Later that evening Appleby explained.
“There was never much doubt, Mr Borlase, that your cousin had been murdered. And clearly the crime was not one of passion or impulse. The background of the case was international espionage. Sir Stephen was killed in order to obtain an important scientific secret and to eliminate the only brain capable of reproducing it. There may have been an attempt – conceivably by the man Krauss – to get at Sir Stephen by the ideological route. But that had certainly come to nothing. You agree?”
Mark Borlase nodded. “Stephen – as I insisted to you – was really perfectly sound. He worried me at times, it is true – and it was only yesterday that I felt I ought to go down and have a word with him. Actually, we didn’t meet. I got him on the telephone, and knew at once that there was no question of any trouble at the moment. So I concealed the fact that I was actually in Sheercliff, put up at the Grand for the night, and came back this morning. I ought to have been franker when you challenged me, no doubt.”
“It has all come straight in the wash, Mr Borlase. And now let me go on. Here was a professional crime. This made me at once suspicious of the genuineness of any muddle over those shoes. But they might be a trick designed to mislead. And, if that was so, I was up against a mind given to doing things ingeniously. I made a note that it might be possible to exploit that later.
“Now the train. I came away from my inspection of it convinced that the girl’s story was a fabrication from start to finish. The fact stared me in the face.”
Denny Fisher sat up straight. “But how could it? I’ve chewed over it again and again–”
“My dear young man, these things are not your profession. This girl, representing herself as badly frightened, ignored three compartments – in two of which she would have found feminine support and comfort – and chose to burst in upon a solitary and suitably impressionable young man of her own age. Again, while the mysterious man with the different-coloured shoes would certainly have retreated up the train, the rifled suitcase was down the train – the direction in which the girl herself went off unaccompanied, for her cup of coffee. Again, the Russian cigarettes had discernibly been smoked in a holder. On one of them, nevertheless, there was a tiny smear of lipstick.” Appleby turned to Derry. “I think I mentioned it to you at the time.”
“Mentioned it?” Derry was bewildered – and then light came to him. “When you made that silly – that joke about seeing red?”
“I’m afraid so. Well now, the case was beginning to come clear. Sir Stephen’s body had been dropped on that rock, and not into the sea, deliberately; we were meant to find it in the strange clothes and the unaccountable shoes – otherwise the whole elaborate false trail laid by the girl on her railway journey would be meaningless. But why this elaboration? There seemed only one answer. To serve as an alibi, conclusive from the start, for somebody anxious to avoid any intensive investigation. My thoughts turned to Meritt as soon as he produced that streamlined picture of the man Krauss as the criminal.”
Mark Borlase nodded. “And so you set a trap for him?”
“Precisely. But first, let me give you briefly what my guess about Meritt was. He had been offered money – big and tempting money – to do both things: get the notebook and liquidate Sir Stephen. He saw his chance in Sir Stephen’s habit of taking that nocturnal stroll. Last night he simply followed him up to the Head, killed and robbed him, and dressed the body in clothes he had already concealed for the purpose, including the odd shoes. Then he dropped the body over the cliff so that it would fall just where it did, returned to the Metropole, and telephoned his confederate to begin playing her part on the eight-five this morning. The girl – her name was Jane Grove – was devoted to him. And she played up very well – to the end, I’d say.”
For a moment there was silence in Appleby’s room. Then Derry asked a question. “And your trap?”
“It depended on what is pretty well an axiom in detective investigation. A criminal who has – successfully, as he thinks – brought off an ingenious trick will try to bring off another, twice as ingenious, if you give him a chance. Still guessing – for I really had no evidence against Meritt at all – I gave him such a chance just as irresistibly as I could.
“The girl, you see, must come forward, and repeat the yarn she had told on the train. That was essential to the convincingness of the whole story. It was, of course, a yarn about encountering a man who doesn’t exist. For this nobody I determined to persuade Meritt to substitute a somebody: yourself, Mr Borlase. You had been on that train and had concealed the fact. I let Meritt have this information. I gave him the impression that I strongly suspected you. I let slip the information that you could be contacted at your club, the Junior Wessex. And as soon as Meritt had left I got a message to you there myself, explaining what I wanted and asking you to co-operate. You did so, most admirably, and I am very grateful to you.”
Mark Borlase inclined his head. “A blood-hunt isn’t much in my line, I’m bound to say. But it seemed proper that Stephen’s murderer should be brought to book.”
Derry Fisher looked perplexed. “I don’t see how Meritt–”
“It was simple enough.” Appleby broke off to take a telephone call, and then resumed his explanation. “Meritt represented himself to Mr Borlase on the telephone as my secretary, and asked him to come to my private address – which he gave as fifteen Babcock Gardens – at five forty-five. He then got in touch with the girl and arranged his trap.” Appleby smiled grimly. “He didn’t know it was our trap too.”
“He was going to incriminate Mr Borlase?”
“Just that. Remember, you would have been able to swear that you saw Mr Borlase leaving Waterloo in a taxi just behind the girl. From this would follow the inference that Mr Borlase had tracked her to her home; and that after his interview here he had decided that he must silence her.”
“But Meritt didn’t himself mean to – to kill the girl?”
“He meant to stage an attempted murder by Mr Borlase; and to that he must have nerved her on the telephone. It all had to be very nicely timed.”
Mark Borlase suddenly shivered. “He was going to arrest me, after he had himself winged the girl? He would have said the revolver was mine – that sort of thing?”
“Yes. He may even have meant to kill you, and maintain that it had happened in the course of a struggle. Then the girl would have identified you as the man with the odd shoes. And that would have been that.”
“How would he have explained being on the scene – there in Babcock Gardens, I mean – at all?”
“By declaring that I had prompted him to go and have a look at you at your club; that he had spotted you coming out and had decided to shadow you. It would have been some such story as that. He had lost his head a bit, I’d say, in pursuit of this final ingenuity. It was criminal artistry, of a sort. But it was thoroughly crazy as well.”
“And Stephen’s notebook?”
“That telephone-call was to say it has been found with Meritt’s things. Meritt thought himself absolutely safe, and he was determined to hold out for a good price.” Appleby rose. “Well – that’s the whole thing. And we shall none of us be sorry to go to bed.”
As they said goodbye, Denny Fisher hesitated. “May I ask one more question?”
“Certainly.”
“The shooting in Babcock Gardens was an afterthought of Meritt’s – and I think it was the afterthought of a fiend. But why – after you had examined the train and guessed nearly the whole truth – did you tell me that the girl was in danger?”
“She was in danger of the gallows, Mr Fisher. But at least she has escaped that.”