The Seven Secrets. Le Queux William
course not,” agreed the detective. “To my mind appearances are entirely against this fellow. Yet, we have one fact to bear in mind, namely, that being sent to town twice he was afforded every opportunity for escape.”
“He was artful,” I remarked. “He knew that his safest plan was to remain and face it. If, as seems very probable, the crime was planned, it was certainly carried out at a most propitious moment.”
“It certainly was,” observed my friend, carefully scrutinising the knife, which Thorpe had brought to him. “This,” he said, “must be examined microscopically. You can do that, Boyd. It will be easy to see if there are any traces of blood upon it. To all appearances it has been recently cleaned and oiled.”
“Short admits cleaning it, but he says he did so three days ago,” I exclaimed.
He gave vent to another low grunt, from which I knew that the explanation was unsatisfactory, and replaced the knife in its faded velvet sheath.
Save for the man upon whom suspicion had thus fallen, the servants had all gone to the house where their mistress was lodged, after being cautioned by the police to say nothing of the matter, and to keep their mouths closed to all the reporters who would no doubt very soon be swarming into the district eager for every scrap of information. Their evidence would be required at the inquest, and the police forbade them, until then, to make any comment, or to give any explanation of the mysterious affair. The tongues of domestics wag quickly and wildly in such cases, and have many times been the means of defeating the ends of justice by giving away important clues to the Press.
Ambler Jevons, however, was a practised hand at mysteries. He sat down in the library, and with his crabbed handwriting covered two sheets of paper with notes upon the case. I watched as his pencil went swiftly to work, and when he had finished I saw him underline certain words he had written.
“Thorpe appears to suspect that fellow Short,” he remarked, when I met him again in the library a quarter of an hour later. “I’ve just been chatting with him, and to me his demeanour is not that of a guilty man. He’s actually been upstairs with the coroner’s officer in the dead man’s room. A murderer generally excuses himself from entering the presence of his victim.”
“Well,” I exclaimed, after a pause, “you know the whole circumstances now. Can you see any clue which may throw light on the affair?”
He slowly twisted his moustache again; then twisted his plain gold ring slowly round the little finger on the left hand – a habit of his when perplexed.
“No, Ralph, old chap; can’t say I do,” he answered. “There’s an unfathomable mystery somewhere, but in what direction I’m utterly at a loss to distinguish.”
“But do you think that the assassin is a member of the household? That seems to me our first point to clear up.”
“That’s just where we’re perplexed. Thorpe suspects Short; but the police so often rush to conclusions on a single suspicion. Before condemning him it is necessary to watch him narrowly, and note his demeanour and his movements. If he is guilty he’ll betray himself sooner or later. Thorpe was foolish to take down that knife a second time. The fellow might have seen him and had his suspicions aroused thereby. That’s the worst of police inquiries. They display so little ingenuity. It is all method – method – method. Everything must be done by rule. They appear to overlook the fact that a window in the conservatory was undoubtedly left open,” he added.
“Well?” I asked, noticing that he was gazing at me strangely, full in the face.
“Well, has it not occurred to you that that window might have been purposely left open?”
“You mean that the assassin entered and left by that window?”
“I mean to suggest that the murder might have been connived at by one of the household, if the man we suspect were not the actual assassin himself.”
The theory was a curious one, but I saw that there were considerable grounds for it. As in many suburban houses, the conservatory joined the drawing-room, an unlocked glass door being between them. The window that had been left unfastened was situated at the further end, and being low down was in such a position that any intruder might easily have entered and left. Therefore the suggestion appeared a sound one – more especially so because the cook had most solemnly declared that she had fastened it securely before going up to bed.
In that case someone must have crept down and unfastened it after the woman had retired, and done so with the object of assisting the assassin.
But Ambler Jevons was not a man to remain idle for a single moment when once he became interested in a mystery. To his keen perception and calm logical reasoning had been due the solution of “The Mornington Crescent Mystery,” which, as all readers of this narrative will remember, for six months utterly perplexed Scotland Yard; while in a dozen other notable cases his discoveries had placed the police on the scent of the guilty person. Somehow he seemed to possess a peculiar facility in the solving of enigmas. At ordinary times he struck one as a rather careless, easy-going man, who drifted on through life, tasting and dealing in tea, with regular attendance at Mark Lane each day. Sometimes he wore a pair of cheap pince-nez, the frames of which were rusty, but these he seldom assumed unless he was what he termed “at work.” He was at work now, and therefore had stuck the pince-nez on the bridge of his nose, giving him a keener and rather more intelligent appearance.
“Excuse me,” he exclaimed, suddenly twisting his ring again round his finger. “I’ve just thought of something else. I won’t be a moment,” and he rushed from the library and ran upstairs to the floor above.
His absence gave me an opportunity to re-examine the little object which I had picked up from the floor at the earlier stages of the inquiry; and advancing to the window I took it from my pocket and looked again at it, utterly confounded.
Its appearance presented nothing extraordinary, for it was merely a soft piece of hard-knotted cream-coloured chenille about half-an-inch long. But sight of it lying in the palm of my hand held me spellbound in horror.
It told me the awful truth. It was nothing less than a portion of the fringe of the cream shawl which my love had been wearing, and just as chenille fringes will come to pieces, it had become detached and fallen where she had stood at that spot beside the victim’s bed.
There was a smear of blood upon it.
I recollected her strangely nervous manner, her anxiety to ascertain what clue we had discovered and to know the opinion of the police. Yes, if guilt were ever written upon a woman’s face, it was upon hers.
Should I show the tiny fragment to my friend? Should I put it into his hands and tell him the bitter truth – the truth that I believed my love to be a murderess?
CHAPTER IX.
SHADOWS
The revelation held me utterly dumfounded.
Already I had, by placing my hand in contact with the shawl, ascertained its exact texture, and saw that both its tint and its fabric were unquestionably the same as the knotted fragment I held in my hand. Chenille shawls, as every woman knows, must be handled carefully or the lightly-made fringe will come asunder; for the kind of cord of floss silk is generally made upon a single thread, which will break with the slightest strain.
By some means the shawl in question had accidentally become entangled – or perhaps been strained by the sudden uplifting of the arm of the wearer. In any case the little innocent-looking fragment had snapped, and dropped at the bedside of the murdered man.
The grave suspicions of Ethelwynn which I had held on the previous night when she endeavoured to justify her sister’s neglect again crowded upon me, and Sir Bernard’s hint at the secret of her past thrust the iron deeply into my heart.
My eyes were fixed upon the little object in my palm – the silent but damning evidence – and my mind became filled by bitterest regrets. I saw how cleverly I had been duped – I recognised that this woman, whom I thought an angel, was only a cunning assassin.
No, believe me: