ARLING appeared at the door. Beyond him, Gore had a glimpse of a purple-faced police sergeant in mysterious colloquy with a lily-white constable. The two turned and peered in curiously at him, then, exchanging a smile of amusement, turned away and went up the road toward the house.
‘The force is mildly annoyed by your arrival on the scene, Colonel Gore,’ Arling smiled. ‘They’ll show you anything they have in their possession. But on the whole they think they’d like you to mind your own business and leave them to get on with theirs. You said you’d like to meet my butler; perhaps you’ll walk down with me to my house and have lunch. Though I don’t know if it is quite delicate on my part to invite you to eat with me.’
‘Sir Maurice has arranged that Colonel Gore will lunch here, Mr Arling,’ said Spain.
Arling appeared relieved. The two men chatted of indifferent subjects as they went down the road that wound among the gorse. Their walk was nearly over when Arling stopped and turned to face his companion abruptly.
‘Look here, Colonel Gore. Do you believe that Gaul did this?’
Gore shrugged.
‘I am here to ask questions, Mr Arling, not to answer them.’
‘Oh, damn that. Have you heard that they found the knife and a handkerchief of Gaul’s with it in a rabbit hole?’
‘Probably.’
‘It’s one of Gaul’s handkerchiefs all right, you know.’
‘Probably. Well, Mr Arling?’
‘Well—there are a couple of things you had better know. I think. First—about Lady Gaul. About three weeks ago Gaul came into the drawing-room from nowhere while I was sitting talking with Lady Gaul—about the slump in cross-word puzzles, I believe. He made a frightful ass of himself—delivered a regular little oration about the danger of our seeing so much of one another and so on and so forth. Of course, I simply roared.
‘But he was perfectly serious. As a matter of fact, I had cut down my visits to the Oast House a good deal during the last few weeks, because of that little scene. I need hardly say that he simply made a fool of himself. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you about this straight off. But—well, they hadn’t found that handkerchief then. Had Gaul himself said anything of it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well—there it is. And there’s another thing you had better know. I mean—I think you ought to know how things stand exactly—and this thing has been on my conscience. You know that letter? Well, when I found Lady Gaul dead, I saw that she had a letter in her hand, as I believed, in my handwriting. I took it out of her hand, read it hurriedly and, like a fool, lost my head and decided to suppress it.
‘Lady Gaul always called me Claud, you see—principally because my own name is John. The imitation of my handwriting was so infernally clever that I got scared and, as I say, lost my head. That’s the only excuse I can give you. I stuck the letter in my pocket and went out to get the servants. After I had found them—it took some time—I went to the telephone to ring up the doctor. When I went into the drawing-room again, I saw, to my amazement, the gardener taking a second letter from Lady Gaul’s hand.
‘That was the letter of which Sir Maurice showed you a copy. But the extraordinary thing—the devilish thing—is that that letter was also in an exact imitation of my handwriting, and was, word for word, a replica of the first letter, which I had pocketed. Of course, I ought to have spoken out—admitted that I had done a silly thing. But like a fool, I didn’t. However, I’m going to do it now. I have done it now. I’ve told Gaul, and I’ve told you I shall send a written statement to the police after lunch.
‘Of course,’ he went on, when they had walked some way in silence, ‘that second letter couldn’t have been written in the interval—say five or six minutes by the time the servants got to Lady Gaul. It was a long letter. It must have been written beforehand. But can you conceive any human being writing two such letters exactly the same? Why, he even went to the trouble of smearing them both with blood.
‘Here, I’ll show you the first letter. Can you conceive anyone doing such a thing?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Gore. ‘All you want is a person with a practised imagination who was also able to foresee that you would pocket the first letter.’
‘Precisely,’ said Arling curtly. ‘And there’s only one person I know who fits both ways.’
He took a sheet of note paper from his pocketbook and handed it to Gore. A long brown smear ran across its middle, encircled by smaller brown spots. Gore examined it carefully through a lens.
‘If it’s a forgery,’ he said, ‘it’s dashed well done. Not a quiver. Usually a glass gives the game away. But this was written slap off. I should like to see some of your own handwriting.’
But the lavish specimens which Arling submitted to him when they reached his house quite clearly did nothing to affect his opinion.
‘Dashed clever,’ he said simply. ‘And dashed awkward—perhaps.’