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Polke, you should examine the house and especially that room, for Horbury may have hidden Lord Ellersdeane's property there. A deeply interesting room that!" added the old man musingly. "I haven't been in it for some sixty years or so, but I remember it quite well. It was in that room that Jasper Chestermarke murdered Sir Gervase Rudd."
Betty Fosdyke unconsciously clutched at Lord Ellersdeane's arm: Lord Ellersdeane spoke, wonderingly. "Thunder?" he exclaimed. "Strange!" Easleby turned sharply from Starmidge, who, holding by one of the pillars, was staring towards the quarter of the Market-Place, from whence the scream of dire fear had come. "That's no thunder, my lord!" he said. "That's an explosion! and a terrible one, too!
That old ruin, up on the crag there, is called Ellersdeane Tower one of Lord Ellersdeane's ancestors built it for an observatory this path'll lead us right beneath it." "Is this the path he would have taken if he'd gone to Ellersdeane on Saturday night?" asked Betty. "Precisely straight ahead, past the Tower," answered Neale.
Horbury had been in a hurry to deliver up these jewels, he'd have driven out to Lord Ellersdeane's place." "Good!" muttered Polke. "That's the more probable thing." "Where are the jewels, then?" asked Neale. Starmidge glanced at Polke with one expression, at Betty and Neale with another. "They haven't been searched for yet, have they?" he asked quietly. "They may be somewhere about, you know."
Horbury's pipe, and as this gentleman saw him smoking it at two o'clock on Saturday, and as Creasy picked it up underneath Ellersdeane Tower on Sunday evening," said Starmidge, "there seems no doubt that Mr. Horbury went that way, and dropped it where it was found. But I can't think he was carrying Lord Ellersdeane's jewels home!" "Why?" asked Neale. "Is it likely?" suggested Starmidge.
And he was surprised to find that the detective's presentation of the case was not that which he himself would have made. Starmidge did no more than refer to the fact that Lady Ellersdeane's jewels were missing: he said nothing whatever about the rumours that some of Chestermarke's securities were said to have disappeared.
According to Starmidge's ideas, the bankers, if they really believed Horbury to have absconded, if certain securities of theirs really were missing, if they really thought that Horbury had carried them off, and the Countess of Ellersdeane's jewels with him, ought to have placed every information in their power at the disposal of the police: it was suspicious, and strange, and not at all proper, that they didn't.
John Horbury, and the presumed theft of the Countess of Ellersdeane's jewels, seem to indicate an extraordinary crime, and opinion varies considerably in the Scarnham district as to whether Mr. Hollis the reason of whose visit to Scarnham is still unexplained fell into the old mine by accident, or whether he was thrown in.
And he may have wanted new funds for it, and he may have collared those securities which the Chestermarkes say are missing, and he may have appropriated Lord Ellersdeane's jewels d'ye see? You never can tell in any of these cases. You see, my lad, you've been going, all along, on the basis, the supposition, that Horbury's an innocent man, and the victim of foul play. But he may be a guilty man!
Nobody knew where I was nobody could get to know. His uncle knew nothing of the Hollis affair no one knew. No one would be told. His uncle, moreover, believed I had run away with convertible securities and Lady Ellersdeane's jewels he, Joseph, would take care that he and everybody should continue to think so.
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