Out of the Darkness
During luncheon Evelyn sat absorbed in her own thoughts, and spoke
little and then at random. Celia, her only companion at the meal, was
naturally full of questions; how did Evelyn know John had not done it?
Why had she left her so suddenly? And the like, to all of which Evelyn
returned evasive answers. She could not shake herself free from the
baffling problems of the tragedy, no matter how often or how sincerely
she resolved to leave them alone. She had been hopelessly, grievously
wrong, but how and why? What had made her go wrong? On what false
basis had she reared her crazy edifices? “Some one,” her mind kept
repeating to her, “barred that window; John couldn’t do it himself;
you have heard and you believe Celia’s story, you have followed
Philip’s trail and it has led you to an absurdity. Who remains?” Then
her mind ran away with her to the new fact which had just penetrated
her consciousness, that there was a large margin of time inside which
the little window might have been broken; it was probable of course
that it had been done soon after the murder, but it was odd, if that
was so, that it had not been discovered many hours earlier than it
was. Supposing it had been done the morning after, what could she make
of that? Who could have done it, and what was the reason why it was
done? It was so easy to make suppositions, so easy to ask questions,
but she seemed to be led into a blank wall when she tried to answer
them.
Luncheon over, she threw herself down into a low basket chair, and
gave herself entirely to a reconsideration of everything she had
discovered. The most important point to be decided was, who had left
that larger footmark in replacing the statuette? It was not John, it
was not Philip. Who else could it possibly have been? As if in reply
to the reiterated question, there was a discreet knock on the door and
Fairlie entered. He bent in his habitual manner of semi-apology when
delivering a message and said that her ladyship would be glad if Miss
Celia would come and sit with her that afternoon. Evelyn, reclining in
her chair, suddenly grew rigid: her eyes had fallen upon his shoes.
She glanced away hurriedly, fearful of betraying the agitation in her
mind; her thoughts had received their answer.
Two men remained who could have broken that window, Fairlie and the
footman. The latter she put out of her reckoning at once; he was an
ordinary, unintelligent, unresourceful lad, who had only been there a
few months. He had never known John; he could not have played a part
afterwards in any case even to save his neck from the gallows. She
could not conceive any reason, except robbery—and of that there was no
trace here—why he should murder his master. But Fairlie was a being of
very different fibre. No one could ever guess at the thoughts lying
hid in that silent soul beneath his stolid mask of dignified
imperturbability. Whatever he had done, he was capable, if he chose,
of concealing it.
Evelyn was too fresh from the complete upsetting of all her reasoning
to leap at once to new conclusions of guilt; she was grown more
moderate in her imaginings and no longer felt assured that any picture
her mind painted was necessarily the truth. But she realized in an
instant the possibilities of this new thought. Fairlie had been
devoted to John as a little child. Whatever had happened it would have
been his first thought to avoid running the risk of implicating John.
She did not go so far in her thoughts as to say Fairlie struck Sir
Roger down, but she saw that he might have done so; he might for
instance have intervened in a quarrel. As to all that she did not know
and refused, as far as she could, to speculate upon thoughts alone;
but at any rate Fairlie might have let John out, Fairlie might have
broken the window—no one more likely. It was obvious that if he was
the one who had barred the window then whether it was he who hurled
the statuette or no and whether that was done before or after John’s
departure, he would have provided the semblance of some other entrance
so that John’s presence on the scene might never be suspected.
The more she thought of it the more probable it seemed that Fairlie
was the man: she was amazed that she had never given him a thought
before. She recalled Philip’s account of how he had roused Fairlie:
there was nothing in that to have prevented Fairlie’s participation
during the earlier part of that long interval between thirteen minutes
to twelve when Sir Roger left the study and half-past one when he was
found dead: plenty of time for him to have let John out, killed Sir
Roger—or killed Sir Roger and let John out, if that was the order—and
gone himself to bed.
Full of such thoughts she saw her work clear before her, to find
proofs which should either dispel this theory as all her others had
been dispelled or make it stand out evident to all as the truth. It
fitted all facts so well that even in her humility she felt assured
that this time it would be strange indeed if she were entirely wrong.
She had none of the bitter, horror-stricken resentment with which her
belief in Philip’s guilt had inspired her; horror she felt still
certainly, but also a kind of unwilling pity. She could not imagine
Fairlie capable of what she would call a selfish crime: there could be
no reason for such an act. Whatever his feelings towards Sir Roger
were—and it was probable that beneath his respectful deference had
lain a deep resentment—they would never have blazed, she felt, into
violence. The thought fought itself in on her that he might have acted
merely as a shield against discovery to John.
At this she rose hastily: it was no use repeating error by vexing
herself in advance needlessly. It was time to act, to prove, not
think. Her recent talk with Humblethorne on the subject of
finger-marks had not been entirely conversational: at the back of her
mind, humiliated though she had been, had still lingered irrepressible
interest, and she had kept wondering whether it would not be possible
to find on the statuette marks which would guide her towards the real
truth. Now she would put the information given her by Humblethorne to
the test. It was characteristic of her that she never stopped to
consider the propriety of her handling the statuette for such a
purpose: it would have been simpler and safer to have informed
Humblethorne of her discovery, but she had erred alone and she would
succeed alone.
She got up from the easy chair and thought out her plans. She must
first get some fine flour and test the statuette. She was about to go
downstairs to beg some from the cook, when glancing at the clock on
the mantelpiece she noticed that it was just two o’clock. The sense of
time had slipped from her: she saw instantly that it would be the most
ill-fitting time to approach the cook, but the best to pursue
unobserved any private inquiry of her own. The servants would all be
at their dinner. At once her mind was made up. She went to her room,
took scissors and paper, and, hurrying to the stain which had so
baffled her, cut out another pattern. Then she made her way without
noise or hesitation to the room she knew to be Fairlie’s. Outside she
paused, wondering what explanation she would give if she were seen,
but the clatter and voices in the servants’ hall reassured her: she
opened the door and stole in. Beneath the washstand were a couple of
pairs of boots; she dived at a left foot, turned it over and placed
her pattern upon it. She had made no error this time: one thing was
certain now, Fairlie’s foot had made the stain.
She was fearful of being discovered and had no definite object in
further delay. But she saw no evening shoes; no doubt the pair then on
his feet were those he had been wearing the evening of the murder, but
they might be hidden away. Hastily she searched the most likely
places, but without result; she opened rapidly one after another the
drawers, but could find nothing. She dared stay no longer, and closed
the drawers silently. She could not quite push home the top left-hand
drawer, however; it had been closed and she was anxious to leave
everything exactly as she had found it. She made another attempt and
became convinced something was obstructing it. Hurriedly she pulled
the drawer right out, felt at the back, and to her horror drew out a
dirty, crumpled handkerchief stained with blood. She had hardly done
so when she heard the screech of a chair being pushed back in the
servants’ hall: she snatched a clean handkerchief from the drawer,
thrust it behind, inserted and forced the drawer home, and fled back
to her room with her pattern and the blood-stained relic crushed in
her hand.
Then, locking the door, she examined what she had so unexpectedly
stumbled upon. It was a man’s ordinary white handkerchief of good, but
not especially fine, linen; it bore in the corner the initials J.F.;
right across its width from edge to edge the centre was stained with a
streaky band of blood, about three inches across at its widest and
then narrowing irregularly to about an inch and a half; and it was
marked by little ribs of dirt.
“More puzzles!” thought Evelyn. “Now what has this been used for?”
She locked it away carefully and then went down as she had first
intended and managed to borrow some fine flour from the cook without
exciting any special interest in that good woman’s lethargic mind; she
had supplied both Celia and Evelyn with many curious things in her
time when they had been amusing themselves learning to cook. So far
Evelyn had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams; she had now the most
delicate part of her self-imposed task before her.
A confidence, however, in her own dexterity of touch—if a
clumsy-handed man like Humblethorne could do it, she certainly could,
was her thought—and a belief that any discovery her experiment might
yield would at best be only additional to what she already knew helped
to steady her excitement and kept her from realizing how unusual her
action was. She put on a pair of thin gloves, went along the passage,
first making sure that no one was about, and, after examining the
statuette once more as it stood, lifted it down by the arm which was
free of any stain.
She was surprised to find how heavy it was; it looked slight and small
in position, but she realized what a terrible blow it must have
inflicted, hurled from that height. One other thing she noticed as she
carried it unobserved to her room, and that was that it had become
loose on its little ebony pedestal. The closer inspection, which was
possible as soon as she was secure against observation or interruption
inside her own locked door, revealed that the stout pins which entered
the pedestal from the feet and held the figure in place had been badly
strained, so that one foot had driven slightly into the pedestal to
one side, and then when the statuette was put again in an upright
condition had shifted back, leaving a distinct mark on the polished
wood. That the statuette had had a severe fall was placed beyond all
doubt.
Celia was a keen and skilful artist in delicate water-colour, so
Evelyn had only to slip through to the girls’ study and borrow a fine
brush to have all her preparations made for the new experiment. First
of all, however, she practised making a few finger-prints by pressing
her thumb on the polished mahogany of her dressing-table and
sprinkling and brushing the flour. She had not been quite so ignorant
of the elements of the art as her questions to Humblethorne had
suggested and in any case did not find it particularly difficult.
After a few attempts she felt reasonably sure of being able to make
visible whatever the statuette concealed.
She came to it, and as she stood looking again at the bent arm a
sudden knowledge came to her as to the use to which the blood-stained
handkerchief had been put: like so much else it seemed obvious
directly the thought had come at all—the handkerchief had been used to
wipe the arm and shoulder. She took it out and examined it again in
connexion with the stains on the statuette; yes, there could be little
doubt. The line of her mouth tightened: a passionate impulse, even if
it culminated in a blow, was less horrible than these evidences of a
cool-headed and deliberate purpose afterwards. She was struck with the
inconsistencies which showed themselves here before her. The criminal
could think to wipe the statuette, move the box, break the window, but
he had never noticed that he had put his foot in the blood. Well, this
was what she had often heard, that criminals nullified a dozen careful
clevernesses by a single evident oversight: the agitated mind, she
supposed, was too occupied in laying its deceptions to observe the
most obvious realities. Her thoughts went again to the marks on the
sill of the drawing-room window, which she had been able fully to see
that morning for the first time; it had struck her then that they had
seemed not merely indefinite, but partially obliterated. She saw at
once now that her thought had been right; the ribs of dirt on the
handkerchief, so out of place in the property of a conspicuously clean
and respectable butler, had been made when the handkerchief had been
hastily rubbed over the trodden sill. She could not be sure, but at
least it seemed highly probable; and just as the stains raised the
presumption of Fairlie’s handling of the statuette so did the dirt of
his shutting of the window.
She laid the handkerchief by, took the statuette carefully in her
gloved hand by the clean arm and tipped it over; she was sure that the
smooth polish of the pedestal would yield the best results and was
afraid of testing the statuette itself in case she altered the
appearance of the bloodstains. Carefully she sprinkled the fine flour
over the front of the pedestal, brushed the surface very lightly, and
then paused with shining eyes and a deep sigh, half satisfaction at
the correctness of her conclusions and facility of her execution, half
distress at the evidence of guilt before her. Clearly marked on the
ebony towards each corner of the pedestal stood out the impressions of
two large thumbs: the criminal after setting it down had evidently
pressed it carefully back into its exact position.
She sat for some minutes staring almost vacantly at the marks; one
link in the chain alone remained now, and that was the identification
of those thumbs. That would not be difficult, she reflected: Fairlie
had necessarily to be always handling things. She rose with quick
decision—the sooner her task was complete the better—locked away the
handkerchief, cleared a drawer, lifted the statuette carefully and
placed it in a prone position in the drawer which she locked. Then she
went downstairs.
In the hall she met Humblethorne, who was holding a telegram in his
hand which Birts had just brought him. He wore a look of
dissatisfaction in consequence both of an absolutely fruitless search
for some further evidence, the shoes for preference, which should
establish Philip Castle’s participation in the escape of the murderer,
and also of the news he had just heard. The telegram said briefly in
official code that John Penterton, carrying a bag, had left his home
shortly before Humblethorne’s information had been received and had
not returned, destination at present unknown, house would be watched
and all steps to trace him followed.
Humblethorne glanced at Evelyn without pleasure. Her attitude had
puzzled him, and if his evidence had not been so overwhelmingly direct
he would have admitted that he felt a real misgiving. People do not
say “Well! we know that: what of it?” in a matter of fact tone, in
such circumstances as his last meeting with Evelyn, unless they have a
reason. Thinking it over, he had been forced reluctantly to the
conclusion that, though he could prove John’s secret entry, he could
not prove his hand in the murder; he could only throw on John the onus
of disproving it. And whatever grounds for suspicion he might have he
knew that so far he had found no proof against Philip whatever. He had
no doubt in his own mind, but this girl showed up to him fearlessly,
almost, he felt, cynically, the weaknesses of his case.
“Miss Temple,” he said, as she was passing the two men, “I think you
ought to be told a little how the case stands. It will be my duty very
shortly to make a very painful communication to Lady Penterton; I
think it would be as well if she was prepared. She may see it in the
paper at any moment now.”
Evelyn shot a keen glance at him and his telegram, and then replied
quietly, “It would be foolish of me to pretend I do not understand.
Has Mr. Penterton been arrested?”
“Not yet,” Humblethorne admitted rather reluctantly. “But it is only a
question of a few hours now before he will be.”
“Then you have still time to avoid making a mistake publicly,” she
replied. “I advise you to use it.”
“Your good opinion of your friend’s brother does you credit,” remarked
Humblethorne drily; “I regret I cannot share it.”
“It is hardly a question of good opinion,” she returned boldly, “but
of proof. You know very well that you have none.”
Humblethorne flushed at this direct blow. “I have proof of things that
will need a good deal of explanation,” he said shortly.
“You shall have all the explanation you require—in half an hour,” she
said. “Delay the arrest that length of time and you will have no
reason to regret it.”
“What do you mean?” he exclaimed.
“You have been looking for a pair of evening shoes, I think,” she went
on with apparent irrelevance.
“Yes.” He tried unsuccessfully to hide his eagerness.
“I will show you them—in half an hour. Wait that long at any rate.”
She nodded and went into the dining-room.