The Mortover Grange Affair/Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE CLAGNE BIRTHMARK
In the course of his professional experiences, Wedgwood had more than once made a surprising discovery, but he had never previously discovered a missing will. Having some knowledge of legal matters, picked up by observation and enquiry, he hastened to assure himself that the document in his hands had been properly executed. As far as he could see, it seemed to be in order—there was the signature of the testator and there were the signatures of the two necessary witnesses. Certain peculiarities struck him at once. This was a holograph will—written out by Gilson Mortover himself, in an old-fashioned, crabbed handwriting; from the style of their caligraphy the two witnesses were probably labourers on the farm. But it was all done correctly: it could stand, as the saying goes. And Wedgwood had mastered its brief contents in another glance: Gilson Mortover had disposed of his property in one short sentence.
I leave everything of which I die possessed in equal shares to my two sons Matthew Mortover and Stephen Mortover and I appoint them joint executors of this my will.
That was plain enough, thought Wedgwood—whatever quarrel there had been between Matthew Mortover and his father, the old man had forgotten or overlooked it, and had remembered the elder son who had gone away as equal beneficiary with the younger who had stayed at home. He glanced at the date of the will—it had been made some years after Matthew's departure from England to Canada—possibly, Matthew and his father had been in friendly communication. As to whether that supposition was correct, the detective knew nothing: what he did know was that Matthew was dead, and Stephen was dead. And in their place stood Matthew's daughter, the girl Avice, and Stephen's son, the young man Philip, each entitled to one-half of what, by the recent discovery of coal, had become a valuable property, how valuable, perhaps, none concerned in its development yet knew.
Wedgwood put the will safely away in his pocket-book, and marking the place in the old volume at which he had found it, put the volume itself aside. Then, reflecting that there might be an unusually hard and trying day before him on the morrow, and that it would be well to follow Mr. Patello's example and get some sleep, he made up the fire again, and disposing himself in a couple of easy chairs on the hearth, composed himself as well as he could for slumber. He slept at last—soundly in the end, waking eventually to find the fire dying down, and Mr. Patello sitting up, woe-begone, on his couch, lamenting the cold and audibly wondering on what was going to happen next.
It was six o'clock in the morning then, and still dark as midnight; when daylight came Wedgwood saw that while the snow had ceased to fall, it had evidently continued during a greater part of the night and was piled up in deep masses about the house. Mortover Grange, in fact, was cut off from the world; snow-bound; he saw little chance of leaving it to prosecute his enquiries. From thence onward until nearly noon he and his companions could do no more than gaze from the windows on a white and silent world. Here and there, in the distance, they saw the smoke rising from the chimneys of some house or other whose inhabitants were in the same plight as themselves, but though Wedgwood, from an upper window, kept a careful look-out in the directions in which he believed the roads to lie, noon had passed before he saw a sign of any human figure. Then, painfully struggling through the drifts from a point higher up the Valley, he caught sight of a man whose objective was evidently Mortover Grange.
As this man came nearer, Wedgwood saw him to be a shepherd, accompanied by a lurcher dog, and when the man turned in at the gate of the courtyard he hurried down to the door to meet him. The two women and Mr. Patello had also seen him coming and were at the door before Wedgwood; the man was already speaking to them when he got there.
"So Mrs. Baxter, up there at the Drovers' Arms, seeing as I was coming this way, she said would I just drop in and see if Mr. Philip had got home all right," he was saying. "'Cause, of course, the storm was that bad when he left there———"
"Mr. Philip isn't here at all," answered Mattie Patello. "He's never been home!" She turned to Wedgwood, helplessly. "You talk to him!" she said. "I don't understand———"
"You've come down from the Drovers' Arms, eh?" asked Wedgwood. "Just now?"
"Why, it's taken me an hour or two getting down, sir," answered the man. "But I had to come down this way, storm or no storm, and I called in at the Drovers' Arms as I was passing, and the landlady, Mrs. Baxter, she said would I call in at Mortover Grange and just see if Mr. Philip got home all safe the other night, 'cause she'd been very anxious about him."
"What night was that?" asked Wedgwood. "Last night?"
"No—night before that, sir! He was up there at the Drovers' Arms while late—I saw him there, myself—in fact, I saw him set off home. He would go—though the storm was getting bad then, and Mrs. Baxter I heard her praying on him not to go out in—she was pressing on him to stay the night there. But he wouldn't—he wouldn't hear a word fro' nobody, and out into the storm he flung."
"Been drinking, I suppose?" suggested Wedgwood, giving the man a significant look.
"Why, he'd had plenty, mister," assented the messenger. "I'd heard Mrs. Baxter tell him so, not so long before he flung out. I think that had set his back up, d'ye see—so that he wouldn't listen to her when she begged him to stay the night and go to bed there and then. He'd a queer temper if he were crossed or affronted."
"What time would it be when he left the Drovers' Arms?" asked Wedgwood.
"Getting on to closing time—ten o'clock," replied the man.
"And the night was pretty bad?"
"It were bad enough for me, mister, and my road home from there is pretty plain sailing! It would be worse down this way. And it depends, of course, which way he took, to come home by. If he came down the road, same that I've fared by this morning, he could have got through, likely, if he hadn't tumbled into a ditch by the roadside. But if he went t'other way"—he stopped, shaking his head. "Bad enough on any dark night is that way," he said, "but in a storm like this———"
"What way's that?" asked Wedgwood.
The man turned from the door and pointed up the valley towards the range of hills on its further side.
"You see right up yonder, mister, where there's a cleft in the hillside, and the top of a house standing clear against the sky?" he asked. "That's the Drovers' Arms—the highroad from Harslow to Ruxton crosses there. Well, the short cut here is from just behind the inn all along that hillside—nothing more than a bridlepath, it is, and needs care in following it at night. And there's old quarries all along there—old, disused stone-quarries. In this snow———"
"He could easily have fallen over?" said Wedgwood. "Is that it?"
The man gave him a meaning glance.
"It's a difficult path for a sober man, that, mister," he answered. "And as I said before, he'd had plenty when he left Mrs. Baxter's."
"Where are you going, now?" enquired Wedgwood.
"Further down the valley," said the man.
"What's it like—on the road, out there? Can one get along!"
"Why, if you don't mind a bit of a struggle with it, you can! It's not so bad down here as it is higher up."
Wedgwood made himself ready and succeeded in reaching the highroad. Under his companion's guidance he got to a point where there was a long view down the road towards Netherwell, and there, pausing to rest awhile, he was aware of three dark figures slowly coming along in his direction. He pointed them out to the drover, who, sharper of eye than himself, glanced at them and let out one sharp word.
"Police!"
Wedgwood ploughed his way further along, and eventually made out the figures of the Netherwell Superintendent and two stout constables; far down the road behind them, he saw what he guessed to be a motor-car. Presently the Superintendent recognized him and waved his hand.
"Heard anything?" asked Wedgwood as they met. "I mean—since last night?"
The Superintendent, panting from his exertions, nodded.
"A man came in from these parts this morning," he answered, "with a story of having seen that housekeeper at Mortover Grange and a gentleman on a lonely part of the moor, near the new colliery works, night before last, lost, and uncertain about their way—they wanted to get back to the Grange. He told them as best he could, but yesterday, he says, the postman who had made his way to the Grange during the morning, told him that a young woman there had told him that Mrs. Clagne and a gentleman she had gone out with the night before had never returned. So this man, my informant, thought we ought to know, and I set out with these two men—our car's stuck, down yonder—snow's too deep to get further. What's your news?"
"Pretty much what yours is," said Wedgwood. "Mr. Levigne and Mrs. Clagne left Mortover Grange night before last at five o'clock: they were to return at eight. They never did: they've never been heard of since. And young Mortover is missing, too—this man's just brought some news of him." He retailed the drover's account of Philip. "What's to be done?" he asked. "Something's happened to all three of them, of course!"
"Doesn't the girl at the Grange know where Levigne and Mrs. Clagne were going?" asked the Superintendent. "Hasn't she any idea?"
"Not a notion! But I have!" replied Wedgwood. "From what she says, Levigne and Mrs. Clagne had been squabbling or quarrelling all the afternoon, evidently about business matters. She—this girl—saw papers. She says they seemed to come to some agreement about tea-time, and went out. My belief is that they went somewhere to get somebody to witness signatures—there are houses in the neighbourhood. Then they got caught in the storm, returning. They may be snow-bound—it's waist-high round Mortover Grange."
The Superintendent turned, looking back in the direction of his car.
"If they'd been merely snow-bound in some house hereabouts they'd have contrived to let that girl know," he said. "No—there's been some accident—in both cases. The only thing is search. There's a roadside inn down yonder—the Coach and Four. We'd better get back there, and see about getting some of the men of the neighbourhood to look round and enquire—they'll know their way about better than we shall. We shall find plenty of them, too, down there at the inn I guess—they can't work, this weather."
In this supposition the Superintendent was right; the inn was filled with men, enforcedly idle. Many of them were men working on the sinking of the new colliery; some of them were workers in the adjacent stone-quarries. All were dwellers in the neighbourhood, and the Superintendent began to make enquiries amongst them as to any news of Levigne and Janet Clagne.
None of these men had seen either on the night in question, though both were well-known to all. One man spoke to seeing Levigne earlier in the day; he had passed him, riding in a cab, he said, on the road going towards Mortover Grange. But as to the evening and the night that followed it nobody could say anything: the storm had kept folk indoors.
"Is there any idea as to where they might have gone when they set out from the Grange, mister?" a man asked of Wedgwood, who had explained what he knew of the missing persons' movements. "If us fellows had a notion of that, now———"
"They might have gone to Mr. Malcolmson's," replied Wedgwood. "Where does he live?"
"If you'll come outside, on the road, I'll show you," answered the man. He led Wedgwood and the Superintendent to the front of the inn and pointed across the valley to a low ridge of hillside that rose beyond the works of the colliery. "Do you see a house up yonder, edge of a wood?" he asked. "That's Malcolmson's! A roughish way it 'ud be, too, that night—either going there or coming back—worse, of course, coming back, if they bided there any length of time. It started to be real bad that night between six and seven."
"How do you get up there?" asked the Superintendent.
"Well, from Mortover Grange you'd go up a lane that cuts across where they're making the new coal-pit," replied the man. "Malcolmson's house lies right behind the new works—overlooks 'em. Of course that lane's choked with snow—still, you could make your way there, with a bit o' discomfort."
The Superintendent turned back into the inn, and getting the men together, invited them to form search parties amongst themselves and to scour the districts in which Levigne and Janet Clagne in one direction and Philip Mortover in another had last been heard of. He had no difficulty in getting a ready response; in a few moments various parties were off, and he and Wedgwood essayed the climb up the hillside to the manager's house. They reached it with difficulty—and heard news. Levigne and Janet Clagne had visited Malcolmson about six o'clock on the night before last; they wanted him to witness their signatures to what Levigne said were some legal documents; that done, they had stayed awhile, talking about the colliery; they had gone away together about seven, Levigne remarking that he had a cab coming to the Grange at eight as he wanted to catch the night train to London. The storm was getting bad, said Malcolmson, about the time they left, but he had lent them lanterns, and he could see no reason why they shouldn't have reached Mortover Grange in safety. Of course, if they'd got lost and gone wandering about that was a different matter—he'd heard nothing of them. Yesterday, and that morning, however, he had never been out—the storm had stopped all work, and he had kept to his fireside. But there were cottages near the new colliery, and there were huts, where the navvies lived who were engaged in sinking the shafts, and he turned out now with Wedgwood and the Superintendent and went with them to these places to make enquiries.
It was the middle of the afternoon when Wedgwood got back, still in company of the Superintendent, to Mortover Grange. They had heard nothing. But when they came in sight of the old house, they knew that something had been heard there. There were men at the door, and men in the courtyard—the men whom they had sent off, searching, from the roadside inn. And as they drew near one man detached himself from his fellows and came to meet them. He shook his head.
"We've found him!" he announced in a hushed voice. "Young Mr. Mortover, I mean. It's a bad job-he'd been dead a good while when we came across him! Fallen over the edge o' one of them old quarries—broken his neck, I should say."
"Where have you taken him?" asked the Superintendent.
The man nodded at the house.
"We carried him straight down here," he answered. "The women's busy with him—laying him out."
Wedgwood went straight into the Grange and upstairs. Through an open door he saw two countrywomen busied about a bed. Before he could enter, Mrs. Patello, her eyes wide with amazement, came from the room and beckoned him along the corridor. She seized him by the arm.
"Mr. Wedgwood!" she whispered. "You've heard? They carried him home, dead! Philip Mortover! But—that's not Philip Mortover that's lying dead there! It's Walter Clagne—Janet's boy! He's the Clagne birthmark on his left arm. I saw it on his father, and I saw it on him when he was a baby! Not Philip Mortover at all—Walter Clagne, Janet's boy!"