Part 19

I went straight to the shipping office and, looking over the list of overdue ships, I found a notice that the steamship _Shanghai_, bound from London to Canton was eight weeks overdue. You can imagine how the hound in me woke to life and wagged its tail at that discovery. I sat down and wrote out on a sheet of paper the message, amended into this: “The heir of William Abbott lives at 11 Churles Street. Shanghai lost.” If the writer had possessed the time and paint and space he might have given the full strange history of the case and how the boat had been drifted off and about the seas with that message.

Maybe the chap had jumped to the sharks, driven by hunger or thirst as many a man has done, maybe he had painted his message on that bit of board before leaving some slowly sinking ship and taken it in the boat—no knowing, the fact remained, and seemed clear enough, that some desperate urgency of soul had made him, in face of death and with a steady hand, take a paint brush and write that screed on the bare chance of someone picking it up.

You know my make-up and how, having gone so far on an inquiry of this sort, I was bound to go on. It’s different now. I’ll never touch a thing like that again, but that day I stripped for action, determining to see the business through and find out every bit of meaning there was to it.

I started by sending a cable to the Board of Trade, London Docks. Next day at noon I had an answer which read: “_Shanghai_ sixteen hundred tons, Master’s name Richard Abbott.”

That name Abbott coming over the wires all the way from murky London, in answer, you might say, to the name Abbott written on that board away in the blue Pacific, gave me a thrill such as I have never felt before. I knew now the writer of the message, and at the same time I knew that it was not his own money that he was bothering about simply because he wasn’t William Abbott. I knew that it was highly probable that he was a close relation of William Abbott, brother maybe, or son; that might be placed among the high probabilities owing to the similarity of name and intimate knowledge of family affairs. Just so, and I could go a step further; it was pretty certain that Richard Abbott, the master of the _Shanghai_, was the sole possessor of the knowledge he had given to the world, and, from the urge that drove him in the face of death to tell what he knew, it was possible that the thing weighed on his mind, possible, in fact, that he had kept the thing hidden.

In other words, that he was trying to remedy an injustice committed either by himself or someone else.

I wrote all these probabilities and possibilities down on a sheet of paper, with an account of the finding of the message, sealed the lot up in an envelope and gave it in charge of the manager of the bank I dealt with in Nagasaki, so that in the case of death or accident the heir of William Abbott might have some chance of coming to his due. Then I proceeded to enjoy myself in Japan, determined to think no more of the matter till I got back to London.

I spent a month in Japan, sold the old _Itang_ for more than I had given for her and paid off captain and crew.

IV

I made up my mind that the Churles Street referred to in the message lay in London. London was the home town evidently of the master of the _Shanghai_, and he would refer to Churles Street—perhaps a well-known place in the dock quarter—just as one might speak of Cromwell Road or Regent Street.

On getting in to Southampton, the first thing I did at the hotel was to consult a Kelly’s directory, and sure enough, there was Churles Street, E.C., the only street of that name, a short street of twenty houses or so with the name J. Robertson against No. 11. The street opened off the West India Dock Road, and two days later, when I had disposed of my private business in London, I took a walk in the East End. The Dock Road is a fascinating place if you are in good health and spirits, and if the day is fine, but there is no fascination about Churles Street, a gloomy, evil looking cul-de-sac, not rowdy, but quiet with the quietude of vice reduced to misery and crouching in a corner.

It was a horrible place.

A thin woman nursing a baby was standing at the door of No. 11. I asked her was anyone of the name of Abbott living there and she glanced me up and down.

“Have you come from his brother?” asked she.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve come from Captain Richard Abbott.”

She led the way into the passage, opened a door, and showed me into a room where a man, fully dressed, was lying on a bed smoking a pipe and reading a sporting paper.

A typical lounger and ne’er-do-well, unshaved, and with his collar and tie on the chair beside him, this chap gave me pause, I can assure you.

“Well,” he said to the woman, “what’s he want?”

“You’re his brother?” I said.

“Yes,” he replied, “I’m his brother, and who might you be?”

“Met him abroad,” I replied, “and he asked me to call in and see how you were doing.” I was clean cut off from the business I had in mind, some instinct told me to halt right there and show nothing that was in my hand. The man repulsed me.

“Well, you see how I am doing,” replied he, “hasn’t he sent me anything but his kind inquiries?”

“Yes,” I said, “he asked me to give you a sovereign from him.”

I brought out the money and he took it and laid it on the chair by the collar and tie, then he filled his pipe again and we talked. I had taken a chair which the woman had dusted. I talked but I could get nothing much out of him, to ask questions I would have had to explain, and to explain might have meant bringing this unshaven waster on top of me to help him to prosecute his claims. If I did anything further in the matter, I would do it through an agent, but upon my word I felt I had paid any debt I might owe to the master of the _Shanghai_ by the trouble I had taken already and the sovereign I had handed over in his name.

As we talked a pretty little girl of ten or twelve ran into the room; she was dirty and neglected, and as she stood at the end of the bed with her great eyes fixed on me, I could have kicked the loafer lying there, his pipe in his mouth and his sporting paper by his side.

It seemed that he had four children altogether, and as I took my leave and the woman showed me out, I put another sovereign into her hand for the children.

There I was in the West India Dock Road again feeling that I could have kicked myself. It was not so much the trouble I had taken over the business that worried me as the wind up. I’d put into Shanghai, sent cables from Japan, altered my plans, spent no end of money to bring news to that rotten chap, news of a fortune that if secured would certainly be burst on racing and drink.

I said to myself that this came of mixing in other folks’ business and I took an oath never to do it again—I didn’t know I was only at the beginning of things.

Murchison was the agent I determined to employ to finish up the affair. Murchison is less a detective than an inquiry agent, his game is to find out facts relative to people, he lives in Old Serjeants’ Inn, and knowing him to be secrecy itself and not caring to employ my lawyer, I determined to go to him next day and place the matter in his hands, telling him to do what he could with the business, but to keep my name out of it. He need mention nothing about the finding of the message, but he could give it as coming from some unknown source—the message was the main thing, anyhow.

I called at his office next morning. Murchison is a thin old chap, dry as a stick. I told him the whole story and it made no more impression on him than if I’d been telling it to a pump. He made a note or two, and when I had finished, he told me in effect that he wasn’t a District Messenger, but an inquiry agent, and that I had better take the thing to my lawyer. He seemed put out; I had evidently raised his tracking instincts by my story and ended simply by asking him to take a message.

I apologised, told him the truth, that my lawyer was an old-fashioned family solicitor, gone in years, touchy as Lucifer, the last man in London to set hinting of possible fortunes to beggars in slums. “If you won’t do it yourself,” I finished, “tell me of a man who will.”

“I can tell you of plenty,” he replied, “but if you take my advice you will let me make an inquiry into the business before you move further in the matter; there’s more in it than meets the eye and you may be doing injury to other parties by stirring up the mud, for this man you tell me of seems mud.”

“A jolly good name for him,” said I. “Well, go ahead and make your inquiries; it’s only a few pounds more thrown after the rest, and it will be interesting to hear the result.” Then I left him.

A month later I got a letter asking me to call upon him, and I went.

When I took my seat he sent the clerk for the Abbott documents, and the clerk brought a sheaf of all sorts of papers, laid them on the table and went out. Murchison put on his glasses, took a glance through the papers and started his yarn.

Beautifully concise it was, and I’ll give you it almost in his own words.

V

William Abbott, of Sydney, N.S.W., was a wool broker who came to England in the year 1906 and died worth some hundred and fifty thousand pounds. He had three sons, John, Alexander and Richard.

The Will was simple and direct. Murchison laid a copy of it before me, taken by permission of Abbott’s lawyer’s, whom he had found, and it ran something like this.

“Owing to the conduct of my eldest son, John Abbott, I hereby revoke my Will of June 7th, 1902, by which I bequeathed him the whole of my property, with the exception of the sum of twenty thousand pounds to be equally divided between my sons Alexander and Richard. I hereby bequeath the whole of my property to my son Alexander Abbott. Signed: William Abbott, July 10th, 1904. Witnesses: John Brooke, Jane Summers.”

“Well,” said Murchison, as I handed the paper back, “that signature is a forgery; the body of the document is written as if by a clerk in almost print character, but though I have never seen the handwriting of William Abbott, I will bet my reputation that the signature is forged.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“Because the signatures of the witnesses are forged; they have both been written by the same hand. The signature ‘William Abbott’ has evidently been carefully copied from an original, there is a constraint about it that tells me that, but the witnesses’ signatures, where the forger had nothing to copy and had to invent imaginary names, simply shout. The fool never thought of that; leaving the point of similarity aside, the woman’s signature is as masculine as a Grenadier. The body of the document, though almost in print, is also the work of the forger.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” said he, “handwriting with me is not only a science which I have studied for fifty years; it is something that has developed in me an instinct. Now to go on. Alexander Abbott lives in a big house down in Kent. Richard, at the time of his father’s death, was a captain in the Black Bird Line, evidently working for his bread. A year after his father’s death he bought the steamer _Shanghai_, paying a large sum for it spot cash. He was an unmarried man, and when ashore occupied a flat in Bayswater. Alexander is a widower with one daughter.—That’s all. The case is complete.”

“How do you read it?” I asked. The old chap fetched a snuff box out of a drawer in the desk, took a pinch and put the box back without offering it.

“I read it,” he said, “in this way. John, the eldest son, was a bad lot; the father may have intended to disinherit him, and make a second will; anyhow, he didn’t; put it off as men do. When the father died, Alexander boldly did the trick. Richard may have been party to the business, at first—who knows? Anyhow, it seems that he was later on, since he was able to plank that big sum down for the ship, and since he was left nothing in the will, and since, as you say, he put up that notice you took off the boat and which told the truth.”

I said nothing for a while, thinking this thing over. I was sure Murchison was right.

This thing would have been weighing in the sailor’s mind for years; from what I could make out at Churles Street he had evidently been making John some sort of allowance; one could fancy the long watches of the night, the pacing of the deck under the stars, and the mind of the sailor always teased by the fact that he was party to this business, a forgery that had kept a brother, however bad, out of his inheritance. Then the last frantic attempt to put things right in the face of death, the agonised thought that to write the thing on paper was useless, paper that would be washed away by the rain or blown away by the wind.

“Well,” said I to Murchison, “it seems plain enough, and now, on the face of it, what would you advise me to do?”

“If I were in your place,” said he, “I would do nothing. You say this elder brother is a scamp; Alexander, on the other hand, is a rogue; if you mix yourself up in the business you may have trouble. Why should you worry yourself about a bad lot of strangers?—turn it down.”

That seemed sensible enough, but you see Murchison knew only the bare facts of the case; he had not seen that notice board tossing about in the desolation of the Pacific.

I left him without having made up my mind as to what I should do, half determined to do nothing.

The bother was that the facts Murchison had put before me gave a new complexion to the whole business, a new urgency to that message which I had not delivered. I felt as if the captain of the _Shanghai_ had suddenly come to my elbow, him and his uneasy conscience craving to be put at rest. Just so, but on the other hand there was John Abbott, and I can’t tell you the grue that chap had given me. It wasn’t that he was a boozer, or a waster; he was bad; bad right through and rotten. There is a sixth sense, it has to do with morals and the difference between good and evil; it told me this chap was evil, and the thought of helping to hand him a fortune made my soul revolt.

Still, there you are, I didn’t make the chap, and the fact remained that in doing nothing I was holding him out of his rights.

All that evening the thing worried me and most of that night. Next morning I couldn’t stand it any longer. I took the train for Oakslot in Kent. I had determined to go straight to Alexander Abbott, beard him, tell him of the notice I had found and see what he had to say. The idea came to me that he might make restitution in some way without handing all the fortune over to John—anyhow, it would be doing something, and I determined to use all my knowledge and power if necessary.

Ever been to Oakslot? It is the quaintest and quietest place, and it wasn’t till I got out of the train and found myself on the platform that the terrible nature of the business I was on took me by the arm.

I had no difficulty in finding Alexander Abbott’s residence; the Waterings was the name it went by, an old Georgian house set in a small park; one of those small, rook-haunted, sleepy, sunlit pleasaunces found only in England and best in Sussex or Kent.

I was shown into the drawing-room by an old manservant, who took my card, on which I had pencilled: “From Captain Richard Abbott.”

A few moments passed and the door opened and a girl came in, a girl of sixteen or so, pretty as a picture and charming as a rose; one of those sweet, whole, fresh, candid creatures, almost sexless as yet, but made to love and be loved.

I stood before her. I was Tragedy, but she only saw a man. She told me her father was unwell but would see me. Would I follow her?

She led me to a library, and there, seated by the window which gave upon the sunlit park, sat the criminal, a man of forty or so, a man with seemingly a good and kindly face, a man I would have trusted on sight. He was evidently far gone in consumption, this forger of documents, and it was pretty evident that anxiety had helped in the business; a weight on the conscience is a big handicap if one is trying to fight disease.

I sat down near him and started right in; the quicker you get a surgical operation over the better, and so he seemed to think, for when I told him of the finding of the notice and went on to say that it might be necessary to inquire into the will and that I had reason to believe there was something wrong about it, he saw I knew nearly everything and stopped me right off.

“Everything is wrong about it,” said he, “and thank God that this matter has fallen into the hands of a straight and honest man like you—you will understand. This thing has tormented me for years, but when you have heard what I have to say you will know I did wrong only to do right. There is no greater scoundrel in this world than my brother John Abbott; a terrible thing to say but the truth. My father had made a will leaving him everything. He placed that will in the hands of James Anderson of Sydney, our lawyer. Anderson knew John’s character better than my father and was averse from the business, but he could do nothing. My father was a very headstrong man and blind to John’s doings, which the scamp somehow managed to partly conceal from him. He thought John was sowing his wild oats and that he would be all the better for it. John could do no wrong in his eyes, but a few days before his death he had a terrible awakening with a forged bill of exchange—forgery seems to run in the family. It cost him five thousand pounds to stifle the matter, and the day after the business was settled my father died; slipped coming downstairs, fell, and broke his back.

“I was there and he died in my arms, and his last words were: ‘Get that will from Anderson and destroy it.’ He had no power to write a new will, no strength even to write his signature, and when he was dead there was I with those words ringing in my ears.

“I knew my father intended to revoke his first will, would have done it that day; maybe, ought to have done it days ago, but his mind was in a turmoil and he was a strong, hearty man with never a thought of death. Well, there I was, not only with that knowledge but the knowledge that if the property fell to John it would be the end of the family’s good name; that beast was only possible when he was kept short of money—then there was the lower consideration of my own position, penniless and at John’s mercy.

“I made a will and put my father’s name to it, sure that Anderson would make no trouble, sure that John would not inquire into it, for the forgery of the bill of exchange had drawn his teeth, and the fact of that forgery would account to him for the change in the disposition of the property.

“I dated the will, it is true, some years back, and in the time my father lived in Sydney. I did that because I had to forge the names of the two witnesses; had I dated it recently someone might ask who are these witnesses? As it was there was no one to put that question to, for I was not in Sydney at the time indicated in the will—they might have been hotel servants—anyone.

“I left myself the whole property, not from greed but simply because my brother Richard was at sea. I knew his temperament and character, and it was possible that, had I made him part heir, he would have revolted and disclosed all—for I had determined to tell him everything.

“I placed the forged will among my father’s papers; it was proved and there was no trouble. Anderson, whose clients are largely wool brokers and Australian merchants, has a branch office in London; they were my father’s solicitors in England as well as Australia, and the whole thing went through their hands. They had all the less reason to cast any suspicious eye on the document in as much as they had dealt with the forgery of the bill of exchange.

“Then Richard came back from sea and I told him all. He was horrified, yet he saw that what I had done had been simply to carry out my father’s wish. It was impossible to destroy the old will as he had directed, or possible only in one way—by the creation of a new will.

“After a while he cooled on the matter and even accepted a large sum for the purchase of a ship, the _Shanghai_, now lost. But the thing weighed on his mind as it has on mine, only more so. He was of a different temperament. He did not dread detection, with him it was entirely a matter of conscience: he felt he had defrauded John by being partner to the business, and accepting that sum of money. He seemed to think in his sailor way it would bring him bad luck; no doubt when the end came and he lost his ship he had that in mind, and lest the bad luck might follow him into the next world wrote that notice you found. I have only a few more months to live—now tell me, was I right or wrong in doing what I did?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I am not your judge, but all I can say is this: from what I know of the business, I will move no further in the matter, if for no other reason than that, should John Abbott get word of the business, your daughter would be rendered penniless after your death.”

“Absolutely,” said he.

I asked him was John receiving an allowance, and he said yes. He was receiving two pounds a week for life.

Then I left him and took the train for London, and from that day to this I have heard nothing of any of the lot of them. I expect he’s dead and his daughter an heiress—I don’t know, but I’ll never touch a thing like that again. Even still I’m bothered to know if I was right or wrong in holding my hand and tongue. What would you have done in similar circumstances?