A SKILLFUL DEDUCTION

With Annie's coins missing, the thief must be found

THE COACHMAN'S HOLIDAY - 15

A SKILFUL DEDUCTION

The time had come for Driver David Wasp to take charge once and for all. Next to where he sat he had a musket, primed and charged and ready for use, and he grabbed hold of it and dropped down in one hefty movement to the ground next to the passengers, who were gazing in bemused amazement at a woman who they believed to own virtually nothing and yet who had declared that she had been robbed.

“This has gone far enough,” he growled, “a woman has been robbed and in our midst we have a self-confessed thief who even as we speak is on his way to the gallows!”

“I’m not a thief. Not really! Didn’t you hear what I said?” yelped Mr Jones, “I was fitted up, that’s what I was! Fitted up by my nearest and dearest who want to see me dangling from the end of a rope before the week’s out!”

“Maybe you are what you were accused of, Mr Jones,” grated Mr Smith, carefully adjusting his protruding codpiece. “Maybe it’s you who is plotting and planning on getting away with this good lady’s bright yellow sovereigns when nobody’s looking. Maybe the excellent driver should shoot you here and now and save the country the expense of hiring a hangman!”

“Is it that what’s been stolen?” stammered Mr Jones, “Sovereigns? Gold sovereigns? Who would have thought that a daft old biddy like her would have half a sovereign let alone a plural amount!”

“Hey! That’s not on, calling my mother a daft old biddy!” exclaimed Tom.

“She’s nothing of the sort. Have you really got sovereigns, mummy? Is that what you got given when you sold us poor orphans into misery?” sniffed Dick.

“I got nothing for you!” protested Annie who had already found herself on the defence yet again, a situation she was rapidly wearying of. “All I got was a bit of time to pay my debts before they put me in debtor’s prison for the rest of me days if I didn’t!”

“So where did you get sovereigns from?” asked a doubting Tom.

“That’s besides the point!” snapped Dave. “The point is, who’s taken them? One of the group of us standing here is a thief! One of us has discovered Annie’s small hoard and taken it for himself.”

“Or herself. It could have been a herself,” suggested Mr Smith.

“The only ‘erself here, besides the old woman, is a, ‘ow you say? fourteen year old girl who is as innocent as the beautiful day is long, mon ami,” put in Pierre, “and it could never ‘ave been ‘er, not in a million years.”

“Why? Because she’s a kid?” demanded Mr Smith.

“I resent that!” almost shouted Dave, “she’s a good girl brought up well in honest and godly ways by my lady wife and myself.”

“That’s as good as admitting her guilt!” snapped Mr Smith. “I say we should hold a trial here and now and blame the kid! Yes, that’s what we should do! Who’s in agreement with me? Who says she’s as guilty as hell and ought to be dispatched there before another minute has ticked by?”

“Daddy, I… I… I… never” wept Jane

“I don’t see… she couldn’t be the thief...” muttered My Jones. “I’ve a confession to make. Not a confession of thieving but a confession of liking. I like the girl and in my last few days on Earth I’ve virtually kept my eyes on her all the time. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with me, but...” he turned to Dave, shaking his head, “...sir, you and your good lady wife have toiled long and hard being parents and have succeeded where many might fail. I can tell, I know instinctively, that there is nothing at all dishonest about the girl.”

“Creep,” whispered Mr Smith.

“Well said, mon ami!” contributed Pierre.

“That’s how I see it too, and I’ve seen battlefields of bleeding corpses in my time,” murmured Harry. “I know evil when I see it, and I know who’s not guilty this time.”

“The proof was in his very words, mon ami,” sighed Pierre.

“Driver, are you prepared to be judge and jury like this?” asked Mr Smith. “And executioner. Are you going to be executioner?”

“We need a proper court of law with a proper judge and a right-minded jury,” said Dick. “Anyway, we don’t know who the guilty party is. And even if we all show everyone our possessions, empty out luggage here on this roadside, it won’t prove anything because the guilty party can easily have squirrelled gold coins away, under a rocky stone maybe, or making barely noticeable bulges in his doublet where they can be mistaken for a bulbous skin disease… or down his pants where no other man likes to look.”

“I’d look!” snapped Annie, “for I want my fortune back!”

“I know who the guilty party is,” said Dave Wasp, quietly, and he pointed his loaded musket at Mr Smith. “It is you, sir, making out to be a righteous and noble officer of the courts. It is you who are a master of skulduggery and it is you who have robbed the poor old lady of her wealth and her hopes for the future. But you will not get away with it...”

“But I am an officer, sir, I am in charge of this evil thieving prisoner, and you need to look no further if you want to discover who has stolen old Annie’s sovereigns, for it is him!”

“How are you connected to Mr Jones?” asked David Wasp, “how is it that you of all people are actually allowed to accompany a condemned man on a visit to the seaside? Who on Earth made that possible, when the normal route for such people is from the courtroom to a cell and from that cell to the gallows? Your story, sir, requires close examination...”

“I don’t know him...” muttered Mr Jones, “at least, I don’t think I know him...”

“Of course you don’t,” the driver told him, “for is it not a fact that Smith is not his rightful name, but that he is the one man you yourself would like to see hanging? Is he not the deceitful and black hearted villain who has stolen your own wife’s heart and who, even as we speak, hopes to return to her with riches beyond her wildest dreams? And was the not the whole court proceedings that you told us, all the nonsense about a small-time thief being condemned to hang, all part of a huge drama in which his wife’s family have all played parts in the hope of personal rewards when the poor man dangles at the end of a rope? And is Mr Jones not as innocent as he has always maintained and even as you yourself purported him to be in order to give your role in the farce a little credibility?”

“That is all nonsense...” stammered Mr Smith.

“Not at all,” said Dave Wasp quietly, “for besides the nonsense of the story you told us, you were the only one of this gathering who knew precisely what it was that Mistress Anon had been deprived of when she announced the theft. You knew it was sovereigns and the rest of us were shocked to discover that she even knew what a sovereign might be let alone own them in the plural!”

“Nonsense!” spat Mr Smith, “where is your evidence?”

“That’s easy,” murmured the driver, “for I noticed when we returned from the Inn with the wheelwright that you were suddenly sporting a rather antique and boastful codpiece when before, like the rest of us, you didn’t wear one, or if you did it was insignificant. And that, I suspect, is where we’ll find Mistress Anon’s gold! Nicely tucked inside that codpiece.”

“You’ll never get the better of me!” shouted a suddenly deranged Mr Smith and he turned to run.

“I don’t like doing this. I don’t like it at all,” sighed David Wasp, shaking his head as he squeezed the trigger of his musket with a nervous finger, and the world rocked at the sound.

TO BE CONTINUED...

© Peter Rogerson 06.06.18