The dream detective: being some account of the methods of Moris Klaw (16 page)

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his mind. To-night I shall sleep beside his bed. I shall be unable odically to sterilize myself, but we must hope. From amid the phantasms which that sick brain will throw out upon the astral film—upon the surrounding ether—I must trust that I find the thought, the last thought before delirium came!"

Haufmann looked amazed. I had prepared.him, to some extent, for Klaw's theories, but, nevertheless, he was tremendously surprised. Klaw, however, paid no attention to this. He looked around at the trees.

"I am glad," he rumbled, impressively, "that you managed to hush up. Distinctly, we have now a chance."

"A chance of what?" I cried. "The thing seems susceptible of no ordinary explanation! How can you account for what happened to Ottley and for his condition ? What incredible thing came out from the poplars?"

"No thing!" answered Moris Klaw. "No thing, my good friend!"

"Then what did he fire at?"

"At the coach house!"

I met the gaze of his peculiar eyes, fixed upon me through the pince-nez.

"If you will look at the coach-house chimney," he continued, "you will see it—the hole made by his bullet!"

I turned quickly, and even from that considerable

distance the hole was visible; a triangular break on the red-tiled rim.

"What on earth does it mean?" I asked, more hopelessly mystified than ever.

"It means that Ottley is a clever man who knows his business; and it means, Mr. Searles, that we must take up this so extraordinary affair where the poor Ottley dropped it!"

"What do you propose?"

"I propose that you invite yourself to a few days' holiday, as I have done. You stay here. Do not allow even the doctor to know that you are in the house. The nurse you will have to confide in, I suppose. Mr. Haufmann"—he turned to the latter —"you will occupy your old room. Do not, I beg of you, go outside after dusk upon any consideration. If either of you shall hear it again—the evil whispering—come out by the front door, and keep in the shadow. Carry no light. Above all, do not come out upon the balcony!"

"Then you," I said, "will be unable to stay?"

"I shall be so unable," was the reply; "for I go to Brighton to secure the interview with Miss Greta which the poor Ottley so much required!"

"You don't suggest that she knows "

"She knows no more than we do, Mr. Searles! But I think she holds a clue and does not know that she holds a clue! For an hour I shall slumber—I who, like the tortoise, know that to sleep is to live—

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I shall slumber beside the sick man's bed. Then, we shall see!"

IV

It was a quarter to seven when Moris Klaw entered the sick room. Ottley lay in a trance-like condition, and the eccentric investigator, of whose proceedings the nurse strongly disapproved, settled himself in a split-cane armchair by the bedside, and waving his hand in dismissal to Haufmann and myself, placed a large silk handkerchief over his sparsely covered skull and composed himself for slumber.

We left him and tiptoed from the room.

"If you hadn't told me what he's done in the past," whispered Haufmann, "I should say our old friend was mad a lot!"

The great empty house was eerily silent, and during the time that we sat smoking and awaiting the end of Moris Klaw's singular telepathic experiment, neither of us talked very much. At eight o'clock the man whose proceedings savoured so much of charlatanism, but whom I knew for one of the foremost criminologists of the world, emerged, spraying his face with verbena.

"Ah, gentlemen," he said, coming in to us, "I have recovered some slight impression"—he tapped his moist forehead—"of that agonizing thought which preceded the unconsciousness of Ottley. I depart. Sometime to-night will come Sir Bartram Vane

from Half-Moon Street, the specialist, to confer with the physician who is attending here. Mr. Searles, remain concealed. Not even he must know of your being here; no one outside the house must know. Remember my warnings. I depart."

Behind the thick pebbles his eyes gleamed with some excitement repressed. By singular means, he would seem to have come upon a clue.

"Good-night, Mr. Haufmann," he said. "Goodnight, Mr. Searles. To the nurse I have said goodnight and she only glared. She thinks I am the mad old £001!"

He departed, curtly declining company, and carrying his huge plaid rug and heavy grip. As his slouching footsteps died away along the avenue, Haufmann and I looked grimly at each other.

"Seems we're left!" said my friend. "You won't desert me, Searles?"

"Most certainly I shall not! You are tied here by the presence of poor Ottley, in any event, and you can rely upon me to keep you company."

At about ten o'clock Sir Bartram Vane drove up, bringing with him the local physician who was attending upon Ottley. I kept well out of sight, but learnt, when the medical men had left, that the course of treatment had been entirely changed.

Thus commenced our strange ordeal; how it terminated you presently shall learn.

Moris Klaw, in pursuit of whatever plan he had

formed, never appeared on the scene, but evidence of his active interest reached us in the form of telegraphic instructions. Once it was a wire telling Haufmann to detain the American servants in London should they arrive and to go on living as we were. Again it was a warning not to go out on the balcony after dusk; and, again, that we should not desert our posts for one single evening. On the fourth day the doctor pronounced a slight improvement in Ottley's condition, and Haufmann determined to run down to Brighton on the following morning, returning in the afternoon.

That night we again heard the voice.

The house was very still, and Haufmann and I had retired to our rooms, when I discerned, above the subdued rustling whisper of the leaves, that other sound that no leaf ever made. In an instant I was crouching by the open window. A lull followed. Then, again, I heard the soft voice calling. I could not detect the words, but in obedience to the instructions of Klaw, I picked up the pistol which I had brought for the purpose, and ran to the door. The idea that the whispering menace was something that could be successfully shot at robbed it of much of its eerie horror, and I relished the prospect of action after the dreary secret sojourn in the upper rooms of the house.

I groped my way down to the hall. As we had carefully oiled the bolts, I experienced no difficulty

in silently opening the door. Inch by inch I opened it, listening intently.

Again I heard the queer call.

Now, by craning my neck, I could see the moon-bright front of the house; and looking upward, I was horrified to see Shan Haufmann, a conspicuous figure in his light pajama suit, crouching on the balcony! The moonlight played vividly on the nickelled barrel of the pistol he carred as he rose slowly to his feet.

Though I did not know what danger threatened, nor from whence it would proceed, I knew well that Klaw's was no idle warning. I could not imagine what madness had prompted Haufmann to neglect it, and was about to throw wide the door and call to him, when a series of strange things happened in bewildering succession.

An odd strumming sound came from somewhere in the outer darkness. Haufmann dropped to his knees (I learnt, afterward, that the loose slippers he wore had tripped him). The glass of the window behind him was shattered with a great deal of noise.

A shot! ... a spurt of flame in the black darkness of the poplar avenue! ... a shriek from somewhere on the west front . . . and I ran out on to the drive.

With a tremendous crash a bulky form rolled down the sloping roof of the coach house, to fall with a sickening thud to the ground!

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Then, out into the moonlight, Moris Klaw came running, his yet smoking pistol in his hand!

"Haufmann!" he cried, and again, "Haufmann!"

The big American peered down from the balcony, hauling in something which seemed to be a line, but which I was unable to distinguish in the darkness.

"Good boy!" he panted. "I was a fool to do it! But I saw him lying behind the chimney and thought I could drop him!"

Moris Klaw ran, ungainly, across to the coach house and I followed him. The figure of a tall, lithe man, wearing a blue serge suit, lay face downward on the gravel. As we turned him over, Haufmann, breathing heavily, joined us. The moonlight fell on a dark saturnine face.

"Gee!" came the cry. "It's Corpus Chris!"

"Where did I get hold upon the clue?" asked Moris Klaw, when he, Haufmann, and I sat, in the gray dawn, waiting for the police to come and take away the body of Costa. "It was from the brain of Ottley! His poor mind"—he waved long hands circularly in the air—"goes round and round about the thing that happened to him on the balcony."

"And what was that?" demanded Haufmann, eagerly. "Same as happened to me?"

"It was something—something that his knowledge of strange things tells him is venomous—which struck

his wrist as he raised his revolver! What did he do? I can tell you; because he is doing it over and over again in his poor feverish mind. He clapped to the injured wrist the barrel of his revolver and fired! Then, swooning, he toppled over and fell among the bushes. The wound that so had puzzled all becomes explained. It was self-inflicted—a precaution—a cauterizing; and it saved his life. For I saw Sir Bartram Vane to-day and he had spoken with the other doctor on the telephone. The new treatment succeeds."

"I am still in the dark!" confessed Haufmann.

"Yes?" rumbled Moris Klaw. "So? Why do I go to Brighton? I go to ask Miss Greta what Ottley would have asked her."

"And that is?"

"What she feared that made her so very anxious to get you away from your home. To me she admitted that she had received from the man Costa impassioned appeals, such as, foolish girl, she had been afraid to show to you—her father!"

"Good heavens! the scamp!"

"The canaille! But no matter, he is dead canaille! After you got the brother hanged, this Corpus Chris (it was Fate that named him!) sent to your daughter a mad letter, swearing that if she does not fly with him, he will kill you if he has to follow you around the world! Yes, he was insane, I fancy; I think so.

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But he was a man of very great culture. He held a Cambridge degree! You did not know? I thought not. He tracked you to Europe and right to this house. Its history he learned in some way and used for his own ends. Probably, too, he had no oppor-tunity of getting at you otherwise, without leaving behind a clue or being seen and pursued."

Moris Klaw picked up an Indian bow which lay upon the floor beside him.

"A bow of the Sioux pattern," he rumbled, impressively.

He stooped again, picking up a small arrow to which a length of thin black twine was attached.

"One standing on the balcony in the moonlight," he continued, "what a certain mark if the wind be not too high! And you will remember that on gently blowing nights the whispering came!"

He raised the point of the arrow. It was encrusted in some black, shining substance. Moris Klaw lowered his voice.

"Curari!" he said, horasely, "the ancient arrow poison of the South American tribes! This small arrow would make only a tiny wound, and it could be drawn back again by means of the twine attached. Costa, of course, mistook Ottley for you, Mr. Hauf-mann. Ah, a clever fellow! I spent three evenings up the second tree in the avenue waiting for him. I need not have shot him if you had followed my

instructions and not come out on the balcony. We could have captured him alive!"

"I'm not crying about it!" said Haufmann.

"Neither do I weep," rumbled Moris Klaw, and bathed his face with perfume. "But I loathe it, this curari —it smells of death. Ah! the canaille!"

SEVENTH EPISODE

CASE OF THE CHORD IN G

IT HAS been suggested to me more than once that the extraordinary crime which became known throughout the press as the Chelsea studio murder was the Waterloo of my eccentric friend, Moris Klaw; to which I reply that, on the contrary, it was his Austerlitz. This prince of criminologists, some of whose triumphs it has been my privilege to chronicle, never more dramatically established his theory of what he termed "Odic negatives" than in his solution of the mystery of the death of Pyke Webley, the portrait painter.

His singular power, which I can only term post-telepathy, of recovering thought-forms from the atmosphere, earned him the derision of the ignorant, as I have shown, but the grateful appreciation of the better informed—not least among these, Detective-Inspector Grimsby, of New Scotland Yard.

I cannot doubt that the recent experiments of Professor Gilbert Murray were based upon that law of "psychic angles" laid down by the strange genius of Wapping Old Stairs.

During lunch, I had been reading an account of the Chelsea tragedy in an early edition of the Evening idardy and on returning to my chambers I found Inspector Grimsby waiting for me. A preamble was unnecessary. Simple deduction told me why he had come.

He was in charge of the Chelsea mystery—and out of his depth.

By several years the youngest detective inspector in the Service, Grimsby is a man earmarked by nature for constant promotion. He possesses a gift more precious than genius—the art of using genius; allied to which he has that knack indispensable to any man who would succeed—the knack of finding the limelight. Although he may have done no more than stand in the wings throughout the performance, Detective-Inspector Grimsby invariably takes the last curtain.

This is as it should be, and I accord him my respectful admiration. Therefore, on seeing him:

"The murder of Pyke Webley?" I said, interrogatively.

"Well, that's wonderful!" he declared, trying to look surprised. "I shall begin to think you are Moris Klaw's only rival if you spring things like this on me."

"I see," said I, tossing my paper on the table. "The case is not so simple as it appears."

"Simple!" cried Grimsby. He threw the stump

of a vicious-looking cheroot into my hearth. " Simple ? It's too simple. By which I mean that there is nothing to work upon—nothing / can see."