THE career of Maurice Gaul had been an idyll of literary success. The son of a Christian police court solicitor, the grandson of a Jewish tailor, at a bound he had emerged—somewhere in the early nineteen hundreds—from the obscurity of reporterdom into the full blaze of fame.
A first novel, written in six weeks, had done that for him; a second, dramatized with brilliant success, had supplied him with food and clean collars for the rest of his life. For the following twenty years he had produced best seller after best seller—not all equal in quality to his early work, but all entirely satisfactory to the enormous public for whose literary palate he had never failed to supply just that soothing blend of sentiment and sensation it hoped for from him.
Good-looking, self-confident and suave, with no illusions save that of success, at thirty-six he had fashioned himself into a social personage of dignity if not of importance, had married a wife with ten thousand a year and hosts of influential friends, and had found a seat in Parliament.
The war had made him special correspondent to the Daily Mercury, and four years stay-at-home England, no less than England at the front, had largely depended upon him for its hopes and fears. Four times a week his picturesque pen, gifted with a talent for facile emotion, had brought its column of actuality from France or Salonica or Mesopotamia or Russia to the British breakfast table—authentic stuff, pointed with piquant detail, and beyond doubt turned out by a man who knew everything and every one worth knowing.
Other special correspondentships had followed with peace, and had subsequently supplied excellent copy for more novels, more articles, more Parliamentary Committee work. He had an excellent idea of the value of his wares and had inherited the business ability of his breed; his income from his literary work had probably exceeded that of his wife considerably.
He had been knighted—he had been adorned with distinguished orders—English, French, Belgian and Italian—he had built himself a magnificent house in one of the most beautiful parts of Surrey—and, having thus achieved success at forty-seven, had sealed it by writing a book telling how he had done it.
And then, a few days before, upon this favourite of the gods, disaster, utter and devastating, had fallen like a thunderbolt.
On May 2, Maurice Gaul had left his Surrey residence, the Oast House, and for a week exactly had disappeared from the ken of his large household. According to the account which he had subsequently given to the police, he had spent those seven days in Bristol, collecting local colour for a projected novel, a portion of which was to deal with the experiences of a ‘down-and-outer’ in the capital of the west.
His story was that, for purposes of realism, he had begun his adventures in Bristol with the sum of one shilling, that by the fourth day he had been absolutely destitute and had remained practically so until the end of the week of his experiment. He had accounted thus for the fact that neither on May 6, 7, nor 8 had he seen a newspaper, being unable to afford to buy one.
He had thus remained until the morning of May 9 in absolute ignorance of the terrible tragedy which for three days had set all England agog.
About ten o’clock on the night of May 5, a Mr John Arling, who resided about a mile from the Gauls, and who had known Lady Gaul since her childhood, had received, upon his return to his house from the golf club at Mortfield, where he had been playing bridge, a telephone message which had arrived about half an hour before and had been taken by his butler, Robert Ellis. Lady Gaul had rung up, the butler had said, to ask that Mr Arling would go up to the Oast House as soon as possible, as she wished to consult him upon a matter of very great urgency and importance.
Mr Arling had put on his cap again and started at once for the Oast House, which he had reached about twenty minutes past ten. The drawing-room was on the ground floor, the house, though of wide frontage, being of two storeys only. Its blinds, as usual, had been up and, as he passed its windows, he had seen Lady Gaul, seated with her back to the windows, apparently reading. He had tapped at a window, but she had not turned at the sound.
He was a constant visitor at the Oast House at all hours of the day and, as was his habit, he had entered the house by the front door—which was always left open until eleven o’clock during the summer months—without knocking or ringing, and had gone into the drawing-room.
He had begun an apology for his delay in complying with Lady Gaul’s request, when his attention had been attracted by something odd in her attitude. At first he had believed her asleep. But upon approaching her chair he had discovered to his horror that she had been stabbed between the shoulder-blades and that the back of her frock and the upholstery of the big armchair in which she sat were saturated with blood.
It had been only too evident that she was beyond all help. But he had rushed out of the room in search of the servants and, after some delay, had found the housekeeper at the end of the garden chatting with the head gardener. These two had been the only servants then on the premises, all the rest of the staff having been given permission to witness a night attack on Farnham by tanks and airplanes in connection with manoeuvres then in progress on the other side of the Hog’s Back.
From the garden Mr Arling had rushed to the telephone to summon the Mortfield doctor and to inform the Mortfield police. He had then gone back to the drawing-room where he had found the two servants standing gazing in stupefaction at their murdered mistress.
In the clench of the dead woman’s hand, rolled into a wisp, they had found a blood-flecked letter signed with the initial ‘C,’ but without other indication as to its writer. The contents of that letter had not been published in the newspapers, but the press had conveyed the impression that its purport lent a note of additional painfulness to the affair.
The medical evidence at the inquest had gone to show that Lady Gaul had probably been murdered about an hour before Mr Arling had found her, that two savage blows had been inflicted from behind with a heavy, wide-bladed knife and that her death had been instantaneous. No fingerprints had been found by the police, no footprints. The passing tramp theory had been, of course, suggested, but without conviction.
There had been several dogs about the house and the grounds that night as usual. But neither the gardener nor the housekeeper could recall having heard any unusual barking—though they had admitted that the dogs were all friendly dogs and made no fuss even about tramps.
The tragedy, owing to the social position of the victim and of her husband, had created an immense sensation—a sensation increased by the fact that not until nearly four days later could any trace of Sir Maurice Gaul’s whereabouts be discovered. On the morning of May 9 he had received from a newspaper purchased at Temple Meads terminus his first tidings of the terrible catastrophe which had befallen him. He had at once communicated with the police and had returned to Surrey by road in a hired car to avoid the delays of the cross-country railway journey.
When he had reached his house it had been to discover that a fire which had broken out in the small hours of the morning had reduced it to a blackened ruin. And, waiting for him among the reeking debris, had been a police inspector in whose pocket—though he had not actually produced it then—had been a warrant for his arrest. From that indignity his explanation of his movements during the preceding four days and the inspector’s caution had for the moment saved him.
But all England, reading its newspaper that evening, had shaken its head and, with a thrill, told itself that that ‘lost-in-Bristol’ story was altogether too much to swallow and that the solution of the four days’ mystery of the Oast House was, for any intelligent and fair-minded newspaper reader, as clear as daylight.