‘I am,’ she replied.
‘The gold is not here, miss.’
‘We will see,’ she said. As she spoke she turned once more and bent slightly out, as if to look down through the murky air at the street below.
The inspector gave an impatient exclamation.
‘If you have quite finished, miss, we must return to the station,’ he said. ‘I am expecting some men from Scotland Yard to go into this affair.’
‘I do not think they will have much to do,’ she answered, ‘except, indeed, to arrest the criminal.’ As she spoke she leant a little further out of the window, and then withdrawing her head said quietly, ‘Yes, we may as well go back now; I have quite finished. Things are exactly as I expected to find them; we can take the gold away with us.’
Both the inspector and I stared at her in utter amazement.
‘What do you mean, Miss Cusack?’ I cried.
‘What I say,’ she answered, and now she gave a light laugh; ‘the gold is here, close to us; we have only to take it away. Come,’ she added, ‘look out, both of you. Why, you are both gazing at it.’
I glanced round in utter astonishment. My expression of face was reproduced in that of the inspector’s.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘what do you call that?’ As she spoke she pointed to the sign that hung outside – the sign of the three balls.
‘Lean out and feel that lower ball,’ she said to the inspector.
He stretched out his arm, and as his fingers touched it he started back.
‘Why, it is hot,’ he said; ‘what in the world does it mean?’
‘It means the lost gold,’ replied Miss Cusack; ‘it has been cast as that ball. I said that the advertisement would give me the necessary clue, and it has done so. Yes, the lost fortune is hanging outside the house. The gold was melted in the crucible downstairs, and cast as this ball between twelve o’clock and four-thirty today. Remember it was after four-thirty that you arrested the pawnbroker and his assistant.’
To verify her extraordinary words was the work of a few moments. Owing to its great weight, the inspector and I had some difficulty in detaching the ball from its hook. At the same time we noticed that a very strong stay, in the shape of an iron-wire rope, had been attached to the iron frame from which the three balls hung.
‘You will find, I am sure,’ said Miss Cusack, ‘that this ball is not of solid gold; if it were, it would not be the size of the other two balls. It has probably been cast round a centre of plaster of Paris to give it the same size as the others. This explains the advertisement with regard to the charcoal and sand. A ball of that size in pure gold would weigh nearly three hundred pounds, or twenty stone.’
‘Well,’ said the inspector, ‘of all the curious devices that I have ever seen or heard of, this beats the lot. But what did they do with the real ball? They must have put it somewhere.’
‘They burnt it in the furnace, of course,’ she answered; ‘these balls, as you know, are only wood covered with gold paint. Yes, it was a clever idea, worthy of the brain of Mr Graham; and it might have hung there for weeks and been seen by thousands passing daily, till Mr Higgins was released from imprisonment, as nothing whatever could be proved against him.’
Owing to Miss Cusack’s testimony, Graham was arrested that night, and, finding that circumstances were dead against him, he confessed the whole. For long years he was one of a gang of coiners, but managed to pass as a gentleman of position. He knew old Bovey well, and had heard him speak of the curious will he had made. Knowing of this, he determined, at any risk to secure the fortune, intending when he had obtained it, to immediately leave the country. He had discovered the exact amount of the money which he would leave behind him, and had gone carefully into the weight which such a number of sovereigns would make. He knew at once that Tyndall would be out of the reckoning, and that the competition would really be between himself and Wimburne. To provide against the contingency of Wimburne’s being the lucky man, he had planned the robbery; the gold was to be melted, and made into a real golden ball, which was to hang over the pawnshop until suspicion had died away.
MOLLIE DELAMERE
Created by Beatrice Heron-Maxwell (1859-1927)
The daughter of Edward Eastwick, a diplomat and scholar of Oriental languages who was later a Cornish MP, Beatrice Heron-Maxwell (as she became after her second marriage) took up writing after the death of her first husband left her a widow with two young children. Over a thirty-year period she produced a wide range of fiction. She was a regular contributor to the leading magazines of the day, including The Strand (home of Sherlock Holmes), The Idler and The Pall Mall Magazine. What May Happen, published in 1901, was a collection of what were described as ‘stories natural and supernatural’. One of Heron-Maxwell’s uncanny stories, ‘The Devil’s Stone’, still appears from time to time in anthologies of tales of witchcraft. She was also the author of romances, including The Queen Regent (1902), an addition to the sub-genre of Ruritanian adventure which had been inspired by the enormous success of Anthony Hope’s 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda. The Adventures of a Lady Pearl-Broker, a collection of linked short stories, was first published in 1899. Its heroine and narrator, Mollie Delamere, is a widow in need of an income, just as her creator had once been. She meets with Mr Leighton, ‘the prince of pearl merchants’, a man in search of a female agent who is good-looking, intelligent, courageous and comfortable in high society. Meeting these requirements, Mollie takes the job and is soon launched on a variety of adventures including one
