Cleek: the Man of the Forty FacesHanshew, Thomas W.
General
Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces
Hanshew, Thomas W.
Cleek, Hamilton (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories; Police -- Great Britain -- Fiction
And here the poor, dumfounded, utterly bewildered Major found voice to
speak at last.
"Mummy-case! Body! Dear God in heaven, Mr. Cleek, what are you hinting
at?" he gasped. "You--you don't mean that she--that Zuilika--killed
him?"
"No, Major, I don't," he made reply. "I simply mean that he killed her!
The body in the mummy-case is the body of Zuilika, the caliph's
daughter! This is the creature you have been wasting your pity on--see!"
With that he laid an intense grip on the concealing yashmak, tore it
away, and so revealed the close-shaven, ghastly-hued countenance of the
cornered criminal.
"My God!--Ulchester--Ulchester himself!" said the Major in a voice of
fright and surprise.
"Yes, Ulchester himself, Major. In a few more days he'd have withdrawn
the money, and got out of the country, body and all, if he hadn't been
nabbed, the rascal. There'd have been no tracing the crime then; and he
and the Señorita here would have been in clover for the rest of their
natural lives. But there's always that bright little bit of Bobby Burns
to be reckoned with. You know: 'The best laid schemes of mice and men,'
_et cetera_--that bit. But the Yard's got them, and--they'll never leave
the country now. Take them, Mr. Narkom, they're yours!"
* * * * *
"How did I guess it?" said Cleek, replying to the Major's query, as they
sat late that night discussing the affair. "Well, I think the first
faint inkling of it came when I arrived here yesterday, and smelt the
overpowering odour of the incenses. There was so much of it, and it was
used so frequently--twice a day--that it seemed to suggest an attempt to
hide other odours of a less pleasant kind. When I left you last night,
Dollops and I went down to the mummy-chamber, and a skeleton key soon
let us in. The unpleasant odour was rather pronounced in there. But even
that didn't give me the cue, until I happened to find in the fireplace a
considerable heap of fine ashes, and in the midst of them small lumps of
gummy substance, which I knew to result from the burning of myrrh. I
suspected from that and from the nature of the ashes that a mummy had
been burnt, and as there was only one mummy in the affair, the inference
was obvious. I laid hands on the two cases and tilted them. One was
quite empty. The weight of the other told me that it contained something
a little heavier than any mummy ought to be. I came to the conclusion
that there was a body in it, injected full of arsenic, no doubt, to
prevent as much as possible the processes of decay, the odour of which
the incense was concealing. I didn't attempt to open the thing; I left
that until the arrival of the men from The Yard, for whom I sent Dollops
this afternoon. I had a vague notion that it would not turn out to be
Ulchester's, and I had also a distinct recollection of what you said
about his being able to mimic a Gaiety chorus-girl and all that sort of
thing, and the more I thought over it, the more I realized what an
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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