Great Porter Square: A Mystery. Volume 3. Farjeon Benjamin Leopold

and there I was walking behind him on the other side of the way, with my eyes glued to him. Well, as good as glued. I can walk a long way behind a person, and never lose sight of him, my eyes are so sharp, and I didn’t lose sight of Mr. Richard Manx, as he calls himself. He walked Lambeth way, and I noticed that he was looking about in the funniest manner, as though he was afraid he was being watched. The farther he got from Great Porter Square the more he looked about him; but no one took any notice of him – only me. Well, he went down a street where half the houses were shops and half not, and at the corner of the street was a coffee-shop. There were two doors facing him, one going into the shop where people are served, and the other going into a passage, very narrow and very dark. A little way up this passage was a door, which pushed open. Mr. Manx, after looking about him more than ever, went into the narrow dark passage, and pushed open the door.

      “What I had to do now was to wait until he came out, and to dodge about so that I shouldn’t be seen or caught watching for something I didn’t know what. It was a hard job, as hard a job as ever I was at, and it was all that I could do to keep people from watching me. I waited an hour, and another hour, and another hour, and Mr. Manx never came out of the coffee shop. I was regularly puzzled, and tired, and bothered. But I didn’t know what a little fool I was till after waiting for at least four hours I found out that the coffee shop had two more doors on the side facing the other street; doors just like the others, one going into the shop, and the other into a narrow dark passage. When I found that out I thought that Mr. Manx must have gone in at one door in one street and come out at the other door in the other street, and I was regularly vexed with myself. But that didn’t help me, and I walked away from Lambeth towards Buckingham Palace Road. I wanted to see with my own eyes if Mr. Pelham was at home. He was; I saw him stand for a minute at the window of his room on the front floor. Then I set to watching him. I wanted to find out where he was going to, and what he was up to. I suppose it was seven o’clock, and dark, before he came out. He walked till he met a cab, and as he got in I heard him give the direction of Mrs. Holdfast’s house. That was enough for me; I followed him there, my feet ready to drop off, I was that tired. But I wasn’t going to give up the job. No one came out of Mrs. Holdfast’s house till nine o’clock struck; then the street door was opened, and Mr. Pelham walked into the street. He stood still a little, and I thought to myself he is thinking whether he shall take a cab. He didn’t take one till he was half-a-mile from Mrs. Holdfast’s house. I ran all the way after it. It was a good job for me that the cab was a four-wheeler, and that it went along slow, for running so hard set my heart beating to that extent that I thought it would jump out of my body. I scarcely knew where we were going, the night was that dark, but I knew it was not in the direction of Buckingham Palace Road. Mr. Pelham rode about a mile, then called out to the cabby, and jumped on to the pavement. He paid the man, and the cab drove away, and then Mr. Pelham walked slowly towards Lambeth, looking about him, although the night was so dark, in exactly the same way as Mr. Manx had done when I followed him from Great Porter Square. I had been on my feet all the day, and had walked miles and miles, and I hadn’t had a bit of bread in my mouth since breakfast – but when I was certain that Mr. Pelham was walking to Lambeth I didn’t feel hungry or tired. I said to myself, ‘Fanny, your idea was right; but what does it all mean?’ Well, I couldn’t settle that; all I had to settle was that the two men who shrugged their left shoulders, and who rolled their cigarettes in their mouths in the way I had noticed, were not two men at all, but the same man, living in one place as a gentleman and an Englishman, and in another as a poor foreigner without a shilling. So I was not at all surprised to see Mr. Pelham, dressed like a swell, stop at the coffee shop at which Mr. Manx had stopped, and push through the dark passage by the door I had not noticed when I was waiting in the street this morning for Mr. Manx, and I wasn’t at all surprised that Mr. Pelham didn’t come out again. The man who came was the man I wanted, and I followed him home here to Great Porter Square, and he is in the house now.” And here Fanny concluded the account of her day’s adventures by asking, “Who came in five minutes before I did?”

      “Richard Manx,” I replied.

      “It’s all one,” said Fanny, triumphantly; “Richard Manx is Mr. Pelham. There’s no difference between them, except that one wears a wig, and paints his face, and talks like a foreigner, and that the other lives in a fine house, and drinks wine, and dresses like a gentleman. That was my idea last night. That was what I had to do when I asked you this morning to let me go for the day. There’s something in it; I don’t know what – that’s for you to find out. Are you pleased with me?”

      I pressed the faithful child in my arms, and she gave a sigh and fainted. She was so eager to tell me of her discovery, and I was so anxious to hear it, that we both forgot that for fifteen hours not a morsel of food had passed her lips.

      CHAPTER XXXVI

      BECKY AND FANNY ON THE WATCH

      A CUP of hot tea and some bread and butter soon made little Fanny lively again, and when she was quite recovered I questioned her upon many little points, so as to make sure that she was not mistaken. She convinced me. Richard Manx and Mr. Pelham are one and the same man, and Richard Manx’s motive for taking lodgings in this house was that he might obtain, in a secret and unsuspected manner, access to the room in which your father was murdered. For what purpose? To destroy every evidence of the crime before the house comes into the possession of a new tenant, who might by chance discover what, up to the present moment, has escaped the eyes of the police? No – scarcely that, in a direct way. He is not seeking to destroy or discover anything which he knows to be in existence; he is searching for a document which he suspects your father concealed before he met his death. This is but a reasonable explanation of Richard Manx’s presence here. Arguing in the dark, as we are, and without positive knowledge, we must have a tangible foundation on which to build our theories. I am speaking and arguing like a man, am I not, my dear? I wonder at myself as I read over some of the things I have written; but they are a proof that I have thrown aside all that is weak in my nature, and that I have courage and decision to meet any emergency.

      The document which Richard Manx suspects your father to have hidden, and for which he is searching, must, if it really exist, be of the utmost importance. Shall I tell you what Richard Manx believes this document to be? A second Will, which would make a beggar of the woman who betrayed him, and consequently of Mr. Pelham, who, with your father’s widow, is enjoying your father’s money —your money, my dear! I am not mercenary, but next to the clearing of your name and the punishment of your father’s murderer, I want you to enjoy what is your own. Selfish mortal that I am, I want you to be happy and rich, and I want to share your happiness and riches.

      If Richard Manx obtains possession of this document, it will be a serious blow to us. Something must be done, and done promptly – and at the same time we must not put Richard Manx on his guard.

      Now, pay particular attention to the following little piece of reasoning. Look at the date of the Evening Moon in which the public were first made acquainted with the name of the murdered man. And by the side of that date place the significant fact that Mr. Pelham, disguised as Richard Manx, took lodgings here three weeks before that discovery was made. What follows? That Mr. Pelham knew, three weeks before the police became acquainted with the fact, that it was your father who had been murdered. Why, then, should he not have known it on the very night of the murder itself, and why did he keep the knowledge to himself? What was his reason for concealment? A world of dreadful conjecture opens itself to me, and I am almost afraid to put my thoughts on paper. They are not centred alone on Mr. Pelham; Mrs. Holdfast intrudes herself in a way that makes me shudder. My God! Is it possible that there can be such wickedness in the world?

      In the account Mrs. Holdfast gave the Reporter of the Evening Moon (I have the paper now before me) from which he wrote his “Romance in Real Life,” she says that in her distress at the mysterious absence of her husband, she went to a friend for advice. This friend had interested himself in her case, and had written to America in her behalf, to ascertain particulars of her husband’s movements. Her friend it was who, according to her statement, first suggested that her husband might have been robbed and murdered. He sent her to a lawyer, who, during the interview, made a private memorandum which she read. The lawyer said, “We will find your husband for you, dead or alive;” and then he made the memorandum, as a guide