Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 74

“I told you he was in the swim with a lot of queer fish,” Northfleet reminded him. “And he was a clever devil, or else the police would have got on his trail earlier.”

“He was one of the smartest,” Wenlock agreed. “He never made a false move, so far as I know.”

“What brought him to Ruffa, if he was doing so well in London?” Colin inquired.

“That’s what I asked myself,” Northfleet returned. “Put yourself in his place, and see what you make of it.”

“Oh, yes,” said Colin, enlightened by a recollection of the yacht’s visit. “In London he’d be tied down to the proceeds of English burglaries. Up here, away from the Customs, he could get stuff from the Continent as well.”

“That was what I inferred myself,” Northfleet confirmed. “If you think of the life he was leading in London, it implied that he must have an extremely strong inducement to bury himself up here. I expect that one motive was a desire to launch out as an international fence: buy the stuff abroad, where there was less chance of it being traced to him and where he had the whole of the Continent to draw on after a time. Of course the expenses were pretty big. He had to share with those fellows on the yacht, who brought him stuff; and he had to pay those other men who ran his motor-boat. But with his wider range he could probably drive a bigger trade, and he must have made it pay. Besides, it was a far safer game, run from up here in the wilds, compared with working in London with a policeman at every street corner ready to note anything queer going on.”

“I see now,” Colin broke in. “They must have brought the stuff across, hidden in the yacht’s sand-ballast bags. Puzzled me, that night, when I saw a beggar pitching handfuls of some powder over the yacht’s side. Emptying out the sand, evidently, to get at the gold down below in the bag. And that explains Leven’s short-wave advice to keep clear of the Fisheries gunboat. Afraid of them reporting the yacht to the Customs, probably.”

“Obviously,” Northfleet agreed. “And on the same basis you can account for that muffle furnace in Leven’s lab. here and for his installing a benzene-gas plant in the house. He melted down the gold and cast it into ingots; and then the motor-boat called for these and transported them to the buyers.”

He paused for a moment or two before recommencing.

“We’ve got a bit ahead of the course of events,” he pointed out. “I had my suspicions, but I hadn’t anything in the way of real proof. I dare say we could have employed a private inquiry agent to come up here and watch Leven’s doings; but quite likely nothing would have come of it. A non-technical watcher might have overlooked something that would be plain enough to a chemist. And there was another possibility, though it wasn’t probable: Leven might have discovered gold on Ruffa. The impurities in his gold were, after all, natural impurities. Even platinum occurs in some samples of natural gold.

“I decided to come up here myself and have a look round. As I meant to hunt for the hypothetical alluvial deposit, just to make sure, it would hardly be sound policy to come as a geologist. That would have put Leven on the scent. So I chose to call myself a bird-watcher; and if people laughed at me, so much the better.” He gave Colin a bland smile as he explained this. “Well, I arrived. I saw the yacht and the motor-boat. I found there was no gold. The thing was as plain as print. And yet I was no nearer proof than before. And there were unexpected complications, too.”

Colin guessed that Hazel had furnished these; but the subject was one which it was needless to discuss before Wenlock. He contented himself with an understanding gesture.

“The presence of these two armed scoundrels on the premises was a puzzle to me for a time. Ruffa wasn’t the place where the burglary risk is high. Then I had a glimmering of an idea. Somebody might have got wind of Leven’s private affairs—somebody dangerous. He might have given himself away to a woman, as the cleverest men do at times, and covered up his real doings by this bluff of gold-making. And she might have let that slip to someone else who could take a hint. There are very rum ramifications in that underworld. It’s all pure guesswork, this.

“Then came your revelations, Trent, and my ideas grew much clearer. That reference to Nipasgal in the code message was pretty sound proof that someone was on Leven’s track, although he’d done his best to cover that when he came to Ruffa—changed his name and so forth. And the fact that he was being forced to land his gold consignments at unexpected ports was a plain hint that the people he was up against wouldn’t scruple to try a hold-up game if they could get their hands on the gold. Still, I must admit I didn’t take the business quite seriously at that stage.

“So far as my own investigations were concerned I was no nearer proof than when I came up here. Everything pointed to Leven being a fence; but if I’d been asked for clear evidence I couldn’t have produced it. I’m fairly honest, so I sat down and wrote to my employers saying that I thought I was wasting my time.”

“Oh, that was it?” Wenlock interjected unexpectedly.

Northfleet laughed unaffectedly.

“I suppose you charitably assumed, when you saw that letter, that I’d decided to rat to Leven’s side, where money was obviously to be had? Well, well. No. I wanted to resign for quite other reasons. My position between Leven and Miss Arrow was hardly to my taste.”

“You puzzled Jean and me for a while with your methods,” Colin confessed. “We couldn’t understand what you were playing at.”

Northfleet evidently