“It is certainly one to you,” I agreed, slowly and thoughtfully.
“I have something else,” Pepster went on, taking out his wallet.
“More anonymous letters?” I queried.
“Yes, two.”
He handed them across to me. One was a fragment of blue paper, on which was printed in red ink:
THOYNE IS STILL AT
LIBERTY. WHY?
The other was a picture postcard—a view of the Midlington Parish Church—and the message, in pencil, ran:
WHY ARE YOU PROTECTING
THOYNE. HAS HE PAID YOU?
“It wasn’t sent open like that,” Pepster explained. “It came in an envelope. It’s a popular card, printed by the hundred and sold by every stationer in Midlington. Somebody seems to have a rare grudge against Thoyne.”
“Does he know anything of these?”
“I haven’t told him.”
“Nor of the others?”
“No”
“It might be a good idea—just to see how he took it.”
“If there was anything in them it might put him on his guard.”
I did not press the matter further just then, though I could not help wondering what story there was behind this queer series.
“Put a personal in the Courier,” I suggested, “inviting the writer of communications to the Peakborough police to send his address confidentially.”
“I did.”
“No result?”
“A personal in reply which ran, ‘Take him first and then I will.’ You know he said in one of the other letters that if we would arrest Thoyne he would supply the evidence.”
“No, you can’t do that,” I agreed. “And now,” I added, “if you’ll sit still and not interrupt I’ll tell you a long story.”
And I proceeded to recount the past history of Sir Philip Clevedon and Tulmin, and Thoyne’s connection with it. Pepster heard me to the end in silence.
“This case,” he said, when I had finished, “is the very devil. I’m half inclined to think Tulmin did it after all. At any rate there are three of them in it—Tulmin, Thoyne and Nora Lepley, but which is which—or are they all three in it?”
It was a possibility that had occurred to me more than once.
CHAPTER XXIII
TULMIN’S QUEER STORY
During my journey to London I devoted careful and prolonged thought to the difficult problem of Mr. Ronald Thoyne, whose exact place in the story I had by no means satisfactorily determined. He had played a very curious game all through, and though there was an explanation in his anxiety to help Kitty Clevedon and relieve her anxiety regarding her brother, the facts as I knew them would equally have fitted a desire to throw pursuers off his own scent.
I did not attach undue importance to the series of anonymous letters received by Pepster, and yet, in the light of Thoyne’s queer and frequently mysterious actions, I did not feel inclined entirely to ignore them. I was fully aware that so far I had not found the key to the mystery. Did Thoyne hold that or was it Nora Lepley? Thoyne was an American and, as far as I had been able to gather, came of a wealthy and highly respectable family in Chicago. There was absolutely nothing of any sort against him and yet it seemed queer that he had settled down in England and had apparently no intention of returning to America. Even Kitty Clevedon was not sufficient to account for that. She would certainly have gone with him had he asked her. Even if he had not actually encompassed Clevedon’s death, was he privy to it? Then I remembered suddenly—the first time it had occurred to me—what the Vicar’s wife had told me. Thoyne, when he first went to Cartordale, had lodged at Lepley’s farm and gossip had coupled his name with Nora’s. What was there in that? Little, probably; perhaps nothing.
And so I maundered on, my thought flitting from one thing to another and back again, but with no tangible or coherent result. I could not fit Thoyne into the picture anyhow. If he had set out to fool me he had succeeded, for all I had tripped him up so many times. That again was curious. Practically everything he had told me had been dragged out of him. Very little had come from him voluntarily. He became confidential enough when he knew that I knew, but he offered nothing.
I walked to the address in Bloomsbury Stillman had given me. He met me on the doorstep, and taking me into his room made a few minor alterations in my appearance, not sufficient to merit the word disguise, but enough to prevent Tulmin from recognising me. I had never spoken to him, but I had been on the jury when he was a witness and he might know me again.
And then I gave Stillman another mission—Grainger, Mary Grainger, Nora Lepley.
“Anything particular?” Stillman asked.
“No,” I said. “Everything. I don’t know what it will lead to. It is absolutely new ground.”
I told him all I knew and left him to it.
When Tulmin came in Stillman introduced me as a friend of his named Spencer and for a time we talked on all sorts of topics until Stillman mentioned quite casually that Tulmin had come from Cartordale.
“Did you know Sir Philip Clevedon?” I asked, “the man who was poisoned? A cousin of mine was housekeeper there, name of Halfleet.”
“Mrs. Halfleet, yes, she is the housekeeper,” Tulmin said.
“She thinks he committed suicide,” I observed.
“Nay, she’s wrong there,” Tulmin replied, “he wasn’t the suicide sort.”
“Tulmin,” I said suddenly, “why, I remember that name. You were his secretary, weren’t you, or something of the sort.”
“Yes, that’s right, something of the sort,” Tulmin responded, with a grin.
I was a little taken aback at his almost good-humoured frankness. His was certainly not the attitude of a man who stood in fear of pursuit.
“But surely,” I said, “it’s you the police are looking for.”
“Me? What should they want with me?” he growled, sitting suddenly upright.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m not very well up in the case. It was my cousin that told me. ‘I believe, myself, it was suicide,’ she said, ‘but the police think differently, and they’re looking for Tulmin, who ran away.’”
He rose from his seat and thumped the table angrily, though his face grew a little white. Stillman, who had been watching him carefully, poured out a glass of whisky and handed it to him. Tulmin gulped it down at a draught and seemed to recover his nerve.
“But didn’t you run away?” I asked.
“No, I didn’t, damn you! Who said I ran away?”
“But you disappeared.”
“Mr. Thoyne knew where I was.”
“Who is Mr. Thoyne?” I asked. “My cousin said nothing about him. Is he suspected also?”
“Why,” he responded, with a queer laugh, “you might guess again and get farther off.”
“Do you mean he did it?” I asked.
“I don’t mean anything,” he replied cautiously, and then he added, “It was Mr. Thoyne who sent me here.”
“But why did he do that?” I demanded. “So that the police would—think things?”
“If you didn’t do it you were a fool to quit,” Stillman said.
“Yes, I was a fool, that’s plain enough,” Tulmin muttered, with an unpleasant sort of laugh. “Thoyne’s had me for a fool.”
He reached out his hand for some more whisky, which Stillman supplied.
“I see now,” Tulmin went on, almost as if talking to himself, “that was why Thoyne offered me a job and was so anxious to get me away. Yes, and then he almost pushed me off that blasted yacht of his, and told me to come to London and wait for him. I see his game. He wanted me out of the way, so they’d think—but I didn’t do it, though I know who did.”
I did not allow so much as an eyelid to quiver. If Tulmin stopped talking now I might never get him again.
“It was Thoyne himself—the swine,” he went on. “I saw him give Clevedon the dope that killed him—in a white packet. ‘You’ll sleep all right after that,’ he said, and laughed. He wasn’t far out. He put Clevedon to sleep sound enough.”
“Did you tell Thoyne what you saw?” I asked. “When did he give it to him?”
“Why, Clevedon called on him that night. They’d quarrelled over a girl, and Clevedon went to—I don’t know what he went for.”
“Went where?”
“To see Thoyne—at Thoyne’s house. I followed him. I couldn’t hear all they said, but I could see everything.”
“And you didn’t tell Thoyne what you saw?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But, why?”
“Oh, well, I was keeping that,” he said, with a maudlin grin. “I thought it might come in useful—later on. But Thoyne did it right enough.”
“Do you know what was in the packet?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t possibly say—”
“They both wanted the same girl—I know that—and Thoyne took his chance. He came to the door with Clevedon. I was hid in the bushes. ‘Take a dose of that stuff, and it’ll put you to sleep,’ Thoyne said. And, by God, it did! Suicide, no. He didn’t commit suicide. Thoyne killed him.”
And then he flung his arms over the table and fell into a stupid, drunken sleep.
I glanced at Stillman, who shook his head.
“No jury would take his evidence,” he remarked.
I wondered for a moment or two if Tulmin had written the anonymous letters. But then I remembered that they had borne the Midlington postmark.
“Has he been away from London at all?” I asked.
“No.”
“Not even for a day?”
“No.”
Of course, he might have got somebody in Midlington to post them for him, but I doubted it. I did not think he had written them. His accusation merely came in queer corroboration of their statements. But anonymous letters and a drunken gutter-thief from Chicago. I should have to get a better case against Thoyne than that!
I stayed three or four days in London, having a good deal of business with publishers to transact, and for that period I left Cartordale and its concerns entirely alone. It was a visit from Stillman that plunged me once again into the thick of the mystery.
“It’s only a preliminary report,” he said, “but as far as it goes it is simple enough. Miss Grainger died at Long Burminster, a small village in the Midlands, about sixty miles from London. That was some months ago, and she left behind her a little baby girl, who has been adopted by the people—themselves childless—with whom Miss Grainger herself had been lodging. She wrote to her father, it seems, but he refused to visit her or to have anything to do with her child—said they could send it to the workhouse, which, however, they refused to do.”
I remarked that this seemed a very good and generous action on their part, to which Stillman replied with his characteristic, unbelieving grin, that they were being well paid for it.
“By whom—Grainger?” I asked.
“No,” Stillman replied. “Not by Grainger, but by Mr. Ronald Thoyne.”
“Thoyne!” I exclaimed. “Thoyne again! It seems to be always Thoyne. But what had he to do with Mary Grainger?”
Stillman went on with his story. He reminded me, in the first place, that Mary Grainger and Nora Lepley had been close friends, and that Thoyne had lodged at Lepley’s farm when he first went to Cartordale. He might have met her there; though he believed—he had not yet actually verified this—that Thoyne had been a patient in the hospital at Bristol where Mary Grainger and Nora Lepley had both served, the former as nurse, the latter as V.A.D.
“And is the suggestion, then, that Thoyne is the father of this baby?” I demanded.
But Stillman knew nothing as to that; it might be so, or it might not, but it was quite certain that Thoyne was paying for the child now. And there was another interesting point he had forgotten to mention. When Mary Grainger went to Long Burminster she called herself Mrs. Blewshaw, and wore a wedding ring, which, in fact, was buried with her.
It was when she was ill and knew she could not recover, that Mary had written to her father, who had replied with a violent refusal either to see her or to forgive her. Happily, Mary herself had never seen that letter. She died peacefully and painlessly before it came.
Mrs. Greentree had shown it to Ronald Thoyne, who bade her sit down and write a letter from his dictation, in which she informed the Midlington chemist that his daughter was dead, and asked what wishes he had to express regarding the child. The old man replied in person, but had proved a rather grim, forbidding and unpleasant visitor. He had refused to attend the funeral, or to pay for it, and would not even see the little girl; whereupon Thoyne had come to the rescue, settling all the bills, and arranging that Mrs. Greentree should take charge of the child for the ridiculously generous payment of two pounds a week.
I whistled when I heard that, and Stillman nodded his head.
“It seems a lot, doesn’t it?” he murmured. “If she wasn’t his daughter, I mean.”
The first lesson I learnt when I began my studies in crime and criminology—because crime is not merely the commission of an unlawful deed, but is of itself a complicated psychological problem—was to distrust the obvious. Crime itself is sub-normal, super-normal, extra-normal, anything but normal; and the obvious is always likely to be untrue because there are always people interested in arranging it.
For my part, I never believe what I see or hear until I have also proved it; and, accordingly, though it would seem to one’s ordinary intelligence a certainty that Ronald Thoyne was the father of Mary Grainger’s baby—possibly Mary Grainger’s husband, possibly not; but certainly in some intimate relationship with the dead girl and the living child—I did not take anything for granted. I had yet to learn the other side of the story. Not that I had any reason to suppose that Thoyne was better than his fellows, or that such an entanglement was impossible to him. He certainly had never occurred to me as a saint.
The story seemed fairly clear, though, of course, I lacked many details. Thoyne had met Mary Grainger either at the hospital in Bristol, or while he was lodging at Lepley’s farm, and then, after an interval regarding which we had no information, the girl was found to be living at his expense, and when she died he paid for the maintenance of her child. Added to all this was the other ascertained fact that Nora Lepley, in whose possession I had discovered the phial of prussic acid, was Mary Grainger’s dearest and most intimate friend.
But, then, what had all that to do with the death of Sir Philip Clevedon? Was there any connection at all between the two stories? Certainly I could discern none of even the most shadowy character, and yet I somehow felt that Thoyne was the pivot on which the whole business swung, though so far the key which would open the door of the mystery remained out of reach. It was interesting, too, to recollect that Thoyne’s serious courtship of Kitty Clevedon had not begun until Mary Grainger was safely out of the way—interesting, but whether or not it had any significance, I could not say.
I told Stillman to continue his inquiries, and myself returned to Cartordale.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE WRATH OF RONALD THOYNE
“I want you to come with me to Midlington,” I said to Pepster, whom I met soon after I reached home. “I am going to try a long shot, and I would like you to be there.”
“A long shot at what?” he demanded.
“Well,” I replied, “I don’t quite know. I can’t quite reckon it up yet, but it seems worth trying, anyway.”
Pepster nodded, and waited for me to continue.
“Those anonymous letters,” I went on. “We are going to see their writer.”
“Oh. And who may he be?”
“Grainger, the chemist.”
“But that’s—well, anyway, I’m ready. Shall we go now?”
We found Mr. Grainger behind the counter of his shop, but I was just in time to see a skirt flashing through the door that opened into the little room behind. That it was Nora Lepley I felt sure, though I did not see the face.
“Mr. Grainger,” I began, “we have come to see you about those letters you wrote to the police.”
He shrank back against the shelves behind him, and his face went suddenly grey. He pulled himself together immediately.
“I know nothing of any letters,” he said, moistening his lips. “I don’t understand.”
“Oh, yes,” I responded cheerfully, “you promised to provide the evidence if—”
“Has Ronald Thoyne been arrested?” he broke in, with hardly concealed eagerness.
“Ronald Thoyne?” I echoed. “Did I mention Thoyne?”
“No, no,” he said, “you were referring to the—to Sir Philip Clevedon—yes.”
“I don’t think I even mentioned Clevedon,” I replied.
Grainger passed his hand wearily across his forehead, then faced me once more.
“No,” he said, almost as if he had made up his mind on a point on which he had been in some doubt. “I know nothing of any letters.”
“And you are not ready with the evidence you promised—?”
“I don’t understand,” he returned.
“Of course, I know you promised that if Thoyne were arrested you would provide—but then, in point of fact, there is nothing against Thoyne, and we must have the evidence in advance. If you know anything it is your duty to help us, surely. You say you have evidence against Thoyne—”
“I have not said so.”
“Oh, yes, you said so in that letter you wrote to the police at Peakborough.”
“I wrote no letter.”
“You see, if we did arrest Thoyne, as you suggested, and then your evidence failed, we might be in a very awkward position. Now, if you could give us some idea of its—”
“I know nothing of it.”
The door from the little room behind the shop slowly opened, and Nora Lepley came out.
“What is it you want?” she demanded. “Why are you badgering the—Mr. Grainger in this fashion?”
I turned smilingly towards her.
“Not at all,” I responded equably. “Mr. Grainger wrote to the police and told them that if they would arrest Mr. Thoyne, he would produce evidence that he—Mr. Thoyne, I mean—murdered Sir Philip Clevedon.”
She blazed up in very queer fashion, and wheeled suddenly upon the old man.
“Did you say that?” she demanded.
“I wrote no letters,” he responded half sullenly. “I don’t know what they are talking about. It isn’t true.”
He had gone very white, and his hands were trembling violently.
“I think you’d better go,” Nora said quietly. “He will be ill if you worry him any more. I will talk to him, and let you—and see you again. But you’d better go now.”
I nodded to Pepster, who followed me out of the shop.
“He wrote those letters,” Pepster said, as we walked along.
“Yes, that seems fairly evident.”
“But what does it all amount to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why should he accuse Thoyne?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Thoyne murder Clevedon?”
“I don’t know.”
“But there must be some reason for those letters.”
“Oh, yes, the reason is plain enough—he had a bitter grudge against Thoyne. His daughter seems to have come a cropper, and he suspected Thoyne—yes, that is why he wrote the letters.”
I told him in a few words what Stillman had discovered regarding Thoyne and Mary Grainger.
“It’s a rum story,” Pepster said thoughtfully. “Of course the child is Thoyne’s, and that would account for the grudge, as you say. But it doesn’t explain why he should accuse Thoyne of murder. He must have had something at the back of his mind. It can’t be wholly an invention.”
“I saw Tulmin a day or two back.”
“Gad! and where is he?”
“In London. I asked him who murdered Philip Clevedon, and he replied that Thoyne did it.”
“He replied—what!”
“That Thoyne did it.”
I recounted as much as I thought proper of my interview with Tulmin. But Pepster shook his head.
“The thing’s beyond me,” he said. “It wants a lot of sorting out. But Tulmin’s evidence would go for nothing, and Grainger, if he knows anything, won’t speak. We must wait a bit yet.”
On my way up to Cartordale from the station I overtook Thoyne going in the same direction.
“I am bound for White Towers,” he said. “I am staying there with Sir Billy and his wife.”
“Do you happen to know,” I said, when our preliminary conversation languished a little, “of anyone who has a grudge against you?”
Thoyne regarded me frowningly for a moment or two.
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “there is nobody. I can say that, Holt, freely enough. Clevedon—but he is dead, anyway, and there’s no one else.”
“Did you ever hear,” I asked, “of a girl named Grainger?”
He gave me a quick glance sideways.
“Yes,” he said. “I knew Miss Grainger very well.”
We relapsed into silence which lasted for several minutes.
“Shall I tell you the story?” I asked softly, “or will you tell me?”
“What story?” he demanded roughly.
“The story of Mary Grainger,” I returned.
“There is no story,” he said. “The poor girl is dead. Let her rest.”
“Yes, but—”
“I tell you I won’t talk about it—about her. She is dead, and death ends all stories. Leave it there.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“The Clevedons might be interested.”
“It is no business of theirs.”
“They might not agree with that.”
“I tell you it has nothing to do with them. The girl’s dead.”
“But there is more in it than that—her father isn’t dead.”
“Well, what of her father?”
“He says you murdered Philip Clevedon.”
He stood speechless for a moment or two, then turned away with a short laugh.
“What the devil do you mean?” he shouted. “What blasted foolery have you in mind now? You are a damned fool, the damndest of damned fools. I have never seen Miss Grainger’s father, and he has never seen me. I am getting sick of the very sight of you about. You persistently follow me up as if you thought that I killed Clevedon. Well, if you do think so, why not arrest me and have done with it. I would sooner face a jury and take my trial than put up with this perpetual persecution.”
“It is your own fault,” I returned equably. “You will tell me nothing, and your whole attitude is a challenge. You kept secret your knowledge of Clevedon’s past, but I found that out. You did not tell me where Tulmin was, but I tracked him down. You have said nothing about Mary Grainger. Then there was Clevedon’s visit to you on the night of his death, and the medicine you handed him which—”
“I never have committed murder,” he cried, turning on me with a savage intensity which betokened the inward strain, “but I am nearer to it at this moment than I ever thought I should be. If I stay here I shan’t be able to trust myself. I—”
He left me abruptly, and vaulting a low rubble wall, made off at a quick pace across some fields which gave him a short cut to White Towers.
But in something under two hours he had joined me at Stone Hollow.
“I apologise,” he said, as he strode into my study. “I apologise for everything I said. You were right, and I was a fool. You told me that Grainger had accused me of murdering Clevedon. Well, now he has written to Billy—”
“About the murder?” I asked.
“No, damn the murder—something a lot worse than that,” he responded. “He accuses me of bigamy—says I have a wife living. It’s got to be sorted out now—because of Kitty—and I’ve come to you.”
He took a fragment of paper from his pocket.
“There’s a copy of the infernal thing,” he said. “Read it.”
The letter was terse, and to the point.
“Sir,
“Mr. Ronald Thoyne, who, I understand, is engaged to marry Miss Kitty Clevedon, has been guilty of bigamy. He may have a wife now living, but I cannot say that for certain. All I know is that he married my daughter under false pretences, and then, when he had tired of her, told her he had a wife living in America. He is keeping her child—his child. I advise you to institute careful inquiries into these statements, which you will find can easily be substantiated. The child is being cared for by some people named Greentree, who live at Long Burminster, and Mr. Thoyne is contributing two pounds a week for her maintenance.
“Yours truly,
“Robert Grainger.”
“Well,” Thoyne demanded, “and what do you think of it?”
“It is true about the child and the two pounds a week?”
“Yes.”
“And the other?”
“No.”
“Does anyone know the real story?”
“Yes, Nora Lepley knows all about it. She is at White Towers now. I want you to come back with me and straighten it out. Then we will see Grainger together. It has got to be cleared up now.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I’ll come. And, Thoyne, did you ever suffer from sleeplessness?”
“What the devil has that to do—?”
“Perhaps nothing, but did you?”
“Yes—at intervals. It is a legacy from the war, a result of being gassed. Perhaps for a fortnight I may not be able to sleep, and then it passes, and I am all right for months.”
“Do you take anything?”
“Not if I can manage without. I have a horror of drugs. But occasionally a dose of Pemberton’s Drops—”
“Have you any by you now?”
“No, I gave the last bottle to Clevedon. He looked rotten, and, I think, felt worse even than he looked. I hated the fellow, but I couldn’t help pitying him.”
“He called on you earlier on the night of the—”
“Yes, he did.”
“And that was when you gave him the bottle of Pemberton’s Drops?”
“Yes, what of it?”
“Nothing. Let us get on to White Towers, and have a word with Nora Lepley.”
But on our way I called at the post office and had a long conversation on the telephone with Detective Pepster.
CHAPTER XXV
THE STORY OF MARY GRAINGER
At White Towers we found the family party assembled, apparently awaiting our coming, though old Lady Clevedon, grim, forbidding and unbelieving, flung up her hands as I approached.
“And what may you be doing here, Mr. Detective?” she said. “This is a family council, and strangers—besides, what have you to do with this? It is the other mystery you are engaged on, and you might as well not have been, for all the good it has done.”
“It is all right,” Billy Clevedon interposed, a little brusquely. “Holt is here at my suggestion.”
“If we might all sit down—” I began.
“Do you know who killed Sir Philip Clevedon?” the old lady demanded.
“Yes,” I said, “I do know who killed Sir Philip Clevedon, and before this evening is out I shall probably tell you.”
“Has this—this other business anything to do with it?” the old lady asked.
“Everything to do with it,” I replied. “But, now, let us straighten this out first. I will tell you what I know as fact, and Thoyne can supply any embroidery that may be necessary. In the first place, Miss Grainger—that is Robert Grainger’s daughter—and Thoyne were in the hospital at Bristol at the same time. They left within a few days of each other, Thoyne first and the girl a day or two later. That is fact. Then comes a long interval. When next Mary Grainger is seen she is living in Long Burminster with her baby girl. Whether Thoyne was actually keeping her then, I don’t know, but after her death he paid her debt to her landlady and all the funeral expenses, and since then he has paid two pounds a week for the child.”
“Not much if she is his daughter,” the old lady interposed bitingly.
“But a good deal if she isn’t,” I retorted.
“You mean you think she is.”
“I don’t mean anything except what I have told you, I deal only in facts.”
“But why should he keep a baby girl if she isn’t his daughter?”
“If that is a conundrum—”
“Then if it is a suspicion—”
“It isn’t—it is merely a question.”
“Good! Then Thoyne himself will, sooner or later, supply the answer. But I have not finished my record yet. Just before she died, Mary Grainger wrote to her father, telling him she had secretly married an American soldier, who was in hospital in Bristol, only to find later that he had already a wife—”
“Ronald Thoyne is an American,” old Lady Clevedon muttered.
“I have heard so,” I rejoined. “But that is the story. Those are the ascertained facts. It is Thoyne’s turn now.”
“But before he says anything,” Kitty Clevedon interposed suddenly, “I want to tell you all that I don’t believe a word of it.”
“The detective man said they were facts,” the old lady remarked dryly.
“Perhaps,” Kitty retorted, flushing hotly.
“I don’t remember that there was any perhaps about it,” old Lady Clevedon replied.
“The story, as far as Holt has told it, is perfectly true,” Thoyne said slowly. “But now there is one other person who knows the whole truth, and I want you to ask her.”
“Her! Who?” Lady Clevedon demanded.
“Nora—Lepley, but—”
“She was a V.A.D. in the hospital where Miss Grainger was a nurse,” I interposed. “Yes, she may know—if we could send for her—”
“She is in the house now,” the younger Lady Clevedon chimed in, speaking for the first time. “I will ring for her.”
Nora came, and I handed her a chair. For a moment she hesitated, then sat down with a glance round the semicircle of perhaps not very friendly faces. I sat back watching the girl closely.
“Now then, Mr. Detective, ask her what you want to know,” old Lady Clevedon rasped. “Oh, yes, it’s your job. You’ve got to fill in your interval, you know.”
I glanced at Thoyne, who nodded affirmatively, and then I turned to Nora Lepley.
“You served as a V.A.D. in a hospital in Bristol,” I said. “Mary Grainger was there as a nurse. Then Mr. Thoyne came in as a patient. You remember all that?”
“Yes—what of it?”
“You were there when Mary left, and—”
“No, I wasn’t. I had come home. I turned up ill and they sent me home.”
“Then you were not at Bristol when Miss Grainger ran away with Mr. Thoyne and—”
“Ran away!” she cried. “With Mr. Thoyne!”
She sat straight up in her chair and laughed in my face.
“Mary didn’t run away,” she went on. “She was married. I was there as her bridesmaid. I met them in London specially for it, and Mr. Thoyne was there, too, as best man. She married an American named Blewshaw. He was a patient in the hospital, like Mr. Thoyne. The marriage had to be kept secret because Mr. Blewshaw’s father would object. I didn’t like it, neither did Mr. Thoyne. He told me so. But it was Mary’s business, not ours, and she had agreed. They took a flat in London—oh, I know what you mean. When she died, Mr. Thoyne was paying for her, and he has kept her baby since. But that was because he had introduced Blewshaw to her, and Blewshaw had let her down. He thought he was in some sort of way responsible. I didn’t see it myself but he did. Blewshaw went off to America, and she followed him, only to find that he had a wife there already. When she discovered that she came back to England—she wouldn’t touch the money Blewshaw offered her—and tried to earn her living. But she didn’t tell anyone, not me, not her father. Mr. Thoyne found her just as she was almost at her last gasp, and he looked after her. Her father would have nothing to do with her nor with her baby. Mr. Thoyne found her quite accidentally, and he told me about her. I went down to Long Burminster to see her. That is the whole story.”
“Thoyne comes well out of it, anyway,” I said cheerfully.
Kitty went to him and kissed him, and I think with very little provocation would have kissed me too. She had loyally asserted her belief in him, and possibly had actually persuaded herself that it was genuine. But it was easy to see that she was enormously relieved when she heard Nora Lepley’s corroboration. After all, Mary Grainger had been a very pretty girl, and Thoyne was only a man.
When Nora had gone, Thoyne told us Mary Grainger’s story in more detail, though I can summarise it here in a few lines. It was just as she had recounted it to him, with annotations where necessary, from Mr. and Mrs. Job Greentree. Mary found work at first in Liverpool, where she landed on her return to England, and then, when that failed her, she left her baby with the people with whom she had been lodging, and set out to walk to London, a mad project, as it seemed, though she did better than one might expect.
Many helped her on the way, and eventually she reached a little Midlands village, still over sixty miles from her destination. It had grown dark, and was raining heavily; and as she stood in the shadow, gazing rather longingly at a warmly lighted inn, the door of which stood invitingly open, revealing an interior that seemed to be all bright reds and warm browns, and which, at all events, promised shelter, a heavy motor-van, on the sides and back of which was painted, in big, white letters, “Job Greentree, Carrier,” drew up, and from it descended a big man muffled in enormous coats, and sporting a huge beard. He lifted three or four parcels from the interior of the van, and strode into the inn, leaving the door of the vehicle a few inches open.
Mary crept forward. Here, at all events, was shelter and a means of covering a few more miles. That it might be going in an opposite direction did not occur to her. She clambered easily into the car, and, creeping into the shadows at the far end, lay down on something soft, warm, and comfortable, though whether sacks or rugs, she did not know. What happened thereafter was a total blank to her. She lapsed straightway into a stupor that was more unconsciousness than sleep, and lay thus, oblivious to everything.
When she came to herself she was seated, swathed in blankets, before a wood fire that roared and crackled half-way up the chimney of an old-fashioned grate, while, bending over her, with a mug of steaming brandy in one hand and a spoon in the other, was the motherly, anxious face of a woman.
The carrier—he combined the office with those of village wheelwright, blacksmith and undertaker, and was known far and wide as Job—had drawn up with a rattle at the door of the cottage that stood alongside the smithy, had dismounted and lumbered round to the back of his van.
“By gum!” he said slowly. “That’s a rum un—it is an’ all.”
The door of the cottage was open, sending a shaft of warm light across the roadway.
“Hallo! hallo! Mother, come here and look at this,” the big man shouted.
The woman standing in the porch caught a wrap from one of the hooks behind the door and flung it over her head, then went to the car, where her husband stood with the light of his electric lantern blazing upon Mary, who lay wet through and motionless from utter weariness and exhaustion.
“A girl! Who is she, Job?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know,” the bearded man replied. “I never saw her before. I wonder where she got in.”
“Well, pick her up and bring her through,” the woman said. “She can’t lie there—she’s terrible wet, poor dear!”
The bearded man stooped down, and, lifting Mary as if she had been a doll, strode with her into the house and placed her in an easy chair before a roaring fire in the warm, well-lighted kitchen, and there she lay, with the water dripping from her skirts and forming tiny rills on the hitherto spotless floor.
“Poor dear, she’s worn out!” the woman said. “Now you go and look after your van, and I’ll see to her. It’s bed she wants, and something hot to drink. You keep out of the way for a bit, and I’ll get those clothes off her and some warm blankets round her.”
She ran bustling upstairs, returning in a minute or two with an armful of blankets and some big towels. In three or four minutes she had Mary stripped and then, after a vigorous rubbing, wrapped her in half a dozen blankets, until there was nothing visible save a small, white face peering out from what looked like a bale of woollen goods in a furniture store.
But the exposure and suffering had had their effect, and Mary fell into an illness from which she emerged—it was a surprise to those who nursed and tended her that she came out at all—but a wreck of her former self, with her mind a confused tangle, and her memory gone.
Physically, she made a little, very slow progress, but mentally, she seemed to be at a standstill. And thus it was that Ronald Thoyne found her.
She was seated on the long, wooden bench that flanked the porch of the cottage, when a motor-car drew up suddenly, and Thoyne, leaping therefrom, came towards her with long strides.
“Mary!” he cried. “Is it really yourself, Mary?”
For a moment or two the girl’s brows were knit in a puzzled frown, and then she shook her head. A woman came running from the cottage and laid a hand on his arm.
“Do you know her?” she asked.
In a few, rather incoherent sentences, she told him the story of Mary’s arrival and of her subsequent illness. But she had hardly finished her story—had not, in fact, completed it—when Mary almost sprang at her, shaking her roughly by the arm.
“My baby!” she cried. “Where is my baby?”
They soothed her gradually and when they had heard her story Thoyne took her to Liverpool himself, where they found the child safe and well cared for, a matter on which those responsible had good cause to congratulate themselves when they received Thoyne’s very handsome present. Thoyne took Mary back to the home of the carrier and his wife and there the girl remained until she died.
“And that,” Thoyne concluded, “is the whole story, which I never intended to tell, never should have told, but for the suspicions that seem to have arisen out of it.”
“You were a fool,” Lady Clevedon the elder said tartly. “You had better have told me or Kitty all about it and left it to us. We would have looked after the baby.”
CHAPTER XXVI
NORA LEPLEY’S EXPLANATION
“And now,” Lady Clevedon said, “who was it killed Sir Philip? You promised to tell us, you know.”
“I will,” I responded, “but I am not yet quite ready.”
“No, but dinner is,” the younger Lady Clevedon interrupted. “Suppose we have that first.”
“And after that,” I added, “I should like to see Nora Lepley again, but alone this time.”
“That is easily arranged,” was the reply. “She is staying in the house to-night. But dinner first. Are you really going, though, to tell us—?”
“I have every hope of it,” I responded and there I left it, though during dinner I was subjected to a sort of oblique catechism, chiefly by the two ladies, which I parried as best I could. Not that they addressed many questions directly to me but their conversation, ostensibly between themselves, really amounted to that.
My interview with Nora Lepley took place in the study, the room wherein Sir Philip Clevedon had been found dead, though I don’t think Lady Billy had any particular thought in mind when she sent us there; it merely happened to be convenient. I was not sorry the room had been chosen, though it had not occurred to me to suggest it.
“Now sit down, Miss Lepley,” I said, “and let us talk. But first of all I want you to understand that I mean you no harm if you are frank with me.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she responded a little sullenly, giving me a flashing glance from her black eyes that was at least three parts anger. “What harm could you do me? I am not afraid of you. This is the second time you have wanted me. Didn’t you believe me? Is it about Mary again?”
“No,” I replied, “it is about yourself this time. Did you know that some time ago the police took out a warrant for your arrest?”
“Arrest!”—she sat back in her chair and regarded me smilingly—“Why should they want to arrest me?”
If Nora Lepley was in any way afraid of me or even unusually disturbed she did not show it. Her dark eyes, full of slumbrous fires and undefined passions, regarded me frankly, and a queer, rather mocking smile hovered about her finely modelled lips. She was beautiful in an unexpected, unusual fashion, but her loveliness lacked softness and charm, at least that was my reading of it. She might fascinate or infatuate many men but few of them would love her.
There was not the faintest sign or touch of weakness about her and one could hardly imagine her reduced to tears. Whatever the trouble she was facing, she would fight to the end. One could only try to entrap her with the odds rather in favour of failure unless one were very well equipped indeed. I had to try it anyway.
“They want to arrest you,” I said, speaking carelessly, though I was watching her closely, “for the murder of Sir Philip Clevedon.”
“Sir Philip Clevedon! Murder!” she cried. “Oh, but I had nothing to do with that.”
“You stabbed him with a hatpin.”
“But he was dead before—I mean—I don’t know anything about it—I don’t know what you mean.”
“How did you know he was dead when you stabbed him?” I asked.
“I—but I didn’t stab him—I know nothing about it—I never saw the hatpin—I never had one like it.”
“Sometimes,” I went on remorselessly, “the police do not tell all they know. Sir Philip Clevedon was murdered with a hatpin—just so. But we mustn’t say that. Let us suppose he died of poison and that will throw the real murderer of her guard. Or suppose he had taken poison and was still living when you stabbed him. If a doctor had been promptly brought he might have been saved. Or he may have been dying and you merely finished him. How you would stand then, legally, I mean, I am not quite sure. An interesting query would arise over which the lawyers would waste many words. Did he die from poison or from the hatpin? Either would have been sufficient, but which was first—hatpin or poison? You see, Miss Lepley, the case is not simple. If the police arrest you it may not be easy for you to wriggle out.”
“But I tell you I know nothing of it!” she cried, her voice rising a little.
“Well,” I went on, “let me tell you one or two things I have learned, one or two facts, just to refresh your memory. In France, you know, the reconstruction of a crime is part of their criminal procedure. It is not often adopted in this country—no, sit down, please—but it may be useful now. I think you must hear me out—for your own sake and your parents’—”
“Leave my parents out of it,” she cried, her face reddening violently.
“Unfortunately, we can’t do that,” I rejoined equably. “What affects you touches them, also. You cannot separate yourself from them. But we won’t quarrel over that. Let us go back to the morning of February 24th, when you discovered Sir Philip’s body—”
“He was dead when I saw him,” she said, “and I know nothing of—”
“You went through your aunt’s sitting-room,” I continued, as if I had not heard her, “and you noticed the hatpin which Miss Clevedon had left there the previous night. You recognised it and picked it up.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she muttered sullenly.
“It was in your hand when you entered the study and saw Sir Philip asleep on the—”
“He was dead, I tell you dead!” she cried shrilly.
“Well, perhaps—you say so, anyway. You went up to the couch and plunged the hatpin into his body in such a way that had he been asleep, it would have killed him.”
“He was dead,” she repeated.
“Before you stabbed him with the hatpin?” I inquired softly.
“I didn’t—I know nothing of the hatpin—I don’t know what you mean.”
The words came out a little incoherently. Even her finely balanced nerves were becoming a little jangled. For the moment I thought she was on the verge of collapse. But she pulled herself together again, and sat facing me rigidly alert.
“Then you looked round you. On a little table by Sir Philip’s side was a small bottle. Your first thought was that Sir Philip had poisoned himself—”
“I knew he had,” she interrupted.
“You mean it was suicide?”
“Of course it was suicide.”
“Then why did you stab him?”
“I did not.”
“And more important still”—I slowed down very perceptibly here—“why did you carry away the bottle and hide it in a small opening in the rock wall of the passage beneath the ruined wing?”
Her face whitened a little, but she did not lose her self-control, and sat resolutely facing me.
“You wanted the world to believe that Sir Philip Clevedon had been stabbed to death. Why?”
She faced me unflinchingly—determined, as I could see, not to utter a word.
“Why did you want the world to believe that Sir Philip Clevedon had been stabbed to death?”
She did not move so much as an eyelid.
“Was it in order that suspicion might be cast on Miss Kitty, who had been wearing that hatpin?”
She rose from her seat and passed her left hand with a gesture of utter weariness across her forehead.
“Send for your policeman,” she said, “and let me be arrested. You have no right to torture me. I would sooner go to prison. I would rather be hanged than listen to you any longer.”
I stood up, too, and going towards her, laid a hand on her arm.
“I have not willingly tortured you,” I said gently, “but I had to learn the truth.”
“I have denied everything,” she replied. “I admit nothing.”
“You have denied everything—and admitted everything,” I said.
“What do you mean by that?” she demanded.
“Tell me,” I said softly, “what made you think that Ronald Thoyne had killed Clevedon? You were quite wrong, you know.”
“Wrong?”
“Yes, he had nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all—in the way you mean.”
“But—”
“I know what I am saying—nothing at all.”
“Is that—?”
“It is the absolute truth.”
There came an interruption in the form of a low knocking at the door, followed by the entry of Detective Pepster.
“Well?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said grimly, “both well and bad. I was too late.”
He handed me a document he had been carrying in his hand.
“Grainger’s confession,” he said.
“Grainger!” Nora Lepley cried, springing forward as if with intent to seize the paper. “What do you mean by that? And where is Mr. Grainger?”
“Dead,” Pepster returned laconically. “A dose of the medicine he gave Clevedon. Dead in his own office, and with this paper left on the table.”
“Sit down,” I said, turning to Nora Lepley, “and listen. This will interest you.”
I read aloud what Grainger had written, and after that we had no difficulty in persuading the girl to talk.
CHAPTER XXVII
WHO KILLED PHILIP CLEVEDON
It has fallen to my lot to outline the solution of a good many mysteries, but never did I have a more appreciative or attentive or admiring audience than on this particular occasion. To them I was a wonder-worker, who had straightened out what looked like a hopeless tangle. I made no attempt to undeceive them. It wasn’t worth while, and it would have taken too long. But the reader who has followed my detailed recital will know how I really blundered through, how often I pursued false clues, the many side-issues that misled me, and the patient, methodical and, on the whole, not very exciting linking together of ascertained facts, which eventually conducted me to the goal I sought. That is how all detective work that is worth anything is done. The result may seen brilliant taken by itself, but in detail it is a curious mixture of luck and chance, with some amount of common sense, and a little of what is generally labelled intuition.
“And have you really discovered who killed Clevedon?” Thoyne asked.
“Yes,” I returned equably, “you did.”
“I expected that,” Thoyne rejoined, with a wry smile. “I think you have suspected me all along. I seem to have been the villain of the piece all through.”
“No,” I replied, “you do me an injustice. You were only one among half a dozen. Let me tell you the story. It is very simple, and a few words will encompass it. Grainger hated you because of his daughter, and when you ordered that sleeping mixture from him he filled the phial with prussic acid. His intention was to kill you. That Clevedon was his victim was only an accident. Clevedon called on you earlier on the night on which he died, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but I don’t know how you discovered it. I let Clevedon in myself, and not a soul saw us.”
“But it is a fact.”
“Oh yes, quite. He came to see me to tell me he had resigned any pretensions to marry”—he paused and glanced a little waveringly at Kitty Clevedon—“to the young lady we both wanted. We were friendly enough in a way.”
“You did not disclose this visit at the inquest?”
“No, the question was never asked, and I kept quiet, for fear I might say too much. I don’t regret it,” he added fiercely.
“It has worked out all right,” I replied, “though it gave me a lot of extra trouble and delayed my solution. However, you conducted your visitor to the door and stood for a few minutes in the porch, chatting to him. You were to be relatives by marriage, and had no particular desire to quarrel. You were willing to forget that he had been Calcott—”
“Calcott!” cried old Lady Clevedon, “who’s he?”
“A long story,” I returned smilingly. “Thoyne will tell you all about it some day. It has no bearing on this case. But in the course of conversation”—I had turned to Thoyne again—“he told you that he suffered from sleeplessness, to which you replied that you had occasionally done so since you had been wounded and shell-shocked in the war, but that you had found a very useful medicine, which you advised him to try. You had got a new bottle untouched, and you offered to make him a present of it.”
“Quite right.”
“Then there you have the story—that is how Sir Philip Clevedon died. He took the poison Grainger had intended for you.”
“What an escape!” Thoyne muttered, a little hoarsely.
“And the hatpin?” old Lady Clevedon queried sharply. “Was that an accident, also?”
“Hardly,” I replied, “but that is another story, and a very curious one, too.”
I had reached the most difficult part of my explanation. I had to render it intelligible, without betraying Nora Lepley’s secret, which I had surprised. To put it as briefly as possible, she had thrust the hatpin through the heart of the dead man in the hope of diverting suspicion from Ronald Thoyne, whom she believed to be responsible for Sir Philip Clevedon’s death.
“As I had passed through my aunt’s sitting-room,” she had told me, “I saw the hatpin lying there on the mantelpiece, and I picked it up, intending to return it to Miss Kitty. It was in my hand when I entered Sir Philip’s study and found him dead. I knew he had been poisoned, because there was prussic acid in the bottle on the table.”
She explained to me when I questioned her that she had spent much time with her friend, Mary Grainger, in the shop, and was familiar with all sorts of drugs.
“On the floor,” she went on, “was a white paper, and when I picked it up I found on it some pencil marks I had made myself. I had been into Midlington and had called on Mr. Grainger, who asked me if I would deliver a packet at Mr. Thoyne’s house, as he had no other means of sending it. Of course, I said I would. At the station I looked up some trains on the time-table, and having no other paper with me, I noted them in pencil on the back of the little packet Mr. Grainger had given me.”
So was explained the mysterious figures on the paper I had found in Nora Lepley’s curious hiding-place. I regarded her thoughtfully for a moment or two.
“You had delivered that packet at Mr. Thoyne’s house?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You thought Mr. Thoyne had passed it on to Sir Philip.”
“That’s what I thought—yes.”
“That he had procured some prussic acid from Mr. Grainger, so that he might murder Sir Philip?”
“Yes—and then it occurred to me—that if Sir Philip—that perhaps they might think he had been stabbed if—if the hatpin was found.”
“You did it to protect Thoyne?”
That she had been in love with Thoyne seemed evident; that she would never confess as much was equally obvious; and I had no desire to force her confidence. The fact was sufficient for me; the motive I was content to leave in doubt, or at least, unexpressed. That was the difficulty I had in telling my story to my little audience. I was determined they should not draw the inference I had found inevitable.
“The story of the hatpin,” I said, “is very curious, but quite simple. Nora Lepley, when she found Sir Philip dead, recognised the bottle as one she had found in Grainger’s shop. She had known Mr. Grainger for many years, and had been his daughter’s bosom friend. She jumped to the conclusion that Grainger had poisoned Sir Philip, and it was in the hope of diverting suspicion from him that she took away and hid the bottle and—er—used the hatpin. There is the whole story.”
“But suppose somebody had been involved—Kitty, for example, or Ronald—would she have spoken?” the younger Lady Clevedon demanded.
“Undoubtedly,” I replied.
But I spoke without knowledge, because that was a question I had carefully refrained from putting to Nora herself. My own impression was that she would cheerfully have seen the whole Clevedon family hanging in company if that would have secured Ronald Thoyne’s immunity. But I did not tell them that.