Reeves promises to do his Best
The conversation recorded in the last chapter took place (I forgot to
say) on Saturday afternoon. It was while he was at tea downstairs that
a message was brought in to Reeves telling him that a lady wished to
see him on urgent business. She would not give her name, but she was
waiting for him in what was called “the small lounge”—a dreary little
room, which had something of the air of a hospital waiting-room; she
would be glad if he could come as soon as possible. Disregarding
Gordon’s suggestion that he should take Carmichael with him as a
chaperon, he made his way to the small lounge with some feeling of
self-importance, and found himself most unexpectedly confronted with
Miss Rendall-Smith.
“I’m afraid you think badly of me, Mr. Reeves,” she said, “and you’ll
probably think worse of me before I’ve finished.” (Reeves gurgled
dissent.) “The other day I turned you out of the house and told you to
your face you were a liar. And that’s a bad introduction for me when I
have to come to you, as I come now, asking for your help.”
Reeves was horribly embarrassed. You can offer whisky to a policeman
to show there is no ill-feeling, but it is more difficult to offer it
to a lady. “I’m sure I should be very glad to be of any use,” he said.
“I seem somehow to have made a bad impression on you the other day,
though I still haven’t the least idea how. Wouldn’t it really be
better if we put all our cards on the table and treated one another
frankly?”
“That’s just what I want to do. And, as a sort of guarantee of good
faith, I’m going to tell you exactly what it was that made me
suspicious of you the other day. You brought me a photograph of myself
and told me you had found it on the body of the man who was killed.
Now, I was quite prepared to believe you; he had got, and I knew he
had got, a photograph of me. But the photograph you showed me was not
the one I gave him. It was a portrait taken on the same occasion, at
the same sitting; but it was in a slightly different pose. So I
thought, you see, that you were setting a trap for me. Your manner was
so dreadfully Come-now-young-woman-I-know-all-about-you, that I really
thought you were a policeman, and were trying to bluff me in some way
. . . No, I haven’t finished yet. There was one person living round
here who had a copy of the other photograph, the same kind as you
showed me. And that was Mr. Davenant, whom they arrested this morning
as the murderer.”
“I see. Yes, of course you must have thought I was trying it on. The
fact is, I don’t yet know exactly how that photograph got into my
possession, but I can give a guess now, which I couldn’t have then.”
And he described in outline the discovery of the secret passage and
the sliding panel. “You see, if it was Davenant who was behind that
panelling all the time, it was quite possible for him to take away the
portrait we found on Brotherhood, and to put the portrait you gave him
there instead. I can’t think why he should have wanted to do it; but
there were four of us who all thought at the time that the photograph
looked different when we took it down from the cornice. And that’s
quite natural, if it really was a different one.”
“Well, all that gets us into the reason why I called. Mr. Reeves, are
you working in any sort of co-operation with the police?”
“No. I helped the police by taking them to Weighford and back in my
motor, but I’m not working for them, I’m working on my own. To tell
the truth, I haven’t very much confidence in the intelligence of the
police, or in their methods.” He omitted, somehow, to mention that the
co-operation of civilians was contrary to police regulations.
“In that case I can speak freely. But I want you to understand,
please, that I tell you all this in complete confidence so far as the
police are concerned. Now, will that be all right? I mean, I suppose
you will be called as a witness.”
“I suppose that they can only call me as a witness of how I found the
body on Tuesday, and how I took the police to Weighford to-day. There
is no reason why they should expect me to have any theories about who
the murderer was. I think it will be all right.”
“Well, I’ll risk it, anyhow. You see, I know that the police, once
they’ve caught a man, will always want to convict that man, merely so
as to save themselves trouble, and save their own faces.”
“That’s my experience of them, certainly.” Reeves had no experience in
the matter whatsoever, but there was no harm in agreeing.
“Well, I’d better tell you about myself first of all, and how I come
to be mixed up in the business. My name isn’t, legally, Miss
Rendall-Smith, although it was my maiden name. My legal name is Mrs.
Brotherhood.”
“You mean that you are——”
“His widow. It must be a wonderful thing to be a detective, Mr.
Reeves.”
Reeves was thrilled with the compliment, which a more introspective
person might have suspected of irony. He suddenly remembered that a
detective ought to have a note-book, and write down facts in it. He
had no note-book, so he said, “Excuse me,” and fetched a sheet of the
club note-paper. On this he wrote down in pencil “Miss R.-S. = Mrs.
B.” It looked rather silly, somehow, when he had written it.
“I was brought up in these parts, Mr. Reeves. My father used to be
Rector of Binver. When that photograph was taken—those photographs
were taken, my father was still alive, and I was still unmarried. The
only person who’d ever asked me to marry him was Mr. Davenant—I expect
you know that he belongs to these parts too.”
“I didn’t actually know it.” The phrase suggested that Reeves might
have inferred it, but had not any direct information on the point. “I
suppose he didn’t live at the Hatcheries then?”
“No, his people had a house near here, which has been pulled down
since. His mother, of course, was an Oatvile.”
“To be sure.” Reeves sucked his pencil, and wrote down “Mr. Davenant
senior m. Miss Oatvile.” Then a light burst upon him—“Good heavens!”
he said, “then that’s why he knew about the secret passage?”
“He would, of course. He’s told me that he used often to play here
when he was a boy. Then there was a coolness between his people and
the Oatviles, I think because his people became Catholics. No quarrel,
you know, only they didn’t see so much of each other after that.
Anyhow, Mr. Davenant was badly in love with me and wanted me to marry
him. I wouldn’t—partly because I wasn’t quite sure whether I liked
him, partly because my father was very Low Church, and he’d have been
certain to make trouble over it. Then the Davenants left the place,
and I did too after my father died; and we didn’t see any more of one
another.”
“When was that?”
“Three or four years before the war—1910 I suppose it must have been.
I started out to work for a living, because my father hadn’t left us
very well off. And then, quite soon, I met this man Brotherhood. He
proposed and I accepted him—you mustn’t ask me why, Mr. Reeves. That’s
a thing even detectives can’t find out about, why women fall in love
with men. I’ll only mention that at that time he wasn’t a bit rich.
After I married we lived in a rather horrid house in Kensington. I
never knew anything about his Stock Exchange business much, though I
always had an idea that it wasn’t very safe, if it was even honest. He
began to make money quite soon; and then, you see, he made the whole
of it over to me. He was afraid, of course, that he might go bankrupt,
and he wanted to have a good reserve which his creditors couldn’t
touch. I was always rather a fool about business, or I suppose I
should have minded the arrangement. As it was, I just thought it very
nice of him, and we made arrangements to take a house in the country.
I wanted Binver, because it was one of the few places where I’d any
friends.
“Then, quite suddenly, I found out about him. I don’t mean about his
business; I mean about his private life. There are lots of atheists
who are very nice people; my husband wasn’t one of them. I somehow
feel that he chucked over morals first and religion afterwards, if you
know what I mean, not the other way about.”
Reeves wrote down “Brotherhood not only – God but – morals”; then he
scratched it out again. Miss Rendall-Smith went on:
“I didn’t want a divorce: you see, I’d been rather strictly brought up
about those things. And of course he didn’t want one, because of the
money. Just when I wanted help and advice, I met Mr. Davenant again;
and he was furious when I told him about it all. He set to work to try
and find out something about my husband’s business, and he did
discover something (I don’t know what it was) which would have ruined
him if it had come out. Then he went to my husband and put a pistol to
his head, so to speak—blackmailed him really, I suppose. He made my
husband take a solemn oath to let me go my own way and never, without
my express consent, publish the fact that he’d married me. Then I came
down here and took the house in Binver and thought it was going to be
all right.
“Quite soon afterwards my husband rented a bungalow, as you know, and
came to live at Paston Whitchurch. I think he wanted to keep a watch
over me; I think he also wanted to give me the impression that he was
behaving better. But, as he always went away for the week-ends, I
didn’t feel much interested about that. Once or twice he asked me to
come back to him, but of course I wouldn’t. When Mr. Davenant came
back from the war, he took a house at Paston Whitchurch too, but he
could only come there from Saturday to Monday because of his work up
in London. I think he just wanted to be near me, and to be able to
help me if I was in trouble. And that was the state of things up to
last Tuesday. Only my husband had foreseen his bankruptcy, and was
making desperate efforts to get me to come back to him. The horrible
thing was that I had no hold over him—the secret which would have
ruined him once had no terrors for him then—so I’d nothing but his
bare word to depend on. And I’m afraid that wasn’t much to go upon.
“I knew nothing about what happened on Tuesday till I saw it in the
papers. I still don’t know how or why the police got the idea that it
was Mr. Davenant who murdered my husband. Of course, if they came to
know all that I’ve been telling you now, they’d think it was a
certainty. But I’ve told you about it, because I thought it was best
to let you know everything, and then perhaps you could help.”
“Of course I should be awfully glad to do anything I could to—well, to
establish the innocence of an innocent man. Was that your idea, Miss
Rendall-Smith?”
“Mr. Reeves, do you believe at all in a woman’s intuitions? Probably
you don’t, because you go in for clues and all that sort of thing. But
I assure you I’m as certain that Mr. Davenant never laid a hand on my
husband as I’m certain that you’re sitting in that chair. I can’t
explain the feeling; I can’t analyse it; it’s like a sort of sixth
sense to me. I’ve always had these strong intuitions, and they’ve
always been right. So I’m asking you, quite fearlessly, to work on
this case as hard as you can, and examine all the evidence you’ve got.
I’m perfectly certain that the effect of that will be to prove Mr.
Davenant’s innocence. I know he ran away and hid himself; but after
all, that’s a thing an innocent man may easily do if he’s afraid of
being charged with murder.”
“I was saying the same thing to my friends only this afternoon.”
“Mr. Reeves, you’re wonderful! And, of course, you’ve got to remember
this. Mr. Davenant is—he’s still in love with me. And, you see, he
must have known that if he were charged with the murder, my name was
likely to get dragged into the thing. So it wasn’t only for his own
sake that he tried to get away.”
“Well, I’ll do my best. But you can’t throw any light on the whole
thing yourself, except for what you’ve said? You didn’t, I mean, see
Brother—see your husband or Davenant after you heard about the
bankruptcy?”
“Yes, I think I ought to tell you this. Mr. Davenant heard of the
bankruptcy—or the strong probability of it—beforehand, and wrote to
warn me. So I went up to London to see Mr. Davenant, and came back
that same afternoon. He wanted to take me back to Binver on the
earlier train, but I wouldn’t let him—I didn’t want to be seen
travelling with him. The result was that he travelled on that fatal
train with my husband, and so drew on himself the suspicion of murder.
I don’t think I can ever forgive myself for that.”
“Did Davenant hint to you at all that he meant to see Brotherhood
about it?”
“No, never; he said there was still hope that my husband would stick
to his word like a decent man.”
“There’s one other question I want to ask you, a rather odd one. Have
you any reason to think that Davenant was carrying a golf-ball in his
pocket when he came up on Tuesday afternoon?”
“He might be, of course. But he would hardly have mentioned it, would
he?”
“No: only I had a special reason for asking. Well, Miss Rendall-Smith,
I’ll do my best, and if I want any more information I suppose I can
come over and see you. Are you on the telephone?”
“Yes; it’s Binver 35. Thank you so much, Mr. Reeves; I shall expect
great things of you,” and he showed her out, still smiling
encouragement.
“That’s a damned fine woman,” he said to himself as he shut the door
after her.