The mystery of Angelina Frood
“Tied on!” the sergeant snorted impatiently. “Of course it wasn’t. It
grew there.”
Here the second mariner apparently asked some question, for our friend
turned to him and replied: “_Ja. Maulwurf_”; on which I heard Bundy
snigger softly.
“No, no,” I interposed; “not that sort of mole. A kind of wart, you
know. _Das Mal_.”
On this the second mariner fell out of the deckhouse door, and the
pair burst into yells of laughter, rolling about the deck in agonies
of mirth, wiping their eyes, muttering _Maulwurf_, _Maulwurf_, and
screeching like demented hyenas.
“Well,” Cobbledick demanded impatiently, “have you seen him?”
The mariner shook his head. “No,” he replied, shakily. “I have not any
mahn seen.”
“Well, why couldn’t you say so at first?” the sergeant growled.
“I vos zo zubbraised,” the mariner explained, glancing at his
shipmate; and the pair burst out into fresh howls of laughter.
The sergeant turned away with a sort of benevolent contempt and ran
his eye despairingly over the wilderness. “I suppose we had better
search this place,” said he, “though he is pretty certain to have got
away.”
At his suggestion we separated and examined the possible hiding-places
systematically, but, of course, with no result. Once only I had a
momentary hope that we had not lost our quarry, when the sergeant
suddenly stooped and began cautiously to stalk an abandoned boiler
surrounded by a clump of bushes; but when the grinning countenance of
Bundy appeared at the opposite end and that reprobate crept out
stealthily and proceeded to stalk the sergeant, the last hope faded.
“I certainly thought I saw someone moving in those bushes,” said
Cobbledick, with a disappointed air.
“So did Mr. Bundy,” said I. “You must have seen one another.”
The sergeant glanced suspiciously at our colleague, but made no
remark; and we continued our rather perfunctory search. At length we
gave it up and slowly returned to the neighbourhood of the pier. By
this time the tide had turned, and a few loiterers were standing about
watching the procession of barges moving downstream on the ebb. Among
them was a grave-looking, sandy-haired man who leaned against the
watch-house, smoking reflectively as he surveyed the river. To this
philosopher Cobbledick addressed himself, explaining, as he was in
plain clothes:
“Good afternoon. I am a police officer and I am looking for a man who
is described on that bill.” Here he indicated the poster.
The philosopher turned a pale grey, and somewhat suspicious eye on
him, and having removed his pipe, expectorated thoughtfully but made
no comment on the statement.
“A sea-faring man,” continued the sergeant, “with a mole on the left
side of his nose.” He looked enquiringly at the philosopher, who
replied impassively:
“Nhm--nhm.”
“Do you happen to have seen a man answering that description?”
“Nhm--nhm,” was the slightly ambiguous reply.
“You _have_ seen him?” the sergeant asked, eagerly.
“Aye.”
“Do you know if he belongs to any of the craft that trade here?”
“Nhm--nhm.”
“Do you happen to know which particular vessel he belongs to?”
“Aye,” was the answer, accompanied by a grave nod.
“Can you tell me,” the sergeant asked patiently, “which vessel that
is, and where she is at present?”
Our friend replaced his pipe and took a long draw at it, gazing
meditatively at a schooner which was moving swiftly down the river
under the power of an auxiliary motor, and setting her sails as she
went. I had noticed her already, and observed that she had a white
under-body and black top-sides, and that she carried a single long
yard on her fore-mast. At length our friend removed his pipe,
expectorated, and nodded gravely at the schooner.
“Yon,” said he, and replaced his pipe, as a precaution, I supposed,
against unnecessary loquacity.
Cobbledick gazed wistfully at the receding schooner. “Pity,” said he.
“I should have liked to have a look at that fellow.”
“You could get the schooner held up at Sheerness, couldn’t you?” I
asked.
“Yes; I could send a ’phone message to Garrison Point Fort. But, you
see, she’s a foreigner. Might make trouble. And he is probably not the
man we want. After all, it’s only a matter of a mole.”
“Maulwurf,” murmured Bundy.
“Yes,” said the sergeant, with a faint grin; “those beggars were
laughing at us. Well, it can’t be helped.”
We stood for a moment or two watching the schooner set one sail after
another. Presently Bundy observed:
“Methinks, Sergeant, that Mr. Noah is trying to attract your
attention.”
We glanced towards the Ark, the tenant of which was seated in the
stern-sheets, scrubbing a length of rusty chain. As he caught the
sergeant’s eye, he beckoned mysteriously, whereupon we descended the
bank, and, picking our way across the muddy grass by his little
causeway of stepping-stones, approached the foot of the short ladder.
“Well, Israel,” said the sergeant, resting his hands on the gunwale of
the old boat as he made a rapid survey of the interior, “giving the
family plate a bit of a polish, eh?”
“Plate!” exclaimed the old man, holding up the chain, which, as I now
saw, had a number of double hooks linked to it, “this ain’t plate.
’Tis what we calls a creeper.”
“A creeper,” repeated the sergeant, looking at it with renewed
interest. “Ha, yes, hm. A creeper, hey? Well, Israel, what’s a-doing?
Have you got something to show us?”
The old man laid down the creeper and the scrubbing-brush--which had a
strong suggestion of salvage in its appearance--and moved towards the
door of the Ark. “Come along inside,” said he.
Cobbledick mounted the ladder and motioned me to follow, which I did,
while Bundy discretely sauntered away and sat down on the bank. On
entering, I observed that the Ark followed closely the constructional
traditions. Like its classical prototype, it was “pitched with pitch,
within and without,” and was furnished with a single small window, let
into the door and hermetically sealed.
Seeing that our host looked at me with some disfavour, the tactful
sergeant hastened to make us known to one another.
“This is Dr. Strangeways, Israel. He was Mrs. Frood’s doctor, and he
knows all about this affair. This, Doctor, is Mr. Israel Bangs, the
eminent long-shoreman, a sort of hereditary Grand Duke of the
Rochester foreshore.”
I bowed ceremoniously, and the Grand Duke acknowledged the
introduction with a sour grin. Then, lifting the greasy lid of a
locker, he dived into it and came to the surface, as it were, with a
small shoe in his hand.
“What do you say to that?” he demanded, holding the shoe under the
sergeant’s nose. The sergeant said nothing, but looked at me; and I,
suddenly conscious of the familiar sickening sensation, could do no
more than nod in reply. Soiled, muddy and sodden as it was, the poor
little relic instantly and vividly recalled the occasion when I had
last seen it, then all trim and smart, peeping coyly beneath the hem
of the neat brown skirt.
“Where did you find it, Israel?” asked Cobbledick.
“Ah,” said Bangs, with a sly leer, “that’s tellin’, that is. Never you
mind where I found it. There’s the shoe.”
“Don’t be a fool, Israel,” said the sergeant. “What use do you suppose
the shoe is to me if I don’t know where you found it? I’ve got to put
it in evidence, you know.”
“You can put it where you like, so long as you pays for it,” the old
rascal replied, doggedly. “The findin’ of it’s my business.”
There ensued a lengthy wrangle, but the sergeant, though patient and
polite, was firm. Eventually Israel gave way.
“Well,” he said, “if you undertakes not to let on to Sam Hooper or any
of his lot, I’ll tell you. I found it on the mud, side of the long
crik betwixt Blue Boar Head and Gas-’us Point.”
The sergeant made a note of the locality, and, after having sworn not
to divulge the secret to Sam Hooper or any other of the shore-rat
fraternity, and having ascertained that Israel had no further
information to dispose of, rose to depart; and, I noticed that, as we
passed out towards the ladder, he seemed to bestow a glance of
friendly recognition on the creeper.
“Well,” said Bundy, when we rejoined him, “what had Mr. Noah to say? I
hope you remembered me kindly to my old friends, Shem, Ham, and
Japhet.”
“He has found one of Mrs. Frood’s shoes,” answered the sergeant,
producing it from his pocket and offering it for inspection. Bundy
glanced at it indifferently, and then remarked: “It seems to answer
the description, but, for my part, I don’t quite see the use of all
this searching and prying. It only proves what we all know. There’s no
doubt that she fell into the river. The question is, how did she get
there? It is not likely that it was an accident, and, if it wasn’t, it
must have been a crime. What we want to know is, who is the criminal?”
Cobbledick pocketed the shoe with an impatient gesture.
“That’s the way they always talk,” said he. “They will always begin at
the wrong end. The question, ‘Who is the murderer?’ does not arise
until it is certain that there has been a murder; and it can’t be
certain that there has been a murder until it is certain that the
missing person is dead. And that certainty can hardly be established
until the body is found. But, in the meantime, these articles are
evidence enough to justify us in making other inquiries, and they may
give us a hint where to look for the body. They do, in fact. They
suggest that the body is probably not very far away, and more likely
to be up-stream than down.”
“I don’t see how they do,” said Bundy.
“I do,” retorted the sergeant, “and that’s enough for me.”
Bundy, with his customary discretion, took this as closing the
discussion, and further--as I guessed--surmising that the sergeant
might wish to have a few words with me alone, took his leave of us
when we reached the vicinity of the office.
“That is not a bad idea of old Israel’s,” said Cobbledick, when Bundy
had gone. “The creeper, I mean.”
“What about it?” I asked.
“You know what a creeper is used for, I suppose,” said he. “In the old
days, the revenue boats used to trail them along over the bottom in
shallow water where they suspected that the smugglers had sunk their
tubs. You see they couldn’t always get a chance to land the stuff.
Then they used to fill the spirits into a lot of little ankers or
tubs, lash them together into a sort of raft and sink the raft close
in-shore, on a dark night, in a marked place where their pals could go
some other night and fish them up. Well the revenue cutters knew most
of those places and used to go there and drift over them trailing
creepers. Of course, if there were any tubs there, the creepers hooked
on to the lashings and up they came.”
“But what do you suppose is Israel’s idea?” I asked.
“Why, as the body ought to have come up long before this, and it
hasn’t, he thinks it has been sunk. It might have been taken up the
river in a boat, and sunk in midstream with a weight of some sort. Or
it might have got caught by a lost anchor or on some old moorings.
That would account for its not coming up and for these oddments
getting detached and drifting ashore. So old Israel is going to get to
work with a creeper. I expect he spends his nights creeping over the
likely spots, and that is what makes him so deuced secret about the
place where he found that shoe. He reckons that the body is somewhere
thereabouts.”
I made no comment on this rather horrible communication. Of course, it
was necessary that the body should be searched for, since its
discovery was the indispensable condition of the search for the
murderer. But I did not want to hear more of the dreadful details than
was absolutely unavoidable.
When we reached the Guildhall, I halted and was about to take leave of