The three diners lingered for only a short time over their dessert.
Afterwards, they passed together into a very delightful library on the
other side of the round, stone-paved hall. Hilditch excused himself for
a moment.
“I have some cigars which I keep in my dressing-room,” he explained,
“and which I am anxious for you to try. There is an electric stove there
and I can regulate the temperature.”
He departed, closing the door behind him. Francis came a little further
into the room. His hostess, who had subsided into an easy-chair and was
holding a screen between her face and the fire, motioned him to,
seat himself opposite. He did so without words. He felt curiously and
ridiculously tongue-tied. He fell to studying the woman instead of
attempting the banality of pointless speech. From the smooth gloss of
her burnished hair, to the daintiness of her low, black brocaded shoes,
she represented, so far as her physical and outward self were concerned,
absolute perfection. No ornament was amiss, no line or curve of her
figure other than perfectly graceful. Yet even the fire's glow which
she had seemed to dread brought no flush of colour to her cheeks. Her
appearance of complete lifelessness remained. It was as though some sort
of crust had formed about her being, a condition which her very physical
perfection seemed to render the more incomprehensible.
“You are surprised to see me here living with my husband, after what
I told you yesterday afternoon?” she said calmly, breaking at last the
silence which had reigned between them.
“I am,” he admitted.
“It seems unnatural to you, I suppose?”
“Entirely.”
“You still believe all that I told you?”
“I must.”
She looked at the door and raised her head a little, as though either
listening or adjudging the time before her husband would return. Then
she glanced across at him once more.
“Hatred,” she said, “does not always drive away. Sometimes it attracts.
Sometimes the person who hates can scarcely bear the other out of his
sight. That is where hate and love are somewhat alike.”
The room was warm but Francis was conscious of shivering. She raised
her finger warningly. It seemed typical of the woman, somehow, that the
message could not be conveyed by any glance or gesture.
“He is coming,” she whispered.
Oliver Hilditch reappeared, carrying cigars wrapped in gold foil which
he had brought with him from Cuba, the tobacco of which was a revelation
to his guest. The two men smoked and sipped their coffee and brandy. The
woman sat with half-closed eyes. It was obvious that Hilditch was still
in the mood for speech.
“I will tell you, Mr. Ledsam,” he said, “why I am so happy to have you
here this evening. In the first place, I desire to tender you once more
my thanks for your very brilliant efforts on my behalf. The very fact
that I am able to offer you hospitality at all is without a doubt due to
these.”
“I only did what I was paid to do,” Francis insisted, a little harshly.
“You must remember that these things come in the day's work with us.”
His host nodded.
“Naturally,” he murmured. “There was another reason, too, why I was
anxious to meet you, Mr. Ledsam,” he continued. “You have gathered
already that I am something of a crank. I have a profound detestation
of all sentimentality and affected morals. It is a relief to me to
come into contact with a man who is free from that bourgeois incubus to
modern enterprise--a conscience.”
“Is that your estimate of me?” Francis asked.
“Why not? You practise your profession in the criminal courts, do you
not?”
“That is well-known,” was the brief reply.
“What measure of conscience can a man have,” Oliver Hilditch argued
blandly, “who pleads for the innocent and guilty alike with the same
simulated fervour? Confess, now, Mr. Ledsam--there is no object in being
hypocritical in this matter--have you not often pleaded for the guilty
as though you believed them innocent?”
“That has sometimes been my duty,” Francis acknowledged.
Hilditch laughed scornfully.
“It is all part of the great hypocrisy of society,” he proclaimed.
“You have an extra glass of champagne for dinner at night and are
congratulated by your friends because you have helped some poor devil
to cheat the law, while all the time you know perfectly well, and so
do your high-minded friends, that your whole attitude during those two
hours of eloquence has been a lie. That is what first attracted me to
you, Mr. Ledsam.”
“I am sorry to hear it,” Francis commented coldly. “The ethics of my
profession--”
His host stopped him with a little wave of the hand.
“Spare me that,” he begged. “While we are on the subject, though, I have
a question to ask you. My lawyer told me, directly after he had briefed
you, that, although it would make no real difference to your pleading,
it would be just as well for me to keep up my bluff of being innocent,
even in private conversation with you. Why was that?”
“For the very obvious reason,” Francis told him, “that we are not
all such rogues and vagabonds as you seem to think. There is more
satisfaction to me, at any rate, in saving an innocent man's life than a
guilty one's.”
Hilditch laughed as though amused.
“Come,” he threatened, “I am going to be ill-natured. You have shown
signs of smugness, a quality which I detest. I am going to rob you of
some part of your self-satisfaction. Of course I killed Jordan. I killed
him in the very chair in which you are now sitting.”
There was a moment's intense silence. The woman was still fanning
herself lazily. Francis leaned forward in his place.
“I do not wish to hear this!” he exclaimed harshly.
“Don't be foolish,” his host replied, rising to his feet and strolling
across the room. “You know the whole trouble of the prosecution. They
couldn't discover the weapon, or anything like it, with which the deed
was done. Now I'll show you something ingenious.”
Francis followed the other's movements with fascinated eyes. The woman
scarcely turned her head. Hilditch paused at the further end of the
room, where there were a couple of gun cases, some fishing rods and a
bag, of golf clubs. From the latter he extracted a very ordinary-looking
putter, and with it in his hands strolled back to them.
“Do you play golf, Ledsam?” he asked. “What do you think of that?”
Francis took the putter into his hand. It was a very ordinary club,
which had apparently seen a good deal of service, so much, indeed, that
the leather wrapping at the top was commencing to unroll. The maker's
name was on the back of the blade, also the name of the professional
from whom it had been purchased. Francis swung the implement
mechanically with his wrists.
“There seems to be nothing extraordinary about the club,” he pronounced.
“It is very much like a cleek I putt with myself.”
“Yet it contains a secret which would most certainly have hanged me,”
Oliver Hilditch declared pleasantly. “See!”
He held the shaft firmly in one hand and bent the blade away from it.
In a moment or two it yielded and he commenced to unscrew it. A little
exclamation escaped from Francis' lips. The woman looked on with tired
eyes.
“The join in the steel,” Hilditch pointed out, “is so fine as to be
undistinguishable by the naked eye. Yet when the blade comes off, like
this, you see that although the weight is absolutely adjusted, the
inside is hollow. The dagger itself is encased in this cotton wool to
avoid any rattling. I put it away in rather a hurry the last time I used
it, and as you see I forgot to clean it.”
Francis staggered back and gripped at the mantelpiece. His eyes were
filled with horror. Very slowly, and with the air of one engaged upon
some interesting task, Oliver Hilditch had removed the blood-stained
sheath of cotton wool from around the thin blade of a marvellous-looking
stiletto, on which was also a long stain of encrusted blood.
“There is a handle,” he went on, “which is perhaps the most ingenious
thing of all. You touch a spring here, and behold!”
He pressed down two tiny supports which opened upon hinges about four
inches from the top of the handle. There was now a complete hilt.
“With this little weapon,” he explained, “the point is so sharpened
and the steel so wonderful that it is not necessary to stab. It has the
perfection of a surgical instrument. You have only to lean it against
a certain point in a man's anatomy, lunge ever so little and the whole
thing is done. Come here, Mr. Ledsam, and I will show you the exact
spot.”
Francis made no movement. His eyes were fixed upon the weapon.
“If I had only known!” he muttered.
“My dear fellow, if you had,” the other protested soothingly, “you know
perfectly well that it would not have made the slightest difference.
Perhaps that little break in your voice would not have come quite so
naturally, the little sweep of your arm towards me, the man whom a
moment's thoughtlessness might sweep into Eternity, would have been a
little stiffer, but what matter? You would still have done your best and
you would probably still have succeeded. You don't care about trifling
with Eternity, eh? Very well, I will find the place for you.”
Hilditch's fingers strayed along his shirt-front until he found a
certain spot. Then he leaned the dagger against it, his forefinger and
second finger pressed against the hilt. His eyes were fixed upon his
guest's. He seemed genuinely interested. Francis, glancing away for a
moment, was suddenly conscious of a new horror. The woman had leaned
a little forward in her easy-chair until she had attained almost a
crouching position. Her eyes seemed to be measuring the distance from
where she sat to that quivering thread of steel.
“You see, Ledsam,” his host went on, “that point driven now at that
angle would go clean through the vital part of my heart. And it needs no
force, either--just the slow pressure of these two fingers. What did you
say, Margaret?” he enquired, breaking off abruptly.
The woman was seated upon the very edge of her chair, her eyes rivetted
upon the dagger. There was no change in her face, not a tremor in her
tone.
“I said nothing,” she replied. “I did not speak at all. I was just
watching.”
Hilditch turned back to his guest.
“These two fingers,” he repeated, “and a flick of the wrist--very little
more than would be necessary for a thirty yard putt right across the
green.”
Francis had recovered himself, had found his bearings to a certain
extent.
“I am sorry that you have told me this, Mr. Hilditch,” he said, a little
stiffly.
“Why?” was the puzzled reply. “I thought you would be interested.”
“I am interested to this extent,” Francis declared, “I shall accept no
more cases such as yours unless I am convinced of my client's innocence.
I look upon your confession to me as being in the worst possible taste,
and I regret very much my efforts on your behalf.”
The woman was listening intently. Hilditch's expression was one of
cynical wonder. Francis rose to his feet and moved across to his
hostess.
“Mrs. Hilditch,” he said, “will you allow me to make my apologies? Your
husband and I have arrived at an understanding--or perhaps I should
say a misunderstanding--which renders the acceptance of any further
hospitality on my part impossible.”
She held out the tips of her fingers.
“I had no idea,” she observed, with gentle sarcasm, “that you barristers
were such purists morally. I thought you were rather proud of being the
last hope of the criminal classes.”
“Madam,” Francis replied, “I am not proud of having saved the life of a
self-confessed murderer, even though that man may be your husband.”
Hilditch was laughing softly to himself as he escorted his departing
guest to the door.
“You have a quaint sense of humour,” Francis remarked.
“Forgive me,” Oliver Hilditch begged, “but your last few words rather
appealed to me. You must be a person of very scanty perceptions if you
could spend the evening here and not understand that my death is the one
thing in the world which would make my wife happy.”
Francis walked home with these last words ringing in his ears. They
seemed with him even in that brief period of troubled sleep which came
to him when he had regained his rooms and turned in. They were there in
the middle of the night when he was awakened, shivering, by the shrill
summons of his telephone bell. He stood quaking before the instrument
in his pajamas. It was the voice which, by reason of some ghastly
premonition, he had dreaded to hear--level, composed, emotionless.
“Mr. Ledsam?” she enquired.
“I am Francis Ledsam,” he assented. “Who wants me?”
“It is Margaret Hilditch speaking,” she announced. “I felt that I must
ring up and tell you of a very strange thing which happened after you
left this evening.”
“Go on,” he begged hoarsely.
“After you left,” she went on, “my husband persisted in playing with
that curious dagger. He laid it against his heart, and seated himself
in the chair which Mr. Jordan had occupied, in the same attitude. It was
what he called a reconstruction. While he was holding it there, I think
that he must have had a fit, or it may have been remorse, we shall never
know. He called out and I hurried across the room to him. I tried to
snatch the dagger away--I did so, in fact--but I must have been too
late. He had already applied that slight movement of the fingers which
was necessary. The doctor has just left. He says that death must have
been instantaneous.”
“But this is horrible!” Francis cried out into the well of darkness.
“A person is on the way from Scotland Yard,” the voice continued,
without change or tremor. “When he has satisfied himself, I am going to
bed. He is here now. Good-night!”
Francis tried to speak again but his words beat against a wall of
silence. He sat upon the edge of the bed, shivering. In that moment
of agony he seemed to hear again the echo of Oliver Hilditch's mocking
words:
“My death is the one thing in the world which would make my wife happy!”