Dangerous Cargo (26 page)

“What do you mean?” cried the girl wildly. “What do I know?”

“Twice you begged Horace Laghet over the telephone not to undertake this
cruise!”

“No!” she cried in terror. “How do you know that? What makes you say such
a thing? It’s not true!”

“I know it by a process of elimination,” said Mme. Storey. “It couldn’t
have been anybody else but you. And now you have confirmed it by your
cry.”

“That’s not fair!” cried the girl. “I didn’t know what I was saying!”

“On the contrary,” said my employer a little grimly, “it is at such
moments of emotion that the truth comes out.”

“I will never admit it!” sobbed the girl. “I will never admit it!”

“Your husband was a very clever man!” said Mme. Storey softly.

“I shall tell you nothing!”

“He had an almost uncanny insight into what other people were thinking.
This gave him a power over others. You loved him, but you were afraid of him,
too.”

Mrs. Coade only wept.

“Adrian Laghet and Martin were great friends. Adrian was here all the
time…”

“Well, why not? What’s the harm in that?”

“No harm, certainly. But Adrian was completely dominated by Martin. Martin
could sway Adrian as he pleased without Adrian’s suspecting it.”

“Why do you say such things?” cried the girl. “What are you getting
at?”

“It was certain things that you overheard when Adrian and Martin talked
together that led you to warn Horace Laghet. You heard talk of murder…”

“Oh, don’t torture me!” moaned the girl.

“All of us sympathise with you,” said Mme. Storey. “We are your
friends…But the truth must come out!”

Les was looking at the girl in great concern. He could not stand the sight
of a woman’s tears. “Why don’t you answer Mme. Storey’s questions right out?”
he said gruffly. “Martin is gone. It can’t hurt him now.”

She gave Les a strange look and her resistance suddenly gave way. “It’s
true…It’s true!” she murmured brokenly. “Martin was a devil but I loved
him!…Maybe I didn’t love him, but he had a power over me that I couldn’t
resist!…I struggled against it, but he could make me do what he
wanted…Ever since I married him I’ve been like a lost woman! Nobody
knows…!”

She was unable to go on for a moment. I was slightly behind her, making
notes of her pitiful statement.

“It’s true I suspected something like this might happen,” she went on. “I
tried to warn Mr. Laghet, but it didn’t do any good. Ever since you sailed
away I’ve been nearly crazy waiting for some news…”

“It’s true. Adrian used to come here all the time. They talked about
murder. Imaginary murders. It was all supposed to be in fun. How a clever man
could commit a murder and get away with it. Adrian simply drank it in. He was
a weak fool, and he hated his brother. And Martin kept at him…murder!
murder! murder! until Adrian took fire at the idea. Martin was so clever
Adrian never knew that it was he who had first suggested it!

“And when Adrian had begun to brood on the idea, Martin egged him on by
making believe to raise objections. Martin led him on to ask questions in
such an innocent-seeming way, that Adrian thought all the time he was pumping
Martin! Oh, God, it was fiendish! I knew Martin. I could see the way things
were going. I only overheard a part of their talk, but it was enough! Martin
was so sure of me he didn’t care if I did hear…That’s all. I don’t know the
details of the plot!”

“Well, there’s the situation, Inspector,” said Mme. Storey softly.

“Fiendish!” muttered the Inspector scowling. “She said the right
word!…But if Adrian Laghet killed his brother he’ll have to burn for it
just the same. No jury would be influenced by a plea of murder by
suggestion.”

Mme. Storey began.

“
If
Adrian killed him…”

She got no further. We were all electrified by the sound of a key in the
entrance door of the apartment.

The four of us instinctively drew back through the doorway into the
bedroom which adjoined the little hall. Mrs. Coade struggled to her feet and
stared into the hall like a woman turned to stone.

The entrance door opened and slammed shut. Martin ran into the
living-room, his wicked face all lighted up with pleasure. “Miriam!” he
cried, embracing her. “How’s this for a surprise!” No sound escaped her. Her
body was stiff and unyielding in his arms. Presently it got to him that there
was something wrong. “What’s the matter with you?” he demanded, holding her
away from him.

“Look behind you!” she said hoarsely.

He turned his head and saw us coming out of the bedroom.

His reaction was as lightning—swift as a wild animal’s. With a bound
he was out into the hall again. He didn’t stop to get the entrance door open
but ran on to the dining-room. Les made for the door from the bedroom into
the hall to intercept him, but he was just too late. Les charged after him
into the dining-room. There he all but had his hands on Martin when the
latter slung a chair behind him, and Les crashed over it helplessly. Martin
ran on into the kitchen, and we heard the service door bang back against the
wall. Les picked himself up cursing helplessly.

“It’s all right,” said Mme. Storey calmly. “Inspector Rumsey has men on
the service stairs.”

There was the sound of a brief struggle outside. Presently we heard the
service door slammed shut again, and a brawny plain-clothes man appeared from
the kitchen shoving Martin before him with a hand twisted in the latter’s
collar. A second man followed. Martin’s glasses had fallen off, and we seemed
to see him for the first in all his hatefulness. His face was as ugly as a
gnome’s.

But he was not afraid. He defied us all. Les towered over him with
clenched fists, but he never flinched. Even then he attracted me horribly. I
understood how Miriam felt. Les with a groan conquered the desire to smash
him and turned away.

We all returned to the living-room. Miriam was sitting there like a stone
woman, only her agonised eyes alive. Martin instantly opened up on her.

“Keep your mouth shut, understand! Say nothing and they have nothing on
us!”

Her terrified glance told its own tale. Martin cursed her brutally. “So
you
have
been talking!”

“They told me you were dead!” she murmured.

“You ought to have known me better!” he snarled. “I’m not going to fluff
out like that!”

Meanwhile big Les Farman was staring at him as if he were a ghost. “I
don’t understand,” he muttered. “I don’t understand!”

“The shot you heard was just a bit of stage play,” said Mme. Storey. “I
guessed as much at the time. However, I knew we would catch him here.”

“But how did he escape?”

“I reckon he escaped from the
Buccaneer
just one minute after we
did.”

“He couldn’t have swum ashore. It was more than a mile to shore. The water
is cold enough to kill a man at this season.”

“Then he went ashore in a boat.”

“There were only four boats and they were all accounted for.”

“He had a boat of his own.”

Les stared at her incredulously.

“There are such things as folding boats,” said Mme. Storey. “They roll up
in a bundle. No doubt there was such a bundle amongst all that baggage he
brought aboard. When the bundle was unrolled and set up it would make a
perfectly seaworthy boat. All he had to do was to float it off on the side
opposite to where we were.”

“Well, I’m damned!” muttered Les, staring at Martin with a kind of
reluctant admiration.

“Search him!” said Inspector Rumsey.

Under Martin’s jacket and his ordinary waistcoat the detectives discovered
a second vest made of chamois cloth. “It’s full of lumps,” said one of the
searchers.

“Rather valuable lumps,” said Mme. Storey dryly. “About a million and a
half dollars worth of diamonds.”

Martin was forced to remove the chamois vest. Rumsey slit one of the seams
with his pocket-knife and a couple of glittering stones rolled out on his
palm. A murmur of amazement went around.

“Go through his pockets,” said Mme. Storey.

Amongst the usual objects that a man carries around with him;
handkerchief, fountain pen, wallet, keys, they brought to light a little
pasteboard match box with a gaily decorated cover.

“That’s what I want,” said Mme. Storey, reaching for the box. She snapped
it open. “Look, Inspector, wax matches. Bought in Amsterdam. These will send
him to the chair!”

We had forgotten Miriam for the moment. We heard a shivering sigh, and
turning, saw that she had fainted in her chair. Les picked her up with
infinite tenderness, and carried her to a sofa. Martin looked on with an
amused sneer. It was just as if he had said: My way with the women works
better, old man! I could have smacked his ugly face. The worst of it was, it
was true! Martin, ugly and bad as he was, had a fatal attraction for all of
us.

On the following morning a storm of publicity broke loose in the press.
From the newsgetters’ point of view the story had everything; murdered
millionaire, stolen diamonds, a pair of young lovers to inherit the millions;
even the suggestion of psychic powers in the murderer.

There are always those looking for a chance to get a slam at a popular
favourite, and some of the papers went out of their way to point out that
Mme. Storey’s long record of success had met with a check at last. Horace
Laghet had engaged her to protect him from the plotters, they said, and she
had fallen down on the job.

This was almost more than I could bear. I burned to sit down and write the
truth to the papers; how my employer had accepted the task under certain
definite conditions; how Horace Laghet had repeatedly broken the conditions;
how by his own bull-headedness he had made it impossible for her to save him.
She would not let me write the letter. Let the charges fall of their own
weight, she said; everything blows over.

All those who had been on the yacht became fair game for the reporters.
Adele Holder and Frank Tanner for reasons of their own had but little to say;
Emil and Celia were bewildered by their notoriety; only Sophie enjoyed it.
Her garrulousness was a vein of rich ore that they never succeeded in
exhausting.

Miriam we spirited away where the reporters could not torment her. She had
made up her mind not to see Martin again, and she stuck to it. And of course
as long as he was locked up he could not exert his infernal personal
influence over her. When the case finally came to trial neither side would
call Miriam to testify; the prosecution because they would not, and the
defence because they dared not.

Martin somehow was able to engage the most expensive legal talent in the
country. At that he was probably the cleverest man amongst them. He directed
the strategy of his own defence, and it was masterly. He made a wonderful
witness in his own behalf. Cool, good-humoured, and apparently as open as
window-glass, the prosecutor was unable to catch him out in any important
respect. During the days that he was on the stand, the courtroom was besieged
by thousands of women. It was said that he received a whole basketful of
letters from them daily.

On the other hand the prosecution had not been idle. An autopsy proved
that Horace Laghet’s central nervous system had been paralysed by an
injection of a drug with the properties of curare. Divers were employed to
visit the wreck of the
Buccaneer
, and the pictures they took under
water established that she had been destroyed by a bomb set off inside her
hull. Of course, Martin’s original plan had been to blow her up in some
foreign port, not at the door of his own home town.

Mme. Storey made a hasty trip to Holland, where, assisted by the astute M.
Joannot she was able to check up on Martin’s movement with deadly accuracy.
In addition to complete evidence as to the gathering together of the
diamonds, she was able to show that Martin had purchased a folding boat, had
collected the materials to make a time-bomb, and had visited a notorious herb
doctor, from whom he might have procured curare. The herb doctor had
disappeared.

Adrian, by the time the trial came on, had made peace with himself, and
was anxious to confess everything. On the stand he was obviously the
ill-balanced neurotic and his tragic story was very damaging to Martin’s
case.

Martin was convicted of murder. Afterwards one of the jurors divulged that
he and his fellows had been most influenced by the implied fact that Miriam
had tried to warn Horace of the plot against him, though evidence that she
had done so was not directly before the jury. If it was not true, why had not
the defence put Miriam on the stand? the jurors asked themselves. Thus
Miriam, even in her absence from the trial, convicted him.

He went to the chair blinking and unrepentant. There was a crowd of
weeping women outside the prison gates.

Adrian’s trial followed that of Martin. He pleaded guilty to a charge of
conspiring to kill, and received a long sentence. I am told that his health
is rapidly failing, and that he will never live to complete it.

Adele Holder duly received her legacy from the Horace Laghet estate, and
she and Frank Tanner were married. It didn’t last long. Millionaires were
Adele’s speciality, and she found another. Tanner received a handsome sum to
salve his wounded affections. He has just enough to live on in a small way
without doing a tap of work, and is becoming fatter and more pop-eyed day by
day.

When the trial was over Mme. Storey, Sophie and I spirited the young
lovers down to Elkton, Maryland, where you can be married easier than in any
place in the U.S.A. In Elkton the ministers stand out on their front porches,
and hold up a finger to passing motorists. Later on the same day we put the
newly-joined pair aboard an unfashionable ship in Baltimore under assumed
names. The secret was kept until they had sailed away.