“Is Mrs. Erskine in any danger, too?” Watts ventured in an aside as
the boat cut through the smooth water.
“In very grave danger, indeed, I fancy.”
“And shall I still keep an eye on him?” “Him” was Carter, staring
ahead of the two police-officers.
“You won't need to, after to-night,” was the oracular reply.
“There she is!” Carter called suddenly. “There's the large steam
launch you described.”
He was right. It was the _Hirondelle_, the boat that Mrs. Clark had
hired. Pointer, once he knew that she was the one they wanted, hardly
glanced at her: his eyes were fixed on a black stretch of water,
beyond a projecting arm of land, which lay sombre and unlit.
“Catch her up before she reaches that.”
“The ‘Devil's Sock,’ as our smugglers call it? _Bien._ We shall do
it.”
And they did. The launch when hailed stopped instantly.
“Who is it?” called Clark's breezy voice, in his bad French. “Anything
wrong? Can we help?”
The police cutter closed up. In the light of its electric lamps the
face talking to them changed suddenly, the jaw slackened, the eyes
darted furtively from the police-boat to the pleasure craft about, who
were watching the meeting with curiosity.
“It's all right, Mr. Clark,” the Chief Inspector answered civilly as
he mounted the ladder swiftly, followed by Carter and Watts. “Only
Miss West is most urgently wanted, and we heard that she had gone out
with you in the swiftest launch in Nice, so I borrowed a
police-cutter.” He had opened the door of the little cabin as he
spoke. Carter would have pushed in first if the other's sheer bulk had
not prevented it. As for Watts, a glance from Pointer made him wait
outside.
In the unusually large and airy cabin sat the three other occupants of
the villa and Christine. The women lay back in their chairs with
closed eyes as though asleep; only Major Vaughan blinked evilly at
them.
“Christine!” Carter fell on his knees beside her. “Christine!” He
shook her gently. “She's unconscious. Give me some brandy—some
coffee.” His gaze swept the table doubtfully.
Pointer said something over the rail, and a man stepped up on to the
deck.
“Here is the surgeon. He'll soon tell us if anything serious is the
matter.”
The doctor rolled up Christine's eyelid, felt her pulse, and poured
her out some brandy from his flask. He looked at a coffee-tray on the
table, smelt the coffee, tasted it, and added his brandy to a cup of
the steaming beverage. “She'll be all right with as much of that as
you can get her to drink.”
He bent over the other two women. “Same here. Opium den, eh?” He
whispered to Pointer, who nodded.
A French sergeant of police stepped in, curled his moustache fiercely,
and made a few notes in a book.
“You will all accompany me to the police-station for inquiries on
arrival in the harbour.”
The major cackled softly.
“Why? The ladies would try a little dose of my Eastern friend. I told
them beginners should go slow.”
“_Il n'y' a pas d'explications!_” snapped the Frenchman, seating
himself between the two men, while Watts lounged against the door.
Christine opened her eyes drowsily, and closed them after a look of
infinite relief as she saw Carter's face bending over her. Another sip
or two, and she was able to stagger outside, and supported by Carter
and the doctor walk up and down in the fresh air.
“Where's Mrs. Erskine—Mrs. Erskine's in danger,” she suddenly babbled
after her second cup. “And I thought I saw Mr. Pointer——”
“Here I am, Miss Christine,” came the cheery answer as the Chief
Inspector relieved the doctor, who returned to the cabin to look after
the other two ladies.
“Oh, Mr. Pointer!” Christine clutched the cup he held out to her
dizzily.
“I—there's a letter Mrs. Erskine has which Rob never wrote—someone's
deceived her all these years. He never wrote any of them.” She tried
to speak coherently. Pointer pressed her arm soothingly.
“I know. Don't you worry, Miss West. You let Carter take you home and
sleep this off till he calls for you in the morning.”
“But Mrs. Erskine—those horrible men—Mrs. Erskine——”
“She's quite safe now. Watts is in the cabin. I shall stay with her,
and when Carter has seen you safely into Madame Secret's hands at my
hotel—she's plenty of empty rooms—he'll join me, and between us Mrs.
Erskine will be well taken care of, don't you think so yourself?”
Christine could not think yet. Her mind could only give out the
impressions made on it while it was still working normally before she
had taken the drug. She drank some more coffee at Carter's urgence.
“Are we making for _Californie_? Surely we ought to be there by now.”
“Californie, eh? Why Californie?” asked Pointer.
“Mrs. Erskine's friend—no, not a friend,—a man she knows—a
detective—lives there. We're taking Rob's letter to him—he's very
clever, or something. . . .”
“You found Robert Erskine's letter when you went to tea at the villa,
didn't you?”
In vain Carter gave the Chief Inspector a look not to worry Christine
just now. Pointer thought it did her as much good to exercise her
brains as her lungs, once he saw that she was physically up to the
exertion.
“Yes. Has she told you? Oh, thank Heaven you both came.”
Carter could keep silence no longer.
“Christine, darling, who gave you that stuff to drink?”
“I didn't drink it. She moved her arm as though it pained her. I——”
“What happened when you got back at seven?” asked Pointer.
Christine struggled bravely to answer, and what with the coffee and
brandy, and her own desire to speak, the effort grew easier after the
first broken gasps.
“At seven? Oh, yes, something had upset the household. There didn't
seem to be any servants—we had to wait on ourselves—and when we got to
the garage Pierre wasn't there—Mrs. Erskine had counted on getting
away unnoticed—by ourselves. But Mr. Clark heard us talking and
dragged it out of her that we were off for Californie. So he insisted
on our letting him drive us there down to a launch his wife and the
major were waiting in and going to Californie by water. I felt horrid
when I stepped on board. If only I could have drawn back I would, but
I couldn't leave Mrs. Erskine. Besides, I wanted to see the affair
cleared up as much as she did, only I sure hated coming on this yacht.
I leant over the rails here and refused to go into the cabin where the
others went to play bridge. I seemed to suddenly see us two or perhaps
three—I don't know about Mrs. Clark—I wondered what sort of people
they all really were, for I felt that Mrs. Erskine distrusted them,
too, since she knew about those letters. I began to think about Rob.
Next Mr. Clark came away from the engine over there and the major came
out of the cabin. They stood on both sides of me, and Mr. Clark made
some remark about the view. And all of a sudden I felt frightened.
Jack, what I would have given to have had you there!”—Jack pressed her
arm—“I stepped back from between them, but Mr. Clark—to think that I
used to rather like him—caught me and held me tight while the major
ran something hard into my arm. It hurt frightfully, but Mr. Clark
held me with my face pressed right into his shoulder so that I
couldn't make a sound, and when he left me go and went to the engine
again, the major stood in front of me and laughed.”
“He won't laugh next time he sees you, and as for Clark—” Carter spoke
slowly between his teeth.
“I thought of Mrs. Erskine alone in the cabin—and of her revolver. I
got into the cabin somehow, though my feet seemed to be made of lead,
I remember her helping me to a chair, and asking what was the matter,
and the next thing I heard was your voice, Jack, from miles and miles
away calling to me.”
Pointer thoughtfully stepped away for a moment to glance into the
cabin. Mrs. Erskine, whose eyes were half open, made him a feeble
sign, but he only shook his head with a gesture that implied there was
no hurry, and made Christine go over the details of the afternoon
again.
At the landing stage Watts helped Mrs. Erskine into a taxi, and drove
her off to the villa. Pointer himself, Mrs. Clark, and the men of the
party walking to the police station close at hand, while Carter took
Christine to the Chief Inspector's hotel, where a sympathetic maid and
landlady diagnosed her case as an attack of sea-sickness and helped
her to bed. Carter left her door reluctantly, he would have liked to
stand on guard all night after what had so nearly happened, but a
confidence in Pointer was beginning to reassure him where it was a
question of that police-officer's orders. At the villa he found the
servants flitting uneasily about, like bats. They connected all these
strange goings on with the loss of the emerald pendant and were in
secret mutiny. Carter was asked to join Monsieur Pointer in the
drawing-room, where he found only Mrs. Erskine lying on the
chaise-lounge looking very ill, and Watts.
Pointer was just laying down a packet of legal-looking papers on the
table beside her.
“Here they are. Will-forms taken from the major's pocket. If you don't
understand their significance, Madame; but I see you do”—for Mrs.
Erskine was staring with dilated eyes at them. “It would have taken
some persuasion doubtless to make you sign away your fortune to any
one of your three friends, but—as I think you know—they would have
ways of persuading you, and whether the will would have been valid
wouldn't have interested you, once you had followed Miss West to the
bottom of the Mediterranean. It would have been so easy to connect the
two ‘accidents.’ Miss West overbalanced, and you falling over in an
effort to save her. True, your friends might have had a few awkward
questions to answer; but, after all, the French courts will decide on
the question of the attempted murder of Miss West, that's none of my
business for the moment.” Pointer took a step forward—“This is my real
reason for being here to-night. Janet Fraser, you are detained,
pending an extradition order, for the murder of Robert Erskine, and
for the embezzlement of the Erskine funds under false pretences for
over seventeen years. It's my . . .”
There was a shriek from the woman to whom he was speaking. She sprang
to her feet and looked around her as if demented, as indeed she was by
the shock—for the moment.
“The devils! They've sold me! After all the money they've squeezed
from me they've sold me in the end. Sold me!”
She screeched, arching her back and advancing in a horribly feline
sidle.
“What else did you expect?” Pointer asked imperturbably. “But it's my
duty to warn you that anything you say may be used against you.”
“My God, Mrs. Erskine!” Watts murmured, while Carter felt as though
the solid floor had opened under his feet.
The woman sank back on the sofa, and struggled for self-possession.
“I'm drugged—I don't know what I'm saying—I drank some morphia—we all
did—just to taste it for once, you know . . .” she was mouthing and
grinning horribly—“and it's quite taken my senses away.”
“Neither you nor Mrs. Clark got much of the stuff into your systems,”
Pointer said in his hard official voice; “when you two heard me on
deck you each jabbed a needleful into your arms, but half of it came
out again. Your wrists were all wet to the touch.”
Yet as a matter of fact it was just this small amount of morphia,
irritating instead of calming as a larger dose would have been, which
had thrown and was throwing off its balance the cold, calculating
brain of the woman whom Pointer knew was not Mrs. Erskine.
“I don't know what you're talking about.” She tried again to steady
her flighty wits. “Ask Mr. Russell who I am.”
Carter, who was listening still as a man in a dream, saw now why the
Chief Inspector had begun as he did. He had thrown the woman off her
guard by fear and rage. Unstrung by the growing strain of the
investigation into Robert Erskine's murder, by the morphia taken, by
the revelation of how near she herself had been to the end of all
things at the hands of her accomplices, she could not recover her
poise, try for it as she might. Like some tight-rope walker over an
abyss, she made a desperate effort to save herself even when she was
already all but falling headlong. “Mr. Russell met me scores of times
before my husband's death as well as since.”
“He was easy to hoodwink. It was his father who had known the real
Mrs. Erskine well, the younger Russell had only seen her a couple of
times as a lad. But your aunt by marriage, Mrs. Fraser, of Glasgow,
would only too gladly swear to you any time, as will other relations.
She seemed to think that your death stopped the pressing home of some
claim against you about the illegal sale of a cottage of hers. She
sent me your photo. . . .”
The woman in the white wig, and artificially shaped eyebrow, bit her
grey lips.
“You are Janet Fraser, of Murry Street, Glasgow. You were engaged as a
companion by the late Mrs. Erskine some fifteen years ago, after
having been an unsuccessful actress for over six years. You joined her
near St. Jean de Luz, and went on with her to Bayonne, where she was
taken with a paralytic stroke the same night and was removed to the
hospital. She died a few days later without recovering consciousness.
The doctor in charge of the hospital mistook you for the mistress, and
you kept up the deception. He has identified the photo of Janet
Fraser—your photo without that wig on, and without that shaved peak to
one eyebrow. The hotel people at Bayonne and the sisters at the
hospital have also identified it. Mrs. Erskine lies buried in the
churchyard there under your name. We are getting an order for her
exhumation under the pretext of having her body taken to Scotland. Her
identity can easily be proved by a couple of operations she had had.
You assumed her name, forged her handwriting—which was a very easy one
to copy. You continued to enjoy her income, until chance gave your
secret away to Mrs. Clark, at that time Mabel Baker, your companion.”
The woman seemed to collapse more and more as he spoke. Now she tried
to pull herself up once more.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” she whispered, with a voice
which was but a ghost of itself.
He stopped. “Now, look here. You can deny everything, of course, but
it won't help you any; and meanwhile these others, the Clarks and the
major, who, I don't doubt, are as deep in it as yourself, who've
battened on you for all these years, may get off scot-free, and in any
case won't get much more than a few months. Do you want that?”
Her haggard eyes opened and shut themselves convulsively, her throat
worked, but she forced back the words by an effort which was visible.
“Wait—I'll go on. Robert Erskine came to England. You poisoned him to
prevent his discovering the fraud. For he would have known his mother.
You could not hope to always receive him in twilight as you did Mr.
Russell or anyone who had ever met the real Mrs. Erskine. You wrote
your letters to him as forbidding as possible in order to prevent his
wanting to come to Europe and see you. But you made your big mistake
when by your miserliness you only sent him one thousand pounds of the
money he asked for. The whole of the five thousand would have kept him
in Canada. Carter here is ready to swear that the one thousand which
you finally sent him was the only money Robert Erskine ever received
from you. Those letters you showed me in Paris were all forgeries.
That was why you ‘lost’ them. You got him to supply you with a box of
his stationery when you heard that he was sailing for England. The
discarded box is in our possession. Unfortunately for himself, he told
you that he was coming over, though he did not tell you on what
business, as he had never referred to business matters with you. He
gave you the name he intended to use, and you sent a letter to meet
him on the boat's arrival in which you wrote of your joy at the
thought of seeing him, and that he was to telegraph you as soon as he
had found a hotel. He kept that letter among his papers in a safe.
Otherwise you would have destroyed it as you did all the other papers
in his room. But to go back, for I want you to see that there are no
gaps. As soon as you knew his hotel, you flew over to England and took
a room in the same house, by good luck—as you thought—getting a room
very near his. You passed under the name of Mrs. Willett. You painted,
padded, darkened your eyes with belladonna, and had a wig arranged to
look as like a portrait of Mrs. Clark which you had with you as
possible. The firm who supplied you with it, and the eyebrows meeting
over the nose, kept a copy of that photo, as they always do, to
safeguard themselves in case of dissatisfaction. I found an eyebrow
box in the attic which bore the name of the shop.”
“The others planned it. They egged me on. They were all in it!” burst
out, as though in spite of herself, from the woman. “They said it was
the only way.”
“Very likely they did, but, you see, I have no proofs of that. All I
can prove is that when you found Robert Erskine's acquaintance
impossible to make, that medicine bottle of his gave you your chance.
You changed the last but one dose for a deadly solution of morphia,
obtained how I can't think. . . .” Pointer knew perfectly, but he
wanted her to speak, and she did.
“No, no, no! I never did such a thing!” The sane part of her brain was
fighting the drugged part which wanted to babble.
“Oh, yes, you did.”
“If I did, I got it from that sneering, drug-sodden fiend Vaughan.”
“Robert Erskine drank the poison. When it was acting,—I take it you
listened at the door—you entered his room, locked the door, unscrewed
the back of the wardrobe, fastened the bolt on inside, and dragged the
armchair up to it. You're a tall woman and a strong one, but you must
have had some difficulty with his body before you got it safely
bundled in . . .”
The woman turned livid.
“. . . with your letter to the manager in the pocket. Next you laid in
some things of his which you thought would bear out your 'phone about
his having gone into the country, screwed the back on again, pushed
the wardrobe into position, emptied the medicine bottle on to the
balcony, filled in the cough mixture again, and went through all his
belongings. His bag you fastened inside a larger bag. . . .”—This last
was guess-work, but he saw by her terrified eyes that he had been
right.—“Wearing Major Vaughan's shoes, you crept down the back stairs
into the street. You had already oiled the lock and opened it at noon.
When you had disposed of your bag, and exchanged the shoes for your
own, you waited in the theatre and took a taxi back to the hotel. When
you heard the arrival of the police—your door was ajar, we noticed—you
put on his shoes again, and crept out on to the balcony to peer in
through the blind, as you had done once before when Mr. Beale was in
the room. You had intended to reach France Saturday night, but the
storm which raged made flight out of the question. Even the channel
boats did not go. Besides, once you knew the body had been found, you
waited on to see what would happen. The telegrams which I sent Mrs.
Erskine here were received and answered by Mrs. Clark. You flew to
Paris, using her passport, and back again the same day after the
interview with Russell and me, an interview which you were expecting
and had prepared for after catching sight of Mr. Russell at the
hotel.”
Watts shot his chief a crestfallen glance, but the woman broke out
excitedly: “She lent me that passport. She helped . . . They all
helped . . . They're all in it. Yes, you're right, Inspector, they
knew all about it. And ever since then I've been in hell! In hell! I
knew it was only a question of time before I should be killed in my
turn . . . oh, my head . . . I don't mean that! I don't know what I'm
saying.”
“I'll just make a note of what you say about their being implicated
too.” Pointer drew out a block of writing paper.
She veered around again, the hatred of years sweeping away every
barrier, as the wily police-officer had hoped it would. He had a full
confession of the crime, written in the first person, in his pocket,
only waiting for her to sign, and for that signature he was working,
leaving her no time to recover that cold nerve of hers which had been
temporarily broken down, but which was sure to come again later as he
well knew. There was too much tension between France and England just
then for extradition to be a quick matter when the crime had been
committed on French soil, but with the criminal's confession safely at
the Yard the police could wait in patience the law's delays.
“Stop! Write all this down.” She sprang to her feet and leant heavily
against the table, rocking as she stood. “Write it all out, and I'll
sign it, and then we'll see if those blood-suckers get off with only a
couple of months. _Months!_ While I . . .”
“You'd better see a solicitor,” suggested the Chief Inspector
half-heartedly, but remembering the jury's passion for every advantage
to be given to the criminal, as he pulled out the sheets, which were
burning his fingers.
“No, no! Is that it? Let me read it over.”
“If you want to sign it, just add a line at the foot to say that you
have read it through and that it is correct.”
“I'll put more than that in. I want to say that these three
blackmailers instigated Robert Erskine's death. They told me what to
do. Ever since yon Baker found me one day asleep with my wig awry
she's lived on me, she and Vaughan, who was her lover at the time, and
the man she calls her husband now.”
“And Miss West, what were you going to do to her?” Carter spoke for
the first time—he had been literally spellbound till then. “What of
her?”
For a second the woman blinked at him as though hardly remembering to
whom he referred.
“I'm writing that down, too. When I told them that she had discovered
something wrong with the letters—letters _they_ drafted for me, mind
you they insisted on drugging her, and—and—they told me that she was
to be put ashore somewhere. I thought she was to be kept till we could
get away safely.” Her eyes flickered uneasily, and fell to the paper.
In a fury of vengeance which burned away all thought of personal
safety for the moment if only she could engulf the others deep enough,
Janet Fraser wrote nearly two pages before she signed her name, with
Carter and Watts as witnesses.
The Chief Inspector drew a deep breath of relief, and motioned Carter
to precede him out of the room.
Janet Fraser's hand went to a little picture standing on the
mantelpiece, a sketch of her father's manse. The frame was a
Florentine one, and in a corner her finger pared off a tiny gilt
pellet as she apparently automatically adjusted the water-colour. When
Pointer turned to speak to Watts she slipped it into her mouth. It was
a way of escape she had prepared long ago.
“I shall be quite ready to come with you to England without waiting
for an extradition order,” she said quietly as she lay down on the
couch again and pulled the rug up over her, “but I'm exhausted for the
moment. I want a little rest.”
“Very good. I'll arrange about our tickets so that we can get off by
the early train if possible. I'll be back within an hour and let you
know what has been settled. There will be Watts on duty outside, but I
think you'll be sensible.”
“Quite sensible,” murmured Janet Fraser, looking him full in the face
for a second, and then dropping those pale grey eyes of hers.
Carter and the Chief Inspector walked away in silence. At last the
Canadian spoke.
“So it wasn't Beale after all, and Rob was murdered by that she-devil
who passed as his mother because he would have given the show away!
I'm glad you got her! God! I never thought I should like to see a
woman arrested for murder, but I'm glad you got her! And, see here,
Inspector, I do see why you weren't keen on my helping, nor Christine
either: it did take a mighty keen eye—a trained one—to pick out the
king-log from that jumble.”
“Largely a matter of routine,” muttered Pointer, lighting his pipe.
“Routine!” Carter echoed. “I suppose it was routine that lets
Christine sleep safely in her bed to-night. Poor old Rob. To be done
in like that. . . . I wish to Heaven . . .” He was silent for a few
minutes. “But how in tarnation did you get hold of—of—the truth?”
“Well, it's a longish story. First of all, as I said, was that letter
this woman wrote to Erskine which we found among the papers Beale had
got hold of—she had destroyed the others, you know—asking him to let
her know his address in London at once. That only bewildered me. You
don't suspect a mother easily of having a hand in her son's murder,
but I began to wonder whether Robert Erskine might turn out not to be
her son at all. I found that that was impossible, and I began
speculating a bit along the lines of the truth. A Toronto stationery
box I found in her attic here made me doubt whether the letters I had
taken a bit for granted, I confess, were as genuine as they looked. I
had noted the water-mark, but had let them go at that, under the
circumstances—my mistake that! Then—well, what with one thing and
another, I got hold of a key to her safe and that unlocked her story
as well, or at least the clue to it. It was this way. In the safe were
a couple of the real Mrs. Erskine's old diaries, a large photo of
herself, a small razor, and a couple of white wigs. Strange things for
a lady to keep with her jewels, eh? The photo set me thinking. It had
been constantly handled, and had a clip fastened to the top to allow
of its being hung on any convenient nail. But why? Taken in
conjunction with the wigs, why else than to make up like it? Then the
little razor—Mrs. Erskine's queer eyebrow would fit that idea. In
Janet Fraser's photo—I only got it later on, of course; didn't know of
her existence then—you'll see what beetling eyebrows she has by
nature. The two women were otherwise about the same size and general
build. With the wig, and the eyebrow shaved to a peak in the middle,
and after years of semi-invalidism, the one could easily pass herself
off for the other, when there were no suspicions alert. I found in my
hunt at the villa an old pill-box which gave me a Biarritz address,
and went there. The rest of the story . . . ? Well, after that it
was——”
“Merely a matter of routine,” suggested Carter; “but say, Chief
Inspector, I'll never forget what I owe you. You saved me once when
you drew Beale's fangs, and you've saved Christine to-night.”
“I don't mind telling you that I never in all my life spent a worse
five minutes than when I had to decide what had become of her, and
knew that if I made a mistake there would be no time to put it right.”
Pointer spoke with feeling.
“What made you guess the river?” Carter asked in a hushed voice.
“Couldn't see what else they could do with her. It was obvious that
the house had been cleared so that no one should know of her second
arrival. When she had been at the villa before, she had practically no
friends on this side of the Atlantic. I think they counted on that a
bit. I know this coast pretty well. As Mr. Deane, I've walked it over
for hours, and I couldn't call to mind any ravine or place where a
body could be dropped as though from a motor accident except some
spots a good way off, and where a very stiff gradient had to be
climbed. The tyres and the small amount of petrol were against them.
There only remained the sea, for the villa itself was out of the
question. What they wanted was an accident, not a body that could be
found some time or other, and prove it to've been a murder.”
“You jumped to the conclusion at once that her life was in danger,
then?”
Pointer put his head on one side. “Well . . . in a murder case there
generally comes a moment when a second murder seems the only way to
keep the first one quiet.”
The two men stopped at the Negresco, and Pointer glanced up at the
purple roofs high above them.
“Don't let yourself feel too grateful, Mr. Carter. You and Miss
Leslie, as was, quite tangled me up for a while. There were weeks when
I felt none too sure of either of you.”
“See here,” Carter stopped him as he would have turned away, “I saw
that man of yours—Watts—pull out a knife to-night to sharpen a pencil.
My knife! I had lent it to a funny old gheezer here, a Colonel Winter,
who's pestered me the last fortnight, buzzing around me, and I've been
kind of figuring——”
But the Chief Inspector was gone. Carter gazed after him. “Well, I
guess our British police take some beating after all.” And he went
upstairs to write out a wire offering a reward of five thousand pounds
to anyone who should first find the murderer of Robert Erskine. The
wire was sent off to the Yard, after a futile effort on his part to
get it dated earlier in the day. He thought it would look more natural
to Pointer, but he consoled himself afterwards with the knowledge that
it would have made no difference in the Chief Inspector's acceptance
of the sum solely on behalf of the Police Widows' and Orphans' Fund.
When Pointer returned to the villa it was close on dawn. He and Watts
looked at each other in silence a moment and then glanced away.
“A letter must have come for Mrs. Erskine late last night. I found it
in the letter-box.” Watts handed it to his superior.
“Any sound from in there?” asked Pointer rather tensely.
Watts shook his head, and, receiving no answer to their knock, they
entered.
She was quite dead. Gone by the same way that she had sent Robert
Erskine out of life. They 'phoned for a doctor, though there was no
slightest chance of rousing her to life. Then Pointer glanced at the
letter he held. It was from Russell and Son. He broke the seal and
read:
“Dear Mrs. Erskine,
I will reply to your last at full length to-morrow. This is simply
to ask you to let me have all possible details as to the death of
your one-time companion, Janet Fraser. Place of burial, doctor who
attended her, etc. A relative of hers has died in Australia, and as
next-of-kin she—had she lived—would have inherited his enormous
fortune, which will now go to his more distant kin.
I note in your letter that your press for the sale of your Bell
shares, against which we most strongly counsel you——”
Pointer put the letter down for a moment, and looked thoughtfully at
the dead woman before him.
Transcriber’s Note
This transcription follows the text of the edition published by A. L.
Burt Company in March, 1925, by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf.
However, the following errors have been corrected from the original
text:
* “concide” was changed to “coincide” (Chapter IX).
* “apolgised” was changed to “apologised” (Chapter IX).
* “Negreso” was changed to “Negresco” (Chapter X).
* Twelve occurrences of unpaired quotation marks have been fixed.