CHAPTER XXVI
It was late afternoon when Colwyn reached Heredith the following day.The brief English summer, dying under the intolerable doom ofevanescence for all things beautiful, presented the spectacle ofcreeping decay in a hectic flare of russet and crimson, like a witheredwoman striving to stave off the inevitable with pitiful dyes and rouge.
In this scene the moat-house was in perfect harmony, attuned by its owndecrepitude to the general dissolution of its surroundings. Its aspectwas a shuttered front of sightlessness, a brick and stone blindness tothe changes of the seasons and the futility of existence. The terracedgardens had put on the death tints of autumn, but the house showed anaged indifference to the tricks of enslaved nature at the bidding ofcreation.
Colwyn's ring at the door was answered by Milly Saker, whose rusticstare at the sight of him was followed by an equally broad grin ofrecognition. She ushered him into the hall, and went in search of MissHeredith. In a moment or two Miss Heredith appeared. She looked worn andill, but she greeted Colwyn with a gracious smile and a firm handshake,and took him to the library. Refreshments were brought in, and whileColwyn sipped a glass of wine his hostess uttered the openingconversational commonplaces of an English lady. Had he a pleasantjourney down? The roads were very good for motoring at that time ofyear, and the country was looking beautiful. Many people thought it wasthe best time for seeing the country. It was a fine autumn, but thelocal farmers thought the signs pointed to a hard winter. Thus shechatted, until the glass of sherry was finished. Then she lapsed intosilence, with a certain expectancy in her mild glance, as though waitingfor Colwyn to announce the object of his visit.
"I presume you have come down to see Phil?" she said, as Colwyn did notspeak. "Unfortunately he is not at home," she went on, answering her ownquestion in the feminine manner. "He has gone to Devon with Mr. Musardfor a few days. It was my idea. I wanted him taken out of himself. He ismoping terribly, and of course that is bad for him. I hope to persuadehim to go with Vincent for a complete change when this--this terriblebusiness is finished." Again her eye sought his.
"When do you expect them to return?"
"To-morrow night. Phil would not stay away longer. He has been expectingto hear from you. Can you stay till then?"
"Quite easily. In fact, I came down prepared to stop for a day or so. Ihave some further inquiries to make which will occupy me during thattime."
"Then of course you will stay with us, Mr. Colwyn."
"You are very kind, but I do not wish to trouble you. I have engaged aroom at the inn."
"It is no trouble. I will send down a man for your things. Phil wouldnot like you to stay at the inn--neither should I." Miss Heredith roseas she spoke. "Please do whatever you wish, Mr. Colwyn. I quiteunderstand that you have work to do, and wish to be alone."
"Thank you. Then I shall stay."
Colwyn sat for a while after she had left him, forming his plans. He wasgrateful to her for a tact which had not transgressed beyond the limitsof unspoken thought during their brief interview, but he was morepleased with the fortuitous absence of Phil and Musard at that period ofhis investigations. He welcomed the opportunity of working unquestioned,because he was not prepared to disclose the statements of Nepcote andHazel Rath to any of the inmates of the moat-house until he had testedthe feasibility of both stories in the setting of the crime.
"It has all turned out very fortunately, so far," was the thought whicharose in his mind. "And now--to work."
He glanced at his watch. It was nearly four o'clock. His immediate planswere a walk to Weydene, and another observation of the bedroom whichMrs. Heredith had occupied in the left wing. He decided to leave hisinvestigation of the room until later so as to have the advantage of thewaning daylight in his walk across the fields.
When he returned to the moat-house it was dark, and on the stroke of thedinner hour. That meal he took with Sir Philip and Miss Heredith in thefaded state of the big dining-room--three decorous figures at a brightlylit oasis of snowy linen and silver, with the sober black of Tufnell inthe background. Sir Philip greeted Colwyn with his tired smile ofwelcome. He seemed somewhat frailer, but quite animated as he pressed aspecial claret on his guest and told him, like a child telling of apromised treat, that he was dining out the following night. He insistedon giving the wonderful news in detail. He had yielded to thesolicitations of an old friend--Lord Granger, the ambassador, who hadjust returned to Granger Park after five years' absence from England,and would take no denial. But it was Alethea's doing--she had arrangedit all.
"I'm going to put back the clock of Time," he said, with a feeblechuckle. "Put the hands right back."
"I think it will do him good, don't you, Mr. Colwyn?" said Miss Heredithwith a wistful smile.
"I have no doubt of it," said Colwyn with an answering smile. "A meetingwith an old friend is always a good thing. Are you going with SirPhilip?"
"Oh, yes. I wouldn't go without her," said the baronet, with thehelpless look of senility. "You're going, aren't you, Alethea?"
"Of course, Philip," was the gentle response.
This conversation, slight and desultory as it was, gave sufficientindication to the detective of the heavy burden Miss Heredith wasbearing. The baronet could talk of nothing else during the remainder ofthe dinner, and when the meal was finished he begged his guest to excusehim as he wished to obtain a good night's rest to fortify him againstthe excitement of the coming outing. With an apologetic smile at Colwynhis sister followed him from the room.
The old butler busied himself at the sideboard as Colwyn remained seatedat the table sipping his wine. His movements were so deliberate as toconvey a suspicion that he was in no hurry to leave the room, and theglances he shot at Colwyn whenever he moved out of the range of hisvision carried with them the additional suggestion that the detectivewas the unconscious cause of his slowness. More than once, after thesebackward glances, he opened his lips as though to speak, but did not doso. It was Colwyn who broke the silence.
"Tufnell!" he said.
"Yes, sir?" The butler deposited a dish on the sideboard and steppedquickly to the detective's chair.
"I want to ask you a question or two. It was you who found the back doorof the left wing unlocked on the night of the murder, was it not?"
The butler gravely bowed, but did not speak.
"What made you try the door? Did you suspect that it was unlocked?"
"No; it was just chance that caused me to turn the handle. I'm so usedto locking up the house at nights that I did it without thinking. Icertainly never expected to find it unlocked, and the key in the insideof the door. That was quite a surprise to me. I have often wonderedsince who could have unlocked it and left the key in the door."
"You told me last time I was here that this door is usually locked andthe key kept in the housekeeper's apartments. I suppose there is nodoubt about that?"
"Not the least, sir. The key is hanging there now with a lot of others.Nobody ever thinks of using the door. That is why I was so astonished tofind it open that night."
"If the key was hanging with a number of others it might have been takensome time before and not be missed?"
"That's just it, sir. It might not have been missed by now if I had notdiscovered it that night."
"What time was it when you found it?"
"Shortly before six o'clock--getting dusk, but not dark."
"You are quite sure you locked the door after finding it open?"
"There can be no doubt of that, sir. The lock was stiff to turn, and Itried the handle of the door to make sure that I had locked itproperly."
"Did you return the key to the housekeeper's apartments immediately?"
"I intended to return it after dinner, but I forgot all about it in theexcitement and confusion. It was still in my pocket when I informed Mr.Musard about it."
"Here is another question, Tufnell, and I want you to think well beforeanswering it. Do you think it would have been possible for anybody toenter the house
and gain the left wing unobserved while the householdwas at dinner that night?"
"I have asked myself that question several times since, sir--feeling acertain amount of responsibility. It would have been difficult, becausethe windows of the downstairs bedrooms of the left wing were all locked.There was always the chance of some of the servants seeing anybodycrossing the hall on the way to the staircase, unless the--personwatched and waited for an opportunity."
Colwyn nodded as though dismissing the subject, but the butler lingered.Perhaps it was his realization of the implication of his last wordswhich gave him the courage to broach the matter which had been occupyinghis mind.
"Might I ask you a question, sir?" he hesitatingly commenced.
"What is it?"
"It's about the young woman who has been arrested, sir. Is there anylikelihood that she will be proved innocent?"
"You must have some particular reason for asking me that question,Tufnell."
"Well, sir, I am aware that Mr. Philip thinks her innocent."
"So you told me when I was down here before, but that is not the reasonfor your question. You had better be frank."
"I wish to be frank, sir, but I am in a difficulty. I have learntsomething which seems to have a bearing on this young woman's position,which I think you ought to know, but I have to consider my duty to thefamily. It was something--something I overheard."
"If it throws the slightest light on this crime it is your duty toreveal it," the detective responded gravely. "You are aware that I havebeen called into the case by Mr. Heredith because he is not convinced ofHazel Rath's guilt."
"Quite so, sir. For that reason I have been trying to make up my mind toconfide in you. When you have heard what I have to say you willunderstand how hard it is. It relates to Mr. Philip, sir. Since hisillness I have been worried about his health, because he is so changedthat I feared he might go mad with grief. He hardly speaks a word toanybody, but sometimes I have seen him muttering to himself. The nightbefore he went away with Mr. Musard he did not come down to dinner. MissHeredith was going to send a servant to his room in case he had notheard the gong, but I offered to go myself. When I reached his bedroom,I heard the most awful sobbing possible to imagine. Then, through thepartly open door, I heard Mr. Philip call on God Almighty to makesomebody suffer as he had suffered. He mentioned a name--"
"Whose name?"
The butler looked fearfully towards the closed door, as though hesuspected eavesdroppers, and then brought it out with an effort:
"Captain Nepcote, sir."
Colwyn had expected that name. Nepcote's statement on the previous nighthad led him to believe that Philip Heredith had suspected Nepcote'srelations with his wife, but could not bring himself to disclose thatwhen he sought assistance. It was Colwyn's experience that nothing wasso rare as complete frankness from people who came to him for help. Itwas part of the ingrained reserve of the English mind, the sensitivedread of gossip or scandal, to keep something back at such moments. Theaverage person was so swaddled by limitations of intelligence as to beincapable of understanding that suppressed facts were bound to come tolight sooner or later if they affected the matter of the partialconfidence. Of course, there was sometimes the alternative of areticence which was intended to mislead. If that entered into thepresent case it was an additional complication.
"What interpretation did you place on these overheard words?" he askedthe butler. "Did you suppose that they referred to the murder?"
"Well, sir--" the butler hesitated, as if at a loss to express himself."It was not for me to draw conclusions, sir, but I could not helpthinking over what I had heard. I know Mr. Philip believed the youngwoman to be innocent, and--Mrs. Heredith was shot with Captain Nepcote'srevolver."
"I see. You had no other thought in your mind?"
"No, sir. What else could I think?"
The butler's meek tones conveyed such an inflection of surprise thatColwyn was convinced that he, at all events, had no suspicion of thesecret between Mrs. Heredith and Nepcote.
"Your confidence is quite safe with me, Tufnell," the detective addedafter a pause. "But I cannot answer your question at present."
"Very well, sir." The butler turned to the sideboard again withoutfurther remark, and left the dining-room a few minutes later.
Colwyn went to his room shortly afterwards, and occupied himself for acouple of hours in going through his notes of the case. It was hisintention to defer his visit to the bedroom in the left wing until thehousehold had retired, so as to be free from the curious speculationsand tittle-tattle of the servants.
The moat-house kept country hours, and when he had finished his writingand descended from his room he found the ground floor in darkness. Aclock somewhere in the stillness chimed solemnly as he walked swiftlyacross the hall. Its strokes finished proclaiming the hour of eleven ashe mounted the staircase of the left wing.
The loneliness of the deserted wing was like a moving shuddering thingin the desolation of the silence and the darkness. It was as though theechoing corridor and the empty rooms were whispering, with the appeal ofthe forgotten, for friendly human companionship and light to dispersethe horror of sinister shapes and brooding shadows which lurked in theabode of murder. Colwyn entered the bedroom where Mrs. Heredith had beenmurdered, and by the ray of his electric torch crossed to the bedsideand switched on the light.
He stood there motionless for a while, trying to picture the manner andthe method of the murder. If Hazel Rath had spoken the truth, themurderer had stood where he was now standing when the girl entered theroom in the darkness. Had the light from the corridor, streaming throughthe open door, revealed her approaching figure to him? How long had hebeen there in the darkness, waiting for the moment to kill the woman onthe bed?
If Nepcote was the murderer he must have entered almost immediatelybefore, because he could not have reached the moat-house until nearlyhalf-past seven, and the shot was fired at twenty minutes to eight. Howhad he known that Mrs. Heredith was there alone, in the darkness? Asecret assignation might have been the explanation if the time had beenafter, instead of before the household's departure for the evening. Buteven the most wanton pair of lovers would hesitate to indulge theirpassion while the risk of chance discovery and exposure was so great.
As he pondered over the two stories Colwyn did not attempt to shut hiseyes to the fact that Hazel, on her own showing, fitted into the crimemore completely than Nepcote. She had ample opportunities to slip intothe room and murder the woman who had supplanted her. She had reallystrengthened the case against herself by the damaging admission that shehad sought Mrs. Heredith's room in secret just before the crime wascommitted. Her explanation of the scream and the shot was so improbableas to sound incredible. It was not to be wondered that Scotland Yardpreferred to believe that it was the apparition of the frantic girl,revolver in hand, which had caused her affrighted victim to utter onewild scream before the shot was fired which ended her life.
But Colwyn had never allowed himself to be swayed too much bycircumstance. Appearances were not always a safe guide in thecomplicated tangle of human affairs. Things were forever happening whichleft experience wide-eyed with astonishment. The contradictions of humannature persisted in all human acts. In this moat-house mystery, thegrimmest paradox of his brilliant career, Colwyn was determined not toaccept the presumption of the facts until he had satisfied himself thatno other interpretation was possible. His subtle mind had beenchallenged by a finger-post of doubt in the written evidence; afinger-post so faint as to be passed unnoticed by other eyes, butsufficiently warning to his clearer vision to cause him to pause midwayin the broad track of circumstantial evidence and look around him for aconcealed path.
It was the point he had mentioned to Caldew at his chambers afterreading the copy of the coroner's depositions which Merrington had lenthim. While perusing them he had been struck by a curious fact. Themedical evidence stated that the cause of death was a small puncturedwound not larger than a threepenny piece, but
added the information thatthe hole in the gown of the dead woman was much larger, about thediameter of a half-crown. The Government pathologist had formed theopinion that the revolver must have been held very close to the body toaccount for the larger scorched hole. That inference was obvious, butColwyn saw more in the two holes than that. It seemed to him that thelive ring of flame caused by the close-range shot must have beenextinguished by the murderer, or it would have continued to smoulder andexpand in an ever-widening circle. And that thought led to another ofmuch greater significance. The shot had been fired at close range toensure accuracy of aim or deaden the sound of the report. But, whicheverthe murderer's intention, the second purpose had been achieved,intentionally or unintentionally. How had it happened, then, that thesound of the report had penetrated so loudly downstairs?
As Colwyn moved about the room, examining everything with his quickappraising eye, he noticed that the position of the bed had been changedsince he last saw it. The head was a trifle askew, and nearer to theside of the wall than the foot. The difference was slight, but Colwyncould see a portion of the fireplace which had not been visible before.The bed stood almost in the centre of the room, the foot in line withthe door, and the head about three or four feet from the chimney-piece.In noting this rather unusual position during his last visit, Colwyn hadformed the conclusion that it had been chosen for the benefit of freshair and light during the summer months, as the window, which looked overthe terraced gardens, was nearer that end of the room.
Colwyn approached the head of the bed and bent down to examine thebedposts. A slight groove in the deep pile carpet showed clearly enoughthat the bed had been pushed back a few inches. The change in positionwas so trifling that it might have been attributed to the act of aservant in sweeping the room if a closer examination had not revealedthe continuance of the groove under the bed. The inference wasunmistakable: the bed, in the first instance, had been pushed muchfarther back on its castors, and then almost, but not quite, restored toits original position.
Had the bed been moved to gain access to the fireplace? He could see noreason for such a proceeding. It was too early in the autumn to needfires, and the room had not been occupied since the murder. In any case,the appearance of the grate showed that no fire had been lit. There wasample space to pass between the head of the bed and the fireplace,though perhaps not much room for movement. On his last visit Colwyn hadlooked into this space to test its possibilities of concealment. In thequickened interest of his new discovery he pushed the bed out of the wayand examined it again.
The first thing that caught his eye was a scratch on the polishedsurface of the register grate. It looked to be of recent origin, and forthat reason suggested to Colwyn's mind that the bed had been moved bysomebody who wanted more room in front of the grate. For what purpose?He turned his attention to the grate itself in the hope of obtaining ananswer to that question.
The grate was empty, and in the housewifely way a sheet of white paperhad been laid on the bottom bars to catch occasional flakes of soot fromthe chimney. But there were no burnt papers or charred fragments tosuggest that the grate had recently been used. Dissatisfied andperplexed, Colwyn was about to rise to his feet when it chanced that hiseyes, glancing into a corner, lighted on something tiny and metallic inthe crevice between the white paper and the side bars of the grate.Wondering what it was, he succeeded in getting it out with his fingerand thumb. It was a percussion cap.
This discovery, strange as it was, seemed at first sight far enoughremoved from the circumstances of the murder, except so far as itbrought the thought of lethal weapons to the imagination. But a weaponwhich required a percussion cap for its discharge had nothing to do withViolet Heredith's death. She had been killed by a bullet which fittedNepcote's revolver, which was a pinfire weapon. The medical evidence hadestablished that fact beyond the shadow of a doubt. Moreover, thepercussion cap was unexploded, which seemed to make its presence in thegrate even more difficult of explanation. It looked as though it hadbeen dropped accidentally, but how came it to be there at all? Thestrangeness of the discovery was intensified by the knowledge thatpercussion caps and muzzle-loading weapons had become antiquated withthe advent of the breech-loader. Who used such things nowadays?
By the prompting of that mysterious association of ideas which is calledmemory, Colwyn was reminded of his earlier visit to the gun-roomdownstairs, and Musard's statement about the famous pair of pistols inthe brass-bound mahogany box, which "carried as true as a rifle up tofifty yards, but had a heavy recoil." They belonged to the periodbetween breech-loaders and the ancient flint-locks, and were probablymuzzle-loaders. With that sudden recollection, Colwyn also recalled thatMusard had been unable to show him the pistols because the key of thecase had been mislaid or lost.
This incident, insignificant as it had appeared at the time, seemedhardly to gain in importance when considered in conjunction with thediscovery of the cap in the grate. Apart from the stimulus to memory thepercussion cap had produced, there was no visible co-ordination betweenthe two facts, because it was, apparently, quite certain that Mrs.Heredith had been shot by Nepcote's revolver, and by no other weapon.But the balance of probabilities in crime are sometimes turned byapparently irrelevant trifles which assume importance on investigation.Was it possible that the key of the pistol-case had been deliberatelyconcealed because the box had something to hide which formed aconnection between the pistols and the presence of the cap in the grate?That inference could only be tested by an examination of the case ofpistols. The experiment was undoubtedly worth trying. Colwyn left theroom and descended the stairs.