“He’s engaged to be married.”
“To a woman quite accustomed to hard work and little enough luxury.”
“Just so, but that doesn’t kill the desire for luxury.”
“That’s a point to you, Heather. I quite agree.”
“He was the last man known to be with his uncle on the Friday night of his supposed disappearance.”
“But he is supposed to have disappeared on Saturday morning,” argued Vereker.
“You maintain that you have disproved that Lord Bygrave visited the White Bear on Friday night. You surmised or deduced that some one had impersonated Lord Bygrave; isn’t that so?”
“I did, but I’m in a quandary about the point just now. Let’s leave it in abeyance for a moment, Heather, and return to it later. I think you have gone a shade too rapidly for my complete comprehension. How did you discover that Winslade was the last man to have been with his uncle on Friday night?”
“He was seen driving him towards Eyford by a villager working in the fields between Fordingbridge and Eyford. This villager happened to have once worked on Lord Bygrave’s estate and knew both the men.”
“Ah, that’s satisfactory. Where did they part?”
“That’s the one point I wish to discover. I should say at the cow-pond near Hartwood, where there is a short cut across the fields right to the White Bear. That, of course, is presuming that Lord Bygrave did stay at Lawless’s hostelry on Friday night. It is just at this very juncture that there is room for some clever work on the part of Winslade. Did he assume the rôle of his uncle? Lawless is a most unobservant man. Mary Standish, the only other person who saw his lordship, is engaged to Winslade. She is an astute and very discreet woman. It’s not likely that she would give her lover away should there be any question of his being involved in the case. In fact, she would tell us just what Winslade would teach her to tell us. She is at present very greatly distressed. Winslade himself is behaving in a strange manner, and is nothing like the man he used to be before this matter occurred. That signet-ring was a master stroke on Winslade’s part—presuming this theory to be correct.”
“Winslade’s disguise would be an extremely risky venture,” suggested Vereker, lighting a cigar. “You know, Heather, I’ve thought out very carefully what you have just sketched. I also came to the conclusion that between Fordingbridge Junction and Hartwood was a vital time in the affair, but I couldn’t quite convince myself that Winslade played the rôle of his uncle. I wondered if there might be an accomplice.”
“You discovered that they drove together towards Hartwood?” asked the detective with a shade of surprise.
“Oh, yes. That was not a very difficult matter. Winslade admitted it to me.”
“Ah, that’s most important. You remember, he denied it at first. It looks very fishy.”
“It does; but he told me that he did so to cover his uncle’s tracks. He says that Bygrave left him at the cow-pond, and that he hasn’t seen him since.”
“But what was the reason for all this mystery?”
“Perhaps he’ll tell you,” remarked Vereker guardedly. “Perhaps at this moment you know. But to return to the question of whether the person who stayed at the White Bear was Lord Bygrave, what do you make of this?”
Vereker handed the inspector the trouser button that he had picked up at the stile near the cow-pond. Heather examined it carefully and returned it.
“It means little enough to me,” he remarked, “in its isolated state. What story does it tell you?”
“That button is one of Lord Bygrave’s,” remarked Vereker. “I found it at the stile near the cow-pond. It looks as if Lord Bygrave actually left Winslade’s car at that point and in hastily crossing the stile lost it. That’s the name of his tailor. Strange coincidence, if it’s only a coincidence, that some one in Hartwood should also patronize a Bond Street tailor.”
“It can hardly be a coincidence,” remarked the detective, lost in thought.
“I’m perfectly convinced that it is one of Lord Bygrave’s buttons,” said Vereker and returned it carefully to his purse.
“So,” said the detective with a non-committal air. “And tell me, Mr. Vereker, did you discover the reason for Winslade taking such a time over his journey from Fordingbridge to Hartwood? Of course we need not believe the story of the breakdown of his car unless we choose to do so.”
“I didn’t choose to do so. He stopped at the Mill House, Eyford, where he alleges that his uncle paid a call on a gentleman called Twistleton.”
“Good. I can verify that much. Two yokels on the road saw a car stop near the house. They, however, maintain that the car was coming from the Hartwood direction, and they only noticed one gentleman enter Eyford Mill House.”
“Winslade remarked to me that he had seen two yokels, but they were in a stage of beery mirth. Now, Heather, I wish you could find out just where this Mr. Twistleton is, and who he is, and why Lord Bygrave should call on him.”
“You don’t know anything about him, Mr. Vereker?” asked the detective, with a sly glance.
“I don’t, beyond the fact that Lord Bygrave called on him with regard to money matters, and that the interview wound up in a violent quarrel; that Lord Bygrave struck him, thought he had killed him and promptly vanished, believing himself to be a murderer.”
“A sufficient reason for making a hasty disappearance, of course. Lord Bygrave was quite certain that he had killed him?”
“He was. Winslade promptly drove him, after this fracas, to the stile at the cow-pond, left him there and hasn’t seen him since. Winslade returned to the Mill House to verify the story, but found no trace of the defunct Mr. Twistleton. That accounts for the direction in which the car came when Winslade was seen by the two yokels.”
“Have you examined the Mill House since?” asked the inspector.
“Very carefully. I found the window of the library—the scene of the altercation—open, and I dropped from the window into the back-yard, which contains the garage.”
“And you deduced that Mr. Twistleton must be an active young man to jump from the window and bolt before anybody—say, Winslade—could return from the gate with Lord Bygrave and continue the little altercation?”
“That’s the exact inference I drew, Heather. If an old man had dropped from the window it would have shaken him up pretty badly.”
“And do you believe this cock-and-bull yarn of Winslade’s?” asked the inspector with some impatience.
Vereker blew a smoke ring into the air and with some deliberation replied:
“In the main it’s perfectly true.”
Detective-Inspector Heather greeted this remark with a loud guffaw of laughter.
“My dear Mr. Vereker, really this is too bad. I have never heard such balderdash in my life. I begin to see that we shall shortly have to arrest Mr. David Winslade. If not the actual criminal, he’s an accessory.”
“Ah, well, I must leave all the arresting to Scotland Yard. Later on, however, I may have some very important information for you. I feel that matters are coming to a climax.”
“Well, I’ll look you up again very shortly,” said Heather, and rose to go. “By the way, how’s your sprained wrist getting on?” he asked on reaching the door.
“Oh, progressing very favourably,” replied Vereker, carelessly thrusting the injured wrist more deeply into his trouser pocket, and mentally cursing the inspector’s inquisitiveness.
“A burn takes some time to heal, doesn’t it?” remarked the detective, smiling broadly as he hastened away.
For some moments Vereker stood at the threshold of his flat with a slightly chagrined look on his face. He was just trying to measure the depth of Heather’s last remark.
“Now, how did the devil find that out?” he exclaimed as he closed the door and re-entered his room. “I really believe the wily old hound has got on the scent too. I must hurry up or he’ll forestall me.”
Chapter Fifteen
Returning to his ea
sy chair on Detective-Inspector Heather’s departure, Vereker sat with legs extended, his elbows resting on the comfortably padded arms, his hands clasped together in front of him. It was an attitude he always unconsciously assumed when he was engrossed in thought. Every now and then he would jump to his feet and pace the room with short, quick steps, a curious smile on his lips, his eyes alight with excitement, his glance swiftly, restlessly roving over the pattern of the red and blue turkey carpet. It seemed as if the detective’s last remark had fired a train of thought, the materials for which had lain dormant in his mind awaiting the inflammatory touch.
“So much seems clear,” he soliloquized, “so clear that I wonder why I haven’t assembled the apparently disconnected fragments before. And Heather must know a good deal, that’s patent from the significance of his last remark. I scarcely think he was merely drawing a bow at a venture.”
He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. The hour was late and as yet there was no sign of Ricardo’s return.
“I wonder what has happened to Ricky!” he exclaimed with some impatience. “I hope he hasn’t run his head into any trouble. It would be just like him to get mixed up in some imbroglio.”
Vereker yawned with the weariness of his vigil and then, going into his studio, prepared himself a pot of hot coffee. With this he returned to his drawing-room and picking up a volume of Tchekov’s short stories he settled himself down to read them over a pipe. He read on until weariness—sheer boredom of their naked primitiveness—overcame his attention, the hand holding the volume fell listlessly on to his knees and his head lurched forward on to his breast. He was awakened at length by the persistent ringing of an electric bell followed by a booming tattoo of the knocker on the entrance door to his flat. He jumped from his chair and hastened to open the door. A white and weary Ricardo entered listlessly, emerging into the brilliantly lit hall from the twilight of the landing like some dejected apparition.
“You look tired, Ricky, what on earth kept you so late?” asked Vereker with gentle concern.
“Fagged out, old man. I guess you knew what sort of a job shadowing a man like Smale would be. I shan’t deputize for you again on such an errand for the price of a dinner at Jacques’.”
“I’m sorry you had such a rough journey. Here, have a whisky and soda, it will buck you up.”
“Ugh, whisky and soda—not just now, thank you. I’ve just eaten a quantity of sausages and mashed and drunk a pint of coffee at a questionably clean coffee-stall amidst a band of apparent cut-throats.”
“Can I offer you anything?”
“Sympathy, Vereker.”
“Won’t you try your tinned lobster?”
“Don’t, Vereker, don’t. You might as well whisper boiled pork to a seasick passenger. Let me sit down and in a few minutes I’ll relate my lurid adventures.”
Ricardo flung himself into an easy chair, loosened the laces of his shoes, decided that perhaps after all whisky and soda might be piled on top of inferior sausages and mashed as a corrective, and began his story.
“When I left you, Vereker, I followed your man into Jacques’ restaurant and, taking a small table behind him, I ordered a sumptuous repast. I did the thing properly, you know—it’s impossible to be careful with other people’s money, and I assured myself that you wouldn’t countenance any niggardliness on my part when on such an important errand as your proxy.”
“Naturally—I expected you to do yourself proud, Ricky.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered in any case. When I see a menu with all that choice, mouth-watering French I simply throw discretion to the four winds of heaven. I cut loose with the knife and fork and fairly tear leaves out of the wine list. I’d use Trust funds if anyone were so foolish as to trust me with anything; that is—I press the point—if I had no money of my own.”
“Well, and what about our friend Smale?”
“I didn’t give him a thought at the moment. By Jove, the fish was excellent, you know—grilled sole, and the wine accompanying it was Chambertin. I’ve tasted better, but not much. Then old Jacques possesses a Burgundy fit for Olympus. I got through a bottle of that—I couldn’t help it. The sweets were good of their kind, which is saying a lot for me, for I rarely touch sweets. I did the dessert justice with a port of delightful quality—a really estimable wine.”
“And Smale, what about Smale?” asked Vereker with a faint show of impatience.
“I capped it all with a Corona. I say, they do know how to distil a drop of majestic coffee at Jacques’. Liqueurs are poison—I abhor them. How people can ruin the carefully built edifice of a good dinner by drinking liqueurs!”
“Did Smale indulge in them?” asked Vereker.
“Damned if I know,” replied Ricardo. “I wasn’t looking at the brute, and when I did look up to see how he was getting on, what do you think?”
“I don’t,” replied Vereker, glancing at his friend apprehensively.
“He’d gone!”
“Oh, Ricky, you don’t mean to say you lost sight of him,” queried Vereker dejectedly.
“Most indubitably. He’d gone—vanished like a spook. I was staggered—I mean apart from the copious libations I had poured out to the gods—‘This is a pretty kettle of fish,’ I said and, seizing my hat and coat, I simply shot out into the street to see if I could get a glimpse of him.”
“Not a vestige of him did you see, I suppose,” commented Vereker resignedly.
“Not a vestige, but I was tapped gently on the arm and reminded by one of the waiters at Jacques’ that I hadn’t paid the bill. This fairly put the lid on matters. Instead of dashing around at once and picking up the trail I had simply to go back into Jacques’ and waste time by paying a footling bill: really a detective shouldn’t be asked to pay bills at critical moments. You can imagine how I swore, using every known term of the vocabulary of bad language to little purpose. It failed to relieve me and only incensed the waiter. Once again in the street I glanced round. No sign of Smale. I might as well have looked in the gutter for a golden sovereign. A feeling akin to real grief overcame me—I was sorry for you, old man, for having leaned so stoutly on a broken reed like myself. I thought how foolish it was of you to have trusted me so implicitly with money and a task at the same time. My dazed eyes flitted around in a glassy stare, seeing nothing clearly until they alighted on the words ‘saloon bar’ on the opposite of the street. This brought me to a rational frame of mind; those words admirably matched the texture of my thoughts, and offered me purpose instead of weltering indecision. What more fitting than to drown grief and blow the rest of your cash; never had the offensive words ‘saloon bar’ seemed so imbued with a sense of ministering comfort—they caught some shadow of the divine—”
“And you promptly went in and stayed there till closing time,” added Vereker with a suspicion of curtness.
“Don’t descend to bathos like that, Vereker. I’ve had an adventure and if I unconsciously compose in the narration it is simply instinctive. The true inwardness of events has lit up my imagination, every moment of my evening has been touched with the magic of a certain sublime inevitableness—Fate, you may call it—which has put its very commonplace incidents on a plane which is rarely visited even in moments of the highest artistic exaltation.”
“It wasn’t the wine, I presume?”
“Wine—no, certainly not. It wasn’t wine that led me into the saloon bar of Billy’s opposite and brought me shoulder to shoulder again with Mr. Smale!”
“Good Lord, was he in there too?”
“He was. Mere chance, eh? A blundering and careless Ricardo is thus waited on by that inscrutable thing we call chance.”
“You followed him up this time?”
“I did. I was closer to him than his shadow. I followed him until he disappeared into some mean purlieu of Soho, where he disappeared down into an unsavoury den where human faces appeared inhuman—they were the faces of fauns. From this I was promptly ejected by a super-faun who said I was not a member
of the club. I feigned intoxication and blundered back to decency.”
“So you lost him there. Do you remember the street?”
“I didn’t lose him there. Remembering that I had been once favoured by the capricious goddess, Chance, I was not going to beg at her feet again in a hurry. I patrolled that street until Mr. Smale once more emerged. I was remorseless; I was cunning; hours mattered not to my firm resolve. Had he journeyed to Cathay I would have trudged unflinchingly after him—the Polar wastes would not have sheltered him. As a matter of fact it took just five minutes to reach his digs. They were round the corner of the same street. I know them well—pal of mine suffered there for over a year.”
“Good, Ricky. Well, that’s an accomplishment—by Jove, we’ve got him.”
“The balance out of your money is elevenpence halfpenny, old man, and I’m off to bed.”
Finishing his whisky, Ricardo rose from his chair, sought out a heavy khaki overcoat, relic of his army career, and disappeared into Vereker’s studio with a somnolent “Good night, Sherlock.”
“Good night, Ricky,” replied Vereker with a faint smile, “I’m greatly indebted to you for the night’s work.”
Flinging the butt of his cigar in the fire Vereker sat thinking over his plans for the morrow.
Chapter Sixteen
It was with some difficulty that Vereker roused the somnolent Ricardo at seven o’clock next morning; but once awake his irrepressible friend was soon busy helping to prepare breakfast, or rather taking the onus of that operation entirely on himself. Over the meal Vereker ascertained the exact whereabouts of the lodging-house into which Smale had retreated on the previous night and, leaving Ricardo busy rolling cigarettes and drinking strong coffee, paid an unusually early call on Lord Bygrave’s secretary. It was with a considerable feeling of suppressed excitement that he informed the maid who answered his ring of the object of his visit. Would Smale, he wondered, resort to the subterfuge of being absent or inaccessible? He might take such a course and create a rather difficult situation for the time being.
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