Читать книгу Chief Inspector Pointer's Cases - 12 Golden Age Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding - Страница 42

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POINTER too, was making for Kew, also for the home of Sir Richard Ash, in his quality as one-time partner of Vardon's cousin.

The house inside showed the unmistakable signs of a large family, and small means. But the comfortable, untidy, drawing-room struck a pleasanter note than many a prettier one.

It rang of happy hours.

Sir Richard was a small, dapper man, with eyes alert and bright.

"I suppose your call has to do with my late partner's unfortunate cousin," he began without preamble, once the greetings were over and Pointer seated, "Mr. Dorset Steele telephoned us of his trouble."

The door opened, and Barbara came in. She had just got back.

She was about to leave the two alone with a murmured word of apology, when her eyes fell on the stranger's card that Sir Richard Ash had laid on a table near the door.

"Oh!" she came closer, "are you—is that—"

"I'm from New Scotland Yard," Pointer said with a bow. He thought that she had one of the most taking faces that he had ever seen. Her eyes, at once fearless and penetrating, rested on his in a mute question.

"Oh, Mr. Chief Inspector, have you found out yet if it was—an accident?"

"My dear!" her father said gently, but she kept her eyes on the detective officer.

Pointer was moved by that look.

"Perhaps I could tell you something—" she began, "something about Mr. Vardon. You know, we're engaged?"

"My dear!" her father said again gently.

Pointer looked at her very kindly. Nothing short of absolute necessity would have made him question her. He, who knew so well what snares his questions often held! Not willingly would he lay the burden on her young heart of wondering afterwards if it had been something that she had said, or failed to say, which had led her lover to his death. For, it might yet come to that.

"I think I shan't need to trouble you," Pointer said easily, "but thank you for the offer."

Her father looked relieved. She only watched the more intently, trying to read what lay behind the words. A little of the truth she guessed, and went very white.

"There's nothing like routine-work in a case of this kind," Pointer assured her. "And perhaps if I might speak to Sir Richard—"

"Alone," chirped Sir Richard in great relief, "my dear—the Chief Inspector's time—"

"But daddy, you can't tell him as much as I can."

Pointer saw that there was nothing for it but the truth.

"It's this way. Suppose you wished afterwards you'd put things differently, mightn't it worry you? I don't think it would be quite fair to you, just because you and Mr. Vardon are engaged."

She said no more, and left them. It might seem a dreadful thing of which to suspect a nice girl, but the Chief Inspector would have been unwilling to bet on the point, so certain did it seem to him, that outside, with her ear against the door jamb, Miss Ash would have been found.

"How long has Miss Ash been engaged?"

Now that was just the question at issue between Barbara and her parents. Sir Richard always attributed it to the wonderful intuition of woman that Barbara hugged him quite especially that night. He replied:

"She tells us that they became engaged about a week ago. They intended to keep it to themselves till the young man should have a more assured future."

"You have no objections to the match?"

"Apart from his lack of means, none at all. I like Philip Vardon. He's been very unfairly treated in the past, to my thinking, and taken it splendidly."

"You mean?"

"His Cousin Branscombe's will. Philip Vardon should have had the land left him. Every foot of it was Vardon. It came to Clive Branscombe through his mother. But he was one of those men whom a handsome, imperious woman can twist around her little finger. And Mrs. Tangye, poor soul, was both those things."

"Otherwise a nice woman?"

"Most certainly."

"Ever anything against her? Hint of scandal, or that sort of thing?"

"Not a breath."

"Did she strike you as a very, how shall I put it—lawabiding woman? I mean, do you think she would ever lend herself to anything illegal in any way?"

Pointer was thinking of blackmail.

"The last woman in the world," Sir Richard assured him with a smile, and very definitely.

"Or to be mixed up in anything illegal?"

"Or to be mixed up in anything not strictly above-board, and most respectable. In fact her respectability—I should say—was a shield and buckler nothing could get past."

He tried Ash on another tack, but Sir Richard knew personally nothing of Mrs. Tangye's cousin, nor of her inner life since she had married her present husband.

Pointer thanked him and had risen to go. Turning to him again he said civilly:

"Miss Ash has a bad cold, I see. I'm afraid it's a legacy from the funeral yesterday."

"No. She's getting over an old one. Though I always say that I don't know about weddings, but one funeral is sure to make another. Yet in her case, it seems to've done no harm."

Pointer hoped that the architect's saw would come true in this case. He certainly intended to do his best to see that Mrs. Tangye's funeral should be followed by another—that of her murderer.

The Chief Inspector found Wilmot at the police station, chatting to Haviland.

"Vardon's alibi is rotten." Haviland spoke cheerfully. "As for his box-camera he says he sold it to a man he met in the train a month ago for a fiver. Hard up for an excuse! In fact, he fits the theory we now have of the murder to a T, sir."

"All but the preparations on Mrs. Tangye's part for his unseen arrival," Pointer said in his unmoved way. "A most important 'but,' Haviland. Otherwise, I agree that he fits, supposing his story to be false. For obviously Mrs. Tangye wouldn't have gone openly to the man's room who, a couple of hours' later, was to come so secretly to Riverview, in order to hand him a sum of money she could just as easily have given him at her own house."

"Hence the yarn, you think?" Haviland asked.

"Possibly. But on the other hand, if Vardon's telling the truth, and she did go to Fulham, did give him the money to use for them both, the account he gives of her fits in with what we know of the rest of Mrs. Tangye's actions last Tuesday. Her rush would be not to be too late for that most important appointment in the Riverview morning-room. An appointment for which she had prepared so well. The distrait manner which Vardon mentions would be due to it. So on the whole, until we learn of something that shakes his story, or that would explain why he should be expected to come by the French windows, and not by the front door, I accept it."

"What he told you fits in most of all with suicide," Wilmot reminded him.

Pointer shot him an ironic glance.

"I don't see the Insurance Company's advocate seeing it, if it didn't."

"Any more than I can see a crime here—yet," Wilmot said seriously. "That little point he told you about Mrs. Tangye picking up her pen with her left hand shows what happened. She fired that shot too with her left hand. Or she had an accident while holding it in her left hand. Vardon's no criminal. Apart from every moral consideration, he hasn't the brains for such a crime as you're postulating."

And here Pointer rather agreed. Though with reservations. Criminals have odd pockets of cunning, which even a trained eye may overlook in a first summing up of their character.

Haviland glanced up from his papers.

"I tried that speech of yours on the tea-room manageress. She crumpled."

"What rune was this?" Wilmot asked. "Does Pointer go in for incantations? Pray lend it to me. I'm off to see my tailor."

But Pointer, it seemed, had only told Haviland to ask if it were true, as Miss Saunders maintained, that she had been wearing a purple cloak on Tuesday. The manageress had fallen into the trap, and said that she had been.

"The more I seemed to doubt Miss Saunders having really worn that cloak—she hasn't such a thing in her wardrobe, of course—the more the woman remembered it. Well, of course, that does for the alibi. Once a liar always a liar. And that's a fact. The two women have put their heads together, and concocted it. That's what happened. As a matter of fact, I don't believe now that Miss Saunders was either at the tea-rooms or in the library last Tuesday afternoon between four and six."

Haviland looked half-uneasy at the boldness of his own thoughts, but Wilmot and Pointer only nodded, as though each had already reached that point some time ago.

Barbara meanwhile was discussing the man in charge of the case with her grandfather.

"Looks to be a bit off-colour," Dorset Steele said moodily. He was sitting with his latest stamp between his fingers. The solicitor collected.

"Does he?" in tones of horror.

"Don't you think so?" He held out a Sandwich Island gem. Barbara covered it promptly with the ash tray. A present from herself, which the solicitor regularly produced during her visits, and which he as regularly forgot to use.

"I'm speaking of the Chief Inspector from Scotland Yard. He seems so tied by what he calls routine."

"Huh!" snorted Dorset Steele, almost blowing the stamp off the table. "Routine, indeed! that's what he called his work in that Mailing affair last year. Would Mailing have come out with the truth and ruined our whole defence if Pointer hadn't—" Dorset Steele broke off too indignant to continue, though Barbara heard a muttered "Bottle of ginger-beer indeed! Our best witness!" Snatching up a lens, the solicitor examined a purchase viciously.

"He's a good man," he admitted finally, grudgingly. "His evidence always carries tremendous weight with any judge and jury."

"I'm going to go to the hotel in the city where Phil went, and I'm going to hunt there for that bag of his," Barbara said suddenly. "Of course it's there. He says he saw it taken in by one of the lift-boys. I'm sure I can find it. He pretends now that he doesn't want me to bother. That it's not worth finding, but that's only to save me worrying."

Dorset Steele was sure she could not find it. Pointer had telephoned to him only a little while ago, that two of Scotland Yard's men had failed to trace it. He knew, though Pointer had rung off, that the Yard were searching taxis and left-luggage places. But he thought any diversion good for Barbara.

"I never heard of a madder idea!" he said crossly, and Barbara only smiled. She sped down to the hotel. To the booking-clerk, a pretty girl with a sympathetic eye, she explained that she was Vardon's fiancee and, as he couldn't come for the bag himself, she wanted to make quite sure that it hadn't been overlooked in some odd corner. It contained some important papers.

The girl was friendly. But though she summoned porters and lift-boys, the bag was denied by all and sundry as resolutely as a pain by a Christian Scientist.

Barbara halted disconsolately in the lounge, loath to go. The feeling that though right, she was impotent, that something more should be done, but she did not know what, made her desperate. So much hung on the bag. Had it been stolen? Had some honest mischance happened to it?

"Good morning, Miss Ash," said a voice she had heard for the first time yesterday. A voice that sounded wonderfully pleasant just now. It suggested resource. It suggested power. She shook hands with the Chief Inspector.

"Come about the bag? Not found it yet, I see. What do you say to some tea and toast while I carry on?"

He piloted her into the coffee-room. It was a cold day and a chilly room but his mere presence was comforting. He was so thoroughly on his own ground. Mentally, if not actually.

Barbara handed over the reins gladly.

Pointer started in with asking for the lift-boy, who by this time considered himself the hotel's most interesting inmate. The lad told his side of the story fluently enough.

"There was a lot of luggage come in. Party of Americans arrived. I took it all up in the service lift, and then carried it down, storey by storey. The hall porter had seen to its being chalked with the numbers of the rooms. The gentleman never had a bag with him at all. That's flat."

"Did you take any more luggage up afterwards?"

"No. It was my last trip."

Pointer went up in the lift. He was shown over the hotel willingly enough. The management wanted the thing settled. Pointer represented himself as coming on behalf of the luggage insurance company from whom Vardon was claiming the value of the bag.

Nothing was to be seen that even distantly resembled the article in question. The lift-boy who had taken over after the first one went off duty was next summoned. His answer to Pointer's question, as to what he would do if he found any overlooked luggage left on the top floor landing, was that he would bring it down.

"I'd place it in the lift, like I always do if it's there, and either come down with it if I'd the time, or the night porter 'd haul it down when the lift was next wanted. Either way, nothing couldn't get lost. You can't lose luggage in this hotel, sir, not if you tried!"

"There's no light by the lift on the top floor."

"The lamp in the corridor is enough. You don't need light to get in or take out luggage. All you want is to see the number on 'em. And the corridor lamp is good enough for that."

Pointer nodded. He had done with the boy. He now asked for the lift's mechanician, and a ladder. Together the two mounted on top of the cage. The workman flashed a repairer's lamp around. There, hidden from view by a deep ornamental border, lay a brown kit-bag, marked P. V.

"That's what I'm after!" Pointer picked it up, and gave a receipt—on a luggage insurance company's paper—to the hall porter.

What had happened must have been that the first boy left the bag on the top landing by an oversight. The second boy, seeing the number of a room on a lower floor chalked on it, had heaved it into the lift as he thought, but on to the lift as it turned out, which had already been sent down. The dim light, and dark shaft had at once suggested this to Pointer. No man but an absolutely fearless one rises high, either at Scotland Yard, or in the Force. Yet Pointer held his very breath as he tiptoed past the coffee-room door, at which Barbara was casting constant glances.

His footsteps would not have disturbed a tigress with a wounded cub. But Barbara heard them. She darted out into the hall just as he was arranging a message to be delivered to her later—much later.

"You've got the bag? Phil's bag? Oh, well done."

Pointer made the best of what he considered a very bad job, and let her accompany him back to his car. Nothing but actual violence would have torn her from his find. He span out the tale of his discovery to the utmost as they drove along.

"You're taking it to Mr. Vardon, of course?"

"Of course!" Pointer echoed loftily as though nothing in the world could ever induce him to trifle with, or detain, another's property. "But I think we'll just call in and tell Mr. Dorset Steele its found. He's on our way."

"I want to be there when it's opened." Barbara's fine little nostrils were quivering like a filly's with eagerness.

Pointer was very official.

"I'm afraid this kind of thing—routine work—must be done as routine," he said stiffly. "I think you can trust Mr. Dorset Steele to state the case accurately to you afterwards."

Barbara seemed duly crushed as he had hoped.

"Where would you like me to put you down?" he asked as they came in sight of the solicitor's office.

"My bank is quite close," she suggested pleasantly. It was next door. Pointer glanced sharply at her, but Barbara was counting some change in her purse with the look of incredulous and pained surprise which that operation generally calls forth on a woman's face. Her whole air was business-like. Absorbed.

She shook hands with him and tripped into the lobby. To run swiftly through a passage, out the other side, up a back stair and into the office of Dorset Steele. She tried the knob of his private office. It was locked.

"No one can come in!" snapped Dorset Steele's voice. "It's me, grandfather," she said meekly. He made no reply.

The head clerk who had witnessed her mad swoop upon the inner room, proffered a paper. Barbara wrapt herself in it haughtily, blinking to keep back the tears.

"Phil's bag! I know they're opening it without waiting for him!" So, she was not to be there. To see his vindication. She wanted to read that piece of paper more than any of them could. It would be balm to her quivering, doubt-tormented spirit.

The door was finally unbolted. Barbara was in like a wind-driven bird.

"Well?" she asked, "well?" For there stood the bag in the centre of the table. "Have you opened it? Without Philip?"

"A pretty state of things!" fumed Dorset Steele, putting an arm around her. "My private door practically forced open like—"

"Did you find it?" she asked in quivering suspense.

"A paper signed Mable Tangye giving Mr. Vardon the money to invest for her, is here all right, Miss Ash," Pointer reassured her.

"Then, what's wrong?" she asked her grandfather, looking searchingly into his face, "what's wrong?"

"Nothing!" he snapped, dropping his arm, and turning away.

Barbara's gaze grew more agonised.

"I think you'd better explain, sir," Pointer said quietly. He opened the bag again; he lifted out an envelope.

"There's the paper giving him the use of the money. But would you say that was written by Mrs. Tangye?" he asked Barbara reluctantly.

Barbara stared at it. Her eyes blurred.

"I—I don't know her writing well enough to say."

"It's not like any specimens which Mr. Dorset Steele and I have," Pointer explained. "And it's written with Mr. Vardon's stylograph. And on his paper. The last is natural of course. So is the pen, perhaps, but that writing?" He eyed it very hard.

"I know you'll take his word—" she began. It was a silly sentence. But she was speaking as much to her own heart as to Pointer. She turned to him, confident of being met half-way. Then she stared. He had altered. She had thought his eyes kind; they were steel. For the first time Barbara sensed that the man beside her was by nature a close-in fighter. The cut of his nostrils, the set of his lips, the very bone formation of his good-looking face, would have told a skilled observer as much at a glance. But for the first time in her knowledge of him, the invincible, fiery, essence of the spirit was flaming through the calm exterior of the man.

Instinct told her that nothing would move the Chief Inspector to alter the course which he thought the true one, by the breadth of an atom. She was right, nothing would.

He seemed to her suddenly very awful. Very terrible. She would not be the first who had had cause to think him so.

She looked dumbly at her grandfather.

"The Chief Inspector believes it's a forgery," he said curtly.

Pointer did not go as far as that, he only considered a forgery as possible.

Barbara sat down. She felt faint. What was this law that never seemed satisfied? She thought of the gulls that she had fed only this morning on the Embankment. Their stretched necks and greedy eyes intent on more, always more. Cruel and insatiable by some law of their very being. Remorseless.

"Philip's clever with his pen," she said swiftly, "if he had wanted to copy Mrs. Tangye's writing, he'd have done it better than that."

Her grandfather's eyes stopped her. Dorset Steele looked as though he were going to bite.

"We maintain that it was written with Mrs. Tangye's left hand, and as such would naturally show great differences," the solicitor said at once.

"Leaving that on one side for the moment. As we three are together, and since Mr. Vardon hasn't got here yet—we telephoned to him to come on," Pointer explained to Barbara—"there's another point I'd like to ask you about, Miss Ash."

"You don't need to answer, mind!" Dorset Steele threw in. "A man came to Twickenham police station this morning. To see the Superintendent. He spends his free afternoons going over the fields close to Richmond golf links with his dog picking lost balls. It seems he heard you and Mr. Vardon together last Saturday afternoon. He was out of sight, he says, behind a thicket at the time. According to him, Mr. Vardon was speaking as though he hadn't any certainty that you would marry him. Yet you told us that you had become engaged some days before then."

Pointer stopped Barbara with a gesture as cautionary as her grandfather's might have been.

"I don't want you to answer without thinking very carefully over your reply. According to this man, Mr. Vardon spoke unwillingly of a screw that he could turn—if need be-which would let him make a good deal of money. According to this man, you called over your shoulder as you moved away, out of earshot, that if so, he had better turn it, and turn it hard. Now, if you care to explain this conversation when you've thought over your answers—they are very important, Miss Ash—I would like to hear what you have to say. You're not bound in any way to reply, as Mr. Dorset Steele, here says, but if you should care to clear the points up—that about the date of your engagement, as to whether Mr. Vardon did make any such remark, and you such a rejoinder—"

"The man misunderstood the whole thing," Barbara said quickly. "Mr. Vardon and I had—well—had a quarrel. I was in a horrid temper. Things had been rubbing it in to me what marrying a poor man meant—"

Lady Ash would not have cared to hear herself alluded to as "things."

"Philip has the sweetest, kindest temper in the world. I was a perfect little beast to him. Oh, a perfect toad. Simply too loathsome for words. I goaded him into saying those words. Of course, he didn't mean anything. And, of course, I knew he didn't mean anything!"

"The man heard incorrectly. No such words in fact, were spoken," interrupted Dorset Steele in such stentorian tones that his clerk in the next room jumped. "Will you hold your tongue, Barbara!"

Barbara shook her head.

"If this story is going about, it had better be faced. It's just luck that the only time such a phrase was ever used, was when there was an eavesdroppr. It was Banks, wasn't it?" she asked. "Father of Bobby Banks, whom we had to discharge. He was one of the caddies." Barbara was honorary secretary of the golf club run by the G.F.S.

"Exactly. The man had a grudge, and magnified some trifle," Dorset Steele nodded energetically.

"Mr. Vardon refused to see me this morning," Pointer said after a pause.

"On my instructions," snapped the solicitor.

"Pity. He might be able to straighten this little tangle out by one word."

"My experience is that one word only ties tangles tighter." In his irritation Dorset Steele' was getting as alliterative as a Skald.

"You still think it's safer not to let him talk to me?" Pointer asked.

"Safer? You mean wiser. Certainly. Look at this whole conversation—" the solicitor evidently considered it a sorry sight. "The case is going to the dogs."

Pointer, without glancing at Barbara, rose.

"If you'll excuse me, I'll smoke a pipe outside."

He thought that the girl needed a respite.

In silence Barbara stretched a hand up to her grandfather's shoulder and side by side the two stood looking into the fire.

She saw a dark enough picture. He saw a worse one still.

"Did I—did I bungle things?" she asked at last, under her breath. "The truth seemed best."

"Truth!" the solicitor snorted. "This conversation on the links—"

"If only it hadn't happened," she said sadly.

"If only it hadn't been overheard, it could have been kept from the jury!" he muttered. "Well, when you see your Philip next, try to din a few elementary facts into his head. Truth is what it's best for the other side to believe," he repeated forcefully.

"You'll never din that into his head. Nor into mine either, I'm afraid."

Pointer came in again. He still had the bag with him. Now he placed it on a table behind the door.

"Nothing is to be said about that, until the door is closed." He took up a place at the window, Steps were heard outside. Coming up the stairs. They were on the first floor. Suddenly there came a little halt in them. A sort of catch. Then they went on again. The door opened. Vardon came in. He looked older, leaner. Barbara felt with a sudden pang that she would give all that she possessed to see again that sunny, all's-well-with-the-world look on his face. She watched him with misty eyes. Had she turned an innocent man into a criminal? Was it possible that she had egged him on, talked him on, nagged him on to—She hated herself for the terrible doubt but it was there. Not of the man as he would have been had she let him alone, but of the man whose nerves she might have worn down with her constant reproachings, exhortations for many months now. Had he—the stranger—done this thing?

Vardon's eyebrows lifted as he shook hands with the two of them.

"We've found the bag that went astray," Pointer said cheerfully. "Just look through it, and see if everything's there. It's unlocked, as you said."

Vardon started. He looked swiftly, not at the bag, but first at Pointer and then at the solicitor. The bag came third. Then he opened it, and bent over the things inside. Pointer had put the paper nearly on top.

"Ah, here it is! Now, you see!" Vardon drew it out. But the paper had been under his fingers for fully a second. True, he looked as though a load had fallen from him, but he also looked a little bewildered. Pointer thought that he looked as though not quite able to believe his own luck.

The Chief Inspector took the sheet and asked if he identified it as the one that Mrs. Tangye had written in his rooms. If so, the Scotland Yard man would take it with him, giving Dorset Steele a receipt for it. The solicitor initialled it. He had every confidence in Pointer but he took nothing on trust. Like Pointer himself.

"Mr. Vardon, what screw did you have that you could turn to order to get money?" Pointer asked as the paper changed hands finally.

Vardon's face darkened. He looked narrowly at the two men. He did not glance towards Barbara.

"Just a silly phrase," he said earnestly. "Just a silly, empty phrase."

And to this explanation he stuck. Barbara said nothing. She sat wrapt in suffering. Had Philip only meant that? His face came back to her. Lowering. Tainted by their talk—her talk—of money as the only goal. She felt certain that he had meant something more.

Pointer left the three to a dreary silence, and drove off.

"So he really had a real bag and a real paper from Mrs. Tangye," Wilmot murmured when he dropped in at the Yard in answer to a telephone message from Pointer.

"And the latter fact interested him far less than his uncertainty as to whether something else was, or was not in the bag."

"Perhaps he was acting?"

"He was far too absorbed in finding out what was in the bag—and what was not. So am I therefore."

"Pretty wide field." Wilmot gave his little smile, "I mean, what might have been in the bag, and wasn't."

"Pretty wide, but not illimitable."

"Well, of course, as a matter of fact, it would have to be something the bag would contain." Haviland had managed to make time to be present at the interview too.

Wilmot at once agreed that that would shut out certain articles.

"And I can see the objections to it being a live animal, or a gas, or a liquid," the newspaper man went on suavely. "But even so, the field seems pretty wide for guesswork. Pray, how do you start, Pointer?"

"Something like this: Vardon expected to find something in that bag that wasn't there. He did not look in the least worried, or regretful at its absence, and was on the whole, thankful not to find it.

"So, evidently it was something that would have made his position worse. That is to say, that would have thrown a deeper suspicion on him.

"While his fingers actually passed by the sheet of paper we all wanted to see, the one he claims Mrs. Tangye wrote when she gave him the money, they kept searching the pockets in the bag's lining. Pockets that would only admit of papers. He stared first and hardest at a long envelope-which proved to contain his cheque-book. He pulled it half out while he thought we were all busy with the paper. As soon as he had a clear view of its top, he thrust it back. The address was away from him. It was an unopened envelope evidently, but of the same long, narrow shape, that's the danger. He eyed the remaining papers and books but he didn't take any up."

"Securities?" asked Wilmot, "do you think he is missing anything of that kind?"

"I don't think it's money. Vardon didn't look as he would have done if anything on which he had counted were missing, let alone anything for the sake of which he might be supposed to've committed a crime. And the oddest thing is he didn't know whether it was there or not. It's not a case of something missing in the ordinary sense. There aren't many things which would fit the facts. He doesn't seem to be nervy of it turning up anywhere else, whatever 'it' is. At least, he has made no efforts to go back on his tracks in any way."

"That's his cunning!" came from Haviland.

Pointer rose. His minutes were valuable.

He himself was off to Vardon's late lodgings in Fulham. An Inspector of his had been there and found nothing. Watts could be trusted, yet Pointer felt that something had escaped his eye, as it must have Haviland's. But he came down to the ground floor in the draughty house with nothing scored. The rooms, still empty, were detective proof.

"Mr. Vardon can't come himself," he explained to the frowsy manageress, who seemed to think that a pearl necklace, which would have staggered a Romanoff, went particularly well with a woollen pullover. "But he's afraid he's left something behind. I couldn't quite make out what, over the telephone. Something about a paper..."

She shook her head.

"Not here. He's lost it somewhere else. Mislaid it like as not. He reely was too rushed to notice what he was doing last Tuesday."

"Yes, he took all his luggage with him," she went on in answer to a question of the Chief Inspector's. "A new cabin trunk; old trunk for the hold, a suit case and a bag."

That was the tally. Pointer tried again.

"Still he misses something, and thinks it was left here. I couldn't make out over the 'phone just what as I say. How about an overcoat, or a hat, or a cane even, left in the hall stand?"

She made a motion with her hand and ran down to a semi-basement, negotiating the holes in the carpet with the skill of a pilot among familiar buoys. A moment later she called up:

"Here's his top-coat. His old one. He was wearing a new one when he left. He must have forgotten this. It's his, all right. I mended those pockets for him once myself." Pointer laid it over his arm and thanked her. Then he stayed on chatting. He learnt nothing about the artist from the woman. Vardon's had been a quiet, unobtrusive figure in the house, liked, but hardly noticed.

He switched the talk to Mrs. Tangye's accidental death. The manageress remembered reading the case in the papers. She had had no idea that her late lodger knew the lady.

"He more than knew her. He was a relation. There's a regular family row raging just now because he says he wasn't told of her death till he saw it in the papers. The family say that one of 'em came here that same evening—last Tuesday—and left a message for him."

Pointer wanted to find out whether the keys found in Vardon's luggage might have been left on his table, as he alleged, though not necessarily by Mrs. Tangye. Florence was still as certain as ever that she had noticed them on the desk at Riverview at four—after Mrs. Tangye's last outing.

"I didn't hear of any message. But, of course, in a house like this..."

"Under a management like this," Pointer amended mentally.

"Still, if any one at all called last Tuesday evening, it would likely have been about the death. I expect it was a lady," he hazarded.

"A lady did call here last Tuesday for Vardon"—a young man lounged in for some change for the telephone. "She waited in a car outside for him. As I came up the steps she bent forward and asked me, if by chance, I knew whether Mr. Vardon were in. I glanced up at his windows, saw a light, and told her he was. She sat back with a grunt—but without a thankee."

"Pretty woman? Young? Fair-haired?"

"Look here! I'm off!" the stranger backed out laughing. "No, no! It's all right. She's a rising cinema star. Is she as pretty as they say?"

"If she's a star, she belongs to the Milky Way. The face I had a glimpse of wasn't one to fill the stalls."

"About twenty?" persisted Pointer.

"Times two!"

The Chief Inspector looked disappointed.

"Oh, you mean his cousin! Thin, hatched-faced type, with small dark eyes?" Pointer went on to describe Miss Saunders very accurately though apparently casually.

"That's her!"

"Well, of course then he's right. And he wasn't told. She—his cousin;—wouldn't know either. Not at that hour. I take it it was about eight?"

"About."

"I wonder she waited for him. I wouldn't. Vardon's such a careless chap. I dare say she had to sit on for another hour."

"No. I heard him come running down only a few minutes later and the car buzz off. My rooms are below his."

"I'll bet he was still wrestling with his tie as they drove away," laughed Pointer. But the other had not looked out of his window.

The manageress knew nothing more. No one in the house knew more. Pointer shook the patently expectant hand, raised his hat, pressed the starter, and let in the clutch in one co-ordinated action. There was a paper in the inner pocket of the coat. It felt like a letter.

In a quiet square he examined his find. It was a long, official-looking envelope addressed to, "The Registrar of Wills, Somerset House, London."

With his penkife he raised the flap which was stuck down but not sealed. He drew out a will. By it Mable Tangye left everything of which she should die possessed, to Philip Vardon, cousin of the late Clive Branscombe, and appointed him sole executor.

The will was on a form obtainable at any stationer's. Below the printed matter was written in Mable Tangye's writing, but a singularly uneven writing—that she requested Philip Vardon, if possible, not to withdraw the ten thousand pounds invested in Harold Tangye's firm for at least two years, unless the stockbroker had pre-deceased him.

Pointer tapped the paper thoughtfully.

It was witnessed by one, Edmund Stone, stationer, of 10 River Road, Twickenham, and Robert Murray, assistant, at the same address.

The date was last Monday. Monday! The day before the one on which Mrs. Tangye had a fatal accident, said the coroner. Committed suicide, said Tangye and Wilmot. Been murdered, said Pointer.

The Chief Inspector replaced the envelope, and sat on, staring at his patent tips that winked back at him as though they could tell him a great joke if they would. But what Pointer already knew was sufficient to keep his thoughts occupied.

No wonder the artist was nervous lest this paper should fall into the hands of the police. Here was motive, and motive sufficient some might say. Vardon, the sole legatee—fitted every step of the way now, if his story of Mrs. Tangye's visit were false—except the entrance by the French windows.

There, like some cabalistic Sign of Protection, stood the big question mark, raised by Pointer's own theory of the crime.

So long as he could not be linked with that, so long as no reason showed itself why Mrs. Tangye should have arranged for him to come secretly, Vardon could not be considered more suspect than Miss Saunders, nor than Tangye, supposing the husband to have used another man as his tool.

It was possible, quite possible, that Haviland was right, that Mrs. Tangye had been preparing to go to Patagonia with Philip Vardon, but if so, if Vardon were the criminal, then some strange reason lay behind the murder which had not been even guessed at yet. Of that the Chief Inspector felt assured. Before arresting the artist, Pointer intended to be absolutely certain of his guilt. The odds were too enormously against Vardon to permit of any other course. Here was no case of a man refusing to explain. Whether true ones, or false ones, he had a reply to every question.

Pointer gave his head an impatient shake. He wanted something that could connect up with those footsteps heard in the garden, walking stealthily behind Mrs. Tangye, stopped by, fearful of, the light.

Those footsteps still belonged to no one. Disembodied, Pointer heard them day and night. Whose were they? Vardon's? The husband's? Oliver Headly's? Or those of some still unknown, unsuspected person, some tremendously important person in Mrs. Tangye's life? They might still be anybody's. They still lay in the no-man's land between all the events.

Pointer's thoughts turned back to the will itself. The absolute deletion of her husband's name as a beneficiary, and yet the request at the foot about not withdrawing the money from his firm immediately. That little note was stranger than the will itself, Pointer thought. Supposing the latter to be genuine. He could imagine a woman leaving her fortune away from a husband with whom she had cause to be angry, with whom she was about to have a furious quarrel, but in that case, why the apparent unwillingness to inconvenience him unduly? That did not look like blind rage.

A new thought stirred in the great detective's mind. He put it on one side for the moment, and concentrated on Vardon, and Vardon's rooms last Tuesday evening.

What of him and Miss Saunders? Supposing that the evidence Pointer had just gleaned had been accurate, she had been at Fulham about eight last Tuesday evening. In other words, as soon as she could get there after the police had left Riverview. She had apparently not gone upstairs, but some one had run down and driven off with her.

Pointer called in his thoughts, which were racing too far away on a breast-high scent, and turned his car towards the stationer's, where the will form had been possibly bought, where at all events, it appeared to have been witnessed.