The Mystery of the Skeleton Key

by Bernard Capes

  A. I fancy about that time.

  Q. And at the moment you heard there had been this murder committed, that conjecture, that association between your friend and the murdered girl came into your mind?

  A. It was wholly preposterous, of course. I dismissed the idea the moment it occurred to me.

  Q. You dismissed the idea of Mr Kennett’s having been involved with the girl?

  A. No, of his having committed the murder. (Sensation.)

  Q. But you still thought the entanglement possible?

  A. I thought it might account for his state.

  Q. Why did the first idea, associating Mr Kennett with the crime, occur to you? (Witness hesitating, the question was repeated.)

  A. (In a low voice) O! just because of something—nothing important—that had happened at the shoot—that, and the extraordinary state I had found him in.

  Q. Will you tell the Bench what was this unimportant something that happened at the shoot?

  A. (With emotion) It was nothing—probably my fancy—and he denied it utterly.

  Q. Now, Mr Bickerdike, if you please?

  A. I thought that in—in pulling his gun through a particular hedge that morning, he might have done it with less risk to himself, that was all.

  Q. You suspected him, in short, of wanting to kill himself under the guise of an accident?

  A. I swear he never admitted it. I swear he denied it.

  Q. And you accepted his denial so implicitly that you asked him to go home, leaving his gun with the keeper. Is that not so?

  A. Yes.

  Q. He refused?

  A. Yes, he did.

  Q. Did not much the same thing occur again, later in the afternoon?

  A. Nothing of the sort at all. Shortly before three he came to me, and said he was no good and was going home.

  Q. What did he mean by ‘no good’? No good in life?

  A. No good at shooting.

  Q. And again you asked him to leave his gun with you?

  A. No, I did not—not directly, at least.

  Q. Please explain what you mean by ‘not directly’?

  A. He may have understood what was in my mind. I can’t say. He just laughed, and called out that he wasn’t going to shoot himself, and wasn’t going to let me make an ass of him; and with that he marched off.

  Q. And that is all?

  A. All.

  Q. He didn’t, by chance, in saying ‘I’m not going to shoot myself’, lay any particular emphasis on the last word?

  A. Certainly not that I distinguished. The whole suggestion is too impossible to anyone who knows my friend.

  Q. Thank you, Mr Bickerdike. That will do.

  If witness had entered the box like an oppressed man, he left it like a beaten. His cheeks were flushed, his head bowed; it was observed that he purposely avoided looking his friend in the face as he passed him by on his way to the rear of the Court.

  The excitement was now extreme. All attention, in the midst of a profound stillness, was concentrated on a figure come more and more, with each adjustment of the legal spy-glass, into a definite focus. It was felt that the supreme moment was approaching; and, when the expected name was called, a sigh like that of a sleeper turning seemed to sound through the hall. The prisoner in the dock had already long been overlooked—forgotten. He had been put up, it seemed, as a mere medium for this deadlier manifestation, and his purpose served, had ceased to be of interest. He stood pallid with his hands on the rail before him, rolling his one mobile eye, the only apparently mystified man in Court.

  As Hugo entered the box, he was seen to be deadly pale, but he held his head high, and stood like a soldier, morally and physically upright, facing his court-martial. He folded his arms, and looked his inquisitor steadily in the eyes. Mr Fyler retorted with an expression of well-assured suavity. He was in no hurry. Having netted his fowl, he could afford to let him flutter awhile. He began by leading his witness, only more briefly, the way he had already conducted him at the Inquest, but with what new menace of pitfalls by the road! The discovery of the body; the incident of the gun (prejudiced now in the light of the possible moral to be drawn from witness’s hurry to get rid of it, and his loathing of the weapon); the marked agitation of his aspect when seen by the gardener; the interval in the house, with its suggestion of nervous collapse and desperate rallying to face the inevitable ordeal; that significant outburst of his at the Inquest, when he had exclaimed against an implication of guilt which had never been made; his admission of having bantered the deceased about an assignation—an admission fraught with suspicion of the scene of passion and recrimination which had perhaps more truthfully described their encounter—all these points were retraversed, but in a spirit ominously differing from that in which they had formerly been reviewed. And then at last, in a series of swift stabbing questions and hypotheses, issued the mortal moral of all this sinister exordium:

  Q. You chaffed the deceased, you say, sir, with being where she was for an assignation?

  A. Something of the sort.

  Q. Something of the sort may be nothing of the sort. I suggest that this so-called chaff is better described as a quarrel between you. Will you swear that that was not the case?

  A. No, I will not.

  Q. Then your statement was a fabrication?

  A. I accused her of being there to meet someone.

  Q. You accused her. I am your debtor for the word. Will you swear that she was not there to keep an assignation, and that assignation with yourself?

  A. I swear it most positively. Our meeting was quite accidental.

  Q. On your part?

  A. On my part.

  Q. But not on hers?

  A. I am not here to answer for that.

  Q. Pardon me; I think you are. I suggest that, expecting you to return by the Bishop’s Walk, she was waiting there to waylay you?

  A. She might have been, on the chance.

  Q. I suggest you knew that she was?

  A. I say I did not know.

  Q. Well, you took that way at least, and you met and quarrelled. I suggest that the person you accused her of being there to meet was yourself, and that the dispute between you turned upon the question of her thus importuning you? Is that so?

  A. (After a pause) Yes.

  Q. And I suggest further that the reason for her so importuning you lay in her condition, for which you were responsible?

  A. Yes. It is true. (Sensation.)

  Q. She entreated you, perhaps, to repair the wrong you had done her in the only way possible to an honourable man?

  A. (Witness seeming to stiffen, as if resolved to face the whole music at last) She had already urged that; she pressed to know, that was all, if I had made up my mind to marry her. I refused to give a definite answer just then, since my whole career was at stake; but I promised her one within twenty-four hours. I was very much bothered over the business, and I dare say a bit impatient with her. She may have upbraided me a little in return, but there was no actual quarrel between us. I went on after a few minutes, leaving her there by herself. And that is the whole truth.

  Q. We will judge of that. You say the meeting was none of your seeking?

  A. I do say it.

  Q. Now, please attend to me. You were on your way back, when you met deceased, from the shooting party which you had abandoned?

  A. Yes.

  Q. You have heard what the last witness stated as to a certain incident connected with that morning. Was his statement substantially true?

  A. I can’t deny it. It was a momentary mad impulse.

  Q. And, being forestalled, was replaced possibly by an alternative suggestion, pointing to another way out of your difficulties?

  A. I don’t know what you mean. It was just the culmination, as it were, of a desperate mood, and was regretted by me the next instant.

  Q. Was it because of your desperate mood that you refused to be parted from your gun when you finally left the shoot and returned home?

  A.
No; but because I declined to be made to look a fool.

  Q. I put it to you once more that you knew, when you went home, carrying against all persuasion, your gun with you, that the deceased would be waiting for you in the copse?

  A. It is utterly false. I knew nothing about it.

  Q. Very well. Now, as to the time of your meeting with the deceased. I have it stated on your sworn evidence that that was at three o’clock or thereabouts, and that after spending some ten minutes in conversation with her, you resumed your way to the house, which you reached at about 3.15, appearing then, according to the evidence of a witness, in a very agitated state.

  A. I was upset, I own—naturally, under the circumstances.

  Q. What circumstances?

  A. Having just promised to do or not do what would affect my whole life.

  Q. No other reason?

  A. No.

  Q. Did you hear the sworn statement of the witness Henstridge and another that the report of the shot, which could have been none other than the fatal shot, was heard and fixed by them at a time estimated at a few minutes after three o’clock, that is to say, at a time when, according to your own admission, you were in the deceased’s company?

  A. It is an absolute lie.

  The crisis had come, the long-expected blow fallen; but, even in the shock and echo of it, there were some who found nerve to glance from son to father, and wonder what super-dramatic incident yet remained to them to cap the day’s excitement. They were disappointed. Not by one sign or movement did the stiff grey figure on the Bench betray the torture racking it, or concede to their expectations the evidence of an emotion—not even when, as if in response to some outspoken direction, a couple of policemen were seen to move silently forward, and take their stand on either side of the witness box. And then, suddenly, Counsel was speaking again.

  He addressed the Bench with an apology for the course imposed upon him, since it must have become apparent, as the case proceeded, that the tendency of the prosecution had been to turn more and more from its nominal objective in the dock. There had been a reason for that, however, and he must state it. The inquiries of the police, and more especially of the distinguished detective officer, Sergeant Ridgway, had latterly, gradually but certainly, led them to the conclusion that the motive for the crime, and the name of its perpetrator, must be looked for in another direction than that originally, and seemingly inevitably, indicated. This change of direction had necessarily exculpated the two men concerned in today’s proceedings; but it had been thought best to submit one of them to examination for the purpose of exposing through the evidence affecting him the guilt of the presumptive criminal. That having been done, the police raised no objection to Cleghorn, like the other accused, being discharged.

  He then went on to summarize the evidence, as it had come, by gradual degrees, to involve the witness Kennett in its meshes—the scrape into which the young man had got himself, his dread of exposure, the wildness of his talk and behaviour, the incriminating business of the gun, and, finally, the sworn testimony as to the time of the shot—and he ended by drawing a fanciful picture of what had occurred in the copse.

  ‘I ask your worships,’ he said, ‘to picture to yourselves the probable scene. Here has this young Lothario returned, his heart full of death and desperation since the frustration of his first mad impulse to end his difficulties with his life, knowing, or not knowing—we must form our own conclusions as to that—that his destined victim awaits him at the tryst—if tryst it is—her heart burning with bitterness against the seducer who has betrayed her; each resolved on its own way out of the trouble. She upbraids him with her ruin, and threatens in her turn to ruin him, unless he consents to right the wrong he has done her. He refuses, or temporizes; and she turns to leave him. Thinking she is about to put her threat into immediate execution, goaded to desperation, the gun in his hand—only tentatively adhered to at first, perhaps—decides him. He fires at and kills her. The deed perpetrated, he has to consider, after the first shock of horror, how best to conceal the evidences of his guilt. He decides to rest the lethal weapon against a tree (with the intention of asserting—or, at least, not denying, if subsequently questioned—that he had left it with one of its barrels loaded), concocts in his mind a plausible story of a cigarette and an oversight, and hurries on to the house, where, in his private room, he spends such a three-quarters of an hour of horror and remorse as none of us need envy him. His nerve by then somewhat restored, he decides to take the initiative in the necessary discovery, and, affecting a sudden recollection of his oversight, returns to the copse to fetch his gun, with the result we know. All that it is open to us to surmise; what we may not surmise is the depth of depravity in a nature which could so plan to cast the burden of its own guilt upon the shoulders of an innocent man.’

  One dumb, white look here did the son turn on the father; who met it steadfastly, as white and unflinching.

  ‘We have heard some loose talk, your worships,’ went on Counsel, ‘as to the appearance of a mysterious fourth figure in this tragedy. We may dismiss, I think, that individual as purely chimerical—a maggot, if I may so describe it, of the witness Henstridge’s brain. There is no need, I think you will agree with me, for looking beyond this Court for a solution of the problem which has been occupying its attention. Painful as the task is to me, I must now do my duty—without fear or favour in the face of any considerations, social or sentimental, whatsoever—by asking you to commit for trial, on the capital charge of murdering Annie Evans, the witness Hugo Staveley Kennett, a warrant for whose arrest the police already hold in their hands.’

  Not a sound broke the stillness as Counsel ended—only a muffled rumble, like that of a death-drum, from the wheels of a passing wagon in the street outside. And then the blue-clad janissaries closed in; the Magistrates, without leaving the Bench, put their heads together, and the vote was cast.

  ‘Hugo Staveley Kennett, we have no alternative but to commit you to take your trial on the capital charge.’

  A sudden crash and thump broke in upon the verdict. Cleghorn had fainted in the dock.

  CHAPTER XV

  THE FACE ON THE WALL

  THE morning of the inquiry found M. le Baron in Paris, in his old rooms at the Montesquieu. He was in very good spirits, smiling and buoyant, and not at all conscience-smitten over his desertion of his servant in his hour of need. ‘It will be a not unwholesome lesson for the little fanfaron,’ he thought, ‘teaching him in the future to keep a guard on his tongue and temper.’ He foresaw, be it observed, that certain issue, and felt no anxiety about it. But his face fell somewhat to an added reflection: ‘I wonder if they have committed him for trial by now. Poor girl!’ and he shrugged his shoulders with a tiny sigh.

  Having crossed by the night boat from Southampton, one might have looked for a certain staleness in the Baron’s aspect. On the contrary, he was as chirpy as a sparrow, having slept well throughout a pretty bad crossing, and since had a refreshing tub and brush-up. He sat down—though very late, with an excellent appetite—to his petit pain and rich coffee and brioche, and, having consumed them, took snuff at short intervals for half an hour, and then prepared to go out.

  M. le Baron’s movements seemed carelessly casual, but he had, in fact, a definite objective, and he made for it at his leisure. It lay on the left bank of the river, in or near the district calling itself loosely the Latin or Students’ Quarter. He crossed the river by the Pont des Arts, and went straight down the Rue de Seine as far as the Rue de Tournon, where he turned off in the direction of St Sulpice. The great bell up in the high tower was crashing and booming for a funeral, and its enormous reverberations swayed like Atlantic rollers across the fields of air. In all the world St Sulpice bell is the death-bell, so solemn, so deep, and so overwhelming it sounds. M. le Baron paused to listen a moment. ‘Is it an omen?’ thought he, ‘and am I going to hear bad news?’

  Somewhere at the back of the church, in a little street called the Rue B
ourbon-le-Château, he came to the shop of a small dealer in prayer-books and holy pictures and pious images. It was a poor shop in a faded district, and suggestive of scant returns and lean commons for its inmates. A door, as gaunt and attenuated in appearance, stood open to one side of the shop, and by this the visitor entered, with the manner of one who knew the place. A flight of bare wooden stairs rose before him, and up these he went, to the first, to the second floor, where he paused, a little breathless, to knock on a door. ‘Que diable!’ cried a hoarse voice from within. ‘Who’s that?’

  For answer the Baron turned the handle and presented himself. It was a ragged, comfortless room he entered, frowzy, chill, without a carpet and with dirty whitewashed walls. A table stood in the dingy window, and at it was seated the solitary figure of a man—emaciated, melancholy eyed—Ribault his name, a designer on the staff of the Petit Courrier des Dames. Some of his work lay before him now: he looked up from it with a startled exclamation, and rose to his feet. Those were clad in list slippers: for the rest he wore a rusty frock-coat, and at his neck a weeping black bow.

  ‘M. le Baron!’ he exclaimed, in wonder and welcome. ‘Who would have thought to see you again!’

  ‘Am I that sort, then?’ answered Le Sage with a smile. ‘I am sorry I left so poor an impression.’

  ‘Ah, but what an impression!’ cried the other fervently. ‘An angel of goodness; a Samaritan; a comforter, and a healer in one!’

  ‘Well, well, M. Ribault!’ said the Baron. ‘You are still at the old toil, I observe?’

  ‘Always at it, Monsieur; but in my plodding, uninspired way—not like my friend’s. Ah, he was a great artist was Jean.’

  ‘Truly, he had a wonderful facility. Has he left you?’

  ‘But for the grave, Monsieur. We had not otherwise been parted.’

  Tears gathered in the poor creature’s eyes; he sighed, with a forlorn, resigned gesture. Hearing his words, a shadow crossed the visitor’s face. ‘That foreboding bell!’ he muttered. He was genuinely concerned, and not for one only reason. ‘You will tell me all about it, perhaps, M. Ribault?’ he said.