Witness for the Defence

by A. E. W. Mason

  CHAPTER XI

  THRESK INTERVENES

  Thresk reached his hotel with some words ringing in his head which JaneRepton had spoken to him at Mrs. Carruthers' dinner-party:

  "You can get any single thing in life you want if you want it enough, butyou cannot control the price you will have to pay for it. That you willonly learn afterwards and gradually."

  He had got what he had wanted--the career of distinction, and he wonderedwhether he was to begin now to learn its price.

  He mounted to his sitting-room on the second floor, avoiding the loungeand the lift and using a small side staircase instead of the greatcentral one. He had passed no one on the way. In his room he looked uponthe mantelshelf and on the table. No visitor had called on him that day;no letter awaited him. For the first time since he had landed in India aday had passed without some resident leaving on him a card or a note ofinvitation. The newspapers gave him the reason. He was supposed to haveleft on the _Madras_ for England. To make sure he rang for his waiter; nomessage of any kind had come.

  "Shall I ask at the office?" the waiter asked.

  "By no means," answered Thresk, and he added: "I will have dinner servedup here to-night."

  There was just a possibility, he thought, that he might after all escapethis particular payment. He took from his pocket his unposted letter toStella Ballantyne. There was no longer any use for it and even itsexistence was now dangerous to Stella. For let it be discovered, howevershe might plead that she knew nothing of its contents, a motive for thedeath of Ballantyne might be inferred from it. It would be a falsemotive, but just the sort of motive which the man in the street wouldimmediately accept. Thresk burnt the letter carefully in a plate andpounded up each black flake of paper until nothing was left but ashes.Then for the moment his work was done. He had only to wait and he did notwait long. On the very next morning his newspaper informed him thatInspector Coulson of the Bombay Police had left for Chitipur.

  The Inspector was a young man devoted to his work, but he travelled nowupon a duty which he would gladly have handed to any other of hiscolleagues. He had met Stella Ballantyne in Bombay upon one of her rarevisits to Jane Repton. He had sat at the same dinner-table with her, andhe did not find it pleasant to reflect on the tragic destiny which shemust now fulfil. For the facts were fatal.

  At daybreak on the morning of the Friday a sentry on the outer edge ofthe camp at Jarwhal Junction had noticed something black lying upon theground in the open just outside the door of the Agent's big marquee. Heran across the ground and discovered Captain Ballantyne sprawling, facedownwards, in the smoking-suit which he had worn at dinner the nightbefore. The sentry shook him gently by the shoulder, but the limpness ofthe body frightened him. Then he noticed that there was blood upon theground, and calling loudly for help he ran to the guard-room tent. Hereturned with others of the native levies and they lifted Ballantyne up.He was dead and the body was cold. The levies carried him into the tentand opened his shirt. He had been shot through the heart. They thenroused Mrs. Ballantyne's ayah and bade her wake her mistress. The ayahwent into Mrs. Ballantyne's room and found her mistress sound asleep. Shewaked her up and told her what had happened. Stella Ballantyne said not aword. She got out of bed, and flinging on some clothes went into theouter tent, where the servants were standing about the body. StellaBallantyne went quite close to it and looked down upon the dead man'sface for a long time. She was pale, but there was no shrinking in herattitude--no apprehension in her eyes.

  "He has been killed," she said at length; "telegrams must be sent atonce: to Ajmere for a doctor, to Bombay, and to His Highness theMaharajah."

  Baram Singh salaamed.

  "It is as your Excellency wills," he said.

  "I will write them," said Stella quietly. And she sat down at her ownwriting-table there and then.

  The doctor from Ajmere arrived during the day, made an examination andtelegraphed a report to the Chief Commissioner at Ajmere. That reportcontained the three significant points which Repton had enumerated toThresk, but with some still more significant details. The bullet whichpierced Captain Ballantyne's heart had been fired from Mrs. Ballantyne'ssmall rook-rifle, and the exploded cartridge was still in the breech. Therifle was standing up against Mrs. Ballantyne's writing-table in a cornerof the tent, when the doctor from Ajmere discovered it. In the secondplace, although Ballantyne was found in the open, there was a patch ofblood upon the carpet within the tent and a trail of blood from that spotto the door. There could be no doubt that Ballantyne was killed inside.There was the third point to establish that theory. Neither the sentry onguard nor any one of the servants sleeping in the adjacent tents hadheard the crack of the rifle. It would not be loud in any case, but ifthe weapon had been fired in the open it would have been sufficientlysharp and clear to attract the attention of the men on guard. The heavydouble lining of the tent however was thick enough so to muffle anddeaden the sound that it would pass unnoticed.

  The report was considered at Ajmere and forwarded. It now broughtInspector Coluson of the Police up the railway from Bombay. He found Mrs.Ballantyne waiting for him at the Residency of Chitipur.

  "I must tell you who I am," he said awkwardly.

  "There is no need to," she answered, "I know."

  He then cautioned her in the usual way, and producing his pocket-bookasked her whether she wished to throw any light upon her husband's death.

  "No," she said. "I have nothing to say. I was asleep and in bed when myayah came into my room with the news of his death."

  "Yes," said the Inspector uncomfortably. That detail, next to thedragging of the body out of the tent, seemed to him the grimmest part ofthe whole tragedy.

  He shut up his book.

  "I am afraid it is all very unsatisfactory," he said. "I think we must goback to Bombay."

  "It is as your Excellency wills," said Stella in Hindustani, and theInspector was startled by the bad taste of the joke. He had not theknowledge of her life with Ballantyne, which alone would have given himthe key to understand her. But he was not a fool, and a second glance ather showed to him that she was not speaking in joke at all. He had animpression that she was so tired that she did not at the moment care whathappened to her at all. The fatigue would wear off, no doubt, when sherealised that she must fight for her life, but now she stood in front ofhim indifferent and docile--much as one of the native levies was wont tostand before her husband. The words which the levies used and thelanguage in which they spoke them rose naturally to her lips, as the onlywords and language suitable to the occasion.

  "You see, Mrs. Ballantyne," he said gently, "there is no reason tosuspect a single one of your servants or of your escort."

  "And there is reason to suspect me," she added, looking at him quietlyand steadily.

  The Inspector for his part looked away. He was a young man--no more thana year or two older than Stella Ballantyne herself. They both came fromthe same kind of stock. Her people and his people might have been friendsin some pleasant country village in one of the English counties. She waspretty, too, disconcertingly pretty, in spite of the dark circles underher eyes and the pallor of her face. There was a delicacy in her looksand in her dress which appealed to him for tenderness. The appeal was allthe stronger because it was only in that way and unconsciously that sheappealed. In her voice, in her bearing, in her eyes there was no request,no prayer.

  "I have been to the Palace," he said, "I have had an audience with theMaharajah."

  "Of course," she answered. "I shall put no difficulties in your way."

  He was standing in her own drawing-room, noticing with what skillcomfort had been combined with daintiness, and how she had followed theusual instinct of her kind in trying to create here in this room a pieceof England. Through the window he looked out upon a lawn which was beingwatered by a garden-sprinkler, and where a gardener was at work attendingto a bed of bright flowers. There, too, she had been making the usualpathetic attempt to convert a half-acre of this country of yell
ow desertinto a green garden of England. Coulson had not a shadow of doubt in hismind Stella Ballantyne would exchange this room with its restful coloursand its outlook on a green lawn for--at the best--many years of solitaryimprisonment in Poona Gaol. He shut up his book with a snap.

  "Will you be ready to go in an hour?" he asked roughly.

  "Yes," said she.

  "If I leave you unwatched during that hour you will promise to me thatyou will be ready to go in an hour?"

  Stella Ballantyne nodded her head.

  "I shall not kill myself now," she said, and he looked at her quickly,but she did not trouble to explain her words. She merely added: "I maytake some clothes, I suppose?"

  "Whatever you need," said the Inspector. And he took her down to Bombay.

  She was formally charged next morning before the stipendiary for themurder of her husband and remanded for a week.

  She was remanded at eleven o'clock in the morning, and five minutes laterthe news was ticked off on the tape at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Withinanother five minutes the news was brought upstairs to Thresk. He had beenfortunate. He was in a huge hotel, where people flit through its roomsfor a day and are gone the next, and no one is concerned with the doingsof his neighbour, a place of arrival and departure like the platform of agreat railway station. There was no place in all Bombay where Threskcould so easily pass unnoticed. And he had passed unnoticed. A singleinquiry at the office, it is true, would have revealed his presence, butno one had inquired, since by this time he should be nearing Aden. He hadkept to his rooms during the day and had only taken the air after it wasdark. This was in the early stages of wireless telegraphy, and the_Madras_ had no installation. It might be that inquiries would be madefor him at Aden. He could only wait with Jane Repton's words ringing inhis ears: "You cannot control the price you will have to pay."

  Stella Ballantyne was brought up again in a week's time and the case thenproceeded from day to day. The character of Ballantyne was revealed, hisbrutalities, his cunning. Detail by detail he was built up into a grosssinister figure secret and violent which lived again in that crowdedcourt and turned the eyes of the spectators with a shiver of discomfortupon the young and quiet woman in the dock. And in that character theprosecution found the motive of the crime. Sympathy at times ran high forStella Ballantyne, but there were always the two grim details to keep itin check: she had been found asleep by her ayah, quietly restfully asleepwithin a few hours of Ballantyne's death; and she had, according to thetheory of the Crown, found in some violence of passion the strength todrag the dying man from the tent and to leave him to gasp out his lifeunder the stars.

  Thresk watched the case from his rooms at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Every factwhich was calculated to arouse sympathy for her was also helping tocondemn her. No one doubted that she had shot Stephen Ballantyne. Hedeserved shooting--very well. But that did not give her the right to behis executioner. What was her defence to be? A sudden intolerableprovocation? How would that square with the dragging of his body acrossthe carpet to the door? There was the fatal insuperable act.

  Thresk read again and again the reports of the proceedings for a hint asto the line of the defence. He got it the day when Repton appeared in thewitness-box on a subpoena from the Crown to bear testimony to theviolence of Stephen Ballantyne. He had seen Stella with her wristbruised so that in public she could not remove her gloves.

  "What kind of bruises?" asked the counsel.

  "Such bruises as might be made by some one twisting her arms," heanswered, and then Mr. Travers, a young barrister who was enjoying hisfirst leap into the public eye, rose to cross-examine.

  Thresk read through that cross-examination and rose to his feet. "Youcannot control the price you will have to pay," he said to himself. Thatday, when Mrs. Ballantyne's solicitor returned to his office after therising of the Court, he found Thresk waiting for him.

  "I wish to give evidence for Mrs. Ballantyne," said Thresk--"evidencewhich will acquit her."

  He spoke with so much certainty that the solicitor was fairly startled.

  "And with evidence so positive in your possession it is only thisafternoon that you come here with it! Why?"

  Thresk was prepared for the question.

  "I have a great deal of work waiting for me in London," he returned. "Ihoped that it might not be necessary for me to appear at all. Now I seethat it is."

  The solicitor looked straight at Thresk.

  "I knew from Mrs. Repton that you dined with the Ballantynes that night,but she was sure that you knew nothing of the affair. You had left thetent before it happened."

  "That is true," answered Thresk.

  "Yet you have evidence which will acquit Mrs. Ballantyne?"

  "I think so."

  "How is it, then," the lawyer asked, "that we have heard nothing of thisevidence at all from Mrs. Ballantyne herself?"

  "Because she knows nothing of it," replied Thresk.

  The lawyer pointed to a chair. The two men sat down together in theoffice and it was long before they parted.

  Within an hour of Thresk's return from the solicitor's office anInspector of Police waited on him at his hotel and was instantly shownup.

  "We did not know until to-day," he said, "that you were still in Bombay,Mr. Thresk. We believed you to be on the Madras, which reached Marseillesearly this morning."

  "I missed it," replied Thresk. "Had you wanted me you could have inquiredat Port Said five days ago."

  "Five days ago we had no information."

  The native servants of Ballantyne had from the first shrouded themselvesin ignorance. They would answer what questions were put to them; theywould not go one inch beyond. The crime was an affair of the Sahibs andthe less they had to do with it the better, until at all events they weresure which way the wind was setting from Government House. Of their owninitiative they knew nothing. It was thus only by the discovery ofThresk's letter to Captain Ballantyne, which was found crumpled up in awaste-paper basket, that his presence that night in the tent wassuspected.

  "It is strange," the Inspector grumbled, "that you did not come to us ofyour own accord when you had missed your boat and tell us what you knew."

  "I don't think it is strange at all," answered Thresk, "for I am awitness for the defence. I shall give my evidence when the case for thedefence opens."

  The Inspector was disconcerted and went away. Thresk's policy had so farsucceeded. But he had taken a great risk and now that it was past herealised with an intense relief how serious the risk had been. If theInspector had called upon him before he had made known his presence toMrs. Ballantyne's solicitor and offered his evidence, his position wouldhave been difficult. He would have had to discover some other goodreason why he had lain quietly at his hotel during these last days. Butfortune had favoured him. He had to thank, above all, the secrecy of thenative servants.