by Q. Patrick
“Just what do you mean?” I asked, completely at sea.
She came up to me and pressed her heavy face close to mine.
“I sent you that letter,” she said. “And I’d do it again. Here you are, acting the little detective—pretending you’re just too worked up because your boy-friend’s in danger. But, all the same, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you didn’t know more about it than any of us—you and that idiot, Mark Baines!”
She drew away, sending a cloud of blue smoke up into the air.
“So you wrote the anonymous letter,” I exclaimed. “Did you send the one to Alstone as well?”
“Alstone? Which Alstone?” Her mouth hung open in surprise. “I didn’t even know there was one.”
There was a conviction in her voice which made me inclined to believe her.
“Well, that’s all,” I said, rising. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, Mrs. Tailford-Jones. But it was absolutely necessary. If you should remember anything else, I wish you’d get in touch with me immediately. Bracegirdle’s serving the warrant tonight.”
She followed me to the door, and I felt her soft hand on my sleeve.
“Dr. Swanson!” Her throat was working convulsively. “You must tell me what they’ve got against Toni. Don’t you see? I might be able to help.”
I paused, my fingers on the knob.
“Help? How could you help?”
“I don’t know, but there’s just a chance …” Suddenly she seemed to have become overwhelmed with grief. “I’ll do anything to save him. I swear I will. All you’ve got to do is to tell me!”
“All right.”
I returned to my chair and told her some of the less damning evidence against Toni. She listened until I started to speak of his suspicious night-outings and of his complete lack of alibis for the times at which Polly and Jo Baines met their deaths. Then she gave a triumphant laugh and sprang to her feet.
“If that’s all they’ve got against him,” she exclaimed, with a strange glint in her eye, “I can tell you where he was on the night Polly Baines disappeared, and on the night her father was murdered. He was with me!”
I looked at her in complete amazement.
“You?” I repeated weakly.
“Yes. You never guessed that, did you? You never guessed that all the time you were throwing him on the neck of that Middleton girl he. was coming out to see me.” She stood there a few moments, drawn to her full height. Then she collapsed. Her head drooped and her hands fell limply at her sides. “I think I’ll go upstairs and lie down,” she said softly. “You can find your own way out.”
Pulling the scarlet peignoir around her, she crossed to the door. Despite my partial scepticism, I could not help feeling a little sorry for her. She looked like a dejected cardinal bird that had been caught in the rain.
As I hurried down the drive, my mind was full of Roberta’s sensational confession, which, if true, would help to prove Toni’s innocence with regard to the earlier crimes. But, despite a strong desire, I found it difficult to believe her. She was an hysterical, theatrical woman whose life, lacking inherent reality, was built up around just such dramatics as this. It was possible that she really had worked herself up into an infatuation for Toni. It was possible, too, that he had had some sort of affair with her, though surely—if he cared for Valerie as I believed he did—this must have been a thing of the past. Still, there were several puzzling facts which such a relationship might explain. On the night we had surprised Mrs. Tailford-Jones’ rendezvous with Franklin, Toni had acted in a peculiar fashion. I remembered wondering vaguely at the time whether there had not been something between them. He had seemed irritated and almost jealous to find Roberta alone with another man. “Our local Messalina!” I recalled the words he had spoken with such unwarranted venom.
Still slightly dazed by my recent encounter, I abandoned these fruitless speculations and busied myself with the more concrete of her statements. At least I had fathomed the reason for her dislike of me. She had, apparently, suspected me of acting the over-zealous chaperon to my room-mate. In the light of this, I was reasonably convinced that my anonymous letter had come from her. The style and content were both so obviously Robertian. As for her relationship with Franklin, “the spineless jelly-fish,” that could easily be checked. Gerald’s father, I imagined, was not the type to stand up under cross-examination. The next step in my curious pilgrimage was clear. Turning down the lane, I made toward the Alstones’ house.
Hall, the butler, ushered me into the library, and in a few seconds, Franklin came bustling through the doorway.
“You wish to speak to my father, Dr. Swanson?” he murmured, slipping a cold hand into mine. “He is down in the stables—”
“No, Mr. Alstone,” I interrupted, “I’ve come to visit you. There’s a little matter which I want you to clear up for me.”
Franklin gave me a wintry smile.
“Oh, yes, yes. Won’t you sit down?”
His pale eyes played on mine nervously, then flicked away, glancing along the crowded bookshelves to the majestic picture of Seymour Alstone in full hunting costume.
“I want you to confirm some information,” I continued, “which I have just got from one of our neighbors. The matter itself is trivial and, at the same time, rather delicate, but it helps to explain away several things that have been bothering me. I came to you myself, because I have no desire to make this a matter for the police, and I am particularly anxious to prevent innocent people from being accused of something they did not do.”
Franklin coughed and looked down at the Carpet.
“You see,” I went on, scrutinizing his face closely, “I’ve just been talking to Mrs. Tailford-Jones.”
Franklin’s embarrassment at the mention of Roberta’s name was so apparent that it seemed hardly necessary to continue my inquisition.
“It refers,” I went on, “to a certain interview you had with her in the wood by the disused road—an interview which I happen to have overheard.”
I noticed that the bald dome of his head had turned an unwholesome pink.
“I don’t know what Mrs. Tailford-Jones has been telling you,” he said suddenly, “but I must ask you to hear what I have to say before you form any opinion of my actions. It was not through meanness on my part that I decided to stop payment—”
“Wait a moment, Mr. Alstone,” I broke in, realizing immediately that he supposed Roberta to have been more frank with me than in fact she had. “Let’s have this from the beginning. Of course, I understand that it’s a personal matter, and one that you have a perfect right to keep from me.”
Franklin looked at me with a strange expression in his eyes. His mouth, I noticed, was trembling.
“No, Dr. Swanson, now that she has brought the matter up herself, it will give me great pleasure to be able to confide in someone. I do not trust that woman. I have no wish that you should be left only with her version of the incidents.”
“The meeting was made by appointment, of course?” I said, trying to give the impression that I was in full information of the facts.
“By appointment, yes.” Franklin threw a look over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “Of course, Dr. Swanson, you will appreciate that all this is in strict confidence. It is a highly personal matter, and I should hate to think that my father—well, he is a man of very strong prejudices. It is very difficult to get him to see things in, shall we say, an unbiased fashion?”
I assured him that whatever he told me would go no farther.
“Good, good.” Franklin was very excited. “Well, you doubtless know of the unhappy circumstances of my marriage. For many years I have been without the pleasures of—er—feminine society. I think that it was this, coupled with the knowledge that she, too, suffered in a similar manner, that first attracted me to Mrs. Tailford-Jones. It never was a friendship of mutual respect or taste. At the time I never felt really at ease with myself, but against my better feelings I gradually became involved in an a
ffair from which it was more and more difficult to extricate myself.”
He broke off, and his expression was a strange mixture of fear and hatred.
“Colonel Tailford-Jones, as you know,” he went on, “has very little to live on except his army pension. Mrs. Tailford-Jones has no money of her own, either. At the—er—crest of our friendship, it seemed only just to me that I should allow her a reasonable sum with which to buy the little things that mean so much to the feminine mind.”
So that explained the local mystery of Roberta’s mink coats and diamond bracelets, I thought with inward amusement. It also explained her reticence about telling me what had actually occurred in the car that night.
“You didn’t talk about the marmoset during your meeting with Roberta?” I asked.
“Why—yes, possibly. She was one of the small presents that I gave to Mrs. Tailford-Jones.”
He paused, as though expecting some sort of indication that I understood and appreciated his action.
“Naturally,” I murmured. “And very generous!”
“Generous I have been with her,” he said, with the nearest approach to fierceness I had ever seen in him. “Generous in the extreme. But there comes a time when even I must refuse to finance a woman who obviously looks upon me as nothing more than a convenient source of income—something from which she can obtain the pretty things she uses to attract other men.”
He came quite close to me and stared into my face. His whole body was shaking with fury.
“As long as she made some pretence of fidelity, I was amenable,” he went on. “But there came a time—well, I need not embarrass you by proceeding further.”
He referred, apparently, to my room-mate’s supposed affair with Roberta.
“So you told her,” I asked, “that you could no longer give her money?”
“I did!”
Franklin’s lips twisted into a smile of remembered pleasure.
“And she turned nasty?”
“There’s more to it than that—” he began, but was interrupted by the opening of the door.
He started and turned guiltily toward the intruder.
“Mrs. Tailford-Jones is on the wire, Mr. Franklin.”
One of the maids was standing on the threshold. I realized instantly that Roberta had decided to get together with Franklin on my visit. Luckily for me, she had left it too late.
Franklin was glancing at me furtively. “Tell her I am engaged, please, Mary. I cannot be disturbed.”
The maid nodded and withdrew.
“It was she who made that appointment,” continued Franklin breathlessly, as soon as the door was firmly shut. “I expect she tried to make you think it was I. When her husband had gone off, she called me, and at her suggestion, I picked her up in one of father’s cars and drove to the wood.”
“And there the scene took place.”
“Exactly. I told her precisely what I thought of her. I told her that it was useless to expect anything more from me!”
“And her reaction?”
Franklin bowed his head. “She is not the sort of person from whom one can expect consideration,” he said softly. “She demanded a lump sum of money, threatening me with exposure if I refused to give it to her.”
“Exposure?”
“As you know, Dr. Swanson, my father—” His hands flopped loosely to his sides.
“You gave in?”
“What else could I do? I arranged to meet her and hand over the money.”
“That was to be in the carpenter’s shop?”
He nodded.
“On the night the barn burned down?”
Franklin started as though I had accused him of complicity in that affair.
“Yes, yes. I believe that was the night.”
Now the story was told, the strange, almost demoniacal force that seemed to have taken possession of him, slipped away. He sank down in a chair and blew his nose.
“I must thank you, Mr. Alstone,” I murmured, “for being so frank. You can rest assured that your confidences are safe with me. You’ve been extremely useful, and while I know I have no authority in all this, I would be grateful if you would answer a few more questions.”
He waved the handkerchief in assent, but still did not look up.
“During the time you were in the wood,” I asked, “did you, by any chance, hear a car?”
Franklin seemed to be thinking for a moment, his eyes shifting uneasily.
“Why, yes,” he said suddenly, “I think I do remember hearing one.”
I pricked up my ears.
“About what time?”
“Let me see now.” He seemed eager to help. “I should say offhand that it was sometime about midnight.”
“Fine!” I exclaimed. “You didn’t see who was in it?”
He smiled faintly. “I’m afraid I was rather—upset at the time. I did not pay much attention. I doubt if I even saw the vehicle. You know, the trees there are particularly dense.”
“Quite. You didn’t hear any other sound? The barking of a dog, for example?”
“No. Of that I am sure.”
“See any lights?”
He shook his head. “I just heard the car driving by. That is all.”
I felt my despondency return. This was no new information after all. Merely corroboration of what Toni and I myself had seen. It did raise once more the complication of someone driving about the countryside in an unlighted car—someone who was not Roberta or Franklin. But there was nothing in it to prove that I had in fact heard that cry. Nothing to help in my attempt to disprove Bracegirdle’s accusations.
A few minutes later I took my departure, leaving Franklin standing thin and pathetic before the great oil-painting of the father he so much feared. I thought of the expression I had seen on his face during his diatribe against Roberta, and one thing made itself clear in my mind. Seymour Alstone was not the only person that this strange thwarted individual feared—and hated.
Chapter XIV
By the time I reached home, it was almost noon. I had spent the best part of the morning tracking down what had turned out to be a mare’s nest—a mare’s nest, incidentally, that left a decidedly unpleasant smell in my nostrils. I had learned that Franklin had been entangled in Roberta’s spiderweb; that she had been indulging in a very neat piece of blackmail and that, in the bargain, she professed to be in love with my room-mate. But, with all this startling information, I was no nearer any sort of solution to the mystery. If Toni really had been paying those nocturnal visits to Roberta, a definite proof of it would help considerably in absolving him from complicity in the first two killings. It would not, however, explain away the much more damning evidence against him—the bloodstained fingerprints, the search for the revolver, and the so-far undetected clue of the piece of rope. I found myself regretting my dramatic plea to Bracegirdle. To produce an empty bag at the end of the day would be far more harmful than never to have suggested the hunt.
Feeling extremely inadequate, I decided to continue with my policy of annoying the neighbors. Confessions had simply tumbled out of Roberta and Franklin. Perhaps I would strike some more profitable vein in the others. After all, one fact was certain. Somebody must know something.
Before embarking upon my several wild-goose chases, however, I was resolved to call Valerie and hear the worst about the piece of rope. I had been shirking the issue all the morning, but now I felt that anything would be preferable to the vague uneasiness which the presence of this unexplained clue stirred in my mind.
Mrs. Middleton answered the ’phone in one of her pessimistic moods. Valerie was in her room. No, she was not sick; just thoroughly overwrought. No, she could not call her to the ’phone. She was nervous enough as it was, without having to be bothered by anything fresh. No, she didn’t know what I wanted to say but she was sure it was something worrying.
I interrupted her, pleading to be granted a short talk with 127 her daughter. It was very important. I would not keep her mo
re than a few seconds.
Grudgingly, Mrs. Middleton conceded, stating that she would put Valerie on the upstairs ’phone. Then, as an afterthought, she announced her intention of listening in on our conversation.
I was forced to accept this very second best.
Valerie’s voice sounded extremely tired. There was also a certain aloofness in her tone, the significance of which I could not appreciate. The first few moments I spent in idle chatter for the benefit of Mrs. Middleton. Then I came to the point as directly as I dared.
“Listen, Valerie, you know that thing you gave me yesterday? I want you to tell me where you found it.”
“Where I found it?” She seemed surprised. “Why, is there any need?”
My heart sank as I heard her. The piece of rope had now inevitably to be placed on the debit side of Toni’s account.
“I see what you mean,” I continued despondently. “I just thought you might have some other explanation.”
“And I was hoping you had, Doug. Listen, you’ve got to tell me what happened. You must tell me about everything. Haven’t I given you proof that you can trust me?”
I pictured Mrs. Middleton’s ear clamped to the receiver and replied with a sigh.
“I can’t say anything now, except that the abscess is coming to a head—and that I’m expecting it to burst tonight at ten o’clock. If we can’t do anything before then, I’m afraid the patient will be in a pretty bad way. If you can think of a cure, however desperate, come round at ten. God knows we need it.”
With admirable astuteness, Valerie got on to my meaning.
“Very well, Doug. Ten o’clock? I’ll be there to see you through, whatever Mother says.”
At this point Mrs. Middleton broke in.
“You go back and lie down, Valerie. You’ve done quite enough talking.”
I was just about to hang up the receiver, when I realized that Mrs. Middleton, as well as anyone, would do for my next cross-examination.
“Oh, could you spare me a few minutes,” I said hurriedly, “if I came right round?”
