“Because he’d seen me come out of the window just before, and I didn’t want to be mixed up in it more than I could help.”
“He saw you come out through the window twice.”
“Yes, but—”
“Then the statement you have already made is untrue?”
“Yes, but—”
“Should you like an opportunity of amending that statement? Suppose you call at the police station at seven this evening? That’ll be a quiet time.”
He did not look for a reply, and Gerard Denton understood that it was an order rather than an invitation. The two officers turned to go.
The Superintendent was inwardly rather surprised at the respite which this arrangement gave. “You feel sure he’ll come?” he asked, as they went down the drive.
Inspector Pinkey was in a genial mood. He had some reason for that, having demonstrated his ability to the rural mind. He gave a ready explanation.
“Yes, he’ll come sure enough. It’s that or bolt. And if he bolts now, it’s just like hanging himself. He’ll spend the time making up some lie or other that’ll do the job in another way.”
“He’ll try to get hold of the boy.”
“Yes, but he won’t succeed. That’s partly why I put him off till evening. We’ll take the boy back with us now, and have his statement first. We needn’t let him leave till Mr. Gerard’s walked in. It’s another matter when he’ll walk out, and where to.”
The boy was still at work on the cabbage planting.
“Tommy,” said Inspector Pinkey, “how long was it after the shot was fired that Mr. Gerard came out of that window? I mean the first time he came out.”
There was a pause before the reply came. The boy seemed confused or possibly afraid, lest he might increase the depth of the pit into which he had fallen already. His eyes seemed to dodge those of the Inspector, to look past or beyond him. At last he said: “It wasn’t after, it was before.”
As he said this, Inspector Trackfield looked round, following the direction of the boy’s glance. Gerard Denton stood a few yards behind them.
Whether it was that they had been absorbed in their own conversation, or that he had followed on slippered feet, or that he had trodden the grassy edging of the drive, or a combination of these circumstances, the fact remained that the vital question had been asked and answered with the boy under his own eye.
“Mr. Denton, you’ve no right…,” Inspector Pinkey began angrily, and then checked himself. It was seldom, indeed, that he lost his self-control in such ways.
“I suppose I can walk in my own garden?”
The Inspector did not answer. He said to the boy: “You’d better put that trowel down and come with us.”
CHAPTER XVII.
The two officers walked back to the station with Tommy between them, to the excitement and pleasure of the inhabitants of Beacon’s Cross, who watched their transit. Those who had a near view could observe for the first time that his countenance, on which the usual grin appeared to have been permanently replaced by an expression of sullen stubbornness, was of a distinctly criminal type. During the afternoon the rumour that he had done no more than take a handful of one-pound notes from Lady Denton’s handbag fought in uncertain battle against that which saw him as the murderer of his employer, swiftly and callously emptying his pockets (probably of notes already marked for his undoing), while his victim lay in the agonies of approaching death.
The police station was in sight, but not reached, when Tommy’s captors were obliged to turn to repel the attack of a breathless and indignant mother, who had left her washing board in haste, on a jeering and somewhat inaccurate statement being shouted at her by some boys who ran past her door to the scene of drama, that Potty Briggs was a-running her Tommy in.
Mr. Charles Briggs (opprobriously known as Potty, owing to certain alleged eccentricities of conduct which we must not turn aside to observe) was a local constable. He lived next door to Tommy’s house, and familiarity had bred so much contempt in the mind of the angry matron that, had Tommy actually been in his beefy hands, the High Street of Beacon’s Cross might have witnessed an assault which would not have been forgotten till the next war, or probably beyond that.
As it was, her charge slackened, and her wrathful countenance became somewhat abashed, as she saw that she was confronted by two of the superior officers of the law. With a swift change of direction, she trained her guns upon the defenceless culprit whom she had been intent to rescue a moment earlier, demanding to know what extremity of evil conduct had brought that ignominy upon the name he bore.
It is improbable that she would have been satisfied by Tommy’s sulky assurance that he hadn’t done naught that he knowed, but Superintendent Trackfield took the situation firmly in hand. Treading, as it were, on his own quarter deck, in the High Street of the town he ruled, he recognized that this was an occasion on which his own authority must be asserted, and even Chief Inspector Pinkey must stand aside.
“Now, Mother,” he said, with a firm though kindly grip on a buxom arm, “you know you mustn’t make a scene here. I’ve no doubt Tommy’s a good lad, and good lads don’t come to any harm where he’s going now. You go back and get some tea ready for him for five o’clock, and he’ll tell you all about it when he gets home.”
She withdrew reluctantly, having done nothing to lighten the gloom of her son’s mind, to whose previous troubles was now added a sound conviction that there would be something quite different from tea in his mother’s kitchen, when he had concluded a confession which he now saw that he was inevitably destined to make. The police station, which had seemed so dreadful a destination before, now presented itself to his imagination as a harbour of intervening peace.
“I don’t know,” Inspector Pinkey said, when he had been handed over to the temporary custody of Potty Briggs, and the two officers were alone together, “about letting him go home by five o’clock. I thought of keeping him till we’d got Gerard Denton here.”
“I shouldn’t say that it matters, when we’ve got his new statement signed. If Denton were foolish enough to try to see him before he comes here, he’d just give himself away by trying it on.”
Inspector Pinkey considered that view of the matter, and allowed its force. He was in a mood at once generous, complacent, and energetic. He determined to attack the yielding problem again from another side by a second interview with Mr. Redwin before the time should come to interrogate Gerard Denton with the causes of his inopportune liberality. He hoped to obtain further facts that would enable him to frame his questions in the right way.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that you’ll need any help here this afternoon. You’ll turn Tommy inside out quicker than I should. You’re better up in the breed. I think I’ll stroll over and look at Mr. Redwin again.” The Superintendent accepted this as a gesture generously meant, though it contained an implication which was no less distasteful because he was not sure that it was entirely unmerited. He recognized that it was owing to no effort of his that Tommy was under detention now. He had no doubt that the resources which he controlled would be equal to abstracting the truth from his reluctant lips.
Inspector Pinkey took the road to the Station Inn, from which he returned at about six p.m., intending to have a chat with the Superintendent upon his own experiences before it should be time for Gerard Denton to call. But when he observed, as he entered, that Tommy’s mother sat, massive and frowning, on a bench in the charge room, he concluded correctly that the examination had not proceeded smoothly to its expected end, and that Tommy had not left in time to be home to tea. He must put his afternoon’s experiences aside for the moment, for the consideration of the more immediate problem.
“I’ve kept him,” Trackfield explained, “not that I think it’s going to be any good, but because I thought you might like to have a try at him yourself. Anyway, it’s your case now, and it’s for you to decide whether we’re to ask him to sign this.”
As he spoke, he
passed over a foolscap sheet on which Tommy’s present statement had been transformed into the official jargon considered necessary for such documents.
Inspector Pinkey, glancing down it with practised eyes, observed that it was a free and voluntary statement on the part of the gardener’s boy, in which he withdrew the one that he had previously made when examined on the day following the tragedy. He admitted that he had withheld part of the truth in accordance with a promise made to Mr. Gerard Denton, in return for which he had received a one-pound note from that gentleman. He now said that he had seen Mr. Denton come out of Sir Daniel’s study not only after, as had been asserted previously, but also immediately before the shot was fired.
“And that,” the Inspector said, “is no good to us.”
“Well, he won’t budge. We can’t tell him that he’s got to say that he saw Denton come out of the study window immediately after the shot was fired, whether he likes it or not, though I’ve no doubt that’s what happened. He might turn round in the witness box, or the other side might suggest we’d got his evidence in the wrong way. I’ve gone as far as I dared, and everyone on the staff has had a try, but he just sits sullenly there and says that’s what he saw.”
“I said it’s no good to us,” Inspector Pinkey repeated, “against Denton, I meant. But it’s worse than that. It means, if he withdrew it later, he’d be no use at all. His value as a witness for anything’d be about gone.”
“It was Denton getting behind us there on the drive. He daren’t tell the truth, with him looking on, and now he thinks it’s best not to alter again.”
“Yes,” the Inspector agreed, with a frankness that took at least a share of the blame, though an impartial judgment might have set down a somewhat larger percentage to his account. “We were both mugs about that, if you ask me.”
“Would you like to try him yourself?”
“Yes, I’ll do that. But it doesn’t sound as though it’s going to be any good.”
He spoke with a well-founded pessimism, for when, after dismissing his reluctant mother with an assurance that her son would be with her shortly after seven, but certainly not before, he settled down to Tommy’s interrogation, he was met with a monotonous repetition of the statement which had been reduced to writing already.
There was one moment, however, when the long-badgered youth appeared to hesitate upon the verge of supplying the varied edition which his captors were so plainly anxious to have. But it appeared that, even at the point of surrender, he recalled something which hardened him to a continuance of his previous attitude, leaving the Inspector in some doubt of whether he had inclined toward a belated candour, or had been tempted to secure his immediate popularity by substituting whatever he felt they would like him to say for an actual memory.
Inspector Pinkey had no wish to fake evidence. His aim was to get at the truth in such a form as could be legally put forward, and he knew that it might often be reached by such patient persuasions as were being adopted now. Where there is a strong but legally unprovable presumption of what that truth may be, it is easy to go too far on persuasion’s path.
He recognized that he was in danger of that excess, and he abandoned a useless effort, which he knew that some would say should have been done much earlier.
He left the boy with an instruction that he could be released as soon as Mr. Denton had been shown into the Superintendent’s office, to which he now returned.
“The boy,” he said, with some irritation, “is no use to us, except that he can’t deny that Gerard Denton bribed him, whatever for, and that’s the kind of fact that takes a lot of explaining away. I don’t think we’ll get him to sign that statement. It’s no use to us, unless we decide that Denton comes clear, and then it seems to tie Lady Denton up in the same knot. If we let him sign it, it might be hard to keep it out of court, even if we’d proved it was lies from end to end before we’d be going before the judge.
“We can get him to sign it later, if we have reason to think it’s true. That infernal sweep creeping up behind us as he did. I dare say the only trouble is that he’s afraid of losing his job.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
While the interrogation of the gardener’s boy was proceeding at the police station, with results of such doubtful utility to the patient bloodhounds of the law, a conversation was going on at Bywater Grange which those persistent gentlemen would have been glad to hear.
It took place in Lady Denton’s room, with Gerard walking distractedly from door to window, and his sister-in-law, who may have seen less reason to disturb her mind, more comfortably stretched on a couch which had been upholstered with the primary purpose of supplying an effective background for her own fair and intelligent head.
“You’ve brought it all on yourself,” she said, without over much sympathy in her tone, “and it’s no use fussing now. I told you at the time it was an absolutely crazy thing to have done, but it was half an hour too late then for sense to do any good.”
“How could I tell…?”
“You couldn’t. That was just it. When you’re not sure what to do, it’s mostly best to do nothing, and let other people make the mistakes.”
“And suppose I do nothing now?”
“Well, you might do worse. They can’t force you to go there, and when they bother you next, you can say that you thought it over, and decided to say nothing more.”
“But I’ve signed a statement that they know now isn’t right.”
“No, they don’t. It’s just Tommy’s word against yours. And he’s told one lie already.”
“Yes. And they know why.”
“That’s your own silliness, as it’s no use saying again. But I don’t see that you’ve got so much reason to fuss. You heard what Tommy said in the drive, and you’ll tell them the same tale, and what good will that be to them?”
“Yes, if they don’t get him to say something else.”
“Why should he? Don’t be a fool! And, if he did, he could change again, and what use would he be then?”
Gerard made no reply to this. He walked restlessly up and down, with an occasional “Damn the boy!” or other ejaculation of an unhelpful character. He glanced restlessly at the clock about once a minute, and it moved in the unemotional mechanical way that clocks will at the crises of life, until Lady Denton, who had been watching him in a very serious and considering manner, asked: “I suppose you’ve made up your mind to go?”
“Yes,” he said. “You ought to see that I’ve got to go.”
He knew in his heart that he would have to go, be it foolish or wise. He lacked the courage to stay away. But he had a better reason than that. He knew that Adelaide had been wrong when she had said that it was only Tommy’s word against his. Had he not admitted to the police, in those first agitated moments, that he had given Tommy the money to lie? And wasn’t that an admission that his own statement, having agreed with Tommy’s, must have been false? He couldn’t remember what he had said as clearly as he would have liked to do, but he knew he had admitted that, and he didn’t see now how he could have done any differently. He must have admitted some reason for giving Tommy the money. But it was no use telling Adelaide about that. She would only sneer at him again.
In any case, he knew that he would be bound to go. The same nervous anxiety to be aware of the worst would be a substitute for courage to take him there, as it had led him to follow the officers when they had questioned Tommy that afternoon.
“Well,” Lady Denton was saying, “if you’ve made up your mind to go, I’ll give you one piece of advice. If you want the trouble to end here, you’ll tell them the truth now.”
“Tell the truth?” he exclaimed, as though in utter surprise or bewilderment at this advice. He stared at her with astonished eyes.
“I mean, tell them about the row.”
“I don’t see the need for that. I don’t suppose Tommy heard.”
“Neither do I. Gerard, haven’t you got any sense at all? Isn’t it the reason why you g
ot frightened, and gave him the pound? They don’t know that you don’t think that Tommy heard everything that was said.”
After this, he walked up and down in more agitation than before. The advice seemed mad. And yet he wasn’t quite sure it was wrong. He had a great respect for Lady Denton’s ability, and he saw that she moved through the present trouble more serenely than he, though it had brought suspicion to both their doors. Was it because, if she did not exactly tell all the truth, she had practised a strict economy in the lies she used?
In any case, it would be the simplest way. Gerard Denton was well aware that there is less mental exertion required in supplying a truthful narrative than in sustaining a weak-founded lie. And even if you are telling something less than the whole—even something very much less—a leaven of fact gratuitously supplied, and especially fact which might seem adverse to himself, and could have been learnt from no other source…yes, Adelaide might be right, as she often was.
He glanced irresolutely at the clock again, and went to the cloakroom to prepare for the ordeal which his own folly had brought down on his most inadequate head.
CHAPTER XIX.
Inspector Trackfield looked at the clock.
“No,” he said, in answer to the question he had just heard. “I should say it’s about two minutes slow.”
The two officers sat in the police station reception room, awaiting the presence of Mr. Gerard Denton.
The hands of the clock pointed to seven-oh-five.
As Inspector Pinkey made no reply, he added: “I wonder whether we oughtn’t to have brought him in then, before we questioned the boy. We’d got enough on him to have held him for a few hours, if not more, while we thought it out. I did think of having a watch put round the house, but I didn’t want to interfere, and you’d gone off to the Station Inn.” The mention of that reminded him of the Inspector’s purpose of having a few more words with Mr. Redwin. “You might tell me how you got on…I suppose we’ve got to give him to the half-hour.”
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