John Steadman was hard at work in Luke Bechcombe's study. He was
finding his co-executor, the Rev. James Collyer, of very little use.
It was rumoured that the rector had had a nervous breakdown; at any
rate it appeared impossible to get him up to town and documents
requiring his signature had to be sent to Wexbridge Rectory by special
messenger.
Steadman was cogitating over this fact in some annoyance and
deliberating the advisability of applying for the appointment of
another executor, when he heard the sound of a taxi stopping before
the door, and looking up he saw Inspector Furnival getting out. He
went into the hall to meet him.
The inspector was looking grave and perturbed.
“Have you heard?” he questioned breathlessly.
“Nothing!” Steadman answered laconically.
“Mrs. Carnthwacke was murderously assaulted this morning in her own
carriage in one of London's best-known thoroughfares!”
“What!” The barrister stared at him in a species of stupefaction.
Instead of answering the inspector stepped back to the open door of
the study.
“One moment, please.”
But if to speak to John Steadman in private was his objective he did
not obtain it. Mrs. Bechcombe came quickly into the hall with Cecily
Hoyle close behind her.
“Inspector,” she cried, “what is it? You have discovered my husband's
murderer? I heard you say ‘Mrs. Carnthwacke.’”
The inspector's face was very grave as he turned. Then he stood back
for her to pass into the study. He did not speak again until they were
all in the room, then he closed the door and looked at Luke
Bechcombe's widow with eyes in which pity was mingled with severity.
“Mrs. Carnthwacke has nearly shared your husband's fate, madam,” he
said very deliberately. “I think you must be convinced now of the
absolute impossibility of the theory you have not hesitated to
broadcast all along.”
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Bechcombe questioned sharply.
The inspector spread out his hands.
“As I was just telling Mr. Steadman, Mrs. Carnthwacke was murderously
assaulted and left for dead in her own carriage this morning, in
circumstances which leave small doubt in my mind that the miscreant
who attacked her was Mr. Bechcombe's murderer.”
“I do not believe it! The Carnthwackes—one of them, murdered my
husband,” Mrs. Bechcombe said uncompromisingly. “I have the strongest
possible——”
She was interrupted by an odd sound, a sort of choking gasp from
Cecily. They all turned. The girl was deathly white. She caught her
breath sharply in her throat.
“It—it can't be true! I don't believe it! Why should he want to hurt
Mrs. Carnthwacke?”
“Why should who want to hurt Mrs. Carnthwacke?” the inspector
counter-questioned.
“Because—oh, I don't know——. Oh, I know he didn't!” Cecily accompanied
this asseveration with a burst of tears. “Nobody could be so cruel.”
“Somebody has!” the inspector said dryly. “Is it any consolation to
you to think that there are two murderers at large instead of one,
Miss Hoyle?”
Cecily stared at him, twisting her hands about, apparently in an agony
of speechlessness. She made two or three hoarse attempts to answer
him. Then, with a wild glance round at the amazed faces of Steadman
and Mrs. Bechcombe, she turned and rushed out of the room.
The inspector glanced at John Steadman—a glance intercepted by Mrs.
Bechcombe.
“Hysteria!” that lady remarked scornfully. “I fancy she thinks that
you suspect Anthony, and that naturally—— But enough of Cecily Hoyle.
What is this wild tale of yours about Mrs. Carnthwacke, inspector?”
“It is no wild tale, madam,” the inspector said coldly. “I have just
come from the Carnthwackes' house, where Mrs. Carnthwacke lies at
death's door. I came here by Mr. Carnthwacke's express desire to see
whether I could induce Mr. Steadman to accompany me to consult with
him as to the best measures to be taken now.”
“Of course I will come, inspector,” the barrister said readily. “As I
should go anywhere where it was in the least probable that I should
hear anything at all bearing upon our own case. One never knows from
what point elucidation may come.”
Mrs. Bechcombe turned her shoulder to him.
“Oh, please don't prose, John! Now what has happened to Mrs.
Carnthwacke, inspector?”
“Mrs. Carnthwacke, madam, was just taking a drive as you might
yourself. She came up Piccadilly, left an order at a shop in New Bond
Street, told her man to drive by way of Regent Street and Oxford
Street to the Park, to go in by the Marble Arch and wait near the
Victoria Gate until Mr. Carnthwacke who had been out for the night
came from Paddington Station to join them. As it happened he was at
the meeting-place first. When the car stopped he was amazed to see
Mrs. Carnthwacke lolling back in a sort of crouching position against
the side of the car. At first he thought she had had a fit of some
kind, but there was an odour to which he was unaccustomed hanging
about the car and then he discovered a piece of cord twisted tightly
round his wife's throat. He cut it in a frenzy of fear and for some
time they thought she was dead. But they drove straight to some doctor
they knew close to the Park. He tried artificial respiration and
brought her round to some extent, and then before they took her home,
phoned to Scotland Yard for me.”
“What was the motive?” Steadman asked quietly.
The inspector raised his eyebrows.
“Only one person saw Mr. Bechcombe's murderer. Mrs. Carnthwacke was a
witness to be feared.”
“But you say she is not got rid of! She is alive!” Mrs. Bechcombe
interrupted hysterically.
“At present,” the inspector rejoined grimly. “Mr. Steadman, if you
could come——? As I said before, Carnthwacke is most anxious to have
your advice with regard to what steps should be taken to discover the
would-be murderer. And there is no time to be lost.”
“I am at your service, inspector.” Steadman turned to the door. “You
shall hear further particulars as soon as possible, Madeline.”
In the taxi outside John Steadman looked at the inspector.
“Is this the work of the Yellow Dog, inspector?”
“It is the work of Mr. Bechcombe's murderer, sir,” the inspector
replied evasively.
“You have some grounds for this conviction, I presume,” John Steadman
rejoined. “At first sight it looks as though it might be an entirely
independent affair. An attempt to steal any jewels that Mrs.
Carnthwacke might be wearing. Or her money.”
“You wait until you have talked to Mrs. Carnthwacke, sir. You won't
feel much doubt as to her assailant's identity then.”
“But is Mrs. Carnthwacke able to speak?” John Steadman questioned in
great surprise. “I understood from what you said——”
The inspector looked him full in the face and solemnly winked one eye.
“It suits our purpose that the outside world and particularly Mrs.
Carnthwacke's assailant should think her dying. But, as a matter of
fact, when Mrs. Carnthwacke had rallied from the effects of the
strangulation, except that she feels weak and ill from the shock, she
was practically as well as you or I. She is perfectly able to discuss
the matter with us, though by my advice she is keeping to her own
rooms and it is being given out that she is still unconscious, lying
between life and death.”
At No. 15 Blanden Square, they were received by Cyril B. Carnthwacke
himself. He was looking pale and worried, but he greeted John Steadman
warmly.
“Say, this is all right of you, Mr. Steadman,” he exclaimed. “Come
right away to my sanctum and I will tell you what I can about this
affair.”
He led the way to his study, a large room at the back of the house on
the second floor. When they were inside he locked and bolted the door,
somewhat to Steadman's surprise.
“Now,” he said, going to the opposite side of the room and unlocking
another door, “we are going right away to Mrs. Carnthwacke and you
shall hear what she says, Mr. Steadman.”
The door he opened led into what was apparently his dressing-room with
a communicating door into Mrs. Carnthwacke's apartments. In this a
couple of women dressed as nurses were sitting. They rose. Furnival
murmured:
“Female detectives to guard Mrs. Carnthwacke. Even her own maid is not
admitted.”
One of them opened the farther door and ushered them into Mrs.
Carnthwacke's room. In spite of Inspector Furnival's report, Steadman
was surprised to see how well she looked. She was lying back in a
capacious arm-chair; some arrangement of lace concealed any damage
there might be to her throat, and beyond the fact that she was
unusually pale—which might have been put down to the absence of
make-up—and that one side of her face was a little swollen, he would
have noticed nothing unusual in her.
He went forward with a few conventional words of sympathy. Carnthwacke
drew up three chairs and motioned to the other men to be seated.
“Now, honey,” he said persuasively, “you are just going to tell us all
once more what happened this morning.”
“I will do my best.” Mrs. Carnthwacke closed her eyes for a moment.
“It is such a horrible ghastly thing. But—but I know that to let such
a man be at large is a public danger. So I must tell you though every
time I speak of it I seem to live through it again. Well, I left home
this morning just as well as ever, Mr. Steadman. And really you
wouldn't have thought I _could_ be in any danger in my own car with
two men on the front; now, would you?”
“I certainly should not,” John Steadman agreed.
“Such a thing never entered my head,” Mrs. Carnthwacke went on. “But
first, perhaps, I had better say that I wore no jewellery that could
possibly attract anybody's attention. None at all, in fact, but my
wedding ring and the diamond half hoop that was my engagement ring
which I have worn as a keeper ever since. I haven't even worn my
pearls out of doors lately, because I thought it best to be on the
safe side. Well, I went to my tailor's in New Bond Street. It was an
awful bother getting there, because as you know Bond Street is up—any
street you want to go to is always up—and we had to go very slow in
the side streets because all the vehicles which turned out of Bond
Street were crowding up in the narrower streets, and the traffic was
generally disorganized. I was just hoping we should soon get out of
the crush when the door of the car was opened and a young man got in.
In that first moment I was not really frightened, for he looked like a
gentleman and smiled quite pleasantly.”
“One minute, please,” Steadman interposed. “In what street were you
now?”
“I don't know. I didn't notice. We didn't seem to have left New Bond
Street very long! I really thought for the moment in a half-bewildered
way that he must be some one I had known very well in the old days
when I was in England, and who had altered—grown as it were. He sat
down opposite me. ‘I see you don't know me,’ he said in quite a
cultivated voice, ‘and yet it is not so very long since we met.’
‘Isn't it?’ I said. ‘No, I don't seem to remember you. Where did we
meet?’ With that I put out my hand to the speaking tube, for I was
beginning to think that all was not right. But he was too quick for
me. He caught both my hands in his, then managing somehow to hold them
both in one of his he sprang across and sat down beside me. I
struggled, of course, and tried to call out, though I wasn't so
awfully frightened, not at first, for it seemed unthinkable that I
should really be hurt there in my own car in the broad daylight. But
when I opened my mouth to cry out he stuck something into my mouth,
something that burned and stung. Then in that moment I knew him—knew
him for Luke Bechcombe's murderer, I mean. I struggled frantically,
but he was putting something round my neck, pulling it tighter and
tighter. I couldn't breathe. And then I knew no more till I was coming
round again and my husband and the doctor were with me.” She stopped
and put up her hands to her neck as if she still felt that cruel
strangulating grip.
Cyril B. Carnthwacke's face looked very grim.
“That guy will have something round his own neck soon, I surmise.
Something he won't be able to get rid of, either.”
John Steadman and the inspector had both taken out their notebooks.
The former spoke first.
“You say you know your assailant to be the murderer of Luke Bechcombe.
Will you tell us how you recognized him?”
“Because—because that day when I was talking to the man whom I thought
to be Mr. Bechcombe, whom we now believe to have been the murderer, I
noticed his hands. He kept moving them over the table in and out of
the papers in a nervous sort of way, and I saw——” Mrs. Carnthwacke's
voice suddenly failed her. She shrank nervously to the side of the
chair. “You are sure no one can hear me, Cyril?”
He sat down on the side of her chair.
“Dead certain, honey. Come now, get it off your chest and you will
feel ever so much better.”
“And be ever so much safer,” Inspector Furnival interposed. “As long
as you only know this secret, Mrs. Carnthwacke, Mr. Bechcombe's
murderer has a solid reason for wanting to destroy the one person who
can identify him. But, once this knowledge is shared with others, the
reason disappears. If Mrs. Carnthwacke is disposed of and there remain
others who share her knowledge, he is none the safer. You see this,
don't you, madam?”
“Yes, yes! Of course I do,” she assented feverishly. “I wish now I had
spoken right out at once. But I wanted a big American detective to
undertake to get my diamonds back. My husband had promised to engage
him and I wanted him to have this exclusive information. Now, we will
have everybody else knowing the secret too.”
“Never mind, madam, there will be plenty for him to do,” Inspector
Furnival observed consolingly. “You were telling us you noticed the
hands of the man in Mr. Bechcombe's office.”
“Yes.” Mrs. Carnthwacke glanced up again at her husband and seemed to
gather strength from his smile. “I just looked at his hands
mechanically while we were talking, and I saw that though they were
nice hands, well shaped and carefully manicured, they had one curious
defect, if you can call it a defect. The thumb was unusually long, and
the first—don't you call it the index finger?—was very short, so that
the two looked almost the same length. It was an odd fault, and I
never noticed it in any hand before, until——”
“Yes, madam, until?” the inspector prompted as she paused with a
shiver.
“Until this morning in the car,” she went on, steadying her voice with
an effort. “Just as he caught my hands, I saw his and I knew—I knew
beyond the possibility of a doubt that my assailant was the man who
stole my diamonds, and murdered Mr. Bechcombe.”
“Well, that is definite enough, anyhow,” John Steadman remarked
thoughtfully. “Were both hands alike, do you know, Mrs. Carnthwacke?”
“Yes, they were,” she returned in a more positive tone than she had
yet used. “I noticed that particularly.”
“Did you recognize him in any other way?” the inspector asked with his
eye on his notebook.
“No, not really. I can't say I did,” Mrs. Carnthwacke said
hesitatingly. “That is, I did think there was something about the
eyes, though the Crow's Inn man had his hidden by smoked horn-rimmed
glasses, so I couldn't have seen much of them. But there was something
about his eyebrows and the way his eyes were set that I certainly
thought I recognized.”
John Steadman was drawing his brows together.
“Yes, it is a curious defect and I should think as you say an uncommon
one, yet I cannot help feeling that I have noticed the same thing in
some hands I have seen—fairly lately too, but I cannot remember
where,” he said in a puzzled tone. “Probably I shall recollect
presently.”
Was it a warning glance the inspector shot at him? Steadman could not
be quite certain, but at any rate there was no misinterpreting
Carnthwacke's gesture as he got up from his seat on the arm of his
wife's chair.
“She can't tell you any more, gentlemen, and that's a fact. What
became of that guy is what we want to know and what we reckon your
clever police are going to find out. Now you can't be half murdered
and left for dead in the morning without being a wee trifle exhausted
in the afternoon, so if you could come to my study——”
“You—you won't be long? I don't feel as if I should ever be safe away
from you again,” his wife pleaded.
Carnthwacke's reply was to pat her shoulders.
“I shan't leave you long, honey. And you just figure to yourself you
are as safe as a rock with these gentlemen in the study with me, and
these females in the dressing-room.”
Once more in his study the American's face hardened again as he
invited the other men to sit down, and put a big box of cigars on the
table before them.
“There's nothing like a smoke to clear the brain, gentlemen,” he said
as he lighted one himself. “And what do you make of the affair now
that you have seen Mrs. Carnthwacke?”
John Steadman took the answer upon himself.
“As brutal and deliberate an attempt to murder as I ever heard of.”
“There I am with you,” Cyril B. Carnthwacke said grimly. “How did that
fellow find out where Mrs. Carnthwacke was journeying and when?
There's where I should like you to put me wise.”
“He may not have arranged anything beforehand. It may have been a
sudden thing when he saw the carriage,” Inspector Furnival hazarded.
“Don't you bet your bottom dollar on that, old chap!” Carnthwacke
admonished, puffing away at his big cigar. “He don't go about with a
drop of chloroform and a nice long piece of ribbon handy in his pocket
any more than other folks, I guess. It just figures out like this—some
of our folks here must be acquainted with this guy, and put him wise
to Mrs. Carnthwacke's movements.”
“Yes, I think there can be no doubt you are right about that,” John
Steadman assented deliberately. “What of Mrs. Carnthwacke's maid?”
“Came over with us from the States,” the American told him. “And she
is devoted to Mrs. Carnthwacke. No flies on her.”
“No young man?” the inspector questioned.
“Not the shadow of one,” Carnthwacke told him, leaning back in his
chair and watching his cigar smoke curl up to the ceiling.
“No great friend?”
“Never heard of one. Of course I don't say she has no acquaintance,
but she is one of the sort that keeps herself to herself, as you say
over here.”
“Next thing is the chauffeur and footman,” the inspector went on. “I
should like a talk with them. It seems inconceivable that they should
not have seen this man get in or out.”
“I don't know that it does,” said Carnthwacke thoughtfully. “They are
taught to keep their heads straight in front of them—the footman at
least; and the chauffeur has enough to do in the traffic of London
streets, I reckon, to look after himself and his car. However, you can
have them as long as you like, but you won't get anything out of them.
They swear they saw nothing and heard nothing, and that is all they
will say. They were bothered with the traffic being diverted on all
sides, and continually having to slow down, and of course it was this
slowing down that gave the guy his chance. He must be a cool hand,
that. Say, inspector, do you think it was this Yellow Dog the
newspapers have a stunt about?”
“When we have caught the Yellow Dog I shall be able to tell you more
about it,” the inspector replied evasively. “I will see your men,
please, Mr. Carnthwacke. But before they come let me warn you again to
be most careful not to allow it to be known that Mrs. Carnthwacke
escaped with comparatively so little injury. Continue to represent her
as lying at death's door, and let nobody but the doctor and nurses see
her. I cannot exaggerate the importance of not allowing it to reach
the ears of her would-be murderer that he has failed. We must look to
it that not a breath as to her condition leaks out from us, Mr.
Steadman.”
John Steadman was looking out of the window.
“I quite see your point, inspector. It is most important that we
should not allow the faintest suspicion of the truth to leak out among
our friends, especially——”
“Especially——?” Carnthwacke prompted.
John Steadman did not speak, but he turned his head and looked at the
inspector.
“From the widow, Mrs. Bechcombe,” the detective finished.
Carnthwacke stared at him.
“Why Mrs. Bechcombe?”
“Because,” said the inspector very slowly and emphatically, “she might
tell Miss Cecily Hoyle and——”
The eyes of the three men met and then the pursed-up lips of Cyril B.
Carnthwacke emitted a low whistle.
“Sakes alive! Sits the wind in that quarter?”