“Extensive defalcations. A system of fraud that must have been carried on for many years,” repeated Aubrey Todmarsh. “Well, that pretty well settles the matter as far as Thompson is concerned.”
“I don’t see it,” contradicted Tony Collyer. “Thompson is a defaulter. That doesn’t prove he is a murderer. I don’t believe he is. Old chap didn’t look like a murderer.”
“My dear Tony, don’t be childish!” responded Todmarsh. “A man that commits a murder never does look like a murderer. He wouldn’t be so successful if he did.”
“Anyway, if Thompson is guilty, it pretty well knocks the stuffing out of your pet theory,” retorted Tony. “Thompson didn’t go to the War.”
“No, but the lust for killing spread over the entire country,” Todmarsh went on, his face assuming a rapt expression as he gazed over Anthony’s head at the little clouds scudding across the patch of sky which he could see through the windows above. “Besides, there were murders before the War, and there will be murders when, if ever, it is forgotten. But I do maintain that there have been many more brutal crimes since the War than ever before in the history of the country. Teach a man through all the most impressionable years of his life that there is nothing worth doing but killing his fellow-creatures and trying to kill them, and he will—”
“Oh, stow that—we have heard it all before,” Tony interrupted irritably. “According to your own showing the murder might just as well have been committed by one of your own dear conchies as anyone else. Anyway, I don’t believe Thompson killed Uncle Luke. Why should he? He had got the money. He had only to make off with it. Why should he kill the old chap?”
“Well, Uncle Luke may have taxed him with his shortcomings and threatened to prosecute him, perhaps he tried to phone or something of that sort. And Thompson may have sprung at him and throttled him.”
“Don’t believe it!” Tony said obstinately.
Todmarsh’s eyes narrowed.
“I wouldn’t proclaim my faith in Thompson’s innocence quite so loudly if I were you, Tony. I imagine you have no idea who the world is saying must be guilty if Thompson is innocent.”
“I imagine I have,” Tony returned, his tone growing violent. “I am quite aware that the world”—laying stress on the noun—“is saying that, if Thompson didn’t murder Uncle Luke, I did, to gain the money my uncle left. But I am not going to try to hang Thompson to save my own neck. By the way, I come into some more money when Aunt Madeleine dies. You will be expecting me to murder her next! You had something left you too. You may have done it to get that!”
Aubrey Todmarsh shook his head.
“My legacy is a mere flea-bite compared with yours. And I trust that my life and aims are sufficiently well known—”
Tony turned his back on him deliberately.
“Bosh! Don’t trouble to put it on for me, Aubrey. I have known your life and aims fairly well for a good while. Take care of your own skin, and let everything else go to the wall. That’s your aim.”
His cousin’s dark eyes held no spark of resentment.
“You do not think that, I know, Tony. But, if the world should misjudge my motives, I cannot help it.”
The cousins were standing in the smaller of the two adjoining waiting-rooms in the late Luke Bechcombe’s flat offices. The inquest had been held that morning and the auditors’ report on the books that had been in Thompson’s charge and the contents of the safe had been taken. Their statement that there had been a system of fraud carried on probably for years had not come as a surprise. The public had from the first decided that Thompson’s disappearance could only be accounted for as a flight from the charge of embezzlement that was hanging over him. Ever logical, rumour did not trouble to account for the chloroform and the covered finger-prints or the lady with the white gloves.
The auditors’ report had brought both Aubrey Todmarsh and Tony to the office this afternoon, and as usual the cousins could not meet without contradicting one another or quarrelling. Inspector Furnival and Mr. Steadman had also given their account of their visit to Thompson’s room and the mystery mongers were more than ever intrigued thereby. There could be no doubt that, whatever might be their opinion of his guilt, Thompson’s disappearance was becoming more and more of an enigma to the police. Not the faintest trace of him could be discovered. When he left the clerks’ office in Crow’s Inn, he apparently disappeared from the face of the earth; no one had met him on the stairs, no one had seen him in the vicinity of the square. After an enormous amount of inquiry the police had at last discovered a small restaurant where he generally lunched, but he had neither been there on the day of the murder nor since, and the railway stations had been watched so far without success. In fact, Inspector Furnival had been heard to state that but that they could not find the body he would have thought that Thompson had been murdered as well as his chief.
Thompson was described at the restaurant as always taking his meals by himself and speaking to no one, and always at the same table. Then the waitress who had waited on him for the last two years had never heard him say more than good morning, or good afternoon. He always lunched à la carte, so that there was no ordering to be done. Still with the precautions taken, with his description circulated through the country, it seemed that his capture could only be a matter of time.
But the inspector was frankly puzzled. At every point he was baffled in his attempt to discover anything of the real man. The very mystery about him was in itself suspicious.
The inspector and Mr. Steadman were in Mr. Bechcombe’s private room this afternoon. Everything remained just as it had been when the murder was discovered, except that the body had been removed to the nearest mortuary now that the inquest had been adjourned, and the funeral was to take place at once.
The inspector had been over the room already with the most meticulous care. To-day he was trying to reconstruct the crime. The dead man’s writing-table table was opposite the door into the ante-room, and from there into the clerks’ room. The door into the passage opened upon Mr. Bechcombe’s usual seat. Supposing that to have been unlocked, it seemed to the inspector that, when Mr. Bechcombe had received his expected visitor, he might have been thinking over some communication that had been made to him, and the assassin might have entered the room silently from behind, and strangled him before he was aware of his danger. But there seemed no motive for such a crime, and the inspector was frankly puzzled. There was no view from the window, the lower panes being of frosted glass, the upper looking straight across to a blank wall. The safe was locked again now as it had been in Mr. Bechcombe’s lifetime. Mr. Turner had finished his examination. But, try as the inspector would to reconstruct the crime, he could not build up any hypothesis which could not be instantly demolished, or so it seemed to him. Mr. Steadman stood on the hearthrug with his back to the ashes of Luke Bechcombe’s last fire. For the lawyer had been old-fashioned—he had disliked central heating and gas and electric contrivances. In spite of strikes and increasing prices he had adhered to coal fires.
At last the silence was broken by Mr. Steadman:
“You have the experts’ opinion of the fingerprints, I presume?”
The inspector bent his head.
“It came this morning. It was not put in at the inquest, for it is just as well not to take all the world into our confidence at first, you know, Mr. Steadman.”
“Quite so,” the barrister assented. “Do you mean that you were able to identify them?”
“No,” growled the inspector. “They will never be identified. The murderer wore those thin rubber gloves that some of the first-class crooks have taken to of late.”
“Phew!” Mr. Steadman gave a low whistle. “That—that puts a very different complexion on the matter.”
The inspector raised his eyebrows. “As how?”
“Well, for one thing it settles the question of premeditation.”
The inspector coughed.
“I have never believed Mr. Bechcombe’s murder to have been unpremeditated. Neither have you, I think, sir.”
“Well, no,” the other conceded. “The crime has always looked to me like a carefully planned and skilfully executed murder. And yet—I don’t know.”
“It is the most absolutely baffling affair I have come across for years,” Inspector Furnival observed slowly. “It is the question of motive that is so puzzling. Once we have discovered that I do not think the identity of the murderer will remain a secret long.”
“The public seems to have made up its mind that Thompson is guilty.”
“I know.” Inspector Furnival stroked his clean-shaven chin thoughtfully. “But why should Thompson, having robbed his master systematically for years, suddenly make up his mind to murder him? For he didn’t have the rubber gloves and the chloroform by accident you know, sir.”
“Obviously not.” Mr. Steadman studied his finger nails in silence for a minute, then he looked up suddenly. “Inspector, to my mind absolute frankness is always best. Now, we do not know that Thompson went to Mr. Bechcombe’s room at all on the morning of the murder. But there is another whose name is being freely canvassed who certainly did go to the room.”
“Ay, Mr. Tony Collyer,” the inspector said, frowning as he looked over his notes again. “The obvious suspect. Motive and opportunity—neither lacking. But here the question of premeditation comes in again. Young Collyer would not have known he would have the excellent opportunity that really did occur. Would he have come on chance provided with chloroform and rubber gloves? Would he not have fixed up an opportunity when he could have been certain of finding Mr. Bechcombe in? And also when his fiancée, Miss Cecily Hoyle, was out of the way? Then, when he did put his rubber gloves on is a question. According to Miss Hoyle’s testimony he had not got them on when she left him. He could hardly bring them out while Mr. Bechcombe was talking to him. No, so far as I can see nothing conclusive with regard to either of these two is to be found, Mr. Steadman. What do you think yourself?”
“Personally I shall find it always a very difficult matter to believe Tony Collyer guilty, strong though the evidence seems against him,” Mr. Steadman said frankly. “Thompson, I must confess, seems a very different proposition. Then we must remember the third person in the case, the lady of the white gloves.”
“The owner of the white glove did not strangle Mr. Bechcombe,” Inspector Furnival said positively. “Though she may have been an accomplice. The experts’ evidence decided that the fingers of the hand that killed Mr. Bechcombe were considerably too large to have gone into that white glove.”
“So that’s that!” said the barrister. “Well, it is a curious case. It seemed bristling with clues at first. And yet they all seem to lead nowhere.”
“One of them will in time, though,” the inspector remarked confidently. “The thread is in our hands right enough, Mr. Steadman. We shall find the other end before long.”
“You don’t mean—” the barrister was beginning when there was an interruption.
There was a knock at the door. Mr. Steadman put up his pince-nez as the inspector opened the door. To their surprise Aubrey Todmarsh stood in the passage. He stepped inside, his face paling as he glanced round the room in which his uncle had met his death.
“Ugh!” He shivered. “There is a terrible atmosphere about this room, inspector. Even if one did not know it, I think one would unconsciously sense the fact that some horrible crime had been committed here.”
“Um, I am not much of a believer in that sort of thing,” Mr. Steadman answered. “It is easy enough to sense crime, as you call it, when you know that it has been committed.”
Aubrey shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, I don’t know. You may be right, but I shall stick to my convictions. There are subtler emotions that cannot be shared by anyone. But I am here on business to-day. One of my men, my most trusted man—Hopkins by name—has been doing some work in the East End up by the docks. He met with a man whom he believes to have been Thompson.”
“When?” Mr. Steadman questioned sharply.
“Two days ago.”
“Then why didn’t he speak out sooner?”
“He did not see any description of Thompson until this morning. Then he saw one outside a police-station and he remembered.”
“Remembered what?”
“This man,” Aubrey responded impatiently. “A man that answered to Thompson’s description. He came down to the docks and tried to get a job on some distant cargo boat. Said he could do anything; but Hopkins noticed that his hands were smooth and carefully manicured. Like a gentleman’s hands, Hopkins described them.”
“Did he get his job on the cargo boat?”
“Hopkins thinks that he did, or, at any rate, if not that he managed to get taken as a passenger. He went off somewhere.”
“Where was the cargo boat bound for?” Mr. Steadman seemed more interested than the inspector who was making notes in a desultory fashion.
Aubrey shook his head.
“Hopkins doesn’t know. You see he had no particular reason to notice anything about the man. He would not have done so at all but for the hands, I think.”
“You said just now that Hopkins recognized him from the description when he saw it,” Mr. Steadman pursued. “I must say I thought it delightfully vague. A study in negatives, I should call it.”
“It wasn’t very definite, of course. And Hopkins may have been entirely mistaken. But he said he particularly noticed the short brown beard and the defective teeth.”
“Um!” Mr. Steadman stuck his hands in his pockets. “I am inclined to think Hopkins’ identification a flight of the imagination. The police-station description tells what Thompson was like when he left here. I should look out for a clean-shaven man with regular teeth now.”
Todmarsh did not look pleased.
“I suppose I am particularly stupid, but I really fail to understand why the police should circulate a description when they want something entirely opposite.”
“My dear man, you don’t imagine that a man who could hide his traces as Thompson did would be foolish enough to leave his personal appearance unprovided for? No. We must have every cargo boat that left the docks overhauled at its first stopping-place, but I don’t fancy we shall find Thompson on any of them.”
“Well, he has managed to get away somehow, and I thought you might be glad to hear of something that is a possible clue,” Todmarsh said sulkily.
At this moment the telephone bell, Mr. Luke Bechcombe’s own telephone bell, rang sharply. Todmarsh stopped and started violently, staring at the telephone as if he expected to see his uncle answer it.
The inspector took up the receiver; the other men watched him breathlessly.
“Yes, yes, Inspector Furnival speaking,” they heard him say. “Yes, I will be with you as soon as it is possible. Detain her at all hazards until I come.”
He rang off and turned.
“What do you think that was?”
“Thompson caught at the docks,” Aubrey Todmarsh suggested.
Mr. Steadman said nothing, but a faint smile crossed his lips as he glanced at the inspector.
“The message is that a lady is at Scotland Yard asking to see the official who is in charge of the Bechcombe case,” Inspector Furnival said, glancing from one to the other of his auditors as if to note the effect of his words on them. “A lady, who refused to give her name, but who says that she saw the late Mr. Luke Bechcombe on the day of his death.”
His words had the force of a bombshell thrown between the others.
Aubrey Todmarsh did not speak, but his face turned visibly whiter. He moistened his lips with his tongue. Even the impassive Mr. Steadman started violently.
“The lady of the glove!” he exclaimed.
The inspector caught up his hat.
“I don’t know. I must ascertain without delay, Mr. Steadman.”