The Bradmoor Murder Read online

  “Bradmoor said there was no use to ask the sheik or any of his people. If they had them, they would, of course, not give them up; and if they did not have them, it would make only useless complications to advise them now that he had found such a treasure.

  “Nevertheless Bradmoor did not go on. He remained in camp for several days, and he continued to search through the clothes and equipment the German had taken away. He said the thing got on his nerves. He got to thinking about the German and the menacing blue image in its cell of rose-colored stone!

  “And then he would put the Arabs to inquisition again on the manner of Slaggerman’s death. But he learned nothing further. He never found any trace of the rubies; and presently he set out on his return trip.”

  Lord Dunn stopped in his narrative. He made his characteristic gesture, putting out his hands like a bookmaker dismissing a worthless bet.

  “Now,” he said, “that is what happened to Bradmoor. Marquis thinks there was no adventure in his life connected with the mysterious character of his death. When you come to think about it, wasn’t this adventure connected with it? Wasn’t the old Duke shot through the chest precisely as the German Slaggerman was shot, and apparently with the same sort of weapon?

  “Bradmoor said that he recovered the double express rifle. I never thought to ask him what he did with it; but he evidently brought it back with him, and put it into the gun case in the room where he was killed. It is not in the gun case there; it’s gone, and I believe it’s the weapon with which Bradmoor was killed.

  “Now, here is a coincidence, if you look at it in one direction. Of course, if you look at it in a direction equally convincing and probably more sensible, it isn’t a coincidence. The Arabs shot Slaggerman; and we don’t know who shot Bradmoor. But isn’t there another side to it—the appalling menace in that ivory image, and its threat cut beneath it on the stone bench!

  “It had guarded its treasure over an incredible period of time. Of course, it is easy to laugh at the notion; but we don’t know what sinister influences were at one time abroad in the world, or what control they were enabled to enforce over events. All the religious legends of every race are crowded with stories of it.

  “You can’t dismiss them with a gesture.

  “Bradmoor did not feel altogether at ease about it. He said he could not get the notion of the deadly menace of that strange blue image out of his head! There it sat in its eternal Satanic calm above its threat cut in the rose-colored stone:

  ‘His right hand shall be his enemy. And the son of another shall sit in his seat. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.’

  “And what became of the rubies? The German was no fool. Everything he did was practical and well-planned. He got his counter-expedition together carefully and slowly, and he did not leave Bradmoor until he was sure he could get out. He took the only rifle the expedition had, and he took the rubies.

  “Now, what became of the rubies?

  “It was an immense treasure. Bradmoor said he and Slaggerman had estimated the value pretty carefully. The German knew what such stones were worth in Europe; they could not have had a less value than one hundred thousand pounds sterling.

  “The German did not take any chance with such a treasure. Before he robbed Bradmoor’s medicine chest, he had figured out how he intended to conceal these jewels, and where he intended to conceal them. There could have been no doubt about that. There was only one place where he could have concealed them, and that was somewhere about himself. He could not have cached them in the hope of returning for them; and he could not have risked them anywhere except near to his own hand. That is the reason Bradmoor had not found them when he searched the body.

  “But there is another hypothesis: suppose the Arabs did not find them? And that touches upon another theory with respect to his death. How do we know that the sinister influence expressing itself so appallingly in the physical aspect of that blue ivory image and its deadly threat, did not, in some manner, concern itself with the death of this German, who had helped to outrage its treasure house?

  “And when you get into that idea, does it not follow along to the death of Bradmoor? After all, he was the main offender. He instigated the outrage, and he carried it out. If the blue image got Slaggerman with the double express, may it not—let’s venture on the idea, anyway—have got the old Duke with the double express?

  “The gun is gone, and we find Bradmoor shot through the chest! Of course, I am not advancing any theory about it. My position is: I don’t know. If I were as bold an adventurer into the fantastic as the butler’s mother, I would say the blue image got Bradmoor, just as it got Slaggerman.

  “Let’s consider some of the evidences that the old woman attached to her theory, the items which we know to be correct. The old Duke was afraid of something, and that fear developed, and finally got to be a kind of monomania.

  “Now, what was he afraid of?

  “He was not the sort of man to be afraid. No one could have undertaken the things he undertook in explorations if he had been a timid person. Any natural menace would not have put old Bradmoor in fear.

  “Was it an unnatural menace?

  “I don’t know. But when you can’t think of anything else, when no other hypothesis gets us anywhere in any direction, are we not driven back against that sinister inscription?

  “ ‘His right hand shall be his enemy. And the son of another shall sit in his seat. And I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.’

  “Only,” he added, “I don’t understand the promise in it.”

  Now, this is the story as Lady Joan’s guests related it to me on that night. There was some desultory talk after Lord Dunn had concluded; and then the party broke up. Sir Godfrey Simon, at the step of his motor, handed me a folded paper: “Read that,” he said, “not now—to-morrow, when your head’s cool.”

  I had noticed him writing, on a tiny pad, with a thin silver pencil, while Lord Dunn was in the body of his story. I thrust the paper into my pocket, and Sir Godfrey Simon’s motor turned out into the highroad.

  I retained the memory of his big, inscrutable sphinxlike face.

  III

  We went outside, Joan and I, when the discussion of the mystery of Bradmoor’s death had been given over for the evening, and Lord Dunn, Sir Godfrey and Marquis had gone.

  Joan slipped a light opera cloak over her evening dress. It was a heavenly night. There was a great white moon over the sea.

  We walked through the formal gardens from the cottage, passed the great stone house, to the sheer rock where the current of the Atlantic ran in under the window—where the mystery of Bradmoor’s death had been enacted.

  The ancient house was sinister, with the white moonlight on the walls. It stood on the rock, sheer over the sea. The grounds about it had been laid out by a king’s gardener, but it had fallen by neglect into a wild beauty. The hedges were uncut, the walks overgrown with grass, the shrubbery sprawled in great clusters. With the moon on it, it was like the deserted gardens of some dead city in a Bagdad tale.

  The house had been taken over by the old Duke’s creditors, in the financial wreck after his death. Joan had gone to live in the lodge cottage at the land end of the place. The beautiful things from the house—her own possessions left to her by her mother at her death—had been transferred into it. It was the magnificence of these things that contrasted so markedly with the crudities of the cottage.

  She was not the dead man’s daughter. He had married, late in life, the widow of the Marquis of Westridge; he had no children. The girl was Westridg
e’s daughter. But she had lived on here after her mother’s death, and it was evident that a great love for the place was in her.

  She had grown up in its magnificence—the magnificence of a fairy story—and in a belief that it would always remain.… She spoke softly, gently, affectionately about it, as we stood there in the white moonlight above the sea, looking down into the dark water that moved in against the black, smooth-worn cliff below the tragic window.

  The moving of the water stimulated a subconscious query in me, and I uttered it aloud.

  “I wonder,” I said, “what would become of anything that leaped into the water here; would it be carried out into the sea, or would it be cast up somewhere?”

  The girl replied that long ago, when she was a little child, a fisherman had been drowned in the sea under the window, and his body had been discovered later in the sand of an inlet some quarter of a mile farther along the cliff. She pointed to it. We could see a patch of white where the sand extended, in a brief arc of beach, to the water.

  I don’t know that I mentioned actually in words the suggestion that moved vaguely in me—the nebulous idea that the thing that had accomplished Bradmoor’s death might have drowned in the sea here, and its body gone ashore like that of the dead fisherman. I don’t think I even undertook to imagine what the thing might be. Perhaps it was only the will to walk on with the girl in this mystic fairyland into which the witchery of the moon had changed the world.

  At any rate we went along the path through the neglected gardens, down the broken ledge, until we came out on the arc of sand. The girl sat down on a bit of wreckage, her hands clasped about her knees, looking at the sea; and I walked about in an indolent inspection of the inlet.

  But the thing of particular and vital interest to me was this girl, silent here in the moonlight; her dark hair drawn back from the beautiful oval of her face, her great eyes fixed on the sea beyond her, her lips parted, her body motionless. I had not seen her for three years; and it seemed impossible that the thin, great-eyed girl—who had laughingly promised to go with me to America, when I should come again for her—had grown into this magnificent creature! And my mind ran back to the one time I had kissed her. I recalled it as an hour out of a fairy day.

  It had been three years ago, on my visit to England. Joan was only a slender slip of a girl then. We had ridden to a distant village along a highway bedeviled with motor cars, and we had determined to come back across the moors above the sea.

  I remember the narrow sheep path that led up from the valley onto the plateau of the moors, and the long, almost sheer descent falling away a thousand feet into the valley below—not a ledge of stone, but a smooth slope grassed over with turf.

  But it was as deadly dangerous as though it had been spikes of stone; there was barely width for a horse, and a misstep would have sent horse and rider rolling into eternity. We came at the top into a fairy cove, golden soft in the sun, and looking out over the sea. We stopped and got down and stood a moment by the horses.

  Joan began to fondle the silky muzzle of her horse. And all at once I realized the heavenly creature she would presently become.

  “Joan,” I said, “will you go with me to America when I come again?”

  She did not reply. She pressed her face against the horse and looked out shyly at me.

  And I caught her up into my arms, and kissed her.

  For a moment she was relaxed, soft like an armful of blossoms, and then she tore away, swung into her saddle and raced over the moor.… And ten days later, in the middle of the Atlantic, I got a wireless message of three letters: “Yes.”

  No name, no address, only that single word materializing out of an Arctic fog.…

  For a long time there was no word between us now.

  I stood looking down at the girl, flooded with the soft moonlight, the white sand stretching from her feet to the dark water, where the tide went slowly out. All the events in this complicated tragedy seemed to remove themselves, and to leave only the charm of this girl—alone here, as in an abandoned world.

  Finally I spoke: “You will keep your promise to me now, Joan; you will go with me to America?”

  Her voice, when she replied, was low, even, without emotion.

  “No,” she said, “that is precisely what I never can do, now.”

  I stood in a sort of hypnotic apathy, and she went on in that level, dead voice.

  “You are not free,” she said, “and so you cannot decide this. It is I, who am free, who must make the decision for us. It is not a pleasant thing to say, but the fact is, now, that you are not free to make a choice.… A bankrupt peer of England would be an intolerable thing. You must find a wife, now, who can bring a fortune.”

  I made an impatient gesture.

  “But I do not intend to take this title,” I said. “I shall return to America, to my profession, and you shall go with me.”

  She cried out in sharp protest:

  “Oh, no.… England has desperate need of the sort of man you are, Robin. You are an Englishman; after all, you cannot abandon England. The curse of this land is an aristocracy that thinks only of amusing itself. It needs the energy, the vigor that men like you would bring to it. The law in America is not the narrow profession that it is in England. One goes to the head of affairs in it, in America, as you are going. One becomes there a directing intelligence of great affairs, a guiding factor in all the national events that enable a civilization to advance.”

  She paused a moment; then she went on in the same dead, even voice:

  “You are going to the head of affairs in America; but you must give it up. You must come back to England. You must take the position which this title will give you, and you must bring your energy and vigor of intellect to the aid of the land that needs you. And—and you must marry some one with a fortune.… Our dreams are ended, Robin.”

  She stood up with a whimsical smile.

  “Besides, there is the promise of the Blue Image—the promise to you, included with a threat against the dead man.”

  And she repeated the strange words vaguely, as one repeats something in a distant memory:

  “ ‘His right hand shall be his enemy. And the son of another shall sit in his seat. I will encourage his right hand to destroy him. And I will bring the unborn through the Gate of Life. And they shall lean upon me. And I will enrich them, and guide their feet and strengthen their hearts. And they shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.’”

  She went on, a little quaver in her voice, hard-held, I thought, but with a courage that would not fail:

  “You see, Robin, you are to sit in his seat, for you are the son of another. There is no common blood in the two branches of this house, as everybody knows. This line was the pretender, as your grandfather’s suit made clear. But it had the right of possession, and the conservative English law would not put it out.

  “And so, Robin,” the hard-held voice went on, “you must get a rich wife, and ‘laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces.’”

  I came over a step nearer to her.

  “Joan,” I said, “this is all the veriest nonsense. I love you. Will you go with me to America?”

  Her voice, when she replied, had returned to its vague, even note, to its quality of memory.

  “You must sit in his seat,” she said. “It has been foretold in this strange affair.”

  “Then,” I cried, “I shall sit in his seat with you.”

  I laughed and went on: “I put the thing up to the Blue Image. If he wishes his prophecy carried out, let him see to it. If he enriches us, and guides our feet, and strengthens our hearts, then I will sit in the dead man’s seat, and we shall laugh in his gardens, and sit down in his pleasant palaces. If the great God of the Mountain is able to do this, let him do it, and if he is not able to do it, then you will go with me to America. Shall we declare it is a bargain with him?”

  I stooped over, took her hands and drew her gently to her feet. Bu
t before I got her into my arms, she cried out, and pointed to the beach, where the water was creeping slowly out.

  There was something emerging from the sand, like the end of an iron rod. We went down to it. In the clear moonlight I was able at once to see what it was.

  It was the heavy barrels of a rifle.

  I drew it out of the sand. It was the double express that had disappeared on the afternoon of Bradmoor’s death.

  A surge of interest in the mystery returned. One phase of it, at least, was explained; whoever had assassinated Bradmoor had thrown the gun into the sea, and it had washed ashore here. We took it back with us to the lodge in a breathless interest, for we had a clew to this mystery; and incoherent explanations began to present themselves.

  We took it into the dining room, and put it down on the great table. We lighted the candles, and sat down to examine it. It was rusted from the sea water. It was difficult to work the mechanism of the rifle in order to throw open the breech; and we searched among the articles brought into the cottage for oil, and implements to clean the barrels, and a screw driver. I had to take the rifle apart in order to find if it was loaded. The double barrels contained two cartridges, I found: one of them had been fired; the other remained loaded.

  It was a heavy gun, with a big, hard rubber butt plate like that to be found on the modern shotgun. I made a discovery when I took the weapon apart:

  The catch on the triggers had been filed.

  Now, as a matter of fact, the pull on these heavy rifles is usually some ten pounds; but the catch on the triggers on this rifle had been filed until they were practically hair-triggers.

  This rifle could be fired with the slightest touch on the triggers.

  This seemed incomprehensible to me. A rifle like this with a hair-trigger would be an impracticable and dangerous weapon. No big game hunter would have ever thought of so filing the triggers. It must have been done with a deliberate intention—for some particular reason.