However, we went, and at a little after eight o'clock rang the bell we had rung under such very different circumstances at breakfast-time that morning. The parachute still waved in the mulberry, and a few policemen were unobtrusively hanging about the street. Two of these did not move very far from the gate. I supposed that in view of pending inquiries it was important that the parachute should not be touched.
We waited so long for an answer after ringing the bell that I had almost concluded there was nobody at home. We were, in fact, on the point of turning away when Esdaile himself opened the door.
Poor devil! I learned presently that he had had callers enough that afternoon to make him wish to disconnect his bell altogether—interested parties of all sorts, a dozen of them at least. He had as a matter of fact removed his telephone receiver from the hook. He said its ringing had nearly driven him mad.
But even all this did not explain his weariness as hestood holding the door open in the still bright light of the perfect evening. My first glance at him made me wonder whether something even more untoward than that morning's sudden drama had happened. Before, his manner, baffling as it had been, had at least had a sort of hectic brilliancy, an artificial excitement that had buoyed him up and kept him going. Now it was as unlike that as possible. He was spiritless and played out. He no longer seemed to wish to keep everything and everybody at arm's-length. Indeed, we had his reason almost before he had closed the door behind us.
"Of course, you've heard who it is?" he said to Hubbard in a dull voice.
"No. Who?"
"Chummy Smith."
Only the fanlight over the door let in the last of the day, but it did not need light to reveal how the name Esdaile had spoken affected Hubbard. To me this name conveyed nothing for the moment. I heard Hubbard's indraught of breath.
"You don't say so! Good God! Which? The dead one?"
"No. The other. I happened to ring up the hospital to ask how he was going on and learned that way. That was before I took that infernal receiver off. Come in. I'm all alone."
"Your people got away, then?"
"Yes," said Esdaile. And I fancied I heard him grunt, "Thank God!"
"Who's the other chap?" Hubbard asked as we walked along the passage.
"Fellow called Maxwell. Never heard of him. Did you?"
"No."
"Well, come in. It's the devil, isn't it?"
I suppose itisthe devil when one of your particular friends comes down like this on your roof; but it struck me even then that it would have been still more devilish if he had been killed in doing so. Yet not only had their friend Chummy not been killed, but, according to Rooke's account earlier in the day, he was in a fair way for recovery. Hence I didn't quite see the reason for Esdaile's utter dejection. I should have understood it better had their friend been, not Smith, but the dead man Maxwell.
You see, I had totally forgotten one pretty little incident of that morning's breakfast. Perhaps you have forgotten it too. Remember, then, that Philip had pared an apple for Joan Merrow, had told her to see what initial the paring made on the floor, and had shaped his own guess with his lips—"C for Ch"—as he had hidden his bit of paper under his napkin.
Philip pushed up chairs for us and pottered about in search of whisky and glasses. Then, having set out a tray, he dropped heavily into a chair. For a time none of us spoke, and then I asked if Rooke was out.
"Yes. He's taken Audrey Cunningham home," Philip replied with marked brevity, and the silence fell on us again.
If Hubbard had really come for the purpose of seeing Esdaile's cellar I could see that all thought of this had now passed from his mind. The first thing to do was to cheer Esdaile up. After all, Chummy was alive and doing well. The news when Esdaile had rung up the hospital that afternoon had been reassuring. It might be some little time before he was out and about again, but certainly the occasion did not seem one forgloom. I therefore kept silence while Hubbard pointed all this out.
And as Esdaile's spirits seemed to revive a little and things began to seem not quite so hopeless after all, I began to rummage in my memory for recollection of this Chummy Smith of theirs. I remembered now that I had at any rate heard his name. And I confess that I am a little curious, not to say jealous, about some of these intensive War friendships. It interests me to note which of them survive the quieter and more persistent pressure on the lower levels, and which fail to do so. Not every one of them succeeds. It is one thing to wait in a Mess for the overdue chum, trying not to look too often at the full glass of gin-and-bitters that by this time he ought to have come in and claimed, and quite another to meet that chum a year or two later and, as you ask him what he will have, to know that you are making the swift mental note, "Ah,that'shim in mufti!"
But this rubicon had been safely crossed in the case of Chummy Smith. I began to piece together odd things I had heard. Philip, meeting him in Coventry Street six months before, had stopped, spoken, and had presently brought him home to a scratch supper. A fortnight later Chummy had dropped in again unannounced. Thereafter he had continued to come at fairly frequent intervals. He and myself had never happened to call at the same moment, that was all.
"Who do you say he's flying for now?" Hubbard asked presently.
"The Aiglon Company. He's a goodish bunch of shares in it, I believe. Knows his job, too. Ever see him zoom?"
He described Smith's performance of this terrifyingmaneuver, with the fire of the Lewis gun reserved till the last twenty yards, then the fiery bridge-clearing rafale, and the upshooting like a rocket as he cleared the rail by a yard.
"Yes, he's a dashed good youngster," Hubbard agreed. "Thank the Lord he's all right."
But Esdaile only leaned his head wearily on one hand and sat gazing moodily at his whisky-and-soda.
Then it was that the probable reason for all this depression flashed upon me. Then it was, in that moment, that I remembered that apple-paring, Joan's adorable little schoolgirl's outbreak, and her tucking away of that piece of paper into her breast. Philip Esdaile was thirty-nine, young Smith twenty-four; that is a difference of fifteen years; but a young man of twenty-four could be quite devoted to Methuselah himself if there was a young woman anywhere about. Those frequent calls after that meeting in Coventry Street simply meant that Philip's leg had been pulled. Chummy Smith was no doubt very fond of Philip, but he was even fonder of Philip's wife's help and companion.
And Joan had seen the crash.
No wonder Philip thanked God that she didn't know who it was she had seen come down.
I know now the exact point up to which I was right, and also where I ceased to be right. Mollie Esdaile made a clean breast of the whole guileful conspiracy of their courtship afterwards. Here it is, for your edification and warning.
Mollie had several times been down to visit Philipin his billet at the Helmsea Station. There it was that she had first seen Chummy. At first she had not been able to single out Chummy from the rest of the uniformed mob that led such a mysterious existence down there—a world of womenless men, who paraded at all hours of the day and night, suddenly vanished by the half week together, turned up smiling again, danced with one another to the grinding of gramophones, played cards and snooker, howled round pianos and swapped yarns, Kirchners and pink gins. To Mollie their uniforms were of two kinds only, khaki and dark blue. In course of time she had come to pick out Chummy as wearing both—khaki, but with the rings and shoulder-badges of the other Service. The lad made Philip ask him to tea, and the next time, in Philip's absence, Chummy had asked her to tea.
And so to the sky-blue uniforms and the monochrome of mufti again, by which time Chummy and Mollie were firm friends.
I believe she threw the youngsters together from the moment Philip first brought Chummy home to Lennox Street. She says she didn't, and refers me to Joan. I wouldn't hang a dog on what Miss Joan says on such a matter.
For who can believe in the candor of a young woman of just twenty who, the very first time a young man is brought to the house, straightway enters into a clandestine arrangement to meet him at tea the next day, and presently can hold out her hand with a conventional "Good-by, Mr. Smith," as if the last thing that entered her head was that she would ever set eyes on him again? It takes the nerve of the modern young woman to do that. The case of Mr. Smith, observe, is entirely different. Mr. Smith, suddenlymeeting the lovely young thing, may not be sure whether his feet are treading a polished studio floor or whether they have little Mercury wings on them that waft him through the empyrean; but there is this to be said for Mr. Smith—that when he is in love he doesn't behave as if he wasn't. He fidgets even if she goes out of the room for a minute. He doesn't know that she herself couldn't tell him why she has gone out of the room. He thinks she had something to go for, and never dreams that she is just sitting on the edge of her bed, knowing perfectly well that he will be leaving in half an hour, asking herself what made her so suddenly get up and leave him, and yet not even writing him a note.
The notes came later, at about the time she put a lock on her letter-case. They were numbered "1," "2" and "3" to indicate the sequence in which they should be read (a billet scribbled at seven o'clock in the evening must on no account be read before one that is dashed off at tea-time), and they were constantly on the wing.
Nor did these protégés of Mollie's choose tea-shops that Philip was known to frequent, nor cinemas the kindly gloom of which might by any chance have concealed him. Philip never noticed that his monthly telephone accounts rose perceptibly higher. True, he did ask one evening why the children had been put to bed while it was still broad day, but he was not told that he might find the reason walking hand-in-hand under the trees in Richmond Park.
It is no good asking whether Joan and Chummy were engaged. What is a young woman's engagement nowadays? No doubt Joan's father had in his day ceremoniously "waited upon" her maternal grandfather-elect and had "had the honor" and so on, but Miss Joan always reminded me of the private with the field-marshal's baton—she seemed to have come into the world with a will of her own, a latch-key and her marriage-lines all potentially complete. I remember she called an engagement an "understanding." If by that word she meant what the Psalmist meant, she certainly made haste with all her heart to get it.
Of course, Philip had sooner or later discovered what was going on under his abused roof, and now knew all there was to be known about it. And it must have occurred to him also that, with letters numbered "1," "2" and "3" flying backwards and forwards all the time, any interruption of more than a day or two would set Joan, away in Santon, Yorks, anxiously wondering what was the matter.
You are now to see how far I was right in this.
The lights he had switched on were a couple of standard lamps only, that worked from plugs in the wall. Both had mignonette-colored shades, and while one shade stood a-tilt near the syphon and glasses, the other threw a soft light on Philip's little escritoire. As he sat the light crossed his breast only, leaving his face in a half-transparent obscurity. A few yards away the entrance to the studio made a dead black oblong, so completely without trace of the evening light that must still be lingering in the world outside that I judged that the dark-blue roof-blinds were still drawn.
I suppose it was these roof-blinds, and Philip's apparent disinclination to have them touched, thatbrought my surmises with regard to Monty Rooke into my mind again. And somehow, back again under the roof where the tragedy had happened, these surmises seemed to have grown a little more threatening. Why this alteration of values should take place in me I didn't know, but there it undeniably was, hovering (so to speak) in the spaces above the unlighted chandelier, approaching as it were to the very edge of the penumbra that crossed our host's breast, and accumulated as in some dark power-house beyond the threshold of the black studio doorway. And as this feeling grew on me lesser feelings seemed by comparison to grow less still. My hastily-seized-on explanation with regard to Joan seemed all at once insufficient. A shock of some kind she would naturally receive; that was unavoidable in any event; but what would be simpler than to write to her immediately, to tell her what had been discovered since her departure, to promise to send her daily bulletins, and to warn her that for the present, in the absence of letters, these must suffice?
I didn't know to what extent I was supposed to be privy to the Chummy-Smith-Joan-Merrow love affair, but in the circumstances I did not let that trouble me. I just said what I thought. "She'll have to be told some time or other," I finished by saying.
But for some reason or other he waved my words aside.
"Wouldn't do at all." His voice came from within the shade of the mignonette-colored lamp. "Must think of something better than that."
"But she'll be expecting letters. And she won't get them. My way's much the kindest. What's the objection?"
"Oh, heaps of objection," he answered evasively. "I don't know half of 'em myself yet."
On this I instantly fastened.
"Ah! Then you haven't seen the fellow yet you spoke of?"
I knew I had him. I could feel his mental wriggle.
"What fellow?"
"You said this morning it wasn't your affair, but somebody else's. The fellow I mean is the somebody else."
He spoke slowly.
"Do you mean Rooke?"
"You didn't mention any name. I mean Rooke if it was Rooke."
This time we had to wait a long time for an answer, but at any rate it cleared the air when it did come.
"It was Rooke. I don't remember very clearly exactly what I did say, but I meant Rooke," he admitted.
"You say he's taken Mrs. Cunningham home. He's coming back, I suppose?"
With remarkable grimness Philip replied, "You bet he is."
"You mean you told him to?"
"Yes, and I told him to be pretty quick unless he wanted to drive me crazy. I said I'd give him time for dinner at the Parrakeet, though. I was waiting for him when you came in."
"Then—well, to put it plainly, do you want us to clear off?"
"No—at any rate wait a bit," he answered irresolutely. "I don't suppose he'll be long now."
I don't know how much longer we should have continued to spar like this had not Hubbard suddenlyput a question. He had evidently been thinking it over for some time, and he took care, with a preliminary "I say" and a pause, that he had Esdaile's attention before putting it.
"I say," he said quietly, "about when you came up from below this morning. Why did you want to brush Rooke's clothes?"
And that settled it. Esdaile began with one more "Did I?" but Hubbard did not let him finish.
"Yes, you did," he cut him short. "It was the very first thing you did. And he jumped back when you tried to touch him. Why?"
There was no further attempt at prevarication. Without even taking the trouble to rise, Esdaile pushed back the lamp, opened the upper drawer of the escritoire as he sat, and from the corner of it drew out and placed on the table a 7.65 mm. Webley and Scott automatic pistol.
Honestly, I don't know whether I was surprised or not. On the whole I hardly think I was. If he had produced another candlestick or jar of liqueur I think I should have felt like getting up and walking out; but here at last was something on the fuller scale. Thank heaven, we had done with broken glass and sweeping-brushes and dark blue linen blinds. We might now hope to get a little farther.
For a pistol is a pistol at all times and all the world over. No other weapon has quite so exclusively sinister a meaning. Among the honorable swords and rifles of war it is a low and sneaking thing, and in peace-time an Apache's tool, something for the commongarrotter to shoot through his pocket with. Its proper place was the Criminal Museum at Scotland Yard, not in a decent artist's studio.
So Philip put the revolting thing on his desk, and for a moment we sat looking at its roughened grip, black as crape, and the glossy blackness of the rest of it. Then without a word Hubbard took it up, glanced at the safety-catch and slid back the breach. A cartridge lay ready in the chamber. Then he withdrew the magazine. Six nickel steel bullets showed through the perforations of the clip. The capacity of the W. & S. 7.65 is eight shots. One shot had therefore been fired.
Hubbard replaced the pistol on the desk.
"And where didthatcome from?" he asked with pursed lips.
Philip shrugged his shoulders. Somehow the answer was "Rooke" as plainly as if he had spoken the name.
"And where did he get it?"
"Up there." Philip's eyes made the slightest of turns up towards the ceiling.
"From one of those two fellows?"
"I suppose so."
"How do you mean, you 'suppose' so? Don't you know?"
"I'm not perfectly sure yet. You see, just at that moment Audrey Cunningham came in, and it isn't the kind of thing you discuss with women there. I thought she'd gone, or I should have waited a bit."
"Well, don't you think it's time you told us a little more now?"
This is the narrative that followed, with that beastly object still lying there in the silky light of the mignonette-shaded lamp.
At first Monty had tried to get out of it by saying it was the keys. Esdaile's is not a modern house; its keys are not of the Yale kind, of which you can carry a dozen in one pocket; each of them is anything from three to five inches long, and they weigh very few to the pound. In handing over the house to Monty, Philip had given him eight or ten of these; and so at first (Esdaile said) Rooke had wanted to say it was the keys.
"I don't mean the keys," Philip had replied. "I mean the pocket on the other side that you're nursing as if it had eggs in it. Why have you been standing sideways and behind people all this time? And why did you jump when I wanted to give you a dust-down this morning?"
Esdaile's face became animated as at last he warmed up to it all. He spoke almost vehemently.
"You see," he said, "I wasn't going to have any more damned nonsense. I had quite enough of that—hours of it—all this that I'm telling you took place just after tea. So I was as short as you please. Pity I spoke quite so soon, but I really thought Audrey'd gone. And the idiot hadn't even put the safety-catch on," he added with disgust.
There was no need to urge him now. He was as resolved to tell his story as before he had been reticent. The only unfortunate thing was that until Monty should return he had so little to tell.
"So when he saw the key story wouldn't do he fetched out this pretty little article," he continued, rapping with his knuckle on the writing-desk. "Justlike a kid caught stealing apples he was. I asked him where he got it, and he said on the roof. Then he told me all about you fellows going up into the bathroom, and how he'd been the one to crawl along the gutter because he doesn't weigh as much as either of you."
"But which of 'em gave it to him—Chummy or the other man?" Hubbard asked.
"Well, I'm not so sure that either of them really 'gave' it to him," Esdaile replied. "He began to be a bit of a mule when I pressed him about that. And of course I asked Monty all this before I knew it was Chummy at all, and Monty doesn't know that yet, though I don't think he ever met Chummy. No, as far as I can make out, the pistol was lying on the roof, just out of Chummy's reach, and he kept pointing to it—moving his hand like this."
The gesture Esdaile made was the very gesture I had seen Mr. Harry Westbury make in the Saloon Bar earlier in the day.
"So he just picked it up and put it into his pocket?"
"Just that. Simple, isn't it?"
"And it's been fired?"
"As you see."
"Innocent young man. What did he do during the War?"
"Camouflage," Esdaile replied. "In Kensington Gardens there. Imitation haystacks and dummy O.P. trees and gunpit-screens and painting tanks and so on. Making anything look like what it isn't. Just what he would do."
"Does he know this thing's been fired?"
"That I can't tell you. Audrey came in then."
And that was the answer to all our further questions—Audrey had then come in. Esdaile had as a matterof fact now told us all that had taken place between himself and Monty Rooke. For further information we must wait until Monty's return.
You may imagine, however, that I had now quite a lot of food for thought. In the first place, Rooke had taken it upon himself to conceal a highly material fact from the police. Whether Esdaile yet shared this responsibility was at present debatable. Audrey Cunningham's interruption half-way through Monty's story rather obscured the moral aspect of this last. One does not set weighty machinery going for trifles, and for all we knew Monty, when he arrived, might have a complete explanation. In the meantime Esdaile was probably wise to hold his hand.
A pistol, however, had undoubtedly been fired, and, as a further examination of the barrel showed, probably recently. And, if you remember, there was that small round hole in the starred roof-glass of the studio that I had at first assumed to have been caused by the broken mulberry branch. A pistol-bullet might have made just such a hole.
Next I remembered how Esdaile had been occupied when Hubbard and I had followed him into the studio shortly after his return from the cellar. He had been so engrossed in poking about the broken glass and mats on the studio floor that he had seemed to notice little else. Had he been looking for the bullet that had made that hole in the roof? And why had he had the roof-blinds drawn, and broken out on Monty when he had wanted to put them back again? This last, I admit, set me all at sea again. The drawing of the blinds would certainly hide the bullet-hole in the pane from anybodyinside the house, supposing he wished to hide it; but what about the police who had been onthe roof itself at that very moment? The drawing of the blinds inside would hide nothing from them. Why seek to conceal from the rest of us something that if they cared to investigate they could hardly fail to see?
One more thing. If that pistol had been fired on the premises, somewhere there must be, not only a bullet, but a spent case also. I mentioned this, and Esdaile gave a slight start of recollection.
"Of course!" he exclaimed. "Glad you mentioned that. I found the case in the garden. Here it is. I'd honestly forgotten all about it."
And, as he fetched it out of his waistcoat pocket and put it down by the side of the pistol, I as honestly believed he had.
"But there's no sign of the bullet?" I asked.
"I've looked high and low for it," Esdaile replied. "Low, I should say, because naturally I don't want to go hunting about the roof in the daylight. Too many eyes about. There's no trace of it."
"But it wouldn't be on the roof if it made that hole in the glass. It would be in the studio. Or possibly," I ventured, "in the cellar."
But, as Esdaile was about to reply, a bell trilled in the kitchen, and, with a "That's Rooke, I expect," Esdaile put the pistol and the empty case back into the drawer, motioned us to remain where we were, and went out.
Philip had described Rooke quite well when he had said that he had the air of a naughty boy caught robbing an orchard. He had a hang-dog yet defiant look as he entered, shepherded in by Philip as if we had been a tribunal empaneled for his condemnation. But there was relief in his face too—the relief of one who has got the worst over and hardly fears the rest. And, as he threw his hat on the table and looked round in search of a chair, he unconsciously emphasized his air of boyish guilt by sitting down on a low stool that stood between the empty fireplace and the escritoire.
Esdaile began immediately, as if Rooke had merely been out of the room for a few moments.
"Well, to continue our chat, Monty," he said. "I've told these fellows as much as you've told me. Shall we have the rest of it now?"
From the look on Monty's face I began to think that we might have some difficulty in getting very much more out of him, for the simple reason that, in picking up and concealing an incriminating pistol, he evidently didn't see that he had done anything at all out of the way. He seemed to think that was a natural thing to have done. I gathered also that there was something further on his mind, something that had already begun to dawn on my own and has doubtless occurred to you also. But we will come to that presently.
So Monty merely repeated what we already knew, and then looked from one to another of us as if to ask, "Nowwere we satisfied?"
"Oh, we want to know a good deal more than that," Esdaile continued. "First of all, did he speak? The man who pointed to the pistol, I mean."
"No. He'd taken too bad a toss for that," Monty replied. "He just pointed, the way I showed you, and I thought perhaps he didn't want the thing lying about, so I—well, I obliged him, so to speak."
"But it's been fired."
"I don't know anything about that. I didn't fire it, if that's what you mean."
"It's been fired recently. Did you notice if it was warm?"
"No, I didn't," said Monty, ruffling up, "and it's all very well you fellows talking, sitting down here with glasses of whisky in front of you, but I'll bet if you'd been in my place you'd have done exactly the same."
Here I struck in. I asked him what made him so sure of that. He turned his earnest brown eyes to me.
"I mean you just would. If you'd seen him, I mean—seen his face. It was the look in his eyes; I couldn't get it out of my mind for hours; I can see it now. I tell you you missed a pretty rotten job by not having to go up there, and here you go asking me if pistols were warm and who fired them and all about it as if I'd been having a fortnight's holiday up there."
I saw Monty's point. I suppose I have arrived at that stage of life when I too trust my eyes more and more as time goes on. Men may have all sorts of reasons for saying one thing and meaning another, but he is a remarkable man who can control his looks with the same facility. I have seen many eyes telling the truth while the lips beneath them have told the practiced lie. So if Monty had taken his impulse from Chummy Smith's anguished eyes in that moment, I for one did not feel inclined to blame him.
"You've heard who it was, haven't you?" I said.
"No. Who?"
Philip told him. His eyes opened very wide.
"Not the fellow I've heard you talk about?"
Esdaile nodded gloomily.
"And you meanhefired the pistol?"
There was an embarrassed silence. Nobody so far had ventured to express his thought quite so nakedly. We had an obscure feeling of resentment, as if Monty had been a little lacking in tact. He sat up on his stool and pursed his lips into the shape of a whistle.
"I—say!Thatmakes it the dickens, doesn't it? Well, I know what his eyes looked like, I can promise you that! Poor devil! Thank goodness you were all too busy watching Philip when he came up from down below to notice me much. Nobody noticed me except Audrey, and she——"
Philip sliced his words off like a guillotine.
"You haven't told her anything about this, have you?"
Monty stared at him. "No," he replied, "as a matter of fact I haven't; but what if I had? I don't quite see——"
"Then you see you jolly well don't," Philip curtly ordered him. "Four's quite enough. You understand?"
"Four's quite enough." Do you see what was already working in his mind, and what a sudden jump forward our Case took when his lips uttered that concluding word?
For he did not say "enough" for what. The Whatwas only just dimly beginning to appear. Perhaps I shall save time if I put what I mean into the form of a single question:—
Why had Esdaile, who knew perfectly well that that pistol ought to be in the custody of the police, not himself immediately handed it over?
Why indeed did he not do so now?
That is what I am getting at. He had not onlynothanded the pistol over, but he had drawn blinds and grubbed about floors and had sought high and low, though so far in vain, for a stray bullet. Nay, he might lecture Monty on the picking up of random pistols, but what else had he himself done when he had found that little empty brass case in the garden and had slipped it into his waistcoat pocket? He had pretended to hold back until Monty should have told him everything. Well, Monty had now told him everything.
There was a telephone in the hall. Ten seconds would suffice.
Yet Esdaile did nothing.
I was conscious of a curious quickening of excitement. The whole atmosphere of our little gathering had already changed. Monty, sitting on his stool, seemed somehow less of a culprit, Esdaile something much more nearly in collusion with him. And above all it distinctly began to appear—dare I say "providential"?—that Monty had picked up that pistol.
Why?
Was it because Chummy Smith, instead of being a stranger who must be left to take the consequences of his own acts, was Hubbard's and Esdaile's friend?
It is not for me to draw the hair-line that divides the heart's wish from the conviction of the rightness of the act that follows it. We are all prone to do what we want to do and to look for reasons afterwards. That was for Esdaile and Hubbard to consider. I am merely stating the Case. Personally you will always find me the broadest-minded and most tolerant of men until these lofty qualities begin to react on my own private affairs; after that I become a pattern of the narrow and the hidebound. Whether in their place I should have done as Hubbard and Esdaile did I have fortunately not to answer. What that was you will see in a moment.
For it was now clear that we were looking, without very much dismay, into the perilous face of Conspiracy. A pistol had been fired, and humanly speaking could only have been fired by one man. If the pistol, therefore, ought to have been handed over to the police,a fortioriought the man who had fired it.
But that appeared to be precisely the sticking-point. It was here that I saw both Hubbard and Esdaile preparing to dig in. In a word, until they (private individuals, mark you) knew more about it, Chummy Smith was not to be given up.
Monty's attitude at about this stage began to be rather amusing. Suddenly he left the stool of repentance and began to walk about. He even swelled a little. It was he, after all, who had in a sense saved the situation, and when the cartridge-case was produced (for Hubbard and Esdaile had their heads together over the pistol-barrel again in search of furtherminute indications) he became almost cock of the walk. Incidentally he had one of those flashes of insight I told you he sometimes had, or at any rate it was a flash with which I myself am not without a certain amount of sympathy.
"Well, there isn't half enough murder in the world if you askme," he said. "Only they're the wrong people. If you could get somebody really trustworthy to pick out the right ones no end of good would be done."
"Oh, shut up!" said Philip rudely; and happily the dangerous theory was not pressed.
But Monty had used the awkward word "murder."
And if Monty was amusing, the state of mind of the other two was now fascinatingly interesting. For you see their predicament. To put it quite plainly, they were trying to screw up their courage. Esdaile in particular was almost visibly hardening his heart. That was the fascinating part—to see exactly how much and how little homage they would pay to the decencies before they thought themselves free to go ahead.
The stages of the comedy were rapid. The first of them came when Esdaile wondered whether he oughtn't to go to the telephone, not to communicate with the police, but to ask for the latest news of Chummy's progress.
"Seems funny to think of Chummy being laid out six months after the War's all over," he said. "Remember the Jazz Band in the Mess, Cecil?"
"Red Pepper Two-Step on the Birds, eh?" said Hubbard.
(I am aware that this needs elucidation. The Helmsea Mess Jazz Band had been a noteworthy improvisation, and the Birds had been Chummy Smith'sspecial department. They were stuffed Birds, set in cases round the walls, and the glass fronts of the cases had formed Smith's tympani. With drumming fingertips and softly-pounding wrists I learned that he had got great variety out of his instruments.)
"And the cock-fight between the razorbills?" Esdaile continued.
I could also make a guess at the kind of rag that had been.
"And the night old Pike's motor-bike broke down?"
And though this reminiscence passed over my head, it was plain that they were getting on. Very soon I might expect to be told outright that Chummy Smith was Chummy Smith and a pal, and they would be damned if they would see him in the cart till things were much clearer than they were. So I simply leaned back and amused myself with mental pictures. They were jumbled pictures, but I knew I was sharing them with the other two. I seemed to see their East Coast Base, with planes homing in the evening and the M.L.'s suddenly appearing out of the mists and dropping anchor in the tideway. I seemed to see the rubber-coated and white-mufflered figures striding up the jetty to that Mess they spoke of and loudly demanding drinks and food and hot baths. I imagined the mechanics filling up the tanks and the Duty Officer swearing at the snow and slush as he stamped up and down the 'drome. And, faint and ineffectual as my pictures were, they still had a little of the magic of that life in which gayety and tragedy came so close and the chances of life and death were so intertwined.
I also guessed what a purist in the matter of picking up pistols might find himself up against if he pushed his purism inconveniently far.
Esdaile took the plunge even more quickly than I expected. I saw the little effort with which he pulled himself together.
"Well, it's no good beating about the bush," he said. "We all know how things are. The question is what's to be done."
I don't think he realized, as he pulled out his pipe, that that was now hardly the question at all. Already the question was, not what was to be done, but exactly how it was to be done.
For, if he had realized, he could hardly have overlooked the immensely important point he did overlook. It was left to me to draw his attention to this point.
For when one man kills another, it necessarily follows that one man has been, killedbyanother. And it further follows that, if you decide to shield the killer because he is your friend, you are inevitably forced into an unfriendly attitude towards the victim. What about the victim and his rights in the matter?
You may believe it or not, but until this moment I don't think this aspect of the affair had occurred either to Hubbard or Esdaile. All had been Chummy. More than this: so exclusively had Chummy occupied their thoughts that they had forgotten the ordinary physical fact that a bullet fired into a man's body makes a hole—the same ugly kind of hole whether the person who makes it is your friend or not. Loyalty to friendship in the teeth of the Law is not always the simple thing it sounds. Among the various factsthat faced us was one inescapable one, namely, that a man called Maxwell was at that moment lying in a mortuary awaiting a post-mortem examination.
Esdaile was frowning and clawing his jaw. The realization was sinking in now all right.
"What had you thought of doing with the pistol anyway?" I asked.
"To tell you the truth I hadn't thought," he admitted. "I should say the bottom of the river's the best place for it. But as you say, you can't drop that poor devil's bullet-hole into the river. Does nobody know anything about him?"
Nobody did. Maxwell might have been Chummy's best friend or worst enemy, a good fellow, a rotter, any one kind of all the kinds of men there are.
"Chummy was in Gallipoli. Anybody ever hear of a Maxwell with him there?"
Nobody had.
Then Esdaile took another line. For a moment it seemed quite a hopeful one.
"Well, look at it this way." He tried to evade the inevitable. "It's all very well for Monty to talk out of his hat about there not being murders enough, but what earthly right have we to assume that this was a murder at all? None, I say. Far more likely to have been an accident. Accidents do happen. Chummy wasn't the kind of man to deliberately do another fellow in. It must have been an accident."
But at this moment I remembered Philip's own words that morning in the studio: "Anybody would say it was an accident, wouldn't they? It looked like an accident, I mean? It wouldn't occur to anybody who saw it that it wasn't?" Those were rather remarkable words. They had meant, if they had meant anythingat all, that even then Philip had had his reasons for supposing it hadnotbeen an accident. Now that a thunderclap had revealed that one of the men who had come down on the roof was Chummy, he apparently wanted it to be an accident again.
And by the way, how, at that particular moment, had Philip come to be in possession of an opinion on the matter at all? This was the point I have mentioned as being on Rooke's mind also. So far, in telling his story, Esdaile had taken as his starting-point the moment when he had got possession of the pistol from Monty; but what about the antecedent mystery? How in the first place had he discovered that Monty had the pistol? Why had he walked practically straight to Monty the moment he had ascended from the cellar? The whole series of incidents, from first to last, had passed while he had been still down in the cellar; how then could he know anything whatever about them?
Then I remembered that only a series of diversions had turned Hubbard away from his express purpose in coming to Lennox Street that evening—the purpose of seeing Esdaile's cellar. First had come the shock of learning that one of the men was Chummy Smith; then Joan Merrow's implication in the affair had sidetracked us; and then had come the pistol and Monty. These things were all very well, but they brought us no nearer to the solution of the first puzzle of all. Why had Esdaile behaved as he had behaved when he had rejoined us with a jar of curaçao in one hand and a lighted candle in the other?
But for all this we had to wait. My speculations were suddenly cut short. There was another ring at the door, and Esdaile rose. But before going to seewho it was this time he took the precaution of once more putting Monty's pistol away in the escritoire drawer.
It was well for our Case, as a Case, that he did so. We heard voices in the passage, Esdaile's own tenor and a deeper voice. Then I heard him say, "Well, perhaps you'd better come in."
The next moment he stood holding the door open for a Police Inspector to pass.
For a great number of years past, innumerable reviewers have been so kind as to class me as "one of the younger novelists," and with the passing of time I have acquired a certain affection for the status. But I have to confess myself unlike my brethren in this—I don't know all about women. Indeed, twenty Philip Esdailes poking about twenty cellars are clearer to me than some of the mental processes of such a person as (say) Miss Joan Merrow. For instance, she once told me that she would be terrified to go up in a machine. She told me this (as I subsequently learned) within a very few hours of a side-slip at a few hundred feet that had fairly "put the wind up" Chummy Smith, her companion in this (by Philip) strictly forbidden adventure. Some chance remark of her own revealed all this to me weeks later, and our eyes met, mine sternly accusing, hers of limpid periwinkle blue. Then she had the effrontery to take me aside, to put her arm inside mine, and to whisper that she knew she could "trust" me!
"Trust," indeed!
So, as far as Miss Merrow is my informant for the part of our Case I am now coming to, you are warned what to expect.
Since it was I who discovered Philip Esdaile's painting-cottage for him I think I may claim that I know the Santon country fairly well. It is a vast and skyey upland east of the Wolds, and its edge drops in four hundred feet of glorious white cliff sheer to the sea. Everything there is on the amplest and most bountiful scale, from the enormous stretches of wheat and barley to the giant barns and huge horses and the very poultry of its farmyards. The only tiny thing about it is its church, and this stands in the middle of a daisied field, not by any means one of the largest, but that can hardly be less than a hundred acres. There is a shop-post-office, a short street mostly laithes as big as airship hangars, an opaque horse-pond, and a single telegraph wire the posts of which can be seen for miles diminishing away over the Wolds. The few trees are mostly thorn, all blown one way by the wind and as stiff and compact as wire mattresses.
And Joan herself fitted into all this Caldecott spaciousness as if she had been bred and born there. Half a mile away across the young corn you saw her white sweater at the cliff's edge, and it seemed part of the whiteness of the screaming seabirds, of the whiteness of the awful glimpses of chalk where the turf suddenly ended in air, of the crawling whiteness of the waves far below. And on the shore—but any young girl is a Nausicaa on any shore. Esdaile has drawn and painted her a score of times—young neck, fair thick yellow hair, the none-too-small white feet with the sand disappearing from them as she waded into the anemonied pools. Sometimes it was no more thana cryptic pencil-line, that, as you looked at it, suddenly became her uplifted arm and flank, or the balance of back and hips as she moved across the unsteady white stones. Sometimes the jotting was more abbreviated still, just a dab or two of color that placed her against fawn-colored sand or ribbon-grassed water. But always it was Joan romping as it were her last between the little Alan and Jimmy she mothered and those other dream-stuff children that did not call her mother yet.
I feel fairly certain that it was not in the very least on Philip Esdaile's account that she had given instructions at the Chelsea post-office for the readdressing of letters. Neither was it, as she had falsely said, "to save Mr. Rooke the trouble." Both Philip's stupid letters and Monty's convenience were very minor matters. The really important thing was her own letters. Some little delay her change of address was bound to entail; but if, after "1," "2," and "3" there must be a short pause, "4," "5" and the rest would arrive all in one blissful bag. And, pending her receipt of them, there was no reason why she should cease to write letters.
So, accompanied by the letter-case with the new lock on it, down to the shore she took the children on the first two mornings (which is something of a journey, by the way), and back in the afternoon she came to high tea at half-past four. On the first day she did not even trouble to walk on to the little post-office-shop. But on the second day she did, returning empty-handed to boiled fowl and white sauce, tall piles of Santon bread and Santon butter and Santon jam, pints of hot tea from the luster pot under the haystack cosy, and the children's clamor:—
"I saw a jellyfish as big as a cart-wheel!"
"'N Jimmy found seven starfishes!"
"I foundeightstarfishes!"
"'N I waded out till the water came right up to here!"
"'N I saw a polar bear——"
"Oh, Jimmy, what a story! You've just made that up this minute!"
This last in bell-voiced reproof from Joan. At twenty she still corrected and disputed with them as a rather larger equal.
They had arrived at Santon at half-past eight on a Thursday night, and after tea on the Saturday Joan walked up to the little coastguard-station on the hill. Aeroplanes were not unknown on that wide uplifted promontory, and it would not in the least surprise her if presently, say in another week or so, Chummy, finding himself within a mere fifty miles, were to drop in unannounced. He had in fact said so, in the last letter but four. He had not been able to see her off at the station because he had had a new machine to take up with a fellow she didn't know. On Friday he was chasing off to the Midlands, where he might have to stay the night, and he did not expect to be back in London till Saturday afternoon. So he would not be within fifty miles, and even if a plane did happen to pass over it could not possibly be his.
As a matter of fact a plane did happen to pass over, and she pretended that it was his. She stood watching, eyes shaded with her hand, lips smiling and parted, and the young throat long as the flower-trumpet at thepit of which lies the nectar. Though she had been in a plane (and "trusted" me not to tell), I don't think that in her heart she regarded aeroplanes as apparatus at all. They were not things of wood and steel and oil and petrol that carried a load as a motor-car might have carried a load. All was the particular skill and daring and unaided cleverness of that Chummy of hers. I suppose he simply thought of her and flew.... But her little pretense ended in a light sigh when the plane did not circle, but with unfeeling purposefulness followed the telegraph wire over the Wolds and was lost to her sight. The young chauffeur of the air, whoever he was, knew nothing of the kiss that went after him. She returned to the cottage and the letter-case and began "7."
She knew nothing of the letter that Mollie Esdaile had already received from Philip, fortunately during her absence with the children. Nor did she know that Mollie, still in her absence, had run immediately to the shop-post-office and had telegraphed "Wire fullest particulars immediately most anxious." Chummy (Philip had written) had had a slight accident, nothing serious, but enough to keep him in bed for a few days. It would be better (his letter had continued) if this could be kept from Joan until she, Mollie, heard further from him. If Mollie could also glance through the newspapers before Joan got hold of them, that also Philip recommended. For the rest, he had said nothing whatever about when he himself might be expected at Santon, and Mollie further wondered whether it was to create a reassuring impression that he had passed on to tell her how he was having old Dadley round about some picture-framing, and ended with similar trivial matters. That letter had come on the Fridayafternoon. Saturday had brought neither letter nor reply to her telegram. She was glad that there was a Sunday delivery at Santon, which usually awaited them on their return from Church.
(I may say now, by the way, that Philip's caution about the newspapers was needless. The paper that found its way to Santon about midday was a London paper, but a Northern edition. Minor accidents in Chelsea are seen in perspective from the North, and no account of that Chelsea accident ever did appear.)
Only Joan and the children went to Church on that Sunday morning. Mollie made some excuse about helping the village girl to prepare the midday meal. Perhaps she preferred not to read letters and have her own face read by Joan at the same time.
In the summer, when the door of that diminutive Church usually stands wide open all through the service, you can see from the back pews the postman pass on his way to Newsome's, the farthest farm. So there in Church Joan sat, watching the bees that droned in and out of the open door, the butterflies that hovered, the cattle that tried to crop inside the little wire fence. The whiteness of the daisies was faintly shed up among the old rafters, and the curate's singsong rose and fell peacefully. The postman passed with the Newsome letters, and repassed with his empty bag. Then the sluggish old harmonium droned forth the last hymn, they knelt for the Benediction, and Joan and her charges were the first to hurry forth out into the sunshine again.
And this time there was a letter for her.
But her brows were already contracted even before she opened it. She stood, in the white frock and buttercupped hat, against the musk and geraniumsof the sunny window, already wondering what the quite strange handwriting of the envelope meant, already half afraid to ascertain.
"Is this all——?" she began.
Then with a nervous jerk she tore open the envelope, and a cry broke from her. The blue eyes were wide frightened rounds.
For if the handwriting on the envelope was strange, that of the shaky penciled scrawl inside was not quite familiar either. Yet it was Chummy's. He had had a bit of a spill, he said, but nothing to hurt. Rather shaken, but nothing broken. She was not to come up, as he would be out and up again before she could get there.
And that was all. There was no address at the head of the letter, and he did not say who had addressed the envelope for him, nor why.
"Oh, Mollie, he's hurt!" broke agitatedly from Joan.
Mollie was writing a letter at the little round table where the workbasket stood. Quietly she rose and passed her arm about the girl.
"Yes, darling, but he's quite all right," she calmed her.
"Have you heard from Philip, then? What is it? What does he say?" the words came with a rush.
Mollie had not heard from Philip that morning. That was why she was writing her letter. But she said she had heard from him. She meant the letter she had received on Friday afternoon.
"And somebody's had to write the address for him!" Joan's voice became more unsteady still. "Oh, that means he's badly hurt! I must go at once!"
"Nonsense, dear. Anyway, there are no trains on Sunday. May I see what he says, or——?"
Joan thrust the weak scribble into her hand. She read it, passed it back, and then began to unpin Joan's hat.
"Well, that's nothing to be alarmed about," she said. "He says just the same as Philip. And he tells you you're not to go up. We shall hear all about it to-morrow."
But she did not tell Joan that it was precisely because there was so maddeningly little in the letter she had received from Philip on Friday that, despairing of getting anything plain out of a mere man, the letter she was now writing was to Audrey Cunningham.
I hope you haven't got the impression that I didn't like Mrs. Cunningham. Indeed, if half I presently learned about her was true, it would have been a hard heart that had not shown a very real and compassionate consideration for her. Young as she was, she had had a wretched story. As far as I know it it was this:—
The late George Cunningham, having contracted the dangerous habit of going to bed every night comparatively sober and waking up in the morning very drunk, had one day arrived at the point when something had had to be done about it. I assume that he had tried the usual specifics to no purpose, since he had presently found himself with only two alternatives left. The first of these was to have done with specifics, to go boldly forward, and to trust to the strength of his constitution to land him high, and still dry, among the seasoned octogenarians. The other was to marry, and to trust that the pure love of an innocent young girl might work its traditional miracle.
Unfortunately, instead of choosing he had tried both courses at once. An unjailed criminal of a father had either suggested the match himself or had failed to throw Cunningham out of the window when it had been suggested. So at seventeen-and-a-half Audrey Herbert had become the wife of a man-about-town of forty-two, with a roomy house in St. John's Wood, a considerable private fortune, and a hole in every one of his pockets.
It had not taken Mrs. Cunningham long to discover that a man who goes to bed sober and wakes up drunk, frequently does so in other beds than his own. But her father, to whom she ran, advised her to continue to exercise her influence for good. He seems to have thought that as long as Cunningham did not actually strike her the rest must be accepted as part of marriage-as-it-is. He had passed out of the world in that belief a couple of years after his daughter's immolation.
Cunningham never struck her. Nor, while it lasted, did he starve her of money. Twice, when housekeeping debts had pressed, he gave her blank checks which the bank duly honored. The third time (one of his mistresses appears to have been the occasion) he gave her a considerably wider permission.... No, he had never struck her. Instead he had merely dragged through the mud of alcoholism and unfaithfulness the hope and belief in men he had found her with, and after five years of it had died—not a day too soon, as she had discovered on going into his affairs. When his debts of honor, dishonor and at law had been paid, about a hundred pounds had remained. With this, her clothes, a few pieces of furniture bought in from the sale and her experience of married life, she had become her own mistress again at twenty-three. Mostof the hundred pounds had gone in fees at a School of Dramatic Art. She was now twenty-seven and on the eve of her second marriage.
I am telling you all this because of the part that Mrs. Cunningham presently came to play in our Case. I think her unhappy history partly explained certain things. I would not go so far as to say that with the exception of Monty Rooke she disliked and distrusted all men, but I think that the sense of sex-hostility was latent and instinctive in her. This never took the form of gloom. Quite the other way. Lest it should be thought for a moment that she mourned for the cur with whom she had been kenneled, she was rather histrionically bright. She fell naturally into beautiful attitudes and gestures, which beauty her art enhanced. I think I mentioned the care she bestowed on her manicuring; in the whole of her person and dress she was the same, as if to wipe out some soilure. She was undoubtedly much in love with Monty—who at any rate was a teetotaller. And, except as I have qualified, I think she liked the rest of us well enough. But the history was always behind, and, in my experience, if you like with however natural a reservation, there is something of the same reserve in the liking you inspire.
So in this sense I was prepared to like Mrs. Cunningham, and without any qualification whatever was sorry she had had so ghastly a time and hopeful that her marriage with Monty would expunge the memory of it.
And so we come to the episode of the wardrobe that Audrey Cunningham had bought in from the St. John's Wood sale.
This wardrobe, with a number of dress-baskets and other articles, formed part of the furniture of the bed-sitting-room in Oakley Street that she was now on the point of leaving, and it had been Philip Esdaile himself who had suggested, some time ago, that there was plenty of room for these belongings in his cellar. Nothing had since been said about it; Philip says that the matter had entirely slipped from his memory; and Mrs. Cunningham, having no reason to suppose that he had changed his mind, had as a matter of fact had the wardrobe put on a light cart and brought round to Lennox Street the day after the aeroplane accident, that is to say on the Friday afternoon. Philip himself, coming along the street at that moment, had found the cart at the gate and Monty and Mrs. Cunningham considering the best way of getting the wardrobe in.
"Ah, so you've got it round; good," he said. "I don't quite know where you're going to put it, but we'll find somewhere. Let me give you a hand."
"I thought you said it was to go into the cellar?" said Mrs. Cunningham.
"Eh?" said Philip. "Did I? I believe I did. Well, let's get it in first. We can settle that afterwards. Has Dadley come?"
So the wardrobe was got into the hall, where it was left for the present among Philip's corded and labeled painting-gear.
"Has Dadley come?" Philip asked again.
"Yes. He's been waiting for you for ten minutes in the studio," Monty replied.
"Bon. I don't suppose I shall be more than ten minutes, but don't wait for tea. I've had a cup as a matter of fact."
"Can't say I think much of old Daddy as a framer——" Monty was beginning; but Esdaile was already at the studio door, which he closed carefully behind him.
You may remember the name of old William Dadley. It was he who, when Mr. Harry Westbury had held forth in the Saloon Bar about the danger to property from the air, had ventured to suggest that lives too had their value. His shop was the little one in the King's Road with the alleged Old Master in the window, one half of it black with ancient grime, the other pitilessly restored; and, as Monty had said, artists who were in any hurry to see their pictures back again seldom took their framing to old Daddy. Unless they went farther afield, they were more likely to patronize the up-to-date establishment across the road, kept by the two pushing young men in the Sinn Fein hats and black satin bows and little side-whiskers and hair bobbed like girls'.
And now for the discussion on picture-framing that took place between Philip Esdaile and William Dadley, behind the closed studio door.