It would have been easy enough for Mr. Flexen to send for Hutchings to
the Castle and question him there. But he did not. In the first place, he
did not think it fair to a man who had already prejudiced himself so
seriously by his threats against the murdered man. Besides, he would be
at a disadvantage, under a greater strain at the Castle, and Mr. Flexen
wanted him where he would be at his best, for he wished to be able to
form an exact judgment of the likelihood of his being the murderer.
Indeed, it must be a very careful and exact judgment, for he felt that he
was moving in deep waters; that it was a case in which it was possible,
even easy, to go hopelessly wrong. Also, he was fully alive to the fact
that if threatened men live long, the men who threaten are to blame for
it, and that threats such as Hutchings' are the commonest things in the
world, and, as a rule, of very little importance. But there was always
the chance that Hutchings was the unusual threatener; and, if he were, he
had assuredly been in circumstances most favourable to the carrying out
of his threats.
Accordingly he learnt from Inspector Perkins the way to the gamekeeper's
cottage in the West Wood, where Hutchings was staying with his father,
and drove the car to it himself. Hutchings was alone in the cottage, for
his father was out on his rounds. He invited Mr. Flexen to come in. Mr.
Flexen came in, sat down in an arm-chair, and examined Hutchings' face.
He saw that the man was plainly very anxious and ill at ease. It was
natural enough. He must perceive quite clearly how black against him
things looked.
He was forced also to admit to himself that Hutchings had not a pleasant
face. It was choleric and truculent, and in spite of the man's evident
anxiety, there was a sullen fierceness on it which gave him no little of
the air of a wild beast trapped.
Mr. Flexen wasted no time beating about the bush, but said to him: "When
you visited Elizabeth Twitcher last night you entered and left the Castle
by the library window."
"You got that from that young blighter Manley," said Hutchings bitterly.
"Not at all. I did not know that Mr. Manley knew it," said Mr. Flexen.
"So you did?"
"Yes, sir, I did. I always went to the village that way in the
summer-time. It's the shortest. Besides, his lordship was nearly always
asleep; and if he wasn't and did 'ear me, there was always something I
could be doing in the library, sir."
He spoke with eager, rather humble civility.
"Well, did you, as you went through the library, coming or going, hear
Lord Loudwater snore?"
Hutchings knitted his brow, thinking; then he said: "I can't call to mind
as I did, sir. But, then, I wasn't giving him any attention. I was
thinking about other things altogether. Of course, I went out quietly
enough. But that was habit."
"That sounds as if you had not heard him snore--as if you thought that he
was awake," said Mr. Flexen.
"I don't think I thought about him at all, sir, at the moment. I was
thinking about other things," said Hutchings.
"You say that Mr. Manley saw you go out?"
"Yes, sir. I passed him in the hall and went into the library. We had a
few words, and I told him I had come to fetch some cigarettes as I'd
left behind."
"Do you know what the time was?" said Mr. Flexen.
"No, sir--not exactly. But it must have been nearly half-past eleven, I
should think."
"It is very important to fix the time at which Lord Loudwater died," said
Mr. Flexen. "You can't tell me nearer than that?"
"No, sir. It was nearly ten to twelve when I got home, and I reckon it's
about twenty minutes' walk from the Castle to the cottage here."
"And all you went to the Castle for was to speak to Elizabeth Twitcher?"
said Mr. Flexen.
"That was all I went for--every single thing. And it was all I did
there--every mortal thing I did there, sir," Hutchings asseverated, and
he wiped his brow.
"H'm!" said Mr. Flexen. "As you passed through the library, did you
happen to notice whether the knife was in its place in the big inkstand?"
Hutchings hesitated, and his lips twitched. Then he said: "Yes, I did,
sir. It was in the big inkstand."
Mr. Flexen could not make up his mind whether he was telling the truth or
not. He thought that he was not. But he did not attach much importance to
the matter. People who knew themselves to be suspected of a crime had
often told him quite stupid and unnecessary lies and been proved innocent
after all.
"I should have thought that your mind was too full of other things to
notice a thing like that," he said in a somewhat incredulous tone.
Then there came an outburst. Mr. Flexen had thought that Hutchings was
worked up to a high degree of nervous tension, and he was. He cried out
that he knew that every one believed that he had done it; but he hadn't.
He'd never thought of it. He was damned if he didn't wish he had done it.
He might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, anyhow. He broke off to
curse Lord Loudwater at length. He had been a curse to every one who came
into contact with him while he was alive, and now he was getting people
into trouble when he was dead. Yes: he wished it had occurred to him to
stick that knife into him. He'd have done it like a shot, and he'd have
done the right thing. The world was well rid of a swine like that!
His face was contorted, and his eyes kept gleaming red as he talked, and
he came to the end of his outburst, trembling and panting.
Mr. Flexen was unmoved and unenlightened. It was merely the outburst
of a badly-frightened man lacking in self-control, and told him
nothing. It left it equally likely that Hutchings had, or had not,
committed the crime.
"There's nothing to get so frantic about," he said quietly to the panting
man. "It doesn't do any good."
"It's all very well to talk like that, sir," said Hutchings in a shaky
voice. "But I know what people are saying. It's enough to make any one
lose their temper."
"I should think that yours was pretty easy to lose," said Mr.
Flexen dryly.
"I know it. It is very short, sir. It always was; and I can't help it,"
said Hutchings in an apologetic voice.
"Then you'd better set about learning to help it, my man," said
Mr. Flexen.
He took out his pipe and filled it slowly. The flush faded a little from
Hutchings' face. Mr. Flexen lighted his pipe and rose.
Then as he went to the door he said: "I should advise you to get that
stupid temper well in hand. It makes a bad impression. Good afternoon."
Mr. Flexen drove back to the Castle, considering Hutchings carefully.
There was no doubt that he was, indeed, badly frightened; but he had
reason to be. Mr. Flexen could not decide whether he had worn the air of
a guilty man or an innocent. He could not decide whether the butler had
been too deeply absorbed in his own affairs to hear the snoring of Lord
Loudwater as he went through the library. It was possible that Lord
Loudwater was alive, asleep, and yet not snoring at the time. Snoring is
often intermittent.
He considered Hutchings' violent outburst. Certainly such an outburst
showed the man uncommonly unbalanced; it might, indeed, on occasion take
the form of uncontrollable murderous fury. But it seemed to him that an
actual meeting with Lord Loudwater would have been necessary to provoke
that. But Lord Loudwater had been sitting in his chair when he died; and
if he had not killed himself, he had been killed in his sleep. At any
rate, there was probably sufficient evidence, seeing what juries are, to
convict Hutchings. If he had been one of those not uncommon ministers of
the law, whose only desire is to secure a conviction, he would doubtless
arrest him at once. But it was not his only desire to secure a
conviction; it was his very keen desire to find the right solution of the
problem. He could not see where any more evidence against Hutchings was
to come from. What Mr. Manley had told him about the knife, that it had
been in general use, and that he had seen Hutchings cut string with it
the day before the murder, greatly lessened its value as evidence, even
if Hutchings' finger-prints were thick on it. He decided to dismiss
Hutchings from his mind for the time being, and devote all his energies
to discovering the mysterious woman with whom Lord Loudwater had had the
furious quarrel between eleven and a quarter-past.
With this end in view, on his return to the Castle, he went straight to
the library, where Mr. Carrington was engaged, along with Mr. Manley, in
an examination of the murdered man's papers. They were uncommonly few,
and Mr. Manley had already set them in order. Lord Loudwater seemed to
have kept but few letters, and the papers consisted chiefly of receipted
and unreceipted bills.
When he found that Mr. Flexen had come to confer with the lawyer, Mr.
Manley assumed an air of extraordinary discretion and softly withdrew.
"I want to know--it is most important--whether there was any
entanglement between Lord Loudwater and a woman," said Mr. Flexen.
"I should think it very unlikely," said Mr. Carrington without
hesitation. "At least, I have never heard of anything of the kind,
and so far I have come across no trace of anything of the kind among
his papers."
Mr. Flexen frowned, considering; then he said: "Do you happen to know
whether he employed any one besides your firm to do legal work for him?"
"As to that I can't say. But I should not think it likely. It was always
a business to get him to attend to anything that wanted doing, and he
always made a fuss about it. I can't see him employing another firm too.
But he may have done. The only thing is that I ought to have found either
their bills or the receipts for them among those papers--except that my
late client does not appear to have taken the trouble to keep many
receipts."
"The thing is that I've learnt that Lord Loudwater had a furious quarrel
with some unknown woman between eleven and a quarter-past on the night of
his death, and I want to find her. You can see how important it is. It
may be that she stabbed him, or it may be that she provided him with the
motive to commit suicide--not that that seems likely. But you can't tell:
she might have been able to threaten him with some exposure. Those people
without any self-control are always doing the most senseless
things--bigamy, for instance, is often one of their weaknesses."
"Loudwater was certainly without self-control; but I hardly think that he
was the man to commit bigamy," said the lawyer.
"It would very much simplify matters if he had," said Mr. Flexen in
a dissatisfied tone. "I wonder whether Manley would know anything
about it?"
"He might," said Mr. Carrington.
Mr. Flexen went through the library window to find Mr. Manley strolling
up and down the lawn with every appearance of enjoying his pipe and the
respite from perusing papers.
"Mr. Carrington tells me that you were in Lord Loudwater's confidence,"
said Mr. Flexen.
"Wholly," said Mr. Manley, with more promptness than his actual knowledge
of the facts warranted.
It seemed to him fitting that a secretary of his intelligence and
discretion should have been wholly in the confidence of any nobleman who
employed him. Therefore he himself must have been.
"Then perhaps you can tell me whether he was entangled with a woman,"
said Mr. Flexen.
"Entangled? In what way?" said Mr. Manley in a tone of surprise.
"In the usual way, I suppose. Was he engaged in a love-affair with any
woman, or had he been?"
"He certainly did not tell me anything about it if he was," said Mr.
Manley. "But that is the kind of thing he might very well _not_ confide
to his secretary."
"You don't happen to know if he was making any payments to a woman--an
allowance, for example?" said Mr. Flexen.
Mr. Manley was well on his guard by now. These questions must surely
refer to Helena.
"He never told me anything about it," he said with perfect readiness.
"Not, of course, that I would tell you if he had," he added, in his most
amiable voice. "I've told you that I thought that he made enough trouble
while he was alive. I won't help him to make trouble now that he's dead."
Mr. Flexen thought that the asseveration was unnecessary, since Mr.
Manley had not the knowledge which would make the trouble. He returned to
the lawyer and told him that Mr. Manley had no information to give.
"It seems a very important point in the affair," said the lawyer.
"It is," said Mr. Flexen, frowning. "I wonder if there was an intrigue
with a country girl or woman, some one in the neighbourhood?"
"There might have been. Lord Loudwater rode a great deal. He was
hours in the saddle every day. He had time and opportunity for that
kind of thing."
"On the other hand, there's no need for it to have been any one in the
neighbourhood at all. To say nothing of the train, it's a short enough
motor drive from London; and it was a moonlight night," said Mr. Flexen.
"Then you may be able to find traces of the car. The woman must have left
it somewhere while she had the interview with Lord Loudwater," said Mr.
Carrington.
"I'll try," said Mr. Flexen, not very hopefully, "But there are so few
people about at night nowadays. Five out of the eight gamekeepers are
still abroad. In ordinary times there would have been four at least of
them about the roads and woods. On that night there was only one."
"There's the further difficulty that Lord Loudwater had so few friends.
That will make it harder to find out anything about an affair of this
kind--if he had one," said Mr. Carrington.
"It will, indeed," said Mr. Flexen, and paused, frowning. Then he
added gravely: "I'm sure that there was such an affair, and I've got
to find the woman."