AN _ALIBI_
"It was close on six weeks before the doctor at last allowed his patient
to attend to the grave business which had prostrated him for so long.
"In the meantime, among the many people who directly or indirectly were
made to suffer in this mysterious affair, no one, I think, was more
pitied, and more genuinely sympathised with, than Robert Ireland, the
manager's eldest son.
"You remember that he had been clerk in the bank? Well, naturally, the
moment suspicion began to fasten on his father his position in the
business became untenable. I think every one was very kind to him. Mr.
Sutherland French, who was made acting manager 'during Mr. Lewis
Ireland's regrettable absence,' did everything in his power to show his
goodwill and sympathy to the young man, but I don't think that he or any
one else was much astonished when, after Mrs. Ireland's extraordinary
attitude in the case had become public property, he quietly intimated
to the acting manager that he had determined to sever his connection
with the bank.
"The best of recommendations was, of course, placed at his disposal, and
it was finally understood that, as soon as his father was completely
restored to health and would no longer require his presence in London,
he would try to obtain employment somewhere abroad. He spoke of the new
volunteer corps organized for the military policing of the new colonies,
and, truth to tell, no one could blame him that he should wish to leave
far behind him all London banking connections. The son's attitude
certainly did not tend to ameliorate the father's position. It was
pretty evident that his own family had ceased to hope in the poor
manager's innocence.
"And yet he was absolutely innocent. You must remember how that fact was
clearly demonstrated as soon as the poor man was able to say a word for
himself. And he said it to some purpose, too.
"Mr. Ireland was, and is, very fond of music. On the evening in
question, while sitting in his club, he saw in one of the daily papers
the announcement of a peculiarly attractive programme at the Queen's
Hall concert. He was not dressed, but nevertheless felt an irresistible
desire to hear one or two of these attractive musical items, and he
strolled down to the Hall. Now, this sort of alibi is usually very
difficult to prove, but Dame Fortune, oddly enough, favoured Mr. Ireland
on this occasion, probably to compensate him for the hard knocks she had
been dealing him pretty freely of late.
"It appears that there was some difficulty about his seat, which was
sold to him at the box office, and which he, nevertheless, found
wrongfully occupied by a determined lady, who refused to move. The
management had to be appealed to; the attendants also remembered not
only the incident, but also the face and appearance of the gentleman who
was the innocent cause of the altercation.
"As soon as Mr. Ireland could speak for himself he mentioned the
incident and the persons who had been witness to it. He was identified
by them, to the amazement, it must be confessed, of police and public
alike, who had comfortably decided that no one _could_ be guilty save
the manager of the Provident Bank himself. Moreover, Mr. Ireland was a
fairly wealthy man, with a good balance at the Union Bank, and plenty of
private means, the result of years of provident living.
"He had but to prove that if he really had been in need of an immediate
£5000--which was all the amount extracted from the bank safe that
night--he had plenty of securities on which he could, at an hour's
notice, have raised twice that sum. His life insurances had been fully
paid up; he had not a debt which a £5 note could not easily have
covered.
"On the fatal night he certainly did remember asking the watchman not to
bolt the door to his office, as he thought he might have one or two
letters to write when he came home, but later on he had forgotten all
about this. After the concert he met his son in Oxford Street, just
outside the house, and thought no more about the office, the door of
which was shut, and presented no unusual appearance.
"Mr. Ireland absolutely denied having been in his office at the hour
when James Fairbairn positively asserted he heard Mrs. Ireland say in an
astonished tone of voice: 'Why, Lewis, what in the world are you doing
here?' It became pretty clear therefore that James Fairbairn's view of
the manager's wife had been a mere vision.
"Mr. Ireland gave up his position as manager of the English Provident:
both he and his wife felt no doubt that on the whole, perhaps, there had
been too much talk, too much scandal connected with their name, to be
altogether advantageous to the bank. Moreover, Mr. Ireland's health was
not so good as it had been. He has a pretty house now at Sittingbourne,
and amuses himself during his leisure hours with amateur horticulture,
and I, who alone in London besides the persons directly connected with
this mysterious affair, know the true solution of the enigma, often
wonder how much of it is known to the ex-manager of the English
Provident Bank."
The man in the corner had been silent for some time. Miss Polly Burton,
in her presumption, had made up her mind, at the commencement of his
tale, to listen attentively to every point of the evidence in connection
with the case which he recapitulated before her, and to follow the
point, in order to try and arrive at a conclusion of her own, and
overwhelm the antediluvian scarecrow with her sagacity.
She said nothing, for she had arrived at no conclusion; the case puzzled
every one, and had amazed the public in its various stages, from the
moment when opinion began to cast doubt on Mr. Ireland's honesty to that
when his integrity was proved beyond a doubt. One or two people had
suspected Mrs. Ireland to have been the actual thief, but that idea had
soon to be abandoned.
Mrs. Ireland had all the money she wanted; the theft occurred six months
ago, and not a single bank-note was ever traced to her pocket; moreover,
she must have had an accomplice, since some one else was in the
manager's room that night; and if that some one else was her accomplice,
why did she risk betraying him by speaking loudly in the presence of
James Fairbairn, when it would have been so much simpler to turn out
the light and plunge the hall into darkness?
"You are altogether on the wrong track," sounded a sharp voice in direct
answer to Polly's thoughts--"altogether wrong. If you want to acquire my
method of induction, and improve your reasoning power, you must follow
my system. First think of the one absolutely undisputed, positive fact.
You must have a starting-point, and not go wandering about in the realms
of suppositions."
"But there are no positive facts," she said irritably.
"You don't say so?" he said quietly. "Do you not call it a positive fact
that the bank safe was robbed of £5000 on the evening of March 25th
before 11.30 p.m."
"Yes, that is all which is positive and--"
"Do you not call it a positive fact," he interrupted quietly, "that the
lock of the safe not being picked, it must have been opened by its own
key?"
"I know that," she rejoined crossly, "and that is why every one agreed
that James Fairbairn could not possibly--"
"And do you not call it a positive fact, then, that James Fairbairn
could not possibly, etc., etc., seeing that the glass partition door was
locked from the inside; Mrs. Ireland herself let James Fairbairn into
her husband's office when she saw him lying fainting before the open
safe. Of course that was a positive fact, and so was the one that proved
to any thinking mind that if that safe was opened with a key, it could
only have been done by a person having access to that key."
"But the man in the private office--"
"Exactly! the man in the private office. Enumerate his points, if you
please," said the funny creature, marking each point with one of his
favourite knots. "He was a man who might that night have had access to
the key of the safe, unsuspected by the manager or even his wife, and a
man for whom Mrs. Ireland was willing to tell a downright lie. Are there
many men for whom a woman of the better middle class, and an
Englishwoman, would be ready to perjure herself? Surely not! She might
do it for her husband. The public thought she had. It never struck them
that she might have done it for her son!"
"Her son!" exclaimed Polly.
"Ah! she was a clever woman," he ejaculated enthusiastically, "one with
courage and presence of mind, which I don't think I have ever seen
equalled. She runs downstairs before going to bed in order to see
whether the last post has brought any letters. She sees the door of her
husband's office ajar, she pushes it open, and there, by the sudden
flash of a hastily struck match she realizes in a moment that a thief
stands before the open safe, and in that thief she has already
recognized her son. At that very moment she hears the watchman's step
approaching the partition. There is no time to warn her son; she does
not know the glass door is locked; James Fairbairn may switch on the
electric light and see the young man in the very act of robbing his
employers' safe.
"One thing alone can reassure the watchman. One person alone had the
right to be there at that hour of the night, and without hesitation she
pronounces her husband's name.
"Mind you, I firmly believe that at the time the poor woman only wished
to gain time, that she had every hope that her son had not yet had the
opportunity to lay so heavy a guilt upon his conscience.
"What passed between mother and son we shall never know, but this much
we do know, that the young villain made off with his booty, and trusted
that his mother would never betray him. Poor woman! what a night of it
she must have spent; but she was clever and far-seeing. She knew that
her husband's character could not suffer through her action.
Accordingly, she took the only course open to her to save her son even
from his father's wrath, and boldly denied James Fairbairn's statement.
"Of course, she was fully aware that her husband could easily clear
himself, and the worst that could be said of her was that she had
thought him guilty and had tried to save him. She trusted to the future
to clear her of any charge of complicity in the theft.
"By now every one has forgotten most of the circumstances; the police
are still watching the career of James Fairbairn and Mrs. Ireland's
expenditure. As you know, not a single note, so far, has been traced to
her. Against that, one or two of the notes have found their way back to
England. No one realizes how easy it is to cash English bank-notes at
the smaller _agents de change_ abroad. The _changeurs_ are only too glad
to get them; what do they care where they come from as long as they are
genuine? And a week or two later _M. le Changeur_ could not swear who
tendered him any one particular note.
"You see, young Robert Ireland went abroad, he will come back some day
having made a fortune. There's his photo. And this is his mother--a
clever woman, wasn't she?"
And before Polly had time to reply he was gone. She really had never
seen any one move across a room so quickly. But he always left an
interesting trail behind: a piece of string knotted from end to end and
a few photos.