Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 75

“You can’t spy on a man and make love to his niece at the same time,” he said curtly. “But that’s a mere side-issue. The point is that somebody had swallowed Leven’s lies about gold-making completely, however they got hold of the yam. It wasn’t from the newspaper stunt—that was dead and forgotten long ago. It must have been something on the lines I sketched a minute or two back. Perhaps you know who they were, Wenlock?”

“Leo and his gang?” the detective answered. “We suspected them of several bank hold-ups, but we couldn’t prove it up to the hilt. They weren’t the harmless brand of criminal. Regular bad hats, all of them; and most of them had done time.”

“And what brought you yourself up here so opportunely?”

“Suspicion, merely. I’ve no official status up here. We’ve had our eye on Leven for a long while, but we could prove nothing against him. Take this international dealing that he’d been doing. Suppose the proceeds of a French robbery came to his hands. If the French wanted to extradite him, there was nothing doing. We don’t surrender our nationals to be tried in French courts, especially for a crime committed outside French jurisdiction. What we could have done was to put him on trial for receiving—under the Larceny Act 1916. But you’ve got to prove! that the receiver knows that the goods were stolen property; and he’d beaten us there. Besides, that charge would involve getting a lot of evidence from the French side; it would have been expensive; and it couldn’t be risked unless there was a clear case. We had to prove that he knew what he was doing.”

“I see,” said Colin, rather dazed by the vistas of legal procedure which opened up in his imagination. “Difficult job, no doubt. So you came up here hoping to try some psychoanalysis on him and lay bare his soul—or words to that effect?”

“Or words to that effect,” Wenlock retorted gravely. “As it chanced, I got what I wanted.”

“You did? How?”

“Well,” Wenlock admitted, “since there’ll be no case now, I don’t mind confessing that I went a shade over the score. One has to, from time to time. I had no search-warrant, of course; but that night the gunmen shot me I was left in charge here, you remember, while Leven was snoring upstairs. I went through his papers. He hadn’t bothered to keep them in a safe or anything like that. I read his correspondence with his friends abroad. Some of the letters established guilty knowledge beyond any possible denial.”

“By Jove!” Colin’s admiration was unstinted. “And you did that when you’d just been shot and were expecting to have your throat cut any minute.”

“That was the business I came here for,” said Wenlock stolidly. “Of course I did it. I might never have had another chance.”

“And you talked to him about it the next afternoon, didn’t you?” Colin demanded. “I overheard something about ‘letters’ and ‘extradition.’ ”

“I explained the state of affairs to him,” Wenlock admitted candidly. “Of course I had no warrant to arrest him. I’m off my own ground. But that didn’t amount to a row of pins, once we got out of here. I could easily have got the necessary authority to work. It seemed only fair to warn him. It crumpled him up,” the detective added thoughtfully. “Seven years is the maximum, and his was a bad case. Seven years—at his age——”

An expressive gesture filled in the sense.

“Not so young as he was, and not much chance of making a living when he got out again,” Northfleet interpreted. “He looked a bit dazed, I remember. Now I begin to understand why he chose the risky job at Wester Voe. H’m! That explains why he began to taunt Zelensky at the last. Hadn’t the pluck to suicide, bit let the gunman do the job for him instead. There’s going to be a lot to explain about when we’ve got to tell our tale to the police.”

“Luckily there’s no coroner in Scotland,” said Wenlock in a tone which suggested that he did not approve of coroners. “The procurator-fiscal deals with the case of deaths where there’s any hanky-panky suspected. If he’s satisfied that’s the end of the matter.”

“Leven’s dead, so the case is closed,” Northfleet pointed out. “No point in digging up Leven’s career, is there? I don’t want a scandal for Miss Arrow’s sake.”

“I think it might be got round,” Wenlock hazarded in a tone which went far to reassure Northfleet.

“Thanks,” said Northfleet, answering the spirit rather than the words. Then, leaving a painful subject, he turned to Colin.

“Graigmore will be a bit disgusted when he sees what’s happened to his house. I don’t mind paying—cheap at the price, I think.”

“Halves,” Colin amended. “And that reminds me. What was that patent thunderbolt of yours?”

“Fulminating gold.”

“Gold fulminate, you mean?”

“No, I don’t. I hadn’t the stuffs for making that. I dare say we could have turned out some gun-cotton if we’d tried; but there was the bother of a detonator for that. So fulminating gold was the only thing we could make. It’s easy to prepare. Dissolve gold in aqua regia and then treat the gold chloride with ammonia, and there you are. What scared me stiff was the chance of it going off prematurely. I dare say I was a bit snappy with you when you came bustling into the lab., Trent, but I was afraid of even a slight shock sending it off. It’s not been worked on much, and my recollections of its properties, beyond its explosiveness on shock, are very vague. So I was a bit on edge while I was working with it.”

“You were a bit crusty, but that’s all right.”

Northfleet nodded absently in acknowledgment.

“You’re a mine of miscellaneous information, Trent,” he said at last. “Know anything about the marriage laws in Scotland?”

“No,” Colin admitted. “But there’s a Whitaker’s Almanach over at Wester Voe. You’ll get all the