The magic casket
convenient reach of our guest. Then, with a glance of altruistic
satisfaction at our old friend, he stole out like a benevolent ghost.
“Dear, dear!” exclaimed Brodribb, beaming on the decanter, “this is
really too bad. You ought not to indulge me in this way.”
“My dear Brodribb,” replied Thorndyke, “you are a benefactor to us.
You give us a pretext for taking a glass of port. We can’t drink
alone, you know.”
“I should, if I had a cellar like yours,” chuckled Brodribb, sniffing
ecstatically at his glass. He took a sip, with his eyes closed,
savoured it solemnly, shook his head, and set the glass down on the
table.
“To return to our case,” he resumed; “Miss Bonney is the daughter of a
solicitor, Harold Bonney--you may remember him. He had offices in
Bedford Row; and there, one morning, a client came to him and asked
him to take care of some property while he, the said client, ran over
to Paris, where he had some urgent business. The property in question
was a collection of pearls of most unusual size and value, forming a
great necklace, which had been unstrung for the sake of portability.
It is not clear where they came from, but as the transaction occurred
soon after the Russian Revolution, we may make a guess. At any rate,
there they were, packed loosely in a leather bag, the string of which
was sealed with the owner’s seal.
“Bonney seems to have been rather casual about the affair. He gave the
client a receipt for the bag, stating the nature of the contents,
which he had not seen, and deposited it, in the client’s presence, in
the safe in his private office. Perhaps he intended to take it to the
bank or transfer it to his strong-room, but it is evident that he did
neither; for his managing clerk, who kept the second key of the
strong-room--without which the room could not be opened--knew nothing
of the transaction. When he went home at about seven o’clock, he left
Bonney hard at work in his office, and there is no doubt that the
pearls were still in the safe.
“That night, at about a quarter to nine, it happened that a couple of
C.I.D. officers were walking up Bedford Row when they saw three men
come out of one of the houses. Two of them turned up towards
Theobald’s Road, but the third came south, towards them. As he passed
them, they both recognized him as a Japanese named Uyenishi, who was
believed to be a member of a cosmopolitan gang and whom the police
were keeping under observation. Naturally, their suspicions were
aroused. The first two men had hurried round the corner and were out
of sight; and when they turned to look after Uyenishi, he had mended
his pace considerably and was looking back at them. Thereupon one of
the officers, named Barker, decided to follow the Jap, while the
other, Holt, reconnoitred the premises.
“Now, as soon as Barker turned, the Japanese broke into a run. It was
just such a night as this: dark and slightly foggy. In order to keep
his man in sight, Barker had to run, too; and he found that he had a
sprinter to deal with. From the bottom of Bedford Row, Uyenishi darted
across and shot down Hand Court like a lamplighter. Barker followed,
but at the Holborn end his man was nowhere to be seen. However, he
presently learned from a man at a shop door that the fugitive had run
past and turned up Brownlow Street, so off he went again in pursuit.
But when he got to the top of the street, back in Bedford Row, he was
done. There was no sign of the man, and no one about from whom he
could make inquiries. All he could do was to cross the road and walk
up Bedford Row to see if Holt had made any discoveries.
“As he was trying to identify the house, his colleague came out on to
the doorstep and beckoned him in; and this was the story that he told.
He had recognized the house by the big lamp-standard; and as the place
was all dark, he had gone into the entry and tried the office door.
Finding it unlocked, he had entered the clerks’ office, lit the gas,
and tried the door of the private office, but found it locked. He
knocked at it, but getting no answer, had a good look round the
clerks’ office; and there, presently, on the floor in a dark corner,
he found a key. This he tried in the door of the private office, and
finding that it fitted, turned it and opened the door. As he did so,
the light from the outer office fell on the body of a man lying on the
floor just inside.
“A moment’s inspection showed that the man had been murdered--first
knocked on the head and then finished with a knife. Examination of the
pockets showed that the dead man was Harold Bonney, and also that no
robbery from the person seemed to have been committed. Nor was there
any sign of any other kind of robbery. Nothing seemed to have been
disturbed, and the safe had not been broken into, though that was not
very conclusive, as the safe key was in the dead man’s pocket.
However, a murder had been committed, and obviously Uyenishi was
either the murderer or an accessory; so Holt had, at once, rung up
Scotland Yard on the office telephone, giving all the particulars.
“I may say at once that Uyenishi disappeared completely and at once.
He never went to his lodgings at Limehouse, for the police were there
before he could have arrived. A lively hue and cry was kept up.
Photographs of the wanted man were posted outside every
police-station, and a watch was set at all the ports. But he was never
found. He must have got away at once on some outward-bound tramp from
the Thames. And there we will leave him for the moment.
“At first it was thought that nothing had been stolen, since the
managing clerk could not discover that anything was missing. But a few
days later the client returned from Paris, and presenting his receipt,
asked for his pearls. But the pearls had vanished. Clearly they had
been the object of the crime. The robbers must have known about them
and traced them to the office. Of course the safe had been opened with
its own key, which was then replaced in the dead man’s pocket.
“Now, I was poor Bonney’s executor, and in that capacity I denied his
liability in respect of the pearls on the ground that he was a
gratuitous bailee--there being no evidence that any consideration had
been demanded--and that being murdered cannot be construed as
negligence. But Miss Mabel, who was practically the sole legatee,
insisted on accepting liability. She said that the pearls could have
been secured in the bank or the strong-room, and that she was morally,
if not legally, liable for their loss; and she insisted on handing to
the owner the full amount at which he valued them. It was a wildly
foolish proceeding, for he would certainly have accepted half the sum.
But still, I take my hat off to a person--man or woman--who can accept
poverty in preference to a broken covenant”; and here Brodribb, being
in fact, that sort of person himself, had to be consoled with a
replenished glass.
“And mind you,” he resumed, “when I speak of poverty, I wish to be
taken literally. The estimated value of those pearls was fifty
thousand pounds--if you can imagine anyone out of Bedlam giving such a
sum for a parcel of trash like that; and when poor Mabel Bonney had
paid it, she was left with the prospect of having to spread her butter
mighty thin for the rest of her life. As a matter of fact, she has had
to sell one after another of her little treasures to pay just her
current expenses, and I’m hanged if I can see how she is going to
carry on when she has sold the last of them. But there, I mustn’t take
up your time with her private troubles. Let us return to our muttons.
“First, as to the pearls. They were never traced, and it seems
probable that they were never disposed of. For, you see, pearls are
different from any other kind of gems. You can cut up a big diamond,
but you can’t cut up a big pearl. And the great value of this necklace
was due not only to the size, the perfect shape and ‘orient’ of the
separate pearls, but to the fact that the whole set was perfectly
matched. To break up the necklace was to destroy a good part of its
value.
“And now as to our friend Uyenishi. He disappeared, as I have said;
but he reappeared at Los Angeles, in custody of the police, charged
with robbery and murder. He was taken red-handed and was duly
convicted and sentenced to death; but for some reason--or more
probably, for no reason, as we should think--the sentence was commuted
to imprisonment for life. Under these circumstances, the English
police naturally took no action, especially as they really had no
evidence against him.
“Now Uyenishi was, by trade, a metal-worker; a maker of those pretty
trifles that are so dear to the artistic Japanese, and when he was in
prison he was allowed to set up a little workshop and practise his
trade on a small scale. Among other things that he made was a little
casket in the form of a seated figure, which he said he wanted to give
to his brother as a keepsake. I don’t know whether any permission was
granted for him to make this gift, but that is of no consequence; for
Uyenishi got influenza and was carried off in a few days by pneumonia;
and the prison authorities learned that his brother had been killed, a
week or two previously, in a shooting affair at San Francisco. So the
casket remained on their hands.
“About this time, Miss Bonney was invited to accompany an American
lady on a visit to California, and accepted gratefully. While she was
there she paid a visit to the prison to inquire whether Uyenishi had
ever made any kind of statement concerning the missing pearls. Here
she heard of Uyenishi’s recent death; and the governor of the prison,
as he could not give her any information, handed over to her the
casket as a sort of memento. This transaction came to the knowledge of
the press, and--well, you know what the Californian press is like.
There were ‘some comments,’ as they would say, and quite an assortment
of Japanese, of shady antecedents, applied at the prison to have the
casket ‘restored’ to them as Uyenishi’s heirs. Then Miss Bonney’s
rooms at the hotel were raided by burglars--but the casket was in the
hotel strong-room--and Miss Bonney and her hostess were shadowed by
various undesirables in such a disturbing fashion that the two ladies
became alarmed and secretly made their way to New York. But there
another burglary occurred, with the same unsuccessful result, and the
shadowing began again. Finally, Miss Bonney, feeling that her presence
was a danger to her friend, decided to return to England, and managed
to get on board the ship without letting her departure be known in
advance.
“But even in England she has not been left in peace. She has had an
uncomfortable feeling of being watched and attended, and has seemed to
be constantly meeting Japanese men in the streets, especially in the
vicinity of her house. Of course, all the fuss is about this infernal
casket; and when she told me what was happening, I promptly popped the
thing in my pocket and took it to my office, where I stowed it in the
strong-room. And there, of course, it ought to have remained. But it
didn’t. One day Miss Bonney told me that she was sending some small
things to a loan exhibition of oriental works of art at the South
Kensington Museum, and she wished to include the casket. I urged her
strongly to do nothing of the kind, but she persisted; and the end of
it was that we went to the museum together, with her pottery and stuff
in a handbag and the casket in my pocket.
“It was a most imprudent thing to do, for there the beastly casket
was, for several months, exposed in a glass case for anyone to see,
with her name on the label; and what was worse, full particulars of
the origin of the thing. However, nothing happened while it was
there--the museum is not an easy place to steal from--and all went