THE middle-aged gentleman in gray tweeds reached the Oast House again shortly after eight o’clock to find Spain and the butler paying off the servants, all of whom, by Gaul’s instructions, were to leave his service, temporarily at least, next morning. Spain explained that it was his employer’s wish that, in view of developments now probable, they should feel in no way fettered by any notions of loyalty to him.
‘They don’t want to go, sir,’ said the butler. ‘But they’ve got to go. So have Mr Spain and me. However, I’m not going far. I’m taking a room down at the Jolly Farmer. I have my own ideas about this business, sir. And there’s a certain person I mean to keep my eye on. I’ll mention no names—but I know he had it behind his eyes for poor Lady Gaul. I’ve heard him say so himself, when he was drunk.’
Spain left the worthy man to complete his regretful task and accompanied Gore to his cottage, too depressed by the loss of an excellent position, Gore concluded, to display any curiosity or surprise as to his return.
‘The butler means the man who was butler before him,’ he explained. ‘But they’ve always been bitter enemies. He was talking nonsense just now. You intend to stay the night?’
‘No. I shall not detain you very long, Mr Spain. I wonder if you have any specimens of Mr Arling’s handwriting available. Possibly among Sir Maurice’s papers—’
‘No. Mr Arling never wrote to Sir Maurice. But, as a matter of fact, I have several sheets of manuscripts in Mr Arling’s handwriting. He has been working for some months back upon a book of nature studies. He is an ardent “ist” of various sorts—and I have been typing his manuscripts for him in my spare time.’
While he went to the desk which occupied one corner of the sitting room, Gore strolled over to the bookcase to stand looking at the three novels of the uncelebrated Silas Furlonger.
‘By the way, Mr Spain, I think you said this afternoon that Silas Furlonger was not a nom de plume?’
Spain was absorbed for a moment in his search for Arling’s manuscript. He turned then with a taped bundle of sheets in his hand.
‘Pardon? Oh—Furlonger. Yes, it’s a nom de plume. His real name is Ferdinand Miler. I think I told you that I had been his secretary for some time before coming to Sir Maurice. This is Mr Arling’s manuscript.’
Gore took the bundle of sheets, and, having lighted a pipe, retired to an armchair with them. His interest, however, appeared, to be rather in the matter of the manuscript than its handwriting, for he read a couple of pages with close attention.
‘Mr Arling, too, is an imaginative person, apparently,’ he said musingly. ‘This opening of his is quite lyrical.’
‘Oh yes,’ smiled Spain, ‘nature study is a passion with him. As you probably detect, he has been strongly influenced both by Maeterlinck and Fabre. To that extent—I suppose, one would call him imaginative.’
‘It’s rather odd to find that streak in him—too.’
‘Too?’ Spain repeated vaguely.
‘You see,’ Gore explained, ‘there are at all events two things which I knew for certain about the person who murdered Lady Gaul. He was a person of what I described to Mr Arling himself this afternoon, as practised imagination, and he was also, necessarily, a person who knew that there had been a disagreement between Mr Arling and Sir Maurice Gaul with regard to Mr Arling’s intimacy with Lady Gaul.
‘Then there is the question of times. I have verified Mr Arling’s statement that he dined at the golf club at Mortfield and played bridge afterward. But I have ascertained from the secretary that in fact Mr Arling left the club at nine o’clock, having merely finished after dinner a game of bridge begun before it. The Oast House is not more than twenty minutes walk from the club.
‘He could have murdered Lady Gaul and reached his own house by ten o’clock—easily. Of course, one has to suspect him of quite unusual cleverness, if one is to suppose that he wrote that letter and left it in Lady Gaul’s hand to point, obviously and inevitably, to her husband as the murderer. But there are lots of quite unusually clever people in the world. And, glancing at this manuscript, it would occur to anyone that Mr Arling was one of them, wouldn’t it?’
Spain’s eyes had hardened.
‘I can at all events tell you that Mr Arling has taken considerable pains to distort every possible fact against Sir Maurice. It has been most marked—most gratuitous. As for imagination—well, frankly, does that matter? Does it require much imagination to stab a woman in the back?
‘Not that I suppose for a moment that he murdered Lady Gaul,’ he added with a shrug. ‘He could have done it, no doubt. But—why? Because he quarrelled with Lady Gaul over that letter he had written her?
‘I don’t think that letter would ever have been found, if that had been the case. Mr Arling is a sensitive, cautious man—a man with a perfect dread of anything like notoriety—’
He paused. Gore had risen and had come across the room toward him tranquilly, yet with a deliberation that had caught the other’s attention.
‘Thank you, Mr Spain.’ Gore smiled faintly. ‘Now, will you kindly sit down again in that chair and listen to me.’
As if every drop of blood had fled from his body, the secretary’s drawn little face went, in a flash, livid white. An odd little ejaculation of terrified dismay choked itself in his twitching throat. He sat down again in the chair from which, divining the truth, he had half risen, and stared at Gore helplessly.