CHAPTER XXVI.Mr. Grierson Tries His HandFor some moments Roger was incapable of speech. This disclosure was so totally unexpected, so entirely the reverse of anything that he had ever imagined, that at first it literally took his breath away. He could only stand and stare, as if his eyes were about to pop out of his head, at the two entirely unmoved persons who had sprung this overwhelming surprise upon him.“Is that what you wished to know?” Jefferson asked courteously. “Or would you wish my wife to confirm it?”“Oh, no; no need at all,” Roger gasped, doing his best to pull himself together. “I—I should like to apologise to you for the apparent impertinence of my questions and to—to congratulate you, if you will allow me to do so.”“Very kind,” Jefferson muttered. Lady Stanworth, or Lady Jefferson as she was now, bowed slightly.“If you don’t want me any more, Harry,” she said to her husband, “there are one or two things I have to do.”“Certainly,” Jefferson said, opening the door for her.She passed out without another glance at Roger.“Look here, Jefferson,” exclaimed the latter impulsively, as soon as the door was closed again, “I know you must be thinking me the most appalling bounder, but you must believe that I shouldn’t have tackled you in that way if I hadn’t got very solid and serious reasons for doing so. As things have turned out, I can’t tell you at present what those reasons are; but really it’s something of the greatest possible importance.”“Oh, that’s all right, Sheringham,” Jefferson returned with gruff amiability. “Guessed you must have something up your sleeve. Bit awkward, though. Ladies, and all that, y’know,” he added vaguely.“Beastly,” Roger said sympathetically. “As a matter of fact, that’s a development that had never occurred to me at all, you and Lady Stanworth being married. If anything, it makes things very much more complicated than before.”“Bit of a mystery or something on hand, eh?” Jefferson asked with interest.“Very much so,” Roger replied, gazing thoughtfully out of the window. “Connected with Stanworth, and—and his activities, you understand,” he added.“Ah!” Jefferson observed comprehendingly. “Then I’d better not ask any questions. Don’t want to learn anything more about that side of things. Seen too many poor devils going through it already.”“No, but I tell you what,” Roger said, wheeling suddenly about. “If you could answer a few more questions for me, I should be more than grateful. Only as a favour, of course, and if you refuse I shall understand perfectly. But you might be able to help me clear up a very tricky state of affairs.”“If it’s anything to do with helping somebody Stanworth got hold of, I’ll answer questions all night,” Jefferson replied with vigour. “Go ahead.”“Thanks, very much. Well, then, in the first place, will you tell me some details regarding your wife’s relations with Stanworth? It doesn’t matter if you object, but I should be very glad if you could see your way to do so.”“But I thought you said you knew that story?”Roger did not think it necessary to explain that the lady to whom he had been referring was not Lady Jefferson. “Oh, I know most of it, I think,” he said airily, “but I should like to hear it all from you, if I could. I know that she was in Stanworth’s power, of course,” he added, making a shot in the twilight, “but I’m not quite clear as to the precise way.”Jefferson shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well, as you seem to know so much, you’d better have the whole lot straight. Stanworth nosed out something about her father. His brother was in love with her, and Stanworth gave her the option of marrying him or having her father shown up. He could have had the old earl put in the dock, I believe. Naturally she chose the brother, who, by the way, didn’t know anything about Stanworth’s activities, so I understand. Quite an amiable, rather weak sort of a fellow.”“And since then, of course, Stanworth had the whip hand over her?”Jefferson winced. “Yes,” he said shortly. “Even after her father died, she wouldn’t want the family shown up.”“I see,” said Roger thoughtfully. So Lady Stanworth had little enough reason to love her brother-in-law. And since Jefferson fell in love with her, her cause would naturally become his. Truly he had motive and to spare for ridding the world of such a man. Yet, although Jefferson and his wife might easily have concocted the story of his whereabouts that night, Roger already felt just as convinced of the former’s innocence as he was before of his guilt. The man’s manner seemed somehow to preclude altogether the idea of subterfuge. Had he really killed Stanworth, Roger was sure that he would have said so by the time that matters had reached this length, bluntly and simply, just as he had told the story of his own downfall.But in spite of his convictions, Roger was not such a fool as not to put the obvious questions that occurred to him.“Why was your marriage secret?” he asked. “Did Stanworth know about it?”“No; he wouldn’t have allowed it. It would have looked like a combination against him. He wanted us separate, for his own ends.”“Did you hear the shot that killed him?” Roger said suddenly.“No. About two o’clock, wasn’t it? I’d been asleep two hours.”“You did sleep with your wife then, in spite of the necessity of preserving secrecy?”“Her maid knew. Used to go back to my room in the early morning. Beastly hole-and-corner business, but no alternative.”“And only Stanworth’s death could have freed you, so to speak?” Roger mused. “Very opportune, wasn’t it?”“Very,” Jefferson replied laconically. “You think I forced him somehow to shoot himself, don’t you?”“Well, I—I——” Roger stammered, completely taken aback.Jefferson smiled grimly. “Knew you must have some comic idea in your head. Just seen what you’ve been driving at. Well, you can rest assured I didn’t. For the simple reason that nobody or no threats on earth could have made him do a thing like that. Why he did it, Heaven only knows. Complete mystery to me. Can’t fathom it. Thank God he did, though!”“You don’t think he might have been—murdered?” Roger suggested tentatively.“Murdered? How could he have been? Out of the question under the circumstances. Besides, he took jolly good care of that. I’d have murdered him myself before this—hundreds of times!—if I hadn’t known it would make things worse than before all round.”“Yes, I’ve heard about that. Kept the evidence addressed to the interested parties, didn’t he? I suppose everyone knew that?”“You bet they did. He rubbed it in. No, Stanworth never meant to be murdered. But my God, I had a fright when I saw him lying there dead and the safe locked.”“You were going to try and open it when I interrupted you yesterday morning, of course?”“Yes, properly caught out then,” Jefferson smiled ruefully. “But even if I’d found the keys, I didn’t know the combination. Lord, what a relief that note of his was. You know about that, I suppose?”“You got a note by the post before lunch, did you?”“That’s right. Saying he was going to kill himself. Rum business. Can’t explain it. Almost too good to be true. I feel another man.”“And so are a good many other people, I imagine,” Roger said softly. “And women, too. His activities were fairly widespread, weren’t they?”“Very, I believe. Never knew much about it, though. He kept all that sort of thing to himself.”“That butler now,” Roger hazarded. “He looks a pretty tough customer. I suppose Stanworth employed him as a sort of bodyguard?”“Yes, something like that. But I don’t know about ‘employed.’ ”“What do you mean?”“He was no more employed than I was. That is to say, we got a salary and we did our work, but it wasn’t a sort of employment either of us could leave.”Roger whistled softly. “Oho! So friend Graves was another victim, was he? What’s his story?”“Don’t know all the details, but Stanworth could have had that man hanged, I believe,” Jefferson said coolly. “Instead he preferred to use him as a sort of bodyguard, as you say.”“I see. Then Graves hadn’t much cause to love him either, I take it?”“If he hadn’t known what would happen afterwards, I wouldn’t have given Stanworth ten minutes of life in Graves’s presence.”Roger whistled again.“Well, thanks very much, Jefferson. I think that’s all I wanted to know.”“If you’re trying to look for someone who induced Stanworth to shoot himself, you’re wasting your time,” Jefferson remarked. “Couldn’t be done.”“Oh, there’s a little more in my quest than that,” Roger smiled, as he let himself out of the room.He hurried upstairs, glancing at his watch as he did so. The time was nearly five minutes to four. He scurried down the passage to Alec’s room.“Finished packing?” he asked, putting his head round the door. “Good, well come along to my room while I do mine.”“Well?” Alec asked sarcastically, when they were once more ensconced in Roger’s bedroom. “Has Jefferson written out his confession?”Roger paused in the act of laying his suitcase on a chair.“Alec,” he said solemnly, “I owe friend Jefferson an apology, though I can’t very well tender it. I was hopelessly wrong about him, and you were hopelessly right. He didn’t kill Stanworth at all. It’s extremely annoying of him considering how neatly I solved this little problem of ours; but there’s the fact.”“Humph!” Alec observed. “I won’tsay, ‘I told you so,’ because I know how annoying it would be for you. But I don’t mind telling you that I’m thinking it hard.”“Yes, and the most irritating part is that you’re fully entitled to do so,” Roger said, throwing his pyjamas into the case. “That’s what I find so irksome.”“But I suppose you’ve found somebody else to take his place all right?”“No, I haven’t. Isn’t it maddening? But I’ll tell you one significant fact I’ve unearthed. That butler had as much cause as anyone, if not more, to regret the fact that Stanworth was still polluting the earth.”“Had he? Oh! But look here, how do you know that Jefferson didn’t do it?”Roger explained.“Not much so far as actual hard-and-fast-evidence goes, I’m afraid,” he concluded, “but we greater detectives are above evidence. It’s psychology that we study, and I feel in every single bone in my body that Jefferson was telling the truth.”“Lady Stanworth!” Alec commented. “Good Lord!”“Some men are brave, aren’t they? Still, I daresay she’ll make an excellent wife; I believe that’s the right thing to say on this sort of occasion. But seriously, Alec, I’m absolutely baffled again. I think I shall have to turn the case over to you.”“Well, do,” Alec retorted with unexpected energy, “and I’ll tell you who killed Stanworth.”Roger desisted from his efforts to close the lid of his bulging case in order to look up in surprise.“You will, eh? Well, who did?”“Some unknown victim of Stanworth’s blackmail, of course. The whole thing stands to reason. We were looking for a mysterious stranger at first, weren’t we? And we thought he might be a burglar. Translate the burglar into the blackmailer’s victim and there you are. And as he burnt the evidence himself, and we haven’t the least idea who was on Stanworth’s blackmailing list, we shall never find out who he was. The whole thing seems as clear as daylight to me.”Roger turned to his refractory case again. “But why did we give up the burglar idea?” he asked. “Aren’t you rather overlooking that? Chiefly because of the disappearance of those footprints. That must mean either that the murderer came from inside the house or that he had an accomplice there.”“I don’t agree with you. We don’t know how or why the footprints disappeared. It might have been pure chance. William might have raked the bed over, somebody might have noticed it and smoothed it out; there are plenty of possible explanations for that.”With a heave Roger succeeded in clicking the lock with which he was struggling. He straightened his bent back and drew his pipe out of his pocket.“I’ve talked enough for a bit,” he announced.“Oh, rot!” Alec exclaimed incredulously.“And it’s about time I put in a little thinking,” Roger went on, disregarding the interruption. “You run along down to tea, Alexander; you’re ten minutes late as it is.”“And what are you going to do?”“I’m going to spend my last twenty minutes here doing some high-speed cogitating in the back garden. Then I shall be ready to chat with you in the train.”“Yes, I have a kind of idea that you’ll be quite ready to do that,” said Alec rudely, as they went out into the passage.
For some moments Roger was incapable of speech. This disclosure was so totally unexpected, so entirely the reverse of anything that he had ever imagined, that at first it literally took his breath away. He could only stand and stare, as if his eyes were about to pop out of his head, at the two entirely unmoved persons who had sprung this overwhelming surprise upon him.
“Is that what you wished to know?” Jefferson asked courteously. “Or would you wish my wife to confirm it?”
“Oh, no; no need at all,” Roger gasped, doing his best to pull himself together. “I—I should like to apologise to you for the apparent impertinence of my questions and to—to congratulate you, if you will allow me to do so.”
“Very kind,” Jefferson muttered. Lady Stanworth, or Lady Jefferson as she was now, bowed slightly.
“If you don’t want me any more, Harry,” she said to her husband, “there are one or two things I have to do.”
“Certainly,” Jefferson said, opening the door for her.
She passed out without another glance at Roger.
“Look here, Jefferson,” exclaimed the latter impulsively, as soon as the door was closed again, “I know you must be thinking me the most appalling bounder, but you must believe that I shouldn’t have tackled you in that way if I hadn’t got very solid and serious reasons for doing so. As things have turned out, I can’t tell you at present what those reasons are; but really it’s something of the greatest possible importance.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Sheringham,” Jefferson returned with gruff amiability. “Guessed you must have something up your sleeve. Bit awkward, though. Ladies, and all that, y’know,” he added vaguely.
“Beastly,” Roger said sympathetically. “As a matter of fact, that’s a development that had never occurred to me at all, you and Lady Stanworth being married. If anything, it makes things very much more complicated than before.”
“Bit of a mystery or something on hand, eh?” Jefferson asked with interest.
“Very much so,” Roger replied, gazing thoughtfully out of the window. “Connected with Stanworth, and—and his activities, you understand,” he added.
“Ah!” Jefferson observed comprehendingly. “Then I’d better not ask any questions. Don’t want to learn anything more about that side of things. Seen too many poor devils going through it already.”
“No, but I tell you what,” Roger said, wheeling suddenly about. “If you could answer a few more questions for me, I should be more than grateful. Only as a favour, of course, and if you refuse I shall understand perfectly. But you might be able to help me clear up a very tricky state of affairs.”
“If it’s anything to do with helping somebody Stanworth got hold of, I’ll answer questions all night,” Jefferson replied with vigour. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks, very much. Well, then, in the first place, will you tell me some details regarding your wife’s relations with Stanworth? It doesn’t matter if you object, but I should be very glad if you could see your way to do so.”
“But I thought you said you knew that story?”
Roger did not think it necessary to explain that the lady to whom he had been referring was not Lady Jefferson. “Oh, I know most of it, I think,” he said airily, “but I should like to hear it all from you, if I could. I know that she was in Stanworth’s power, of course,” he added, making a shot in the twilight, “but I’m not quite clear as to the precise way.”
Jefferson shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, well, as you seem to know so much, you’d better have the whole lot straight. Stanworth nosed out something about her father. His brother was in love with her, and Stanworth gave her the option of marrying him or having her father shown up. He could have had the old earl put in the dock, I believe. Naturally she chose the brother, who, by the way, didn’t know anything about Stanworth’s activities, so I understand. Quite an amiable, rather weak sort of a fellow.”
“And since then, of course, Stanworth had the whip hand over her?”
Jefferson winced. “Yes,” he said shortly. “Even after her father died, she wouldn’t want the family shown up.”
“I see,” said Roger thoughtfully. So Lady Stanworth had little enough reason to love her brother-in-law. And since Jefferson fell in love with her, her cause would naturally become his. Truly he had motive and to spare for ridding the world of such a man. Yet, although Jefferson and his wife might easily have concocted the story of his whereabouts that night, Roger already felt just as convinced of the former’s innocence as he was before of his guilt. The man’s manner seemed somehow to preclude altogether the idea of subterfuge. Had he really killed Stanworth, Roger was sure that he would have said so by the time that matters had reached this length, bluntly and simply, just as he had told the story of his own downfall.
But in spite of his convictions, Roger was not such a fool as not to put the obvious questions that occurred to him.
“Why was your marriage secret?” he asked. “Did Stanworth know about it?”
“No; he wouldn’t have allowed it. It would have looked like a combination against him. He wanted us separate, for his own ends.”
“Did you hear the shot that killed him?” Roger said suddenly.
“No. About two o’clock, wasn’t it? I’d been asleep two hours.”
“You did sleep with your wife then, in spite of the necessity of preserving secrecy?”
“Her maid knew. Used to go back to my room in the early morning. Beastly hole-and-corner business, but no alternative.”
“And only Stanworth’s death could have freed you, so to speak?” Roger mused. “Very opportune, wasn’t it?”
“Very,” Jefferson replied laconically. “You think I forced him somehow to shoot himself, don’t you?”
“Well, I—I——” Roger stammered, completely taken aback.
Jefferson smiled grimly. “Knew you must have some comic idea in your head. Just seen what you’ve been driving at. Well, you can rest assured I didn’t. For the simple reason that nobody or no threats on earth could have made him do a thing like that. Why he did it, Heaven only knows. Complete mystery to me. Can’t fathom it. Thank God he did, though!”
“You don’t think he might have been—murdered?” Roger suggested tentatively.
“Murdered? How could he have been? Out of the question under the circumstances. Besides, he took jolly good care of that. I’d have murdered him myself before this—hundreds of times!—if I hadn’t known it would make things worse than before all round.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about that. Kept the evidence addressed to the interested parties, didn’t he? I suppose everyone knew that?”
“You bet they did. He rubbed it in. No, Stanworth never meant to be murdered. But my God, I had a fright when I saw him lying there dead and the safe locked.”
“You were going to try and open it when I interrupted you yesterday morning, of course?”
“Yes, properly caught out then,” Jefferson smiled ruefully. “But even if I’d found the keys, I didn’t know the combination. Lord, what a relief that note of his was. You know about that, I suppose?”
“You got a note by the post before lunch, did you?”
“That’s right. Saying he was going to kill himself. Rum business. Can’t explain it. Almost too good to be true. I feel another man.”
“And so are a good many other people, I imagine,” Roger said softly. “And women, too. His activities were fairly widespread, weren’t they?”
“Very, I believe. Never knew much about it, though. He kept all that sort of thing to himself.”
“That butler now,” Roger hazarded. “He looks a pretty tough customer. I suppose Stanworth employed him as a sort of bodyguard?”
“Yes, something like that. But I don’t know about ‘employed.’ ”
“What do you mean?”
“He was no more employed than I was. That is to say, we got a salary and we did our work, but it wasn’t a sort of employment either of us could leave.”
Roger whistled softly. “Oho! So friend Graves was another victim, was he? What’s his story?”
“Don’t know all the details, but Stanworth could have had that man hanged, I believe,” Jefferson said coolly. “Instead he preferred to use him as a sort of bodyguard, as you say.”
“I see. Then Graves hadn’t much cause to love him either, I take it?”
“If he hadn’t known what would happen afterwards, I wouldn’t have given Stanworth ten minutes of life in Graves’s presence.”
Roger whistled again.
“Well, thanks very much, Jefferson. I think that’s all I wanted to know.”
“If you’re trying to look for someone who induced Stanworth to shoot himself, you’re wasting your time,” Jefferson remarked. “Couldn’t be done.”
“Oh, there’s a little more in my quest than that,” Roger smiled, as he let himself out of the room.
He hurried upstairs, glancing at his watch as he did so. The time was nearly five minutes to four. He scurried down the passage to Alec’s room.
“Finished packing?” he asked, putting his head round the door. “Good, well come along to my room while I do mine.”
“Well?” Alec asked sarcastically, when they were once more ensconced in Roger’s bedroom. “Has Jefferson written out his confession?”
Roger paused in the act of laying his suitcase on a chair.
“Alec,” he said solemnly, “I owe friend Jefferson an apology, though I can’t very well tender it. I was hopelessly wrong about him, and you were hopelessly right. He didn’t kill Stanworth at all. It’s extremely annoying of him considering how neatly I solved this little problem of ours; but there’s the fact.”
“Humph!” Alec observed. “I won’tsay, ‘I told you so,’ because I know how annoying it would be for you. But I don’t mind telling you that I’m thinking it hard.”
“Yes, and the most irritating part is that you’re fully entitled to do so,” Roger said, throwing his pyjamas into the case. “That’s what I find so irksome.”
“But I suppose you’ve found somebody else to take his place all right?”
“No, I haven’t. Isn’t it maddening? But I’ll tell you one significant fact I’ve unearthed. That butler had as much cause as anyone, if not more, to regret the fact that Stanworth was still polluting the earth.”
“Had he? Oh! But look here, how do you know that Jefferson didn’t do it?”
Roger explained.
“Not much so far as actual hard-and-fast-evidence goes, I’m afraid,” he concluded, “but we greater detectives are above evidence. It’s psychology that we study, and I feel in every single bone in my body that Jefferson was telling the truth.”
“Lady Stanworth!” Alec commented. “Good Lord!”
“Some men are brave, aren’t they? Still, I daresay she’ll make an excellent wife; I believe that’s the right thing to say on this sort of occasion. But seriously, Alec, I’m absolutely baffled again. I think I shall have to turn the case over to you.”
“Well, do,” Alec retorted with unexpected energy, “and I’ll tell you who killed Stanworth.”
Roger desisted from his efforts to close the lid of his bulging case in order to look up in surprise.
“You will, eh? Well, who did?”
“Some unknown victim of Stanworth’s blackmail, of course. The whole thing stands to reason. We were looking for a mysterious stranger at first, weren’t we? And we thought he might be a burglar. Translate the burglar into the blackmailer’s victim and there you are. And as he burnt the evidence himself, and we haven’t the least idea who was on Stanworth’s blackmailing list, we shall never find out who he was. The whole thing seems as clear as daylight to me.”
Roger turned to his refractory case again. “But why did we give up the burglar idea?” he asked. “Aren’t you rather overlooking that? Chiefly because of the disappearance of those footprints. That must mean either that the murderer came from inside the house or that he had an accomplice there.”
“I don’t agree with you. We don’t know how or why the footprints disappeared. It might have been pure chance. William might have raked the bed over, somebody might have noticed it and smoothed it out; there are plenty of possible explanations for that.”
With a heave Roger succeeded in clicking the lock with which he was struggling. He straightened his bent back and drew his pipe out of his pocket.
“I’ve talked enough for a bit,” he announced.
“Oh, rot!” Alec exclaimed incredulously.
“And it’s about time I put in a little thinking,” Roger went on, disregarding the interruption. “You run along down to tea, Alexander; you’re ten minutes late as it is.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to spend my last twenty minutes here doing some high-speed cogitating in the back garden. Then I shall be ready to chat with you in the train.”
“Yes, I have a kind of idea that you’ll be quite ready to do that,” said Alec rudely, as they went out into the passage.