premises, but without result.

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