“Strange that no one has testified to that handwriting,” I remarked.
He looked at me in surprise.
“Fifty persons have sent in samples of writing which they think like it,” he
observed. “Often of persons who never heard of the Fairbrothers. We have been
bothered greatly with the business. You know little of the difficulties the
police labor under.”
“I know too much,” I sighed.
He smiled and patted me on the hand.
“Go back to your patient,” he said. “Forget every other duty but that of your
calling until you get some definite word from me. I shall not keep you in
suspense one minute longer than is absolutely necessary.”
He had risen. I rose too. But I was not satisfied. I could not leave the room
with my ideas (I might say with my convictions) in such a turmoil.
“Inspector,” said I, “you will think me very obstinate, but all you have told
me about Sears, all I have heard about him, in fact,”—this I
emphasized,—“does not convince me of the entire folly of my own
suspicions. Indeed, I am afraid that, if anything, they are strengthened. This
steward, who is a doubtful character, I acknowledge, may have had his reasons
for wishing Mrs. Fairbrother’s death, may even have had a hand in the matter;
but what evidence have you to show that he, himself, entered the alcove, struck
the blow or stole the diamond? I have listened eagerly for some such evidence,
but I have listened in vain.”
“I know,” he murmured, “I know. But it will come; at least I think so.”
This should have reassured me, no doubt, and sent me away quiet and happy. But
something—the tenacity of a deep conviction, possibly—kept me
lingering before the inspector and finally gave me the courage to say:
“I know I ought not to speak another word; that I am putting myself at a
disadvantage in doing so; but I can not help it, Inspector; I can not help it
when I see you laying such stress upon the few indirect clues connecting the
suspicious Sears with this crime, and ignoring the direct clues we have against
one whom we need not name.”
Had I gone too far? Had my presumption transgressed all bounds and would he
show a very natural anger? No, he smiled instead, an enigmatical smile, no
doubt, which I found it difficult to understand, but yet a smile.
“You mean,” he suggested, “that Sears’ possible connection with the crime can
not eliminate Mr. Grey’s very positive one; nor can the fact that Wellgood’s
hand came in contact with Mr. Grey’s, at or near the time of the exchange of
the false stone with the real, make it any less evident who was the guilty
author of this exchange?”
The inspector’s hand was on the door-knob, but he dropped it at this, and
surveying me very quietly said:
“I thought that a few days spent at the bedside of Miss Grey in the society of
so renowned and cultured a gentleman as her father would disabuse you of these
damaging suspicions.”
“I don’t wonder that you thought so,” I burst out. “You would think so all the
more, if you knew how kind he can be and what solicitude he shows for all about
him. But I can not get over the facts. They all point, it seems to me, straight
in one direction.”
“All? You heard what was said in this room—I saw it in your eye—how
the man, who surprised the steward in his own room last night, heard him
talking of love and death in connection with Mrs. Fairbrother. ‘To kiss what I
hate! It is almost as bad as to kill what I love’—he said something like
that.”
“Yes, I heard that. But did he mean that he had been her actual slayer? Could
you convict him on those words?”
“Well, we shall find out. Then, as to Wellgood’s part in the little business,
you choose to consider that it took place at the time the stone fell from Mr.
Grey’s hand. What proof have you that the substitution you believe in was not
made by him? He could easily have done it while crossing the room to Mr. Grey’s
side.”
“Inspector!” Then hotly, as the absurdity of the suggestion struck me with full
force: “He do this! A waiter, or as you think, Mr. Fairbrother’s steward, to be
provided with so hard-to-come-by an article as this counterpart of a great
stone? Isn’t that almost as incredible a supposition as any I have myself
presumed to advance?”
“Possibly, but the affair is full of incredibilities, the greatest of which, to
my mind, is the persistence with which you, a kind-hearted enough little woman,
persevere in ascribing the deepest guilt to one you profess to admire and
certainly would be glad to find innocent of any complicity with a great crime.”