Country homes -- Fiction; Middle-aged women -- Fiction; Murder -- Investigation -- Fiction; Mystery fiction
His inherited cupidity was aroused. Eager to get Halsey and Jack Bailey
out of the house, he went up to the east entry, and in the
billiard-room gave the cashier what he had refused earlier in the
evening—the address of Paul Armstrong in California and a telegram
which had been forwarded to the club for Bailey, from Doctor Walker. It
was in response to one Bailey had sent, and it said that Paul Armstrong
was very ill.
Bailey was almost desperate. He decided to go west and find Paul
Armstrong, and to force him to disgorge. But the catastrophe at the
bank occurred sooner than he had expected. On the moment of starting
west, at Andrews Station, where Mr. Jamieson had located the car, he
read that the bank had closed, and, going back, surrendered himself.
John Bailey had known Paul Armstrong intimately. He did not believe
that the money was gone; in fact, it was hardly possible in the
interval since the securities had been taken. Where was it? And from
some chance remark let fall some months earlier by Arnold Armstrong at
a dinner, Bailey felt sure there was a hidden room at Sunnyside. He
tried to see the architect of the building, but, like the contractor,
if he knew of the room, he refused any information. It was Halsey’s
idea that John Bailey come to the house as a gardener, and pursue his
investigations as he could. His smooth upper lip had been sufficient
disguise, with his change of clothes, and a hair-cut by a country
barber.
So it was Alex, Jack Bailey, who had been our ghost. Not only had he
alarmed Louise—and himself, he admitted—on the circular staircase, but
he had dug the hole in the trunk-room wall, and later sent Eliza into
hysteria. The note Liddy had found in Gertrude’s scrap-basket was from
him, and it was he who had startled me into unconsciousness by the
clothes chute, and, with Gertrude’s help, had carried me to Louise’s
room. Gertrude, I learned, had watched all night beside me, in an
extremity of anxiety about me.
That old Thomas had seen his master, and thought he had seen the
Sunnyside ghost, there could be no doubt. Of that story of Thomas’,
about seeing Jack Bailey in the footpath between the club and
Sunnyside, the night Liddy and I heard the noise on the circular
staircase—that, too, was right. On the night before Arnold Armstrong
was murdered, Jack Bailey had made his first attempt to search for the
secret room. He secured Arnold’s keys from his room at the club and got
into the house, armed with a golf-stick for sounding the walls. He ran
against the hamper at the head of the stairs, caught his cuff-link in
it, and dropped the golf-stick with a crash. He was glad enough to get
away without an alarm being raised, and he took the “owl” train to
town.
The oddest thing to me was that Mr. Jamieson had known for some time
that Alex was Jack Bailey. But the face of the pseudo-gardener was very
queer indeed, when that night, in the card-room, the detective turned
to him and said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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