British Murder Mysteries: J. S. Fletcher Edition (40+ Titles in One Volume). J. S. Fletcher

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СКАЧАТЬ be getting a glass too much again, some day, and then—then, perhaps he’ll add to what he said before. And—you’ll be sure to hear of it.”

      “I’m not certain of that,” answered Mitchington. “I made some inquiry and I find that Collishaw is usually a very sober and retiring sort of chap—he’d been lured on to drink when he let out what he did. Besides, whether I’m right or wrong, I got the idea into my head that he’d already been—squared!”

      “Squared!” exclaimed Bryce. “Why, then, if that affair was really murder, he’d be liable to being charged as an accessory after the fact!”

      “I warned him of that,” replied Mitchington. “Yes, I warned him solemnly.”

      “With no effect?” asked Bryce.

      “He’s a surly sort of man,” said Mitchington. “The sort that takes refuge in silence. He made no answer beyond a growl.”

      “You really think he knows something?” suggested Bryce. “Well—if there is anything, it’ll come out—in time.”

      “Oh, it’ll come out!” assented Mitchington. “I’m by no means satisfied with that verdict of the coroner’s inquiry. I believe there was foul play—of some sort. I’m still following things up—quietly. And—I’ll tell you something—between ourselves—I’ve made an important discovery. It’s this. On the evening of Braden’s arrival at the Mitre he was out, somewhere, for a whole two hours—by himself.”

      “I thought we learned from Mrs. Partingley that he and the other man, Dellingham, spent the evening together?” said Bryce.

      “So we did—but that was not quite so,” replied Mitchington. “Braden went out of the Mitre just before nine o’clock and he didn’t return until a few minutes after eleven. Now, then, where did he go?”

      “I suppose you’re trying to find that out?” asked Bryce, after a pause, during which the listeners heard the caller rise and make for the door.

      “Of course!” replied Mitchington, with a confident laugh. “And—I shall! Keep it to yourself, doctor.”

      When Bryce had let the inspector out and returned to his sitting-room, Ransford and Mary had come from behind the curtains. He looked at them and shook his head.

      “You heard—a good deal, you see,” he observed.

      “Look here!” said Ransford peremptorily. “You put that man off about the call at my surgery. You didn’t tell him the truth.”

      “Quite right,” assented Bryce. “I didn’t. Why should I?”

      “What did Braden ask you?” demanded Ransford. “Come, now?”

      “Merely if Dr. Ransford was in,” answered Bryce, “remarking that he had once known a Dr. Ransford. That was—literally—all. I replied that you were not in.”

      Ransford stood silently thinking for a moment or two. Then he moved towards the door.

      “I don’t see that any good will come of more talk about this,” he said. “We three, at any rate, know this—I never saw Braden when he came to my house.”

      Then he motioned Mary to follow him, and they went away, and Bryce, having watched them out of sight, smiled at himself in his mirror—with full satisfaction.

Chapter XII. Murder of the Mason’s Labourer

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      It was towards noon of the very next day that Bryce made a forward step in the matter of solving the problem of Richard Jenkins and his tomb in Paradise. Ever since his return from Barthorpe he had been making attempts to get at the true meaning of this mystery. He had paid so many visits to the Cathedral Library that Ambrose Campany had asked him jestingly if he was going in for archaeology; Bryce had replied that having nothing to do just then he saw no reason why he shouldn’t improve his knowledge of the antiquities of Wrychester. But he was scrupulously careful not to let the librarian know the real object of his prying and peeping into the old books and documents. Campany, as Bryce was very well aware, was a walking encyclopaedia of information about Wrychester Cathedral: he was, in fact, at that time, engaged in completing a history of it. And it was through that history that Bryce accidentally got his precious information. For on the day following the interview with Mary Bewery and Ransford, Bryce being in the library was treated by Campany to an inspection of certain drawings which the librarian had made for illustrating his work-drawings, most of them, of old brasses, coats of arms, and the like,—And at the foot of one of these, a drawing of a shield on which was sculptured three crows, Bryce saw the name Richard Jenkins, armiger. It was all he could do to repress a start and to check his tongue. But Campany, knowing nothing, quickly gave him the information he wanted.

      “All these drawings,” he said, “are of old things in and about the Cathedral. Some of them, like that, for instance, that Jenkins shield, are of ornamentations on tombs which are so old that the inscriptions have completely disappeared—tombs in the Cloisters, and in Paradise. Some of those tombs can only be identified by these sculptures and ornaments.”

      “How do you know, for instance, that any particular tomb or monument is, we’ll say, Jenkins’s?” asked Bryce, feeling that he was on safe ground. “Must be a matter of doubt if there’s no inscription left, isn’t it?”

      “No!” replied Campany. “No doubt at all. In that particular case, there’s no doubt that a certain tomb out there in the corner of Paradise, near the east wall of the south porch, is that of one Richard Jenkins, because it bears his coat-of-arms, which, as you see, bore these birds—intended either as crows or ravens. The inscription’s clean gone from that tomb—which is why it isn’t particularized in that chart of burials in Paradise—the man who prepared that chart didn’t know how to trace things as we do nowadays. Richard Jenkins was, as you may guess, a Welshman, who settled here in Wrychester in the seventeenth century: he left some money to St. Hedwige’s Church, outside the walls, but he was buried here. There are more instances—look at this, now—this coat-of-arms—that’s the only means there is of identifying another tomb in Paradise—that of Gervase Tyrrwhit. You see his armorial bearings in this drawing? Now those—”

      Bryce let the librarian go on talking and explaining, and heard all he had to say as a man hears things in a dream—what was really active in his own mind was joy at this unexpected stroke of luck: he himself might have searched for many a year and never found the last resting-place of Richard Jenkins. And when, soon after the great clock of the Cathedral had struck the hour of noon, he left Campany and quitted the Library, he walked over to Paradise and plunged in amongst its yews and cypresses, intent on seeing the Jenkins tomb for himself. No one could suspect anything from merely seeing him there, and all he wanted was one glance at the ancient monument.

      But Bryce was not to give even one look at Richard Jenkins’s tomb that day, nor the next, nor for many days—death met him in another form before he had taken many steps in the quiet enclosure where so much of Wrychester mortality lay sleeping.

      From over the topmost branches of the old yew trees a great shaft of noontide sunlight fell full on a patch of the grey walls of the high-roofed nave. At the foot of it, his back comfortably planted against the angle of a projecting buttress, sat a man, evidently fast asleep in the warmth of those powerful rays. His head leaned down and forward over his chest, his СКАЧАТЬ