THRESK INTERVENES
Thresk reached his hotel with some words ringing in his head which Jane
Repton had spoken to him at Mrs. Carruthers' dinner-party:
"You can get any single thing in life you want if you want it enough, but
you cannot control the price you will have to pay for it. That you will
only learn afterwards and gradually."
He had got what he had wanted--the career of distinction, and he wondered
whether he was to begin now to learn its price.
He mounted to his sitting-room on the second floor, avoiding the lounge
and the lift and using a small side staircase instead of the great
central one. He had passed no one on the way. In his room he looked upon
the mantelshelf and on the table. No visitor had called on him that day;
no letter awaited him. For the first time since he had landed in India a
day had passed without some resident leaving on him a card or a note of
invitation. The newspapers gave him the reason. He was supposed to have
left on the _Madras_ for England. To make sure he rang for his waiter; no
message of any kind had come.
"Shall I ask at the office?" the waiter asked.
"By no means," answered Thresk, and he added: "I will have dinner served
up here to-night."
There was just a possibility, he thought, that he might after all escape
this particular payment. He took from his pocket his unposted letter to
Stella Ballantyne. There was no longer any use for it and even its
existence was now dangerous to Stella. For let it be discovered, however
she might plead that she knew nothing of its contents, a motive for the
death of Ballantyne might be inferred from it. It would be a false
motive, but just the sort of motive which the man in the street would
immediately accept. Thresk burnt the letter carefully in a plate and
pounded up each black flake of paper until nothing was left but ashes.
Then for the moment his work was done. He had only to wait and he did not
wait long. On the very next morning his newspaper informed him that
Inspector Coulson of the Bombay Police had left for Chitipur.
The Inspector was a young man devoted to his work, but he travelled now
upon a duty which he would gladly have handed to any other of his
colleagues. He had met Stella Ballantyne in Bombay upon one of her rare
visits to Jane Repton. He had sat at the same dinner-table with her, and
he did not find it pleasant to reflect on the tragic destiny which she
must now fulfil. For the facts were fatal.
At daybreak on the morning of the Friday a sentry on the outer edge of
the camp at Jarwhal Junction had noticed something black lying upon the
ground in the open just outside the door of the Agent's big marquee. He
ran across the ground and discovered Captain Ballantyne sprawling, face
downwards, in the smoking-suit which he had worn at dinner the night
before. The sentry shook him gently by the shoulder, but the limpness of
the body frightened him. Then he noticed that there was blood upon the
ground, and calling loudly for help he ran to the guard-room tent. He
returned with others of the native levies and they lifted Ballantyne up.
He was dead and the body was cold. The levies carried him into the tent
and opened his shirt. He had been shot through the heart. They then
roused Mrs. Ballantyne's ayah and bade her wake her mistress. The ayah
went into Mrs. Ballantyne's room and found her mistress sound asleep. She
waked her up and told her what had happened. Stella Ballantyne said not a
word. She got out of bed, and flinging on some clothes went into the
outer tent, where the servants were standing about the body. Stella
Ballantyne went quite close to it and looked down upon the dead man's
face for a long time. She was pale, but there was no shrinking in her
attitude--no apprehension in her eyes.
"He has been killed," she said at length; "telegrams must be sent at
once: to Ajmere for a doctor, to Bombay, and to His Highness the
Maharajah."
Baram Singh salaamed.
"It is as your Excellency wills," he said.
"I will write them," said Stella quietly. And she sat down at her own
writing-table there and then.
The doctor from Ajmere arrived during the day, made an examination and
telegraphed a report to the Chief Commissioner at Ajmere. That report
contained the three significant points which Repton had enumerated to
Thresk, but with some still more significant details. The bullet which
pierced Captain Ballantyne's heart had been fired from Mrs. Ballantyne's
small rook-rifle, and the exploded cartridge was still in the breech. The
rifle was standing up against Mrs. Ballantyne's writing-table in a corner
of the tent, when the doctor from Ajmere discovered it. In the second
place, although Ballantyne was found in the open, there was a patch of
blood upon the carpet within the tent and a trail of blood from that spot
to the door. There could be no doubt that Ballantyne was killed inside.
There was the third point to establish that theory. Neither the sentry on
guard nor any one of the servants sleeping in the adjacent tents had
heard the crack of the rifle. It would not be loud in any case, but if
the weapon had been fired in the open it would have been sufficiently
sharp and clear to attract the attention of the men on guard. The heavy
double lining of the tent however was thick enough so to muffle and
deaden the sound that it would pass unnoticed.
The report was considered at Ajmere and forwarded. It now brought
Inspector Coluson of the Police up the railway from Bombay. He found Mrs.
Ballantyne waiting for him at the Residency of Chitipur.
"I must tell you who I am," he said awkwardly.
"There is no need to," she answered, "I know."
He then cautioned her in the usual way, and producing his pocket-book
asked her whether she wished to throw any light upon her husband's death.
"No," she said. "I have nothing to say. I was asleep and in bed when my
ayah came into my room with the news of his death."
"Yes," said the Inspector uncomfortably. That detail, next to the
dragging of the body out of the tent, seemed to him the grimmest part of
the whole tragedy.
He shut up his book.
"I am afraid it is all very unsatisfactory," he said. "I think we must go
back to Bombay."
"It is as your Excellency wills," said Stella in Hindustani, and the
Inspector was startled by the bad taste of the joke. He had not the
knowledge of her life with Ballantyne, which alone would have given him
the key to understand her. But he was not a fool, and a second glance at
her showed to him that she was not speaking in joke at all. He had an
impression that she was so tired that she did not at the moment care what
happened to her at all. The fatigue would wear off, no doubt, when she
realised that she must fight for her life, but now she stood in front of
him indifferent and docile--much as one of the native levies was wont to
stand before her husband. The words which the levies used and the
language in which they spoke them rose naturally to her lips, as the only
words and language suitable to the occasion.
"You see, Mrs. Ballantyne," he said gently, "there is no reason to
suspect a single one of your servants or of your escort."
"And there is reason to suspect me," she added, looking at him quietly
and steadily.
The Inspector for his part looked away. He was a young man--no more than
a year or two older than Stella Ballantyne herself. They both came from
the same kind of stock. Her people and his people might have been friends
in some pleasant country village in one of the English counties. She was
pretty, too, disconcertingly pretty, in spite of the dark circles under
her eyes and the pallor of her face. There was a delicacy in her looks
and in her dress which appealed to him for tenderness. The appeal was all
the stronger because it was only in that way and unconsciously that she
appealed. In her voice, in her bearing, in her eyes there was no request,
no prayer.
"I have been to the Palace," he said, "I have had an audience with the
Maharajah."
"Of course," she answered. "I shall put no difficulties in your way."
He was standing in her own drawing-room, noticing with what skill
comfort had been combined with daintiness, and how she had followed the
usual instinct of her kind in trying to create here in this room a piece
of England. Through the window he looked out upon a lawn which was being
watered by a garden-sprinkler, and where a gardener was at work attending
to a bed of bright flowers. There, too, she had been making the usual
pathetic attempt to convert a half-acre of this country of yellow desert
into a green garden of England. Coulson had not a shadow of doubt in his
mind Stella Ballantyne would exchange this room with its restful colours
and its outlook on a green lawn for--at the best--many years of solitary
imprisonment in Poona Gaol. He shut up his book with a snap.
"Will you be ready to go in an hour?" he asked roughly.
"Yes," said she.
"If I leave you unwatched during that hour you will promise to me that
you will be ready to go in an hour?"
Stella Ballantyne nodded her head.
"I shall not kill myself now," she said, and he looked at her quickly,
but she did not trouble to explain her words. She merely added: "I may
take some clothes, I suppose?"
"Whatever you need," said the Inspector. And he took her down to Bombay.
She was formally charged next morning before the stipendiary for the
murder of her husband and remanded for a week.
She was remanded at eleven o'clock in the morning, and five minutes later
the news was ticked off on the tape at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Within
another five minutes the news was brought upstairs to Thresk. He had been
fortunate. He was in a huge hotel, where people flit through its rooms
for a day and are gone the next, and no one is concerned with the doings
of his neighbour, a place of arrival and departure like the platform of a
great railway station. There was no place in all Bombay where Thresk
could so easily pass unnoticed. And he had passed unnoticed. A single
inquiry at the office, it is true, would have revealed his presence, but
no one had inquired, since by this time he should be nearing Aden. He had
kept to his rooms during the day and had only taken the air after it was
dark. This was in the early stages of wireless telegraphy, and the
_Madras_ had no installation. It might be that inquiries would be made
for him at Aden. He could only wait with Jane Repton's words ringing in
his ears: "You cannot control the price you will have to pay."
Stella Ballantyne was brought up again in a week's time and the case then
proceeded from day to day. The character of Ballantyne was revealed, his
brutalities, his cunning. Detail by detail he was built up into a gross
sinister figure secret and violent which lived again in that crowded
court and turned the eyes of the spectators with a shiver of discomfort
upon the young and quiet woman in the dock. And in that character the
prosecution found the motive of the crime. Sympathy at times ran high for
Stella Ballantyne, but there were always the two grim details to keep it
in check: she had been found asleep by her ayah, quietly restfully asleep
within a few hours of Ballantyne's death; and she had, according to the
theory of the Crown, found in some violence of passion the strength to
drag the dying man from the tent and to leave him to gasp out his life
under the stars.
Thresk watched the case from his rooms at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Every fact
which was calculated to arouse sympathy for her was also helping to
condemn her. No one doubted that she had shot Stephen Ballantyne. He
deserved shooting--very well. But that did not give her the right to be
his executioner. What was her defence to be? A sudden intolerable
provocation? How would that square with the dragging of his body across
the carpet to the door? There was the fatal insuperable act.
Thresk read again and again the reports of the proceedings for a hint as
to the line of the defence. He got it the day when Repton appeared in the
witness-box on a subpoena from the Crown to bear testimony to the
violence of Stephen Ballantyne. He had seen Stella with her wrist
bruised so that in public she could not remove her gloves.
"What kind of bruises?" asked the counsel.
"Such bruises as might be made by some one twisting her arms," he
answered, and then Mr. Travers, a young barrister who was enjoying his
first leap into the public eye, rose to cross-examine.
Thresk read through that cross-examination and rose to his feet. "You
cannot control the price you will have to pay," he said to himself. That
day, when Mrs. Ballantyne's solicitor returned to his office after the
rising of the Court, he found Thresk waiting for him.
"I wish to give evidence for Mrs. Ballantyne," said Thresk--"evidence
which will acquit her."
He spoke with so much certainty that the solicitor was fairly startled.
"And with evidence so positive in your possession it is only this
afternoon that you come here with it! Why?"
Thresk was prepared for the question.
"I have a great deal of work waiting for me in London," he returned. "I
hoped that it might not be necessary for me to appear at all. Now I see
that it is."
The solicitor looked straight at Thresk.
"I knew from Mrs. Repton that you dined with the Ballantynes that night,
but she was sure that you knew nothing of the affair. You had left the
tent before it happened."
"That is true," answered Thresk.
"Yet you have evidence which will acquit Mrs. Ballantyne?"
"I think so."
"How is it, then," the lawyer asked, "that we have heard nothing of this
evidence at all from Mrs. Ballantyne herself?"
"Because she knows nothing of it," replied Thresk.
The lawyer pointed to a chair. The two men sat down together in the
office and it was long before they parted.
Within an hour of Thresk's return from the solicitor's office an
Inspector of Police waited on him at his hotel and was instantly shown
up.
"We did not know until to-day," he said, "that you were still in Bombay,
Mr. Thresk. We believed you to be on the Madras, which reached Marseilles
early this morning."
"I missed it," replied Thresk. "Had you wanted me you could have inquired
at Port Said five days ago."
"Five days ago we had no information."
The native servants of Ballantyne had from the first shrouded themselves
in ignorance. They would answer what questions were put to them; they
would not go one inch beyond. The crime was an affair of the Sahibs and
the less they had to do with it the better, until at all events they were
sure which way the wind was setting from Government House. Of their own
initiative they knew nothing. It was thus only by the discovery of
Thresk's letter to Captain Ballantyne, which was found crumpled up in a
waste-paper basket, that his presence that night in the tent was
suspected.
"It is strange," the Inspector grumbled, "that you did not come to us of
your own accord when you had missed your boat and tell us what you knew."
"I don't think it is strange at all," answered Thresk, "for I am a
witness for the defence. I shall give my evidence when the case for the
defence opens."
The Inspector was disconcerted and went away. Thresk's policy had so far
succeeded. But he had taken a great risk and now that it was past he
realised with an intense relief how serious the risk had been. If the
Inspector had called upon him before he had made known his presence to
Mrs. Ballantyne's solicitor and offered his evidence, his position would
have been difficult. He would have had to discover some other good
reason why he had lain quietly at his hotel during these last days. But
fortune had favoured him. He had to thank, above all, the secrecy of the
native servants.