Cressida's Narrative
Reassured by the knowledge that Sir Clinton had taken the examination
of Cressida out of the inspector's hands, Wendover was eager to know
if anything fresh would be elicited from the Fleetwoods which might
help him to carry his theories to a further stage. Feeling sure that
he could clear Cressida from the murder charge, he had difficulty in
restraining his impatience during the half-hour which elapsed before
they were shown into the Fleetwood suite.
His first glance at Cressida showed him that the strain of the last
day or two had told heavily upon her. Her darkened eyes and the
weariness of her whole attitude spoke for themselves of the long hours
of tension and anxiety; and on her face he could read clearly the
apprehension which she was vainly striving to conceal. What puzzled
him most was an impression of conscious guilt which he sensed in some
mysterious way without being able to analyse it clearly.
Stanley Fleetwood, lying on a couch with his leg in splints, seemed to
present almost as difficult a problem. On his face also the strain had
left its traces; and his whole expression inevitably suggested the
bearing of an accomplice who, seeing that all is lost, still
determines to brazen things out in the hope that some turn of the
wheel may yet bring him into a safer position.
The third occupant of the room was the lawyer, a pleasant, keen-faced
man, who was seated at a table with some papers before him. His face
betrayed nothing whatever as to his views on the case.
“Mr. Wendover has no _locus standi_ here, of course,” Sir Clinton
explained when the lawyer had been introduced to them, “but I think it
might be advantageous to have a witness at this interview who is not
officially concerned in the case. Have you any objection, Mr. Calder?”
The lawyer mutely consulted Cressida and her husband, and then gave
his consent without ado. Stanley Fleetwood nodded his assent.
“I've consulted Mr. Calder,” he said, when this matter had been
settled, “and we've come to the conclusion that frankness is the best
policy. We've nothing to conceal. Now, what is it that you want to
know?”
Wendover's glance, travelling from one to the other, reached
Cressida's face; and he could see plainly that she was in dread of the
coming ordeal. It seemed as though she had made up her mind for the
worst, and could see no hope of coming safely through the inquisition.
“Perhaps Mrs. Fleetwood could tell us what she knows about this
affair?” Sir Clinton suggested. “Then, after we've had her account,
Mr. Fleetwood could amplify her story wherever he came into the matter
directly.”
Cressida nerved herself for the task, but she seemed to find
difficulty in controlling her voice. At last she pulled herself
together with an obvious effort and began.
“If I'm to make the thing clear to you,” she said, looking
distrustfully from one to another in the group, “I'll need to go back
a bit, so that you can understand the state of affairs properly. You
know, of course, that I married Nicholas Staveley in 1917, when he was
convalescing after a wound he got. It's common property that my
marriage was a complete failure. It couldn't have been worse. In less
than a month he'd shattered almost every ideal I had; and I loathed
him more than I'd thought it possible for one person to loathe
another. And he terrified me, too.
“He went back to the Front again; and the next we heard was that he'd
been reported killed in action. It sounds dreadful to say it, I know,
but I can't pretend I was anything but glad when I heard the news. He
was a horrible creature, horrible in every way. Life with him, even
for that short time, had been a waking nightmare; and it was an
infinite relief to find myself free of him. Then, in 1926, I married
Mr. Fleetwood.”
She paused and glanced at the lawyer, as though to draw some
encouragement from him. Evidently the sequence of her narrative had
been concerted between them beforehand. Wendover's glance passed from
her to Stanley Fleetwood; and he could see from the expression on
Fleetwood's face how much he must have hated the dead man on
Cressida's account.
“Last week,” Cressida continued, in a slightly more controlled tone,
“I got a letter signed ‘Nicholas Staveley.’ It was a dreadful shock to
see that handwriting again. It seems that the report of his death had
been a mistake; but he had let it pass for purposes of his own. It had
suited him to disappear then. Now it suited him to reappear—so far as
I was concerned. You can guess what that meant to me. It invalidated
my second marriage; and it threw me into the hands of that brute. Or,
at least, if it didn't actually put me into his hands, it gave him a
weapon against me which he could use for his own ends. He was a
selfish beast, and vindictive, too; and I saw that he meant to stir up
all the trouble he could. His letter hinted quite plainly that
blackmail was his object in reappearing at this moment. He knew I'd
married again, and he saw his chance.”
The lawyer produced a paper and handed it across to Sir Clinton.
“This is the letter,” he explained.
Sir Clinton glanced through it and then put it down on the table.
“That's a pretty production,” he commented. “I can understand your
feelings, Mrs. Fleetwood. Please go on.”
Cressida glanced across at the couch.
“Naturally I consulted Mr. Fleetwood,” she continued. “We decided that
the best thing to do was to arrange a meeting with the man and try to
get him to let us put matters on some bearable kind of footing.”
“What we wanted,” Stanley Fleetwood interrupted, “was to persuade him
to allow a divorce to go through quietly. Then we could have
regularised matters with as little fuss as possible. From what I'd
heard of him, he didn't seem the sort who would refuse a bribe, if it
was big enough——”
He caught the lawyer's warning eye and halted abruptly.
“I understand,” Sir Clinton interposed smoothly. “You wished to come
to some agreement with him. We needn't discuss the terms. Will you go
on, please, Mrs. Fleetwood?”
“I wrote him a letter,” Cressida pursued, with rather more courage in
her tone as she saw that Sir Clinton was obviously not directly
hostile, like the inspector. “Mr. Fleetwood took it across to Flatt's
cottage that afternoon—Friday afternoon—and dropped it into the
letter-box. You'll understand in a moment that I didn't wish Mr.
Fleetwood to meet this man face to face.”
The inspector looked up from the note-book in which he was making a
shorthand report of the interview.
“You might identify the letter we found on the body,” he suggested.
Sir Clinton produced the letter, and Cressida examined it.
“Yes, that's it. I arranged to meet him at Neptune's Seat late in the
evening, when no one was likely to be on the beach. I didn't want to
have him coming about the hotel, naturally.”
She halted for a moment or two, as though she felt she was coming to
the difficult point in her tale.
“Perhaps you won't understand what I've got to say next. If I could
let you know what sort of man he was, you'd understand better. There
are some things one can't tell. But I want you to know that I was
really in physical fear of him. I'm not easily frightened; but during
the month or so that I lived with him he stamped fear into me—real
physical fear, downright terror of personal violence, I mean. He
drank; and when he had been drinking he seemed to grow almost inhuman.
He terrified me so much that I left him, even before he went back to
the Front.”
Her face showed even more clearly than her words what it had meant to
her. She halted for a space, unintentionally letting her effect sink
home on her audience.
“When it came to meeting him,” she went on, “Mr. Fleetwood insisted on
going with me.”
“Naturally,” Stanley Fleetwood broke in. “I wanted to go alone to meet
the fellow; but she wouldn't let me go either alone or along with
her.”
Cressida nodded.
“If they had met, nothing could have prevented a quarrel; and that man
would stick at nothing. I was afraid of what he might do. Anything was
better than letting them meet. But I was horribly afraid of meeting
him alone, without any protection. I'd had enough experience of him
already. So I borrowed a pistol from Mr. Fleetwood and took it with me
to Neptune's Seat. I thought it would serve to frighten that man if he
showed any signs of going over the score.”
“What sort of pistol was it?” Armadale interjected, looking across at
Stanley Fleetwood.
“A Colt .38. I have the number of it somewhere.”
“I'll get you to identify it later on,” Armadale said; and with a
gesture he invited Cressida to continue.
“Mr. Fleetwood gave in about going with me to meet the man,” Cressida
went on, “but he insisted on taking me down to the shore in our car. I
let him do that. I was glad to know that he'd be at hand. But I made
him promise not to interfere in any way. He was to stay with the car
while I went down alone to Neptune's Seat.”
“I think the inspector would like to know exactly what you did before
you left the hotel,” Sir Clinton intervened.
“Mr. Fleetwood went round to the garage to get out the car. Meanwhile
I went down to the ladies' dressing-room, where I keep my golfing
things. I changed my slippers for my golfing-shoes—I was in an evening
frock—and I slipped on my golfing-blazer. Then I went out through the
side-entrance and joined Mr. Fleetwood in the car. He drove me down to
the point on the road nearest Neptune's Seat. I left him there, got
out of the car, and went across the sands to the rock.
“The man was there, waiting for me; and at the first glance I could
see he'd been drinking. He wasn't drunk, you understand, but he wasn't
normal. When I saw that, I was terrified. I can't explain these
things, but he—— Oh, I used to shiver at times even at the very
thought of what he'd been like in that state; and when I met him down
there, face to face, I was really in terror of him. I pulled the
pistol out of my pocket and held it in my hand, without letting him
see it.
“Then I spoke to him and tried to persuade him to come to some
arrangement with me. It was no use—none whatever. You've no idea of
the kind of man he was. He wanted money to keep his mouth shut. He
wouldn't hear of any divorce, because that would loosen his hold on me
if it went through, he said, and he meant to keep me in his grip. And
then he said—oh, I'm not going to repeat what he said about Mr.
Fleetwood and myself—horrible things, meant to hurt me and degrade me
in my own eyes. And the worse he got in that way, the angrier he grew.
You know what a drunken man's like? I know it only too well.”
She made an involuntary gesture which betrayed even more than her
words.
“At last he went beyond all bounds. I was trembling all over, partly
from fear and partly from pure rage at the things he said. It was
quite clear that I could do nothing with him in that state; so I
turned to go. Then he muttered something—I'm not going to repeat it;
you can imagine it for yourselves—and he pounced forward and gripped
me when I wasn't expecting it.
“I lost my head completely. I didn't know what I was doing. I was
almost beside myself with terror of him. Somehow the pistol went off
in my hand, and down he fell at my feet and lay there without a
movement. It was too dark to see anything clearly, and I was
absolutely taken aback by what had happened. I said to myself: ‘I've
shot him!’ And at that my nerves got the upper hand completely, and I
turned and ran up the beach to the car. I told Mr. Fleetwood at once
what had happened. I wanted him to go down and look at the man, but he
wouldn't hear of it. He drove me back to the hotel, and we left the
car in one of the side-alleys. I went in through the dressing-room,
took off my blazer, and changed my golfing-shoes for my slippers. I
was so much upset that I forgot to take the pistol out of the blazer
pocket. And when I came out into the hotel corridor, I heard that Mr.
Fleetwood had tripped on the stairs and hurt himself badly. That put
the pistol out of my mind at the moment; and when, next day, I
remembered about it, and went to get it, someone else had taken it
away. That terrified me, for I knew someone was on my track.”
She paused for a moment, and then added:
“That's really all I have to tell. It was the purest accident. I
didn't mean to kill him. When I took the pistol with me to the shore,
I only meant to frighten him with it. But he'd been drinking, and I
wasn't ready for him when he attacked me. I was terrified, and my
finger must have twitched the trigger without my knowing what I was
doing. I'd never have shot him in cold blood, or even intentionally in
a fit of anger. It was the merest accident.”
She stopped there, evidently having said everything that she could
bring herself to tell.
“One moment, Clinton,” Wendover interposed as the chief constable
turned to question Stanley Fleetwood in his turn. “There's just one
point I'd like to have cleared up. Would you mind telling me, Mrs.
Fleetwood, whether you can recall how Staveley was dressed when he met
you?”
Cressida, looking up quickly, seemed to read the sympathy in
Wendover's face, for she answered readily enough.
“It wasn't a very good light, you understand? He wore some sort of
lounge suit, but I couldn't tell the colour of it. And when I got down
to Neptune's Seat he was carrying a light coat of some kind over his
arm; but as I came up he tossed that down on the rock beside him.”
“He didn't put it on again, did he?” Wendover demanded.
“Not so far as I can remember,” Cressida replied, after some effort to
recall the point.
“You were caught in the rain before you got back to the hotel, weren't
you?” Wendover pursued.
“Yes. It came down hard just after the car started.”
Wendover's satisfaction at these answers was too plain to escape
Cressida's attention. She looked at him with a faint gleam of hope in
her expression, as though expecting him to come to her help; but her
face fell when he turned to the chief constable and indicated that he
had nothing further to say. Sir Clinton took his cue.
“Now, Mr. Fleetwood,” he inquired, “you didn't stay by the car as you
had arranged, did you?”
Stanley Fleetwood looked suspiciously at his interlocutor.
“As it happened, I didn't,” he admitted, rather with an ill grace. “It
was bad enough to let my wife meet that scoundrel at all. You couldn't
expect me to stand off at a distance, could you? I'd promised her not
to interfere; but that didn't hinder me from getting as near them as I
could, just in case of accidents. I went down to the shore, keeping
behind a groyne that runs down towards Neptune's Seat.”
“So we supposed,” Sir Clinton commented. “You haven't a second Colt
pistol, have you?”
“No. One's all I have.”
“So you didn't fire a shot from behind the groyne, by any chance?”
Both Fleetwood and Cressida seemed completely taken aback by this
question. They glanced at each other; and then Stanley Fleetwood
answered:
“No, of course I didn't. How could I, when I hadn't a pistol?”
“Of course not,” Sir Clinton admitted. “Occasionally one has to ask
questions as a matter of form, you know. Now, what happened after Mrs.
Fleetwood's pistol went off? I mean, what did you yourself do?”
“I saw her hurrying up the beach towards the road, where she expected
to find me; so naturally I bolted up the way I'd come and joined her
at the car.”
“And then?”
“She told me she'd shot Staveley. I shed no tears over him, of course;
but I wanted to get my wife away as quick as I could, in case anyone
came along, attracted by the noise of the shot. So I drove up towards
the hotel. I didn't put on the lights of the car, because they might
have been noticed by someone in the distance; and I didn't want to be
traced through the car if I could help it. I'm being quite frank with
you, you see.”
“I wish we could persuade everybody to be _quite_ frank,” Sir Clinton
confessed. “It would lighten police work considerably. What happened
next, please?”
“As I was driving up, it suddenly struck me that we'd left all these
tracks on the sand, and that when everything came out our footprints
would be evidence connecting us with the business. So I made up my
mind—I'm being perfectly frank with you—I made up my mind that after
I'd dropped my wife at the hotel I'd take the car back again and see
if Staveley was alive, If he wasn't, then I'd make hay of our
tracks—rub 'em out somehow and get clear away if possible. Then it
occurred to me that Staveley alive would be better than Staveley dead.
If he was only hurt, then the whole affair might be hushed up somehow.
Apart from that, frankly, I'd rather have had him dead. Anyhow, when I
got to the hotel I bolted upstairs to my room to get a flask of brandy
I keep for emergencies. I meant to revive him if he was alive, you
see? And in sprinting downstairs again I slipped and crocked myself,
and that finished any chance of getting down to the beach again. I'd
left the car outside, of course, meaning to take it to the garage
later on, after I'd been down to fix things up on the beach.”
“That seems clear enough,” Sir Clinton said in a tone which suggested
that he had got all the information he wanted. “Have you any questions
to ask, inspector?”
“There's just one point,” Armadale explained. “Did you see anyone
except Staveley between the hotel and the rock, either going or
coming?”
Stanley Fleetwood shook his head.
“I saw nobody at all. Naturally I kept a sharp look-out on the way
home.”
Sir Clinton indicated that, so far as he was concerned, the matter was
ended. As if to make this still clearer, he turned to the lawyer,
Calder, who had taken practically no part in the proceedings.
“Are you by any chance Mr. Fordingbridge's lawyer?”
Calder seemed somewhat surprised by the question.
“My firm has had charge of the legal affairs of the Fordingbridge
family for more than a generation,” he explained a little stiffly.
“But I don't see what that has to do with this business.”
Sir Clinton ignored the stiffness.
“We're investigating Mr. Fordingbridge's disappearance just now,” he
explained, “and I would like you to give us some information which
might help us. Can you spare a moment or two?”
Calder, though evidently not prepared for the move, made no objection;
and, when Sir Clinton and his companions left the room, the lawyer
followed them.
As soon as they had reached a place where there was some chance of
privacy, Sir Clinton made his purpose clear.
“One possible explanation of Mr. Fordingbridge's disappearance has
been suggested, Mr. Calder. He had large funds belonging to other
people within his control under a power of attorney. Unless we can
learn the state of these funds, we are rather at a loss to know what
we're looking for. Now, quite unofficially, have you any information
on the point, or can you make a guess as to the state of affairs?
Every moment may count, you understand; and we don't want to bark up
the wrong tree, if it _is_ the wrong tree.”
The lawyer evidently had no desire to implicate himself.
“There's always a possibility of malversation,” he admitted, “in every
case where a man has control of someone else's money.”
“You were familiar with the affairs of the Fordingbridge estate, I
suppose, before Paul Fordingbridge took them out of your firm's hands
not long ago? I mean that, if I got hold of his papers, you could tell
roughly if there had been any hanky-panky?”
“I think it's possible.”
Sir Clinton considered for a time before speaking again.
“Suppose I get permission to examine his papers, either from the
family or from the authorities, you could put your finger on any
malversation if you had time to look into things?”
“Very likely, though it might take time.”
“Then I'll get permission, one way or another. I suppose any papers
will be at his house in London?”
“Probably.”
“Then I'll go up to town with you this afternoon, Mr. Calder, and
we'll look into things with your help.”
The lawyer made no comment on the suggestion, and, as Sir Clinton
showed no desire to detain him further, he went back to his clients.
As soon as his back was turned, Armadale swung round on Wendover.
“I see what you're driving at now, sir,” he declared in a rather
scornful tone. “You think she'll get off on a manslaughter charge
instead of a murder case. And, of course, if it's merely manslaughter,
she's a nice-looking girl with a hard-luck story ready, and you're
counting on a sympathetic jury to bring in a verdict that'll amount to
an acquittal. That's it, isn't it?”
Wendover was genuinely amused.
“That's deuced ingenious of you, inspector,” he admitted. “I hadn't
thought of it in that light at all.”
“Oh, hadn't you?” Armadale replied. “Well, in any case, you needn't
count much on it. What's the evidence in favour of it? Nothing but a
prepared statement by the accused and her accomplice, backed by a
sharp lawyer. Any prosecutor would make hay of it in five minutes so
far as credibility goes.”
“I'm not depending on her statement, inspector. I had the whole affair
cut and dried in my mind before she opened her lips. All that her
statement did was to confirm my ideas on every point. Your case is a
complete wash-out.”
Armadale seemed quite unshaken by this blunt assertion.
“I'll be glad to listen to your notions, sir,” he replied, in a tone
which he would have used towards a spoiled child whom he wished to
conciliate. “It'll be most instructive to hear what a layman thinks of
this affair, sir.”
Wendover was slightly nettled—as the inspector meant him to be—by the
faint but unmistakable emphasis on the word “layman.”
“Sometimes the looker-on sees most of the game,” he retorted
sententiously. “It's true enough in this case. You've missed the
crucial bit of the evidence, inspector. Didn't you hear Mrs. Fleetwood
tell you that, while she was interviewing him, Staveley had no
overcoat on? And yet he was shot through his coat. The hole in the
coat corresponded to the position of the wound on the body. Does that
convince you?”
“You mean that he must have been shot later on, after he'd put on his
coat? No, sir, it doesn't count for a rap, so far as convincing me
goes. She and Fleetwood have had plenty of time to concoct their yarn
and put in nifty little touches like that. What's that evidence worth?
Nothing, when it comes from the criminals and when there's nothing to
back it up independently.”
Wendover's smile broadened into something resembling an impish grin.
“You've missed the crucial bit of evidence, inspector. Mme.
Laurent-Desrousseaux could have given it to you if you'd asked her;
but you didn't think of it. I did.”
“And might I ask what this valuable bit of evidence is?” the inspector
inquired, with heavy politeness.
Wendover had no objection now.
“It's the time that the rain began to fall on Friday night,” he
explained, with the air of setting a dull schoolboy right. “Mme.
Laurent-Desrousseaux told me that the rain started all of a sudden,
_after_ the Fleetwoods' motor had gone away from the shore.”
The inspector thought he saw what Wendover was driving at.
“You mean that Staveley put on his coat when the rain came down, and
you're relying on his not having had it on beforehand when Mrs.
Fleetwood met him? But you've only her story to go on.”
“No, inspector. I've got an independent witness to the fact that he
was carrying his coat over his arm at first. Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux
told me he was carrying it that way when she met him before eleven
o'clock.”
“He might have put it on as soon as she left him,” objected the
inspector, fighting hard for his case.
Wendover shook his head.
“It's no good, inspector. There's more evidence still. If you
remember, Staveley's jacket was wet through by the rain, although he
was wearing his rainproof coat over it. He was shot through the coat.
He put the coat on after the rain started. But by the time the rain
had started the Fleetwoods were away up the road to the hotel in their
car. Further, if he put it on _after_ the rain started, then the shot
that Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux heard was obviously not the shot that
killed Staveley. See it now, inspector?”
Armadale was plainly disconcerted by this last touch.
“It's ingenious,” he conceded gruffly, without admitting that he was
convinced. “What you mean is that Staveley was carrying his coat while
he talked to Mrs. Fleetwood. She fired her pistol and her shot missed
him. She ran off to the car. Then, after the car had gone, the rain
came down and soaked Staveley to the skin. After being nicely wet, he
took the trouble to put on his coat, which had slipped his mind during
the downpour. And then someone else came along and shot him for keeps.
That's how you look at it?”
“More or less.”
“H'm!” said Armadale, pouncing on what he thought was a weak spot. “I
generally manage to struggle into a coat, if I have one, when a
thunderstorm comes down. This Staveley man must have been a curious
bird, by your way of it.”
Wendover shook his head. In view of past snubbings, he was unable to
banish all traces of superiority from his tone as he replied:
“It's all easily explicable, inspector, if you take the trouble to
reason it out logically. Here's what really did happen. Mrs.
Fleetwood's story is accurate up to the point when the pistol went
off. It so happened that, as she fired, Staveley slipped or tripped on
the rock, and came down on the back of his head. You remember the
contused wound there? That happened in this first fall of his.”
The inspector paid Wendover the compliment of listening intently to
his theory. The old air of faint contempt was gone; and it was clear
that Armadale was now seriously perturbed about the solidity of his
case.
“Go on, sir,” he requested.
“Staveley came down hard on the rock with his head and was stunned,”
Wendover explained. “He lay like a log where he had fallen. It wasn't
a good light, remember. Now, just think what Mrs. Fleetwood could make
of it. Her pistol went bang; Staveley dropped at that very instant;
and there he was, to all appearance, dead at her feet. Naturally she
jumped to the conclusion that she'd shot him, and probably killed him.
She went off instantly to consult her husband, whom she'd left in the
car. Not at all unnatural in the circumstances, I think.”
The inspector's face showed that he was beginning to feel his case
cracking; but he said nothing.
“Meanwhile,” Wendover continued, “all her husband had seen was some
sort of scuffle on the rock—in a dim light, remember—and he'd heard
her pistol explode. Perhaps he'd seen Staveley fall. Then his wife cut
back towards the car, and he ran up along the groyne to rejoin her.
What could he think, except that his wife had shot Staveley? And she
thought so herself; you've got Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux's evidence
for that, in the report she gave you of the Fleetwoods' conversation
before they started the car.”
“There might be something in it,” Armadale conceded, in a tone which
showed that he was becoming convinced against his will. “And what
happened after that? Who really committed the murder?”
Wendover had thought out his line of argument very carefully. He meant
to convince the inspector once for all, and prevent him giving
Cressida any further annoyance.
“Don't let's hurry,” he suggested. “Just let's look around at the
circumstances at that moment. You've got Staveley lying on the rock,
stunned by his fall—or at any rate sufficiently knocked out to prevent
his getting up at once. In the crash, his wrist-watch has stopped at
11.19; but the glass of it hasn't been broken. You know how easily
some wrist-watches stop with a shock; even if you play a shot on the
links with a watch on your wrist the swing of the club's apt to stop
the machinery.
“Then comes the rain. It soaks Staveley; but he's too muzzy to get up.
The crack on the head keeps him quiet—or he may have been unconscious
for a while. By and by he wakes up and scrambles to his feet; finds
the rain pouring down; and mechanically he picks up his rainproof and
puts it on. By that time the Fleetwood car is well on its way to the
hotel. There was only one person near at hand.”
“Mme. Laurent-Desrousseaux, you mean?” demanded the inspector. “You're
trying to fix the murder on her, sir? She had a grudge against
Staveley; and there he was, delivered into her hands if she wanted
him. Is that it?”
Wendover could not resist a final dig at Armadale.
“I shouldn't care to commit myself too hastily to an accusation
against anyone,” he said, smiling pleasantly at the crestfallen
inspector. “Certainly not until I was sure of my ground, you
understand?”
Armadale was so engrossed in a reconsideration of the evidence that
apparently Wendover's mockery escaped his attention.
“Then your case is that the wrist-watch stopped at 11.19, when he fell
the first time, but that the glass wasn't broken until he was shot
down, later on?”
“That's what seems to fit the facts,” Wendover averred, though without
letting himself be pinned down definitely.
“It's one way of looking at the business, certainly,” the inspector
was forced to admit, though only grudgingly. “I can't just see a way
of upsetting your notions right away. I'll think it over.”
Sir Clinton had been listening with a detached air to the whole
exposition. Now he turned to Wendover.
“That was very neatly put together, squire, I must admit. The handling
of the watch-stopping portion of the theme showed how well you've
profited by your study of the classics. I wish I had time to read
detective stories. Evidently they brighten the intellect.”
Wendover was not deceived by this tribute to his powers.
“Oh, of course I know well enough that you spotted the flaw long
before I did. You told us, days ago, that there was one. It was when
the inspector produced the pistol from Mrs. Fleetwood's blazer, I
remember.”
“There's a flaw in almost every case that depends purely on
circumstantial evidence, squire; and one can never guess how big that
flaw is till one has the whole of the evidence together. It's safest
to wait for all the evidence before publishing any conclusions; that's
what I always bear in mind. Mistakes don't matter much, so long as you
keep them to yourself and don't mislead other people with them.”
He turned to Armadale, who was still in deep cogitation.
“I'm going up to town this afternoon, inspector, to look into that end
of the Fordingbridge business. In the meantime, I want you to do two
things for me.”
“Very good, sir,” said the inspector, waking up.
“First of all, put all that sand-heap we've collected through fairly
fine sieves, and see that you don't miss a .38 cartridge-case if it
happens to be there. Quite likely it may not be; but I want it, if it
should chance to turn up.”
“So _that's_ what you were looking for all the time?” Wendover
demanded. “I must say, Clinton, you came as near lying over that as
I've known. You said you were looking for shells, or the brass bottle
with the genie in it; and you insisted you were telling the truth,
too; and that makes it more misleading still.”
“Not a bit of it, squire. I told you the plain truth; and if you take
the wrong meaning out of my words, whose blame is it? Did you never
hear an American use the word ‘shell’ for an empty cartridge-case? And
the genie's brass bottle, too. Could you find a neater description of
a cartridge-case than that? Didn't the genie come out in vapour, and
expand till no one would have supposed he could ever have been in the
brass bottle? And when you fire a cartridge, doesn't the gas come
out—far more of it than you'd ever suppose could be compressed into
the size of the cartridge? And wasn't the genie going to kill a
man—same as a pistol cartridge might do? I really believed that I'd
produced a poetical description of a cartridge-case which would be fit
to stand alongside some of Shakespeare's best efforts; and all you can
say about it was that it misled you! Well, well! It's sad.”
Wendover, now that he saw the true interpretation, could hardly
protest further. He had to admit the ingenuity which had served to
mislead him.
“Then there's another thing, inspector, which is much more important.
You'll go at once to a magistrate and swear information against Mrs.
Fleetwood on a charge of murder, and you'll get a warrant for her
arrest. That's to be done immediately, you understand. You'll hold
that warrant ready for execution; but you won't actually arrest her
until I wire to you: ‘Take Fleetwood boat on Thursday.’ As soon as you
get that message, you'll execute the warrant without any delay
whatsoever. That's vital, you understand? And, of course, there
mustn't be a whisper about this until the moment of the arrest.”
As he heard these instructions, the inspector glanced at Wendover with
the air of one who has pulled a rubber out of the fire at the last
moment. Wendover, thunderstruck, stared at Sir Clinton as though he
could hardly believe his ears.