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Updated: June 2, 2025
My ruse would have proved truly futile had Gastrell's body been discovered, shot through the head, a letter in his pocket pointing directly to suicide, and a revolver on the ground still loaded in every chamber! A minute later I was hustled into the car, squeezed tightly between several men. On the floor of the car were a number of large sacks, exhaling an odour none too savoury.
Dulcie, who was standing by quite unconcernedly, turned at once to me without answering Mrs. Gastrell's question. "Dear old Mike," she said, "how delightful of you to have come. I do hope you have entirely recovered. You looked so ill when you saw me off at Paddington this morning that I felt anxious about you all the way home. What was the matter with you? Have you any idea?"
Stapleton had left the neighbourhood on the day after the robbery, had been absent ever since that of course might be, and probably was, merely a coincidence. At supper at Gastrell's reception in Cumberland Place Mrs. Stapleton had acknowledged "Mrs. Gastrell's" smile of recognition, and an instant later the two women had stared at each other stonily, and Mrs.
But perhaps the strangest, most arresting thing about Gastrell's face was his eyes daring eyes of a bright, light blue, such as one sees in some Canadians, the bold, almost hard eyes of a man who is accustomed to gazing across far distances of sunlit snow, who habitually looks up into vast, pale blue skies one might have imagined that his eyes had caught their shade.
And turning to Preston he added, "Were you right? Did he follow the widow and Miss Challoner home last night?" "Yes," I answered for him, "I did. Did you see Dulcie at Gastrell's last night?" "I should say so and we saw you gazing at her. You nearly gave yourself away, Mike; you did, indeed. You ought to be more careful.
Among other agreeable circumstances, it was not the least, to find here a parcel of the Caledonian Mercury, published since we left Edinburgh; which I read with that pleasure which every man feels who has been for some time secluded from the animated scenes of the busy world. Dr. Johnson found books here. He bade me buy Bishop Gastrell's Christian Institutes , which was lying in the room.
At that instant I remembered that the woman I had in my mind was the woman who on board the Masonic had, so Jack had told me, called herself Hugesson Gastrell's wife, and called herself his wife again at the house in Maresfield Gardens. But Gastrell had told Easterton, or at any rate led him to suppose, he was unmarried.
Then there was something not quite normal in Gastrell's posing one day as a married man, the next as a bachelor; also in his pretending at one moment that he had never seen Osborne and myself before, yet admitting at the next that he had met us. True, he had advanced an apparently sound reason for this volte-face of his, but still The affair, too, in Maresfield Gardens.
That a human life should have been sacrificed was terrible to think of, and yet The reflection that, but for the sacrifice of Gastrell's life, I should myself have been lying dead, set my mind at ease; and after all, I said mentally, the death of a man like Gastrell must do more good than harm.
Preston exclaimed, his small, intelligent eyes twinkling oddly. "That is as I thought. One of Gastrell's accomplices set the line out of order between three and five this afternoon.
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